After studying heroic imagination last week, I was curious about the health effects of 9/11 on first responders. I found out that many firefighters had a steep decrease in pulmonary function. About four times as many firefighters and twice as many EMS workers had below-normal lung function for their ages six to seven years after 9/11 as they did before the attacks. Many are also suffering from cancer, but there is no proof that it is related to the dust they breathed following the attacks. Many rescue and recovery workers who started work on or soon after 9/11 are more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, and almost 1 in 5 adults enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Registry reported PTSD symptoms.
For the past two weeks we have been studying fallacies, which is an invalid argument. There are four different types of informal fallacies, which are caused by the words used in an argument. Fallacies of relevance, weak induction, presumption, and ambiguity. I found it very interesting, but I was a little confused since I was absent the first day we learned about what fallacies are and the different types. After we had studied all the different kinds of fallacies, we started to watch Bowling for Columbine, a documentary by Michael Moore about gun laws and the Columbine Massacre. As we watched, we realized how Moore skewed evidence which made the documentary biased and used many types of fallacies. He edited sound bites to make a person statement prove the point he was trying to make. He also had phantom questions, guerrilla interviews, and loaded language. He would make hasty generalizations about people and use loaded language to make a person or group of people look bad, without giving background information on those people or the situation they were in. Studying fallacies made me realize how I often used then as a child to win arguments. For example, if I got into a fight with my best friend, I would tell her to let me get my way or I wouldn't be her best friend anymore, which is appeal to force, a fallacy of relevance.
After beginning BFC this week, I wonder what the community of Littleton and friends and families of victims thought about the movie. It didn't portray them in a bad light necessarily, but the way Moore presented the events and the reasons for what happened at Columbine and the days after was not all that positive or completely true at times.
Works Cited:
1. Farley, T. (2011, October 1) A Message from Thomas Farley, MD, MPH, the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. What We Know About the Health Affects of 9/11. Retrieved from www.nyc.gov/html/doh/wtc/know/know.shtml
2. (2011) michael-moore-young [Photograph], Received from http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Entertainment/images-8/michael-moore-young.jpg
3. (2011) Comunbine_High_School_sign [Photograph], Received from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d0/Columbine_High_School_sign.jpg
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