Nothing Human Is Alien
3rd March 2012, 02:13
I haven't seen much of anything about this in English-language news sources. It comes just after another Korean was arrested for sarcastically retweeting a message from a North Korean twitter account (http://www.revleft.com/vb/skorean-indicted-re-t167382/index.html?t=167382).
In a nutshell: Bak Kyong-Shin, a law professor at perhaps the most "prestigeous" university in South Korea, who also happens to be a member of the Korea Communications Standards Commission, posted pictures of penises with the question "Do you get turned on by looking at these photos?." He did this in protest against the deletion of other photos deemed "obscene" by the KCSC.
What happened? The KCSC discussed his actions, ruled the penis photos "erotic," and deleted them.
Bak then posted a photo of a famous painting (Gustave Courbet's "Origin of the World") that shows a human vagina, and wrote "Freedom of expression must be the freedom of all expression; it is not the freedom to express that which is socially 'good.' .... Once we start deleting things then it is the death of art, the death of culture, and the death of civilization."
Now, a few months after the fact, he has been indicted for "dissemination of obscene material."
This is the equivalent of the FCC in the U.S. arresting one of its own members.
In a nutshell: Bak Kyong-Shin, a law professor at perhaps the most "prestigeous" university in South Korea, who also happens to be a member of the Korea Communications Standards Commission, posted pictures of penises with the question "Do you get turned on by looking at these photos?." He did this in protest against the deletion of other photos deemed "obscene" by the KCSC.
What happened? The KCSC discussed his actions, ruled the penis photos "erotic," and deleted them.
Bak then posted a photo of a famous painting (Gustave Courbet's "Origin of the World") that shows a human vagina, and wrote "Freedom of expression must be the freedom of all expression; it is not the freedom to express that which is socially 'good.' .... Once we start deleting things then it is the death of art, the death of culture, and the death of civilization."
Now, a few months after the fact, he has been indicted for "dissemination of obscene material."
This is the equivalent of the FCC in the U.S. arresting one of its own members.