In this blog post. I will be discussing Michael Moore's film, Where to Invade Next. In the film, Michael Moore visits other countries to learn about their policies on things such as vacation, healthcare, schooling, drugs, and incarceration. He focuses on wanting to bring all of the ideas over to the United States in order to make the country better. In the documentary Where to Invade Next, Michael Moore focuses on the differing policies on vacation, healthcare, schooling, drugs, and incarceration between the U.S. and other countries. For example, in Italy, every citizen is given thirty-five days paid vacation a year. In Finland there are no standardized testing in the schools and the students are rarely given homework and in Slovenia, university is free. In Portugal, drugs have been decriminalized so you cannot get arrested for drug usage. In Norway, the prisoners are incarcerated in normal homes faraway from society instead of prisons because they believe in rehabilitation. Moore expressed his desire to steal all of these ideas and bring them back to the U.S. However, when he did so, the people he was talking to all informed him that most of the ideas originated in America. However, there is no guaranteed paid vacation for any person unless their company provides it and it’s usually only two weeks at the most. All schools in the U.S. get ranked by how well their students perform on standardized tests such as the PSSA. There is no free school in the U.S. at all. A large part of the prison population in the U.S. are incarcerated because of drug use or possession. In the U.S., prisoners are mass packed into giant buildings made of concrete with cells that lock and armed guards. Moore establishes ethos when he visits Italy because they spoke about how without the vacation that they are given every year, they would not be as happy and would be more stressed, more sick, and less likely to work as hard. He establishes logos when he is visiting Portugal and he is learning about how drugs are decriminalized there, meaning you cannot get arrested for doing drugs. They explain that arresting someone doesn't help that person stop doing drugs, if anything it makes them want to do it more because they lose any support they've had if they do go to prison. He appeals to pathos when he is in Germany and learns that the students are taught extensively about the Holocaust so that they may learn from the past mistakes so it may not happen again. Also, they show how every house that was owned by a Jew in Germany has their names out front of it in brick on the ground. Moore's telos, or aim, is to inform the audience of different ways of living that seems foreign to the U.S. now, but was originally our ideas. The kairos in the film appears every time Moore is ready to leave, he announces that he is stealing their idea and bringing it back to America.
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In this blog post, I will be reflecting on my choices that I have made regarding my Life-Choice Memoir. We were required to watch a video called Reflective Writing to assist with our writing the memoir. This post will answer a few questions about my process and choices. While composing my Life-Choice Memoir, I chose not to work with anyone because I was not sure which direction I wanted my story to take and feel as though that would have made it difficult for the other person working with me. This approach worked the best for me because I believe my memoir will be more authentic by working alone. I am using two rhetorical modes, those being description and exposition. Description is the showing writing and exposition is the telling writing. The genre I am writing in is creative nonfiction and the subgenre is a memoir. I started writing this project as soon as the project was explained in detail. This helped me to gather more information about how I was going to write and exactly why I was writing. I believe this was a good approach because my writing will be reflective of what I have learned. I wrote this project in a few places and I must admit, I am still not finished. I wrote a majority in class surprisingly. I think the classroom setting limits the distractions that constantly surround me and when I come to class, I am prepared to write. I also wrote part of it outside in a grass field because I like feeling the breeze and the sun on my skin. Being surrounded by nature makes me happy and I am more inclined to motivate myself to write if I am feeling good. I believe this was a wonderful approach because it assisted in me getting all the jumbled up ideas that were swimming around in my head, down on paper. Choosing the topic was definitely the most challenging decision when it came to this memoir because I could not think of one specific time that I had to make a difficult decision since I have made many of them. However, I decided to choose the most important one and that was to live. Every day I feel grateful for making that decision. Writing this narrative, I felt very vulnerable but proud of myself that I had the courage to write about the things I never talk about. It also helped me to come to peace with certain elements that I found to be very embarrassing. I will continue to revise my narrative by focusing more on descriptive writing and figuring out which details are and are not important.
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