Political Freedom Research Articles

The Cancer of Cancel Culture: Spreading "Correct" Scientific Ideologies Across North American Academia.

The spread of "cancel culture" related to sex and gender controversies in North America is examined as part of a larger movement to politicize sex research findings and certain sex and gender narratives as "correct" and "incorrect" from a so-called social justice standpoint. This binary is then used by academic administrators and empowered individuals or self-interest groups to reward or punish scholars for their viewpoints. The cases described by Meyer-Bahlburg, Lowrey, and Hooven are concrete examples of a growing "sexual McCarthyism" where empirical results are challenged by offended social justice "warriors" and embellished on social media into ad hominem attacks, to the point that it can damage-or even cancel-the careers of productive sexual scientists. This occurs largely out of fear on the part of academic administrators and lawyers charged with protecting the university from "brand damage" that might occur if the offending scholar is not dealt with. Sexual scientists are being vilified for research on sex differences, sex/gender assignment and subsequent causes for transitioning and/or de-transitioning, research that shows few or no untoward social or psychological effects of viewing pornography, research that debunks the notion of porn or sex "addiction," research showing the efficacy of medications to treat sexual desire disorders in women, research on "minor attracted persons" and even animal research that dares to show homologies to human sexual behavior. The silencing of empirical evidence and alternative viewpoints is contrary to the intellectual mission of universities and destructive to academic and political freedoms.

The Promise of (Un)happiness:34 Literatureand Yi Si-u's Surrealist Poetics in Colonial Korea

AbstractThis article examines Korean surrealism—the avant-garde movement most explicitly preoccupied with questions of the psyche and subjectification within an historical context of colonial unfreedom—through attention to the short-lived journal Samsa munhak 三四文學 (34 Literature, 1934–37) and its most representative poet, Yi Si-u 李時雨. Drawing from psychoanalysis and affect theory, it addresses Yi Si-u's scholarly underexamined but substantive meditations on the constitution of the subject, desire, and repression, focusing specifically on the question of (un)happiness and its implications for psychic and political freedom in a colonial climate of despair only partially brightened by the allure of the commodity. The author aims to demonstrate how Yi's surrealist refraction of subjective desire both registers the sociopolitical pressures of his historical context as well as negatively conceptualizes a liberated form of happiness at odds with the standardized variant administered by the hegemonic colonial authority. As such, the dialectical inseparability of collective liberation from psychosocial repression and the individual pursuit of happiness can become legible, an insight that may contribute to current theorizations of affect, commodification, and emancipatory movements.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

The Advertising Museum in Seoul: Dream-Images and the Freedom to Advertise

Abstract This article examines how the Korea Advertising Museum in Seoul participates in constructing narratives of past and present in postmillennial South Korea, and how historical advertisements create ambiguities within those narratives. The analysis is inspired by Benjaminian scholarship on collective dreamworlds and on advertisements as dream-images, while the curatorial choices are situated against, first, the historical-cultural specificity of advertising in South Korea and, second, the social-political imaginaries of the mid-2000s, when the museum was developed and opened. The article details how the Advertising Museum constructs the post-democratization South Korean present as the dreamed-of future, by equating historical progress with a triumphant march of technological, political, and aesthetic freedom to advertise. When museumified old advertisements are brought into the present as technologically and aesthetically archaic, they support the hegemonic narrative of progress and arrival. However, the article also shows how the dream-images of old advertisements are not perfectly contained. Old advertisements still may shock because their collective utopias remain unattainable in the postmillennial present, despite its technological and industrial sophistication and despite it being declared the hoped-for future.

The freedom dilemma: Milton's (and Adam's) inability to reconcile reason and authority

Much scholarship on the separation scene in Paradise Lost focuses on whether or not Adam could have acted differently to prevent Eve from working alone. The separation scene, however, is impossible to resolve. Through this scene, Milton traces the origin of his own struggle to reconcile the principles of political freedom. In Brief Notes upon a late Sermon, Milton faces the reality that his own principles cannot be reconciled. The separation scene places Adam in a similar situation, as he struggles to reconcile Raphael's conflicting advice regarding following God's will. Milton's and Adam's failures raise questions regarding the possibility of human freedom.

THE MENEACHMEUS AS A MIXTURE OF OLD AND NEW COMEDY

Comedy was a popular theatrical style in ancient Greek literature and was imitated and adapted by the Roman playwrights with small changes. In Ancient Greek, comedy as a literary genre is split into three categories based on the time periods in which it differs: Old Comedy, Middle Comedy and New Comedy. Old comedy (480-430 B.C.) is characterized with political freedom and intellectual vitality while middle comedy (405-336 B.C.) is characterized with a little politics or poetics as a result of Athens' financial ruin in 404 B.C. As for the new comedy, it is characterized with romantic love, marriage, stereotypes, and misunderstandings. Plautus’ The Meneachemus which is considered as a surviving manuscript of New Comedy provides data concerning the qualities of the genre. Therefore, this paper aims to study The Meneachemus in terms of reflecting the features of new comedy.

Inventing Free Speech: Politics, Liberty and Print in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract Our modern concept of political free speech as an individual political right was first elaborated in detail three hundred years ago by two London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, in their best-selling, endlessly reprinted, anonymous newspaper column, known as ‘Cato’s Letters’ (1720–23). As is well known, Cato’s novel ideas about speech and press freedom proved hugely influential, especially in the American colonies. Because they underpin the peculiar formulation of the First Amendment of the United States’ constitution, their impact is still with us today. But Trenchard and Gordon’s own lives and motives are remarkably obscure, and how they managed to formulate a completely new way of thinking about politics and public debate has remained an unexplored puzzle. Nor has it previously been appreciated that their arguments, as well as refocusing existing discussions of press liberty, directly engaged long-standing concerns about false news and public deception. Drawing on newly discovered printed and manuscript evidence, this essay reveals the deliberately misleading character of their ideology, and the reasons for its hidden partiality. It shows both how political freedom of speech first came to be systematically conceived of as a mechanism for truth, an antidote to falsehood, and the foundation of all liberty — and that, ironically, this new and powerful theory was itself but a partial, biased fiction about the world. That is a paradox whose consequences we are still living with.

Analysis of Administrative Structures and Economic Programs of the Ahmad Shahi’s Era

Shah Ghazi Amanullah Khan is the founder of a new and modern Afghanistan. Throughout his reign, significant changes and innovations have taken place in Afghanistan’s economic, legal, and social aspects. One of his most precious and valuable achievements was taking freedom from the British Occupation. In all his political meetings, trips, and gatherings, Ghazi Amanullah Khan discussed civil and political freedom with a resolute intention and high morale in this regard. The purpose of study is to deeply analyze the administrative and economic structure of Ghazi Amanullah Khan’s government; to identify those factors which positively affect the economic and administrative structure; to explain the overall leadership. The descriptive, explanatory, and analytical research approaches are used in this work. It is worth mentioning that this research study is entirely based on library sources. Most of the sources are reputable and trustworthy textbooks, published journal articles, law reports, and websites. According to well-known historians and the study of history in terms of administrative and economic structure and achievements that one of Ghazi Amanullah Khan’s reforms was that he created national symbols such as state emblems, national days, national anthem, national flag, medals, and national currency. All of these were part of Ghazi Amanullah Khan’s reforms. The researcher suggests and recommend to the central government and to the local governments of Afghanistan as well as to the regional governments that to deeply study the administrative and economic structure, achievements, and reforms of the Ghazi Amanullah Khan’s era and try to implement them in their central and local institutions. Furthermore, the researcher has a suggestion to work on the military, political, and social structure of Ghazi Amanullah Khan’s government in order to squinch the academic thirst of the researchers and academia.

Is There a Right to Hope That God Exists? Evil and the Principle of Non-Parity

In this paper, I respond to James Sterba’s recent book ‘Is a Good God Logically Possible?’ I show that Sterba concludes that God is not logically possible by ignoring three important issues: (a) the different functions of leeway indeterminism (and the political freedom presupposed by it) and autonomy (the two are very different things, even though both go under the name of freedom), (b) the differences in the conditions of agency in God and in creatures, (there is non-parity in how each must apply the single moral law), and (c) the non-parity between our knowledge and God’s. I provide a brief summary of Sterba’s arguments, and I develop the following points: 1. Sterba’s argument against a Free-Will Defense hinges on his conflation of political freedom and autonomy; 2. Sterba’s crucial premise for his argument against soul-making theodicies (namely, that the “Pauline Principle” should be applied univocally across God and creatures) is false; 3. Sterba’s arguments against skeptical theism depend on his assumption that our knowledge is comparable to that of God. In each case, Sterba either does not recognize non-parity between God and creatures or does not recognize the difference between the profane (e.g., political matters) and the sacred, (e.g., spiritual matters having to do with the inner nature of the soul’s development).

Розвиток змісту поняття «свобода» в іудаїзмі

Against the background of quite frequent historical periods of physical imprisonment of the Jewish people, this people became the bearer of the Revelation of Truth, which led to the conscious use of freedom of choice in favor of preserving divine gnosis with further ethical direction of freedom. At this stage of the design of the Torah as a collection of sacred books, and the subsequent management of its commandments, the freedom of the individual was sacrificed to the general religious goals of the community. The sacred fear of the greatness of God led to the realization of almost total predestination. The Talmudic and rabbinical currents, which initially continued to cultivate the content of freedom that began in the Torah period, later adopted the anthropocentric ideas of medieval Europe and gradually transformed their religious and cultic positions under the influence of civil liberties. so-called "modern Judaism". The common general orientation of the freedom of the Jewish people has been divided into the political and social freedoms of each individual Jew, where each is responsible for the ethical consequences of his own existence.

Anti-pandemic restrictions, uncertainty and sentiment in seven countries

We investigate how the stringency of government anti-pandemic policy measures might affect economic policy uncertainty in countries with different degrees of press freedom, various press reporting styles and writing conventions. We apply a text-based measure of uncertainty using data from over 400,000 press articles from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, the UK and the USA published before the wide-scale vaccination programmes were introduced. The measure accounts for pandemic-related words and negative sentiment scores weight the selected articles. We then tested the dynamic panel data model where the relative changes in these measures were explained by levels and changes in the stringency measures. We have found that introducing and then maintaining unchanged for a relatively long time a constant level of anti-pandemic stringency measures reduce uncertainty. In contrast, a change in such a level has the opposite effect. This result is robust across the countries, despite their differences in political systems, press control and freedom of speech.

A dichotomy between democracy and personal freedom on the spread of COVID-19

PurposeThe authors analyze the effects of political freedom and personal freedom on the spread of COVID-19 in a cross-country study. The authors also investigate how income inequality, urbanization and previous experience with a similar respiratory epidemic/pandemic, such as SARS and MERS, affect the spread of COVID-19.Design/methodology/approachThe authors employ data from 102 countries to examine the relationship of countries' economic and sociopolitical factors, such as political freedom and personal freedom and their COVID-19 infection cases per million population at 120 days, 150 days and 180 days after the reported 10th infection case. The authors also include the log term of real GDP per capita to control for counties' economic development and regional dummies to control for regional-specific effects.FindingsResults of this study show that personal freedom, rather than democracy, has a significant positive effect on countries' COVID-19 infection cases. On the contrary, democracy has a negative impact on the infection rate. The authors also find that socioeconomic factors such as higher income inequality and urbanization rate adversely affect the COVID-19 infection cases. A larger older population is associated with fewer infection cases, holding everything else equal. Previous experiences with the coronavirus crisis affect countries only at the 120 days mark. Real GDP per capita has no significant effect.Originality/valueThe main contribution of this paper is to jointly explore personal freedom, which implies a social framework with more emphasis on self-value and self-realization and political freedom, that is, democracy. The authors show that it is personal freedom, rather than democracy, that contributes to higher COVID-19 infection cases. Democracy, on the other hand, reduces the number of infection cases.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-12-2021-0769

Internet regulation and crisis-related resilience: from Covid-19 to existential risks

ABSTRACT A broad literature on Internet regulation relies on imaginaries of the Internet as a socio-political technology. Deep mediatization of everyday life, however, increases the role of the Internet as a critical system for crisis response and mitigating global catastrophic risks. This article offers a theoretical contribution to exploring the role of regulation in crises through critical engagement with the concept of mediatization. The article addresses the question of what is “the meaning of Internet regulation in crisis situations and how it may diminish capacity to address future emergencies?” It stresses that understanding the consequences of mediatization in the context of future crises requires an exploration of Internet regulation from the mediational perspective and of the concept of generativity. Relying on an analysis of the role of digital platforms in Russia during the Covid-19 pandemic, the article illustrates how different forms of regulation limit resilience by restricting the generative potential of innovations that offer new forms of response to emerging threats. It highlights how the limitation of political freedoms in specific countries and the degree of global catastrophic risk are interrelated.

Applying Commemorative Museum Pedagogy to Public Music Studies

Applying Commemorative Museum Pedagogy to Public Music Studies

Review: Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements, by Deva Woodly

Review: <i>Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements</i>, by Deva Woodly

THE INSTITUTE OF CITIZEN APPEALS AS AN ACTIVE MECHANISM FOR THE PROTECTION OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC HUMAN RIGHTS

The institute of appeal of citizens to state authorities as an effective mechanism of implementation of socio-economic human rights and freedoms is studied. Attention is drawn to the fact that human rights are the highest social value and determine the degree of political, economic, cultural and other human freedoms. The authors established that the state must be accountable to the individual for its activities, in this regard, ensuring human rights and freedoms is the main responsibility of the state, but all this is possible subject to the principle of the rule of law, which in many countries is enshrined as constitutional. It was found that the problematic issues remain related to the definition of international requirements for the mechanism of implementation of the right of citizens to appeal to public authorities, providing a mechanism for exercising the right of citizens to appeal to public authorities using the latest information technologies, etc. The authors have found that the institute of citizens' appeal to public authorities, as a mechanism for exercising human rights and freedoms, includes many important areas, such as the conduct of public affairs, both directly and through freely elected representatives; the functioning of public control; ensuring the right of access to public information, etc. The peculiarities of the development of the institute of citizens' recourse in the context of international experience in the realization of human rights and freedoms were investigated. It was found that the dynamism of the development of international law at the present time has also influenced the fairly rapid development of the institute of citizens' right to appeal to public authorities, which in turn has affected the increased participation of citizens of different states in the political processes in the world. The concept of the right of citizens to appeal to public authorities has been formulated. International requirements for the mechanism of implementation of the citizens' right to appeal to public authorities were analyzed and identified. The authors found that the international requirements for the mechanism of implementation of the citizens' right to appeal to public authorities are based on five basic principles. The prospect of introducing information technology in the process of citizens' applications to public authorities is considered. It was determined that the rapid development of modern information technologies and their introduction into various spheres of social life has not bypassed their introduction into the legal sphere, which in turn led to the processing of increasing volumes of information in a short period of time, and on the other hand, was a consequence of threats of violation of individual rights, through unauthorized access to personal data, their theft and use for criminal purposes. Shows the problematic aspects arising from the introduction of modern technologies in the work with the citizens' appeal, which affect the protection of personal data. The experience of many countries, such as Great Britain, Germany, Scotland, USA, etc., in the implementation of the system of electronic appeal and the use of electronic petitions as the most progressive form of communication with the government is analyzed.

Mongolian Sign Language Recognition Model

Sign language is a gesture-based manual used by people with hearing impairment and spoken language disorder to communicate with others. There is no universal sign language — the most used one is the American Sign Language. Mongolian Sign Language (MSL) has hand signs for letters of the alphabet, numbers, and other commonly used words. There are an estimated 16000 MSL signers. The lack of means to translate MSL into the Mongolian language, such as professional interpreters or translator applications, hinders MSL signers’ freedom of expression and political and public participation. Here, we created an MSL recognition system model that uses a camera to capture the letter symbols for the MSL alphabet and translates them into written Mongolian words. The proposed model uses two machine learning models that 1) recognize input, sorts, and filters, and 2) process Mongolian language. The model had an F1 score of 0.8678, given 51 distinct hand gestures. The natural language processing model that forms words had sufficient performance, though it can be improved in further works.

The Influence of Political and Economic Factors on Emigration From Russia to Europe

This research examines the influence and interaction of economic and political factors on the process of emigration from the Russian Federation to European countries (e.g., Finland, Switzerland, and Spain) from 1996 to 2019. According to the theoretical part, we determined that the scale of emigration decreases with an increase in GDP per capita. However, with a sharp increase in GDP at the turn of the 2000s, the emigration from Russia to the selected countries has only increased in what can be considered a phenomenon. Following the theoretical framework, we have determined that this process can be facilitated by some extra variable, which in our case is political freedom. To visualize the process, we observe the indicator of freedom of expression, which moderately declined from 1999 to 2016. As a result of the comparative analysis of migration, economic and political data from OECD, Eurostat, and V-Dem Institute, we determined that due to the deterioration of political freedoms within the country, negative political factors have shifted positive economic growth and affected the increase of emigration scale to the selected European countries.

Political freedom and its philosophical understanding in the student perception: methods of focus groups and business game

The article considers the features of student perception of the concepts of "freedom" and "political freedom" within the framework of the socio-philosophical approach. The results of the conducted business games on this topic are given. The article also discusses and analyzes the topics of focus groups conducted by the students. The conclusion about the attitudes of young people towards political participation and the impact of these attitudes on the realization of human potential is made.

The Nexus Between Self-determination, Territorial Integrity and Uti Possidetis Juris: The Case of Somaliland

The right to self-determination is important in that it allows a state to enjoy economic, social and political freedom. Arguably, the right to self-determination has existed long before its theorisation under international law. In as much as the right to self-determination is an important right, the right to territorial integrity under Article 2 of the United Nations Charter is equally important. This principle prohibits the use of force by one state against another, thereby compromising its political independence. Thus, the principle of territorial integrity builds on the right to self-determination by allowing states to decide how they will govern themselves politically. Both principles correlate with the principle of uti possidetis juris, which is geared towards preserving the colonial borders of former colonies. These three principles come into play in the case of Somaliland which seceded from the parent state, Somalia. The three principles have influenced the recognition of Somaliland in several ways. In practice, there has been tension around how these three principles should be applied. According to precedent, the right to self-determination is encouraged to be exercised under international law up to a point where they lead to cesession. This article delves into the nexus between these three principles, and in particular Somaliland’s latitude to exercise the right to self-determination to detach itself from the obviously undesirable union with the larger Somali Republic.