The last few days, finally on a short holiday in Istria (and my dear are these Croatians afraid to enter the EU on July 1!), I’ve been trying to think what to write about, or at least, where to start on reporting about the current Albanian pre-election situation. A small recap: about two weeks [...]
On Sunday I woke up around 11 am to the sound of the nationalist song “Xhamadani vija vija” (YouTube terror). Somebody was playing it loudly on a car stereo or maybe the wind brought it to my window from Skënderbeg Square where nationalist party Aleanca KuqeZi was holding their “peaceful” rally “against” Berisha. I [...]
As promised an update on the independence day craze that is currently spreading throughout the capital, the country, and neighboring countries such as Kosovë. Let’s start with the fate of the 1000 sheep and 1000 lambs that were supposed to be slaughtered for the 28th. Although announced by the Prime Minister’s office, both Municipality [...]
The 50th post! Now that numerical perfection should hold the promise of some rhetorical fireworks. Still half-jetlagged and waking up at 11 instead of my customary 8, I have only just returned from the US to find myself a paralyzed witness to the proceedings of Gay Pride Week in Belgrade. My initial ideas about [...]
For two months Spain’s coal miners have been on strike; they famously marched on Madrid to take their protest directly to the conservative government; more recently they have been subjected to brutal police repression, fighting back with home-made rockets and dynamite. Their dispute hinges, as do all politics at the moment, on austerity measures. The [...]
In about forty-five minutes I will walk out my door. Ten minutes after that, I will attend my local Republican Party Caucus in the gym of my old high school. My neighborhood, it’s fair to say, is democratic. I think there is a Romney supporter up the street, but they posted no yard sign this [...]
Your own, personal, antichrist. To stand outside of the human condition forwards the imperative of ordo as to obtain confusio “In radical fashion, he sweeps away the traditional image: this image, he insists, must be understood allegorically, not in some literal historical way. What the ‘antichrist’ means is grasped philologically everyone who is Christo [...]
In the last two posts (1,2) we briefly considered what happened in the run-up to, and during Britain’s mass public sector strikes a little over a week ago on 30th November 2011 (so-called N30). We fitted it into a longer running series of agitations, beginning with the student movements this time last year, the major [...]
On 29th November I spoke to an ambulance driver (who wished not to be named) at a major urban hospital. “What are you lot on about?” He approached me, pointing to the copies of the newspaper which I was distributing. “The public sector strike tomorrow, and the pensions the politicians are pulling in” I [...]
There are two newspapers in the UK to read if you’re after the grubby materiality of what’s going on in the country: Fleet Street and the City of London’s mainstay, the Financial Times, and the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Morning Star. The Economist is no longer “where the ruling classes chat amongst themselves” as [...]