<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - Opinion]]> 10 <![CDATA[Dream of a summer nap]]> This is a romantic and utopian vision of Mallorca. It starts from a remote possibility: that politicians impose taxes that make it more interesting to plant tomatoes than to expand a hotel. It is fiction...

]]> <![CDATA[Who educates the young people who vindicate Francoism?]]>

Just a few days ago, on October 12th, while the Puerta del Sol encampment for the right to housing was trying to keep Maricarmen’s memory alive, a group of young people—many of them minors—appeared with flags and Francoist symbols to berate and insult the campers. The image is hard to stomach: adolescents born in the 21st century championing a dictator against other young people who are simply asking for a place to live. A few weeks ago, I wrote here that Maricarmen had given us a lesson in dignity; on the day of the nation’s maximum exaltation, some responded to her with the eagle emblem and raised arms. This is not an isolated incident. Here, too, we have heard “vivas to Franco” that have ended up in the newspapers, and any secondary school teacher will be able to tell you what is heard in the hallways or what circulates in the students’ WhatsApp groups.

]]> <![CDATA[With my head in Spain: I loosen up so I don't have to choose]]> Defining oneself in terms that deviate from what is systemic and structural always implies fighting against the elements and, even, against oneself. We may say that we are not racist, but social racism is so inoculated within each of us that we must militate obstinately to escape it. We may say that we are feminists and more or less the same will happen to us. We will know, if we are self-critical and conscious, that every day we may maintain sexist attitudes, which we will have to try to correct while seeking demanding coherence. Just as it will not be easy for us to define ourselves as anti-capitalists while we go on accumulating monetary assets and real estate as a result of our work effort.

]]> <![CDATA[Electoral frauds]]> Following the corresponding instructions from their Madrid-based party leaders, Vox in the Balearic Islands and part of the PP's orbit are attempting to cast a shadow of suspicion of electoral fraud over the November 29th elections. Predictably, this disinformation campaign will increase as the election dates approach, and the leaders of the PP and Vox have made the solidity of their arguments clear. Feijóo: “I was president of Correos and I do not trust the executives of Correos”. Abascal: “We already know that these people [Pedro Sánchez and the socialists] are capable of anything”. Even when it comes to spreading lies, Feijóo cannot avoid once again demonstrating his exhausting mediocrity, and Abascal, his laziness.

]]> <![CDATA[The cats, two by two]]> Cats always come into my family in pairs. You adopt one and, before long, my sister is already placing a second one on us. It might be because it’s from a litter where it was the only one not nursing and, of course, it’s going to die. “Just keep it for a couple of days”… And a couple of days means forever.

]]> <![CDATA[The Pact of nothingness]]> I read the latest headline about the Government's Pact for Sustainability and I am left open-mouthed: ‘The Pact for sustainability places innovation and knowledge as requirements for economic diversification’. The Pact met on Thursday to reach this empty, topical, boring, uncommitted conclusion, without any shred of imagination, ambiguous... Nothingness, in short. Innovation and knowledge can be the requirements for anything: for a restaurant's recipes, for new hair loss prevention products, or for a new model of robot vacuum cleaner.

]]> <![CDATA[Some mayors present flowerpots]]> One thinks that, after years of writing about nonsense regarding the territory, one knows something about urban planning. Well, no. It turns out that, after waiting half a lifetime for limits on tourist capacity, after following the debate on how the Government and the island councils could lower the pressure of visitors that is drowning the Islands and the islanders, the matter is much simpler.

]]> <![CDATA[Go down to Palma, phew]]> Going down to Palma has become one of those things one does because there is no other choice. I go to my mother's place, to the house where I was born, and also to work. I don't go there for tourism, but lately I always have the feeling that, to get there, I have to cross a world that has invaded the place where I need to pass. I even have to have a special permit to enter this part of the city. Those who saturate it, however, do not need any authorization to do so.

]]> <![CDATA[Posidonia, another victim of the unsustainable Balearic model]]> For years, scientists have strived hard to make society in general, and especially the ruling class, understand that environmental protection was not a whim, nor a trend, but an inescapable necessity. Obviously, the little success they have had is attributable to many factors, but in the case of the Balearic Islands, it basically has to be attributed to a production model based on land consumption. The sustained growth for more than half a century has always been based on breaking records of people. More tourists and more inhabitants.

]]> <![CDATA[Chopin's Nocturne No. 20 in Westerbork]]> I had never visited a concentration camp. We arrived at Westerbork without any preconceived notions, open to almost everything. To almost everything except for what I found. I expected, perhaps, a scream, a wound, a smell, a different silence. There are spaces of memory where it seems you can still hear the heartbeat of those who lived there. In Westerbork, I did not feel any of that. Trees, grass, paths, silence. A space so clean and pleasant that it seemed like a bucolic place to go with children to spend a Sunday evening.

]]> <![CDATA[2029: The end of our people]]> At the beginning of September, coinciding with the start of the school year, the world woke up to a new threat in sight. “I believe that if we do not slow down the current pace of progress, there is a high probability that we will all die in the immediate future,” stated Jacob Coxon, mathematician, technologist, and former Anthropic employee. Just what we needed! Afterwards, other voices joined in. The latest, David Robison, who had led transparency work on the OpenAI safety team.

]]> <![CDATA[The demand]]> And now, suddenly, elections in Spain. It seems that we will have to go to vote at the end of November, and all because the Madrid government has gotten its act together late and poorly regarding the housing issue, showing the electorate, however, that perhaps there was a bit of political will at the same time that now the right (especially the Catalan one) can be blamed for the failure of some dubious measures that may not work at all.

]]> <![CDATA[To participate is also to open new forms of participation]]> There are words that, from being repeated so much, run the risk of losing the ability to challenge us. Participation is one of them.

]]> <![CDATA[Rufián and Sánchez's head]]> Spain has not managed to complete a legislative term for more than a decade. The end of the two-party system and the fragmentation of Parliament have taken us to the polls six times, including those on November 29th. Two were electoral repetitions due to the impossibility of forming a government, an absurdity because the citizen mandate we received was: vote again because the politicians are not capable of making the numbers add up. Now, Pedro Sánchez, seeing the window of opportunity that opens for him after the failure of the housing decrees and the end of his pact with Junts, throws down the gauntlet once again: always moving forward, even if it seems like political suicide.

]]> <![CDATA[From the 15-M to the tenants: what has changed?]]>

At the beginning of 2011, I found a note one day under my office door about an event called ‘The State of Malaise’. Added by hand was: “This is it!”. It came from a student, frustrated for some time by the lack of channels for political—and intellectual—expression for his generation. Shortly after, this same young man launched the hashtag #acampapalma, and in no time, Plaza de España became the Plaza of Iceland, in the wake of the 15-M movement.

]]> <![CDATA[Weddings and croquettes]]> I have always thought that marriages are like croquettes: more or less everyone makes them the same, but in every house they have a different taste. There is a more or less common base, and then everyone adds a touch that makes them different.

]]> <![CDATA[My last mental movie]]> Are you nostalgic? Do you miss things, people, places, and situations that you haven't even experienced or that you shouldn't even miss? I do. And from time to time, any day can turn into a Sunday afternoon. Sunday afternoon. Everyone knows how to identify the type of feeling these two words invoke: those hours designed to rethink your life's goals, reevaluate happiness, and fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others – a bad thing to have social media open. I like reading Alba Tarragó and her Filla Única, because I feel that in her head, an autumn movie is also playing, walking while the leaves fall in our mental Central Park. It doesn't help to write these lines when an electrical storm illuminates the sky, which now becomes dark too early.

]]> <![CDATA[Defame the poor]]> Pilar López is the evicted woman who burst into Parliament last Tuesday, October 6th, to let President Prohens know in person that she felt disappointed and abandoned (those are the words she used): having voted for the PP had not served to prevent her from losing the home where she had lived for the last 15 years, after having contributed for 40 years and having worked mainly in the hospitality industry, as a room maid. She had already gone, days earlier, to the Palma City Council plenary session to make her protest heard. Pilar López spent the recent and monstrous summer living inside her car, the only space that separated her from sleeping rough. She is—like Maricarmen, who died this week, like Olga and Javier, two residents of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat who have committed suicide—a victim of greed, speculation, and an out-of-control market that sees housing as a commodity that provides easy and abundant money. It is not: housing—let us insist on it as much as necessary—is a basic right and also a constitutional right, and for that very reason, it is superior to the right to property or the law of supply and demand.

]]> <![CDATA[The seats are for consuming]]>

Some illustrious representatives of the PP have demanded that the squares remain clear of grumbling campers. This has been done by the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez Almeida. Of course, the mayor of Palma, Jaime Martínez, has also complained about the encampment in Plaza de España. Furthermore, he has offered us a display of demagoguery by having used the complaints from Flama regarding sexist behavior by some campers. A behavior that the collective itself has criticized.

]]> <![CDATA[Clean the torrents... of chalets]]>

It has been eight years since the Sant Llorenç flash flood. The tragic death of 13 people brought to the table how poorly things have been done for decades, and how we have accumulated people and homes in places where it was not only already prohibited to do so, but where common sense also dictated it was not a good idea.

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