Thoughts on this week's Eagle

So, this week's issue of The Eagle came out today. I haven't read all of it, but I have some brief thoughts on somethings I've noticed. There wasn't a correction for the Nobel Peace Prize inaccuracy last week, so odds are no one told them about it. I'll have to email them about it.

There were some really poor word choices in the opinion section. One opinion piece mentioned "discriminate policies," as opposed to "discriminatory policies." Another piece talks about "the untenable position where we get sick and the Health Center is... closed...." That position is hardly "untenable." Unenviable, perhaps, but not untenable. The thing that really aggravates me about that is that this was a staff editorial. The editorial staff should know better.

Favorite Eagle Rant this week: "The worst thing about living on America's #1 Most Politically Active Campus is listening to drunk Republicans rant about economics

Ragging on AU's rag

Having edited two sections of a student newspaper, I understand that such a publication can be difficult to put together. But AU's student newspaper, The Eagle, is surprisingly disappointing. It does have a nice tabloid format, as well as a decent variety of stories, but overall, I have to say that it's quite mediocre. Pretty much every week there are corrections for the previous issue.

This last week, they failed to notice that a study abroad student in London who contributed an article mistakenly wrote that her economics professor recently received the Nobel Peace Prize. Consider the fact that the Nobel Prize in Economics is not even given by the same organization as the Peace Prize, which went to an imprisoned Chinese dissident, and I think you can grasp how incompetent their editors and copy-editors are.

There has, however, been an entertaining debate between the AU STAND Coalition and AU Students for Life over whether abortion in the U.S. is genocide. It started when AU Students for Life displayed signs listing abortion as a genocide along with Rwanda, Darfur, and the Holocaust. STAND took umbrage to this, and wrote a letter to the editor pointing out that abortion does not meet the actual definition of genocide. AU Students for Life responded the next week with their own letter to the editor, which said that abortion can be considered genocide, if you broadly define genocide "as violence resulting from the dehumanization of a class of people in a society." The letter also argued that unborn children are discriminated against "because of their age and development level."

As someone who has actually studied genocide and international law, I'm going to have to say that AU Students for Life is way (read: waaaaay) off base. They are blurring the meaning of genocide. The essential definition of genocide is very clear. Redefining it broadly, like AU Students for Life is trying to do, undermines the concept of the crime. Simply put, genocide is systematic, and its objective is to destroy, in whole or in part, a distinct national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Terminating a pregnancy does not meet either of these criteria. It is an individual choice, not a concerted, systematic campaign. And an abortion is performed not because of who the unborn child is, but because a woman has decided that she does not want to give birth for some personal reason.

Anyway, one thing that I do like about The Eagle are the Eagle Rants, which are short statements from readers about a variety of topics. One last week complained about The Eagle mistakenly using a quotation mark for an abbreviated year instead of an apostrophe, as is correct. I am not alone....

Attack of the killer commute (a.k.a. my life so far)

Well, I'm about to start week five of graduate school. I'm enjoying it so far. Unfortunately, the commute is killing me. Each day I go to school, it takes me about three and a half hours all together. Needless to say, I'm hoping to find an apartment soon. The biggest problem I'm having is that most days I'm either too busy or too tired to apartment hunt.

I'm finding it much easier to meet people than during the beginning of my undergrad. There was a welcome event for my program on Friday. Afterward, a huge group of students and some faculty and staff went to a place called Guapo's. I had never been there before, but apparently that's the place that IPCR people hang out. Anyway, I had a good time talking with classmates.

Afterwards, I had a horrible drive to Arlington to go to a friend's birthday party. It's hardly a new criticism, but Washington is poorly designed. What should have taken me 15 minutes took about an hour because I kept missing turns and taking wrong turns. The signs in DC in particular should be done differently because they are so hard to see at night. They should be bigger, or there should be signs before the intersections, like in Baltimore.

Well, that's more or less my life so far. I'll probably have something more interesting to post later.

Want small government? Go to Somalia...

Apparently some rational people infiltrated a tea party in Boston. Some of their signs are pretty awesome. Below are two of my favorites.

End(?) of hiatus...

So, it's been several months since I've last posted. I keep having ideas, but never follow through with them. Among the (generally untimely) posts I might end up writing include:

-Why I hate Watchmen (the movie, of course)
-Why I hate V for Vendetta (the movie, of course)
-Why I hate Avatar (a trend? I think so...)
-An ongoing series showing how I, as a snobby film-goer, might be spared from crappy movies
-The quality problems that are inherent in keeping 24 "exciting" (a completely moot point since it's now cancelled)
-The social messages that Pixar is brainwashing your children with.

As you might notice, I've made a few minor changes to the blog. I've ditched the widget(?) that connected to my Twitter account, as I've lapsed into Twitter neglect. I have, however, included a rather ill-fitting Tumblr widget in its place, as I consider Tumber to have much more potential than Twitter. By which, I mean that I'll probably stop using it in six months or so.

In personal developments, I have been accepted into graduate school, specifically American University's School of International Service. You probably cannot tell, but I'm quite excited.

Anyway... I am currently reading Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. They're quite interesting, in my opinion, though he does occasionally write something that seems bizarrely short and devoid of context. It probably would have been good to find an edition with some form of commentary on them. I suppose that's yet another failing of the Great Books series.