Wikileaks Debate: Opening Statement

I decided to debate about the topic of whether Wikileaks is overall more harmful or more beneficial to society. For those of you that don't know what Wikileaks is, it is an international non-profit organization that publishes secret materials from unknown news leaks that the government and the media are trying to hide from the general public. As for the side I'm going to debate for, I decided to debate for the side that think Wikileaks is overall more beneficial for society. The main reason why I decided to choose this side is that I'm one of those people that truly believe in the word “truth”. I believe “truth” is really important because “truth” is reality; if we live in a world without truth, we are not truly “living” at all because we would be living in a world of lies.

Wikileaks symbolizes an opportunity; an opportunity to escape from a fake world that our very own government has created. I don't understand why some people have the power to know the truth while the majority is left in the darkness. I thought this country was built upon the idea of that “all men are created equal”; if that is true, why some some people get to the know the truth while others don't? I don't think this is right at all. Everybody should be entitled to know the truth or at least be able to seek the truth without being criticized or hated. From what I assume in history, one of the reason why we decided to create a government in the first place is that we gave our trust to the people that deserved to lead us. We sure have gone a long way from then. Now, instead of respecting the people in the government, we have come to a time of when people are living in fear of knowing the truth. People are afraid that the government will “hunt” them down if they learned something that they shouldn't have or if they have shared the "wrong" information to the public when the information is only reserved for the higher ups. Overall, I admit that Wikileaks is not completely beneficial, but I believe that it is way more beneficial than it is harmful.

Political Power

This blog post is about whether the gaining of power corrupts the person or not. In my opinion, it really depends on the person or in this case “the animal” to see if they get corrupted when attaining a lot of power. There are good and bad people all around the world which means there would always be different possibilities of what the outcome of a country would come to depending on the person ruling it. If a person has a bad sense of moral then the country would most likely is doom to fall while a country is being rule by a person with good sense of moral, the country probably flourish and stay harmonious.

There are many reasons why people would abuse this power and it doesn't necessary mean that certain person have to be bad person. One reason that a person might be corrupted by power is because of greed. All human contain greed within them and depending on the person, this greed can either be really big or really small. When a person has a big sense of greediness, that person has a high chance of being corrupted by power since that person would always want more than they already have which ultimately would cause a country to be destroyed. Another reason why people would abuse their power is because some people are really selfish. Similar to greed, a person that is really selfish would not able to create a “equal” society, instead it is most likely to cause a country to be destroyed also.

If I could gain this kind of power, I would share this kind of power with friends. This way I can stay away from being greedy and selfish which would overall be good for a country because I believe a country should be ruled by different people which thus enable the country to grow and prosper.

If George Orwell would answer this question, I think his answer would probably similar to mine about that it really depends on the person. Two examples of this is when he uses a old pig named major in his book “Animal farm” to reveal the idea of animalism:

“And above all, no animal must ever tyrannies over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are brothers.” (Page 31)

and

“No animal muse ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal” (Page 32)

These quotes form the story show that in a way, George Orwell believe that there could have been a different way of how this book would ended up if major was still alive. By killing the pig off, Orwell was able to create new possibilities of new animals being the ruler with a bad sense of moral which causes the idea of animalism that old major explained into contradiction within itself.

Response to "Free Topic-School"

This is something that I found in one of Jackson's blog post that I thought was interesting to write about:

"School is the basis of your life because your future is based on your career. If you mess up school now, you will have a bad career in the future. School has allowed me to realize that my current life is a basis for my future career and how I live it. I know to get good grades and have great study habits. I am preparing myself for my future career and life."

Even though Jackson see this kind of thing of going to school in order to get a good career as a positive thing in life, I see it the other way around. The way how school work in society is somewhat tedious. Why do I say this? First off, I can see why going to school and learning new things is really important in life, but the concept of when a person happen to fail, they would lose a lot of their chances of getting a good job which thus may lead that person to other alternative road which can be pretty ugly.

An ideal kind of system of a school that I would like to see is that everybody deserve to have the opportunity of getting a good job even though if the person didn't do as good in school. I think school should be a place to learn and not competition of whoever get a better grades get the better job offer. This of course is one of the main reason why people cheat in school in the first place. They forget about the learning and rather cheat their way around without actually learning the actual content of just to getting the grades needed to beat everybody else the on opportunity to get into a better college or get a better job offer. This saddens me when I see the tremendous pressure that school pushes down on kids.

In conclusion, I can see why school is a good thing of giving a person chance of being successful in life. The only thing that I wish would be better is if society don't put so much emphasize on school since it causes so much pressure to students which lead to them forgetting about the learning and focus more on the grades.

My Opinion on the Articles About Elite Colleges

Out of the articles that I read this week that was about the debate of whether going to an elite college is better for a person's life or not, my favorite one have to be the article “Skip the Admissions Game” by Kevin Carey. It was a pretty interesting and convincing read compared to the other articles. The main reason why I thought this article stand out from the other ones was the fact that this writer did a fantastic job at engaging the reader by using a somewhat humorous tone toward the readers and actually used support that the readers can actually look into:

“The Community College Survey of Student Engagement, for example, identifies public two-year institutions that are unusually good at employing the teaching practices that research show lead to learning and graduation. Most community colleges participate and you can look up the results at www.ccsse.org."

I also liked the way how he wrapped up his article with an conclusion that restated his main point into a single completed sentence:

“That means that even if you're not among the chosen few, you can still get a great college education -- if you know where to look.”

The article that I least favorite is “The Specialization Trade-Off” by James Shulman. The main reason why I didn't like it so much was because there was no evidence whatsoever in the article that state that elite school focuses more on sport then education. I don't think this is completely false, but when a debater states something such as this, I think it is only fair for the him or her to provide the readers evidence such as a list of colleges that actually prefer sport accomplishments over education accomplishments. Another thing that bugged me about this article was the assumption from the writer about how sport is great enough to actually overshadow education about which benefit a certain elite college:

“But if you’re a school that is trying to beat Yale in swimming, then selecting someone on the basis of her potential in the 100-meter butterfly is a rational investment for the college.

”

Response to "How animal testing is minimised"

After scrolling around reader, I came upon an article about animal testing from the World news that caught my eyes. This is something that I found within this article that I thought is interesting to talk about:

"The approach to finding alternatives to animals in scientific procedures is widely referred to as the three Rs: replacement, refinement and reduction. Practically speaking, this means trying to avoid the use of living animals, minimising the number used, and reducing their suffering and distress during any experiments."

I thought this approach in animal testing is awesome (even though if it is just 'minimize') because I'm glad people finally starting to realize that animal cruelty is just plain wrong. The way how I see living things is that every single one of them deserve respect. I feel it is a responsibility for humans to take care of other animals instead of abusing or killing them. I believe that "something" out there chose us humans to be the dominant species in this planet. Even though I don't really believe in any specific religion, I do believe that since whatever reason why humans were chosen to be the top class in the animal kingdom, we should have the responsibility to take care of all other animals because technically we all are one big family since in one point in time, we shared a common ancestor.

When I first heard about scientists using animals such as mouses for experiments, it just sickens me that people do such a thing to animals. Although animal testing always been for good causes such as finding a cure for a certain disease, I can't see why people are not smart enough to invent something that allow them to figure these things out without using innocent animals like tools.

I do not know for a fact if other animals have any feelings or not, but I can think examples of animals showing expression. For example, when a dog is happy or excited, they would stick out their tongue and wag their tail around. This obviously shows that some animals may do have feelings within them. In conclusion, I'm glad that animal testing is minimised because after finding that out, my worries for animal abuse lessen down a bit.