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(09/14/17 4:31am)
The Rohingya in western Myanmar are being ethnically cleansed by the Burmese government, and the President of the United States has done nothing to stop it. His administration might even have learned from Myanmar’s example when it decided to repeal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, placing hundreds of thousands of de facto American citizens back under the shadow of deportation. The Trump administration does not care about the values the United States traditionally stands for. The past eight months of this presidency have seen an America in moral and strategic decline, the executive’s various departments left to implement their policy preferences in haphazard and disconnected fashion while the president caws to the white nationalist id and makes impetuous, destabilizing decisions. America looks mean and small, and the world is suffering for it.
(09/01/17 3:04am)
The white supremacist rallies of Aug. 11 and 12 brought, with shock and violence, scenes of a city and nation in disrepair. The tensions at the heart of Charlottesville, between its residents and the University they host, between its longstanding constituents and its oblivious gentrifiers, between its bloodied history and its liberal identity, had settled into an uneasy inertia. The Robert E. Lee statue would go and the parks would be renamed, but the waiting list for affordable housing would remain just as long and neighborhoods just as segregated. The terrorism Charlottesville suffered has reinvigorated those strains, and in turn demands that we reflect on what we can do to ease them.
(08/22/17 12:46pm)
The University is beautiful. The Lawn, Pavilions, pathways and statues emanate a sense of permanence, figures of orderliness amidst the chaos, sloping delicately toward the Rotunda. But the classical facade of the Academical Village was built by brutality and oppression, white marble stained by the blood, sweat and tears of the slaves who built these Grounds.
(07/15/17 2:09am)
The Fourth of July this year was like any other. Towns and cities across the country marked the occasion with fairs during the day and firework displays at night. People ate funnel cake, and immediately came to regret it.
(04/27/17 5:10am)
The results of the first round of the French presidential elections are in, and despite significant fluctuations in the polling in the few weeks leading up to the vote, they are along the lines most expected. Emmanuel Macron, the centrist, cosmopolitan independent, and Marine Le Pen, the hard-right, nationalist firebrand of the National Front, came out on top. Their success ushers in a campaign between two diametrically opposed visions for the French Republic, the West and the world ahead of the second round of voting on May 7. Le Pen is likely to lose by a large margin, and the hope is that the magnitude of her defeat will reverberate internationally, signaling that the election of President Donald Trump was the high-water mark of a populist movement in retreat. There is much evidence to corroborate that optimism. More likely than not, however, we are in the eye of a storm whose most devastating effects are yet to come.
(04/12/17 5:21am)
On Tuesday, April 4, reports emerged that the Assad regime hit the village of Khan Sheikhoun in Syria’s Idlib province with sarin gas, killing at least 85 people and wounding hundreds more. Within 63 hours, the United States launched 59 tomahawk cruise missiles at Shayrat Airfield, the site from where the chemical attacks were launched. This American military action, the first directed at the Assad regime since the Syrian uprising began six years ago, drew bipartisan praise from congressional leadership, the foreign policy establishment and allies in Europe and the Middle East. Others have voiced deep consternation about the strategic, legal and procedural implications of the strike.
(04/05/17 4:06am)
The Jefferson-Madison Regional Library hosted a discussion last week on reparations to the black community hosted by the Charlottesville Showing Up for Racial Justice chapter. The Cavalier Daily reported on the event, and its coverage received a lot of attention. This may well be because of the, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his landmark article “The Case for Reparations,” “popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties.” Talk of reparations, the common dismissal goes, is ludicrous on its face, a product of white guilt and a symptom of the pathological liberalism flaring in college campuses across the country. This is an intellectually dishonest treatment of an important idea. The policy specifics reparations may be politically unfeasible, but the underlying intellectual foundation is solid. Communicating that message to the American people has the best chance of succeeding if we eschew ideology, orthodoxy and zealotry in an effort to appeal to the country’s bedrock sense of justice.
(03/29/17 4:29am)
The Cavalier Daily Editorial Board recently argued Charlottesville should not remove the statue of Robert E. Lee from Lee Park, arguing such an action would be illegal, inefficient and would fix nothing. After acknowledging the statue’s racist symbolism, the board argued it is better to contextualize the monument by telling the stories of African Americans in the antebellum period — both enslaved and free — and being clear about the statue’s history. But the board’s piece contradicts itself in key areas, and it ends up sounding a confused note. The statue’s glorification, the board claims, has inflicted clear harm on the Charlottesville community and, yet, its removal would fix nothing. An exploration of the Lee statue’s history reveals the insidiousness of both this monument to racism and the law which proscribes its removal and our inaction today. The Charlottesville City Council was right to vote for its removal, and it should proceed with due haste in tearing it down.
(03/22/17 4:06am)
Since lawn room selections came out last month, a debate has been raging in The Cavalier Daily Opinion section about the relative weight merit and representation should be given in the Lawn room selection process. The arguments have so far focused on the role of the calibration committee in the process, which was revamped for the 2016-17 school year with apparent success. In response to the criticisms leveled at his first piece by Alexander Adames, who argued that it is crucial for the selection committee to consider context and inequities, Matt Winesett retooled his justification of a meritocratic process to account for Adames’ arguments. Unfortunately, his reliance on a false choice between the Lawn as an award or a mirror presupposes a trade-off which rarely exists for competitive application processes and certainly does not exist for the Lawn. The calibration committee does not consist of a “relaxation of standards” because of the simple fact that there are far more qualified applicants than there are Lawn rooms. Furthermore, his emphasis on the Lawn’s prestige makes it seem like just a host of statistics and accolades. Rather, it is the living, breathing and historical center of the University, where excellence, inclusion, merit and representation should be mutually reinforcing. The calibration committee helps us achieve that vision.
(03/20/17 4:18am)
The story of the rise of the Tea Party is a familiar one. Protests erupted in the summer of 2009 and continued as a Democratic president and Congress pushed through a slew of consequential reform measures, culminating in the landslide Congressional victories for Republicans, which made John Boehner Speaker of the House. An equally important and well-known part of this story was the Tea Party’s instrumental role in unseating numerous Republican incumbents who were deemed too moderate. Arms-control legend Dick Lugar of Indiana, Mike Castle of Delaware, Eric Cantor of Virginia and numerous others lost to fringe candidates as America’s growing hatred of all things elite and establishment grew in proportion to Washington dysfunction — eventually bringing us President Donald Trump. As Democrats regroup, they cannot afford to make the same mistake of applying endlessly more stringent litmus tests to their standard-bearers. Not only would this be a recipe for electoral defeat in the midterms and beyond, but it would also further erode whatever slight chance remains of finding common ground.
(03/03/17 8:38pm)
At this year’s Munich Security Conference, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., delivered a poignant address in which he expressed fear that the liberal international order is being eroded by a crisis of confidence and that the U.S. is retreating from the world. Unfortunately, Sen. McCain is one of a small minority of elected Republicans willing to speak inconsistent truths to the Trump administration. In an op-ed published by The Cavalier Daily two weeks ago, Ali Hiestand, the chair of the College Republicans at the University, wrote passionately of the need for liberals to stop grouping President Trump in with all Republicans, asking “are you against Trump or are you against the entire Republican Party?” She could well point to Sen. McCain and the minority of other Republicans who join him in his criticism. Considering the president ran and won on the Republican ticket, it seems more like Hiestand is in denial of what has happened to her party and what it is actively doing to assure the success of the president’s nationalist and xenophobic agenda. To criticize one is to criticize both.
(03/01/17 5:01am)
President Trump rescinded the Obama administration’s statements of policy and guidance Feb. 22 that ensured transgender students’ access to bathrooms which match their gender identity. In their “Dear Colleague” letter, the U.S. Justice and Education Departments stated “there must be due regard for the primary role of the States and local school districts in establishing educational policy.” As part of a longstanding tradition in American history, the letter’s citation of states’ rights as justification for this action is an ugly, cynical attempt to veil the Trump administration’s bigotry. In response, University President Teresa Sullivan released a statement which reiterated the University’s commitment to diversity and intolerance of “discrimination or harassment toward LGBTQ faculty, staff, or students” and the inclusion of gender identity and sexual orientation in its existing non-discrimination policy. This, however, does not go far enough.
(02/22/17 5:30am)
The University Board of Elections released the interim expenditure report which all candidates for elected student offices had to fill out by Feb. 13, three days before the official start of the campaign on Feb. 16. The results are stunning. The interim expenditure report, as distinguished from the final one to be submitted on Feb. 24, showed more than double the total spending of the 2016 elections reported by the final report, with student elections projected to cost $6,800 this year to last year’s definitive $2,873.18. The race for student council president is in another dimension. Kelsey Kilgore projected $2,490 of spending alone. This is a singularly egregious example of a candidate making up the difference in a race with the raw power of the resources she can draw on. It is a blatant violation of the trust, integrity and fairness of the election process for a candidate to attempt to buy an election she is not qualified to win. The student body must mobilize to amend the constitution of the University Board of Elections next year to cap permitted spending so that this can never happen again.
(02/15/17 5:06am)
As the Spring 2017 elections approach, it seems that we have yet another Honor referendum to consider. Vj Jenkins and Nathan Gonzalez are spearheading the “Empowered 55” movement to pass the “Democratization Amendment to Honor’s Constitution.” Their efforts represent what is best about student self-governance here at the University, pushing changes they believe are important by gathering signatures, making their case and mobilizing support. Unfortunately, the proposal they bring before the student body is misguided as it stands and would be detrimental to the careful maintenance of the community of trust if implemented.
(02/08/17 5:31am)
Last semester, after students and faculty signed a letter asking University President Teresa Sullivan to stop pointing to Jefferson as a “moral compass” following an email she sent to students on Nov. 9, the discussion that ensued took on national proportions. The question of the value of quoting Jefferson in the wake of Trump’s election to the presidency became representative of a wider conversation about language in American discourse. Reactions to the letter broke along the same tired lines.
(02/01/17 5:00am)
The wars of 18th century Europe were fought by professional armies over limited territorial disputes. They were between kings, respective of each other’s right to rule, pushing the boundaries of the balance of power on the basis of ruthless calculations of their interests, yet never quite breaking through them. This situation changed irrevocably after the French Revolution brought Napoleon I to power and with him a war not of militaries, but of entire peoples. Napoleon was not after concessions but rather exporting the revolution, and his writ, to all of Europe. He proclaimed the ideals of the French Revolution to be universal, leveraging the first citizen-drafted army from the continent’s most respected land-based military power to back the unlimited claims of his personal rule. It took years for the other great powers to recognize that Napoleon was playing by an entirely different set of rules. After his candidacy and one week of his presidency, it should be clear to all that Donald Trump is deliberately overturning today’s set of rules in a revolutionary effort to create a more isolated, more fearful and less compassionate America.
(11/14/16 5:23am)
In a recent Cavalier Daily article, guest writer Milan Bharadwaj makes an inaccurate claim about free trade policies. He focuses his ire on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he claims “mainly” was responsible for outsourcing “nearly 40 percent” of America’s manufacturing jobs as a result of its implementation. The author proceeds to describe how American workers cannot compete with their Indian and Chinese counterparts, who are paid a fraction of what American workers are compensated. The claim that NAFTA itself caused 40 percent of jobs in the manufacturing sector to disappear is debunked after a quick Google search or two, and it's vital to note that the North American Free Trade Agreement currently encompassing the United States, Canada and Mexico has nothing to do with China or India.
(11/09/16 7:52am)
My fellow columnist Jesse Berman recently argued “it would not be surprising for other U.S. allies to act similarly” to the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, who has, amidst a barrage of insults directed at President Barack Obama, taken steps to move the Philippines away from the United States and toward an alignment with China and Russia. His argument hinges on the idea that Duterte is setting a precedent other American allies might follow, citing Egypt and Pakistan as examples of countries with negative views toward the United States that could translate into deteriorating relationships. A far more likely reality is that Duterte is an idiosyncratic blip in the Asia Pacific region. His evolving stance reflects longstanding colonial grievances and anger over America’s objections to the extrajudicial anti-drug murders taking place in the Philippines, and not a wider, much less a global, anti-American trend.
(11/01/16 11:12am)
In a recent Cavalier Daily article, Honor Committee Chair Matt West expressed his hope that the University community would find the committee’s plans for the rest of the current term “ambitious” yet “realistic.” They include updating the Informed Retraction, or IR, to make it a “more expansive option,” in West’s words, with specific recommendations expected in the spring. These include addressing spotlighting, rewriting Honor plaques and proposing changes to the by-laws that would give Honor the authority to defer or decline jurisdiction over reports, mainly those involving offenses in Title IX cases. These are all important efforts, and the Honor Committee is right to pursue them vigorously, with more detail as they proceed. But they skim the surface of the philosophical divide at the heart of Honor’s contested future. At this pivotal moment in Honor’s history, the University community needs an organized effort to promote student-led debate that helps lead to greater engagement with and mastery over the fork in the road we face.
(10/06/16 3:06pm)
Saturday Night Live’s cold open depicting the first presidential debate was fiction reflecting truth at its best. The skit distilled the dynamic of the televised encounter, and the election as a whole, as being between an unhinged, pathological liar with an overtly racist appeal, and a dedicated if unrelatable public servant who has spent more than 40 years being scrutinized.