Today's link round-up

[sabotabby]

First, the serious stuff:
Chris Clarke (will my e-crush on him never cease?) has a heartbreaking and brutal post about Haïti. You should read it.

Also on Pandagon, Ilyka has a post about an out-of-control high school in Louisiana where the black students can't so much as catch a bit of shade without the white students threatening to lynch them.

krinndnz linked to the recently declassified PowerPoint slides of the Pentagon's *ahem* plan to invade Iraq. I can't make sense of them, and I bet half the people at the Pentagon couldn't either, because the whole point of PowerPoint is to confuse. Actually, the entire post is pretty right-on.

Then the fun stuff:

Also from krinndnz, two blogs for your edification and amusement: Literally, A Web Log and the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks. I have not looked at the latter in enough detail to ascertain whether "Good" Burger in Toronto is in there, but I hope so.

dania_audax has a link to a comic that nearly cost me a keyboard this morning: Who Is Your Savior?

Finally, in the Funny or Sad? category, we have this story from fengi. I'll just quote from the same bit, because...wow:

Al Hurra television, the U.S. government's $63 million-a-year effort at public diplomacy broadcasting in the Middle East, is run by executives and officials who cannot speak Arabic, according to a senior official who oversees the program.

That might explain why critics say the service has recently been caught broadcasting terrorist messages, including an hour-long tirade on the importance of anti-Jewish violence, among other questionable pieces.

Facing tough questions before a congressional panel last week, Broadcasting Board of Governors member Joaquin Blaya admitted none of the senior news managers at the network spoke Arabic when the terrorist messages made it onto the air courtesy of U.S. taxpayer funds. Nor did Blaya himself or any of the other officials at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the network.
...
Blaya conceded that the top officials in the network's chain of command could not understand what was being said on al Hurra broadcasts...the network's news division also had no assignment desk, he said. That left decisions over al Hurra's content in the hands of its reporters and producers, who are, according to Blaya, hastily-hired Arabic-speaking journalists with insufficient understanding of Western journalistic practices or the network's pro-Western mission.

Comments

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I worked one summer in Jena, LA. It's a scary place. There was a riot while I was there because a black football player was dating a white cheerleader. That said, by La Salle county standards, Jena is quite liberal. There are towns nearby which are much, much worse.

[sabotabby]

I'm trying to imagine how it can get worse than that, but I'm not sure my brain wants to go there.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

There is a town near Jena called Nebo. It is all white because black people who go there end up dead, or as happened when I was in Jena, beaten half to death and left in a dumpster. The Jena little league team is multiracial but when they go to Nebo they leave the black kids at home because it's considered too dangerous to take them.

[peterbilt-47.livejournal.com]

Uh.



Every once in awhile I make an effort to cultivate childlike innocence and ask myself if I'm just being prejudicial in my vigorous dislike of the south. I wish they wouldn't keep justifying my feelings.

[sabotabby]

Every once in awhile I make an effort to cultivate childlike innocence, period.

[peterbilt-47.livejournal.com]

Now that's good punctuation.

And I love the icon.

[sadie-sabot.livejournal.com]

what people who know the south and the north tell me is that the south is appalling but overt, while in the north the racism is much more covert, but no less real.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I disagree. Of course there is racism in the northern US (and practically everywhere else on the planet) but the south is something else again. And it's not the whole south either. There are, mostly urban, pockets that are getting on for civilized but the small towns and rural areas are really bad. I've worked in something like 30 states as well as Canada, a good chunk of Europe, Australia and NZ and I've never encountered racism as pervasive, unashamed and obvious as in places like Louisiana and Mississippi.

[sadie-sabot.livejournal.com]

well, I'm not in a position to know, honestly, having spent less than a month in the south in my life.

And it is true that the increasing number of horrible stories of overt violent racism I'm hearing are coming from the south.

I do think it's important to notlet the extremity of what goes on in the south to lull us into a false sense of safety or a false sense of the north having made really good progress, though.

I just watched a movie calle d"freedom on my mind" aobut the civil rights struggle in Mississippi, and I couldn't help but think, you know, a lot of those racist whites depicted in the film are still alive, and you can't tell me they changed their minds or that they didn't pass that shit to their children.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I remember driving through Mississippi on my way from Jena to New Orleans. There were places where the people (rural blacks) were living in tar paper shacks like one sees in photos from the 1860s. Cabrini Green is pretty grim but it's a hell of a step up on that. I think it's been a long time too since I've heard anybody say in all seriousness, as I did in Jena, "Nigger boy get your eyes of that white girl's ass".

[sadie-sabot.livejournal.com]

OMG

woah.

[collie13.livejournal.com]

Heehee! Yes, the Jesus fanfic comment almost caused me to splort my drink on my screen. Almost. Heroic self-control for the win! ;)

[sabotabby]

It's amazing that I manage to keep my drinks in at all.

[esizzle.livejournal.com]

For the Funny or Sad? category, I vote for funny. The only thing funnier (and sadder) than the article itself were the user comments on the abctelevision source link, e.g. "I am not sure that America could made bigger fools of on a regular basis if we tried." My personal favourite in this is that a tv station called 'the free' actively fires its reporters for something they said. It's like nobody even tries anymore.

[sabotabby]

I'd almost think that the entire Bush administration was a clever piece of performance art, except people are getting killed.

[seaya.livejournal.com]

http://busconductor.livejournal.com/91085.html

Please to be helping me with this one.

It looks really interesting, but it's in Russian. Heh.

[sabotabby]

It looks awesome, but the only thing I understand in the text is the "OMG."

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

Off topic: The current evil cat-themed plot line begins here ...

[sabotabby]

I need to post the pictures of the new neighbourkitten. She is definitely planning evil using cuteness.

ego

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Eeee! Linkage! *handwave* Gracias.


Also, that link about Al Hurra - good lawd. That's just the kind of QA we've come to expect from the last 20 years of the US government's Arab outreach, innit. It's yet more hideous symbolism, and we already export truckloads of bad symbolism to the region (for instance, The Map).

Re: ego

[sabotabby]

It's times like this that I wish aliens would invade and arbitrarily redraw the map of the US. Not that this would stop American exceptionalism, but it might be a nice object lesson.

Re: ego

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

If they left out Texas and Florida in the new U.S., I migth actually go for that :)

Re: ego

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

Actually the scary thing is that the hypothosis that "genocide promotes peace" is not all that wacky in some circles. I've read some credible historians argue that Europe is the stable Europe of today because of the "population transfers" that happened during and shortly after World War 2.

[lopukhov.livejournal.com]

I have to say the last story is my favourite!

[sabotabby]

Naturally.