Populist Samfaina with Habermas in the background
Laporta's Trump-esque dance celebrating victory, and Víctor Font's grimace feigning defeat, remind us that the world of top-level football is populated by individuals who know neither how to win nor how to lose. Speaking of Trumpism, the photo from a few days ago of Leo Messi smiling alongside Donald Trump says it all about the values football is supposed to embody. The most trollish elements of the Catalan right delude themselves into thinking they've won something and erupt in tavern chants, because their weakness only allows them to project their insecurities onto the pitch of a stadium.
The Spanish right wing—which is also reminiscent of taverns, cavemen, and barracks—has won the regional elections in Castile and León, but this victory has also brought a certain chill to their feet. Is it possible that Vox has reached its peak? Is Feijóo's decline irreversible? Has the momentum run out? Can they continue until 2027 using the end of Sánchez's policies as their sole electoral slogan, without any program or proposals? Are Sánchez and his policies truly finished? These are unsettling questions for the Spanish ultranationalist right, with answers that are not necessarily comfortable. In any case, the PP's experience has been confirmed, as they already knew before this cycle of regional elections began, which is proving more damaging than they anticipated: that the supposedly most important party in the Spanish political system cannot make any significant decision without the approval of another (presidentialist, top-down, personalist) extreme party.
He has won an Oscar One battle after anotherA film with a social-democratic slant that offers a rather inconsistent and watered-down caricature of the far right and far-left direct action groups, based on a novel by the ever-verbous Thomas Pynchon. It's a minor work in the filmography of Paul Thomas Anderson, a filmmaker who is almost always excellent, but always much better than the fanfare surrounding him. Sinners (what is Open until the early hours (with pretensions of anti-racist discourse) and Hamnet (One of those melodramas that clumsily manipulate the viewer's tear ducts to elicit a tear). The acting Oscars (Jessie Buckley, Michael B. Jordan, Sean Penn) remind us that we live in times of overacting and theatrics.
Jürgen Habermas, a great thinker on democracy, died a few days ago. We should be grateful, first and foremost, that he wasn't implicated in the Epstein Papers. Habermas's philosophical legacy is enormous and, in our time, has an urgent character: the rejection of cynicism, deceit, the abuse of power, and the rule of force. Faced with all this, and with the pull of the public sphere (a concept he introduced) toward the grotesque and the obscure, Habermas proposes the ideas of the Enlightenment and the ideal of individual and social freedom as ethical pillars upon which to build a deliberative democracy. It may not seem so, but this is a response to the facts discussed earlier.