Just for fun

From a French 101 exam.

J'ai un petit ami.  Il s'appelle Brandon.  Il a vingt-trois ans, et il est étudiant.  C'est un bel homme, et il est trés intelligent et amusant.  Il est* plutôt paresseux**, mais c'est un bon étudiant.



*I have more verbs now.
**He's not, but I wanted to use the vocabulary word.

Nature and Doom in Beowulf

Answer to an essay question on an exam.  Written in class, so the writing is less polished than in formal essays.

By setting the confrontations Beowulf has with the monsters first at night, then in the lake, and then in the dragon's underground lair, the author of Beowulf is at once expressing fears of those things themselves--darkness, the water, and the wilderness--and is also using those settings to externalize and express deeper psychological fears:  of the unknown and unseen (Grendel, lurking in the night), uncontrolled female power (Grendel's mother), and death (the dragon's lair is a barrow, where Beowulf does indeed meet his death).

A Question of Identity

I am Taiwanese-American, and I identify myself as Taiwanese-American, not Chinese-American.  To some, the distinction may seem minor; to me, that perception is exactly why the distinction matters.  Like many other Taiwanese and Taiwanese-Americans, I hope for the eventual recognition of Taiwan as a sovereign nation, independent of the communist People's Republic of China, but before that can happen, the international community must recognize that Taiwan is, in fact, a separate entity from China.

Our Construction of Reality: Kant and the Power of the Mind

A rationalist in his thinking, concerned purely with reason—the intellectual processes of the mind—and dismissive of physical experience, Plato posited that the physical world is unreal, and that truth and reality lie beyond it in an immaterial world existing outside of space and time.  Immanuel Kant proposed a different strategy for understanding reality.  Kant's strategy shared Plato's framework of dual existences, but demystified the framework and validated earthly existence by claiming that, although there is a world of objective truth beyond human experience, it exists not in some ethereal plane beyond space and time, but rather alongside the subjective world of human experience, which, to Kant, is itself real, valid, and true.  Kant then solved the problems of rationalism and empiricism by proposing a radical method of understanding the division between the objective world and the subjective one.

Escape from Illusion: Plato's Allegory of the Cave and the Matrix

Nearly four hundred years before the birth of Christ, Greek philosopher Plato formulated a startling theory about reality.  The physical realm, Plato taught, is neither real nor the source of any genuine wisdom or enlightenment.  The things in this earthly world are merely illusory, impermanent reproductions of the perfect, unchanging, true essences of objects and ideas.  To achieve wisdom, Plato argued, a philosopher must first awaken to the unreality of the visible world, and then undertake the arduous process of learning to contemplate the reality beyond.  To illustrate this theory, Plato created the Allegory of the Cave, his tale of one man's liberation from a cave of shadow and illusion into the real world beyond.  More than two thousand years later, filmmakers Larry and Andy Wachowski proved the continued relevance of the Allegory of the Cave by repackaging it as The Matrix, a blockbuster science fiction movie about sentient artificial intelligence, computer-generated virtual reality, and one man's liberation from his virtual-reality bondage.

Socrates and Nietzsche

"An unexamined life is not worth living."
-Socrates

Over two thousand years after Socrates made his famous pronouncement, despair is everywhere.  Gifted with health and luxuries once unimaginable, we modern humans go to therapy and take medications to cope with our despair.  Our despair is not the desperation of poverty or enslavement, but a despair of the soul, which causes us, in the midst of our material comforts, to ask, "Is this life worth living?"  And speaking to us from the distant past, Socrates answers, "An unexamined life is not worth living."

The Arbiters of Media Success

Mass media inundate contemporary American life.  TVs, the Internet, and cell phones supply information, entertainment, and communication on demand.  Billboards loom over streets; magazines tempt captive audiences in every supermarket checkout line.  Modern media has achieved unprecedented ubiquity and significance, which some media critics lament.  The pervasiveness of mass media, those critics argue, has brainwashed audiences and consumers into mindless imitators of media images, many of which, critics say, promote sexual promiscuity, drug use, violence, and diseases such as anorexia and bulimia.  For instance, in her article, “Anorexics Are Victims of Society's Obsession with Thinness," Susan Renes accuses the media of causing eating disorders in women through its portrayal of thin models as desirable in her article.  Renes writes, “We are bombarded by advertising and mass media messages that say women must be as thin as the models in magazines and on television,” and, consequently, women “disregard their need for...a sufficient amount of food to adequately sustain them,” placing their health at risk to live up to a media-perpetuated standard.  Although eating disorders are a serious problem, however, overweight American consumers far outnumber eating disorder victims, contradicting Renes's contention that the standard of beauty commonly promoted by the media poses a grave danger to American women.  The average American's diet and lifestyle demonstrate an apparent resistance to the pursuit of thinness and fitness the media promotes.  In fact, media critics' perception of a one-sided causal relationship between media and consumers assigns a disproportionate power to the media and assumes extreme passivity in consumers.  A closer examination of the media/consumer relationship uncovers substantial consumer influence over the media.  What the media shows does affect consumers' tastes, aspirations, and values, but the consumer market itself dictates what the media decides to show.

A Free Press Keeps Us Free

In June of 2009, the Chinese government arrested dissident author Liu Xiaobo. As Audra Ang of the Associated Press reports in her article, “Chinese Intellectuals Call for Release of Dissident,” Liu had recently co-authored “a bold manifesto urging civil rights and political reforms [within the Chinese government].” That manifesto may cost him fifteen years in prison for the crime of “inciting to subvert state power.” The heavy penalty reflects how seriously the regime regards its control of information. Like all totalitarian governments, the Chinese government understands that to control the people, it must control the press. And, just as a state-controlled media controls the populace, so a free press keeps the people free.