Fragmentation in a Global Society as Seen through the Eyes of a Soccer Near-Great

The great paradox of the world today is that as individuals transfer more of their social, economic and cultural identities from sovereign states to a trans-statal community with increasingly permeable borders populated by para-statal institutions of public and (increasingly) private origins, the same individuals use the Internet, telecommunications and other contemporary media to coalesce in smaller, intimate, (often) largely virtual communities. Globalization and fragmentation go hand in hand.

No, that doesn’t sound right. In fact, it sounds awful. I think that I should be talking about the Evangelion community and neo-Nazi websites and Daily Kos and Rush Limbaugh and what have you. But I don’t have the time or energy to do it. So I’ll just link to the this article on Brazilian soccer players, which started me on this jag a week ago.

Afghan-Pakistani Jirga Shows the Power of the English Language

That looks like Arabic script in the photo in the Al Jazeera article on the Afghan-Pakistani conference held in Kabul. Otherwise, it's nothing but English on the banners. In fact, the news footage on BBC showed President Musharraf addressing the jirga in English, overdubbed with a local language. Another reminder that English has become the language of global discourse.

Of course the tools of globalization can be used to good effect by all. The English language is no exception, as the CNN-friendly spokesmen of the Taliban showed us to such effect, in the pre-9.11 days.

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Using those tools and creating them are two very different matters, as this physicist informs us on science and Islam.