Posted on 07/16/2014 12:26:07 AM PDT by beaversmom
For my English 121 class I have to do a research/argumentative paper.
I don't want it to necessarily be about something like guns or abortion. I want something a little creative. It has to be something I can research. Something I feel passionate about (I know you all don't know what I'm passionate about, but I am passionate about conservatism). It doesn't have to be politically related/controversial, but those are the terms I generally think in. It can be something from the past or present. Also, I have to give the opposition's side.
Any serious/creative ideas, please post.
BTW, shockers of all shockers, my teacher is liberal. I don't think he will grade me harshly, though, for coming down on a conservative side of an issue. I think he will be fair.
The other advantage is that while libs don’t always support private property rights, they hate “big pharma.”
That sounds really interesting. What were some if your son’s conclusions?
He concluded that the long-term cost of the two ways of wiring was about the same, and so the lower outage rate on buried wires was the key element in favor of that plan. He included a few stories about people dying of cold or not able to run medical equipment when their power was out, for emphasis. His assignment didn’t require him to defeat every objection - just to mention some objections and address them.
My other college-age son did a paper about coal-ash disposal, a major environmental issue in these parts. His conclusion was that it’s a very bad system of waste storage, and there’s not much than can be done to improve it. Something totally different is needed, involving lots of chemistry ... and that’s why he should be offered a full scholarship to Appalachian State University to study environmental chemistry.
Unfortunately, he was not, but it was still a good paper and an interesting study subject.
If investigating Common Core also investigate Outcome Based Education and Marc Tucker.
They also like to think that they hate monopoly (notwithstanding that their “logic” leads to government monopoly). My pet peeve - everyone’s pet peeve, actually - is “bias in the media,” but in general that topic is radioactive for a paper to be graded by a lib. But I had an extreme lib uncle (RIP since about 2 years), and I was able to throw him seriously off balance by demonstrating that the Associated Press is a monopoly (and was very aggressively so in the second half of the Nineteenth Century).That was only a personal discussion, not a formal paper, but to the extent that you believe in the prof’s good intentions, you would have a chance to make him seriously think. The AP even was, according to a now-defunct web site, found by SCOTUS to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1945. And the rationale for the AP (and any other wire service) is that it was the only way to economically transmit the news in the years after the telegraph was first commercialized (in the middle of the Nineteenth Century). But now, of course, every Tom, Dick, and Harriet has Internet access, and can use as much bandwidth as the whole AP did in 1900, without a moment's thought.
So the question you could discuss is the extent to which alarums which were raised in the Nineteenth Century over the obvious concentration of public influence which the AP already represented in those (relatively) early days, and Adam Smith’s warning:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nationsmay still be relevant in an era when it is acknowledged by all that the AP did in fact attempt to promote objectivity in reporting (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3179318/posts), at least initially.My own position is that it is always arrogant to take for granted your possession of a virtue - and that by assuming that they are objective, journalists routinely excuse themselves from the arduous work of self examination which is the only way to even attempt to be objective. IMHO journalists - like everyone else - desire to be influential, and that the nature of journalism casts aspersions on the people who arguably could have prevented whatever calamity journalism is currently reporting. Consequently journalism naturally criticizes Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena,” and suggests paper-tiger, utopian (government) solutions to all problems. Such nostrums never actually have to work, because their only real purpose is to make journalists promoting them seem superior to the responsible people who, their expertise and dedication to solving such problems notwithstanding, did not prevent the problem which the utopian “solution” putatively addresses.
The result of the wire services (it doesn’t actually matter to my analysis that the AP is monopolistic among wire services) is a continual “meeting together” of journalists, and their arrival at a consensus (“conspiracy against the public”) that slanting the news in favor of their own importance represents “objectivity.” The political result is that politicians whose only desire is to go along and get along naturally associate themselves with journalism’s favored slant - and are rewarded by journalists with positive labels such as “progressive,” “liberal,” or “moderate," while their opponents are tarred with bad PR and negative labels such as “conservative” or “right wing” or “extreme.”
If you go with Fracking, you should watch this
It is awesome !!!
Filmmaker/producer Ann McElhinney discusses the human devastation that radical environmentalism causes. The presentation was recorded at the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute’s 2011 Western Women’s Summit held in the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara CA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHhtlu-F5VM
“I did a paper in English 102 of how transcendental the lyrics of Jackson Browne were in 1976”
I always liked his music. He went to high school here in north OC. Had a one-armed customer who was one of his roadies.
Sorry wrong video, still a must watch, but here’s the one on Fracking.
“Lessons from the Debate over Fracking”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giwRvzHs5oA
They look like they could both be dating the same guy.
You are wrong to assume anything about a lieberal.
Research Common Core. There’s red meat there, including the College Board influence. You could argue for an alternative to the SAT/ACT.
I forgot a couple of topics:
Feasibility of USAF grass or flower-made gasoline.
Workability of solar roads.
Hydrogen or helium cars and the distribution system necessary to run them.
The actual effects of ‘wind’ power
In a way, those terms are meaningless. With or without human intervention, DNA is constantly mutating. There is no baseline that one can point to as the "original" DNA of an organism for comparison. It is the nature of DNA to change, of organisms to mutate. Each living human being has roughly 120 mutations that did not exist in either parent, and the same is true of every other living species as well.
If we restrict those terms to describing DNA alterations brought about by intentional human intervention, then "GE" (genetic engineering) would refer to the process, and "GMO" (genetically modified organism) to the result. Our processes for achieving these are extremely refined and targeted now, thanks to our increased understanding of the enzymes that organisms use to alter DNA. We extract and use those natural enzymes for our own genetic engineering projects. We're no longer limited the way our ancestors were, when they had no control whatsoever over what would result when they randomly swapped around thousands of genes between organisms.
Good luck...I liked English...particularly Lit
All the old Asylum acts of that era.....
Thomas Jefferson to G.K. van Hogendorp…
The most effectual engines for this purpose are the public papers. You know well that that government always kept a kind of standing army of news writers who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented & put into the papers whatever might serve the minister. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper. When forced to acknolege our independance they were forced to redouble their efforts to keep the nation quiet. Instead of a few of the papers formerly engaged, they now engaged every one.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/let38.asp
Beaversmom,
How far outside of the box do you intend on going with this paper? In my last year as a college student, I had a history class for which I did a comparison of constitutions.
The British Constitution as a living and breathing document, and a larger view of the progressive ideology that went into constructing that argument. I put that paper online if you wish to read it:
https://archive.org/details/COTUKlivingbreathing
I do a lot of thumbing through old documents relating to progressivism, if you want to go there.
What topic did you settle on?
Thank you for your posts and interest. I’m considering a few topics and I will elaborate more in a few. As part of my grade I have to do an assignment where I discuss the assignment and respond to two peers. Teacher wants to know the topics we are considering. I want to go over this thread again and see if any other topics catch my eye. I’m considering one I came up with on my own...one that is near and dear to the teacher’s heart, but I will be kind of on the opposite side of it even though I engage in the practice, too. Also considering some ideas I got from here. And another timely topic in the news. But I want to give this thread a good go through before I make my final decision. Thank you so much and to everyone that responded. Loved all the ideas that were brought forth.
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