Thursday, February 11, 2016

Language, Emotion, and Reason Intertwine in the Mellish Motors Situation

Find examples from the Yale situation or the Mellish Motors situation that demonstrate how language, emotion and reason intertwine.


When a used car shop in New Annan, Canada, put up a sign saying "Women are like snowflakes. They can't drive." it sparked a storm of outrage and debates revolving around the sign. One side argued that the sign was misogynistic and not even funny. Others than called these people too PC (politically correct) and was only intended as a joke. It very quickly escalated into hate speech from and against both sides whilst the debate switched into a debate over Political Correctness.
The sign on the top right was the original one, the others were then put up as responses to the debate by the owner.

This debate on Facebook is a glowing example of the fallouts the sign caused. It started with someone (for the sake of simplicity I'll refer to him as "Poster") saying she is "disappointed with the number of male and female friends who don't see the harm in sexist "jokes" like the one on the Mellish Motors' sign, let alone its  ridiculous rebuttals." She went on to state how misogynistic the world nowadays is and compared her own "rebellion" to that of Rosa Parks' Bus Boycott.
Responder 1 was glad to point out the mistakes in her argument. First off, she has just compared herself to "the mother of the freedom movement" (this is what US Congress called Rosa Parks); it can be clearly seen how she let her emotion negatively affect her reason, as she let herself overexaggerate for the sake of simply having more arguments (more to say) and to get her point across to everyone. Responder 1 proceeded to bring in logical arguments for his own side (which is that the whole debate has gotten out of hand) and to point out that the original complainer (Ms. Ling) has already called a truce. He also used sarcasm, a very powerful linguistical tool for debates.
Then came Responder 2, who supported Poster and continued her arguments in a very dramatic way. She used several vulgar expressions, swore, and didn't have more than one real logical argument. To sum up: she let her anger cloud her judgment of how she should argue. Paraphrased, because of her heightened emotion, her language was affected in a negative way, which suggested she had bad skills of reason.

1 comment:

  1. Daniel, this post is like a good play by play analysis in sports: it closely follows the arguments and offers good comments on some of the highlights (e.g., this ain't Rosa Parks). The next step is to try to draw some broader conclusions from these examples. I find it interesting that reason can be used as an emotional weapon.

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