Vinicius and racism in Spain: it's not just football How many times over the past two years have we talked about increased racism and xenophobia in Spain, driven by the political polarisation of the public sphere after Vox, Spain’s version of the new far-right, appeared in 2018 and began to shift the Overton Window towards tribal division, the rejection of “others” and hatred once more, with everyone egged on by social media algorithms that seek clicks and reward attention and visceral emotion? Spanish Twitter exploded overnight after Real Madrid player Vinicius was racially abused again at a match against Valencia. Valencia fans began outside the stadium with chants of “Vincius, you’re a monkey”. On the pitch, the abuse continued: “fucking black guy, bastard, idiot, fucking black bastard, dog, monkey, you’re a fucking monkey”, etc, etc, along with the monkey grunts. “It wasn't the first time, nor the second, nor the third”, Vinicius tweeted afterwards: “Racism is normal in La Liga. The competition thinks it's normal, the Federation does too and the opponents encourage it”, adding: “I'm sorry for the Spaniards who don't agree, but today, in Brazil, Spain is known as a country of racists”. International sports media are clear about what happened: ‘Racism is normal in La Liga’: Vinícius Júnior outraged by abuse at Valencia (Guardian); Real Madrid star Vinicius Junior says Spain's La Liga 'belongs to the racists' after pointing out abusers during match (Sky); Real Madrid player Vinícius Jr. racially abused during Spanish La Liga match (CNN); Vinicius Junior says Spanish league ‘now belongs to racists’ after enduring more abuse (AP); and on and so forth. La Liga chairman Javier Tebas, though, decided to rant on Twitter…against Vincius…for not understanding what he promises his league has been trying to do to stop racism in the top tier of Spanish football: “Antes de criticar e injuriar a @LaLiga, es necesario que te informes adecuadamente @Vinijr”. Marca reports the previous nine complaints filed with authorities by La Liga over racism against Vinicius have gone almost nowhere. A few fans have had their season tickets temporarily revoked. The racist tribal chants in stadiums continue. This terrible, polarised, divisive and at times openly racist public sphere, between politics and football, in Spain, which did not at all use to be like this, is the environment that we now have to watch our kids grow up in and in which they will become teenagers during their most formative years. Because if they see political leaders on TV dividing and pointing and ranting against “others”, who just happen to be black and North African, and then they see football fans shouting “fucking monkey” slogans at black players on the pitch, and noboby, including the authorities, does anything about it, well then they will come to believe that it is okay to do that, that it’s all just a bit of a laugh with the lads, no problem, and look at all the retweets on the videos, and the vicious cycle will continue. In theory, as a planet over the last couple of centuries, we had all learnt that rampant polarised nationalism and racist hatred towards “others” were very bad things that led to even worse things happening as societies. The concepts of human rights and the rule of law didn’t come out of nowhere. Now in the third decade of the 21st century, after tribal politics and social media algorithms have again encouraged increasing polarisation and division, leading to the rise of the new far-right in many countries, not just Spain, we again find ourselves in a new vicious cycle that excludes some and sets them up as “others” to be hated and vilified, rather than including all and striving to better the whole for everyone. So we must try again, we must learn again. It’s not just football.

So from a creator's point of view it's still frustrating to have to copy and paste the same things into ten different social media places, whether it's FB or Twitter or Instagram or now Nostr or Mastodon or Social Notes. It shouldn't be this hard. I just generally have one thought at a time that readers in different places might like to read and comment on.

Garre, Vox, drought and the regional elections A former Popular Party First Minister is now running as a Vox candidate A few years ago, Alberto Garre was a senior Popular Party politician in Murcia. He even became, for a brief one-year period, regional first minister after the previous incumbent, Valcárcel, who had been in the post for 19 years (yes, nineteen, one nine) left. Garre then went quiet for a while before reappearing in 2017-2018 with a new regional party called Somos Región (“We Are Region”). That was not a bad idea at the time, with everyone focused on the Catalan separatists and regional matters and Murcia had never really had a regional party to speak of. If it had worked in Cantabria and Galicia and Cataluña and Andalusia, why not try a more energetic regional identity down here? Back then, somebody organised a political-media play with a large farmers protest using hundreds of tractors to collapse traffic in the city centre for two days, a kind of agricultural Occupy Wall Street thing that was nominally about fields, crops and water. Who was then acclaimed by the farmers at the end of day two, as the solution to all of their problems? Garre. Unfortunately for him, Vox began its national surge at the same time and by the time the last elections came round in 2019, ran off with all of those votes. Farmers got their tractors out in Murcia last year too, but the political star of the show then was not Garre but…Santiago Abascal, Vox’s national leader, who if I remember rightly raced down on a motorbike from a session in parliament in Madrid earlier in the morning. So it is now interesting to note that Garre has reappeared again. The headline news is that he has now abandoned Somos Region to run as the number 3 man on the Vox list at the regional elections next month (Spain has a closed-list proportional representation electoral system, not first-past-the-post). Polls suggest Vox will take 7-8 of the 45 seats in the regional chamber, which means it is almost certain that Garre will now be elected as a regional MP…for Vox. It is also worth noting that Garre is from a town called Torre Pacheco, which is heavily agricultural with lots of immigrant workers. Vox won the vote there at the last general election (38%). At the last regional election, the PP came first (23%), Vox came fourth (13.85%) and Garre’s Somos Región came fifth (10.57%). Ciudadanos, which is set to do terribly this year, came sixth back then on 8% of the vote. So it’s not out of the question that someone is sitting in an office somewhere adding Garre’s 10% to Vox’s 13% and musing that the 8% from Ciudadanos has to go somewhere and so that might work for Garre and Vox and they get to take the town from the PP with an experienced local bloke who goes straight in to a top regional job in a right-wing coalition goverment where he can put extra pressure on policies like farming, water and immigration. The farmers will quite like that, I imagine, and a former PP man now jumping to Vox at such a late stage might convince others too.

Could intense drought affect Spanish elections? The driest parts of the country have seen less than 80 mm of rain in the past six months, have reservoirs at less than 25% capacity and are in emergency status. [Click through to see all the maps]

Could intense drought affect Spanish elections?

The driest parts of the country have seen less than 80 mm of rain in the past six months, have reservoirs at less than 25% capacity and are in emer...

Substack now has a “generate image” AI function for your articles in the images menu:

NPR quits Twitter: "NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter's decision to first label the network "state-affiliated media," the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries". https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter-government-funded-media-label

So there is now a four-way race for micro-blogging, short-post chatty-value things: 1. Substack Notes, emails + $$ subscriptions 2. Musk Twitter + Blue + Super Follows..?? 3. Nostr + Bitcoin lightning ⚡ 4. Mastodon + ?? Substack has a good shot at it with Notes, because Musk seems intent on sinking Twitter (cultural problems); Nostr is still way outside almost everybody’s technical comfort zone (edge tech dev culture, Bitcoin maxis, access with key pairs, etc.); and Mastodon is too slow and sluggish and split up across its “fediverse” (more strange cultural things). Substack and Nostr are the two that are open about generating income for content creators/writers/artists/analysts being a good thing and built in to the experience. Value creation and flow is good. And this makes sense from a network perspective because those accounts end up being the hubs most of the action is centred around, and then the hubs talk to the hubs and all the rest. Musk, inexplicably given his reputation as a business genius, has not understood this part for Twitter.

📝 Substack Notes is live: will it kill Twitter? Retweets are "restacks" and there's a one-click "subscribe" to follow writers. Musk is probably worried right now.

Substack Notes is live: will it kill Twitter?

Retweets are "restacks" and there's a one-click "subscribe" to follow writers.

Sumar divides left and subtracts election seats But "Sumar" (add up) is a catchy repetitive name for millions of messages between now and the elections. Could the female Galician communist surprise even the male Galician conservative by voting day? The first polls are out after Sumar (Yolanda Díaz) announced on the left: El País/40DB: all lines mostly flat, like before. El País has not asked about Sumar on the left. On the right, no notable impact from Vox's motion of no confidence against Sánchez. They are still on 14-15%. Feijóo and Sánchez continue to lead on each side. Neither the left nor the right would add up to an overall majority. La Razón/NC Report: Vox and the PP add up to a right-wing majority. The PSOE gets 21.9% of the vote on the left and Sumar gets 11.9% with 28-31 seats, which destroys Podemos, down to 5.1% and 3-5 seats. El Mundo/Sigma Dos: "Yolanda Díaz sinks Pedro Sánchez", says the paper’s headline. They award 12.3% of the vote to Sumar if Díaz runs by herself, without Podemos, and 16.3% if Sumar and Podemos run together. In both cases, the PSOE drops to 22%. Vox and the PP would get enough for a right-wing majority in one scenario but not in the other. Electomania/Panel: no impact on the right for Vox after its motion of no confidence against Sánchez. They are stil at 14-15% but there would be a right-wing majority between Feijóo and Abascal. On the left, if they run separately, Sumar takes 8.6% of the vote and leaves Podemos on 5%, with 24.6% for the PSOE. If they run together, the percentages of the vote are similar but the number of seats changes: if they run separately, the PSOE gets 100 seats, Sumar 14 and Podemos 4, for a total of 118 on the left. If Sumar and Podemos run together, the PSOE drops to 82 but Sumar-Podemos gets 47, adding up to 129 for the left in total. “Sumar” (add up, addition, adding up) is not a bad name on a linguistic and psychological level, to imprint the new political brand in the minds of millions of voters. Between now and the elections, hundreds of journalists will be writing thousands of articles with phrases like "If Sumar and Podemos add up...", “if Díaz adds up with Belarre", "on the left, the PSOE could add up with Sumar…." Every time a reporter or analyst starts writing a sentence that includes "add up, addition, adding up, will add up, could add up, might add up, may possibly add up", Yolanda Díaz will get more points from the collective psyche. The constant pounding and repetition of very simple names and messages works best for broadcast media and social media notifications buzzing on phones. Add up, add up, add up. And “add up” is a positive label. It is not “subtract”, “divide” or “destroy”, so the underlying brand message contrasts with the prevailing political environment that in the past several years has become increasingly full of polarised nastiness, bickering and mutual hatred. “Add up” is not very far away conceptually from “hope” or “together” and is at least not that age-old generic empty signifier that all politicians everywhere promise voters: “change”. An inherently positive, future-oriented, simplistic brand that will get repeated millions of times in millions of messages between now and the general election. Mixing such a simplistic concept-name-message with the incentive of the possibility of a first female Prime Minister of Spain in the year 2023 (more hope, more future, more progress), along with a serious, experienced candidate (whatever each voter thinks about her philosophy and politics) could have a huge electoral impact on the left, much more so than the suggestion in these first polls, which at the moment divide and subtract. Could Díaz destroy not only Podemos but also the Socialist Party between now and December? Much has been said, including by himself, arrogantly, about the arrival of the Galician conservative Feijóo in Madrid to become the next Prime Minsiter of Spain, almost automatically, according to that narrative, without effort, but could a female Galician communist be the great electoral surprise of 2023? Thanks for reading.

Oh, come on. What a dick. Musk is marking Substack links as unsafe after Substack announced a Twitter-like notes feature for short posts they are calling Notes.

Vox wasted its motion of no confidence and a new option arises on the left to further split the vote. Yolanda Diaz confirms she wants to become Spain's first female Prime Minister. Vox lost its motion of no confidence, of course, as they and everyone else knew they would before it all unfolded. The 89-year old former communist MP Ramón Tamames, who somehow ended up as the candidate, did not substitute Pedro Sánchez as Prime Minister on March 22. Given what happened in the autumn with the disastrously managed criminal law reform that led to hundreds of convicted rapists and sex offenders having their sentences reduced or even being released from prison early, a coherent argument could be made that there was a moral case for tabling the motion of no confidence against the government, even knowing that politically they were going to lose. That could then have been presented at all the election campaigns this year as having made a strong if numerically futile stand against something a lot of people would have at least recognised as a problem. Vox could also have framed that strong, moral stand against the cynical inactivity of their competitor on the right, the Popular Party, and I’m sure that would have convinced some conservative voters, many of whom surely find what happened to be repgunant and unjust. Abascal’s habitual polarised rhetoric could in this case have worked in his favour but Vox chose instead to ask the 89-year old former communist to make the speeches as candidate. So they just got laughed at and lost, and now they can’t even claim at the elections that they made the strong moral stand or that their leader personally did all he could to raise the party’s concerns against Sánchez and Podemos. The real political surprise that day, I wrote then, was the speech, framing, presentation and rhetoric of another Communist Party member, Yolanda Díaz, currently the Deputy Prime Minister in the left-wing coalition government. She has been working on a political brand for this year’s elections called Sumar (add, addition, adding up). Her speech two weeks ago in Congress seemed so polished that it even sounded prime-minsterial, and prime-ministerial enough that perhaps even Sánchez and the socialists should be worried in case she manages to grab votes from them on the left. At a large set-piece presention rally for Sumar this weekend, Díaz confirmed that suspicion from a fortnight ago: “I think that I can be useful to our country. Today, humbly, I am going to take a step forward. Today I want to be the first female Prime Minister of our country. I want to be the first female Prime Minsiter of Spain. If you want that too, we will do it. I want to be the first female Prime Minister of the country because now is the time for women, because women want to be the protagonists of history. Today I want to be the first female Prime Minister of the country because the Spain that women know is unstoppable, because there is no going back, because the future, today, is about adding up and we are going to do it". Did she say that she wants to be the first female Prime Minister of Spain enough times in that short paragraph? Eight weeks away from the local and regional ballots, what polling that has been published is mostly where it was before and doesn’t yet mention Sumar anyway. The PSOE is still between 25-27%, the PP is on around 30%, Vox is stuck at 14-15% and Podemos still down around 10%. The last major shift in the polls in Spain was twelve months ago after Feijóo ousted Casado as the leader of the Popular Party, which boosted the PP to the top of the pile generally and distanced them greatly from Vox on the right. Abascal has wasted his major parliamentary set piece to try to change that. In theory, with Spain’s electoral system, another spilt on the left benefits the right, especially if Feijóo’s PP continues to dominate a waning Vox, and benefits Sánchez as the strongest candidate on the left. There are no dominant majority parties on either side like there used to be, though. A well articulated campaign by Díaz, based on seeking a historic feminist vote, could upset the balance in a relevant manner. Some reports are already talking about an immediate suggestion of a leak of 200,000 votes from the socialists to Sumar. And this is just the beginning. Also note the comment by Michavila (GAD3 polls) this week: “Yolanda Diaz’s speech is more like the PSOE than to Podemos”. Could Díaz and Sumar create and maintain a snowball effect through to the general election at the end of the year? Pedro Sánchez has said today in reference to the formal appearance of the new party on the left that "my wish would be for all of the pieces of the puzzle to fit together”. Former Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias has said that “If Sumar goes into the elections without Podemos, it will be an electoral and political tragedy”. Will Podemos and Sumar join forces at some point? Is there an outside chance Diaz could really upend the balance on the left and even end up with more votes than the socialists? Thank you for reading.

⛔ This is the drone flight restrictions map for the region of Spain I live in. Spain's paratroopers jump training base is here, parachute jumping exercises, Spain's Air Force Academy is here, military flying exercises, a civilian airport, a submarine base, a military shipyard, a petrol, gas and chemical refinery, several heliports, several bird sanctuary areas.

⚡️Some of the zaps you're trying are working, others not, for whatever technical or UI reason.

Nostr.build is down....

Cultural shifts: the chill emoji hand is spreading. South of Spain, real life, in the street today, we saw some firefighters putting out a dumpster fire on a Sunday morning. They gave my son a cool firefighter sticker and then shouted cool live your dream stuff out of the window to him while making the "chill" sign. 🤙🤙

This is an interesting book if you're trying to build something.

📸 Nostr + permanence + non-deletion: Amazon is shutting down DPReview, the massive photography and camera review site. All of that life effort and energy from hundreds of thousands or millions of image creation fans over decades down the toilet. Users are raging on the forums: "I don't agree with erasing the whole website, it is akin to burning down a library. It is barbaric to delete an entity with this much information in it. This website has become an archive of all digital cameras from 1998 to 2023, this information should be preserved". - https://www.dpreview.com/news/5901145460/dpreview-com-to-close - https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4705550 -

About Amazon

Update from CEO Andy Jassy on role eliminations

The message below was shared with Amazon employees today.

⚡ Vox motion of no confidence: Day 1 The 89-year old candidate for PM managed not to fall asleep in his seat. Pay more attention to the evolution of Deputy PM Yolanda Díaz (Sumar, communist). Okay, let’s get back to it. I’ve been translating a novel for the past month, snowed under with 130,000 words or so of science fiction and time travel. Thank you for your patience. It has been surprisingly refreshing to take a bit of a break from Twitter and the news for a few weeks and imagine other worlds. Unfortunately, I see that the flood of insults and contempt continue as soon as I write almost anything at all over there. That model of journalism and reporting and conversation, which worked and served us all well for a decade of convulsive global events, appears to have disappeared, even though the site remains under Musk. That’s a shame but life is too short to put up with such constant negativity. There might perhaps be something to be done with more in-depth, feature-like stories with photos and videos and things here on the Substack. I will explore that a little over the course of the year. In the meantime, you have shown over the past few months that you do value a half-decent analysis here of what’s going on with some issue—in our case Spain. I promised you I would keep writing about this year’s elections and politics and that I will do. A couple of times a week will be enough for that, not daily. Not feeling any motivation at all to keep chasing the latest news headlines or the constant political bickering from one side or the other right now. Today something interesting and objectively relevant has happend, though. The motion of no confidence that Vox was banging on about in December finally got underway in parliament. Yes, at the end of March, three months later. Two days of debate and then a vote, which nobody in Spain believes they have a hope of winning. The Popular Party leader, Feijóo, has not even bothered to turn up to watch (he is formally a senator, not an MP). The man put forward as replacement Prime Minister is Ramón Tamames, a former Communist Party MP from 1970s Transition-era Spain that Vox has somehow managed to convince to take part as an “independent” candidate. Yes, he has shifted ideologically all that way from the far-left to the far-right in the intervening 40 years. He did well this morning, I thought, at the age of 89, not to fall asleep in his comfy leather chair in the chamber, from where he slowly read out a pre-prepared written speech that consisted of a long list of complaints about what he thought was generally wrong with Spain. Policy suggestions for solving any of them were noticeably absent. A 30-page version of that speech was leaked to the left-wing media site El Diario last week and Tamames found out while he was being interviewed on an obscure radio show one night. He didn’t even know what El Diario was. “It’s the Podemos commie website”, the host helpfully informed him. Summing up a morning of debate for you, Vox has gifted the left two days of national media attention in exchange for nothing or even minus points given all the ridicule and doddering. The PM, Pedro Sánchez (PSOE, socialist), and the Deputy PM, Yolanda Díaz (Sumar, communist) have been able to argue again they are great in government and that their political ideologies are winners. After waffling on for nearly an hour himself, Tamames later interrupted Sánchez to protest to the Speaker that the PM had taken an hour and forty minutes to reply and had turned up with 20 pages of socialist ideology and policy that had nothing to do with what Tamames had mentioned. The Speaker told him off for interrupting and Sánchez was allowed to continue talking about Sánchez and how great Sánchez’s govermnet was compared to Rajoy’s previuos Popular Party administration before the pandemic. Vox does not appear to have even come up with a plan to benefit from the operation electorally on the right. How many PP voters are this evening thinking about swapping over to vote for Abascal instead of Feijóo? I would wager very few after this morning’s uninspring, pre-planned drudgery. Abascal (Vox) began by trying to convince the chamber that it was all “very serious” despite everyone making fun of it for the past couple of weeks and that Sánchez was now a smelly Prime Minister hanging around the political fridge beyond his use-by date. At other times, Sánchez appeared to be playing “Robin Hood when he has never stopped being the Sheriff of Nottingham”. Only minutes after relating immigrants to criminal rapists in his own ususal rhetoric, Abascal said that the feminists, communists and socialists “do not have the right to crminialise all men in Spain” as rapists. He attempted to criticise the PP for not really turning up for the debate and for drifting towards becoming the social-democratic party the country needed at the same time as he tried to half-heartedly convince them to vote for Tamames. Sánchez replied that Abascal was hiding behind the 89-year old former communist, that he had failed at his previous motion of no confidence and if he was still around after the next general election, he perhaps wouldn’t have enough Vox MPs left to try again. He framed Abascal as a coward or at least a shirker, “that’s what you might expect from someone who exalts military values but avoided military service” and wondered “what’s the point of Vox?”, assuring listeners that he struggled to recall even a single measure from the far-right to improve peaceful coexistence among Spaniards over the past few years, but that they sowed “hatred everywhere”. The PM said the Vox model for Spain rejected science, climate change, Europe, gender violence, feminism, infant poverty, the regional government system and the differnt official languages recognised by the Constitution. The far-right offered “a way of life under that euphemism of a dominant culture that takes us back to the worst moments of the 20th Century, a country that rejects its democratic memory and honours the mausoleums from the dictatorship built with slave workers to the greater glory of the tyrant”. Abacal said “I am not going to reply to all of the lies you have mentioned”. Tamames, despite getting told off by the Speaker for interrupting, was not wrong in his appreciation of how long Sánchez rambled on about his vision of his government’s achievements. Such are the rules of parliamentary football. The Deputy Prime Minister, Yolanda Díaz (Sumar, communist) replied with what I thought was the most intelligent political speech of the day. A modern, educated, powerful woman politely and respectfully replying in 2023 to an old, economist and politician from another time but using the opportunity to frame herself and her ideological vision for how to govern Spain in a—dare we say it—prime-ministerial fashion. She spoke with some eloquence, both rhetorically and intellectually, about the consitutional, economic and human imperative of strengthening the welfare state for all and of how she believed the current left-wing coalition government she is part of has achieved that to some degree over the course of the current parliament and especially during the Covid pandemic. Voters, of course, will agree or disagree strongly depending on which side of politics they are already on, and with the different ideological or policy aspects, but in the same way as it seemed to me that voters on the right would not be shifting to Vox from the PP after today’s performance, voters on the left, even perhaps from the PSOE, and especially women, might this evening be considering a vote for Sumar after listening to Díaz. It was not so long ago that the PP’s Isabel Díaz Ayuso (Madrid, First Minister) was spoken of as a possible first female Prime Minister of Spain, but could there be a scenario containing a surprise from the far-left? It’s not probable, given the disjointed nature of national politics and the current state of the polls, but looking at how Diaz has evolved over the past year or so, it’s not completely implausible either. Thank you for reading.

⚡ Right, back in to writing Spain analysis, then, have been translating a science fiction novel this month. Will post the whole articles on Nostr as we were saying, and we can see if lightning tips really work over the next few weeks and months.

Have only posted a few random tweets since Christmas. A bit more today because there's a motion of no confidence in the government going on in Spain. Just loads of negative energy, anger, insults and contempt still on Twitter, even after those two or three months of almost no activity. Who needs that? What's the point? Very unhealthy for everybody. That model is dead, doesn't feel like an attractive place to be like that anymore. People are moving on: Substack, Mastodon, Nostr, wherever.