politics

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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Solicitation

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Weak Humanism 3 Comments

Just today, I posted a solicitation for book recommendations as my Facebook status. I asked for fiction recs– proscribing Stieg Larsson in advance — and almost immediately received a host of literary endorsements from my many bibliophile friends (and, a pleasant surprise, from my students as well). I was happy to see that most of…

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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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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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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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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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