RMWMTMBM Archive

Due Process

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Human Rights, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 1 Comment

Nassar al-Alwaki, father of alleged terrorist and Al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Alwaki, is suing the U.S. government for putting his American-born son on the military’s so-called “capture or kill” list. (All reports seem to indicate that the “capture or” part is rarely heeded. For all intents and purposes, these lists serve as execution orders.) The lawsuit…

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Deny and Imply

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Digital Humanities, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive 4 Comments

Gary Shteyngart’s new novel Super Sad True Love Story takes place in a not-too-distant future America that reads uncomfortably familiar and, consequently, entirely believable. There, America has suffered a sharp decline in global economic and political importance, and has refashioned itself as an almost unabashedly consumerist Security State– though the Horatio-Alger-esque resolve (and hubris) that…

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Is Ground Zero A “Sacred” Site?

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 6 Comments

As everyone knows, there has been much Sturm und Drang about the proposed Park 51 project (a.k.a., the “Ground Zero mosque”) and its proximity to the lower Manhattan site where the World Trade Center Towers stood before 9/11. Let me say at the outset that I’m not going to comment much here on the merits…

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3-Minute Fiction (Round 5)

June 9, 2024 Dr. J Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive 1 Comment

Just a reminder that the 5th round of NPR’s excellent writing contest for listeners, Three Minute Fiction, is currently underway. This round is hosted by Michael Cunningham (author of A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days and, perhaps most famously, The Hours) who will serve as one of the…

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Thinking In Images

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Thinking in Images 3 Comments

I was at a dinner party recently with colleagues and, per usual, the conversation at some point turned to bemoaning students’ sometimes less-than-ideal language skills. The complaints were standard fare– what ever happened to proper grammar? to sophisticated and orderly essay construction? to close and careful reading skills? to the capacity for clearly translating ideas…

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Inception

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Film, Film Reviews, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive 6 Comments

“What’s the most resilient parasite? An idea.” — Dominic Cobb, protagonist in Inception If you buy the basic premise of the new film Inception, most of our ideas (perhaps all of them) begin deeply in our subconscious, in our dreams. There, they are born and grow, fertilized and fed in a world in which they…

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Bon Mots: Coetzee on the Origin of the State

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Bon Mots, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

From his most recent novel, Diary of a Bad Year (Viking, 2007, p.3), J.M. Coetzee’s chief narrator, Señor C, speculates: Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that “we”– not we the readers but some generic we so wide as to exclude no one– participate in its coming into being….

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The Not-Long-Enough Arm of the Law

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Human Rights, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 4 Comments

Earlier this week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued its second arrest warrant for the President of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on his watch in the course of the ongoing conflict in Darfur. Included in the charges against Bashir is the crime of genocide, which the ICC claims…

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Bon Mots: Arendt on the Rights of Stateless People

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Bon Mots, Human Rights, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

From The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt/HBJ, 1979, p. 295-6), Hannah Arendt tracks the coincidence of statelessness and rightlessness: The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion– formulas which were designed to solve problems within…

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The Uncanny Valley 4: Magic, Miracles, and the Necessary Third

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Uncanny Valley 3 Comments

As many of you know, I was a tad bit obsessed with a certain theory in robotics known as “the uncanny valley” several months back. I even delivered a philosophy paper this past Spring using the uncanny valley as one way of explaining our aversion to racial passing. (You can read my series of posts…

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