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City, Knife
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See also: Booze and teenager sweat

SHHHHHHHH!

Everyone ever.

Yeah, now that I've left Facebook and try not to spend too much time online I didn't even know about this campaign until I saw this post. I'm sure that if I saw 50% of people suddenly posting this stuff they didn't know about till yesterday when some celebrity mentioned it I'd be just as annoyed as you, Nigel.

Also, whenever people take the anti-interventionist position (which I see as rather anti-cosmopolitan and anti-humanist,) that their concerns end at their country's borders, I'm always reminded of Philip Larkin's poem "Homage to a Government."

Also - isn't the new ExileFaker EP fucking awesome?

I was in Uganda year before last. Kony is still a problem but not like he was a few years ago. They've had him on the run for a while, especially because the US has put some serious diplomatic pressure on the Islamist government in Khartoum who were giving him a safe haven in Sudan to operate from in order to use him and his child army as a proxy and continual thorn in the side of Uganda. But the North of the country, where my family runs several tea plantations, is still filled with refugee camps populated by boys who were forced to smash their parents' skulls open and little girls who've known nothing but rape and childbirth for their teenage years.

But Uganda, which was the most prosperous country in East Africa does have a lot of other problems these days. Christian fundamentalism (largely fueled by American missionaries,) has increased its hold in the past year, which has resulted in a spike in AIDS and harsh new anti-homosexuality laws with capital sentences. On top of that, there's still a prevalent belief in witchcraft, particularly the idea that children are demonically posessed, and it's not uncommon to hear reports of entire villages gripped by superstitious hysteria going so far as to poison their own children with battery acid or herd them into a communal building and then set it on fire to purge the demons.

Still, President Museveni, for all his downsides (especially listening to his idiot Christian fundamentalist wife's advice on policy) has actually done a lot to combat the LRA over the past 10 years, and he deserves some credit, especially for creating a military coalition involving several not-always-friendly East and Central African countries. The idea of a coordinated military operation involving, just to give one example, Uganda and the DRC would have been unthinkable a few years ago. If they can cooperate on an operation like trying to either kill Kony or land him in the Hague, then they should be applauded for that. And if the US can help, then we absolutely should.

I think people like Downstate, who seem to adopt a "well, everything sucks and if we fix one problem another will just appear so we shouldn't even bother fighting," attitude rather annoy me. There are a lot of Bosnians, Kurds, Afghanis and Libyans who are very glad that stronger nations, after much appeal on their part, finally did something to help them. Obviously there will always be more problems, and obviously no country is perfect, but I think that people in places like Somalia, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea deserve a better life and if countries with the financial and military means to help them can use their power carefully (which they obviously don't always do,) to help them, I'm all for it. And people who try to draw moral equivalencies between genuine totalitarian movements and Western democracies, flawed though they may be, are just flat out misinformed, if not deliberately ignorant.

People should probably bear in mind that the Blip team has a policy of not booking out-of-town acts that have already played (although they do often play parallel gigs/afterpartys, etc..), so people listing Virt, Random, Trash80, etc... should know that, wish list though it is, these excellent choices are not likely to actually be playing. Even though seeing them on the Blip stage again would be awesome. Especially Touchboy.

POPstar
Matt Nida
Rhinostritch
DotDummy/B.Leo
Cream in all Moustache
Squarewave Surfers
Oxygenstar
Ro-Bear
Chipocrite
Game Boy Music Club Marching Band Project

Basically a little less yelling and thumping and violence and a little more melody and subtlety and exuberance is my hope. Although I have a feeling I may be in a minority here.