Word: argumentativeness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...won’t make the argument here for any particular wage level. My beef is with the tenor of the discussion. Both sides have been too eager to attack the other side. This discussion isn’t about whether the Student Action Labor Movement (SLAM) is too radical or The Crimson is too conservative. It’s about the workers. It would be criminal to oppose a reasonable wage increase for Harvard’s workers because you don’t like the tactics or the personalities of SLAM activists...
...only counterarguments—to what is an undeniably good thing—involve reservations about time. The argument is that if Lamont becomes a student center, there will be no impetus for the construction of a real student center across the river. If the last year has taught us anything, it is that student activism, serious or otherwise, can change the minds of College and University planners. Until that’s proven wrong, it makes no sense to downplay and insult what the College is already offering...
...ranks with the conservative Right in opposing gay marriage. They say gay rights are not the same as civil rights. They accuse gays and lesbians of "hijacking" the civil rights movement for their homosexual agenda. They say it's unholy and unnatural. But it's for perhaps that last argument alone that, as the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court mulls a challenge to an old state law now being used to prohibit out-of-state homosexual couples from wedding there, black Americans should sympathize with gays and lesbians who want to marry...
...aside the moral question of gayness. Conservative blacks should denounce the Massachusetts law in question not because they've suddenly decided to embrace something they find wrong but because the law is wrong. It's ostensibly a Federalist argument that is in fact homophobic-and was racist-in intent. And it offends me to the core that lawmakers would deny equal rights to one minority group using a statute created to target others, a statute that could have barred, even invalidated, my existence and might have prevented me from marrying my (white) boyfriend from Massachusetts in Massachusetts. Remember that...
...Steven Cohen, a former Bill and Hillary Clinton press aide, even says it could help her do so. "For the viewing public to hear the phrase 'Madam President,'" he says, "certainly goes a great deal in getting people comfortable with the idea." (That may be a tad extreme. The argument assumes, on the one hand, that people weren't already willing to elect a woman and ignores, on the other, that CiC's viewership of 15 million or 16 million does not quite reach Ross Perot's tally...