Satire Project Update

My group and I will be doing a skit about that topic of man becoming slave to technology. So far we have decided that a few students in our group will be in a video that will be shown it in class and a few will be presenting in class. We plan to film the video sometime this week, hopefully on Thursday in class. My group started working on our script on a google docs, which is shared with everyone in the group. We need to edit it and add a few lines so that our presentation is a little longer but it's more or less finished. We have also decided on costumes and what everyone will be wearing, both in class and in the video and are in the process of making props and signs that we will need for the video and class. We still need to do the group reflection essay but we know what we should write.

The Word Police 3/5/17

"The Word Police", written by Michiko Kakutani, is an article about the rise of political correctness and its impact on language and society. Kakutani describes the people who advocate for P.C. as the "self appointed language police" and says they believe that by enforcing new rules, regarding what words are politically correct to use, they will be able to fix some of the world's biggest issues, racism and sexism. The author uses irony, sarcasm, and mockery to express how ridiculous she finds the efforts of the P.C. police. She feels that their efforts are exaggerated to the point that they become a distraction from the real issues. As political correctness grows, euphemisms grow with it and it allows people to hide their true identities and the inequalities of life. As Orwell said, euphemisms are "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Kakutani says that by changing "testimony" to "ovarimony" or "women" to "womyn" to avoid the suggestion of sexism, or getting upset over phrases like "bullish on America" or "the city of brotherly love", it "tends to distract attention from the real problems of prejudice and injustice that exist in society at large." I felt that Kakutani's biggest point was that actions speak louder than words. She said "Calling the homeless 'the underhoused' doesn't give them a place to live; calling the poor 'the economically marginalized' doesn't help them pay the bills". If you want to fix the world's problems, you don't do it by changing the usage of words. Like Kakutani said, do you really think  making such changes will remove the prejudice in people's minds?

Politics and the English Language 2/4/17

George Orwell, in his essay, "Politics and the English Language", explains that stale imagery and lack of precision have diminished the English language. He talks about how the language is declining and changing in a bad way due to economic and political causes and goes on to provide his readers with five passages as examples of how writing has become unclear and faulty. Orwell says that aside from the individual faults of each passage, the five passages share similar flaws. It is as if each writer either has a meaning and can't express it, or he unintentionally says something else, or he is almost uncaring as to whether or not his words have meaning. According to Orwell, "this mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing." He states that political writing is bad writing because it uses the English language so mechanically, repeating the same words and imitating previous writings, that the life of what is being said is drained. Some political speeches aren't even written by the politicians who give the speeches. Orwell also explains that political writing is one that uses vague language specifically to hide important details from the audience or to limit the image that forms in the audience's head. "Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness" because things like "the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, and the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan" are too brutal for most people to face. But vague language also allows the audience to be misled on purpose and Orwell wants his readers to be aware of that. 

I found Orwell's essay to be very interesting yet difficult to read. After understanding his reasoning for the essay I found that I fully agree with him. The English language is diminishing and is being taken advantage of in political writing. Politicians are able to bend and cloud their words to reveal only what they want the audience to hear. When serious events occur, deadly or dangerous, political speeches are purposely made vague so that the people understand that there is something going on without getting mental pictures of the deaths or specifics. On one hand it's noble that they want to shield the people from the brutalities happening around us but on the other hand we don't fully understand the severity of the events due to the fact that certain details are hidden from us. Imprecise and unclear language also allows governments to conceal violence or illegal acts in agreeable words and phrases. This kind of language in political writing shows that the speaker does not want to reveal all the facts about what has happened or is about to happen, especially if it only benefits him/ her and not the audience. Orwell's purpose was to inform his readers that vague language is being used, especially in political language to brain wash or trick people and gain their trust but if we learn to avoid this kind of language ourselves then we won't be misled by politicians because we'll know that there is something not being said.

The Case Against Affirmative Action 1/14/17

David Sacks' and Peter Thiel's "The Case Against Affirmative Action" is an article about the negatives of affirmative action in Stanford and how the real problem it is that people are trying to solve a problem that no longer exists; the problem being that admissions officers are racist when accepting students into Stanford, they're not. The authors state that Stanford's admissions office cannot right the wrongs of history, but its mission is still to admit the best class of students it can find. The sole criteria being individual achievement; not just grades and test scores but also "accomplishments in athletics, music, student government, drama, school clubs and other extracurricular efforts." They feel that race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual preference should not have a place on this list; "these are traits, not achievements." Sacks and Thiel say that if diversity were really the goal, students should get admitted based on unusual characteristics, not based on race. The authors ended their article by making a good point. "A Stanford without affirmative action will be a Stanford in which the question of who belongs here will no longer need to be answered. It will no longer need to be answered because it will no longer need to be asked."

I absolutely love the way Sacks and Thiel ended the article. Affirmative action has caused and promoted discrimination to the extent that students in Stanford are questioning who belongs in the school and who is there due to some sort of diversity matrix. Without affirmative action people will know that all the students at Stanford genuinely deserve to be there. After doing research on the issue of affirmative action, I feel that affirmative action was established with the correct mindset but it was carried out wrong. I think diversity is very important; it helps show people different perspectives on things. But there are other ways to achieve diversity without basing it on race. There will always be racist people in the world but forcing a school to admit students, who may not even belong in the school based on their achievements, because they come from a minority is not right and it's definitely not necessary. We already have diversity, in schools and in work places; even our president is from a minority group and he became president because he was most qualified not based on his race. While affirmative action was developed to level out the playing field, it gives way to discrimination and makes it unfair to the people who are denied a spot in school or work because a person of a minority took their spot, and not because he/she is more qualified. Like Sacks and Thiel said, "It is a strange cure that generates its own disease." Affirmative action was put in place to diversify and include minorities but when students start to suspect that other students were admitted because they come from a minority, the very racism and discrimination that affirmative action was created to stop, occurs. It gives the impression that minority groups just can't compete, and that's not true.