Philosophy of Health Mandy

In the 1950s, over 100,000 biracial children were orphaned in South Korea, sparking what is known today as international adoption. These were children largely abandoned by US military men and the Korean prostitutes the US military exploited during the war, by expanding the forced sexual labor camps established earlier by the Japanese, and which exist today. Grace M. Cho has written an homage to these women in her book Haunting the Korean Diaspora, telling a story which can only make sense in the retelling of the larger narrative of the Korean War. Join us, as we delve into the waters of sex workers, napalm, atomic bombs, and shamans, trying the piece together the fragments of lost voices.

Special thanks to Jamie Ward for his standup.

Visit philoofhealth.org to support this podcast and my path to healing by donating or using my ebay or amazon links, or to set up a personal consultation with me.

G.O.A.'L. (Global Overseas Adoptees' Link) is the only organization by adoptees for adoptees to assist in everything from requesting birth records to providing psychological assistance to helping you move to Korea. With First Trip Home, they remain the only non-religious sponsor for adoptees to return to Korea and the only program to specifically center around doing a Birth Family Search. While it involves trips to adoption agencies and your city of birth, it also includes sightseeing adventures typical of other motherland tours exclusively with other adoptees and native volunteers.

In this episode, AK Salling, G.O.A.'L's Secretary General and tour guide extraordinaire, walks us through First Trip Home as well as G.O.A.'L.'s founding, mission, and future. We discuss the birth family search process (DNA testing, the Korean media, tips for adoption agencies, international legal issues, etc.), information about reuniting with birth families, and the relationship many adoptees have with Korea after coming back.

To donate to G.O.A.'L.:

Paypal: donations@goal.or.kr
Bank transfer: Kookmin Bank 375301-04-00076

Special thanks to Caleb Yee for his artwork, Kevin Shea for his standup, and Kalyna Rakel for permission to use her song So Removed.

Visit philoofhealth.org to support this podcast and my path to healing by donating or using my ebay or amazon links, or to set up a personal consultation with me.

"The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

http://philoofhealth.org/2017/07/children-of-empire.html

How do you solve a problem like Korea?

This week we are joined by Kristi Brian, a cultural anthropologist and author of Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship. In it we ask everything from "what constitutes family?" to "how are children turned into products for American consumers?" We discuss adoption horror stories, the history of adoption in the United States, racism, adoption as charity and industry, capitalism, patriarchy, and white feminism. And after getting into some depressing details of a corrupt system, we talk about some possible ways of moving forward and imagine what the future of families could look like.

Check out my post Health is the Great Paradox where I lay out the modern Western paradigm--what I see as the root of adoption issues.

Special thanks to Ninja Sex Party for their cover of Everybody Wants to Rule the World and Take on Me.

Visit philoofhealth.org to support this podcast and my path to healing by donating or using my ebay or amazon links, or to set up a personal consultation with me.

"The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

https://www.gofundme.com/seoulsister

http://philoofhealth.org/2017/07/children-of-empire.html

Peter KJ Park joins us for our third and final podcast to discuss mystical history, the alternate history competing with the story that we are all familiar with today. We discuss Georg Ast and Thaddeus Rixner, two philosophers who not only expounded a history that did not begin in Greece, but also saw India and Egypt as a part of the original progression of the history of philosophy and civilization. Unlike Kant and Meiners, they did not share the belief that non-whites were incapable of serious thought and were therefore not blinded by the astounding and undeniable achievements made by non-white cultures, their impact on the Western philosophy, and their place in Western history.

Join us for the third episode of this three-part series as we explore theories of race and racism then and now, the quest for the origin of civilization, philosophical mysticism, the evolution of Spirit, and the double-consciousness of W.E.B. Dubois.

Special thanks to Ninja Sex Party for their cover of Aha's Take On Me.

Visit philoofhealth.org to support this podcast and my path to healing by donating or using my ebay or amazon links, or to set up a personal consultation with me.

Peter KJ Park joins us once again to delve into two historians of philosophy who rejected the emerging view of history, Joseph Marie de Gérando and Friedrich Schlegel, both of whom set upon the task of writing a comparative history of philosophy. This model was based on Enlightenment science, but instead of classifying all the natural stuff of this world, they were intent to classify all the systems of thought that have existed throughout the story of mankind. They thought to organize, divide, and compare the intellectual history of civilization. They part company, however, when it comes to precisely when that history begins, de Gérando being a Meiners devotee, and Schlegel being a scholar of Sanskrit and Persian.

Join us for the second episode of this four-part series as we explore the where historians before Kant believed Western civilization was born, alternate views of history and development of philosophy, how those more accurate accounts of humanity's development became lost to history, and what these revelations mean to us today.

Visit philoofhealth.org to support this podcast and my path to healing by donating or using my ebay or amazon links, or to set up a personal consultation with me.