politics

Groovy, Man

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

ReadMoreWriteMoreThinkMoreBeMore just passed 70,000 hits! Again, a big THANK YOU to all the readers who keep coming back. Especially those of you who have contributed to the recent Why I Chose Memphis series, which prompted an interview by the Memphis Flyer that I gave today and which will appear in print soon. (Keep those stories…

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2010 Year In Pop Culture

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 2010 Year in Review Lists, Dr. J's Lists, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Year in Review Lists 1 Comment

Right out of the gate, 2010 looked to be a very promising pop culture year. Back in January, at one of the early American Idol auditions, we were introduced to aspiring contestant General Larry Platt, who regaled the judges with his seemingly-improvised yet totally-infectious original composition “Pants on the Ground.” Before America’s favorite non-plussed judge…

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Tortured Reasoning

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

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…

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Notes From the Other Side of the Job Market

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Dr. J's Lists, Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive 4 Comments

In my first 3 years at my current position, I served on 2 tenure-track search committees, a process that literally took up every spare moment of my time (and many non-spare moments) for the 4 or 5 months that it lasted. Although I certainly learned a lot in my time on SLAC Search Committees– including,…

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Democratic Political Playbook (Revised, 2010)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Dr. J's Lists, Obama, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 4 Comments

It shouldn’t come as any surpise that the “Red Wave” did, as predicted, wash ashore in Washington, DC after polls closed on the 2010 midterm elections last Tuesday. Although Democrats managed to hang on to 51 Senate seats, they lost their “house” (a trauma all-too-familiar to many of their constituents). Republican, Tea Party and Independent…

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The Many Faces of You, America

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Women and Gender Issues 0 Comments

I’ve tried to refrain from commenting here upon the complete train-wreck that is (“surprise” Senate primary winner from Delaware) Christine O’Donnell, but a self-respecting political blogger can only be reasonably expected to hold out for so long. We’re all aware of the catalog of crazy things that have somehow made their way out of Christine…

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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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