Politics

Remember Who The Enemy Is

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

[Disclaimer: I haven’t read any of the books in Suzanne Collins’ wildly popular Hunger Games trilogy, though I did see the first movie version of that trilogy (The Hunger Games) last year and I just saw the second film, currently out in theaters, Catching Fire.  I’ll go ahead and stipulate that the books are probably…

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Once More Into The Breach, Dear Friends

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Women and Gender Issues 0 Comments

Prompted by a recent piece on newAPPS, I’m (somewhat reluctantly) forced to acknowledge the renewed attention to a not-at-all-new phenomenon in the world of Philosophy over the last couple of years, namely, the dramatic under-representation of women in our profession.  Here’s what you need to know up front, assuming that some of you readers are…

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Tolerance Is Not A Virtue

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues 0 Comments

Let me be clear at the outset: when I say that tolerance is not a virtue, I’m saying that as a philosopher for whom virtue has a conceptually substantive meaning.  I do not mean to imply that tolerance is a vice, a claim to which I think no reasonable moral agent, and no philosopher worth…

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Genius: Generative or Generic?

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

I had the very good fortune of seeing historian Darrin McMahon (Florida State University), author of the recently published Divine Fury: A History of Genius, deliver a lecture last week as part of Rhodes College’s year-long Communities in Conversation lecture series. I want to write a bit here about some of the questions his book…

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AltAc, TransAc, PostAc and Just Plain Old ACK!

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 0 Comments

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow published a piece a few days ago in the NYT entitled “The Repurposed Ph.D.,” which served as my first introduction to the neologism “post-academic.” The abbreviated (and eminently hashtaggable) version of that term– “PostAc”– is something like the poorer, sadder and less pretty twin of “AltAc” (“alternative academic”), which has for the last…

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Hate Crimes, Complicated: Or, Why It’s So Hard To Do What’s Right, Even When You’re “Right”

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Women and Gender Issues 0 Comments

I’ve never been in a fist-fight in my entire life  but, yesterday, I received my first black eye. I got my black eye roughly 48 hours ago now, on what just so happened to be the last day of my College’s Fall break, which ended Tuesday evening.  I spent the entire evening on Tuesday with…

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Doctor Nobody, or: How I Learned to Stop Sitting Passively By and Actually Fight the MOOC Machine

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 69 Comments

As just-another college professor, it’s hard not to feel like the war against MOOCs is more than a little bit like the War on Drugs, or the War or Terror, or the War on Poverty.  The “enemy” is largely nonspecific, nonlocatable, plural, mutable, incredibly powerful and often invisible.  It’s hard to tell on which front…

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Those Children Were Not Babies

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

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2012 Year in Politics

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 2012 Year in Review Lists, Dr. J's Lists, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Year in Review Lists 0 Comments

Election years are always crazy years for American politics.  They’re not always Clint-Eastwood-talking-to-an-empty-chair crazy, though.  Nor are they, as a rule, “legitimate rape”- or “binders full of women”- or “fiscal cliff”- or “austerity”- crazy, that is, so crazy that one requires a Crazy-to-English translator to watch the evening news.  And although American politics is never…

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Film of Exception: Zero Dark Thirty

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Film, Film Reviews, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

I’m not sure exactly where to place the blame for the total disappointment that is the (Academy Award-nominated) film Zero Dark Thirty, which tells a based-on-real-events story of “the greatest manhunt in history.”  The hunted is, of course, al-Qaeda founder and mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks Osama bin Laden.  Zero Dark Thirty is organized as…

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