Monday, November 25, 2002
I noticed in Jay Nordlinger's column in NRO that Republican ex-football star Steve Largent got beat by the Democratic candidate for Governor of Oklahoma largely because Largent was in favor of a proposed ban on cock fighting. As Nordlinger said, "Cock fighting! In America! In 2002!" Well, the pro-cock fighting lobby seems to be pretty powerful in Oklahoma. I wonder if there's a fish-dynamiting or stop sign-shooting lobby; I guarantee you there's a snake-handlers' organization of some kind. And then these foreigners accuse us of having no respect for rural tradition. Hit's aggravatin', Ah kin shore tell ya.
The Vanguardia instituted a new policy a few months ago. The paper, which is fun to read because of its many local quirks though often maddening, has been around since 1881 in the hands of the same family. Anyway, they started printing letters to the editor in Catalan. Before, even if you had written your letter in Catalan, they printed it in Spanish, I suppose because they'd always done that way. The following letter from today's Vangua breaks a trend. For about the last eight consecutive days they'd published at least one thing that was horribly anti-American. Today there's no Yankee-bashing; today it's the Brits' turn. The interesting thing about this Brit-bashing letter is that it's written in Catalan. Anyone who would use Catalan to write to a publication that's 99% in Spanish must be a pretty serious Catalan nationalist; that person is using Catalan out of context and you only do that if you want to make a point. But this letter upholds Spanish claims regarding Gibraltar, which is really weird for a Catalan nationalist, since being pro-Catalanist automatically implies being anti-Spain around here and often implies being either a Francophile, a Germanophile, or an Anglophile. I'm confused. I think the letter-writer is, too. Here goes. It's in italics.
After the English betrayal of Catalonia (1714), as payment for their services, Castile ceded them the occupation of Gibraltar so that they could defend the Strait with their powerful Navy as long as they considered it necessary, and then return it without transferring it to a third party.
This was confirmed in the Treaty of Utrecht, in which it was specified that Gibraltar could only be occupied by the British Army and Navy and that no civilian could reside there. Therefore, the current inhabitants are squatters with no right to self-determination or anything else. And even less so the Moroccans, the Indians, et cetera, who the British brought there when Franco closed the frontier in response to Churchill's new betrayal; he had promised that if granted a little more Spanish territory to build an airport, when the war against Nazism ended, they would return the Rock to Spain, but they forgot about it. And now Spanish airplanes are not even allowed to land there, while they illegally overfly Spanish territory whenever they feel like it.
In the end, Gibraltar has become a cave of Ali Baba, where, without paying taxes to anyone, every souvenir stand gives out the address to open up hundreds or thousands of fictitious companies that launder money and traffic in drugs and then invest the enormous profits in land all over the Costa del Sol.
If the British had any common decency (vergonya, literally "shame"), something they've never had, they wouldn't have a colony within a European state like theirs which is even in NATO.
JOSEP-ANTON GELI PUYOL
Platja d'Aro
Note the entirely made-up history--France was Spain's ("Castile's") ally in the war that ended in 1714, not England; the war ended with the French royal house, the Bourbons, on the throne of Spain. The English had given some support to the Catalans, many of whom opposed the Bourbons, but when the general war ended in 1713, a peace treaty was signed at Utrecht, England got Gibraltar (among other things) as a victorious power, and the Catalans obstinately held out. The British washed their hands and the Catalans got stomped. Some betrayal. And I seriously doubt Churchill promised Franco anything other than a swift kick in the ass if he didn't do as told, since after it became obvious in 1943 that the Nazis were going to lose Franco was hanging by a thread. The Allies seriously discussed ousting Franco as a consequence of World War II. Also note the conspiracy theory about Gibraltar as an important nexus of cash and illegality, the ridiculous resentment at the English "illegally overflying" Spanish territory, the antidemocratic assertion that those who live in Gibraltar have no rights, the racist-sounding statement that "Moroccans and Indians" have even fewer than no rights, the persnickety legalism about strict adherence to insignificant clauses of a 1713 treaty, the intemperate insult about the British lack of vergonya, and the nationalist fury behind the whole letter. This guy is angry because Britain has dissed Spain by not giving up Gibraltar when politely requested to, so he hates the entire British people, in his eyes just a bunch of poca-vergonyas and hijos de la Gran Bretaña.
In Spanish, hijo de la gran puta means, literally, "son of the great whore" and figuratively "motherfucking son-of-a-bitch". Hijo de la Gran Bretaña is obviously a play on this. That's what they call you guys around here, Des. Do you like it?
After the English betrayal of Catalonia (1714), as payment for their services, Castile ceded them the occupation of Gibraltar so that they could defend the Strait with their powerful Navy as long as they considered it necessary, and then return it without transferring it to a third party.
This was confirmed in the Treaty of Utrecht, in which it was specified that Gibraltar could only be occupied by the British Army and Navy and that no civilian could reside there. Therefore, the current inhabitants are squatters with no right to self-determination or anything else. And even less so the Moroccans, the Indians, et cetera, who the British brought there when Franco closed the frontier in response to Churchill's new betrayal; he had promised that if granted a little more Spanish territory to build an airport, when the war against Nazism ended, they would return the Rock to Spain, but they forgot about it. And now Spanish airplanes are not even allowed to land there, while they illegally overfly Spanish territory whenever they feel like it.
In the end, Gibraltar has become a cave of Ali Baba, where, without paying taxes to anyone, every souvenir stand gives out the address to open up hundreds or thousands of fictitious companies that launder money and traffic in drugs and then invest the enormous profits in land all over the Costa del Sol.
If the British had any common decency (vergonya, literally "shame"), something they've never had, they wouldn't have a colony within a European state like theirs which is even in NATO.
JOSEP-ANTON GELI PUYOL
Platja d'Aro
Note the entirely made-up history--France was Spain's ("Castile's") ally in the war that ended in 1714, not England; the war ended with the French royal house, the Bourbons, on the throne of Spain. The English had given some support to the Catalans, many of whom opposed the Bourbons, but when the general war ended in 1713, a peace treaty was signed at Utrecht, England got Gibraltar (among other things) as a victorious power, and the Catalans obstinately held out. The British washed their hands and the Catalans got stomped. Some betrayal. And I seriously doubt Churchill promised Franco anything other than a swift kick in the ass if he didn't do as told, since after it became obvious in 1943 that the Nazis were going to lose Franco was hanging by a thread. The Allies seriously discussed ousting Franco as a consequence of World War II. Also note the conspiracy theory about Gibraltar as an important nexus of cash and illegality, the ridiculous resentment at the English "illegally overflying" Spanish territory, the antidemocratic assertion that those who live in Gibraltar have no rights, the racist-sounding statement that "Moroccans and Indians" have even fewer than no rights, the persnickety legalism about strict adherence to insignificant clauses of a 1713 treaty, the intemperate insult about the British lack of vergonya, and the nationalist fury behind the whole letter. This guy is angry because Britain has dissed Spain by not giving up Gibraltar when politely requested to, so he hates the entire British people, in his eyes just a bunch of poca-vergonyas and hijos de la Gran Bretaña.
In Spanish, hijo de la gran puta means, literally, "son of the great whore" and figuratively "motherfucking son-of-a-bitch". Hijo de la Gran Bretaña is obviously a play on this. That's what they call you guys around here, Des. Do you like it?
The Spanish Mediterranean coast is very similar in a lot of ways to Southern California. The climate is more or less the same; Barcelona gets a bit colder in the winter than LA does and also gets a bit more rain. Like Southern California, this very pleasant climate area wasn't densely populated in the pre-technology days; the huge booms in population in both places occurred only after the locals got hold of enough capital to attract extensive outside investment, which happened about the turn of the last century in both California and Catalonia. One of the things they had to do in both places was assure a supply of water, and aqueducts (much larger in LA than in Barcelona) formed the basis for the further expansion of those areas. I would figure that nearly half the people in Spain live along the Mediterranean--figure six million in Catalonia, four million in Valencia, a million in Murcia, seven million in Andalusia, and a million in the Balearics for a total of nineteen million out of Spain's forty million.
Anyway, the Mediterranean regions of Spain desperately need more water. There are millions of people living along a narrow coastal strip with a dry climate. The small rivers in southeastern Spain, the Júcar and the Segura, just don't provide enough water, especially with the drought that's affected that area over the last few years. So what they want to do is spend a bunch of government money on what's called the National Hydrological Plan, which would ship water from the Ebro River, the only large river in Spain that flows into the Med, south to Valencia and Alicante, and would purchase water from the Rhone in France, which carries an inexhaustible supply of fresh water out of the Alps, to be carried to the Barcelona area by aqueduct. (They say in Barcelona that the Rhone is the river that empties the most water into the Med. That would imply that it carries more water than the Danube, the Nile, and the Dnieper. I don't know whether this is true, but the Rhone is certainly an impressively big river when you see it at, say, Avignon. The Ebro's really not too much of a river by American standards; it's wide but shallow. The Rhone is deep.)
A good many people are against this plan, mostly Aragonese from the Ebro Valley, who want the Ebro's water to be used for irrigation in Aragon itself rather than farther south. The Catalans from the Ebro Delta are against it, too, because they fear that the rich Ebro Delta rice-growing area might dry up--the Plan says that won't happen, that only excess water unnecessary to sustain the lower river valley and delta will be sent south. The Ebro Delta Catalans don't particularly trust the government, though.
This plan has created beaucoup de political problems. The conservative governing PP has lost support in Aragon, maybe even enough to put Aragon in Socialist hands at the next elections. The PP never had much support anyway in Catalonia, but the Plan serves as something for enemies of the government to rally around. But in Valencia, a PP stronghold, the Plan is quite popular, and the Valencian Socialists are in trouble, since they can't oppose it like the Aragonese and Catalan Socialists can. The Valencian Socialists' support base is in favor of the plan, so they're left with a dilemma: support the Plan, which would imply supporting their enemies, the governing PP, or oppose the plan and anger their base. The Greens are agitating against the Plan, which makes sense, and the Communists are too, which doesn't. Both groups might pick up some single-issue support in the next elections but I doubt that either will make anything more than minor, very short-term gains.
Anyway, the Mediterranean regions of Spain desperately need more water. There are millions of people living along a narrow coastal strip with a dry climate. The small rivers in southeastern Spain, the Júcar and the Segura, just don't provide enough water, especially with the drought that's affected that area over the last few years. So what they want to do is spend a bunch of government money on what's called the National Hydrological Plan, which would ship water from the Ebro River, the only large river in Spain that flows into the Med, south to Valencia and Alicante, and would purchase water from the Rhone in France, which carries an inexhaustible supply of fresh water out of the Alps, to be carried to the Barcelona area by aqueduct. (They say in Barcelona that the Rhone is the river that empties the most water into the Med. That would imply that it carries more water than the Danube, the Nile, and the Dnieper. I don't know whether this is true, but the Rhone is certainly an impressively big river when you see it at, say, Avignon. The Ebro's really not too much of a river by American standards; it's wide but shallow. The Rhone is deep.)
A good many people are against this plan, mostly Aragonese from the Ebro Valley, who want the Ebro's water to be used for irrigation in Aragon itself rather than farther south. The Catalans from the Ebro Delta are against it, too, because they fear that the rich Ebro Delta rice-growing area might dry up--the Plan says that won't happen, that only excess water unnecessary to sustain the lower river valley and delta will be sent south. The Ebro Delta Catalans don't particularly trust the government, though.
This plan has created beaucoup de political problems. The conservative governing PP has lost support in Aragon, maybe even enough to put Aragon in Socialist hands at the next elections. The PP never had much support anyway in Catalonia, but the Plan serves as something for enemies of the government to rally around. But in Valencia, a PP stronghold, the Plan is quite popular, and the Valencian Socialists are in trouble, since they can't oppose it like the Aragonese and Catalan Socialists can. The Valencian Socialists' support base is in favor of the plan, so they're left with a dilemma: support the Plan, which would imply supporting their enemies, the governing PP, or oppose the plan and anger their base. The Greens are agitating against the Plan, which makes sense, and the Communists are too, which doesn't. Both groups might pick up some single-issue support in the next elections but I doubt that either will make anything more than minor, very short-term gains.
Sunday, November 24, 2002
Since we're moving into the world of Internet porn translating, I figure it's my business to do some research into the sector. There are several websites devoted to marketing and sales in the Internet porn industry, all of which make fascinating reading. We liked this one here, called Adult Webmaster Consultants--sounds pretty professional, right?--with a long list of articles. Another one we liked was Cozy Frog, which takes rather a frat-boy approach to the whole thing. Another very complete and detailed page is X-Biz. It's quite clear that the objective of all these sites is to persuade people to set up porno websites and to sell them the necessary products. AWC and X-Biz take a rather more professional approach, while Cozy Frog, which bills itself as "your buddy"--reach for your wallet now and hold onto it tight!--uses an "it's fun and easy" approach and is directing itself at the first-time porno webmaster, maybe a college kid without much money. If you want to take a look at the innards of the industry--rather a sanitized version, and all on the marketing, sales, and distribution side of the porn industry rather than the production side--you might want to check these websites out. If you do, remember that they're trying to sell you the idea of being a porno webhost. Resist that idea. I have a feeling that a whole lot of people get skinned thinking they can just jump into the clannish porno industry.
Well, we went down to the bar to watch the soccer game last night. We wandered around at game time, 9:00, looking for a bar that wasn't packed, and finally found one down on Calle Providencia. Remei ate a hot dog and a whole ración of patatas bravas, which in their nasty form, which these were, are frozen fried potatoes with mayonnaise, and in their delicious form are fresh double-fried potatoes--they put them in the deep-fryer for a couple of minutes till they're golden-brown and then let them cool, then put them back in for a couple of minutes, which makes them super-crispy--with a spicy sauce, sort of like KC-style vinegary, hot barbecue sauce. The best in Barcelona are at the Bar Tomás on Mayor de Sarrià below the Plaza de Sarrià. So, they ran out of bottled beer and we had to drink some pretty foul stuff out of the tap. Avoid tap beer if possible in Barcelona. This isn't true in Madrid or the País Vasco or Old Castile. I have no idea why. Perhaps it's just that Estrella, the dominant beer in the Barcelona market, is gross out of the keg, and that the brands in Madrid and the North are simply better keg beers. Estrella is fine out of the bottle; it's a standard, fairly strong Pilsener.
Anyway, we had to stand up at the back but at least it wasn't crowded and we could see the TV pretty well. I keep thinking somebody ought to introduce the sports-bar concept into this country; they could at least put in several TVs, invest a thousand bucks, so everyone could see better. But no bar has more than one, and that one is often no bigger than 21 inches. The game itself wasn't very exciting. The first half was quite dull; both teams were playing scared and couldn't put anything together on the attack because they were both playing on the defensive so much. Barça coach Louis Van Gaal changed his standard 3 defensemen-4 midfielders-3 forwards formation, an attacking setup, for a more balanced 4 defensemen-2 defensive midfielders-3 attacking midfielders-1 forward formation. The guys who were supposed to be attacking midfielders played defensively during the whole first half. Mendieta, who is not having a great year--he may be too old at 29--was especially static and Kluivert, the forward (Van Gaal benched the small and rather one-dimensional forward Saviola for the bigger and more multifaceted midfielder Motta) was all by himself in the middle of about eight Madrid guys. Ronaldo didn't play for Madrid, he's sick or something. Figo played and he stood up to the pressure very well, with all 108,000 fans yelling for his scalp. The very first thing Cocu, who was marking him, did was to foul him. By minute two Cocu had fouled him twice. And the next forty-three minutes went more or less like that, with the sole exception of a very nice bicycle kick (what they call a chilena here) by Cambiasso that Barça's goalie Roberto Bonano stopped with no problem. Raúl was never a factor. Neither were any of the other Madrid players for the rest of the game. The closest they got to the Barça goal for the rest of the match was a corner kick, a very eventful corner kick, for sure.
Barça came out for the second half fired up and in a 3-4-3 formation, and after three minutes Mendieta, from the point, made a very nice first-touch pass with his heel for Gabri, who had burned his man Iván Helguera and who was onside on the inside of the box, and who just as quickly fed it to Kluivert charging into the small box, who was wide open and blasted the ball into the lower-right corner of the goal well outside the reach of a diving Casillas. The ref annulled the goal, incorrectly, saying that Gabri had been offside. In the ref's defense, the play was very fast and I'm sure his error was unintentional. On the other hand, I'd like to strangle the son-of-a-bitch. The Barça players then began bombarding Casillas, Madrid's goalie, with long shots that he stopped without much trouble. Then Cocu muffed one when he was wide open in front of the goal, and then Motta injured Makelele with a vicious tackle for which he should have been red-carded. Then, with twenty minutes left, Figo went to take a Madrid corner kick and the fans began throwing shit at him, including an empty J&B whiskey bottle which might, with a little bad luck, have killed somebody. A couple of people threw mobile phones, which is pretty stupid when you figure that if you throw your own phone, the cops can probably figure out who it belongs to. On the other hand, the kind of guy who throws a mobile phone at an defenseless opposing soccer player's head is quite likely to have stolen said mobile phone.
So the ref, quite rightly, suspended the game for ten minutes while the crowd got calmed down. Nothing much happened during the last twenty minutes except that Riquelme bounced a free kick off the crossbar that had Casillas beaten. It ended up 0-0 and with only one fairly serious bit of rioting. Let me make something clear about European soccer hooligans. The Spanish hooligans are considered soft by the Brits and perhaps by the Dutch, maybe even the Italians, but they're plenty violent by American standards. These Spanish guys, Barça's Boixos Nois, Madrid's gang of openly Fascist wealthy skinhead toughs Ultra Sur, the Frente Atlético, Español's wealthy and Fascist Brigadas Blanquiazules, that mob of squatter thugs that roots for Seville, Bilbao's pro-ETA Abertzale Sur, would all eat the Oakland Raiders' fans for lunch. That bunch of fat middle-aged drunken idiots wouldn't last a minute against these young guys who know how to fight and who carry weapons, often knives. Remember, the Frente Atlético murdered a Real Sociedad fan, stabbed him to death, only three years ago, and the Boixos Nois stabbed a French supporter of Español to death not so long ago, either. Earlier this year a lynch mob of Seville fans had a security guard at their mercy and beat him bloody before the TV cameras. Not even American hockey fans would stand a chance in a square-go with these thugs. Not even Detroit Red Wings fans. Not even those animals in Philadelphia.
Anyway, we had to stand up at the back but at least it wasn't crowded and we could see the TV pretty well. I keep thinking somebody ought to introduce the sports-bar concept into this country; they could at least put in several TVs, invest a thousand bucks, so everyone could see better. But no bar has more than one, and that one is often no bigger than 21 inches. The game itself wasn't very exciting. The first half was quite dull; both teams were playing scared and couldn't put anything together on the attack because they were both playing on the defensive so much. Barça coach Louis Van Gaal changed his standard 3 defensemen-4 midfielders-3 forwards formation, an attacking setup, for a more balanced 4 defensemen-2 defensive midfielders-3 attacking midfielders-1 forward formation. The guys who were supposed to be attacking midfielders played defensively during the whole first half. Mendieta, who is not having a great year--he may be too old at 29--was especially static and Kluivert, the forward (Van Gaal benched the small and rather one-dimensional forward Saviola for the bigger and more multifaceted midfielder Motta) was all by himself in the middle of about eight Madrid guys. Ronaldo didn't play for Madrid, he's sick or something. Figo played and he stood up to the pressure very well, with all 108,000 fans yelling for his scalp. The very first thing Cocu, who was marking him, did was to foul him. By minute two Cocu had fouled him twice. And the next forty-three minutes went more or less like that, with the sole exception of a very nice bicycle kick (what they call a chilena here) by Cambiasso that Barça's goalie Roberto Bonano stopped with no problem. Raúl was never a factor. Neither were any of the other Madrid players for the rest of the game. The closest they got to the Barça goal for the rest of the match was a corner kick, a very eventful corner kick, for sure.
Barça came out for the second half fired up and in a 3-4-3 formation, and after three minutes Mendieta, from the point, made a very nice first-touch pass with his heel for Gabri, who had burned his man Iván Helguera and who was onside on the inside of the box, and who just as quickly fed it to Kluivert charging into the small box, who was wide open and blasted the ball into the lower-right corner of the goal well outside the reach of a diving Casillas. The ref annulled the goal, incorrectly, saying that Gabri had been offside. In the ref's defense, the play was very fast and I'm sure his error was unintentional. On the other hand, I'd like to strangle the son-of-a-bitch. The Barça players then began bombarding Casillas, Madrid's goalie, with long shots that he stopped without much trouble. Then Cocu muffed one when he was wide open in front of the goal, and then Motta injured Makelele with a vicious tackle for which he should have been red-carded. Then, with twenty minutes left, Figo went to take a Madrid corner kick and the fans began throwing shit at him, including an empty J&B whiskey bottle which might, with a little bad luck, have killed somebody. A couple of people threw mobile phones, which is pretty stupid when you figure that if you throw your own phone, the cops can probably figure out who it belongs to. On the other hand, the kind of guy who throws a mobile phone at an defenseless opposing soccer player's head is quite likely to have stolen said mobile phone.
So the ref, quite rightly, suspended the game for ten minutes while the crowd got calmed down. Nothing much happened during the last twenty minutes except that Riquelme bounced a free kick off the crossbar that had Casillas beaten. It ended up 0-0 and with only one fairly serious bit of rioting. Let me make something clear about European soccer hooligans. The Spanish hooligans are considered soft by the Brits and perhaps by the Dutch, maybe even the Italians, but they're plenty violent by American standards. These Spanish guys, Barça's Boixos Nois, Madrid's gang of openly Fascist wealthy skinhead toughs Ultra Sur, the Frente Atlético, Español's wealthy and Fascist Brigadas Blanquiazules, that mob of squatter thugs that roots for Seville, Bilbao's pro-ETA Abertzale Sur, would all eat the Oakland Raiders' fans for lunch. That bunch of fat middle-aged drunken idiots wouldn't last a minute against these young guys who know how to fight and who carry weapons, often knives. Remember, the Frente Atlético murdered a Real Sociedad fan, stabbed him to death, only three years ago, and the Boixos Nois stabbed a French supporter of Español to death not so long ago, either. Earlier this year a lynch mob of Seville fans had a security guard at their mercy and beat him bloody before the TV cameras. Not even American hockey fans would stand a chance in a square-go with these thugs. Not even Detroit Red Wings fans. Not even those animals in Philadelphia.
Saturday, November 23, 2002
Tonight is the big game and all of Spain is gearing up for it. In possibly the biggest rivalry in the world in club football, Real Madrid comes to Barcelona tonight. The game is only on pay TV so we're going to have to go down to the bar to see it and jam in there with everybody else. The etiquette is that you can show up early, like a couple of hours early, and get a table, but you are obligated, more or less, to start buying drinks and keep them coming. You can wait a few minutes between drinks, and they don't have to be alcoholic. If you show up late, about game time, you'll have to stand in the aisles and at the back. Etiquette prohibits blocking the view of those seated. You also have to buy drinks, of course. They don't change the prices on game nights, so each Coke or beer or cup of coffee will only cost you a buck or a buck and a half, as usual. It's great business for the bar owners; this is all totally illegal, of course. They're not allowed to publicly exhibit pay-TV programming. No one ever enforces it, though; in fact, you'll see cops in the bars watching the game. (That's actually a good thing, since the bar becomes a small, crowded space with a lot of people whose emotions are flying and who have been drinking all evening. That's where the cops need to be; there's nobody on the streets anyway, since everyone is watching the game.)
You can't predict what's going to happen since both teams' players get so pumped up for the game. The stadium, the Camp Nou, is packed with 108,000 fans screaming for blood. They especially want Figo's blood, since he played for Barça for many years and then suddenly jumped to Madrid for more money after promising eternal fidelity to the Barça and its colors. They'll want Ronaldo's, too, though he won't get nearly as much abuse as Figo. Ronaldo only played with FC Barcelona for one year and if was obvious that he was a hired gun--his play was brilliant but he didn't pretend that his emotions toward the Barça were the same as those of the fans. They don't feel nearly as betrayed by Ronaldo. He's just a mercenary in their eyes. When Figo came to the Camp Nou for the first time as a Madrid player two years ago, they virtually booed him off the field. He refused to (or was ordered not to) take the corner kicks from the right side, which is normally his job because he's the right wingman, because he or somebody was afraid they'd lynch him if he got that close to them. One of the local sports papers printed up phony 10,000 peseta notes with Figo's picture on the front instead of the King's and the Barça fans showered the field with them, like confetti. Then, last year, Figo didn't play when Madrid came to Barcelona.
This year he's going to play, though. So is Raúl, who is nursing nagging injuries and isn't in top form, and Ronaldo. Zidane is out, though, as is Hierro. Both Barcelona and Madrid have suspect defenses, and Fernando Navarro's suspension won't help Barça out. Van Gaal, Barça's coach, will substitute Gabri as a central defenseman for Navarro; Gabri is a good, utilitarian player who is a good defender for a midfielder but a bad defender for a defenseman. Luis Enrique is still out, injured, for Barcelona, and Barça could use him since he's the team leader on the field. He's a former Real Madrid player who considers himself shabbily treated by that club and its fans and jumped to Barça when his contract ran out about five years ago. He hates Madrid and they hate him. When he plays in Madrid they chant "¡Luis Enrique, tu padre es Amunike!" Amunike was a Nigerian player with the Barça a couple of years back. I imagine the more brainless and racist Madrid fans find this very funny.
You can't predict what's going to happen since both teams' players get so pumped up for the game. The stadium, the Camp Nou, is packed with 108,000 fans screaming for blood. They especially want Figo's blood, since he played for Barça for many years and then suddenly jumped to Madrid for more money after promising eternal fidelity to the Barça and its colors. They'll want Ronaldo's, too, though he won't get nearly as much abuse as Figo. Ronaldo only played with FC Barcelona for one year and if was obvious that he was a hired gun--his play was brilliant but he didn't pretend that his emotions toward the Barça were the same as those of the fans. They don't feel nearly as betrayed by Ronaldo. He's just a mercenary in their eyes. When Figo came to the Camp Nou for the first time as a Madrid player two years ago, they virtually booed him off the field. He refused to (or was ordered not to) take the corner kicks from the right side, which is normally his job because he's the right wingman, because he or somebody was afraid they'd lynch him if he got that close to them. One of the local sports papers printed up phony 10,000 peseta notes with Figo's picture on the front instead of the King's and the Barça fans showered the field with them, like confetti. Then, last year, Figo didn't play when Madrid came to Barcelona.
This year he's going to play, though. So is Raúl, who is nursing nagging injuries and isn't in top form, and Ronaldo. Zidane is out, though, as is Hierro. Both Barcelona and Madrid have suspect defenses, and Fernando Navarro's suspension won't help Barça out. Van Gaal, Barça's coach, will substitute Gabri as a central defenseman for Navarro; Gabri is a good, utilitarian player who is a good defender for a midfielder but a bad defender for a defenseman. Luis Enrique is still out, injured, for Barcelona, and Barça could use him since he's the team leader on the field. He's a former Real Madrid player who considers himself shabbily treated by that club and its fans and jumped to Barça when his contract ran out about five years ago. He hates Madrid and they hate him. When he plays in Madrid they chant "¡Luis Enrique, tu padre es Amunike!" Amunike was a Nigerian player with the Barça a couple of years back. I imagine the more brainless and racist Madrid fans find this very funny.
The oil spill off Galicia is out of control. The coast between Corrubedo to the south and Cariño to the north, including two protected natural areas, has been polluted already and it looks like the oil is moving north, which is good for the marine life in South Galicia's Rias Baixas and for Portugal but has the French worried. The government is not well prepared, as they don't have enough contention barriers or cleanup boats, and they're getting smacked around some politically. About 6000 tons of oil was spilled in the first leak and 5000 tons more escaped when the tanker Prestige sank. There are 70,000 tons more of oil within the tanker 10,000 feet down; they're now saying that oil will solidify. Let's hope so because if that stuff gets out the "black tide" will suddenly be seven times worse. Meanwhile, the price of percebes has doubled in the Madrid markets.
The Vanguardia has a table of the fifteen worst oil spills of all time; this one so far, with 11,000 tons, is comparatively still very small. Even if all the oil in the sunken tanker gets out, this one would probably place about 25th in history. The biggest spill of all time was 1991 when the Iraqis sabotaged the Kuwaiti oilfields and dumped 800,000 tons of crude into the Persion Gulf, and the second was 1979 in the Gulf of Mexico when those Mexican oil rigs blew out and spilled 450,000 tons. The biggest tanker spill ever was number three on the all-time list when the tanker Atlantic spilled 280,000 tons into the Caribbean in 1979. What I found interesting was that none of these top 15 spills have happened since 1991. The Vanguardia's reporter, Antonio Cerrillo, who has done his research, says that after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989, which was not among the top 15, by the way, the Americans passed laws prohibiting single-hulled tankers from docking at American ports and establishing that tanker owners must contract an unlimited-liability insurance policy, to pay off in case of accident. This means that if you want to do business with the Yanks, you have to play by their rules, and their rules have done a lot to reduce oil spills. It's not the American government on your ass to keep things safe: it's the insurance companies, and they're a lot meaner and tougher than Uncle Sam because it's their asses on the line if you screw up. In contrast, EU laws on the subject have not even gone into effect yet and contain a limit on the liability of the tanker owner. The single-hulled Prestige would not have been allowed to carry oil to the US and no American company would have insured it. Score one environmental point for the US. Greenpeace is complaining that the strict American laws concentrate the less safe tankers in Europe.
The Vanguardia has a table of the fifteen worst oil spills of all time; this one so far, with 11,000 tons, is comparatively still very small. Even if all the oil in the sunken tanker gets out, this one would probably place about 25th in history. The biggest spill of all time was 1991 when the Iraqis sabotaged the Kuwaiti oilfields and dumped 800,000 tons of crude into the Persion Gulf, and the second was 1979 in the Gulf of Mexico when those Mexican oil rigs blew out and spilled 450,000 tons. The biggest tanker spill ever was number three on the all-time list when the tanker Atlantic spilled 280,000 tons into the Caribbean in 1979. What I found interesting was that none of these top 15 spills have happened since 1991. The Vanguardia's reporter, Antonio Cerrillo, who has done his research, says that after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989, which was not among the top 15, by the way, the Americans passed laws prohibiting single-hulled tankers from docking at American ports and establishing that tanker owners must contract an unlimited-liability insurance policy, to pay off in case of accident. This means that if you want to do business with the Yanks, you have to play by their rules, and their rules have done a lot to reduce oil spills. It's not the American government on your ass to keep things safe: it's the insurance companies, and they're a lot meaner and tougher than Uncle Sam because it's their asses on the line if you screw up. In contrast, EU laws on the subject have not even gone into effect yet and contain a limit on the liability of the tanker owner. The single-hulled Prestige would not have been allowed to carry oil to the US and no American company would have insured it. Score one environmental point for the US. Greenpeace is complaining that the strict American laws concentrate the less safe tankers in Europe.
This article from the Weekly Standard on the Florence anti-global demonstration earlier this month is well worth a read. The Standard also has a short piece by David Brooks that, among other things, puts the lie to Eulàlia Solé on conditions in Afghanistan, and Brooks's piece has, like, facts and stuff in it! Slate has a quite amenable piece on Charles Barkley, his new book, and his political ambitions.
Friday, November 22, 2002
OK, here's a "Six Degrees of Separation" meme trace for you guys. A couple of days ago I linked to Sasha Castel's (fully credited, she wasn't pretending to have made it up) reproduction of the Bush-Condi Rice "Who's on First" conversation. You may have read it. It's pretty funny. If you haven't read it, go read it. Anyway, this meme, if I can be a pompous ass, is suddenly everywhere. It's exploded all over the world. Yesterday at about 8 AM their time I was listening to KSJO (the most obnoxious radio station I know) in San Jose through Internet "radio" and their morning Drive Time Zoo Team Wacky DJ's Dipshit Dave and Fuckwit Frank, or whatever their names are, did this routine, which they didn't credit but which they certainly didn't make up themselves, as I'd read it beforehand on Sasha's blog and already linked to it here. She got it from one V.C. Darte, who apparently e-mailed it to her. What I'd like to see is where this meme came from and where it's going to. Sasha, where did V.C. Darte get it from? Everyone else, where did you first come across this if it wasn't through us and / or Sasha?
Baltasar Porcel is really letting us down. He's just boring again today, he's been boring all week. But never fear, Eulàlia Solé, sociologist and author, is here! The thing about Lali Solé is that her column only appears once a week rather than every day like Porcel's, and her idiocy / dullness ratio is about 1 : 1 while Porcel's is about 1 : 10. That is, for every joyfully imbecilic Lali column, there's merely one boring, stupid one. You have to read through ten boring, stupid Porcelazos before you get one that shines with the intense glowing imbecility that Porcel is capable of. We know a guy who spent a couple of years in the sociology department at the university before switching to philosophy and getting his Ph.D.; he says that Lali is far and away the dumbest professor in the sociology department and one of the three or four dumbest at the whole university. Anyway, Lali's text is in italics below; our comments are in standard type. The title is "The fruits of war".
The results of the war for the Afghan people could well be called rotten fruits. It's because of this that Afghanistan has stopped appearing on the news, that no one has heard anything from Karzai, his government, and the warlords, nor about the promised reconstruction of the country, nor about the supposed liberation of the women. Just as the capture of Bin Laden has been a failure, the makeup used to beautify the military operation, as if that were possible, has been too. There is nothing farther from being fulfilled than the obligations acquired by the US regarding the political, economic, and human development of the country.
Profundity Score on a 1 to 10 scale, with ten representing, say, Immanuel Kant and one representing, say, Tipper Gore: -3 for getting all her facts wrong.
From health to food, from education to freedom, everything is shamefully lacking. Many people have to walk for days in order to reach a health center, in which the most basic services are lacking. Sometimes it's even worse and they find the health center levelled by bombs. Food is scarce for the immense majority of people, dreadfully poor after 23 years of military conflicts and finished off by the last one. As far as the refugees returning home, they find themselves with a panorama of destruction, unemployment, hunger, and lack of clean water. Lack of personal safety is also permanent, with the warlords doing as they want. Very few women have access to work, and very few have managed to free themselves from the burka, still submitted to the will of those in charge and frightened of being attacked.
Profundity Score: -5 for expecting the US to have already turned Afghanistan into Denmark and for not blaming at least some of the Afghans' problems on, say, the SOVIET invasion which started all this off back in 1979.
While some things are just the same as before the last war, the rest have gotten worse. If the bombings have borne any fruit it is that of mass poverty for the population, as we have already said, and that of becoming even more evil (envilecimiento) for those who have gotten rich off the conflict.
Profundity Score: -9 for blatantly lying, for accusing the Americans of having profited off the Battle of Afghanistan, and for calling the United States evil without mentioning a single scrap of evidence.
When we get down to it, there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to war. The landscape that weapons leave behind is always monotonously the same. This reiteration does not only not faze those who make money off devastation, but encourages them to probe its possibilities even more deeply. A man as lucid as Gabriel Jackson denounces, in the last issue of "Vanguardia Dossier" the attempt of the Bush Administration to revoke the ABM treaty, signed in 1972 to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. To the entire deadly arsenal that threatens the survival of defenseless civilians, they want to add the radioactive weapons that new countries may make. Insanity which we'll have to put the brakes on in some way.
Profundity Score: -17 for not having any idea of what the ABM treaty deals with, for thinking that the US wants more countries to have nuclear arms, and for accusing the Americans of making war to make money again.
The way is not starting another war, this time against Iraq under the pretext that it has dangerous armaments. It makes no sense to accuse someone else of having weapons of mass destruction when you have even more of them yourself. It's true that it's urgent to put an end to the potential danger that threatens the future of humanity, but that will only be possible if the weapons accumulated in every single country, including the one that claims to dispense justice, are eliminated.
Profundity Score: -13 for failing to see the difference between nukes in American or British hands and nukes in Iraqi hands, for being a pacifist imbecile who actually thinks that weapons can be abolished, and for gratuitously insulting the US.
Civil society must become aware both of the risk it is running and of the pressure it can exercise to remove from power the enemies of both peaceful development and a democratic distribution of the wealth of the world.
Profundity Score: -21 for claiming that Communism is the answer.
I've been accused of being too sensitive to anti-Americanism. But when faced every day with this kind of blind hate, it's kind of hard not to be. And don't believe the anti-Americans when they claim to hate the American government but respect the American people. They don't. They hate Americans as individuals, too. It's pure racism. And many Europeans like Eulàlia Solé, whose face I will cheerfully spit in if I ever get the chance, are chock-full of anti-American racism. Like, for example, the above column. No European has ever had to listen to his country reviled in the way that I have to every day.
The results of the war for the Afghan people could well be called rotten fruits. It's because of this that Afghanistan has stopped appearing on the news, that no one has heard anything from Karzai, his government, and the warlords, nor about the promised reconstruction of the country, nor about the supposed liberation of the women. Just as the capture of Bin Laden has been a failure, the makeup used to beautify the military operation, as if that were possible, has been too. There is nothing farther from being fulfilled than the obligations acquired by the US regarding the political, economic, and human development of the country.
Profundity Score on a 1 to 10 scale, with ten representing, say, Immanuel Kant and one representing, say, Tipper Gore: -3 for getting all her facts wrong.
From health to food, from education to freedom, everything is shamefully lacking. Many people have to walk for days in order to reach a health center, in which the most basic services are lacking. Sometimes it's even worse and they find the health center levelled by bombs. Food is scarce for the immense majority of people, dreadfully poor after 23 years of military conflicts and finished off by the last one. As far as the refugees returning home, they find themselves with a panorama of destruction, unemployment, hunger, and lack of clean water. Lack of personal safety is also permanent, with the warlords doing as they want. Very few women have access to work, and very few have managed to free themselves from the burka, still submitted to the will of those in charge and frightened of being attacked.
Profundity Score: -5 for expecting the US to have already turned Afghanistan into Denmark and for not blaming at least some of the Afghans' problems on, say, the SOVIET invasion which started all this off back in 1979.
While some things are just the same as before the last war, the rest have gotten worse. If the bombings have borne any fruit it is that of mass poverty for the population, as we have already said, and that of becoming even more evil (envilecimiento) for those who have gotten rich off the conflict.
Profundity Score: -9 for blatantly lying, for accusing the Americans of having profited off the Battle of Afghanistan, and for calling the United States evil without mentioning a single scrap of evidence.
When we get down to it, there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to war. The landscape that weapons leave behind is always monotonously the same. This reiteration does not only not faze those who make money off devastation, but encourages them to probe its possibilities even more deeply. A man as lucid as Gabriel Jackson denounces, in the last issue of "Vanguardia Dossier" the attempt of the Bush Administration to revoke the ABM treaty, signed in 1972 to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. To the entire deadly arsenal that threatens the survival of defenseless civilians, they want to add the radioactive weapons that new countries may make. Insanity which we'll have to put the brakes on in some way.
Profundity Score: -17 for not having any idea of what the ABM treaty deals with, for thinking that the US wants more countries to have nuclear arms, and for accusing the Americans of making war to make money again.
The way is not starting another war, this time against Iraq under the pretext that it has dangerous armaments. It makes no sense to accuse someone else of having weapons of mass destruction when you have even more of them yourself. It's true that it's urgent to put an end to the potential danger that threatens the future of humanity, but that will only be possible if the weapons accumulated in every single country, including the one that claims to dispense justice, are eliminated.
Profundity Score: -13 for failing to see the difference between nukes in American or British hands and nukes in Iraqi hands, for being a pacifist imbecile who actually thinks that weapons can be abolished, and for gratuitously insulting the US.
Civil society must become aware both of the risk it is running and of the pressure it can exercise to remove from power the enemies of both peaceful development and a democratic distribution of the wealth of the world.
Profundity Score: -21 for claiming that Communism is the answer.
I've been accused of being too sensitive to anti-Americanism. But when faced every day with this kind of blind hate, it's kind of hard not to be. And don't believe the anti-Americans when they claim to hate the American government but respect the American people. They don't. They hate Americans as individuals, too. It's pure racism. And many Europeans like Eulàlia Solé, whose face I will cheerfully spit in if I ever get the chance, are chock-full of anti-American racism. Like, for example, the above column. No European has ever had to listen to his country reviled in the way that I have to every day.
Thursday, November 21, 2002
Horologium has an excellent Fisking (they call it a "dissection") of a genetically-modified-food terror-monger. Check it out. It has, like, actual facts and stuff in it. Also check out the Belligerent Bunny Blog, if you haven't already. No Replacement for Displacement has three, uh, rather aggressively nontraditional carols we can all sing around the fireplace the night of Christmas Eve after we get home from church and get oiled on eggnog. Samizdata has a hilarious bit that fans of Viz comic will appreciate on how exactly the Brits are going to contribute to the war on Saddam. The Jedman gives his opinion on tailbone tattoos.
The sage who gets the back-page interview in today's Vanguardia is a real moral guy whose name is Denis Halliday. Mr. Halliday is an Irishman who was once the Adjunct Secretary General of the UN and who is so moral that he resigned in 1998 because he thought we were being too mean to Iraq. Mr. Halliday is very proud that his father was a pacifist who worked to keep Ireland out of NATO. We've excerpted it. The questions, of course, are Q. Mr. Halliday's answers are A.
Q. The CIA says they were making chemical weapons.
A. The first UN inspection was done with some rigor, but Butler's was working for the CIA, the Mossad, and the secret services of various countries. That wasn't serious.
Q. I suppose that you don't support the mission that is beginning now.
The mission is impossible: they have to find weapons of mass destruction and, if there aren't any, the United States will attack anyway. We all know that.
Q. Why is it going to do that?
A. Iraq is the second-largest oil producer in the world. It's simply that. The United States wants absolute control of the oil market.
Q. Oil is an obsession of the Bushes.
A. And Bush is ready to do whatever it takes to get control over it. And once it has absloute control, you can be sure that Europe will pay a very high price for that oil.
Q. So why didn't they take over Iraq after they won the first Gulf War?
A. Bush Senior pulled back at the possibility of an explosion of the Kurdish powder-keg and an Iranian intervention. It's a very complex area, very much so.
Q. And what will they do after Hussein?
A: A protectorate with military bases, as in so many other countries. A puppet government and an informal occupation.
Q. That won't be easy.
A. It will be bloody...
Q. What do you think will happen?
A. The worst. We'll attack Iraq, with the shameful complicity of the UN and of its secretary general, and we will commit genocide. And, after thousands of deaths and much suffering, the Bushes will finally have their oil.
We won't comment too much, except that we wonder which star system this guy is receiving on his tooth fillings. Where did this pathological hatred for the Bush family come from? Where did he get this paranoia about the CIA and the Mossad controlling the UN? Why does he blindly believe, so simplistically, that America plans to attack Iraq in order to grab the oil after this canard has been debunked eight million times? And why is he so sure that America is acting in bad faith and its goal is to grab all the oil and then extort the Europeans? And who's the guy at the Vanguardia who keeps printing all this anti-American stuff, day in and day out? How about a little balance?
Q. The CIA says they were making chemical weapons.
A. The first UN inspection was done with some rigor, but Butler's was working for the CIA, the Mossad, and the secret services of various countries. That wasn't serious.
Q. I suppose that you don't support the mission that is beginning now.
The mission is impossible: they have to find weapons of mass destruction and, if there aren't any, the United States will attack anyway. We all know that.
Q. Why is it going to do that?
A. Iraq is the second-largest oil producer in the world. It's simply that. The United States wants absolute control of the oil market.
Q. Oil is an obsession of the Bushes.
A. And Bush is ready to do whatever it takes to get control over it. And once it has absloute control, you can be sure that Europe will pay a very high price for that oil.
Q. So why didn't they take over Iraq after they won the first Gulf War?
A. Bush Senior pulled back at the possibility of an explosion of the Kurdish powder-keg and an Iranian intervention. It's a very complex area, very much so.
Q. And what will they do after Hussein?
A: A protectorate with military bases, as in so many other countries. A puppet government and an informal occupation.
Q. That won't be easy.
A. It will be bloody...
Q. What do you think will happen?
A. The worst. We'll attack Iraq, with the shameful complicity of the UN and of its secretary general, and we will commit genocide. And, after thousands of deaths and much suffering, the Bushes will finally have their oil.
We won't comment too much, except that we wonder which star system this guy is receiving on his tooth fillings. Where did this pathological hatred for the Bush family come from? Where did he get this paranoia about the CIA and the Mossad controlling the UN? Why does he blindly believe, so simplistically, that America plans to attack Iraq in order to grab the oil after this canard has been debunked eight million times? And why is he so sure that America is acting in bad faith and its goal is to grab all the oil and then extort the Europeans? And who's the guy at the Vanguardia who keeps printing all this anti-American stuff, day in and day out? How about a little balance?
On the oil tanker thing, the Vanguardia says that the Times of London says the tanker that sank off Galicia had been in port in Gibraltar for six hours a few months ago, and that was the only connection the tanker had with Gibraltar: that one visit. The tanker had, of course, called at dozens of ports both before and after its docking there. Any connection the more rabidly nationalistic Spanish press (ABC, La Razón, El Mundo) has been trying to draw with this mess and the existence of Gibraltar as a British colony is bogus.
Bush, in Prague at the NATO summit, promised to consult with America's NATO allies before any armed action against Iraq, which he said was avoidable--we assume by means of a total capitulation by Saddam. He also called on the nations of the world and the NATO countries in particular to openly show their diplomatic support for America and stated that if Iraq did not comply with a strict regime of inspections, America would form a coalition to be sure that Saddam is disarmed. Bush also called on the NATO allies to increase their defense budgets; America's defense budget is double that of all the other allies put together. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria will be formally invited to join NATO today. This will be the first admission of ex-Soviet republics into NATO, and also the first admission of an ex-Yugoslav republic. It serves as the official seal of approval on Slovakia, which took a good bit longer than its more advanced cousin, the Czech Republic, to democratize, and it's especially important for Romania and Bulgaria, who also took longer to democratize than their Hungarian neighbor. Romania and Bulgaria are scheduled to join the EU in 2007 and joining NATO will be a big boost to their credentials. (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta and Greek Cyprus join the EU in 2004). Interestingly, both Romania and Bulgaria are very pro-American and have volunteered help against Iraq; so has Poland. Croatia, Macedonia, and--get this one--Albania are the candidates for the next expansion of NATO. We're all for it. Get them into the official clubs of civilized countries. That'll help make sure they never slide back out. NATO also agreed to extend its current peacekeeping mission in Macedonia six more months. The French got all into a snit because they want a European Union force to replace the NATO force in Macedonia. It was agreed that this will be discussed later.
Meanwhile, the British are ready to roll on Iraq. They've got 20,000 men, a complete division, all set to go, the largest contingent except for the Americans. Among the units to be sent is the famous Seventh Motorized Brigade, the Desert Rats.
Dirtbag ETArras José Ignacio Krutxaga, Fernando García Jodrá, and Lierni Armendáriz are on trial in Madrid for murdering municipal cop Juan Miguel Gervilla in Barcelona. Seems that what happened is that they were going to carbomb the radio host Luis del Olmo on Dec. 20, 2000, but the red Fiat Uno they'd stolen and loaded up with twelve kilos of explosives--they were going to park it and blow it up by remote control when del Olmo passed by on his way to work, they knew his habitual routes--broke down on Avenida Diagonal, the main street leading into the central city from the west. The car was blocking a whole lane and it was eight in the morning, rush hour. The cop, who was directing traffic, came over to see what was up; Jodrà was pushing the Fiat from behind. The cop noticed a screwdriver in the ignition and immediately sussed the car was stolen. He went for his gun but Jodrà jumped him and they both went down to the ground. Krutxaga jumped out of the car with a gun and shot Gervilla, the policeman. Jodrà got up, grabbed his own gun which had fallen to the ground in the fight, and shot Gervilla in the head as he lay on the ground holding up one arm to protect himself. This cell of terrorists is also responsible for the murder of former Socialist cabinet minister Ernest Lluch; they got 33 years each for that. I personally wouldn't mind at all using the death penalty on them. I imagine most Spaniards agree with me, but it's very politically incorrect to say so, especially if you want to be considered one of the enlightened, solidarious, and hip.
Also, some jackass etarra named Urtzi Murureta Gondra blew himself up with the explosives he was manipulating as part of an ETA training course being held in a remote area of central France near Limoges. Unfortunately he didn't die, though he was badly wounded in an arm and a leg. He is thought to be one of the cell that murdered Judge José María Lidón.
Bush, in Prague at the NATO summit, promised to consult with America's NATO allies before any armed action against Iraq, which he said was avoidable--we assume by means of a total capitulation by Saddam. He also called on the nations of the world and the NATO countries in particular to openly show their diplomatic support for America and stated that if Iraq did not comply with a strict regime of inspections, America would form a coalition to be sure that Saddam is disarmed. Bush also called on the NATO allies to increase their defense budgets; America's defense budget is double that of all the other allies put together. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria will be formally invited to join NATO today. This will be the first admission of ex-Soviet republics into NATO, and also the first admission of an ex-Yugoslav republic. It serves as the official seal of approval on Slovakia, which took a good bit longer than its more advanced cousin, the Czech Republic, to democratize, and it's especially important for Romania and Bulgaria, who also took longer to democratize than their Hungarian neighbor. Romania and Bulgaria are scheduled to join the EU in 2007 and joining NATO will be a big boost to their credentials. (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta and Greek Cyprus join the EU in 2004). Interestingly, both Romania and Bulgaria are very pro-American and have volunteered help against Iraq; so has Poland. Croatia, Macedonia, and--get this one--Albania are the candidates for the next expansion of NATO. We're all for it. Get them into the official clubs of civilized countries. That'll help make sure they never slide back out. NATO also agreed to extend its current peacekeeping mission in Macedonia six more months. The French got all into a snit because they want a European Union force to replace the NATO force in Macedonia. It was agreed that this will be discussed later.
Meanwhile, the British are ready to roll on Iraq. They've got 20,000 men, a complete division, all set to go, the largest contingent except for the Americans. Among the units to be sent is the famous Seventh Motorized Brigade, the Desert Rats.
Dirtbag ETArras José Ignacio Krutxaga, Fernando García Jodrá, and Lierni Armendáriz are on trial in Madrid for murdering municipal cop Juan Miguel Gervilla in Barcelona. Seems that what happened is that they were going to carbomb the radio host Luis del Olmo on Dec. 20, 2000, but the red Fiat Uno they'd stolen and loaded up with twelve kilos of explosives--they were going to park it and blow it up by remote control when del Olmo passed by on his way to work, they knew his habitual routes--broke down on Avenida Diagonal, the main street leading into the central city from the west. The car was blocking a whole lane and it was eight in the morning, rush hour. The cop, who was directing traffic, came over to see what was up; Jodrà was pushing the Fiat from behind. The cop noticed a screwdriver in the ignition and immediately sussed the car was stolen. He went for his gun but Jodrà jumped him and they both went down to the ground. Krutxaga jumped out of the car with a gun and shot Gervilla, the policeman. Jodrà got up, grabbed his own gun which had fallen to the ground in the fight, and shot Gervilla in the head as he lay on the ground holding up one arm to protect himself. This cell of terrorists is also responsible for the murder of former Socialist cabinet minister Ernest Lluch; they got 33 years each for that. I personally wouldn't mind at all using the death penalty on them. I imagine most Spaniards agree with me, but it's very politically incorrect to say so, especially if you want to be considered one of the enlightened, solidarious, and hip.
Also, some jackass etarra named Urtzi Murureta Gondra blew himself up with the explosives he was manipulating as part of an ETA training course being held in a remote area of central France near Limoges. Unfortunately he didn't die, though he was badly wounded in an arm and a leg. He is thought to be one of the cell that murdered Judge José María Lidón.
Wednesday, November 20, 2002
From the Culture supplement to today's Vanguardia is this paragraph from a commentary by Ana Nuño on a novel by one François Emmanuel, a--no, you're wrong! So was I. He's Belgian. Anyway, the plot of the book is that the narrator, an industrial psychologist with the French subsidiary of a German firm, is assigned to treat the boss, who has freaked out. Nuño's text is in italics below.
The plot develops, cleanly and linearly, this analytic process (Oh, great, another French...well, Belgian novel that takes place on a psychiatrist's couch) and, at the same time, introduces another motif that ends up becoming the obsessive self-exploration of the narrator-psychologist: the discovery of a hidden truth that concerns not only the boss, but the whole company. This hidden truth, which the author never explicitly mentions, allows us to relate the logic of the business world--with its restructuring plans, its search for maximum profit, and its increases in productivity--with the universe of the Nazi concentration camps, the brutal form taken by the bureaucratic rationalizationation of the largest systematic business of the destruction of human lives in History. WHAT? The logic of capitalism is that of the Nazi concentration camps? Is this chick smoking better dope than I am, that stuff that you take one hit of and instantly see how to rearrange the world, or is she on a crazed ditchweed headache high? The Nazi concentration camps were first cousins of the Soviet gulag, honey. Oligarchical collectivism and all that. Totalitarianism. Not capitalism. Socialism. Remember, the Nazis were National Socialists, not National Capitalists.
...(This is the first) work of fiction that explores the survival in our world of the logic that made possible the death factories of Auschwitz and the other extermination camps. A logic that continues its labor among us, hidden among the folds of the most poswerul and apparently innocuous instrument of creation and modification of the world: language. Must be a crazed ditchweed headache high. She's going off on a Chomskyan tangent, as Chomsky believes that language is the most important tool that the capitalist oppressors use to keep the rest of humanity enslaved. I'd shout "Run for your lives," but for some reason the article comes to a dead end here, so there's no more Chomskyan crap. Vocabulary note: "Chomskyan" means "a person whose ideas are within the current of linguistic and philosophical thought founded by Noam Chomsky." Steven Pinker is a Chomskyan. "Chomskyite" means "a person who is a political follower of Noam Chomsky." Those morons in Rage Against the Machine are Chomskyites.
Also, here we go again with "hidden truths". Spanish leftists, and a lot of Spanish non-leftists, are Gnostics: they believe that there's a hidden structure behind everything. Secret powerful forces run the world and manipulate everything. Everything happens for a reason, though we may not understand that reason; the powerful do, however. Nothing is true, since all knowledge is manipulated by those in charge. It's all one vast conspiracy, and the Americans / Jews / oil companies / arms manufacturers / CIA / cattle mutilators / crop-circle aliens / los que tienen muchas intereses are behind it. This is, of course, straight-out paranoia, and it's a distressingly common way of thinking in Spain, and I think in the other Latin countries as well.
The plot develops, cleanly and linearly, this analytic process (Oh, great, another French...well, Belgian novel that takes place on a psychiatrist's couch) and, at the same time, introduces another motif that ends up becoming the obsessive self-exploration of the narrator-psychologist: the discovery of a hidden truth that concerns not only the boss, but the whole company. This hidden truth, which the author never explicitly mentions, allows us to relate the logic of the business world--with its restructuring plans, its search for maximum profit, and its increases in productivity--with the universe of the Nazi concentration camps, the brutal form taken by the bureaucratic rationalizationation of the largest systematic business of the destruction of human lives in History. WHAT? The logic of capitalism is that of the Nazi concentration camps? Is this chick smoking better dope than I am, that stuff that you take one hit of and instantly see how to rearrange the world, or is she on a crazed ditchweed headache high? The Nazi concentration camps were first cousins of the Soviet gulag, honey. Oligarchical collectivism and all that. Totalitarianism. Not capitalism. Socialism. Remember, the Nazis were National Socialists, not National Capitalists.
...(This is the first) work of fiction that explores the survival in our world of the logic that made possible the death factories of Auschwitz and the other extermination camps. A logic that continues its labor among us, hidden among the folds of the most poswerul and apparently innocuous instrument of creation and modification of the world: language. Must be a crazed ditchweed headache high. She's going off on a Chomskyan tangent, as Chomsky believes that language is the most important tool that the capitalist oppressors use to keep the rest of humanity enslaved. I'd shout "Run for your lives," but for some reason the article comes to a dead end here, so there's no more Chomskyan crap. Vocabulary note: "Chomskyan" means "a person whose ideas are within the current of linguistic and philosophical thought founded by Noam Chomsky." Steven Pinker is a Chomskyan. "Chomskyite" means "a person who is a political follower of Noam Chomsky." Those morons in Rage Against the Machine are Chomskyites.
Also, here we go again with "hidden truths". Spanish leftists, and a lot of Spanish non-leftists, are Gnostics: they believe that there's a hidden structure behind everything. Secret powerful forces run the world and manipulate everything. Everything happens for a reason, though we may not understand that reason; the powerful do, however. Nothing is true, since all knowledge is manipulated by those in charge. It's all one vast conspiracy, and the Americans / Jews / oil companies / arms manufacturers / CIA / cattle mutilators / crop-circle aliens / los que tienen muchas intereses are behind it. This is, of course, straight-out paranoia, and it's a distressingly common way of thinking in Spain, and I think in the other Latin countries as well.
This article from the Weekly Standard demonstrates exactly why I am a small-L libertarian but not a big-L Libertarian. My nitpick: there are a lot of people who are, in general, libertarian on social issues, free-market on economic issues, and hawkish on foreign policy and defense. Andrew Sullivan calls them "eagles". I guess I'm one, though I think the name is dorky.
Xavier Basora from Buscaraons has a good post on Kyoto and a couple of well-worth-reading responses to things we've said on this blog. Definitely check it out. Don't confuse Xavier, who runs the blog, lives in Canada, and has a Catalan name, with the other guy, Xabier, who lives in London and has a Basque name. I'm not sure what's eating Xabier. He's been reading this site for a while and once sent a quite friendly letter. I really didn't think that we'd said anything particularly offensive recently. Patronizing I have to admit to, but not unfair, I don't think. Also, it's only fair to point out that the Anglo-Americans outshine the French in business, war, and government, the Low Countries folk and Swiss have them beat at business and government, and the Germans are superior in business and war, but next in line come the French in all those categories. We could debate exactly where to rank every culture on everything, but you'd have to put the French ahead of the Spanish, Italians, Poles, and Russians at business, war, and government, not to mention every non-Western culture. The French outstrip everybody else in fields from painting and poetry to cooking and lifestyle. (You heard right. The Latin lifestyle really is more pleasant than the Anglo-American. I'd give the four big Latin countries top rank in way of life, tied perhaps with the Dutch and the Belgians and maybe even the Catholic Germans. Then the Anglo-Americans.) I'm not quite sure why they can't accept that their country is the nicest place in the world to live, but that it isn't quite as strong as some other Western cultures at some other things.
Cinderella Bloggerfeller gives the Maoists well-deserved hell. Check it out. Sasha Castel, who has been kind enough to link to the Monsieur Stinky Cheese Psychologist interview, has a hilarious bit that she found somewhere, President Bush and Condi Rice doing the old "Who's on First" routine. Atlético Rules keeps you up to date on the Galicia oil spill, which is turning out to be a huge mess. The Galician coast is beautiful and teeming with life, much of which ends up on tables all over Spain. If you like fish and seafood, you'll love Spanish food, especially up on the north coast, anywhere from Tuy to Fuenterrabia. If you go to Las Peñucas in the Puerto Pesquero in Santander, you can get paella de marisco, gambas a la plancha, and merluza a la vasca for literally twenty bucks, I am not exaggerating, and that includes the house wine or a pitcher of beer, all recently dragged out of the cold Atlantic. Not the wine, the fish. Galicia is famous for percebes, a mollusk that looks so gross that I refuse to eat it. It's said to be delicious, so if you can bring yourself to actually put such a thing in your mouth, you'll probably love it. Coquilles St. Jacques, the scallop dish, is really of Galician origin. Galician-style octopus is famous throughout Spain; any real Gallego bar has a large pink octopus under the glass on the bar. They also serve tiny octopi in olive oil, parsley, and garlic sauce. Most people think they're delicious. Octopus in any form also grosses me out, though I have tried it. I feel sorry for them; I've seen documentaries of scientists making friends with them and of octopi solving problems, like figuring out how to open a jar with food inside it. After you've seen an octopus using a tentacle to caress a guy in a diving suit who is scratching the big mollusk's "nose" above its beak, it's hard to want to eat one. (Full disclosure: I'm a speciesist. I won't eat mammals, birds, reptiles, or amphibians, and I generally avoid seafood--I eat it once a month or so. Anything lower than amphibians is probably too dumb to have a consciousness, I figure.)
Anyway, back to Galicia. The fisherpeople are doing everything they can to haul up all life forms before the ship's oil tanks blow. The ship has cracked in half and sunk, and its oil tanks are under extreme pressure since it's sunk to the bottom, which is like ten thousand feet down. Many places along the coast have already been contaminated by oil washing up on the beaches, and when the rest of the oil comes out, the whole Galician coast south of El Ferrol and maybe some of the Portuguese coast, too, is going to be a mess. No more percebes from there for a few years.
This is ridiculous. There has got to be some way to make oil tankers generally safe. I can't think of an oil tanker that belonged to a big company that's caused a big mess like this since the Exxon Valdez. They must have the capability to make their tankers virtually unsinkable, and I'm sure they do it, since safety measures have got to be cheaper than cleaning up cormorants. Oil tankers that do not meet the highest standards of safety should simply not be allowed to do business. This is one place where the good of the commons (a non-oily sea) is more important than the individual right of Joe Blow to sail whatever kind of ship he wants wherever he wants. America and Britain and Canada and Australia ought to get together with the rest of the European democracies and anyone else who wants to sign on and simply not permit any tanker that does not meet the minimum standards to take on or unload oil in their countries. I don't think that ought to be too hard to do. Tankers are pretty big and easy to spot; it's hard to be sneaky with something like that. And, no, there's no comparison with the Kyoto Treaty (which the Europeans are never going to abide by, either), since the science behind the global warming theory is still under question. There's no dispute about the bad stuff that spilling oil into the sea does.
Cinderella Bloggerfeller gives the Maoists well-deserved hell. Check it out. Sasha Castel, who has been kind enough to link to the Monsieur Stinky Cheese Psychologist interview, has a hilarious bit that she found somewhere, President Bush and Condi Rice doing the old "Who's on First" routine. Atlético Rules keeps you up to date on the Galicia oil spill, which is turning out to be a huge mess. The Galician coast is beautiful and teeming with life, much of which ends up on tables all over Spain. If you like fish and seafood, you'll love Spanish food, especially up on the north coast, anywhere from Tuy to Fuenterrabia. If you go to Las Peñucas in the Puerto Pesquero in Santander, you can get paella de marisco, gambas a la plancha, and merluza a la vasca for literally twenty bucks, I am not exaggerating, and that includes the house wine or a pitcher of beer, all recently dragged out of the cold Atlantic. Not the wine, the fish. Galicia is famous for percebes, a mollusk that looks so gross that I refuse to eat it. It's said to be delicious, so if you can bring yourself to actually put such a thing in your mouth, you'll probably love it. Coquilles St. Jacques, the scallop dish, is really of Galician origin. Galician-style octopus is famous throughout Spain; any real Gallego bar has a large pink octopus under the glass on the bar. They also serve tiny octopi in olive oil, parsley, and garlic sauce. Most people think they're delicious. Octopus in any form also grosses me out, though I have tried it. I feel sorry for them; I've seen documentaries of scientists making friends with them and of octopi solving problems, like figuring out how to open a jar with food inside it. After you've seen an octopus using a tentacle to caress a guy in a diving suit who is scratching the big mollusk's "nose" above its beak, it's hard to want to eat one. (Full disclosure: I'm a speciesist. I won't eat mammals, birds, reptiles, or amphibians, and I generally avoid seafood--I eat it once a month or so. Anything lower than amphibians is probably too dumb to have a consciousness, I figure.)
Anyway, back to Galicia. The fisherpeople are doing everything they can to haul up all life forms before the ship's oil tanks blow. The ship has cracked in half and sunk, and its oil tanks are under extreme pressure since it's sunk to the bottom, which is like ten thousand feet down. Many places along the coast have already been contaminated by oil washing up on the beaches, and when the rest of the oil comes out, the whole Galician coast south of El Ferrol and maybe some of the Portuguese coast, too, is going to be a mess. No more percebes from there for a few years.
This is ridiculous. There has got to be some way to make oil tankers generally safe. I can't think of an oil tanker that belonged to a big company that's caused a big mess like this since the Exxon Valdez. They must have the capability to make their tankers virtually unsinkable, and I'm sure they do it, since safety measures have got to be cheaper than cleaning up cormorants. Oil tankers that do not meet the highest standards of safety should simply not be allowed to do business. This is one place where the good of the commons (a non-oily sea) is more important than the individual right of Joe Blow to sail whatever kind of ship he wants wherever he wants. America and Britain and Canada and Australia ought to get together with the rest of the European democracies and anyone else who wants to sign on and simply not permit any tanker that does not meet the minimum standards to take on or unload oil in their countries. I don't think that ought to be too hard to do. Tankers are pretty big and easy to spot; it's hard to be sneaky with something like that. And, no, there's no comparison with the Kyoto Treaty (which the Europeans are never going to abide by, either), since the science behind the global warming theory is still under question. There's no dispute about the bad stuff that spilling oil into the sea does.
Here's another article from Front Page on the history of Islam which is right on target with the facts. For the full horror of the history of slavery within Islam, check it out. Also, you ought to read this interview with Stephen Schwartz, an American Islamic journalist, on why Wahabism is a fanatical current within Islam. We have a nit-pick with Schwartz: he overestimates the presence of the Islamic heritage in Spanish culture. In fact, everything Jewish or Islamic in Spain was ruthlessly crushed, between Ferdinand and Isabella's expulsion of the Jews in 1492--400,000 Spanish Jews were affected, of whom about 150,000 converted to Christianity and stayed. The rest mostly went to North Africa, and their descendants are now called Sephardic Jews. (The Catalans had already killed off all their Jews in the 1391 pogrom. One thing we must say in favor of the Spanish Muslims is that they did not treat Jews particularly badly most of the time, unlike the Spanish Christians.) The Muslim inhabitants, the moriscos, were pushed out of Castile into Muslim Granada during the early 1400s, and they were finally expelled from Valencia, Aragon, and Andalusia in 1609-10, 400,000 of them. The moriscos also mostly went to North Africa. Everything Muslim or Jewish was stamped out by the Inquisition--whose horrors affected relatively few people, mostly Jews who had converted to Christianity (conversos), but those horrors were pretty horrible. The only thing left in Spain of the Muslim heritage is the architecture, though it's said that the complicated water-rights and irrigation laws of Valencia are left over from the Muslim days. Some say flamenco music is of Muslim origin, though others say it's gypsy. Probably it's some of both mixed in with some plain old Spanish.
Comment on flamenco: What you hear in the States is generally pop-disco flamenco, of which the most frightening recent example is "Macarena", though "Aserejé" has some flamenco influence in it. (The girls are named Ketchup because their flamenco-pop dad's monicker is Tomate. Get it?) Flamenco and its cousins sevillanas, copla española, rumba, and the like fulfill the same role in Spanish society as country music does in American. Both of them are musics of rural people who emigrated to the city, and they've both been heavily influenced by the technology available there. Both flamenco and its cousins, and country, have adopted synthesizers, drum machines, electric guitars, and the like; they are urban forms of music based on traditional rural styles but using modern technology and influenced by international pop. The traditional rural styles still exist, but only in flamenco's heartland and among modern middle-class hipsters, just the way that traditional gospel and folk music can still be heard in America--but most of its fans are the NPR crowd. (Should you, while in Barcelona, want to check out a bar with old-style flamenco, hit the Galpón Sur on Calle Guilleries in Gràcia and ask the bartender to put on something good. Every couple of weeks they have concerts--it's either flamenco, jazz, or South American. Everybody who goes there is some kind of Communist or worse but they're friendly enough if you can take a little joshing.) The most critically-acclaimed modern flamenco musicians are Camarón de la Isla and Tomatito. Their stuff is influenced somewhat by rock, but it's definitely legit. These guys have soul. Camarón died relatively young a few years ago and there's now a Camarón cult, kind of like the Jim Morrison cult. A flamenco-rock band, mostly rock, that's worth checking out is Ketama. The Gypsy Kings are probably the most famous "Spanish" musicians; they're actually French. They play rumbas and they're a great party band. True flamenco aficionados look down on the Gypsy Kings as inauthentic and too poppy, but I like them. Another Frenchman is Manu Chao, whose political ideas are idiotarian supreme but who's a damn good musician, a rumba-rocker. He used to be the frontman for a group called Mano Negra, whose album Puta's Fever will get your next bash hopping. He had a song that was a big hit a few months ago called "Me gustas tú", which was the only thing that made the radio tolerable during the hellish "Operación: Triunfo" summer of 2002. All of these guys ought to be easy to find on one of those music-sharing sites, in case you're interested. Manu Chao is really hip right now because he's one of those anti-globo wackos and plays shows at their demos, so if you want to tell your friends you're into what's cool in Europe, give Manu a listen.
Comment on Jim Morrison: I went to Jim Morrison's grave once when I was in Paris. It's in the historic and really quite beautiful Pére Lachaise cemetery, where dozens of French notables like Voltaire and Chopin are buried. When you walk in the front gate, you can see tombs vandalized with signs that say JIM with an arrow pointing to his tomb. Just listen for "The End" blasting out of a boom box a hundred or so yards away and that's where you want to go. When you get there you'll see a bunch of freaks drinking beer, smoking pot, and communing around Jim's tomb, which has a small bust of Jim on it that's been painted and repainted over and over. One guy ceremonially poured a beer over Jim's head, which seemed like a waste of a perfectly good beer to me. Graffiti like JIM BROKE ON THROUGH FOR YOU AND ME and JIM IS THE LIZARD KING FOR EVER are scratched all over the neighboring tombs. Based on the graffiti, I'd say a lot of the pilgrims to Jim's grave are Italian. Are the Doors especially popular there? Anyway, a few years ago, whoever's in charge of Pére Lachaise announced that Jim's lease on the tomb was up and that he had to go somewhere else, and it was easy to get the impression that they didn't care where somewhere else was as long as it was a long way away from there. I don't know if they ever moved his grave or not. Interestingly enough, Jim Morrison, if he had any political ideas at all, which I doubt, would have been a rather unpleasant sort of conservative. He hated hippies, thought they were a bunch of idiots. He hated homosexuals. Though he'd take anything he could get hold of, his drugs were alcohol and speed, not pot and acid. He hated San Francisco; L.A. was much more his style of decadent. Though he hated his father, a lifetime US Navy officer, he was not against the war in Vietnam and thought the protestors were morons. He didn't really like anything too much except getting really fucked up and freaking out other people with his Lizard King crap. His death was suicide at age 27; he killed himself intentionally bit by bit rather than all at one go.
Comment on flamenco: What you hear in the States is generally pop-disco flamenco, of which the most frightening recent example is "Macarena", though "Aserejé" has some flamenco influence in it. (The girls are named Ketchup because their flamenco-pop dad's monicker is Tomate. Get it?) Flamenco and its cousins sevillanas, copla española, rumba, and the like fulfill the same role in Spanish society as country music does in American. Both of them are musics of rural people who emigrated to the city, and they've both been heavily influenced by the technology available there. Both flamenco and its cousins, and country, have adopted synthesizers, drum machines, electric guitars, and the like; they are urban forms of music based on traditional rural styles but using modern technology and influenced by international pop. The traditional rural styles still exist, but only in flamenco's heartland and among modern middle-class hipsters, just the way that traditional gospel and folk music can still be heard in America--but most of its fans are the NPR crowd. (Should you, while in Barcelona, want to check out a bar with old-style flamenco, hit the Galpón Sur on Calle Guilleries in Gràcia and ask the bartender to put on something good. Every couple of weeks they have concerts--it's either flamenco, jazz, or South American. Everybody who goes there is some kind of Communist or worse but they're friendly enough if you can take a little joshing.) The most critically-acclaimed modern flamenco musicians are Camarón de la Isla and Tomatito. Their stuff is influenced somewhat by rock, but it's definitely legit. These guys have soul. Camarón died relatively young a few years ago and there's now a Camarón cult, kind of like the Jim Morrison cult. A flamenco-rock band, mostly rock, that's worth checking out is Ketama. The Gypsy Kings are probably the most famous "Spanish" musicians; they're actually French. They play rumbas and they're a great party band. True flamenco aficionados look down on the Gypsy Kings as inauthentic and too poppy, but I like them. Another Frenchman is Manu Chao, whose political ideas are idiotarian supreme but who's a damn good musician, a rumba-rocker. He used to be the frontman for a group called Mano Negra, whose album Puta's Fever will get your next bash hopping. He had a song that was a big hit a few months ago called "Me gustas tú", which was the only thing that made the radio tolerable during the hellish "Operación: Triunfo" summer of 2002. All of these guys ought to be easy to find on one of those music-sharing sites, in case you're interested. Manu Chao is really hip right now because he's one of those anti-globo wackos and plays shows at their demos, so if you want to tell your friends you're into what's cool in Europe, give Manu a listen.
Comment on Jim Morrison: I went to Jim Morrison's grave once when I was in Paris. It's in the historic and really quite beautiful Pére Lachaise cemetery, where dozens of French notables like Voltaire and Chopin are buried. When you walk in the front gate, you can see tombs vandalized with signs that say JIM with an arrow pointing to his tomb. Just listen for "The End" blasting out of a boom box a hundred or so yards away and that's where you want to go. When you get there you'll see a bunch of freaks drinking beer, smoking pot, and communing around Jim's tomb, which has a small bust of Jim on it that's been painted and repainted over and over. One guy ceremonially poured a beer over Jim's head, which seemed like a waste of a perfectly good beer to me. Graffiti like JIM BROKE ON THROUGH FOR YOU AND ME and JIM IS THE LIZARD KING FOR EVER are scratched all over the neighboring tombs. Based on the graffiti, I'd say a lot of the pilgrims to Jim's grave are Italian. Are the Doors especially popular there? Anyway, a few years ago, whoever's in charge of Pére Lachaise announced that Jim's lease on the tomb was up and that he had to go somewhere else, and it was easy to get the impression that they didn't care where somewhere else was as long as it was a long way away from there. I don't know if they ever moved his grave or not. Interestingly enough, Jim Morrison, if he had any political ideas at all, which I doubt, would have been a rather unpleasant sort of conservative. He hated hippies, thought they were a bunch of idiots. He hated homosexuals. Though he'd take anything he could get hold of, his drugs were alcohol and speed, not pot and acid. He hated San Francisco; L.A. was much more his style of decadent. Though he hated his father, a lifetime US Navy officer, he was not against the war in Vietnam and thought the protestors were morons. He didn't really like anything too much except getting really fucked up and freaking out other people with his Lizard King crap. His death was suicide at age 27; he killed himself intentionally bit by bit rather than all at one go.
Check out Atlético Rules for the scoop on the oil spill off the coast of Galicia. Someone said on TV3 that if the spill had been crude oil instead of fuel oil it would have been even worse, since fuel oil is slightly heavier than water and tends to sink whereas crude oil floats on top of the water and is more easily carried to shore. I don't know whether this is true--could someone who knows basic physical science tell us? There's also been some complaining about Gibraltar, as that was the oil tanker's destination. The tanker was apparently substandard and in violation of several laws, one of which was that it was supposed to be double-hulled but was only single-hulled. Those responsible should, of course, face the consequences; the captain of the ship is in jail in Galicia. Seems to me that it ought to be the shipowner in there if anyone's going to jail. I'm really not sure what Gibraltar has to do with anything, but certain sectors of the media seem to be trying to draw a connection between the existence of Gibraltar as a British colony and this oil spill. I don't get it.
Thanks to Patrick Crozier from CrozierVision and UK Transport for adding our new slogan to the template--we're too astonishingly untechnological to figure that out, though we have figured out how to add links to the blogroll at least, and thanks again to Jessica from The Blog of Chloe and Pete for being so quotable. Check 'em all out. UK Transport is, despite its title, interesting; Patrick explains how things work from an informed perspective and throws in lots of libertarianism and economics knowledge as a bonus. If he called it something like "Next Stop: Disaster. Mind the Gap", he'd get a lot more readers. Jessica is an awfully good writer.
Check out this story about three European kids and their swell behavior; one of them is a Spaniard. (We found this through Best of the Web.) Are we surprised? Unfortunately, no.
First, you need to remember who European exchange students are. They are rich kids. Participating in an student exchange is not free. Also, your English needs to be good before you get to America or you're going to have real problems. Only rich kids have the money to go to the kind of private schools where they make sure you learn English. The father in the story said they were spoiled, which I have no problem believing with a Spanish kid, especially a boy, who really is the king of the house. These rich kids are super-hip; they're from big cities and are used to hitting snazzy discos on weekends and going sailing and the like. They have every kind of electronic gear imaginable and they use it, so they're absolutely up-to-the-minute on what's in and what's out in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York. Also, these kids drink and use recreational drugs. They can afford it. The absolute last place to send them is Utah, for God's sake. Of course they're going to hate it.
America, unfortunately, except for New York, is not hip in the eyes of the rich kids. What's hip now is being anti-globalistic and solidarious and the like. The children of the wealthy are always the first to jump on every trend--they've got the motive, social competition, the opportunity, being able to find out instantly what's hip in Tokyo, and the ability, since they have tons of dough. Anyway, the trend now is pretending you're a squatter. Walk through rich parts of Barcelona like La Bonanova and Sarrià and you'll see fourteen-year-old kids dressed like Sixties hippies and with shit stuck through their faces.
But almost all of America is square; high schools in Utah ask you to do silly stuff like take the homecoming game seriously and rent a tuxedo to go to the Prom. These Euro-kids are just going to be bored with that. And they're going to be bored in school, too, since European private schools are at least two grade levels above average American public schools. It shouldn't be too surprising that they should get into mischief--they're used to getting away with everything anyway. Also, part of being hip is being anti-American. You can't be hip and like George Bush, not even in America and especially not in Europe. What it's really hip to do, in fact, since being a squatter is so hip, is to mouth the squatters' ridiculous political slogans, which usually have something to do with smashing capitalism or justifying the ETA and other terrorists. Sixteen-year-old kids never see the contradictions between their lifestyles and radical politics.
So you've got three immature though worldly rich urban European kids who think America's uncool and that Utah is especially uncool--the poor kids begged to be taken to Ogden, for God's sake, for a little urban atmosphere! And they do something really dumb and in rotten taste instead of, say, going back home when they decided they didn't like it. Nobody should be at all surprised. Also, I'm not surprised that the FBI checked them out, either--they damn well should have, with these morons filming themselves with a gun and yelling infantile squatter stuff about how terrorism is cool. You never know what the hell they might be up to.
I have had several Spanish students in my Proficiency-level classes who had done an exchange in high school in the United States. They all had very positive experiences; I'm sure it helps a lot that these were nice rich kids whose parents hadn't spoiled them. These were kids who were interested enough in learning English that they continued trying to improve though their English was already very good. And none of them could remotely be described as hip. Thank God. Really, I think people who have friends over for dinner and go to a movie or maybe for a few drinks on Saturday night probably have a lot more fun, and are certainly a lot more fun to be around, than people who care so much about how others see them that they go out of their way to do silly crap so that other folks will think they're hip. Like stay out until seven in the morning in expensive discos listening to crappy music that's so loud you can't hear what people are saying and they have to yell in your ear while swallowing pills whose contents you're really not too sure about.
This has been today's Startlingly Obvious Sermon. Thank you.
First, you need to remember who European exchange students are. They are rich kids. Participating in an student exchange is not free. Also, your English needs to be good before you get to America or you're going to have real problems. Only rich kids have the money to go to the kind of private schools where they make sure you learn English. The father in the story said they were spoiled, which I have no problem believing with a Spanish kid, especially a boy, who really is the king of the house. These rich kids are super-hip; they're from big cities and are used to hitting snazzy discos on weekends and going sailing and the like. They have every kind of electronic gear imaginable and they use it, so they're absolutely up-to-the-minute on what's in and what's out in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York. Also, these kids drink and use recreational drugs. They can afford it. The absolute last place to send them is Utah, for God's sake. Of course they're going to hate it.
America, unfortunately, except for New York, is not hip in the eyes of the rich kids. What's hip now is being anti-globalistic and solidarious and the like. The children of the wealthy are always the first to jump on every trend--they've got the motive, social competition, the opportunity, being able to find out instantly what's hip in Tokyo, and the ability, since they have tons of dough. Anyway, the trend now is pretending you're a squatter. Walk through rich parts of Barcelona like La Bonanova and Sarrià and you'll see fourteen-year-old kids dressed like Sixties hippies and with shit stuck through their faces.
But almost all of America is square; high schools in Utah ask you to do silly stuff like take the homecoming game seriously and rent a tuxedo to go to the Prom. These Euro-kids are just going to be bored with that. And they're going to be bored in school, too, since European private schools are at least two grade levels above average American public schools. It shouldn't be too surprising that they should get into mischief--they're used to getting away with everything anyway. Also, part of being hip is being anti-American. You can't be hip and like George Bush, not even in America and especially not in Europe. What it's really hip to do, in fact, since being a squatter is so hip, is to mouth the squatters' ridiculous political slogans, which usually have something to do with smashing capitalism or justifying the ETA and other terrorists. Sixteen-year-old kids never see the contradictions between their lifestyles and radical politics.
So you've got three immature though worldly rich urban European kids who think America's uncool and that Utah is especially uncool--the poor kids begged to be taken to Ogden, for God's sake, for a little urban atmosphere! And they do something really dumb and in rotten taste instead of, say, going back home when they decided they didn't like it. Nobody should be at all surprised. Also, I'm not surprised that the FBI checked them out, either--they damn well should have, with these morons filming themselves with a gun and yelling infantile squatter stuff about how terrorism is cool. You never know what the hell they might be up to.
I have had several Spanish students in my Proficiency-level classes who had done an exchange in high school in the United States. They all had very positive experiences; I'm sure it helps a lot that these were nice rich kids whose parents hadn't spoiled them. These were kids who were interested enough in learning English that they continued trying to improve though their English was already very good. And none of them could remotely be described as hip. Thank God. Really, I think people who have friends over for dinner and go to a movie or maybe for a few drinks on Saturday night probably have a lot more fun, and are certainly a lot more fun to be around, than people who care so much about how others see them that they go out of their way to do silly crap so that other folks will think they're hip. Like stay out until seven in the morning in expensive discos listening to crappy music that's so loud you can't hear what people are saying and they have to yell in your ear while swallowing pills whose contents you're really not too sure about.
This has been today's Startlingly Obvious Sermon. Thank you.
Tuesday, November 19, 2002
We assume everyone has by now heard the so-called news that John Kennedy was in very poor health and took a whole pile of drugs, some consciousness-altering. Here's a link from Fox News. These findings (they certainly seem to be completely legitimate) are interesting but not new, though they certainly do serve as confirmation for what was previously reported.
Paul Johnson wrote in A History of the American People, published in 1997, "(Joseph Kennedy's) lies centered on certain areas. One was Jack's health. Old Joe had learned many tricks in concealing the true state of his retarded daughter, Rosemary, buried alive in a home. He used them to gloss over the seriousness of Jack's back problems and his functional disorder, eventually diagnosed as Addison's disease. Strictly speaking, Jack was never fit to hold any important public office, and the list of lies told about his body by the Kennedy camp over many years is formidable. The back pain Jack suffered seems to have increased after he became President, and his White House physician, Dr. Janet Travell, had to give him two or three daily injections of novocaine. Jack eventually found this treatment intolerably painful. But he did not fire Travell, fearing that, though she had hitherto been willing to mislead the media about his health, she might now disclose his true medical history. Instead, he kept her on the payroll but put himself into the hands of a rogue named Dr. Max Jacobson, who later lost his medical license and was described by his nurse as 'absolutely a quack'. Known to his celebrity clients as 'Doctor Feelgood' , because of his willingness to inject amphetamines laced with steroids, animal cells, and other goodies, Jacobson started to shoot powerful drugs into Jack once, twice, even three times a week. Although he turned down a request to move into the White House, he had succeeded, by the summer of 1961, in making the President heavily dependent on amphetamines." Johnson says later that Kennedy's chubby cheeks, which he only developed after becoming President, were the result of all the cortisone that was being injected into him.
Paul Johnson wrote in A History of the American People, published in 1997, "(Joseph Kennedy's) lies centered on certain areas. One was Jack's health. Old Joe had learned many tricks in concealing the true state of his retarded daughter, Rosemary, buried alive in a home. He used them to gloss over the seriousness of Jack's back problems and his functional disorder, eventually diagnosed as Addison's disease. Strictly speaking, Jack was never fit to hold any important public office, and the list of lies told about his body by the Kennedy camp over many years is formidable. The back pain Jack suffered seems to have increased after he became President, and his White House physician, Dr. Janet Travell, had to give him two or three daily injections of novocaine. Jack eventually found this treatment intolerably painful. But he did not fire Travell, fearing that, though she had hitherto been willing to mislead the media about his health, she might now disclose his true medical history. Instead, he kept her on the payroll but put himself into the hands of a rogue named Dr. Max Jacobson, who later lost his medical license and was described by his nurse as 'absolutely a quack'. Known to his celebrity clients as 'Doctor Feelgood' , because of his willingness to inject amphetamines laced with steroids, animal cells, and other goodies, Jacobson started to shoot powerful drugs into Jack once, twice, even three times a week. Although he turned down a request to move into the White House, he had succeeded, by the summer of 1961, in making the President heavily dependent on amphetamines." Johnson says later that Kennedy's chubby cheeks, which he only developed after becoming President, were the result of all the cortisone that was being injected into him.
Find out if your blog is banned in China! We're not, unfortunately; we've done too much France-bashing and not enough Commie-bashing. Here's our position. China is a dictatorship but from what we read things could be a lot worse there, and were a lot worse pretty recently. Still, things could be one hell of a lot better, and one of the reasons is that, despite all the economic growth along the coast from Shanghai to Hong Kong, China is still a Communist state, and Communist states suck to live in. The West should do everything possible to encourage the development of human rights in China, though besides issuing firm protests whenever the Chinese government decides to treat somebody unpleasantly, I'm not sure what else we can do. This does not extend to cutting off trade with China or slapping sanctions on them or going off on some military adventure. China's simply too big and important to be ignored, and all we can do is deal with them at a level of diplomatic courtesy. We are not China's friend, nor do we want to be, but it would be reckless folly to turn China into an enemy. This does not apply to, say, Cuba. Cuba is, fortunately, not so important that we have to deal with the Castro regime. We can shun Castro and we are right to do so. But we just can't shun China, no matter how much we'd like to. Is this enough to get us censored? Anyway, click here to find out if you're banned in China. (Thanks to Horologium for the link.)
Monday, November 18, 2002
Iberian Notes scoops Reynolds! InstaPundit says that Bush is going to snub Gerhard Schröder at the upcoming NATO summit in Prague. We wrote about this back in October! Check our old website if you don't believe us. It's still up at www.johnandantonio.com/InsideEuropeIberianNotes.
This story from the Onion is just plain hilarious, besides being politically and economically dead-on-target.
In the financial section of yesterday's Vanguardia, there was an interview with unpleasant arrogant French marketer and psychologist Clotaire Rapaille. M. Rapaille "lives in a mansion in Tuxedo, New York. His consulting firm has branches in Europe and the United States and advises 50 corporations out of the Fortune 100. He bases his theories of psychoanalysis and archetypes on the work of Freud, Jung, and Levi-Strauss," so you can see just how up-to-date and visionary M. Rapaille's ideas are. M. Rapaille brags about his use of focus groups to determine that Nestlé should emphasize how good its coffee smells in its advertising and that General Motors should give its cars an aggressive image. M. Rapaille is definitely pushing the creative envelope and showing his general state-of-the-artness here. The questions, of course, are Q., and M. Rapaille's answers are A.
Q. What is American culture like?
A. You can sum it up in one word: adolescent. Obsessed by violence, sex, and food. In reality, since it's adolescent, there's not much sex and a lot of violence.
Q. Why adolescent?
A. Because the US has never had a father. It has an enormous Oedipus complex. They never had to kill the king or the aristocrats, which are paternal figures in Europe. That's why there's so much obsession with age in the US. They think they can be "forever young", like the song.
Q. And since 9-11?
A. 9-11 has had a profound impact on the American mentality. They've never been invaded. The only wars were the ones in Hollywood. The answer is fear and the desire to fight. People want to say, don't mess with me! We've seen an incredible increase in the security budget. The US is becoming a militarized country.
Q. How does this influence consumption?
A. Things like the adaptation of a military vehicle, the Hummer, or bullet-proof vests have become fashionable. Executives from one of my clients, DuPont, have remarked to me that they are selling huge quantities of Kevlon, a material five times stronger than steel. I think we're going to see a comeback of bomber jackets. And military boots.
Q. But "military chic" already existed.
A. This is no longer military chic. This is real, much more visceral.
Q. In what sense?
A. I divide the motivation of the consumer in three categories. The cortex, which is intellectual. The limbic, which is realted to emotion. And third, the reptilian: an instinct for survival and reproduction. The reptilian is winning out. Although it may look for an intellectual alibi, power is reptilian and in the US, now more than ever, it is what's in charge since the events of 9-11.
Q. Like the Hummer, for example.
A. A car is much more than a vehicle to get from point A to point B. A car is a message. There's no need to have a Hummer to go shopping at the mall. But I think there's a reptilian instinct under the surface, in the depths of the mind, the message they want to emit is something like "Don't mess with me. If there's a collision, you're going to die and I won't." In Europe this would be perceived as too simplistic. But the United States is simplistic.
Q. Will it stay like that?
A. In reality, I think that 9-11 should mean the coming of age for the Americans. And this should express itself in respect for other cultures. Until now, the United States has had no foreign policy becuase they thought that the rest of the world was nothing more than a bunch of small countries that would wind up becoming little Americas.
Q. How will this affect the strategies of the big corporations?
A. Look at McDonald's. It's a symbol of old-time globalization. One product for the whole world. But this model was already being questioned and it died definitively on 9-11. Now they have to diversify, recognize that in France we like cheese as something alive with a smell, that's not dead like pasteurized American cheese.
Q. Give some examples.
A. A good one is L'Oreal in Japan. They've been very successful because of their respect for Japanese aesthetics, so different from the French. To do this you have to be sure of yourself. And L'Oreal has this because it's French. American companies can't rely on their culture because it's so poor. That's their problem.
We won't comment too much here, except to say that we're shocked that DuPont, General Motors, and forty-eight of the other top Fortune 100 companies are actually paying this guy enough money to live in a mansion for spouting this drivel. We are also shocked that these companies are paying this guy to talk shit about their own country. We don't need to hire any Frenchmen to do that. We already have Chomsky, Vidal, Sontag, Lewis Lapham, Bill Moyers, Ramsey Clark, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Alec Baldwin, and Woody Harrelson. We suggest that if you, the reader, work for a company that hires Monsieur Clotaire Rapaille, or if you own stock in such a company, you might gently propose to someone on the board of directors that the company save some money by no longer hiring said unpleasant arrogant anti-American French psychologist to tell them crap they could have picked up from an intro marketing book, a bad Psych 101 textbook, and a couple of Naomi Klein manifestoes.
We'd also like to point to good old nationalism as a reason for M. Rapaille's anti-Americanism. This is clearly visible in his last three answers. He thinks America doesn't respect other countries, like France, where we mistakenly tried to sell them non-stinky cheese. Such an affront to la belle France! Meanwhile France, so superior, is "successful in its exportations" because it respects other countries' cultures; it can do this because it has a rich culture, not a poor one like the American. M. Rapaille would not fall into such obvious chauvinism were he not a nationalist, blinded into thinking that his culture is superior to the adolescent American. He just can't understand why America is richer, more powerful, and more successful than his own beloved France, and he refuses to admit it just may be because American culture is superior to French in several important fields. Now, we'd prefer to say that America, as a culture, excels at some things, and France, as a culture, excels at others. Two of the things that America excels at are marketing in particular and business in general, and these are two things in which the French have always been weak. They have even historically turned up their Gallic noses at such matters; remember Napoleon's jibe that the British were "a nation of shopkeepers"? Well, the shopkeepers kicked Napoleon's superior French ass when it came down to the real fighting. British culture won out over French, and don't think the French don't know that and don't resent it (which is why they can be so snotty about French--they can't stand it that English is the world's first language rather than French), especially since France was, until the mid-1800s, the most populous country in Europe except Russia and should have been able to beat the English militarily, as with more inhabitants they should have had both more men and more money than the British. Yet since the War of the Spanish Succession, which ended in 1713 and in which France took a serious loss, France has been on the winning side in only one important war: the War of the American Revolution. Since then, they've lost all the big ones; I would hand them a loss in World War One since they'd have been conquered again if it hadn't been for first the British, for four long years of trench warfare, and then the Americans, with their 1918 contingent of fresh fighting men. They're clear losers in World War Two, no matter how much the postwar settlement tried to disguise that fact. Face it, Frenchmen: you're lousy at business and war. Be proud of the good things about your culture instead of bashing the British and Americans for being better at some things than you are.
Q. What is American culture like?
A. You can sum it up in one word: adolescent. Obsessed by violence, sex, and food. In reality, since it's adolescent, there's not much sex and a lot of violence.
Q. Why adolescent?
A. Because the US has never had a father. It has an enormous Oedipus complex. They never had to kill the king or the aristocrats, which are paternal figures in Europe. That's why there's so much obsession with age in the US. They think they can be "forever young", like the song.
Q. And since 9-11?
A. 9-11 has had a profound impact on the American mentality. They've never been invaded. The only wars were the ones in Hollywood. The answer is fear and the desire to fight. People want to say, don't mess with me! We've seen an incredible increase in the security budget. The US is becoming a militarized country.
Q. How does this influence consumption?
A. Things like the adaptation of a military vehicle, the Hummer, or bullet-proof vests have become fashionable. Executives from one of my clients, DuPont, have remarked to me that they are selling huge quantities of Kevlon, a material five times stronger than steel. I think we're going to see a comeback of bomber jackets. And military boots.
Q. But "military chic" already existed.
A. This is no longer military chic. This is real, much more visceral.
Q. In what sense?
A. I divide the motivation of the consumer in three categories. The cortex, which is intellectual. The limbic, which is realted to emotion. And third, the reptilian: an instinct for survival and reproduction. The reptilian is winning out. Although it may look for an intellectual alibi, power is reptilian and in the US, now more than ever, it is what's in charge since the events of 9-11.
Q. Like the Hummer, for example.
A. A car is much more than a vehicle to get from point A to point B. A car is a message. There's no need to have a Hummer to go shopping at the mall. But I think there's a reptilian instinct under the surface, in the depths of the mind, the message they want to emit is something like "Don't mess with me. If there's a collision, you're going to die and I won't." In Europe this would be perceived as too simplistic. But the United States is simplistic.
Q. Will it stay like that?
A. In reality, I think that 9-11 should mean the coming of age for the Americans. And this should express itself in respect for other cultures. Until now, the United States has had no foreign policy becuase they thought that the rest of the world was nothing more than a bunch of small countries that would wind up becoming little Americas.
Q. How will this affect the strategies of the big corporations?
A. Look at McDonald's. It's a symbol of old-time globalization. One product for the whole world. But this model was already being questioned and it died definitively on 9-11. Now they have to diversify, recognize that in France we like cheese as something alive with a smell, that's not dead like pasteurized American cheese.
Q. Give some examples.
A. A good one is L'Oreal in Japan. They've been very successful because of their respect for Japanese aesthetics, so different from the French. To do this you have to be sure of yourself. And L'Oreal has this because it's French. American companies can't rely on their culture because it's so poor. That's their problem.
We won't comment too much here, except to say that we're shocked that DuPont, General Motors, and forty-eight of the other top Fortune 100 companies are actually paying this guy enough money to live in a mansion for spouting this drivel. We are also shocked that these companies are paying this guy to talk shit about their own country. We don't need to hire any Frenchmen to do that. We already have Chomsky, Vidal, Sontag, Lewis Lapham, Bill Moyers, Ramsey Clark, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Alec Baldwin, and Woody Harrelson. We suggest that if you, the reader, work for a company that hires Monsieur Clotaire Rapaille, or if you own stock in such a company, you might gently propose to someone on the board of directors that the company save some money by no longer hiring said unpleasant arrogant anti-American French psychologist to tell them crap they could have picked up from an intro marketing book, a bad Psych 101 textbook, and a couple of Naomi Klein manifestoes.
We'd also like to point to good old nationalism as a reason for M. Rapaille's anti-Americanism. This is clearly visible in his last three answers. He thinks America doesn't respect other countries, like France, where we mistakenly tried to sell them non-stinky cheese. Such an affront to la belle France! Meanwhile France, so superior, is "successful in its exportations" because it respects other countries' cultures; it can do this because it has a rich culture, not a poor one like the American. M. Rapaille would not fall into such obvious chauvinism were he not a nationalist, blinded into thinking that his culture is superior to the adolescent American. He just can't understand why America is richer, more powerful, and more successful than his own beloved France, and he refuses to admit it just may be because American culture is superior to French in several important fields. Now, we'd prefer to say that America, as a culture, excels at some things, and France, as a culture, excels at others. Two of the things that America excels at are marketing in particular and business in general, and these are two things in which the French have always been weak. They have even historically turned up their Gallic noses at such matters; remember Napoleon's jibe that the British were "a nation of shopkeepers"? Well, the shopkeepers kicked Napoleon's superior French ass when it came down to the real fighting. British culture won out over French, and don't think the French don't know that and don't resent it (which is why they can be so snotty about French--they can't stand it that English is the world's first language rather than French), especially since France was, until the mid-1800s, the most populous country in Europe except Russia and should have been able to beat the English militarily, as with more inhabitants they should have had both more men and more money than the British. Yet since the War of the Spanish Succession, which ended in 1713 and in which France took a serious loss, France has been on the winning side in only one important war: the War of the American Revolution. Since then, they've lost all the big ones; I would hand them a loss in World War One since they'd have been conquered again if it hadn't been for first the British, for four long years of trench warfare, and then the Americans, with their 1918 contingent of fresh fighting men. They're clear losers in World War Two, no matter how much the postwar settlement tried to disguise that fact. Face it, Frenchmen: you're lousy at business and war. Be proud of the good things about your culture instead of bashing the British and Americans for being better at some things than you are.
Sunday, November 17, 2002
Check out Merde in France, who claims to have spent "20 years behind enemy lines" and has quite a lot to say.
My pal Murph came over this morning and we got cranking on the porno translations; if this job turns out well, which we think it will, we have a lot more similar work coming. We got them finished in record time, it isn't difficult at all. What we are figuring is that the most important part is to make sure the pervos correctly understand how to pay. We were very careful about getting that exactly right, as we were about the various legal disclaimers. We actually don't think the rest of the text matters too much at all. The site we translated is one of those "Barely Legal" ones that feature young-looking girls; the owner proclaims that all models are 18 or over and openly offers a list of the modeling agencies that he hired the girls from, several of them in Hungary and the rest in Britain, so we figure he's legit and that nothing unethical is going on here. We have no ethical problem about providing the necessary material that pervos need as long as no minors or animals are involved and nobody really gets hurt. As Remei says, "If it's legal, money is money." Her very Catholic dad used to be the doorman at a cabaret, which was the thirty-years-ago equivalent of a strip club, so I bet that's where she came up with that expression.
Ali of True Porn Clerk Stories says that 100% of the pervos that rent barely legal videos are men over 45, so we figure that's the market our translations are aiming at. We did a little "research" with Google for barely legal sites in Spanish and discovered that they contain a lot of diminutives, especially to refer to parts of the female anatomy. The plot of the text that accompanies the photos always contains some reference to not being ashamed or embarrassed, which we figure is supposed to reassure the pervos, who are quite likely ashamed of themselves. The text emphasizes that the girls in the photo like to "play", which reminds the pervo that these girls are young and contains connotations of innocence, but it also emphasizes that the girls are inviting you, the pervo, to come and play with them. They are willing partners. They want to play with you. They like to play. It's OK because the girls like it. So you're not a bad person if you like it, too. At least, that's what the website is telling the pervo. Also, there's always a section in which the model "addresses" the viewer directly and explains how much she likes taking off her clothes and how sexually excited it makes her. This section is always full of juvenile slang, as if it had really been written by a teenager. Somewhere in here the girl "says" that she's always wanted to be a porno model and she's so happy that she's old enough now. The price of the service, by the way, is $35 a month, so they're not aiming at the "let's look up a porno site for fun" market here. They're aiming at real porno fans who have enough money to pay thirty-five bucks to look at pictures of 19-year-olds with pigtails wearing Catholic school uniforms exposing their genitals. The masturbating-with-a-stuffed-animal motif is also popular, as is playing with a hose, I suppose because of its connotations, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
Ali of True Porn Clerk Stories says that 100% of the pervos that rent barely legal videos are men over 45, so we figure that's the market our translations are aiming at. We did a little "research" with Google for barely legal sites in Spanish and discovered that they contain a lot of diminutives, especially to refer to parts of the female anatomy. The plot of the text that accompanies the photos always contains some reference to not being ashamed or embarrassed, which we figure is supposed to reassure the pervos, who are quite likely ashamed of themselves. The text emphasizes that the girls in the photo like to "play", which reminds the pervo that these girls are young and contains connotations of innocence, but it also emphasizes that the girls are inviting you, the pervo, to come and play with them. They are willing partners. They want to play with you. They like to play. It's OK because the girls like it. So you're not a bad person if you like it, too. At least, that's what the website is telling the pervo. Also, there's always a section in which the model "addresses" the viewer directly and explains how much she likes taking off her clothes and how sexually excited it makes her. This section is always full of juvenile slang, as if it had really been written by a teenager. Somewhere in here the girl "says" that she's always wanted to be a porno model and she's so happy that she's old enough now. The price of the service, by the way, is $35 a month, so they're not aiming at the "let's look up a porno site for fun" market here. They're aiming at real porno fans who have enough money to pay thirty-five bucks to look at pictures of 19-year-olds with pigtails wearing Catholic school uniforms exposing their genitals. The masturbating-with-a-stuffed-animal motif is also popular, as is playing with a hose, I suppose because of its connotations, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
Thanks to Horologium for linking to us. It's a good site. Check it out. In other blog news, the always avant-garde Sasha Castel and the boys from Dodgeblog have merged into one single blog, giving you not one but four good reasons to click on Sasha's site. This is quite likely the beginning of something new. Blogs are no longer a trend; they've matured. There's been a shakeout of a lot of the warblogs that started up post-9-11 or post-Sullivan, Kaus, and Reynolds. The blogs that had just one thing to say, that they were angry about 9-11 and wanted justice to be done, have mostly folded. Only the polyblogs (I think it's a better term than "warblogs"; it implies that you deal with many subjects, and "poly" sounds like the first half of "politics", which is one of the subjects that a true polyblog deals with) that had many different things to say have stuck around. For examples, look at the way such bloggers as Jane Galt and Sgt. Stryker have constantly expanded the number of subjects they write about, and they both changed the formats and names of their blogs when their lives changed. Jane and the Sarge, of course, are committed bloggers, but most people would just give it up when they got a challenging new job or moved all the way across the country. For instance, I quit for a month, in August, when I was on vacation in Kansas City. I think a lot of current bloggers are going to give it up in the next few months, or certainly years. We're going to get married or get new jobs or move to Seattle or have a kid and "full-time" blogging will become impossible. I mean, blogging is cool, and if it didn't exist a lot of people would be a lot worse-informed than they are, but if your blog's more important than your life, your priorities are wrong.
Sasha and the Dodgeblog boys have come up with a solution to this problem by merging their already well-established blogs. I imagine that we'll see a lot of mergers within the next few months as people who want to continue blogging come to see it as a solution to the problem of not being to post at least every couple of days. Merging looks like a very convenient way of assuring that there are always a lot of high-quality new posts up on a blog and that traffic will remain high, as the new merged blog will reap the collected goodwill of both established blogs.
Anyway, I think that there will be a continued influx of new polybloggers to take the place of those who just plain drop out, and established polybloggers will increasingly merge with others instead of simply giving up their blogs altogether when their life situations change. I really think mergers will provide more and better blogs, as people who post less frequently will average higher-quality posts.
I don't know what the rest of your bloghabits are, but I find I can't keep up with more than about thirty blogs. I check in with all the ones on my blogroll at least once a week, and there are a few others that I look at occasionally that I really ought to link to. I check InstaPundit and the Spain-Europe oriented blogs every day and four or five others--Jane Galt, Steven Den Beste, Sullivan and Kaus, Samizdata--at least every two or three days. I imagine most blogreaders are sort of like me in their habits: there's a limit to how much of blogdom we can absorb at once. Merging blogs will reduce the number of blogs within our personal bloglimits, without giving up and allow us to read and keep track of more new, up-and-coming blogs.
Sasha and the Dodgeblog boys have come up with a solution to this problem by merging their already well-established blogs. I imagine that we'll see a lot of mergers within the next few months as people who want to continue blogging come to see it as a solution to the problem of not being to post at least every couple of days. Merging looks like a very convenient way of assuring that there are always a lot of high-quality new posts up on a blog and that traffic will remain high, as the new merged blog will reap the collected goodwill of both established blogs.
Anyway, I think that there will be a continued influx of new polybloggers to take the place of those who just plain drop out, and established polybloggers will increasingly merge with others instead of simply giving up their blogs altogether when their life situations change. I really think mergers will provide more and better blogs, as people who post less frequently will average higher-quality posts.
I don't know what the rest of your bloghabits are, but I find I can't keep up with more than about thirty blogs. I check in with all the ones on my blogroll at least once a week, and there are a few others that I look at occasionally that I really ought to link to. I check InstaPundit and the Spain-Europe oriented blogs every day and four or five others--Jane Galt, Steven Den Beste, Sullivan and Kaus, Samizdata--at least every two or three days. I imagine most blogreaders are sort of like me in their habits: there's a limit to how much of blogdom we can absorb at once. Merging blogs will reduce the number of blogs within our personal bloglimits, without giving up and allow us to read and keep track of more new, up-and-coming blogs.
Saturday, November 16, 2002
I am an idiot. My favorite writer on the NFL is Gregg Easterbrook, the Tuesday Morning Quarterback. He'd been writing that column over the last two years in Slate and it didn't come back this season. I thought, Well, too bad, he's doing something else (Easterbrook is a very level-headed issues and politics journalist who in the past has been a frequent contributor to the New Republic, which is where I picked up on him during TNR's Andrew Sullivan-Michael Kelly period, back when TNR was really good), maybe writing another book (I read a terrific one by him, the name of which I have unfortunately forgotten, on the environment; his conclusion was that the market and improved technology have been the major causes of today's much-cleaner-than-25-years-ago environment and should be allowed to keep doing their work, and that overregulation is not only economically unsound but in the long run environmentally harmful, since it causes resources to be wasted that could be more productively employed elsewhere. He's a be-concerned-but-don't-panic guy on environmental issues, which I consider moderate and reasonable.) Anyway, the reason I like his football writing so much is that he doesn't pretend to be a sportswriter; his point of view is that of a generally well-informed, amused but rather detached TV spectator who uses the reasoning skills he developed writing about politics and issues to give readers a perspective that you never see anywhere else. I just found him. He's on ESPN and he's still writing on football; he's just getting paid more for it, I hope a lot more. Check him out.
The Vanguardia's Saturday TV magazine includes a two-page section on what's happening in the celebrity social scene around the world. This week they include photos and explanatory test about Gerard Depardieu. Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, Vincent Pérez (he's a European actor), fatherhood and Phil Collins, Guy Ritchie, Ethan Hawke, Michael Douglas, Andre Agassi, and Jude Law, Woody Allen and that poor girl, the Ketchup girls, Edward Burns and Christy Turlington, Chelsea Clinton, and Caroline Kennedy. That's three Europeans and a whole lot of Anglo-Americans; the Kennedys are reported on in Europe as if they were a royal family, and they're trying to do the same with Chelsea Clinton, to establish her as some kind of American princess. Poor Chelsea. It's not her fault her parents are who they are.
This horrific murder case in Wichita and this equally horrific one in the Kansas City area are why Kansas voters brought back the death penalty: so it can be used on these psychopaths who have amply demonstrated that they are not fit to live.
Friday, November 15, 2002
We just found this site called Bartleby.com which absolutely rules. It provides you with access to hundreds, literally hundreds of canonical Great Books. You can no longer say, if you've never read Aristophanes, that you always wanted to but never managed to get hold of a copy, because here it is. Along with everything else we've never read but sure have run across the title or author of a lot. "Oh, yeah, Pico della Mirandola. Italian Renaissance. Uh, what else.....?" Real readers will love this site. (No, we're not some kind of super-intellects who normally spend hours of our spare time reading Greek theater, though perhaps we should. We came across it by accident while searching for info about H.L. Mencken.)
Here's one from National Review Online showing that enviro-nuts and peace freaks, who are generally the same people, fall into a massive contradiction according to their own alleged reasoning when they oppose a good Saddamizing of Saddam. Jerry Taylor, one of the authors, is someone who's written other articles, all enviro-nut-bashing, that I've read. He generally has the goods, as far as I can tell; that is, what he says as far as the facts go almost always checks out with what other writers and sources I know and trust also say. My problem with him, though, and let me emphasize that I generally agree with what he says, is that he's such an anti-enviro partisan that I sometimes feel he'd be capable of twisting evidence, of making the facts fit the theory, just to score a few debating points. Maybe it's because of his style. I can't but help think that he's a lawyer, and if I remember right he used to be a lobbyist. It seems like there's a little drop of Three-in-One on everything Taylor writes, he's so slick. Just not quite slick enough; if your slickness shows, you're not really slick. Now how's that for an unfalsifiable hypothesis?
Check out this article on the false, multi-culti belief in a great Islamic civilization from Front Page; the author has the facts right and his conclusion is, sadly, quite correct, with the partial exception of Muslim Spain, which was actually a pretty decent place between about 750 and 1000 AD..
Antonio says that the majesty of Islamic civilization is stressed in Spanish schools, or at least was when he was there; he thinks the real reason is that Spain was conquered by the Muslims from the Christians and then reconquered by the Christians after a war that lasted, on and off, for almost eight hundred years. Spain and Christianity look quite heroic as the vanquishers of such a powerful and rich culture, so said culture's real level of power and wealth tends to be inflated.. Also, several of the finer moments in Muslim history did occur in tradition-rich Córdoba under the Umayyad Emirate, which continued holding power in Muslim Spain long after the Abbasids had overthrown them (750 AD) in the rest of the Muslim world. Islamic Spain was thus politically independent of the rest of the Muslim world, the only independent Muslim state outside the Baghdad Caliphate, and it shouldn't be a surprise that Muslim rule in Spain was different from Muslim rule across the Straits. Spanish Islam under the Umayyads was rather tolerant, the emirs and later caliphs established a functioning government and promoted agriculture and commerce, and Córdoba was genuinely cosmopolitan. This generally happy state of affairs crashed after the death of Almanzor in 1002, when Islamic Spain broke up into tiny warlord states which were rather similar to the feudal duchies and counties of Christian Europe. Everything in Islamic Spain then proceeded to go straight to hell and only got worse until the Muslims finally got the boot from their last little enclave in 1492.
The Spaniards quite reasonably feel somewhat proprietary about the accomplishments of Muslim Spain, since the number of foreign Muslims who came to occupy the land that is now Spain was small. Most Spanish Muslims were the same old Celt-Iberian-Roman-Visigothic people who had always lived in Spain who got converted, though there's no question that occupying Muslims left plenty of their genes to be passed down along with those of the folk who had already been there. (Also, the occupying Muslims brought many Slavic and black African slaves to Spain, where they of course reproduced and blended in with the already-existing mix.) There is still a definite tendency in Spain today to distinguish the noble Moors who fought against El Cid from the nasty Moroccans who pick lettuce.
Source: Atlas histórico de España y Portugal.
Antonio says that the majesty of Islamic civilization is stressed in Spanish schools, or at least was when he was there; he thinks the real reason is that Spain was conquered by the Muslims from the Christians and then reconquered by the Christians after a war that lasted, on and off, for almost eight hundred years. Spain and Christianity look quite heroic as the vanquishers of such a powerful and rich culture, so said culture's real level of power and wealth tends to be inflated.. Also, several of the finer moments in Muslim history did occur in tradition-rich Córdoba under the Umayyad Emirate, which continued holding power in Muslim Spain long after the Abbasids had overthrown them (750 AD) in the rest of the Muslim world. Islamic Spain was thus politically independent of the rest of the Muslim world, the only independent Muslim state outside the Baghdad Caliphate, and it shouldn't be a surprise that Muslim rule in Spain was different from Muslim rule across the Straits. Spanish Islam under the Umayyads was rather tolerant, the emirs and later caliphs established a functioning government and promoted agriculture and commerce, and Córdoba was genuinely cosmopolitan. This generally happy state of affairs crashed after the death of Almanzor in 1002, when Islamic Spain broke up into tiny warlord states which were rather similar to the feudal duchies and counties of Christian Europe. Everything in Islamic Spain then proceeded to go straight to hell and only got worse until the Muslims finally got the boot from their last little enclave in 1492.
The Spaniards quite reasonably feel somewhat proprietary about the accomplishments of Muslim Spain, since the number of foreign Muslims who came to occupy the land that is now Spain was small. Most Spanish Muslims were the same old Celt-Iberian-Roman-Visigothic people who had always lived in Spain who got converted, though there's no question that occupying Muslims left plenty of their genes to be passed down along with those of the folk who had already been there. (Also, the occupying Muslims brought many Slavic and black African slaves to Spain, where they of course reproduced and blended in with the already-existing mix.) There is still a definite tendency in Spain today to distinguish the noble Moors who fought against El Cid from the nasty Moroccans who pick lettuce.
Source: Atlas histórico de España y Portugal.
Cinderella Bloggerfeller has a translation of an interview with Alain Finkelkraut, another intelligent French intellectual, much as that might strike you as four words that don't fit together. Check it out. And check out "Jesus Gil" at Atlético Rules and Xavier Basora at Buscaraons while you're at it.
Baltasar Porcel has been merely dull of late, not completely imbecilic, but for imbecility there's a regular Vanguardia columnist named Eulàlia Solé who outstrips even him. She's billed as a "sociologist and author", which right there ought to send chills up your spine. Back on Nov. 1 she published this screed in the Vangua, and I've been saving it for a slow day. Here goes. The title is "Badly Governed". Sole's text is in italics.
Those who govern should be more intelligent and reasonable than those they govern. Those who direct a society must not be incompetent and, in addition, greedy and insensitive to the misery of others. This shouldn't happen, but it does.
Profundity Score, on a scale of 1 to 10, with a ten score going to, say, Aristotle and a one score for, say, Jimmy Carter: 1.5.
Their spokesmen try to distract us by waving around the crimes committed by small-time crooks who steal their victims' wallets. They try to ignore the fact that real insecurity comes from other sources. From the risk of catastrophic nuclear wars or accidents; from terrorist actions that can strike anywhere; from the constant war ultimatums. These spokesmen do not mention that after 9-11 the method used to put an end to terrorist attacks has failed. They refuse to recognize that the violence of war in Afghanistan, the deaf ears turned to the violence between Palestinians and Israelis, do nothing but generate more violence.
Profundity Score: 1.2.
As if human beings did not know how to communicate and negotiate, the most important of those who govern only promote the use of force and completely ignore the possibility of reaching a negotiated settlement. Is this mere short-sightedness or a reflection of an execrable moral status?
Profundity Score: 1.1.
Bush and his sidekicks want to assure themselves of the power of petroleum and they are ready and willing to massacre human lives. If they haven't done so yet, it is because those who are governed have declared themselves against it in many demonstrations and those who govern have been obligated to ask the permission of a UN that is not behaving as docilely as on other occasions. In Russia, President Putin prefers to prolong the war against Chechenia instead of signing an agreement similar to those reached with other ex-Soviet republics, while he responded to the terrorism personified in a Moscow theater by provoking more than two hundred deaths.
Profundity Score: -8 for calling Bush and Powell and Rumsfeld and Rice and Cheney murderers, as well as for thinking that the anti-war left has accomplished anything significant and for comparing apples and oranges in the case of Bush and Putin..
No, they are not governing us well. And what does humanity do? What do the voters do in democratic systems or the oppressed under political or theological dictatorships? They distract themselves from their impotence with consumption, small thefts, religious fanaticism. But, are we really impotent? In the streets and among intellectuals and scientists there are more and more voices that question the established order and demand a different use and distribution of the wealth that comes from industry and nature.
Profundity Score: -6, since this paragraph includes a defense of Communism.
Against those who want to get drunk on petroleum without caring about the blood that must be spilled, more intelligent people of good will are promoting hydrogen as a clean source of energy, affordable by all countries and a generator of peace. Those who govern badly are those who refuse to modify their actions. What would then happen to their war-making arsenal, to the weapons factories, to the power that they accumulate by terrorizing the whole world? But hydrogen is there, unlimited, equitative. Clearer, less-selfish heads are already advancing its use.
Profundity Score: -5 for grave scientific and economic stupidity and ignorance, as well as for the repeated "blood for oil" canard.
We want to open this up for a vote. Who is a more ignorant fool, Baltasar Porcel or Eulàlia Solé? Where does Haro Tecglen rank? How do they compare with such Anglo-American jackasses as the Baghdad Three, Maureen Dowd, Eric Alterman, Norman Mailer, Susan Sarandon, Woody Harrelson, or the Noamster himself? By exposing these clowns as what they are, are we just wasting our time? I'm not trying to convince the clowns themselves they're wrong, of course; they're unconvincible. I hope, though, that more people will take these ridiculous arguments these clowns make and refute them to their faces. We just may be able to convince a few bystanders that the clowns are just that. On this blog, however, we sometimes feel like we're preaching to the choir, that we're making the band laugh but not the audience. Well, there's nothing we can do about it except keep plugging away and hope that a few undecided bystanders fall into the clutches of the Blogosphere where we can grab them and slap some sense into their heads.
Those who govern should be more intelligent and reasonable than those they govern. Those who direct a society must not be incompetent and, in addition, greedy and insensitive to the misery of others. This shouldn't happen, but it does.
Profundity Score, on a scale of 1 to 10, with a ten score going to, say, Aristotle and a one score for, say, Jimmy Carter: 1.5.
Their spokesmen try to distract us by waving around the crimes committed by small-time crooks who steal their victims' wallets. They try to ignore the fact that real insecurity comes from other sources. From the risk of catastrophic nuclear wars or accidents; from terrorist actions that can strike anywhere; from the constant war ultimatums. These spokesmen do not mention that after 9-11 the method used to put an end to terrorist attacks has failed. They refuse to recognize that the violence of war in Afghanistan, the deaf ears turned to the violence between Palestinians and Israelis, do nothing but generate more violence.
Profundity Score: 1.2.
As if human beings did not know how to communicate and negotiate, the most important of those who govern only promote the use of force and completely ignore the possibility of reaching a negotiated settlement. Is this mere short-sightedness or a reflection of an execrable moral status?
Profundity Score: 1.1.
Bush and his sidekicks want to assure themselves of the power of petroleum and they are ready and willing to massacre human lives. If they haven't done so yet, it is because those who are governed have declared themselves against it in many demonstrations and those who govern have been obligated to ask the permission of a UN that is not behaving as docilely as on other occasions. In Russia, President Putin prefers to prolong the war against Chechenia instead of signing an agreement similar to those reached with other ex-Soviet republics, while he responded to the terrorism personified in a Moscow theater by provoking more than two hundred deaths.
Profundity Score: -8 for calling Bush and Powell and Rumsfeld and Rice and Cheney murderers, as well as for thinking that the anti-war left has accomplished anything significant and for comparing apples and oranges in the case of Bush and Putin..
No, they are not governing us well. And what does humanity do? What do the voters do in democratic systems or the oppressed under political or theological dictatorships? They distract themselves from their impotence with consumption, small thefts, religious fanaticism. But, are we really impotent? In the streets and among intellectuals and scientists there are more and more voices that question the established order and demand a different use and distribution of the wealth that comes from industry and nature.
Profundity Score: -6, since this paragraph includes a defense of Communism.
Against those who want to get drunk on petroleum without caring about the blood that must be spilled, more intelligent people of good will are promoting hydrogen as a clean source of energy, affordable by all countries and a generator of peace. Those who govern badly are those who refuse to modify their actions. What would then happen to their war-making arsenal, to the weapons factories, to the power that they accumulate by terrorizing the whole world? But hydrogen is there, unlimited, equitative. Clearer, less-selfish heads are already advancing its use.
Profundity Score: -5 for grave scientific and economic stupidity and ignorance, as well as for the repeated "blood for oil" canard.
We want to open this up for a vote. Who is a more ignorant fool, Baltasar Porcel or Eulàlia Solé? Where does Haro Tecglen rank? How do they compare with such Anglo-American jackasses as the Baghdad Three, Maureen Dowd, Eric Alterman, Norman Mailer, Susan Sarandon, Woody Harrelson, or the Noamster himself? By exposing these clowns as what they are, are we just wasting our time? I'm not trying to convince the clowns themselves they're wrong, of course; they're unconvincible. I hope, though, that more people will take these ridiculous arguments these clowns make and refute them to their faces. We just may be able to convince a few bystanders that the clowns are just that. On this blog, however, we sometimes feel like we're preaching to the choir, that we're making the band laugh but not the audience. Well, there's nothing we can do about it except keep plugging away and hope that a few undecided bystanders fall into the clutches of the Blogosphere where we can grab them and slap some sense into their heads.
Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar spoke with President Bush yesterday by telephone for 25 minutes. The two leaders agreed that they greatly distrusted Saddam. Spanish government insiders are filtering the official line, "If Baghdad hasn't paid any attention to the UN for years, there's no reason to think that this time will be any different." Aznar repeated to Bush that he will of course give permission for the US to use its bases in Spanish territory as part of a war on Saddam. They also discussed the upcoming NATO summit in Prague and the Turkish situation; Aznar will be meeting with the new Turkish leader on Monday and will transmit a message from Bush.
Aznar's calm and patient diplomacy and his strong support for Spain's ally, the United States, have made him one of Europe's key movers and shakers; don't forget that Aznar is the elder statesman of European Union leaders, in office since 1996. Spaniards generally do not know about the high regard in which Aznar is held internationally; they often underestimate him as a little man with a silly mustache who lacks charisma. That's his external physical appearance, and it has nothing to do with what's inside the man's brain.
Aznar's calm and patient diplomacy and his strong support for Spain's ally, the United States, have made him one of Europe's key movers and shakers; don't forget that Aznar is the elder statesman of European Union leaders, in office since 1996. Spaniards generally do not know about the high regard in which Aznar is held internationally; they often underestimate him as a little man with a silly mustache who lacks charisma. That's his external physical appearance, and it has nothing to do with what's inside the man's brain.
Not all Frenchmen are idiotic jerks like the guy who wrote the book about how the attack on the Pentagon is a fake or Hubert Védrine or Lionel Jospin or Robert Hue or Jean-Pierre Chévenement or José Bové--or those two horrid Hispano-French hybrids, Ignacio Ramonet and Manu Chao. Here is a laudable and noteworthy exception, along the lines of our man Jean-François Revel. Writer and philosopher André Glucksmann has been writing interesting stuff for years, and while we don't agree with everything he says, he very often makes intelligent comments. He gets the back page of La Vanguardia today for an interview; the interviewer is Víctor M. Amela. We've excerpted the interview; Q is the interviewer and A is Glucksmann.
Q. When Bush bombed Afghanistan, was that terrorism?
A. No! He supported the Afghan moderates against the terrorists. Good for him! He didn't raze Kabul. People died, yes; there is no such thing as a clean war, of course. Look, sometimes it is necessary to use violence against terrorists.
Q. Is Saddam one? Should we attack him?
A. Didn't Saddam gas the Kurds? And there are hundreds of nuclear plants and oil production facilities that are impossible to defend; horror is coming closer and closer.
Q. Tell me, what is Good?
A. The absence of Evil! Good can not be conceived in a universal or absolute way. Good is relative. But Evil is absolute: it is the destruction of humanity.
Q. So who wants Evil?
A. I'll give you three exterminatory ideologies: Nazism (in the name of a superior race), Stalinism (in the name of a sole social class), and Islamism (in the name of a god). In the name of different things, yes, but with a nexus in common among the three: nihilism.
Q. Define nihilism.
A. Easy. "Everything is permitted; everything is right."
Q. (Nihilism) is then a sort of suicidal destruction, like the 9-11 pilots.
A. The awful thing is, after that happened, many people thought, "It's horrible, but the Americans deserved it for their historical bad behavior."
Q. Isn't that true?
A. Look, if we start reasoning like that, will any nation be saved? And blaming the victim is a form of being nihilistic.
Q. When Bush bombed Afghanistan, was that terrorism?
A. No! He supported the Afghan moderates against the terrorists. Good for him! He didn't raze Kabul. People died, yes; there is no such thing as a clean war, of course. Look, sometimes it is necessary to use violence against terrorists.
Q. Is Saddam one? Should we attack him?
A. Didn't Saddam gas the Kurds? And there are hundreds of nuclear plants and oil production facilities that are impossible to defend; horror is coming closer and closer.
Q. Tell me, what is Good?
A. The absence of Evil! Good can not be conceived in a universal or absolute way. Good is relative. But Evil is absolute: it is the destruction of humanity.
Q. So who wants Evil?
A. I'll give you three exterminatory ideologies: Nazism (in the name of a superior race), Stalinism (in the name of a sole social class), and Islamism (in the name of a god). In the name of different things, yes, but with a nexus in common among the three: nihilism.
Q. Define nihilism.
A. Easy. "Everything is permitted; everything is right."
Q. (Nihilism) is then a sort of suicidal destruction, like the 9-11 pilots.
A. The awful thing is, after that happened, many people thought, "It's horrible, but the Americans deserved it for their historical bad behavior."
Q. Isn't that true?
A. Look, if we start reasoning like that, will any nation be saved? And blaming the victim is a form of being nihilistic.
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