Satire 2.0: Creating an argument that agrees with the other side’s premise

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Soft-Core Sophist

Last week, things got a little heated for Stephen Colbert. The host of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report had a segment discussing Dan Snyder, owner of the NFL’s Washington Redskins.

In the piece, Colbert discussed Snyder’s journey to talk to members of various Native Americans to talk about their reaction to the football team’s name, which many have criticized as being racist, mostly because it’s racist.

After those talks, Snyder was apparently moved by the plight of the Native Americans and started the Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation to help them.

Colbert was similarly moved by Snyder’s journey, and that’s where the trouble began, and where the #CancelColbert movement started on Twitter. Continue reading →

Preventing the nation from being caught in a poverty trap

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Soft-Core Sophist

Like all good-thinking Americans, I’ve always considered the food stamp program to be a terrible burden on this country. It forces the nation’s poor into a poverty trap and puts a serious strain on the country’s taxpayers.

That’s why I applauded when Congress came to a bipartisan agreement in January that would cut food stamp benefits by up to $90 a month for around 850,000 families, on top of the $36 a month cuts (the average for a family of four) from November.

But now new information is coming out that shows there might be a cost to these cuts.

Continue reading →

Let’s stop bullying at the root

Posted on March 25, 2014 by Soft-Core Sophist

A couple months ago, we looked at how a New Zealand school was eliminating bullying.

But what’s good for the kiwis might not be good for us Americans. That’s why it’s nice to see a North Carolina school has come up with their own way to solve the bullying problem, by going right to the source.

They’re asking the bullied kid to stop being such a target.

Continue reading →