3-12 Explain the collapse of the family. See Harari video “The Future of Humanity.” Homework: Write a preliminary or tentative thesis. Turn in any homework that you haven't turned in yet.
3-14 Look at students’ thesis statements. Look at 5 types of thesis statements. Look at logical fallacies. See Harari’s video “Why Fascism Is So Tempting.” Go over thesis statements.
3-19 Peer Edit for Essay #2
Essay #2 Due 3-26-19
Minimum of 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Choice A
Watch Netflix documentary Ronnie Coleman: The King. Considered to be the greatest bodybuilder of all time, Coleman is now on crutches, faces a lifetime of excruciating pain, must take opioid pain medication, may have to be consigned to a wheelchair, and by most accounts the abuse he took to become a champion bodybuilder is the reason for his condition. The film celebrates Coleman’s life principle to persist in doing what he loves, but doing what he loves comes with a price: excruciating, life-altering injuries. Is doing what we love worth it? In this context, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the notion that in order to achieve exceptional success, we are justified to make sacrifices of our body, minds, and souls.
Is Coleman’s current condition justified by his success and his heroic drive to do what he loves? Answer this question and be sure to have a counterargument section.
Three Sources:
You need to cite two sources, the Ronnie Coleman documentary and Bourree Lam’s Atlantic article “Why ‘Do You What You Love’ Is Pernicious Advice.” This is based on essay, "In the Name of Love" by Miya Tokumitsu.
Johann Hari: "Are Junk Values Making Us Depressed?"
From The Passion Paradox by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness:
When Passion Goes Bad:
One. You become a slave to external results and validation.
Two. You become blind to everything but your passion.
Three. You burn out.
Four. You lose joy.
Five. Everyone tells you how find your passion but no one tells you how to find it, or how to live with it.
When Passion Helps You Thrive and Be Your Best
One. You use passion to achieve self-determination, which means you are not dependent on external validation or external rewards like money and fame, but for the intrinsic joy of your passion.
Two. Your passion is accompanied by competency and mastery of your craft. In other words, passion without the discipline and focus to make the passion become actualized is worthless.
Three. Your passion is accompanied by autonomy and freedom to live your most authentic self, not a terrified shadow of yourself seeking outside approval.
Four. Your passion gives you a sense of relatedness: your passion connects you to something larger than yourself.
Developing a Thesis for Option A:
One. Of course, we should have some passion for anything we do. It is too self-evident to make a claim that we should have passion or not when making a career choice.
Two. To achieve critical thinking in this topic, we have to talk about passion in terms of specific definition, a specific context, and a specific application.
Definition
Your essay should discern between intrinsic and extrinsic passion.
Not all passion is equal. Some passion is deeply-seated in the core of one's soul. Other passions are superficial and transitory or short-lived.
Specific Context
Your essay should discern between the passion of a noble pursuit, like recycling or saving the planet or developing renewable energy technologies or being passionate about something based on greed or hate or racism or some other despicable impulse.
Passion is not absolute. Life often requires that we make compromises with our passion for our self-interests. For example, I might be a great artist, but I can't make a living doing studio art, so I have to compromise by using my artistic skills as a graphic designer for Honda or Lexus or the computer gaming industry.
The idea that we must "live our passion" without restraint and in some absolute form is often unrealistic, absurd, childish, asinine, and self-destructive.
Application
Your essay should frame passion as only one tool in your career toolbox. For example, passion that is not harnessed by discipline, structure, consistency, and common sense is not only worthless; it's dangerous.
McMahon's "Hot Take" Thesis
To advise people to "follow their passion and do what they love" is an empty, even dangerous bromide unless we attach that advice to important caveats or conditions: People should follow their passion and do what they love if the love comes from an intrinsic place, if people have the discipline and guidance to develop competence and mastery of the thing they love, if people are willing to make compromises when the thing they love can't make them a living as they originally intended, and if people have calculated the net liability of doing the thing they love with its net benefits.
In the case of Ronnie Coleman, the latter calculation is his individual choice. Personally, I would not subject myself to a lifetime of major surgeries, crippling injuries, and pain medications in order to be the world's best bodybuilder; however, unlike Ronnie Coleman, I am not a rare muscle freak who has the potential to reach the level of muscle freakishness that Ronnie Coleman was able to obtain.
Counterargument
McMahon's rebuke of passion is nonsense. We are not mercenaries, robots, soulless android-like supporting our lifestyles with whatever jobs are available. We go to college in part to find a way to awaken passions within us that we can connect to the job market. Eliminating the passion component is foolish, cruel, and unwise because if we pursue careers solely based on financial interests, we will lose our soul, we will fall into depression, we will fizzle out, and we won't have the competitive edge against those who pursue the same fields we do and have authentic passion in what they do.
Option B
Watch Netflix Black Mirror episode “Nosedive,” and listen to the NPR Hidden Brain episode “Why Social Media Isn’t Always Very Social,” and watch Sherry Turkle’s Ted Talk video, “Connected, But Alone?” Then in the context of those 3 sources develop an argumentative thesis about the way the social media misuse creates psychological dissolution, depression, and thwarted emotional development.
Choice C
Take an episode from Hasan Minhaj’s Netflix news show Patriot Act and develop an argumentative thesis that addresses one of Minhaj’s topics.
Choice D (with some elaborations)
In Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, read Chapter 9 “The Arrow of History” and write an essay that applies Yuval’s notion of cultural inconsistencies and contradictions (164) to a contradiction you see in contemporary life. You can apply these inconsistencies to Harari's claim that we "prefer power over truth," as stated in his Guardian essay "Humans are a post-truth species."
You can also apply these "cultural inconsistencies and contradictions" to the Netflix comedy special "Nanette" in which Hannah Gadsby expresses her contradictory positions on being a comedian. Specifically, address the Gadsby's argument that stand-up comedy, based on a setup and a punchline, sacrifices too much moral complexity, catharsis, and wisdom to justify doing it. For your sources, you can use the Netflix special, the New York Times article, New Yorker article, The Atlantic article, and The Washington Post article. In Gadsby's performance, she questions the very role of comedy and expresses her desire to quit doing comedy as much as she shows her desire to continue making it. Explain this contradiction.
Choice E
Based on Chapter 9 in Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, develop a thesis that argues that money is in many ways a form of religion. By money, I might be more accurate and more helpful if I replace the word "money" with "capitalism." You can find an elaboration of this topic on Harari's website. In these terms, then, Choice E is really the same as Choice F: See below.
Choice F
Based on Chapter 16 in Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, support, refute, or complicate Harari’s assertion that the free market is a dangerous cult that results in “Capitalist Hell.”
Choice G
Based on chapters 18 and 19 in Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses Harari’s notion of “imagined communities” and the human quest for happiness and meaning. You can find an elaboration of imagined communities on this website.
Choice H
Based on Chapter 20 in Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, develop an argumentative thesis about the viability of the “Frankenstein Prophecy.” You can find an elaboration of this prophecy on Harari's notion of AI on this YouTube video and this website.
Choice I
Watch Yuval Noah Harari’s Ted Talk video “Why Fascism Is So Tempting” and write an argumentative thesis that addresses his claim. This topic is elaborated on in Shoshana Zuboff's notion of surveillance capitalism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHHb7R3kx40
Do we really seek democracy and the truth or do we insulate ourselves in our delusional bubbles and repel evidence that might challenge our reality? Is this a new problem in the social media age? Or have we always been drawn to a fascist defense of our tribe? Harari elaborates on this theme in his essay, "Humans are a post-truth species."
Choice J
Watch Hasan Minhaj critique student loans in his Netflix Patriot Act episode and develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the topic. For example, should student loans be forgiven? Your answer to that question would be your argumentative thesis.
Choice K
Watch Hasan Minhaj critique current administration (episode "Civil Rights Under Trump") for taking away civil rights and write an argumentative thesis that agrees or disagrees with Minhaj's claim that these government policies are bad for Americans.
Recognizing Logical Fallacies
Begging the Question
Begging the question assumes that a statement is self-evident when it actually requires proof.
Major Premise: Fulfilling all my major desires is the only way I can be happy.
Minor Premise: I can’t afford when of my greatest desires in life, a Lexus GS350.
Conclusion: Therefore, I can never be happy.
Circular Reasoning
Circular reasoning occurs when we support a statement by restating it in different terms.
Stealing is wrong because it is illegal.
Admitting women into the men’s club is wrong because it’s an invalid policy.
Your essay is woeful because of its egregious construction.
Your boyfriend is hideous because of his heinous characteristics.
I have to sell my car because I’m ready to sell it.
I can’t spend time with my kids because it’s too time-consuming.
I need to spend more money on my presents than my family’s presents because I need bigger and better presents.
I’m a great father because I’m the best father my children have ever had.
Weak Analogy or Faulty Comparison
Analogies are never perfect but they can be powerful. The question is do they have a degree of validity to make them worth the effort.
A toxic relationship is like cancer that gets worse and worse (fine).
Sugar is high-octane fuel to use before your workout (weak because there is nothing high-octane about a substance that causes you to crash and converts into fat and creates other problems)
Free education is a great flame and the masses are moths flying into the flames of destruction. (horribly false analogy)
Ad Hominem Fallacy (Personal Attack)
“Who are you to be a marriage counselor? You’ve been divorced six times?”
A lot of people give great advice and present sound arguments even if they don’t apply their principles to their lives, so we should focus on the argument, not a personal attack.
“So you believe in universal health care, do you? I suppose you’re a communist and you hate America as well.”
Making someone you disagree with an American-hating communist is invalid and doesn’t address the actual argument.
“What do you mean you don’t believe in marriage? What are you, a crazed nihilist, an unrepentant anarchist, an immoral misanthrope, a craven miscreant?”
Straw Man Fallacy
You twist and misconstrue your opponent’s argument to make it look weaker than it is when you refute it. Instead of attacking the real issue, you aim for a weaker issue based on your deliberate misinterpretation of your opponent’s argument.
“Those who are against universal health care are heartless. They obviously don’t care if innocent children die.”
Hasty Generalization (Jumping to a Conclusion)
“I’ve had three English instructors who are middle-aged bald men. Therefore, all English instructors are middle-aged bald men.”
“I’ve met three Americans with false British accents and they were all annoying. Therefore, all Americans, such as Madonna, who contrive British accents are annoying.” Perhaps some Americans do so ironically and as a result are more funny than annoying.
Either/Or Fallacy
There are only two choices to an issue is an over simplification and an either/or fallacy.
“Either you be my girlfriend or you don’t like real men.”
“Either you be my boyfriend or you’re not a real American.”
“Either you play football for me or you’re not a real man.”
“Either you’re for us or against us.” (The enemy of our enemy is our friend is everyday foreign policy.)
“Either you agree with me about increasing the minimum wage, or you’re okay with letting children starve to death.”
“Either you get a 4.0 and get admitted into USC, or you’re only half a man.”
Equivocation
Equivocation occurs when you deliberately twist the meaning of something in order to justify your position.
“You told me the used car you just sold me was in ‘good working condition.’”
“I said ‘good,’ not perfect.”
The seller is equivocating.
“I told you to be in bed by ten.”
“I thought you meant to be home by ten.”
“You told me you were going to pay me the money you owe me on Friday.”
“I didn’t know you meant the whole sum.”
“You told me you were going to take me out on my birthday.”
“Technically speaking, the picnic I made for us in the backyard was a form of ‘going out.’”
Red Herring Fallacy
This fallacy is to throw a distraction in your opponent’s face because you know a distraction may help you win the argument.
“Barack Obama wants us to support him but his father was a Muslim. How can we trust the President on the war against terrorism when he has terrorist ties?”
“You said you were going to pay me my thousand dollars today. Where is it?”
“Dear friend, I’ve been diagnosed with a very serious medical condition. Can we talk about our money issue some other time?”
Slippery Slope Fallacy
We go down a rabbit hole of exaggerated consequences to make our point sound convincing.
“If we allow gay marriage, we’ll have to allow people to marry gorillas.”
“If we allow gay marriage, my marriage to my wife will be disrespected and dishonored.”
Appeal to Authority
Using a celebrity to promote an energy drink doesn’t make this drink effective in increasing performance.
Listening to an actor play a doctor on TV doesn’t make the pharmaceutical he’s promoting safe or effective.
Tradition Fallacy
“We’ve never allowed women into our country club. Why should we start now?”
“Women have always served men. That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it always should be.”
Misuse of Statistics
Using stats to show causality when it’s a condition of correlation or omitting other facts.
“Ninety-nine percent of people who take this remedy see their cold go away in ten days.” (Colds go away on their own).
“Violent crime from home intruders goes down twenty percent in a home equipped with guns.” (more people in those homes die of accidental shootings or suicides)
Post Hoc, Confusing Causality with Correlation
Taking cold medicine makes your cold go away. Really?
The rooster crows and makes the sun go up. Really?
You drink on a Thursday night and on Friday morning you get an A on your calculus exam. Really?
You stop drinking milk and you feel stronger. Really? (or is it a placebo effect?)
Non Sequitur (It Does Not Follow)
The conclusion in an argument is not relevant to the premises.
Megan drives a BMW, so she must be rich.
McMahon understands the difference between a phrase and a dependent clause; therefore, he must be a genius.
Whenever I eat chocolate cake, I feel good. Therefore, chocolate cake must be good for me.
Bandwagon Fallacy
Because everyone believes something, it must be right.
“You can steal a little at work. Everyone else does.”
“In Paris, ninety-nine percent of all husbands have a secret mistress. Therefore adultery is not immoral.”
The Curse of Tatiana Minero
The incident that sealed my deeply-entrenched bitterness and my brooding disposition forever, an event that at the time seemed relatively harmless, happened to me over thirty years ago. I was sixteen, a bodybuilder of svelte proportions, tanned and endowed with long brown locks, luscious thick eyebrows, and piercing beady brown eyes. I had showy squared-off cheekbones and a strong commander-like jaw that allowed me to exude a certain swarthy appeal. But beneath my supercilious, self-assured pose resided your typical teenage male, a social nincompoop, self-conscious, awkward, prone to excessive sweating. I was, like many young men my age, tongue-tied around women, having devoted all my time and effort to honing the perfect body but spending zilch on attaining even a modicum of a personality. A pity I didn’t have the insight to see that such a condition would lead to a lifelong curse, a searing affliction that men suffer when they are compelled to look back on a lost opportunity and then are left to wonder what could have happened if only they hadn’t fumbled the ball.
We all fumble. We all make mistakes. But we all learn from our errors and go on with our lives. Right? Wrong. Dead wrong. Take it from me, a middle-aged, rancorous man. Heavy-hearted, emotionally-arrested, a slave to the past, I am a helpless victim to a memory that, against my will, plays over and over in my mind and keeps its freshness and vitality even as I wither away.
The incident happened in the dead of summer. Scheduled to enter Mr. Teenage Golden State in a couple of weeks, I was tanning myself at Cull Canyon Lake, when I noticed an olive-skinned girl had thrown down her towel close to me and plopped herself down on the sand. This was no ordinary girl. This was a sixteen-year-old goddess, the fabled Tatiana Minero. Her body slathered in a deliquescing, zero-sun protection tropical banana-coconut tanning oil, she was soon stretched out in the supine position, revealing her smooth, willowy body in a tiny green chambray bikini, the material so scanty that both top and bottom could easily fit inside a robin’s egg. Her straight, dark, silken brown hair flowed down the length of her sleek, reticulated back. Her diminutive ankles were adorned with little shimmering bracelets of tiny silver, almond-shaped bells that jingled when she walked, emitting a sort of siren’s call so that every time she stood up to walk toward the drinking fountains, all of the men, overcome with a sort of smoldering, glandular itch, abruptly stopped what they were doing to observe what was no doubt the most cataclysmic event of the day, the witnessing of Tatiana Minero strolling slowly toward the drinking fountains to take a sip of water. To see Tatiana Minero get up from her towel, stroll toward the fountains, wet her parched mouth, and return to her spot on the sand was to be keenly aware of a palpable change in the atmosphere. Male hormonal levels, tensions, and anxieties immediately began to rise and seethe as all men’s eyes were glued to Tatiana’s trajectory to and from the drinking fountains. It was as if her mere act of walking was a rare phenomenon, one of the great wonders and mysteries of the world, so that all the men at Cull Canyon Lake, not wanting to miss a second of this breathtaking spectacle, became completely fixated and motionless in a sort of bizarre time warp whereby Planet Earth seemed to have, in deference to Tatiana, stopped rotating. I can still see the men frozen between the apex of their leap off the diving board and the water below them, I can still see them stuck in mid-air as they lunge for a Frisbee or a football, I can still see them unable to clamp their teeth down on the mouth-watering poor boy sandwich they were eager to bite into just a moment before Tatiana Minero stood up and, like the Priestess of Planetary Rotation, halted the Earth’s revolution around the Sun. All of the men at the lake, their conversations and antics interrupted, their lives put on hold, their very thoughts jammed, were noticeably agape, their eyes burning with torment and insanity, as they beheld this sylphlike teenage girl walk ever so slowly toward the drinking fountains.
To add to our misery, occasional breezes wafted Tatiana’s sweet-smelling tanning oil into our direction, affording us a redolent reminder of her presence so that, like dogs in some cruel Pavlovian experiment, we shuddered with violent paroxysms as we inhaled her potent, ambrosial cocktail.
But the torment didn’t stop there. As if Tatiana wasn’t already unbearably irresistible, she also enjoyed the cachet and supernatural aura of belonging to a prized progeny of sisters, aunts, and cousins, who, known simply as The Minero Sisters, were legendary throughout the San Francisco East Bay for their beauty, the kind that aroused such passion that men squandered entire fortunes, warred and conspired against each other, and plotted diabolical schemes into the deep of the night for the privilege of being one of their suitors.
As I tried to relax on my pale orange Charlie Brown bedspread, I had heard some guys nearby whispering to each other, with the kind of excitement and conspiratorial glee reserved for surprise movie star appearances, about how this gorgeous girl lying on the sand next to me was one of the Minero Sisters. To merely utter the words “Minero Sisters” elicited an immediate smile and understanding and sometimes caused the hairs behind a man’s neck to bristle, for the words had the same kind of power and brand recognition as the words BMW, Mercedes Benz and Lexus.
Some guy from my school had introduced me to Tatiana as she was lying on her beach towel just a few feet away from me. To my surprise, upon meeting me, her ears perked up and her dark saucer eyes seemed to greedily soak in her view of me as she sat upright, supported by her long, slender arms, their sleek shape and cocoa butter tan highlighted by gold arm bracelets coiled around her delicate wrists like writhing snakes. With a coquettish giggle, she outstretched her legs in front of her while her high-arched feet circled playfully, causing her ankle bells to jingle. Then turning her head toward me in a way that caused her long dark brown hair to whip around her body like a matador’s cape, she stared at me, asked me who I was and why she had never seen me before. The tone of her voice was downright imperious. She sounded like a mildly irritated queen who would have her informants beheaded for having failed to apprise her of my very existence. “How come I’ve never seen you before?” she asked again. I told her I attended Castro Valley High. No wonder, she said, she had never seen me; she was a student at Hayward High School. Then out of the blue, she asked me a question that caught me completely off guard:
“Are you a good kisser? Cause with a body like that, boy, it would be a real shame if you weren’t a good kisser.”
In shock, dumbed by her beauty, and paralyzed by such a brazen proposal, my bowels loosened, and I found myself unable to speak. I tried and tried with all my will to say something in response to her audacious remark but my lips were pressed shut. I would have been happy merely spitting out some incoherent gibberish, but my brain synapses were apparently short-circuited rendering my jaw locked and I was revealed for who I truly was, a helpless mute, a dumbfounded ninny, an inexperienced awkward-handed Billy goat, unworthy of holding court with the great Tatiana Minero.
My failure to respond to her scintillating offer seemed to tell her all she needed to know about me, which was, of course, that for all my tanned, sculpted muscles, I was in fact not a good kisser, not just in the literal sense of not being able to kiss, that is, the mechanical act of caressing her lips with my own, but in the fuller, broader, more devastating sense of not having the confidence, the moxie, and the élan, to express passion toward her. Her question about my kissing was in a way an ingenious work of espionage; she had sent a reconnaissance team, a sort of Geek Patrol, into my psyche to see just what I was made of and found, rather quickly, that I was indeed a geek, so that, armed with this information, she insouciantly turned around and did not speak to me again.
Ever.
It was not just that she did not speak to me, but, on a more traumatic scale, that she actually seemed to recede from my universe, fade, and disappear, forever out of my grasp so that now, over thirty years later, I still reconstruct the event and imagine how rapturous it would have been had I had it within me to respond to her question with something charming, assured, and sophisticated, something that would let her know that I was indeed the great kisser she had been looking for.
Please don’t get me wrong. It’s not like my whole life has succumbed to this one incident. I’ve moved on as best I could. I went to college, got a decent-paying job, and married a beautiful Mediterranean woman. She is a splendor to behold, voluptuous, large-lipped, blessed with long curly brown hair. Quite frankly, the best way to imagine my wife is to think of Anita Ekberg in Federico Fellini’s famous fountain scene in La Dolce Vita. Yes, my wife does possess what many might call that larger-than-life kind of beauty, the kind that is so powerful and delectable that I enjoy, in the public arena, the assurance and satisfaction that other men will seethe with envy and admiration whenever they see me with her.
But you see, not all is well. My wife is sometimes awakened at night by my crying out Tatiana’s name. Yes, I still dream of her. Imagine it. Tatiana, a girl I never even touched, being the cause of my greatest infidelity! It brings me so much anguish to still be under her spell more than thirty years later. She is such a haunting presence in our home, such an unwelcome apparition. Sometimes my wife, after hearing me speak of Tatiana in my sleep, shakes me from my sleep and admonishes me for speaking the other woman’s name again.
I rarely sleep at night myself because I fear I may have another one of my cursed dreams. Sometimes Tatiana laughs. Sometimes she says she still wants me. Sometimes she cries because, she says, I have betrayed her. Sometimes she does not even appear as beautiful teen girl I met at the beach but an ugly reptile with skin covered in green scales. I know she is not the same girl who spoke to me at the lake over thirty years ago. She is something else entirely, a demon, a succubus, an unclean spirit that will show me no mercy.
I’ve resorted to sleeping on the couch. I feel safer in the event that I have one of my dreams I can cry out Tatian’s name with no one hearing me.
Often I find myself lying on the couch sleepless and whimpering like an injured dog. My stomach will often hurt and I will try to abate the pain by drinking a vermillion green chalky substance that my doctor promises will assuage my chronic dyspepsia.
I sit up and drink the medicine while flaring my nostrils in disgust, after which I fall asleep and begin to dream of my lovely Tatiana, so full of grace, sophistication, and splendor. It pains her to see me forced to drink such a bitter-tasting noxious beverage, and she shares these words with me:
“You fool, if only you would have said yes you will kiss me at the beach, you wouldn’t be in this predicament. But you had to say no. And no one refuses Tatiana Minero without paying the price. Therefore, sweet dreams will elude you forever and ever. Good night.”
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