<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - Antoni Riera]]> 10 <![CDATA[All of Mallorca will be a city: the model that is destroying the island]]>

The entire island of Mallorca will end up being a large city. I first heard it about thirty years ago, and I couldn't say from whom. A spokesperson for GOB? A professor from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University? A militant from the PSM? It doesn't matter now.

]]> <![CDATA[Hooligans who make King Pig true]]>

"Only Vox can clean up what's there"Vox will clean house." Thus, quite naturally, employing two languages ​​within the same sentence—one to satisfy the loose ends coming from Palma and the other to remind himself a little of the one he speaks every day—Esteve Sureda, spokesperson for the far-right party in Manacor, referred to the municipality's need for cleanliness. He wasn't talking, however, about papers, trash, overflowing containers, or abandoned street furniture. He was talking about people. In any case, the conflict, the problem, and the row are theirs, those who made the video recalling "our customs" and "our godfathers" without hesitation to speak a language they never spoke. What, for him, should be "Mallorcan identity"? The far-right's cynicism is outrageous. The alarms, however, are all going off because of racism and the The xenophobia of this party, which shamelessly replicates the dehumanizing patterns of 1930s Nazism, culminated, it must be remembered, in one of the most shameful episodes in human history: industrialization.

]]> <![CDATA[Anxieties in a world that's going backwards]]> Memes and parodies about the way young people react to everyday problems are commonplace. Particularly witty is the Valencian influencer Ignacio Gil Conesa, better known online as Nachter. This man, with over ten million followers on TikTok, has left his previous job and now dedicates himself to "content creation," which is the new term for generating videos and other audiovisual materials with the aim of entertaining and, above all, making likes and followers.

]]> <![CDATA[Between therians and anti-vaxxers: how far are we willing to go in being deceived?]]>

These past few days, the whims of the algorithm have decided to make my feed Instagram phenomenon of theriansThese are people who feel an "inner connection with real animals." In other words, they feel like animals. If they are dogs or cats, they walk on all fours. If they are snakes, they slither with the elegant, scaly undulation of those forked limbs that so many people find unpleasant. Apparently, the phenomenon is viral in Argentina. Perhaps these are people who have realized that trying to be human under the chainsaw regime is impossible. But you don't have to go that far: in some schools in Mallorca, there are already families who empathize with these peculiar identity needs of their children.

]]> <![CDATA[He who changes his head scratches himself]]> Last week, Professor Gabriel Bibiloni, whom we who knew him when we studied Catalan Philology at the University of the Balearic Islands held in high esteem, He was the protagonist of an event which, beyond the annoyance it caused him, the shop assistant who served him and the managers of the establishment where it happened, is a reflection of the humiliating agony and scandalous contempt that we Catalan speakers must live with when we leave our tribal pebble, what is now called "the comfort zone".

]]> <![CDATA[The 'vos' and the loss of respect]]>

"These papers here will be yours..." a colleague from the high school told me the other day in the staff room. I suddenly understood that "yours" meant all the colleagues in the department, not just me. Today I went to buy the checkout, which is the only place we usually interact with someone from the department store, and a girl said to me, very nicely, "Would you like a bag, sir?" It's become clear to me now that perhaps the colleague from the other day was referring exclusively to me...

]]> <![CDATA[Saint Anthony, to re-edge in order to revive]]> Now that we're back from the sweet and festive Christmas celebrations, we're entering the big week of Sant Antoni. I took the opportunity to ask my students at IES Portocristo what songs they knew... And they knew quite a few. "Yes, teacher"Sant Antoni, for rain, inside you're making plants and clappers, to earn a few coins to make new shoes." "Very good, Yerai," I agreed. The Sant Antoni festival has taken off so much that even in a place of such impressive cultural diversity as Portocristo, the children of the newcomers... do they know what a "lova" is? Nobody in the classroom has the slightest idea, despite having heard and sung the song dozens of times. "And a claper?" Nobody knows that either.

]]> <![CDATA[Content creators... you choose!]]> Whether from institutions, social forums, or personal opinions like the one you're reading now, there's a tendency to promote content creators in our language, eager to project a positive spirit and optimistic expectations regarding the health of the Catalan language, which we so often tend to view through a victim mentality, or even from a negative one. And it's important to do so! I recommend following the Parlars Mallorquins page, which began as a website focused almost exclusively on linguistics, dialectology, and other philological curiosities, and has become a national reference point, and I would even say an anti-capitalist one. I also like to follow what @CasHorrach says from time to time; he's quite witty, that guy. Or President Àngel Aguiló, whose words are as eloquent as they are forceful. These are our own cases, with a lot of influence on social media and which also resonate in conventional media, such as IB3, which finds a creative source of information and a connection to the reality of the internet—a reality that is no longer clear whether it also reflects the reality of the street or not.

]]> <![CDATA[The sea will boil]]> The unbearable lightness of knowing what we think. The days leading up to Manacor have been intense. The sea has boiled, like a casserole in the oven, in the apocalyptic Ausiès-Marché style. The local cultural organization has canceled a conference on Chuetas and antisemitism because the speaker was to be the historian, and also self-proclaimed Zionist (that's how she describes herself, the label isn't mine), Laura Miró. The episode is incredibly complex, and nothing I say about it will escape accusations of being a Zionist or a Palestinian terrorist from supporters of both sides. I'm not aiming for neutrality. I want a free and sovereign Palestinian state. I'm disgusted by the genocide that the Israeli state is perpetrating against what some still cynically call "Holy Land." I don't want Israeli colonization of that territory, just as I don't want Spanish colonization of ours. Between the state and the oppressed people, my choice is clear. Cancellation is another matter entirely. It drives me crazy that we don't let someone speak, especially when we've already invited them to share their perspective (wasn't this the initial mistake?). If we've reached the point where we can't listen to each other, where we can't speak frankly, with all the nuances, all the complexities, and all the controversies in the world, then we've lost our way in this whole mess.

]]> <![CDATA[Cooking to eat, a delicious anachronism]]> Two weeks ago I bought a rabbit at the butcher's. I asked them to cut it into pieces. I put the thighs, shoulders, and meatiest parts of the loin, which I had seasoned with salt and pepper, into a pan with enough oil. When they started to brown, I added two small potatoes and, after a few minutes, a large chopped onion. I seasoned it well with salt. It was finger-licking good.

]]> <![CDATA[My little house, however poor it may be]]> "I had a little house by the sea, I had a flowery garden and a peaceful sky, I had a boat and some nets on the beach and a sweet dawn when I woke up...", thus begins the The Ballad of LucasThe habanera that Joana Pons popularized in Menorca to such an extent that the song is now part of the collective imagination of Menorca, and also of those of us Mallorcans who are occasionally tempted to make a trip to the neighboring island.

]]> <![CDATA[Everything that doesn't move, breaks]]> In the spring of 2022, I had the opportunity to interview Oriol Junqueras. He had been released from prison just under a year before. I began the interview by addressing the division among pro-independence individuals and groups concerned with preserving the unique identity of Catalan culture. Junqueras suddenly alerted me: in Europe, discussing identity issues is frowned upon, especially now with the rise of the far right and the fear that we are regressing to the situation before the Second World War.

]]> <![CDATA[The names of our hope]]> "Thank you very much for showing interest in women's football.". CE Manacor recently appointed a new women's football coordinator. Due to my work as an intrepid reporter, I became interested in this new position within the club's infrastructure. Alicia, the new coordinator, received our message and contacted us. In Spanish. I returned her reply, via WhatsApp, in Catalan. And all with spelling mistakes, and we agreed on a telephone interview. Hearing her voice and looking at her lineage, I asked her: "Weren't you a student of mine?" "Are you a Toni?" Spanish speaker. She was a student of ours, a good handful of years ago, at the IES Portocristo. I thought... "Whew, Toni, how are you going to do around here?" the waiter attacked me. Shorts, white shirt, trousers with pleats in dress and manner, in service and speech.

]]> <![CDATA[Against evil]]> Not many days ago, a woman posted a very dejected image on social media of one of the many parks Manacor has available for the enjoyment of its citizens. She lamented that, due to the water shortage, the City Council, or whatever entity was responsible, had stopped watering the lawn that gave so much life to an outdoor space so frequented by families with their children, or by owners with their dogs. At that point, one of those furious commentators blurted out: "They've had to stop watering because the Moroccans go to the free fountains to get water and get it stuck." Not a word about the swimming pools, the golf courses, or the hotels.

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