2006 Top Ten of Polemic for Philosophy

Stupidity

Stupidity is a lack of intelligence, understanding, reason, or wit. It may be innate, assumed or reactive. The word stupid comes from the Latin word stupere. Stupid characters are often used for comedy in fictional stories. Walter B. Pitkin called stupidity "evil", but in a more Romantic spirit William Blake and Carl Jung believed stupidity can be the mother of wisdom

Green Party of Canada candidates in the 1993 Canadian federal election

The Green Party of Canada ran seventy-one candidates in the 1993 federal election, none of whom were elected. Information about these candidates may be found here

Obersturmmann

Obersturmmann was a paramilitary rank of the NSDAP which existed from 1931 to 1945. Translated as "Senior Storm Trooper", the rank of Obersturmmann was considered the equivalent of a Private First Class. The rank of Obersturmmann can trace its origins to World War I where the position was held by low level non-commissioned officers who served as fire team leaders in Stormtrooper companies

Binary opposition

A binary opposition is a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning. Binary opposition is the system of language and/or thought by which two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. It is the contrast between two mutually exclusive terms, such as on and off, up and down, left and right. Binary opposition is an important concept of structuralism, which sees such distinctions as fundamental to all language and thought. In structuralism, a binary

Underemployment equilibrium

In Keynesian economics, underemployment equilibrium is a situation with a persistent shortfall relative to full employment and potential output so that unemployment is higher than at the NAIRU or the "natural" rate of unemployment

English independence

English independence is a political stance advocating secession of England from the United Kingdom. Support for secession of England has been influenced by the increasing devolution of political powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where independence from the United Kingdom is a prominent subject of political debate

Manitoba Social Credit Party

The Manitoba Social Credit Party was a political party in the Canadian province of Manitoba. In its early years, it espoused the monetary reform theories of social credit

State of nature

The state of nature, in moral and political philosophy, religion, social contract theories and international law, is the hypothetical life of people before societies came into existence. Philosophers of the state of nature theory deduce that there must have been a time before organized societies existed, and this presumption thus raises questions such as: "What was life like before civil society?"; "How did government first emerge from such a starting position?," and; "What are the hypothetical reasons for

Word

In linguistics, a word of a spoken language can be defined as the smallest sequence of phonemes that can be uttered in isolation with objective or practical meaning. In many languages, words also correspond to sequences of graphemes ("letters") in their standard writing systems that are delimited by spaces wider than the normal inter-letter space, or by other graphical conventions. The concept of "word" is usually distinguished from that of a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of word which has a meaning

Communism

Communism is a far-left philosophical, social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, namely a socioeconomic order structured upon the ideas of common or social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership, and can involve the absence of social classes, money, and the state. Communism is a specific, yet distinct, form of socialism. Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance, but disagree on the means to