Aladdin --> Prince Ali

In Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger, the main character, Dick, saves the life of a wealthy businessman's son, and is rewarded with a comfortable job that pays $10.00 a week, the equivalent of $154.00 per week in 2007.

Alger is clearly making a statement about what you have to do in America to become rich. He's saying that you need two things. First, you need to be a pro-actively nice person. When the kid falls into the river, Dick risks his own life to save the child. Most people today are nice, but they aren't the kind of person who would go out and try to make the world a better place without being asked. Dick saves the kid without hearing that the father would offer a fortune to the person who saves his son.

The other thing that Alger is saying is that as you work your way to the top, don't step on other people to get there. Dick pays the entire rent for his room, even though he has a room mate. When he and his room mate, Fosdick, decide to move to a better room in a better neighborhood, Dick says that he is going to refer all of his shoe-shining customers to Johnny Nolan, another shoe-shiner who is having trouble keeping business up.

Don't you wish this text moved?

I was going to be all cool and actually make a video for this post, and simply post the link to it, but I ran out of time. So here's my post. Whoo.

I am a video boy. Video is my thing. It's what I do. So please excuse me if I ramble about the awesomeness of video.

We live in a visual culture. With phrases like "seeing is believing", "show me the proof", and "I don't see any difference" running rampant, I don't think I need to take the time to elaborate on the visuality of the US.

What I will talk about is why. Right now, there are ways to fool the ears. We do this all the time. Ventriloquists. Synthesizers. Celebrity Impersonators. Hearing isn't believing. I can talk about whatever I want, and you can argue with me. You might even win (although I doubt it. :P ).

Smelling and tasting isn't believing either. In the book "Fast Food Nation", Eric Schlosser describes a lab where the tastes and smells of McDonalds, Burger Queen, and all of the other restaurants are grown in test-tubes. If you're interested, check out page 124 by clicking on the link above. Heck, think about scratch-and-sniff stickers. I guess we can't ever say "the nose knows" ever again.

So, baring touch (A nobel prize to the person who can effectively and repeatedly argue through the sense of touch), all that's left to be reliable is Sight. Sight is our main source of input from the world. If we see something, we believe it. That's why special effects in movies are so exciting and attractive. Because we believe they're real. So if I were to tell you all about how PCs crash every two minutes, you might believe me. But if I were to sit you down in front of my PC and let you watch it crash every two minutes, my case would be a lot more solid. So, to answer the prompt for this post, yes, I believe that a visual argument is more persuasive than an aural argument. 

Hurry! Hurry! Read all about it!

When you pick up the newspaper, tune into NPR, or watch the 6 o'clock news, you expect to hear certain things. Strife. Hunger. Pain. Disaster. Politics. Weather. Sometimes, there's a feature about someone who's done good for the community, but they're usually included because they recently died. This is (mostly) why I don't listen to the news any more.

You see, the news is almost like a five year old. If I (five year old) don't like Lucy–wait, no, that's a weird name. if I don't like Mrs. Hauffen-Pheffer, then I will probably not "report", or "tattle" in five year old speak, accurately. If the previous sentence didn't make any sense to you, lets try an example. I don't like Mrs. Hauffen-Pheffer, so when she accidentally gets some crumbs on my homework, I'm going to tell my teacher that she maniacally destroyed my homework, most likely in an attempt to take away my chance at getting an A+, and will almost certainly do it again. Inversely, if I was best friends with Buckley, and he knocked the cookie jar over and broke it, then I would probably say, in his defense, that someone, possibly Buckley (although unconfirmed), might have accidentally chipped the ceramic on the handle.

I believe that this is called "spin" or "editorializing", and is bad. It calls attention to the (vocab word) ethics of the writer.

Psh, you say, this doesn't actually happen in the news. CNN knows what they're doing. NPR is a professional organization. You're talking about tabloid stuff. Well, there you're wrong. I don't have enough time to actually put links into this post, but it happens quite a bit. Thank You, Rupert Murdoch.

Also, there's the issue of the appeal to pathos, or emotion. Emotion is something that news peoples like to play with. When we're sad or anrgy, we want to take action against something. When we're happy, we want to support something. When we feel uncomfortable, we want to change something. But there is an issue about the manipulation of people's emotions. Just in the way that some people have accused me of creating unfair arguments that loose the logic in the appeal to pathos, news services sometimes do this to make people see their "spin".

A Really Boring Post

Hello, Internet!

I must apologize, the following blog is going to be extremely boring. Please don't read it.

In his essay, ""Half Criminals" or Urban Athletes? A Plea for Fair Treatment of Skateboarders" by David Langley, the author uses some rather shaky evidence to support his thesis. While I agree totally with what he's advocating, and his essay was very well crafted, he uses evidence that is not as solid as it could be. He gives two examples of police officers making *unfair* judgement calls based off of their own interpretation of skateboarding law. However, these two incidents may unfairly represent the general consent of police officers across the US. He also mentions one of the skateparks in Seattle, although it turns out that  there are over 100 skateparks in and around Seattle. What about the other parks? He mentions that the park is dangerous due to its poor design, but he never cites any statistics or data that supports this. Langley also mentions how the skateboarders are good for the environment, but he doesn't give any data to back this up, either. Overall, this essay appears to be more of a transcription of a casual conversation between Langley and one of his friends than a persuasive essay. F+

Voices of Insanity

Greetings, Internet! Today I come to you with another scholarly post. Sorry.

My assignment for today is to talk about a pseudo-argument. Ridiculous Rhetoric? Preposterous Paralipsis? Outrageous Oratory?Fuzzy Fustian? Prolix Persuasion? Sounds like a simple enough assignment.

I have written a total of... three (I think) papers on gay marriage. Of course, in doing the research for these papers, I've had to look up all of the opposing arguments. Often, the opposition is a little more violent than the [pro] side. Actually, almost every article I read against gay marriage cited the bible as the main source of their argument. Now, I have no direct problem with calling religion into an argument. Heck, in one of my papers, I cited a press release from a religious organization as part of my argument for gay marriage.

My issue is when people start to believe that the bible is the "end all, be all" of opinions. If the bible says it, then it's true. This is not an argument. I could come up with all the possible persuasion that I need. Data, statistics, interviews, nice little pie charts, but if the bible says it, then it's true. In the play Inherit The Wind, the man being interviewed simply refuses to even listen to the scientific evidence because the bible says that god made man. Classical rhetoric simply stops, and all logic dies.

Good bye. :)

This is going to be a short(er) post than normal

Pathos, in addition to sounding a lot like one of the three musketeers, is an important aspect of rhetoric. What is rhetoric, you ask? Rhetoric is constructive arguing. There's no such thing, you may say. Have you ever heard of constructive criticism?

Pathos is pathetic. Not in the way the Bush administration is pathetic, but in the way sharing a warm cup of cocoa around a toasty fire one late frosty Thursday afternoon is pathetic. Pathetic comes from the Greek παθητικός, pronounced like 'pathetos'. It means an appeal to emotion.

Pathos comes into play in rhetoric when you want to go beyond informing the reader, and actually touch them. You see, I could tell you all about the history of censorship in America, about all of the lawsuits that have arisen from the issue, about who's who in the national debate, about the actual ethics of censorship, but it probably wouldn't be very interesting, and most definitely wouldn't reach you. You would probably respond with a big, fat "who cares?"

If I really wanted to tell you about censorship in America, I would probably try to bring some emotion into my argument. I might try to show you some of the things that the press has hushhushed in the past few years. Or I might present some sort of hypothetical situation in which a family member was killed when they were sent off to Iraq, and the news, instead of being nice and all, ignored the tragedy because it was "too graphic". All of these techniques are employed because I want to make you feel some sort of emotions. The phrase "putty in my hands" morbidly describes this quite well.

Pathos doesn't go alone. As I may (or may not) talk about in some later posts, Pathos goes hand in hand with Ethos and Logos to form a persuasive argument.

From the Border…

Hello, Internet! I'm writing this from an, erm, rather elderly computer, so there's no guaranteeing it will work. I finally have some time to relax and do some not-so-scholarly stuff, like writing, swimming, counting the number of SUVs with tinted windows we pass, etc. So now I get to rant.

First of all, I just want to say that if any of you reading this live in or around the Houston, Texas, good luck battling it out with Hurricane (now a tropical storm) Ike. Houston, you have a problem. I stayed up til 10 last night watching CNN's coverage of the hurricane. I will never forget the reporter who was standing 15 feet away from the retaining wall of the Galvaston bay, trying to stand up straight. He kept reading an anamometer, which was giving a reading of 120 mph winds, and telling the camera that it must be malfunctioning. It wasn't.

The first meeting of my high school's GSA club was two days ago. Some people complained that it was at the same time as the Republican club. That's almost as weird as the LOG CABIN organization. But I guess that, since something like one out of every ten people are gay, and one out of every two people are republican, I guess that it makes sense. It just seems strange.

Umm… Anything else I wanna talk about? I guess it doesn't really matter. No one really reads the posts they don't need to comment on. I wonder if there's anyone out there that is reading this that isn't in my high school. Comment if you don't know me, please.

Apple's new iPods are Nano-Chromatic! What that means, no one knows, but it sounds really cool. The new iTunes, like just about everything nowadays, lets you choose functionality OR privacy, but not both. Google Chrome is still discriminating against macs. Grrr.

My little brother has spent this entire weekend listening to his iPod. I can't believe how plugged in he is. There's a difference between using technology to your advantage, and technology using you to Bill Gate's advantage. I'm getting kinda worried that Pete Doctor's and Andrew Stanton's image of the future might not be that unrealistic–or that distant.

OK, I think I have nothing else to say. I left a soda in the oven, so I gotta run. See y'all later, and dream on…

SOS: Sink Or Swim?

Greetings, Program! Extra points if you know what movie that's from.

Here on THE WORDS OF MAGIC, we like to do a lot of theoretical stuff. So here's another one. By the way, this is mostly stolen borrowed adapted from Cory Doctorow's super-amazing book, "Little Brother". Passages in this funky font are verbatim passages, because he is such a good writer, I make it bad by paraphrasing. I don't know if I'll use any original passages yet, but we'll find out. The entire book is free and covered by the Creative Commons. For more info, go to CrapHound.Com, his website.

Imagine that you are walking around downtown on a weekend with your friends. You heard on the morning news that there was some sort of bomb threat on your city, but you didn't really pay all that much attention.

Suddenly, a large, un-marked van careens around a corner. People in blackout suits jump out, grab you and your friend, and throw you in the back. You are bound and gagged. As your captors tie you on to a rail in the back of the van, you see another hostage. She is crying. There are bruises all over her face, and her clothing is dirty and has been ripped in places. She has obviously been tortured. You are scared.

Suddenly, you hear voices. They are the voices of your captors. You can't make out entire sentences, but you pick up something about a bomb going off at noon, and strategic positioning of hostage vans. You hear that there is one "agent" missing, but he should turn up soon.

Pause the story for a second. Let's examine some of the logical assumptions you are probably making, and continue those lines of thought.

• I have been kidnapped by terrorists. They've planted a bomb somewhere, and they're planning on holding me hostage until their demands are met.
• One of the terrorists is missing. Maybe he's been picked up by the police or the FBI.
• My parents don't know where I am. My friends do, but they probably got picked up by one of the other hostage sites.
• The girl on my right has been tortured. She's probably going to be on the news in a demands video.

Now, lets assume that the missing man has gotten picked up by the US government. He has vital information relating to where you are. In this instance, if you had to choose between the police using torture to interrogate the missing man about your whereabouts, or have the police simply go on a wild goose chase, or worse yet, not know anything has happened, what would you choose? Torture? Hmmm...

Lets go on with our story. I think now would be a good time for a quote.

Who were these clowns? They weren't wearing insignia. Maybe they were terrorists! I'd never really believed in terrorists before -- I mean, I knew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world, but they didn't really represent any risk to me. There were millions of ways that the world could kill me -- starting with getting run down by a drunk burning his way down Valencia -- that were infinitely more likely and immediate than terrorists. Terrorists killed a lot fewer people than bathroom falls and accidental electrocutions. Worrying about them always struck me as about as useful as worrying about getting hit by lightning.

Ignore the change from 3rd person to 1st person. Lets keep going.

If they were terrorists, I wanted to know. I didn't know what a terrorist looked like, though TV shows had done their best to convince me that they were brown Arabs with big beards and knit caps and loose cotton dresses that hung down to their ankles. Not so our captors. They could have been half-time-show cheerleaders on the Super Bowl. They looked American in a way I couldn't exactly define. Good jaw-lines, short, neat haircuts that weren't quite military. They came in white and brown, male and female, and smiled freely at one another as they sat down at the other end of the truck, joking and drinking coffees out of go-cups. These weren't Ay-rabs from Afghanistan: they looked like tourists from Nebraska.

You are forced to change from your day clothes into blue jumpsuits. Your phone was in your pocket. Now it is gone, and you loose hope for salvation. You are transferred into a large, white truck, and put into what looks like a cell in the back. A large, beefy man enters.

The man who came in was wearing a military uniform. A US military uniform. He saluted the people in the truck and they saluted him back and that's when I knew that I wasn't a prisoner of some terrorists -- I was a prisoner of the United States of America.

Now the tables are turned. It turns out that you are not a Terrorist hostage, but have been kidnapped by the Department of Defense.

You hear the large, beefy man talk to one of the people who nabbed you. He talks in curt, crisp tones.

"These are just children," He says. "They can't be the ones we're looking for."

The woman he's talking to replies, "They were all at the right location, wearing nondescript clothes, and had almost no identifying information in their wallets. No cash, no names on their clothing, and weren't with any adults. These could be our men."

"Right. Move them to the base, and process them. Interrogation will begin at oh' eight hundred tomorrow morning."

Pause again. The Department of Defense has taken hostage a bunch of teenagers, who are a dubious threat to national security, and is about to interrogate them through torture. Maybe one of the 40 or so in the back of the truck with you might know something. But it's doubtful. And at any case, is it worth pushing you to the edge of death to get that information?

Some of you out there might be crying "No Fair" at this. You might be saying that this is a fictional event. True, but something similar, although slightly different circumstances, has occurred. This even happened at the same prison as in "Little Brother".

Torture may indeed be a viable way of extracting information from those who we need information from. But there is also a host of other alternative, none of which are anywhere near as damaging or controversial as torture.

There is no value to a human life, as it is priceless. I am not a religious person, not by a long shot, but I am reminded of one of the many, many commandments: Thou Shalt Not Put A Stumbling Block Before The Blind (or something like that). This means that you should not make more difficult the lives of those who in difficulty. Actually, there is very little debate amongst the Jewish culture about the validity of torture. See here.

Long story short (too late), torture is simply out of the question. There is no instance in which torture is applicable where there is no other course of action that could be as productive or even more so than torture.

Big Business's Bastard Baby

Hello, Internet!
Sorry I haven't gotten much time to post non-academia stuff, but I've been kinda crazy lately. Whoo. So here, for your entertainment, is a little ranting and raving about genetically altered food:



I am a fairly liberal person. OK, maybe I'm a little more than fairly liberal. Maybe I border on socialist, I don't know. I've never thought too much about it.

I have pretty strong opinions about gay marriage, the war in Iraq, gun control, global warming, etc. So when it came time to plop down a few hundred words about Genetically Manipulated food (GM for short), I thought this would be a a walk in the park. Now I see I was wrong.

The reason for this is that I don't have "one" opinion on GM foods. I can't say I hate anything genetically altered and I can't say Let's all give our babies super-powers. Therefore, I can't say that GM foods are bad, and I can't say they're good. Let me explain...

I like to think of America as the land of notification. I get a text message when my car is low on gas. I get an email when my mortgage rates change. I get a phone call when my brother gets a good grade on his homework. Driving to school I get notified about how Subway has $5 Foot Longs, how I can get a vasectomy for less than a tank of gas, and how someone lost their labradoodle and misses him terribly. People who are against notifying consumers that they're eating Genetically Manipulated food argue that it would be too expensive to add a tiny ticker to the bottom of the box saying "May Contain Genetically Augmented Tofu". They usually cite some figure in the phone number regions as the cost. It's not that I disbelieve them, but that number really isn't all that huge. For instance, American Airlines saved around $40,000 in the eighties when they removed one olive from their In Flight Meal Salads. Don't believe me? Check it out.

But that's not the real reason why I have difficulty figuring out my opinion on GM food. Now, in America, I'm totally against it. I don't really care about all of the "this test showed this, that one was inconclusive" stuff that most people argue about. Let's worry about more pressing issues, like E. Coli in our happy meals. Or what about salmonella poisoning? Or obesity?... The list goes on and on.

I'm not justifying using GM foods, but I do think that it's kinda rediculous to be pushing for GM foods to be labeled when milk with added hormones isn't. (By the way, sorry for all the links. I'll try to back off)

I guess here's what I really think: We, here in america, are debating whether or not WE should be using GM foods. But countries in Africa are having the same debate. Zambia has outlawed drought resistant grain plants while in the middle of a famine. Starving children could be eating right now, but they can't, because their government would rather them die now than them die in 45 years from frog genes in their bread.

Food for thought. Ah, the irony.

Insert Witty Title Here

OK, this is the third time that I am attempting to post this, so I hope it works this time. Stick around, and you may hear me rant about why I hate my computer.

I talked in a previous post about the differences between implicit arguments and explicit arguments. If you hated that post, then you're going to hate this one, too.

My assignment is to talk about the cartoon on Page 1 and the advertisement on Page 24. I'm assuming that you don't have the same book that I do, but if you really really really want to know what I'm talking about, there is a link to the book here. So, because you don't actually have the book I have sitting in front of you, I will do my best to make this post readable by anyone. After all, my point is about how it is beneficial to take into account your audience when crafting and editing an argument. Not about how I'm an A+ student (I'm not).

The cartoon on Page 1 is just that. A cartoon. Nothing more than a small frame of black and white animation that is intended for brief comical effect. Sure, there are small differences, like how Doonesbury is considerably more political than Garfield, but Doonesbury is only for entertainment purposes.

Conversely, the Advertisement on Page 24 is not for comic effect. It's designed for education. The education of the reader/viewer. Obviously it's not a forty page scholarly white paper, but it is intended to be a bit more educational than the comic.

The important thing about writing arguments is to realize that when it comes to audience, it's NOT one-size-fits-all. It's more like hand-crafted shoes: there is no mold, just a new argument for every audience. The comic reaches much more people, has a much shorter amount of time to communicate it's point, has different requirements (like it should probably be funny–that's why it's called a "comic"). The full-page ad was run in a health magazine, where the audience was a much more concerned, educated, select few who are already committed to making a change in the way that America deals with food.

By now, I'm sure I've bored the boots off of you. Let me give you a little more exciting example of why the two are different. Keep on reading, it gets better.

I am a movie maker. A triple threat, as they're called. Some even call us "slashes", because I am usually the writer / director / producer / editor / hair stylist /… well, you get the idea. And I can tell you that from experience that writing… oh, say a short, five minute documentary about the dark side of the fast food industry is vastly different from writing an hour and a half romantic comedy about conjoined twins who fall in love with their math professor's niece. Oh yes. Very different.ﾠ

I hope that by now you get the idea. Here's hoping that this post makes it, and doesn't crash and burn like the first two did.

Implicit VS Explicit Arguments

Keep track of these numbers:

(1)

Growing up, one of my fondest memories was of Shabbat dinners. Some weeks, it was the only night when the entire family could have a nice dinner together. I always enjoyed the methodical, orderly form that it had. First came the blessings over the candles, then the wine, then the bread. Of course, I especially liked the blessing over the wine, because I would get to take a sip of that mystery drink that only old people get to enjoy.

Looking back, that wine was some of the worst I've ever had. Living in the bay area in California, my parents would take frequent trips up to Napa and Sonoma Valley. The wine they came back with was always exponentially higher in quality, as well as in price. Every now and then I would get a tiny sip or two when my parents had a nice dinner and opened up a fancy wine.

Now, with an almost embarrassing snobbery, I look down on two-buck chuck wines and other lower forms of alcohol. When I do turn 21, I have absolutely no intentions of going to the nearest bar and drinking my brains out on whatever costs the least.

(2)

I believe that the US drinking age should be lowered to eighteen because it promotes better drinking habits. Drinking at the age of 21 promotes alcohol as a forbidden luxury to minors, and encourages them to binge once they hit the age of 21. For more information, I highly suggest that you read this article, published by Professor Ruth C. Engs, a teacher at Indiana University.

OK, now that I've held you as a captive audience without telling you what I'm doing for long enough, I'll go ahead and tell you why you just sat through 265 irrelevant words. I'd like you to pause for a minute and think about which piece, (1) or (2), you liked better.

Number two? Not so much? It's OK, I wouldn't enjoy reading it either. But this post isn't about good writing styles. Nope. It's about good arguing styles. You see, according to A Lovely Book, perhaps you've heard of it, "Writing Arguments", there are two types of arguments. Implicit and Explicit.

Number One was an example of implicit arguing. Implicit Writing is almost like acting. It involves playing with the reader's mind, making him/her believe that their thoughts and emotions are original. It paints a picture in the mind of the reader, showing him or her what the author is trying to convey.

Number Two was explicit. I don't think I need to explain this quite as much. Explicit arguing is where you state your opinion and make a good case around it.

Sorry, everyone. I don't have a good ending for this post like most of the other ones. So I'll end with a joke.

This joke comes from our fantastic friends at All Too Flat.com

A man takes his cross-eyed rottweiler to the veterinarian. The vet calls him in and asks what's wrong.
"My dog's cross-eyed," replies the man.

So the vet picks up the dog, shines a torch into his eyes, checks his teeth and so on. After a couple of minutes, the vet lets out a sigh and says, "I have to put your dog down."

"Why?" exclaims the man, to which the vet replies, "Because he's bloody heavy!"