10/14

Corbett and Eberly in The Elements of Reasoning work to describe what it means to be a citizen critic and then try to outline the pitfalls that many citizen critics encounter when trying to employ reason.  A citizen critic can effectively criticize someone’s reasoning without attacking them personally. Being a critic is extremely easy with such ease of access to entire digital communities open for discussion and debate. Most texts posted on the internet don’t just allow people to respond but need it to fully function in its fullest manner in the mediated public sphere. However, because it is so easy to share ideas and critiques, Corbett and Eberly stress that it is the responsibility of the individual to use sound reasoning and to identify when someone else is not using sound reasoning. Corbett and Eberly seem to think that a responsible citizen critique can help keep the internet a little more democratic. Unfortunately there are always out to thwart democracy. 

In Jason Parham's "It's Time We Treat Police Brutality as a National Crisis" there is an entire section dedicated to responses from readers. Many of the readers just simply give their support for the writer’s arguments while others attempt to deconstruct the problems present in the author’s original writing. One responder in particular never necessarily disagreed with the author, however, he presented the idea that presenting the argument as a race issue would then somewhat incriminate ALL police officers as being racist, which just isn’t true despite any number of evidence that is given. Eventually, talks broke down and name calling began in the comments section before real discussion began on this subject of employing a false dilemma that Cobertt an Eberly mention