Threesome

• Fafblog!'s Medium Lobster on Libya:

  And so it is that the United States is fighting to free the Libyan people from the Libyan people by killing the Libyan people. The situation is fairly straightforward, after all - Libya faces a humanitarian crisis, and the only way to address a humanitarian crisis is to bomb it with hundreds of cruise missiles. I'm told that the Red Cross still delivers bottled water and medical supplies by duct-taping them to the nose cone of an outgoing Tomahawk. More importantly, the Libyan people are oppressed by a bloodthirsty dictator - a dictator who kills his own people - and the least we can do is kill those people ourselves. How, I ask, can we stand idly by and allow people to be slaughtered by a ruthless tyrant when we could be slaughtering them instead?

• Young male feminist on matching his actions to his ideals:

  I took a feminist-political-theory class my junior year and was introduced to feminist writers and activists of all different stripes. For an uninitiated 20-year-old, it was rather uncomfortable sitting through readings of The Vagina Monologues, but in hindsight I'm grateful. It was challenging and enlightening, but also frustrating and disheartening, to come to the realization that I had been complicit in the oppression of women simply because I was unaware.
  
  Years later, I still have a lot of changing to do. See, it's one thing for me to admonish someone like Chris Brown for violence against women, but it's completely different to analyze my own shortcomings

• Republic of T's Terrance, with pictures, on the de-industrialization of Detroit:

  But that’s not what’s happened with Detroit. Nor is this the story of some lost civilization that left only its architecture behind to help us determine just what did it in. We’re not talking about the Nazca Lines, the Lost City of Atlantis, the lost colony.
  
  Ever since I was a child, I’ve had an affinity for abandoned places. During trips to visit my grandparents, I would pass the time looking at the kudzu-covered shacks, the abandoned storefronts, and old, empty houses along the Georgia highways. I’d wonder about the people who lived or worked in those places, what stories they held, and make up stories about how they came to be abandoned.
  
  But when I look at the pictures of Detroit’s ruins, I don’t have to wonder or make up the story of what happened. Neither should anyone else.

If the archaelogists need cheat sheets, though...