2 peer reviews

For your peer reviews, please write a response to each peer about his or her essay using the following prompts to guide you. To receive credit, each peer review must be thorough and complete (1–3 pages). Address each of the following prompts to provide your peer with plenty of critical, constructive feedback. Review your peer’s paper as you would like yours reviewed! Feel free to address any other aspects of your peer’s essay not outlined here.

Guidelines

• Write about the central argument of the essay, and how the argument is expressed in a claim. Write too about what can be done to strengthen or clarify the claim. Would the argument work better if a different type of claim was used?
• Write about the types of factual evidence and appeals used to support the claim and what suggestions you have for improvement.
• Write about how the argument is organized and what suggestions you have to make it flow more clearly and logically.
• Write about flaws in logic (fallacies) or leaps in reasoning you see that weaken the argument. Is it unclear how your peer’s writing moves from one point to the next? What suggestions do you have for addressing such problems?
• Write about the source material used as support and whether it is credible, adequate, and effective. Does your peer interact with the source material, or let it do the talking? Is the source material cited properly in-text and included on a works cited page?
• Based on your assessment, write about what you think the underlying warrant or major premise of the argument is, and whether you agree.
• Write about the strongest and weakest aspects of the draft.
• Write about what you would add, remove, or change to make the draft stronger.
• To the best of your ability, please make note of the types of errors in mechanics, grammar, and spelling your peer should watch out for and give an example from her or his paper.

Peer # 1

A More Peaceful Existence

In the past, I’ve said that people simply have to get to know each other better to not hate each other so much. I stand by that claim, but it seems to require elaboration.

Imagine, if you will, a fellow of some sort. Give him the exact opposite beliefs you have on something that matters to you. Do you hate him? Now the hard part: if you do, why? What he’s done is the same as what everyone else has: analyze his life experiences and come to the most logical conclusion he can. Hopefully, he isn’t done refining his alliances, and will grow wiser as he changes, however, he, like all others, can only accomplish this via questioning his premises.

Questioning your premises is absolutely critical for growth, beyond measure. You can grow old with the premise that everything, bar none, your country does is good. It’s your ultimate good; your end-all, be all; it’s, for all purposes, your religion. And you can do this, brilliantly reaching philosophical depths hardly a soul has been tempted by, developing elaborate thought processes, best explained in flow charts, about the moral developments gained and the various interpretive camps of moral belief yielded, but your growth, insight, and knowledge are ultimately limited by what notions you’ve explored. Your view of the world will be shut if this is the only one you’ve ever attempted, or even considered.

But more than this, it could be wrong. If you’ve invested every brain cell to one basket, one immoral basket, all is for naught. You’ven’t left the world better than you found it, and you’ve expended your days on a minute bit of what is, and you’ve fallen into the curious trap of an incorrect conclusion being found through flawless logic, by the means of an incorrect premise. Thomas Cathcart, famously, demonstrates this in his philosophical book, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar:

“An old cowboy goes into a bar and orders a drink. As he sits there sipping his whiskey, a young lady sits down next to him. … She says, ‘I’m a lesbian. I spend my whole day thinking about women. …’ A little while later, a couple sits down next to the old cowboy and asks him, ‘Are you a real cowboy?’ He replies, ‘I always thought I was, but I just found out I’m a lesbian'” (Cathcart).

People are all capable of this, and perform it regularly. Here’s a more relevant example.

A second fellow hates homelessness. He hates it entirely, and believes it should be eradicated at all costs, at least in America. Is this possible? Yes. If he happened to be a remarkably persuasive person, he could talk the government into helping him enact his plan. And so, wherever there are homeless people, the government simply moves in, occupies nearby buildings, and lets the homeless in. If they refuse, protesting theft of property or the conditions, they’re forced in. Better yet, homelessness is outlawed. The punishment is death. Homelessness has been defeated, and utopia has been achieved shortly.

The flaw, hopefully visible here, is that the premise is that homelessness is either the singular evil, or one so great it overshadows all others. This allows the simple conclusion that anything is permissible in the elimination of it. Logic is, perhaps surprisingly, fallible, and anyone can make less hyperbolic blunders of the same nature.

Now, the first fellow, who’s your antithesis, he might be a Nazi. He might be a Jihadist. He might be a fool of any sort, and he might be bitter and filled with hate from his years in this world. He might be horrible, he might be unacceptable, and he might deserve more wrath than his mortal form can endure, but to indulge yourself in getting as close to payback as you can yields nothing. It is suffering for suffering’s sake, and all your righteous wrath proves only that you can be provoked to the same violence and destruction that characterizes your supposed archnemesis in ideology. Perhaps you aren’t the same. You’re an avenger, a defender, and you don’t do this out of hate, but out of necessity. Who is anyone else to say?

But what if I told you this nameless man, who hates you with every fiber of his being, all because of something you couldn’t change if you tried, is “young and in love,” “polite and low key,” and of “Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother” (Fausset) like Tony Hovater, featured in the New York Times article “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland” by Richard Fausset.  This doesn’t excuse his other behaviors, and doesn’t even mean you have to tolerate or be around him, and he might even have it all coming and then some, but it goes to show that people are complicated, and even the most evil and destructive alive aren’t bad to the bone. Nobody is, just like how nobody’s good through-and-through.

Imagine the first thing you think of when I say “Trump Supporter”. There’s a single, popular character used in many political cartoons to represent this individual (intended as archetypism), which might resemble your idea quite a bit. He’s male, an Aaryan to the bone, aggressively patriotic, uneducated, overweight, and angry when he isn’t impassive and/or having his mind polluted with Fox News, Infowars, Trump, and modern Confederate and Nazi apologists. This, obviously, doesn’t represent either the 61,201,031 (“2016 Presidential Election Results”) voters Trump accumulated in the 2016 Presidential election, or his current approval rating, as high as 49% in the last few weeks (“How Popular is Donald Trump”), but it’s a powerful and prevalent stereotype that’s attributed all too often to millions of people– and others have their fair share of cruel images, from the heavily-pierced, rainbow-haired, figure (of less-determined gender) who’s, what do you know, also screaming in rage whenever they aren’t building up energy through the consumption of repetitive, mind-numbing media. Remarkably, the strawmen reminisce each other, within the mainstream of the US, at least.

And all this only applies to malice, which is much rarer in others than we seem to tend to believe. It’s become a famous phrase that one should “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” (Bloch). This is the principle known as Hanlon’s Razor, and it explains how it’s better to assume others are misguided, or, if you’re feeling a bit harsher, stupid, than evil. It allows you to have friends whom you know on a level beyond the mere surface, without them being simple replications of you in every significant and meaningful way. I, for one, have never met a person with the same religious beliefs as I on every minor detail, and no one even close politically. This doesn’t stop me from having friends, companions, and other acquaintances in every district of my life, and knowing them each in a unique and meaningful way. This does, however, prevent others who don’t feel the same way.

Hanlon’s Razor can be expanded on, though. Even when disagreement is inevitable, it needn’t be maximized, and can best be left to the most minor understanding available. An immigration dispute can be left to thoughts of security vs liberty on an international level, with race never being assumed, and only accepted as the answer when stated. Never assume the worst of others. In the same vein, I don’t hate the rich if I want to raise taxes on them, hate the poor if I don’t; hate Muslims if I ethically dispute values of Islam, hate Christians and their values if I don’t; hate America if I believe slaveowners shouldn’t have statues, hate black people if I don’t; or even assume those who disagree with me on gender, abortion, pollution, or evolution are stupid. These people are evaluating the facts they have best they can. Give them a break.

That said, if a life promising peaceful coexistence doesn’t appeal or sounds too hippie, that’s because it is hippie, and it might prevent horrors like the over 200 million estimated deaths as a result of military conflicts and totalitarian regimes in the 20th century (White). This doesn’t consider extragovernmental murders and all the other, even more personal, ways people harmed each other purposefully in that exceptionally bloody century, and this isn’t hardly so famously divided as today. With the internet and globalization offering ideological harbors outside of direct, immediate, policy application, there are far more outlets for unusual and taboo beliefs within far smaller a space, from digressing thoughts and interpretations on religions, politics, relationships and sex, and even things that seem like they’d be simple, such as science. This causes day-to-day existence to be only more controversial as the world plunges with all the recklessness of a child in summer into the 21st century, and the unimaginably great technologies people will develop in it.

Works Cited

“2016 Presidential Election Results”. Politico, Politico, 13 December 2016, https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/.

Bloch, Arthur. Murphy’s Law, Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong. Internet Archive, Internet Archive, Price / Slern / Stone Publishers, 1980, https://archive.org/details/murphyslawbooktw00bloc.

Cathcart, Thomas. Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar. Abrams Image, 1 March 2007, https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7997709M/Plato_and_a_Platypus_Walk_into_a_Bar.

Fausset, Richard. “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 25 November 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/us/ohio-hovater-white-nationalist.html.

Hands, Phil. “Hands on Wisconsin: Trump supporter visits Santa Claus.” Wisconsin State Journal, Wisconsin State Journal, 27 November 2016, https://madison.com/wsj/opinion/cartoon/hands-on-wisconsin-trump-supporter-visits-santa-claus/article_a375725a-4ad3-503c-aece-86aec0c116bd.html.

“How Popular is Donald Trump?” fivethirtyeight.com, fivethirtyeight.com, 7 August 2020, https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/.

Peer # 2

If College was more affordable

Ever since I was a kid, it was always drilled into the back of my head that college was the only way to get a decent job and be successful in life. As I’ve grown up, I see that statement has two sides and that life can take you in many different directions without going to college. Unfortunately, with the way the economy is working today, the higher your education, the better job you can get.  For some people college isn’t an option, it could potentially leave them with major life debt due to the extremely high tuition costs and fees. While there are financial aid packages out there, the chances of someone being able to get enough money to cover all the costs needed is very low. If college had a reduced cost, it would leave individuals to be able to continue their education, be even more able to contribute to society and obtain higher level jobs with their degree.

Right now, the playing field is not equal. The only way to make equal a reality in this case would be that every college was affordable or free to the students wanting to attend it. If this were the case, many more individuals would be able to send family members to college and obtain higher education. Therefore, being able to have an economic opportunity in America today.

Without lowering the cost of college, it will only get higher as the decades move forward. There is no cap to the price, while the economy keeps changing so will the price of tuition, housing, food, transportation and much more.

One might be attending school to earn a decent job, but while that might be the case, entering the workforce with a ton of debt makes saving towards anything a real problem. “On average, students in America graduate with debt that is more than $31,000.” In addition, students are more likely to major in something that they would make more money, than something they are passionate about and want to peruse in life.

“College graduates with a bachelor’s degree typically earn 66 percent more than those with only a high school diploma; and are also far less likely to face unemployment.”

If you want to be a top of the tier worker for a company, you need some form of a degree. Whether that being an associate, bachelors, masters or whatever else one wants to go after, this all costs a large chunk of money that most people are not able to pay for up front. “In today’s economy, higher education is no longer a luxury for the privileged few, but a necessity for individual economic opportunity and America’s competitiveness in the global economy.”

https://www.uopeople.edu/blog/pros-and-cons-of-lowering-college-tuition/

https://www.ed.gov/college