Some of the most athletic leaps in logic I’ve experienced have been in discussions about race and gender. Lines become blurred as differences of personal perspective become synonymous with “fascism” and “communism,” alchemical transformations come over topics, viewpoints and values.  In one particular instance, I was accused of being racist over my stance on free speech…in a disagreement about feminism. Theultimate example of these bizarre shifts, however, is the all-answering and unanswerable allegation of “white privilege.” I say unanswerable not because it is a legitimate claim, but because the types of people who will use this as an argument are generally not the type who are open to hearing the other side. Bellevue College has had a number of events talking about race-issues, where talk about white privilege elicits somber nods of agreement, and disagreement, if and when it occurs, is rebutted with the same two magical words. Before I go further, there is a small biological hurdle: race isn’t a thing. There is no race gene.

It doesn’t exist. So, in order to talk about white privilege, let’s ignore the illusionary nature of race that the idea relies on, since without the existence of race, we couldn’t make claims about any kind of racial privilege.

What we end up with is essentially the following line of argument: “Racism is bad, and in today’s society, white people end up doing better in many aspects of life than black people. This means that if you are white, you must be benefiting from a set of unearned societal gifts that you probably aren’t even aware of, and you should acknowledge this.” No doubt, some academic somewhere probably has an infinitely more nuanced post-modernist thesis that somehow gets around the issue of Asian privilege, but the gist of the idea is approximately the same.

There’s usually an accompanying implicit message that white people should feel ashamed for this, and should perhaps feel obligated to give something back in compensation for the imperialistic crimes of their great-great-great-grandparents.

Even if we grant the idea of “race,” people are different, and you can’t expect to know anything, let alone everything, about an individual just because they happens to be black.So why on earth is it magically okay to assume someone is “privileged” based their skin color if they’re white? This is the painful and irritating irony of white privilege; it’s fighting fire with gasoline.

Beforeyou assume that someone is “privileged” based on skin color, think about what racism actually means, and what you’re expecting based solely on their race. A little introspection will go a long way in stopping the divisiveness this stubborn bastion of disguised bigotry has been inflicting on campus.

Allergy season has struck. It may have slapped you in the face, hit you in the nose or punched your eyes.  However it attacked, there’s no doubt you’re motivated to fight back. Months of congestion, runny noses, itchy eyes and headaches are endured because our bodies are tricking themselves. Allergic reactions are triggered by the body misinterpreting foreign invaders like pollen, fungal spores or dust mites as damaging threats. This interpretation causes the release of histamine, a naturally  produced   immune   response   chemical. Histamine is what causes inflammation and irritation.

We know the best way to avoid symptoms is to lessen exposure to the threats posed by the outdoors; but staying inside whenever the wind blows is not an option for most. Over-the-counter antihistamines are prescribed as the mundane treatment for allergy systems, but tend to dehydrate mucus membranes and damage tissue, which causes irritation. There are readily available naturopathic remedies that you can use at home, and some are described below.

Use a nasal saline solution designed for sinus decongestion.

Perilla oil has been shown to counteract allergic reactions while soothing itchy eyes, decreasing sinus symptoms and erasing wheezy, asthma-like respiratory effects in as few as seven days. Local honey and bee pollen ingestion may help the body through immunotherapy in a way similar to vaccinations. The honey must be local to have this effect because plant populations and their pollen and spores vary from region to region.

Spicy foods, such as real wasabi and spicy peppers make sinuses and tear ducts spring into action.        Peppermint tea acts as a decongestant and contains anti-inflammatory and mild antibacterial constituents. Steep loose leaf organic tea and cover for at least three minutes to maximize the antioxidant count in each cup.

Avoid synthetic clothing during allergy season. Try cotton and other natural fabric, particularly organic ones that aren’t farmed with synthetic pesticides.

Walnuts, flax seeds, salmon and other foods rich in alpha-linolenic acid, an omega-3 fatty acid, will help lessen allergy symptoms. The healthy fat in walnuts helps strengthen your immune system to keep it functioning and organized so it attacks against unwanted invaders such as viruses and cancer cell, but doesn’t overreact to spring’s plain old pollen.

Avoid harboring these common household plants at least during allergy season: orchids, ivy, fichus, yucca and palm. They are likely to increase sinus symptoms by 20 percent.

Do, however, keep these non-allergenic plants around: German Violet, Lithops, Snake, White Flag, Creeping Charlie, Donkey Tail, Hens-and-Chickens fern and Blood Leaf. Also avoid over-watering your plants, which can catalyze the growth of sinus-irritating mold.

Make sure to wash your furry pets relatively often during allergy season as well. Their fur is a great place for pollen to latch onto, and their own dandruff, sweat and spring-time shedding might multiply your symptoms.

This opinion does not represent the opinion of the Watchdog staff

One of the most common of logical fallacies is that of “equivocation.” In the narrow sense, equivocation is the use of a word with more than one meaning in a misleading manner. Silly cases are easy to see through, but many cases of equivocation are much more subtle and sound more convincing at first glance.

The word “safety,” for example, can mean physical safety, as in safety from being attacked or killed. In more recent times, however, it has often been used to denote emotional comfort and a near complete lack of stress. “I don’t feel safe” can mean “I feel in danger of being shot if I speak my mind,” or it can mean “I feel in danger of people disagreeing with me or not liking me if I speak my mind.”

Now, we have laws in place to protect us against the former. Comparatively speaking, college campuses are extremely safe places. Incidents of violence on school grounds, unlike the daily violence of major metropolitan centers, are rare enough to make national news when they do happen. When we walk around at Bellevue College, we’re quite a bit safer than we would be walking around in downtown Seattle.Conversely, we do not—and cannot—have laws to protect us from the latter. Different people have different ideas of what is normal and even what should be morally acceptable. Homosexuality, for example, is deeply offensive to many people, even to some here on campus. This view is, itself, extremely offensive to me. It really, deeply bothers me that students think that other people are doomed to Hellfire simply for who they are. Whose emotional “safety” should we protect? We can’t do both.

When students say things like “I feel less safe on campus” in response to some crude and offensive writing, as happened on April 21 (in erasable marker on a dry-erase calendar), I can’t help but feel a bit of outrage on behalf of the gay couples in Uganda and Iran who really, truly are not safe. What they are doing, intentionally or not, is attempting to sneak in protection against psychological harm under the banner of physical harm. I’m reminded of a scene from Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons,” in which Sir Thomas More is arguing with a prosecutor named William Roper. Roper says, “I’d cut down every law in England” to punish the devil, to which More replies, “Oh? And when the last law was down and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide Roper, the laws all being flat?” safety is an enticing but poisonous offer that we should emphatically reject. In addition to stagnating discussion, protecting my emotional safety means taking away yours, and protecting yours would mean throwing out mine…and childish, even detestable, is nothing like a “threat” to anybody.

South Park slipped in a joke aimed at the United Kingdom in its famous Scientology episode where, after Stan calls the religion a scam and deems Tom Cruise’s acting to be merely “okay,” Cruise runs sobbing off the screen, shouting over his shoulder: “I’ll sue you! I’ll sue you in England!”

The joke is actually a rather dark one—so true was this little prod about England’s infamous libel law that British stations actually refused to show that particular episode for fear of litigation from the Church of Scientology. These are courts where Russian oligarchs can sue Russian journalists for slander, and have done so at crippling costs to the journalist, even when the claims are true. The foreign phenomenon has even earned the nickname “libel tourism,” and is by no means limited to Russia; journalists writing about Icelandic banks, Saudi Arabian princes and American movie stars have experienced the force of British defamation law without ever having to visit the misty isles.

The intense power behind a mere accusation of libel is hard to exaggerate, and we have a lot of reason to care about it. In addition to the threat to writers, British journalist Nick Cohen makes a strong case in his book, “You Can’t Read This Book” that the threat of retribution to potential whistleblowers on Wall Street was one of the biggest factors in allowing the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crises to happen. In point of fact, many of Cohen’s cited cases were phrased hypothetically or otherwise hedged so that his title didn’t become a more literal description. While some of these instances aren’t directly the result of British libel law, the mentality and effect of other legal constraints against slander is essentially the same. Broadly speaking, this brand of censorship has significantly dampened the progress of science, journalism, politics, economics, medicine, business, comedy and even daily conversation.

This is why we can all celebrate (a rare thing when studying international politics) the fact that the libel law reform campaign has been at least partially successful. On April 25, Parliament approved a law making it much more difficult to use the courts to attack the press or otherwise suppress dissenting opinions. Many thanks to the science community for their efforts in making that happen.

The war is not won however—far from it. The directional shift of Britain back to its own enlightenment values is marred by the dangerous slippage of other countries and institutions. Imitation policies, enforcing particular views on what is respectful and what is true, are quickly bringing others into the pit it’s taken Britain so long to climb out of.

The attempt to impose truth, or even good manners, by force has proved over and over again to be a failure. This time it happened to be Britain’s libel law, but it’s a globally replicable effect, and it’s a lesson we should take to heart. If we want to reap the benefits of skeptical inquiry, we must also accept the associated risks. We can’t have one without the other, and the attempt to escape all hurt feelings and falsehoods while still pursuing truth will ultimately fail on both fronts as it always has.

This opinion does not represent the opinion of the Watchdog staff.

“I’m not a criminal, I’m not a terrorist,” said Joshua Brown, BC student, “and the idea of this place makes me scared. I don’t think I need to be a bad person to be frightened, and people who equate fear to guilt should read more Orwell. If the government can decide who is guilty and who deserves to go free without trial and without peers, then the people in this country should, as the freedom lovers they proclaim to be, be appalled.”

Brown is, of course, talking about the infamous and unconstitutional Guantanamo Bay, the American detention camp located on Cuban soil for those who have been accused of terrorism. Since 2002, America has officially used this detention camp as a way of imprisoning those who are considered too dangerous to be allowed in the country itself. It has since been repeatedly regaled as wholly unlawful, unconstitutional and hypocritical by international attorneys, world leaders and the general populace of the globe.

It is a terrifying place. Most recently the prisoners have begun a widespread hunger strike, refusing to eat in protest to the unethical treatment of their persons and religions, citing enhanced searches of their Qurans for contraband as the most immediate cause of upset.

Of the 166 total prisoners there, the military has released statements that 28 are on hunger strike and that 10 are subject to regular force-feeding in order to keep them alive.

4 have been hospitalized. Attorneys speaking on behalf of the prisoners openly claim that the official numbers are lies, figments from the American military, and that the majority of prisoners are involved.

It is not the first time that the Guantanamo detainees have gone on hunger strike, though never to such a widespread extent. It’s also not the first time that the nation has moved to shut down the facility.

Congress has tried and quite apparently failed. It was one of Obama’s greatest campaign promises, becoming as inseparable to him as the striking red and blue ads with the little “Yes we can!” slogans. He actually did sign a presidential decree stating that the bay must be closed, at most, one year after signing. That was 2008. He has since signed several documents that circumvent the closure, and today Guantanamo still stands.

Cuba itself doesn’t believe that America has legal grounds to stay there and, since the Cuban revolution, has adamantly claimed that America is violating international law by refusing to disband the lease.

Many of the prisoners have been cleared of charges. It has been proven that a significant number have simply been falsely accused. In fact, they have been all but set free. But there’s nowhere to put them. Congress refuses to budge on laws allowing them to move into America, and other countries will no longer take them.

It is likely that hardship will follow them for their entire lives because they have been accused of something they never did, when, and if, they are ever even allowed to leave the prison in the first place. That does not mean the freedom-loving people of America should abandon the innocent people they have enslaved and embittered.

To be quite honest, I’m quite surprised we haven’t figured that out by now.

This opinion does not represent the opinion of the Watchdog staff