Fall 2024 ENG 102: First Essay Topics for Student Essays

The rising popularity of cosmetic surgery among young people, driven by social media and popular culture, is reshaping perceptions of beauty and self-worth
The Criminal Mind: What Makes a Murderer? Is it Learned or our Genetics?

Is the Death Penalty helping society
The Positive of The Negative: A Critique of the Myth of Positive Thinking
Abortion - a Pro-choice Argument
Fast Fashion, Please Slow Down
The Importance of Nature to Our Mental Well- Being
Video Games: The Underrated Story Medium
Inflation and How it is Destroying The Economy
The Negative Impact of Social Media on the Young
Social Media: The Negative Impact on Our Society
Ultra-processed food is an addiction and what we are consuming is progressively killing us
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world
Gambling, and Why it Should be Regulated by The Government
The Ongoing Struggle for Equitable Treatment of Artists
Plastic as a Pollutant: How Harmful is it to the Environment
Disability Rights: We Are Human Too
Conspiracy theories: the more they’re denied the harder people fight.
Fitness: The Power of the Mind and Body

Agape: An exploration of “love” in the Christian faith
Exploring the Themes of Fate, Morality, and Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s and the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men
A Critique of America's Tipping Culture

Importance of Mental Health
The Effects of Drugs on Athletes
Psychological Analysis of Marvel Characters
The internal military conflicts and civil war in Burma (Myanmar)
Serial Killers: Are They Born or Created?
The impact of a ketogenic diet on mental and physical well-being
The Bible’s Authority in Modern Ethics

Eschatology: The Study of the Biblical End Time
Artificial Intelligence: The Impact on Jobs
Marilyn Monroe: The story behind the blonde beauty

On Social Suffering, Healing, and Art
We need proper mental healthcare in America's prison system

Don’t That Picture Look Dusty?: An Argument for the Continuing Relevance of the Western Genre
The History and Psychology of Advertising
Modern-Day Propaganda: The Biggest Influence on Young Voters
Ancient Slavic pagan myths are not just interesting stories, fairy tales, or legends but also a legacy of ancient knowledge.
Problems with funding and performance of social care in America
The Negative Impact of Electric Vehicles
Social Media: Disconnected Minds
Overmedicating of Prescription Drugs & Loss of “Drug War”
Identify and control your anxiety
Unraveling the Tragedy: Addressing Injuries and Fatalities in Thoroughbred Horse Racing
Improving STEM Education in Grades K–12 for Academic Achievement and Job Readiness
The Origins of you: How your childhood impacts your later life

Why Read: A Defense

The Importance of Enterprise Management in Leadership
The Dangers of Pesticides
Policing and White Power
Childhood Echoes- How Early Experiences Sculpt Later Life
We as a human species need to form a solution to our destructive behaviors before it gets out of control and reaches a point of irrevocability.
Is Social Media Detrimental to Adolescents Development and Mental Health
Social Media: The Teenage Effect
Rapid Etymological Changes in the Language Used by Gen Z
Good and Bad Parenting and Its Effects on Children
The impact of poverty on overall health
Asteroid Mining: Is It Ethical?
Why is soccer so popular, and why is it interesting?
The Power and Influence of Microtrends in Modern Society
Social Media in Relation to Childhood Development and Psychology
Animal Experimentation: Inhumane or Progress
Cybersecurity plays a crucial role in modern criminal justice by enhancing the investigation and prosecution of cybercrimes through advanced digital forensics, legal frameworks, and historical context
Is Cloning Soldiers Ethical in the Star Wars Universe
A Defense of African American Studies
The Red River Gorge does not need a resort built due to economic and environmental reasons.
Black Education as Resistance: From Historical Struggles to Contemporary Activism

Eraserhead (USA: David Lynch, 1977)

 

A dream of dark and troubling things . . .
David Lynch’s 1977 debut feature, Eraserhead, is both a lasting cult sensation and a work of extraordinary craft and beauty. With its mesmerizing black-and-white photography by Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell, evocative sound design, and unforgettably enigmatic performance by Jack Nance, this visionary nocturnal odyssey continues to haunt American cinema like no other film. - Criterion Collection

Our Eraserhead screening was naïve and unexpected and for me had lasting impact, because when art enters our heads uninvited, leaves traces after it’s flashed through our consciousness, jars the brain beautifully so we can’t help watching wide-eyed, these experiences take root and give the imagination fertile reach. - Chris Vaughan

 
Eraserhead (USA: David Lynch, 1977: 89 mins)

Bond, Lewis. "David Lynch: The Elusive Subconscious." (Posted on Youtube: September 3, 2016)

Caldwell, Thomas. "Great Directors: David Lynch." Senses of Cinema #20 (May 2002)

Carvajal, Nelson. "Beautiful Nightmares: David Lynch's Collective Dream." (Posted on Vimeo: 2013)

Cox, Catherine S. "Eraserhead." Senses of Cinema #40 (July 2006)

Ebiri, Bilge. "David Lynch Thinks That No One Will Ever Agree on What Eraserhead is About." Vulture (September 16, 2014)

"Eraserhead: Who Hurt You David Lynch?" The Critical Cinephile (February 1, 2014)

Godwin, Kenneth George. "Eraserhead: An Appreciation." Cagey Films (ND)

Gonzalez, Francisco. "David Lynch's Eraserhead Explained." The Film Connosieur (November 18, 2013)

Graham, Garrett. "Made my film students watch Eraserhead and this was their reaction." r/davidlynch (2021)

Johnson, David. "Henry's Window is the Key to Eraserhead." Welcome to Twin Peaks (November 25, 2014)

Lim, Dennis. "David Lynch's Elusive Language." The New Yorker (October 28, 2015)

Lynch, David and Chris Rodley. "I See Myself: Eraserhead." The Current (September 16, 2014)

Sobczynski, Peter. "Defying Explanation: The Brilliance of David Lynch's Eraserhead." Roger Ebert (September 16, 2014)

Vaughan, Chris. "Strangest Damn Things: Eraserhead in My Head." Bright Lights Film Journal (October 23, 2020)

ENG 102 2024: Resources #27

    Communication is communion. When we communicate with others, we take something from them into ourselves, and give them something of ours.
    Perhaps it is this thought that makes us so nervous about the idea of encountering cultures outside the human. The thought that what it means to be human will shift - and we will lose our footing.
    Or that we will finally have to take responsibility for our actions in this world. - Dr. Ha Nguyen (Nayler, Ray. The Mountain in the Sea. Picador, 2022: 301)

Orinoco, Achelous, Mississippi, Nile ... Ganges, Hudson, Danube ... Styx and Lethe ... Namings of moving waters flowing between two banks, waters rolling as Time itself, as if veins of Great Mother Earth. River is vital fluidity; the rivers move through both the upper world and the lower world, over ground and underground, inside and outside: rivers of fertility and prosperity, rivers of forgetting, rivers of binding oath, rivers of commerce, rivers of blood and rivers of water, rivers of rebirth, rivers of death, rivers of sorrow, all presided over in our mythic history by beneficent deities, dreadful nixes or changeable river spirits, offering fresh or freshening water, living fish, clay, fertile soil, flood cycles and waterways as famously along the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates. The rivers have been the abode of immortals who have offered these many gifts of purity, cleansing, grace and a mythic passage to the "other shore." Nefarious river spirits can just as easily take life, claiming the bodies of  those who drown in swift and unpredictable currents. The river speaks of life a s flow, freedom, movement, dangerous currents, drowning, running ever along, running its course, flooding, also as confinement, direction, holding, channeling. The river reminds us that we can never rise above our source; all rivers flow downhill from their source, finally terminating in a sea or confluence. Creatures can be driven to swim upstream, like the salmon, and others just go with the flow; rivers carry things and are transporting in ways both literal and metaphorical. And rivers can run dry, their beds worn and empty, signs of a changing course or season, nature living in time. Language is a river of words ... a river of poetry and music transporting the head of Orpheus; rivers are weary, strong, flowing, sparkling, gushing, falling, rapid, smooth, heavy, bright. Everything that lives partakes of the quality of riverness (40). -- The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images (Taschen, 2010)

Yet how could so many good, committed liberals - philosophers and statesman who were otherwise so dedicated to the ideals of human freedom and self-governance - allow chattel slavery to flourish in America. ...
The answer to that question can tell us something not only about slavery in America but also about the shadow side of American vision of self-making as a whole, an insidious undercurrent that will continue to run throughout the narrative of American self-creation. ...
Liberal language about human rights was in this regard often contradictory - insisting on equality and yet locating human dignity in highly specific conceptions of what (some) people were capable of doing. Those who did not fit the paradigm of what human beings should be, conversely, were understood as moral children, still needing the authoritative guidance of those civilizations that had already come of age. Thus, for example, does the English philosopher and statesman John Stuart Mill, a major proponent of the ideal of personal liberty who was nevertheless employed the the colonial East India Company, insist in 1874 that so-called barbarians are too intellectually immature to observe a social contract. "They cannot be depended on for observing any rules," he announced, and therefore "nations which are still barbarous have not gone beyond the period during which it is likely be for their benefit that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners. (76-78) Burton, Tara Isabella. Self Made: Creating Our Identities from DaVinci to the Kardashians. Hachette Book Group, 2023.

In the old days, when you couldn't show sex on film, directors like Hitchcock had metaphors for sex (trains going into tunnels, etc). When you can show more realistic sex, the sex itself can be a metaphor for other parts of the character's lives. The way people express themselves sexually can tell you a lot about who they are. Some people ask me, 'Couldn't you have told the same story without the explicitness?'. They don't ask whether I could've done Hedwig without the songs. Why not be allowed to use every paint in the paintbox? --John Cameron Mitchell, "How to Shoot Sex: A Docu-Primer" (2007): Shortbus Region 1 DVD release (Th!nk Film) 

Because we are ostensibly a democracy, whose citizens potentially have the world’s information at their fingertips, powerful interests work to ensure that we are the most propagandized society. Propaganda can work to purposely distort reality through targeted misinformation, but it also operates to distract through endless entertainments and disillusion through aggressively disruptive white noise chatter. It doesn’t matter how much knowledge is available to us if we remain blind to the possibilities of critical thinking and active resistance. This is not a hyperbolic conspiracy theory; it is just common sense that those who benefit the most from the current socio-political structure will work to reproduce the status quo and keep those who are not benefiting, who are even suffering, from recognizing their predicament. One important way in which propaganda works in a democratic society is to keep us blissfully entertained and distracted while indoctrinating us into an official narrative. This can be most clearly seen in the Pentagon and CIA directed support, funding and vetting of a range of TV Shows and films that follow a narrow and manipulative action entertainment narrative about American wars abroad while conditioning Americans to accept abhorrent and anti-democratic practices, such as torture. Three prominent examples are the TV show 24 (2001 - 2010) and the films Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and American Sniper (2014), all of which turned torture and assassinations into entertainments designed to reinforce a complacent American public's belief in the necessity of these acts of state terror. - Michael Benton, "Ideological Becoming" (September 30, 2022)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Eig, Jonathan. "King: A Life - New Bio Details Extensive FBI Spying & How MLK’s Criticism of Malcolm X Was Fabricated." Democracy Now (May 30, 2023) ["We speak in depth with journalist Jonathan Eig about his new book, King: A Life, the first major biography of the civil rights leader in more than 35 years, which draws on unredacted FBI files, as well as the files of the personal aide to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, to show how Johnson and others partnered in the FBI’s surveillance of King and efforts to destroy him, led by director J. Edgar Hoover. Eig also interviewed more than 200 people, including many who knew King closely, like the singer, actor and activist Harry Belafonte. The book has also drawn attention for its revelation that King was less critical of Malcolm X than previously thought."]

Flight, Thomas. "Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now?" (Posted on Youtube: May 23, 2023) ["In this video I dive into what Metamodernism is and what it looks like in film, and chart how the movies have evolved since their modernist origins."]

Galeotti, Mark. "Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2022)." New Books in Military History (May 5, 2023) ["Mark Galeotti's book Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2022) is a timely overview of the conflicts in which Russia has been involved since Vladimir Putin became prime minister and then president of Russia, from the First Chechen War to the two military incursions into Georgia, the annexation of Crimea and the eventual invasion of Ukraine itself. But it also looks more broadly at Putin's recreation of Russian military power and its expansion to include a range of new capabilities, from mercenaries to operatives in a relentless information war against Western powers. This is an engrossing strategic overview of a rejuvenated Russian military and the successes and failures on the battlefield. Thanks to Dr Galeotti's wide-ranging contacts throughout Russia, it is also peppered with anecdotes of military life, personal snapshots of conflicts, and an extraordinary collection of first-hand accounts from serving and retired Russian officers. Russia continues to dominate the news cycle throughout the Western world. There is no better time to understand how and why Putin has involved his armed forces in a variety of conflicts for over two decades. There is no author better placed to demystify the capabilities of the Russian military and give a glimpse into what the future may hold. Putin's Wars is an engaging and important history of a reawakened Russian bear and how it currently operates both at home and abroad to ensure Russia is front and centre on the world stage."]

Habib, Connor. "The Archangel Michael and the Challenges of Our Time." Against Everyone #275 (September 29, 2024) ["Michaelmas is the esoteric christian celebration of the Archangel Michael. How can connecting with the impulses of the holiday show us how to co-share their burden of those who are suffering; strengthen love through our will; and leave the path of empowering violence?"]

Hertag, Julia. "Timekeeping." Sidecar (May 19, 2023) ["Unrueh – ‘unrest’ – the title of Swiss director Cyril Schäublin’s latest film, set in 1877 among anarchist watchmakers in Saint-Imier, a remote village in Switzerland’s Jura mountains, is the term for the wheel in the centre of a mechanical watch that ensures its continuous and even ticking. The unrest wheel inside a pocket watch is so tiny and the act of adjusting it so meticulous that, despite the film’s extended close-ups on the mechanism, its workings remain mysterious. Even the detailed explanations given by a young factory worker, Josephine Gräbli (Clara Gostynski), to her fellow anarchist, Pyotr Kropotkin (Alexei Evstratov), who happens to be visiting the village, don’t entirely clarify it. When Josephine asks if he understands her, Kropotkin replies: ‘I think so’. If the functioning of the unrest wheel is largely impenetrable, Unrueh suggests, so are the forces revolutionizing production in Kropotkin’s time (as well as those that keep our own economic system running)."]

Hoag-Fordjour, Alexis and Sara Mayeux. "We the People: Legal Representation." Throughline (August 8, 2024) ["The Sixth Amendment. Most of us take it for granted that if we're ever in court and we can't afford a lawyer, the court will provide one for us. And in fact, the right to an attorney is written into the Constitution's sixth amendment. But for most of U.S. history, it was more of a nice-to-have — something you got if you could, but that many people went without. Today, though, public defenders represent up to 80% of people charged with crimes. So what changed? Today on Throughline's We the People: How public defenders became the backbone of our criminal legal system, and what might need to change for them to truly serve everyone."]

Kelsey, Janice and Paul Kix. "60 Years Ago Today: Police Attack Children’s Crusade with Dogs & Water Cannons in Birmingham, Alabama." Democracy Now (May 2, 2023) ["Sixty years ago today is known as “D-Day” in Birmingham, Alabama, when thousands of children began a 10-week-long series of protests against segregation that became known as the Children’s Crusade. Hundreds were arrested. The next day, “Double D-Day,” the local head of the police, Bull Connor, ordered his white police force to begin using high-pressure fire hoses and dogs to attack the children. One photograph captured the moment when a white police officer allowed a large German shepherd dog to attack a young Black boy. Four months after the protests began, the Ku Klux Klan bombed a Black Birmingham church, killing four young girls — Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair. We revisit the history of the Children’s Crusade with two guests: civil rights activist Janice Kelsey, who joined the Children’s Crusade as a 16-year-old in 1963, and author Paul Kix."]

Li, James. "America's New Caste System Exposed." 51/49 (Posted on Youtube: June 11, 2023) ["James breaks down two new laws, HF 68, known as the “The Students First Act”, which approves the use of taxpayer money to fund private schools, and SF 542—“An Act Relating to Youth Employment”, which allows 14 year olds to work 6 hour night shifts, allows 15 year olds to work on assembly lines moving items up to 50 pounds, and also allows 16 and 17 year olds to serve alcohol. Are these new laws meant to provide more opportunity to ordinary Americans, or are the rich passing laws to codify a modern day caste system?"]

Like Stories of Old. "Escaping Our Mental Prisons: What Psychedelic Movies Are Really About." (Posted on Youtube: May 31, 2023) ["An analysis of psychedelia in cinema, and of the philosophical and neurological insights it provides."]

Lombardo, Paul A. "Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (John Hopkins University Press, 2022)." New Books in Political Science (April 24, 2023) ["“Three generations of imbeciles are enough” were the infamous words U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in 1927. In Buck v. Bell, an almost unanimous Court upheld a Virginia law allowing the sterilization of people the state found to be “socially inadequate” and “feebleminded.” This landmark decision allowed the eugenics movement to take full effect, with multiple states passing similar laws. In Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), Dr. Paul Lombardo unpacks the case of an individual – Carrie Buck – to argue that the case not only represents the collective power of the eugenics movement in the early 20th century but an individual miscarriage of justice. Using extensive archival sources, Dr. Lombardo demonstrates that Carrie Buck was neither a “moral degenerate” or “feeble-minded.” She was a rape victim of sound mind. Her sterilization was based on fraudulent evidence. The powerful eugenics lobby manufactured a case – and a sympathetic court gave them a precedent that justified Carrie Buck’s sterilization – and over 60,000 sterilizations in the following decades. Three Generations, No Imbeciles frames the history of sterilization as essential to understanding contemporary legal fights over birth control and abortion. Does the constitution’s promise of “liberty” include the right to become pregnant or end a pregnancy? Dr. Lombardo’s epilogue and afterward outlines the connections between Buck and modern cases involving abortion, disability rights, and reparations for those sterilized. Originally published in 2008, the book has been updated in 2022 with a terrific epilogue and afterward with an eye towards contemporary events in reproductive politics. Dr. Paul A. Lombardo is Regents’ Professor and Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law at the Center for Law, Health & Society at Georgia State University. He has published extensively on topics in health law, medico-legal history, and bioethics and is best known for his work on the legal history of the American eugenics movement. His website houses the images and all documents discussed in the podcast including the petition for rehearing created by the National Council of Catholic Men."]

Longworth, Karina. "Thelma & Louise (Erotic 90S, Part 4) ." You Must Remember This! (April 17, 2023) ["One of the most controversial movies of the 1990s, Thelma & Louise pushed every hot button of the new decade: date rape, sexual harassment, the failure of the feminist movement to create real change for the working class, and how pissed off women were, or were not, entitled to be about all of the above. Though it made more noise as a media phenomenon than at the box office, Thelma & Louise made so many people so mad that it had the feeling of a turning point. We’ll talk about the anger the movie communicated, the anger it inspired, and debate its lasting legacy."]

Remnick, David. "Israel vs. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran — and Itself." The Ezra Klein Show (September 20, 2024) ["It’s been almost a year since Oct. 7. More than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza are dead. The hostages are not all home, and it doesn’t look like there will be a cease-fire deal that brings them home anytime soon. Israeli politics is deeply divided, and the country’s international reputation is in tatters. The Palestinian Authority is weak. A war may break out in Lebanon soon. There is no vision for the day after and no theory of what comes next. So I wanted to talk to David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker. Remnick has been reporting from Israel for decades and has a deep familiarity and history with both the region and the politics and the people who are driving it. He first profiled Benjamin Netanyahu back in 1998. In 2013, he profiled Naftali Bennett, the politician leading Netanyahu in polls of who Israelis think is best suited to be prime minister. And he recently profiled Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza. In this conversation, we talk about what Remnick learned profiling Netanyahu, Bennett and Sinwar, as well as where Israel’s overlapping conflicts with Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Hezbollah and Iran sit after nearly a year of war. Remnick and I were both recently in Israel and the West Bank, as well as near Israel’s border with Lebanon, and we discuss our impressions from those trips."]

"Tested: Questions of a Physical Nature." Throughline (August 6, 2024) ["In 1966, the governing body of the Olympic track and field event started mandatory examinations of all women athletes. These inspections would come to be known as "nude parades," and if you were a woman who refused the test, you couldn't compete. We're going back almost a century to the first time women were allowed to compete in Olympic track and field games, and to a time when a committee of entirely men decided who was a female and who wasn't."]

House (Japan: Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, 1977)

How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie House (Hausu)? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava? Any of the above will do for this hallucinatory head trip about a schoolgirl who travels with six classmates to her ailing aunt’s creaky country home and comes face-to-face with evil spirits, a demonic house cat, a bloodthirsty piano, and other ghoulish visions, all realized by Obayashi via mattes, animation, and collage effects. Equally absurd and nightmarish, House might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet. Never before available on home video in the United States, it’s one of the most exciting cult discoveries in years. - The Criterion Collection

House (Japan: Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, 1977: 88 mins)

Juzwiak, Rich. "The Joy of Hausu." Four Four (January 21, 2010)

Kittle, Alex. "House [Hausu] (1977)." 366 Weird Movies #71 (November 24, 2010)

Pridham, Matthew. "The Cutest Nightmare You Ever Did See: A Review of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Hausu." Weird Fiction Review (June 14, 2013)

Stephens, Chuck. "House: The Housemaidens." Current (October 26, 2010)

Williams, Evan Calder. "Sunset with Chainsaw: A New Way of Reading Horror Film Politically." Film Quarterly 64.4 (Summer 2011): 28-33. 

ENG 102 2024: Resources #26

I have tried to invent a story which may seem a possible, or at least not wholly impossible, account of the future. ... To romance of the future may seem to be indulgence in ungoverned speculation for the sake of the marvelous. Yet controlled imagination in this sphere can be a very valuable exercise for minds bewildered about the present and its potentialities (9). -- Stapledon, Olaf. The First and Last Men. (1930)

To come upon a lake is to come upon a fluid expanse of mystery, apparently still and yet moving. At lake's edge the earth is suddenly missing, gives way to another medium and appears again at the shore beyond. Hence our word "lacuna" is derived from "lac" or lake, and signifies something omitted or missing, a hiatus. The lake, for many people, has been a symbol of the land of the dead, of life gone missing into the fluid substance and darkness of another world. The contained reflecting presence of a lake has evoked many mythical ideas. For example, the lake has been seen as earth's open liquid eye at the edge of knowledge where all that is solid dissolves into a two-way mirror of the soul - a sometimes visionary, at other times hungry eyes that look up from the underworld below. Standing at water's edge and gazing out over the surface, we pause and give way to dream, reflection, imagination and illusion; to other worlds below and beyond in ourselves, making lake symbolically the entry, for good or will, into psyche's unconscious dimensions. (44)  The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images. Taschen, 2010.

"As citizens of a globalized world it is imperative that we develop a broader awareness of key issues. A quick exercise: Ask yourself: in how many countries are Americans currently engaged in active military missions? Or, how many American military bases are there around the world? Or, how many corporations control 85 - 90% of the world’s media that informs us about these issues? (Answers: 80 countries in 2017 - 2018, approximately 40% of the world; approximately 800 military bases in 70 countries; estimates vary of 5 to 6 media giants controlling app. 80% of the world's media and this is further problematized by the rapid spread and variation of new media). Some people would be surprised by this information regarding America’s "national security corporate complex" and the filters in the corporate media that ensure most American citizens remain unaware of the extent of our imperialism. How many of us could discuss in depth why we are fighting in these countries, or what are the democratic implications of media consolidation. Even worse, how many could explain the connection between American imperialist wars and corporate media consolidation?" - Benton, Michael D. "Ideological Becoming." Dialogic Cinephilia (September 30, 2022)

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 

Anderson, Elle, et al. "Love in the Time of Replika." Hi-Phi Nation (April 25, 2023) ["We explore the lives of people who are in love with their AI chatbots. Replika is a chatbot designed to adapt to the emotional needs of its users. It is a good enough surrogate for human interaction that many people have decided that it can fulfill their romantic needs. The question is whether these kinds of romantic attachments are real, illusory, or good for the people involved. Apps like Replika represent the future of love and sex for a subpopulation of people, so we discuss the ethics of the practice. Host Barry Lam talks to philosophers Ellie Anderson and David Pena-Guzman of the Overthink podcast about what theories of love would say about these kinds of relationships. AI lovers include Alex Stokes and Rosanna Ramos."]

Blocher, Joseph. "We the People: Gun Rights." Overthink (August 1, 2024) ["The Second Amendment. In April 1938, an Oklahoma bank robber was arrested for carrying an unregistered sawed-off shotgun across state lines. The robber, Jack Miller, put forward a novel defense: that a law banning him from carrying that gun violated his Second Amendment rights. For most of U.S. history, the Second Amendment was one of the sleepier ones. It rarely showed up in court, and was almost never used to challenge laws. Jack Miller's case changed that. And it set off a chain of events that would fundamentally change how U.S. law deals with guns."]

Fontainelle, Earl. "A Secret History of Secret History, Part I." The Secret History of Western Esotericism #1 (September 5, 2017) ["In this episode we borrow the following description of western esotericism from the website of the Centre for the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents and use it as a guide for the first half of a survey of western esoteric traditions: 

The term “Western esotericism” covers a wide spectrum of neglected currents in Western cultural history. As an umbrella term that intends to highlight connections and developments over a long period, from antiquity to the present day, esotericism includes phenomena as varied as Gnosticism, Hermetism, and Neoplatonic Theurgy, Astrology, Alchemy, and Natural Magic … 

We attempt to give a very basic introduction to each of these currents of thought and to the texts that tell us about them. If you’ve always heard that ‘Neoplatonism’, ‘Hermeticism’, and ‘Gnosticism’ were somehow important precursors to the more familiar esoteric currents which we know and love from the Renaissance and early-modern periods, but don’t really know much about these movements in their natural habitat, this episode is the perfect introduction. We also introduce three of the most important occult sciences, Astrology, Alchemy, and Magic, and foreshadow the complexity and intricacy of the textual traditions which transmit them, which will take this podcast from the muddy banks of the Euphrates and the Nile circa 1,500 BCE to the drawing-rooms of Enlightenment Europe and beyond."]

---. "A Secret History of Secret History, Part II." The Secret History of Western Esotericism #2 (September 5, 2017) ["In this episode, part two of our overambitious survey of western esotericism, we look at the second half of the summary borrowed from the Centre for the History of Hermetic Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, which mentions:

… Christian Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, Christian Theosophy and Illuminism, the currents of modern Occultism, Spiritualism, Traditionalism, the New Age movement, Neopaganism, Ritual Magical groups, and a host of contemporary alternative spiritualities and forms of popular “occulture”.

Our list has jumped from the occult sciences discussed last episode right into the Renaissance; where are the middle ages? All too often, this period is devalued in historiography. We therefore spend some time surveying the amazing flowering of esoteric sciences, Hermetic lore, the kabbala, and ‘mystical’ ideas in the middle ages, and emphasise the importance of the medieval Islamicate world in the history of western thought generally, and western esotericism specifically. We do get to the Renaissance (finally), and discuss a few key players. We then dart through the Reformation period, sketching the context of European death, destruction, and ideological warfare which provides a context for so much of the flowering of esoteric thought in this period. Finally, we make the briefest of nods to the modern period, the new types of esoteric thinking that have arisen in the period of ‘disenchantment’ following the Enlightenment, and their continued development today."]

Franks, Mary Ann. "We the People: Free Speech." Throughline (July 25, 2024) ["The First Amendment. Book bans, disinformation, the wild world of the internet. Free speech debates are all around us. What were the Founding Fathers thinking when they created the First Amendment, and how have the words they wrote in the 18th century been stretched and shaped to fit a world they never could have imagined? It's a story that travels through world wars and culture wars. Through the highest courts and the Ku Klux Klan. Today on Throughline's We the People: What exactly is free speech, and how has the answer to that question changed in the history of the U.S.?"]

Hanegraaff, Wouter. On Western Esotericism." The Secret History of Western Esotericism #3 (September 5, 2017) ["We ... discuss the thesis of his recent book Esotericism and the Academy, and in the process explore the contours of the historical development of western esotericism from late antiquity down to modern times, and consider the formation of western esotercism as an object of historical study in now almost forgotten polemics of the Reformation period. Finally, Professor Hanegraaff gives a cogent and forceful argument that the study of western esotericism is not just interesting to specialists and nerds (although it is), but absolutely essential to creating a more accurate history of the development of western thought as a whole."]

Olsson, Tore C. "What Red Dead Redemption II Reveals About Our Myths of the American West." Literary Hub (August 28, 2024) ["This near-universal decision to foreground the game’s western-ness was not inevitable. Of the ninety-six main story missions in Red Dead Redemption II (by my count), only a thin majority of fifty-one take place in a western setting, while forty-five are set in the Deep South, Appalachia, or the Caribbean. Why then is the game almost exclusively classified as a western? It is due to the simple fact that in American popular culture, there are no established genres called “southerns,” “Appalachians,” or “Caribbeans.” But for more than a century, there have been a jaw-dropping preponderance of “western” films, TV series, comics, novels, and, of course, games. Both the producers and reviewers of Rockstar’s game knew that of all the regions it showcases, only one is a deep-rooted genre and a national obsession."]

Pappe, Ilan. "On Zionist Mythologies." Against the Grain (September 10, 2024) ["Since last autumn, we’ve witnessed an unspeakable crime perpetrated by the state of Israel with our tax dollars. And that crime has been rationalized by much of the U.S. media. Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe says that such justifications rest partly on a distorted view of the history of Palestine/Israel. He suggests that dismantling the mythologies about the formation and nature of the state of Israel is key to fighting for justice."]

Sirota, David. "Milk Money." Master Plan (August 27, 2024) ["Ever wonder how America became so corrupt? It didn’t have to be this way. Our series begins in 1971, a time when hot pants were hot, bell bottoms were swinging, and campaign cash flowed like… milk. "]

West, Stephen. "The Frankfurt School: Erich Fromm on Freedom." Philosophize This! #151 (February 6, 2021) ["Key Takeaways:
Development of Individualism: Fromm compares the evolution of human society to the growth of a child, highlighting a move from dependence to independence. This individuation process, seen through historical stages from pre-civilization to modern society, reflects an increase in personal freedom and responsibility.
Freedom’s Double-Edged Nature: Fromm argues that increased individual freedom, while providing autonomy and choice, also brings isolation and anxiety. This duality is evident in modern society, where people enjoy unprecedented personal freedoms but also face the burden of making meaningful choices alone.
Negative vs. Positive Freedom: Fromm distinguishes between negative freedom (freedom from external constraints) and positive freedom (freedom to act on one's own will). He suggests that true freedom requires a balance of both, emphasizing the importance of using our autonomy to foster connections and meaningful actions.
Escape from Freedom: Fromm identifies ways people escape from the challenges of freedom: authoritarianism (seeking power or submission), destructiveness (acting against life and change), and automaton conformity (blindly following societal norms). These escapes represent a retreat from the responsibilities of freedom and individuality.
Recommended Reading:
Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm (1994): This book explores the psychological challenges associated with the transition from traditional societies to modern freedom, and how this shift can lead to authoritarianism.
"The Art of Loving" by Erich Fromm: A profound analysis of love as an art that must be actively practiced and developed, rather than a passive feeling. Fromm explores how love, in its various forms including romantic love, familial love, and self-love, is an expression of one's life and a key to human fulfillment.
The Essential Fromm: Life Between Having and Being by Erich Fromm (2014): This work encapsulates Fromm's views on achieving a fulfilling life, focusing on the dichotomy between 'having' and 'being', and the art of living well."]

---. "The Frankfurt School: Erich Fromm on Love." Philosophize This! #150 (January 30, 2021) ["Key Takeaways:
The Problem of Human Existence and Separateness: Erich Fromm posits that a fundamental issue in human existence is the feeling of separateness or existential loneliness. This awareness of being separate from others and the universe drives people to seek connections beyond themselves, often through love, to alleviate this sense of isolation.
Transactional vs. Genuine Love: The podcast explores the difference between transactional love (where love is treated as a commodity in a personality market) and genuine love. Fromm criticizes the former as being about mutual benefit and not true love, suggesting it leads to relationships that are shallow and likely to fail.
Love as an Active Faculty: Fromm argues that love should be viewed not as a passive emotion that happens to someone, but as an active faculty, a skill that can and should be developed. True love involves a constant, active effort to connect and care for others.
Mastering the Art of Love: The episode discusses Fromm's view of love as an art form that requires dedication and practice, similar to mastering any skill. He emphasizes the importance of humility, courage, faith, and discipline in developing the ability to love genuinely and deeply.
Recommended Reading:
Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm (1994): This book explores the psychological challenges associated with the transition from traditional societies to modern freedom, and how this shift can lead to authoritarianism.
"The Art of Loving" by Erich Fromm: A profound analysis of love as an art that must be actively practiced and developed, rather than a passive feeling. Fromm explores how love, in its various forms including romantic love, familial love, and self-love, is an expression of one's life and a key to human fulfillment.
The Essential Fromm: Life Between Having and Being by Erich Fromm (2014): This work encapsulates Fromm's views on achieving a fulfilling life, focusing on the dichotomy between 'having' and 'being', and the art of living well."]

---. "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Paulo Freire, Education)." Philosophize This! (September 12, 2024) ["We talk about Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. His critique of the banking model of education. The importance of critical consciousness. His Existentialist influence. The dialectic between oppression and liberation. The problem-posing model of education. The role of dialogue in learning and the co-creation of knowledge. Marx's influence on Freire. The flexibility of Freire’s pedagogy. And some responses to critics of Freire."]

Cultural Soothsayer - Music Mix #35

 Billy Strings; J.D. McPherson; Twen; Wet Leg; fun.; Pink Tornado; Leo London; Sir Hick; Fluid Druid; Abronia; Waffle Taco; Aimee Mann; Sinead O'Connor; Gorillaz; The Red Clay Strays; Spoon; Future Islands; Jose Gonzalez; The White Stripes; Honeyglaze; TV on the Radio; Father John Misty; Pink Fuzz; Bear Hands; Grimes; Slothrust; Beach House; Menahan Street Band; Alice Cooper; David Bowie; The Cranberries; Car Seat Headrest; Altin Gun; Elliot Smith; Blitzen Trapper; The Veils; Q Lazzarus 

Cultural Soothsayer - Music Mix #35

ENG 102 2024: Resources #25

    Traumatic events by definition elude immediate first-person embodied experience, and they tend not to stay within their chronological and spatial contexts. As Cathy Caruth has remarked, trauma is 'locatable not in the simple violent or original event in an individual's past, but rather in the way that it's very unassimilated nature - the way it was precisely not known in the first instance - returns to haunt the survivor later on' (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4). A traumatic event, in other words, is so overpowering that it cannot be experienced while it is happening. Instead it is reexperienced in delayed, repetitive form - through flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive hallucinations, bodiless memories of missing subjectivity.
    As a phenomenon whereby 'the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it' (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 91- 92), trauma constitutes a paradox. How is it possible for the 'most direct' knowledge of an event to occur as that event's 'absolute' unknowability? The difficulty of resolving this paradox is evidenced in nonfiction accounts of trauma by a persistent recourse to figurative language: trauma is (figuratively) an 'out-of-body experience in which the victim (figuratively) 'relives' the event that caused the psychic wound or the survivor inhabits a reality that is (figuratively) 'otherworldly. (153)" - Chu, Seo-Young. Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science Fictional Theory of Representation. Harvard University Press, 2010.

    In the forests of South America, hunters sleep faceup so the jaguar will see them as beings capable of looking back at him, and leave them alone. If they sleep facedown, the jaguar will mistake them for helpless prey and attack them. 
     We must understand not only how we organize and perceive the world, but how the world sees us. We must understand how the world around is truly structured, and how we are perceived by the other selves which inhabit it.
    If we are to communicate with a sentience that has gained language skills like the ones we have, everything will rely on how sensitive we can be to how that alien mind perceives our actions. Everything (189). -- Dr. Ha Nguyen in Nayler, Ray. The Mountain in the Sea. Picador, 2022.

 

Mythological images are the images by which the consciousness is put in touch with the unconscious. That’s what they are. When you don’t have your mythological images, or when your consciousness rejects them for some reason or other, you are out of touch with your own deepest part. I think that’s the purpose of a mythology that we can live by. We have to find the one that we are in fact living by and know what it is so that we can direct our craft with competence. - Joseph Campbell (from Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation) 

----------------------------------------------------------

Duffy, Katherine E., et al. "The World’s Most Beautiful Bird Lives in Yellowstone National Park: Behold the Peregrine Falcon." Literary Hub (October 12, 2023) ["Evolution honed peregrine falcons to be unparalleled speed machines. They have long, pointed wings, enabling them to swoop and dive in flight at mind-boggling speeds as they pursue avian prey, from small birds to shorebirds to ducks, that they capture in midair. Their bodies are tightly cloaked in sleek feathers that contribute to their streamlined aerodynamic efficiency—no fluffy owl feathers on a peregrine. Their nasal openings have a post that baffles air so that peregrines can continue to breathe as they dive. Being struck by a diving peregrine often kills prey instantly, but if it does not, the peregrine inserts the upper part of its bill, with projections called tomial teeth, between the prey’s neck vertebrae. With a quick twist, the peregrine instantly severs the spinal cord of its prey. As it flies with prey held by tightly clenched feet, each toe ending in a sharp piercing talon, the peregrine might even eat on the wing."]

Larson, Rob. "As Much Power As the President: How Billionaires Became More Influential than World Leaders."  Literary Hub (August 29, 2024) ["This is why class is a useful concept; as researcher Katie Quan has said, “Not to think in terms of class is unfortunate, since no matter what our ideological persuasion may be, class analysis gives us a way of viewing the world that identifies power relationships. It clarifies who has power." This is an excerpt from Rob Larson's book Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More]

Longworth, Karina. "Crash and David Cronenberg (Erotic 90’s, Part 16)." You Must Remember This (September 18, 2023) ["One of the only high-profile NC-17 releases post-Showgirls, David Cronenberg’s Crash was the kind of dark adult art film that the rating was supposedly created to support. We’ll talk about how Crash fits into Cronenberg’s filmography, why it was controversial when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996 and when it was released in the US in 1997, how it played into the UK general election of 1997, how it functioned as an early warning against charismatic billionaires, and how it embodied a post-Prozac and pre-Viagara moment."]

O'Connor, Anahand. "How the Food Industry is Influencing Your TikTok Feed." On the Media (September 20, 2023) ["In July, the World Health Organization issues a report indicating that aspartame, an artificial sweetener used in many low calorie sodas and snacks, was "possibly carcinogenic to humans." The new statement on a widely utilized artificial sweetener led to controversy in the medical community, with the Federal Drug Administration saying they saw no concern over aspartame consumption. Some dietitians even took to social media to voice their contradicting opinions. Anahad O’Connor, a health columnist at The Washington Post, the response to the announcement on social media smelled a bit fishy. In a report released earlier this month with colleagues Caitlin Gilbert and Sasha Chavkin, O’Connor found that dozens of registered dietitians, some with more than 2 million followers each, were paid to counter the WHO’s announcement. He and his colleagues followed the money back to industry groups like American Beverage, which represents companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. This week, OTM correspondent Micah Loewinger sits down O'Connor to learn more about the growing trend of influencer dietitians and the long history of food and beverage lobbies attempting to influence our eating habits."]

Tolentino, Jia. "On Children, Meaning, Media, and Psychedelics." The Ezra Klein Show (September 3, 2024) ["I feel that there’s something important missing in our debate over screen time and kids — and even screen time and adults. In the realm of kids and teenagers, there’s so much focus on what studies show or don’t show: How does screen time affect school grades and behavior? Does it carry an increased risk of anxiety or depression? And while the debate over those questions rages on, a feeling has kept nagging me. What if the problem with screen time isn’t something we can measure? In June, Jia Tolentino published a great piece in The New Yorker about the blockbuster children’s YouTube channel CoComelon, which seemed as if it was wrestling with the same question. So I invited her on the show, and our conversation ended up going places I never expected. Among other things, we talk about how the decision to have kids relates to doing psychedelics, what kinds of pleasure to seek if you want a good life and how much the debate over screen time and kids might just be adults projecting our own discomfort with our own screen time."]

Seaford, Richard. "On the Origins of the Soul." The Secret History of Western Esotericism #4 (September 13, 2017) ["In some of the earliest documents we possess from Indo-European cultures – the Rg Veda and the Homeric poems – the human beings depicted do not have ‘souls’. That is to say, they have organs of what we might call different types of consciousness, but there is no indication that there is a unifying principle which knits all the different organs together. Then, at the beginning of the sixth century BCE, something rather startling happens: in both Indian texts (the Brahmanas, Upanishads, and others) and in Greece (in the movement known as Pre-Socratic philosophy) the notion arises that there is indeed a unifying, bounded, and possibly immortal soul. Richard Seaford has a provocative theory, based in a sociological / anthropological approach, as to why this new and revolutionary idea comes into being at just this time in just these places. Whether you agree with him or not, you will not want to miss Professor Seaford’s masterful survey of the Greek and Sanskritic evidence for the first appearance of that most essential entity, the soul. Other fascinating themes touched on: What is the ‘Axial Age’, and what makes it so ‘axial’? The problems of dating the Homeric poems and the Rg Veda. The origins of the concept of the incorporeal in Greece and India. What money and private property have to do with the rise of the soul."]

Valis, Karen. "On Magic and Artificial Intelligence." The Secret History of Western Esotericism (November 8, 2023) ["We are delighted to speak with Karin Valis, machine-learning engineer and esoteric explorer, on the vast subject of how the fields of artificial intelligence and magic overlap, intertwine, and inform each other. We discuss:The uncanny oracular effects and synchronistic weirdnesses exhibited by large language models, Conversations with ChatGPT considered as invocation, AI as the fulfilment of the dream of the homonculus (with the attendant ethical problems which arise), AI as the fulfilment of esoteric alphanumeric cosmologies (and maybe, like the Sepher Yetsirah, this isn’t so esoteric after all; maybe it’s just science)."]

West, Stephen. "Resistance, Love, and the importance of Failure. (Zizek, Byung Chul Han)." Philosophize This! #201 (May 6, 2024) ["Today we talk about a potential way to find meaning for someone prone to postmodern subjectivity. We talk about surplus enjoyment. Zizek's alcohol use, or lack thereof. Resisting surface level consumption. Love. And failure."]

---. "The truth is in the process. Zizek Pt. 3 (Ideology, Dialectics)." Philosophize This! #198 (March 25, 2024) ["Key Takeaways - Ideology's Function and Risks: Ideology simplifies complex realities, aiding decision-making and action, but its uncritical acceptance can perpetuate systemic flaws. Žižek's Critique of Ideological Frameworks: Žižek examines how ideologies, especially within global capitalism, shape societal norms and individual actions, often obscuring deeper systemic issues. Dialectical Understanding of Reality: The dialectical method reveals the continuous and dynamic process of change and contradiction in societal and ideological structures. Necessity of Ideology in Human Experience: Ideology is essential for making sense of the complex world, serving as both a simplifying tool and a psychological coping mechanism. Recommended Reading: The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Žižek: In this foundational work, Žižek explores the mechanisms of ideology, offering a complex analysis of how individuals interact with and are influenced by their ideological constructs. Living in the End Times by Slavoj Žižek: Žižek examines the global capitalist system and its crises, arguing that we are living in the end times of capitalism and facing an urgent need for radical change."]

Zhao, Ben and Heather Zheng. "Fighting Back Against AI Piracy." Hidden Brain (August 8, 2024) ["If you’ve spent any time playing with modern AI image generators, it can seem like an almost magical experience; but the truth is these programs are more like a magic trick than magic. Without the human-generated art of hundreds of thousands of people, these programs wouldn’t work. But those artists are not getting compensated, in fact many of them are being put out of business by the very programs their work helped create. Now, two computer scientists from the University of Chicago, Ben Zhao and Heather Zheng, are fighting back. They’ve developed two programs, called Glaze and Nightshade, which create a type of “poison pill” to help protect against generative AI tools like Midjourney and DALL-E, helping artists protect their copyrighted, original work. Their work may also revolutionize all of our relationships to these systems."]

ENG 102 2024: Resources #24

We are, and have always been,a part of the world. We do not stand above it. We are "involved' with the world. This word has a sense not just of participating, not just of complication. but also of a curling inward, a coiling we call "involution." We are coiled into the world, nestled inside its processes, wound into its forms (365). - Dr. Ha Nguyen in Nayler, Ray. The Mountain in the Sea. Picador, 2022.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Art and the Natural World: An Entangled Life." Bloomsbury Visual Arts (2024) ["Envisioning the artist as a kind of fruit-bearing tree, Dadaist painter-poet and sculptor Hans ‘Jean’ Arp conceives of art as an extension of our bodies. We produce art, he suggests, in the literal sense, as we move and grow, sprouting artworks like berries in season."]

Bogutskaya, Ana. "A Deep Fear of Things Sincere." Talking Scared #209 (August 28, 2024) ["Anna Bogutskaya is one of the UK’s most prominent film critics, with a penchant for horror. She knows her scary onions. And in her new book, Feeding the Monster [subtitled Why Horror Has a Hold On Us], she asks an important question (well, important to the likes of you and me) – Why does horror have a hold on us? In concise but free-ranging essays, she looks at the prominent themes that sets the horror oft the last decade apart, peeling back the skin of the genre to see how it’s muscle flex and grip, and also give you tons of films to watch in the process. We have a similarly freewheeling conversation in this episode, talking about everything from our primal horror movie experiences, to the meme-ification of monsters and why Mike Flanagan is both outlier and heart of the genre." She is also the author of Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You To Hate.]

Flight, Thomas. "Why The Zone of Interest Does Not Let You See." (Posted on Youtube: May 2024) ["A look at how The Zone of Interest uses off-screen space and sound design in one of the most hauntingly powerful ways I've ever seen in a film. Featuring an interview with Johnnie Burn, sound designer who just won an Oscar for his work on this film."]

Gordillo, Gastón. "The Fascist Disposition." Verso (July 18, 2024) ["What does the word “fascism” mean today, when fossil capitalism continues its accelerated march toward a climate catastrophe and the liberal democracies of North America and Europe support and arm Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza?"]

Like Stories of Old. "In Search of Absolute Beauty." (Posted on Youtube: March 26, 2021) ["Media included:A Hidden Life; A Star is Born; Amadeus; Annihilation; At Eternity’s Gate; Baby Driver; Before Midnight; Before Sunset; Black Swan; Cloud Atlas; Days of Heaven; Doctor Who; Dreams; Equilibrium; First Man; For vs. Ferrari; Gravity; Her; Interstellar; Into the Wild; Knight of Cups; Loving Vincent; Nomadland; Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Soul; Sound of Metal; Sunshine; The Thin Red Line; The Counselor; The End of the Tour; The Great Beauty; The Greatest Showman; The Grey; The Intouchables; The New World; the Perks of Being a Wallflower; The Secret Life of Walter Mitty; The Shawshank Redemption; The Tree of Life; To the Wonder; Voyage of Time."]

Valis, Karin. "Divine Embeddings: From the creation dance of Lord Shiva to the multidimensional vector space of word embeddings." Mercurial Minutes (June 26, 2023) ["Language, in any form, is a divine tool, a bridge between the tangible and the ineffable. Not a territory, yet powerful enough to change us to the core, trigger emotional storms or religious experiences. From the creation dance of Lord Shiva, threading the Garland of Letters that constitute the universe, to the multidimensional vector space of word embeddings, the divine essence of language unravels. The dance continues, inside the boney rigs of A100 industrial-grade GPUs, into realms we are just beginning to imagine."]

West, Stephen. "Is Killing Animals for Food Morally Justifiable?" Philosophize This! #71 (October 31, 2015) ["We see this in our culture all the time. Go to the supermarket: there’s beef. There’s chicken. There’s duck, lamb, anything you want. Are we patronizing a cause that is inherently immoral? Not talking about factory farming. Even if you went out and hunted, is it morally justifiable to kill animals for food? Now, I want to say something right off the bat. I don’t know what the answer to this question is, alright? Just because I’m giving arguments as a podcaster refuting people’s criteria does not mean that I think I somehow know the answer and that I’m pompously attacking how other people choose to behave. Really, I have no idea if there is an answer here, seriously. What I want to do is illustrate the games that we play in our heads, how easy it is to keep two sets of books when it comes to these moral criteria that we have. And I want to do it in an interesting context, so this conversation is a good one."]

---. "Kierkegaard on Anxiety." Philosophize This! #79 (March 22, 2016) ["A lot of people are lost. A lot of people find themselves either lost in the finite—conferring their identity onto social conventions or whatever culture happened to fall into their lap when they were born—or lost in the infinite—stuck in a state of analysis paralysis about the truly infinite possibilities that they can choose from, but they never really act on one of them. And as we were talking about last time, truly being a self requires you to have the realization that, yeah, there are an infinite number of things that I can do, but it also requires you to actually make a choice and act on one of those that corresponds with who you truly are. See, when we find ourselves in this balancing act between the two, the finite and the infinite as Kierkegaard calls them, we experience what he calls a state of dizziness, dizziness caused by the fact that we look at the sheer magnitude of possibilities that we have to choose from coupled with the fact that eventually we know we got to choose one of them. As you can probably imagine, in this state our heads get filled with all sorts of questions. We start catastrophizing. What if I’m wrong? What if this is a huge mistake I’m making? What if I wake up one morning a 60-year-old, retired, Navy admiral with a prosthetic hip and I feel like I did everything all wrong. And this is the essence of anxiety, isn’t it? To fear some future outcome that we really have little control over anyway."]

---. "New Atheists and cosmic purpose without God - (Zizek, Goff, Nagel)." Philosophize This! #197 (March 10, 2024) ["As we regularly do on this program-- we engage in a metamodernist steelmanning of different philosophical positions. Hopefully the process brings people some joy. Today we go from ideology, to New Atheism vs Creationism, to Aristotle, to Thomas Nagel, to Phillip Goff's new book called Why? The Purpose of the Universe."]

---. "On Insecurity." Philosophize This! #72 (November 18, 2015) ["On today's episode, we take a close look at insecurity from multiple angles. We look at it as a stand-alone method of influencing human behavior and consider how it compares with other methods of influencing human behavior. Ultimately the goal is to understand a little more about why we think and act the way we do. If you want some additional reading, check out the links below on Kant's moral law; there is a strong connection to what we've been talking about in the last few episodes, including this one. "]

The Fly (Canada/USA/UK: David Cronenberg, 1986)

The Fly (Canada/USA/UK: David Cronenberg, 1986: 96 mins)

In the hands of Canadian body-horror maestro David Cronenberg, the 1958 Vincent Price vehicle in which a scientist transforms into a giant human-fly hybrid is reimagined as metaphor for disease, decay and the ageing process. Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis (a real couple at the time) play lovers whose burgeoning relationship deteriorates, the film cannily blending romcom, sci-fi and horror with results that are both revolting and utterly heartbreaking; Cronenberg’s romantic tragedy has often been interpreted as AIDS allegory. The special effects by Chris Walas, on full display in the grotesque transformation scenes – deservedly won the Academy Award for best makeup. – Katherine McLaughlin

Ayers, Drew R. "Vernacular Posthumanism: Visual Culture and Material Imagination." Department of Communication Dissertation,  Georgia State University, 2012.

Cargill, Robert C. and Brian Salisbury. "One Junky Summer: The Fly." Junk Food Cinema (August 24, 2016)

Cronenberg, David. "The Beetle and the Fly." The Paris Review (January 17, 2014)

Flores, Steven. "The Auteurs: David Cronenberg (Part 1)." Cinema Axis (October 28, 2013)

---. "The Auteurs: David Cronenberg (Part 2)." Cinema Axis (October 30, 2013)

ENG 102 2024: Resources #23

Monstrosity, for me, is always positive. It's about debunking all the normative ways of society and social life (1). - Julia Ducournau 
Quoted in Creed, Barbara. Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema. Routledge, 2022. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 

Bayne, Tim. "Exploring the Boundaries of Consciousness." NOEMA (July 25, 2024) ["A journey into the mystical hillsides of Nepal in search of answers to questions about which beings we can call conscious."]

Burr, Ty. "What Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’ tried to tell us." The Washington Post (August 9, 2024) ["The surveillance state that seemed so far-fetched in 1974 turned out to be a mild harbinger of the state of surveillance 50 years later."]

Dias, Elizabeth and Lisa Lerer. The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America. Flatiron Books, 2024. ["From two top New York Times journalists, the breathtaking untold story of the plan to overturn Roe v. Wade and the consequences for women, abortion, and the future of America. In June 2022, Americans watched in shock as the Supreme Court reversed one of the nation’s landmark rulings. For nearly a half century, Roe was synonymous with women’s rights and freedoms. Then, suddenly, it was gone. In their groundbreaking book The Fall of Roe, Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer reveal the explosive inside story of how it happened. Their investigation charts the shocking political and religious campaign to take down abortion rights and remake American families, womanhood, and the nation itself. In doing so, Dias and Lerer go beyond the traditional political narrative into the most personal reaches of American life. Reeling from Barack Obama's 2012 landslide presidential victory – and motivated by a spiritual mission – a small but determined network of elite conservative Christian lawyers and powerbrokers worked quietly and methodically to keep their true cause alive: ending abortion rights. Thinking in generational terms, they devised a strategic, top-down takeover at every level of political and legal life, from little-known anti-abortion lobbyists in far flung statehouses to the arbiters of the constitution at the highest court in the land. Broad swaths of liberal America did not register the severity of the threat until it was far too late. At a moment when women had more power than ever before, the feminist movement suffered one of the greatest political defeats in American history. With stunning scope, journalistic rigor, and unprecedented access to the highest echelons of conservative and liberal power, Dias and Lerer chronicle the end of the Roe era. Their deeply human reporting stretches from inside abortion clinics to the halls of the White House, exposing powerful behind-the-scenes actors and recasting the actions of those already in the spotlight. The result is a sweeping and intimate narrative of secrets, power, jaw-dropping revelations, and a beacon to guide us forward."]

Dorian, M.J. "William Blake • On Vision's Wing • Part 1: The Marriage of Heaven & Hell." Creative Codex #47 (August 7, 2024) ["William Blake is considered one of the greatest artists and poets of the English language, yet he lived most of his life in poverty. Why? Many of his acquaintances considered him mad while friends who knew his art considered him 'brilliantly mad'. What was so different about Blake? Join me on this William Blake series as we pry open the mind of this celebrated creative genius to find the true meaning of his enigmatic works."]

Jones. Josh. "Carl Jung Offers an Introduction to His Psychological Thought in a 3‑Hour Interview (1957)." Open Culture (August 1, 2024) ["... Jung describes the persona in plain terms and with everyday examples as a fictional self 'partially dictated by society and partially dictated by the expectations or the wishes one nurses oneself.' The less we’re consciously aware of our public selves as performances in these terms, the more we’re prone, Jung says, to neuroses, as the pressure of our 'shadow,' exerts itself. Jung and Evans’ discussion of persona only grazes the surface of their wide-ranging conversation about the unconscious and the many ways to access it. Throughout, Jung’s examples are clear and his explanations lucid. Above, you can see a transcribed video of the same interviews."]

Kennard, Matt. The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. ["While working for the Financial Times, investigative journalist Matt Kennard had unbridled access to the crème de la crème of the global elite. From slanging matches with Henry Kissinger to afternoon coffees with the man who captured Che Guevara, Kennard spent four years gathering extraordinarily honest testimony from the horse's mouth on how the global economic system works away from the convenient myths. It left him with only one conclusion: the world as we know it is run by an exclusive class of American racketeers who operate with virtually unlimited weapons and money, and a reach much too close to home. Owing to the very nature of the Financial Times, however, Kennard was not able to publish these findings as part of his day job. Enter The Racket, now in a fully updated second edition. This tell-all book, reported from all corners of the world, will transform everything you thought you knew about how the world works-and in whose interests. Kennard reports not only from across the United States, but from the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. In doing so he provides startlingly clear and concrete evidence of unchecked, high-level, interrelated systems of exploitation all over the world. At the same time, through encounters with high-profile opponents of the racket such as Thom Yorke, Damon Albarn, and Gael García Bernal, Kennard offers a glimpse of a developing resistance, which needs to win. Now more relevant than ever, this 2nd edition contains a new preface by the author and a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges."]

Kroll-Zeldin, Owen. Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine. New York University Press, 2024. ["Examines how young Jewish Americans’ fundamentally Jewish values have led them to organize in solidarity with Palestinians. Unsettled digs into the experiences of young Jewish Americans who engage with the Palestine solidarity movement and challenge the staunch pro-Israel stance of mainstream Jewish American institutions. The book explores how these activists address Israeli government policies of occupation and apartheid, and seek to transform American Jewish institutional support for Israel. Author Oren Kroll-Zeldin identifies three key social movement strategies employed by these activists: targeting mainstream Jewish American institutions, participating in co-resistance efforts in Palestine/Israel, and engaging in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns. He argues that these young people perceive their commitment to ending the occupation and Israeli apartheid as a Jewish value, deeply rooted in the changing dynamics of Jewish life in the twenty-first century. By associating social justice activism with Jewish traditions and values, these activists establish a connection between their Jewishness and their pursuit of justice for Palestinians. In a time of internal Jewish tensions and uncertainty about peace prospects between Palestine and Israel, the book provides hope that the efforts of these young Jews in the United States are pushing the political pendulum in a new direction, potentially leading to a more balanced and nuanced conversation."]

McAfee, Noëlle. "Civil Disobedience." Overthink (June 4, 2024) ["Do political subjects have a default obligation to obey the law? In episode 105 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss civil disobedience in the present context of university activism for divestment from genocide in Gaza. They chart the genealogy of the concept of disobedience in political theory, from Thoreau and MLK through to today. Together with guest Noëlle McAfee, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory University, they reflect on the relationship between legal protest, civil disobedience..."] 

Pfau, Daniel. "Neuroendocrinology (Sex & Gender)." Ologies (June 15, 2020) ["How many genders are there? How do you know if you’re queer? Is sexual orientation biological, and if so, how? The amazing Michigan State University neuroscientist and endocrinology researcher Dr. Daniel Pfau joins to share their path in academia finding the perfect research, understanding their own genderqueer identity, what animals in nature exhibit queer behavior, how hormones influence the brain, how important it was for them to find community and why the gender binary isn’t a good fit for a lot of people. They are just charming and kind and wonderful and this episode will help you understand just how many ways there are to be human. Also: smitten meadow mice, Gender Unicorns and Alie as a lion. "]

West, Stephen. "Capitalism is dead. This is Technofeudalism. (Yanis Varoufakis)." Philosophize This! #206 (July 21, 2024) ["Today we talk about the concept of Technofeudalism as described by Yanis Varoufakis. We talk about the comparisons of our world to the feudal system, the origins in the economic policy of 2008, and a few potential paths forward centered around important questions to be revisiting."]

---. "The Frankfurt School (Part 7): The Great Refusal." Philosophize This! #114 (December 23, 2017) ["What Marcuse starts to realize is that the Great Refusal, in order to be done effectively, has to be an extremely individual, personalized journey that people embark on. Because if the Great Refusal is ultimately you being a personification of radical subjectivity, well, what subjectivity are you trying to radicalize? Your own subjectivity. And it takes a deep understanding of that subjectivity to be able to change it. See, because what happens so often is, people see the way the world is; they believe with every fiber of their being that something needs to change about it. And they get so caught up looking at things out there, external to them in the world that they want to change so badly, that they forget about looking inside of them and changing themselves first. You know, there’s this attitude people often have of, “Well, if I’m the one that’s trying to live the Great Refusal here, then obviously I’m not part of the problem. Look, I’m the one that has a moral intuition that people should be liberated. I’m the one that wants to fight every day to make sure people aren’t needlessly repressed. It’s other people out there that don’t believe this stuff that need to change, not me.” Marcuse would say to this person, you’ve already fallen into a trap of perpetuating the way that things are. Marcuse would ask, do you think there’s any baggage you’re carrying around, having been born, raised, and conditioned to think of the world in the way that you do by a system as dominating as monopoly capitalism? Do you think it’s possible that conditioning has a strong effect on the way you feel liberation should occur? What sort of problems might that lead to down the line if you find yourself a member of one of these #movements? The answers to these questions became massively important to Marcuse throughout his later work. And understanding the answers to them, as we’ll see by the end of this episode, is the biggest step you can take towards actually living the Great Refusal."]

---. "How to Win an Argument, Pt. 1." Philosophize This! #73 (December 1, 2015) ["On today's episode, we take a look at several common logical fallacies. We analyze what they mean and how they are used in the context of an argument, and then we provide tons of examples that illustrate how to spot the fallacies. The goal here is to give you more confidence in your ability to practically use the raw information that we talk about on the show every week, and to have an episode you can return back to and refresh your memory if you ever forget them. "]

Grace John - Refugee crisis in Asia: Overlooked displacement on Thai-Burma border (ENG 102)

 

Grace John

Benton

ENG 102

30 September 2024

Refugee crisis in Asia: Overlooked displacement on Thai-Burma border

In the world today there are many cases of ongoing human struggle, conflict and persecution. Asia does not usually come to mind when discussing humanitarian crisis, because there are other western-focused areas that gain more attention on today’s popular culture and media. Refugee displacements are one of the overlooked issues most often resulting from internal political and international conflicts. Refugees may be defined as any person outside their country of origin due to fear of cultural, religious or political persecution who are unable to safely return. By looking at Asia and specifically the southeast Asia region, we can see many prominent examples of refugee crises and displacement. This paper will focus on the Karen (Kayin) people group of Eastern Myanmar (Burma) and the Thailand border. This ethnic group is not widely known as some of the other refugee population, like the displacement of the Muslim Rohingya people of north Myanmar into Bangladesh. It is also worth noting that this paper will refer to the country as Myanmar as it’s the most widely accepted official name, however, it is important to acknowledge the fact that several countries do not officially recognize this name change from Burma, which was implemented in 1989 by the authoritarian regime that took power to establish the Republic of the Union of Myanmar. By exploring the political, social, and economic challenges of resettlement through the lens of Karen people on the Thai-Burma border, this paper will uncover the inadequacies of current refugee policies and demonstrate the need for a better international cooperation to address the increasingly complex needs the displaced population there.

The international implications of safely handling refugees are significant and even the farthest countries from the epicenter of the crises can have a lasting impact. To introduce this topic and the country of Myanmar with its surrounding issues today, we can go back to 2017 – 2018 when the country gained international headlines after the deadly crackdown on the Muslim Rohingya minorities from the northern Rakine state, by the majority Buddhist people and government of Myanmar. In an important demonstration of how far reaching our influence can be in these situations, the social media platforms we all use today played a role in the digital influence on the crises. As internet access became more widely accessible during that time in Myanmar, the social media platform Facebook was heavily criticized for allowing and failing to timely act on the violent and anti-Muslim content being spread from its Burmese users in Myanmar who were able to weaponize the platform during the military campaign in 2017 to drive out the Rohingya (Trending, BBC 2018). In the globalized world today, it is more important for large organizations, companies and governments to pay attention to refugee crises and the resulting humanitarian issues. In the case of the Karen people of eastern Myanmar with the Thailand border, they are no exception in this case. Like the crises that unfolded with the Rohingya Muslim population, the Karen people have endured a long history of persecution for their ethnicity in Myanmar. To better explain the context, it is important to understand why the country is prone to such deep conflict stemming from ethnic and political differences.

The geographical features of Myanmar have shaped the balances of political and military power and have formed the borders of various ethnic minority states. The central region of the country is dominated by the majority Burmese population surrounded by mountain ranges and rivers that have formed unique cultural and linguistic groups encircling the central region. Out of the different groups of ethnic minorities, the Karen people of the eastern region of Myanmar have played a significant role in the history of the country since gaining independence from Britain (Banki, 2008). Ethnic groups that composed the Burmese military at the time broke off into different factions to oppose the rise in communism favored by the core Burmese leaders and to form their own independence from the country. The Karen ethnic military units defected and formed their own leadership and military defense forces. This led to internal armed conflict since the end of World War 2 and after British colonial occupation ended (Hill, 2023). After looking into the recent history of these conflicts, it becomes clear that the cultural and political differences have promoted the independence among the various ethnic minorities of Myanmar. These cultural and linguistic differences, along with decades of armed conflict, have not only inspired independence among Myanmar’s ethnic minorities, but also made the resettlement of the displaced groups, such as the Karen people, very challenging. After understanding this historical background, the next focus should be on the political and economic barriers that complicate refugee resettlement of the displaced people.

The complicated history and persisting conflict has created the increasingly desperate situation for the displaced and refugees fleeing across the borders. As of the August 2024 Humanitarian update, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Myanmar issue published that an estimated 18.6 million people in Myanmar are described as in need of humanitarian aid. On the Thai-Burma border, estimated total number of displaced refugees is around 250,000 (OCHA, 2024). There are also numerous refugee camps that have appeared along the border in Thailand that serve as temporary home for the displaced. The first few camps started to appear in 1984 and have been growing since then. Many of these along the border are Karen refugees from the nearby Kayin border state in Myanmar, among other ethnic minorities. There have been several issues that have made living in these camps challenging, specifically access to resources and humanitarian aid through the host country, Thailand. Thailand does not recognize these camps as official grounds for resettlement of its inhabitants and currently lacks the legal and economic capacity to help support and sponsor many of the refugees (Banki, 2008: 64). This issue of economic sustainability is one of the key issues in understanding the biggest struggles of the refugees in the Thailand-Burma border.
            As Banki et al. highlight in the protracted displacement research, a significant portion of the refugee population in Thailand was classified as economic migrants rather than refugees (Banki, 2008). This misclassification poses a major problem for the refugees, as it limits the protections available to these individuals, leaving them vulnerable to unfair treatment and deportation. In a further study that uncovered these consequences, Human Rights Watch revealed that the inadequate policies towards refugees, and even discovered that the mishandling of refugee camps on the border leads to abuse, extortion and arbitrary deportation of refugees along the border (HRW, 2020). However, distinguishing between refugees fleeing political persecution and those escaping economic hardship is inherently challenging, as these two situations are often closely linked. While refugees are granted protection under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, economic migrants, regardless of their circumstances, do not receive the same recognition or protections in Thailand (Banki, 2008). The distinction between the two classes should be closely examined and more care needs to be shown towards people displaced because of persecution in their home countries. From the Thai perspective, it is difficult to classify refugees out of the many migrants who cross into Thailand from other parts of Myanmar for better economic opportunities, not only those who are displaced by the conflict for genuine humanitarian need. Thai authorities need to have greater care and discernment in their handling of the refugee crises on the border.

Research currently shows how many of the refugees in Thailand from Myanmar have struggled to find a sustainable economic solution while in the refugee camps due to the lack of legal structure in the hosting country. Humanitarian Policy Group research from 2023 shows that there has been little to no improvements on this issue in Thailand since reports started emerging on this problem. Refugees are still stuck in a stateless limbo of having to choose to find work, education and health needs within the settlement camps or to venture into Thailand where they face discrimination and a high risk of deportation and arrest due to the lack of legal protections there for refugees. The HPG paper mentioned that there may still be potential for improvements on this issue with the newly elected Thai government in 2023, however this remains to be seen (Hill, C., 2023). Perhaps a better solution to this ordeal would be to partner with other international humanitarian groups such as UNHCR who have active working relationships on the ground with Thai resources and the refugees from these areas to formulate a better process for identifying and categorizing refugee status. That way, it will become more manageable for Thai authorities to offer durable economic solutions to ease the plight of the refugee populations there.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are many different countries and organizations that have helped in the resettlement effort. Uniquely positioned as a leader in resettling is the United States. Since 1980 the US has worked with the UNHCR to establish a process for resettling refugees who pass through a vetting process. The US works to ensure certain communities can receive refugees, and by partnering with volunteer organizations, are able provide resettlement assistance to some refugees. The recent executive orders from 2019 gave permission to the local governments on handling the resettlement and placing of refugees in their communities. It’s up to the local leaders to determine how to place refugees to give them the best opportunities and consider their community needs for welcoming new refugees. (Caren, 2008). The Karen refugees from Myanmar specifically are frequently settled to the US through these UNHCR programs and have been resettled mainly into urban areas over the years. Since local communities now have a part to determine if reguees will resettle to their communities, these resettlement programs should also consider the options to choose rural or small-town locations over the larger cities and urban resettlements that often takes place. One study highlights the outcomes and potential cons of this resettlement strategy in a small case study done in rural Georgia highlights some of the positive outcomes of the Karen refugees who have settled there (Gilhooly, 2017). These rural settings offer refugees a less traumatic environment, where the Karen refugees can maintain cultural practices and more effectively integrate into their new lives. The U.S. government should explore rural resettlement programs, considering key factors to ensure successful integration to communities able to welcome them and where they can have a higher chance of successfully resettling there.

In conclusion, the crisis along the Thai-Burma border, particularly with the Karen people, represents an often overlooked yet important humanitarian issue today. The Thai government’s limited legal protections and economic capacity, combined with the misclassification of refugees as economic migrants, continue to exacerbate the struggles of these displaced populations. The resettlement process offered by countries such as the U.S., especially into urban areas, often fails to provide the sustainable solutions necessary for meaningful integration for these people. However, exploring rural resettlement programs, as evidenced by successful examples in the U.S., could offer a viable option that supports both the refugees and host communities. To effectively address these challenges, international organizations like the UNHCR must collaborate more closely with local governments to create policies that better identify and support refugees, while also ensuring their successful integration into communities of the host countries where they are resettled. Ultimately, solving the refugee crisis on the Thai-Burma border requires a coordinated global effort and a reevaluation of current policies and practices to ensure the best possible humanitarian outcome of the current and future of displaced populations.

 

Works Cited

Banki, Susan Rachel, and Hazel Johanna Lang. “Protracted Displacement on the Thai-Burmese Border: The Interrelated Search for Durable Solutions.” http://www.ashgate.com eBooks, 2008, pp. 59–81.  https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/items/4450461d-59b6-5496-beed-f51b40384102.

Caron, Rosemary M. “The U.S. Refugee Resettlement Conundrum.” Peace Review, vol. 32, no. 4, Oct. 2020, pp. 527–35. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/10402659.2020.1921416.

Gilhooly, Daniel, and Eunbae Lee. “Rethinking Urban Refugee Resettlement: A Case Study of One Karen Community in Rural Georgia, USA.” International Migration, vol. 55, no. 6, Dec. 2017, pp. 37–55. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12341.

“Thailand: Refugee Policies Ad Hoc and Inadequate.” Human Rights Watch, 28 Oct. 2020, www.hrw.org/news/2012/09/13/thailand-refugee-policies-ad-hoc-and-inadequate.

Trending, Bbc. The Country Where Facebook Posts Whipped up Hate. 12 Sept. 2018, www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-45449938.

Hill, C., Thako, H., Shêê, T., et al. (2023) Exploring Karen refugee youths’ aspirations and wellbeing amidst protracted displacement in Thailand. HPG working paper. London: ODI https://odi.org/en/publications/exploring-karen-refugee-youths-aspirations-and-wellbeing-amidst-protracted-displacement-in-thailand/.

“Myanmar Humanitarian Update No. 40 | 16 August 2024.” OCHA, 16 Aug. 2024, www.unocha.org/publications/report/myanmar/myanmar-humanitarian-update-no-40-16-august-2024