Irony and Book Burning (Kennie)

Irony means the expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect. The Nazi where one group of people who burnt books back in the 1900’s, they burned 18,000 in public and 25,000 more books including works by Albert Einstein, Vicki Baum, Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Heine, Helen Keller, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, Frank Wedekind, Ernest Hemingway and H.G. Wells. Also in May 1940, Belgium was destroyed by the German army and 900,000 books where burned. This was after 300,000 more books were burned in WWI at the same library. The Nazi where burning specific books, the Nazi burned books of the Jewish authors. Do I see irony in people finding motivation to burn books? No I don’t, I think that to burn a book and erase someone’s work from history, you have to want to do it or hate that someone. I think they find their motivation to burn a book in a book, if its against their beliefs or like how the Nazi burned only Jewish books. 

Book Banning (Kim)

Books are very powerful and always useful. Books are always needed and used everyone has read a book before soon don’t like to read but use books to get information out of it. Others like looks because they have great stories them, something you cant stop reading and want to know what happens next! Many people LOVE to read love the stories in them and in my opinion the books are better then what they are in movies because some books they make into movies but are not as great as they were in the book, they leave out so many good things. For example the “The Hunger Games” the movie was good but it left out so many things. So books are better, I think that in their society they just were too lazy to read or just didn’t like feeling dumb which no one is. Just have to practice but they wanted the easy way out so they just burn books don’t even try! There excuse is because of fights and all that but that doesn’t even really happen, maybe only on movies but not real life, I never seen someone fight because someone else is smarter then them. Never! I don’t think this will ever happen in our society, reading and learning is a big thing here. It actually got bigger then it was before. Here the importance in a good education with out it you cant really get a good job, so I really don’t see this happening anytime soon.

Beatty's words (Selso)

3. Captain Beatty says, “A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”  What power is he giving books?  Why do you think his society decided it was easier to ban books than to teach people to think?  Can you see this happening in our world?  Why or why not?

He is comparing a book to a gun. He is giving books as much power as a gun has. They probably decided that because people are less dangerous if they aren’t smart, a smart person could easily beat a person that is not smart at almost anything. Because the smart person can think, he or she can easily think of a plan to win or beat the other person a person that is not smart can’t think up a plan to win because he lacks that ability if he has never read before. Yes I can see it happening to our world but differently, instead of the fireman burning the books most people will just give up books on their own. A lot of people already don’t like reading it is mostly the younger people that do not like reading most of the older people do like reading. And if they do end up giving up on books the same thing will happen as in the book. They won’t be smart enough to survive on their own with out knowledge.

Execution Debate (Brianna)

Execution Debate

I don’t feel the death penalty helps prevent crimes because if someone isn’t scared to do a crime big enough to receive the death penalty then they are not scared to die. I do feel it helps get bad people off this world. If someone is to kill another person intentionally and get away with it then most then likely they will do it again. There for why allow them to live, so they can kill innocent people for self-satisfaction. Also taxes payers shouldn’t have to pay to keep bad people locked up until they die. Some one can live for a long time.

The families of crime victims should not be able to administer the death penalty or be the one to pull the switch. It is confect of interest; it wouldn’t be considered the right thing to do. Just because someone killed/hurt their family member it would give them any closure or make them feel any better by killing the person at fault. End the end they would feel bad and be as bad as the person who committed the crime. Also if the crime was not internal but the family felt it was it wouldn’t be right to hit the switch even though the person hurt/killed their family. A person that has lost a loved one by someone else then they would know how it feels to lose someone close and they shouldn’t want someone else to feel their pain. So they should just leave the executions up to a person that knows what they are doing.

Captain Beatty (Ayana)

            Captain Beatty in Fahrenheit 451 speaks of books as if they hold the whole world in between their pages. Books hold the knowledge of the world actually because if we can’t get to a book, where do we go?

A book.

Exactly.

Captain Beatty is laying the power for the people to think in his world to the books. They are denied the right to read though, so no reading, no knowledge, and the first man to open a page is the terminators come back to life. I think the society in Fahrenheit 451 decided to ban books because they didn’t like the pain and suffering of knowing the truths about the world. No books, add up to no questions of the world.

I thought about it and honestly I can see this happening in today’s modern world. I see bookstores closing every year, less people buying or reading books. Books are falling to the feet of all the new electronics and happiness people like. Yes, some people download books onto their Kendall’s but in reality it is not the same. We will get distracted easily reading off our new shiny toy. We see something and the next thing we know were tweeting, face booking, goggling and leaving that story in he USB graveyard.

Books are the world, I cannot say this any clearer. Electronics die and break but books are forever. You can bind that page, or glue that part back in.  Down the road, if the knowledge is lost we can count on books to be there to guide us. The point in the matter is that Captain Beatty is leaving the power of knowledge on books doorstep. It’s humans choice to follow if we so choose.

Power of Books (Yesenia)

He is  giving the books the power to make the person read it so he can go tell someone about it and then obviously their going to catch the person and burn the books and the person. I think their society decided to ban books because 50% of them were based on the real life/past/history, and some other 50% was based on non existent things and was all fantasy. I guess they thought that a lot of people were starting to actually think about fantasy and start to believe it since it seemed so real. I know I think about the fantasy part of things, I know that they possible wont happen but sometimes its good to think outside the box. I think they didn’t want to teach people to think because then they would figure out the truth about things, and because maybe some people took a longer time to understand things so they probably thought it would be a lot of work to try and make people understand / learn new things. I don’t think this would ever happen to our society because we believe in one another and if someone can do it , anyone else can do it. Plus there’s nothing bad with knowing the past of things, if you don’t know the past of things you would never understand how hard things were for people before and you would start taking many things for granted. What if one day everything’s gone? You wouldn’t know what to do or how to survive.