Beyond Straw Men

"Addressing plastics can feel overwhelming. Guilt, shame, anger, hurt, fear, dismissiveness, and despair abound. Beyond Strawmen moves beyond "hot take" or strawman fallacies by illustrating how affective counterpublics mobilized around plastics reveal broader stories about environmental justice and social change. Inspired by on- and offline organizing, Pezzullo engages public controversies, policies, and headline-making advocates in Bangladesh, Kenya, the US, and Vietnam through hashtag activism, campaign materials, and her podcast, Communicating Care. She argues that plastics have become an entry point into contested environmental politics, including carbon-heavy masculinity, carceral policies, planetary fatalism, eco-ableism, greenwashing, marine life endangerment, pollution colonialism, and waste imperialism. Attuned to plastic attachments, Beyond Strawmen shares how unsustainable patterns of the plastics-industrial complex are resisted through imperfect but impactful networked cultures of care"--

Addressing plastics can feel overwhelming. Guilt, shame, anger, hurt, fear, dismissiveness, and despair abound. Beyond Straw Men moves beyond “hot take” or straw man fallacies by illustrating how affective counterpublics mobilized around plastics reveal broader stories about environmental justice and social change. Inspired by on- and offline organizing in the Global South and the Global South of the North, Phaedra C. Pezzullo engages public controversies and policies through analysis of hashtag activism, campaign materials, and podcast interviews with headline-making advocates in Bangladesh, Kenya, the United States, and Vietnam. She argues that plastics have become an articulator of crisis and an entry point into the contested environmental politics of carbon-heavy masculinity, carceral policies, planetary fatalism, eco-ableism, greenwashing, marine life endangerment, pollution colonialism, and waste imperialism. Attuned to plastic attachments, Beyond Straw Men illustrates how everyday people resist unsustainable patterns of the plastics-industrial complex through imperfect but impactful networked cultures of care.

A series of strange events leads a man to a confrontation with the deadly Straw Men.

Proves that the "straw man" referred to by freedom advocates exists, how it is created, how you become surety for it, and how to disconnect from it.

Acknowledgements -- 1. -- Fallacy Theory and the Straw Man -- 2. -- Fallacy Names and the History of the 'Straw Man' -- 3. -- Straw Men, Weak Men, and Hollow Men -- 4. -- Straw Men and Iron Men -- 5. -- The Puzzle of Effectiveness -- 6. -- The Puzzles of Dialecticality and Meta-Argumentation -- 7. -- Consequences for Fallacy Theory -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

"For several decades, the field of bioethics has played a dominant role in shaping the way society thinks about ethical problems related to developments in science, technology, and medicine. But its traditional emphases on, for example, doctor-patient relationships, informed consent, and individual autonomy have led the field to not be fully responsive to the challenges posed by new human biotechnologies such as assisted reproduction, human genetic enhancement, and DNA forensics. Beyond Bioethics provides a focused overview for students and others grappling with the profound social dilemmas posed by these developments. It brings together the work of cutting-edge thinkers from diverse fields of study and public engagement, all of them committed to a new perspective that is grounded in social justice and public interest values. The contributors to this volume seek to define an emerging field of scholarly, policy, and public concern: a new biopolitics."--Provided by publisher.

As a small boy in Epping Forest, Jack Straw could never have imagined that one day he would become Britain's Lord Chancellor. As one of five children of divorced parents, he was bright enough to get a scholarship to a direct-grant school, but spent his holidays as a plumbers' mate for his uncles to bring in some much-needed extra income. Yet he spent 13 years and 11 days in government, including long and influential spells as Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary. This is the story of how he got there. His memoirs offer a unique insight into the complex, sometimes self-serving but always fascinating world of British politics and reveals the toll that high office takes, but , more importantly, the enormous satisfaction and extraordinary privilege of serving both your constituents and your country. Straw’s has been a very public life, but he reveals the private face, too and offers readers a vivid and authoritative insight into the Blair/Brown era and, indeed, the last forty years of British politics.

This book shows how research in linguistic pragmatics, philosophy of language, and rhetoric can be connected through argumentation to analyze a recognizably common strategy used in political and everyday conversation, namely the distortion of another’s words in an argumentative exchange. Straw man argumentation refers to the modification of a position by misquoting, misreporting or wrenching the original speaker’s statements from their context in order to attack them more easily or more effectively. Through 63 examples taken from different contexts (including political and forensic discourses and dialogs) and 20 legal cases, the book analyzes the explicit and implicit types of straw man, shows how to assess the correctness of a quote or a report, and illustrates the arguments that can be used for supporting an interpretation and defending against a distortion. The tools of argumentation theory, a discipline aimed at investigating the uses of arguments by combining insights from pragmatics, logic, and communication, are applied to provide an original account of interpretation and reporting, and to describe and illustrate tactics and procedures that can be used and implemented for practical purposes.. This book will appeal to scholars in the fields of political communication, communication in general, argumentation theory, rhetoric and pragmatics, as well as to people working in public speech, speech writing, and discourse analysis.