Hallelujah! Finally I have found a book by a Latin Americanist that was a pleasure to read. Mario Ojeda Revah is a professor in Mexico and he has no interest in turning his field of knowledge into a site for narcissistic self-flagellation by the bearers of delicious liberal guilt. In Ojeda Revah’s México and the Spanish Civil War, Mexicans are not silent and pathetic victims, like they always are in the work of American scholars, but people with agency and a mind of their own. And shockingly, some Mexicans suck, and not because the evil US forced them.

Of course, Ojeda Revah has ideology. Everybody does. But his ideology is one I like because it isn’t stale. Ojeda Revah clearly favors the idea that Spaniards and Latin Americans have a lot more in common than not. I also believe that it’s high time to drop the ancient animosities of the colonial times. When a country hasn’t invaded in a couple of centuries, it’s time to let it go and move on. Hell, I was ready to move on when Russians managed to stay away from Ukraine for two decades. But we know how that turned out.

In short, the book was very unpredictable because the author actually did research and communicated his findings in the book. Unlike so many scholars who don’t research anything and instead spout off SJW slogans for 300 pages.

By the way, this is the first book in exactly 15 years that I will be reviewing for an academic journal, so now I have to say all this but in polite language.

Remember how we talked about fluid capital and the erosion of all solid institutions and practices by the unchecked capital flows?

This fluidity is chaotic in nature. It’s not a single stream that goes in a well-defined direction. It’s a million tiny flows and rivulets that erode solidity. Fighting the chaos is exhausting and pointless. The only way is to embrace it. 

Are you sure you are not wasting too much energy on trying to bring order to chaos? 

I’ve been sick for a very short time but already missed the tragic news about two terror acts in Germany. It’s not easy to follow real news these days because everything is drowned out by the noise from purposefully scandalous outbursts aimed at keeping us subdued and compliant. Many crucially important things are happening but we are unaware of them because we are mesmerized by the con artists who are waving a flashy object in front of us. 

If each of us makes a list of what we considered news this past week, we’ll see how much of it was trivial and aimed at duping us into passivity. And it’s not only political passivity but the intellectual, too. 

I used to have a fairly decent news feed that I’d created manually out of the sources I picked myself. But since the election my news feed began to get infected by empty, tabloid-like stories that communicate nothing but infertile gossip.

I knew it was going to happen. I was well-aware that both politics and reporting would be emptied of all content in favor of hardcore entertainment. But I expected it to be a gradual process. Instead, it all happened within a single year. 
What I want to do is to start a Real News blog series where we can discuss important stories and not this goddamn fluff about stars’ hand-holdings, brawls, and divorces.