18 minute read
NORTHERN IRELAND TALKS ATTEMPT TO QUELL VIOLENCE
KARISA YUASA
United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced he is in the process of ending harsh Brexit border checks in Northern Ireland in an effort to calm tensions between unionists and loyalists.
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Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom that shares a western and southern border with the Republic of Ireland—a country part of the European Union. Although tensions have existed for decades between the mostly-Protestant loyalists—who wish to remain part of the U.K.—and the mostly-Catholic unionists—who wish to remain part of Ireland and the EU—violence erupted on a scale not seen in decades.
On March 29 police officers were attacked while attempting to disperse a crowd in majority unionist Derry, Northern Ireland. Violence continued nightly and on April 2, 12 police officers were injured in Derry and almost a hundred people gathered in Belfast, Northern Ireland’s capital, for a loyalist protest where eight officers were injured and seven people were arrested, according to BBC.
Protests and occasional violence continued nightly until April 9, following the death of British Prince Philip.
Signs in west Belfast on Apr. 9 read: “We would ask all PUL [Protestant, Unionist, Loyalist] protests are postponed as a mark of respect to the Queen and the royal family. The continued opposition to the NI protocol and all other injustices against the PUL community will take place again after the period of mourning.”
Some police and politicians have spoken of fears of children being coerced to participate in the violence after 12 and 13 year olds were seen in videos of the unrest. Ireland’s justice minister Naomi Long said she felt “ill” after watching videos of adults “standing by cheering and goading and encouraging young people on as they wreaked havoc in their own community,” referring to it as “child abuse.”
“I know that many of our young people are hugely frustrated by the events of this last week but causing injury to police officers will not make things better,” said Arlene Foster, the Democratic Unionist party leader. “I appeal to our young people not to get drawn into disorder which will lead to them having criminal convictions and blighting their own lives. I also ask parents to play their part and be proactive in protecting their young adults.”
“It’s really, really important that we stand shoulder to shoulder and say no to this type of criminal behaviour, and that we don’t allow our children to be sucked in by criminal gangs who are orchestrating some of what we see on our streets,” said Michelle O’Neill, Ireland’s deputy first minister.
According to AP News, the recent violence is due to the Public Prosecution Service’s decision made on March 30 not to prosecute any politicians who attended a funeral last June—allegedly attended by approximately 2000 people despite COVID-19 restrictions, which limited funeral attendance to 30 people—in addition to growing Brexit and economic frustrations.
“These are areas of multiple deprivation with the sense of not much to lose,” said Katy Hayward, a professor of politics at Queen’s University Belfast. “And when [people] are mobilized by social media telling them ‘Enough is enough, now is the time to defend Ulster,’ then many of them—too many—respond to that.”
The violence was to a scale not seen since prior to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The Good Friday Agreement, also known as the Belfast Agreement, paused nearly three decades of violence between loyalists and unionists that cost over 3,000 lives.
“The Good Friday Agreement was an exercise in conflict management, not conflict resolution,” said Donnacha Ó Beacháin, Director of research at the Dublin City University School of Law and Government. “The conflict is not resolved and in many ways it institutionalized the conflict. In that sense, the guns have been decommissioned, but the mindsets that led to the conflict in the first place have not been fully put aside.”
According to The Guardian, Brexit minister David Frost and European commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič met on April 15 to discuss Northern Ireland. The talks were described as “productive” and “constructive,” but no concrete decisions have been announced.
Frost said the discussions “had begun to clarify the outstanding issues, and some positive momentum had been established,” but added that the “difficult issues remained and it was important to continue to discuss them.”
“[Ireland] truly became a completely different place in the last 23 years, because of the Good Friday agreement” said Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheál Martin. “We owe it to the ‘agreement generation’ and indeed future generations not to spiral back to that dark place of sectarian murders and political discord.”
HIJACKED CARS BURN AT THE PEACE WALL ON LANARK WAY. PETER MORRISON/AP PHOTO
SHAC READY AND WILLING TO DISTRIBUTE VACCINES AS NEEDED
BENJAMIN KIRKPATRICK
The center for Student Health and Counseling, located on the Portland State campus, provides COVID-19 testing, but does not currently offer the vaccine. SHAC’s website states it is “taking measures to obtain the COVID-19 vaccine,” but it is unclear when the center will obtain it since Oregon controls vaccine distribution within the state.
SHAC Medical Director Dr. Mark Bajorek stated all health practitioners and nurses working at SHAC have been certified and trained, so if they receive a shipment of vaccines, they are prepared to administer them.
“We’ve also gone through the training and made sure our refrigerators are up to snuff so that if they drop off [the] vaccine, we can store it for the appropriate amount of time,” Bajorek said. “We have all the right conditions for that, so those pieces are in place. We have the gloves, we have the syringes and needles, we have all those pieces in place.”
SHAC does not have any direct control over obtaining the vaccines or have any specific information on when they will be available. Bajorek stated if individuals are interested in receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, they should check out the airport (PDX Red Lot Vaccine Clinic) or Oregon Convention Center, which currently administer the vaccine and have the infrastructure to distribute vaccines in much larger quantities.
Bajorek said SHAC could realistically vaccinate 100–200 people a week, compared to the thousands of vaccines that other venues like the airport or convention center can administer per week.
“Give us a couple of hundred vaccines, and we’ll get them to students, faculty and staff,” Bajorek said. “We’d be able to arrange that, too. I don’t decide how the vaccine is allocated. All I can say is, we have the pieces in place. We’d be happy to take care of folks.”
Bajorek did acknowledge that certain populations of individuals may be unable or unwilling to venture to those areas to receive vaccines.
“Right now, the convention center is open, and they’re doing 1,000 vaccines a day, which is fantastic. But what groups are missing? You know, maybe not everybody can go between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., so how do we make sure that we capture those people that want to get vaccinated?”
Many students who attend PSU are also off-campus, presenting a unique challenge to international and marginalized students.
“I think there are just so many competing interests, like schools opening back up,” Bajorek said. “Are we taking care of them? While stores are open, are we making sure that food service workers are taken care of? For restaurants or cafes that are opening, are the people that work those jobs also taken care of, and have they been vaccinated? It’s a tricky thing. It is just a new problem for all of us to discern through. Some of the things I’m sure we’ll get right, but we have to be able to recognize when we’re headed down the wrong track.”
As of April 19, everyone 16 years of age and older in the United States is eligible to get a COVID-19 vaccination. Those looking to receive a vaccination can visit VaccineFinder.org to find vaccine providers near them. They can also check your local pharmacy’s website for vaccine availability, or watch local news outlets and the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) website for more information. When asked about the types of vaccines that will be available, Bajorek stated SHAC doesn’t have control over the particular brand of vaccinations they will receive in the future. Regarding the eligibility of the vaccine, SHAC would be offering it free-ofcharge to students, faculty and staff members.
Potential side effects of the vaccine mainly include a sore arm and fatigue. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has made headlines recently, with reports of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, or clots in the brain, in an extremely small amount of individuals who received the vaccine.
Administration of the vaccine had been put on pause due to potential safety concerns, though use of the vaccine will soon resume with an extra warning added to its label about blood clot risk, the Food and Drug Administration announced Friday. The Center for Disease Control has begun an investigation into the death of one Oregon woman who died within two weeks of receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The OHA emphasized it is too early to draw a connection between the death and the vaccine until the investigation is concluded.
When asked about the J&J vaccine, Bajorek stated the risk for developing these blood clots is “about six per six-million, so it’s like one-in-a-million. Being struck by lightning in your lifetime is like one-in-15,000.” He said the risk of getting a blood clot from COVID-19 is much higher than from a vaccine.
Individuals who receive the vaccine are not injected with a live virus—unlike measles boosters, for example, which use weakened versions of the virus.
“There are three different types of vaccines, and two of the most common are the Moderna and the Pfizer,” Bajorek said. “They are messenger-RNA related, so you’re getting this RNA in a lipid particle, and that’s what’s going into your system. It meets up with the ribosome and is converted to a protein, and then your body makes antibodies to that protein—but there’s never any virus; it’s just part of the code for that virus that gets injected into the body.”
As far as who should get the vaccine, Bajorek stated everyone eligible to receive one should. Younger people who are not in a high-risk category can still come into contact with the virus and potentially spread it to others who may be immunocompromised.
Some people do experience challenges with receiving the vaccine, but individuals and medical professionals such as Bajorek are doing their best to help.
“I’ve, on my own time, gone to group homes and given vaccines to people and volunteered to help people that are in marginalized communities,” Bajorek said. “We have got to make sure those people are taken care of. I mean, that’s what healthcare is about— protecting people you know and making sure that they stay well.”
Even if we do end up reaching herd immunity, which is when most of the population in an area becomes immune to a specific disease, Bajorek said “we have to monitor how long this vaccine lasts. We know that some vaccines last a lifetime, and others, like the flu vaccine, you still have to get one every year. And, you know there’s a possibility that we’ll continue to make boosters, and we’ll have to monitor for that, whether that’s in six months or a year or two years.”
The Biden Administration has recently begun working on what it calls the COVID-19 Community Corps, an initiative to enlist people to help their friends, family and neighbors get access to vaccines. Just under 50% of American adults have yet to receive any shot of a vaccine, and vaccine supply will soon overtake demand.
Bajorek said any updates regarding the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine will be posted on SHAC’s website and sent out to students, faculty and staff via email. SHAC is encouraging individuals to get a vaccine wherever there is availability. Information can be found on the Oregon COVID-19 vaccine website.
“We just want to get that vaccine out to folks,” Bajorek said. “We continue to advise our friends, ‘please get a vaccine. Volunteer and get a vaccine. Do whatever you can to get a vaccine.’”
STUDENT RACHEL OWEN GETS THE PFIZER VACCINE. PHOTO COURTESY OF RACHEL OWEN
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THIS WEEK around the WORLD
Apr. 12–15
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April 19 FINLAND
Finland was named the “happiest country in the world” for the fourth year in a row by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which issues a yearly report assessing the happiness of the world’s population. The World Happiness Report uses statistics from interviews of “more than 350,000 people in 95 countries,” taken by the polling organization Gallup. The rankings aren’t based on factors like income or life expectancy, but rather on how people rank their own happiness on a 10-point scale. The United States has never broken the top ten. Five years ago, the U.S. was ranked 13th, but slipped to 18th and 19th place in recent analyses, according to an AP News report
April 20 SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL
Wildlife was seen in the Pinheiros River following the removal of 30,000 tons of surface garbage, according to Reuters. The river runs through the center of São Paulo, Brazil’s wealthiest city and what some consider the “financial heart” of Latin America. “The project is to improve the river’s quality, not to make it transparent, with fish and where people can swim,” said Edison Carlos, president of Trata Brasil, an organization that supports clean water and sewage. “We do expect for the smell, which is especially bad on hot days, and the mosquitoes to be eliminated, and to see the return of some fish.” According to São Paulo’s Governor, João Doria, the Pinheiros river clean-up was the largest environmental project in the country, costing 4 billion reais, or $735 million. “When I see fish in Pinheiros river, I see life,” said Jose Bueno, an urban planner with the river conservation group Rios e Ruas. “So we are not defending something invisible, something abstract. We are protecting what is alive,”
3 April 20 CHAD
The President of the African nation of Chad, Idriss Déby, died suddenly after visiting the front lines of the country’s civil war, according to BBC. “[Déby] breathed his last defending the sovereign nation on the battlefield,” an army general said on state TV while announcing his death. The exact circumstances of his death remain uncertain, but Déby is believed to have been shot on April 17 while Chad military forces fought a rebel group north of the capital N’djamena, according to CNN. A military statement mentioned he “took control of operations during the heroic combat led against the terrorists from Libya. He was wounded during the fighting and died once repatriated to N’Djamena.” Déby’s son, Mahamat Kaka, was named interim president by the transitional council of military officers.
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April 21 BALI STRAIT, INDONESIA
An Indonesian submarine with 53 people on board went missing during a military training exercise. Based on when the submarine lost contact, it was estimated that there was approximately 72 hours worth of oxygen onboard. The submarine asked permission to dive before losing contact, according to CNN. On April 25, the ship was found broken into at least three different pieces and all crew members were pronounced dead, according to Reuters. “Based on the evidence, it can be stated that the KRI Nanggala has sunk and all of its crew have died,” said military chief Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto. President Joko Widodo sent condolences to the families of the crewmembers saying, “All of us Indonesians express our deep sorrow over this tragedy, especially to the families of the submarine crew.”
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April 23 POKROV, RUSSIA
The imprisoned Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny has ended his hunger strike, according to a New York Times report. The 24-day hunger strike was the most recent development in a years-long conflict between President Vladimir Putin and Navalny, his most prominent critic. Navalny started the hunger strike to protest the reported lack of prison medical care for his back pain and loss of sensation in his legs. Earlier this month, the Russian police reported nine arrests after doctors allied with Navalny gathered outside the prison and demanded to have access to him, according to NPR. Putin has refused to speak Navalny’s name publicly, even after protests overwhelmed the Russian political landscape in the wake of Navalny’s arrest.
BRAINWASHED BY PINKERTON
GETTING TOO OLD TO HATE WEEZER
MORGAN TROPER
In one of Saturday Night Live’s only moderately relevant and funny sketches from the past decade, two Weezer fans—played by Leslie Jones and Matt Damon—disrupt an otherwise civil dinner party when a new Weezer song comes on the Alexa. The conceit is that Matt Damon is a “ride or die Weezer fan” who appreciates every era of the band, while Leslie Jones swears by only their first two albums—1994’s The Blue Album and 1996’s Pinkerton. You know, the good ones.
This skit is hard to watch, which is par for the course with most of Saturday Night Live, a show that predominantly panders to moneyed, condo-dwelling liberals and their ilk. But unusually for SNL, this skit isn’t hard to watch because of the war criminal apologetics or whatever—it’s hard to watch because it’s eminently relatable. It forces me to acknowledge that I have wasted precious hours of my life having this very same debate, both on and offline. The vicarious embarrassment grows even more pronounced once you realize that “Weezer” here is a proxy for virtually any meaningless yet polarizing topic within apolitical pop culture. You could recreate this skit except have it center around Star Wars, or Kanye or, God forbid, the Martin Scorsese-Marvel Cinematic Universe feud.
For some context: Weezer’s 1994 debut was released to critical acclaim and strong sales, cementing the band’s status as a quirky fixture of ’90s alternative rock radio. While writing the band’s follow-up, Pinkerton, frontman Rivers Cuomo was studying at Harvard, where other students wearing Weezer shirts supposedly didn’t even recognize him. The isolation Cuomo experienced back East—far from his adopted hometown of Los Angeles—coupled with his immersion in English literature and high-brow art forms such as opera, did wonders for his songwriting but stunted his emotional development. On Pinkerton, Cuomo ditched the references to Dungeons & Dragons and Kiss, opting instead to write vignettes about masturbation and being creepy toward his teenage female fans. The band—and the rest of the world—was understandably bewildered.
When Pinkerton was released, it was a critical flop, and it performed poorly on the charts relative to the band’s debut. Bassist Matt Sharp, who played a pivotal role in shaping the band’s early aesthetic and was something of Cuomo’s musical foil, quit the band shortly thereafter. The record and its surrounding narrative has become nearly impossible to parse—in 1996, critics deemed it pathetic, indefensibly misogynistic and wholly without artistic merit. Around the mid ’00s, critics began reevaluating the record on a large scale. Not only is it now widely considered the band’s masterpiece, but Pinkerton is often referred to as the inflection point where Sebadoh-esque indie rock, power pop and emo collided, an aesthetic that endures to this day. Additionally, a widely held belief among one camp of Weezer fans is that Rivers Cuomo expended so much emotional energy making Pinkerton that he has nothing left to say. For this reason, Weezer “purists,” as Matt Damon’s character calls them in the SNL skit, hate every Weezer album released after Pinkerton.
Per usual, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, or possibly even off to the side. Pinkerton is a cathartic piece of music—especially if you’re a sexually frustrated teenager— but in terms of emotional and musical scope, it pales in comparison to the band’s debut. Moreover, an important critique of Pinkerton—that the pop world in 1996 simply wasn’t literate enough for—is the idea that it traffics in orientalist tropes and fetishizes its Asian subjects. This point specifically is touched on in Jenny Zhang’s groundbreaking Rookie essay from 2015, “Far Away From Me.”
But people love a loser’s history, and so Pinkerton is now the best. By my estimation, the purpose of the SNL skit isn’t to give weight to that claim—it’s to demonstrate that both sides of the argument are equally ridiculous. Going to bat for Pinkerton may have been risky once, but that position is so canonized now that it reeks of stock iconoclasm, à la proudly proclaiming you are an atheist in secular society.
But I ultimately still sympathize with Leslie Jones’ character’s viewpoint, and what does that say about me? Every time I hear a new Weezer song I feel my blood pressure increase and the urge to tweet something stupid. Pinkerton was, at one point in time, so integral to my identity as a music fan that a bad Weezer album felt like a personal affront. Intellectually, I know my reaction—i.e., impassioned disgust—toward Weezer’s latest album, OK Human, is immature and unreasonable, but I also can’t help myself. I sometimes can’t tell if I hate new Weezer because it’s genuinely offensive or if I’ve just been thoroughly charmed by the Pinkerton mythos.
The funniest part of the SNL skit is that nobody besides Matt Damon or Leslie Jones really cares about Weezer or understands what is being discussed. This, too, is relatable—the older I get, the more monotropic my interest in Weezer seems. Pinkerton doesn’t exactly make for a great water cooler discussion topic—so I guess I’ll just have to argue with myself.
PINKERTON. COURTESY OF WIKIPEDIA
