By Peter Williamson Opinion Editor 2014 is the year of many 10-year anniversaries – Justin and Janet’s Superbowl mishap, Ronald Reagan’s death, the landing of the Rover Spirit on Mars – and the virtual birth of thefacebook.com. Soon after it became the Facebook we all love (or hate). Initially only available to students of various…
Let’s Language
Lisa Rückwardt Staff Writer Having barely passed the ACC 170 French entrance test I decided to look for a way to improve my French a little. I could read some books, a really dry grammar book still from my high school time for example, or I could finally get a smartphone and download a language…
What Austerity Boils Down To: Buckingham Palace needs a new boiler
By Anonymous Staff Writer A few days ago I came across the odd news that the boiler used for the heating system in Buckingham Palace needs to be replaced – something hardly worth writing about apart from the fact that the costs are to be carried by the taxpayer. “Wait a second” you might…
Money: Interesting and Valuable Insights
An article crowd-sourced by the fall 2013 Ethics Class UCR Philosophy Track What you have before you is something quite peculiar: A document written by about 25 students, on the subject of money. This surely must be the first such article published in the Tabula Rasa. The title reflects one of the unique qualities a…
Disorder or Socially Unacceptable?
By Lisanne Ophoff Staff Writer A few months ago, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was published. When I looked at the changes that had been made, I noticed something that got me thinking (actually, I noticed several things but I’m not writing an article about all of them). What…
Enjoy Christmas – While You Still Can
By Peter Williamson Opinion Section Editor Many people, including me, like Christmas. For most here in Europe, it means a short holiday, spending time with your family and friends, and enjoying the atmosphere of it all. The world almost seems at rest when you are sitting at a dinner with your loved ones or sharing…
This Is Your Life, and It’s Ending One Minute At a Time
By Jochem Gerritsen UCR Alumnus, Class of 2013 I am sitting in my Comparative and Transnational Public Policy class in Paris. It’s 16.00 and in 45 minutes this class will finally be over. The course is part of my Masters; a lot has changed since last year. One thing that did not change at all…
Approaching the ‘War on Terror’ – Could the Westgate Mall Shooting Have Been Prevented?
By Lisanne Ophoff UCR Class of 2016 On September 21, armed Al-Shabaab militants stormed the Kenyan shopping mall Westgate. Armed with AK-47’s and grenades, the conflict caused enormous chaos and resulted in dozens of fatalities. They asked Muslims to leave and sometimes checked if people were really Muslims by asking them, for example, for the…
An Attempt at Unmasking “the State”
By Martha Hooge UCR Class of 2014 “We have come to take the state for granted as an object of political practice and political analysis while remaining quite spectacularly unclear as to what the state is” (Abrams). The task that we´re faced with now is to demystify the state, destabilize our idea of it, that…
How Our Democracy was Hacked and What We Need to Do About It
By Peter Williamson Opinion Section Editor Have you ever been hacked before? Contracted a virus or spyware? For those of you who have, it’s both annoying and frightening. Annoying because it takes a lot of time to resolve the issue and root out the virus. Frightening because you can never know exactly what damage was…
Undesirables in Prison
By Hanna van Leent Staff Writer Where are you from? If you are not from The Netherlands, then there is a chance that your fellow countrymen, -women and children are being held in custody in the Netherlands without having committed any crime – apart from the fact that their request of asylum has been turned…
Is it Okay to Read the Works of Extremist Writers?
By Anonymous UCR Class of 2015 As some of you might have heard, there has been a heated debate about whether the film adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game”, which will be hitting the cinemas soon, should be boycotted. The debate arose because the author himself has made several homophobic statements and even wrote in his…
The Need for Military Action in Syria
By Trevor Maloney Editor-in-Chief One cannot help but feel deep sadness and frustration over the ongoing conflict in Syria. As has been reported by The New York Times and many other news organizations, the American intelligence community has proven that the government of Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against its own people. Much of the…
The Political Side of Sport: The Olympic Games in Sochi
By Hanna van Leent Staff Writer Ice Skating has always been part of my family: my grandmother, my mother and I all can ice skate, and we watch various competitions every year during those cold and dark winter days. As a Dutch native, I have cheered for most professional Ice Skaters from the Netherlands for…
Is Uhuru Kenyatta Denying Kenya’s Reality?
By Lisa Rückwardt Staff Writer During the elections in June 2013, the new president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta promised the provision of laptops for each primary school student. He was highly criticized by various newspapers and by the Kenyan population for such a costly and unreasonable project. But what exactly does Kenya and its inhabitants…
Does Bilingualism Equal Fluency: A Canadian Exchange Student’s Struggle
By Rachel McLean When I first arrived in Middelburg around the last week of August 2013, I found that most people started to identify me as “the Canadian exchange student” after I’d introduce myself. I learned that to most people, being Canadian meant that I was bilingual, that I spoke English and French. Often that…