Juliana's RWS 200 Blog

In highschool, I had read academic journal articles and scholarly articles for things like research essays. The worrrssttt ones are scientific journals. I remember senior year I was trying to write a research paper on animal agriculture and its affect on the environment and I had to go through so many papers with tons of academic science-y language. It kinda sucked. The good news about this scholarly article is that it's not about science! (even though I love science) So I found that it was easier to read than I was expecting due to my bad experience. But there were some things that made it challenging. The language first of all is pretty difficult. It's not one of those casual reads. Also, all the information is just really dense. The article was like 11 pages of dense information. Kind of scary. I do kind of enjoy the fact that the information isn't subjective though. I like the way Chomsky writes subjectively, but I also feel like sometimes objective writing is nice...

This week we read Chomsky principles 4-7 and those principles include "Shift the Burden," "Attack Solidarity," "Run the Regulators," and "Engineer Elections." I want to focus on Attack Solidarity today though.  A claim that he made in this section was that to masters, "solidarity is quite dangerous." That's because the people who want to control everything and have a concentration of wealth and power don't want to spend time thinking about the good of EVERYONE, but rather the good of themselves. And this idea can be seen in many ways. Chomsky writes that politicians have created the idea that "you've got to be for yourself and follow the vile maxim." This works for the really rich, and not for anyone else. He builds this claim by introducing social security and the affects it has had on the country. Social security is always seen as a problem, but Chomsky argues that in fact, it's not even a problem. H...

I want to start off by saying, regardless of what I've read about Chomsky, I don't think he's anti-American.  Seriously. It doesn't make you anti-American to question certain parts of American culture that have been around for a really long time. If anything, that sounds reasonable to me. Things change so much day to day, year to year, century to century. Why is it reasonable to assume something would stick around for so long and not change?  Chomsky’s book called the Requiem for the American Dream takes a super interesting (and pretty liberal) stance on the American Dream. He sets aside 10 principles about the “concentration of wealth and power, “ but this week we only got to 3 of them. The first one is reducing democracy. He explains that “inequality has many consequences” and there are some that obvious. For example, we know that inequality leads to the lives of some being worse than others. That’s the whole point. But he brings up the interesting study ...

Rebecca Jones, author of Finding the Good Argument or Why Bother with Logic?, discusses argument and what it means to use argument in writing and in daily life. An interesting perspective she brought to the table was that "the word argument often means something negative" and that's why so many people misinterpret its place in writing. When you hear the word argument, or even the word arguing you are immediately sensing a couple of things. First of all: tension. I feel like tension is always involved in argument. You assume something is going down. Then you think of irritation or even anger. There are so many negative emotions associated with that word that it seems almost as if the word “argument” used in an academic sense is a completely different word. Sure, it has the same spelling and sound, but is it really the same? If argumentation is considered negative, then they are two very different words. Argumentation has to do with persuasion. That soun...