Mission creep
Afghanistan used to be a simple narrative: We’re going after the bad guys. It had a mission that could be summed up in two words: happy hunting. There was a simple exit strategy: Put Osama Bin Laden’s head on a pike, light up cigars, and slap each other on the back as we saunter off to the C-130’s and fly home.
Give freshmen a choice
You may have seen a recent initiative which I helped publicize to allow freshmen to live in fraternities, sororities, and independent living groups during their second semester. The initiative quotes a variety of reasons why it is time to give second-semester freshmen the freedom to choose their own residence, and I encourage you to visit <i>http://fsilg-housing.org</i> to sign on and support the effort. However, this piece is not written by “us.” This piece is written by me, because I want to explain why this proposal is so important, from my particular point of view.
Corrections
An article last Wednesday on MIT’s Solar Electric Vehicle Team gave the wrong year for Robert Pilawa. He is a current graduate student and completed his undergraduate degree in 2005, not 2006.
From the Editor
A headline last Wednesday, “Sex Changes Just Got Easier!” was offensive as well as technically inaccurate. The headline has been changed to “MIT Reduces Paperwork for Gender Changes” on our website.
The Supreme Court’s Supreme Mistake
On Thursday, January 21, the Supreme Court, under the excuse of “freedom of speech,” invited heightened levels of corruption back into political campaigns with a ruling that has the potential to damage the democratic system of elections. In 2002, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, usually referred to as the McCain-Feingold Act, was passed by Congress. This landmark legislation prohibited corporations and labor unions from using their money to run ads supporting or opposing election candidates in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 60 days before general elections. After Thursday’s ruling, which struck down this part of the law, in addition to two previous rulings supporting it, big business was handed a political megaphone with which it could both drown out the average citizen and try to control politicians to an even greater extent than it does today.
Late to the Party
The french politician Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, upon seeing a crowd marching through Paris, supposedly once said: “There go my people. I must find out where they’re going so I can lead them.” In the wake of their humiliating defeat in Massachusetts, many Democratic strategists are now embracing the spirit of Ledru-Rollin, urging their party to adopt a more “Main Street” tone in order to survive the mid-term elections this November.
Let’s Regulate the Freshmen in FSILGs.
An unknown number of second-semester freshmen choose to live in their fraternities, technically breaking MIT rules, and the Institute does not regulate the practice. Everyone knows about it. Regulating the practice, rather than pretending it does not exist, would protect MIT students from whatever risks it may incur.
Letters to the Editor
Wah-wah-wah-why-wasn’t-I-born-in-the-60’s arguments seem to be the calling card of our generation. Subtract a few years and I’m sure you’d get the calling card of the generation before us. And so on.
Letters to the Editor
The January 6th edition had a wonderful opinion piece by Ethan Solomon on the subject of living off campus.
College Admissions is No Scam — Just Reflection of Socioeconomic Disparity
Recently, the Boston Globe ran a piece entitled “The College Admissions Scam.” The author, Neal Gabler, seemed to reiterate what has been in the magazines since I started high school. College admissions is a game and the more money you have to ‘play,’ the easier it is to navigate the system. Thank you for your originality. You’ve done your research well. What really peeved me about his piece was his adamant statement that “the admissions system of the so-called ‘best’ schools is rigged against you…indeed, the system exists not to provide social mobility but to prevent it and to perpetuate the prevailing social order.”
What’s the Rush?
Like many other MIT men, I decided to join a fraternity my freshman year. I spent a good part of Rush going from house to house, enjoying the steak and lobster dinners, go-kart rides, and other freebies. Eventually, someone at one of the houses took a liking to me and invited me back to his house multiple times.
Populists at the Gate
In the beginning, it was nothing more than knee-jerk catharsis, drawn from the tattered, frustrated, and disenfranchised remnants of small-c conservatives and angry libertarians. It was disorganized and chronically off-message, defenseless against being used as a public soapbox by every ‘birther’ conspiracist and one-world-government loon that didn’t feel he had a large enough audience on the Ron Paul internet forums. It was derided as far-right fringe, dismissed as corporate astroturf, and joyfully mocked as latently homosexual.
Corrections
A Nov. 6, 2009 article on the Division of Student Life Visiting Committee’s visit to MIT and the Undergraduate Association’s response misspelled the last name of the Dean for Student Life. He is Chris Colombo, not Colomobo.
What Makes Up MIT’s Core?
Perhaps the biggest disappointment in the Task Force Final Report is the ambiguity about the parts of the community and MIT core that are worth preserving. While the report references community involvement as a way of ensuring that MIT stays “true to its core,” there is little substance to this hope.
Protest in Iran: <br />What Happens Next Is Anybody’s Guess
One of the most difficult aspects of the study of politics is recognizing the natural tendency in human psychology toward certainty and simplification, even when the data itself is not entirely clear. More difficult still is resisting this temptation when powerful historical analogies are available that cursorily appear to match the current experience.
Illegal Immigration: It’s Illegal
Blue hats are blue. Big trees are big. Do you agree with these statements? How about this one: Illegal immigration is illegal. For some reason, this point has been a contentious issue in the United States over the past few years.
‘The Tech’ on the Task Force Report
Were we conspiracy theorists, we would have to say that the release of the Institute-wide Planning Task Force’s Final Report smack in the middle of final’s week was done purposefully to minimize the number of students who would read and comment on it immediately. The timing, coming almost two months behind schedule, certainly seems coincidental, and intentional or not, student commentary on the report has been muted.
The Off-Campus Option
For a lot of reasons, undergraduates are often scared off from moving to apartments in Cambridge, Boston, or Somerville. Finding an apartment is a significant investment of valuable time and there are more unknowns than living in dorms or FSILGs — how much will utilities cost? How will I get to class? What’s a security deposit? But with the right strategy and the right attitude, moving off-campus can be financially, socially, and developmentally well-worth the risk.
Iran’s Numbered Days
Some countries are no better than publicity-crazed celebrities. Britney Spears has a breakdown one day just so she can make a comeback the next. As a global example, North Korea claimed in April to have put a satellite into orbit with a Taepodong-2 missile. Of course, anyone who saw part of the very same missile fall into the Sea of Japan must be lying. And any radar tracking the missile must have been malfunctioning.
The Bhopal Disaster, 25 Years Later
In the night of December 3, 1984 forty tons of methyl isocyanate, a highly toxic chemical used to produce pesticides, leaked from a chemical plant belonging to Union Carbide (now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical) in Bhopal, India, that by some estimates killed 8,000 people within three days and affected over 500,000 residents of the area. Over 15,000 more people died of the consequences of gas exposure in the years that followed. Today, with the plant’s toxic waste site still not cleaned up, people in Bhopal are drinking very toxic water. Recently published reports from accredited laboratories in Switzerland and the UK found 15 highly toxic chemicals in the groundwater of Bhopal whose levels greatly exceed the safe levels recommended by the WHO, in some cases over a thousandfold. Most of these chemicals could be neurotoxic and damage the brain and other internal organs. The incidence of children born with congenital birth defects linked to their parents’ exposure to the gas is ten times higher in Bhopal than in other localities with matching socioeconomic factors.