.

Obituary: Le Journal

Something is rotten in the kingdom of Morocco proclaims Issandr El Amrani in a Guardian piece about the closure of Moroccan magazine Le Journal Hebdomadaire. Though El Amrani notes that the Le Journal case is only one indicator, something is rotten, indeed. The magazine’s offices were liquidated after a commercial appeals court declared that Le [...]

31.01.2010

8 Comments

How the U.S. Censors Arabs

In my spare time, I’ve been doing a lot of talking to activists and reporters about two issues that are getting very little coverage in the U.S., despite both being facets of U.S. policy. The first is H.R. 2278, which eatbees has done a better job than I ever could of explaining here. For those [...]

29.01.2010

2 Comments

Net freedom for all? Not so much…

I’m a bit late to the party with comments on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Net freedom speech last Thursday; I was deep in work that day and spent the weekend doing fun things (like visiting with friends and finally seeing Avatar). Still, though there have been plenty of excellent analyses of the speech (check [...]

25.01.2010

2 Comments

Links for 1/24/10

A guest blog post on stuff white people do notes the racist ways in which the death penalty is used in the United States; a compelling argument against it even for those who don’t find it inherently wrong. Yaman Salahi reviews The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, touching on the particularities of how pro-Palestinian organizations [...]

24.01.2010

No Comments

Blog for Choice Day 2010

Yesterday was “Blog for Choice Day 2010″ but as I was on a train sans wi-fi for most of the day, I missed it.  I did, however, read an incredible post by Sara Gwin of Silence is Betrayal: a Feminist Blog.  Gwin presents a history of George Tiller (this year’s theme, in his honor, was [...]

24.01.2010

No Comments

The Anatomy of Multi-Directional Propaganda

Earlier in the week, I tried checking out the TV for news about Haiti, but each time was confronted with pieces that disproportionately focused on white people, Wyclef Jean, and Israel.  With regard to Israel in particular, the media seems to be focused on Israel’s highly effective field hospital in Port-au-Prince, which even Jewish papers [...]

20.01.2010

2 Comments

1968

42 years ago: a revolution on the brink.  1968: the year of protests.  the year that rocked the world.  the year that Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were brutally murdered*. I was born 14 years later, too late to understand the intricacies of the time.  I showed up too late for the [...]

18.01.2010

No Comments

Twi-ddiction?

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I have a wee bit of an addictive personality.  Fortunately, it doesn’t manifest itself in any particularly nefarious ways (anymore, anyway – I quit smoking in March!), but I’m still a bit of an all-or-nothing gal. That’s why I’ve decided to take a long break from Twitter. [...]

17.01.2010

12 Comments

Got $20? Send it to Haiti (UPDATED)

Haiti is not within my typical geographic area of interest, but it is (and should be) impossible to ignore the catastrophe there: as many as 100,000 people killed by a 7.0 earthquake which occurred on January 12.  As many as 1/3 of Haiti’s 9 million people are in need of aid.  For a country that [...]

13.01.2010

4 Comments

For Rushdie

Let me tell you a secret: I think Christopher Hitchens is an idiot. Though I admit I’m a latecomer to his columns, from the moment I heard about the SSNP incident, I was utterly convinced. In fact, I’m perhaps glad that I didn’t know much about him at the time, because I fear that I [...]

05.01.2010

10 Comments

Jason Calacanis Shows His (Horribly Bigoted) Stripes

Here’s no secret: Jason Calacanis doesn’t impress me. Sure, the dude can make money (but so could Bernie Madoff), but as far as ideas go? I’m underwhelmed, seriously and truly underwhelmed. So today, when I spotted this delicious rant of Jason’s on TechCrunch, I was quite pleased to be among the first in line to [...]

04.01.2010

55 Comments