BACK TALK
Entries from August 13, 2006 - August 19, 2006
An Iranian "confession" film
The Iranian government is about to release a film documenting the "confessions" of Dr. Ramin Jahanbegloo, the eminent Iranian philosopher of non-violence, apparenly obtained while he is incarcerated without any charges in Iran's notorious Evin prison.
Preliminary conjectured sections of the 'confession' are being written about on Rooz On-Line. So far, the clerics and religious police in Iran's theocracy have obtained Ramin's confession that he created the "web," and that he also created the "CES" organization to disseminate information.
Last I heard, in the 2004 American elections Al Gore had claimed credit for creating the 'web,' despite its actual invention by the computer scientists at CERN. As for the 'CES,' I'm sure the people in Las Vegas will be fascinated to watch the Iranian film, in order to learn that their 'Computer Expo Show,' the world's largest convention, was created by an Iranian philosopher.
If these early trailers turn out to be the actual 'confessions' in the film, their laughable absurdity will be lost in the film's ominous import: the clerics and their theofascism are utterly disconnected with reality. The official disconnect with reality is an important feature of totalitarianism (see Arendt's book, Totalitarianism).
Want to bet whether this film wins an Oscar for 'Best Foreign Film'?
'Be free.'
Don Kirk
in Duoism, the Philosophy of Freedom
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A New Project Exile
It is hardly surprising that, as the population in the United States continues to increase, and as we continue to incarcerate a greater percentage of criminals, the prison populations are swelling. A 2004 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics gives us the most recent information available on “correctional populations”: there are a total of nearly seven million men in prison or jail or on probation or parole. Twenty years earlier, in 1984, the total was well under three million.