Word: argumentativeness
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Many proponents of banning full veils in public places argue for it as a means of liberating women who currently wear them, believing they suffer under an oppressive culture. However, this argument is invalid on several grounds. First, it assumes that women who wear the burqa are uniformly forced to do so, which is simply untrue. Like all personal choices, women decide to don this attire for many reasons—some good and some bad, some based on coercion and some on freedom. To tar all burqas with the brush of oppression is condescending and inaccurate. Furthermore...
Comedy Central’s decision to censor South Park is antithetical to that very idea, and the argument that its decision was in the interest of safety despoils the spirit of free speech that protects all types of comedy, no matter how sophomoric, gross, or unfunny we deem it. South Park’s creators are no strangers to death threats and have offended every major world religion, ethnic identity, and sexual identity conceivable. They have surely been menaced by some radical fringe representing these groups...
Detractors of what may seem like a romanticized argument in favor of airing an offensive episode might point to the fact that people associated with the creators of the show were under threat, or that the possibility of dying for being a humorist is unfair. But these people miss the fact that the very exercise of free speech meets with danger—the danger that one will be oppressed by some influence, whether vigilante violence or state power. The moment when we are unwilling to protect the rights of our fellow because of possible violence against him or those...
According to Kennedy School Professor J. Richard Hackman, a specialist in social and organizational psychology, the phenomenon of anonymous authorship recalls an argument made by sociologist Erving Goffman in his text “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life...
...also said the argument that a man was intoxicated and didn’t mean to commit rape similarly diminishes the woman’s right to her body...