Happiness, Meaning, and Personal Ethics Project
Reflection
This was a project on the topic of our classes happiness, meaning, and sense of place. All of us wrote something that we felt would reveal our personal happiness and meaning or sense of place. I wrote a open letter to happiness personified above. In this text I talk about happy traps, my frustration with happiness, my frustration with the pressure to be happy all of the time, the existential point of view, and my meaning. Through creating this letter I hoped to answer the questions, "What is happiness and what makes you happy?" and "What does it mean to live a meaningful life?". I did this through discussing the ways I find happiness and how I can use meaning in my life to find happiness.
Happiness can be and is viewed many different ways. Everybody has their own personal happiness and their own way to try and capture it. However, in trying to capture it we are put into this system of wanting to be happy all of the time. When in reality we can't be happy all of the time because of how humans live. This system can lead to terrible things. Humans who just want to be happy and feel good all of the time become addicts. Drugs are a happy trap and lead to a spiral of other terrible happy traps. However, being aware of how you pursue happiness protects anyone from this trap. At the end of my letter to happiness I say I am done pursuing happiness, but I am just started finding happiness through the inherent meaning that I create throughout my life. By doing this I am rejecting the system we are all in and saying I am going to make my own happiness because I know I can't buy it. There is no way a mountain of stuff is going to fill a 'void' of happiness in my
I didn't really have any questions spur out of me when prompted to list questions I still need to answer. I believe that throughout our life we will have questions that need to be answered, but right now I am feeling pretty content with my existence. I could ask the question of why we are here, but I don't know the answer to that question and I believe that we will never know our true reason to exist except to purely exist. How about the question of meaning? Well, we all make our own meaning to survive and thrive, whether it be through church or family. Where will I go from here? Forward with time of course. I don't know where I am going, even though there is a rough outlined path ahead for me, I could end up lots of places in my lifetime(mostly on earth) and there are many differing choices ahead of me that will either minorly or drastically change which way I am headed. "Only time will tell. It's not right for me to make a statement now." -Sourav Ganguly
Happiness can be and is viewed many different ways. Everybody has their own personal happiness and their own way to try and capture it. However, in trying to capture it we are put into this system of wanting to be happy all of the time. When in reality we can't be happy all of the time because of how humans live. This system can lead to terrible things. Humans who just want to be happy and feel good all of the time become addicts. Drugs are a happy trap and lead to a spiral of other terrible happy traps. However, being aware of how you pursue happiness protects anyone from this trap. At the end of my letter to happiness I say I am done pursuing happiness, but I am just started finding happiness through the inherent meaning that I create throughout my life. By doing this I am rejecting the system we are all in and saying I am going to make my own happiness because I know I can't buy it. There is no way a mountain of stuff is going to fill a 'void' of happiness in my
I didn't really have any questions spur out of me when prompted to list questions I still need to answer. I believe that throughout our life we will have questions that need to be answered, but right now I am feeling pretty content with my existence. I could ask the question of why we are here, but I don't know the answer to that question and I believe that we will never know our true reason to exist except to purely exist. How about the question of meaning? Well, we all make our own meaning to survive and thrive, whether it be through church or family. Where will I go from here? Forward with time of course. I don't know where I am going, even though there is a rough outlined path ahead for me, I could end up lots of places in my lifetime(mostly on earth) and there are many differing choices ahead of me that will either minorly or drastically change which way I am headed. "Only time will tell. It's not right for me to make a statement now." -Sourav Ganguly
Rhetorical Discourse Project
Don't have the video of my Performance right now.
We are here tonight because of something that we all use on a daily basis. Rhetoric is everywhere in our society. Your kids use it all of the time on you to persuade you to buy them that deluxe ice cream or the next best toy. But it doesn’t end there, no it goes from simple household rhetoric to the politics, debates, controversies, and many more. This is where it is important to have a rhetorical awareness because in the current day rhetoric seems to go unnoticed. I plan to explain what rhetoric is and its power in our society through this presentation.
Let’s start with an example of distracting rhetoric from politics. Let’s look at Donald Trump. I would say he is a very good rhetor because he is so well known. Even though he is a great rhetor, he has his holes as well. He uses a logical fallacy known as ad hominem. Logical fallacies are things that can go unnoticed and are there to weaken the opponents argument or strengthen yours. In the case of ad hominem you simply make others words sound less powerful by attacking what they do, how they look, and other things like this. It happens a lot and seems to work. An example from Donald is, "Look at that face!" he cries. "Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!" The laughter grows halting and faint behind him. "I mean, she's a woman, and I'm not s'posed to say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?" This is a simple and easily spotted form of ad hominem and it most likely distracted you from the point Carly was trying to make.
Another example of powerful rhetoric is is shown in the past. It is shown through a very powerful and bad man. His name is Adolf Hitler. This man was able to motivate a whole country that was in poverty to go to war against the whole world. His reasoning? He promised to get the country out of poverty and into power again, thus giving food and water to the people.
An important quote I found from him is, “All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.” This is a very important part of understanding what rhetoric is, reading rhetorical statements. This is saying that propaganda needs to be able to be understood by the least intelligent of the receiving end of the propaganda because that is what it’s aimed towards. “All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.” He is targeting the least intelligent because they are most likely the more willing of a population to join another side.
In the present ISIS uses this form of propaganda all over the internet. For example, “We fear not the swarms of planes, nor ballistic missiles, nor drones, nor satellites, nor battleships, nor weapons of mass destruction. How could we fear them, while Allah the Exalted has said, ‘If Allah should aid you, no one can overcome you.’” The use of rhetoric from a religion is sometimes all people need to join a cause. Think about it for a second, if you thought you were invincible because you had a God on your side and you truly believed that, would you join? I know what you are thinking. Well, no I would not want to, but that is not the point, I want you to step into the shoes of another man and realize that they are in their right mind because they are “fighting the good fight”.
I hope that through this presentation you learned something about the importance of rhetoric in our society and the power it has. If you didn’t get much out of this here’s a quick satirical statement for you to think about. Let’s stop thinking we are walking when we are being pushed around by the rhetoric that envelops us. Anyways have a good night and enjoy the rhetoric you are about to consume as well as being able to listen for slip-ups in the evidence used.
Let’s start with an example of distracting rhetoric from politics. Let’s look at Donald Trump. I would say he is a very good rhetor because he is so well known. Even though he is a great rhetor, he has his holes as well. He uses a logical fallacy known as ad hominem. Logical fallacies are things that can go unnoticed and are there to weaken the opponents argument or strengthen yours. In the case of ad hominem you simply make others words sound less powerful by attacking what they do, how they look, and other things like this. It happens a lot and seems to work. An example from Donald is, "Look at that face!" he cries. "Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!" The laughter grows halting and faint behind him. "I mean, she's a woman, and I'm not s'posed to say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?" This is a simple and easily spotted form of ad hominem and it most likely distracted you from the point Carly was trying to make.
Another example of powerful rhetoric is is shown in the past. It is shown through a very powerful and bad man. His name is Adolf Hitler. This man was able to motivate a whole country that was in poverty to go to war against the whole world. His reasoning? He promised to get the country out of poverty and into power again, thus giving food and water to the people.
An important quote I found from him is, “All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.” This is a very important part of understanding what rhetoric is, reading rhetorical statements. This is saying that propaganda needs to be able to be understood by the least intelligent of the receiving end of the propaganda because that is what it’s aimed towards. “All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.” He is targeting the least intelligent because they are most likely the more willing of a population to join another side.
In the present ISIS uses this form of propaganda all over the internet. For example, “We fear not the swarms of planes, nor ballistic missiles, nor drones, nor satellites, nor battleships, nor weapons of mass destruction. How could we fear them, while Allah the Exalted has said, ‘If Allah should aid you, no one can overcome you.’” The use of rhetoric from a religion is sometimes all people need to join a cause. Think about it for a second, if you thought you were invincible because you had a God on your side and you truly believed that, would you join? I know what you are thinking. Well, no I would not want to, but that is not the point, I want you to step into the shoes of another man and realize that they are in their right mind because they are “fighting the good fight”.
I hope that through this presentation you learned something about the importance of rhetoric in our society and the power it has. If you didn’t get much out of this here’s a quick satirical statement for you to think about. Let’s stop thinking we are walking when we are being pushed around by the rhetoric that envelops us. Anyways have a good night and enjoy the rhetoric you are about to consume as well as being able to listen for slip-ups in the evidence used.
Reflection
This project was about rhetoric and how to use it effectively. Above you can see the writing I did for this project. In this project we created something like a speech. Whether it be a video, a debate, a ted talk, a song or rap, you had to go on the stage and present something that showed your rhetorical skill.
The funny part of mine is that it is the art of rhetoric in our society. Through this piece I try to use rhetoric in a way that I try to show the importance of knowing what the art of rhetoric is and how having an awareness of it is a useful tool. By giving examples of powerful rhetors I show how if we simply ignore it we can easily be seduced by it. Yes rhetoric is very tempting and unless we have the know how we all fall for it's tricks. Things like empty rhetoric where someone says this will happen, but shows no evidence to back it up are tempting. I am off on a tangent. I show the art of rhetoric in my actual presentation and how it's used by people to confuse us and persuade us. I also used plenty of evidence and ethos to give me more of a powerful statement.
I connected through looking at things like real world problems like ISIS. It's amazing how powerful these people are and how inflammatory their rhetoric is. As explained in Kyle's speech things like Facebook have the possibility to send a message from 49 people to the rest of the site. As these things get more and more well known people start to see them everywhere and that is where a rhetorical awareness comes in. If you have a rhetorical awareness you can look for what the post is actually "saying". Whereas others are blind to the fact that this post is trying to convince you that ISIS is "fighting the good fight" and are much more easily persuaded into doing the wrong thing.
Honestly the hardest part of this project was refining and refining and refining until I was in the time limit and had a good presentation. Even then one of the comments from the audience was able to add more of a power to my speech than I had thought. It was just to add a positive rhetor to the mix to show how it can be good and bad. If I had anything I would change about this project it would be that. Show how it can and is used for good on occasion. But you know overall I feel really good about this project and that even though there was a lot of work to do it was worth it.
I have learned that rhetoric is a powerful weapon that if used properly can thwart governments and free slaves. It has become a game for a lot of people and watching it happen as I get my own awareness is as Jon Stewart said, "...a good way to pass the time." I am starting to see the hidden parts of our great country that no one blatantly talks about. Things like the power our media has to change how we view the world and even our own communities. These days rhetoric moves too fast or the average person to keep up. So we have to start running faster.
The funny part of mine is that it is the art of rhetoric in our society. Through this piece I try to use rhetoric in a way that I try to show the importance of knowing what the art of rhetoric is and how having an awareness of it is a useful tool. By giving examples of powerful rhetors I show how if we simply ignore it we can easily be seduced by it. Yes rhetoric is very tempting and unless we have the know how we all fall for it's tricks. Things like empty rhetoric where someone says this will happen, but shows no evidence to back it up are tempting. I am off on a tangent. I show the art of rhetoric in my actual presentation and how it's used by people to confuse us and persuade us. I also used plenty of evidence and ethos to give me more of a powerful statement.
I connected through looking at things like real world problems like ISIS. It's amazing how powerful these people are and how inflammatory their rhetoric is. As explained in Kyle's speech things like Facebook have the possibility to send a message from 49 people to the rest of the site. As these things get more and more well known people start to see them everywhere and that is where a rhetorical awareness comes in. If you have a rhetorical awareness you can look for what the post is actually "saying". Whereas others are blind to the fact that this post is trying to convince you that ISIS is "fighting the good fight" and are much more easily persuaded into doing the wrong thing.
Honestly the hardest part of this project was refining and refining and refining until I was in the time limit and had a good presentation. Even then one of the comments from the audience was able to add more of a power to my speech than I had thought. It was just to add a positive rhetor to the mix to show how it can be good and bad. If I had anything I would change about this project it would be that. Show how it can and is used for good on occasion. But you know overall I feel really good about this project and that even though there was a lot of work to do it was worth it.
I have learned that rhetoric is a powerful weapon that if used properly can thwart governments and free slaves. It has become a game for a lot of people and watching it happen as I get my own awareness is as Jon Stewart said, "...a good way to pass the time." I am starting to see the hidden parts of our great country that no one blatantly talks about. Things like the power our media has to change how we view the world and even our own communities. These days rhetoric moves too fast or the average person to keep up. So we have to start running faster.
Voices from the Animas Project
Project Reflection
In this project we went out in the community and into our own research and asked multiple different questions about what had really happened to the river. The main portion of this project was definitely in online research and readings. Lots of spirit seminars and even one socratic seminar. The other part was in finding someone to interview and ask questions about their perspective on the river spill and what they believe happened.
I learned that this has turned into another blame game made by, guess who, the people of the communities affected. And that I believe that when this sort of thing happens you don’t instantly go to blame someone so that they have to clean it up you start by helping the clean up. It’s like a child’s game we brought into the grown up game. I mean come on mature people. Otherwise I learned the importance of knowing what you are talking about before you make giant assumptions. Having a background of research and time put into the subject allows you to talk about it correctly and not start rumors that spread like wildfire as we again see in our school system.
To be honest my interview went swimmingly. The person I interviewed was Becky Joyce who works with the San Juan County Health Center. It was great, she thought that the questions I asked her were great and answered them thoroughly. Over a couple of minutes I realized that she had done her own research into the matter or that she had heard people at her job talking about the subject. The only hard part about the interview was learning how to use Audacity correctly and doing over the phone, but that was not really a big challenge since in the first place I know how to use Google for research and the phone call ended up working just fine. At least I know a little about how to use Audacity and how to come up with personalized questions for the person I am asking and I know how to conduct myself when asking a person questions.
To be honest the exhibition was not all it was built up to be for me. I was there for an hour total and for half of that I was walking around basically doing nothing. Most all of the computers were taken and the rest I didn’t feel right taking because there may be some computers that may not work and then the parents should be listening instead of the students. However what I did do for those thirty minutes was help parents who were having technical problems and either moved them to another computer that was working or fixed their problems. Then the other half came and I was assigned the Chem Table. Maybe one to three people came up and asked a couple of valid questions, but that was it. The rest of the time I was acting like a military personnel with Mitchell and messing with the other students walking around.
The most valid personal growth is the strengthening of my theory that people are just straight up lazy. If there is something to do they don’t want to do it they want to continue to sit on their soft cushioned recliner and watch harumph!’Futballlll! No instead they play the blame game and the loser gets to clean it up. The stuff that I learned academically is important as well. Things like how to conduct an interview and do more personal research, but that tops both of those.
I learned that this has turned into another blame game made by, guess who, the people of the communities affected. And that I believe that when this sort of thing happens you don’t instantly go to blame someone so that they have to clean it up you start by helping the clean up. It’s like a child’s game we brought into the grown up game. I mean come on mature people. Otherwise I learned the importance of knowing what you are talking about before you make giant assumptions. Having a background of research and time put into the subject allows you to talk about it correctly and not start rumors that spread like wildfire as we again see in our school system.
To be honest my interview went swimmingly. The person I interviewed was Becky Joyce who works with the San Juan County Health Center. It was great, she thought that the questions I asked her were great and answered them thoroughly. Over a couple of minutes I realized that she had done her own research into the matter or that she had heard people at her job talking about the subject. The only hard part about the interview was learning how to use Audacity correctly and doing over the phone, but that was not really a big challenge since in the first place I know how to use Google for research and the phone call ended up working just fine. At least I know a little about how to use Audacity and how to come up with personalized questions for the person I am asking and I know how to conduct myself when asking a person questions.
To be honest the exhibition was not all it was built up to be for me. I was there for an hour total and for half of that I was walking around basically doing nothing. Most all of the computers were taken and the rest I didn’t feel right taking because there may be some computers that may not work and then the parents should be listening instead of the students. However what I did do for those thirty minutes was help parents who were having technical problems and either moved them to another computer that was working or fixed their problems. Then the other half came and I was assigned the Chem Table. Maybe one to three people came up and asked a couple of valid questions, but that was it. The rest of the time I was acting like a military personnel with Mitchell and messing with the other students walking around.
The most valid personal growth is the strengthening of my theory that people are just straight up lazy. If there is something to do they don’t want to do it they want to continue to sit on their soft cushioned recliner and watch harumph!’Futballlll! No instead they play the blame game and the loser gets to clean it up. The stuff that I learned academically is important as well. Things like how to conduct an interview and do more personal research, but that tops both of those.
My Interview |
The Archive |