the news we follow

Two hundred people died in Spain when bombs exploded on commuter trains. Did you also know that 337 people were killed in Uganda last month at a camp for displaced people?

According to American media, mayhem in Europe is big news, apparently, but mayhem in Africa is not.

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5 thoughts on “the news we follow

  1. George,
    Perhaps those artists interested in distributed creations could produce stickers of world maps with, say, a Peterson projection, for a project like… implementation
    http://nickm.com/implementation/
    which Jill Walker blogs about …
    http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/archives/networked_literature/gift_literature.html
    Then there is the eye-catching inversion:
    http://www.flourish.org/upsidedownmap/
    What Stuart Brand did for the Earth Day with the image of green planet, could bloggers do for world maps in every classroom and library, etc. etc.?
    Or K-12 blogging with a new country per day…
    Odd, I now have a tune from a Coca-Cola advert
    %… to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony…% http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ccmphtml/colaadv.html
    Maybe the corporate sponsor could do a reprise or the MoveOn people could borrow the rights to the song…

  2. …trying to come up with a thoughtful comment, here, George, but all I’ve got is this: once again, African lives, so the logic of the U.S. goes, mean less. Eastern DRC. Uganda. Rwanda. Nigeria. Eritrea. Central African Republic. Zimbabwe. Somalia. In each of those and more, people have found themselves killed, maimed, and tortured. Ask someone who Ahmed Chalabi is, and a casual news-watcher could fire off some explanation of the Iraqi National Congress and the role of dissident exiles in American policy. Ask someone about what happened in Bunia… good luck. Ask why the U.S. left Robert Taylor alone for so long… good luck. Ask why Saddam Hussein, tyrant to his own people, was worse than Robert Mugabe… good luck.
    It’s not that Madrid doesn’t matter. Clearly, it does. So does that other continent.

  3. “Scott Rosenberg makes the point I was going to make about the elections in Spain: they were not an expression of appeasement of terrorists; they were an expression of outrage over the government lying to voters.”
    The government’s lies were reprehensible, yes, but I suspect the terrorists will see things in a different light. Post hoc ergo propter hoc: the Islamic militants bombed the subway and a few days later a new government was installed promising to withdraw troops from Iraq. The pseudo cause and effect structure may amount to a logical fallacy, but it will have real, material consequences. There is jubilation among the rank and file of Al Quaida . . .

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