[BLOG] Some Monday links
Dec. 30th, 2013 11:55 pm- Charlie Stross wondered about the Accelerationist tendency among certain techno-libertarians, a desire--briefly--to make things worse so as to bring about the revolution.
- Daniel Drezner had much to say, about Chinese public discontent with North Korea, the necessary role of the United States as the global economic hegemon, unhelpful Israeli panic, and intellectual rot among pundits.
- At the Economist's Eastern Approaches, the close link between the late Lou Reed and Czech dissident Vaclav Havel was explored, as was the death of Poland's first post-Communist prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, homophobic vandalism in the middle of Warsaw, and contested democracy in the South Caucasus.
- Far Outliers covered the world, touching upon the black experience in 1930s North Dakota, the Wilsonian reset of American-Latin American relations, the tensions between Chinese and Japanese baseballers in Hawaii, the grisly state of Antarctic cuisine at the Soviet bases in mid-century, the chaotic nature of the Tsar's army in the First World War and the causes of the 1915 Singapore mutiny in pro-German Islamic solidarity.
- A Fistful of Euros talks of post-political German politics and traces the weakness of the Italian economy to low productivity associated with weaknesses in management.
- Geocurrents maps the Iranian nuclear program and the route from Moscow to St. Petersburg in the Russian provinces.
- GNXP's Razib Khan notes the genetic distinctiveness of French Canadians.
- Language Hat examines language among the Neanderthals and slang in Singapore.
- Language Log, meanwhile, tracked a mysterious Indic manuscript found in a Cairo geniza and the representation of Pekingese dialect.
- Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the sympathy of Nixon and Kissinger for a Pakistan that, in 1971, was comitting genocide in Bangladesh.
- New APPS Blog touched upon the parlous state of Greek universities, argues that there is nothing obscene about trying to explain the Holocaust, and considers the fate of wild dogs in Istanbul.
- Open the Future's Jamais Cascio is unimpressed by the separatisms of the rich on the causes of the rich.
- Personal Reflection's Paul Belshaw notes shifting political attitudes among young Australians, more left-wing in some ways than their elders.
- The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer explored Argentina's settlement with its debtors, the fact that the United States is the only global military power of note and will remain so for some time, and China's apolitical investment in the Caribbean.
- Peter Watts mourned his noble cat Chip. Would that all cats were so loved.
- Registan's writers covered a variety of issues, including the prospects for tourism in Kyrgyzstan, the complications in Central Asia of the Eurasian Union, the essential meaningless of Uzbekistan's Gulnara Karimova despite her being the daughter of the country's dictator, and Kazakhstan Fashion Week.
- Peter Rukavina explores his involvement in the Elections PEI website from 1995 and documents the reaction in 1882 to Oscar Wilde's visit to Charlottetown.
- Understanding Society's Daniel Little examines the prescriptions of a book published in the early 1980s (Beyond the Waste Land: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline by Sam Bowles, David Gordon and Tom Weisskopf) concerned with income stagnation and inequality. How has it aged?
- The Volokh Conspiracy covered topics as various as controversy over European Union policies towards settlements in different occupied countries, African discontent with the International Criminal Court, controversy over the law of genetically-engineered children, and a sober evaluation of the importance of Nelson Mandela.
- The greatly honoured late science fiction writer Frederik Pohl's blog The Way the Future Blogs will, I have learned, continue after its founders death as new unpublished material gets shared.
- Window on Eurasia covers all manner of post-Soviet issues, from the issues of Tajik immigrants in Moscow, Belarusian involvement in Russian frontier territories, Russian interest in a united Ukraine, and the inevitability of the death of the Aral Sea and the need to plan alternative outcomes to save the local ecology.
- Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell talks of the thought of British political scientist and radical Ralph Miliband.