SWA #21

The Onion in this piece is trying to argue that the American people don't read anything anymore because they figure if it is important then they will see a video clip on tv or it would have a picture by it. They are saying that the citizens have been forced down to such an elementary level that in order for anyone to read it there has to be a picture or something to catch their attention. We see this in the article through the writers sarcastic comments and the people he is interviewing comments it becomes especially sarcastic in the end where he quotes the person as saying "I'm sure if it's important enough, they'll let us know some other way, after all, it can't be that serious. if there were anything worth while bburied deep in that block of impenetrable Englsih, it would at least have an accompanying phonto of a celebrity" The writer uses the form of hyperbole to stregnthen his arguement by trying to show how rediculous some people in our country have become. He tries to show people these extreme cases so people will make sure they are not like the people who have been quoted in the article. He almost tries to make his reader feel as though they are the people that are being quoted to make them realize what has become of our country.

SWA #19

Andriesen never takes a side on the issue of defining a sport other than that sports can be argued many ways and the only thing that will be agreed upon is that people will never agree. Andriesen point of the article is to get the reader thinking about whether or not there truly is a definition to sports. I do agree with Andriesens last point where he claims that as long as people are having fun playing than it truly does not matter if it is classified as a sport. The only circumstance I can think of on whether or not something was a sport or not would be if it was being questioned with if it should receive funding from a school. If a school claims something is not a sport and therefore should not recieve funding yet other institutions claim it is a sport then that could cause a debate and therefore would need certain guidelines. In the end it is not important whether things are sports or not as long as people are enjoying them and having fun than that is what "sports" were intended to do.

SWA #18

Local: State requiring voter identification in order to vote
http://www.wistv.com/story/15881001/voter-id-ads-overlook-absentee-option

I am leaning towards this issue because I like what the state of South Carolina is doing with the identification. I think it is actually quite dumb that this is not required in every state in the U.S. I can also open this issue up to a broader issue the only reason why it is my local was because I first discovered it through the discussion about South Carolina recently going to this method.

Global: Illegal Immigrants coming to the US
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1804127?seq=2
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3002344

This was the easiest to find information for because it is such a global issue. The information was very broad however and I do not find this quite as interesting. In the end I thought it would be better if I picked a different issue.

Whether college athletes should be paid to play
http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/tndl65&div=16&g_sent=1&collection=journals

I really like this issue but I just can not seem to find enough information. It is fairly young and I do not know if I would be able to write 5-7 pages. This issue definitly interests me however and I feel as though in a couple more years once college athletics starts trying to deal with the issues instead of having just "investigations" this would be a very good topic to write about.

Internet Article

http://www.naturalnews.com/029854_factory_food_health.html

The author of this article claims that we can not keep giving the FDA power over the few remaining farms because the disease outbreaks are coming from the factory farms that the FDA funds. He gives us examples of the factory farming and the conditions that these animals are raised in to show the audience why these factory farms are unsafe. These examples include how they are fed and pumped with growth hormones and their living conditions of being locked up in close quarters with their own feces and rodents. His argument does convince me that something needs to be done because of the stuff that these factory farms are getting away with and selling to us. The steroids and other hormones that are pumped into the animals are not natural and studies are finding that they are bad for us. Also the conditions of these animals with the spread of disease in them is unsafe for the buyer because we now do not know what we are buying.

Fear Factories

In Fear Factories, Mathew Scully writes on the way that conservatives are able to turn their heads to the cruelty towards animals in today’s society. He starts by introducing a book he has written on the subject, and then gives all the examples of how animals are treated from being killed for their bile to being hunted online, and then dives into his reasoning for why conservatives today “don’t care.” Scully believes that people do not want to know how these animals are treated so that they will not feel remorse for the animals. Scully uses pathos to try to pull the reader in by saying "they lie covered in their own urine and excrement, with broken legs from trying to escape or just to turn, covered with festering sores, tumors, ulcers, lesions.” He continues to make his examples worse and ends the article talking of how people are now trying to clone the animals by tampering with their genes in order to recreate them. In the end Scully concludes by saying if humans can not accomplish something without hurting themselves or other beings on earth then why would we do it at all? This again appeals towards a person’s pathos and makes them think about why we would inflict this pain on the animals because we would not do it to our own kind.

RA #2 Picture 2

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