Category: Health and Wellness
Just came across this powerful speech by a 12-year old child, so thought to post it here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sghunMfTnPg
Masturbation will cure your blindness.
Emotional, but not really very powerful. Not very heavy on facts, very heavy on heartstrings. Lots of oversimplification, misrepresentation of reality, misunderstanding reality, and simply getting facts wrong in that speech.
This is why children shouldn't give speeches. They don't know enough to know what they're talking about. They're cute, and they make you feel sad when they talk about sad things, but they don't actually know what they're talking about.
We need to stop listening to people who speak from emotion. We need to start learning for ourselves about the reality of the world. I'm not saying everything in this speech was wrong or inaccurate, but how will you know what is or isn't wrong or inaccurate without doing your own research? Lean on intelligence, not emotion.
The very first thing I was told in my speechwriting class--taught by someone who has made a living writing speeches for almost twenty years--is that emotions are always, always, always more significant than logic. This is why people have been swallowing eloquently worded bullshit since the beginning of time.
Yes, more significant, not more factual. I can't tell you how often I have debates with people who believed something because it was said to them eloquently or passionately. People can just as easily be passionately wrong as they are passionately right. The only way to find out which they are is to be so yourself.
Yup. Significant just means what has more impact on people. I guess most of us are simply wired to appreciate the emotional appeal over the logical appeal. In fact, even someone's credibility (ethical appeal) comes before logic. Kinda sad.
We need passion, for by passion is the human spirit moved. perhaps they don't juggle figures, or come with concrete examples of what needs to be done, or what's happening. But they're twelve and thirteen. Their message is positive, and whether there's data behind it, we can seefor ourselves at least some of the consequences of our environmental shift. We could do the world a lot better by doing something about this; even if it is small. These children are fighting for something they believe in. An if they only have passion at this point, at least they aren't being pulled in different directios by all the conflicting evidence. All the facts, they will learn later. Besides, it's not like if you thrust tons of evidence in someone's face they'll necessarily act on it.
Go back and read what you just wrote. Please explain to me exactly how they can be passionate about anything without having the facts? They aren't passionate at all. They're cute puppets. That's what kids do. They give you someone adorable and easily corrupted.
Its sad, though not wholly unexpected, that you think emotion is better than fact, or that you can get fact later once you have passion. Many of the evils in our world today are based on faulty thinking, (I won't call it logic, it doesn't deserve that), such as that. That's why political candidacies are the circuses they are today. People respond to cuteness and rhetoric without having the wherewithal, conviction or even the inclination to research for themselves.
Passion is good, I'm passionate, but be passionate about fact as best you know them, and be passionate about finding out more facts than what you already know. Don't react from emotion. Love with your heart, do everything else with your brain.
Sure, I'll agree with you there. Do your research. learn the facts. it's not that I'm saying facts are bad, merely that they are not the be all and end all. If they were, we'd have a lot more people in this world willing to act, rather than merely be passive.
No, facts are not the be all and end all, but they should be the beginning. You should work from facts. The girl in this video didn't do that. She worked from emotion and a few things people told her. That's not a good thing to do when talking to people who literally control portions of our lives.
Very true. But I think it's rare to find one who begins searching for the truth without some emotional kickstart. Fact is the mind of discovery, while emotion is the heart. In this regard, the facts about environmental discord exist, if you believe them. That's the problem with fact, especially in this day and age where so much "fact" exists. Doubtless there is truth out there, but it's often buried under so much half-truth and sometimes even utter fallacy that it becomes a tedius matter of sifting through nuggets of information until you - hopefully - find that truth ... or in some people's case settle on a truth you want to believe. Emotion and fact are two sides of the same coin - balancing each other - not working against one another. it's only wen one values one over the other - yielding to emotional response and disregarding fact, or valuing fact and shunning emotion - that there comes discord. In this case, this speech might have lacked sufficient fact to cary weight, however by invoking emotion, it will hopefully gode those who see it into some sort of action - to discover the truth for themselves.
You can't decide on a fact. Its a fact. You can't say, "well I tend to lean more toward the idea that earth is flat and accelerating upward at 9.8 meters per second squared. That whole gravity thing, I'm not sold on it". That's conjecture, its not a fact.
Yes, emotion and fact go together, but this speech didn't say that. It didn't say, "You should go out and get facts", it said, "Here's facts, now do something about them." The problem was, the facts that the little girl presented weren't facts, they were untruths. Thus, all she had was emotion, and few people look past that.
Take the OP for example. Judging from the fact that this board is called, "a powerful speech", and not "a powerful invitation to go out and gather facts of your own", we can assume with relative safety that the OP watched the video, was drawn in by the cuteness and heartstring tugs of the little girl, and swallowed the load of crap she spewed like a catfish.
Blah blah blah.
yes imprecator, nothing to see here, cary on.
True enough, lightning. I conceit that this speech and its message could have been handled better. Though I stand by my point about fact and emotion. You're right in that fact is fact. Gravity is a fact, genetics, humans needing oxygen. The problem I have always faced is that those facts aren't always clear. It's easy to read things which sound factual - even which are sourced with viable sources. But sadly, well-written and formulated articles or arguments don't necessarily make something factual. So it becomes a matter of delving, and hoping you come across the facts eventually. Most of the people I know don't usually get that far. They come across something they want to be fact, then settle. When we want something to be true, we settle on what we consider factual information. It's all a big problem, not only for me, but I believe for majority of us.