grandepequeno

This reminded me of an exception to this which is the portuguese communist writer Jose Saramago, he grew up very poor and won the nobel prize in literature 25 years ago TODAY!

Here's a quote from when he visited Palestine

During the Second Intifada, while visiting Ramallah in March 2002, Saramago said that "what is happening in Palestine is a crime we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz ... A sense of impunity characterizes the Israeli people and its army. They have turned into rentiers of the Holocaust." In an essay he wrote expanding on his views, Saramago wrote of Jews: "educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted . . . on everyone else . . . will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner."

Today marks 25th years since portuguese communist writer Jose Saramago won the Nobel prize in literature, don't know if they ever gave the award to anyone else as based as him but it's pretty cool. I've read a few of his books in audio form they're very interesting

Here's a quote from when he visited Palestine

During the Second Intifada, while visiting Ramallah in March 2002, Saramago said that "what is happening in Palestine is a crime we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz ... A sense of impunity characterizes the Israeli people and its army. They have turned into rentiers of the Holocaust." In an essay he wrote expanding on his views, Saramago wrote of Jews: "educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted . . . on everyone else . . . will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner."

Getting into government, but even if the socialist party comes back they have a habit of doing privatizations too, or not really challenging ongoing privatizations, and right now I'm not too keen on the parliamentary left going into coalition with the PS to "push them left" so I don't really know. Maybe if the PS comes back they'll just increase funding or something

Funily enough the government already said that they won't increase the tax that funds the RTP so that thing is just going to bleed money until the next big austerity push where it will be very easy to justify full privatization

Yes but the EU mediated, for example, the ceasefire between Russia and Georgia in 2008, and even admitted that Georgia ignited that conflict by firing on Russian soldiers.

This is unthinkable right now, the EU has adopted the same "we're better than everybody else and our enemies don't have reasons for their grievances" attitude that reinforces its intransigence.

Also, at this point, it's fair to say that America just DOESN'T negotiate anything, they didn't negotiate with Putin to not invade Ukraine even though they knew he was gonna do it, they don't negotiate with China over Taiwan, the don't negotiate with Iran, they don't negotiate with Venezuela. It's an empire of maximalist positions, "do everything we want and we might leave you alone", and this is internally justified with american exceptionalism but the EU is behaving a lot like this too.

There's been a perfect example of Pre-Privatization and liberal hypocrisy in Portugal this week.

So we got a new center-right PSD government earlier this year, this week during a "Future of Media" conference the prime minister announced that RTP, the national public broadcaster, will gradually no longer have advertising on it until the total removal of ads in 2027, which would mean it would lose 6.6 million euros in revenue in the next 3 years.

Now, in theory, this could free up the channel from commercial influence and market shit, in practice all this means is that in a few years there are gonna be EVEN MORE calls to fully privatize RTP because it's not making any money.

This is functionally the same as when Orban takes over the public broadcaster or some shit, because once RTP is sold to some media conglomerate, it's obviously going to shift right, and serve its funders' interests, but of course there's not a peep from EU institutions about this.

And it's not like RTP today is some leftist or even center-leftist institution, for example in the news segments (the "telejornal") there's been plenty of "Passive Voice" shit when reporting about Palestine, and they have some pretty shitty anchors and guests too. But at the same time there's a lot of series, documentaries (both left and right) and cultural products that just would not get funded on other channels, if RTP gets privatized we'd see even less portuguese cultural production.

Funnily enough at the same conference, the PM also asked for journalists to be "more tranquil" and then complained that journalists ask him questions that they hear in their earpieces instead of asking what they want, which he's being made fun of for (not by me though, because I genuinely hate journalists)

Should mention that on the whole the RTP has like a bunch of channels and radio stations, and also turned a profit last year while the big private media channels didn't

Thank you for the recommendation, I just obtained the book

The proposal to no longer capitalise "Russia" on official documents in Latvia got struck down, L

The next time there's a recession and these countries and people actually have to deal with real problems it's going to be so funny

My favorite point ever is that if you live in the first camp, and actively oppose the second, it doesn't matter what you say or what you identify yourself you are in effect in favor of the first camp

Well the former ruling socialist party is the second largest member of the nfp, and the former president Hollande won a seat through the party, this is what he said

“How can I be useful? Having held the positions I’ve held, having made a certain number of demands on my country’s foreign policy, I could be useful in ensuring that France’s interests are preserved,” he told BFM after his election.

I'm sure the LFI and PCF think differently (or at least aren't as suspicious regarding foreign policy), but the PS probably weighs enough that it could make heavy demands in a theoretical NFP government

The NFP won 180 seats, 60-68 of those through the PS, if the party leaves the NFP the whole coalition goes back into 3rd place being the RN. The biggest grain of salt that has to be understood is that, unfortunately, a big part of the coalition's success represents the revival of the formerly decimated neoliberal center-left and that if you know anything about these parties you know that talking left, promising left, and governing right is part of their MO