Declaration of War

 We're at war and we don't know it. 

 For a long while now we've been at war. And it's a world war. And we're losing it. It's a war with casualties from mostly one side only, but it's a very civic war. In this war, most of the time, it's not like someone will come to us and shoot us, oh no. That's not polite. In this war we lose little by little, our lives and our time. Although in some areas you do get shot, where the fight is in its worse shape. It's an asymetrical war, both sides are rather different in numbers and power. But it's a war nonetheless. 

This war has been raging for all our history. Sometimes there's calm periods and truces. Sometimes there's small victories. But lately it's going worse for us, after a period where it seemed we could achieve some level of victory, or at least a reasonable truce. 

 We've had recent battles in plenty of places. In Brazil, we lost to ignorance and stupidity, and because of its current culture it may take some time before any victories can be achieved. In Chile there was a recent stand off that gives us hope after a long period of darkness, but it needs to be developed and to grow into a victory, and it may not be one just yet. In Bolivia we won after almost losing an important battle. Hong Kong seems lost, the battle continues but the enemy is too brutal in there. In USA we were defeated so long ago nobody remembers our side, but lately there's been some movements towards a change, although it's still in its infancy, and the latest results are not really a victory. Poland was never in our side but maybe after the latest abuse some reaction will be triggered. I'm not informed enough to talk about countries in Africa but it seems there's been an ongoing change in there too, little by little, in some of them small victories for us. Turkey has been conquered after a period of hope, and we need to recover it but won't be easy. Russia had some chances but the opportunity was not taken. Most religious-based countries mark a huge defeat for us.

Spain was lost since 1939, and is still lost to this day. Catalunya has a chance to be a small win, but Spain will fight us to the death. 

One side is always the same: Fascism, dictatorships, unchecked corruption, economic power, religious power. The other is just the average person. 

The war is simple: Average people want to have nice lives. Lives where you do work, but you also have free time, health, friends, and where you can work with what you like. Lives where you can allow yourself presents, for you and your friends and family. Where you can have vacations and visit places. Where you can have moments of rest and calmness. Where you can believe whatever you want and no one imposes their views on you. Where you can retire and you don't need to die right away. Where people help each other. and where we can collectively decide things for ourselves. Then we have internal struggles about how to achieve these objectives, but that's the idea.

The other side wants to have these things only for a few of themselves, the chosen ones, and everyone else should suffer and die slowly to provide these things to them, It's a simple as that.

 Maybe this seems simplistic or evident. But what I want to remark, is that this is WAR. When people get kicked out of their houses, people DIE. When factories are closed down, people DIE. When hospitals are privatized and medicine is not affordable, people DIE. Those are casualties. When some rich or powerful bastard takes a decision to withheld resources for the common people, this person is PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE for the impoverishment, misery and death of these people. Same way I would be accused of not helping someone that was bleeding to death in my house if I ignored them and didn't call an ambulance nor did anything at all.

All this was to explain a few things regarding the current struggles:

 1-This war is all the same war. Catalan people wanting to vote and getting beaten by police is the same war as Hong Kong people wanting to decide for themselves and getting beaten by police. It's the same war as BLM in USA. Its the same war as medical professionals asking for more resources. It's the same war as workers asking for better conditions. It's the same war. So, support all of them and don't be blinded.

2-A lot of idiots are supporting the wrong side because in their little evil minds, they think they're part of the powerful side and that they will get better lives through it. The reality is that they will be squashed and discarded with all the rest, but since they will not be the first ones and the first ones are a group they don't like, they think this is good and later they'll be spared. 

3-Being neutral or equidistant, or "centrist" here means support to the powerful. As they say in Germany, a table with 1 Nazi and 9 people that let them be there is a table with 10 Nazis. And thinking the one doing the beating is the same as the one being beaten is morally abhorrent. 

4-Civility is not an option when it results in one side always winning because they're the only ones that can be nasty and violent and brutal while the other side is expected to put the other cheek and accept their fate and "be nice". Doing a "smart" economic operation that can force a building full of people to be kicked out to the streets should be responded with the same rage and pain that it has caused and the person responsible should suffer horrible consequences for it.

5-The current health crisis is making everything on hold, but we should not forget that we're at war, and you can see whose lives have been the most affected and who's reaping benefits from all this, and understand then who needs to be defeated. 

Any approach that doesn't take this into consideration, that doesn't understand this is a war, that doesn't understand that we're all going to suffer and die unless we turn the tide strongly to the other side will not succeed. To go back to USA, the current election results will not achieve anything at all, things will just get worse a bit more slowly in there, the important defeat there was in the democratic primaries and after that one the end result would be bad or horrible, but never good.

The "agree to disagree" and moderation is for cake, not for the worth of human lives. And Nazi Germany was not defeated with hugs and good intentions.

It's the end of the world (as we know it)

So, we're again in Interesting Times. And maybe we have had enough for a while.

Nevertheless, this has created an opportunity at least. Yeah, it's a horrible thing what's happening and it would be better if it didn't, but it's giving us lessons, really important ones. And I'd like to mention some of them, as I think about them.

1-In lots of workplaces, it is possible to work from home. This one is written from a privileged standpoint, of course, shops and industries and the primary sector is not included in this. But there's currently a lot of new jobs, based on services, where we have been forced to go there every day and stay there for a lot of hours, to be present just out of a certain old fashioned panic that if we don't have someone breathing on our neck, we won't work. Well, not the case, clearly. At the same time, there's meetings and such things that in the end were not as necessary as we thought and can be shortened or eliminated without that much problem. For sure in-person contact has its advantages too, but this should really made us rethink how we work, and try a more balanced system where maybe we can easily be home at least half of our time.

2-Really essential services are the primary sector, the food shops and the cleaners. Jobs like working in a supermarket or cleaning offices and houses should be better valued and paid nicely. Also better considered.

3-Healtchare must be public. Private healthcare that depends on profit has no advantage in dealing with this, because it requires a lot of resources and hours and it's overall too expensive. Also, public healthcare must be well-funded and have enough resources. And given this learning, I would go further: Just straight up ban and nationalize private healthcare companies. Also, if you're all for private healthcare and vote for parties that are against public one, it's only fair you refute any treatment nor help in public hospitals and facilities. Or reconsider your vote next time.

4-Capitalsim doesn't work. The system is totally broken and this crisis is showing its worst sides. Under pure capitalism, we would need to continue working right now, as we die left and right. Under pure capitalism, now people should just go hungry and starve and die out as they cannot work. Under pure capitalism, any business that was unable to function for this period should just close and disappear, or leave its employees to die out at least. This is neither a sustainable model nor a model we should want to keep. This needs to go. I'm not advocating for communism, but we must get rid of the idea that the market is great, when the truth is the market would see humankind destroyed in order to keep benefits. We have seen this before, in the people that lose track of the real world and require workers to do extra hours to finish a project that will ultimately have no meaning 2 weeks after completion. Well, I'm exaggerating a bit on this example, but this same attitude is the one where some manager considers that maybe people should just work, because the company needs it, without realizing this means people will die.

5-Related to this, we need to make people in power responsible for their actions. Managers who have disregarded warnings and asked people to work have killed people. Governments who haven't taken action once it was clear how serious the situation was and have not followed medical expert's recommendations are guilty of personally killing people. One thing is not knowing what to do, another very different is thinking that since your friend the banker prefers people to die than to close some of his business, you can allow it. Or allowing it out of some political agenda. This means you are killing people. And this is not the only situation when this happens: when a government allows banks to kick people out of their homes from unpaid mortgages, both the bank and the government are directly killing people. When a manager over stresses their workforce to the point of people having nervous breakdowns, they are directly killing people. When a rich bastard not only doesn't pay their taxes but also pressures the government to close public hospitals, they're directly killing people. No more fucking euphemism, if you do these things you're a killer, and you should not be allowed to get away with it.

6-Centralism doesn't work. Look, I think Spain is a failed project and I'd rather be left out of it. Maybe you don't think the same, that's fine. But what is undeniable, as we've seen in companies, countries and other organizations, is that when you centralize everything, when you try to manage personally more and more and more things, when you're further away from the real action separated by layers of responsible people, well, you have a less clear image of what is happening. In this crisis, hospitals and small towns or neighborhoods can know better what's the best actions to take. They can know better what resources they have, what do they lack, what to do. So you leave them be, unless they prove to be doing a bad job out of it. Then, if they lack things, if you have organizations over them you can manage that from such a higher level, and so on. But when you try to, basically, micromanage everywhere, that doesn't work. So let's not do that. From a government point of view, I believe regions should be more independent and able to take their own decisions, since they tend to know better their own needs. For example, now Spain has declared we can go back to work. This is idiotic and will cause deaths as the experts are saying (see point 5), but I'd say that for some regions it may be OK. However, should be managed region by region as I said, to see which ones can do it and which ones cannot.

7-Spain's traditional parties plus the right wing parties are useless. Right wing, we know, they're here to steal and lick their rich friend's anuses, and people can die as far as they care, we all know that. However, I hope it also helps to show that PSOE is almost as bad: they militarized the crisis instead of giving funds to healthcare, and since their members are professional politicians that don't know how to do things but know how to get paid from public funds, we've had the situation were resources are not reaching the people, or they buy the wrong things and millions are wasted, plus time is lost.

8-Left-wing parties do not deserve special protection just because they're considered left-wing. We made this mistake before with PSOE, letting it do things that were not left-wing just because we labelled it as the left-wing party. So, the same applies now to Podemos. They're part of the government even if they're not big enough to make some changes. I understand they're not able to criticize some of the government actions without creating a conflict, but that doesn't make them untouchable. We should criticize the fact that they let military to lead this crisis. We should criticize that they're not protecting workers by allowing people to work. And we should criticize their silence or their praise to the current government, when it's not right.

9-USA, UK and Brazil, as very capitalist and right-wing countries, are far from the worst of it, and it will be a massacre in there. Spain is already one because of several of the mentioned points, and forcing people back to work now will kill and numbers will grow again.

10-Catalunya's proposals have been a bit more smart than Spain's (because duh, it's not very hard to be), but far from effective, and one of the involved parties has also been de-funding public healthcare, and that's something we should not forget either.

There's plenty more things I could say, but politically speaking I find these are quite relevant...

Intolerance is the way

Lately I keep seeing posts and comments,  especially on facebook, about respecting all ideas and positions.

Fuck that.

Let me elaborate: Karl Poppe indicated that there is a paradox on tolerance. The idea is that a society that is tolerant of intolerance has the risk of becoming intolerant, since the intolerants can become majority and destroy this tolerance.

I'm not an expert on all the nuances here, but I agree with the general principle. The idea is that there are positions that are not defensible, and that if there's people that won't consider rationality at all, their positions should not be allowed as viable.

The thing here is about extremes of course, and I would say that a good indication  is any position that ask for repression, internment or death of any group of innocent people.

So,for example, in lots of areas of the world there's this growth of extreme right wing supporters. Bolsonario in Brazil, Trump and the Alt right in USA, lots of different parties in Europe, etc. (Spain doesn't count, the 2 main right wing parties are directly fascists, so extremism didn't grow, it just never left after the dictatorship. Fascists won and conquered Spain and until it is taken from their hands and they're properly defeated, we'll have this issue).

These parties and people are the type that, for example, defend that LGTBs cannot marry, makes laws that are bad for them and allows discrimination as a "right" they have of not liking them. They are also very anti-immigrant and racist, anti-women and anti-cultures that are not the state-approved ones. They´re very conservative and plenty of times religious, but only of their religion of course.

So in these cases, the "I don't agree with you but will defend your right to say it" does not apply. There's no "need to accept all different opinions". It´s not a matter of "subjectivity". It´s not about "agree to disagree" and leave it at that.

Nazism and fascism needs just one answer, which is brutal repression, intolerance to such ideas and no apology for hating extreme right bastards. In Germany, for example,  doing the nazi salute gets you arrested. I fully agree with this.

What some people that try to be moderate and reasonable fail to see is two main points in here. The first one is that this is a tactic from the extreme right. When establishing your position, if you know most people that consider themselves moderate will try a compromise, if you´re inflexible and extreme, the middle ground will become a lot more to the right than what should be allowed. If your standard position is "kill all gays", for example, a moderate might feel that a balanced outcome is to allow not hiring gay people at work or not providing services to gay people. The extreme right, and the right in general actually, have been moving the extreme more and more to the right for years. The result is that "moderate" ideas now are actually clearly from the right. So the right answer when someone says "kill or imprison all gays" (or something to that effect), after maybe spending a few seconds trying to reason and double-checking the mental sanity, is to ban the bastard from participating in politics and conversations, and arresting them for good measure.

The second point that "moderates" fail to see is that the two positions are not equal. When a politician says that "women should stay at home and in the kitchen", to put another example, being against this is not "subjective". You see, in this point you can agree, or don´t. The thing is agreeing to this limits the freedom of women and represses them, so if women call the person on their misogynistic bullshit, you cannot say it´s just another point of view: This will directly harm women. Therefore, it is perfectly valid to not allow this type of ideas in political discourse, any party that defends this should be just banned and be done with it. Again, it's not a matter of opinion, one side gets harmed with this position while the other does not: when this happens, the side not harmed has no right to defend this opinion. And this is in no way the same as some religious bastard saying that it "harms" their idea of religion. It´s the basic difference between victim and oppressor, between attacking a person or defending yourself. A person defending themselves does not share the same level of guilt as the person attacking, doesn't matter the outcome. And it's impossible to be moderate and reach a middle ground when one side wants to exist and the other side wants to basically kill you or deny the fact that you exist.

Related to that, being indifferent to such behaviour and ideas is also not acceptable. If someone is an abuser, an homophobe, a violent person, supporting them means that even if you're not these things actively, you think it's fine or not a big deal. So accepting an homophobe as a candidate or voting for them makes you one too,even if you would not directly do something else homophobic. Again, fascism was, and is,a problem not becasue of the minority that is directly violent, but because there was a silent majority that accepted those things and considered it the new normal. 

So, summarizing, fuck that. Fuck fascists, and fuck dictators. It is perfectly reasonable to try and not allow such options to even exists in politics,and to confront anyone defending such ideas and trying to be moderate or defending it as "just another opinion". To put it bluntly so it gets into the skull of some people , would you consider it just "another opinion" if i'd vote for the party that wants to straight-up murder your family? 

So no, not all opinions should be tolerated.

Looking at you, Brazil.

The Problems Of Leadership

A friend told me I should write sometimes about USA,and especially after the last months, there's plenty I could comment or rant about...

However, there's too many fronts currently to comment on all in a structured matter in a single post...so I won't really comment on it yet.

Instead, I will rant about something I realised recently and deeply troubled me. It is somewhat related to USA, but I started to think about it regarding Spanish news.

Basically, we humans have a big problem regarding our leaders.

I don't mean that our current leaders are problematic (although that may be true for most), but that our relationship with leaders is rather wrong....

Let me elaborate.

In Spain, as most of you probably know, there has been for some time now a number of organizations and parties that have its origin on demonstrations and protests. Some are older than others, but they are groups that tend to be very democratic, with members voting and encouraging participation. In several cities they created their own party brand, usually using some word that means "together" or "possible" or both. Apart from those there's also Podemos, which is a new party at the state level that defends similar ideas and was created as well from demonstrations. A bit apart but also relevant and much older we have the CUP, a catalan party that defends independence but also very progressive ideas and full democracy (they always vote for any major decisions to take, and simple majority wins). Finally there is also related organizations defending certain rights (like the platform for mortgage victims, or PAH, that tries to stop in any way,including making human  barriers, cases where people are forced to abandon the house they live in becasue they cannot pay to the bank).

There's more,  but that's a good initial representation of rather democratic organizations.

Anyway,in Spain the traditional parties (who are corrupt as fuck regardless of theoretical ideology) laughed about these new parties and organizations, saying they had little support.

However,after some elections,the traditional parties are no longer laughing.  Oh no. They're afraid.  Becasue these new ones are gaining a lot of suporters.  So what did they do? They attacked their leaders. They started to try and find dirt on them, ridicule them, ask them to be ethical paragons when they themselves are far from it, slandered them, associated them with terrorists, etc.

This shows a way of thinking about what a leader is that matches perfectly with conservative ideals.  Conservatives are happier with strong authorities,and strong authorities are achieved when you have one person ruling the others. The Leader. The idol to imitate and compare yourself to it. The untouchable party members that is smart and handsome or pretty and is always right.

The leader decides for you what is good and what is bad, so attacks to the leader are attacks to your whole party.

So,they do the same with these new organizations. And it's stupid. Becasue these new organizations are very democratic. If one of the founders is an hypocrite, the organization just needs to get rid of it,but the ideals and thoughts of the group should not change heavily just becasue one person is gone. And the decisions are voted,so it doesn't matter if some founder fucked up some decision,it's a common thing.

However,now the sad part comes. Attacking the leader kind of worked sometimes. Becasue these progressive parties, even if they defend democracy, also tend to fixate on a leader to guide them. People who support these organizations do not realize either sometimes that it doesn't matter who's leading becasue it's a group effort. So the leader is also always right and handsome or pretty and all that in here too,and the end result is that the discussions are sometimes not which idea is best,but who said what, as if we cannot support good ideas from 2 different possible leaders....

Of course the national media has also always emphasized this,becasue it's a nice way to undermine the same efforts these organizations are making to bring politics to a more accessible area, where everybody participates. I remember some execrable articles from a newspaper considered from the "left" spectrum where they are taking about "schism " in one of those new parties just becasue 2 of the leading people are debating different postures,which will then be voted....

All this was to point to the fact that we delegate too much on leaders to take our decisions for us, to form opinions. We as a species tend to fixate on the person,and not on the idea behind. Therefore, we tend to defend stupid ideas if the right person has mentioned them.

This is a problem, becasue it means we tend to accept the fallacy of Authority, to believe that everything a person says is true just because of the person.

What we should be doing is considering ideas. For sure if we don't uderstand the idea we should delegate to someone with expertise, but we should always be a bit careful about that.

For example,  an old male Nobel -price winner in physics taking shit about homosexuals should be shamed and ignored. He may know about physics but he's still an intolerant old man. We do not publish on the newspapers when someone 's grandad does the same,so if he's not taking about his field of physics he should not be considered as any kind of authority on such topics.

On a more subtle way, let's say a political leader that you like has a program with 10 points. You agree on 9 of them and are ambiguous or dislike 1 of them. So,the fact that they may have a bad point does not invalidate the other 9. In the same way, the fact that 9 of these points are good it is not a free pass for the 10th point. Complaining about the 10th point does not attack the first 9,and defending the first 9 does not protect the 10th.

Becasue the important thing is ideas, and that's what we should be supporting and scrutinizing. In politics in particular each one should choose representatives that match your ideology better, but again this is not a free pass for them to do whatever they want,and we should discuss problematic concepts and fight them if we think it's important, no matter how much we agree on other points.

Conservatives sees this as a weakness, and lots of otherwise progressives believe this rethoric.

We should be smarter than that.

We will never have perfect leaders, and we never should consider them to be so.  And the faster we get used to this the faster we can act on their bullshit....