Human Rights

A Punishing Lesson: On Black Mirror’s “White Bear”

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 1 Comment

[NOTE: This is the another installment in my series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!] “White Bear” (S2E2) is one of only two Black Mirror episodes that I use in class. (The other is “Be Right Back,” which I reviewed here.) In my regular, face-to-face classes, the…

Sixth Amendment, Unfunded

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 0 Comments

This is just a short post motivated by my #BlackLivesMatter Reading Group session yesterday, where we discussed Albert Samaha‘s excellent essay “Indefensible: The Story of New Orleans’ Public Defenders.” I thought I was long past being shocked by anything

Hashtagging Solidarity

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 0 Comments

The printing press, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane: each in their own way radically shrunk the world, diminished the power of mere distance to maintain our strangeness to one another. Yet, arguably, no human innovation has served as a greater tool for transcending Nature’s most seemingly impregnable boundaries, space and time, than the World…

American Apartheid

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 0 Comments

For they know they are not animals. And at the very moment when they discover their humanity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its victory. –Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth America has always been and remains an apartheid state. The latter part of that sad but increasingly undeniable fact was made apparent last night in…

The CIA Report Is The Purloined Letter and Obama Is The Prefect: My Break-Up Letter to President Obama

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 0 Comments

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we did some things that were wrong. We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. — President Barack Obama, Press Conference (Aug 1, 2014) “That is another of your odd notions,” said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling everything “odd”…

Those Children Were Not Babies

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 0 Comments

In a press conference shortly after the horrible news of the Connecticut grade-school shooting broke, White House press secretary Jay Carney said: “There is, I am sure– will be, rather– a day for discussion of the usual Washington policy debates, but I do not think today is that day.” Carney could not have been more…

Why I Stood With The Students

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 0 Comments

As I reported in my previous post, students at my college organized an event last Monday night, the Rhodes Solidarity Vigil, which was meant to demonstrate solidarity with the nonviolent student protesters at UC-Davis (and elsewhere) who were brutalized by police while peacefully exercising their right to assemble. This is why I stood with the…

Solidarity

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 0 Comments

This past Monday, November 21, students at Rhodes College organized a candlelight vigil to show their solidarity with the student protesters at UC-Davis who were assaulted by police while nonviolently protesting on November 18. Rhodes’ event was an answer to the call sent out by Occupy Colleges, the student wing of the Occupy Movement, asking…

Tortured Reasoning

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 4 Comments

I haven’t posted much on human rights recently, the primary focus of my research, though I continue to plug away at thinking and writing about it every day. One of the topics that I spend a lot of time with is torture, an issue that I intend to use as the go-to “case study” in…

The Rich Man’s War Is The Poor Man’s Fight

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 0 Comments

Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen’s new book The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of America’s Wartime Inequalities (reviewed in The Nation here) proves that the age-old description of the American Civil War as a “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight”– which may or may not have been true of the Civil War– IS…

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