The piece written by a Duke University student/porn performer shocked the Internet for a few days and swept through our daily conversations. While many praised her writing and her confidence, I would like to urge everyone to get over the shock of pornography.
Death’s a bitch, isn’t it? The idea that one day you’re a happy-go-lucky guy playing Ultimate Frisbee and the next a pile of ashes being scattered into Lake Monona by relatives whose next stop is IHOP for chocolate chip pancakes is crazy to me. To those of us who just can’t get on board with belief in an afterlife (Heaven doesn’t sound so bad, but can you imagine waking up in a boat on the River Styx with Hades’ minions prodding you in the ass?), death is a pretty freaky proposition.
Hola Badgers! Are you Pre-Med, Pre-Dental or Pre-Vet? Are you interested in getting hands on clinical experience while also traveling and enjoying the culture of a different country? Then come to one of our VIDA-Volunteer Travel Information Sessions this week to learn more about how you can help provide free healthcare to some of the most underserved areas in Central America! You will learn more about VIDA and get one step closer to hands on, resume building, unforgettable experience! Our organization is about providing free healthcare to some of the most impoverish countries in Central America including Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Panama while allowing Pre-Health students to get lots of hands on clinical experience. On each trip we have a medical team, a dental team and a veterinary team. It is an amazing opportunity for students to do what they love, get hours of hands on clinical experience, provide free healthcare to countries in Central America that need it the most and also experience different cultures while traveling.
So, I wanna talk about Spike Jonze, “Her” and the old, old debate about an author’s ability to decide how exactly their work is interpreted. And about the BBC, I guess.
Any one of the 83 percent of students who stepped foot into any of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s recreational sports facilities last year can tell you they leave much to be desired. Students have to trek up five flights of stairs to get from the weight room to the cardio room at the Serf. Pipes are constantly leaking, and students can frequently be seen huddled at the back of the room waiting for a machine to become available. Forty percent of outdoor recreational sports activities, which students pay a fee to participate in, are lost annually due to the condition of the fields.
Your news report (Ad Hoc Diversity Planning Committee releases UW-Madison Diversity Draft plan, Feb. 20, 2014) is wrong in repeating the assertion that UW-Madison has gone without a diversity plan since Plan 2008 ended more than five years ago. That incorrect assertion was first made by the co-chairs of the Ad Hoc Diversity Planning Committee during their Diversity Forum presentations last fall.
?Working as a Fitness Consultant and supervising the exercise spaces for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Recreational Sports, I get a firsthand look at the deteriorating facilities that are available for students and faculty here at the university. But it does not take an employee to see that these facilities are not meeting the demands of a university as prestigious as the University of Wisconsin.
On Feb. 10, mass media were embroiled with an intense debate. The debate was about the United States government’s possible drone strike on a U.S. citizen who lives abroad. The target is not just an ordinary U.S. citizen, but a terrorist affiliated with al-Qaeda who happens to hold a U.S. citizenship due to his original place of birth.
Last Monday the Cardinal opinion staff’s own Michael Podgers wrote an article criticizing a program put on by Badger Catholic during Valentine’s Day. The program, run outside of St. Paul’s Catholic Church, featured men giving away roses to women that had notes in them. In his piece, Mr. Podgers criticized Badger Catholic for reinforcing outdated gender stereotypes, and demeaning women by self-determining for them their inherent dignity.
This week I have chosen to address an issue of 'softball' politics in order to get at something much larger. I take issue with the name of a street in Madison. On the surface this may seem like useless complaining, but I assure you I have a point. We have many streets named after the founders. The city itself is named after James Madison. However, there is one particular founder who we should not be naming streets after: Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.
As I was reading Theresa Cooley’s opinion piece “Come one, come all—It’s just casual sex” in The Badger Herald last week, a particular comment caught my eye. “A student from the 19th century came back,” it said, a reference, I suppose, to Ms. Cooley’s Biblical references and religious perspective on sex.
Mr. Podgers, the Rose Campaign last Thursday (Feb. 13) was trying to accomplish a good, to challenge a mindset that limits sex to pleasure or an action that is not completely giving of one’s self. You incorrectly identified the goals of the campaign by Badger Catholic and claimed the idea that the men involved were imposing views on women through the passing out of roses with short notes attached.
We should be pissed that black men in America today stand a one-in-three chance of going to jail. We should be pissed that the unemployment rate for blacks in Dane County is at 25.2 percent, compared to 4.8 percent for whites. We should be pissed that the achievement gap between white students and black students in Wisconsin is the widest in the nation. In fact, we should be pissed that the widespread ignorance of these facts is the key explanation as to why we’ve never reached full racial equality in this country. The first step to solving a problem is admitting that there is one, and sadly, too many white people reject the idea that they have a privilege based on the color of their skin and that it is fueling the fires of racial injustice.
Allow me to begin with another healthy dose of honesty: Madison and race relations have not been going too hand-in-hand lately. In fact, this is an inherent understatement: A precedent has been set for the underrepresentation of people of color in the university and the city itself, while Black and brown people continue to systematically overpopulate the prison system in the county as well as the low-class/impoverished living conditions so subtly buried beneath the transfer points. (There have been several recent articles detailing these issues in full, notably from Rev. Alex Gee in The Cap Times last December.)
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Ad Hoc Diversity Planning Committee, charged with drafting a new diversity plan, released preliminary suggestions Feb. 18 for improving aspects of diversity and inclusivity at the university. While we are glad these plans are in motion, we believe the success of the plan depends on campus input and making sure this draft—no matter how rough it may be—is available to the campus community.
When we say Wisconsin, do we really say it all? Or in other words, as a community, are we really doing everything we can to foster inclusivity for all groups and ideas, and additionally, what else needs to be said about this issue?
We all have individual desires, concerns (fears even) and spectrum of sexuality goes beyond the gay/straight/bi triptych. Each of us arguably has an unique sexuality. Religion, class, gender identity, cultural and racial identities and life experiences all play unique roles in shaping sexuality and how it blossoms. There are two things that many students may struggle with while on campus within the context of sexuality: stigma and shame.
The Daily Cardinal asked for the campus' input on the current social climate at UW-Madison. These are the responses we received. If you want to contribute to the discussion, email actionproject@dailycardinal.com, and we will publish your input.
The Daily Cardinal is pleased to announce the first of three special issues this semester dedicated to exploring topics challenging to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the surrounding community. The publications will form a series we call The Daily Cardinal Action Project, an effort to inform the campus community about pertinent issues and spark action.
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Solutions by The State News
