Current Turmoil

Trump met and held a press conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg this past Wednesday, 4/12/17, in which he declared that NATO is “no longer obsolete” (despite his campaign claims), and made repeated calls for greater “burden sharing” among NATO members. This meeting followed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s conference with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, and Stoltenberg emphasized the need for communication with Russia, which would (and I paraphrase) “remain a large neighbor regardless.” Trump focused on the emotional impact of the videos of children who died in Bashar al-Assad’s sarin gas attack on the Syrian people. (Assad later [4/13] denied the attack and the deaths.) Shortly before, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer essentially mollified Hitler’s attacks and denied that they were against Germans [4/11].)

On April 6th, shortly after those videos were publicized, the U.S. launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at one of Syrian government’s airbases (from which the gas attack was launched). International response to the U.S. strike has been mixed, but, except for Russia’s, tending slightly more towards positive than national response. (Bannon opposed the strike, while Kushner was in favor; legislators were mixed. It is worth noting the complexity of this decision: Clinton had previously been in favor of stronger actions against Assad.) This has been called the U.S.’ first targeted hit on the Assad government, but its success has been questioned. On April 13th, the U.S. dropped a 20,000-pound bomb in Afghanistan, targeting ISIS/ISIL forces and aiming to not hit Afghan and U.S. forces, with disputed accounts of other casualties. (I might be misremembering, but I thought I saw a link on my Facebook newsfeed Friday morning to what I think was an Onion article, which emphasized that further bombing Afghanistan would create far more antagonism towards the U.S.; I cannot find the link anymore.) This “mother of all bombs” — there are more nicknames for missiles and bombs than one might expect — was in part dropped in order to “send a message,” just as was (to a greater extent) the U.S.’ missile strike in Syria. The U.S. has been striking targets in both countries for years.

This is amidst rising tensions (an overused catchphrase that somehow remains rather accurate) with North Korea, which continues to issue warnings against U.S. action, and an outwardly vacillating relationship with China. The news media have described these warnings as also primarily aiming to “send a message.” Among all of this, there is also decreasing transparency within the White House (visitor logs will no longer be public), further cuts to national programs, and further infringements on Internet privacy; along with an increase in (terrible) WWIII memes online. The grief is unimaginable  — and that the world is getting messier and more dangerous seems simultaneously a given and a platitude — but with the tragedy, I am reminded of administrations’ continual manipulation of conferences and surrounding media. And of the messages that are being sent.

— Lora

Excelsior Isn’t As Magic As It Seems

On April 7th, 2017, New York Legislature passed the Excelsior Scholarship, a program/scholarship which would make tuition free for lower- to middle-income students in all four-year undergraduate State University of New York colleges. In order to be eligible for Excelsior, a student must be enrolled full-time, complete 30 credits per year, have a yearly income of up to $100,000, and after graduating, students must remain in New York for the same amount of time that they received the Excelsior scholarship. If a student leaves New York before the amount of time is reached, the tuition covered by Excelsior becomes a loan.

Sounds pretty good, right?

In theory, it’s a great program. But there are two aspects of student life in New York that Excelsior does not take into account: the first is the fact that most lower-income students have to juggle work and school, and do not have the time to take 30 credits per semester. The scholarship only benefits the “traditional student” who graduates in four years and never has to drop/withdraw from a class for any number of reasons. Although Excelsior allows students to take a different amount of credits each semester so one could, hypothetically, drop a class, the minimum amount of credits allowed for one semester is 12, meaning students would have to take 18 credits the following semester, which is around 6 classes. Most lower-income students cannot take five classes per semester, much less six.

In terms of lower-income CUNY students, most already receive financial aid from the state which covers tuition, book and student fees, and transportation for commuting students. As David Chen notes in a New York Times article, Excelsior only covers tuition, therefore lower-income CUNY students would have to cover the additional costs of education on their own. Transportation in and of itself can come up to anywhere between $363 and $464 per semester with the recent raise in monthly unlimited Metrocard fares; lower-income students would end up paying more under the Excelsior Scholarship than they currently pay while receiving financial aid.

The second aspect that New York government officials fail to acknowledge, a fact which was brought up by a fellow intern, is that CUNY/SUNY schools are severely underfunded and cannot afford a sudden influx of students brought on by the promise of free tuition. Colleges are understaffed, classes are overcrowded, professors are underpaid, upgrades to schools’ infrastructure is unheard of, though very much needed, and many schools have to deal with budget cuts, like our own Brooklyn College, which will no longer have an on-campus bookstore as of next semester due to budget cuts.

Although Excelsior is a step towards making higher education more accessible to working- and middle-class students, as Chen argues in his article, it will only really benefit a small percentage of primarily middle-class students.

-L

E-sport

For a long time, there has been a stigma surrounding video games, for the idea of playing video games is considered a waste of time. To some who have been playing video games since a very young age, however, playing video games is more than just…well, a game. When E-sport, which many regard as competitive online gaming, first started, there has been an on-going debate about whether E-sport should be considered “true sport.” Whether or not E-sport should be considered an actual sport, and even if it eventually becomes an actual sport, a much more interesting question to explore is will E-sport players ever going to receive the same respect as traditional sport athletes?

Regardless of the different opinions, E-sport has been gaining popularity on the Internet. The Wang Theatre in Boston, for instance, recently held a four-day competition with 3 million dollars in prize money. Last fall, the Staples Center in Los Angeles hosted a world championship event of an online competitive game, which attracted an estimate of 43 million people – and the first place winner took home a two-million-dollar prize split between players of the winning team. Emerson college, in fact, will be launching an “Intro to E-sports” this coming fall as part of its sports communication program to allow students the opportunity to engage with various collegiate E-sport entities around Boston as sources of experiential learning. These examples, in a sense, demand that E-sports be treated as a sport.

Although one is physical and the other online, numerous examples show that there are as many similarities as there are differences between E-sports and traditional sports. Unlike traditional sports, competitive video games are privately owned – in other words, there is not a single ruling entity that supervises E-sports. Even so, E-sports and traditional sports share the same concepts. Just as traditional sports, like basketball and football, require strategic thinking and team effort, competitive online gaming demands strategic thinking and teamwork from each player to reach the main objectives, such as destroying the enemy’s base to win a battle of some kind as a whole. Like athletes who train themselves everyday for long hours to achieve peak physical strength, agility, and stamina, competitive online players have to constantly work on improving their stamina to be able to play for very long hours everyday and practice on a number of things like hand positioning, precise timing, and accuracy. Traditional athletes must learn to adapt in many unusual situations; and similarly, competitive online players are required to have the same degree of adaptability, as many privately owned game companies often change the game mechanism and introduce news rule to the game every now and then. From a health perspective, many often argue that the long hours of sitting and staring in front of the computer leads to long term health issues. Even then, given the growth in today’s technological advancement, these issues will sooner or later be reduced, or eradicated, by future technological inventions. In fact, there are a number of common injuries involved in traditional sports. How, then, is E-sport different from traditional sports? Some called E-sport a mind sport – but I don’t think that is completely accurate, because E-sport involves as much physical participation as it involves mental participation from each player. These examples call into question the idea of “sport” – and in a sense, what is sport? And where do we draw the line between E-sports and traditional sports? These are just some things to consider.

On a different note, I think E-sports can be beneficial. E-sport is not meant to take over or to replace traditional sports; rather, it simply offers a platform for those who do not have the physicality for traditional sports. Those who insist that E-sport is not a sport, and will never be considered a sport, seem to have misunderstood this very (important) point of E-sport. There are those who play E-sports for a living, just as those athletes who play traditional sports for a living. In this respect, these E-sport players deserve not only some degree of recognition but also the same kind of respect as those traditional athletes.

— Jason