Examples of Fallacies

Bandwagon - appealing to popularity or the fact that many people do something as an attempted form of validation.

Spongebob asks Patrick if "wumbo" is even a real word. Patrick responds by saying everyone knows what wumbo is . " It's 1st grade, Spongebob"

Anecdotal- using personal experience or an isolated example instead of a valid argument, especially to dismiss statistics

Sandy argues that if Spongebob, Mr. Krabs, Patrick, and Squidward can last over 1 minutes on land it will prove that sea creatures are better than land creatures.

Composition/Division- assuming that what's true about one part of something, has to be applied to all or other parts of it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8Ye9O-LpuA (I'm really sad it wouldn't let me show this)

Squidward relates talking loud and sounding smart to playing instruments loud and sounding good.

I Can't Think Of A Creative Title™

In his TED Talk on creativity, Lawrence Lessing uses three examples to strengthen his argument on how we should stop the extremism of copyright. The first is how John Philip Sousa thought that the phonograph would take away the creativity of the individual. The second is a Supreme Court case that challenged that airplanes were trespassing on property but failed. Finally, Broadcast Music Inc. gave away free music that was created by the public even though it was not the best quality.

These three examples all mimic today's culture regarding copyright and how kids today make their contribution to culture. We are a "rewrite" culture and not a "read-only" culture. Piracy laws are in place so that people do not trespass on ideas on the internet and the public today mostly consists of amateur culture. Lessing had a good argument and supported it by using evidence from our society. Also his connections that we live in an "age of prohibitions" where "ordinary people live life against the law" was really strong since it took his argument and applied to his audience.

I agreed with him that a culture that is built upon breaking the copyright law is not right and the extremes of having no copyright and too much copyright just will not win on either side. Lessing makes another good point of having "artists make their work available for non-commercial use". This would allow youth culture to continue and not be subjected to copyright laws. Kids today would still be able to make good memes and not have to worry about copyright.

This difference between kids today and kids before, according to Lessing, is that they watched TV and we create TV. Maybe this stems from our Millennial self-entitlement, or the fact that we were subjected to a lot of information from a young age, but society as a whole is progressively getting more creative. Why would we want to limit this? Creative people are valuable assets in any situation since they are generally better at solving problems and critical thinking on their own. In that case, listen to Lessing in order to stop Uncle Sam from limiting the freedom of the creative people. Without creativity we are nothing but a bunch of gray, lifeless masses. So let's get creative.

CONGRE$$

Today in class, the John Oliver video talked about the reality that goes behind funding congressional campaigns. The congressional campaigns ending in 2014 received a total of 1.7 billion dollars. That's more than the 1.4 billion than that received from the presidential campaigns of 2012. More info on that can be found here in this cool map. That is an astronomical amount of money going into a competition and should be concentrated into other areas.

Oliver also comments on how congressional candidates spend most of their time campaigning yet, they hate campaigning. However, there is no law ready to be passed in Congress that will solve this problem. It is also incredible how political campaigns diffuse themselves into everyday life. Oliver notes that political candidates use seafood restaurants, wedding anniversaries, and even pop concerts, citing that "the power of Taylor Swift not only changes the music business it makes money".

Personally, I like politics right where it is, on CNN, and not at the 1989 tour. Since it is a hassle to everyone involved, I do not quite understand why it does not just end. Seriously, what is the point? The reality behind it is that a huge amount of money is needed to fund a political campaign.

Someone has to pay for all those rallies, bumper stickers, and other merchandise, and that someone is going to be people of the higher classes. No person with average income can afford to do all the necessary tasks required of an election campaign for Congress. This not only in itself is problematic to society on an economic end but also a personal end. If we are electing people to represent our ideals and interests in Congress then, they should live similar lives like the average person but they simply do not. They only support their rich friends and their corporate sponsors. This is largely responsible for the reputation of Congressmen of being greedy and stupid.

 

High end political campaigns will never die. As long as money exist and Congress still thinks they can buy votes then we shall keep receiving those phone calls to pledge our donations. Hopefully one day, we will be able to see an honest person in office who will actually do their job which is to represent the American people. Unfortunately for now, we will remain a Walmart-nation overly concerned with how we can lower the cost of labor and make the most profit.