Full: A Documentary

It Truly Is All a Lie

The social pyramid is something that has haunted societies since their creation. The desire to narrow the base and the fear of the pyramid collapsing should not seem alien to members of a society. Often, the social pyramid shows to be the ugly side of a society. This scenario is seen when Capote describes Garden City in In True Blood. As he begins to describe the city, Capote makes the town seem like a small but generally pleasant town. Capote is able to excel in introducing this idea to us via the use of quotations. One can read paragraph after paragraph of compliments and feel slightly convinced. On the other hand, one can read a line of quotation and be greatly impacted. There's just something about those two marks that encompass the sentence or phrase in each side that makes your brain highlight said sentence or phrase.

While reading this description, Capote saying that the city has "much to support the defensive boastings of the citizenry: a well-run public library, a competent daily newspaper, green-lawned and shady squares here and there" (33) and so on makes me think that Garden City is a rather nice town. However, a stranger who I don't know anything about saying that you can "'Look all over the world, and you won't find friendlier people or fresher air or sweeter drinking water,'" really convinces me that Garden City is a great city. Never mind the lack of evidence behind his overall weak argument, this guy's word is what really counts. Perhaps it's the appeal to popularity by showing that other people agree which adds this magical characteristic to quotations but they still accomplish their purpose of convincing me.

Anyways, the idea of the positivity of Garden City is something that Capote greatly enforces during the beginning of his description. However, Capote, being as thorough as he is, still has to bring up the negatives of the town. Turns out that Garden City lies in the middle of something referred to as the Bible Belt. This leads to religion being a big factor in social status. This is bad in itself, but it turns ugly as Capote goes into depth. The bottom half of the pyramid consists of Catholics, Baptists, and Methodists while the upper half consists of Presbyterians and Episcopalians. Turns out that Catholics, Baptists, and Methodists account for eighty percent of the populations. This leads to a pretty wide pyramid. What do the Garden Citians have to say about this?

"'No, sir. Nothing like that here. All equal, regardless of wealth, color, or creed. Everything the way it ought to be in a democracy; that's us.'"(34)

You won't fool me this time quotation. I can see right through your semicolon. You're full of lies! Capote shows us the denial that the Garden Citians have towards this fairly apparent fact showing light on an interesting idea. The people of Garden City think that they live in a type of utopia, and when asked about something negative, they simply shrug it off. It's like if they favored ignorance over tackling and actual problem. Perhaps they will have the same reaction towards a certain murder. *wink* *wink*

Jack Thompson...

If there is a general trend that I see with fallacies it is that they are mostly caused by people that think they know more than they actually do. Whether it is due to lack of knowledge or just wrong knowledge in general, people that commit fallacies never have a complete understanding of the topic, and what could be a better example of this than a sixty-year-old man from Ohio trying to talk about video games. I don't really like Jack Thompson so I'm gonna really enjoy tearing him appart right in the fallacies.

First of all, everything that Thompson says pretty much has false comparison written all over it. Shooting in a video game and shooting in real life might be somewhat similar but that doesn't mean that they are the same. This comparison is actually pretty ridiculous. Thompson is basically comparing shooting in real life with moving a dot around on a screen and occasionally pressing buttons. One can argue that there is the psychological factor since you are shooting people in both scenarios but that is still the same type of fallacy. Those things on the screen might look like people but they aren't people. They are simply a bunch of pixels and polygons put together in order to look human. You can't possibly compare this to a living, breathing human made of flesh and bones. However, the fallacies don't stop there.

Jack Thompson also suffers from the use of bad examples. The one that really stood out to me was Doom. Thompson is trying to convince us that this twenty-year-old game in which your only controls are moving forwards, moving backwards, turning, and shooting is teaching young adults how to shoot at people when in the game you spend most of the time shooting at brown and pink demons.

                                         Who needs military training when you have Doom?


These bad examples are what end up luring Thompson in for a third type of fallacy: the fallacy of the complex cause. There are many other reasons behind these kids' behaviors during the shootings. Maybe they learned how to use an actual gun when they were younger? Maybe these kids are insane? I don't know about you but even after playing some Call of Duty, I would still be scared out of my mind by simply thinking of pointing a gun at someone. Of course Jack Thompson, being someone that probably has never held a controller in his hand, wouldn't know this. With this I repeat my initial idea. If you want to avoid fallacies, try to have complete knowledge of what you are talking about.

Johan Cruyff's Chivas Project

Winter 2011, Club Deportiva Guadalajara has been knocked out of the title run by small team Queretaro FC leading to a disappointing end to a great season. Guadalajara, otherwise known a Chivas, needed someone to change their mentality, someone to lead them to victories again. Who could be put in charge of such an important task? None other than the Barcelona and Netherlands legend: Johan Cruyff. However, in order to be effective, he would first have to show that he has the qualities necessary for a leader. Cruyff is able to do this via practical wisdom, a topic that is gone into depth in the seventh chapter of Heinrichs's Thank You For Arguing, in which he divided it into three parts.

First, one must show off one's experience. This was probably the easiest part for Cruyff. Having won twenty-four titles as a player and fourteen titles as a manager, Cruyff has a lot of material to show off. The mere idea of a player that came second behind Pele in the World Player of the Century poll would come all the way to Mexico to help a team in the highly criticized Mexican football league would have any Chivas fanatic ecstatic. The man is already a legend. When it comes to showing off experience, Cruyff is basically set. It's the next two parts that require Cuyff's effort.

The second and last parts of practical wisdom are bending the rules and appearing to take the middle course. These two come into play in a decision Cruyff made recently, and by recently I mean yesterday. One of the biggest factors that define Chivas is the fact that the team is composed of only Mexicans. It is one of those traditions that should never be broken. However, this has posed a small problem for Chivas. With a more limited player pool to choose from, Chivas has recently suffered in keeping the level of the squad high despite the departure of most of the players that formed a part of the great team that played during the mid 2000s and were even crowned champions in 2006. As a result, Chivas has produced poor results in the recent years. Cruyff's response to this proved to be very controversial. Cruyff proposed that Chivas allow non Mexicans to join. What?! Cruyff had just decided to go against the tradition of the team! It was later clarified that Cruyff meant that players born outside of Mexico but of Mexican heritage would be able to join. By doing this, Cruyff is able to successfully fulfill the last two requirements of practical wisdom.

By altering the rules of the club, Cruyff is able to bend the rules and show that he has the willpower and desire to change the results of the club. Then, by not going to extremes in the changes that he does, Cruyff appears to take the middle course. This is able to fill all the Chivas supporters with hope, and allows the fanatics to believe in Cruyff.

Oh Pitbull

Logos, pathos and ethos. These are those words that you can hear endless times in English class yet still have no idea what they mean. The one that is probably the biggest victim of this is ethos. Your teacher describes that ethos is the use of character. Ok, what does that mean and how do you do that? In the sixth chapter of Thank You for Arguing, Heinrichs attempts to answer these questions as clearly as he can, and he is able to succesfully do this with some examples that are really easy to understand. However, I want to show a different approach to the art of ethos. While Heinrichs shows how you should take advantage of ethos, I want to show you the opposite of ethos. In this entry you will learn about how to mess up in the use ethos through everyone's favourite baldy: Pitbull.

I want you to ask yourself something: do you like Pitbull? I'm not asking you about your trivial musical taste. I'm asking you if you like Pitbull as a person. This response is an effect of ethos. Personally, I don't really like Pitbull as a person.

Something about Pitbull makes me think that he didn't do too hot in his English classes. Maybe it is strange rhymes or how he always sings about the same things. Another possible reason is that he has no understanding of how to use ethos.

Two tools that Heinrichs gave us for the use of ethos are bragging and appealing to the values of the audience. When it comes to bragging, Pitbull seems to be a master. The amount of bragging that occurs in his songs get to a point where it is ridiculus. However, overusing the tool of bragging doesn't make you good at ethos. In the contrary, at extreems it actually hinders the success in terms of ethos. You can't really like a character who won't shut up about his money and how "Tiger Woods times Jesse James equals Pitbull all night long." In the other hand, when it comes to appealing to the audience's values, Pitbull is at the other extreme. Lyrics-wise, Pibull is only able to appeal to the values of people like him. Now, I am not going to judge people like Pitbull, but the use of lines such as "I got it locked up like Lindsay Lohan" and "Fo sho, flood the club like New Orleans" is pretty worrisome. If you do not think that these are brilliant lyrics and feel that they are offensive, then you have just experienced how it is to be in the recieving end of bad ethos. These lines don't make you like Pitbull. In fact, now you wouldn't actually want to hear what Pitbull wants to say. Such is the importance of ethos in rhetoric. Ethos is basically the door, the first step in succesfully convincing.

Hopefully, you were now able to actually learn something from Pitbull: how not to use ethos. Pitbull should feel proud. Or he could just not care. He's probably too busy counting his money in order to care about what some high school kid has to say about his rhetorical skills.

Gary Johnson 2012

Every four years there is an event that shakes the world. People around the world gather around to presence and event that never fails to be memorable. No, it is not the FIFA World Cup. No, it is not the Olympics either. Why would you even consider the Winter Olympics? What I'm referring to is the elections for the President of the United States.

It is only just that an event of this magnitude gets to get all the attention it can. Because of this, the two main candidates of this election get to be on not one, not two, but three debates that are broadcasted across the world. I had the pleasure to witness the third and final debate before the elections next month and am happy to say that nothing was accomplished in those eighty minutes were the future of America was supposed to create an impact on the people. This is mostly due to how the two candidates greatly limited themselves in their use of rhetoric.

If I had to do a quick review of the entire debate, it would probably look like this:

Mitt Romney: Right now, America is at its worst condition it has ever been in every aspect. These last four years have been the worst four years of America's history. Vote for me.

Barack Obama: You have contradicted yourself in every statement. A few weeks ago, you said things completely different from what you are trying to say right now. I will now proceed to continue doing the same things that I have been doing for the last four years AKA accomplishing nothing.

In all actuality, the use of rhetoric showed to be incredibly unbalanced. The amount of blame that was used by the two candidates was so great that I was basically drowning in the forensic statements. They couldn't go two sentences without referring to something that the other did in the past. This proves to be a problem since America is currently in dire need of change, in other words, deliberative ideas. However, this need cannot be fulfilled if the people that are supposed to do this are too busy talking about the past to even give a complete idea of the future.

To give the candidates credit, they were able to make good use of ethos during the debate. When Romney started to talk about how his dad owned a car company when talking about how he supports the small companies, I couldn't help but imagine him in a pink polo with a popped collar. Too bad that this little image was quickly shattered since it was the same Mitt Romney that said that Detroit should go bankrupt.

There were also some slight glimmers of pathos when Romney said that the economy was on the "road to Greece" and when Obama identified soldiers as "young men and women" when attacking the use of the military. However, this was not able to save the debate. It was generally repetitive and uninteresting making me want Gary Johnson to be elected president.

Rhetorical Soccer

It is very common to find a person who thinks that arguing and fighting are basically the same. This person is wrong. This is what Jay Heinrichs tries to clarify in the second chapter of his text, Thank You for Arguing. Before describing the many methods of arguments, Heinrichs clarifies what arguments truly are and how they are different from fighting.

Heinrichs defines argument as the attempt to make someone to want to do what you want. In the other hand, fighting is the attempt to force someone into doing what you want. "You fight to win; you argue to achieve agreement" (17). A way in which I like to represent this is in international conflicts. If you try to solve the conflict with a treaty, both parties are generally happy with the result. This would represent the argument. In the contrary, if you decide to go in by force and invade the other party in the conflict, you might have a victory, but you will be in the risk of the other party fight back in the form of a revolt or revolution due to the built up anger against your methods. This would represent fighting. Sadly, this representation is very literal and very large scale making it seem like an unrelatable, uninteresting lecture. Because of this, I decided to make a much "cooler" representation. If you carefully analyze it, soccer can actually be used as an example of this contrast.

Soccer and language! Many athletes go to play in order to get away from classes such as English. Who could have possibly made a connection between these two polar opposites? This guy (points at self with both thumbs).

The method of victory in soccer, much like in most other sports (not golf), is getting the most points. Because of this, every player aims for his team to score many goals. There are two different ways for one to approach this goal (pun intended). The first one is the tactical approach. Whether it's the passing moves of Barcelona or the waiting for the counter attack of Chelsea, tactic shows to have a huge impact on the result, and tactic, in its core, is a form of argument and rhetoric. When you think up a tactic, it is impossible to avoid taking into consideration the behavior of the opponents since they are a fairly important part of the game. If you pass the ball around, you are trying to make the opponent's players run after the ball and get tired, making it easier to score. If you defend and look for the counter attack, you are trying to make the opponent's players spread out and leave behind a lot of space for an attack, making it easier to score. In both scenarios, the tactics are trying to make the opponents do what the teams want them to do: Heinrichs's definition of argument.

If tactic represents the arguments in soccer, what represents the fights? This part is actually quite literal. In soccer, fights are fouling the opponent. By making absurd tackles, you can injure the opponent's players, stop plays, and possibly make it easier for your team. However, fouls don't give you goals or points. In fact, fouls get your players sent off. Fouls are an option that is also a big risk. This is a characteristic shared with fighting. It has the possibility of working, but it leaves you open and at risk.

If you like to watch soccer, it is pretty obvious that tactic is preferable over fouling. In the same way, for people that know rhetoric, it is pretty obvious that argument is preferable over fighting. This goes to show how universal rhetoric is even if you are not aware of it.