![]() ![]() Zaroff seems to embody the philosophy of social Darwinism, as he attempts to justify his hunting of men by stating, “Life is for the strong, to be lived by the strong, and, if needs be, taken by the strong. ![]() ![]() In “The Most Dangerous Game,” Connell explores extreme social Darwinism on a small scale on Ship-Trap Island. These extreme social views eventually culminated in the Holocaust with Nazi Germany’s mass genocide of Jews, racial minorities, Romani people, the disabled, and homosexuals. Sometimes, the socially unfit were rounded up and killed. in which procreation was encouraged in socially “fit” people (usually white, able-bodied, and middle-to-upper class), and the “unfit” were sterilized by force and/or in secret. Social Darwinist extremism led to eugenics programs across Europe and the U.S. These ideas quickly escalated into extremism when societies and governments, following British philosopher Howard Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest,” started labeling certain humans as socially unfit (usually racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities, among others) and treating them as subhuman. Social Darwinism is a term used to describe the ideologies that became popular in the late 19th century applying Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection to human society. Zaroff personifies the social Darwinist extremism that plagued much of the early 20th century. ![]()
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6/30/2023 0 Comments Antigone play![]() ![]() ![]() However, in this version, we take a fresh look at Antigone's own rigidity as an equal contributor to this story's devastating ending. Antigone is usually seen as the righteous heroine while Creon is the hated villain. Creon, the ascending king, proclaims, "Regarding the bodies of the sons of Oedipus: Eteocles, a hero who fought for Thebes…will be given a hero's burial…But for Polyneices who recruited foreign troops to attack our home-let his corpse rot under the sweltering sun, food for the birds and the dogs…Anyone who dares to bury the enemy will be publicly executed." So begins this adaptation of Antigone, who battles Creon, her uncle, for the right in God's name to bury her dead brother, Polyneices, but loses that fight in a horrifying conclusion to this story. ![]() 6/30/2023 0 Comments Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead![]() “And so there was a way in which I was learning about myself by reading about the inner lives of people who didn’t exist. “They didn’t happen to be real people, because I was reading fiction, but the emotion was true,” she continued. For the first time, really, I had access to the internal lives of other people. I think that a lot of that was inspired by the books that I was reading. “I began to see more complexity in the world around me, I began to have different kinds of thoughts, I began to form deeper friendships. ![]() “For me, that time was an awakening,” she said. The most formative were the ones she read around age 11 or 12, on the border between childhood and puberty. “I just sort of tried to rediscover what it was that made me feel so strongly about books in the first place.” ![]() She decided to buy all the books she could remember reading as a child, as well as books that had been written for children since. “And then I asked myself what it was that I wanted from writing, and where my connection with books began, and the answer to that question was definitely in childhood, because that’s where my connection with reading began.” “When I lost all of that, even though it was sad, it also felt like a release, in a way: it was a clean slate,” she said. ![]() ![]() Then one day her toddler knocked her computer off the table, and all the stories she had been laboring over were permanently gone. ![]() 6/30/2023 0 Comments The wisdom pyramid brett mccracken![]() ![]() We assert as facts what we feel to be true, and when someone challenges us, we turn it back on them, because how dare they question the validity of our feelings? To have one’s felt truth invalidated is to have one’s very identity dismissed. “Our overstimulated brains are becoming weaker, less critical, and more gullible at a time in history when we need them to be sharper than ever.” ( ) Meanwhile, as we are consumed by the ‘far away’ dramas of our social media spaces, we neglect the tangible realities of our immediate place-the local news, proximate debates, and immediate problems we could more meaningfully address.” ( ) “We can easily come to the point where we spend hours attending to headlines about things that will never affect us, debates about things we know little about, and problems we cannot solve. “humans have struggled with contentment: we want more than what we have, and we want it now.” ( ) Using the illustration of a Wisdom Pyramid, he points readers to more lasting and reliable sources of wisdomnot for their own glorification, but ultimately for God’s. ![]() “Oxford Dictionaries declared ‘post-truth’ the international word of the year in 2016, defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’” ( ) Logos Research Subscription for Schools. ![]() 6/30/2023 0 Comments Bell hooks theory![]() ![]() ![]() As a result of the racist portrayals of black people in white-dominated cinema, independent black film arose. Through critical discussion around black women and cinema, the oppositional gaze enters as a way for black people to attain agency to combat white supremacy. hooks describes the gaze of a black body as repressed, denied, and ultimately interrogating. ![]() It was created as a critique of film theory by bell hooks in her essay "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators". Therefore the act of gazing, when conditioned against it, becomes a powerful act to alter power dynamics. The act of the gaze became an act charged with rebellion when enslaved persons would defiantly gaze back at the slave-owners since they would often be punished for simply looking at them. Hooks' essay is a work of feminist film theory that criticizes both the male gaze through Michel Foucault's "relations of power" and the prevalence of white feminism in feminist film theory. The "oppositional gaze", first coined by feminist, scholar and social activist bell hooks in her 1992 essay collection Black Looks: Race and Representation, is a type of looking relation that involves the political rebellion and resistance against the repression of a black person's right to look. ![]() |