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opinion
If there's a KU secret admirers, can there be a KU anonymous haters?
Listening to the entire R. Kelly "Trapped in the Closet" to celebrate national Coming Out Day.
I remember why I stopped riding Safe Bus...
To whomever found my sunglasses in Learned thursday, please return them to Eaton or Spahr. They were given to me and hold great sentimental value. Thank you.
TEXT FREE FOR ALL
Why is an advanced thermo test the least stressful thing I have to deal with this week?
Why does Kevin keep getting into the FFA and I don't...lame.
Whenever I'm having a bad day, I read the UDK's police reports to feel a little better about myself.
My professor shaped a student to sit in a chair by a TA by reinforcing her behavior with a clicker and M&M's.
All my fat just jiggled cause this bus driver likes driving over curbs.
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 16, 2013
There's a girl in the library staring at me. Hasn't looked away in 5+ minutes. What do I do?
When Wikipedia helps you out more than your teacher... Lord help us -the students of Neuroscience.
Just because the government shut down doesn't mean you can steal our baby trees.
Your mom is named mom...my mom is named mom...dude don't freak out but I think we are related.
I like to take a moment everyday to think about how lucky my friends are to have me.
To the jokers who think Battenfeld isn't good at sports: time, place, sport. You choose how you want to be embarrassed.
"Oh I almost forgot to tell you, something really important happened to me. I almost knocked the Chancellor down the stairs!"
I swear Dave Franco was just on my bus.
The girl in my 9am class just walked in wearing clearly shacked clothes... and last nights makeup and hair. At least she made it to class I guess...
Just saw a girl wearing a fancy pack. Please do not let that be the next big trend.
Chiefs games are starting to get really really bad for my liver.
Call out friends on bigoted Halloween costumes
O October is, in my humble and-entirely-embedded-in-incorrigible-fact
opinion, the best of all months. "Hocus Pocus" shows up on cable once more, pumpkin spice lattes become as widespread as the bubonic plague circa the 14th century, and I feel like I can jump into a sartorial paradise swathed in boots and scarves. Basically, October is the Beyonce of months. Even more so because October is the lucky host to my second favorite holiday, Halloween (the first being Amy Poehler's birthday). Yet, there is one thing that bums me out quite a bit concerning my most precious of months. Something that comes around every Halloween and not only bums me out, but seriously annoys, frustrates and even angers me.
Yall, a lot of folks choose to have really stupid bigly costumed costs. There are a lot of racist ones. Oh god, way too many racist ones — Pocahattans bedecked
in dreamcatchers and feathers,
Suicide Bombers with turbans
portraying all Muslims and Ar-
abs as terrorists, white kids from
Johnson County dressing up as
rappers and darkening their skin
aka doing blackface — these
examples turn people's races and
ethnicities into a hurtful costume.
And last year, I saw a lot of racist
costumes.
I also saw costumes that weren't just problematic because they were racist, but because they were homophobic, sexist and classist. In a particularly gross personal encounter, I was at party last Halloween where a dude came as a "Breast Cancer Examination Machine," all done up in a cardboard box and tinfoil with a convenient slot cut out for his hands to slip through. He came up to me, smiled, and asked "Would you like to get checked?" wiggling his hands at my chest level.
I politely informed him that I'd already reached my quota for gross misogyny for the day, but
thanks anyway.
A lot of you probably aren't going to have gross, dehumanizing costumes. A lot of you are going to go as super rad things, like Finn from Adventure Time or the Powerpuff Girls. Or, you'll just throw a sheet over your head last minute with eyeholes cut out. Whatever floats your non-bigoted boat. Keep riding the S.S. Not Being a Jerkwad at Halloween. But, the thing is, you most likely are going to have a run-in with at least one friend or acquaintance who didn't set sail on the same ship you did. Aka, they are Being a Huge Jerkwad because of their
costume, whether they are aware of it or not. And really, a surprising amount of people don't plan problematic costumes realizing they are problematic. They just wanted something funny or clever. They also just happen to live in a society where people regularly denigrated for their social classifications within power hierarchies, which leads us to think that things that are gross, i.e. transphobic, racist, ableist and so on, are "funny or clever."
So, what are you to do when your friend/acquaintance's definition of "funny or clever" leads to problematic costumes at Hallowen? Call it out.
Now, I wouldn't necessarily recommend just pointing to their costume and straight up saying "Hey yo, this is racist" or whatever fill-in-the-blank applies — or at least with at first. Bluntness works with some people, but most will probably shut down, as people tend to think of critiques of their problematic choices as personal
attacks, even though they aren't Engage them in conversation. Ask why they picked that costume. Ask them how they think a person from a marginalized group might be affected by their costume if they saw it. For example, if one of "Breast Cancer Examination Machine" dude's buddies had asked him if he thought women would feel uncomfortable or unsafe around a person wearing such a costume, maybe he would have thought twice about being a douchebag. And maybe he wouldn't have. Sometimes, people are in fact totally aware that they are being douchebags, and they actively continue to behave as such.
But if they're going to listen to anybody, it's probably someone who they would consider a friend.
Katherine Gwynn is a junior from Olathe studying English and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies.
Fear-mongering media drives wedge between American people
It is a common human trait, currently underlined by the seasonal swell of chain-saw wielding, hockey mask-laden horror superstars, to fear strangers. I don't speak of fear in terms of the purely explicit 'trembling in our boots,' or cold-sweated quivering behind drawn shades
— I mean the pervasive tendency to distrust our neighbor and the tightly held belief that our greatest enemy lies outside of ourselves.
you don't need to go far to discover this sentiment — flip on the local news and you will undoubtedly be slapped with a tale of the horrors taking place one block over. Call an old friend — you'll hear at least one account of a friend-of-a-friend's sister being robbed at gunpoint while her children sat in the backseat. Easier yet, visit any social media site, any "news" app and amidst the "25 Reasons Nutella is Better than Friends" article, you won't have to move your eyes more than a fraction of a centimeter to find a story splattered with heart-wrenching personal interviews, photos, and videos depicting a tragedy of dark, twisted human proportions. And while the sagas of "Criminal Minds" FBI agents, Walter White and Detective Benson intrigue and wonderfully entertain us, they also create addictive narratives rooted in the supposed inherent blackness of humankind, and weekly at 8 p.m. on AMC they remind us that this evil is active and present. You can never be too careful.
I make no argument against fear itself. Fear is an intrinsic and essential capacity that is woven into our evolutionary makeup and equates our physical survival-
al. Fear — at its best — inspires our power to discern what is morally sound, what is consistent with our values, and what will foster our growth rather than stunt it. I argue against the modern manufactured fear, the fear misshapen by a media that operates under the principles of profit. The more vivid and gut-twistingly disturbing a story is, the better it sells; the more graphic and viral the cellphone video clips are, the higher the viewership. Thus is a warped relationship between desensitization and sensationalism: as we read and visually (not literally) experience a certain level of horror, the next story of the same caliber does nothing to shock us or peak our interest. The media is then inspired to churn out more outrageously gritty detail to stay in the game.
The modern manufactured fear I refer to has sprinted passively, spread by the simple actions of scrolling and absorbing. Narratives of dread unwillingly work their way into our collective habits — we know an abstract evil exists just around the corner, whether or not we've actually encountered it beyond our flat-screen TVs. So we lock our doors, clutch our pepper spray, screw in our headphones, avert our eyes and actively turn our attention not outwards.
but inwards. Inwards toward screens that incubate self-interest with an assuring white glow and a new batch of revisions: "Flesh-Eating Heroin Spreading to Suburbia (WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES)," "How To Spot A Member of the World's Most Deadly Street Gang," or "The Life of a Monster: Ariel Castro's Chilling Saga."
I by no means advocate ignorance. A healthy understanding of potential danger and knowledge of current events is crucial to being a good citizen. True, awareness of your surroundings may mean avoiding solo walks down dark alleys in the dead of night, it may mean keeping a close eye on your wallet, it may mean trusting your gut to know when to dismiss yourself from a situation. But awareness of your surroundings also means distinguishing between what you have merely heard through the grapevine to be true or what "CSI New York" told you to be true, from your actual experiences with the truth. This manmade fear alienates us from entire groups of people we deem "dangerous," it prohibits empathy and intimacy with the person sitting next to you on the train, it fosters a culture of judging passsby as possible threats on the scale of their appearance alone. Fear fashions an assumed distrust that contours our perceptions of others and saps the ties that bind our community. What I truly fear is a society fractionated and disenfranchised by habits colored not by their own experiences, but by stale, over-synthesized stereotypes, inflated and formulated for maximum scandal.
Erin Calhoun is a pre-med student from Naperville, Ill.
Irony can be powerful tool if used sparingly
If you haven't gathered from my previous columns, I am a huge David Foster Wallace fan. Today I'm going to finally cave and write a column about one of his nonfiction pieces. Hailing from the collection, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," DFW's essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" may ostensibly be confined to the topics of television and fiction, but explores the deeper ramifications of what they imply about American society as a whole. Although it was written in 1993, much of what he observes about television is applicable to the internet today. Irony is dangerous. In grossly oversimplified terms, that's the main thrust of DFW's argument in this essay. Not only is it dangerous, but its overuse in society is cheapening the value of our interactions with one another. Television, he claims, isn't necessarily to blame, but is a good example of the prevalence of irony.
Remember that Super Bowl commercial for Hulu featuring Alec Baldwin, in which he reveals that Hulu is "an evil plot to destroy the world" by rotting our brains with television? It's dripping with irony. The audience knows that Hulu isn't an evil plot, and the advertisers at Hulu know that the audience knows, and it's funny. So what's the point? It sets up an in-joke between the advertisers and the watchers, which is intended to engender a sense of belonging or loyalty in the watcher. It shows that the advertisers think irony has mass appeal; in other words, it's become the norm in society.
Irony can be a powerful tool for change. For instance, Mark Twain's incisive irony in Huck Finn brought the racism of the South into sharp focus. Using irony in a satirical way is a great way to expose systemic flaws; however, what it can't do is propose constructive solutions to the problems. DFW puts it nicely: "... irony, entertaining as it is, serves an exclusively negative function.
Irony as a cultural norm, then, is dangerous because it is essentially negative. When irony is the norm, it becomes increasingly uncool to be serious about anything. If an ironist never means what he says, when can we ever have a meaningful conversation?
It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing... But irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks."
"Anyone with the heretic gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig," DFW avers.
CAMPUS CHIRPS BACK
Cue the internet phenomenon of "trolling." Read almost any Youtube comment section if you're unsure of what it means. Sadly, I've seen trolling bleed into real life. I've seen a lot of potentially good discussions about current events be derailed by a troll. It's selfish, because the only winners in the situation are the troll and those that realize what's going on. By choosing to feign indifference, the troll protects himself from having his own beliefs challenged, while those that are still trying to have an honest discussion are antagonized.
I think one of the greatest opportunities we have here in a university environment is the chance to connect with a diverse range of people. Being able to see things from another person's perspective and compare it with and challenge our own is a worthwhile practice. Let's not let a culture of irony detract from these meaningful connections.
Jason Bates is a senior majoring in Chemical Engineering from Overland Park.
Pre-made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are the sweatpants of food.
@NikiJay11
A couple dressed as Rihanna and Chris Brown post-flight. Pretty terrible.
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