{"id":397,"date":"2004-08-04T23:24:32","date_gmt":"2004-08-05T06:24:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stefangeens.com\/?p=397"},"modified":"2004-08-04T23:24:32","modified_gmt":"2004-08-05T06:24:32","slug":"i-think-darfur-i-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/2004\/08\/i-think-darfur-i-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"I think, Darfur I blog"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just a quickie, I hope, before I head off for a final bout of summer travel (to Oxford for Charles’s and Pamela’s wedding!), on an article that will surely lead the Swedish blogosphere into a tizzy, now that Erik’s linked<\/a> to it.<\/p>\n

Mikael Pawlo, a writer at the Swedish IDG tech news website, faults Swedish (and, for that matter, all) bloggers<\/a> for not blogging Darfur. While genocide looms, he writes, Swedish bloggers are discussing I, Robot<\/em> and Buffy<\/em>. A failure by the Swedish media and politicians to give Darfur the attention it deserves has not led to bloggers raising hell. So much for all that supposed grass-roots journalism, he concludes. So much for blogging.<\/p>\n

Mikael, sorry. It’s my fault. I should have made it clearer to you and everyone else who visits this blog: I am against genocide<\/strong>. Slavery too. Famine, war, oppression — all bad. Lots of other things besides. Here I was, all this time thinking it was my obligation to engage readers with interesting posts about things I possibly know something about, about topics where there is disagreement and hence room for interesting debate, when it turns out all you want is a checklist of the world’s injustices, sorted by size, updated semi-weekly.<\/p>\n

Of course, Mikael, you could always start your own blog. It’s not like I had to get a licence or something to run this here URL. If you had a blog, you could tell all comers what exactly annoys you with the process currently underway to alleviate this crisis. We might even find we disagree on some things (oh, look, something to blog about!). For example: I think Darfur is<\/em> now getting the attention it deserves, at least in the media I follow. I think the UN is<\/em> applying the lessons it learned in Rwanda. I think alarm bells were<\/em> raised soon after the situation in Darfur escalated from mismatched ethnic conflict to incipient genocide; I think aid agencies are<\/em> there in force, and well funded this time, on the border, while the thorny issue of military intervention in Sudan proper is discussed in the US, EU and UN. I think the specter of this intervention, and the certainty of sanctions, is spurring the Sudanese government to try to rein in the militias responsible (we’ll see). I think an outside military intervention does not automagically solve this crisis. What do you want — a rerun of Somalia? If not, got any bright ideas?<\/p>\n

But I am not an expert in the details of combating incipient genocide, so I don’t know why you particularly want to know my opinion. (For that matter, I suspect you aren’t an expert either.) I do know that a lot of expertise exists, and that it is being applied en masse<\/em> to the crisis. As far as this blog is concerned, I’m just trying to avoid sounding like those letters to the editor that get published in Time magazine. You know the ones: “I think it’s a real tragedy what is going on in [insert region here]. Why can’t people just get along? We can send people to the moon, so why can’t we stop this? Sincerely, Marge Smith, Tulsa Oklahoma.” Way to go, Marge.<\/p>\n

Way to go, Mikael.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just a quickie, I hope, before I head off for a final bout of summer travel (to Oxford for Charles’s and Pamela’s wedding!), on an article that will surely lead the Swedish blogosphere into a tizzy, now that Erik’s linked … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-economics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7eNhC-6p","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}