Tag: When it Comes

“I worked in a Republican administration and I worked in a Democratic administration, and I talk about entertaining and I talk about cooking, and I think the more we cook and entertain, the more we stay connected with our friends no matter what their politics are,” the “Barefoot Contessa” host told the Huffington Post in an interview released Monday. “So, no, I don’t talk about politics. That’s how I feel about politics.” While Garten, 70, was reluctant to delve too deeply into her own political beliefs, she did profess her admiration for former first lady Michelle Obama. “I admire that becoming the first lady was a surprise to her — it wasn’t something that she chose,” Garten said. “She grew into it and she was an extraordinary example for women everywhere. “In the ’70s, when I looked at the organizations that I was in, I would think to myself, ‘Could I ? or did I want to ? be the head of this organization?’ And the answer was always no,” Garten said. So when I turned 30, I decided I need to set up my own organization where it was only my wits that determined if I would succeed or not … It was a chance I was willing to take and it paid off. Businesses. “She’s very smart and very interesting and she loves her friends. I loved that he loved to go to a foreign place and eat whatever they were eating, and that he would go into people’s kitchens and see what Mom was making at home or what Grandma or Dad was cooking at home.

The Kavanaugh hearings, he wrote on Friday, constituted an “American nadir.” You often hear such phrases from people who think the biggest problem with the Kavanaugh battle is that the participants weren’t more courteous and open-minded. Implying, as Brooks, Flake, and Collins do, that America’s real problem is a lack of civility rather than a lack of justice requires assuming a moral equivalence between Brett Kavanaugh’s supporters and Christine Blasey Ford’s. If tribal implies unthinking or inherited group loyalty, then Democrats and Republicans were actually more tribal in the mid-20th century. The parties are so bitterly polarized not because they’ve become more tribal but because they’ve become more ideological. The “tribalization” of American politics, Brooks argues, “leads to an epidemic of bigotry. There is no equivalence between the “bigotry” faced by preppy lacrosse players and that faced by black males. Similarly, there is no equivalence between the “bigotry” faced by men accused of sexual assault and the “bigotry” faced by women who suffer it. In April 1963, seven white Alabama ministers and one rabbi wrote a letter to Martin Luther King Jr.. The problem that the Kavanaugh struggle laid bare is not “unvarnished tribalism.” The problem is that women who allege abuse by men still often face male-dominated institutions that do not thoroughly and honestly investigate their claims. Brooks, Collins, and Flake may decry the “tension” this exposes.

The two main political parties have a long history of disputes and disagreements over a plethora of complex issues. When it comes to engaging in political discussions, it is often hard for members of the left and members of the right to respectfully and knowledgeably talk about things, largely because of the crucial fundamental differences in the ideals and policies that each party focuses on. The two-party system is most often blamed for the major discrepancies among members of our country, but the inability to have a respectful and informative argument or discussion based in legitimate reasoning, is the true root of many of the problems stemming from politics. This is where fallacies come into play. A fallacy, which is the use of invalid or faulty reasoning to form an argument, is a clear sign of an argument lacking many crucial elements of validity. RELATED: Rosario: Average Iowans with left-leaning views are not coastal elites While a fundamental difference in opinions and values fueled by the two-party system certainly has a role in the effectiveness of an argument or discussion, I think that fallacies are the single most obnoxious thing in political discussion. I think that fallacies often make one seem ignorant in an argument, and when they are used to insult or discredit someone else who has a different opinion. Many fallacies are counterproductive in an argument. Using fallacies such as this one says less about the strength of your opposition’s argument and more about one’s own lack of reasoning. More in Opinions