Thursday, February 9, 2012

balko


1.      What does Radley Balko claim in this essay? How do you know? What position is he responding to? Cite examples from the text to support your answer.

Balko’s claim in the essay is that government intervention to curtail obesity (including limiting access to high-calorie foods, requiring menu labeling of nutritional value and fat and calorie content, and taxing high-calorie food), as well as treating obesity as a public health issue, is wrong-headed; instead, personal responsibility should be encouraged. He also argues the larger point that the socialization and government subsidization of medicine leads people to become less responsible for their own health and encourages them to continue to behave in unhealthy ways. See paragraphs 2–3, 5, and 8–9.

2.      Reread the last sentence of paragraph 1: “In other words, bringing government between you and your waistline.” This is actually a sentence fragment, but it functions as metacommentary, inserted by Balko to make sure that readers see his point. Imagine that this statement were not there, and reread the first three paragraphs. Does it make a difference in how you read this piece?

Without the fragment that ends the first paragraph, Balko’s negative stance would not be clear through the end of the second paragraph (unless one noted the negative connotation of language such as “agitating for a panoply of government anti-obesity initiatives”). But he makes his position explicit at the beginning of paragraph 3.

3.      Notice the direct quotations in paragraph 7. How has Balko integrated these quotations into his text—how has he introduced them, and what, if anything, has he said to explain them and tie them to his own text? Are there any changes you might suggest? How do key terms in the quotations echo one another? (See Chapter 3 for advice on quoting, and pp. 109–11 for help on identifying key terms.)

The first is a direct quotation, which Balko introduces by naming both the speaker and the organization she represents. The second is not so much a quotation as a phrase included in quotation marks so that Balko can distance himself from it;  “personal responsibility bias” is a concept promulgated by trial lawyers that Balko finds ridiculous. He comments directly on the title of the ABC News documentary as a way of emphasizing the point made in the two previous quotations that the idea of personal responsibility, in his view, is being given short shrift.  

1.      Balko makes his own position about the so-called obesity crisis very clear, but does he consider any of the objections that might be offered to his position? If so, how does he deal with those objections? If not, what objections might he have raised?

Although Balko offers examples of what is being proposed by those he opposes and provides a brief summary of their views, he does not consider direct objections to his own position in any detail. For example, he doesn’t explore the issue of the cost benefits of governmental intervention to curtail obesity, an issue that would be raised in opposition to his “leave it up to individuals” approach.






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