This Memorial Day, we took a look back at how the U.S. soldier has evolved over the years. Did you know camouflage wasn’t introduced until the end of World War II?
(via newshour)
There’s a movie based on Battleship — so why not adapt any of these 12 board games as well?
We put together a dozen fake posters for board game movies we’d like to see — as well as plot summaries and casting suggestions for each flick. (For Connect 4: “In Connect III, Reg Caldwell pulled one last job and thought he was out of the life for good. He was wrong. Again. With only four bullets in the chamber, he takes on syndicate boss Milton Bradley (William Fitchner), who has kidnapped Caldwell’s sister. Luckily, sis (Gina Carano) is known to be pretty sneaky herself.”)
(via huffingtonpost)
Campfire Sessions: on Flickr.
![theatlantic:
Solving War Crimes With Wristbands: The Arrogance of ‘Kony 2012’
The t-shirts, posters, and wristbands of awareness campaigns like Invisible Children’s do not mention that death and failure often lie along the road to permanent solutions, nor that the simplest “solutions” are often the worst. (In fairness, you try fitting that on a bracelet.) Instead, they shift the goal from complicated and messy efforts at political resolution to something more palatable and less controversial: ever more awareness.
By making it an end in and of itself, awareness stands in for, and maybe even displaces, specific solutions to these very complicated problems. Campaigns that focus on bracelets and social media absorb resources that could go toward more effective advocacy, and take up rhetorical space that could be used to develop more effective advocacy. How do we go from raising awareness about LRA violence to actually stopping it? What’s the mechanism of transforming YouTube page views into a mediated political settlement? For all the excitement around awareness as an end in itself, one could be forgiven for forming the impression that there might be a “Stop Atrocity” button blanketed in dust in the basement of the White House, awaiting the moment when the tide of awareness reaches the Oval Office. […]
Treating awareness as a goal in and of itself risks compassion fatigue — most people only have so much time and energy to devote to far-away causes — and ultimately squanders political momentum that could be used to push for effective solutions. Actually stopping atrocities would require sustained effort, as well as significant dedication of time and resources that the U.S. is, at the moment, ill-prepared and unwilling to allocate. It would also require a decision on whether we are willing to risk American lives in places where we have no obvious political or economic interests, and just how much money it is appropriate to spend on humanitarian crises overseas when 3 out of 10 children in our nation’s capital live at or below the poverty line. The genuine difficulty of those questions can’t be eased by sharing a YouTube video or putting up posters.
Read more. [Image: Glenna Gordon]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0ksnvsM921qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
Solving War Crimes With Wristbands: The Arrogance of ‘Kony 2012’
The t-shirts, posters, and wristbands of awareness campaigns like Invisible Children’s do not mention that death and failure often lie along the road to permanent solutions, nor that the simplest “solutions” are often the worst. (In fairness, you try fitting that on a bracelet.) Instead, they shift the goal from complicated and messy efforts at political resolution to something more palatable and less controversial: ever more awareness.
By making it an end in and of itself, awareness stands in for, and maybe even displaces, specific solutions to these very complicated problems. Campaigns that focus on bracelets and social media absorb resources that could go toward more effective advocacy, and take up rhetorical space that could be used to develop more effective advocacy. How do we go from raising awareness about LRA violence to actually stopping it? What’s the mechanism of transforming YouTube page views into a mediated political settlement? For all the excitement around awareness as an end in itself, one could be forgiven for forming the impression that there might be a “Stop Atrocity” button blanketed in dust in the basement of the White House, awaiting the moment when the tide of awareness reaches the Oval Office. […]
Treating awareness as a goal in and of itself risks compassion fatigue — most people only have so much time and energy to devote to far-away causes — and ultimately squanders political momentum that could be used to push for effective solutions. Actually stopping atrocities would require sustained effort, as well as significant dedication of time and resources that the U.S. is, at the moment, ill-prepared and unwilling to allocate. It would also require a decision on whether we are willing to risk American lives in places where we have no obvious political or economic interests, and just how much money it is appropriate to spend on humanitarian crises overseas when 3 out of 10 children in our nation’s capital live at or below the poverty line. The genuine difficulty of those questions can’t be eased by sharing a YouTube video or putting up posters.
Read more. [Image: Glenna Gordon]
great stuff right here
Graphic columnist Steve Murray’s greatest fear
