Head-to-Head: Should America reach for diplomacy first in foreign affairs?
When intervening in world affairs, should the U.S. prefer military or diplomatic methods?
50 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
When intervening in world affairs, should the U.S. prefer military or diplomatic methods?
As I write this article, the state of race relations in our country is as bad as most people can remember. The Washington Post reported this July that “Pessimism about race relations in America is higher than it has been in nearly a generation.” The Post’s survey found that 63 percent of respondents think race relations are generally bad. The highly publicized deaths of African American men in questionable police shootings have led to widespread protests and major polarization. On college campuses these trends have created various ripple effects.
In the past few years, I have noticed an increasing tendency to attack political opponents by attaching labels to them like "homophobia" or "xenophobia." The term "phobia," once used primarily as a psychiatric description, is now commonly used to malign adversaries.
A week or so ago, I was riding my bike near the Statehouse and stopped to look at the prominent statue of Benjamin Tillman, a South Carolina governor and senator who was active in politics from 1890 until his death in 1918. Tillman’s legacy stoked controversy last year as social activists campaigned to remove his name from Clemson University’s historic Tillman Hall. Recalling that Tillman was a white supremacist who boasted about his involvement with a lynch mob, I was somewhat surprised to see engraved on his statue’s placard the words: “He was the friend and leader of the common people. He taught them their political power and made possible for the education of their sons and daughters.” My guess is that those who put up the statue believed, as Tillman did, that the "common people" did not include African Americans. This placard has a glaringly racist blind spot, which needs to be corrected. In fact, my first inclination was to call for the statue to be removed altogether.
In an Aug. 25 article, The Daily Gamecock announced that a federal complaint was to be filed by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine regarding the USC School of Medicine’s use of pigs in medical training. The Gamecock reported that “according to the organization, the emergency medicine training program might be engaging in questionable practices by using pigs to teach surgical practices.”
Science tells us that every species currently in existence is only a minute fraction of vast numbers of species that have long since come into existence, lived and died out. The animals and plants we see now are the products of ruthless competition in which the losers have gone extinct. Extinction is merely part of the blind force of natural selection driving all biological life. So why should we be concerned if human activity causes species to go extinct?
Socialism is a big deal these days. Bernie Sanders overwhelmingly swept the under-30 vote by running as a “democratic socialist,” and his ideas live on in some of Hillary Clinton’s proposed policies. YouGov, a major online research firm, found that nearly as many under-30s had a positive view of socialism than they did of capitalism. Democrats were even more favorable to socialism, which ranked even with capitalism at 43 percent. Clearly, cultural attitudes toward socialism in America are changing.
Britain's vote to leave the European Union was announced weeks ago and is already fading in American minds in the wake of attention-grabbing police shootings and retaliatory attacks. But we would do well to consider what led to the much-discussed Brexit.
A lot is said these days about the right’s “war on women,” which refers to social conservatives’ attempts to reduce access to abortions and avoid paying for contraceptives and abortifacients in healthcare plans. Whether you agree or disagree with these positions, they are not what this article is primarily concerned with.
If you’re a college student reading this, chances are you’ve already heard a lot about not wasting your summer. You probably know that you should be working, or taking part in an internship or studying abroad right now.
To teach or not to teach Shakespeare? That is the question.
In the U.S., the Democratic Party has become known as the party of compassion, of caring. It is perceived as the advocate of the unsung and downtrodden. It makes an effort to win over demographics that have been historically marginalized or oppressed and champion their causes.
Griffin Hobson’s article in the March 28 paper is a potent example of the recent phenomenon in American culture of freedom of religion being reduced to freedom of worship. In his caricaturing diatribe on conservative Christians, who he suggests are whiny bullies, he appears to problematize their complaining of oppression by pointing out statistics that remind us how Christian America still is: “Almost every United States president has been Christian, over 90 percent of congressmen are Christian, a majority of Supreme Court justices are Christian and the majority of the population are Christians.”
Water is, as we all know, a necessity for human life. Our bodies are nearly 60 percent water and, unsurprisingly, the medical community recommends consuming lots of liquids: 13 cups a day for adult men and nine cups a day for adult women.
Whenever I see a report of a scandal involving a senator or representative, one of the first thoughts to come to mind is often “I hope he or she wasn’t a Republican.” This tendency towards party loyalty — which can develop into ignoring or rationalizing away what we know to be right in favor of what is convenient — is found in all of us and must be suppressed. We know this on a surface level: Anyone reading this sentence would probably agree that we should not let bias, partisanship or political expediency shape our view of justice. But often, we still fall victim to this kind of moral compromise.
As we watched the March 3 Republican debate together, a friend from New Jersey asked me why Gov. John Kasich was polling so poorly, since he is certainly the most qualified of the remaining candidates for high office.
Not all change is good. Most people would recognize the truth of this statement. After all, going through life we experience many unwelcome and detrimental changes. We instinctively realize that in our short and precarious existence in this world, change is inherently neutral — but in effect often bad. I could argue from here the virtues of conservative policy, but I want instead to address the tremendous recent outbreak of dissatisfaction with the government and desire to shake things up by supporting a non-traditional candidate.
This past Saturday a vulgar and egotistic nativist with no political experience triumphed in the South Carolina polls. To the roughly 67.5 percent of Republican voters who did not or will not vote for Donald Trump, this is rather painful. It seems that negative stereotypes of Southerners are more true than we would like. But for me, an evangelical Christian, the most galling part of the outcome is that more evangelicals voted for Trump than for any other candidate. Trump received 33 percent of the evangelical vote in South Carolina compared to Cruz’s 27 percent and Rubio’s 22 percent.
Marco Rubio has been hailed as "the Republican Obama," a young, eloquent and impassioned candidate with a capable of attracting marginalized minorities. In some ways this label rings true. Rubio rides the tailwinds coming off of a two-term presidency of the other party, as did Obama. Also like Obama, Rubio is running at a time when his party has captured positions of power but has been stymied by an opposition president. Perhaps most tellingly, however, Rubio enters the field at a time when partisanship and gridlock in government has reached unprecedented levels, which Obama claimed to be able to fix in his 2008 bid.
Recently, a common topic of conservative conversation has been how quickly and decisively the public has changed their minds on gay marriage. A decade ago, only 42 percent of Americans supported legalizing same sex marriage. In 2006, only Massachusetts had legalized gay marriage, with a handful of other states offering domestic partnerships or civil unions to gays. Now 60 percent of citizens are in favor of it, and thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling last June, it is legal in all fifty states.