Politics

The King, The Clown, The Colonel: Axis of Evil?

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 7 Comments

There are debates about a few really important issues that have a tendency after a while to fade into a kind of white noise for me. I generally find this to be true about debates over capital punishment, abortion, the existence or nonexistence of God, and the legalization of drugs. It’s not that I think…

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REPOST: Picking A Fight… Like A Girl

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues 4 Comments

[NOTE: This is a post that was originally published on this blog a year ago (10/08/09), which I am re-posting now because of recent interest in the newly-developed and eminently revealing What Is It Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy? blog. It is interesting to me to see this issue resurface with such force…

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Morehouse Mean Girls

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

I’ll admit that I hesitated, more than once– more than a dozen times, to be honest– before posting this entry. So, allow me a few caveats here at the start. First, I’m not a Morehouse grad, not even a Spelman grad– two of the most prestigious HBCU’s in the country– and I can appreciate that…

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200,000-Strong Bartlebys Unite To Say: “Meh”

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Obama, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive 8 Comments

The much-ballyhooed “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear”— brainchild of America’s Ironists-in-Chief Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert— came and went this past Saturday in Washington, DC. Although the crowd-count estimates vary (as they always do), most put the number at somewhere between 200,000 and a quarter-million attendees. (TRANSLATION: For Midwesterners, that’s somewhere between the total…

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Exercise Your Franchise!

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

If you didn’t “early vote” before, please take the time to go to your local polling place today and exercise your franchise. As Tom Stoppard once wrote: “It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.” But if you don’t vote, you can’t be counted. Stop. Think. Vote.

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Deconstructing Sasha Fierce

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Music, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues 10 Comments

I’m guessing that many of us have those fleeting fantasies from time to time in which we conjure up what we imagine would be the AWESOMEST. COURSE. EVER. For example, my fantasy courses: “I’m Not Here To Make Friends: Ethics and Reality TV” (sort of a cross between ethical theory, applied ethics, and existentialism), or…

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Cold War In The Classroom

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 5 Comments

Dr. Miller, aka Anotherpanacea, has called me to account for my post a few days ago (“Why I Won’t Turn It In“), in which I detailed my objections to the pay-per-plagiarism-police service known as Turnitin.com. AnPan does use the service, and he offers his own justifications for that choice in his post titled “Why I…

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

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Human Rights, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 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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Dear NYT, please stop writing stories about Memphis politics.

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Memphis, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 6 Comments

Somebody, for the love of God, please make it stop. Once again, the New York Times has given us embarrasingly reductive, bordering on cartoonish and condescending, reportage about Memphis politics. This time, it’s an article provocatively entitled “Black Candidate Brings Race Into a Primary in Memphis.” (I’m shocked that they were able to refrain from…

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Briefly Noted

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

I’m working against some fast-approaching deadlines– also working in the midst of some please-ice-me-down-or-shoot-me-now heat indices here in Memphis– so all I can rustle up are a few truncated reflections on things that have piqued my interest of late. For those of you playing along at home, I’ve provided helpful and handy-dandy guides for filing…

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