"A few days a go, in my AP Lang class, we discussed an argument know as the straw man, (for those of you not familiar with the straw man, basically it's an argument that you make up a stance to argue against because they don't have the capacity to fight back), but ever since we've discussed this I've been seeing tons of examples of this.
For example, we have three show choirs at our school, a freshmen group, a prep, and a varsity. One girl, we'll call her Cake, was discussing show choir with someone who is not in show choir, we'll call him chip (I'm hungry if you can't tell). Anyway, well chip says "It's seems like you guys (as in the people in varsity show choir) are really mean to the prep group." Cake automatically gets defensive (even though she was totally just trashing a few specific people in the prep group) and says "No we're not, they just all think they're better than us!" So here's where the straw man comes in, "Everyone in the prep group says that they're going to beat the varsity, *blah, blah, blah* *mean, low blow about someone, etc*" First of all, saying 'everyone' can not possibly be true, you cannot sum up the views of an entire, diverse group of people with one statement. Second of all, since when has ANYONE said that. I would say, in general, our three show choirs get along pretty well, we support each other and cheer our loudest, and hope for them to win.
Another example, many commercials use the straw man, using the statement "Other *insert type of product here* don't have *insert special feature here*" What do you mean by other, how do you know they don't have that special ingredient? Did you illegally high-jack their recipe? Didn't think so.
It's weird how when someone points something out to you, that's all you see.
Like on Glee, when they introduced Sam, Finn made a comment about the largeness of his mouth, and now that's all I can see. (it's okay though I think his large mouth looks good on him)
No comments:
Post a Comment