What's So Bad About Hate?

1.       Questions

·         Should the law against hate crimes remain active or should they get rid of it?

·         How do you distinguish a crime between and a hate crime?

·         Why do humans hate?

2.       Response?

Should the law against hate crimes remain active or should they get rid of it?

The author, Andrew Sullivan, of “What’s So Bad about Hate” states, “For if every crime is possibly a hate crime, then it is simply another name for crime.” I agree with his statement. How does the law distinguish between a crime and a hate crime? It is based off of opinion and emotions, not facts. The jury in a court can’t get into a person’s head and tell if the crime they committed was out of hate or not. I believe this is why they should get rid of the hate crime law. A person could commit a crime and receive more time in jail because they were thought to have committed a hate crime, when it wasn’t a hate crime at all. Don’t get me wrong, there are many instances of hate crimes and I believe those are extremely cruel and uncalled for, but there is no way to distinguish the motivation of a person who committed a certain crime. The example that Andrew Sullivan gives in his article is perfect. A gay man cuts his grass regularly and his grass clippings always spilled into his straight neighbor’s driveway. Finally, the neighbor was fed up and the next time the grass clippings spilled onto his driveway, he yelled gay slurs to the man. The neighbor agreed to clean them up from the other man’s yard, but later found all of them in a box on his front porch. This led the gay man to spraying his neighbor with a hose. In return, the straight neighbor’s son came out and beat up the gay man. The police were called and the son was arrested for a hate crime. How does the law distinguish if that was a hate crime or not? They can’t. They can never know if that was driven out of anger or hate towards gay people, which is why there should not be a law for hate crimes.

Lady Gaga and the Death of Sex

1.      Questions

·         Is Lady Gaga portraying herself as someone she is not?

·         Is Lady Gaga hiding behind her gaudy makeup and over dramatic costumes?

·         Has the growth in technology affected the way we distinguish real vocals compared to bad?

2.      Response

In the article “Lady Gaga and the Death of Sex”, the author Camille Paglia discusses her point of view on the idea that Gaga is pretending to be someone she is not. I can most definitely agree with the author on this idea. In the article the author talks about how almost every single song of Gaga’s has some similarity to another popular artist’s music or persona. Gaga has become this huge artist that constantly preaches to children that don’t fit in to “love who they are” and to “accept themselves”. She states that she is celibate, but most of her songs have strong sexual references.  I actually believe that her preaching’s very ironic. Lady Gaga never grew up being a misfit or an outcast. She grew up with money and went to an expensive private school in New York. Gaga is trying to be some sort of therapist trying to help children who don’t fit in.

Lady Gaga’s music is far from being original or her own creation. If you look at her as a complete artist, she is almost identical to Madonna. There was an instance in which one of Gaga’s music videos was so much like Madonna’s, that Madonna was actually angry. Music artists are supposed to be unique, that what draws us to them. So how has Lady Gaga become so famous? She uses other artists ideas, copies their ideas and persona, and makes children that don’t fit in, feel like they fit in by making it seems like she can relate. 

1.      Questions

·         How does the internet affect a person’s ability to concentrate?

·         Has the internet had an effect on a person’s desire to read books?

·         What kind of style of reading has the internet created over time?

2.      Response

In the article Is Google Making Us Stupid?, by Nicholas Carr, he touches on the idea that the internet has a substantial and negative effect on a person’s ability to concentrate. People have lost the ability to read novels or long internet articles due to extensive use of the Net. When we do have to read, we actually are not reading, we are skimming and skipping through sentences. Instead of reading an entire article on the internet, people tend to just read the headings and the bullets to get the “gist” of it. As a growing society, we are always wanting information and we want it fast. Once we have found the information needed, it is on to the next new question that we want answered immediately. As an avid user of the internet, I have also noticed my decreased ability to concentrate on long articles, or novels. Growing up I loved to read and overtime, I have lost the ability to sit down and read a book because it “takes too long”.  

While the internet may play a part in decreasing a person’s ability to concentrate, Nicholas Carr fails to consider positive effects of the Net. While some scientists and people believe that clicking on multiple sites and skimming through each article is “dumbing” us down, others believe that it actually has some benefits. Skimming, stopping to process the information, opening different tabs to compare and contrast articles can be a good thing. This makes a person an active reader, forcing them to think and to engage in all of the information they are reading. Although they are not reading every single word in the article or they are reading out of order, this still calls for complex thinking and processing of information.