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real power of the sociological imagination is found in how you and I learn to distinguish between the personal and social levels in our own lives

C. Wright Mills (1916-1962

neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both"

50 percent of all college students in the country never graduate, we call that a larger social issue.

Does sociology provide personal and larger social insight

Be aware of the three-strike issue

Know which factors you can control

larger social factors that have historically contributed to these patterns

brief spike in divorce after World War II

It was the highest rate of marriages, highest rate of births (The Baby Boom began in 1946

Divorces continue to be high during economic prosperity

ecline during economic hardships.

abundance of single women

urban

enslaved to those force

They still impact you, and you can follow Mill’s ideas and manage as best you can within your power concerning consequences of these forces

exploring the effects of new media on society and culture

The knowledge is all around people and a lot of advanced technology is so ubiquitous that it makes connection, organising, sharing and learning easier than ever before

new culture and environment

they mediate relationships. Media changes, relationships change and the culture changes.

media helped the people there in a big way

Media is therefore not just tools and communication

Think about how we watch TV. We watch TV for the content, but the content drives relationships. We watch TV while at dinner, we congregate in groups to watch sport. These are the conversations that create our culture

a brief history of the phrase

it's a way for people to raise their personality and not be indistinguishable. More people want to be important today - more people want to be the new American Ido

We all need identity and recognition and the media keeps bombarding us with messages of the kind of people we should become. The search for the authentic self leads us towards self-centered modes of self-fulfillment and disagreement on several things - values, views, approaches. We're more disengaged and more fragmented. The new media revolution is creating the cultural background for this kind of a change.

micro-learning

This is the

Colorism can occur within one’s own community, or across racial and ethnic groups

any other “racial” group.

Our more systematic historical research shows that the importance of skin color on life chances dates back at least to the nineteenth century.

it may emerge as an indirect effect of the person’s ability to take advantage of the higher social status that has accrued over many generations to light-skinned African-Americans

skin tone within a given race or ethnicity is associated with socioeconomic outcomes.

Being dark-skinned has psychological as well as economic, educational, and temporal costs.

“colorism” may be a direct response to the behavior of or, more likely, the appearance of a person standing before the potential employer, judge, or teacher.

people who suffer from discrimination may not protest it because they are unaware of their unfair treatment, because they perceive no alternatives, or because they see no means of effective protest. 

Light-skinned blacks tend to come from families with relatively high status on these dimensions, so skin tone affects educational attainment indirectly.

light- and medium-skinned blacks received shorter sentences for all crimes than the darkest category of blacks.  In every case except property crimes [i.e. for drug, personal, and miscellaneous crimes], the darkest group of blacks received higher sentences, on average, than whites

sentences are 2 percent shorter for light-skinned blacks compared with whites, 4 percent longer for medium-skinned blacks, and 2 percent longer for dark-skinned blacks. Those differences seem small, but 4 percent of a 2,560 day sentence (the average length for whites) is over three months of prison time.

light-skinned African Americans are relatively advantaged in the social and economic arenas,

they have a similar advantage as voters and political actors, and that dark-skinned blacks perceive more discrimination.

Light-skinned blacks may be slightly more likely to perceive discrimination against other members of their race, and they are a little more likely to participate politically.

So why isn’t colorism an issue around which blacks organize politically?

Public opinion in this instance was ill informed, insensitive to some of the most important implications of the tax cuts, and largely disconnected from

a variety of relevant values and material interests

light-skinned blacks as roughly analogous to middle-class Americans – certainly not at the top of the distribution, but enjoying enough benefits from the unfair structure that they would be hesitant to disrupt it too much.

he implication is that dark-skinned blacks ought to perceive that they are doubly maltreated, that skin color hierarchy is just as unfair as the racial hierarchy within which it nests, and that protest is warranted. 

the task is to understand their values on their own terms.

Applying this logic to the case of skin color discrimination yields several hypotheses.  Perhaps dark-skinned blacks are aware of their doubly unfair treatment, but choose to ignore it because they too care more about some other political value, such as racial solidarity or individual autonomy.

Similarly, light-skinned African Americans may recognize,

that “for generations of black people, color and class have been inexorably tied together,” but they too care more about racial solidarity than about either taking advantage of or fighting this internal division. 

in short, one form of unfairness may be worth accepting or ignoring publicly for the sake of fighting another, or simply pursuing some unrelated goal.

The deeply religious, in short, vote their values, not their interests.

At the turn of the twentieth century, both black and white media frequently used “mulatto” (and sometimes “quadroon” and “octoroon”) – sometimes favorably, sometimes unfavorably, but to a surprising degree simply as a common and unremarkable descriptor.

those descriptors were never used or were terms of opprobrium or shock.

one can explain the lack of collective attention to the unfairness of skin tone discrimination by pointing to the dissemination of and allegiance to other, apparently stronger values.

Racial nationalists have traditionally been hostile to black feminists or black Marxists who seek to draw attention to unfair practices within the black community

they are similarly hostile to any discussion of skin color differentiation because it appears to be a strategy of “divide and conquer.

the skills to make a lethal weapon.

Ape Genius - which gives a fascinating insight into the depth of intelligence of animals who share 99 per cent of human genes

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And most important of all although they can imitate, they can't teach or build on the achievements others have made - unlike more successful humans.

But if apes have the power to reaso

n, learn skills, feel emotion and co-operate in a frenzied tree-top hunt for Colobus monkeys as chimpanzees do, why don't we have a planet of the apes?

The leading proponents of this version of the argument are all associated with the Discovery Institute, a politically conservative think tank based in the United States, and believe the designer to be the Christian deity.

The scientific community therefore considers intelligent design a pseudoscience

ID proponents have sought to overturn the methodological naturalism inherent in modern science, proposing that it be replaced by "theistic realism" or "theistic science" in which ID presents a broadly theistic understanding of nature.[12]

a single system which is composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning".[40]

mousetrap

Removal of any one piece destroys the function of the mousetrap

bacterial flagellum of E. coli,

Coyne responds that in light of the evidence, "either life resulted not from intelligent design, but from evolution; or the intelligent designer is a cosmic prankster who designed everything to make it look as though it had evolved"

problem of poor design in nature

"What designed the designer?"

Invoking an unexplained being to explain the origin of other beings (ourselves) is little more than question-begging.

For a theory to qualify as scientific,[n 21][106][n 22] it is expected to be:

Consistent

Useful

Empirically testable

Based on multiple observations (often in the form of controlled, repeated experiments)

Typical objections to defining intelligent design as science are that it lacks consistency,[107] violates the principle of parsimony,[n 23] is not scientifically useful,[n 24] is not falsifiable,[n 25] is not empirically testable,[n 26] and is not correctable, dynamic, provisional or progressive.[n 27][n 28][n 29]

There is a gap in scientific knowledge. The gap is filled with acts of God (or intelligent designer) and therefore proves the existence of God (or intelligent designer).[124]