South Korea Indicts Park Jung-geun Over Twitter Posts – NYTimes.com
South Korean prosecutors indicted a social media and freedom-of-speech activist this week for reposting messages from the North Korean government’s Twitter account.
This is a bizarre case of nationalism. Using some law on the books about criminalizing anything that “benefits the enemy,” this guy got detained for a ReTweet. What a genius move on Park’s part. Rather brilliant.
I have a chapter in this book, which will be coming out soon. But the bigger news is that someone named “Viggo Mortensen” has endorsed it.
“This book is a very important waypoint on the quest for a better understanding of the digital change and its influence on religion. Based on a thorough scholarly analysis of how religious communities and pastors negotiate the new media, the authors develop new perspectives for the global future. Readers come away with a grounded theoretical and empirical understanding of this new and exciting landscape of digital religion and digital spirituality.”
—Viggo Mortensen, Professor in Global Christianity at Aarhus University, Denmark
Here’s the Amazon link for the book.
John Gray has a great article in Prospect magazine on the place of Freud and psychoanalysis in Western intellectual history.
Today the idea that psychoanalysis is not a science is commonplace, but no part of Freud’s inheritance is more suspect than the theory of the death instinct. The very idea of instinct is viewed with suspicion. Talk of human instincts, or indeed of human nature, is dismissed as a form of intellectual atavism: human behaviour is seen as far more complex and at the same time more amenable to rational control than Freud believed or implied. Theories of human instinct only serve to block those impulses to progress and rationality that (for all the scorn that is directed against the very idea of human nature) are considered to be quintessentially human.
Freud’s ideas are today not simply rejected as false. They are repudiated as being dangerous or immoral; the “gloomy mythology” of warring instincts is condemned as a kind of slander on the species, the fundamental nobility of which it is sacrilege to deny. To be sure, righteous indignation has informed the response to Freud’s thought from the beginning. But its new strength helps explain one of the more remarkable features of intellectual life at the start of the 21st century, a time that in its own eyes is more enlightened than any other: the intense unpopularity of Freud, the last great Enlightenment thinker.
Click on the picture for the link to the piece.
http://youtu.be/7SHhpGjqvJo
http://youtu.be/ft0lPtPdTp8
http://youtu.be/Da5JkiwdwYo
A three-part BBC special on Nietzsche, Sartre and Heidegger. Kind of amazing.
