The Message Of Russia’s Election, Kony2012 And Other Online Voyeur Justice

The Article:
Russia’s election, Kony2012 and online voyeur justice by Sarah Kendzior in Al-Jazeera.

The Text: St Louis, MO – On March 4, I spent the day watching the Russian election – not the news coverage of the election, but the election itself. Across Russia, 90,000 web cameras were installed in polling stations in order to ensure transparency and ward off allegations of ballot tampering and fraud. Voting was broadcast through the website www.webvybory2012.ru, where viewers around the world could take-in scenes of Russian life: a Chechen man sprawled out on a couch near a makeshift voter booth, a birthday party at a polling station in Tyumen and ballot stuffing in Dagestan.

These videos, while entertaining, were Russian politics as reality TV: a selective spectacle more revealing in what it did not reveal than in what it actually showed. While a few violations were exposed – the Dagestan ballots were eventually tossed – the videos were more notable for what remained blurry (the ballot boxes, in most cases) and for what happened off-screen. Large increases in absentee ballots and supplementary voter rolls, “carousels” of Putin supporters driven to multiple polling stations, and other questionable practices took place beyond the cameras’ watchful eyes.

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Want To Crash The Justice System? Here’s How.

The Article: Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System by Michelle Alexander in the New York Times.

The Text: AFTER years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless. But some questions a woman I know posed during a phone conversation one recent evening gave me pause: “What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to trial? Couldn’t we bring the whole system to a halt just like that?”

The woman was Susan Burton, who knows a lot about being processed through the criminal justice system.

Her odyssey began when a Los Angeles police cruiser ran over and killed her 5-year-old son. Consumed with grief and without access to therapy or antidepressant medications, Susan became addicted to crack cocaine. She lived in an impoverished black community under siege in the “war on drugs,” and it was but a matter of time before she was arrested and offered the first of many plea deals that left her behind bars for a series of drug-related offenses. Every time she was released, she found herself trapped in an under-caste, subject to legal discrimination in employment and housing.

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PETA: Guilty Of Things You May Not Think Of

The Article: PETA’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad History of Killing Animals by James McWilliams in the Atlantic.

The Text: In 2011, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) behaved in a regrettably consistent manner: it euthanized the overwhelming majority (PDF) of dogs and cats that it accepted into its shelters. Out of 760 dogs impounded, they killed 713, arranged for 19 to be adopted, and farmed out 36 to other shelters (not necessarily “no kill” ones). As for cats, they impounded 1,211, euthanized 1,198, transferred eight, and found homes for a grand total of five. PETA also took in 58 other companion animals — including rabbits. It killed 54 of them.

These figures don’t reflect well on an organization dedicated to the cause of animal rights. Even acknowledging that PETA sterilized over 10,500 dogs and cats and returned them to their owners, it doesn’t change the fact that its adoption rate in 2011 was 2.5 percent for dogs and 0.4 for cats. Even acknowleding that PETA never turns an animal away — “the sick, the scarred and broken, the elderly, the aggressive and unsocialized…” — doesn’t change the fact that Virginia animal shelters as a whole had a much lower kill rate of 44 percent. And even acknowledging that PETA is often the first to rescue pets when heat waves and hurricanes hit, that doesn’t change the fact that, at one of its shelters, it kills 84 percent of supposedly “unadoptable” animals within 24 hours of their arrival.

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15 Ways Christians And The GOP Use The Bible To Control Women

The Article: 15 Ways the Bible Is Used by Christians and the GOP to Control and Malign Women by Valerie Tarico in Alternet.

The Text: Why can’t GOP politicians trumpet their religious credentials without assaulting women?

Because fundamentalist religion of all stripes has degradation of women at its core, and fundamentalist Christianity is no exception. Progressive Christians believe the Bible is a human document, a record of humanity’s multi-millennial struggle to understand what is good and what is God and how to live in moral community with each other. But fundamentalists believe the Bible is the literally perfect word of the Almighty, essentially dictated by God to the writers. To believe that the Bible is the literally perfect word of God is to believe that women are tainted seductresses who must be controlled by men.

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The Real Problem In Uganda

The Article: The Real Battle in Uganda by Jackee Budesta Batanda in Foreign Policy Magazine.

The Text: While the rest of the world jumps onto the Kony2012 bandwagon — wrongly assuming that the main problem in Uganda is the Lord’s Resistance Army — Ugandans are worrying about the much more urgent problem plaguing their country: nodding disease.

The cause of the disease is unknown. It affects thousands of children in Northern Uganda, causing symptoms similar to epilepsy, but with more severe mental and physical retardation. (The photo above shows 12-year-old Nancy Lamwaka, a victim of the disease.) Yet the Ugandan government has been notably slow to deal with the problem.

A lot has happened since I last blogged about the government’s strange priorities. As I noted at the time, the Ugandan president’s office requested additional funding for its own needs that amounted to nine times of what the Health Ministry had specified for its first response to the disease. The government’s failure to allocate resources to this threat raises serious questions about its competence and its commitment to dealing with crises.

So the Hon Beatrice Anywar, an MP for Kitgum District, decided to take action: she ferried a number of children from her constituency to Mulago National Referral Hospital in the capital, Kampala. There were reports that the police tried to stop the bus from leaving Kitgum for fear that she would parade the children before Parliament.

When the sick children arrived in Mulago, journalists had a field day taking pictures. While the ethics of this display are questionable, I think it was necessary in order to shock our leaders into action. And Anywar did exactly that by bringing nodding disease to our doorstep. The issue can no longer be ignored.

The president later visited the victims at Mulago, where he promised more government support.

In the spirit of International Women’s Day, women activists in Uganda tied themselves to trees today in solidarity with Northern Ugandan mothers whose children are afflicted by the disease. Parents are often compelled to tie their sick children to trees to protect them from falling down or wandering off.

The gravity of the problem has been aptly described by women’s rights activist Jackline Asiimwe: “It is not acceptable for any parent to think that the only option left to save their children is by tying them to trees when they have a government whose mandate is to ensure that the citizens exercise their right to good health and access to medical attention wherever and whenever necessary.”