Topic for persuasive essay.

I am going to try writing about capital punishment in the state of Oregon.

The first execution in Oregon since 1997 will be in August.  This state seems most likely to respond.

Click to access death_row_inmates.pdf

http://news.sanford.duke.edu/news-type/news/2010/death-penalty-costs-nc-taxpayers-11-million-year

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2011/09/22/death-and-taxes-the-real-cost-of-the-death-penalty/2/

Click to access index.pdf

Click to access death_warrant_press_release.pdf

My friend, Bert, has been having troubles with his roommate, Ernie.  ERnie has been drinking and smoking pot in their room and even bringing girls back to their room knowing Bert was trying to sleep.  This recently climaxed when Bert got dragged away from a card game with a call from Ernie saying he had locked himself out of their room.  My friend walked across campus to go let him in.  When Bert got there he was confronted by some cops who wanted him to let them search the room.  They told him they would get warrants if they had to, but it would take time.  Bert submitted.  He let them in.  They found the roommate’s booze and drugs.  We don’t know what will happen to my friend’s roommate, but my friend knows he wants to have a former roommate.  At first I told him to delay his decision and see how things played out, but then I realized that I knew how they would play out.

Ernie has no respect for Bert.  Bert should have none for Ernie.  No relationship will work between them, and it is impossible for roommates to have no relationship, if only because of the way they are crammed together.  I told Bert to do what was best for him.  We have a mutual friend whose roommate dropped out.   I suggested they live together.  They respect each other and I think they will be able to make something work out.

No relationship is possible to maintain without respect.  If two people don’t respect each other on a basic level they can’t be friends because they will mistreat each other.  They can’t work together because they won’t trust the work the other has done or the intentions of the other.  They really can’t even be against each other because they do not care enough to oppose each other.  No relationship can mesh because there is no common ground to build a relationship on.  People even respect their enemies.  The result when two people who don’t respect each other try to have a relationship is that they mistreat each other without thinking about it, Ernie did to  Bert when he had sex in front of my friend without giving him a chance to leave. I believe that if you want to have a relationship with someone you must respect each other or someone, generally the nicer one, will be hurt.  I believe that any relationship not built on respect will fail.  I believe in cutting relationships with people who don’t respect you.

Stall Stories

Apparently placement is important.  When I go to the bathroom I find myself reading a nice flier the janitors have placed inside each stall.  The papers are full of words and were I not essentially stuck looking at them, they are about eye level when sitting down, I would never read them.  Yet, I seem to know things I wouldn’t look up.  There is a children’s book that emphasizes the need to be reciprocal with gifts illustrated by a child who destroyed a tree by never taking care of it.  I got advise on how to handle my roommate’s stress levels.  These papers try to teach me things.  Most of the things they try to teach me are things I don’t care about. I don’t care about the napkins I recycle and how they become mulch.  I don’t care about the histories of LGBT organizations or thon.  Yet, I know much more than I would be willing to admit in most circumstances.

These papers have a captive audience.  They are a different color from the stall door and as was stated earlier they are placed at eye level.  Unless you brought something else to do during the time you will spend in that confined space reading the paper is something you can hardly avoid.  How does this apply to the rest of the world?  There are captive audiences everywhere, though perhaps not as obviously.  In west there is a store called Si Su which has high prices, but CVS is so far away.  They can afford to have high prices because generally people find more utility in immediate gratification than money saved down the road.  The meal plan on your student id is similar.  The food at the commons may be unappealing at times, but you don’t have to walk downtown and spend actual money to eat.  Apparently location is very important in the real world.

 

Tact

People value kindness.  For whatever reason people value this quality more than assertiveness and directness.  This results in signs thanking us for not smoking.  People rarely just come out and say “You shouldn’t smoke because it is a disgusting habit.”  They prefer to phrase it as “Smoking is bad because of the health risks to yourself and those around you.”  People don’t always say what they mean because of the perceived necessity to preserve somebody’s feelings.  If your friend can’t stand you saying “I want to go to sleep, but you are in my room, so get out.” they probably have emotional problems.  Instead you say things like “Its getting pretty late huh?” and your stupid friend can’t figure out what you actually mean.  Then you spend two hours trying to drop hints so that your friend will leave, before you actually find the ability to break it to your friend that you value sleep more than their company.  Then they are totally fine and they leave.

In the above scenario if you had initially just told them to leave they would have and you would have saved an additional two hours for sleep.  Why bother wit this tact when it isn’t necessarily useful.  People are not going to be offended because you are direct when you tell them that they shouldn’t smoke.  They will be upset if you tell them that the they are disgusting human beings.

There is a time for tact and there is a time for directness.  All you have to do is find the times when your friend will not be offended or you need a change in the current situation very soon then you should be direct.  If the time is not a major issue or your friend will actually be hurt and use some tact, but be firm.  Personally I feel worse when somebody tries to get me to do something indirectly.  So restaurant signs please be so kind as to in form the public to stop smoking immediately rather than thanking the for not smoking.

Les Miserables

I’m reading Les Mis as a hobby right now and am continually shocked.  The idea that there was  a person as cruel, misguided, and merciless as Javert in the world at any time is astounding and very far fetched.  For those of you who don’t know Les Mis is a story by French author Victor Hugo in which a man named Jean Valjean is persecuted by a police officer for a crime he committed without violence eight years previously.  In these eight years Jean has been constantly been investing in saving his own soul by raising an area of France through his own goodness and kindness.  I find the idea non compelling that there should be such a persecution.  Jean Valjean became a high ranking official, the mayor of his town, and constantly worked to raise those around him to greater heights.

The reason I think this is rhetorically relevant is that this book has had one of the greatest effects on the world in the realm of ethics of literature.  It sold out of the first edition in Paris within 24 hours.  How? What caused people to need this book so badly.  The writing style favors very long sentences.  It is not a particularly happy book.  At the end — Spoiler alert — Javert kills himself because he can not cope with the destruction of his ethical code by releasing his prisoner.  I think it comes down to the idea of the Ted talk we watched in class.  The important thing is what you believe.  The entire book recommends and endorses second chances.  We all want to believe that as low as we sink, we can always find some way to recover.  This is emphasized in the way the book shows the difference between justice and the law, as well as other minor themes including love and duty.  I think that is why Les Mis has been such an influential book.  People are attracted not to the story but to what the story tries to teach us.

Vampires (HW)

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was not named “Dragon” in the Romanian tongue for no reason.  He was a creature damned who could only survive by draining the blood of his victims– remember that because “the blood is the life” he drains the life from people to survive–damning them in turn to be removed from the grace of God and damned to either walk the earth with the same curse or Hell.  Dracula is a terror.  The book is a horror novel, so why to young women swoon at the idea of vampires?

Twilight is a story in which a young woman falls in love with a vampire named Edward.  There are certain similarities between the two vampires.  Both Dracula and Edward are described as attractive people, and there has always been a connection in Bram Stoker’s book between the act of a vampire sucking a person’s blood and sexual attractiveness.  However, in Bram Stoker’s book, this seems more to be a sort of hunting tactic, a way for the vampire to keep its victim in place and too prevent the victim from fighting back.  It also is meant to show a fall from grace as the pure virgin that was Dracula’s victim in the book becomes a bloodsucking temptress who tries to seduce her fiancee and lures children away from their play to feed.  There is no sense of love between the living and the dead.  Why has this change occurred.  I will investigate this in my paper.

Words

I haven’t been able to speak this week.  I don’t know how the gift of speech was taken from me, but it has.  At first I was ok with it more or less. I had an excuse not to communicate with people.  Then it got frustrating.  I did have to communicate with people.  I needed to talk with the fencing coaches, my teachers in class, the people serving food in the commons, and I couldn’t do it.  I don’t know a sign for chicken.

How do we stray from the accepted symbols for communication.  This concept is why playing charades is fun.  You have to understand someone fairly well to know what their behaviors or symbols mean.  It occurred to me that if someone began arguing with me I would have no tools with which to defend myself.

I could try writing my points down, but they would probably lose some of the pathos that can be found in most people’s voices naturally. writing down the words I would say would make them flat and one dimensional.  The conversational tone would not come through so clearly making the speech seem les eloquent and more poorly put together.  Writing an essay takes a great deal of thought.  I couldn’t do any more than write down my ideas without much depth and silently listen to the other arguer tear my points apart.

Words are an incredible invention which I took for granted until they were gone.  I now need to rely on my face, which generally remains neutral naturally to communicate how I am feeling and crudely made gestures to convey my thoughts.   The gestures have maybe a thirty percent success rate when people are paying attention.  How can somebody effectively employ rhetoric in a discourse when the other members of the dialogue are using a different form of communication? Any ideas?

Competitions

Why do people enter competitions.  I ask this question because I saw a flier for a bench press competition in white building where the fencing team practices.  I am not physically weak, but I know I will not win that competition.  Somebody will be better than me.  I don’t understand why anyone who knows they won’t win would ever agree to participate.  The answer I came up with is the one I would answer anyone with if they asked me why I continued to compete as a fencer despite constantly losing.

I strive for perfection.  It is impossible but what matters that.  I love the journey.  When I competed I saw people who had come closer.  I realized I wanted to be better than them despite their experience.  I competed locally because every time I go to go out and measure myself against the closest to perfection I could see.  I loved it.  Even when I lost I saw what I could be.  It was addicting .  I loved it.

I started competing at higher and higher levels.  I saw greater people.  I saw a new standard.  It was like finding a new reality. I wanted more.  Competition drove me.  It may not have obsessed me but it came close.  Every time I competed I was getting closer to the ideal.  I still salivate at the idea of perfection, but I get fewer chances as I win more and more competitions.  Suddenly I am the person in my state who will probably win the competition.  Winning is good and that is part of why I compete now.

I don’t see how that applies to weight lifting, but I think the above reasoning may be part of why some people engage civilly  when they compete.  There may be other reasons but this is the one I know best.  Why do you guys compete/

A portion of the proceeds will go to…

Today at about five o’clock I was doing something I am really good at.  I was getting hungry.  I was ready for dinner, when I checked my text messages and found a message form my friend.  He had posted in a group chat that we all should eat at Bradley’s hoagie and sub shop because part of the proceeds will benefit Habitat for Humanity.  I was hungry and it was an easy way to help people too, so I decided to text my friend and eat with him.  We met at the HUB ten to fifteen minutes later.  I assumed that the food would be good because my friend had recommended it.  We met up and he called a friend to find out where the place was.  I had been completely ready to eat there based on the recommendation of a friend who had never eaten there before.

I have decided to look at what drove me to eat at the sandwich shop.  I think it boils down to a couple key factors.

  1.  I don’t have anything against helping people.  I may not always go too far out of my way to help someone, but if I am walking past someone and they drop something, I will reach down and pick it up.  This made the idea that the proceeds may help somebody go to help somebody attractive to me.
  2. I was going to eat anyway.  I was getting hungry and wanted food.  It was a short walk away from the HUB and I needed to stop there anyway.  The location and the service made the entire adventure easy.  I wasn’t losing anything to try eating there.  If 110% of the proceeds were going to Habitat for Humanity if I bought a couch across time, I would have told my friend  I might make a small donation, but there was no way I was buying a couch.
  3. The recommendation was from someone I trust.  If a random man in the street was telling me this was a good idea, I may have found another establishment to frequent.  As it was, I didn’t even care when I realized he hadn’t been there when he recommended the establishment.    This is probably extremely obvious, but this idea is probably why celebrities are used to advertise many products.  It also dictates why certain celebrities, i.e.. OJ Simpson are rarely asked to act as advertisers.

For those of you wondering, the food was very good.  I got a Cajun chicken cheesesteak and was very pleased.  The quality of the product will probably cause me to go back.  Turns out that is a factor in getting repeat customers.