Word: arguments
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...waterboard. But as with much of the eagerly anticipated documents, its meaning is anything but clear. Which means that far from ending the debate on whether harsh interrogation worked, the inspector general's report and CIA memos have simply provided more grist to both sides of the argument...
...rising visibility of gay people in the region is just one of many social changes that have been accelerated by travel, urbanization, education, democratization and, most of all, the explosion of information across every imaginable medium. This isn't simply Westernization - the old argument that homosexuality is yet another crass cultural import from the West has been all but discarded. But the Asian social institutions and beliefs that often stood in the way of tolerance - religious conservatism, intense emphasis on marriage and having children, cultural taboos against openly discussing sexuality - are weakening. In some parts of Asia, space is opening...
...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...
...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...