Alpha's Troll and Cantarbaqash Corner LOL

[OdaySomali]

AB how do you do Inaar?

[Alpha Blondy]

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@OdaySomali

said:</cite>

AB how do you do Inaar?

 

i'm doing excellent. everything is brilliant Alhamdullah. life is so good these days. i've never been happier. i wish the same for you, too. thanks for your greetings. it has been noted. cheers. A

[Alpha Blondy]

 

to someone special.

[Alpha Blondy]

The cold, hard truth about the ice bucket challenge

 

 

I look at the camera, hold a bucket of ice water over my head, tip it upside down, post the video on social media and then nominate two others to do the same. Along the way, my nominees and I use the opportunity to donate to the ALS Association, a charity that fights amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also called Lou Gerhig’s disease), a fatal neurodegenerative disease. Multiply this activity 70,000 times, and the result is that the ALS Association has received $3 million in additional donations. Via the ice bucket challenge, celebrities and the general public have fun and receive publicity; at the same time, millions of dollars are raised for a good cause. It’s a win-win, right?

Sadly, things are not so simple.

 

The key problem is funding cannibalism. That $3 million in donations doesn’t appear out of a vacuum. Because people on average are limited in how much they’re willing to donate to good causes, if someone donates $100 to the ALS Association, he or she will likely donate less to other charities.

 

This isn’t just speculation. Research from my own non-profit, which raises money for the most effective global poverty charities, has found that, for every $1 we raise, 50¢ would have been donated anyway. Given our fundraising model, which asks for commitments much larger than the amount people typically donate, we have reason to think that this is a lower proportion than is typical for fundraising drives. So, because of the $3 million that the ALS Association has received, I’d bet that much more than $1.5 million has been lost by other charities.

 

A similar phenomenon has been studied in the lab by psychologists. It’s called moral licensing: the idea that doing one good action leads one to compensate by doing fewer good actions in the future. In a recent experiment, participants either selected a product from a selection of mostly “green” items (like an energy-efficient light bulb) or from a selection of mostly conventional items (like a regular light bulb). They were then told to perform a supposedly unrelated task. However, in this second task, the results were self-reported, so the participants had a financial incentive to lie; and they were invited to pay themselves out of an envelope, so they had an opportunity to steal as well.

 

What happened? People who had previously purchased a green product were significantly more likely to both lie and steal than those who had purchased the conventional product. Their demonstration of ethical behavior subconsciously gave them license to act unethically when the chance arose.

 

Amazingly, even just saying that you’d do something good can cause the moral self-licensing effect. In another study, half the participants were asked to imagine helping a foreign student who had asked for assistance in understanding a lecture. They subsequently gave significantly less to charity when given the chance to do so than the other half of the participants, who had not been asked to imagine helping another student.

 

The explanation behind moral licensing is that people are often more concerned about looking good or feeling good rather than doing good. If you “do your bit” by buying an energy-efficient lightbulb, then your status as a good human being is less likely to be called into question if you subsequently steal.

 

In terms of the conditions for the moral licensing effect to occur, the ice bucket challenge is perfect. The challenge gives you a way to very publicly demonstrate your altruism via a painful task, despite actually accomplishing very little (on average, not including those who don’t donate at all, a $40 gift, or 0.07% of the average American household’s income): it’s geared up to make you feel as good about your actions as possible, rather than to ensure that your actions do as much good as possible.

 

This why Caitlin Dewey, a blogger for the Washington Post who claims that we should praise the challenge for raising so much money, gets it all wrong. The ice bucket challenge has done one good thing, which is raise $3 million for the ALS Association. But it’s also done a really bad thing: take money and attention away from other charities and other causes. That means that, if we want to know whether the ice bucket challenge has been on balance a good thing for the world, we’ve got to assess how effective the ALS Associations is compared with other charities. If 50% of that $3 million would have been donated anyway, and if the ALS association is less than half as effective at turning donations into positive impact on people’s wellbeing than other charities are on average, then the fundraiser would actively be doing harm. It’s perfectly possible that this is the case: even though some charities are fantastically effective, many achieve very little. You just can’t know without doing some serious investigation.

 

This isn’t to object to the ALS Association in particular. Almost every charity does the same thing — engaging in a race to the bottom where the benefits to the donor have to be as large as possible, and the costs as small as possible. (Things are even worse in the UK, where the reward of publicizing yourself all over social media comes at a suggested price of just £3 donated to MacMillan Cancer Support.) We should be very worried about this, because competitive fundraising ultimately destroys value for the social sector as a whole. We should not reward people for minor acts of altruism, when they could have done so much more, because doing so creates a culture where the correct response to the existence of preventable death and suffering is to give some pocket change.

 

Cannibalism of funding among charities is a major problem. However, there is a solution. The moral licensing phenomenon doesn’t always happen: there is a countervailing psychological force, called commitment effects. If in donating to charity you don’t conceive of it as “doing your bit” but instead as taking one small step towards making altruism a part of your identity, then one good deed really will beget another. This means that we should tie new altruistic commitments to serious, long-lasting behavior change. Rather than making a small donation to a charity you’ve barely heard of, you could make a commitment to find out which charities are most cost-effective, and to set up an ongoing commitment to those charities that you conclude do the most good with your donations. Or you could publicly pledge to give a proportion of your income.

 

These would be meaningful behavior changes: they would be structural changes to how you live your life; and you could express them as the first step towards making altruism part of your identity. No doubt that, if we ran such campaigns, the number of people who would do these actions would be smaller, but in the long term the total impact would be far larger.

 

So, sure, pour a bucket of water over yourself, or go bungee jumping, or lie in a bathtub of beans, whatever. But only do these things if you connect these fundraisers with meaningful behavior change, otherwise your campaign, even if seemingly fantastically successful, could be doing more harm than good.

 

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http://qz.com/249649/the-cold-hard-truth-about-the-ice-bucket-challenge/

 

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i've done the challenge....LOL

[Alpha Blondy]

Human zoos and colonial nostalgia

 

 

In a week that has seen an unarmed black teen shot down by police, a controversial art performance may seem frivolous or even insignificant. But Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B, a 21st Century reinterpretation of Victorian-era human zoos, in which black Africans were paraded in front of a curious European audience, is just the thin end of the wedge in which black bodies are dehumanised.

 

Bailey, whose show is currently the talk of Edinburgh festival, and is coming soon to London’s Barbican, claims he is interested in the way people were objectified in order to legitimise colonial policies. However, to interrogate abhorrent practices in our history, one does not need to replicate them. As recently seen with Kara Walker’s mammy sphinx, general audiences are rarely savvy enough to comprehend the complexities of such histories, and instead the entire work descends into a spectacle. A review of Exhibit B in the Guardian reveals the skewed power relationship between Bailey, a privileged South African, white, male artist, and his black performers, whom he instructs behave “with compassion,” but also makes fun of their appearance and is comfortable with openly using racial slurs. I find it difficult to believe that his intent for the viewer is to provoke thought and discussion, rather than just ogle.

 

Even allowing for artistic expression, offensive or not, there are wider questions to be addressed. Something is seriously wrong when not a single person in the programming department of an organisation as large as the Barbican, which is publicly funded and supposed to serve the diverse, multicultural audience of London, saw a problem with scheduling this show. This is what happens when diversity is relegated to being the sole responsibility of the outreach and education departments, while programming and curating remain homogenous. And good luck to that outreach department – is it really any surprise BME visitor numbers are so low, when this is how we are represented in the arts? A few schools and community workshops will not balance it out.

 

At a time when black artists are marginalised and struggling for visibility, arts institutions still see fit to provide a platform to such uninspired, tired tropes, in the spirit of some sort of colonial nostalgia. BME and women artists are frequently criticised or dismissed for themes of identity politics in their work, but black lived experiences seem to be acceptable fodder for white artists. Of course, white artists are not exempt from exploring colonial histories – it is a shared history, after all. However, other artists, both black and white have inserted themselves into the picture when examining oppressive historical practices, such as Coco Fusco & Guillermo Gomez Pena, Tracy Rose, and Leah Gordon. Perhaps Brett Bailey should stop putting people in cages and instead take a look at the zoo-keeper.

 

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http://minorliteratures.com/2014/08/18/human-zoos-and-colonial-nostalgia/

 

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interesting read.

[Alpha Blondy]

[Alpha Blondy]

 

 

[Alpha Blondy]

 

classic!

[Alpha Blondy]

WHAT’S IN A NAME? A BRIEF HISTORY OF "ASKARI"

 

The Askari Monument in Dar-es-Salaam, erected by the British in 1927. Prior to WWI, under German colonial rule, a statue of Major Hermann von Wissmann stood in its place

 

Perhaps the most iconic figure of World War I in Africa, the African soldiers who fought in East Africa are mostly known through the archives left by the colonial powers for which they fought. The Germans spun tales of their martial qualities and undying loyalty. The British sources, while offering a more mixed picture, also offered high praise for the King’s African Rifles, to whom they built a monument in the heart of Dar-es-Salaam.

 

As Michelle Moyd argues, these self-serving European narratives undermine the violence of the East Africa campaign. They also constitute layers of mediation that make it extremely difficult to know much about the interior lives of askari, what they thought the war was about, or what they hoped would happen afterwards.

 

There is however value in understanding how these narratives were put together, what history they draw from and which legacy they left behind. It all begins with the name these soldiers were assigned: askari, a title ubiquitous across the colonial armed forces in East Africa.

 

The term reflects a complex cultural heritage and casted African soldiers out, marking them as distinct and different from the European soldiers. It then fell out of use, before finding new meanings as the colonial structures of East Africa weakened.

 

Before the modern era, the Indian Ocean was one of the richest areas of cultural and economic exchange in the world. Beginning in Antiquity, the seasonal monsoons carried trade from the eastern shores of Africa to India, Persia and Southeast Asia, creating a massive region of exchange.

 

With the rise of Islam and the subsequent spread of the Arabic language in the 7th century CE, new vocabulary and cultural norms spread amongst the trading partners, including the bantu-speaking peoples of East Africa.

 

The language of the Swahili, literally the “People of the Coast”, absorbed many of the words of their coreligionist trading partners, including maktaba (library), kitabu (book), kahawa (coffee), and askar (army). This led to soldiers or guards being called askari, or men of the army.

 

It was with this label that the European ‘explorers’ referred to the armed men that escorted them to the Great Lakes, the Rift Valley, and beyond. As Henry Morton Stanley noted in How I Found Livingston:

 

I have used the word "soldiers" in this book. The armed escort a traveler engages to accompany him into East Africa is composed of free black men, natives of Zanzibar, or freed slaves from the interior, who call themselves "askari," an Indian name which, translated, means "soldiers." They are armed and equipped like soldiers, though they engage themselves also as servants; but it would be more pretentious in me to call them servants, than to use the word "soldiers;" and as I have been more in the habit of calling them soldiers than "my watuma" servants this habit has proved too much to be overcome.

 

It was under the title of askari that the private mercantile companies of an expansionist and industrial Europe -- such as the German East Africa Company, the Congo Free State, and the Imperial British East Africa company -- began to retain these fighting men to protect their interests and to suppress the Arabic and Swahili traders and slavers that were their main competition.

 

Despite the high-minded appeals to morality and capitalism that had initially funded them, these companies failed or were driven out of business one by one. Direct governmental oversight took over. To maintain colonial control, the new government-run colonies continued recruiting local soldiers, now organized in regular units, whose askari title remained unchanged.

 

The Germans formed the Deutsch Ost-Afrika Schutztruppe, the Belgian Congo had its Force Publique, the Portuguese their companhias indigenas, and the British their King’s African Rifles. Being an askari brought with it decent pay, privileges and possible rewards after retirement.

 

The average German askari started at 20 rupees per month, and could climb to 45 if he was promoted to lance corporal. This compared favorably with most other trades. Even skilled railroad workers in German East Africa made at best 17-25 rupees for the same time commitment.

 

Other colonial forces offered roughly comparable pay grades and similar incentives, such as being exempt from the often harsh colonial taxes. This tax-free pay went even farther when the askari were on the march. In such times, the askari could demand food and shelter from other colonial subjects. Askari were allowed to order around village headmen to see that all their needs were met.

 

When they finished their service, long-time askari, especially amongst the British, had small pensions set aside, benefited from preferential hiring into other colonial service, and sometimes even land grants to aid their retirement.

 

However, despite the pay and privileges granted by their imperial patrons, the askari were always kept as distinct and separate units from the professional armed forces of the colonial powers they served. They were armed with older weapons, wore simplified exoticized uniforms, and were given limited technical training at best. From the formation of their forces in the early 20th century until the end of colonial empires in East and Central Africa, to be an askari was to be the Other of European soldiers.

 

The rise of nationalism and the process of decolonization following the Second World War overturned the meaning of the word askari. To be an askari was to be a colonial soldier, not a soldier defending his own people.

 

Portugal first dismissed the terms askari and companhias indigenas in 1951 as a part of their ludicrous attempt to pretend that they had no colonies, only “overseas provinces” of Portugal. Soon after, the Congo, Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya claimed their independence. Former colonial forces became national armies and the term disappeared from the official vocabulary.

 

The transition to a national army was however not as easy as simply dropping the term askari: all four countries’ army experienced mutinies in the first three years of their independence.

 

By the 1980s, only a single holdout remained. South Africa found itself as the last bastion of white colonial power on the continent where the language of colonialism survived. The term askari re-emerged at that time, but in reference to informers and African fighters coerced into working against the African National Congress.

 

In this context, the term recalled not the askari’s military service but the oppressive role they played in supporting the colonial system, at the expense of the people. As the continent transformed and black South Africans made themselves heard, the meaning of the term had radically changed.

 

The word has not completely disappeared. Numerous corporations and businesses use it in their names and it is still in use to refer to soldiers or more likely policemen. However, within East Africa the average soldier will more often be referred to as mwanajeshi and the police will just take the title of polisi.

 

Askari has been and remains a term for those that retain the coercive power of violence in service to the state. As the nature of that state changed, so has the meaning of the word: from a guardian figure in a region of vast cultural exchange, to an exoticised enforcer of the colonial order, to a mixed legacy that holds both policemen and traitors accountable to the African people.

 

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http://wwiafrica.ghost.io/a-brief-history-of-askari/

 

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interesting article.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

caadi maha.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

following developments back in the UK. i vehemently support the YES vote, as it could signal a way forward for Somaliland's independence aspirations.

[Alpha Blondy]

so i've got this Japanese Couch-surfer staying with me. this is his second visit to SL. he stayed almost 3 weeks with me back in 2012. he's an awesome guy walahi. it's been so nice having him around. he's very polite and courteous, really.

 

he's been hanging around with me and couple of diaspora friends. we've all being chilling out in a number of joints around the city. he usually pays. he's a good housemate too. very clean. yesterday, during the Jeudi Soir festivities, we watched couple of movies including transformers age of extinction.

 

yesterday, we went to the Ministry of Culture to get our permits. on Sunday, inshallah, we plan to visit my tol's land in Las Geel and Berbera. promises to be an excellent eid holidays.

[Alpha Blondy]

 

R&B star Akon accused of going to extreme lengths to avoid catching Ebola after crowd surfing in giant 'bubble' at a concert in Goma, DRC . LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

[Alpha Blondy]

dhamaan akhyarta waxaan leeyahay Ciid Mubarik. have a good one inshallah. i'm going downtown to buy my ciid clothes LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL.

[Tallaabo]

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@Alpha Blondy

said:</cite>

 

R&B star Akon accused of going to extreme lengths to avoid catching Ebola after crowd surfing in giant 'bubble' at a concert in Goma, DRC . LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

Lool :-D