This week we read the tragedy of Oedipus in class. It was probably the one of the best examples of a tragedy because Oedipus exemplifies a story of inescapable misfortune. From leaving his home town of Corinth to avoid the prophecy. Only to lead himself right into fulfilling the tragedy in the end.
However, the ending of Oedipus allowed us to implement something that we had learned last week from The Tragic Fallacy by Joseph Krutch. When he said that "its conclusion must be, by its premise, outwardly calamitous..." you get a glimpse what the ending of Oedipus really meant. Starting when we learn of Jocasta hanging herself and then moving to Oedipus puncturing his own eyes with the brooches from his wife's robes. These commotion is very calamitous there is an enormous amount of chaos that takes place in a very short period of time. Which eventually leads to Creon showing mercy to his nephew/brother-in-law and sparing his life. Restoring faith in humanity. Concluding the story of Oedipus. It was really cool seeing how all of the different things that we had learned about and read ending up tying together in the end. Which lead me to think about other things that made me though of tragedy. Immediately I went to the story of Allan Turing, an English computer scientist from the 40's. Which is why one of my tragedy blog post has a picture from the movie The Imitation Game. The story of this amazing man is a perfect real world example of a tragedy and I would recommend that if you do not know about this man and his work. Go and read about him on http://www.turing.org.uk/.
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This week we asked ourselves what is a tragedy. Instinctively I thought of the stories of "Romeo and Juliet" and "Hamlet" but I learned it has other applications. Such as in the sense of economics. With the tragedy of the commons. I spent most of my time reading that wiki page because I felt like it was the most interesting. It basically preached how if you let people regulate a common good with only their conscious the resource will eventually be depleted. Then their was an example of a man who applied this theory to the idea that welfare created a sort of unhealthy belief that people could leech off the work of others while not contributing back to society. Which I guess can sort of be true in some cases but not all. Seeing as most of the time welfare does serve its purpose and be the social security net that is needed to keep people from living in awful conditions for long periods of time. Little bit of a side track but the story serves as another way to describe the idea of a tragedy by showing that things like basic economics can be an example of a tragedy.
On Friday we also talked about the Dakota Access Pipeline and the protesters. Personally I did not have too much of an opinion on the pipeline because it is very rare for one of the many pipelines to leak. So I felt like the concern about it was mostly unwarranted until Luco showed us this article that held the reason that the first proposed pipeline was rejected. Since the pipeline had run near the capital's water supply for the same reason that the Standing Rock tribe do not want the pipeline. Basically saying that the people of Bismarck are more important that the Standing Rock tribe. |
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March 2017
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