July 2014 Recent blog posts

Let us dig some more on this question of values




 

In my post on values http://connect.nmmu.ac.za/Blogs/Developing,-Problematizing-and-Testing-An-Applied/July-2014/More-reflections-on-values I wrote

 

Some people are indoctrinated by their community to take and adopt values and views and are raised accordingly.  They do not take the opportunity to scrutinize, test and evaluate both the values they share with their community and the contradictory values for this considered to be a betrayal of the community, family, country and ethnic identity.




As you know, I have a Research Tips moodle wherein the aims and wishes are as followed:

 

I wish to help with scholarship, scholarly writing and research. Practitioner-oriented students and staff seem to be overwhelmed by research and the research components of their courses. Research is the number one cause of drop out. I wish to make research exciting as a significant contribution to knowledge and scholarship.

The aim here in this forum (moodle) is to support Masters and Doctoral candidates and beginning and intermediary researchers in their research programmes.

To provide tips and advice, as well as resources and materials. I

To provide spaces for questions on and discussions about the degree programmes and research practices and careers.


The main objective is to provide an answer to the alienation and loneliness that many Masters and Doctoral candidates experience as they conduct their researches and to ensure that they get their degrees as quickly and smoothly as possible and in a manner that is pleasant and enriching for them

 

I have put this tip this morning in my moodle at

http://learn.nmmu.ac.za/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=10623#p35064

 

A researcher must know to critically reflect on his/her actions, intentions, plans and feelings and experiences.  There is no research inquiry without this that should become natural and should practiced again and again.




I am an Israeli Sabra researching Ontology.  I am becoming more and more fascinated with propaganda and indoctrination

 

Prof Karl Rogers, the director of the Dewey The John Dewey Center for Democracy and Education

asked me

how do we avoid the partisan assertion of bias (propaganda), self-indulgent solipsism, or the retreat into relativism?

And I am reflecting and posing very difficult questions that clash with everything the Zionist narrative is emerging into as this conflict gets out of hand.

 

This is my personal blog that helps me with my own research and teaching practices, and does not represent my institution or its views.  Except that I live by and abide by my institution welcoming of democratic, pluralistic discourse, freedom of speech and  critical thinking and challenging.  Never again we shall have an apartheid here in South Africa and anywhere in the world that is combined with propaganda, indoctrination and terror.  Challenging and criticism of the mainstream view is essential.

 




I had a conversation yesterday, Sunday the 20th of July, with a holder of the nationalist Zionist position where I presented the piece I wrote here on the situation.I tried to give him the contradictory discourse to the traditional national Zionist discourse and doctrine.

 

The traditional national Zionist is very simple, predicted and predictable.

Jews suffered in the diaspora, Jews go to their biblical homeland. Jews have the right to defend themselves.  Israel is right.  The Arabs are wrong.  Anyone who challenges this is an anti-Semite, if a non Jew, or a self-hating Jew trying to please the majority and survive in the diaspora, if ethnically Jewish.  

 

The result was an interaction that completely failed the Turing test in the sense that the other side inserted responses to my contradictory challenges that might have been written or scripted by a computer, AI.  I was fascinated as I never had an interaction that failed the Turing Test




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