This is my research, folks. You won’t be able to read this anywhere else, and I think it’s fascinating stuff.

In 2012, a royal decree established in Spain the creation of a committee charged with promoting the image of Spain as a brand. The committee believes that national identity should be formed by companies associated with the nation, and all citizens are supposed to adopt and practice these values.

This means that control over national identity is handed over, in its entirety, to business interests. Which are notoriously fickle in their national allegiances and pick up and leave whenever it is more profitable. This is a very open and clear effort to destroy the concept of national identity. This privatization of national identity is sponsored by the governments of many Western European nations, so it’s not just a Spanish thing.

The Spain as a Brand committee is chaired by Carlos Espinosa de los Monteros y Bernaldo de Quirós, the IV Marquis of Valtierra. When I heard his name, I knew there had to be something really nasty in his past. So I went digging around and discovered that this gentleman’s uncle and father were present at the famous meeting between Franco and Hitler in 1940. The Espinosas belonged to a faction that was pushing Franco in an even more pro-Nazi direction.

Franco repaid the Espinosas’ loyalty to the ideals of national-socialism. Carlos Espinosa had a job in Franco’s Ministry of Commerce that he later parlayed into positions as a CEO of Inditex and Mercedes-Benz Spain. At the height of the crisis, Espinosa is chairing the Spain as a Brand committee and promoting his deeply neoliberal ideas on every corner. The conclusion we can draw is clear: those who inherited their power and riches from the Franco era are trying to destroy the nation-state because that’s the last obstacle in the way of complete freedom of capital flows.

Am I super cool, or what?

In any case, a German photographer and a group of Spanish poets got together to create artwork that questions the validity of the Spain as a Brand idea. Its great photography, great poetry, and it’s extremely impressive that artists in Spain are so engaged in discussing the crisis, the collapse of the nation-state, the economy, politics, etc. There is nothing even remotely similar happening in the increasingly irrelevant and navel-gazing US art.

Title: Marca(da) España

Year: 2014

My rating: 9 out of 10

The first 100+ dead bodies of Russian soldiers have come home from Syria, and now the rest of the world is trying to prevent Putin from sending more troops and supplies to help Assad.

Bulgaria has already closed its airspace to Russia’s military cargo airplanes that are trying to get to Syria. The US is now working to convince the perennially sleepy Greeks to do the same.

Remember that new biography of Kissinger that I told you I was going to read? It’s titled An Idealist and argues that Kissinger was not a cynic and pragmatist that everybody considers him to be but an idealist. I highly doubt this is a valuable insight into Kissinger but here is my question: why would anybody believe that being an idealist is a good quality for a politician to have?

Look at Putin. All he does is the opposite of pragmatic. He is chasing the idealized and deeply unrealistic vision of Russia as a world power on the same level with the US. He’s sacrificing his country’s economy and the lives of its citizens plus he’s destabilizing one region of the planet after another to keep pursuing this impossible fantasy.

What’s so great about this blind idealism?

Americans, you know I love you to bits. You are talented, creative, hard-working, kind people. There is one quality, though, that you have and that drives me up a wall. Of course, not all of you possess it and probably not even the majority does. But those who do practice it do it with such an abandon that it is embarrassing to observe.

The quality I’m talking about is the capacity to engage in very public and overwrought exhibitions of self-pity. 

A student at my previous school once wrote something as follows in an essay:

Bartolomé de Las Casas narrates the horrible atrocities that the indigenous people experienced at the hands of the conquistadors. The Spaniards murdered, tortured, and raped the indigenous people. They ripped open the bellies of pregnant women and threw the babies to the dogs. This caused horrible suffering to the indigenous.

I have also experienced horrible suffering in my life. For instance, back in the 8th grade, I spent a lot of time preparing for a math test and hoping to get an A. But I got a C instead! This caused me great pain and suffering!

N insists that the student was simply trying to be a smart-ass and wasn’t writing all this seriously. I’d like to believe him, even though the destruction of the indigenous cultures of the Americas is a very inappropriate subject for this kind of smart-assery. However, this sort of thing happens so often that I can’t help suspecting that people do it very much in earnest.

See some examples under the fold.

Continue reading “Self-Pity” →

The perennially aggrieved Ian Welsh is blasting Russians for sending troops Syria. When Russia invaded Ukraine and sent incomparably more troops to kill Ukrainians, Welsh couldn’t cheer loudly enough. The killing of Syrians, however, looks a lot more disturbing to him.

This is not as illogical as it might seem. Exalted pseudo-Lefties of Welsh’s ilk hate nobody more than non-Russian FSU people. They still petulantly cling to the discredited fantasy of a “good USSR” and detest those of us who demonstrated how horrible and oppressive the “prison of nations” was by escaping from it as soon as possible.

From vast personal experience, I can assure you that nothing dampens the mood at a gathering of arm – chair Marxists as an entrance of a Ukrainian. Welsh and Co can’t wait for all of us to expire already and stop marring the joy they get from their erotic fantasies about the USSR of their dreams. 

Thank you for the support, everybody. You are good, kind, profound people, and it helps to know you exist.

Tragedy always highlights who is a great person and who is a self-involved piece of shit. I have had an opportunity to discover that the overwhelming majority of people are good and capable of feeling compassion and offering help. Even those who make an occasional clumsy comment have the capacity to understand that they are wrong and apologize.

Of course, there is also a class of people who can’t help trying to make somebody else’s suffering about their all-important selves. I have learned that the most destructive people are those who start every sentence with the word ‘I’.

“I don’t know what to say that will help you. I’m afraid of saying something insensitive. I’m suffering, too. I have no idea what to say right now.”

The message here is, “Forget your suffering, come service my emotional needs instead.”

Such people are to be avoided at all costs.

People, tomorrow and the day after is the second anniversary of Eric’s death. I won’t be posting anything new for obvious reasons.

Here are some fun old posts for you to read while I’m away:

Students and money.

In case you forgot that robbery is not cool, here is a reminder.

I kind of miss taking the bus because of the funny stories that came out of the rides.

What the UK was like back in 1990.

A story about a Russian class I once taught.

Have you ever wondered why nobody wants to date happy men? Here is the answer.

Do you remember the weird anti-sex tantrum Naomi Wolf once pitched?

An immigrant discovers inequality.

Toilet religion is both funny and disturbing.

The KGB people had a sense of humor.

Do you remember the stuttering student debacle? That one was fun.

The attitudes towards responsibility among liberals and conservatives.

A short funny post on toddlers and tiaras.

Now seems like a good time to remember the Biden / Ryan vice-presidential debate. Good times!

In case you forgot my stalker story, here it is.

I’ll be back on Monday.

I found this on somebody else’s blog:

What is the total number of months during the Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush I administrations, plus the first term of Clinton, when the unemployment rate was lower than today?

I guessed wrong but not by much.

I think it’s ridiculous that the unstable county clerk from Kentucky or wherever had to be jailed. The woman obviously has mental issues, what’s with the weird personal history, the strangely emotional reaction to paperwork, sudden religious conversions, unhealthy appearance, and a weirdo son from one of the weirdo marriages.

It would have been more productive to send her on medical leave. Now she’s become some sort of a martyr for an undefined cause, and that’s just stupid.

People are incredibly stupid. A newscaster in Arizona has to defend herself for pronouncing Spanish words correctly because idiots were traumatized by the realization that other languages exist. The newscaster broke the unwelcome news to them:

Just so you know, I was lucky enough to grow up speaking two different languages and I have lived in other cities in the U.S., South America, and Europe. So, yes, I do like to pronounce things the way they are meant to be pronounced and I know that change can be difficult, but it’s normal. And I know that, over time, everything falls into place.

Just in case anybody has any more questions about the permanently unhireable, ask yourself what kind of a modern workplace would want an infantile hysteric who goes into fits when hearing the word “mesa” pronounced correctly. 

A flurry of news reports recently have suggested that as the Assad regime falters, Russia may be pouring troops and weapons into Syria.

Well, duh. Everybody who’s less into navel – gazing than the US media knows that Putin has sent troops to Syria. He’s doing it to impress and cow the US by posing as a fearless and dedicated anti-ISIS fighter. If he manages to make advances against ISIS, Putin hopes that his invasion of Ukraine will be forgiven and forgotten.

The added bonus of the plan is to show the world how weak and impotent Americans are, dawdling and fumbling in the region where valiant Russians save the day as the Americans stand helplessly by.

And Putin is right. The foreign policy of the US is all about finding any pretext for yet another idiotic “Reset” with Russia. And as we have seen since 2000, it matters not one bit who’s in the White House. Nothing seems likely to get the US off the path of appeasing Russia. Which means that Putin’s plan will be very successful.