matthewbennett
Matthew Bennett

https://thespainreport.substack.com/

Journalist. Thoughts about a changing Spain.

Public Key

npub1075jp98z9ylsjlrulmefx0kn0gt8qckz2nz5p2n7cfhgqxwwcunqqe5mxs

NIP-05 Address

matthewbennett@getalby.com

NIP-57 Address

matthewbennett@getalby.com

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs8l2fqjn3zj0cf0370au5n8mfh59nsvtp9f32q4flvym5qr88vwfspzemhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejz7qgewaehxw309aex2mrp0yh8xmn0wf6zuum0vd5kzmp0u43m2n

Publishing to

eden.nostr.land

relay.snort.social

Author Public Key

npub1075jp98z9ylsjlrulmefx0kn0gt8qckz2nz5p2n7cfhgqxwwcunqqe5mxs

Show more details

Last Notes

2023-12-29 11:05:58

Spain Notes, Dec 29: AI + Spain nuclear phase out + Bildu governs Pamplona + Franco, again
(Image below from DALL-E 3: “Spain in the world, intense, power, global, chaotic”)
A Complex, Global 21st Century
1/ The NYT is suing Open AI (Chat GPT) and Microsoft for using its copyrighted content: “Millions of articles from The New York Times were used to train chatbots that now compete with it”. (Story, court document)
2/ There are some good first takes on where it all might go on Twitter.
A Changing Spain
3/ Reuters: Spain confirms nuclear power phase-out, extends renewable projects deadlines.
4/ Sánchez went on a trip to…Iraq. In early morning (Spain time) statements, no questions, with the Iraqui PM, he said he supported an immediate, permanent ceasefire and a two-state solution to the Israel-Gaza conflict.
5/ Global alt-right influencer Jack Posobiec, with 2 million followers on X, published a new podcast episode: “EVERYTHING THEY TOLD YOU ABOUT THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR WAS A LIE FRANCO SAVED SPAIN AND FOUGHT FOR CHRIST”.
6/ Bildu, the left-wing Basque party associated with ETA, is back in charge of Pamplona City Hall, (Navarra) after the socialists voted in favour during a controversial confidence vote against the right.
7/ Belarra (Podemos): “The social majority is back in progressive government in Iruña [Basque name for Pamplona]”.
8/ Vox: “Infamy is committed in Pamplona. Pedro Sánchez hands the city to the heirs of ETA”.
9/ El País: “The Socialist Party needs to explain its deal with the radical Basque separatist coalition”.
10/ El Mundo: “What happened yesterday was not only the complete political legitimation of Bildu by the PSOE, but a change in the essence of the PSOE itself, a moral dissent against everything socialism had defended and fought for for decades in the Basque Country and a Navarra, ravaged by terrorism”.
11/ ABC: “Sánchez breaks his word again and allows the Socialist Party to hand over the mayor’s office in Pamplona to Basque radicals, contrary to what he promised before the July general election”.
12/ Might we see the implosion of Spain's alt-right party Vox in 2024 if Ortega-Smith challenges Abascal for the leadership? In that political subculture, such a challenge to the alpha male will be seen as even more disloyal than usual, a betrayal, and prove extremely divisive.
New York Times: “Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as “Copilot”) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment”.
- Understand a changing Spain better
- Guarantee the independence of this analysis
- Access all the exclusive premium articles
For the email version with links, subscribe here:
https://thespainreport.substack.com/subscribe
https://void.cat/d/81i7gQPaqbMorwYGKExfWC.webp

2023-12-27 17:06:12

Spain Notes, Dec 27: Galicia elections + Vox leadership challenge + AI Spanish history
1/ Reuters: “Spain opposes using the European Union's anti-piracy naval force to protect merchant ships in the Red Sea from the Yemeni Houthi militia, but it is willing to consider the creation of a different mission to tackle the problem, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Wednesday”.
2/ MORE ELECTIONS IN SPAIN: Galicia, February 18.
3/ The PP is in charge up there, so this is a Feijóo bet against Sánchez and the amnesty deal with Puigdemont. The PP First Minister, Alfonso Rueda (PP), said it was time to “decide on the future of Galicia”.
4/ Rueda is the guy who took over from Feijóo when he moved to Madrid last year to try to become Prime Minister.
5/ They only passed the regional budget…last week
6/ Sánchez did a Christmas press conference this morning.
7/ The PM said public transport would continue to be heavily subsidised or even free for some train journies.
8/ He blamed the right for the increase in political polarisation and insults.
9/ A report that Ortega-Smith, the senior Vox leader inovolved in the scuffle in Madrid City Hall the other day, might challenge Abascal for the leadership of the party in 20’24.
10/ Ortega-Smith tweeted furiously against the media for publishing the story…but didn’t deny it.
11/ Pablo Iglesias on the King’s speech: the former Podemos leader, from the far-left, sees Felipe VI’s words as clearly aligned with the political right
12/ FT: Spain extends windfall tax on banks and energy companies
13/ Guardian: Andalusia wetlands deal hailed as green transition model
14/ Bloomberg: Spain extends measures put in place to ease inflation hit
15/ BBC: Spain forward Putellas to have knee surgery
16/ Somebody has done an AI image of The Lady of Elche (4th Century BC).
17/ Jaime del Burgo has republished the scandalous photo of the Queen on Twitter, after causing a royal storm several weeks ago and deleting it.
EXTRA: Apart from Japan, Spain is the country where people least trust, or find least important, the news reported by the public TV channel (Reuters Institute).
https://void.cat/d/UK7PwhjDZPkv1UzyeATmV1.webp
FOR THE EMAIL VERSION WITH LINKS, join here:
https://thespainreport.substack.com/subscribe

2023-12-23 11:50:02

Spain Notes, Dec 23: aggresive Vox bullying in Madrid City Council. The conservative Mayor calls on Ortega Smith (Vox) to resign
1/ There was a(nother) physical scuffle in a Madrid City Council…it was VOX.
2/ The first video to appear of the incident showed scuffles and outrage on the Mas Madrid side of the chamber after Vox leader Ortega Smith moved in that direction after making some remarks on the rostrum.
3/ Another angle of the incident, which appeared later, showed there had indeed been a brief physical altercation, with Ortega Smith clearly making an aggressive gesture towards Mas Madrid councilllor Eduardo Rubiño.
4/ The affected councillor, Eduardo Rubiño, said Ortega Smith had thrown a water bottle towards him in an “aggressive, intimidatory manner”. “He was very close to coming into physical contact with me”, Rubiño said.
5/ Mas Madrid group leader Rita Maestre said “There was just a physical assault by Mr. Ortega Smith on Mr. Rubiño … right in front of you all”. She questioned whether that was how council meetings work: “You have the right to assault people when they say things you don’t agree with..?”
6/ The Mayor, Almeida (PP) demanded Ortega Smith resign: “unacceptable”.
7/ The Vox leader in the city tweeted out “not a chance, coup leaders”.
8/ “Vox has been doing politics like this for a long time”, Rubiño told a radio programme: “we’re talking about a party that just a few days ago wanted to hang the Prime Minister by his feet […] with the support of far-right groups with swastikas chanting “homo, homo, homo” through the streets. How are we now surprised by this?”
9/ “[Ortega Smith] turned round and said ‘now go and cry’…why does he say ‘now go and cry’”, he added: “and he said that to me, maybe he wouldn’t have said it to another person, a person he thinks is perhaps less of a man than he is, and it reminds me of the phrase that bullies in school use with homos in class”.
10/ Ortega Smith again refused to resign: “I hope he recovers from his grave injuries”, he quipped.
11/ Fans of both sides jumped in on social media in support of their man.
12/ “Dick boy says Ortega Smith nearly came into physical contact with him”, tweetd Ndongo, for example, on the Vox side, with some laughing emojis.
13/ “Rubiño, you’re not much of a man”, tweeted Irene González, a columnist in Vozpópuli.
14/ “My full support for you, Rubiño, and my strong condemnation of Ortega Smith”, tweeted PSOE chairwoman Cristina Narbona: “that behaviour is not acceptable from an elected representative of the people”.

2023-12-22 16:21:37

Europa Press also reporting they have confirmed that Spain has BLOCKED European participation in the US Prosperity Guardian mission vs. the Houthis in Yemen via the pre-existing EU anti-piracy Operation Atlanta off the Horn of Africa.
https://www.europapress.es/nacional/noticia-espana-bloquea-contribucion-mision-atalanta-operacion-eeuu-mar-rojo-20231222103927.html

2023-12-22 16:19:21

A Jewish sonderkommando prisoner to historian Laurence Rees: "Nobody knows themselves. All of us could be good or bad people in these situations. Sometimes, when somebody is really nice to me, I find myself thinking, ‘How will he be in Sobibor?'". @azaizamotaz9 in Gaza:
http://ww2history.com/testimony/Holocaust/Participant_in_Sobibor_revolt
https://void.cat/d/NJ7imvfGZiL6hpjmECHTbY.webp

2023-11-18 12:39:00

1,000 subscribers: corporate ads, political manipulation or independent journalism
This simple framework helps you to understand what is really going on.
What an explosive few days for Spain, politically! Sánchez has now tied up the top job until 2027 unless the coalition falls apart or unless the right somehow manages to stage a motion of no confidence, which they don’t have the votes for. But where does that leave Spanish politics as a whole?
The right is now angered and in disarray, with Vox and the alt-right taking to the streets and the PP adopting its more conservative strategy. The amnesty bill part of the deal is still to come and there will now almost certainly be a day when Puigdemont comes home to enormous media fanfare. And what will the new government do with its second chance at progressive policies?
Tucker Carlson’s little trip to Madrid this week is not the journalism we need. This is even worse than what happened during the Catalan crisis in 2017 when serious foreign media parachuted reporters in and left us with a sensation that they didn’t really know what they were talking about. In 2023, we get global ideological influencers.
Carlson turned up to go to the protest outside PSOE HQ with Vox leader Abascal, took some selfies with Vox MEPs and social media satellites and sat down for a mechanical interview with Abascal to talk about Abascal’s view on Spain with ideological questions on Abascal’s favourite topics. No constrast, no outside information, no other views, no ciritique, no analysis, not even any other reporting on what the party was doing.
We know we can do much better than that, and independently.
It all fits in with the previous thoughts on what we want from reporters in Israel-Gaza at the minute, where we mostly don’t speak Arabic or Hebrew and don’t understand the finer points of complex regional tribal politics there, or with what we were saying about the regional journalist here in Murcia who, while working for Onda Cero, was a politely critical voice against regional government and power but suddenly got sacked after more than 30 years.
There are still only three basic options for funding journalism, each focused on value for who is really paying: corporate ads, obscure political influence funding or readers who choose to subscribe.
In the first case, media companies are selling your valuable attention to advertisers so that you buy their products and feel emotions for their brands. This is how we end up with ever more sensationalist, emotional and repetitive click bait.
In the second, political parties and their obscure financial backers want to control frames, narratives, stories, labels and opinions so that the next time you argue with your family or friends or go to vote, you do so in their favour, to push their agenda and to give them power, according to their view of the world.
The third case is the only option in which a journalist is working directly with his readers and where the only aim is more and better journalism so that everybody understands things better.
The first two seek to manipulate you. The third only seeks understanding. An imperfect human understanding, as each journalist will do it better or worse over time, and favour some stories and labels over others, and that will interact with your own worldview and background, but he is not seeking office or votes or to sell you a product or brand. Just journalism and analysis.
Once you understand this simple framework, you understand what Tucker Carlson and Vox, or the professional Israeli propaganda machine, or regional political power somewhere, are really doing and why, all while they present themselves superficially as democratic and pro-freedom-of-the-press.
We still have a chance with option three. It’s still possible. The Internet and thinks like Twitter and Substack make it possible.
1,000 subscribers is a real number that is doable for readers and that buys real reporting and analytical independence for a journalist to do serious work and dispatches from events for you. In our case, that’s a number that gets me roving around Spain for you too, with photos and videos and interviews to better illustrate this bit of a global changing reality.
Every reader counts, it all adds up, and we get something that has never really existed before in media history: readers direct to journalists, with no manipulative intermedaries. No ads, no political influence.
Subscribe now: https://thespainreport.substack.com/subscribe
Or zaps for Nostr people.

2023-11-16 18:15:28

1/ Sánchez reappointed Prime Minister of Spain, in 179-171 vote.
2/ In favour: PSOE (121), Sumar (31), Esquerra (7), Junts (7), PNV (5), Bildu (6), BNG (1), Coalición Canaria (1)
3/ Against: PP (137), Vox (33), UPN (1)
“We must all read Maquivelli more”, said Sánchez.
The right in Spain needs to change frames, discourses and rhetoric. They lost the general election in July after a personal campaign against Sánchez. The left and separatists voted together to appoint the new Speaker in Congress, 178-172, and now Sánchez PM again, 179-171.
After the local and regional elections in May, the right thought Sánchez was finished. He doubled down and called a snap general election. The right assumed they would win a conservative-far-right coalition. Sánchez sold himself as the antidote to that. Now he is PM again.
https://void.cat/d/8Q1vUUbUFhXjJ5tkEWo1ft.webp

2023-11-15 10:15:17

What happens next in Spain? 4 scenarios for Sánchez's amnesty deal with Catalan separatists
1. Somebody, some other institution, stops it. The King. Europe. The courts. Not happening, at least not before the vote happens. King Felipe is a modern, constitutional monarch, not an ancien régime absolutist tyrant. Constitutionally, as far as I understand it, he cannot refuse to sign a law that parliament has passed. He has no wriggle room to imprint his personal marque on events. If he were to try, the crisis might even go up a level to talk of abdication. This is not national-to-regional constitutional authority like in 2017, this is the Prime Minister himself doing a deal with a fugitive from justice, to stay on as PM. His party, the PSOE, controls Congress, the seat of national sovereignty, via the Speaker and the Speaker’s Committee. Vox petitioned the Supreme Court yesterday for an injunction to stop the debate today, on the grounds of bribery, terrorism and abuse of authority, and the Supreme Court rejected that this morning. Europe doesn’t work on such short timelines. The latest message was from Von der Leyen’s spokesman, Eric Mamer, in a tweet yesterday: “the Commission has received today the draft law from the Spanish authorities and has just started its analysis”. The Polish rule-of-law crisis with the European Commission began…in 2015. A “maximum priority”, “urgent” response from Spain’s Constitutional Court, might be…three months, once appeals start being filed.
So the debate begins at 12 p.m. today. 1,500 police reinforcements have been drafted in to lock down Congress and the surrounding streets.
2. Last-minute political backstabbing. House-of-Cards style, with secret power grabs and behind-the-scenes dirty moves. Maybe García-Page’s eight MPs from Castilla la Mancha will rebel, given his public statements against the deal. Maybe the PP and Vox offer Sánchez some MPs at the last minute to tempt him away from the separatists and the far-left. Maybe some random socialist or Sumar MPs will have a crisis of conscience and an actual independent thought. Maybe Sánchez himself will rip up the deal after being reappointed PM this week, stabbing Puigdemont in the political back. Maybe, but probably, almost certainly, not. Spanish MPs, in Spain’s party political system, do not rebel against the party line and the boss. There is no independence of thought or action when voting buttons are pressed. In practice, you could reduce the number of MPs in Congress in Madrid from the current 350 to about 10 and all the votes would come out with the same result. Likewise, there is no chance of the PP and Vox offering, or of Sánchez accepting, their votes in a European style grand, cross-party coalition. None of them could stomach that. For several years now, in a political environment in which no one has even a majority, never mind a supermajority large enough to change the constitution, Sánchez has always chosen, voluntarily, when faced with the pressure of events, the far-left (Podemos, Sumar) and regional separatists, instead of the constitutional right or even the liberal centre. If he used Puigdemont to get reappointed and then ripped up the amnesty deal, what would he do for a budget and all the other laws he will want to pass for the rest of the parliament, through to 2027?
Last-minute political backstabbing. House-of-Cards style, with secret power grabs and behind-the-scenes dirty moves. Maybe García-Page’s eight MPs from Castilla la Mancha will rebel, given his public statements against the deal. Maybe the PP and Vox offer Sánchez some MPs at the last minute to tempt him away from the separatists and the far-left. Maybe some random socialist or Sumar MPs will have a crisis of conscience and an actual independent thought. Maybe Sánchez himself will rip up the deal after being reappointed PM this week, stabbing Puigdemont in the political back. Maybe, but probably, almost certainly, not. Spanish MPs, in Spain’s party political system, do not rebel against the party line and the boss. There is no independence of thought or action when voting buttons are pressed. In practice, you could reduce the number of MPs in Congress in Madrid from the current 350 to about 10 and all the votes would come out with the same result. Likewise, there is no chance of the PP and Vox offering, or of Sánchez accepting, their votes in a European style grand, cross-party coalition. None of them could stomach that. For several years now, in a political environment in which no one has even a majority, never mind a supermajority large enough to change the constitution, Sánchez has always chosen, voluntarily, when faced with the pressure of events, the far-left (Podemos, Sumar) and regional separatists, instead of the constitutional right or even the liberal centre. If he used Puigdemont to get reappointed and then ripped up the amnesty deal, what would he do for a budget and all the other laws he will want to pass for the rest of the parliament, through to 2027?
3. The radical right does something stupid. At other moments in Spanish history, with grave national risk perceived by conservatives or the far-right or the old establisment, with no apparent mechanisms to stop or slow events, a general would be found to ride to Congress on a horse or with a bus-load of soldiers to try to put a stop to the left and regional separatists “destroying Spain”. It has happened several times before, from the mid 19th-Century onwards. One of those episodes, although the systemic causes were much more complex, ended very badly in the Civil War and 40 years of Francoist dictatorship. The last attempt was “only” in 1981, with Tejero shooting at the ceiling of the chamber in Congress where today’s debate will happen. Just yesterday, in constitutional terms. In 2023, a military or general officer option is not going to happen…but there is a chance the radical right might attempt a Trump- or Bolsonaro- style Jan 6. assault on parliament, which is more in vogue as a desperate protest measure. Tucker Carlson was in Madrid this week, smiling alongside Vox leader Abascal outside PSOE headquarters. Alt-right Telegram channels and influencer channels in Spain have been buzzing for two weeks with ideas about different levels of protest in different places. There are even some among them who are annoyed at the King and the whole 1978 constitutional system. The main group behind them, Revuelta (linked to Vox), last night told all its supporters to get down to Congress this morning. This is the reason there are 1,500 extra police around parliament in Madrid today. And sometimes these things snowball out of hand, once people start interacting in real life and others start finding out about it.
4. It all just blows over. Basically what we have here, underneath it all, is Puigdemont sees his chance to come home without going to jail and Sánchez gets to be Prime Minister for another four years. The rest of it is fluff to make that core exchange happen. As we have seen, respect for the rule of law in Spain is not as stringent on principle as it might be in some other nations or cultures. Does anybody really care about the thousands of political corruption cases at all levels over the past 20 years, beyond using it as polarised ammunition to lob at the other side? And as we are all seeing, if you have political mates in the right places, pesky judges and even whole chunks of criminal law and entire crimes can be made to go away if you have a few votes someone needs to stay in power. Get the wording and the frames right in the language in your bill, pound it home with friendly talking-heads on TV for a couple of months so that everybody just shrugs after a few growls, and job done, people will move on to the next big story, or to enjoying Christmas, which is just around the corner. The other institutions won’t stop it, the political parties won’t stop it, the radical right won’t get anywhere even if they do try to storm parliament, Sánchez gets his votes this week in Congress, the amnesty bill goes through, enough to be published in the official gazette, which means it becomes law, some people file some appeals but courts take months to decide, Puigdemont comes home, spends a triumphant couple of days on TV smiling and by Easter, all the fuss has died down. Sánchez is still PM and the right is stuck in opposition until 2027.

2023-11-14 16:19:44

- reply

Hopefully it will pick up if I keep posting stuff here.

2023-11-14 15:29:35

Tucker Carlson turned up in Madrid with Spanish alt-right leader Abascal (Vox) at the protest outside Socialist Party (PSOE) HQ last night and confirmed to @okdiario that he was here because "the world isn't seeing it enough and that's why we wanted to come, because it's not getting the coverage it deserves".
"Anybody who would violate your Constitution, potentially use physical violence, to end democracy, is a tyrant, is a dictator". That's political activism, not journalism. Vox related people were overjoyed.
https://void.cat/d/FVyGR1tMuP2MCWKJ8qkRvN.webp

2023-11-14 15:27:30

Two Spanish government ministers, Belarra (Social Rights) and Montero (Equality), as well as Jeremy Corbyn (UK), have signed a petition for an ICC investigation into Netanyahu, Gallant, Gantz et. al for genocide and crimes against humanity in Gaza. https://justiceforgaza.info
https://void.cat/d/2QB55Z3DUBGiaQs4W64EL5.webp

2023-11-13 17:08:27

A summary of Sánchez's proposed amnesty law for Catalan separatists in English for you:
🔴Vox: to file criminal complaint against Sánchez
🔴Vox: to seek urgent Supreme Court injunction
🔴PP: Sánchez "has filed the paperwork to become a totalitarian"
1. Applies to all crimes related to Catalan separatist, independence or secession process
2. Between 2012 and 2023
3. Judges get two months to put it into practice, "urgently"
4. With a special mention for the 2014 referendum (Artur Mas) and the 2017 referendum (Puigdemont)
5. All crimes related to promoting, procuring, organising or executing any kind of independence of Catalonia, or collaborating or assissting to do so in any way
6. All crimes related to money, the misuse of public funds, or abusing the authority of public office
7. Contempt of court, public order offences, attacking police officers, resisting arrest, blocking police ofciers, abuse of authority, public criticism of authorities
8. NOT INCLUDED: murder, serious assault, torture, inhumane traetment, terrorism, treason, crimes against the financial interest of the EU, racism, antisemitism, anti-gypsyism
9. Amnesty means: crimes do not exist, release from jail or detention, elimination of criminal record, arrest warrants and search orders expire immediately, bail conditions expire immediately, no administrative fine processes
10. Amnesty also means any public workers involved also get their jobs back with full rights and a clean record
11. There is a paragraph on page 16 that makes sure to point out that there will be no restrictive bail measures of any kind, or jailing of anyone on remand, even if someone appeals the process, or tries to argue it is unconstitutional
12. Amnesty bill modifies Criminal Code, adding "amnesty" to list of reasons criminal responsbility is extinguished.
13. Amnesty bill modifies Accounting Tribunal Act, adds "amnesty" to list of reasons financial responsibility is extinguished.
14. In very long preamble, government argues the law is constitutional because it is "singular" and applies very spefically to a well-defined set of circumstances.
15. Government argues that the bill is needed to deal with an "exceptional situation" in "the general interest" in order to foster greater political and social coexistence in Spain.
16. Government argues that if the amnesty were not to go ahead, social and political tensions with Cataln separatists could continue into the future.
17. Spanish government argues that other European countries and European law back the principle of amnesty. Cites Italy, France, Portugal, Germany, UK, Austria, Belgium, Ireland and Sweden.

2023-11-11 18:51:03

Just a quick comment today. Given the rapid development of events on the streets and with political rhetoric since the weekend, in terms of the political narrative and where things might go, I think it would no longer be implausible for there to be an attempted assault on Congress by the Spanish alt-right during Sánchez's confidence debate in parliament (still without a date set by the also socialist Speaker of the lower house).
That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. It just wouldn’t be implausible or illogical, having suddently gone from boring normality to 39 people injured and police charges with rubber bullets and tear gas in the Spanish capital in four nights of “spontaneous” protests. The amnesty deal with Puigdemont is now done and the right is fuming.
The alt-right sees Sánchez as a traitor. The confidence debate will be the point of maximum psychological and political tension, when the hated Sanchismo gets to renew its mandate in the Prime Minister’s office, Moncloa, for another four years, through to 2027, thanks to the widely criticised amnesty agreement with the even more hated Puigdemont, who is still a fugitive from Spanish justice, with both of them, in the eyes of the right, trampling all over the Constitution, and with a strong perception of democratic impotence among the protesters, without judicial protection and with the clock ticking down against them.
All the elements are there.

2023-11-11 18:49:40

1/ Well, that escalated even quicker than the quick escalation the other day. The former PP leader in Catalonia, and a founder of Vox, Alejo Vidal Quadras, was shot in the face on a street in Madrid.
2/ The last report on his condition, yesterday evening, was that he was stable in hospital with no risk to his life, although his jaw was smashed twice.
3/ Initial suspicions on social media, given the very tense political climate this week, were that it must have been someone on the left, but police are investigating an Iranian connection and a professional hit job.
4/ His last tweet before being shot was: "The infamous deal between Sánchez and Puigdemont that crushes the rule of law in Spain and ends the separation of powers has now been done. Our nation will thus cease to be a liberal democracy and become a totalitarian tyranny. We Spaniards will not allow it".
5/ A local PSOE leader in Sanlúcar (Cádiz, Andalusia), Victor Mora, was assaulted on the street by a man shouting “traitor!”, “you’re ruining Spain!”.
6/ Sánchez and Puigdemont did their amnesty deal (pdf), the get-out-of-jail-free card for Puigdemont and votes for Sánchez to repeat as PM.
7/ All four Spanish judges’ associations came out against the deal.
8/ Three Spanish prosecutors associations rejected the deal.
9/ Tax inspectors rejected the deal.
10/ The judicial council issued another statement rejecting the deal.
11/ PP leader Feijóo called for “more democracy” in response and a “responsible, firm, serene” approach to opposition to the deal.
12/ The PP is sticking to its pre-Sunday-lunch protest plan, which won’t have any effect on the amnesty deal at all.
13/ Alt-right led protests outside PSOE HQ continued for a seventh night and tonight there are even more planned, around the country as well as in Madrid.
14/ Vox leader Abascal went along again. He said during a press conference earlier in the day that “this is a new black period in the history of Spain, today a coup against the nation began”.
15/ There were scuffles and violence again, with 24 arrests and seven officers injured, after some pople in the 8,000 strong crowd started chucking objects and flares at them.
16/ The Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) is now on board. They get even more regional powers and negotiations on the recognition of the Basque nation.
17/ ABC: "PSOE humilliates the state"; editorial: "PSOE abandons the Transition".
18/ El Mundo: "Sánchez hands the state over to Puigdemont"; editorial: "A deal against everyone living together".
19/ El País: "PSOE and Junts do deal for PM in exchange for amnesty for Catalan separatists"; editorial: "a new phase in Catalonia".

2023-10-06 15:38:45

So Bluesky is pretty dead, then. Just like Nostr, Notes, Threads and Mastodon. Even after Musk has spent a year doing stupid, destructive things at Twitter, it is still livelier than the rest.

2023-08-22 14:22:48

Somebody launched friend.tech, a new ETH social network.

2023-08-16 10:39:38

- reply

Hmmm, don't know. Doesn't seem as lively or slick as in the spring.

2023-08-11 13:02:25

What happened to revolutionary Nostr with the instant zaps excitement that just worked. People gave in because of the Apple Store demands..? What kind of revolutionary fuck-the-system, let's-build-something-different culture is that..?

2023-08-06 18:09:18

Helped a local author friend @Rayoplateado translate his futuristic science-fiction thriller into English this spring if you're into that kind of story and want to read something this summer:
https://www.amazon.com/Only-Truth-Trilogy-Book-ebook/dp/B0C8TSVW7F/

2023-06-13 20:22:02

Game of Seats: Will Sumar beat the Socialists in Spain? We are only two weeks into a brutal eight week political fist fight.
Maybe Sánchez will get lucky. A poll out today in El Mundo suggests the Socialist Party (PSOE) has gone up a few seats in voters’ appreciation over the last few days, although the conservative Popular Party is making strides on the right, supposedly to the detriment of Vox. The next government might depend on one or two seats on either side.
The PSOE is suffering intense internal disarray that smells of the end of an era, though. Three senior regional socialist barons, sitting regional first ministers, protested the direction Sánchez is driving the party in by not turning up for a key national meeting to approve the electoral lists for the general election: the actual names that go on the ballot paper in Spain’s closed-list proportional representation system in each province.
Senior regional barons protesting publicly about electoral lists is something of a death cross in Spanish politics. Remember what suddenly happened with Feijóo and Casado in the PP last year. Depending on the number of votes a party gets, three or four or N names from the list in that constituency get to become MPs. So the closer your name is to the top of the list, the safer your seat. The order of the names on the lists and who gets to go to parliament is therefore dependent not on voters but on party bosses at each level.
What were the regional bosses outraged enough about to kick up a media fuss this week, when image and loyalty are all in Spanish politics because it’s the party boss at the next level up who decides if your name goes on the list? Sánchez has booted out people that were already on the regional election lists to shove in his own people from the national level. (Also in regional socialist politics this week, the PSOE chairwoman in Seville, Amparo Rubiales, resigned after calling a senior conservative leader “a Nazi jew”).
Further to the left of the socialists, phoenix-like destrucion and renewal has occured in the same week, with the messy assortment of Life-of-Brian regionalist minority far-left parties—I would bet no Spaniard could name them all—finally coming together, if only in name for now, under the Sumar (“Add Up“) umbrella, which means that the communist Deputy Prime Minister, Yolanda Díaz, has been successful in imposing her strategic will on that chunk of the whole, although looking at the spineless opponents in her path and the backstabbing that has taken place this week, not much operational nouse was needed to achieve that victory. Her brand, her leadership and, very importantly, her framing for the media battle through to election day on July 23 will now prevail. Media report that her face will also be appearing on the Sumar ballot paper, which seems a little totalitarian.
Whatever the results of that vote, her far-left brand will now have a chance to grow its roots futher during the next parliament. More Game of Thrones or House of Cards moves will slowly strangle all of the mini Peoples Fronts of Judea to their last breaths.
United Left, Podemos and all the rest have now bent the knee. The supine Minister of Consumer Affairs, Alberto Garzón, nominally the leader of United Left, gave up his castle without a fight. The House of the Sea Monsters of Valencia (Compromis) managed to get Díaz to agree to a long, waffling name on the electoral banner in exchange for their troops. The nonsense mouthful translates as: “Commitment-Add Up: Let’s Add Up To Win”. The antagonistic militant feminist Equality Minister, Irene Montero (Podemos, Pablo Iglesias’s partner), who believed herself heiress to the Red Throne but who now resides in one of the poshest parts of Madrid and last year succeeded in passing legislation that got hundreds of rapists and child abusers out of the dungeons early, has not been included in the Sumar electoral lists. Cheers could be heard from the lines on the right. Her supposedly loyal partner at the top of Podemos, Ione Belarra, the Social Affairs Minister, is on the list, in the number five spot, a safe seat. When the horses’ hooves banged on Casterly Purple, she caved and took whatever Díaz offered for a comfy safe seat in the next parliament.
So Sánchez has had to impose his will on the Socialist Party from the national level to ensure some of his friends are in the top safe spots on the regional electoral lists. That speaks of dissent, bitterness, infighting and collapse, with a PM still nominally in charge but losing momentum daily. Díaz has imposed her will on Sumar in a more subtle, less destructive manner on the far-left and her star is rising. There is now a certain degree of renewed hope in that camp. Who has been the cleverer of the two politicians over the past year? Clearly she has. And she has set her sights on the top job.
In theory, with the weight of existing Socialist Party electoral machinery at the local and regional level, Sumar will not surpass the PSOE as the leading party on Spanish left on July 23. But there are six long weeks of brutal mutual punishment left until the general election. We are only two weeks into this. The local and regional elections were only a fortnight ago. Pablo Iglesias once said that his real goal was for Podemos to become hegemonic on the left in Spain. Might Díaz now be better placed, faced with a declining PSOE, to attempt that? She will spend the next six weeks talking to left-wing voters around the nation in dulcet tones about feminism and healthcare and education and doing things together and caring for everyone…and their chance to elect a first female Prime Minister of Spain. How many will be tempted by that tale?

2023-06-13 20:21:23

Are we still doing ⚡ journalism? Will post a couple of columns.
Could the right win a historic victory in July? Some polls start to suggest support for Vox might fall...in favour of the PP?
The image below is the graph of shifts in Spanish politics since the transition to democracy in the 1970s following the death of Franco, in percentage of the vote for each party. Right-wing parties are at the bottom, centre parties are in the middle, then left-wing parties and the regional nationalists at the top. The numbers for all previous years are real, from general elections. The numbers for 2023 are from the latest GAD3 poll in ABC. GAD3 has a good reputation as a pollster in Spain. The white dotted line is 40%, which is when the right moves into overall majority territory: Aznar in the year 2000 and Rajoy in 2011. The latest poll gives the Popular Party (36.6%) and Vox (12.4%) the highest combined share of the vote for the right for the last 46 years: almost 50%.
After five years of a socialist-communist coalition government and the global Covid pandemic, if those poll numbers end up being correct, that would be a historic shift of the electorate towards a new victory for the right in Spain, this time with conservatives in coalition with the far-right. 12.4% for Vox is also about three points lower than where Abascal’s party has been polling consistently for almost a year now. Which is to say, GAD3 is forecasting a drop in support for the far-right in the weeks running up to the general election, and a drop that would break that long-running flat trend line at 15%. GAD3 is not the only one: Sigma Dos also has Abascal on 12%. How many Vox voters are looking at the state of play, faced with a sudden chance of getting rid of Sánchez and the left, and deciding to switch back to Feijóo’s PP to give him more seats? Is Feijóo now the winning horse in this election race?
https://nostr.build/i/183c5b02cb1ccaab4728b4e88bfcaa57ce3e4288c6d2e29315dab7f5eef09c67.jpg

2023-06-13 20:18:45

Have been working on a drone project more than writing over the past two or three months. Here is one of the results. Mavic 3, printed on A2 size paper on a Canon Pro-1000 printer. Gobsmacking level of detail and tonal range possible.
https://nostr.build/i/5022823e88dccb39ce1ee033a31099b8a6e1ea28872a4422ad1763a1490b1fb0.jpg

2023-05-28 09:24:46

Whoa, now we've got AI bots writing logical, reasonable, on-topic comments on posts as soon as something is published:
https://nostr.build/i/bbc1e1e434004a057b9a4df07a06e5c469a71ab81064d2b6810fc929a89cc0dc.jpg

2023-05-28 09:21:53

Vote buying cases rock the end of the local and regional election campaign in Spain
The going rate for a local vote in Spain, in such a highly fragmented and untransparent market, appears to be in the €50-200 range.
Spaniards vote today in local and regional elections. Water and the drought situation for farmers, housing and sqautters, the former terrorist murderers in Basque separatist election lists and the Vinicius racism in football scandal have all been major national points of contention over the past two or three weeks. The campaign has ended on an ugly democratic note, though, with an explosion of reports of vote buying taking place at the local level.
A non-exhaustive list of the places where some form of electoral fraud has been reported during the final days of this election campaign includes: Melilla (North Africa), Mojácar (Andalusia), Albudeite (Murcia), La Gomera (Canary Islands), Moraleja de Sayago (Castilla y León), Bigastro (Valencia), Las Hurdes (Extremadura), Pozuelo de Calatrava (Castilla la Mancha), Carboneras (Andalusia), Castro Caldelas (Galicia), Paterna del Campo (Andalusia), Mazarrón (Murcia), Vallalba del Alcor (Andalusia), Jaén (Andalusia), Arona (Canary Islands), Valverde del Camino (Huelva).
Some of them are still just accusations between parties but many have already reached the courts, with arrests by the Civil Guard. The price per vote, even with such an untransparent, highly fragmented market, seems to be in the €50-200 range. The methods involved are postal voting and online voting and many include the pressuring of immigrants, the poor or the elderly, for whom €150 means a lot but which is really cheap for a candidate looking to gain access to tens of millions of euros in juicy municipal contracts over the next four years.
If any convictions come out of all the investigations and arrests, the guilty parties could face up to three years in jail. Most of the headlines and media attention have gone to the vote buying involving Socialist Party (PSOE) candidates but looking at the lists of cases, there are several electoral fraud complaints involving Popular Party (PP) candidates too.
Vote buyers in Albudeite (Murcia) showed innovation, offering joints alongside the money. News also broke about a socialist mayor in Maracena (Andalusia) and a senior regional socialist leader being investigated for the kidnap of another socialist councillor, after the judge lifted the secrecy on that investigation; and in Valencia, a socialist candidate resigned after he was arrested and found to be a member of the Latin Kings gang.
Even though the list looks long and generates scandalous headlines and talking points in the last days of the campaign, it’s still only a couple of dozen towns out of over 8,000 that are voting today, and the Spanish voting process itself is normally pretty spotless. Are the two dozen towns just typical dirty local politics, far-removed from national campaigns and ideological aspirations but now more visible thanks to the speed of technolgy and reporting, or are they representative of a broader problem in local politics in Spain, the tip of an iceberg that limited policing resources have only managed to investigate in those few places? What would we discover if we had access to all the Whatsapp messages from all the local candidates across the country? Is there more of this going on than meets the eye and could systemic improvements be made to the voting process to stop it happening again in the future, or is it not worth the effort because it only happens in a few random towns?

2023-05-28 09:21:30

Is Spain about to get a bunch of regional coalitions between conservatives and the far-right?
Centre party Ciudadanos is set to disappear and Podemos is mostly being replaced by Sumar.
Right then, the election campaign for Spain's local and regional elections is now underway. In two weeks, voters go to the ballot boxes across most of the country for the first time since the Covid pandemic. These elections will precede the national general election by about six months, depending on when the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez (PSOE), decides to call it. So these elections are a key national test for all the parties after four years of a socialist-communist coalition governing the nation and five years since Sánchez ousted the former conservative leader, Mariano Rajoy (PP), in a motion of no confidence in 2018. Political power is up for grabs in 8,000 town or city halls and 12 Spanish regions.
The general tenor of the polls seems to be that Spanish conservatives (Popular Party, PP) will mostly hold on to their current positions or make some gains. Notably, with two weeks to go, there is Isabel Diaz Ayuso (PP) in Madrid, who might achieve an overall majority, and Fernando López Miras in Murcia, where the Popular Party has somehow managed to remain in government continuously for the past 28 years, with not even a single courtesy parliament for anyone else to have a go. In Valencia, the Balearic Islands, La Rioja and Aragón, the PP might push ahead of the socialists although whether or not that will be enough to allow them to govern is another matter.
Also notable this year, after the explosion of new political options over the past ten years, is what is happening to the smaller parties on both sides. Podemos looks set to become an even more minor player in almost every region and Ciudadanos is now on course to lose all of their seats in the regional parliaments where voters are casting a ballot. It looks like those votes are going to the PP and Vox on the right, which means Santiago Abascal's far-right party will increase its seats almost everywhere, perhaps even doubling their current numbers. That will allow them to pressure PP candidates who win but short of an overall majority and stoke the polarised ideological debate going in to the national election later in the year, against the left but also in terms of whether or not the PP should be doing coalition deals with the far-right.
Would a series of regional wins for the right now, but split between the conservatives and the far-right, thus forcing coalition deals to be done, lead straight to the same conclusion nationally in December or energise the left and regionalists to vote against the idea?
Nationally, the PP is on 30-33% of the vote, far from a majority, and Vox for some reason is still flatlined on 15%, which is where they were at the last general election. They have been stuck at that level for the past nine months, after the PP rose once more under the new leadership of Feijóo. It was only just over a year ago that Abascal and his crew had begun to overtake a sinking PP on the right, then under the deficient captaincy of Pablo Casado. The abrupt swapping out of Casado for Feijóo has clearly worked from the Popular Party's point of view.
On the left, some polls are giving Yolanda Díaz's new party, Sumar, up to 12% or 13% of the vote, which would put them almost level with Vox and destroy what's of left of Podemos, pushed down to 4-6%. One poll in (right-wing) La Razón this week has the PSOE dropping to 22%, which would be a disaster for Sánchez. Generally speaking in the Spanish closed list proportional representation system, the more split the vote is on either side, the worse that side does in terms of seats overall, so the two-way split on the right (PP and Vox, with the disappearance of Ciudadanos) should edge out the three-way split on the left (PSOE, Sumar and Podemos, plus assorted minor fringe parties like Más País or United Left).
The major campaign themes over the past few weeks have been water and the drought situation for farmers, housing and sqautters, and the decision by Basque separatist party Bildu, which has supported the left-wing coalition nationally, to include 44 former ETA terrorists, among them seven convicted murderers, in their electoral lists for this month's ballots.

2023-05-28 09:20:21

Should convicted terrorist murderers be allowed to become elected politicians in Spain? Bildu included 7 murderers and 37 other terrorists in its local election lists.
Outrage ensued last week after the COVITE terror victims association in the Basque Country published a statement warning Spaniards that the radical left Basque separatist party Bildu (currently five MPs in the national parliament in Madrid) had included 44 former ETA terrorists, including seven murderers, in its electoral lists for this month’s local elections.
“No dignified democracy, no country under the rule of law, aware of the significance of its terror victims, would allow terrorists to walk through a revolving door into politics. That these people can reach public office, as if they had not posed a very serious threat to democracy in the past, is worrying and disappointing", said their chairwoman, Consuelo Ordóñez.
The right has slammed Sánchez and the Socialist Party with the issue all week after the election campaign began last Thursday night and this morning, news broke that the seven murderers, at least, had promised not take up their seats on local councils if elected on May 28. The other 37 convicted terrorists apparently still intend to do so, though, and if the renunciation is just a pre-electoral pinky-promise statement from a bunch of convicted murderers, would they have large ethical or moral problems with unrenouncing on the day after the elections and taking up their seats after all?
Bildu leader Arnaldo Otegui, himself a convicted terrorist kidnapper, today said of the seven murderers, announcing that they would renounce their seats if elected, that "Our almost 4,500 male and female candidates subscribe to EH Bildu’s commitment to exclusively peaceful, democratic paths". So after including the seven terrorist murderers and 37 other assorted terrrorists in their electoral lists, another former terrorist promises that his party is dedicated to peace and democracy.
Should former terrorists, murderers, kidnappers and all the rest, be allowed to take part in democratic politics at all, even after they leave jail? Does one ever really become a former terrorist or a former murderer, to then take advantage of the tribal name recognition to slide into a comfy spot in local politics somewhere after a mid-life career change?
The United Kingdom notably saw the case of Martin McGuinness, the former IRA member who later became the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and even had his photo taken shaking hands with Queen Elizabeth. At the other extreme, we have the 30 men still held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba by the United States, who haven’t even gone to trial yet after 20 years of arbitrary detention.
Clearly Spanish law and the Constitution as they stand allow the 44 ETA terrorists to run for office in the electoral lists after completing their sentences and voting rights are a fundamental constitutional issue, so if the outrage really goes beyond election week headlines, the politicians would need to get together across the board to reform both criminal law and the Constitution to withdraw the right to stand for public office from those people convicted of the most serious crimes: terrorism and murder.
As we saw during the years of Puigdemont’s Catalan separatism, such deep constitutional reform, while possible in theory, in practice would need an enormous amount of cross-party support in parliament that currently just does not exist: a two-thirds vote in both houses, followed by the dissolution of parliament, followed by a general election, followed by a new two-thirds vote, again in both houses, followed by a national referendum.
Would the 35 million Spaniards, in the Basque Country and the rest of the country, who do not vote for Bildu (276,519 votes in 2019) support the idea of convicted terrorists and murderers never being allowed to run for public office as politicians? Or does allowing them to participate in public life in this way, despite the damage it must cause to the relatives of their victims, an inherent part of Spanish democracy and the country’s way of interpreting the philosophy of law?

2023-05-28 09:19:58

Vinicius and racism in Spain: it's not just football
How many times over the past two years have we talked about increased racism and xenophobia in Spain, driven by the political polarisation of the public sphere after Vox, Spain’s version of the new far-right, appeared in 2018 and began to shift the Overton Window towards tribal division, the rejection of “others” and hatred once more, with everyone egged on by social media algorithms that seek clicks and reward attention and visceral emotion?
Spanish Twitter exploded overnight after Real Madrid player Vinicius was racially abused again at a match against Valencia. Valencia fans began outside the stadium with chants of “Vincius, you’re a monkey”. On the pitch, the abuse continued: “fucking black guy, bastard, idiot, fucking black bastard, dog, monkey, you’re a fucking monkey”, etc, etc, along with the monkey grunts.
“It wasn't the first time, nor the second, nor the third”, Vinicius tweeted afterwards: “Racism is normal in La Liga. The competition thinks it's normal, the Federation does too and the opponents encourage it”, adding: “I'm sorry for the Spaniards who don't agree, but today, in Brazil, Spain is known as a country of racists”.
International sports media are clear about what happened: ‘Racism is normal in La Liga’: Vinícius Júnior outraged by abuse at Valencia (Guardian); Real Madrid star Vinicius Junior says Spain's La Liga 'belongs to the racists' after pointing out abusers during match (Sky); Real Madrid player Vinícius Jr. racially abused during Spanish La Liga match (CNN); Vinicius Junior says Spanish league ‘now belongs to racists’ after enduring more abuse (AP); and on and so forth.
La Liga chairman Javier Tebas, though, decided to rant on Twitter…against Vincius…for not understanding what he promises his league has been trying to do to stop racism in the top tier of Spanish football: “Antes de criticar e injuriar a @LaLiga, es necesario que te informes adecuadamente @Vinijr”. Marca reports the previous nine complaints filed with authorities by La Liga over racism against Vinicius have gone almost nowhere. A few fans have had their season tickets temporarily revoked. The racist tribal chants in stadiums continue.
This terrible, polarised, divisive and at times openly racist public sphere, between politics and football, in Spain, which did not at all use to be like this, is the environment that we now have to watch our kids grow up in and in which they will become teenagers during their most formative years. Because if they see political leaders on TV dividing and pointing and ranting against “others”, who just happen to be black and North African, and then they see football fans shouting “fucking monkey” slogans at black players on the pitch, and noboby, including the authorities, does anything about it, well then they will come to believe that it is okay to do that, that it’s all just a bit of a laugh with the lads, no problem, and look at all the retweets on the videos, and the vicious cycle will continue.
In theory, as a planet over the last couple of centuries, we had all learnt that rampant polarised nationalism and racist hatred towards “others” were very bad things that led to even worse things happening as societies. The concepts of human rights and the rule of law didn’t come out of nowhere. Now in the third decade of the 21st century, after tribal politics and social media algorithms have again encouraged increasing polarisation and division, leading to the rise of the new far-right in many countries, not just Spain, we again find ourselves in a new vicious cycle that excludes some and sets them up as “others” to be hated and vilified, rather than including all and striving to better the whole for everyone. So we must try again, we must learn again. It’s not just football.

2023-04-25 16:09:58

So from a creator's point of view it's still frustrating to have to copy and paste the same things into ten different social media places, whether it's FB or Twitter or Instagram or now Nostr or Mastodon or Social Notes. It shouldn't be this hard. I just generally have one thought at a time that readers in different places might like to read and comment on.

2023-04-19 15:44:35

Garre, Vox, drought and the regional elections
A former Popular Party First Minister is now running as a Vox candidate
A few years ago, Alberto Garre was a senior Popular Party politician in Murcia. He even became, for a brief one-year period, regional first minister after the previous incumbent, Valcárcel, who had been in the post for 19 years (yes, nineteen, one nine) left. Garre then went quiet for a while before reappearing in 2017-2018 with a new regional party called Somos Región (“We Are Region”). That was not a bad idea at the time, with everyone focused on the Catalan separatists and regional matters and Murcia had never really had a regional party to speak of. If it had worked in Cantabria and Galicia and Cataluña and Andalusia, why not try a more energetic regional identity down here?
Back then, somebody organised a political-media play with a large farmers protest using hundreds of tractors to collapse traffic in the city centre for two days, a kind of agricultural Occupy Wall Street thing that was nominally about fields, crops and water. Who was then acclaimed by the farmers at the end of day two, as the solution to all of their problems? Garre. Unfortunately for him, Vox began its national surge at the same time and by the time the last elections came round in 2019, ran off with all of those votes.
Farmers got their tractors out in Murcia last year too, but the political star of the show then was not Garre but…Santiago Abascal, Vox’s national leader, who if I remember rightly raced down on a motorbike from a session in parliament in Madrid earlier in the morning. So it is now interesting to note that Garre has reappeared again. The headline news is that he has now abandoned Somos Region to run as the number 3 man on the Vox list at the regional elections next month (Spain has a closed-list proportional representation electoral system, not first-past-the-post). Polls suggest Vox will take 7-8 of the 45 seats in the regional chamber, which means it is almost certain that Garre will now be elected as a regional MP…for Vox.
It is also worth noting that Garre is from a town called Torre Pacheco, which is heavily agricultural with lots of immigrant workers. Vox won the vote there at the last general election (38%). At the last regional election, the PP came first (23%), Vox came fourth (13.85%) and Garre’s Somos Región came fifth (10.57%). Ciudadanos, which is set to do terribly this year, came sixth back then on 8% of the vote. So it’s not out of the question that someone is sitting in an office somewhere adding Garre’s 10% to Vox’s 13% and musing that the 8% from Ciudadanos has to go somewhere and so that might work for Garre and Vox and they get to take the town from the PP with an experienced local bloke who goes straight in to a top regional job in a right-wing coalition goverment where he can put extra pressure on policies like farming, water and immigration. The farmers will quite like that, I imagine, and a former PP man now jumping to Vox at such a late stage might convince others too.

2023-04-18 11:27:26

Could intense drought affect Spanish elections? The driest parts of the country have seen less than 80 mm of rain in the past six months, have reservoirs at less than 25% capacity and are in emergency status.
[Click through to see all the maps]
https://thespainreport.substack.com/p/could-intense-drought-affect-spanish
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_facc6f8b75e03f49bbb06d1b23da72ddfa3f88929582a478f226f14ef307a0e5.jpg

2023-04-18 09:41:15

- reply

Yesterday, El Confidencial in Spain announced they had been working on using AI images to top an article and that this was the result. They got slammed on Twitter (she has two right hands, there are two cups of coffee, the lamp is floating in the air, what are all the illustrators going to do?) but I reckon nobody would have noticed if they hadn’t gone public with it. They could have just run with it for three months and I think nobody would have noticed.
https://twitter.com/ec_diseno/status/1647869723445547010

2023-04-18 09:40:39

Substack now has a “generate image” AI function for your articles in the images menu:
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_b72bb2ee58c5936001fc334a7478ba786981e46ffad6496bc5a1053b3238788f.png

2023-04-12 13:55:23

NPR quits Twitter: "NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter's decision to first label the network "state-affiliated media," the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries".
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter-government-funded-media-label

2023-04-12 08:49:56

So there is now a four-way race for micro-blogging, short-post chatty-value things:
1. Substack Notes, emails + $$ subscriptions
2. Musk Twitter + Blue + Super Follows..??
3. Nostr + Bitcoin lightning ⚡
4. Mastodon + ??
Substack has a good shot at it with Notes, because Musk seems intent on sinking Twitter (cultural problems); Nostr is still way outside almost everybody’s technical comfort zone (edge tech dev culture, Bitcoin maxis, access with key pairs, etc.); and Mastodon is too slow and sluggish and split up across its “fediverse” (more strange cultural things).
Substack and Nostr are the two that are open about generating income for content creators/writers/artists/analysts being a good thing and built in to the experience. Value creation and flow is good. And this makes sense from a network perspective because those accounts end up being the hubs most of the action is centred around, and then the hubs talk to the hubs and all the rest. Musk, inexplicably given his reputation as a business genius, has not understood this part for Twitter.

2023-04-11 19:41:06

📝 Substack Notes is live: will it kill Twitter? Retweets are "restacks" and there's a one-click "subscribe" to follow writers. Musk is probably worried right now.
https://thespainreport.substack.com/p/substack-notes-is-live-will-it-kill

2023-04-10 12:30:25

Sumar divides left and subtracts election seats
But "Sumar" (add up) is a catchy repetitive name for millions of messages between now and the elections. Could the female Galician communist surprise even the male Galician conservative by voting day?
The first polls are out after Sumar (Yolanda Díaz) announced on the left:
El País/40DB: all lines mostly flat, like before. El País has not asked about Sumar on the left. On the right, no notable impact from Vox's motion of no confidence against Sánchez. They are still on 14-15%. Feijóo and Sánchez continue to lead on each side. Neither the left nor the right would add up to an overall majority.
La Razón/NC Report: Vox and the PP add up to a right-wing majority. The PSOE gets 21.9% of the vote on the left and Sumar gets 11.9% with 28-31 seats, which destroys Podemos, down to 5.1% and 3-5 seats.
El Mundo/Sigma Dos: "Yolanda Díaz sinks Pedro Sánchez", says the paper’s headline. They award 12.3% of the vote to Sumar if Díaz runs by herself, without Podemos, and 16.3% if Sumar and Podemos run together. In both cases, the PSOE drops to 22%. Vox and the PP would get enough for a right-wing majority in one scenario but not in the other.
Electomania/Panel: no impact on the right for Vox after its motion of no confidence against Sánchez. They are stil at 14-15% but there would be a right-wing majority between Feijóo and Abascal. On the left, if they run separately, Sumar takes 8.6% of the vote and leaves Podemos on 5%, with 24.6% for the PSOE. If they run together, the percentages of the vote are similar but the number of seats changes: if they run separately, the PSOE gets 100 seats, Sumar 14 and Podemos 4, for a total of 118 on the left. If Sumar and Podemos run together, the PSOE drops to 82 but Sumar-Podemos gets 47, adding up to 129 for the left in total.
“Sumar” (add up, addition, adding up) is not a bad name on a linguistic and psychological level, to imprint the new political brand in the minds of millions of voters. Between now and the elections, hundreds of journalists will be writing thousands of articles with phrases like "If Sumar and Podemos add up...", “if Díaz adds up with Belarre", "on the left, the PSOE could add up with Sumar…." Every time a reporter or analyst starts writing a sentence that includes "add up, addition, adding up, will add up, could add up, might add up, may possibly add up", Yolanda Díaz will get more points from the collective psyche.
The constant pounding and repetition of very simple names and messages works best for broadcast media and social media notifications buzzing on phones. Add up, add up, add up. And “add up” is a positive label. It is not “subtract”, “divide” or “destroy”, so the underlying brand message contrasts with the prevailing political environment that in the past several years has become increasingly full of polarised nastiness, bickering and mutual hatred. “Add up” is not very far away conceptually from “hope” or “together” and is at least not that age-old generic empty signifier that all politicians everywhere promise voters: “change”. An inherently positive, future-oriented, simplistic brand that will get repeated millions of times in millions of messages between now and the general election.
Mixing such a simplistic concept-name-message with the incentive of the possibility of a first female Prime Minister of Spain in the year 2023 (more hope, more future, more progress), along with a serious, experienced candidate (whatever each voter thinks about her philosophy and politics) could have a huge electoral impact on the left, much more so than the suggestion in these first polls, which at the moment divide and subtract. Could Díaz destroy not only Podemos but also the Socialist Party between now and December? Much has been said, including by himself, arrogantly, about the arrival of the Galician conservative Feijóo in Madrid to become the next Prime Minsiter of Spain, almost automatically, according to that narrative, without effort, but could a female Galician communist be the great electoral surprise of 2023?
Thanks for reading.

2023-04-08 15:47:38

Oh, come on. What a dick. Musk is marking Substack links as unsafe after Substack announced a Twitter-like notes feature for short posts they are calling Notes.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_77a51331f60d4189c1b98f675b2d7fa9b03971a2f0ecc021e7c17fdd6c035c1e.png

2023-04-05 20:26:55

Vox wasted its motion of no confidence and a new option arises on the left to further split the vote. Yolanda Diaz confirms she wants to become Spain's first female Prime Minister.
Vox lost its motion of no confidence, of course, as they and everyone else knew they would before it all unfolded. The 89-year old former communist MP Ramón Tamames, who somehow ended up as the candidate, did not substitute Pedro Sánchez as Prime Minister on March 22.
Given what happened in the autumn with the disastrously managed criminal law reform that led to hundreds of convicted rapists and sex offenders having their sentences reduced or even being released from prison early, a coherent argument could be made that there was a moral case for tabling the motion of no confidence against the government, even knowing that politically they were going to lose. That could then have been presented at all the election campaigns this year as having made a strong if numerically futile stand against something a lot of people would have at least recognised as a problem.
Vox could also have framed that strong, moral stand against the cynical inactivity of their competitor on the right, the Popular Party, and I’m sure that would have convinced some conservative voters, many of whom surely find what happened to be repgunant and unjust. Abascal’s habitual polarised rhetoric could in this case have worked in his favour but Vox chose instead to ask the 89-year old former communist to make the speeches as candidate. So they just got laughed at and lost, and now they can’t even claim at the elections that they made the strong moral stand or that their leader personally did all he could to raise the party’s concerns against Sánchez and Podemos.
The real political surprise that day, I wrote then, was the speech, framing, presentation and rhetoric of another Communist Party member, Yolanda Díaz, currently the Deputy Prime Minister in the left-wing coalition government. She has been working on a political brand for this year’s elections called Sumar (add, addition, adding up). Her speech two weeks ago in Congress seemed so polished that it even sounded prime-minsterial, and prime-ministerial enough that perhaps even Sánchez and the socialists should be worried in case she manages to grab votes from them on the left.
At a large set-piece presention rally for Sumar this weekend, Díaz confirmed that suspicion from a fortnight ago: “I think that I can be useful to our country. Today, humbly, I am going to take a step forward. Today I want to be the first female Prime Minister of our country. I want to be the first female Prime Minsiter of Spain. If you want that too, we will do it. I want to be the first female Prime Minister of the country because now is the time for women, because women want to be the protagonists of history. Today I want to be the first female Prime Minister of the country because the Spain that women know is unstoppable, because there is no going back, because the future, today, is about adding up and we are going to do it".
Did she say that she wants to be the first female Prime Minister of Spain enough times in that short paragraph?
Eight weeks away from the local and regional ballots, what polling that has been published is mostly where it was before and doesn’t yet mention Sumar anyway. The PSOE is still between 25-27%, the PP is on around 30%, Vox is stuck at 14-15% and Podemos still down around 10%. The last major shift in the polls in Spain was twelve months ago after Feijóo ousted Casado as the leader of the Popular Party, which boosted the PP to the top of the pile generally and distanced them greatly from Vox on the right. Abascal has wasted his major parliamentary set piece to try to change that.
In theory, with Spain’s electoral system, another spilt on the left benefits the right, especially if Feijóo’s PP continues to dominate a waning Vox, and benefits Sánchez as the strongest candidate on the left.
There are no dominant majority parties on either side like there used to be, though. A well articulated campaign by Díaz, based on seeking a historic feminist vote, could upset the balance in a relevant manner. Some reports are already talking about an immediate suggestion of a leak of 200,000 votes from the socialists to Sumar. And this is just the beginning. Also note the comment by Michavila (GAD3 polls) this week: “Yolanda Diaz’s speech is more like the PSOE than to Podemos”.
Could Díaz and Sumar create and maintain a snowball effect through to the general election at the end of the year? Pedro Sánchez has said today in reference to the formal appearance of the new party on the left that "my wish would be for all of the pieces of the puzzle to fit together”. Former Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias has said that “If Sumar goes into the elections without Podemos, it will be an electoral and political tragedy”. Will Podemos and Sumar join forces at some point? Is there an outside chance Diaz could really upend the balance on the left and even end up with more votes than the socialists?
Thank you for reading.

2023-03-26 14:35:54

⛔ This is the drone flight restrictions map for the region of Spain I live in. Spain's paratroopers jump training base is here, parachute jumping exercises, Spain's Air Force Academy is here, military flying exercises, a civilian airport, a submarine base, a military shipyard, a petrol, gas and chemical refinery, several heliports, several bird sanctuary areas.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_6a95698d415575175764996cfca7c57459cc7bd8f8f46a666c20a91cd2e07fed.png

2023-03-26 12:31:19

- reply

Legends and lore...

2023-03-26 12:29:29

⚡️Some of the zaps you're trying are working, others not, for whatever technical or UI reason.
https://i.nostrimg.com/80ab993020cbc93693869d5631bb31f34e47c3dbd2b4453248a67ef8c814638c/file.jpeg

2023-03-26 12:14:56

- reply

They might want to publicise that a bit better...

2023-03-26 11:33:21

Nostr.build is down....

2023-03-26 11:24:42

Cultural shifts: the chill emoji hand is spreading. South of Spain, real life, in the street today, we saw some firefighters putting out a dumpster fire on a Sunday morning. They gave my son a cool firefighter sticker and then shouted cool live your dream stuff out of the window to him while making the "chill" sign. 🤙🤙

2023-03-24 18:16:30

This is an interesting book if you're trying to build something.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_3619bb43a7a3e8e22b5bb9d24a0a80d0136fa93ed60a93dcf9496243bae76021.jpeg

2023-03-22 22:39:26

📸 Nostr + permanence + non-deletion: Amazon is shutting down DPReview, the massive photography and camera review site. All of that life effort and energy from hundreds of thousands or millions of image creation fans over decades down the toilet.
Users are raging on the forums: "I don't agree with erasing the whole website, it is akin to burning down a library. It is barbaric to delete an entity with this much information in it. This website has become an archive of all digital cameras from 1998 to 2023, this information should be preserved".
- https://www.dpreview.com/news/5901145460/dpreview-com-to-close
- https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4705550
- https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/update-from-ceo-andy-jassy-on-role-eliminations

2023-03-22 17:11:25

- reply

That's the question, isn't it. Will Nostr be able to keep all of that polarised tribal nonsense away or is it inevitable over time as more people pile in because, well, humans?

2023-03-22 17:09:56

- reply

Well done, Synace! This is the way.

2023-03-22 08:06:10

- reply

That's the spirit! Better a few sats than some insults on Twitter.

2023-03-22 07:49:35

- reply

I agree. It is a strange thing compared to where we were before. Before it was maybe 90% normal polite learrning, information, debate and 10% insults. Now it is the other way round as soon as I post something on Twitter. Hyper bubbleisation or extreme polarised tribalisation or whatever we want to call it. Instead of some fun "gotchas" from time to time, now it feels like a race to see who can come up with the most contemptuous personal insult as quickly as possible, and other thousands of followers "like" and retweet the insults and contempt. Giga-chad thug culture or something.

2023-03-21 20:06:04

- reply

Right, could be, some combination of "that's good enough" and "this guy's on our side and has said something cool".

2023-03-21 20:04:41

⚡ Vox motion of no confidence: Day 1
The 89-year old candidate for PM managed not to fall asleep in his seat. Pay more attention to the evolution of Deputy PM Yolanda Díaz (Sumar, communist).
Okay, let’s get back to it. I’ve been translating a novel for the past month, snowed under with 130,000 words or so of science fiction and time travel. Thank you for your patience. It has been surprisingly refreshing to take a bit of a break from Twitter and the news for a few weeks and imagine other worlds. Unfortunately, I see that the flood of insults and contempt continue as soon as I write almost anything at all over there.
That model of journalism and reporting and conversation, which worked and served us all well for a decade of convulsive global events, appears to have disappeared, even though the site remains under Musk. That’s a shame but life is too short to put up with such constant negativity.
There might perhaps be something to be done with more in-depth, feature-like stories with photos and videos and things here on the Substack. I will explore that a little over the course of the year. In the meantime, you have shown over the past few months that you do value a half-decent analysis here of what’s going on with some issue—in our case Spain. I promised you I would keep writing about this year’s elections and politics and that I will do.
A couple of times a week will be enough for that, not daily. Not feeling any motivation at all to keep chasing the latest news headlines or the constant political bickering from one side or the other right now.
Today something interesting and objectively relevant has happend, though.
The motion of no confidence that Vox was banging on about in December finally got underway in parliament. Yes, at the end of March, three months later. Two days of debate and then a vote, which nobody in Spain believes they have a hope of winning. The Popular Party leader, Feijóo, has not even bothered to turn up to watch (he is formally a senator, not an MP).
The man put forward as replacement Prime Minister is Ramón Tamames, a former Communist Party MP from 1970s Transition-era Spain that Vox has somehow managed to convince to take part as an “independent” candidate.
Yes, he has shifted ideologically all that way from the far-left to the far-right in the intervening 40 years. He did well this morning, I thought, at the age of 89, not to fall asleep in his comfy leather chair in the chamber, from where he slowly read out a pre-prepared written speech that consisted of a long list of complaints about what he thought was generally wrong with Spain. Policy suggestions for solving any of them were noticeably absent.
A 30-page version of that speech was leaked to the left-wing media site El Diario last week and Tamames found out while he was being interviewed on an obscure radio show one night. He didn’t even know what El Diario was. “It’s the Podemos commie website”, the host helpfully informed him.
Summing up a morning of debate for you, Vox has gifted the left two days of national media attention in exchange for nothing or even minus points given all the ridicule and doddering. The PM, Pedro Sánchez (PSOE, socialist), and the Deputy PM, Yolanda Díaz (Sumar, communist) have been able to argue again they are great in government and that their political ideologies are winners.
After waffling on for nearly an hour himself, Tamames later interrupted Sánchez to protest to the Speaker that the PM had taken an hour and forty minutes to reply and had turned up with 20 pages of socialist ideology and policy that had nothing to do with what Tamames had mentioned. The Speaker told him off for interrupting and Sánchez was allowed to continue talking about Sánchez and how great Sánchez’s govermnet was compared to Rajoy’s previuos Popular Party administration before the pandemic.
Vox does not appear to have even come up with a plan to benefit from the operation electorally on the right. How many PP voters are this evening thinking about swapping over to vote for Abascal instead of Feijóo? I would wager very few after this morning’s uninspring, pre-planned drudgery.
Abascal (Vox) began by trying to convince the chamber that it was all “very serious” despite everyone making fun of it for the past couple of weeks and that Sánchez was now a smelly Prime Minister hanging around the political fridge beyond his use-by date. At other times, Sánchez appeared to be playing “Robin Hood when he has never stopped being the Sheriff of Nottingham”. Only minutes after relating immigrants to criminal rapists in his own ususal rhetoric, Abascal said that the feminists, communists and socialists “do not have the right to crminialise all men in Spain” as rapists. He attempted to criticise the PP for not really turning up for the debate and for drifting towards becoming the social-democratic party the country needed at the same time as he tried to half-heartedly convince them to vote for Tamames.
Sánchez replied that Abascal was hiding behind the 89-year old former communist, that he had failed at his previous motion of no confidence and if he was still around after the next general election, he perhaps wouldn’t have enough Vox MPs left to try again. He framed Abascal as a coward or at least a shirker, “that’s what you might expect from someone who exalts military values but avoided military service” and wondered “what’s the point of Vox?”, assuring listeners that he struggled to recall even a single measure from the far-right to improve peaceful coexistence among Spaniards over the past few years, but that they sowed “hatred everywhere”.
The PM said the Vox model for Spain rejected science, climate change, Europe, gender violence, feminism, infant poverty, the regional government system and the differnt official languages recognised by the Constitution. The far-right offered “a way of life under that euphemism of a dominant culture that takes us back to the worst moments of the 20th Century, a country that rejects its democratic memory and honours the mausoleums from the dictatorship built with slave workers to the greater glory of the tyrant”.
Abacal said “I am not going to reply to all of the lies you have mentioned”.
Tamames, despite getting told off by the Speaker for interrupting, was not wrong in his appreciation of how long Sánchez rambled on about his vision of his government’s achievements. Such are the rules of parliamentary football.
The Deputy Prime Minister, Yolanda Díaz (Sumar, communist) replied with what I thought was the most intelligent political speech of the day. A modern, educated, powerful woman politely and respectfully replying in 2023 to an old, economist and politician from another time but using the opportunity to frame herself and her ideological vision for how to govern Spain in a—dare we say it—prime-ministerial fashion. She spoke with some eloquence, both rhetorically and intellectually, about the consitutional, economic and human imperative of strengthening the welfare state for all and of how she believed the current left-wing coalition government she is part of has achieved that to some degree over the course of the current parliament and especially during the Covid pandemic.
Voters, of course, will agree or disagree strongly depending on which side of politics they are already on, and with the different ideological or policy aspects, but in the same way as it seemed to me that voters on the right would not be shifting to Vox from the PP after today’s performance, voters on the left, even perhaps from the PSOE, and especially women, might this evening be considering a vote for Sumar after listening to Díaz. It was not so long ago that the PP’s Isabel Díaz Ayuso (Madrid, First Minister) was spoken of as a possible first female Prime Minister of Spain, but could there be a scenario containing a surprise from the far-left? It’s not probable, given the disjointed nature of national politics and the current state of the polls, but looking at how Diaz has evolved over the past year or so, it’s not completely implausible either.
Thank you for reading.

2023-03-21 20:03:00

⚡ Right, back in to writing Spain analysis, then, have been translating a science fiction novel this month. Will post the whole articles on Nostr as we were saying, and we can see if lightning tips really work over the next few weeks and months.

2023-03-21 17:35:21

- reply

Right, quite shocking just for an app and some messages.

2023-03-21 17:26:37

Have only posted a few random tweets since Christmas. A bit more today because there's a motion of no confidence in the government going on in Spain. Just loads of negative energy, anger, insults and contempt still on Twitter, even after those two or three months of almost no activity. Who needs that? What's the point? Very unhealthy for everybody. That model is dead, doesn't feel like an attractive place to be like that anymore. People are moving on: Substack, Mastodon, Nostr, wherever.

2023-03-16 12:57:18

🛸📸🎥 Are drones and drone photography/videos big business where you are in the world..?

2023-03-14 16:35:58

⚡️Thanks to whoever sent along 3 sats.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_c38171fca820c9eea305223db066bf07ccad9b638a247c8bb692c6dc40c27b71.jpeg

2023-03-09 11:17:51

- reply

No idea if it's working over there or not. Just another experiment someone is doing for now. You are right, but it applies to both tribes: Tribe 1 values digitial thing called NFT in wallet on phone in ETH. Tribe 2 values digital thing called zaps in wallet on phone in BTC. Almost no one can explain the code behind it all. Both are a million miles from grannies in villages understanding what the fuck is going on. Both things can be turned into dollars or euros by creators for beer or paints or cameras or trips. Both versions of tips to express support or gratitude or cool.

2023-03-09 11:07:28

⚡️There's an interesting question for readers and content creators when a value exchange, generated by some emotion, takes place: is it because the reader really values whatever has just been created or because the creator has just resonated with the values of the tribe? Is it gratitude and support or ego?

2023-03-09 11:06:27

- reply

Well there's an interesting question down that path for readers and content creators when that value exchange, generated by some emotion, takes place: is it because the reader really values whatever has just been created or because the creator has just resonated with the values of the tribe? Is it gratitude or ego?

2023-03-09 10:34:08

⚡ Different vibes for different tribes:
1. Substack + email + fiat subscriptions
2. Damus + Nostr + bitcoin zaps
3. Mirror + posts + eth article NFTs
4. LinkedIn + messages + new contract/order
5. Twitter + tweet threads + super follows
6. Etc, etc.
Some kind of tribal group space, some kind of messaging pipe through which content and energy and emotions and intentions are sent, and some kind of mutual value transmission mechanism that works for everyone.

2023-03-09 10:28:19

- reply

Well, as far as I understand how that side of things is working, they like or value that collection aspect or motivation, crypto as a way of doing digital assets (vs. the bitcoin money let's try and take down the whole global financial system motivation), whether it's more like playing cards or more like acquiring a unique digitial work of art or photography. Different vibes for different tribes. So I suppose what Mirror is trying to do there is not dissimilar from zaps over here. Micro tips either way. 100 sats or 0.0001 eth. If we are talking about normal content (and not pumping shitcoins or ape NFTs or something), both options from reader to creator arise from a desire to express some kind of support or gratitude.

2023-03-09 09:51:02

- reply

I know everybody has their own strongly held position on those things and that there are different camps. From a content creator's point of view, if one option or another works, it's all readers or viewers or listeners wishing to send him some value in some form in their own preferred manner, whether that be bitcoin zaps or ethereum NFTS or a Substack fiat subscription, and it all adds up and can all be channelled into more and better content and stories and photos or drawings or whatever it is that everyone likes doing in the way that a particular creator does it.

2023-03-09 09:25:32

⚡ And then they have this where, using the Optimism layer-2 thing on Mirror, you can set the article or post itself to be what they call a "collectible" NFT that so many readers can collect it for a price (I imagine if they like what you have written or published very much), and you can set those two variables (their suggested default settings in the screenshot). Now I know Bitcoin-ETH is a huge war with many fights, and I have no idea how many readers they have over there doing this or want to do this, or if it is growing or not, but from a writer or a content creator's point of view, why not? If it works, this is another crypto income flow that will allow you to pay for real life and build and invest in your creative project as you go along. Substack-email-fiat-subsriptions vs. bitcoin-lightning-money-activism vs. ETH-optimism-art-NFTs. All interesting stuff. All doing better new versions of the content-value loop for readers and creators.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_7dda98b1cf503996bf8d750e992d98ea45d118086a51d3554d9712be686c8aeb.png

2023-03-09 09:14:19

⚡ Reading a bit more about what Mirror is doing with its ETH micro-value Medium/Substack minting effort, it seems they are using a layer 2 thing called Optimism. Is that supposed to be like lightning for ethereum?
https://www.optimism.io/

2023-03-08 21:24:48

- reply

Slowly, slowly.

2023-03-08 21:09:26

Without wanting to cause a fight about non Bitcoin value and content development, things, I just got an email from Mirror, which was doing a kind of Medium/Substack thing on ETH, and which I didn't pay any attention to last year. They are now doing something new called "subscribe to mint", which is another version of crypto + content + some value. Also saw that they had started doing this (screenshot), which seems to me to be a little like tips but with little bits of ETH and readers apparently get an NFT of the article or something. Haven't experimented with it myself yet, will need to read and play around further, but that kind of thing might work too, if there's a crowd of people who like doing that. They are also linking to something in their docs called Juicebox, which appears to be crowdfunding with ETH.
- https://dev.mirror.xyz/unYe1NE7GIS7vahvFTRdhjrHKlaS6YYuuttrR6TpMHE
- https://g.mirror.xyz/rq__HuWEfylTTjaYeMMkheYvCEV3obxuW09STRjLqG4
- https://juicebox.money/
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_7b5dce98cd336ef5620a6c85c19774d03ba00e35a3405fda666b2da179eb86f0.png

2023-03-07 14:29:03

This reckons Spain leads the world in selling properties for Bitcoin:
https://forexsuggest.com/crypto-real-estate/
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_8cd9042c6b9e4fc10309e5fbb3a3832162f3bdda65d227373a5ef020a0b5da5a.png

2023-03-06 22:50:27

Also an exciting posts by zaps ⚡️screen on the new Damus update.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_0b1e83e23e64642356569ee1ff1df972d0ef43e2104124c6beeb0f009b3793e2.jpeg

2023-03-06 22:47:17

Well done #[0], long press the zap button now in Damus to get this screen with cool zap options⚡️⚡️
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_86b08aedba762e71a9f6c6c4ed8618e355f058e70ee111282442da73d3c0239f.jpeg

2023-03-06 12:54:03

- reply

Right, 'cause you could do 1,000 sats in a few minutes, but if someone wants to get all the way to 1 bitcoin....

2023-03-06 12:48:02

#[0] Thought of a problem for you with your Zapraisers: how does someone mention or promote the same Zapraiser again, which they need to do if it's a little crowdfunding effort, without creating a new one? #Zapraiser 1M

2023-03-06 08:50:42

"Twitter insiders have told the BBC that the company is no longer able to protect users from trolling, state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation, following lay-offs and changes under owner Elon Musk."
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64804007

2023-03-04 16:58:24

- reply

Isn't that going to be really messy if it's not just one note or tweet but a whole app in a thousand folders with a specific structure that needs to execute precisely, right down to the last comma otherwise it breaks...?

2023-03-04 12:45:44

This is a cultural shift:
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_a243925540a971c692b691408ebfe3c6f8ba67aa103268dbeb14f41a47c8767a.png

2023-03-04 12:30:35

⚡️The first "posts by zaps" screen I have seen, on Nostur. Imagine what happens with this idea when i) great memes, ii) great journalism on stories or iii) great politicial polarisation.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_116da385b66ff97bf0030d526206748ea29f612128f955384d82f6b3df0f54ad.png

2023-03-04 09:36:52

- reply

Don't you still end up with somebody somewhere being the source or owner of the replacement..?

2023-03-04 09:15:05

- reply

What does permissionless mean in this context? What is the big problem with Github..?

2023-03-04 07:23:10

⚡️Zaps seem to be some combination of "thanks" and "support". Maybe we get a new verb out of that one day. Also, it seems they would be a great fit for charities and NGOs (Red Cross, human rights, etc). Maybe someone could code that into the zap interface and a user could specify a default NGO(s) to also send a few sats to every time he zaps a normal user. Could be changed or list or dropdown for new or urgent things like Turkey-Syria earthquake. More giving.

2023-03-03 19:32:55

- reply

That's an interesting view:
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_116da385b66ff97bf0030d526206748ea29f612128f955384d82f6b3df0f54ad.png

2023-03-03 09:22:40

⚡ What is going to generate most zaps...?
a) shit posting
b) serious but interesting
c) political polarisation

2023-03-02 19:43:27

- reply

Perhaps a bit excessive for him to kindly expose the problem but then mute everyone responding in such a friendly manner.

2023-03-02 19:05:25

- reply

Isn't that the bloke that caused the problem...?

2023-03-02 17:19:45

- reply

Is there anything on Nostr to stop someone writing a script to spam everyone with a new note per batch of 500 npubs and a 100,000 sat lightning invoice attatched, every hour, all day..?

2023-03-02 15:00:32

⚡ After Geyser does an attempt at lightning crowdfunding, #[0] has come up with something he is calling "zapraiser", which I'm guessing is zap + fundraiser.
- https://geyser.fund/project/thespainreport
- #zapraiser 100k

2023-03-02 14:47:42

#[0] What is a zapraiser? Zap + fundraiser..? Like a mini crowdfunding...?

2023-03-02 09:51:39

- reply

This might be helpful to you. Don't know if that's a big or small cache size.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_cf349acceacbeb0dd6a3d2acc8b1e08777379e532afa60443c39b2f80b2d7728.png

2023-03-02 09:50:25

Iris has done a 3GB cache on my desktop over the past 3-4 weeks. Don't know if that's normal or big or small.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_cf349acceacbeb0dd6a3d2acc8b1e08777379e532afa60443c39b2f80b2d7728.png

2023-03-02 09:46:57

- reply

Ok, I will try but normally open and close it a lot during the day anyway.

2023-03-02 09:00:39

- reply

I remember watching it last year and my own perspective was that of a journalist after the pandemic, and I had seen, again but in a much more intense way, how difficult it is to surface the truth sometimes, especially images and sound, which are like kryptonite to those in authority, and how very many forces you often find trying to stop it. You see how cynical politics and bureaucracy is very up close. I remember watching the presentation and thinking, wait a minute, they were taking those photos for their bosses, to make it look good. Fucking monsters. Propaganda and iniquity.

2023-03-02 08:55:16

Iris has been too slow to use for the past couple of days.

2023-03-02 08:47:12

⚡ Lightning crowdfunding is already a thing:
https://geyser.fund/project/thespainreport

2023-03-01 20:02:52

- reply

Makes sense to me. If I'm your reader, I just want your posts when I open Nostr. I don't care which relays you are using or which ones are trying to block you.

2023-03-01 18:59:01

- reply

We could talk about something interesting while we're all here...
...what would you spend one bitcoin on with your projects in life at the minute...?

2023-03-01 18:42:19

Iris has gone really slow/weird.

2023-03-01 18:41:49

- reply

Nice to meet you all.

2023-03-01 17:45:29

Why is it so hard to organise books on Kindle into collections that sync across devices?

2023-03-01 16:35:22

- reply

Are relays that post to other relays a thing? Can we tell it to write to 100 relays for maximum readers and reach but only read from 5 other ones? What happens if you change your relays? Or if you quote tweet something from a relay I am not aware of? Lots of questions still...

2023-03-01 16:29:14

Have any interesting new desktop clients appeared over the past few days?

2023-03-01 16:17:48

I still don't understand what I'm supposed to be doing with relays as a user. I sent sats to the paid ones suggested a couple of weeks ago but I don't know what they're doing. From a journalist perspective, my understanding is that I still want to push posts to as many as possible. The more people reading the better, right? Or wrong? More relays = more anti-censorship? The paid ones are mixed in with the free relays on my list, which has about 25 on it in all. Should I be doing more, less, just paid? If I start removing relays, do I start making it difficult or even impossible for some readers to continue to read?