[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

[rfmcdpei]

• Daniel Drezner has to point out that the comparisons some Israelis like Netanyahu are making between Idi Amin's Uganda and modern Iran, with the implication that a successful strike against Iran's nuclear facilities will discredit Iran the way the Israeli commande attack at Entebbe did Amin is just, well, argh.
• Eastern Approaches is decidedly unimpressed with Romania's education system, and not only because it prompts many talented young people to leave their country to pursue their dreams.
• Far Outliers' Joel quotes from Christopher Clark's Iron Kingdom to describe how post-German unification Prussia's Kulturkampf against Roman Catholics--at least partly a campaign against potential separatists--ended up backfiring and consolidated German Catholics behind their faith.
• Geocurrents' Asya Pereltsvaig documents how the words sounding like, alternatively, "tea" and "chai" have diffused around the world into different languages following patterns of culture, history, and geography.
• Language Hat is intrigued by a New York Times story describing how a Spanish felt hat factory is kept afloat by orders from the couple hundred thousand Satmar Hasidim.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Erik Loomis commemorated on the 4th the creation in 1942 by the United States of the bracero guest workers program with Mexico, criticized for its poor treatment of the guest workers but in so doing preparing the ground for later Chicano rights movements.
• New APPS Blog's John Protevi starts with Plato's suggestion in the Republic that suitably capable women could belong to the class of protectors in his ideal polity to consider the complexely-gendered presentation of women athletes and the significant variations in performance within gender.
• Registan's guest blogger Navruz Nekbakhtshoev reports from Tajikistan's recently conflict-hit Badakhshan region, noting that the recent conflict wasn't an ethnic conflict mobilizing different groups on ethnoreligious lines but rather something more limited.
• Towleroad reports on Gaymercon, a proposed con for gay geeks that could conceivably take off.