Opinion

Opinion

Column: Write for the passion, not the paycheck

Cathy Cook | March 20

How many people do you know who are writing a novel? And have been for 10 years (yes, they’re only 21, so this masterwork has been in the works since they were 11)? I know a lot. 10 would be on the low end. There’s the 13-year-old I met on a weeklong camping trip who was almost done with her first novel and had plans to start her second (since when did 13-year-olds start writing novels instead of watching cartoons? Have they always done that? Did I just do being 13 wrong?).

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Opinion

Letter: White people are disproportionately targeted for crime

Daily Lobo Readers | March 19

Editor, President Trump's second travel ban is on the back-burner and students are returning from Spring Break festivities. With the campus refreshed and political climate cooled for the moment, I feel now is a good time to broach an uncomfortable-but-important topic amid our racialized political atmosphere: Whites as disproportionate targets in interracial crime. I was hesitant to report the shocking facts on interracial crime and white victimization when I first learned about them from a Department of Justice report two years ago. Reporting anything that challenges the conspiracy of white privilege could implicate me as a hater - or worse.

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Opinion

Letter: Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations are hurting New Mexico

Daily Lobo Readers | March 16

On Saturday night, March 11, 2017, I started a long overdue conversation on the floor of the House. For the past 14 years, New Mexico tried an experiment – we cut personal and corporate income taxes to see if jobs would flow into the state. The experiment failed. Jobs and people left the state. Revenues tumbled. Schools, public safety and infrastructure were decimated. And the tax burden rose sharply on lower and middle class wage earners.

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Opinion

Spring Break Dictionary: Your guide to puking at parties, blacking out and all the other fun experiences you can expect from spending an entire week intoxicated

Cathy Cook | March 10

Spring Break — (n.), an academic tradition that began in the 1930s as a way to offer a midterm break or time off for Easter. Contemporary spring break practices still have much in common with Easter: The concept of rebirth (when your roommate seemed dead after three shots of tequila, but came back to life at the smell of bacon pancakes), the importance of large stones (or being stoned), the centrality of eggs (a pivotal hangover food), and the sacrifice of one man (the sober sitter/DD/Jesus take the wheel) for the lives of the collective. PAAARTAY! — (n.), the homing beacon of drunk spring breakers. This loud inebriated shout, frequently accompanied by a drunken selfie and incoherent hashtags (#pooturnt #durnkselfie), helps spring breakers find one another when they’ve lost their brethren.

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Opinion

Column: Where are you when we need you the most, Joe Biden memes?

Cathy Cook | March 10

It’s probably not healthy to get nostalgic about things only a few months past. But the joy, the optimism, the humor! How could I not miss Joe Biden memes? Biden was first sworn in as a U.S. senator at 30, making him the sixth youngest U.S. senator. (The youngest was John Henry Eaton, who was sworn in at age 28 in 1818. You’re supposed to be 30 to serve in the Senate, but no one bothered to ask Eaton how old he was, and I guess he didn’t worry about the age requirements). Biden was a senator from the time he was first elected in 1972 to when he became vice president in 2009, having been re-elected six times.

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Opinion

Letter: Craving more money is the most harmful addiction

Daily Lobo Readers | March 8

Editor, Booze, junk food, cocaine, meth, sugar, heroine, sodas, cigarettes are all awful addictions, but no addiction is more harmful than craving much more money, more stuff than we need. I enjoy having enough -- healthy food, one sunny room to live in, a garden for food and flowers. I lived well all of 2016 on $4,946.00 for my total expenses -- rent, food, etc. -- less than half the U.S. poverty level for me as a single person.

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Opinion

Letter: Republicans are repeating dark history through mass deportations

Daily Lobo Readers | March 8

Editor, The Republicans' 30-year lock on the Supreme Court has made them extremely reactionary and unwilling to legislate. “Ethnic cleansing” has been defined as the attempt to get rid of (through deportation, displacement or even mass killing) members of an unwanted ethnic group in order to establish an ethnically homogenous geographic area.

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Opinion

Letter: Regardless of political differences, students should support each other

Daily Lobo Readers | March 5

Editor, It’s been a long year of transition and change for many groups of people, specifically students. It seems hard to believe that political differences can cause so much hate and violence against one another. As I read this article ("Column: The importance of kindness in times of political tension") I thought to myself, 'What do the red gloves mean to me?'

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Opinion

Letter: Americans have a right to deny illegal immigrants a home in their country

Daily Lobo Readers | March 5

Editor, There is an old legal maxim: "Hard cases make bad law." The implicit knowledge behind this statement - of how society is affected by the legal institutions of this country - has universal application. More directly, it has application to undocumented immigrants in New Mexico. To invoke an adjacent topic seen often in the local community, the Native American plight that occurred in the U.S. through colonial times, in sum, fits the definition of genocide.

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Opinion

Column: Water is life, and clean water is a responsibility

Cathy Cook | March 5

Water is life, according to Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Water Protectors and the astronomers who found seven potentially habitable planets in another galaxy (why are they potentially habitable? The distance between them and their star means water could exist on their surfaces). My week had a theme: I covered a NoDAPL crash course, a talk on water quality protection in an era of uncertain environmental regulation and I paid a visit to the Edward Skeats exhibit at the UNM Art Museum.

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Opinion

Letter: Yiannopoulos' comments were taken out of context

Daily Lobo Readers | March 1

The politically lame at the Washington Post and Salon, and their friends here at UNM, have recently took to expressing their best virtue signalling yet over a deceptively-edited video clip of Milo Yiannipoulos sharing his relationship views. I want to address Milo's statements head-on, because the implications are serious.

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Opinion

Letter: New immigration policies make schooling secondary to safety for some

Daily Lobo Readers | February 28

Editor, It has been over a month of bad news for me. I have always tried to be exceptional in my school work. I started off as a psychology major and during my second year I decided to start working on a minor in statistics because I want to pursue graduate education. Aside from trying my best in all my classes, I am currently working as a research assistant in a laboratory and enrolled in El Puente research fellowship. I am also part of the Psychology Honors Program, where I have been working on writing a thesis which I hope to finish sometime in 2018.

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Opinion

Column: The importance of kindness in times of political tension

Nichole Harwood | February 28

Few things in life can radically impact how an individual treats another more than politics. Friends, family and coworkers will seemingly transform into strangers when they passionately defend their own political views, spewing harsh and cold words to those who oppose them. This is one of the reasons many households and workplaces do not allow politics to be discussed at all. These rules, however, do not hold true in social media or in public outside of homes among family and strangers alike.

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Opinion

Letter: Trump election remains illegitimate

Daily Lobo Readers | February 26

Editor, The “basket of deplorables” is gradually waking up to their newest American nightmare.

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Opinion

Column: Milo's downfall shows even the alt-right limit speech

Jonathan Baca | February 26

After all the riots and battles he caused on campuses in the name of free speech, alt-right activist and former Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos’ career has completely imploded — ironically because of something “unacceptable” he said. Yiannopoulos — a gay, Catholic British alt-right firebrand — raided and pillaged across U.S. liberal college campuses as part of his “Dangerous Faggot Tour,” essentially a hate-filled series of live trolling events. There were riots at UC Berkeley when he was scheduled to attend, and because of the huge car fires and mayhem that violent anti-Milo protesters had created, campus police decided it was too dangerous for him to appear.

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Opinion

Letter: Trump's deportation order is pure racism

Daily Lobo Readers | February 22

Editor, Regarding Trump's executive order to deport undocumented or, as most xenophobes put it, "illegal aliens" is not to fix reform or even enforce the laws that already exist. It's a racist action pure and simple, perpetrated by a fascist neo-Nazi bigot with plenty of supporters who have hated, feared anyone of color or non-white for centuries. Probably due to their own lack of culture. And (they) are still angry that they lost the Civil War! I honestly think you are not even from this planet! Aliens! Viva la revolution!

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Opinion

Letter: Yiannopoulos supporters suddenly silent on pedophilia comments

Daily Lobo Readers | February 22

Editor, For those of us who campaigned against UNM’s special treatment of speaker Milo Yiannopoulos, including the waiving of a security fee regularly charged to student groups, it’s been satisfying to see his recent fall from grace due to comments he made last year that appeared to advocate pedophilia. However, it’s interesting to note that members of our community defending his visit in the name of the First Amendment have been notably silent on the pedophilia comments that led to the cancellation of his book contract and the dis-invitation from speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

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Opinion

Column: Why the anger in comment sections?

Cathy Cook | February 20

When it comes to online comment sections, I break the rules. Even my browser tells me: never read the comments. Roommates remind me not to feed the trolls. I just want to read, respond and reimagine the people on the other side of my screen. Different comment sections have reputations: Facebook is mundane if somewhat surreal, Imgur sas the same five jokes in the first 10 comments, and YouTube has the comment section the devil would avoid if he had high speed internet (we all know the devil has dial-up, that has to be part of hell). YouTube comments are Bad with a capital B. Some of these tropes are true, but not universally. And even when they are true, I feel compelled to scroll. In my experience, the quality of comments has more to do with what content the commenters are responding to than what platform they’re responding on. Undeniably, though, anonymity does something to people. They get braver; they get meaner.

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Opinion

Letter: In reality, pot is completely harmless

Daily Lobo Readers | February 19

Editor, Brad King wrote, "NM liberal lawmakers seem to be clamoring to climb on the pot legalization bandwagon, just like our ill fated neighbor to the north."  Here in the reality-based community, "Colorado’s GDP increased by 3.6 percent in 2015, the fourth most of any state in the country.

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Opinion

Column: The history of "fake news"

Nichole Harwood | February 19

In a world where the legitimacy of news is constantly called into question by politicians and readers alike, whose responsibility is it to determine what is "fake news" and what is not? It is both the reporter's job to write factually accurate news, and the reader's responsibility to check the legitimacy of their choice in news outlets, whether this outlet is online or through a news network. But all news has one measurement in common that is ultimately connected to its value and newsworthiness: the ability of news in any form to catch the eye of a reader, a viewer or a listener.