What is Literature

To me Literature, with a capital L, is a broad term. Some people say literature, by it's very definition must be literary, and so it excludes any other art form. And then those people would say it's only that literature which is 'valuable'. Valuable is an extremely subjective qualifier, and so is the definition of literature. To me literature is anything that has a kind of meaning to anyone. Now I know this sounds like I'm calling things like 50 Shades of Grey literature, and while to me it isn't, to someone out there it has meaning, and that gives it value. To me 50 Shades of Grey is as wasteful of time and money as the Avengers, but some people disagree, and I understand that. Anything and everything with any kind of meaning to any one person has value, and thus is a form of literature. 

There are so many pieces of literature I love. It makes it extremely difficult to pick a piece of literature that is my one favorite. I love many of Quentin Tarantino's movies, notably Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fictions. I love the recent Batman trilogy, and I also enjoyed Interstellar, and Inception. I love the Eragon series of books, also a Song of Ice and Fire is really good too. I like a bunch of TV shows too like the Office, Breaking Bad, the earlier seasons of Dexter, etc. 

I learned a bunch of stuff this year in class, mainly about literature analysis. I thought it was pretty interesting to learn all about the rhetorical strategies authors use in order to try to convince their readers and it's good to have that awareness when reading arguments, so we can peer into the truth of an argument rather than get caught in the intricacies of an author's rhetoric. All of this will help me next year as I continue to analyze literature, and it will help me later on in life as I continue to read, and people continue to try to influence me and my beliefs and opinions.
I struggled with writing to show, and most of the writing assignments, I felt like sometimes there wasn't enough direction for the assignment and it left too much for us to figure out and this made getting good grades on everything hard, even if you put work into it. I wish we had done more film analysis because movies are awesome. Also, more MLG 360 noscope Snoop Dog OG videos.

Why should we (not) be concerned about the Death Penalty in Texas?

(From:http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/sentencing-life-americans-embrace-alternatives-death-penalty)

There are many, many, arguments to be made about the Death Penalty. Is it humane? Is it constitutional? Is it fair? Most of these issues are argued along moral grounds,backed with little evidence and lots of personal bias. The issue I seek to explore is: Does the Death Penalty make sense? What I mean is does it make both fiscal, and ethical sense to continue to carry out the Death Penalty as a form of punishment for crimes in our legal system. The exigence is clear, several people are put to death every year, and millions of tax payer's dollars fund their deaths. If the Death Penalty and lethal injection are not logical, then both those being put to death and those paying for those deaths deserve to know in order to avoid death and save millions of dollars. Also, in order to justify the continued use of the Death Penalty, one supporting the other side must prove that it is indeed logical.
Also, another exigence of this argument is that people must be informed on the true consequences of the death penalty. Many people are misinformed and believe that lethal injection is a ridiculously expensive procedure, however most of the costs associated with the Death Penalty are derived from the trials which "cost 3 times more than non-death penalty cases, or $3 million for a single case", according to an Urban Institute Study quoted in Forbes. After having researched some I can also say that most of the numbers people use in their arguments against the death penalty tend to be rather irrelevant, since they are quoted mostly from a Dallas newspaper in 1992. Part of what I will attempt to do to respond to this exigence is find proper and accurate data to decide whether the Death Penalty is logical or not.
This issue has a very large rhetorical audience. Some may say that they don't care, but every year every single tax payer in Texas pays for the legal fees of Death Penalty cases as well as the costs of lethal injection, which according to the BBC "has risen 15-fold since 2010, when they cost the state $86." Even if one is not a tax payer of a death penalty state, they might be part of the argument on purely humanitarian grounds as well.
It's an issue that encompasses almost everyone in the United States, and it leads to very different opinions, but opinions matter much less when facts show an opinion is illogical.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2011/09/22/death-and-taxes-the-real-cost-of-the-death-penalty/
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17210285

What defines our Culture?

This is a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. Even though this is not really what a tree looks like, because we have been conditioned by culture to know from a very young age when we draw trees in class that trees have a brown trunk and green leaves and thus we recognize this as a painting of a tree. But this is not what a tree really is, trees our not limited by what we believe them to be in our culture. We know that trees can have yellow, red, and brown leaves and different colored trunks. Yet, if we ask someone to draw a tree, it will almost certainly always be a green leafed brown tree. Postman addresses this in his novel, this being how a painting or a literary piece can influence what we see as a norm in our culture.

Postman says many things in the first chapter of his book. While you may or may not disagree with some of what he says, his underlying theme revolves around a fact about communication through different forms of 'media'. By media he, and I by extension, do not mean just text messages or facebook. We mean any for of communication whatsoever: verbal speech, the different forms of writing, the radio, etc. This fact, that is almost irrefutable, is that the way we think and act and the way our culture is formed is 100% connected to the forms of communication available to us. You may have realized by now, that based on my own personal experience and musings, that I agree with Postman When he says that "our metaphors"(Postman 15)  which by extent means our languages and forms of communication, "create the content of our culture"(15) and that because our means of communication change our society so much that this more recent change to communication through things like television will bring along a change in society. I think his argument is very solid, he mentions many well known figures from history and also more recently. The weakest aspect in my opinion is, ironically, his use of language. I feel like the book itself is not really geared towards scholars or people already very informed on the the topic but towards "culture watchers and worriers"(5) like he mentions. However, the language he employs and the way he communicates is quite dense and frankly a drab and long read, which reminds me of The Shallows which I read over the summer. They both seem like long lists of evidence with explanations, which while still informative, are not very thought provoking, since they are put forth as undeniable facts, instead of suggestions, so all one has to say is 'no I disagree' and the argument means very little at that point.
I think his overall argument, even if television is becoming less and less the major form of communication, still holds very true. However, I feel like most of our perception of the world now comes through a different medium, that is to say the Internet. The Internet is interesting because even though it is a mixture of writing, audio, and video they are all communicated very differently and thus give us a different perception of reality. In the Shallows the author explains how our own form of thought mirrors the presentation of the Internet, and if our thoughts define our culture does this not mean that the Internet, our leading form of communication, defines most of our culture? I would have to say, yes it does.

Why Charlie Hebdo is NOT the Penultimate Example of Freedom of Speech

I think 'Freedom of Speech' is a commonly misunderstood right by many people. In fact, the supposedly satirical magazine proves that point. This magazine is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with people. The writer's of this magazine are being held up as some sort of embodiment of freedom of speech, treated as the purist form of expressionism, and the ultimate use of the right that is guaranteed to us by the first amendment. It sickens me, to see all these young french people parading through the streets, my friends in France, my friends here, being misled. Before I continue I would like to clarify. The attack on the Charlie Hebdo is a tragedy, one of the saddest events in recent French history, and a disgusting act of terrorism. I felt personally saddened and affected as a French citizen, to see something so terrible take place in a place a view as my home, where my family lives and where i am from. However, just because something is terrible, and people have unjustly died just because they expressed themselves, does not mean these people are suddenly heroes with a beautiful message. I will tell you what people thought of Charlie Hebdo before these attacks. People saw it as a dying magazine made by a bunch of trouble makers, and make no mistake all these 'journalists'(something they are continuously called by the media, despite the cartoonists never reporting on anything based on the facts, supporting only their preformed biases completely based off of their misconceptions and ignorance) are just trouble makers, with no message, whose only goal is to offend and disturb as many people as possible. The people that drew in this magazine, are some of the most intolerant people to live in France, and that is saying something. What people now parade as free speech and a glorious message is the product of a bunch of people sitting around a table saying "Let's take a modern event or culture, draw a picture of it, at a sexual innuendo, and see how many people we can offend." While this is obviously not what happened exactly, the product is the same. Look at the pictures below:

Now tell me, where is the message in these? Sure you can look at the first one and say "Oh well their making a commentary on the president and saying he's stupid." but please explain the second and third one, and the purpose of the first one since it's obviously not to find a solution since we all already no Hollande is a terrible president. What I see personally, keep in mind that I am an unbiased source in terms of religious affiliation because I do not affiliate myself with one, is extreme disrespect. Where is the message? The only message I can get from this is "We dislike religion, so we will make fun of religion because WE ARE INTOLERANT PEOPLE." Going back to my original sentence, I will tell you one people misunderstand, and why there is a problem with this magazine. Just because one has the right to say something, or anything, does not mean one should ever say it. And just because you can say something does not mean it's true or justified. Look at these two pictures, read about the cartoonists who drew them, and tell me if you really think these people know what Christianity and Islam are all about. Because all I get from these pictures is that the cartoonists know nothing about these religions, and because they are either racist or against religion due to a personal prejudice, they choose to disrespect a culture and the people who it belongs to, because they are intolerant.

Do not get me wrong, just like the other issues we have covered in class, I do not believe we should forcibly limit the speech of others, racist comments should be allowed, a person should be ALLOWED to speak their beliefs, but that does not mean in any way at all that a person SHOULD spew their racist and intolerant idiocy all over the place. And what makes me even more upset about the whole stupidity of this magazine, is that people now think, because of a terrible tragedy, they are open-minded champions of free speech when they are the literary equivalent of a child who chooses to stay out one minute past curfew just to spite his or her parents. Freedom of Speech more than anything, should encourage speech to be meaningful, but these people show the exact opposite. Their speech lacks meaning, and it lacks legitimate motive, unless one counts racism and intolerance as legitimate. 

True Freedom of Speech is represented in those who risk their lives to spread a real message, a journalist who risks his life to bring the truth, and to spread the word. Not a bunch of intolerant bullies who put down other peoples cultures because they don't understand them.