"I've been told a lot of times about what's not possible," Warren said, when Maddow asked about Washington's intractable political culture.
Rudyard Griffiths of the Dominion Institute, a think-tank concerned with Canadian identity, points to a long history of finding ways to accommodate seemingly intractable differences of language, culture and religion, such as those between English and French speakers or Catholics and Protestants.Some of the new disputes will doubtless be resolved in the courts.
Two intractable wars should preclude the culture war McCain has just so shamelessly embraced.
"It is doubtful that the public-intellectual market is a more debilitating or less intractable feature of contemporary American culture than these other affronts to the fastidious".
And when a study in The New England Journal of Medicine last fall reported that despite all the efforts and new financial incentives, there was no significant decrease in patient injuries, these same enthusiasts were quick to point to the inertia and intractable attitudes of the medical "culture".
To tip into something closer to fascism, two mutually-reinforcing things are necessary: nihilist culture and an intractable crisis.
All cultures struggle with intractable mental illnesses with varying degrees of compassion and cruelty, equanimity and fear.
Without any access to intelligence (our first big advantage, it would seem) we had to rely on common sense and history, on the knowledge that these expeditions into other cultures were often intractable and destabilising.
Consider for a moment the reports of abysmal adult literacy (like the study where two-thirds of millennials and nearly four-fifths of all boomers were unable to successfully sort fact from opinion), or the indications that the online culture wars are literally intractable (like this study suggesting exposure to differing political opinions online actually increases polarization).
We note that we did not keep track of individuals in the cultures because it was intractable to do so through the several rounds of vegetative propagation, and we therefore do not know which exact genotype each experimental plant was.
