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(10/30/15 4:05am)
One of the most salient discussions on Grounds is mental wellness. Last week my fellow columnist Hasan Khan wrote on the need for greater mental health resources in the wake of a litany of studies of college campuses reporting the same finding: an unprecedented number of college students suffer from stress, anxiety and depression and many often have little recourse but to leave school. It is likely true the University could do far more to equip its students with the right tools and resources to find support, but perhaps an alternate route to wellness is right in front of us.
(09/11/15 4:01am)
A 2014 Gallup poll found that “very religious” people tend to vote Republican. Exit polls from the 2014 midterm elections showed 78 percent of white evangelicals and 60 percent of white Catholics voted Republican. At a time when less religious people, nonreligious people and minority voters all lean Democratic, conservative Christians are the GOP’s most formidable and reliable voting bloc. Why, when the modern GOP is anathema to Christian values, do Christians reliably and consistently vote Republican?
(08/18/15 4:00am)
Former President Jimmy Carter recently called the United States “an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.” As a result of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, he claims, “we've just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election's over.”
(06/01/15 4:30am)
Recent coverage of presidential campaigns highlights how the interests of the political establishment, corporations and the press have become increasingly intertwined. Betraying a blatant disregard for journalistic integrity, the mainstream media — from print publications like The New York Times to cable news — takes it upon itself to effectively choose the winners and losers of an election that is almost 18 months away. I have little regard for the half-baked logic behind most conspiracy theories, but it is just as lazy to digest what you read without question as it is to believe the unorthodox without sufficient evidence. With this in mind, I believe a thorough examination of presidential campaign coverage uncovers a disturbing reality: that many in the media forgo their duty to the public (to provide reliable information on all major party candidates) and instead unethically diminish unconventional candidates whose ideas and positions represent a departure from the status quo.
(04/24/15 4:20am)
Barring any extraordinary developments, Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. Her fundraising dominance, colossal stature in the national party and faultless credentials — she has been a Secretary of State, senator and active first lady — preclude any credible path to victory emerging for any of her likely primary opponents. Though progressives have tried to refute this claim by pointing to 2008 when her alleged inevitability yielded to President Obama’s grassroots support, this comparison quickly breaks down. There is no candidate in the field with anything close to the youthful dynamism, historic appeal and soaring oratory skills Obama possessed as a candidate eight years ago. Moreover, Clinton’s commanding edge in the polls (60 percent support among Democratic voters) far surpasses the 40 percent she held last time around.
(04/10/15 4:06am)
Conventional wisdom tells us that, in 2016, the Republican Party needs a transformational figure who can broaden the party’s appeal for an ever more diverse electorate or else it will become a minority party. The Republican Party has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Their edge in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014 only underscores the extent of their demographic woes: they can only win when turnout is low — 2014’s turnout was the lowest in 70 years — and when the electorate tilts whiter, older and more conservative. Just as the party needed Reagan over 30 years ago, the GOP needs a leader to realign its narrative, its policy platform and its image to adapt to the demographic and ideological realities of the twenty-first century. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who announced his candidacy for President in Kentucky on Tuesday, is the only candidate in the field that can take up this mantle and is thus the GOP’s best choice for 2016.
(03/20/15 4:00am)
Student groups’ efforts to promote “awareness” and “start the conversation” of the discriminatory treatment of minorities by law enforcement and the courts, while well-intended, distract from more effective forms of advocacy. The rampant use of buzzwords like “awareness,” “paradigms” and “dialogue” has saturated the already limited space for meaningful action pertaining to criminal justice reform.
(03/06/15 2:10am)
Last year I penned an article — originally a Cavalier Daily Opinion section application piece intended for my editors only — entitled “Examining Women’s Studies.” It was deservedly met with a deluge of criticism and controversy. Just hours after the article was published, I received a flood of Facebook messages from strangers either praising my “courage” or ridiculing me for stupidity, misogyny and just generally being an all-around degenerate. The article’s comments ranged from logical deconstructions of my argument to the obscene. In one of my discussion sections, a student expressed her take on the article by saying to me, “It’s a real shame because you seemed like a nice guy.”
(02/20/15 7:40am)
As traditional arguments for voting Republican — like believing it will bring about limited, efficient and pragmatic government — have collapsed, the GOP has relied on a politics of fear to win elections amidst low turnout and an increasingly apathetic public. In 2016, the politics of fear will fall short of the historic nature of Hillary Clinton’s inevitable candidacy. The potential for the first female president and her impeccable qualifications — Secretary of State, a senator and First Lady — mean that the eventual Republican candidate will have to adopt a more positive, moderate form of messaging. In order to chart a compelling path for the GOP to the White House, it is first necessary, however, to deconstruct how the politics of fear manifests itself and how it fails.
(09/12/14 3:52am)
A one-term, six-year presidency would reinvigorate the broken, gridlocked American political system. This is not a new idea; in fact, the delegates of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 favored a one-term, seven-year executive tenure but decided against it largely for political reasons. There is, however, an urgent need for change today in the hyper-partisan capital where, as former Senator Jim DeMint put it: “Good ideas go to die.”
(07/11/14 8:23pm)
The biggest public policy crisis facing our generation is climate change. Public opinion polls and demagogic politicians will say otherwise, but even economic downturns as bad as the Great Recession are temporary and cyclical; the daily disappearance of rare species is permanent.
(04/18/14 5:06am)
I am not on the Honor Committee, but I consider all of us stakeholders and co-stewards of Honor. Honor doesn’t belong to the Honor Committee or the officers who work on their — and our — behalf, and it certainly doesn’t belong to Phi Delta Theta; the Honor system belongs to all of us who live in and are governed by the Community of Trust. In fact, as someone without formal experience with Honor, and free of its shackles on ideological diversity, I hope I can better represent the silent majority at the University.
(04/11/14 6:43am)
The purpose of this piece is not to disprove the widespread notion that drug use is bad; rather, I want to illustrate how legalization is the best way to limit the social, human and economic costs of drug use. As a clarifier: this argument covers recreational drugs like marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine, MDMA, LSD and heroin. A brief outline of theoretical, economic and public health and safety arguments will demonstrate how legalization is the best approach to taking on the enormous challenge presented by the growing illicit drug trade and the War on Drugs that is spiraling out of control — both in lives lost and tax dollars wasted.
(04/04/14 3:45am)
We too often regard diversity as something that we can detect from someone’s visible attributes — his or her skin color, gender or ethnicity. Race is probably the most cited aspect of diversity; however, it is just one part of what might comprise someone’s identity. Thus, the University’s efforts to create a diverse student body or a company’s efforts to create a diverse workplace ought to look more at a more holistic range of factors that may promote diversity. These factors may include, as well as race, gender, socioeconomic status, region or country of origin, sexual orientation, and perhaps what is most overlooked: diversity of experiences, interests and pursuits.
(03/28/14 3:56am)
Television, in the twenty-first century, has dismantled and reinvented common cultural perceptions of the American dream. Admittedly, though, the banality of today’s world of 24-hour cable television — where we are inundated with bland sitcoms, reality TV, paid programming and advertisements — has a crippling effect on Americans’ capacity to grapple with political and socioeconomic realities. It is these same realities that inform an accurate understanding of the American dream, and its diminished availability. In the past decade, however, a plethora of culturally significant television series have reinvigorated substantive discussion of the American dream in a way that other artistic mediums, like film, and perhaps even literature, cannot and have not.
(03/24/14 4:50am)
Mainstream academia and this University wrongly regard hip-hop as an area of popular culture that does not deserve formal study. If asked why classes focused exclusively on hip-hop are not regularly offered when thousands of students (myself included) devote their time and course credits to the study of now-obscure works of Arthurian legend or Gothic horror, I am confident the University administration would respond that hip-hop is not as intellectually fertile as the aforementioned areas of literature. But I would respond that hip-hop, a young and growing artistic domain, asks penetrative questions concerning consumerism, the American Dream and structural inequalities in the modern American macroeconomy in a thoughtful way. Furthermore, academic study of hip-hop will elevate and popularize those artists who deserve recognition, as opposed to those who have little artistic merit, separating the wheat from the chaff.
(03/07/14 6:30am)
We hear the phrase “partisan gridlock,” and we naturally assume that it is a product of both Democrats and Republicans’ failures to find common ground and enter the negotiation table. The reasonable and balanced thing to do, we assume, is to distribute blame equally between the two parties. This view, however, is both misguided and misinformed and, upon further scrutiny of recent legislative impasses, we must realize that that Republicans should bear most of the responsibility for gridlock.
(02/27/14 5:50pm)
EDITOR'S NOTE: Ben wrote a follow-up to this column on March 6. It can be found here.