Anna’s Blog

I think that the whole situation of Dick Cheney’s company profitting so much by raising the price of gas in Iraq to about $25 a gallon is really wrong. It’s really bad that the vice president is making millions of dollars unethically by creating a gas monopoly for his company in Iraq. I don’t think that his company should have gotten involved in a foreign affair like Iraq because not only are Iraqis suffering by having to pay so much for gas, but so are our troops that are in the middle east. Clearly our vice presient cares more about making money than doing what’s right for our country, and I believe taht some sort of law should be passed so that this can’t happen again.

Also, I think it’s really strange that President Bush  doesn’t really agree with the plan that the group who wrote the article devised.  The plan they’ve thought up allows us to remove troops sooner rahter than later, and still help Iraq to become a stable country.  Obviously he doesn’t know what he wants, if he would rather keep troops there or try to take them out as soon as possible.

I found an article about the shooting outside of a stripclub in Queens that we mentioned in class: http://www.nysun.com/article/44585

This article claimed that the shooting was not in fact due to the police being racist, but officers doing their job and acting on evidence that they had found.  The article’s author doesn’t seem particularly racist or antiracism, as he does point out both ways that Sean Bell could have been killed. The point was made that…

“One might reason as follows: Black people are overrepresented in dangerous neighborhoods. Thus, officers will have more violent encounters with black men than with white ones. Possibly, then, officers of any color, exhibiting the tendency inherent to our species to generalize, might internalize, even involuntarily, that in tense situations, black men are more of a threat than others.”

I think it’s very interesting that today, even though we don’t believe that racism exists much anymore, a lot of us probably think of African Americans and other races differently without even realizing it.  The reason given by the author is a veyr possible one, that black people are generally found more often in poorer communities, and so we think of them as more of a threat than others.  Clearly, there are a lot of possible reasons that we and the police officers might possibly have been racist.

I think that satire is so popular because it is funny and a way to talk about serious problems in a light way.  This might help people to be able to deal with them better.  A reason why things like “A Modest Proposal” and Borat are considered to be satire is because while they are very funny, they are about political problems that need to be solved.  Something like Scary Movie would not be considered to be satire because it is just funny and there is nothing behind the humor.  The purpose of those types of movies is not to expose problems through humor, but just to give the audience a good laugh.  I guess that I do like satire because I don’t really find it annoying.  While I haven’t seen Borat, I really like the Daily Show and things like that which are very obvious as to which problems they are talking about.