[LINK] Some Friday Links

[rfmcdonald]

• 'Aqoul's Shaheen touches on the famous case of a Muslim woman in France who was divorced because she wasn't a virgin and points out that the divorce was gramted on the well-established grounds of marrying under false pretenses. Worry might instead be profitably directed towards the misogyny inherent in the assumption that women must be virgins to be moral.


• blogTo has easily convinced me of my need to go to Mars at the Ontario Science Centre. Now,.


• Castrovalva argues that it makes more sense to see the Communism of Brecht as not akin to (say) the Naziism of Riefenstahl but rather as the relatively incidental fascism of France's Céline?


• Centauri Dreams lets us know that the Milky Way Galaxy might have only two arms instead of the expected four, and that quark stars might be exploding throughout.


• Far Outliers' Joel critiques Anne Applebaum's general assault upon blogs and Wikipedia, by asking whether the mainstream media--like, say, The New Republic that published Applebaum's article--is really that much more accurate and unbiased, or more accurate and unbiased at all.


• Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros blogs about a possible solution to the Moldova-Transnistria standoff, while Will at The Dragon's Tales touches upon the tricky situation of Abkhazia and Russia and Georgia.


• Gideon Rachmann worries that Obama might not win.


• Via Joe.My.God comes the video "Dads, I'm Straight".


• Language Hat considers obscenities in the multilingual Soviet army, with special emphasis on Chechens faced with the Russian language.
  
• Spacing.ca argues that the TTC shouldn't be concerned with drunk or drugged drivers, but rather with racist and otherwise impolite booth attendants.


• Strange Maps has an abundance of goodness, including a map of United Germanic States covering most of Europe in alliance wit Britain and the United States, a map of the lost rivers of London, and a lunatic plan by a long-forgotten American on what the world should look like after the Second World War.


• John Reilly at The Long View has a fascinating post about the relationships of empire to culture and of both to the longue durée and the future of human civilization. I still have to think on it.