Thursday, March 19, 2020

Martin The Warrior Essays - Martin The Warrior, Redwall, Free Essays

Martin The Warrior Essays - Martin The Warrior, Redwall, Free Essays Martin The Warrior Martin In a time of danger A time of hunger The mouse was a stranger The mouse was strong He showed the cats With help from some bats How to behave He showed his pain, anger, and strife The creatures were thankful As a matter of fact He was honored for not only a life But for many years to come The novel, Martin the Warrior by Brian Jacques, is a book about a young mouse warrior named Martin, son of Luke the Warrior, a mouse that fought sea rats, One day, after the murder of most of his tribe (including his wife), Luke set sail to have his revenge against Vilu Daskar, the stoat pirate responsible for the massacre. Before he left, he gave Martin his sword, which had been handed down through their family since Luke's own grandsire lived. This book is about how Martin travels through a land full of moles, squirrels, and other woodland creatures which talk and walk upright. Martin goes around meeting creatures from all different lands and asks them to join his army to fight a tyrant who is keeping slaves in his fort, Marshank. The plot of this book is how Martin and his friends fight the tyrant, Badrang, to free slaves. The main idea of the book is how and why Martin and his army fight the tyrant. When Martin was captured as a slave for Badrang the Tyrant, he was furious. Not only did the evil rat steal his father's sword, he beat and mistreated all of the slaves horribly! Devising a plan, Martin frees himself and two of his friends from the Marshank, the slave camp: Brome the mouse and Felldoh the squirrel. Brome's sister, Laterose (Rose for short) and her companion Grumm the mole all set out with Martin and his friends to go get help from their hometown of Noonvale. Unfortunately, due to the sea's conditions, Martin, Rose, and Grumm get separated from Brome and Felldoh. The two strings of the story carry on and tie together at the end: Martin's group eventually reaches Noonvale, where he returns to Badrang to get his revenge, and Brome and Felldoh join the Rambling Rosehip Players, a bunch of happy-go-lucky animals that made the hardships less hard, and also get to the slave camp. The ending is tragic, and whenever I read it I get depressed. Martin, in the end, retrieves his sword from Badrang, and succeeds in killing him, but Rose, who he has become very much attached to, tries to help Martin in killing Badrang, but only ends up getting killed by him herself. Also, Felldoh died toward the end he had fought Badrang one-on-one but the lousy cheater called his army to help him. Felldoh, being a great warrior, killed many of Badrang's men but did not kill Badrang himself. Brome still lived, but found he did not like war, so he became a healer. Some of the characters that Martin encountered along his travels changed from being his enemies to being his allies. The creatures changed when Martin was off to go fight the tyrant and when he and his friends asked them to which to join fight the tyrant so he could not capture any more creatures for his slaves and makes his horde any more powerful. Sometimes it did not seem believable because of how they turned from enemies to allies instantly and why they joined without even knowing who Badrang the tyrant was. I felt like I had a similar relationship when Martin was leading his army into battle. I have this feeling when Im a captain of my basketball team and I have the partial responsibility of leading them to victory or defeat. I thought that the best scene in the book was when Martins army attacked the tyrants fort for the second time. It reminds me about whenever I lead or am a part of an activity of some sort, like basketball or tennis. I think that the title, Martin the Warrior, is fitting because its simple and it tells what the book is about. I liked the authors style of telling what was going on in the book and how he described it. He

Monday, March 2, 2020

Definition and Examples of the Bandwagon Fallacy

Definition and Examples of the Bandwagon Fallacy Bandwagon is a  fallacy based on the assumption that the opinion of the majority is always valid: that is, everyone believes it, so you should too. It is also called an appeal to popularity, the authority of the many, and argumentum ad populum  (Latin for appeal to the people).  Argumentum  ad populum proves only that a belief is popular, not that its true. The fallacy occurs, says Alex Michalos in  Principles of Logic, when the appeal is offered in place of a convincing argument for the view in question. Examples Carling Lager, Britains Number One Lager (advertising slogan)The Steak Escape. Americas Favorite Cheesesteak (advertising slogan)[Margaret] Mitchell enhanced the GWTW [Gone With the Wind] mystique by never publishing another novel. But who would be so churlish as to want more? Read it. Ten million (and counting) Americans cant be wrong, can they? (John Sutherland, How to be Well Read. Random House, 2014) Hasty Conclusions Appeals to popularity are basically hasty conclusion fallacies. The data concerning the popularity of the belief are simply not sufficient to warrant accepting the belief. The logical error in an appeal to popularity lies in its inflating the value of popularity as evidence. (James Freeman [1995), quoted by Douglas Walton in  Appeal to Popular Opinion. Penn State Press, 1999) Majority Rules The majority opinion is valid most of the time. Most people believe that tigers do not make good household pets and that toddlers shouldnt drive...Nonetheless, there are times when the majority opinion is not valid, and following the majority will set one off track. There was a time when everyone believed the world was flat and a more recent time when the majority condoned slavery. As we gather new information and our cultural values change, so too does the majority opinion. Therefore, even though the majority is often right, the fluctuation of the majority opinion implies that a logically valid conclusion cannot be based on the majority alone. Thus, even if the majority of the country did support going to war with Iraq, the majority opinion is not sufficient for determining whether the decision was correct. (Robert J. Sternberg, Henry L. Roediger, and Diane F. Halpern, Critical Thinking in Psychology, Cambridge University Press, 2007) "Everyone's Doing It" The fact that Everyones doing it is frequently appealed to as a reason why people feel morally justified in acting in less than ideal ways. This is particularly true in business matters, where competitive pressures often conspire to make perfectly upright conduct seem difficult if not impossible. The Everyones doing it claim usually arises when we encounter a more or less prevalent form of behavior that is morally undesirable because it involves a practice that, on balance, causes harm people would like to avoid. Although it is rare that literally everyone else is engaged in this behavior, the Everyones doing it claim is meaningfully made whenever a practice is widespread enough to make ones own forbearing from this conduct seem pointless or needlessly self-destructive. (Ronald M Green, When Is Everybodys Doing It a Moral Justification? ​Moral Issues in Business, 13th ed., edited by William H Shaw and Vincent Barry, Cengage, 2016)​ Presidents and Polls As George Stephanopoulos wrote in his memoir, Mr. [Dick] Morris lived by a 60 percent rule: If 6 out of 10 Americans were in favor of something, Bill Clinton had to be, too... The nadir of Bill Clintons presidency was when he asked Dick Morris to poll on whether he should tell the truth about Monica Lewinsky. But by that point he had already turned the ideal of the presidency upside down, letting arithmetic trump integrity as he painted his policies, principles and even his family vacations by the numbers. (Maureen Dowd, Addiction to Addition, The New York Times, April 3, 2002)