TOW 2: America's Billionaire by Maureen Dowd

Maureen Dowd, a long time writer of almost 40 years for publishings such as Time Magazine and The New York Times, comes out swinging at Republican lawmakers.  In her piece she comments on two news events.  These two are Warren Buffet speaking at Georgetown and the reforms of Food Stamp funding.  She starts out immediately insulting the "House Republican gargoyles," making it quite obvious that this article is for a far left reader.  This article starts out by talking of how there the House is trying to cut spending on things that are as important in her eyes such as Obamacare and Food Stamps.  She goes on further to say that they "don't understand math or history."  After this harsh criticism she moves to try and gain support for Buffets speaking of his contributions with help of Bill Gates and many other extremely wealthy people.  My consensus with this is that she shoots herself int the foot in her effort to appeal to ethos.  Her idea is that she can piggy back on the great authority that a figure like Warren Buffet carries by simply connecting two somewhat similar pieces, but she does a terrible job of this.  In my opinion, Dowd stretches things way to far trying to connect two things that have almost nothing in common.  Her effort to appeal to ethos thus leaves her looking like less of an intelligent source than when she started.  This appeal may have a slightly different feel on me than her normal audience however.  Her normal audience, likely being a farther left group that is also have strong opinions about the topic, are probably more easily stirred than I.  They most likely already agree with her from the moment she insulted Republicans, and the rest is likely icing on the cake.  This is the reasoning for her appeal to pathos.  To compliment her appeal to ethos Dowd uses pathos to charge up her already opinionated audience.  These two methods work together flawlessly and in the presence of the audience she is targeting, would likely work to perfections.

New IRB: The Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

For my current IRB I chose to read Malcolm Gladwell's The Outliers.  I chose this book due to a few reasons.  One of the first is the fact that is was recommended by one of my past teachers with whom I share some common interests.  In class he often spoke of the book and even had us read a section at one point to assist in our comprehension of another topic.  The same teacher also recommended me another book by Gladwell, Blink, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  Although I do agree with Mr. Yost for the fact that his writing does start to get repetitive and even boring after a full book, I enjoy his style of writing and also his content, and this IRB gives me a chance to finally get to this book which I have been looking at for a long time, but have never gotten to.  The Outliers is an insight in the patterns off the successful and of the uncommon.  It explains subtle similarities that share part of the credit for many people's success.  Whether it was their birth month, birth year, or simply their race or religion, many hidden variables play major roles in a person's success.  This point of view on success is an outlier in many people's minds because it essentially can be stretched so far as to say that the reasons that people are successful are completely out of their control.  This makes people feel insecure because is says that there is a finite position to which they can succeed.  Gladwell is not specifically trying to make that point, but he simply takes his own interest into account when writing on how there are truly many patterns in the things that seem random, and that if you look close you can find them.

Tow Post 1

The conflict in Syria is one of the biggest issues in current events.  Not only are such aspects as the death toll and the use of chemical weapons frightening, but also, Obama’s waffling on the topic adds to the discussion.  This inability to have certainty and to get anything done on this issue inspires this cartoon.  This cartoon is drawn by Henry Payne, a conservative Princeton alumni and cartoonist for the Detroit News.  In this cartoon he uses humor to comment on America’s role as the global police and Obama’s weakness in the matter.  He uses many aspects such as the fact that Obama, the driver, is signaling two different ways, right with the turn signal, but left with his hand.  This is a way of communicating how indecisive Obama is on the issue by stating that he is unsure of which way to go, and further, which political ideals to follow, the right with the route to war, or the left and peace.  Payne also adds the “Caution Student Driver” sticker as a way of showing that Obama is a relative neophyte in this issue having never dealt with anything like it in his five-year tenure.  Payne uses these aspects of humor as a way of communicating with his mainly conservative audience.  Since he knows that his audience has many of the same views as he does, Payne can go out on a limb and make Obama a topic of humorous intent.  This knowledge of his audience allows him to get his point across because he can cut straight to the point and joke about Obama’s asininity without having to beat around the bush.  He can directly insult Obama and can comment on his failures without having to soften it, resulting in a much more raw and specific cartoon.  All of these facts combine assist Payne in his delivery of the idea that Obama was failing his job by being indecisive, giving off a poor representation of the United States as a whole.

By Henry Payne