v for vendetta :)

I recently finished reading V for vendetta. I really liked this book. The story takes place in a dystopic kind of world in Britain, during the late 1900s. The government gives people no freedom. The type of government is totalitarianism. This means that the government, under the rule of one person or many people, doesn’t have any limits to its power, and strives to regulate and watch every aspect of everyone’s lives, public and private. In the book, there is a fascist party called Norsefire, who govern Britain. The main character is a revolutionary who supports anarchy and begins a campaign to destroy the fascist party and their dictatorship.

The book obviously depicts what a world would be like if we didn’t have the freedoms we have today. It shows what would happen if our world was ruled by a dictator. There are so many freedoms that we consider basic rights but a lot of them can be taken away. But one thing that cannot be taken away from people is the freedom of thought, and people can still find a way out of dictatorships. People can fight for their freedoms. We have the freedom of decision. Throughout history there have been tyrants and dictators in several countries in our world, but they were overthrown. However tyranny, dictatorships, and corruption are no thing of the past, they still exist today. We witnessed the revolution in Egypt, so we know that we have the power to win freedom for ourselves, and for others.

extremely loud and incredibly close philosophy

In this book the primary character is a nine year old boy named Oskar Schell, he is on a “mission” throughout New York. His goal is to find the lock that matches a key that belonged to his father. Oskar’s father died in the world trade center on September 11^th. His journey takes him through many memories, new experiences, and overwhelming amounts of emotion.

Throughout the book I noticed a theme of lying. Oskar frequently lies to people, sometimes in an effort to receive sympathy, sometimes to escape, and sometimes because he cannot bear to tell the truth. The book switches from Oskar’s perspective to the perspective of his grandmother and also his grandfather (it’s a little confusing). So to be philosophical I thought of a question, which Sophia stern told me a little about before I read the book. When can you lie? Or more of when is it ok to lie? I have to say that this book is very powerful, it’s very emotional. I believe that it is ok to lie sometimes. We all know the phrase “ignorance is bliss”, I believe that it is ok not to tell something to someone because it is painful to know. Generally the truth is better in most situations. But I believe there can definitely be reasonable exceptions. It’s one thing to lie to your parents when you got in trouble in school and it’s another thing to lie to someone because the truth is too painful. Some of you may believe that even if the truth is hard to accept it still should be known, but I think it’s not necessary. I know that if I was in the same situation as the character in my book, I would have not told anyone.

rereading the call of the wild :)

 I'm almost done with rereading one of my favorite childhood books. The themes from social studies continue to appear throughout the book. I must say that I have learned a lot, and now that I reread this book I find so much more meaning in it. From reading it I thought about a quote that Ms.Rear told us in class. And basically that quote said that philosophy is questioning the seemingly obvious, and making it questionable. And although I know that the book isn’t really about dogs, but is an allegory for factory workers, I still came up with an ethical question. How do we know that we are the superior species, or are we the superior species? This question really vaguely connect to the book, it’s just that the thought just popped into my head. The way that some humans treat other living things or even other humans can sometimes be very vulgar. Sometimes it’s being careless, or ignorant, other times it may be arrogance. Obviously there is no such thing as a perfect world but is it ethical for someone to believe that we as humans or maybe just one individual is superior?

Some people believe that medical intervention is wrong because of their religion. Is it ok that people have created a way to change nature’s outcome? The human life is something we value so much, and we work our way around natural selection. Many of the ill or injured are saved because of our technology and advancement. But the population on earth is constantly growing, yet the earth is not. Is our way of living doing greater good? Basically I just talked about a lot of questions that I got from reading, not all of them relate to my book directly, which I apologize for, but this whole philosophy unit has got me thinking this way.

Philosophy and skepticism

So today I went to Barnes and Noble to get a math regents prep book. And while I was there I decided to sit down, among books, and do my philosophy homework. My friend Suphasa brought me 3 books about philosophy: philosophy for dummies, the idiots guide to philosophy, and just philosophy. Since I consider myself neither a dummy nor an idiot, I looked through “philosophy”. The book was very interesting; I wish I actually had more time to look through it. I mainly looked at the idea of skepticism because that’s what I needed to do for homework. The book made some very strong points about skepticism. I was completely amazed at how many different forms of philosophy there are and how almost all go back to ancient times. Now I have some various opinions on our unit for philosophy. At first I thought it was all kind of useless. I thought philosophy is just the way you choose to direct your life, but now I do believe that this unit could be beneficial to my knowledge.

                I decided to choose skepticism as the main topic because it’s an interesting point; there isn’t enough evidence for anything. There are some completely obvious things that the vast majority of us agree to, water is wet, and we are humans, and so on. But some early philosophers called these “obvious” things into question. Before you simply assume that they were insane, think about it. We know very little about our brain, about ourselves. Are you really here right now, reading my blog post? You could be dreaming, who are you? Who am I? How do you know? Such conversations could go on about any topic, you could infinitely try to break things down by asking why and how, it will come to a point where the question becomes unanswerable.

Personally I think that it makes some sense to call reality and the physical world into question, but it’s completely ineffective and non-beneficial (unless it amuses you to believe such things). There are some situations where this may work, you could be skeptical about whether or not someone stole your pen, and until they show you enough evidence to disprove your suspicion, you may remain skeptical. Now sometimes I find philosophy frustrating because answering one question leads to another question that is more perplexing. As I was thinking about skepticism I thought “how do we know when to stop being skeptical” or “how do we know we have enough evidence”.  It really would make no sense to doubt everything simply because you can, so that means you must be able to trust to a certain level. So if someone says “your shirt is yellow” and you get all skeptical saying something like “how do you know you aren’t color blind, how do you know I’m even here right now. How do you know you’re not dreaming” so on.. You’ve got to just believe in reality in my opinion because the world might get a little out of hand if we begin to doubt the existence and presence of everything in it… so yeah, philosophy, a very confusing subject.

rereading the call of the wild- social studies themes

                Since last week we were talking about muckrakers in social studies, I decided to reread the call of the wild. Now that I have in mind that Jack London was an investigative journalist and a social activist, it changes my perspective on the story completely. When I first read this book I was probably in fourth or fifth grade and to me it was just a great story about dogs. But as I learned about the background information for the time period and the author, I realized that the book “isn’t really about dogs” as Ms. Maier said. It’s like the picture books we did, it’s an allegory, and it has a much deeper meaning than it seems to. The main character is a dog named Buck who had a very happy life in a California estate until he was kidnapped and sold to several men. Buck is forced to train as a sled dog and experiences brutality from man and beast and also nature. In his new environment there is “neither peace, nor rest, nor a moment’s safety”

The beginning (first chapter) is very easy going and calm. But then as soon as we enter the scene where Buck is kidnapped, we enter a whole new type of text. From here on, many parts of the book have a dark tone, and there are many violent scenes. I believe that these scenes with poor working conditions (for the dogs) and harsh environment and rules represent those factory workers in the progressive era, which also faced those kinds of issues. Not all of the dogs make it, only the strongest survive, there is absolutely nothing they can do about their current conditions, such were factory workers. There was little that factory workers could have done about their working conditions, no matter how much they protested, until the Triangle fire. It took the deaths of people in order for working conditions to change.

I think it’s useful for me to reread this book especially since now I can relate it to events that have happened in history. It’s a really great book, and it’s still interesting the second time through for me.  :)