Did America Conspire to Cover Up a Genocide in the Congo?

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Saturday February 19, 2011 · 8:14 AM PST

2011/02/19 · 08:14

Last week, Bernard Ntaganda was sentenced to four years imprisonment for “endangering state security” and “harboring ethnic divisionism.” The former charge is all too familiar to human rights activists and is little different from similar politically-motivated prosecutions across the globe. The crime of “divisionism,” however, codified as “sectarianism” under Rwandese law, is relatively unique. The closest parallels to these laws are probably most familiar to Americans as “hate speech” laws common to Europe, but prohibited by the First Amendment in the United States.

International human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have concluded that Mr. Ntaganda was almost certainly targeted for his opposition to the regime of President Paul Kagame. President Kagame is not well known in the United States, but he owes his prominence to the role he played in ending the 1994 Rwandan genocide as leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF. The sanitized version of this story was distributed to American audiences briefly in the award winning film Hotel Rwanda. Unfortunately, the politcally correct version omits several important facts, omissions that help explain the current political climate in Rwanda and the slide toward authoritarianism on the part of Kagame and the rest of the political leadership.

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In Defense of Liberalism: Introducing the Critical Realists Working Group

Alec82

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Thursday February 17, 2011 · 11:18 AM PST

2011/02/17 · 11:18

So what is the Critical Realists Working Group?

Group for discussing epistemological liberalism and illiberal threats to American liberalism and its core values of equal protection, free speech and secularism. To promote epistemological liberalism on Daily Kos, within the Left and in American politics generally.

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High Crimes and Misdemeanors in Ohio

Alec82

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Friday February 04, 2011 · 8:48 PM PST

2011/02/04 · 20:48

Kelley Williams-Bolar is no no longer in jail, but the Ohio Justice and Policy Center has taken up her appeal, with attorney and executive director David Singleton promising a three-front strategy: Litigation, a pardon application and of course media scrutiny. The newly elected Republican governor of Ohio, John Kasich, plagued by public criticism of his all-white cabinet, has developed an unexpected conscience and has directed his legal team to review the Williams-Bolar case.

Alec82

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Thursday February 03, 2011 · 2:53 PM PST

2011/02/03 · 14:53

Last week, Ugandan gay activist David Kato was bludgeoned to death. On Saturday, the pastor who presided* over his funeral called for gays to repent "or be punished by God." Today, President Obama, Senator Gillibrand and other notables, even the husband of Representative Giffords, appeared at a prayer breakfast sponsored by "The Family", a right wing fundamentalist organization. Among their most influential members is David Bahati, a core member of the Family responsible for the introduction of genocidal anti-gay legislation in Uganda.

Kato's death did not take place in a vacuum. The Uganda anti-gay bill introduced in parliament in October of 2009 was partially the product of an alliance between Ugandan politicians and U.S. evangelicals. Today, that global alliance had access to the most powerful politician on the planet.

Alec82

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Wednesday February 02, 2011 · 8:42 PM PST

2011/02/02 · 20:42

Yet another commission tasked with studying the problem of racial disparity in criminal sentencing has reported that black defendants are more likely to be sent to prison than their white counterparts in the State of Illinois, the same state that sent the last three black senators to Washington and one of the same to the White House. In a report that was commissioned by state senator Mattie Hatter, the commission found that black defendants were more likely to be sent to prison for low-level drug offenses than white defendants. Unfortunately, this is nothing new. Reports on the disparity are only skin deep; to find the root causes, we need to reconsider some bipartisan and popular decisions that stretch back over decades.

Alec82

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Tuesday February 01, 2011 · 9:29 AM PST

2011/02/01 · 09:29

In 1988 the Thatcher government in the United Kingdom passed what became known as "Section 28," a controversial amendment to the 1986 Local Government Act. Section 28 stated that a local authority inter alia, "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship". Although the act did not create any criminal penalties for a violation, it did result in a significant amount of self-censorship, including the closure of gay and lesbian student groups at the secondary and university level.

Today, the same government that enforced Section 28 is prosecuting five men under Section 29(c)(1) of the Public Order Act for distributing threatening material intended to stir up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation. History, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

Alec82

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Monday January 31, 2011 · 11:23 AM PST

2011/01/31 · 11:23

Last Wednesday, Ugandan gay activist David Kato was bludgeoned to death. On Saturday, the pastor who presided over his funeral called for gays to repent "or be punished by God."

Alec82

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Saturday January 29, 2011 · 4:30 PM PST

2011/01/29 · 16:30

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has overturned a six and a half year sentence imposed by a federal district court in 2009, after the judge in that case impermissibly relied on a genetic theory to support the argument that the man, Gary Cossey, was likely to re-offend. Professor Douglas Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy has the details borrowed from the decision (warning PDF) and The New York Times.

Alec82

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Wednesday January 12, 2011 · 7:24 AM PST

2011/01/12 · 07:24

Torts was one of the substantive classes in my first year of law school that I enjoyed the least, and it is also an area of the law that I make little use of on a daily basis. Nevertheless, I want to return to this subject today, because two related elements in negligence actions, duty and causation, speak to the Tucson massacre in a way that might help illuminate our discussion of Saturday’s events. With that, I return to a case included in a handout in my torts class.

Alec82

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Sunday August 22, 2010 · 10:58 AM PDT

2010/08/22 · 10:58

"Critical theory," as used in this diary, refers to a theory with a definitive political and ethical purpose, one that informs liberation movements:

Critical Theory has a narrow and a broad meaning in philosophy and in the history of the social sciences. "Critical Theory" in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. According to these theorists, a "critical" theory may be distinguished from a "traditional" theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human emancipation, "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them" (Horkheimer 1982, 244). Because such theories aim to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings, many "critical theories" in the broader sense have been developed. They have emerged in connection with the many social movements that identify varied dimensions of the domination of human beings in modern societies. In both the broad and the narrow senses, however, a critical theory provides the descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry aimed at decreasing domination and increasing freedom in all their forms.

Alec82

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Wednesday August 18, 2010 · 12:10 PM PDT

2010/08/18 · 12:10

Tim Wise's provocatively titled rec list diary, With Friends Like These, Who Needs Glenn Beck? Racism and White Privilege on the Liberal Left, is not without some value. After all, the Left can sometimes be guilty of promoting "colorblindness" as a solution to racial disparities in this country. But Tim Wise's endorsement of homophobic stereotypes, and his deliberate or negligent misrepresentations of the gay community, require a response.

Alec82

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Saturday August 14, 2010 · 4:14 PM PDT

2010/08/14 · 16:14

The bare bones allegation that a statute, ordinance or similar legislative enactment is unconstitutional does not allow a federal court to entertain a lawsuit by any party who objects to the law. In order to challenge a statute as unconstitutional, a party must have "standing." This is not a statutory requirement or a simple court rule; it is rooted in Article III of the United States Constitution. The party invoking federal jurisdiction bears the burden of establishing three elements: (1) Injury in fact, (2) a causal relationship between the injury and the challenged conduct, and (3) a likelihood that the injury will be redressed by a favorable decision. Lujan v Defenders of Wildlife, 112 S. Ct. 2130, 2136 (1992) (Lujan). The injury must result from an incursion on a "legally protected interest" that is "concrete and particularized" to a complaining party, as opposed to the generalized grievance of people who believe that the government is not following the law as they believe it to be. It must also be an injury that is "actual or imminent," not conjectural or speculative. Id.

So do the opponents of marriage equality have what it takes to get the case before the Ninth Circuit or the US Supreme Court?

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Did America Conspire to Cover Up a Genocide in the Congo?

In Defense of Liberalism: Introducing the Critical Realists Working Group

High Crimes and Misdemeanors in Ohio

President, U.S. Political Establishment Embrace Genocidal Anti-Gay Group

New Study on Racial Disparity in Sentencing

Section 29: At the Intersection of Free Speech and Anti-Gay Ideology

The Globalization of Homohate: Time to Ask Some Hard Questions

Born A Criminal? Second Circuit Decision Illustrates Need for Sex Offender Reform

Tucson and Proximate Causation

+ + Un Good: The "New" Attack on Liberalism

The White Lies of Tim Wise? "White Gays," Racism and Homophobia

Prop 8: What about Standing?