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Boko Haram — more complicated than you think — By Richard Dowden | African Arguments
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The Haitian Blogger: UN Impunity in Haiti: Cholera Outbreak IS Criminal Negligence
What this report fails to show is what “‘century” exactly did Haiti have a previous outbreak of cholera? It can’t since Haiti has never had a documented case of a cholera outbreak.
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The Soft Bigotry of Kony 2012 – Max Fisher – International – The Atlantic
1- From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.
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…My heart’s in Accra » Unpacking Kony 2012
As someone who believes that the ability to create and share media is an important form of power, the Invisible Children story presents a difficult paradox. If we want people to pay attention to the issues we care about, do we need to oversimplify them? And if we do, do our simplistic framings do more unintentional harm than intentional good? Or is the wave of pushback against this campaign from Invisible Children evidence that we’re learning to read and write complex narratives online, and that a college student with doubts about a campaign’s value and validity can find an audience? Will Invisible Children’s campaign continue unchanged, or will it engage with critics and design a more complex and nuanced response.
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let’s talk about kony « Securing Rights
As my angry Twitter timeline suggests, Invisible Children’s public narrative relies on basic, nigh unavoidable failings. Let’s start with the flip-side of the human rights coin: the recognition that, despite their constructed nature, perceived ethnic, cultural, and historical boundaries exist across nations, states, and physical borders. Colonialism’s historical baggage matters, and the competition for voice-representation is, for all intents and purposes, a zero-sum game. Ugandan civil society participants, particularly the ones engaged in the non-Invisible Children-affiliated reconstruction, reconciliation, and post-conflict development work, are noticeably absent from Jason Russell’s narrative. In two and a half years of grassroots advocacy work, I’ve met enough intelligent, morally sensible advocates to know that monolithic accusations of neo-colonialism, Africa-saving, and cultural condescension are, frankly, tripe.
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How to Turn a Priest into a Cannibal » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
I have always been interested in how a supposedly independent press so often manages to report on foreign affairs from the point of view of the State Department. What are the mechanisms by which the government’s narrative ends up being the frame for stories about U.S.
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Truthy is a research project that helps you understand how memes spread online. We collect tweets from Twitter and analyze them. With our statistics, images, movies, and interactive data, you can explore these dynamic networks.
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The debate also comes as a number of government officials have spoken out against gay rights in recent weeks. House Speaker Alex Tyler said in January that no bills endorsing gay rights would be advanced during his tenure.
Liberia’s press secretary Jerolinmek M. Piah has said that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf will not sign into law any bill supporting same sex marriage. “This government opposes gay rights,” he said.
