Spoken Argument

So, the spoken argument that I found was an actual argument between my dad and myself. He kept asking me questions about what I wanted to do with some flowers that my mom got for me, and I didn't want to deal with it so I just kept telling him that I didn't know what to do. (I actually didn't, because usually my mom just deals with everything herself, but she was gone at the time so I was in charge of the indoor gardening.) Then my dad decided to overreact a little bit, telling me that every bad thing I do is just accumulating, and when I'm in college and I need something, he's not going to give it to me. So that's the context, now for the analysis.

My dad was standing up, and I was sitting down at my computer, so that gave him a feeling of authority over me. His tone of voice was loud and penetrating, in order to get through to me and to make me feel scared about the future consequences of my actions. He kept repeating the word "accumulate" in order to draw emphasis to the fact that I'm (apparently) rude a lot of the time and that it's not just going to be forgotten each time. His argument, though, was made less effective because he sometimes didn't know what to say to back up his claims. This made me kind of laugh a little bit (but secretly, of course) because I don't get as scared of him as I did when I was a little girl. He didn't have anything specific to threaten me with, but warned me all the same about how the accumulation of my actions will return to haunt me.

Overall, it wasn't a very successful argument. I personally didn't feel too much in response. Maybe that's just because it tends to happen every day. I also just disagree with him - I don't think I was being rude at all. But that's always a matter of opinion, so neither my dad or myself would be really qualified to decide the truth.

McDonald's

So, I think that reading Fast Food Nation for BLA has really gotten into my head. Every time I pick it up, I find something either disturbingly disgusting or morally repulsive. I'm constantly tapping people around me on the shoulder and saying, "Oh my gosh did you know that at Taco Bell in 1978..." or "I'm never eating at Wendy's again because..." So I've decided to write my persuasive blog post on fast food. And I'm probably ruining the whole entire thing by having this little introduction, because it makes me sound unprofessional. So long, ethos.

The fast food industry is junk. Not just the food, either. The way that business is run, and most of all the way that employees are treated. There needs to be a way for the workers to organize unions and demand benefits that any employee of any business rightfully deserves. However, the corporations that run the restaurants will do anything in their power to prevent unions from forming, in order to save money. Because of this, there needs to be legislation enacted in the interests of employees of fast food restaurants.

Employees of fast food restaurants are discriminated against and seen as simply commodities, easily fired and replaced. The restaurants try to mechanize as much as possible, in order to be able to hire the cheapest, least-skilled workers. These workers are usually teenagers or immigrants, who are then taken advantage of. They aren't allowed to form unions, though some have tried. The corporations will do anything and everything to prevent the organization of workers in the hopes of receiving more than minimum wage or some basic benefits like healthcare or seniority privileges. But every such attempt has failed - in a San Francisco McDonald's in 1973, workers trying to create a union were subjected to lie detector tests, interrogations, and threats of dismissal if they refused to answer questions, and in Montreal in 1997, when workers tried to organize a union, the McDonald's was shut down weeks before the union's certification. To compensate for the horrendous treatment that employees receive, site managers resort to making them feel like they are a valuable part of a team through a technique called "stroking." This allows companies, like Taco Bell, to underpay their workers. For example, in 1997 a Washington Taco Bell was discovered to have coerced its workers into working off the clock in order to avoid overtime pay, forced its workers to wait until the restaurant got busy before officially starting their shifts and to work after their shifts had ended without pay, required them to clean the restaurant on their own time, and compensated its workers with food instead of solid wages. When they were convicted of these crimes, Taco Bell didn't even admit to its wrongdoings! The "fast food mentality" has swept our nation, turning even clothing stores into factories designed to generate the most possible revenue for the lowest price, with no regard to the well-being of consumers or of workers.

Those companies that claim that their actions are perfectly legal and that they wouldn't be able to afford to continue if they gave their workers more benefits are ridiculous. The McDonald's Corporation grosses over 9 trillion dollars in revenue each year (as of December 2008), so obviously allowing for healthcare for employees wouldn't cause too many problems.

Legislation needs to be put into effect that will stop these, and many more, injustices in the fast food industry. Workers deserve, as do employees in any other line of business, to have steady incomes that actually allow them to live life and to have benefits that equal those of other industries.

Wow, I could actually go on for days and days about this issue if I had the time. But I think this is enough information to make my point. I couldn't even think of any rebuttals besides the money one, so that part of my post was pretty weak, I guess. Anyway, all of the information comes from Luke Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and The Wall Street Journal's Market Watch website.

Animal Rights

Okay, so I really hated both essays on animal rights, but I think my hatred for them will make this blog post more interesting than the one I would write about student rights. I feel like all of the people who write about student rights will say the same thing, but we have to admit that we're biased (duh... we're students). So I chose animal rights.

Hearne's piece, in my opinion, was pretty bad. She couldn't objectively discuss animal rights and let her feelings about how much she loved her dog, Drummer, get in the way of her arguments. This made me less sure about her credibility as an authority on the subject. I thought, while I was doing my CRJ about this essay, that maybe she just promoted her views on animal rights so that no organization would tell her how to treat her pets. She claims that she just disagrees with the rights that organizations like the Humane Society and ASPCA try to protect, but maybe all she wants is to be able to be free from what they tell her to do. Who knows, maybe she was snubbed by one such organization in the past or something. I definitely don't know. But I do think that she could be a little bit more objective, rather than subjective, in claiming that rights should protect the pursuit of happiness, not just avoid suffering. I also disagreed with her beliefs about animals in general. I mean, nobody really thinks that animals think the way humans do. And I think that trying to prevent their suffering is a great way to ensure their rights. Pain tends to overrule other feelings - if I were in the middle of running a marathon and got a foot cramp, I would stop because of the foot cramp, even though I would know that finishing the race would feel great and give me a sense of achievement - what Hearne considers "happiness."

I think that Singer also takes his position on animal rights a little bit too far. Comparing a cow to a human infant, for example, seems ridiculous to me. Maybe it's just because of the society I've been raised in, but I still can't wrap my head around how these authors seem to think animals are the same as humans. Just because a mature dog can reason better than an infant does not make it human. And I love animals as much as anyone I've ever met, but it just makes no sense to me how Hearne and Singer can consider them so similar to humans. Treating animals differently than humans is not the same thing as racism, because animals don't see the injustice in the same way that we would. Though, of course, I agree with his indignation at the conditions in which animals on "factory farms" are kept, I still don't think that we should all become vegetarians. I will admit, though, that Singer's argument seems much more valid than Hearne's. He uses specific experimental data, laws, and hard facts to support his ideas. The language he uses manages to be cool and logical while still showing the reader how he feels, much unlike Hearne, who simply poured out her heart through her pen when writing her essay. Even the form that Singer uses - broken up into sections, setting examples apart from the other text - makes him seem like a more reliable source of information than Hearne. And I agree more with the idea that animal rights should protect the animals from suffering than I do with the idea that rights should allow animals to be happy. Because I think that animal owners everywhere know how to make their animals happy. It's the ones that are suffering that we need to fight for.