[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Crooked Timber's Maria Farrell writes about Ireland's Magdalen Laundries, institutions she sees as product of Irish misogyny and Roman Catholicism.


• Daniel Drezner took note of the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and argues that the main people arguing about a currency war are (among others) developing countries and a Bundesbank that doesn't want to lose power to the European Central Bank.


• Eastern Approaches points out that cohabitation in Georgia between President Saakashvili and the governing opposition is not going well.


• Far Outliers' Joel points out that the dialect of African-Americans in the Japanese translation of Gone With The Wind is that of the marginalized Tohoku region in northern Honshu, visited two years by disaster.


• Geocurrents maps the results of a referendum on conscription in Austria, noting that the largely rural state of Burgenland--once part of Hungary, and still a frontier region--voted strongly in favour.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Dave Brockington notes that the American states with the longest voting lines tend to have Republican governments and relatively large African-American and Latino populations.


• Progressived Download's John Farrell points out that private labs offering adult stem cell treatments very often inflict terrible, novel illnesses on their clients.
  
• Registan's Mitchell Polman points out that Central Asia is hardly likely to prosper if foreign influence is seen as a zero-sum game. All kinds of powers need to take part.


• Window on Eurasia quotes from a Russian Eurasianist thinker, Rustem Vakhitov, who argues that separatist tendencies in Russia overall are strongest in Russian regions. Why single out the ethnic republics and risk triggering something?


• Zero Geography's Mark Graham maps Twitter usage in different African cities.