Yesterday, the French National Assembly voted for a ban on “conspicuous religious symbols” in public schools by a majority of 494 in favour to 36 against. With the bill polling at 70% favourable among the French public, neither major political formation saw any gain in opposition.
Votes against came from several quarters. Alain Madelin [...]

I’ve noticed that, after the front page, the consistently most hit posting on AFOE is this one. Somehow, I doubt that my shining prose is the reason.
Also, we get quite a lot of traffic from people looking for sexy weman. Well, this is certainly the right place. :^)
What lessons should we be taking [...]

Once upon a time, there was a large, intellectually hegemonic, somewhat totalising ideology rooted in a heterodox school of economics. Its advocates proposed to make massive changes to the structure of society and claimed that only such a revolutionary realignment could alleviate the contradictions and failures of the existing order and save the world [...]

ARTE - a sort of Franco-German cooperative education channel - has been talking about the headscarf debate tonight. It’s a bit weird to watch. First, they showed a documentary about a school in Germany with a large Muslim community. Clearly, it was a relatively poor neighbourhood. The bulk of the documentary [...]

We like to keep on top of the latest in high tech here at AFOE. So, thanks to our crack AFOE research and development team, you can now create links directly to comments on this blog by using the URL you get by clinking on the comment’s data and time.
AFOE Labs appreciates [...]

When I first came to Belgium, one of the things that genuinely surprised me is how people seem to think Buffy, the Vampire Slayer is a children’s programme. Admittedly, the title doesn’t exactly say “socially relevant drama”, but I doubt that the show’s success on American TV would have been possible without the age [...]

Book Review:
The Tainted Source
by John Laughland
A while back, I discovered that my great-grandfather’s estate in Ukraine, Apanlee, figures in a novel which is something of a favourite among neo-Nazis and Aryan supremacists. This led me to a number of websites that I wouldn’t regularly have frequented, including the Zundelsite and Stormfront’s webpage. There [...]

I’ve moved it to pedantry.fistfulofeuros.net. I’m putting this note here because, unfortunately, you can’t get to that URL because DNS to it has been cut off for a few hours. This is the third time our ISP has done this in a week - propagate DNS for a subdomain and then cancel it [...]

Hi folks. I’ve been off-line a bit fighting with my landlord and trying to get my new apartment straightened out. I’ve moved as of the first of December. My new Internet connection is up and running, but my workstation hasn’t been able to talk to my monitor since the move. I [...]

Conrad Black - quite possibly the worst newspaper owner in the history of Canada - has agreed to resign from his chairmanship at Hollinger International, essentially ending his career as a political figure and opinion-maker. Hollinger, the owner of the Daily Telegraph, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post, used to own a number [...]