Word: argumentativeness
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...fact, GOP leaders have said that global warming is a hoax, that fears about carbon are "almost comical," that the earth is actually cooling. When I asked Chu about the earth-is-cooling argument, he rolled his eyes and whipped out a chart showing that the 10 hottest years on record have all been in the past 12 years - and that 1998 was the hottest. He mocked the skeptics who focus on that post-1998 blip while ignoring a century-long trend of rising temperatures: "See? It's gone down! The earth must be cooling!" But then he got serious...
...then adjust for socioeconomic status, and, when the disparity persists, conclude it must be genetic. That consistent failure of reasoning bemuses Jay Kaufman, a McGill University professor of epidemiology who studies health disparities. "Why are we still doing this study?" he says. "If you are trying to make the argument that [different health outcomes] must be genetic by exhausting other possibilities and saying what is left over must be genes, well, that's never going to work. There are a million things that affect people's lives. If you think it's genes, then measure genes...
...that Harvard is admitting legacies over equally—or even more—qualified candidates. Anti-legacyism is the last acceptable prejudice. These underqualified, overprivileged, moderately pasty folk need to stop slipping over the admissions border and stealing everyone’s slots. Or so the argument goes...
...argument can be made that this is nothing new. Dwight Eisenhower tiptoed around Joe McCarthy. Obama reminded an audience in Colorado that opponents of Social Security in the 1930s "said that everybody was going to have to wear dog tags and that this was a plot for the government to keep track of everybody ... These struggles have always boiled down to a contest between hope and fear." True enough. There was McCarthyism in the 1950s, the John Birch Society in the 1960s. But there was a difference in those times: the crazies were a faction - often a powerful faction...
...Afghanistan experts suggest that Obama needs to make that argument now, while Congress is still being patient with the Administration's AfPak policy. "We're going to need time in Afghanistan to be successful," says California Representative Buck McKeon, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee. Just back from a trip to Afghanistan, McKeon says his main worry is that Obama will come under pressure from his own party to speed things up: "I hope he doesn't get so much push back on the left that he waffles on giving the sufficient time to the military...