[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• 'Aqoul has a whole slew of interesting posts up, from an exploration of the technical problems with Unicode-represented Arabic language on the Internet, to a roundup of the whole Turkey-Armenia-Kurdistan mess, to a commentary on how state-driven Iranian and Chinese investment in Iraq is taking off.


• Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing links to an English-language blog that explores Tropa de Elite, an extraordinarily popular Brazilian film about elite military police in Rio de Janerio who, among other things, happily torture and murder slum dwellers in large numbers.


• Edward Hugh's Bonoboland outlines the overheating of the Romanian economy, as emigration not only diminishes the size of the Romanian labour force but fuels a growing trade deficit via the emigrants' remittances.


• Centauri Dreams explores the risks to humanity if our electromagnetic broadcasts were detected by superior civilizations out there.


• Crooked Timber features a link to an interesting BBC deocumentary that, among other things, presents archival recordings of the speech patterns and accents of British and Irish POWs in German captivity in the time fo the First World War. Things change.


• Joel at Far Outliers links to an interesting post exploring the way in which the hostility of African Anglicans to gay rights could be traced to the late pre-colonial period, when sexual "deviance" acquired links to tyranny and Muslim imperialism as in the case of Buganda's King Mwanga II.


• Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros links to a disturbing article by Serbian writer Vladimir Arsenijevic at Sign and Sight, "Our negroes, our enemies". Arsenijevic writes about the way in which the traditional racist stereotypes of Albanians in the old SFRY have hardened under Milosevic into a eliminationalist and denialist hatred which has been spreading. "Almost a third of young people believe that the Chinese – the only relatively large group of foreigners in our country – should have their residence permits removed, even if they obey the law. Every third teenage boy and every second teenage girl is looking down on homosexuals and people infected with HIV."


• inuitmonster reports that the Georgian government is hoping to use an open-air Boney M concert in South Ossetia to bring independence-minded South Ossetians back into the fold.


• Speaking as someone who got my Chief Scout Award back in 1995, reluctant props to the city of Philadelphia for charging local Scout troops market rent for the use of city's facilities because of their continued ban on gay scouts


• Chriostopher Hitchens, génocidaire? According to an account feorag at the Pagan Prattle, Hitchens favours dealing with radical Islam by killing as many Muslims as it takes. Sigh.


• Finally, Strange Maps hosts a Finnish map of Europe if the Nazis won. The point of divergence seems to be around 1944, with an Italy divided on north-south lines but a successfully (re)conquered Soviet Union.