Never Before A Sentence

Hey guys, so our teachers challenged us a couple days ago in class to write a sentence that no one has ever written before (or so we hope) and I wanted to try one out, here goes:

            "While quoting a quote you should beware that your quote may become quite cold and decide that it is morally opposed to being quoted already after you have quoted it"


            "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo while eating sandwiches"


I thought those were funny and clever, you should try one and leave it as a comment! Night y'all

Rumsfeld Legacy

Last year during the last couple months of school, there was hype about a visitor coming to New Trier. Many of the students speculated about who it could have been, and I was no exception to this. I had hoped that it would be a great writer for the Chicago Tribune come to talk about a project of his or someone else with equally important experience to talk about. But no. Who came instead was an alumni of New Trier - Donald Rumsfeld - who, in my opinion, and in the opinion of countless other students and faculty is a cold and heartless being that condoned some of the most malicious and disgusting violations of human rights in the history of the United States.

There was a lot of buzz after the event about "the kid who asked him about torture" and that kid was me.

Now I am not writing this post in an angry way to try to cover up the fact that I am ashamed in what I did, but only to enlighten those who do not so quickly shun me for it. I still, to this day, believe that what I did was the right thing to do, and no one could convince me otherwise.

First, here are some facts:

1. Abu Ghraib was a torture facility that was seized by the United States military after their invasion of Iraq
2. Donald Rumsfeld offered legal justification for the "enhanced interrogation" techniques through counseling of his legal staff
3. A blind eye was turned to the rape, murder, torture, psychological, and physical abuse of detainees at both Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo bay

I believe that every person should be accountable for not only their direct actions, but the actions that their inaction, and or aide justifies. Donald Rumsfeld allowed for torture to occur during his time as the Secretary of Defense - the torture was done by the US military that he oversaw in his time as the Secretary and he did nothing about it.

He is a despicable person that deserves nothing from society - he has marred his name, and his legacy - and there is no defense to what he did.

There was no benefit to implementing these techniques, and the only word that can describe it is disgusting.

The Inequality Map

I'm not as muscular as this guy - proves the point...

Some people are just better than others at certain things. It's a fact, some are just not meant to become star baseball players. Some are stronger, some are smarter, some have longer genitals, and some make better cupcakes; yet no one is the best at everything.

Yet which types of social inequalities is it safe to flaunt about?

David Brooks, an Op-Ed columnist for the NY Times, recently wrote an article entitled "The Inequality Map" that deals directly with this question. In the article he states that he "will provide you with a guide to the American inequality map to help you avoid embarrassment".

Through his wisdom it has become apparent to me that my wearing of a University of Michigan sweatshirt almost everyday is evident of a larger aura of intellectual elitism that I carry around with me day to day.

The most interesting thing about this article is that in outlining the different types inequality present in American society, he brands some as permissible and some as not. For instance, tight workout shorts or a Michigan Sweatshirt are to be expected, but telling people that your ancestors were on the mayflower is not.

There are so many layers to society that it is sometimes hard to distinguish where you fit in. Although the question of fitting in is something that interests me more from this article than the content of the article itself, I would argue that there is a subtext to his writing that is not 100% apparent. His listing of socially acceptable things is more a critique of American values than an explanation of them.

Within the first paragraph, he jests at the idea of these arbitrary exceptions. In the quote that I used above, he is using sarcasm to explain his views of the so called "inequality map". He is making a point that when viewed from the outside, I.E. from the viewpoint of a foreigner, that our societal assumptions are ridiculous.

If you were to take the viewpoint of a foreigner, someone who did not understand, or has not yet become attune to our culture, what would stick out to you on our so-called "inequality map"

W.E.I.R.D.

I very much enjoy reading articles about psychology. I find the enjoyment gained from trying to understand thought and emotion limitless. Among the types of articles that I read, I try to focus on those written by philosophers and sociologists, as they do not have too many calculations and data tables for me to get lost in.  The reason for this being that when there is a claim made in philosophical terms, there is usually a worded warrant for why it is true, yet in scientific writing, there is usually a large amass of data to prove the point. Do you like reading analysis based essays, or evidence based essays? Why? What do you think this says about your personality?

I started the blog post this way for two reasons; the first being that I wanted you to get an understanding for how I talk and formulate ideas, the second of which to use the post thus far as an example for how a study would be written, as I have not used any data in this post yet far. 

I have recently been reading about how you place in the socioeconomic ladder effects your psychological state. There were a lot of articles about how being underprivileged makes you feel vulnerable which causes aggression because of humiliation and things such as that, but the gem that I was luck enough to find was of a totally different genre.

Due to an article entitled "The Weirdest People In The World?", my entire world view has changed just a little bit.

Weird, an acronym for Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic, is used in the context of countries that seemingly meet all of those requirements, and can thus foster a creative capitalist environment. The article contests the assumption that "there is little variation across human populations", and that these “standard subjects” of psychological instincts "are as representative of the species as any other population."

Specifically though, the article takes on the though that people who have been raised in a WEIRD country have the least connection to others on a psychological level, we actually see, and interpret the world completely differently.

As an example, the study cites that when placed in a room with a box of cereal and left for 3 hours, the WEIRD subject allowed themselves to eat some of the cereal, without direction, within fifteen minutes, whereas the non-WEIRD subject did not touch it. This study was done 2000 times with the same controls.

How are you "WEIRD"? Our American Studies class lives in a sheltered world, how might you see the world differently than others?