Imagine an egalitarian world in which all food is organic and local, the air is free of industrial pollution, and vigorous physical exertion is guaranteed. Sound idyllic?

Click here to continue reading…

“Wow.”  That’s pretty much all I could say when I opened the link my roommate sent me to the Clutch Magazine blog entry about the UNICEF German National Committee’s ad campaign, which depicts white kids - IN BLACKFACE - made from MUD. Yikes!

Although the UNICEF example is extreme, the idea of rich/white people ”exoticizing” themselves in order to show solidarity with those in the Global South is all over the place.  I felt similarly about Keep the Children Alive’s I am African campaign posters that depict mostly white celebrities (none of whom, save for the foundation’s founder Iman, are African) donning super-imposed “tribal” markings.

If the UNICEF add leaves a bad taste in your mouth, i suggest snacking on Uzodinma Iweala’s essay from the Post. (You can also check out UNICEF’s response to complaint letters, posted on AfricanAmerica Political Pundit)

PS, Irony alert: As the U.S. has officially deemed the conflict in Liberia over, it has revoked the Temporary Protected Status of Liberian refugees.  As of October 1, 2007, those who are here under TPS–many of whom have rebuilt their lives in the US–will be sent back to a country that may not be in the midst of acute crisis, but is in no shape to absorb the thousands of people who fall into this crack.  Click here for the full story.

From the desk of “Hannah Arendt’s application for reincarnation as a dewy-eyed teen idol has been summarily denied.”

Boing Boing–quite possibly the greatest thing on the internet and my de facto source for conversation material when I’ve run out of things to say–brings us this nugget of totalitarian weirdness. Novel developments in the politicization of death have fallen off in recent years, but this a striking return to from. To wit,

China to Tibetan Buddhist monks: no reincarnating without our ok

It’s a weird world out there folks. Getting weirder.

You know that old adage,  if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, did it really fall?  Part of me has to wonder that if that’s the logic being applied to post-Katrina New Orleans: if the only people complaining are marginalized, poor, and/or of color, is there really a problem? 

Two years out and the horrors just keep on comin’.  I admit that like a lot of people, I’ve become pretty desensitized, but this story on the conditions at the House of Detention at New Orleans Parish Prison snapped me back.  It is especially disconcerting when put in the context of our already racist and dehumanizing criminal justice system (i.e. the Boston Review article, see John’s post below), and our role as development policy judge, jury, and executioner (pun most definitely intended).

The Global Strategy Institute is a Washington-based organization that consults with corporations, government, and non-profits about their long-term thinking and planning.

One of their projects, the Seven Revolutions, imagines the 7 biggest issues that will affect the world in the year 2025. They include: Population, Resource Management, Technology, Information/Knowledge, Economic Integration, Conflict, and Governance.

The main page for the organization also features a regularly update blog that covers all kinds of multidisciplinary news items.

Globalhood and Art for Change present an exhibit of travel photography from
India, Peru, Nicaragua and China. The theme of this collection is cohesion
across cultures — seeing the familiar in landscapes, gestures and faces from
around the world. Travel photography is too often about gawking at the strange
and unknown, but it is our hope that the viewer will instead recognize
something of their own lives in these images from far away.

Carlito’s Art Gallery
1701 Lexington Ave (btw 106th and 107th st.)
Thursday August 23rd, 6-9pm
No RSVP required, no cover.

Prints of these photographs will be available for purchase. All proceeds will
go towards supporting the projects of Globalhood: more details available at
www.globalhood.org.

It’s not as epically awesome as Discipline and Punish, but the current Boston Review has a great article by Glenn C. Loury about criminal justice in America.

Loury tracks both the increasing racialization of the criminal justice system and the consequences of the shift from a rehabilitative to a punative paradigm in sentencing. What remains is a staggering picture wherein “the police and the penal apparatus are now the primary contact between the adult black American male and the American state.”

Loury concludes by offering a Rawlsian critique of our situation, asking what it would mean to honestly assess the excesses of the American criminal justice system from behind the veil of ignorance. This section proves enlivening, though I have little faith in the veil as a meaningful tool for policy-making.

Anyway, enough prattling on from me. Here’s the full text of the article.

Foreign Policy magazine (in conjunction with The Fund for Peace) has released “The Failed States Index 2007″, a sort of “worst dressed” list for the Global South.  FP proclaims from its venerable pages that this ranking is important because it points out those places whose instability is endangering our ability to live in the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed, and that the threats they pose “ripple far beyond their borders and endanger the development and security of nations that are their political and economic opposites.” In a disappointingly sophomoric fashion, the explanation goes on to blame states like Iraq, Zimbabwe, and “Public Enemy #1” Sudan for foisting their messes onto the already overburdened shoulders of the West.  As if these “failed” states were the errant children of a wealthy family, crashing a posh dinner party, FP asks how dare these nuisance countries contaminate our sanguine world with their “conflict,” “uneven development,” and, god forbid, “non-democratic regimes.”

I don’t know what I find less productive about FP’s analysis.  There’s the reckless scapegoating of South as well as blatant ignorance of the role the West, and specifically the US, plays in creating and sustaining the reality of these “failed” states (the most egregious example, of course being Iraq).  What I find more disturbing is the refusal to acknowledge that the US experiences any, if not all of criteria for determining “failure.”  We may not have “open-air arms bazaars” but it’s not exactly hard to buy illegal weapons; we may not be actively exterminating our native populations, but we have relegated them to reservations that exist in abject and inhumane poverty; we are privy to an brand of intensely uneven and unaccountable development; we invaded and occupy a sovereign nation; and during Katrina our poor infrastructure and what amounted to state abandonment led to the deaths thousands and created an internal refugee crisis.