My main takeaway from podcast #3 is that we often are confused about what we know and what we assume to be true. In reality, these are two separate entities that have two separate meanings. A lot of what we think we know is because of what we assume to be true. This ties into our conversation about the culture in which we live. Many people are so caught up in their own perception of reality that they use this against other cultures when they quote on quote “don’t fit the norm.” This is extremely harmful and detrimental to other races and cultures. Our skin color, beliefs, creed, sexual orientation, and even religion do not give people the right to judge others without an understanding of how another person’s culture differs from our own.

I think this concept ties directly into Hidalgo’s piece about immigration law. Hildalgo provides us with six concrete laws that give people the power to limit immigration. However, these six laws, as Hildalgo states, are what he calls “interaction restrictions that, “are morally problematic in part because they infringe on the liberties of citizens” (Hidalgo Pg.6) A culture and perception about immigration exists, especially in the United States. These assumptions fall underneath the same umbrella of getting what we know and assume to be true confused. We fail to understand the why and immigrant’s point of view. 

I found the different types of lies to be extremely interesting from this week’s reading. While I do not consider myself a liar I could identify several occasions where I have used gray, colorless, red, and blue lies. We unknowingly lie to ourselves and others on a daily basis. When I ask someone how they are doing and they answer with either “good” or “great” a lot of the times I follow up my question with “how are you really doing.” I am surprised that the majority of the time people elaborate on their original answer and even sometimes change their original response. What’s even more fascinating is that when I ask the follow-up question the person never admits they lied. They simply brush their original answer to the side for an honest one. 

I think everyone experiences gray lies on a daily basis, especially when you do not want to answer a question honestly or even at all. I like the description that colorless lies are often “self-deception” (Pg. 25). I really resonated with this in my everyday life. An example being when someone asks me how much work I have for that day or week. As students, we often tend to downplay the amount of work we have for an assignment or class. This “self-deception” allows us to be more at ease when taking a break or choosing to do something else instead of work. I think that blue lies appear most often in everyday life, especially within the classroom. An example being when a professor asks if the class has any questions and two things happen. One, no one says anything because it might be the end of class and they are trying to leave as fast as possible. Or two, students may feel that even though they have a question that the best answer to give is “no further questions” because that is deemed to be the best answer. All in all, I am more aware of how often I lie and how often others lie on a daily basis. Taking this a step forward, how exactly do you think we can prevent various forms of lying moving forward? 

I was extremely surprised at the results of the implicit bias test I took. I chose to take the test about weight and was shocked at my results that showed a 31% automatic preference to thin people. I thought this number would be much lower. I credit this to my involvement in athletics. My friend group is primarily made up of division one athletes who are all in tremendous shape. I believe this heavily influenced my answers on this test. I was also surprised because I myself am moderately overweight and I have always been about body positivity and acceptance of others regardless of weight. I think that this test is extremely telling not just for myself but also others in the sense that weight is a sensitive issue that unknowingly pushes others away from each other. I think this is something that can be avoided going forward.

I found the first podcast to be very concise and understandable. The main point that I thought was the most thought-provoking was the different impact that cultural relativism has on every single person in the world. Going off of the circumcision debate, I have never looked at that argument from the other side of the lens, meaning that those women who do choose to get circumcised in fact do not see the practice as genital mutilation. My main question about cultural relativism is whether or not people use this tactic to their advantage to justify actions? Specifically, do people use cultural relativism as a crutch to get away with doing or saying whatever they want?

The reading was also very eye-opening to me as I learned more about the correlation between morality and the truth. I made connections to 2020 in several ways, but the two main connections were the BLM movement and COVID-19. The BLM movement was heavily criticized and politicized when in reality, people failed to acknowledge the lack of morality in regards to police brutality. People fail to admit that whether or not a person did something illegal or not, it is morally incorrect to use the power of being a police officer to kill the people you are sworn to protect and serve. Mask wearing is another thing. Many people still feel that wearing masks is pointless and that COVID-19 is not as bad as it seems to be. The fact of the matter is it is morally correct to wear a mask because it protects both yourself and others. Regardless of a person’s view on the pandemic, wearing a mask is morally correct in this detrimental time. Finally, I drew connections to various arguments that we have studied over the course of this semester but this time was more critical of the way in which we evaluated premises and beliefs. It is extremely difficult to put personal beliefs to the side in order to successfully diagram and understand an argument.