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(03/18/13 9:05am)
I do not pretend to be an expert on international military affairs. But it seems we have entered a new age of post-Cold War war craft. Last Tuesday, media outlets across the United States reported the escape of several Ukrainian “attack” dolphins. RIA Novosti, a Russian news source, reported that the “killer” dolphins swam away from their handlers during training exercises in order to search for mates. The Russian media stated that the Ukrainian Defense Ministry denied these reports and refused to even acknowledge the existence of the dolphins. Given the repeated sightings of killer dolphins in the Black Sea, the Defense Ministry’s denials seemed baseless.
(03/04/13 11:28am)
The United States prides itself on being the hero. When a dictatorship or communism raises its anti-American head, the stars and stripes swoop in to save the day with democracy and capitalism. The State Department advertises that its mission is to “advance freedom … by helping to build and sustain a more democratic, secure and prosperous world.” One would imagine that a nation so committed to the spread of democracy would take all necessary steps to preserve democracy within its own borders.
(02/18/13 9:19am)
Last October, Savita Halappanavar, was admitted to an Irish hospital with severe back pain. She was 17 weeks pregnant and in the process of miscarrying. A little over a week later, she died from blood poisoning. Doctors maintained that their “hands were tied” by Ireland’s strict anti-abortion laws. However, the leaked draft report by the Irish health ministry indicates that doctors failed to diagnose the infection for three days and, furthermore, that medical staff should have considered performing an abortion procedure even before Dr. Halappanavar asked for one.
(02/04/13 12:04pm)
Sometimes, living under a tyrannical socialist dictator for a couple of years seems like a good idea. I know that sounds absurd and exactly like Glenn Beck’s worst fear, but sometimes the type of democracy we have in our federalist system of government seems to hopelessly and ironically impede the recognition of our rights. I realize that the tyrannical, socialist style essentially failed with the end of the Cold War, and I am definitely not coming out as a die-hard supporter of the Soviet Union. But I do believe that the federal government should have the power to act for the public welfare to protect and preserve the core rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
(01/09/13 8:28am)
Last year was a banner year for women. A record number of female athletes competed in the Olympics. The women of the U.S. Olympic Team dominated their male counterparts in the gold medal count. A world-renowned authority on IQ tests found that women’s IQ scores have risen more quickly than men’s over the past century. Women were pivotal in the re-election of President Obama, and there is now a record 100 women in Congress.
(11/19/12 10:23am)
It happened again. A man in power developed a case of chronic wardrobe malfunction. The leader of the organization that is “the nation’s first line of defense,” the Central Intelligence Agency, couldn’t even manage to defend himself against the temptation of an affair with his biographer.
(11/05/12 7:43am)
Language is more than just English, Spanish, Chinese or Arabic. Language acquires meaning through context, and although the meaning of a simple word such as “Hello” may be fairly universal among English-speakers, this is not the case for more complicated expressions such as “basic healthcare” and “religious freedom.” Superficially, these phrases may seem fairly self-explanatory—of course everyone is entitled to access to basic healthcare, and every fifth grader knows that religious freedom was one of the founding principles of this country. However, the underlying definitions of these terms dictate the parameters of debate. If two parties involved in a discussion have fundamentally different understandings of the core terms of their disagreement, then they could just as well be speaking mutually incomprehensible languages.
(10/22/12 6:58am)
Apparently, every employer who wants to help women break through the glass ceiling just needs to go out and look for female candidates to put in their binders. That’s what Mitt Romney did when he was putting together his cabinet as governor of Massachusetts.
(10/08/12 7:39am)
The ultimate goal of American foreign policy should be “ending tyranny in our world.” That’s what former President George W. Bush said in his second inaugural address. And he wasn’t the first president to tout American democracy as the panacea for the world’s injustices. In the wake of the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley rationalized the annexation of the Philippines with a promise to ensure the “full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples” for the Filipinos. Before World War I, President Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy was a feigned balancing act between the right to self-determination and the spread of democracy—he almost invariably prioritized democratization over self-determination. When Wilson identified making the world “safe for democracy” as the main goal of the United States’ entry into World War I, he solidified the tradition of American moral imperialism that survives to this day.
(09/24/12 3:46am)
Free speech is tricky. It can offend or uplift, terrify or exhilarate, incite or pacify. Along with the other First Amendment rights to freedom of religion and freedom of association, we commonly understand our right to express ourselves freely to be absolute. But this is far from reality. Even as we go about our quotidian activities, the vast majority of us constantly apply a filter. We refrain from saying exactly what we please because we think it might unnecessarily offend the person we’re talking to or just because we’re concerned about subscribing to the status quo and not looking like a fool. Exercising such restraint is a central characteristic of a well-adjusted adult, an individual who has fully internalized the prescribed conduct of society. This auto-policing of speech allows us to interact in a “civilized” manner with our peers and thereby work toward achieving the quintessential capitalist goal of perpetual development and improvement.
(09/10/12 6:18am)
If you’ve paid attention at all to the presidential elections, you should be terrified. Not because of the very serious threat of voter fraud (an earth-shattering total of 2068 cases since 2000, less than .001 of a percent of the votes cast), and not because of the formidable force of Hurricane Isaac (which ended up doing more damage to post traumatic stress disorder-stricken New Orleans than the elephant-hat wearing delegates in Tampa). The real reason you should be stockpiling canned foods, watching “The Hunger Games” to learn some essential archery skills and filling your sinks and bathtubs with water is the imminent threat of an apocalypse. Both parties imagine that the country is on the brink of destruction, one pivotal Election Day away from either a socialist takeover or a return to the glory days of the Industrial Revolution. The former will straightjacket job creators, provide illegal immigrants with a path to citizenship and guarantee a woman’s right to choose and gay marriage. The latter will turn back the clock to give job creators the free reign to provide for their employees and to pollute as much or as little as they wish, devise a system to encourage illegal immigrants to self-deport, define marriage as union between a man and a woman and identify a woman’s uterus as the only part of her body that is not free to pursue all the opportunities available to her.
(08/27/12 7:09am)
Last week, I had to double-check my surroundings to make sure I hadn’t slipped through some time warp into the 19th century, because that would be the only explanation for Rep. Todd Akin’s comments. Apparently, it’s rare for a woman to get pregnant from rape—“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.” But I read the story on my iPhone, went for a run on the human hamster wheel, drove home from campus in a car powered by gas instead of horses and made my dinner on an electric range. By all indications, the first week of law school had not pushed me so far over the edge that I had landed among the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens and the Brothers Grimm.
(08/21/12 12:19am)
It’s official. Women are smarter AND more successful in sports than men.
(05/24/12 5:36am)
The International Volleyball Federation has robbed millions of viewers of the chance to watch athletic, bikini-clad women spike volleyballs this summer.
(04/23/12 4:00am)
Over the past two weeks, the war on women has developed a new focus: motherhood. I guess I should be happy that women aren’t being discussed as inanimate bodies with child-bearing capabilities anymore, but I can’t get over Ann Romney’s equation of her own experiences of motherhood with those of working women experiencing economic hardship. Before I get attacked for exemplifying the typical anti-family, secularist, liberal Left, I have to make one thing clear: I do not wish to undervalue the work of mothers across the world in any way. I just find it difficult to believe that Ann Romney, who went to private school, got a degree from Brigham Young University and took classes at Harvard Extension School, can fully empathize with an unemployed mother on welfare. Somehow, I think there has to be some disconnect.
(04/09/12 4:00am)
As a self-proclaimed theory nerd, I have spent the majority of my Duke career trying to answer what may seem like superfluous questions. What is epistemology? Phenomenology? Post-structuralism? All of these lead to the ultimate question: What is a person? Needless to say, I never anticipated that any of these questions would ever migrate from the realm of abstract theory into the political sphere. Then this election began.
(03/26/12 4:00am)
When I went to Washington, D.C. with my mother in April 2004, as a relatively clueless 14-year-old, I naively believed that the “March to Save Women’s Lives” would be an isolated incident of activism, incited by an isolated attempt on the part of the president to overthrow Roe v. Wade. Many of the women I ran into at the event stated over and over again that they have already fought for a woman’s right to choose. They felt like they had stepped into a time warp and traveled 40 years back in time. A woman’s right to choose was supposed to be a debate of the past. I, as an eighth-grader, should be able to grow up knowing that other women had fought for my right to choose ... and won. It shouldn’t be something I had to go to D.C. to fight for. At that point, no one could have imagined that the debate over a woman’s right to choose would, only two election cycles later, be subsumed in what Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post calls “the national brush fire over birth control access, abortion and overall reproductive health.”
(03/12/12 4:00am)
As Duke students settled into their Spring break on March 6, the charitable organization Invisible Children released their KONY 2012 video, which “aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.” This video is the most recent example of the charity’s media-centered efforts to end an ongoing conflict in Uganda and tell the stories of children abducted from their homes and forced to join the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the boys as soldiers and the girls as sex slaves. The video’s successful appeal to young viewers to donate and encourage “culturemakers” and policymakers to join the effort through social media is unprecedented: As of March 8, the video had almost 40 million YouTube views, and “InvisibleChildren” was trending worldwide on Twitter. And that’s without even considering the number of times a link to the video has been shared on Facebook—by March 7, the video had been shared over 3.5 million times by Facebook users. Clearly, the campaign is working.
