Scott Moses, unclear as ever

What the hell is Scott Moses trying to say? Does he even know what he’s trying to say? It makes me nauseous, but I am strangely compelled to read all of his commentaries. The latest, a heartbreaker about the tragic life shared by a brother and his sister. As I read Tuesday’s piece I kept waiting for the punch, waiting for meaning to spring from this drawn-out tale.

One paragraph to go and still nothing worth the two minutes it ha taken me to read it. The payoff – the poor, tragic boy graduates high school, illiterate and church-going. When an army recruiter speaks at church, the boy stands up and yells “I want to fight … I want to kill those Muslim bastards.” The story is over. That makes no sense at all.

Is this a column blaming poverty and hardship for Muslim hatred? Is it a distaste for the relationship between church and state that Moses is attempting to convey? Is this a true story? Or is Moses merely rambling on and then putting a completely unrelated morsel of controversy at the end, for effect? Too many questions and NO answers.

A cynical mockery of our voting system and government would have been more timely and at least would have made sense. Instead, I’m left to scratch my head in Moses’ general direction. What the hell is Scott Moses trying to say?

Jake Lewis
Senior philosophy and journalism major

Three strikes editorial strikes out

This is in response to the poorly thought out Nov. 6 editorial denouncing California’s three strikes laws.

Are we supposed to feel sorry for Andrade? 

The law is cruel? You know, it’s not very nice of him to steal, either. 

Certainly life imprisonment would be excessive if it were only considering the videocassette theft, but he has committed two other crimes that led up to this sentence. 

This, being Mr. Andrade’s third crime (to be convicted of), indicates that he does not possess the self-control necessary to function in society and is not going to learn a lesson. 

Three-strikes laws are no secret; if Andrade was planning to ever stop stealing, it should be after his second offense.

Since he continued his wayward ways, what is to indicate that he would ever stop without three-strikes laws? 

Three strikes laws are in place to make him stop misbehaving. Should Andrade continue to cycle in and out of jail until death? 

If three-strikes laws stay in place and become more common, people might stop after their second crime, and if not we can just build more prisons.

Troy Heerwagen
First-year mechanical engineering major