Damnatio Memoriae

Are we just the sum of our memories? Is erasing all the memories of a person more, or less humane, than the death penalty? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, a member of the diplomatic corps recounts the history of Etescanate people and the evolution of their implantation of the death penalty over the centuries. Initially, the death penalty was a drawn out, painful and public affair. As time progressed, it remained public, but became more humane. With the advent of new technologies, it was moved indoors as a private affair where electrical shocks or injections were used. Now, the Etescanate people believe they have found the most humane form of capital punishment, complete memory erasure. Those that are found guilty of the most serious crimes are given a chemical cocktail that completely erases their minds of their entire past. There is one caveat to this punishment, while the government has outlawed killing by the state, it still leaves open the possibility of killing by others and, in some cases, the convicted opt to be killed privately instead.

Analysis of The Implementation of Public Relations Function at The Department of Industrial and Trading of Yogyakarta in Improving The Market Quality

Department of Industrial and Trading of Yogyakarta does not have any Public Relations Officer (PRO), but they continue its implementation of Public Relations function for increasing market quality. The objective of this study are to find out the implementation of Public Relations function from this department. Situational Theory of the Publics, The Concept of PR’s Function, and SWOT Analysis will be guide for this study. This study is a qualitative descriptive, in the interest of investigate, measuring, and interpreting the problems of this study. The results shows that this department is implement Public Relations functions in many kind of activities, include Press Agentry, Public Affair and Community Relations, Inovations, and Branding Strategy. Functions implemented by this department are: maintain a good relationship with their publics, create the corporate image, communications between organization and publics, and make programs for all the publics. Based on the results, SWOT Analysis, and Situational Theory of The Publics, the implementation has not been succeed. This is due to the inability of identifying the publics, fulfill its wishes, and find out the right strategy. In the other words, the failure comes out because there is no Public Relations in this department. The contribution of this research is in the form of policy recommendations to other organizations to implement the public relations function as much as possible to achieve the objectives of the program.

Trasformazioni sociali, affettivizzazione della sfera pubblica e ricerca di senso

Western societies are crossed by a plurality of critical phenomena. The perception is that of being grappled with an uncontrollable anthropological drift, which make us powerless, leading towards a point of no return. A constitutive character of such a drift is the enslaving of the public spheres to the affects (i.e. affectivization). Any public affair and discussion is less and less addressed in terms of functional criteria (i.e. in terms of optimization of utility in reason of objective data) and more and more as the trigger as well as the target of affective acting-out. Such a dynamics challenges all individuals and institutions that think that civilization and progress are a matter of the human efforts to enslave the affective exercise of the present moment to the capacity of the reason to draw futurables. Education - and higher education within it - is at the front line of this challenge, because it is up to it the effort of promoting the symbolic resources that enables people to succeed in the twofold task of valorizing subjectivity and enslaving its affective substance to aims of social and civic progress. The present paper intends to contribute to address such a challenge. To this end, it proposes an interpretation of the affectivization spreading the contemporary social landscape, based on current debate in cognitive sciences. On this grounds, the general idea that such a phenomenon is something different from and more than a mere epidemy of irrationality - as it is more or less implicitly treated by observers and analysts- is deepened. Following that, strategic and methodological implications for higher education are discussed. It is called for an extension of the function of higher education, in the direction of taking charge of the demand of symbolic resources required to address the uncertainty generated by the contemporary socio-institutional turmoil.

Engagement for Freedom

This article presents Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of the tension between existence and politics and the role of political commitment in existentialist philosophy. Based on Sartre’s concept of engagement, the article analyzes the transition from the personal to the political perceived as a movement from personal moral consciousness to the awareness of the importance of the individual as a social actor and citizen in society. Sartre’s concept of political engagement can be characterized as critical intellectual commitment and “Socratic Citizenship.” Accordingly, this article is also an acknowledgment of the two important philosophers of ecoethica, Tomonbu Imamichi and Peter Kemp, both committed public intellectuals who said that the role of the philosopher is to contribute to the public affair of cosmopolitan society. Thus, the article presents the political engagement in four major parts: (1) From the existential to political engagement, (2) Political commitment as a struggle for human freedom, (3) The Socratic Citizenship, and (4). Conditions of authentic political action. Political engagement represents an effort to realize the respect owed to each individual as a universal singular, as well as that owed to freedom and democracy in the Kingdom of Ends.

Problémás magánjogi elemek a helyi rendeletalkotásban

Local governments may establish legal relationships governed by civil law in numerous ways, for example, through the creation of associations, various institutional agreements or they can also do so by means of enacting regulations. In line with the stipulations of the Fundamental Law of Hungary, local governments may adopt regulations on two legal bases: if authorized by law or if they want to regulate a local public affair; however, the regulation may not contradict any higher form of legislation. While in the first case it is not only the right but also the obligation of local governments to enact regulations that can even be sanctioned, in the second case it is almost completely optional. The scope of public affairs regulated by local governments is rather broad. While the smaller local governments typically limit their activities to the regulation of the most urgent matters, the larger local governments enact regulations in a wide range of issues also due to the volume of their responsibilities. In many instances a part of these regulations does not remain within the framework of supremacy but also includes numerous elements of civil law. These could include matters related to parking or municipal housing, as well as problems in connection with public services. Norms regulating peaceful public coexistence represent a separate subject area as in many cases they wish to regulate legal relationships pertaining to privacy. In the case of the latter issue, the clause stating that the local regulations shall not contradict any higher form of law is especially central, as it necessitates the extensive knowledge of civil and in some cases even constitutional law to ensure that such a regulation is enacted that fully complies with the laws. This paper introduces and examines those local government regulations that include elements of civil law also and which typically cause problems, with special emphasis on the rules of peaceful public coexistence. Some of these problems are revealed within the scope of legal supervision practiced over local governments, while in other cases the body reviewing the regulation acts in response to citizens’ initiatives.

Evangelism, Revivals, and Foreign Missions

Dissenters in the long nineteenth century believed that they were on the right side of history. This chapter argues that the involvement of evangelical Nonconformists in politics was primarily driven by a coherent worldview derived from a Congregationalist understanding of salvation and the gathered nature of the church. That favoured a preference for voluntarism and a commitment to religious equality for all. Although Whig governments responded to the rising electoral clout of Dissenters after 1832 by meeting Dissenting grievances, both they and the Conservatives retained an Erastian approach to church–state relations. This led to tension with both those Dissenters who favoured full separation between church and state, and with Evangelical Churchmen in Scotland, who affirmed the principle of an Established Church, but refused government interference in ministerial appointments. In 1843 this issue resulted in the Disruption of the Church of Scotland and the formation of a large Dissenting body north of the border, the Free Church. Dissenting militancy after mid-century was fostered by the numerical rise of Dissent, especially in cities, the foundation of influential liberal papers often edited by Dissenters such as Edward Miall, and the rise of municipal reforming movements in the Midlands headed by figures such as Joseph Chamberlain. Industrialization also boosted Dissenting political capacity by encouraging both employer paternalism and trades unionism, whose leaders and rank and file were Nonconformists. Ireland constituted an exception to this pattern. The rise of sectarianism owed less to Irish peculiarities than to the presence and concentration of a large Catholic population, such as also fostered anti-Catholicism in Britain, in for instance Lancashire. The politics of the Ultramontane Catholic Church combined with the experience of agrarian violence and sectarian strife to dispose Irish Protestant Dissenters against Home Rule. The 1906 election was the apogee of Dissent’s political power, installing a Presbyterian Prime Minister in Campbell-Bannerman who would give way in due course to the Congregationalist H.H. Asquith, but also ushering in conflicts over Ireland. Under Gladstone, the Liberal party and its Nonconformist supporters had been identified with the championship of oppressed nationalities. Even though Chamberlain and other leading Dissenting liberals such as Isabella Tod resisted the extension of that approach to Ireland after 1886, preferring local government reform to Home Rule, most Dissenting voters had remained loyal to Gladstone. Thanks to succeeding Unionist governments’ aggressive foreign policy, embrace of tariff reform, and 1902 Education Act, Dissenting voters had been keen to return to a Liberal government in 1906. That government’s collision with the House of Lords and loss of seats in the two elections of 1910 made it reliant on the Irish National Party and provoked the introduction in 1912 of a third Home Rule Bill. The paramilitary resistance of Ulster Dissenters to the Bill was far from unanimous but nonetheless drove a wedge between British Nonconformists who had concluded that religion was a private matter and would do business with Irish Constitutional Nationalists and Ulster Nonconformists, who had adopted what looked like a bigoted insistence that religion was a public affair and that the Union was their only preservative against ‘Rome Rule’. The declaration of war in 1914 and the consequent suspension of the election due in 1915 means it is impossible to know how Nonconformists might have dealt with this crisis. It was the end of an era.

Public service motivation, prosocial behaviours, and career ambitions

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the behavioural consequences of public service motivation (PSM) and how motivation relates to an individual’s call to serve both inside and outside of the workplace. More specifically, this study examines whether and how PSM relates to prosocial behaviours – volunteering and giving – and career ambitions to work in the government or non-profit sector among public affair graduate students. Design/methodology/approach – Logistic regression is used to examine the PSM link using a composite of the 40-item scale, each of the six dimensions – commitment to the public interest, civic duty, social justice, attraction to policymaking, compassion, and self-sacrifice – and the five-item scale from the Merit Principles Survey. The analyses draw upon data from a unique online survey of 122 graduate students in Master of Public Administration and Master of Public Policy programmes. Findings – The results indicate that people with higher levels of PSM are more likely to want to work in public service and volunteer. However, mixed results were found for the relationship between PSM and giving charitable donations and career ambitions to work in government and no link was found for career ambitions to work in the non-profit sector. Originality/value – This paper answers calls to examine the dimensions of PSM and examines Perry’s (1996) original conception. The results provide practical implications for human resource managers as well as non-profit and public managers in recruiting and retaining employees and volunteers.

Liberal Studies’ role in civic education: an exploratory study

Purpose – Liberal Studies (LS), as a compulsory subject for senior secondary students (S4-6) who sit for the Diploma of Secondary Education, was introduced in 2007. There has been increased discussion about merits of the subject. This paper was written based on a study the researchers conducted with LS teachers and students to probe the role LS may play in relation to civic education. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The study employed a qualitative methodology and a series of in-depth interviews were carried out with real LS teachers and students to tap their views about LS from their lived experience. Findings – Findings suggest that LS, if conducted appropriately, can be one of vehicles of civic education particularly in such matters related to enhancing social awareness and the ability to partake in public affair debates. It can also be of potential use to nurturing civic virtues in support of democratic discussion. On the other hand, its relationship with real social and political participation by students was not confirmed. Originality/value – This paper represents one of the first to explore about LS’s possible role in civic education with real grounded data. The paper will be of reference value to readers interested in civic education and teachers, students and policy planners of the subject.