By Trent Serwetz
In ancient times, warriors fought within meters of their opposition, feeling the sweat and blood of their human enemies. In the modern age, rifles, bombs, and artillery increasingly distanced the human from his/her target, moving the soldier farther and farther away from the gaze of the dead. Today, hundreds can be killed with the push of a button and the deployment of an unmanned orbital missile.
The ever-growing distance between the killer and the killed is not rendered exclusively as physical distance. It is a distance from the human …

By Trent Serwetz
Election Day 2008. Op Ed pieces flood in, each one asking a more optimistic question than the last. Change is on the horizon, figured as not just political change but an upheaval of the entire American sociopolitical tradition. “Doesn’t [Obama's victory] imply a “post-racial” America?” One archetypal piece asks. “And shouldn’t those of us — white and black — who did not vote for Mr. Obama take pride in what his victory says about our culture even as we mourn our political loss?”1
A close analysis of voter demographics …

By Trent Serwetz
“…Piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab. It ain’t no different than smashing a window at Tiffany’s and grabbing [merchandise].”1
Vice President Joe Biden made this admonishment on June 22, 2010 as he introduced the Obama administration’s new “Joint Strategic Plan” for enforcing intellectual property rights. While his words are significantly more severe than the administration’s actual record would suggest, they leave no doubt as to the direction of the Executive Branch’s IP policy initiatives. Biden’s words represent a serious threat to the American people.
U.S. intellectual …

By Trent Serwetz
This just in:
BJ Lawson has won the Republican Party’s nomination for NC’s fourth congressional district, earning  46 percent of the 23,000 votes cast (2010 North Carolina Primary Election Results, WRAL.com (link)).
Lawson, who also won the 2008 GOP nomination, won tonight’s primary election running on a platform of limited government and fiscal responsibility. The Lawson campaign especially highlighted the importance of constitutional government and opposed the Federal Reserve.
“I think the primary message of the campaign has been about getting our economic freedom back, the freedom to create our …

By Trent Serwetz
Ever had sexual relations with an underclassman, or someone who is your subordinate in a Duke Club hierarchy? Under the university’s new sexual misconduct policy, you are likely guilty of sexual misconduct.
The university’s new policy, adopted in summer 2009, destroys the importance of context clues and nonsensically broadens Duke’s adjudication of sexual harassment to indict students who are clearly innocent of any sexual misconduct1. As such, the policy is both antithetical to the proper enforcement of sexual misconduct on campus, as well as lethally dangerous for students.
On March …

By Lingfeng Li and Trent Serwetz
As we look forward to the 2010 elections, The Gothic Guardian sat down with Frank Roche, a Republican candidate for the United States Congress representing North Carolina, for an interview.Our interview with BJ Lawson, Roche’s opponent in the Republican primary, can be found here.

The Candidate
Frank Roche values courage – he uses the word directly no less than five times during the course of an hour-long interview, and alludes to it in countless other instances.
Courage may explain his choice to run for U.S. Congress in …

By Trent Serwetz
Everyone knows what a political conservative sounds like; as soon as a person starts going off about tax cuts or defensive spending, it becomes an ostensible fact that they are conservative. But where did conservatism come from, and why do certain views resonate with us as conservative, while others don’t?
Edmund Burke, one of the philosophical founders of modern conservatism, sympathized with the colonists during the American Revolution because he felt that the English taxation was an arbitrary and oppressive use of government power1.
Adam Smith, the other grandfather of …

By Trent Serwetz
Intoning the phrase “political conservatism,” depending on the audience, might conjure up images of the bygone Reagan era and the laissez faire policies associated with it. On the other hand, to some people “conservative” is symbolic of a horned devil with a pitchfork and a can of Budweiser.
For a couple of reasons, identifying the meaning of the word conservatism while sifting through all the spin surrounding it is no easy task. The modern media is so polarized that we are constantly bombarded with negative images of both conservatives …