mango

One from the 2009 normblog archives, A Climate of Fear by guest blogger Sean Coleman.

Decades of walled-off obscurantism and unquestioned power had managed to disguise the fact that the Irish Catholic Church had been running what was, effectively, an archipelago of brutal prison camps across the country

YOLLAND: Who's confused? Are the people confused?
OWEN: And we're standardising those names as accurately and as sensitively as we can.
YOLLAND: Something is being eroded.

there are at least four different ways of reaching a figure based on the methods of, respectively, the US Department of Energy, BP, The Oil and Gas Daily (Texas) and Middle East Economic Survey (Cyprus)

- Fred Halliday (2005)

Wet Uluru, from the Mick Hartley archives. Stunning

summer '12 fresh easy re-up NYT social determinants of health in Mississippi, Persian linkages ...

Cox doesn’t know oak trees, but she knows how to talk to people. She knows when to ask if someone cannot afford insulin, or is not taking insulin, or is not keeping the insulin cold, or cannot keep the insulin cold because there is no electricity or refrigerator. Not having health insurance is a huge problem in Mississippi, but it isn’t the only one

Bhakti Shringarpure riffs from Concerning Violence, a new documentary on Fanon, by Göran Hugo Olsson. Quoting David Macey

In a sense, it is almost absurd to criticise Fanon for his advocacy of violence. He did not need to advocate it. The ALN was fighting a war and armies are not normally called upon to justify their violence. By 1961, the violence was everywhere. It had even seeped into the unconscious.

A schoolteacher "somewhere in Algeria" set his pupils, aged between 10 and 14, the essay topic “What would you do it you were invisible?” They all said that they would steal arms and kill the French soldiers.

The children of Algeria dreamed of violence, and two of Fanon’s young patients in Blida acted out those dreams. Our prosperous societies do not have nightmarish dreams of massacres in Sétif or Philippeville or torture in their schools. Algeria had been having those nightmares for over a century.

Tokers, table football, cabbies, as many places. A day in Goma archived

"the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement"

(h/t RS)

Creating and Destroying the Universe in Twenty-Nine Nights
by David Shulman

Last spring - new genetic complexity discovered in mosquitoes

'Sex workers' rights are just workers' rights'

Guy Walks Into a Bar

from her archive: Samia Errazzouki responds to Chomsky on Western Sahara and the 'Arab Spring'

How warming impacts the Andes: one example

I think mistersloane (Jim Hollands) is superb here on District 9

Stanley Kauffmann, reply by Joan Didion

'If Philip Roth Hates Women, Why Does He Want To Have Sex With Them, Hmmm?'

On Smarm

Britain and empire: vessel of cruelty

"Short-term savings gained by drastic austerity measures should be weighed against their long-term costs".

Earlier this year, the New Scientist reported on a Greek austerity tragedy

(via the best fish.)

'Reorienting the discussion about sex work'

here

'Asked why he had not tried to leave, he said: "If we are caught, it is straight to the Palestine Branch. Anyone who goes in there does not come out."'

If, for example, you are an Aguaruna Indian in Peru, with a history of occasional revenge raiding stretching back the small handful of generations which comprise living memory (no Aguaruna can really know the extent to which such raiding was going on even a few generations ago, leave alone millennia), and if you have recently been pushed out of the forest interior into riverine villages by encroachment from oil exploration or missionaries, then your chances of being killed by your compatriots might even exceed those caught in Mexican drugs wars, Brazilian favelas, or Chicago’s South Side.

In such circumstances there would undoubtedly be much more homicide in Aguaruna-land than that faced by well-heeled American college professors, but also much less than that confronted by inmates in Soviet gulags, Nazi concentration camps, or those who took up arms against colonial rule in British Kenya, or apartheid South Africa.

If you find yourself born a boy in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in the center of the world’s richest nation, your average lifespan will be shorter than in any country in the world except for some African states and Afghanistan. If you escape being murdered, you may end up dead anyway, from diabetes, alcoholism, drug addiction, or similar. Such misery, not inevitable but likely, would not result from your own choices, but from those made by the state over the last couple of hundred years.

What does any of this really tell us about violence throughout human history? The fanciful assertion that nation states lessen it is unlikely to convince a Russian or Chinese dissident, or Tibetan.

oh

A hurricane's inequality

Caliban:
You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!

because you're a cunt

Just your typical randomised archive smear against the Met [linked to this], move along now

'It was while he in the custody area that Demetrio witnessed Harrington allegedly assault the 15-year-old, who was handcuffed. Demetrio told investigators he saw Harrington kick the young teenager in the back of the leg and, once he was on the floor, knee him in the back.

He said the alleged assault made an "echoing" sound and the teenager cried out: "I am on the floor now – you can't do anything to me. I am handcuffed and I am on the floor."

Demetrio said that medical staff were called to the scene after the teenager, whose identity is not known, began making "strange" breathing noises for several minutes.'

"a black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die...Europe to go fuck off and stay away until we have finished the job"

- Radovan Karadzic

Tyee archive - 'Harperland'