WWW www.habermas.org

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: January 13, 2006
Latest Update: January 25, 2006
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Topic of the Week:
Rage: When Beliefs and Values

Enter Governance Discourse

The Packing of the Supreme Court
with an Reactionary Constitutional Philosophy

Consider that most commentators are comparing Alito to Scalia and Thomas. Very, very conservative. Going back really to originalism. Consider the power of three on the Supreme Court. Consider also that half of us not only did not vote for Bush in 2004, but claimed that our votes were ignored through purposely faulty technology. How does that make the Supreme Court representative of the people of the United States? All the people?

Our laws permit this to happen. Conservatives claim that we have done this in the past to them. Certainly during Roosevelt's New Deal we did, and Roosevelt did consider packing the courts with liberals. He didn't. But neither did we work out ways to keep our legal system representative. These are crucial issues we need to talk about, amongst ourselves, with families and friends and strangers. We need to think carefully about how these issues are going to shape our future.

Illocutionary Discourse

Illocutionary discourse is discourse in which we try in good faith to understand the perspective and the validity claim that the Other is making. In this case, the Other includes those Supreme Court Justices who take ultra-conservative, originalist positions, if you disagree with those postions, or those Supreme Court Justices who take liberal interpretative positions, if you disagree with those positions. Either way, approximately half of the U.S. disagrees with the other half, so we have the Other right next door.

Please bear in mind that trying in good faith to understand the Other does not mean that you AGREE with the Other. Humans are the only species to have language. That language permits us broad interpretive understanding. Illocutionary discourse is about coming to see each other as human, and about making a good faith effort to embrace all humans as human AND different from one another.

Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Evolution

The nominations to the Supreme Court also represent religious conservatism, championed by the President and many of his administrative choices. So where we would normally not engage in theology, spiritual concerns, and secular humanism we now find ourselves needing to discuss issues like creationism, intelligent design, and evolutionary science. Social justice is like that. It tends to encompass much more than we normally consider. As we approach globalism, and try to stamp our own identity on the identity of others, we will need increasingly to have a solid base of reasoned understanding, so that these issues won't scare us, and we can engage in governance discourse, even when such sensitive issues as beliefs and values crop up.

YES, We Have to Talk About This, and RAGE Is Not the Answer

For years we have been taught not to discuss religion and politics. That makes for good cocktail conversation, but lousy government and neighborly relations. Sociology class is a good place to check out the arguments, hear all perspectives, and experiment with illocutionary discourse. Then take your learning home to family and friends, because we all have to learn to deal with these issues in non-stressful ways. Acts of God, Intelligent Design, and/or fellow humans demand that we learn to live together or die. I'd rather live, in peace.

love and peace, jeanne

NEWS, Announcements, and

Current Events Discussion Topics:

Grade Corrections, Fall 2005:

We processed lots of grades, removing the Incompletes on Wednesday. It'll take them a few days to go through the channels and get posted. I haven't picked up the new messages on learning records yet. Will try to get to these tomorrow.

These incompletes were the resulto of my inability to pick up your messages from transform_dom when we hit almost 10,000 messages. I need you to post them on learning records jeanne January 25, 2006.

Note that jeanne's e-mail is notfunctioning properly. That's jeannecurran@habermaas.org Reach me at tranform_dom until I can get it fixed.

Grade Corrections, Fall 2005:

We processed lots of grades, removing the Incompletes on Wednesday. It'll take them a few days to go through the channels and get posted. I haven't picked up the new messages on learning records yet. Will try to get to these tomorrow.

These incompletes came about because I couldn't find your posts when we hit almost 10,000 posts. I need you to post the numbers of your posts or just submit another copy of them to learning records, so that I can post them on the site for your future access. This was a computer glitch that occurred when we had to use Yahoo for our listserv. Please don't give me a printed version. I can't possibly retype those. From learning records, I can cut and paste them to our learning records. jeanne January 25, 2006.

Learning Records, Fall 2005:

• Statistics - Sociology 220
• Moot court - Sociology 370
• Helping Professions - Sociology 386
• Love 1A - Sociology 395
• Grad Love 1A - Sociology 595
• Directed Reading and Practicum - Sociology 597, 599

New Office

Our office is across the hall from where we used to be, SBS -B325. They moved us out of SBS B326 during the last week of classes, while I was having a reaction to the radiation therapy. All our stuff got moved across the hall, but it's in no condition for immediate use. We hope to get moved in by late January. jeanne

Syllabus for Sociology 395_01: No Child Left Behind Undergraduate Section. In Room SAC 3162, in the Old High School Buildings parallel to the Gym buildings.

Syllabus for Sociology 395_01: No Child Left Behind Graduate Section. In Room SBS F121.

http://www.quackwatch.org/index.html Quackwatch, a website maintained by Stephen Barrett, M.D.

"Quackwatch, Inc. . . . is a nonprofit corporation whose purpose is to combat health-related frauds, myths, fads, and fallacies. Its primary focus is on quackery-related information that is difficult or impossible to get elsewhere. Founded by Dr. Stephen Barrett in 1969 as the Lehigh Valley Committee Against Health Fraud, it was incorporated in 1970. In 1997, it assumed its current name and began developing a worldwide network of volunteers and expert advisors. . . . "

Call for Papers

Casazine - Online Magazine for members of Casa. "CASA offers a platform for people to discuss and combine efforts and information working towards social transformation. For more information on CASA 2005 Borders, Markets, Movements and to find out about the summer meeting CASA 2006: Constructing Social Change go to http://www.casa.manifestor.org/." Jeanne joined this group a couple of years ago, though she couldn't make their summer meeting. I think our goals fit. Some of you should consider following this. I think their summer meeting this year might be in Montreal. Check out the site. Contribute a paper to CASAZINE.

Conference in June 2006

Please check out the proposal I submitted on Christmas Eve. If you want to go, we need to start thinking about money NOW!

The Ecstasy Exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art through February 20. Just a few weeks left. jeanne

"Ecstasy" is the trippy, messy, highly entertaining survey put together by Paul Schimmel of the Museum of Contemporary Art here. It sprawls through the Geffen Contemporary, the museum's cavernous warehouse in Little Tokyo, which too often begs for attention but is now jammed with blissed-out mobs.

Visual Sociology

• Medical Care for the Poor in China
  Ryan Pyle for the New York Times
  

  "Jim Guilan, who has heart disease but cannot afford the treatment he needs, in a clinic on the outskirts of Fuyang, China, with a brother."

  

  Wealth Grows, but Health Care Withers in China "Rural Areas Lag With Fall of Socialized Medicine." By Howard W. French, New York Times. Saturday, January 14, 2006, at p. A1. Backup. The lack of medical aid for the poor and those who are no longer part of mainstream profit-making is a global issue. We will explore how this affects our concepts of "No Child Left Behind."

  Health care is a global issue in cost and in lack of access for the poor and elderly. These involve philosophical and ethics issue of our sense of responsibility to human life in general. Libertarians and liberals differ philosophically. Christians seem a little confused, even to many of their own, Backup of Wayward Christian Soldiers, By Charles Marsh, New York Times, January 20, 2005, at p. A 19.

• College Drinking

  

  ABSOLUTe EXCUSE

  We need to talk about drugs and alcohol, and prescription drugs advertised all day and evening, and their effects on our youth. Binge Drinking, Students, and Learning Reference list of readings. Essays and self tests to follow.

• Feminist Choice
  
  Illustration by Jeffrey Scales; photograph by William C. Shrout/Time Life Pictures
  Getty images; Betty Friedan inset, Susana Raab

  BETTY FRIEDAN REDUX
  "Her advice, that women must work, is debated once again."

  Backup of "Today, Some Feminists Hate the Word 'Choice' ". Articles and a few references. Essays and self tests to follow.

  

  Love Doesn't Conquer All;
  Neither Does War
  And What Shall I Say to the Other Who Will Not Listen? (Bakhtin)<.center>

Lectures, Notes, and Texts

Self Tests Self Tests Index, Fall 2005 Lecture notes with self tests on the substantive concepts discussed. These are not a "substitute" for actual lectures in class or workshops, but I have tried to cover the main concepts so that absence from class will not critically deprive you of the substance of our discussions. The tests are for your own understanding of how well you have grasped the concepts. If you are confused, please make sure you clarify the concepts with jeanne when she is available in the office.

In the Matter of Wars Being Fought Over My God Is The "Right" God - Investigating the Murder of a Pharaoh Include the quote on no wars ever being fought in polytheistic cultures over which gods were the right gods.Cite also Guilford on many kinds of "knowing," or intelligence.

• Self Test on One Right Answer for God Not Yet Up Up soon. jeanne

Mathematical Models and Reality: More Problems with the Arrogance of Knowingness - Reliable Knowledge and Error in Simulation Models By Mark Boyland, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. March 9, 2002. Our social constructs are really mathematical models by which we've approximated what we see for reality. Though we don't really calculate them mathematically, as one does with computer simulations, we do a rough calcuation with our brains. Unfortunately, we then confuse the social constructs with reality itself.

CompareRemarques sur les simulations Ceci n'est pas une pipe (René Magritte).

• Self Test on Models; Can We Trust Them? Do we distort them? Include gender M/F model and compare to homosexuality gender and sexuality model. Not Yet Up Up soon. jeanne

Tradition As a Source of Knowledge - Folk Remedies and the Arrogance of Knowledge We cling to knowledge because it matters to us. We need to "know," for knowledge is power. When someone counters our knowledge by offering alternative possibilities or concepts, our power is threatened. That's personal. We fight to preserve our knowledge as the "right" knowledge.

• Self Test on Folk Remedies and the Arrogance of Knowledge Not Yet Up Up soon. jeanne

The Classics As a Source of Knowledge - Why Study the Classics Many of today's articles are founded on the classic studies in sociology, psychology, anthropology, and even philosophy. By failing to acknowledge the importance of those who went before us we lose a sense of the historical depth of our field and trivialize the discipline by trying to fit it into easily publishable bits that can be replicated and extrapolated with relative ease for promotional objectives. Publishers want to sell new books, and authors want to get paid for writing new books. Distortion of the field if we forget the role of the classics.

• Self Test on the Classics as Lending Depth to the Discipline Not Yet Up Up soon. jeanne
• Self Test on a Quick Insight to Secondary Analysis of Data Huff's delightful choice of measurement in his article on Defending Our Study of the Classics. Not Yet Up Up soon. jeanne

Foucault, Magritte, and Critical Pedagogy “I'm not lying, this is not a pipe”: Foucault and Magritte on the Art of Critical Pedagogy by James Palermo, Buffalo State College, Phikosophy of Education, 1994. Backup.

• Self Test on Critical Pedagogy and Standardized Testing Not Yet Up Up soon. jeanne

Costs of War Costs of War A visual sociology piece on the way framing alters our perception of art work. Frames provide a context which lends meaning to that which is constrained within that context.

• Self Test on Costs of War Art Project included.

Urban Legends There is no overall librarian for the Internet who can check sources for you. You need to be aware of hoaxes and rumors that are reproduced so often on the Internet they seem true.

• Self Test on Urban Legends Not up yet.

Critique of Representativeness of a Panel "Critique of the NIH Consensus Conference on Acupuncture," Wallace I. Sampson, MD, FACP. On the Quackwatch Website.

• Self Test on Urban Legends Not up yet.

Famous People and Concepts We Should Have Heard Of, But Often Haven't

• Allport

  "Although he was no friend of Freud's depth psychology, Gordon Allport was convinced, along with Freud, that what Freud called "the American approach to psychology" was not only boring, but misleading. Compiling ranks of statistics, averaged across individuals, leads us to what Dan McAdams (1996) has called the psychology of the stranger. It describes everyone in general and no one in particular. It misses the personal meaning of life's events, and the individual ways of responding to life's events that Allport called traits. Allport called this statistical approach to understanding human nature the nomothetic method, and contrasted its emptiness and aridity to the richness of the idiographic approach -- an approach centered on the meanings and stories of the individual." from Chuck Huff, Why Should We Care?
  Backup.

  • nomothetic approach - "Compiling ranks of statistics, averaged across individuals . . . It describes everyone in general and no one in particular." (Huff, ibid.)
  • idiographic approach - "an approach centered on the meanings and stories of the individual. . . " (Huff, ibid.)

• Bandura - learning from modelling behavior (Bandura and Walters - well-known research team)

Academic Support and Resource Links

• A Range of Sources on Global Info

  Left/Right Perspectives - Cursor - New York Times - The National Review
  Arts and Letters Daily - The Economist - The Sierra Club - The Guardian
  Wall Street Journal - The Weekly Standard - The Nation - The Cato Institute (Libertarian)
  BBC NEWS | Americas - truthout - Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles
  Los Angeles Times - Chicago Tribune - La Opinion - The Washington Post
  Cursor's Al Jazeera Archive - Ha'aretz - Palestine Monitor - Palestine Report

  Indymedia - Mother Jones - BBC News - New Profile - KPFK Progressive Radio
  Progressive Sociologists Network Environmental Working Group - Mirror of Justice

• Mentoring

  Graduate Exams Study

  • University of Chicago Prelim Study
  • Revised Syllabi for jeanne's Fall 2005 Classes
    
  • Instructions for Tutoring and Learning Records Requests

    Some older files not yet revised for Fall 2005, but useful.

  • Mentoring Help for New Students with Frequently Asked Questions
    
  • Mentoring Help for Returning Students with More Frequently Asked Questions
    
  • Shared Reading Suggestions
  • Learning Styles

  • Home Page for transform-dom You can read all the messages on Transforming Dominant Discourse from this page. Just click on messages in the left hand frame. You can read the messages, even if you're having difficulty signing up.

  Preparing for Graduate Study:

• Test Prep Preview Joshua L. Stewart, recommended this site because it has free practice tests. If you're thinking of taking the GRE, the LAST, or any other graduate entry test, this might be a good place to gather some early information. Joshua suggested it for Praxis Practice, but a quick first look suggests they don't mean by praxis what we do. Check it out, anyway, if you have some spare time. jeanne

Resource Literacy

• Urban Legends Reference Pages. They post rumors and scams and phony e-mails circulating, to offer you a quick check. It worked for me. I entered "Fat Boy" as a google seacrch, and when I saw the Snopes.com link, I knew it would help, and it did. To not check your sources is as grievous as to plagiarize someone else's information and writing. A Page from Urban Legends As an Example.

• the-artists.org Good quick reference site with many of the artists, art schools, and visual approaches to present social issue that we discuss. Added April 8, 2005.

• Plagiarism Watch www.streetgangs.com site. The intelligent and effective use of resources means that you have to be careful not to plagiarize other people's material. We have several files on plagiarism, but I think the one that might make the most sense to you is this complaint on streetgangs.com. They give you samples of sites that have taken their material without citation, even at colleges, and they also give you examples of sites that have used their material with proper attribution. I find the irony poetic, and hope that their message will get through to you the importance of attribution. Dr. O'Connor on his Mega Criminal Justice site led me to streetgangs.com and noted that others frequently hack into the site. For that reason I have created a backup copy for your use in case you cannot access the actual site. Please be sure to attribute any citation to streetgangs.com. jeanne Backup.

  You might want to consider also the information on Dr.Woo Suk Hwang of South Korea:

  "Therapeutic Cloning Was a Fraud"
  By Hsien Hsien Lei, PhD | Related entries in Genetic Engineering

  One of the year’s biggest stories in bioscience appears to have been make-believe. In May, scientists in South Korea announced they’d been able to clone eleven embryonic stem cell lines containing the DNA of patients who suffered from diseases such as Parkinson’s, diabetes, and spinal cord injury. The hope was that the cloned stem cells could be used therapeutically via transplantation without fear of rejection.

  Now Dr. Woo Suk Hwang has admitted to fabricating the results. Nine of the 11 colonies of stem cells featured in the study published in the journal Science apparently don’t exist and the other two may not have been real either. The researchers involved have asked Science to retract their paper." From geneticsandhealth.com, consulted on December 26, 2005.

Using Academic Language Effectively

Merriam-Webster Dictionary Search:

and Careers

• Resumes:

  • College Journal Resume Suggestions . . . Backup

• Letters of Recommendation:

  • Letters of Recommendation: How to get me to respond to your request. Many of you need letters. If you will follow this format, I can do them quickly and make them good.
  • Dog Letters If you do not give me adequate information, but do manage to get my attention, you may end up with a dog letter. That is a letter that says that you work well with people, that you are enthusiastic, that you persist at getting things done, and that everyone likes you. Of course, my dog gets along well with people, brings his ball to them, is enthusiastic, and persists at getting them to take his ball. Everyone likes my dog. That's a dog letter. It's so general it could be about my dog. jeanne

• Career Options You Might Not Have Considered

  • visual media and their interdependence with other means of knowing to understand that we are not totally rational creatures deciding things apart from our feelings and values. Wolfowitz (new President of the World Bank to aid developing countries AND principle advocate of the Iraq War) might feel very differently when he is exposed to visual and aural images of the poor developing countries that have not before been his primary concern. So we want to know how best to present those developing countries visually. And we might find that we can have a career doing that sort of thing, so it does reflect on us as individuals. Added April 2, 2005.

Sneaky Strokes and Flying Good Dogs

Flying Dog is also a painting by Zhang Kai. Best I've ever come across to illustrate our site with magic numbers and unicorns and whipped cream cats and now, flying dogs, oh, and Faupel's Flying Fish.:

• Icons and acronyms and what they mean in Internet Speak

• Index of Nice Things We've Said to Each Other

  • I Was Scared of Statistics
    • Jennifer Schwind, Fall 2005

  • It Feels Good to Make a Difference
    • Olivia Guttierez, Love 1A, Fall 2005

  • The Site Goes On - You're Always Welcome Back
    • From Angelique Hawley on December 16, 2005: Message No. 9072 on transform_dom.

      Merry Christmas! Jeannne and Pat and all the marvelous students at CSUDH that has shared in "Naked Space"

      I wish I had a lot of money so that I could reward all of you properly. Transform_domDigest is so wonderful.

      I can recall when being one of the first users in 2004 and I see we are at digest 594. my how time flies when we are learning and having fun.

      Jeanne you and Pat are the bomb!

      I continue to read the digest although I am not taking any of your classes now. The digests have been more informative than the school paper. Please continue to keep it going.

      Get rest ! I hope to see you .

• Flying Good Dogs: Whenever something happens in this or any other class that works out well, that inspires you, that helps in studying, whatever, take a few minutes to send us an e-mail. We'll post it where all of us can learn from it, including other teachers.

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