Leaving on a Jet Plane (Again)

I talked to Travel Cuts at St. Mary's University on the phone. It turns out that a round-trip ticket from Charlottetown to Toronto would cost just under 450 dollars if I left on the 1st of May and came back to PEI on the 9th (the day before graduation), and that a train ticket from Toronto to Kingston and back will be ~93. The Air Canada ticket has been deserved; I can book the VIA Rail one a day in advance.

So. That's my probable window of opportunity for early visits to Toronto.

From Richmond

Very interesting. Tom?

From the Richmond Times-Transcript:

"Mayor asking for vote on Iraq"

BY JEREMY REDMON
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER Mar 11, 2003

Richmond Mayor Rudolph C. McCollum Jr. says President Bush has not made a convincing case for a war in Iraq. He is asking the City Council to take a stand on the issue.

"I definitely believe there is a time for war, but I don't believe we have necessarily gotten to that point," the mayor said.

( Read more... )

( The full text of the proposed resolution )

</lj-cu

"America's Eurasian reshuffle"

From The Asia Times:

"America's Eurasian reshuffle"
By Francesco Sisci and Lu Xiang

BEIJING - The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, seemed close enough to Samuel P Huntington's forecasts in his famous The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, but the consequences for the world appear now, some 18 months after those events, completely opposite. France and Germany, the bulwark of Western civilization according to Huntington, are on a collision course against the United States; ironically, the European countries closer to the US are the ones further from Huntington's "nordic" culture: Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe.

( Read more... )

</lj-cut

A meme

There's a brand new talk
But it's not very clear
That people from good homes
Are talking this year
It's loud and it's tasteless
I've not heard it before
Shout it while you're dancing
On the -er dance floor

Fill in the blanks!

I ____ Randy.
Randy is ____.
If I were alone in a room with Randy, I would _______.
I think Randy should _____.
Randy needs ______.
I want to ____________ Randy.

"What Bangkok can teach Baghdad"

From the Jerusalem Post:
"What Bangkok can teach Baghdad"M, By Rona Yona

When my family invited me to join them on their winter break in Thailand, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what it was going to be like.

I definitely didn't expect it would show me a way out of the problems of the Middle East.

( Read more... )

[REVIEW] When Victims Become Killers

Review. Mahmood Mamdami. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 364 pp.

Rwanda has the unhappy distinction of being the country that most people think of when the word "genocide" is mentioned. ("Hutu," "Tutsi," "interahamwe," and "génocidaire" will also be prominent.) The question of what happened in Rwanda and why it happened is important, not merely because of its implications for Rwanda and for central Africa (don't forget that the current war fought by a half-dozen nations in the Congo at a cost of two million dead was sparked by the genocide of 1994), but because of what it says about human nature. The Rwandan genocide was, as horror-struck observers and survivors (and participants) have pointed out, quite different from other genocides in the 20th century (the Nazi genocide of Jews and Slavs, for example) because it enlisted virtually the entire population of Rwanda not targeted by the genocide: Men and women, adults and children, laypersons and clerics, the illiterate and the educated, all demographics of the Rwandan population took part in the genocide. There wasn't any bureaucracy to adroitly ship the undesirables out of public sight, there wasn't any segmentation of the genocide from the rest of the population, there was only indiscriminative massive slaughter. eren't What happened?

So far, there hasn't been a particularly useful book on the Rwandan genocide, from the point of view of explaining just what happened and why. Philip Gourevitch's 1998 We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families comes closest, but it lacks any profound historical perspective, I find. Gourevitch works from the statements of the Rwandans he interviewed that Rwandan culture is inherently authoritarian and fatalistic, that Rwandans are themselves prone to cruelty; but then, two or three years after a genocide such as the Rwandan, wouldn't any shocked survivor or observer find it difficult to avoid that? And then, there are problems with the official narrative of post-genocide Rwanda: The official RPF history of Rwanda is certainly more accurate than that of the génocidaires (it's really spectacularly unlikely that "90%" of Rwandan Tutsis were RPF supporters, never mind the rather simple question of whether slaughtering one million people can ever be moral); but then, the RPF came to power only after waging a bloody civil war in the early 1990s that displaced one Rwandan in six. I don't think we've ever gotten a consistent answer about the hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees who had fled ahead of the advancing pro-Rwandan forces some years ago into the depths of the Congolese forests and were never seen again.

( What happened? Briefly put, colonialism. )