Friday, January 28, 2011

Rebutted to Alex

So, before I rebut against Alex's blog post, i first have to say that i agree with what he says. However, for sake of getting a good grade in this class, i will pretend to be against this. Even so, a great debater should be able to think about both sides of an argument.

First off, my open begins his statement with that he would not want his DNA to manipulated. However, what if it is a matter of life or death? What if the DNA manipulation can help the baby but have negative effects as well like a problem with sight or hearing or skin problems etc. The life of a child is more important than any negative mutation of minor consequences.

another thing is what does it matter that a parent changes the DNA to meet their standards? So what? Nothing is wrong with that. It just seems to raise moral and ethical questions. But, what would the effect be if the baby comes out blonde even though they were support to come out a brown haired one? So, the question i guess remains with the parents and weather or not they want to change the DNA or not.

so, the last point i want to make is this ethics problem i mentioned earlier. Is it really un-ethical to change the DNA of a baby? Well, yes it can be if it were harmful. However, the manipulation of DNA to change something as silly as hair or eye color is not harmful. Also, my opponent says that the parents will need to tell there children what they did, but i think that they do not. It dose not seem that important to tell them what happened.

so, to conclude, I believe that it is ultimately up to the parents whether or not hey want to change the DNA sequience so that they could get the ultimate baby they want.





Again, just want to say that i do agree with what Alex says, this is just for sake of the class.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Wikileaks is designed to spread or "leak" censored information to the people about the government. There purpose is to benefit society by doing this, not harm it. Even when some people believe that this is something that is meant to harm society. All wikileaks is doing is exposing the government of what it trully is instead it "claims" to be. Our government does things in our nations name that we might not be proud of. So, if we do not know what "we" are doing, then how can "we" say "we the people"? In other words, how can we have a democracy, when our government cant be true to us? A democracy defined by dictionary.com is this:
"Government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system."
"Government by the people"..... If our government is hiding something, then its not "by the people" and thus not a democracy. This is all wikileaks is tying to do.

Here are some positive things that came out of wiki leaks:

In Tunisia, the President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, has been ruling Tunisia with an "iron fist" claims New York Times and The Atlantic.  However the news of this has been sort of shut off to the rest of the world, if i read this correctly, and that, since wikileaks leaked this, the President was driven out to exile. This is, of course is a good thing because he was basically a dictator and censorship-leader.

There has been a huge massive leak regarding papers of the war in Iraq stating first had accounts and secret things about the starting the war. This can be found the actuall wikileaks website here.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Here is a qoute from Bianca's blog:

Every time we have a substitute at ASTI, it seems that my class almost always takes advantage of them, and I personally get annoyed every time it happens. In fact, no offense to anybody, but it is rude. 
I agree with this. I think its very wrong to take advantage of subs, especially when they are having trouble getting use to the school.

The rite thing to do would to help them with trying to get to know the school. like would could show them good ol' ASTI hospitality by telling them the little things they should like no college students in the bathroom. We should also try to help them with names, instead of just letting it go. Like if a name is uncommon, then we should correct so the don't make an as* out of them selves. I think thats the one thing i can't stand most; when we laugh at the things they say or the way they pronuce words or names.

You know, that also goes for other things in life like the social background info we as teens spend so much of our time in. Like we make fun when people say things that either sounds weird or is weird.

Back to subs. Another thing subs are subjected to are the disrespectful comments behind their backs. I hate talking about people behind their backs because what ever you have to say, u should just say to them face on. I hate this. Every sub has to go through eventually, but some are good evaluations. Like the sub that Bianca was talking about. I was in her school so i had her too. She was awesome! she taught us real Spanish and taught us how to take notes. She is awesome. Also, she had something no other teacher had, and that was like this element around them wanted you to study. It was so awesome to finally learn Spanish from my sub. I mean this in no disregard to my real spanish teacher; she was a good teacher.  

Elite colleges VS non-elite colleges

I believe that, out of the seven debaters on this website, "Skip the admissions game" is the most persuasive one. I chose this one because they said examples of what they meant and had both sides of the argument, if i recall. Also, he defined what an elite college is; not many of the debaters did that. All of these things help me determine whether or not i should believe this article. Between all these things above, I think that the most persuasive one was the definition of an elite college. This really made believe what he was saying because he actually had the thought process. In anthropology, antroplogists should always site where they come from that can some how have a negative effect on the outcome of what ever they are doing. Like lets say if a white male was looking at the communication between black females. He would have to put that he is a white male and that he mite bring that to his studies with out knowing it.

Out of the seven again, the least persuasive was the "merit and race". I think the major down fall is the major vocabulary of this article. Now, going from what i sid above, I am a freshman that hasn't really expanded my diction to a level of a collegiate standard (however, thats why we have 3 higher grades above freshman). However, once i decipher the complex language, i still have some trouble with what he is saying about minorities. Is he saying that minorities should go to prestiugues school to raise their life's quality? Or is he saying, as a minority, we should be liable to programs that help us. if he is saying the second, then he is racist. There are to many factors to look at to determine whether or not he is being racist, so i wont mention them. Anyways, with all this trouble we had with this article, i have determined that this is the least persuasive.
"The ignorance of people can sometimes be overwhelming. Sometimes it just hits me that we, humans, the animals that have an open consouis and can feel love are the same animals that can a drop a nuke and comit genocide on a people because religious sterotypes. We are the animals that can make industries like Pixar and the Red Cross, but yet, we can also judge someone based on thier skin color or have rich and poor. Well, I think we messed up, big time. I think it stared to go bad when we first elected the first tribal leader. Some say that we need a leader but i think that was our major and ultimate defeat. Egalitarian. That basically means in a crude and understated way equal. Thats how we all should of acted at the beginning. This would mean that we would hold each member in the tribe EQUALLY responsible for the saftey of the tribe and themselves, the maintanice of the tribe and self and the progression of the tribe and self. 

What would that look like today? well sort of like this: When we see a pot hole in the street, we fill it.When we see a root damaging the ashalut, we chop it. When we mistakingly given someone a penny for change, even though it should have been a dime, we switch it. It may not seem like it, but this is revolutinary. It's silly to thinink that a change mis calculation can lead to genocide, but it can. Thats when we, as humans start to get lazy."....

so this is sort of what i was thinking writing for my peace essay. After i talk about laziness, i'll go a start to talk about obtaining peace today and then ill re-state my maintance thing, add a couple of quotes here and there, and yeah. 
 so please, comment and comment all u want. I think thats a wonderful way of learning, through constructive criticism.