After reading sections from Gad Saad’s book, and having him talk about it with us in class, i feel that he did a great job explaining the concepts he was talking about by giving hard evidence of them. For example, in class we talked about victimology (I thought that whole section was interesting) and he gave examples of people who did studies and then when those studies did not provide the results they wanted they took on a victimhood stance. Two examples that I remember from the reading Gad also brought up in class which was the one where Israelis were dehumanizing the Palestinians because they were not raping them and then the other was the graduate student who wore a hijab for a certain number of days and even though everyone was nice to her during that time she still kept her thesis the same and said that people were overly nice as a why to compensate for their “concealed bigotry.” (page 111)
The last of these two stood out to me because it seems people think that other people have hidden agendas or something which would mean that they are mixing their emotions with their ability to think rationally about something. Thinking that people have hidden agendas would assume that that person would have some diabolical intent or something like that.
The whole concept of ideological pathogens I found to be quite interesting.
This is only the 2nd time in my bucknell career (that I can remember) that i have had a guest speaker come and talk in the class that was NOT associated with the school. This also makes me ask questions of why is that the case? Since bringing in outside professionals or professors from other schools makes class more engaging since students get to ask basically any range of questions they want (including uncomfortable topics).
Going off of what i mentioned earlier, i did like that he did a good job explaining things but that does not mean that i agree with everything he was talking about.