Informal Research, Post 2

5 fascinating findings on how disgust affects the way we vote, grocery shop and discriminate

“A growing body of evidence suggests that this emotion of disgust influences our moral beliefs and even our deeply held political intuitions,” says Pizarro, a professor of psychology at Cornell University. “It works through association. When one disgusting thing touches a clean thing, that clean thing becomes disgusting — not the other way around. This becomes a very useful as a strategy if you want to convince someone that an object, or an individual or an entire social group ought to be avoided.” As Pizarro points out, Nazi propaganda described Jews as smelling terrible while, more recently, anti-gay websites conjure up images of “vile sex acts.”

http://blog.ted.com/2012/10/23/5-fascinating-findings-on-how-disgust-effects-the-way-we-vote-grocery-shop-and-discriminate/


http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005202
This has plenty of good info about Nazi propaganda and I don't think you can get more credible than this.

This site also has lots of information about it and it has quotes from Goebbels about it.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/propaganda_in_nazi_germany.htm

This website has so many helpful pieces and topics in it. it has many links that take you to more specified research and it is more or less a research paper help website about the whole Holocaust made by the ushmm.
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/nazprop.html

Writing that Moves You

Jacob Lewis

English 1102

Writing that moves you

                One of my favorite bands is a group called Rise Against. I like their music because almost all of their songs has some sort of message about life or about the actual truth of things. My quote is from one of their newest songs, Satellite, off the CD Endgame.

“You can’t fill your cup until you empty all it has

You can’t understand what lies ahead

If you don’t understand the past

You’ll never learn to fly now

Till your standing at the cliff

And you can’t truly love, until you’ve given up on it.”

                I really like this quote because it says a lot about a wide range of topics in life such as, love, commitment, trust, and new and old ideas. The first line of text is more or less saying that you can’t start something if you haven’t finished what you’re already working on. Say you half a cup full of milk, then before your done drinking it you try and put some soda in there. Well that wouldn’t taste too good. The same with things in life, if you try and do too much everything gets mixed up and what could be good is ruined because of what you haven’t finished.

                The second and third lines have a message about the past. It’s trying to say that you should use your knowledge and experiences from the past to be able to work better in the future. Plus, like another old saying goes “If you don’t know where you came from, you can’t possibly know where you’re going.”

The fourth and fifth lines talk about commitment. No one actually learns how to do something by reading about it and watching others do it. To truly be able to grasp a concept or ability one must be do it themselves. People must make the commitment when they really want something that they have to go and “throw themselves off the cliff” so that they can truly earn what it is they are searching for.

                The last line does talk about love in one sense. It is also talking about possession. Nowadays smaller children are just given these nice new things without them doing anything to earn them. I know back when I was little I had to do work to earn money to buy my own toys, or I waited till my birthday or Christmas to get it. Now people have no sense of value though. They just throw their new iPhones around like they’re indestructible or something. What this quote is trying to say is that you really don’t know what you have until it’s gone. Once you lose something, such as love as the quote says, you find out how truly important it is to you and how much it affects your life.

                The author, Tim McIIrath, uses a few different stylistic intricacies in this quote. One thing that I noticed was that the first and last line of it has one idea on one line, while the four middle lines have two ideas on two lines each. This gives the quote a little bit of a pattern which makes it easier to say, which makes sense, since this is a song. He also puts opposite ideas together in antithesis to reinforce the ideas that he’s trying to push forward. 

TIB paper

Listen to advice

I believe that the plain truth is needed before someone can fix something. Once all the layers of sugar coating and lies are gone, you can actually get to the dirty work of fixing whatever problem that was being ignored.

A few years ago I decided that I wanted to play soccer for a U14 team in the league nearby, because I was still young enough to play in that division. So I signed up for a team, but it wasn’t long after that, that I realized that the guys I was playing with were above my caliber, even thought they were younger than me. At first this made me pretty upset because I didn’t know why my team mates were so much better than me, and I felt like I didn’t fit in. At first I looked at my teammates with resentment because of this.

 I’m pretty sure my coach saw this because he came and talked me before our first game. He was worried that I was having problems with the team and wanted to know what was wrong. So I told him that I didn’t fit in because everyone was better than me. Then he told me the honest truth, he told me that yes, I didn’t fit in, but that it wasn’t because the other guys were better than me, it was because I was the first new guy on the team in four years, and that I haven’t found my place yet. So, taking all of his advice into account I started trying to be friends with everyone, and I did eventually find my place on the team and even became a captain at the end of the session.

Thanks to my coach I found out that I was wrong, and afterwards I was able to change how I acted so that I could fix my situation. Sometimes I think we all jump to conclusions and get stuff messed up in our brains. Sometimes these mix ups can cause a lot of damage. I know if I had stayed stuck in my way of thinking, then my whole experience with that new team could have been dramatically different. Because I had a coach who came and talked to me and told me what my problem Really was, I was able to turn a bad experience into a great memory of a session that I really enjoyed.

I think that sometimes everyone needs that one person in their life that can bring them back to Earth and tell them how it really is because sometimes we all see things in the wrong light. It’s those people in our life that help us get past all the little stuff that we see and turn our focus onto the real problem. So now I am coming to understand that sometimes when people criticism us that it’s not always bad, sometimes people are just trying to set our sights on the right problem.

Inquiry Proposal

The topic that I want to cover in my Inquiry Paper is WWII Propaganda.  I chose this topic because propaganda seems to be the best example about how language can be used to control the way a person thinks.  I really do not have a lot of knowledge on this subject other than that all countries had their own form of propaganda and that they used this propaganda to create feelings throughout the general public so that they supported different political maneuvers. I think what interest me the most about this subject is how these posters and newspaper ads controlled how the population of each country thought about the war, and how every country had different reactions and feelings about the war because of this propaganda. I have always been very interested about anything and everything that has to do with World War Two. Mostly I have focused on only the military side of things, but it is also very interesting to me to be able to learn stuff about the civilian side, or the behind the scenes things that deal with the war.

            There are many different angles to the topic of World War Two propaganda, so I am going to have to narrow the focus of my paper down. If I don’t specialize my inquiry question then there is so much information to cover that my research paper would probably be better of just becoming a book on the topic. Since there were so many different nations in World War Two, there is a significant amount of different angle I could go with this paper.  Some of the most well know are the propaganda posters from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but American war posters also fall under the category of propaganda.

I think that the most interesting and probably the most accurately documented type of Propaganda from the time period is that of Germany before the Invasion of Poland. This is why I am going to write my Inquiry Paper on that specific type of World War Two Propaganda. I want to understand what was it that made the people of Germany hate and despise the Jews so much that they would start putting them in Ghettos and eventually killing them by the masses. Ever since middle school we have been learning about the Holocaust and what happened, but none of my teachers has really explained how the Nazis actually got people to believe them and to follow their beliefs. The only thing I was taught about it was that Hitler and his party got the whole country to follow them, but never how they managed to do that. I think that the Nazi propaganda was one of the main things causing the people to think like this. 

“How did the Nazi Propagandists twist language to trick people into following their beliefs?”

Introduction

Introduction

Hello, my name is Jacob Lewis I am 18 years old and I am studying Mechanical Engineering Technologies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I am writing this Blog as an assignment for my English 1102 Class. This Blog will later serve as a E-portfolio for my final grade. At the moment I really don't know what the heck I'm doing with this thing but I'm going to try my best at this.

Inquiry topic

Topic: Nazi Propaganda before WWII
Question: How did Nazi Propagandist twist language to create such a hatred of Jews?

Introduction

Hello, my name is Jacob Lewis I am 18 years old and I am studying Mechanical Engineering Technologies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I am writing this Blog as an assignment for my English 1102 Class. This Blog will later serve as a E-portfolio for my final grade. At the moment I really don't know what the heck I'm doing with this thing but I'm going to try my best at this.