For a while now I’ve had a private theory about the way our world used to work. It goes like this: although communism may have been bad for the people of Russia (and of the Soviet satellite states), it did a useful job in keeping the west honest through negative example. Free speech? Yes, we [...]

The Russian-Georgian war should remind everyone of a very important point regarding NATO and the European Union. Specifically, just as John Lewis Gaddis said about the Cold War, reassurance was as important as deterrence, and this made self-deterrence very important indeed.
NATO members benefited from a common deterrent towards the Soviet Union, but also from reassurance [...]

Can’t find any pictures yet, but I’ve seen blogs of people coming up from Prague just to see him. That’s about a five-hour trip each way by train (no ICE connection yet). Expectations on the radio this morning were that the event would be huge.
Wish I could be there, but we’re getting packed up to [...]

An interesting post at Language Log, about the position of minority languages/dialects in France. Traditionally, France before the Revolution was more of a geographical expression than a state in the modern sense, to adapt the famous phrase about pre-Bismarckian Germany. Highly diverse regions, with little in common except allegiance to a distant Parisian king; the [...]

That gaggle of elite geeks who have been arguing against the horrible possibilities an internetworked world offers to fraudsters and state bullies for years have often said that one day, there’ll be a horrible crunch. A disastrous moment of truth. As Chernobyl finished the reputation of nuclear power for 20 years, the Privacy Chernobyl will [...]

Another Euro 2008 open thread but one in which we feel compelled to note how tonight’s match was an insight to the central role of television in the experience — as evidenced by how flat things went (at least where I was watching) when the global TV feed apparently collapsed for significant portions of the [...]

Can either host score in their opener? Can the Germans live up to their high expectations? Is it a replay of Slavic Europe vs Germanic Europe, or is it just a game with a ball?
All this and more in Sunday’s games…

The German newspaper whose website could be better organised has a very good article about the Gurtel, Vienna’s other great boulevard, once described as the proletarian Ringstrasse. I never knew this, though:
Wobei auf dem Gürtel früher Linksverkehr herrschte, wie in England. Siegfried Tschmul, ein Wiener Jude, erinnert sich gut daran. Als er 1938, nachdem die [...]

The Georgians may have lost two more UAVs in the escalating crisis between them, Abkhazia, and Russia (in so far as the latter two are distinct). At least, the Abkhaz side is claiming that their “anti-aircraft forces” shot down two drones, presumably Georgian ones; the Georgians deny it, which is interesting because they were keen [...]

This post reminded me a lot of Vienna University in 2001-2002; I was there as a SOCRATES student, still actually a member of the Labour Party, while the strange times we live in began. I also first encountered the word “blog” around about then, and indeed visited the Blogger front page, but for some reason [...]