October | 2016 | Make Mexico Pay for the Blog

Exploiting Fear

When I first read The Hunger Games series, one of the aspects of the series that resonated with me was the power the government over its people. The President of Panem exploited the fear the citizens had of potential rebels from District 13. Even though the insurrection done by District 13 was years ago and…

All Asians are bad drivers.

And all Muslims are terrorists, right? Well actually uneducated racist who wrote both that sentence and the title, wrong. In fact, “most Muslims oppose terrorist violence” (Kurzman 63). The threat of Islamic terrorism is overstated in the United States, and only a very small percentage of Muslims are truly radically Islamic. To diminish the threat…

Woman In The White House

The Hillary Clinton rally on October 27 was everything that I thought it would be – of course, my perspective was through a laptop screen as that was the closest I was going to get to being inside the coliseum (thanks to the one class that didn’t get cancelled that day…. I’m clearly not bitter…

Vote for the Girl

Last week, a panel hosted by Wake Forest spoke on Violence Against Women. The panel featured Deborah Ross, one of the candidates running for Senate in North Carolina. However, Ross’s main discussion point was not on violence against women, but rather on the impact of women in office. To make her point, she discussed domestic…

Terrified of Terrorism

On September 11, 2011 I sat in the kitchen eating frosted flakes before it was time to head off to Pre-K. I vaguely heard the weather man talking on the TV and the bustle of my mom getting everyone ready for school. I sat there musing about the big bow in my hair and how…

Telephone and Terrorism

In Lisa Stampnitzky’s Disciplining Terror, she proposes terrorism is a social construction developed by new events, new experts, and new practices of knowledge, which over time has experienced changes in the overall meaning of terrorism. Terrorism appeared as a new problem in the public sphere during the 1970’s, causing new discourse to take place. At…

The War Metaphor

Terrorism is not easily defined. According to Stampnitzky, terrorism does not have one definition because it “is not a stable or fixed category” (p. 4). Stampnitzky talks about how terrorism first began making an appearance as a problem with the formal word “terrorism” attached, how government reacted to the beginning of terrorism, how this topic…

Taking Terrorism Back To The Future?

If we were to imagine how terrorism experts would imagine 2030, it would be full of Islamic suicide bombers plaguing nearly every street of the United States, with ISIS militants running street corners and stopping traffic. While this is obviously a gross exaggeration, the threat of Islamic terrorism to the United States is also grossly…

War of Terror! Great Success!

Sacha Baron Cohen’s highly objectionable Borat might be the most offensive American social satire of the last decade, if not ever. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, and just about every other discriminatory “-ism” plague this mockumentary. However, what might be most offensive about this film isn’t Baron Cohen’s obviously bigoted character, what might be most offensive is…

How many skittles would it take

We’ve studied different types of moral panics and looked at the effects they have. However, have we realized the fact that we are constantly living in a state of moral panic at the threat of terrorism? I have yet to experience an advertisement or an infographic on the percent of radical terrorists that act, and…