Sinn Fein-IRA joke

You heard it here first – unless you’re familiar with the early 20th century Spanish gypsy repertoire.

Out-of-date ideologies

Daft slogans are, for tourists, the most visible evidence of Barcelona’s role as a Disneyland of absurd and forgotten ideologies. The success of the dominant ultra-nationalist caste in Catalonia in stamping out Spanish and non-standard Catalan from public services is clearly reminiscent of that of Mussolini’s lot in mid-1920s Italy with respect to regional dialects…

The madness of Níjar

Surprise has been expressed in circles, squares and other pleasingly simple geometrical arrangements of peapoles, that revolutionaries should want to destroy those who, according to Ken Livingstone and other prophets of the New Municipalism, are their nearest and dearest. What folly, my darlings! We creaky reactionaries know that revolutions always destroy society (and often themselves)…

Anti-guiri? yes, but…

Frequently racist paranoia vis-à-vis “imperialistic cultures” like the “Anglo-Saxon and Germanic” (with particular reference to the former) has permeated political thought of most varieties here for a long time and has been particularly evident in the last year or so. Sometimes, however, conflicts of interest arise. José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) was an elitist liberal…