Tag: Violence

I close my eyes and let out a big sigh, in an attempt to empty the negative thoughts from my body. Maybe by doing so, I will somehow bring the positive energy in with my next breath. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking. “So what is wrong with it, give me the unfiltered and ugly truth&r...

We have a zero-tolerance fighting rule at my school, and my students feel this is unfair. We usually discuss the issue in class at least twice. The first time is when we discuss reasoning and instinct. Most animals act on instinct, but humans, in theory, should be able to reason. If they are plac...

As one would have probably come to expect, Donald Trump is not handling the news of a third indictment particularly well. It’s become increasingly apparent since before he even lost his reelection that he’s getting more paranoid, angry, and frankly delusional as he dedicates his entire e...

I’m in a philosophical mood today. I’ve been watching The Good Place again, or more accurately binging it obsessively. Watching Team Cockroach wrestle with the ethics of punishment, morality, and existentialism is really fun. If you haven’t watched it, go do that. D...

The Christmas lotto draw sends Spaniards into a frenzy. In Summer many buy tickets, or decimos, on vacation — you’d never know where the luck could land. Some spend hundreds of Euros. The December 22nd draw is surreal: school children with shrill voices sing out numbers and cash amo...

For a straight week protesters around Miami-Dade County have taken to the streets in the City of Miami, Miami Shores, Miami Beach, Miami Lakes and North Miami shouting, “Black Lives Matter” and demanding accountability from local police departments. Like many of the other protests hap...

Context: Summer 2017, back in the day, when we first began our life as a removalist, we were driving a small Toyota Hiace Van (it’s like a goget van). We mostly did smallish jobs, like moving a fridge or a sofa. The ‘Call’: After a finished day, when scrolling through job offers...

Weber introduced, or promoted the idea that Protestants have a certain work ethics thanks to the values imparted by their religion. The idea — like almost all of sociology — is marshmallow-soft. Consider the reverse: that Protestants at the time happened to have a certain culture, and ot...

I knew it was coming before it happened. Sure enough, as soon as I got in the door of my studio apartment, a wave of nausea overwhelmed me. I ran to the sink as the remnants of my lunch exploded from my face. Welcome to the world as I know it. These days, it is a good day if I only vomit once or ...

On Christmas morning, 1492, the residents of Forlì, Italy, awoke to an invading army of 15,000 strong led by the murderous Cesare Borgia. Months earlier, Cesare's dad Rodrigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI), had decreed his family the rightful rulers of Romagna. The noble Italian families were orde...

Skyrocketing drug use, hate crimes, political violence, and school shootings—I don’t know what else I’ve left out, but what do all of these have in common? Ultimately, they all have some relationship with meaning-making. For example, it might be hard to see how shooting up a sch...

Why the Lewiston, Maine mass shooter escaped the state’s “yellow flag” laws, meant to keep weapons of death and destruction out of hands like his, is a question in search of answers. Eighteen people were murdered and thirteen more injured: the price for ignoring threats m...

Remember back in the 90’s when people tried to blame video games for all of the violence? Prior to that humans had been peaceful and video games came out to muck it all up. Indeed. Hello. Let me give you a little background on myself. At Basic Training they handed me an M-16. I hit every ta...

In March of 2019, my friends and I were in Miami Beach for spring break. In broad daylight, one of my friends was sexually harassed and physically assaulted by an intoxicated male spring breaker. It happened so fast that we did not capture the incident on video or even get a good description of the ...

My office was housed in one of the priciest buildings in the financial district, on the 30th floor. Because land was expensive in this area, the buildings were rather close to one another. I could, therefore, clearly see the offices in the adjacent building. The majority of offices in this area u...

Washington particularly suffers from a high number of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. A recent study of urban areas across the country reported 71 missing and murdered American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls in Washington cities, 45 of those in Seattle alone. Nat...

I currently live above a family whom I often hear screaming and crying, sometimes I even feel a physical disturbance. I really haven’t been doing anything about it, even if sometimes I become worried about harm happening, so before I move, I really want to reflect my thoughts about domestic vi...

In the heart of San Francisco, where the fog often dances with the rising sun, there lived a young man named John. His world, a tapestry woven with vibrant threads of culture, love, and kinship, was anchored by one irreplaceable figure: his grandmother. John’s grandmother was a figure ...

When a Black woman named Rho shared her story that a man hit her in the face with a brick, some Black men chimed in to say they weren’t responsible for her protection, while others suggested intervening would be too dangerous. However, even if they wanted to avoid a physical confront...

We talk about race because we are hurting because we are being murdered because we are invisible to our governments. We talk about race because we want to speak up about the violence we face every day. We talk about race because we want to be heard. We don't talk about race to hurt you or ...

The 1500s and 1600s in England and Europe were anything but gentle times. People were routinely burned at the stake for religious heresy, a practice that began in the twelfth century and continued through 1612. Torture was an official instrument of the English government until 1640. The famous Tower...

Testosterone is a potent hormone with a chequered past. It’s probably most famous for its role as an anabolic steroid in professional sport and bodybuilding, and has been closely associated with aggression and violence (e.g., the infamous ‘roid rage’). This seems to ma...

The phrase “epidemic of violence” has become ubiquitous in contemporary media. Last year, the Human Rights Campaign called the escalation of attacks on transgender and gender non-conforming Americans an “epidemic.” The United Nations, the Guardian, and NBC News have all discu...

Beyond various forms of discourse which perpetuate violence, there is a more nuanced dynamic in the relationship between life and death—in terms of which holds sway, and what they actually mean in a world where violence is almost a commodity. Here, I aim to demonstrate that the monopolization ...

A while ago on Medium, I wrote an article titled, “Identity, Power, and Difference,” where I drew on Butler, Foucault, and Deleuze, to illustrate the dynamics between more broadly defined forms of social power and the emancipatory potential that subjects can house in the face o...

I am currently exploring the incorrect, immoral, indecent, or just plain odd behaviors that proliferate in online spaces. As a part of this exploration, I developed a new course for my university, Online Deviance. I am making it up as I go! It’s never advisable to do this, but I’ve learn...

The original title of the documentary, screened under the title Monopoly of Violence, is Un pays qui se tient sage, which correctly translates as “A country behaving gently”. And this a reference to the sentence “Voilà une classe qui se tient sage”, meaning “Here...