Monday, March 31, 2008

I bless the rains ...

OK folks. I have been on the internet for two US election cycles, and have observed that during a Presidential election year, the political web becomes totally fucking unusable, as one gets sucked into a) a vast amount of pointless horse-race coverage and b) the horrific internecine fights of one's friends in vaguely left-wing politics in the US (this has been mainly over Ralph Nader last time round, but the Hillary/Barrack fight certainly appears to have the legs).

I've basically despaired of being able to do anything about this (not even resist the temptation to get involved myself), and so I've decided that starting today and ending on election day, I will be unmooring the semi-island D-Squared Digest from the Anglosphere and hiring a fleet of tugs to tow it to Africa. For the next six months plus, this will be an African politics blog. I've sorted out a few reasonably reliable looking African media sources and will be mainly linking to other African blogs. The purist approach would be to also maintain the all-Africa, all the time policy on Crooked Timber and the Guardian blog, but we'll see how this goes.

Bwana awabarik to all of us, but particularly me.

Update: by the way, somebody slap me if I try to weasel a US elections post by on the pretext of Obama being half Kenyan.

14 comments:

  1. Awesome. I miss the Head Heeb. Definitely a gap in the market.

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  2. Ah, but we all see right through this thinly-veiled endorsement of Obama over Hillary.

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  3. Exclusively Africa? I can't see it lasting - do they have prediction markets on African elections?

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  4. It's a fool who plays it cool.

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  5. What good African blogs do you read, please?

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  6. Now we can get into horrific internecine fights about whether to intervene in Darfur!

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  7. Commentary on Zimbabwe elections, please! :P

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  8. hang on folks I need to learn something about the subject first!

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  9. I hear they have a lot of very large stone structures over there. Oh yeah, and a river of some sort.

    But do they have superdelegates?

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  10. the temptation to retrospectively declare this an April Fool is palpable, but I've just realised that I don't do much horse race blogging on UK politics, so why should I in Africa? I have a couple of semi-related Zimbabwean topics to work on now ...

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  11. Mugabe's finished. The results are "As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serangetti ..."

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  12. Aw, I was hoping you would revisit this in the wake of the Obama campaign.

    Surely it would still be appropriate, as it deals with the African diaspora.

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  13. I predict that it will be a smaller change than you imagine.

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