Category: american society
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Length and Strength
If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to try something. I’ll present the same argument three different ways. I hope that by the end, you’ll understand why. First The length of an argument is directly proportional to its strength. Second Generally, the length of an argument is proportional to it’s strength. Barring excessively and pointlessly wordy […]
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On Privilege
White privilege, as you may know, is a sociological concept describing the advantages enjoyed by white persons beyond what is commonly experienced by the non-white people in those same social spaces (nation, community, workplace, etc.). It differs from racism or prejudice by the fact that a person benefiting from white privilege need not hold racist […]
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Signal, Noise, and Lou Dobbs
Jarrod Trainque (flickr) Signal to noise ratios are something most people are at least mildly familiar with. They’re the reason that you either turn off the radio or change the station as you drive out of the range of the station you were listening to. But where radio on road trips is the obvious place […]
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Watching America’s Game
IowaPolitics.com It’s chaos. It’s a circus. It’s a money parade. It’s undemocratic. It’s pointless. It’s cheap drama. It’s the real American Idol. That’s right everyone, it’s the middle of America’s presidential politicking season. I could make a list, but I doubt I need to. You know that many people–in America, but especially in stable parliamentary […]
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“There is almost no problem we can solve all by ourselves”
Source: cursedthing Former President Bill Clinton was on Charlie Rose last Friday. He said a lot of interesting things, and though they also did a fair bit of rehashing tired arguments about the presidential campaign, it is a pretty good interview to watch. Without question, the line that most caught my attention was this one: […]
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Of Teddy Bears and Ignorance
By now you’ve probably heard something about a teddy bear in the news. But it seems to me that the way people understood the story had a lot to do with where they heard about it. So in the tradition of this piece, I’ve created two very different interpretations pared down from different news sources. […]
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OPW: Norman Mailer on America
Norman Mailer died two weeks ago, and so I’m slow on the uptake. But I’d rather quote something interesting and out-of-date that timely and uninteresting. So on today’s “Other People’s Words,” what Norman Mailer told Charlie Rose about his country in 1998. You know, I think we live in the most exceptional country ever for […]
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Happy Thursday!
I’d planned on writing something today, but when, on rising, I was greeted by four inches of accumulated snow my resolve to do so quickly cracked and eventually crumbled. Already somewhat interested in making Thanksgiving (it’s tomorrow in United States) an extended break, I was unable to do any serious thinking. So, Americans (and perhaps […]
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“Working to Live” and Other Lies
You hear the complaint a lot: “too many American live to work when they should really be working to live.” The dichotomy always rang false to me, and I finally figured out why. The first problem is that this, like most dichotomies, is completely false. To demonstrate this, I’ve compiled a short list of the […]