[LINK] Randy Milholland's answer to Women in Refrigerators

The Women in Refrigerators argument is described at Wikipedia; the Milholland comic at Something Positive is here. The comments at james_nicoll's thread are worth reading.

(Yes, it's the right link now--thanks mindstalk.)

[LINK] Some Friday links

• Amused Cynicism reports that the modern Egyptian government wants to extend copyright protection to ancient Egyptian cultural artifacts, some of them five thousand years old and more. Practicality comes to mind as a major objection to this new policy.


• 'Aqoul has an open comments thread on Benazir Bhutto's assassination, and another on the way in which the American occupation authority has finally decided to patronize local tribal sheikhs.


• Boing Boing reports on the recent brawl between Armenian and Greek Orthodox priests during clean-up at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.


• Bonoboland's Edward Hugh reports that wage and price inflation in Russia is growing, hinting at some potential for breakdown ahead.


• Charlie Stross blogs his Christmas wishes.


• Crooked Timber has an open comments thread on the death of Benazir Bhutto.


• False Positive's Christmas cookies look delicious.
  
• Joel at Far Outliers links to an interesting post about the Abayudaya, Uganda's indigenous Jews.


• Ian at Hunting Monsters suggests that some Israelis, at least, might be moving towards some sort of pragmatic accomodation with Hamas-run Gaza.


• Joe. My. God links to recent reports that, in 1992, Ron Paul wrote a rather racist essay in which he claimed that 95% of Africa--Americans in Washington D.C. were criminals. (Paul says that a ghostwriter wrote it..)


• Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman has an interesting essay about the bad side-effects of Pakistan's post-independence policy of privileging the Urdu language over all others.


• I'm not sure whether this thread debating the claim that the spread of English and inter-jurisdiction tax competition is creating a single European Union labour market is entirely crazy.


• Peteris Cedrins' Marginalia writes, in the wake of Latvia's accession to the Schengen zone and the signing of a border territory ratifying Russian annexations of once-Latvian territories, about his frontier-crossing experiences in that Baltic state.


• The Pagan Prattle reports that radical British parliamentarian George Galloway has outed himself as a creationist.


• Finally, Strange Maps hosts a map of the Kiribati island of Kiritimati, also known in English as Christmas island,
  

[BRIEF NOTE] Belgium's Germanophones

Belgian's electoral crisis has been solved for now with a new government, though the underlying tensions between the Netherlandophone Flemish and Francophones in Wallonia seems set to explode into confrontation sooner or later. Perhaps it will be over Francophone migration to Brussels' nominally Netherlandophone suburbs, or it might be that Miss Belgum's inability to speak Dutch will be the trigger.. One group of Belgians most notable for its absence from the past year's crisis are the seventy thousand or so Germanophones of Belgium, concentrated in a few territories in eastern Belgium and described--as in Reuters' November ""Achtung?" -- Belgium's German-speakers pipe up" and Le Monde's more recent "Les germanophones, des Belges heureux" ("The Germanophones, the happy Belgians")--as a satisfied minority perplexed by its fate in the case of a Belgian breakup. Says Reuters:

At a parade in the mostly German-speaking town of Eupen on November 11 to honor Saint Martin, the patron of generosity who shared his coat with a beggar, the carnival mood was tinged with concern and rare shows of patriotism.

As children and brass bands paraded towards a giant bonfire in one of the main town squares, Belgian flags were -- unusually -- displayed on windows, and painted on some people's cheeks.

"It's always about the Dutch and the French-speaking communities and I'm a little disappointed that they don't even talk about us," said Henri Sparla, a senior citizen.

To date the German-speaking community -- most of whom are tucked into the east of the French-speaking region of Wallonia -- has been served well by Belgium's political system of compromises between 6.5 million Dutch-speakers and 4 million francophones.

The kingdom recognizes German as one of its three official languages, the community has its own parliament and education system, and the European Union has described Belgium's German-speakers as one of Europe's most pampered minorities.

[. . .]

"What makes Belgium is that we speak different languages," said Katerin Bauer, a 24 year-old scout leader. "The Flemish don't consider themselves Dutch, the French-speaking don't consider themselves as French and we are not German."

As children followed tradition to walk through the streets singing songs and carrying paper lanterns, some of the German-speaking adults wondered what they would do if Belgium were no more.

"I wouldn't know where I belong anymore. I speak German and live in Wallonia, where shall I go to? To France, Germany, Luxembourg? I would lose my attachment to what I call home," said father Michael Kempen as his children gathered around the traditional bonfire.

Some German dialect speakers were included on the wrong side of the Germanic-Romance language frontier within the Belgian provinces of Luxembourg and Limburg in 1839, but most of Belgium's Germanophones are live in Eupen-Malmedy. Formerly a territory of Prussia's Rhine Province, after the First World War Eupen-Malmedy was ceded to Belgium and, apart from an interlude in 1940-1945, has remained Belgian ever since. After a period of Belgian repression, from the 1950s onwards Belgian Germanophones eventually came to enjoy the same government policies of cultural decentralization and self-rule as Belgium's two dominant language groups. The modern institutionalized German-speaking community of Belgium seems to have succeeded in preserving the German language in Belgium, as described in Mercator's analysis of that language's position.

What would happen to this minority in the event of Belgium exploding, I wonder? The Le Monde article seems to suggest that independence might be the least unpopular choice, given a reluctance to join Germany and the potential unattractiveness of a continued alignment with an independent Wallonia. The idea of Eupen-Malmedy becoming a European Union member-state does have a certain Grand Fenwick appeal to it, but ...

[BRIEF NOTE] Bhutto and Pakistan

Several people have referred to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as a historic event, the sort of shock that will be singled out as a critical event by writers of school textbooks and participants in alternate-history discussions. Easily granted that she was hardly a revolutionary--Bhutto was deeply embedded in Pakistan's feudal power structures, and the allegations of corruption aren't reassuring--she might well have been the last scion of the ancien régime who could have been at least imagined to do something.

Now, she's dead. The ability of the different factions of the ancien régime to govern--the political parties, the state, the military--seems to be in question. After Bhutto, the deluge? I leave it to you to imagine who the Jacobins might be.