[BRIEF NOTE] Elsewhere

[rfmcdonald]

• Abiola Lapite has two posts of particular interest to me. One notes that freedom of speech is still rather further from realization in Turkey than it should be in a country applying for membership in the European Union. The other discusses the furour in the United States provoked by the recent crossover advertisement of the NFL and Desperate Housewives, apparently provoked by the fact that, you know, a black guy sexually interested in a white woman is racist. Or something. It then segues into an interesting discussion on the racial composition of actors in heterosexual porn.


• Jay Manifold talks about Titan and why it was okay for for Newton to be a crackpot


• Jonathan Edelstein discusses the resuscitation of East African supranational federalism at length, while mentioning disappointing developments in the Ethiopian-Eritrean peace process and noting the existence of the South Pacific Federation Project blog.


• Claudia Muir at Halfway Down the Danube writes about the problems associated with Romania's new adoption laws, which practically prohibit adoptions of Romanian children by non-Romanians. Douglas, for his part, discovers statuary by a famous Yugoslav artist in the middle of Bucharest.


• On the subject of Yugoslavia, Michael Manske at The Glory of Carniola gives us mp3s of Yugoslavian patriotic anthems.


• Francis Strand compares the United States and Sweden.


• Logan Ferree talks about sex, in the American context.


• A Fistful of Euros has quite a lot of material on the ongoing Ukrainian situation. Pro-orange, in case you're wondering.


• Hurry Up Harry describes the activities of contemptible dictatorships past and present.


• And on livejournal, serod has a glorious rant about the outcome of the Greatest Canadian contest on CBC, while creases wonders what the proper term is for fundamentalists of the Left broadly defined and orlandobr has a post on the Ukrainian situation that's rather interesting even if I disagree with almost all of it.