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(04/12/17 11:50pm)
After six bloody years of civil war, Syria is a smoldering shell of a country. Of a pre-war population estimated at 22 million, 470,000 people — more than one person in every fifty — have been killed. Over half the populace have been forced to leave their homes because of the fighting. Five million Syrians have fled for neighboring countries, while 6.3 million are internally displaced within the country. It is a humanitarian crisis of heartbreaking proportions, and there’s no end in sight.
(04/09/17 10:56pm)
As you’ve probably noticed, all students at USC have a language requirement as part of the Carolina Core, ranging from just having to meet entry-level requirements to having to take two more classes past entry level.
(04/03/17 12:19am)
A major part of President Trump’s campaign was his promises to provide a better alternative to an ailing Obamacare. Last week his first major legislative effort to make good on those promises was thwarted, not by opposition Democrats, but by a coalition of hard-line Republicans calling themselves the Freedom Caucus.
(03/23/17 10:07pm)
Reading the recent articles of a couple of my fellow opinion columnists, Bryce Wilson and Alyssa Broer, I found myself agreeing with their basic premise that young people need to be more involved in politics.
(03/13/17 2:02am)
The Daily Gamecock recently reported on a number of alarming alcohol statistics at USC. As demonstrated by this chart, USC outpaces the national average and even the SEC average in a number of alcohol-related behaviors among freshmen. Some of the more concerning statistics listed are that only 42% of USC freshmen don’t drink, 13% have been taken advantage of sexually and 11% have engaged in ‘problematic drinking’ (more than 10 drinks for men and 8 for women), the last stat being almost twice the national average.
(02/21/17 7:26pm)
In case you haven’t noticed, South Carolina is having an unusually warm winter. It’s commonplace to see people walking around in shorts. Even when it gets cold, some students still persist in wearing shorts, even if they layer up on their upper half.
(02/15/17 2:58am)
This Valentine’s Day, it’s fitting that we consider the things we associate with romance. Behind the dim restaurants, low voices, glasses of wine, inviting smiles or whatever other mental furniture you conjure up lie the ideas of commitment and emotional security. You may instinctively disagree, but consider that only 9 percent of millennials say that they never want to be married, which, though a higher percentage than older generations, is still less than one in 10. Most of us have an innate desire for this kind of lifelong connection with another person, in which we can be vulnerable about ourselves and still be accepted.
(02/09/17 2:32am)
President Trump ran his highly successful campaign on promises to restore America’s lost greatness. “Make America Great Again” was a brilliant marketing strategy because of its vagueness. There are a lot of conflicting idealized versions of the past that he was able to bring together using it. However, the vagueness of his trademark promise gives him significant leeway to do whatever he wants and claim that it is restoring American greatness.
(02/05/17 3:52pm)
What is college for? I don’t know for sure how most college students would respond to this question, but from my conversations and other interactions with hundreds of fellow students, I’m going to posit that the majority view college as a sort of prerequisite to the life they want to live. Or in other words, it’s a period of life one must pass through in order to get to where you really want to go.
(01/26/17 1:27am)
In an age of polarization, Donald Trump was an incredibly divisive candidate. He called his opponent the devil and threatened to jail her if he won. His antagonism extended not just to Democrats but to a number of countries abroad, including trade allies like Mexico and fellow NATO members. His victory pleased probably the smallest proportion of America’s population since the "Corrupt Bargain" of 1824 installed John Quincy Adams in place of the popular Andrew Jackson. (Note: Russians do seem to be thrilled with Trump’s victory, which is not reassuring.)
(01/19/17 1:48am)
In our increasingly partisan age, it is becoming more and more uncommon to find people willing to recognize the virtues of the opposing party’s positions and admit the flaws of their own. One of the most strikingly divergent issues is over the persistence of poverty in the United States, the world’s ninth wealthiest country.
(01/12/17 2:33am)
Imagine a group violently forced from their homeland two millennia ago that lived scattered through Europe, Africa, and the Middle East as minorities, tolerated at best, persecuted for their race and religion at worst, which only in the last century endured both one of the world’s most brutal genocides in Europe and a coordinated ethnic cleansing from North Africa and the Middle East. Further, imagine that this group was permitted to establish a nation in their former homeland and against all odds, held that nation against repeated military assaults from their hostile neighbors.
(12/02/16 5:17am)
We’ve all heard things like “All religions lead to God,” “It doesn’t matter what you believe, just that you’re sincere,” and “Religion is really just about living a good life, so all religions are equally valid.” This is the post-modern face of religious pluralism. I call it religious relativism because it attempts to relativize religion, that is, to strip it of any claims to absolute truth.
(11/22/16 2:20am)
That all is not well in the current state of higher education is an inarguable fact. Some of the most obvious evidence for this is that the cost of tuition skyrocketing while a third of college professors are only part-time and, according to the American Community Survey, “31 percent of part-time faculty are living near or below the federal poverty line.”
(11/16/16 10:44pm)
Whatever else it may have been, the recent election was not really about social issues. The candidates did come down on their party’s side of the major ones: abortion, LGBTQ rights and welfare, but their campaigns were not defined by them. However, these issues are by no means going away. The divide on these issues is starker than ever, with rhetoric increasingly tending toward outright demonization of people holding the opposite view. Perhaps nowhere else in American society have these issues exerted as much pressure and caused such bitter divide as within Christianity.
(11/07/16 12:59am)
While I have found that the general perception of America’s two major parties is that the Democrats are the party of the people while the GOP is associated with America’s elite, this election cycle has proved the opposite. The fact that Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee and likely next president of the U.S. is not primarily the result of popular effort but of the party leadership’s decision that she would be their nominee. Democratic voters never really had the chance to choose someone else.
(11/04/16 3:42am)
In previous election cycles, much attention was devoted to the increasing partisanship of American politics. It was generally viewed as a bad thing — in fact, when President Obama was running for the first time in 2008, he positioned himself as the one who would be able to transcend partisan gridlock and cooperate with the opposition to get things done. That obviously didn’t happen. Now, we are in the closing stages of a political season marked by the most rabid partisanship in living memory.
(10/30/16 3:44pm)
Despite our culture’s abolition of most taboos about sex, one area that doesn’t get a lot of press is pornography. This lack of press is incongruent with the historical trend of porn becoming ever more accessible — yes, pornography is a historical trend that predates Hugh Hefner and Playboy. From the printing press to magazines and finally the internet, the spread of pornography has accelerated rapidly. Today, there are more than a billion websites on the internet. Of those, Fight The New Drug, a website devoted to exposing the harms of pornography, reported that 12 percent are pornographic. The website also reported that 40 million Americans say they are regular porn users. Research for a 2007 book, "Pornified," indicated that 70 percent of 18- to 24-year-old men visit porn sites at least once a month. Considering Christianity’s strong sexual ethic, the findings of a 2014 study that 77 percent of self-identified Christian men between the ages of 18 and 30 watched porn at least once a month indicate that the current rate for the same segment of the general population is likely to be higher.
(10/24/16 1:59am)
As many as 470,000 people have died in Syria’s civil war, and there’s no end in sight. Between the cruelty of the IS and the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas carried out by the regime and Russia, it’s no wonder 4.8 million people have fled the country and another 6.6 million people remain displaced within its borders. The West’s response to such acute suffering has been feeble and indecisive, allowing the conflict to escalate and drive record immigration.
(10/12/16 10:56pm)
That the Republican party has a problem appealing to female voters is not really debatable. In 2008 and 2012, 14 and 12 percent more women, respectively, voted for Obama than his Republican opponents. Before Trump, what was debatable was what the GOP was doing wrong in its approach toward women. I want to briefly deal with Trump’s profound flaws in this respect, then discuss the broader GOP problem.