Unit 1
What is confirmation bias: When you search selectively for evidence to confirm your preexisting beliefs (preconception). Example: If A believes the fish in a specific restaurant makes people feel sick and B that eats at the restaurant gets sick, A would believe that B getting sick is because of the fish.
Two Cultures: The discussion of two cultures resonates with my perception of the Chinese educational system deeply. Like that in the UK, the educational system in China seems as inflexible but more disorganized. Chinese students enter colleges through the Chinese College Entrance Exam, with a high school education that hardly prepares them to locate their interest of study. However, upon finishing the College Entrance Exam, they are required to select a major for their next four years in college, where it is usually impossible to alter the major, which students made with “uneducated” decision–not to mention that the division of disciplines in Chinese universities are sometimes quite confusing. With these barriers to students’ access to further resources and education outside of their intended major, it is only natural that the academia in China is also “culturally” separated like in the UK. The cynicism of philosophy students and the “nerdy optimism” of the natural science students are all too easily distinguishable from their utterly different and implicitly opposing comments on Chinese social media, which I sometimes found annoying–an immature act of knowledge flaunting without an understanding of each other’s disciplines. I hope to not be one of them.
On Bullshit: My confusion of the distinction between lying and bullshitting was unraveled by Frankfurt’s careful explanation. He explains that lying requires the undertaker to first understand what the objective truth is, and then misrepresent both the state of the affair under discussion and the teller’s own state of mind on the subject. On the other side, bullshiters have no regard for the matters discussed above at all, who only pick things to suit their purpose, let their descriptions be false or true. And I also find it very interesting that Frankfurt refers to St. Augustine’s essay “Lying” to demonstrate that most of the tellers of lies are not in the strictest sense “liars” but people who find lies as a means to an end, while a very small portion of people lie only for the pleasure from the articulation and spread of falsity, who are regarded by Augustine as the true liars. Meanwhile, I find the author’s explanation of the cause of bullshit at the end of the article quite reasonable. Based on his assertion that bullshit arises from the mismatched relationship between a lack of knowledge on the topic and the responsibility and needs to voice on the topic, the author interestingly states that democracy’s promotion of citizenship and personal voices have prompted citizens with inadequate comprehension to evaluate and comment on too many affairs happening around them, facilitating the production of bullshit.
Unit 2
Boal says: “the theatre of the oppressed is an unfinished theatre.” What does this mean? Why is it “unfinished”?: To me, the theatre has been a platform to narrate stories from the past while making modern adaptations to provide us with an imaginative narration of our future. Most of the stories of oppression, while having a start, seldom have an end. For instance, while slavery and blatant homophobic and sexist laws have been outlawed in the modern days, they are usually continued in yet a more subtle and undetectable way, such as structural inequality and unconscious biases. Telling the stories of the past oppression, in the more obvious and blatant original form, remind us of the history of such crimes and to not neglect their presence in our modern reality. In unit 6, I watched the films “5B” and “Paris is Burning,” both a form of documentary theatre that narrates stories of oppression, discrimination and marginalization of the queer community by the mainstream society. While the modern world has greatly promoted queer rights compared to the past, there are still ingrained systemic and perceptual biases against the LGBTQ+ community that need more work to identify and remedy. To solve such problems, we need to source their origins and sometimes documentary theatre is the best tool for such retrospection.
Unit 3
History, Colonialism, and Diaspora?: History is the past itself as well as the narration of the past by people. Colonialism is the forceful conquer of a land, its original resident, and the original cultures and the imposition of the conquerers’ rule, cultures, and other aspects of life. Diaspora is a situation where original residents of an area are forced to disperse to other areas due to political, economic, natural reasons and other pushing factors.
My new definition of colonialism: I have always understood colonialism as usually a physical invasion of an indigenous place with imposition of culture, religion, norms, and governance with force from the invading population, but never perceived how the interaction of the different elements produce the outcome that we examine in retrospect. Dr. Luise’s talk on Deconstructing Systematic Violence in Colonial Manila showed me how the conflict between the Catholic Spaniards’ religion and the unconverted Sangleys’ culture created the two populations’ uneasy coexistence in Manila that intensified into a mass massacre against unconverted Sangleys. Moreover, the talk also exemplified how the colonialists would justify their murderous acts. In the case of Spaniards’ massacre of inca noble soldiers in 1532, the justification of the massacre is self-defense, as a soldier commented: “if one knows the intent of the enemy, he should attack beforehand.” In the case of Manila massacre, one of the justification was Sangleys’ crime of sodomy. The talk gave me a fresh and detailed instance of colonialism.
Unit 4
Josephine Baker used her body to step toward a bright personal career as a performer. Her body was then used to represent liberation and integration against racism and discrimination, as she made unconventional (nude) performances and later promoted desegregation in clubs. Her body was also political for purposes of peace and humanity, as she spied on Germans during World War II. Her body was omnipotent, showcasing what a woman of minority and color could achieve in all kinds of personal, social, and political arenas.
- Josephine Baker is making representations of black people as primitive, exotic,
- It satisfies European fantasies of primitivism and animalistic nature
- It can be problematic because it negatively reinforces the stereotypes; it provides a negative stereotypical model for a successful black female’s entertainment career.
- Josephine’s choice to become a black female entertainment in this way not only reinforces the idea that black people are like that but they enjoy doing that.
- The symbolism of banana: monkeys; banana plantations; sexual diversity
Unit 5
Injuries may be the focus in grief as well. But whereas grief focuses on the lossor damage itself, anger focuses on the act that inflicted the damage, seeing it aswrongfully inflicted by the target
Transitional Anger. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/apa.2014.19
This distinction made between grief and anger makes much sense to me. Relating back to my personal experiences, grief does feel like a more basic and intuitive response to losses or damages, a mental process solely focusing on the fact that something is lost or damaged without further reference to other contexts of the event. Anger, however, contains a more complex layer of cognitive process that involves judging the causal relationship of the losses/damages, such as who is accountable, whether action that causes the loss is justified, etc. I always thought of grief as a richer and more complex construct while anger as a cruder one. Yet the analysis here challenges my previous perspective.
Unit 6
Paris is Burning
It has been absolutely tormenting for me to see the other side of the New York City depicted in this documentary. The queer community, rejected and neglected in the real world, had to seek refuge in their underground drag shows. It was a means for them to find acceptance and imagined normality, as a means of self-illusion and solace impossible to be found in the real, cruel world. In this world, “the idea of realness is to look as much as possible like your straight counterpart” and “you’ve erased all mistakes, all the flaws, all the giveaways, to make your illusion perfect.” However, it could erase the fact that it can only be a temporary refuge and the queer community had to return to the real world. “The ballroom tells me I’m somebody but when do ballroom’s over you have to convince yourself that you are somebody and that’s where they get lost.” Through this film, I have learned a bit more about the struggle of the queer community in the earlier days.
Unit 7
Shame, Pleasure, and Dilemma.
Shame might be the first movie I have watched that explicitly explores the moral, the sensual, and presumably the philosophical perspectives of sexual pleasure, instead of incorporating sex scenes just for sex scenes. Brandon, the protagonist, is a financial worker with a successful career in New York suffering the unresistible domination of sexual desires over himself. His excessive sexual drive and lack of self-control push him to a lascivious lifestyle: prostitution, hookups, unprotected sex, etc. His desire for sensual pleasure leads to his sexual indulgence, which in turn ironically makes him more and more tolerant of the sensual input, and more in need of extreme stimulation. Such a self-destructive cycle climaxes with the scene where he is physically orgasming but his face displays the extreme agony inside of him. It is that moment where we all understand he has lost the ability to obtain sensual pleasure, and this is more than that. His unrestrained sexual lifestyle made him unable to love others but only capable of having sex. Brandon fails to have sex with the woman he is dating yet immediately afterward has sex with a prostitute. Having his sexual habits discovered by others, his sister and his boss, pushed him to desperate shame, urging him to forgo all his bad behaviors but in the end making him resort yet again to even more unrestrained sexual indulgence. Even though the story of the movie is not widely applicable to the life of most of us, its message about the inner conflicts between our raw, animal desires and morals is profound. It provides a mirror for us to look back into the Brandon inside of ourselves, to examine the forces driving our behaviors and their regulating forces. Which one is prevailing?
