Symposium: Cancel Culture Doesn't Work

Content Warning: Mentions of suicide, sexual harassment and assault; discussion of racism and sexism. Language is shifting all around us, every day, whether we notice it or not. Just last year, Merriam-Webster added [https://web.archive.org/web/20210329222735/https://www.merriam-webster.com/topics/words-were-watching] “petrichor,” “swole” and “stan” to its dictionary. So it should be no surprise that, even in just four years, new terminology has come to dominate our political discourse. Canc

Symposium: The Racial Politics Underneath the Welfare Question

In my last column, I discussed [https://amherststudent.com/article/symposium-frozen-texas-and-the-welfare-question] the rhetoric surrounding the Texas freeze, the relief going to Texas and Republican arguments about relief and redistributive government programs in general. I showed how the moral arguments of personal responsibility and pulling oneself up by the bootstraps are self-defeating and lead to stagnation. I also showed how the empirical arguments against these relief policies are predi

Symposium: Frozen Texas and the Welfare Question

On Feb. 13, a massive winter storm brewed in the Pacific Northwest. Two days later, it had crashed down across the Midwest and Southeast and left millions of Texans without power, freezing in their poorly insulated homes [https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/freezing-cold-and-burning-mad-texas/618048/] . The very next day, amid Republicans’ attempt to blame green energy rather than their own deregulation of the Texas energy market [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/opinion/green-ne

Symposium: The Thought-Terminating Cliché

Antifa. Antifa, antifa, antifa. There’s a phenomenon in psychology called “semantic satiation [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation].” It happens when you say a word over and over again so many times that, to you, it starts to lose all meaning and becomes a series of almost nonsensical sounds. Say the word “antifa” enough, and it no longer means anything. The recent movement of anti-fascists in America and around the world, along with their broad adoption of the term “antifa” to d

The Symposium: To Desystematize Racism, Start With Criminal Justice

Black Lives Matter. One might see such a statement as uncontroversial. People’s lives matter. Black people are people. Therefore Black Lives Matter. It’s the simplest kind of argument you could make — a deduction following from two premises. And yet, the American justice system routinely devalues Black lives. Black people, men and women like Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, are disproportionately murdered by the police [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/]. Similarly, though l

The Symposium: Please Don’t Go to Brunch

I remember the first time I ever heard the name“Donald Trump.” I was in eighth grade and it was October 2015. I came home from school to hear my mom talking about this guy who was running for president and saying all these crazy things. Neither of us knew, back then, that it was the beginning of what would become a long, long nightmare. Like many, I spent most of last week in a kind of half-daze. I watched more cable news than I think I ever have before. And when I woke up on Saturday morning t

The Symposium: Ranked-Choice Voting in Massachusetts and the Power of Local Activism

Last week [https://amherststudent.com/article/the-symposium-republicans-have-trashed-democratic-norms-now-what] , I considered the viability of local activism in response to a grid-locked national system. On that thread, this week I will take a look at a particular motion on the ballot in Massachusetts next week. Popularly known as “Question 2 [https://ballotpedia.org/Massachusetts_Question_2,_Ranked-Choice_Voting_Initiative_(2020)] ,” since it is the second question on the Nov. 3 ballot, this i

The Symposium: Republicans Have Trashed Democratic Norms. Now What?

The Symposium is a column by Leland Culver ’24 intended to act as a forum for the Amherst community to engage in dialogue together about current issues.If you would like to contribute to the Symposium, whether with suggestions for a topic, your opinion on this week’s topic or by guest-writing an installment yourself, you can submit by clicking thislink [https://forms.gle/uuuGB7YY5PtuHApM6]. This week’s topic ison preserving democratic values in the face of a majority conservative Supreme Court.

The Symposium: Election Season is Almost Over, Make the Most of the Final Stretch

The Symposium is a column by Leland Culver ’24 intended to act as a forum for the Amherst community to engage in dialogue together about current issues.If you would like to contribute to the Symposium, whether with suggestions for a topic, your opinion on this week’s topic or by guest-writing an installment yourself, you can submit by clicking thislink [https://forms.gle/uuuGB7YY5PtuHApM6]. This week’s topic is a reminder to stay politically active, even in the final stretch of the election. On

The Symposium: Does Your Mail-In Vote Count?

The Symposium is a column by Leland Culver ’24 intended to act as a forum for the Amherst community to engage in dialogue together about current issues. If you would like to contribute to the Symposium, whether with suggestions for a topic, your opinion on this week’s topic or by guest-writing an installment yourself, you can submit by clicking this link [https://forms.gle/uuuGB7YY5PtuHApM6]. This week’s topic is the legitimacy of mail-in voting. On Tuesday, October 29, I joined 73 million of m

The Symposium: How Should News Outlets Cover Violent Protests in a Violent System

The Symposium is a column by Leland Culver ’24 intended to act as a forum for the Amherst community to engage in dialogue together about current issues. If you would like to contribute to the Symposium, whether with suggestions for a topic, your opinion on this week’s topic or by guest-writing an installment yourself, you can submit by clicking this link [https://forms.gle/uuuGB7YY5PtuHApM6]. About a week and a half ago, The New York Times [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/opinion/biden-trump

The World Feels Like It's Crumbling, So What Do We Do?

I am motivated to write this by the announcement of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a prominent liberal justice and champion of women’s rights on the U.S. Supreme Court. The moment that my friends and I received the news, the energy that had carried us through the evening all but evaporated, and despair hung heavy in the air. That word, despair, has lingered in my mind for the past several months, as catastrophe after catastrophe seems to rock our world even as my personal quality of