LRB | Mahmood Mamdani : The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency. The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur now.
What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics – a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? The insurgency and counter-insurgency in Darfur began in 2003. GRITtv: Vandana Shiva: Understanding the Corporate Takeover - GRITtv with Laura Flanders - blip.tv. "Intellectual property" is a silly euphemism | Technology.
"Intellectual property" is one of those ideologically loaded terms that can cause an argument just by being uttered. The term wasn't in widespread use until the 1960s, when it was adopted by the World Intellectual Property Organization, a trade body that later attained exalted status as a UN agency. WIPO's case for using the term is easy to understand: people who've "had their property stolen" are a lot more sympathetic in the public imagination than "industrial entities who've had the contours of their regulatory monopolies violated", the latter being the more common way of talking about infringement until the ascendancy of "intellectual property" as a term of art.
Does it matter what we call it? Property, after all, is a useful, well-understood concept in law and custom, the kind of thing that a punter can get his head around without too much thinking. Out of control But it is also dissimilar from property in equally important ways. Most of all, it is not inherently "exclusive". Justice with Michael Sandel - Home. Justice with Michael Sandel