Author: mfs6039

The website I chose for an organization that collects money from the public is called Alaska Wildlife Alliance. We were supposed to find an organization that doesn’t really mean much to us. As I am not an animal abuser or anything, I am simply not interested in the wildlife and animal abuse. I am not an animal person in general.

Some logical appeals they gave were statistics of different wild animals that were being abuses. They also gave background on how they started finding these animals, and the risk of this. They stated that if certain wildlife were to continue to be abused, this would ultimately result in extinction. They also presented an ecosystem approach and how it is good for the environment.

Colleges and Universities should work to help limit the norms of rape culture and get students and staff more educated and make punishments more strict.

I think this subject is very big being that we are in college. This is something that every college and university deals with.  But I feel schools should fix the way this problem is dealt with. For example, at Penn State we get emails every day about a rape that has happened on campus. These emails come in so much that we are desensitized to the topic. We just expect it to happen. Also the place where these sexual assaults happen are just given a slap on the wrist or a  warning, then continue to do the same thing. This is like an on-going cycle. There are also other colleges that make it very difficult for students to even report a rape. Big institutions that don’t want to tarnish their names tend to ignore big problems like these.

Some research questions would include:

• Sexual assaults each year at big colleges
• Of those sexual assaults reported, how many students are expelled or suspended?
• Comparison of students expelled from academic violation and students expelled for sexual assaults

The deliberation I attended was one that was about raising mental health awareness in schools. As a psychology major, this just caught my eye. Mental health is and has been an ongoing issue in the United States for a long time now. I was interested to see how they would pull together this deliberation with the fact that mental health in high schools is such a wide and broad topic.

To start off  the deliberation, the group started off with some statistics and a story to grab the attention of the audience. They said one in five students will and do suffer from a mental health issue. The story that they told was about a girl that was in high school and wanted to go to some type of counseling for the academic stress that she was facing. The guidance counselor told her that according to the school rules, this was only for people that had a death in the family. I feel this information opened up the room and made everyone realize how big of an issue this is. This is prioritizing the key values at stake, one of Gastil’s criteria. They identifies the problem in a way that would make the audience sit back and reflect on their own opinions and values upon the subject. They also created a solid information base based on experiences and facts.

This deliberation was split up into portions. The first portion of this was the awareness portion. They talked about how it is important for students to be aware of the resources that they have in the schools regarding mental health. They suggested that all schools should have assemblies and individual conversations with students more often to ensure that the students are well aware of the resources and the guidance that is given to them throughout the school year. During the questions part of the deliberation, there was some controversy as some people asked why students could not reach out first. Students replied with not all students are willing to reach out and communicate with their counselors as they might be reserved. This falls into the category of considering other’s ideas, another one of Gastil’s criteria. It could also tie into respecting other participants and ensuring mutual comprehension which are two more criteria.

The next portion was prevention. They pitched that a great way to prevent mental health in schools is to reduce the amount of work load that students are given. They stressed that students who work outside jobs, play sports or any other extracurricular activities can be faced with plenty stress trying to balance everything. In the audience, students agreed with this as they said that having multiple exams in one day could cause plenty of stress on them.

The last portion of the deliberation was about mental treatments. The group started off with statistics of how many people know about mental health treatments and how many people actually get them. This eventually turned into the audience speaking and sharing different perspectives and experiences about mental health. This conversation eventually led to the discussion of the stigma surrounding mental health and why some people are hesitant to open up about mental health. Since everyone in the room had a chance to speak, this follows adequately distributing the speaking, another one of Gastil’s criteria.

Overall, I think it was an interesting deliberation. It was cool to see all of the different views from teachers, faculty, and students on this topic. Although, I was confused as to why they did mental health in high schools, but not in college. I think that topic would have been something they can related to more.

In class, one of our deliberation topics is Medical Marijuana. This is something that has been legalized since 2011 in 16 states. The purpose for this is to allow people that need marijuana to possess it in small amounts for their medical conditions. Although more states are starting to legalize medical marijuana, this is still a gray area. Under Federal Laws, it is still illegal. So where does this leave college students that need to have it on campus? This is where some controversy comes in. Should medical marijuana be allowed on campuses and in dorms? If so, what forms of this substance are acceptable? Should it just be edibles, joints, or both?

My thoughts on this topic is that I feel it should be legal. If students are able to have it anywhere else and they are living on campus, it should be available to them. This is like an inhaler, if you have asthma you should have it by you at all times. For people that absolutely need this for like anxiety attacks or any other serious issues, this resource should be something that is available to them if they need it, not to their disadvantage.

https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cannabis/19/10/14697260/medical-marijuana-on-college-campuses-is-it-allowed-should-it-be

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/medical-marijuana-college-campuses-allowed-222642062.html

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/us-visa-pregnant-women_n_5e28ccd0c5b6779e9c2d4379

The post that I decided to use for an online deliberation is a story from HuffPost. This story is about how the U.S is planning to impose Visa restrictions on pregnant women. This would restrict women from birth tourism which is people traveling to the U.S and having babies so that their babies have a U.S passport.

The comments to this story were very controversial as there were many different opinions. They did follow some of the deliberation criteria as well. Most comments were about what we can do to avoid or fix this problem. The people in the comments were providing many ways in which they could address  this problem. There were people that agreed with this change and people that were very against it. I don’t think people with totally different opinions bashes each other necessarily, they really just talked and discussed their views which ties into respecting other participants in Gastil’s deliberation criteria. This could also tie in with ensuring mutual comprehension as the spoke specifically addressing each other’s opinion instead of just arguing past each other.

The picture I chose for this blog is a picture of Ruby Bridges. She is a civil rights activist and the first African American child to desegregate William Frantz elementary school in Louisiana.

By looking at this picture, I can easily say that it argues the struggle of blacks to get an education and that this act of discrimination and hate was not just toward older blacks, but innocent children as well. First, you can see that the people around her protecting her are white. This explains that blacks did  not have any say or voice. The fact that she had to have all these white men with her just to go to school conveys that message. Also they have no face as well which stands out. It is just their bodies. They have no identity.

This says a lot about her character. These men are so much older than her and more superior and she is still there. She also could have easily quit the school but still decided to keep on going there despite all the threats she was getting and white mobs waiting for her outside her school. You can also see the graffiti in the background that protesters have put up. She walks right past the hateful words and continues to go to school. This picture is truly powerful as well as Ruby Bridges.

 

The TED talk that I watched was on the Illuminati. The Illuminati is something that has been around for a long time and is still allegedly going on in today’s society. This talk basically just went over the history of the Illuminati and where it originated from.

Some important ideas I took from this speech is when the Illuminati started which was in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt. He was a church professor that was  stressed out about the ideologies of churches back then. He then took his ideas and views and started a secret society now known as the Illuminati.

He started this based off a group called the Freemasons and recruited people off of their high rankings in that group. This group was also based on people with wealth and class. Many believed these societies tried to undermine religions, but the main idea if this group was just to keep religion away from governance. Right when this group had a strong influence on the government, all societies were banned. Today, there are still theories and multiple conspiracies that people of high social status especially in the music industry are still involved in the Illuminati.

In this talk the speaker has great transition and a great flow while speaking. He is very clear and you can understand what he is talking about. The pictures go along with what he is saying as well and are visually clear.

Link to TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/chip_berlet_are_the_illuminati_real/transcript

This speech is given by Mitzchilouise S. Baylosis. She was a finalist from from Batasan Hills High School. This speech is for the extemporaneous speech contest.

I feel she did a great job on this speech for not using any notes or text. The speech was well delivered. She didn’t have her head down or was not looking around, her eye contact was always towards the audience. For being as small as she is, she also projected her voice and made it sound loud and clear. She did not stumble or mess up any words which again I think is amazing for not even using note cards or any sources. She also did not look stiff at all using hand gestures as a sense of engagement.

The speech really hits home on the persuasive appeals, though. She is told to convince the audience to watch her favorite movie or T.V show. She picks the movie that is the most emotional  and appeals to the senses. The plot of the movie she picks is about a young boy with disabilities, but who loves to draw and is very good at. But she explains how society and his parents doubted him because of his disabilities and his inability to be normal. She then say “just like we need senators, and a president, we need those kind of people in this world.” This then makes people actually think about what she is saying and relate it back to politics and how their life would be different without it. It also forces them to put themselves in someone else’s shoes and show empathy. I think this speech was very well given.

In this article, the author calls studies “bunk.” He is arguing that most studies that  are shown today are not reliable. He notes in the article that “studies show whatever someone wants them to.” He also uses Malcolm Goodwell and his book “Outlier” as an example .Gladwell argues how everyone is born the same and no one is born better than anyone else.

 

I feel for the paradigm shift it is important to stay away from bunked research. Is it really representing the whole population? Also some studies are biased or use specific people for studies so it is very easy to get a bunked study. It is also very concerning that most of the experimenters were unable to repeat their own experiment, or even someone else’s experiment. Once again, there are a lot of studies out there, but this shows that very few are reliable and can be repeated. For research for a paradigm shift, the research that you are presenting, especially to show the shift, has to be very reliable and valid.