Picking The Wrong #ewaste "Underdogs" Part I

Happy 4th of July (from France).  Everyone here is talking about "underdogs" - though without a solid French translation. Different translations convey different assumptions.  Opprime is "oppressed", perdants is "losers". Sous-estime is "underestimated" (which works after the unexpected victory, in hindsight).

When Iceland beat England in the Euro Cup, and Wales beat Belgium, it was a surprise.  When Leicester City - facing elimination from the Premier League a year earlier - won the entire British Isles championship, the French sportscaster seemed to be missing a handle for the story.

Could 2016 be the Year of the Underdog?   One long-running theme of this Good Point: Ethical E-Waste Blog is our critical look at how #photojournalism can create, leverage, or ignore underdogs.  The audience of mankind is highly evolved to nurture the young and oppressed (what I call the Steve Pinker "nurture" instinct), which causes us to support scrappy underdogs vs. big corporations. Mass media is not an umpire - it's a player in the game.  Media controls who's perceived as worthy of nurture, and who's perceived as "imperialist" or "bully".  We nurture the oppressed, we root for the underdogs.  And when it's an obscure, technical, or foreign story, we depend on the media to tell us who the bullys and who the underdogs are.

Here's a kind of derivative take.  Mass media can create a "loser" who "wins" the underdog blessing. Being an underdog is a blessing of "moral currency". We see this in everyday society, people exaggerating their "rags to riches" history, the tourists' propensity to validate their "close encounter" with poverty.  And I need of course little excuse to repost the greatest comedic clip of all time, BBC's "The Four Yorkshiremen" sketch (pre-Monty Python's "Finally 1948" show).



So on July 4, Superpower USA reflects back on the scrappy 1776 Minutemen who overcame the King of England, the United Kingdom's rule.  Like Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo and Princess Leiah, a handful of colonies "against all odds" threw off the yoke of the 1700's greatest superpower, Great Britain.  Iceland, Bernie Sanders, Wales, Leicester City, and George Washington, the lovable underdogs.

The underdog card...

Agbogbloshie Ghana: Eden & Hell Ain't What it Used to Be

The Economist Babbage Blog and recent Guardian pieces, rerunning the "A Place Called Away" portrait of Ghana Electronics recycling are kinda wow, kinda 2008.

Any true student of urban studies know that these cities are changing day by day.

I was sticking my neck out in 2010, telling folks that the Guardian Newspaper photos of 2 tons of white monitors in Agbobloshie did not prove the thesis that people like Joe Benson were "organized crime" for exporting 500 tons of black hotel televisions.  The photos at Agbogbloshie (@Guardian "Sodom and Gomorrah", another exotic biblical reference) practically disprove the allegation on their own.  1990s waste outside an African city does not mean that 2000s product purchased in Essex London is headed for the same place.

This is about People and Geography, not about Stuff.  There is no "Hell" on any geography map, and there is no "Eden",  and there is no place called "Away".   People who describe emerging markets with words like "Hell" and "Eden" have a Victorian Economist view of the world.

Or maybe it's more the Mary Poppins timeline.  Saving Mary Poppins and SavingAfrica have a certain theme in common.



Below are 4 Key "World Travellers" of 2014 who are making the great E-Waste Hoax go away.  Not with a Bang nor a whimper, but with a Tweet.

How "Dual Citizenship" (or Multi-Citizenship) Works

We used to hear, 30 or 40 years ago, that the USA did not allow dual citizenship.  Or that the USA didn't used to allow it, but now it does.

Here is the deal.   Who decides who has citizenship in France?  France does.  Who decides whether someone is granted citizenship in Botswana?   Botswana.

If I'm the government of Guacamolepeonda, and I declare that all people with red hair are citizens without need of a passport or paperwork, that red haired people setting foot on our soil are citizens... the USA has nothing to say.

As explained by the US Department of State website:

U.S. law does not mention dual nationality or require a person to choose one citizenship or another. Also, a person who is automatically granted another citizenship does not risk losing U.S. citizenship. 

If a red headed American sets foot in Guacamolepeonda, perhaps by accident, he/she is at that moment a legal citizen of Guacamolepeonda under out Guacamolepeonda constitution.  You have the right of due process in the USA to defend the revocation of your citizenship.  So you are, no matter what, a dual citizen for the amount of time the USA revokes your citizenship.