RCL Blog 9 : History of a Public Controversy Memo

November 17, 2021

History of Public Controversy Memo

Riley Landrum, Natalie Abramov, Isabel Duran

English 137H

November 18, 2021

Work Plan: History of a Public Controversy, Capital Punishment

Duties of Each member:

Natalie Abramov: The Goalkeeper- gathering, organizing research, finding videos and images, working on video script, and helping with interview questions.
Isabel Duran: The Park Ranger- gathering research, organizing research, Narrator, help with iMovie editing, and working on video script.
Riley Landrum: The Scribe- gathering research, finding videos and images, iMovie editor, and working on video script

Timeline-

During Break – Focus more on individual work, finalizing statistics and formatting what all we want to show to the group
Nov 29- We are using this day to formulate a topic organizer and finalize specific details.
Dec 1- Start Gathering Images and videos, also begin to formulate the script
Dec 3- Start planning out video clips etc.
Dec 6- Begin Video Editing, work on narration
Dec 8- Clean up clips, add any final touches
Dec 10- Present to the class
Dec 13- Submit Final

DAY 1

Our group discussed topics that we may like to make the center of our project:

Black Lives Matter
Gun Control
Vaccines/COVID
Abortion
Capital Punishment
Climate Change
Marriage Equality
Student Debt Crisis
Police Reform
White Supremacy
Minimum Wage
Marijuana Legalization
Cancel Culture
History Repeating Itself

Then, we picked different colors and highlighted our top three choices.

Me: Capital Punishment, Police Reform, Cancel Culture

Isabel: Capital Punishment, Marriage Equality, White Supremacy

Riley: Capital Punishment, Student Debt Crisis, Cancel Culture

We all had chosen capital punishment in our top three, but two of us also chose cancel culture. We then weighed the main points about capital punishment versus cancel culture and decided which one we would be more interested in. After comparing the two, we settled on capital punishment.

DAY 2

On the second day, we discussed and expanded on the topic of capital punishment by listing points we could mention in the video.

History of how it started
What are the problems with it?
What are the opposing views?

We also listed more talking points and talked about stasis theory.

History
Costs
Innocence
Race/Gender
Mental Illness/Intellectual Capacity
“Eye for an eye”/Ethics
Not addressing the issue of crime

In another list, we weighed the pros and cons of the death penalty.

PROS

Offenders never get out of prison

CONS

Cost
More people of color on death row than any other race (75%)
Does not deter from more crime
Puts innocent people at risk
Makes one person and another person unclear if it is constitutional

Lastly, we decided our opener and assigned main points for each of us to research.

Our opener will include a popular case, which we decided would be on Rodney Reed.

DAY 3

We each chose 2 aspects of the death penalty that we all let help support our main idea
From those two aspects each, we collected credible sources with statistics.
We shared Google Docs with all our information to look over.
We will begin organizing and formatting at our next meeting
We also found court cases to discuss to use as openers and examples of why this issue is important

The ethical issue of Capital Punishment is not only detrimental to the overall justice of the court system but causes controversy amongst the debate of whether ethics play a part in the decisions being made. To this day, innocent people are falsely accused and executed without any remorse, causing a drift in not only the community but the faith in the system.

According to an article from, The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, Richard Leo states that “In recent years, the media have reported numerous high-profile cases in which individuals were convicted of and incarcerated for serious crimes they did not commit, only later to be exonerated. Many, though not most, of these exonerations occurred after post-conviction DNA evidence established the innocence of those convicted.” While capital punishment is till prevalent in modern society, the misuse of this punishment is what abuses power in some of the higher authority positions, which reveals deeper rooted issues of the morals and ethics within society. Many victims on death row plead innocent, yet social factors can prevent proper justice to be given.

Framing Questions: 2 each

When does capital punishment cross the line from being ethical to unethical?
Does taking a life from someone who took a life justify the act?
What are the financial benefits from abolishing the death penalty?
How is it ensured that the inmate on death row is certainly guilty?
What role does capital punishment play in stopping offences and protecting the community?
Should the public/politicians be held accountable for the death penalty as a form of punishment for offenders?

Thoughts on Chamber

November 5, 2021

To begin on a good note, I finally reached rank Platinum 1! After being stuck in a low rank since the game’s release, I finally improved enough to be in the top 13% of the player base!

The new season started yesterday, which means that the ranks have reset and Riot Games has also announced that they are releasing a new agent to play in two weeks. With seventeen current agents in the game, they are split into four different types archetypes: Duelists, Controllers, Initiators, and Sentinels. The new agent, Chamber, is classified as a sentinel, meaning that his abilities specialize in defensive play by slowing down the push by attackers.

His abilities were leaked, and many in the community are worried that he will be too overpowered when he’s released. Rendezvous, his signature ability, allows the player to place a teleport allowing him to reposition himself quickly to confuse the enemies. Another ability is Headhunter, where Chamber can equip a revolver and eliminate an enemy with one shot instantly. With this ability, playing against an amazing aimer will be difficult since players usually buy armor to avoid being eliminated in one shot with the standard guns.

Chamber’s most defensive ability is called Trademark, and it allows him to deny area to the attackers by playing down landmines which slows the enemies and alerts Chamber of their location. Finally, his ultimate ability is called the Tour de Force, and it equips a gun similar to the revolver in the Rendezvous ability where one shot instantly eliminates the other player, however, this gun has a larger scope and is easier to hit the enemies.

Combining this ultimate ability with his slow fields would almost guarantee a kill, since the fields show the enemy location and restrict their movement. Because of these abilities, people have had mixed opinions about this next agent because his abilities cater to a player who has great aim and can take out the enemy team with ease.

Currently, the game faces a problem with players unable to easily counter a Jett with an Operator. Simply, Jett is an agent who can use the one-shot weapon, the Operator, to land a body shot and instantly kill an enemy player and then dash away from enemy sight with ease. With the announcement of Chamber, it’s definitely possible that Jett players will be dethroned by a better one-shot agent. Like Jett, Chamber can escape from enemy sight lines with his teleport, which could possibly make his agent superior.

Personally, I’m definitely excited for the release of Chamber in two weeks and I can’t wait to try to play him in game! I’ll attach his ability trailer below:

VALORANT CHAMBER Ability Gameplay Reveal Trailer

RCL 8 – TED Talk Outline

November 4, 2021

Oral Content

Topic: The shift of larger bodies being more represented in media due to the Body Positivity Movement

Purpose: To explain this recent shift that formed around 2012 because the media should continue to be more representative of realistic body types.

Thesis: Society has shifted from idealizing the thin woman’s body to wanting to accept one’s body despite its “flaws” because of the popularization of the body positivity movement in the last decade.

Introduction

At the young age of six, I was enrolled into a Russian ballet school and body-shamed every lesson for not being thinner. The ideologies around me represented that I had to be skinny to be beautiful and appealing to look at, especially on stage. The costumes given to me were always skin-tight and too small, making me look at myself in the mirror and question why the others at the ballet school seemed to discriminate against me.

I quit ballet school. I hated being treated differently for being bigger than the other girls in my class, and I left without looking back. The skinny models in the media had made me think that was what I was supposed to look like, or I wasn’t beautiful. However, shifting towards today’s society, that ideal has changed and larger body types are more represented, making myself and others more accepting with my appearance.

Body

Main Idea – The body positive movement emerged in 2012 to challenge unrealistic standards for women in the media, as thin, white women were idealized by many and became the standard for a beautiful woman in the 2000s.

A. Support

Celebrity images on the cover of magazines always showed celebrities to have a skinny stature. Young women in this decade that grew up in this environment of idealizing the skinny body have shown to have a worsened mental state concerning body-image.
Media in the 2000s has promoted the ideal woman body type to be a skinny white woman, as the turn of the century had influenced young women to want to look like Victoria Secret models or have the “Barbie look” like Angelina Jolie with unrealistic standards for all women.
Slide 1: Show images of 2000s magazines with these societal standards of beauty

B. Support

Media in the 2000s heavily idealized being skinny, and it was commonplace that being fat was looked down upon. For example, the 2004 movie Mean Girls, portrayed Regina George as the popular, skinny girl, and the plot included girls sabotaging Regina by feeding her foods that would make her gain weight so no man would like her anymore
Slide 2: Show image from the movie scene described

Main Idea – Social media that contains content about fitspiration and thinspiration are heavily damaging to one’s body image and tries to come off as body positivity, however, it is the opposite.

A. Support

Due to about “89 percent of adults using at least one form of social media daily”, photo-based social media platforms such as Instagram create countless opportunities for appearance-comparison sand stir up guilt in one’s body image (Cohen). Constantly scrolling through content intended to inspire weight loss or fitness goals causes a person to compare themselves to the pictures of thin people shown, inevitably creating a negative body image and an incentive to change one’s appearance
Constantly scrolling through content intended to inspire weight loss or fitness goals causes a person to compare themselves to the pictures of thin people shown, inevitably creating a negative body image and an incentive to change one’s appearance.

B. Support

As body-positivity became more popular, posts labeled as thinspiration or fitspiration have also become idealized in social media. These categories of posts “have been found to disseminate messages that conflate notions of health with thin-ideals, exclude individuals of larger body sizes, and promote fat stigmatization and disordered eating” (Cohen).
Critics of the body-positivity movement state that with the popularity of these types of posts, more viewers of these posts believe that they need to do anything in order to feel positive about their body, such as excessive exercise or dieting
Slide 3: Show example of these types of post

Main Idea – With body positivity becoming more prevalent in the media, more realistic bodies are being shown through advertisements, celebrities, and television.

A. Support

The clothing brand Aerie launched their #aeriereal campaign in 2014 which uses models with realistic bodies including those with stomach rolls, cellulite, and stretch marks in their advertising. After the launch of this campaign, sales went up by 20% and soared higher and higher.
Dove’s self-esteem project which uses non-models of all different sizes and skin colors to “make beauty a source of confidence” with their marketing, because these women are committed to taking photos with no retouching or editing. Dove’s sales increased from $2.5 billion to $4 billion after using a diverse amount of appearances, which is similar to Aerie’s success.
Slide 4: Show Aerie and Dove campaigns

B. Support

Victoria Secret, famously known for their tall, skinny, clear-skinned models, had cancelled their 2019 fashion show for the first time in twenty-four years which was due to the increasingly popular body positivity movement which hurt the company’s image after not becoming representative of other body types unlike other brands.
Lizzo’s popular tracks such as ‘Fitness’ and ‘My Skin’ strive to normalize all body types and want women to be confident and comfortable in their bodies.
Slide 5: Show Victoria Secret models / Lizzo

Conclusion

The body positivity movement has shifted society’s view on beauty and has caused women to feel less pressure to live up to the unrealistic standards of always keeping a slim body.

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