My concern trollish ways got the better of me. In my previous post, on Mélenchon as a pedagogue, I expressed worry that he was serving to bring workers over from the Front national to the Front de gauche only to later have troops available to follow Mélenchon into pushing for a Hollande victory over Sarkozy [...]
This early February speech, by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the presidential candidate for the Front de gauche, a left-wing coalition in France, has been helpfully subtitled in English: Jean-Luc Mélenchon Discours de Villeurbanne Eng… par kominaaa Jean-Luc Mélenchon Discours de Villeurbanne Eng… par kominaaa If you only have time for one part of the speech, I recommend [...]
From the headline, “Eastern Europe’s Hitler nostalgia,” Michael Goldfarb’s cross-posted article in Globalpost and Salon (where I read it) feels like link bait. And maybe flame/trollbait. The subhead promises an article about “pro-Nazi sentiment” in “Lithuania and Latvia.” What follows is an article dispatched from, and largely about, Poland.1 It’s easy to say about an [...]
I was in New York this weekend, and I decided to spend part of Friday afternoon at Zuccotti Park. I had been told that there was nothing going on there, so I expected to see ruins of a political movement in tatters, the kind of romantic fantasy of an unexperienced nostalgia that has yielded us, [...]
A journalist friend once said that he’d never write a certain airline’s name “airBaltic,” because he refused to do their brand management for them. I can’t remember if he chose to call them “Airbaltic,” “AirBaltic,” or “Air Baltic” instead, but the lowercase initial was beyond the pale. In English, of course, proper names are always [...]
Continue reading about Free advertising and trademarked names
As far as I can tell, there are three men named Corentin (it’s a Breton name) who are memorialized in some way in (slightly greater) Paris: Corentin Cariou, Corentin Celton, and Corentin Cloarec. Cariou has a métro station and street named after him. Celton, a métro station and hospital. And Cloarec, a street. Corentin Cariou [...]
I may also mention that the book was written… where the libraries are not well equipped for European studies… Hence it is possible and even probable that I overlooked things which I ought to have considered and that I occasionally assert something which modern research has disproved or modified… On the other hand it is [...]
Continue reading about Erich Auerbach on scholarship in the post-Library.nu era
Coworkers today, knowing of my deep interest in football supporter culture, asked me what I thought of what happened in Egypt yesterday, where 70+ people were killed in violence in Port Said after a match in which al-Masri defeated visitors al-Ahly 3–1. I meekly responded that the football pitch is often a proxy for the [...]
Continue reading about Organization and tactics: when football isn’t just a game
It’s tough to read through the sneering contempt shown by the journalist, but lrytas.lt is reporting that Algirdas Paleckis was found innocent of denying Soviet atrocities. The court found that Paleckis’s comments were an opinion, and therefore protected. Then the journalist, in a non sequitur, reminds us of who Paleckis’s grandfather was. I’ve already covered [...]
Continue reading about Paleckis found innocent in something resembling a victory for free speech
[I expanded and updated this on 21 December 2011, to organize the argument better and provide more background.] News has broken over the past week about the uncertain fate of Algirdas Paleckis, the head of the Socialist People’s Front, a party in Lithuania. Speaking on the radio in November of last year, he talked about [...]
Continue reading about Lithuanian speech laws can claim first scalp