Politics

#30DaySongChallenge, Day 3: A Song That Reminds You Of Summertime

I live in Memphis, so summertime makes me think of heat. Hot heat. Sticky heat. Unrelenting heat. Oppressive heat. The kind of heat that you can’t escape and you can’t recover from, despite the fact that you spend most of your time between May and September mad-dashing from one air-conditioned place to another air-conditioned place….

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#30DaySongChallenge, Day 4: A Song That Reminds You Of Something You’d Rather Forget

You know what I’d rather forget? Donald Trump. I’d like to forget that he currently sits in the Oval Office, guzzling Diet Cokes, downing McDonalds cheeseburgers, drooling over Fox & Friends, and firing off barely-literate tweets. I’d like to forget the circus he manufactured leading up to his 2016 election, and the dumpster fire he’s…

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Datapocalypse Now?

Facebook and its enigmatic custodian Mark Zuckerberg suffered their biggest hit to date this week when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica— which self-describes as a political and commercial service that “uses data to change audience behavior”– pulled the personal data from 50 million Facebook users, without their permission, and used it to advance Donald Trump’s…

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Humanity: How To Tell Your Students They’re The End Of It

For the last couple of semesters, I’ve been trying to introduce my students, in as gentle and nonthreatening a manner as possible, to the idea that they may very well be the last of “humanity” as we know it.  This has not been a well-received speculative proposition. In my defense, I really make an effort…

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MEA CULPA: I Was So Wrong About Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg totally proved me wrong in his testimony to Congress over the last two days. Contrary to what I anticipated in my blog post yesterday (here), he *DID* attempt to explain to Congress things that they (obviously) did not know or understand, he *DID* offer concrete suggestions for policy/legislative change, he *DID* explicitly oppose the…

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Parental Control: On Black Mirror’s “Arkangel” (Guest Post by Shannon M. Mussett)

[This is the next installment in my ongoing series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!] [Note from Dr. J: What follows is a guest post on S4E2 “Arkangel” from Shannon M. Mussett, a brilliant philosopher and dear friend with whom I frequently disagree about almost all things technological. I’ll be…

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Zuckerberg, Congress, and Morality Theater

Our country’s most enigmatic robot overlord, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is scheduled to appear before Congress today to answer questions about, among other things, Facebook’s complicity with Russian bots, sock-puppets, and fake-news generators as well as the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal. As I’ve said before on this blog, we really ought not underestimate the importance of…

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The Fine Line Between Proselytizing and Parody: On “Roseanne”

Two decades after its season “finale” in 1997, Roseanne made its triumphant return to prime-time television this past Tuesday night.  More than 18 million people tuned in (including President Trump) and, if the hot takes are to believed, most people loved it (including President Trump). Critics have attributed the largely positive reception of Roseanne to its sympathetic…

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Black Mirror for Beginners

In my experience, of the people who have actually watched Black Mirror, there are two types: those who absolutely LOVE it, and those who never got past the pig episode. To be fair to the second group, “the pig episode” (aka, “The National Anthem”) is the very first episode of the very first season and it packs…

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Chatbots and the Re-Ordering of the Polis

This past weekend, at the Society for Existentialism and Phenomenology conference, I heard a really fascinating panel dedicated to “The Promises of Polytheism” and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Now, as a rule, I’m not all that interested in theism(s) of the sort that most people would recognize, but I…

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