As strange as it may sound, Donald J. Trump, the current president of the United States of America, has been repeatedly likened to Cyrus the Great (lived c. 600 – c. 530 BC), the founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. The comparison between Trump and Cyrus the Great is especially popular among evangelical Christian Trump-supporters in the United States, but it also has some prominence among Israeli Jews. Let’s take a look at who Cyrus the Great was, why Donald Trump is being compared to him, and why these comparisons don’t hold up to scrutiny.
Continue reading “Is Donald Trump the Second Coming of Cyrus the Great?”Tag: Current events
Why Tearing Down Confederate Monuments Is Not “Erasing History”
In case you haven’t already heard, the United States has a lot of monuments honoring the Confederate States of America, as well as the individuals most closely associated with it, such as Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson. According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), there are currently 780 monuments and statues across the United States honoring the Confederacy and people associated with it.
According to The Washington Post, about one in every twelve Confederate monuments is in a Union state, which is absolutely baffling when you consider that the Union actually won the war. My home state of Indiana, which was a Union state through and through, currently has several Confederate monuments. Even Massachusetts, one of the most vociferously pro-Union states, had a Confederate monument until just a few years ago.
Most people reading this are probably already well enough aware that there is a great deal of controversy over these monuments. Many people (myself included) believe these monuments should be taken down. Defenders of the monuments, however, insist that removing them is “erasing history.” In this article, I intend to show how this insistence is a form of false framing. Taking down Confederate monuments is objectively not “erasing history” at all, but rather simply refusing to glorify people who fought to defend the institution of slavery.
Continue reading “Why Tearing Down Confederate Monuments Is Not “Erasing History””Should the Elgin Marbles Be Returned to Greece?
The Elgin Marbles are a collection of ancient Greek marble sculptures that originally decorated some of the ancient monuments on the Akropolis in Athens, particularly the Parthenon, but were removed in the early nineteenth century by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin and are currently held in the British Museum in London. There have been many calls for the Elgin Marbles to be returned to Greece so they can be put on display in the Akropolis Museum in Athens along with most of the rest of the sculptures from the Parthenon. In this article, I will make the case for why I think they should.
Continue reading “Should the Elgin Marbles Be Returned to Greece?”The Bizarre Origins of the Word Idiot
The 2016 election cycle in the United States has been one of the most bitter and divisive in recent memory. Both of the candidates—Hillary Rodham Clinton (D) and Donald J. Trump (R)—are regarded as so thoroughly unlikeable in every way that many people are outright refusing to vote for either of them. If you decide not to vote in this election, though, you are an idiot. I do not necessarily mean you are unintelligent or even ignorant for that matter; I merely mean that you are an idiot.