- Congo, at Ask This Black Woman, about the death toll there.
- Here we go and Oh brother, on Clinton, at Donna Darko.
- The Politics of Humanity: ICE’s Drugging Policy, by XicanoPwr.
- News and Politics, at NOSE CONE.
- Freedom from the Press, at Hidden Hysteria
- UPDATE Framing, at Feministe. On misuse of the term Identity Politics. It’s nice to see an ongoing effort to iron out a particularly absurd glitch in political talk: the idea that everything other than male, able, straight Anglo culture is some kind of conspiracy. Related posts by Kai; Nezua on Witentity Pollatix.Like every other kind of politics, I think identity politics can have good or bad results. Nationalism, racism, sexism, colonialism are also full of identity politics. People who are oppressed can turn around and oppress the next people down the chain. But the absurd situation today is that only challenges to colonialist, racist and sexist policies of the powerful are dismissed as “identity politics.” As if that dismissal meant anything other than power worship: “it’s ok for the strong to have a gang; it’s not ok for the weak.”
The Feministe piece also draws an analogy to a similar strange usage of the term “class war” in the media—even billionaire Warren Buffett puts that one in perspective when he says “It is class war; my class is winning.”
- UPDATE Lt. Ehren Watada on the legality of the Iraq war, at Fire Witch Rising.
- UPDATE Video, Derrick Ashong on Obama and health care, at Professor Zero. Very patient interviewee turns the tables on a very rude reporter.
And of course the 5 million dead figure also recalls a historical holocaust in the same region:
Outside Belgium, [Leopold II] is chiefly remembered as the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken by the King. The state included the entire area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The extraction of rubber and ivory in the Congo relied on forced labour and resulted in the deaths of millions of Congolese.
[...]Estimates of the death toll range from two to fifteen million.
