Pars pro toto, totum pro parte

*yuck*

I just edited content worth one full page of a tabloid without the liberty to yell at a few of the writers who came up with some of those articles. Qualitatively, it's fine, but that's a judgment I'm making in a vacuum: quantitatively, there's so much lacking in their arguments that I could throw the posts in their faces. Some of the posts are about the government's decision to allow the incursion of FDI in retail, and some others are about alternate sources of energy. The principle flaw I've come to notice in viewpoints against these entities is the use of synecdoche: the assumption that justifying parts will justify the whole (pars pro totum) or that justifying the whole will justify the parts (totum pro parte).

It could as easily be just me and my ideas, but 1) given the responsibility to evaluate the merits of such content - ideological and otherwise - and 2) expected to speak up against those issues, I find that the ink-space available for voicing views that are honest in the sense that they are not born as a result of expectations is really, really low.

*yuck*

As a journalist, one of the worst things, if not the worst, you'll have to do is work with people whom you disagree with absolutely, with content that you abhor but are forced to edit and pass on as agreeable. Such are the issues that will plague your conscience when you inhabit the lower rungs of the corporate ladder. This is not a rant that stems from cowardice or self-loathing but from pure regret born as a result of irrationality.

On Ambition

The purpose of ambition lurks behind a crudely fashioned mask of perseverance, resilience and desire; while it is none of them, what it is has been a matter of conjecture owing, more so than not, to the passage of time. Ambition, as far as I am concerned, is a pointer, and ambitious are those in whose service it points always forward. However, before it is contended that such a definition does naught to fulfil such expectations of itself as a designator of an individual's scholastic or industrial position, ambitiousness, I would implore, is a state of mind that has never once been proffered for invocation but is realized as, rather to be, the intended or inadvertent presence of certain traits in certain measures, i.e. will of mind to push and pull, strength of heart to sustain and forbear, and acuity of intellect to beguile and deter. Ambition, therefore, is the truth of direction assured the truth of such an assemblage and not, contrary to what it is regrettably believed to be, any one of the two.

Ambition reserves unto itself a certain qualifying dignity; had it not, then there would be no ambitious fools.