Grey Wool Knickers They breathe

February 13, 2009

Links for February 10th through February 13th

These are my links for February 10th through February 13th:

May 26, 2008

More on the “General Strikes”—مزيد من الكلام عن الإضرابات العامة

Filed under: Masr —مصر — Tags: , , , — admin @ 9:49 pm

ّI just read a few of my friend Daïkha Dridi’s articles and they made me a bit depressed.  Mostly because, even after all this time with Arabic, I could largely read them in French, even with my 17-year-old high-school French that I never practiced with actual French-speakers.  I could skim her articles better, or maybe about the same, as most Arabic articles I come across.  That’s depressing.  Granted, I couldn’t produce a French sentence to save my life at this point, and much of my understanding is due to the number of cognates.

But, aside from this, I found the articles wonderful, and I wish I’d known about them earlier so as to refer to them, both for information I was lacking in my research on the “bread crisis” and to direct readers to her.  On the Facebook issue, I don’t disagree with her assessment, though I look at it from a different perspective.  Despite the fact that Facebook users mobilize the rhetoric and the more spectacular (I mean this in the derogatory sense) forms of radical left politics, I still think it is worthwhile to consider the April 6th Facebook movement on its own level.  From the radical left perspective, they certainly seem to be effecting a sort of détournement (to use her word, translated as “hijacking” by Google Translate) of the movement of militant labor in Egypt, but there is certainly more going on than this. (more…)

May 6, 2008

Facebookists for Regime Change—الفيسبوكيون لتغيير النظام

Filed under: Masr —مصر — Tags: , , , — admin @ 11:17 am
[singlepic=847,320,240,,center] Collection of Facebook banners by Sami Ben Gharbia/Global Voices Advocacy

This article was commissioned for Is Greater Than

When Mark Zuckerberg, a 19-year-old Harvard drop-out, launched Facebook in 2004, he could not have imagined that one day his project would become the primary organizing tool for a vast movement of anxious, frustrated Egyptian youth. (more…)

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