Special blogroll notice
I've been taking notes while crusing the BlogNet, discussing stuff with bloggers and found a large number of people who I want to check in on periodically. I've found the lesser lights are not lesser voices and in fact it's interesting how many stories the major lights post have percolated up from the new guys on the blogroll (like I said, I've been taking notes). The "higher beings" and "mortal humans" do get and create new stuff but they also read a lot of us regular types so I figure I can do no less. That's part of the reason for my blogroll inflation, and there are too many to announce them all.
There are a couple of special cases I want to make note of, though. ibyx emailed me a link to a new blog named AfricaBlog that looks more than promising. I already ranted once in their comments. To be honest these guys are still working it out conceptually, and I'm going to disagree with things, I can see that already. But they are taking what looks like a real shot at it. Here's an example:
Concepts to Remember
There are two concepts that are helpful when discussing or considering Africa: colonialism and the Destabilization Loop.
The impact that colonialism had on Africa is much the same as other areas of the world, and has been mentioned several times in the context of problems we face in dealing with Iraq. The modern borders of nations had nothing to do with natural boundaries between homogenous peoples, interests or even languages. The borders were set for the convenience of the colonial powers. Sometimes to aid in administration, but often deliberately arranged so that ethnic groups were separated into separate nations and grouped with another ethnic group, so that one was always a distinct minority. The colonial power (whether England, France, Belgium, etc) would then put the minority group in power over the majority. This ensured that a significant minority would be educated, relatively wealthy, and firmly committed to supporting the European colonial power due to dependence on the colonial power to maintain the status quo with its military might.
Much of the instability we have seen over the last few decades in Africa is due to majority groups attempting to wrest back control from a minority group accustomed to being in power. One of the most tragic examples is that of Rwanda and Burundi. In both cases, the Tutsis were in placed in power, despite making up just 14-15% of the population. Most of the slaughter in that region comes from Hutus either trying to wrest control from the Tutsis or "getting revenge" for decades of oppression, or else the Tutsis trying to keep the Hutus cowed and in line.
Another thing I've noticed is those "conservatives" that don't just make me grind my teeth when I read them actually tend to be libertarians. Said realization makes it easier to recognize reasonable opposing voices…I know how to talk to libertarians, while there seems to be no talking to conservatives at all. So over the next few days, when I get over a couple of things I've blogged in the last few hours, I'm going to update the lonely conservative outpost by renaming it appropriately and adding at least two other blogs:
Dog of Flanders, whom I know from the comments here to be a reasoning man, and
Suburban Blight, whom I've linked to once before in connection with the New Weblog Showcase and is a contributor to AfricaBlog. It'll just take a minute to get to it because this section is hard-coded in the template.
posted by Prometheus 6 at 7/30/2003 12:41:22 AM |
Posted by P6 at July 30, 2003 12:41 AM
| Trackback URL: http://www.prometheus6.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1377
