I don’t have a lot of time this week for more fake analysis, but the second round of parliamentary elections is over, and the Seimas will be led by a centre-right coalition under Andrius Kubilius for the first time in almost a decade. It strikes me as obviously odd to, in wanting “change,” to vote [...]
Continue reading about Welcome to the centre-right Lithuania
The first round of the Seimas elections are done, and while it is too early to figure out precisely what the Seimas will look like for the next four years, it might be useful to the readership to understand what has already happened and who did what. I’m a dilettante when it comes to pretty [...]
Lietuviams.com features an interview today with Ainė Ramonaitė, one of the people behind manobalsas.lt, a website designed to help inform Lithuanian voters about how they should vote. This sort of site is especially useful in a multi-party parliamentary system like the one in Lithuania. Such informative sites tend to be rather useless in a binary [...]
Izvestia has thrown together a map of the four different kinds of attitudes towards Russia EU nations display, from Russophobia to Russophilia. I learned about the map from this article on alfa, and have reproduced the map here. You can click on the image to get a bigger version, and the original is, for now, [...]
Everything I know about military tactics I learned from playing Civ4. In other words, I don’t know much at all about military tactics. But there are two situations that always annoy me when playing the game that I try to avoid. The first situation is the small attack met with large counterattack. This is, in [...]
In my earlier post on the conflict over South Ossetia, Darius wrote back with a comment, the response to which will be this post. My initial question was regarding the specifically “Lithuanian” interest in supporting Georgia, but Darius responded that the pro-Georgian position is hardly surprising—in fact, it is the default, Western, mainstream position (especially [...]
[UPDATE: I’ve cleaned up this post for style and have added some links, now that I am in front of my own computer in Brussels.] I first heard of the incidents in the Caucasus (South Ossetian provocation leading to Georgian shelling leading to Russian response, which has included crossing into Georgia proper) while hidden in [...]
Well, it’s a good thing I decided to wait until after Šokių šventė to weigh in on the Seimas’s passing a nearly certainly unconstitutional dual citizenship law, since President Valdas Adamkus just vetoed it. About the veto I do not have much to say, since the article I read is only filled with Regina Narušienės [...]
The beforementioned response from PLB to the question of citizenship remains a complete mystery to me. I eagerly want to play a game of “find the subtext” in pulling apart the various moves in Narušienė’s statement, but the subtext that emerges is so grotesque and offensive, that I do it only hoping, sincerely, that I [...]
Continue reading about Dual citizenship without amending the Constitution
As I mentioned in the last post, a more detailed interview with me (and a neat photo!) appeared in lietuviams.com on Monday. It was since picked up by delfi and alfa, and my comment about envisioning Vilnius as a Disney World Fantasyland even ended up being the “dienos citata” at delfi. So that’s that. So [...]
Continue reading about lietuviams.com interview (on delfi and alfa, too)