Response to RJ

Going to college is not simply about getting a job. While the main reason that people attend college is to receive higher levels of education is specific fields so that you are prepared for a job when you graduate, there are many other important things that college offers students. In America, there are many different types of college that prepare you for life on your own in different ways. In a two year institution, it focuses on giving you the necessary skills for a job in a specific field at a much cheaper price; it is basically two years of job training. There are also four year schools that have main schools of focus inside of them like Clemson, that greatly increase your knowledge, ability, and job readiness in one field while also furthering your education less in others. In a liberal arts school, you amass a great wealth of overall education over four years and even more in one field. 
Employers today are looking for workers who come in ready to work, and this is why college is becoming more and more important in the competitive job market. Though the idea of getting paid to be trained is a good idea in theory, no employer would want to pay to train someone, especially if there are people who not only have the skills necessary, but are well versed in other fields that could be beneficial as well. Therefore, college is a way of getting ahead of the competition. Then it becomes a matter of which type of higher education is best for the job you want out of the choices I mentioned above

Fraternities and Sororities: Whats the Point?

Fraternities and Sororities have come under the microscope as of late due to the negative effects of hazing. As we all know, Greek life has been at fault for the deaths of dozens of college students in recent times, beit through hazing, drugs, or alcohol. As a result, many Greek organizations around the country have had their charters removed, thus ending a long history at certain schools for some of these fraternities and sororities. The media backlash has also been quite hard, slamming Greek life left and right. Because of this, people are going insofar as to proclaim that fraternities and sororities will be obsolete in the next 10-15 years. When the media storm was coupled with the reality that I am in my freshman year of college, a time where most people who are going to rush do so, I inevitably began to ponder Greek life overall, wondering what exactly the point behind it was, and how it worked.
Pledging
I guess I got a pretty decent firsthand account of what pledging was like, as my roommate pledged KA this spring. I saw what time he was coming home every night, what he looked like when he did, and his overall condition (Don't worry RJ, none of KA's secrets have been told to me). Even though fraternities at Furman are not known for their rigorous pledging, what he was going through seemed terrible. He would get back at 2 am essentially every night, and have to be up at 8 for class. He was incredibly irritable during the entire pledging process, and rightly so. Six-ish hours of sleep every night, plus all of the verbal abuse that he was going through would be way too much for me. I wondered not only why he did it, but why frats would put people through this at all. I still don't get the former question, but I think I have a pretty good understanding of the latter. By putting people through physical hell in a group (e.g. a pledge class), it allows for them to bond over a common enemy, which is one of the easiest ways to forge close connections between people.
Groupthink
One of the biggest problems with organizations such as Greek life is Groupthink. Groupthink is when the desire for harmony within the group leads a group to make irrational decisions. This can be seem in fraternities ad nauseam, with incident after incident where a group of people do something that they would not do individually. This is one of the main reasons for the problems that Greek life has gotten itself into. A good example of this is the SAE fraternity at Oklahoma chanting a racist chant; most likely, many people who were chanting did not agree with the chant, but went along with it to keep peace in the group.
Paying for Friends
This is a question that I have gone back and forth on. Are you or are you not paying for friends? The most basic interpretation states that you are not; you are paying dues for the fraternity or sorority that goes to putting on functions and other events. This question can be interpreted differently though, because while you are not directly paying for friends, you are paying people and getting friends in return. These are friends that you would likely not have if you did not pay those dues. Obviously other organizations will have dues, but the reason that these organizations exist is fundamentally different than a sorority or fraternity. For example, when I played academy soccer in high school, there were fees that had to be paid in order for me to play. Just like fraternities and sororities, I had to pay these fees or I could not be apart of the organization, and I became friends with some people on the team. However, they money that I paid was to play soccer at a high level, not to make new friends. In this case, friends were a byproduct of paying the fees. I now ask, why does someone join a fraternity or sorority? I am not in one, so I cannot personally answer, but from what I have gathered through talking to people that I know in the Greek system the answer is two-fold: to have a good time and make friends. This time, making friends is no longer the byproduct but the main product. It then becomes obvious that you are paying for friends, among other things

Furman Engaged

I am really not sure why they call it Furman engaged. That is certainly not the adjective that I would use to describe my time today. I went into the PAC with some players on the soccer team because we were told that we could get out body fat and bone density calculated in the BodPod and the DEXA machine. It is always interesting to see your body composition as an athlete, so you can see what you need to work on to stay healthy. So we get to the testing room and spend thirty minutes listening to how the device works, as if we would ever need to operate it. Then two demonstrations are done, and the show is over. I was super disappointed that I had just wasted my time at a terribly disengaging explanation of two health science machines. The tests themselves were not even that accurate. The machines combined cost $200,000, and they have a %2 margin of error. So essentially, one student paid Furman over four years for those two machines through tuition, and they can't even get a completely accurate reading? Furman should really have spent that money better because skin folds cost significantly less than that and only have a %5 error. Basically what I learned today was that money was not well spent and health science is really boring.

SAE Ban

I am a pretty big proponent of the Bill of Rights, and all of the rights that we were given because of it. The first one, the amendment that allows for freedom of speech, is a cornerstone of the United States and separates us from many other countries around the world. People often get confused however, on exactly what freedom of speech entails. Basically, all case law after its inception aside, freedom of speech means that American citizens can say whatever they want and cannot get punished by the United States government. This does not mean that you can say whatever you want and not get in any trouble from anyone in the United States. Unlike the United States constitution, universities and fraternities do not have a First Amendment that allows for you to say anything that you want. This is because universities and fraternities have set core values that one usually cannot go against, as it will generally result in a removal from that institution. One of these values is anti-racism. Students cannot go around promoting racism at a university because can create a hostile learning environment, plus it makes the university look bad. They can do this because you are not being forced to attend this school or pledge a fraternity by the government, and they only accepted you in these institutions because they thought that it would be beneficial for the school. The same concept applies for jobs; if you work somewhere, they have every right to fire you if you do something that go against what the company believes in. Therefore, this is not at all a first amendment issue. Now, if the government were to detain these two individuals for the racist remarks, then it would become a first amendment issue. That's the beauty of Freedom of Speech; you can say whatever you want, and the government cannot punish you, but any non-governmental organization that you are apart of sure as hell can.

Daniel Butler Rebuttal

I am really not sure where I stand on the topic of abortion. I think that maybe I would be for abortion in event that the mother has been raped or has no other option because the quality of life for the child is going to be so poor. The rape argument for me is the strongest; if a woman is impregnated against her will, I think that I would totally understand if she wanted to abort the pregnancy to get rid of any possible tangible memory of that horrible event. If she believes that the quality of life is going to be horrible for the child, she does possess the option to put the child up for adoption, which seems like a pretty good idea to me, especially when you consider the growing amount of gay couples in America and people that cannot physically have a baby. The problem with this is that the adoption system in America is not great; it is very expensive and time-consuming, not to mention the fact that there is a real chance prospective parents could be turned away.
I say that I have all of these opinions on abortion, but I am not sure that they would hold if I were required to decide whether to terminate a specific pregnancy or not. I want to say that I would keep the same beliefs, but the topic of abortion is just not important enough to me to actually have strong beliefs on it. It very well could be the case that I would flip and decide not to go through with the abortion in the moment, because at that moment it becomes real. For me, even if I were to believe that aborting a pregnancy was not killing a prospective life in theory, I think that I would feel like it was while in the moment.
To be honest, I hope that I am never placed in a position where I would have to decide whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, because I do not know what I would do. This is mostly because abortions have never directly affected me, and I hope they never will (knock on wood). Therefore, I just simply do not care enough about abortion

Isaac Response

Education is an incredibly important part of every civilization, as it helps it move forward and advance, but what is the best way to educate? Personally, I love hands on learning. I love doing things that are fun and learning at the same time. A good example of this is soccer. Each day on the training field, I am learning what works and what doesnt, but at the same time I am having fun. Sometimes this can get frustrating, as all learning does, but overall it is quite enjoyable. That being said, not everything can be incredibly fun while you are doing it. Take math for example; the best way to teach math is to learn by doing, but doing math bores the hell out of some people. Math is a great skill to have, but many people never learn it because it is so boring. The only way to get good at math is to get over the boring parts and just do it. This concept can be hard to grasp when you are really young, which is why so many people are unmotivated.
Having really good teachers is a great idea in theory, but in practice, it is going to be quite difficult to find that many people who are enthusiastic and good at teaching people that actually want to be teachers. The main reason being the salary; teachers make horrible money, and yet they are vital to progressing society. The simple solution would be to pay them more, but where would this money come from? The government isnt just going to put a ton of money simply into teachers' salaries, so that is a just a dream.
I do agree that we should be focusing more on education and an easy way to do that would be giving teachers more money, but I just dont see that happening.

Kat Response

Studying abroad is a great opportunity for many people, as it does help you learn a new language and develop new relationships, but is it really worth it for everyone? I say that it really depends. If you are going to major in a foreign language, then studying abroad in that country is definitely worth it because you will become exponentially more proficient in that language. I do not really get the point in only majoring in another language to begin with, as you can just as easily go and learn the language in the country and major in something else. This would be much more helpful in the job market, but this is an entirely different issue. If you are going to major in international business, then studying abroad is a really good thing to do, especially if you can get an internship while in another place. I am sure that I am missing some majors where studying abroad is incredibly beneficial, so I am sorry. But other than those two majors, studying abroad is not quite that beneficial for you. That being said, studying abroad from what I have heard is an incredibly amazing experience. There is a really big difference studying abroad being super helpful and being super cool. College is a time unlike any other where you can do things like studying abroad, so if you have to opportunity I would do it, but it may come with some consequences.

Hana Response

As a kid, I was never spanked. My parents were not the type to physically punish me, instead they opted to grounding me. If I did something wrong, I would get privileges taken away. These punishments ranged from no television for the day to being totally grounded for weeks on end, depending on the egregiousness of my acts. I was the type of kid that got grounded a lot; I was always doing something that merited a punishment. I wasn't a bad kid in the general sense of the phrase; I didn't get into fights or get bad grades. Instead of that, I would do one little thing wrong, and then dig myself into a deeper hole from there. For example, I would call my older sister a name, and lose television privileges. Then I would ignore my mom and continue to watch TV. I would then lose the TV for a week but keep ignoring my mother. The punishments would pile up, and the next thing that I knew I would be grounded for an entire month. It isn't that I didn't fear these punishments or think that they would not hold water, I just refused to think ahead to think about how these punishments would actually affect me in the future. Then after the interactions with my parents were all over, I would sit and think about how stupid I was being and regret my actions very soon after it was all over. Despite these emotions, the next time I would get in trouble, nothing changed. I never really learned how short-sighted that I was being. This still is a problem for me today, as I will still get into altercations with people of authority and lose horribly. This happens to me in soccer with referees, and used to happen with teachers in high school. I am working on it though, and I'm getting better.
As you can see, every type of punishment is going to come with some negative effects. Aversive conditioning can cause people to be cripplingly fearful of people with authority, while the ways that my parents punished me may have caused me to have not enough fear for authority figures. I think that the best way to condition children is to understand the child and simply know what they will respond to the best.

Athletes

The amount of money that athletes receive in sports is ludicrous. Millions of millions of dollars go into paying players to let them play a game, and the money keeps going up. The baseball example that Jack gave was a very good one, with people earning over thirty million dollars a year to pitch less than thirty games. These numbers are insane, and they are not exclusive to baseball either. In soccer, things are probably much worse. Based off of pure salary, the best baseball players make on average more than the best soccer players. For example, the world's best soccer player, Lionel Messi, makes 20 million euros per year, whereas the best baseball player makes 50% more than that per year. However, most of the money in soccer does not go players' salaries like in baseball. Unlike American sports, most soccer players do not get traded for someone else or go into free agency. Instead, they are transferred for cash. In other words, if one team wanted Messi, they would not trade a bunch of their own players for him, but would instead offer money to Messi's club, Barcelona. Every player in the world has a price tag, and these tags can be incredibly high numbers. The world record transfer happened last year, with Gareth Bale going to Real Madrid for, at the time, roughly $150 million dollars. That was only the money required to get his former club to sell him and does not include his $15 million salary. While this amount seems crazy, some players have even higher "buy-out clauses," or the amount of money required to terminate the player's contract to allow him to join another team. Cristiano Ronaldo has a rumored buy-out clause of $1 billion dollars. This number is incredibly high, but that is for a reason. It is an amount above that that any club would pay for him. This brings me to my point. Although the money that is thrown into sports is absolutely insane, this is really not an issue. The reason that there is so much money in sports is because people are willing to pay that much. It may seem unfair to people that were not born with these athletes' talent, but it isn't like these people are being forced to pay their own money to support these sports. They can either choose not to patronize them, or spend their own money supporting something that they like. Yes the amount of money is crazy, but it is simply a response to the demand from the fans and the supply of money that they have.

The Internet

The internet is an incredible resource that puts unlimited information right in front of you, whom ever you are, where ever you are (with wifi.) It was theorized that the internet and all of this new technology that we have would turn all of us into much smarter beings and make all of our lives infinitely easier. In some senses it has; I can now write a research paper using hundreds of primary and secondary sources without ever having to get up from my seat; I can now figure out what the weather will be like in Spain in two weeks in a matter of seconds. This is all a great improvement to the old ways that those things had to be done; however, it has had quite a few unexpected, serious consequences that we are just now starting to discover.
First of all, the internet can be a very dark place, not just certain sites but also in terms of human happiness. According to a recent study done by the Institute of Physiological Sciences at the University of Leeds shows that long periods of time spent on the internet can lead to depression. In other words, the amount of time one person spends on the internet had a high correlation to depression and feelings of sadness.
Social Media is making us more anti-social. More and more I find myself at a table with my friends, and we are all on our phones. No one is talking; no one is listening. Everyone is absorbed in their phones, checking what is going on in the world of technology. If we wanted to, we could all just text each other and that would be our whole conversation. The only problem with this is that text does not pick up on the tones that people are attempting to convey. This can lead to people getting upset over something that is simply misread.
The internet and technology can be very useful, but just like any tool, harmful.






http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/03/surfing-web-make-depressed/

Sydney's Blog

I think that almost everyone would agree that falsely accusing someone of a crime is a bad thing. It is really unfortunate that people are being falsely accused of rape, as it ruins their life even though they did nothing wrong. That being said, rape cases are very often simply a case of "he said, she said," so it is very difficult for courts to decipher who is innocent and who is guilty. In theory it should be easy; there would be no accusations if it did not happen, but that is not how life works. When there is the possibility that someone may receive a very large payoff at little cost to them, there will always be people who value this money over someone else's life. This brings up a much larger problem within society, and that is the abuse of the legal and civil court systems for personal gain. A very good example of this would be the law suit that was brought upon McDonald's in the early 2000s. They were sued for millions of dollars because people felt that their food was too fattening, and people could not control themselves. They ate too much of their food and became fat. The law suit was successful and McDonalds as a result decided to nix their Super Sized option for fries and a drink. Obviously changing this would be very difficult, and I do not see any way to do so, but it does irk me that someone will ruin another person's life for their own personal gain. 

Selfishness is something that we all suffer from, but it is not always a bad thing. It is our primal instinct to put ourselves above all else; it is what keeps us moving forward. In a capitalistic society, it is what takes us to the top and supplies us with money. That being said, where do we draw the line between looking after our own self-interests and being so selfish that we will ruin other people's lives to get what we want?

Capital Punishment

As society has progressed through time, people like to think that we as people are also progressing. We think that we are continually getting smarter and learning from our mistakes. We are definitely seeing the errors that our ancestors have made, but are we really learning from them? We see the same things happening over and over again; the stock market crashed in 1929, due in part to mistakes made by people, and very similar things led to the recession in 2008. Throughout history, we can see that different forms of death sentences have existed. Many different reasons for these death sentences appeared. In some cultures, execution was used to punish criminals, in others it was used to crush political opposition to those that unsuccessfully challenge those in power. Back in ancient times, the ways that people were murdered were quite gruesome, like being burned alive or boiled to death. These deaths served a purpose, as they were often public and attempted to deter people from attempting the same crimes and suffer the same fate. People in civilizations to follow tried to become more and more civil; for example, the guillotine cut off the heads of its victims immediately causing no physical harm to people while creating a public scene for all to see. People have used firing squads to kill people since the rifle was invented, and this too can be a quite humane way to kill someone. By using more that one person in a firing squad, no one knows who actually killed the victim. This is quite unlike the guillotine that has a someone that pulls the pin to kill the person. This can be a problem because while it does not create pain for the victim, it can cause some emotional pain for the executioner, who has to deal with the fact that he or she has killed someone, which can weigh on someone's mind very heavily, no matter how much the person deserved it. In America today, we use lethal injection to punish people to death, and this has quite a few complications. First of all, the price to actually create the murderous concoction costs quite a bit of money, and it is not made in America. Therefore, Americans cannot control the amount of the solution is produced. As a result, people some prisons have basically been putting everything under the kitchen sink into the mix in order to attempt to kill people. This can also lead to people not being killed humanely, as we can see from some examples in American history. For example, Angel Diaz was sentenced to death, but when he was lethally injected, he did not die. It took a second dose after a half an hour, and Diaz felt extreme pain before finally dying. By killing people with lethal injection we are not only exposing people to extreme pain on occasion when trying to kill them without harm before death, but we are also creating an executioner that will too experience pain from these events. This shows that although we say and try to learn from our mistake, we often times revert back to the thing that we are trying to avoid.

This is the first year in soccer that I have ever struggled with any sort of injury. Growing up and playing every day, I never was hurt. Maybe I would get a little cut up or bruised, but never a real injury. Then this year, my first year of college soccer, came about. I was excited to play at the next level, but nervous about how I would compare to the other players. Would I be good enough to be considered in the same league as them? Would I be able to start immediately and play all season? I have never had to ask myself these things, as my natural ability had generally gotten me where I wanted to be. These questions plagued my mind for months leading up to the start of the season. Unfortunately though, I still have not found out the answer to any of these questions. The second day of preseason, August 2, I went to the trainer complaining about my foot. Unsure of what exactly was wrong, he sent me to a doctor to get X-Rays and MRIs. I soon found out that I had a severe bone bruise and torn tendons in my foot, and I would be out of commission for at least another two months, leaving me with about three weeks of the season to train, most of which I would use to slowly get back into the swing of things. Finally healthy again, the offseason started. So in order to make up for lost time, I decided to train with the professional team in my city. However, in the first session I broke my finger. Fingers seem pretty insignificant, but I am a goalkeeper so I tend to use them a lot. As a precaution, I went to the doctor and the next day I was getting surgery to pin back the broken bone. This brings me to today, a time where those questions still loom over my head. They will have to wait another two months to be answered