RMWMTMBM Archive

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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Why I Won’t Turn It In

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 4 Comments

I recently learned that my institution has signed up for Turnitin.com, an Internet “plagiarism-prevention” service that allows professors to submit students’ papers and checks them against other submissions to verify that they’ve not been copied. There’s no mandate at my institution yet (as far as I know) for faculty to participate, and so I plan…

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Let The Right One In

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Film, Film Reviews, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Women and Gender Issues 2 Comments

If you’ve been stuck under a rock for the last couple of years, you may not be aware that vampires are all the rage right now. Since I’m not a huge fan of scary movies, scary monsters, or scary things in general, I’ve managed to sidestep any real exposure to the recent vampiremania, though a…

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I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Relativism, RMWMTMBM Archive, The Search for Values 5 Comments

I’m not ashamed to admit that philosophers can be quite persnickety in our insistence upon precision in language. Much of what we do, after all, involves precisely defining things, concepts, meanings, values, processes, systems, states of being and the like. That’s not to say that we are actually settled on precise definitions for everything; in…

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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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More Good Listenin’

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Dr. J's Lists, Music, RMWMTMBM Archive 2 Comments

One advantage of sabbatical life (a.k.a. the solitary writing life) is that you get all the music-listenin’ time you could ever want or stand. Assuming you’re one of those people who can work while you listen to music, which I am, you may find yourself compelled to supplement the ol’ iTunes Music Library from time…

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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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Bon Mots: Fanon on Racism

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

From his essay “Racism and Culture” in Toward the African Revolution (Grove Press, 1964, p.59-60), Frantz Fanon writes: It is at this level that racism is treated as a question of persons. “There are a few hopeless racists, but you must admit that on the whole the population likes…” “With time all this will disappear…”…

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