10 4th Of July Photos That Would Make The Founding Fathers Weep
Posted on July 3, 2013 in Images
Sometimes, it seems the true price of having too much freedom is a complete poverty of taste.
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The Issue Of Color In America
Posted on June 28, 2013 in Articles
What a rainbow of a week it’s been in the colorblind United States. Reds, blues, yellows, greens and purples streaked the skies Wednesday, following the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and kicked back Proposition 8 back to California courts. Homosexual men and women were left in tears (as was Jesus, according to New Testament-touting troglodyte Mike Huckabee) as it seemed equality was no longer a lofty, holed ideal but a palpable reality that included them in its rich stitching.
And yet, as it so often goes in the American struggle for civil rights, the gains we make in one arena are tempered by our willful failure in another. 24 hours before a chorus of cheers reverberated about the imposing columns before the Supreme Court’s halls, a sobering silence cloaked its patrons as they received word that some of the most successful civil rights legislation the United States has ever seen, the Voting Rights Act, had effectively been gutted in yet another 5-4 split decision.
In his majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts stated that the United States has “changed”, and that old formulas for determining which states require preclearance before revising voting laws, procedures or locales are out-of-date, unfair and place an undue, singular burden on certain states whose histories have evolved since 1965 (pay no mind to the fact that typically, a burden becomes “undue” when the costs of a requirement outweigh its benefits, which in this case would be ensuring that the Fifteenth Amendment is adhered to at the local, state and federal level, and that minorities are not prevented from voting based on their race; apparently the pursuit of equality is secondary to the bureaucratic hassles imposed on states with a history of opposing it).
26 Staggering Photos Of The Protests Raging In Brazil
Posted on June 21, 2013 in Images
We seem to be living in an era of what esteemed news anchor Ron Burgundy might describe as “quick escalation”. As with current protests in Turkey, peaceful movements in Brazil rapidly grew violent following a frenzied episode of police brutality and intimidation. What began as a relatively harmless demonstration against an increase in public bus fares soon became a massive, nationwide movement railing against high taxes, corruption within the Rousseff administration, and lavish spending on a superfluous World Cup stadium (costing taxpayers around $30 billion to build) while much of the population could be better served by their tax dollars funding literacy programs, better healthcare and so on.
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The images are truly stunning (especially as it’s estimated that 80% of those participating have never taken part in a single protest or belonged to a political movement before), and the movement–refusing to confine itself to a single objective–doesn’t show signs of stopping any time soon. Check out an incredibly informative video below for more information about what hosting the World Cup in Brazil really means.
Martin Luther King Jr’s Best Quotes You Haven’t Read
Posted on June 9, 2013 in Quotes
At a time of true social and political tumult, Martin Luther King’s words managed to propel the civil rights movement forward as much as they provided a a necessary tonic to the understandable amounts of violence sweeping through the nation. While passages sprinkled throughout many history books are those wherein MLK discusses civil rights, King’s genius was not limited to issues of race and social equality. Take a look below at Martin Luther King Jr’s best quotes you haven’t read:
New Statistics Study Maps Out How A Singular “American English” Doesn’t Exist
Posted on June 7, 2013 in Images
America might still lamentably be divided on gay marriage and marijuana legalization, but as this recent NC State statistics study points out, the most divisive factor could be the way we pronounce the name of that innocuous little decapod residing in creeks across the country: the crawfish. Read on and you’ll realize that if we even want to dream of having an official language, we need to actually act like it first.
