hello friends and welcome back to the channel in today's uh video we're going to talk about counter arguments and also we are going to talk about thanos um so i've brought thanos here for a reason uh and it's not to snap half of the universe out of his existence um so what i'm going to do though is walk you through how to do a counter argument about literature so it's similar to a counter argument about pretty much anything else the only difference is that it's going to be about literature which adds to some trickiness so
count your arguments so it's important to establish what counter arguments are not before we uh establish the current argument is counter arguments are not uh not picking aside and they're not uh both sides for no reason a lot of times what i will see from a student who is writing an essay is they will write something like um for instance uh let's just pick some abortion so students writing about abortion and they will say uh you know they will have their thesis they'll say abortion is good uh or at least abortion is necessary and there
will be a bunch of reasons they'll be like here's one reason here's another reason here's a third reason well actually abortion might be bad look at them and say like what's with that last point that goes off topic and they said well that was my counter argument no no no no that's not how counter arguments work the way that counter arguments work is you take a you take the argument against you and you respond to it in such a way that uh you can explain why that argument is bad or your argument is better so
you can't not pick a side you have to pick a side you can't just say well you know it could really be both it's not what counter arguments are counter arguments are saying here's what other people say and this is why they're wrong or to be a little bit more complicated i'll walk you through the three-step process so in order to do a counter argument you have to do the following things one identify or anticipate and identify the opposition so you need to be thinking about well what is it that people are going to say
so let's just say um let's pick a silly topic um dogs make great pets all right so if i'm going to anticipate and identify the opposition for why dogs make good pets i need to be thinking about why might someone not think a dog makes a good pet and then who is that person so i may might say something like cat owners might say that dogs don't make good pets because they require too much attention so if i'm saying dogs are great what i'm gonna do is think okay why would someone disagree with me all
right well dogs do need a lot of attention so maybe that would be the reason they would say that furthermore who might do that well cat people all right next after i know who my opposition is and i anticipate it and i explain who they are then i need to explain the opposition's point of view fairly a lot of people will do one of two things they either won't really explain their opposition's point of view or they won't do it fairly so often what i will get is uh you know like let's take um global
warming uh and some people as i've seen some students write papers where they say well some people don't think that global warming is that big of a deal but they're wrong and then they move on okay what's important to do is actually lay out your opponent's position so that they can more clearly understand your reader can understand that you know what the opposition's issue is if you don't do this then what people can can accuse you of is like well do you even really know what the opposition thinks are you just arguing and sticking to
your point so you want to make sure that you explain your opposition's point of view think of it this way the shoe is on the other foot and someone was explaining your position how would you want it explained you need to show that you understand your opposition's point of view so well that your opponent would be satisfied with it so you know if we're going back to cats and dogs then i would say cat owners cat owners would likely point to the following information uh when citing dogs uh large attention requirement they might say xyz
and i'm but in this case what you're doing is you say okay here cat owners might say dogs don't make good pets they would likely point out the following things so you want to show that you understand what your opposition is saying all right and then finally what you're going to do is respond to the opposition and you have a couple different options option a refute and if this were a will smith movie it would be oh hell no be concede and concession would be more like and see somewhere in between now uh it really
depends on what your topic is which op which choice you choose when it comes to responding to your opposition say oh no that's totally not true well you would have to explain explain why the opposition is wrong with reason and evidence so what you would be doing is you would be pointing out the holes in the opposition's argument and explaining why yours is still superior largely just saying no they're wrong we're good the other option is concession well he has a point there now some students get confused this they say why would i ever concede
a point and the reason you can see a point is conceding a point or explaining that the opposition is at least partially correct in its opposition to you does the following one makes you seem reasonable uh it makes you seem uh like a reasonable thoughtful person so if you're the kind of person who's willing to acknowledge the ownership your own shortcomings in your argument you actually look like a better person you look like a better arguer it's actually more effective furthermore what you will do is um addressing holes in your argument is much more effective
when you do it versus your opposition this is the kind of situation where um you know if there's going to be a pr nightmare for instance it's worth uh putting in a press release about it rather than waiting for tmz to show up to your door and do an expose so addressing holes in your argument if you know there's a weakness in your argument it's better for you to talk about it than to wait for somebody else to bring it up because you're if you talk about it then you're gonna be a lot more uh
equipped to respond to it then finally there's somewhere in between um some and most counter arguments really do fall somewhere in between concession or refutation um it's not always as open and shut as he's either right or he's wrong um sometimes he's right about some things and wrong about other things so for instance i could say while cat owners are indeed correct that dogs require lots of attention i disagree that they uh make bad pets because of this due to the fact that and then you would explain so for instance what i've done here is
i've started my saying hey who's if i think dogs are awesome cat owners might disagree here's why then explain okay this is why they might disagree with me and then respond to them by saying okay while i understand why they agree with why they disagree with me i ultimately disagree with them and here's why here's why i'm right here's why they're wrong that's counter argument in a nutshell so you're probably wondering what does this have to do with thanos okay so i wanted to take an example from uh popular culture and literature and i wanted
to pick basically the biggest movie in the world the avengers now if you haven't seen the avengers that's okay um all you need to know about thanos is that thanos his plan his evil maniacal plan is to thanos's plan equals collect magic gems in order to wipe out half of the universe's population so in this case when it comes to a literary argument it's going to be it's not going to be me arguing with aminos it's not going to be me arguing with anything i might be arguing with what is the text trying to say
the reason i picked thanos is that there are two well there's a lot of different ways you could interpret this but there are two common ways you could interpret this thanos's plan equals collects magic gems in order versus population in order to uh preserve sustainability natural resources so and that's his stated goal he says that his homeworld was wiped out because the the homeworld used all the natural resources and uh they were overpopulated and so his point is that he's going to cut half the universe he's going to cut the life of the universe in
half so that that way we have more sustainability and then we can more responsibly use our resources so there's two ways that i can think about this way number one avengers argues through thanos master plan that humans are in dire need uh our entire need taking care of the planet last cap catastrophic uh result or um solutions become necessary so in this case i could easily argue about this movie that avengers is saying hey humans need to take better care of the environment or i could also argue i could also argue avengers infinity war argues
through thanos master plan that excessive focus on environmentalism at the expense of human life is destructive ideology so i could say hey avengers infinity war uses thanos to say like guys plant a tree and care about global warming i could easily also say avengers infinity war through thanos is saying guys if you focus too much on environmentalism you're going to destroy the world and become thanos i could support both contradictory claims about the movie using textual evidence from the movie i could say that avengers is a environmentalist film or avengers is an anti-environmentalist film both
theses could be supported by evidence and before you say well you know i talked to the directors and they said remember death of the author the directors and the writers don't necessarily even matter because what their art what their text is arguing might be completely independent of what they intended so here you have two contradictory arguments and you would want to put in a uh you could frame this in the same three-step structure so with thanos here i might be saying first of all so let's just pick one and i'm just gonna randomly okay i'm
gonna say it's environmentalist and then i'm gonna say my opposition thinks it's anti-environmentalist so i could say okay so um first i need to anticipate and identify who my opposition is so i could say some viewers could interpret avengers infinity war differently uh arguing that it is in fact anti environment or at least anti-environmental extremism better yet that i even know a couple weeks ago or a couple months ago i saw some senators tweeting about it so you know i could say some viewers like um republican senator ted cruz could interpret avengers infinity war differently
he in fact pointed out that uh that environmentalists are that that he was making a joke about environmentalists and about how um environmentalists are often super villains so even if if ted cruz is part of my opposition i can cite him and that actually will make my money uh stronger but next i have to explain their point these viewers note how how the pursuit of environmental justice causes thanos to turn to genocide in the movies while thanos this goal is admittedly noble in terms of preserving natural resources these critics would point out that thanos is
indeed a bad guy and achieves his aims through death and destruction not wholly unlike some extremist groups who adhere so tightly to their ideology that they lose track of compassion in the process so that's that would be in i could go in further i could maybe cite ted cruz for instance but what i'm trying to do here is just explain that i understand the point i understand the point so that that way people like ted cruz would be able to be like yes you do understand my purpose next i need to respond i'm either going
to refute or i'm going to concede or i'm going to do a little bit of both in this case i'm going to do a little bit of both while it's true that blind adherence to an ideology even a noble one like environmentalism can be can be taken to the extreme i disagree that avengers is anti-environmentalism i disagree because while thanos is a villain his underlying message still serves as a cautionary tale if humans took care of their planet then thanos would not even feel the need to go on his homicidal mission it's only the environmental
crisis such as climate change that would give rise to thanos in the first place yes thanos is bad but only because the world already got so much worse therefore avengers infinity war calls us to take care of our natural resources so what i've done here is i've walked you through a counter argument about literature if i think infinity war is environmentalist i'm going to say all right well some people disagree with me and here's who they are then i'm going to say well here's what they think here's what they point to and then finally i'm
going to say alright well what do they do right what are they do wrong what are their good points for the bad points and i'm going to argue against them and that more or less is a counter-argument about literature
