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
When I came to the center yesterday, it was clear that I had rolled in via Vélib’. “Be careful tomorrow with Vélib’,” one instructor warned me, because today’s general strike will make the bicycles extremely valuable. With at least the RER B scheduled to be out of commission, it’s entirely possible that I would have [...]
Continue reading about Are grass’s roots that much more impressive than trees’?
When the Awl complains that this has been a miserable American summer, they’re mostly right, but it hasn’t been exactly a great summer in France, either. Sarkozy has decided to kick off the 2012 presidential campaign extra early by re-burnishing his xenophobic credentials, angling to get the support of the far-right Front National types–the very [...]
Continue reading about Mechanical reproduction of la manif and the Tea Party
This xkcd comic from Monday has been forwarded around a bit. My own reaction was heavily influenced by @sepoy’s comment that maybe JFK was talking about the “global south (po folk)” avant la lettre. I think it’s funny that JFK could have merged the idea of the “Global South” with the literal southern hemisphere. Randall [...]
Yoann Gourcuff is blaming the vuvuzelas for France’s uninspired play on Friday night in Cape Town. The players couldn’t hear each other on the field, he whined, and they had to rely on gestures. Patrice Évra added that the players can’t sleep because the vuvuzelas start going off at 6am every morning.1 Twitter has been [...]
Continue reading about Imperialist n00bs: quit complaining about the vuvuzelas
[A lot of the below is meandering toward what I suspect is a rather obvious conclusion to hardened veterans of the digital humanities. Since I'm not one of those, my own shoes needed to walk the mile. Of what transpires below, what might be new is, quickly, how while there is a call for digital [...]
Continue reading about Image vs. Text (also quant. vs. qual.)
[UPDATE: Added video links] As the iPhone app beside this paragraph indicates, it was kind of a big day for the Parti socialiste in France, who managed to win control of 21 of 22 regional councils in metropolitan France. Only Alsace squeaked by with a UMP majority, and overseas, the UMP won control of the [...]
Everyone in the US knows that the more removed an election is from a presidential election, with emergency special elections inhabiting the limit point away, the more turnout will be depressed. Furthermore, everyone in the US knows, since the Christian Coalition rode this pony into power, that the lower turnout is, the fewer votes you [...]
