Essay #4 Options Due May 16
Writing Assignment Option #1
Develop a thesis that explains how Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (should be online) is an allegory of the moral challenges we face as we are drugged by privilege leaving us indifferent about the sufferings of The Other. Successful essays will connect the allegory to modern day social injustices such as the inhumane working conditions of migrant workers or the incarceration system, to name a couple.
Explanation
The privileged position themselves to sacrifice a group to perpetuate the privileged group's power. The privileged, like the leaders in Le Guin's short story, rationalize their exploitation of the sacrificed group by making utilitarian pronouncements such as "sacrificing a few for the greater good."
The poor are used as a resource in our society. They pay for municipal violations, they pay higher fees for cars, house, interest payments. There is an entire industry based on exploiting the poor. For example, there are check cashing agencies in poor neighborhoods that take a huge percentage out of the check before handing over the cash.
Small children work in sweat shops all over the world. They don't have a childhood. They don't see their parents. They are slaves. However, they are in demand because they allow American consumers to buy clothes for cheap. Thus these small children are sacrificed for our consumer pleasures.
The same can be said with agriculture. People work in substandard working conditions so we, the consumer, can buy affordable produce.
The same can be said of the restaurant industry. People are exploited so we, the hungry diner, can "eat out on the cheap."
Perhaps the worst sacrifice is made in the industrial prison complex where poor people of color are the primary source of income for this industry.
Theme of Denial
We are all upset by injustice, but we can inure ourselves to cruelty and injustice through denial or willed ignorance.
We rationalize:
"Someone's gotta clean those toilets."
"Someone's gotta pick cheap produce so I can feed my family."
"I'm sad that cows cry before they get slaughtered, but dang that double cheeseburger with goat cheese, bacon, onion rings and sopping with tangy chipotle mayonnaise is delicious."
"I know my peanut butter has cockroach pieces and rat hair in it, but what are you going to do?"
To use the above John Oliver video in a comparison with the Ursula Le Guin short story, you might consider the following parallels of moral shortcomings:
denial
compartmentalization
desensitization to cruelty
confusing majority rule with moral order
confusing status quo with moral order
preferring self-interest and pleasure over moral duty to others as a Faustian Bargain (deal with the devil)
Writing Option #2
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Sources:
"Empathy: Probably a Good Thing" (reveals Straw Man Argument)
"Why Paul Bloom Is Wrong About Empathy and Morality"
"I Could Say That Paul Bloom Is a Callous Idiot, But I Empathize With Him"
Suggested Outline
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's points.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Writing Option #3
Support, refute, or complicate Malcolm Gladwell's claim that expensive universities are immoral to serve gourmet food to their students because the cost excludes financially challenged students from attending these universities.
Sources
Morality of Food Choices in Malcolm Gladwell's Podcast;
Bowdoin's Defense Against Gladwell
Mother Jones Challenges Gladwell
Gladwell's Food Fight podcast on YouTube
Writing Option #4
Support, refute, or complicate the claim that the disease model of addiction can be harmful to some addicts who would benefit more from a habit or conditioning model of addiction.
Sources
Addiction is not a disease" reviewed by Laura Miller
"Is Addiction a Habit or a Disease?" by Zachary Siegel
"Addiction is a Disease and Needs to be Treated as Such"by David Sack.
See Ed Kressy’s autobiographical essay.
Writing Option #5
Support or refute the argument that there is no valid defense of the Anti-Vaxxer position. You can consult the following:
"Why Vaccination Refusal Is a White Privilege Problem"
"Anti-Vaxxers: Enjoying the Privilege of Putting Everyone at Risk"
"What Everyone Gets Wrong About Anti-Vaccine Parents"
"We Seem to be More Frightened Than We've Ever Been"
"How to Change an Anti-Vaxxer's Mind"
Sample Thesis
While many parents are well intentioned and fearful of vaccines as they are mired in a sea of overwhelming alarmist information, their decision to deny their children vaccines is misguided, at best, and morally repugnant, more likely, when we consider their refusal to acknowledge real science and empirical evidence, their reliance on logical fallacies and quack pseudo-science, their narcissistic conspiracy mentality, and, most of all, their decision to exact a potentially fatal pestilence upon our children.
Sample Outline
Paragraph 1: In your introduction explain the justifications used for the anti-vaxxer movement.
Paragraph 2: Refute or defend those justifications in your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Group Activity
Get into groups of 4 or 5 and ask the following 3 questions:
One. Do you have an emotional response to parents who don't vaccinate their children?
Two. Are parents who don't vaccinate their children getting a "bad rap"? Explain.
Three. How could you incorporate these two questions into an introduction for your essay?
Writing Option #6
Support, refute, or complicate Tom James' claim that the promises of legal pot have not been fulfilled by incompetence, corruption, and confusion.
Sources
The Failed Promise of Legal Pot
Writing Option #2
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paul Bloom's Claim That Empathy Has Deficits
One. Empathy is a poor moral guide because it's biased and often looks-based.
Two. Empathy blinds us from utilitarian approaches to policy in favor of feelings approaches.
Three. Empathy is inferior to compassion. The latter desires to help others in the absence of feelings or empathy.
Four. Excessive empathy or "hyper empathy" can be bullying and controlling over others.
Five. Excessive empathy can lead to excessive self-denial and self-abnegation.
Six. Empathy can be selfish, indulgent, unpleasant, and inappropriate when the person is reacting to someone who is suffering (drowning example).
Seven. Empathy leads to emotional burnout.
Eight. Empathy is a liability for doctors who need calm, not empathy, to make their patients feel better.
Sources:
"Why Paul Bloom Is Wrong About Empathy and Morality"
Counterargument:
"I Could Say That Paul Bloom Is a Callous Idiot, But I Empathize With Him"
Nathan J. Robinson's Fallacies
One. Ad hominem: attack the man, the character
Two. He accuses PB of wanting us to feel others' pain less: Straw Man Fallacy.
Three. He accuses PB of saying one thing and doing another: Semantic and Splitting Hairs Fallacy.
Four. He accuses PB of wanting to be "more significant than he is." False Motivation Fallacy.
Five. Complexity Fallacy. If the argument isn't simple enough, accuse the writer of being unclear and dishonest.
Six. "Fudging and circumlocution": Wordy Refutation Fallacy: Hide behind big words to sound convincing.
Seven. "He provokes audience and makes a bold statement" and then he is "hedging and qualifying": Stipulation Fallacy. Essayists use stipulations all the time. They are part of sophisticated analysis, not trickery.
Eight. "fundamental human belief": Tradition and Emotional Fallacy.
Nine. We need more, not less, empathy: More Is Better Fallacy.
Ten. "No one said a doctor needs to feel depressed": Red Herring Fallacy.
Eleven. "He sets himself up as a tough-minded truth teller." False Representation Fallacy.
Suggested Essay Outline
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's points.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
McMahon Grammar Lesson: Comma Rules (based in part by Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers)
Commas are designed to help writers avoid confusing sentences and to clarify the logic of their sentences.
If you cook Jeff will clean the dishes. (Will you cook Jeff?)
While we were eating a rattlesnake approached us. (Were we eating a rattlesnake?)
Comma Rule 1: Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS) joining two independent clauses.
Rattlesnakes are high in protein, but I’d rather eat a peanut butter sandwich.
Rattlesnakes are dangerous, and the desert species are even more so.
We are a proud people, for our ancestors passed down these famous delicacies over a period of five thousand years.
The exception to rule 1 is when the two independent clauses are short:
The plane took off and we were on our way.
Comma Rule 2: Use a comma after an introductory clause or phrase.
When Jeff Henderson was in prison, he developed an appetite for reading.
In the nearby room, the TV is blaring full blast.
Tanning in the hot Hermosa Beach sun for over two hours, I realized I had better call it a day.
The exception is when the short adverb clause or phrase is short and doesn’t create the possibility of a misreading:
In no time we were at 2,800 feet.
Comma Rule 3: Use a comma between all items in a series.
Jeff Henderson found redemption through hard work, self-reinvention, and social altruism.
Finding his passion, mastering his craft, and giving back to the community were all part of Jeff Henderson’s self-reinvention.
Comma Rule 4: Use a comma between coordinate adjectives not joined with “and.” Do not use a comma between cumulative adjectives.
The adjectives below are called coordinate because they modify the noun separately:
Jeff Henderson is a passionate, articulate, wise speaker.
The adjectives above are coordinate because they can be joined with “and.” Jeff Henderson is passionate and articulate and wise.
Adjectives that do not modify the noun separately are cumulative.
Three large gray shapes moved slowly toward us.
Chocolate fudge peanut butter swirl coconut cake is divine.
Comma Rule 5: Use commas to set off nonrestrictive (nonessential) elements.
Restrictive or essential information doesn’t have a comma:
For school the students need notebooks that are college-ruled.
Jeff’s cat that just had kittens became very aggressive.
Nonrestrictive:
For school the students need college-ruled notebooks, which are on sale at the bookstore.
Jeff Henderson’s mansion, which is located in Las Vegas, has a state-of-the-art kitchen.
My youngest sister, who plays left wing on the soccer team, now lives at The Sands, a beach house near Los Angeles.
Comma Rule 6: Use commas to set off interrupters or interjections between sentences.
Keith Manderlin, a close friend of mine, went on the buttermilk fried chicken diet and lost 45 pounds.
I looked down at my thumb, a flat grape in the aftermath of me hitting it with a hammer, and realized I had better have my wife drive me to the emergency room.
Green tea, which is believed to be rich in anti-oxidants, varies in quality depending on your supplier.
I sat down and wrote a song on the piano, a lugubrious homage to my angst-ridden adolescent years, which became my all-time selling hit single.
Peanut butter, known to contain significant amounts of rat and cockroach parts, continues to be a brisk seller in spite of its reputation for containing impurities.
Commas and Other Punctuation for MLA Citations
The following needs commas:
When Zombies Became a Worldwide Pestilence, Circa 2012
I’ve been teaching college composition and critical thinking for thirty years. If I had to pick a year that defined a radical change in my students I’d have to point to 2012. That was the year things started to go downhill. It was the year when smartphone users in the United States topped 100 million. It was the year a growing number of Americans and people worldwide began to see the smartphone as a necessity more important than having a toothbrush or wearing underwear. The smartphone became an external organ an external amygdala with Wi-Fi.
More than a human appendage, the smartphone became an opium-drip machine that you carried around with you 24/7. You could enjoy validation and dopamine all day long, until your brain dulled and short-circuited rendering you a mindless zombie falling down a rabbit hole of anxiety and depression.
Depression made people turn to their little opium gadgets with even greater intensity as if the very source of their mental disease might save them and put them into states of euphoria the gadget had once provided them.
I talk about the smartphone-induced zombie state with my students all the time. I talk about how this zombie state will make them “bottom feeders” in the new economy. Their time and energy wasted on their opium machine will make them lose their competitive edge to those who have the strength of mind to keep their smartphones in their proper place.
Having a competitive edge has never been more urgent in this age of merciless economic stratification where everything is tiered including our educational caste system. I remind the class that 8000 students walk through the Humanities Building every week and of those students only 3% will pass our college’s Critical Thinking courses which puts my students in the 97 percentile. A staggering 90% of the remedial students won’t even make it to freshman composition.
It’s bad enough to struggle at the bottom of the educational ladder with the odds set against you. But it’s far worse to voluntarily keep a smartphone attached to you constantly because now you’re aiding and abetting in your own demise by allowing this insidious contraption to turn you into a dysfunctional zombie.
I tell my students that this zombie state was prophesied in the 1999 film The Matrix in which we see we have a choice to take the Red Pill of knowledge or the Blue Pill of ignorance. Most people in the film’s future dystopia choose ignorance. The Blue Pill prophecy was fulfilled I tell my students in 2012 when everyone in the world believed erroneously they not only did they need a smartphone; they needed to constantly address the smartphone’s voracious appetites.
All of my students have horror stories of friends and family members whose lives have been ruined by smartphone addiction. They’ve traded ambition and caring for being numbed and depressed by their little dopamine device. They talk of older brothers and sisters unemployed college dropouts who malnourished and corpse-like languish in dank, dimly-lit basements where they are shackled to their smartphones day and night.
My students speak of their own battles with social media-induced anxiety and depression. Listening to my vitriolic rants against social media many of them have deleted their Facebook accounts. They all feel better for it. I’ve had students announce to the class that they deleted their Facebook account and it was followed by applause as if they were announcing their many days of sobriety at an A.A. meeting.
I confess to my students that while I rarely use my five-year-old smartphone a dinosaur by today’s standards I have wasted tens of thousands of hours mindlessly relaxing in front of the Internet since the late 1990s when I was deluded like millions of others into believing surfing the Net gave me infinite possibilities and a giddy sense of omnipotence. But thousands of hours wasted on skimming news articles, consuming entertainment, and conducting product research was time I could have spent practicing writing and playing piano. Rather than honing those skills I’ve remained a dilettante.
I too am in need of an intervention I confess to my students. I too am a casualty of the false utopian promises of technology. Looking at twenty years and tens of thousands of hours wasted wallowing in the malaise of the Internet's mind-numbing seductions I must now redeem myself before it's too late.
I make an announcement to my class. I am going to write a book about critical thinking as the antidote to the zombie state, which became a worldwide pestilence in 2012. The process must be reversed. The Red Pill must replace the Blue Pill. I will call my book Critical Thinking for the Zombie Apocalypse.
This sound like futility.
This sounds like a fool’s errand.
This sounds like the desperate play of a washed-up nonentity straining for relevance.
But my quest to save the students in my critical thinking class is like religion when you think about it. Religion tells you the world is a place of darkness and that to surrender to the world results in death—you navigate the Earth like a mindless zombie unaware that you slog across the planet in darkness.
I can shrug my shoulders and say the hell with it. Why fight the current? Why fight this tsunami of social media and smartphone addiction that is eviscerating our brains? Because complete surrender is nihilism the belief that nothing matters.
I cannot be a Priest of Despair and Hedonism.
I cannot tell my twin daughters now in the first grade that life is a meaningless joke.
If George Carlin is right that when you’re born you’re given a free front-row ticket to the freak show then you should know why it’s a freak show. And you should learn to tell the difference between a freak show and a non-freak show.
Knowing the difference means a lot to me.
But George Carlin was only half right.
The world is a freak show to be sure but only part of the world is. A freak show by definition means something deformed, grotesque, askew, out of whack. But these conditions are degraded versions of something better.
An informed opinion is a rare thing and it is a good thing to have.
An uninformed opinion one that is held out of habit and reflex more than anything else is a degraded version of the informed opinion. Mobs of people with uniformed opinions wreak hell and havoc on the world.
If they win then let the freak show begin.
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