The Monday Mix (26/09/2022)
Hey friends,
Been a quiet week after the mayhem of the past few weeks, so I’ll get straight into it and share the articles that interested me over the past week:
Is Catalonia Still Dreaming of Independence?
I lived in Barcelona for two years and one of the sights that struck me when I first got there in 2015 was the sheer number of Catalan flags that were hanging from balconies across the city. I knew next to nothing about the region, or Spain for that matter, so it was a shock to see so many of these flags and the sentiment of the people who were, mostly, intent on independence.
There are some parallels with Scotland in the desire for independence but I feel the Scottish National Party has handled the process (they have been helped by Brexit and the series of incompetent governments in the UK) better, with a tentative referendum scheduled for next year. Going for broke in 2017 seems to have hurt the Catalan independent movement with support falling since. The constitution of Spain forbids a region from leaving the country, so this issue sits at an impasse. The best solution might be for a referendum to be mutually agreed upon by both parties to try and clear the situation. Of course, this could backfire if the result is close, but the issue could slowly dissipate anyway.
It’s unlikely Catalonia will become an independent country any time soon, but with geopolitical ructions going on in the world it can’t be discounted.
Prohibition in America
An interesting look at a popular documentary on prohibition and the perception of the prohibitionist themselves. Key here is that the prohibitionists are often considered as the bad guys, but what the author states they were concerned with was the traffic of alcohol and its sale by unscrupulous merchants.
The essay is interesting but what I find fascinating is that prohibition even happened at all. It seems crazy to me that a country would completely ban the sale of alcohol. If that were proposed here in England, and probably in most countries, the party who proposed would get nowhere near power. It’s a bizarre part of American history that seems like a plot of a crazy alternate history film.
Lotteries as Elections
The idea of using lotteries instead of conventional elections might sound bizarre, but it was commonly used in ancient Greece. One of the problems with modern politics is that a lot of our politicians today are bad. Trump, Bolsonaro, Truss, Berlusconi, I could go on and on. All are terrible politicians but all of them were elected at the ballot box.
The problem is that politicians are often attached to special interests who bankroll them to get in power and then do their bidding. This is probably more of an issue in America than most other places, but it’s starting to happen here in the UK now too. Instead of an election, you’d have a simple lottery where anyone can stand and the winner is drawn at random. It seems mad, but I think if this was introduced for a certain quota of seats, say 10 to 20%, it could make a difference. You’d get ordinary people from a wider cross-section of society in positions of power which, in theory, would lead to less division and acrimony. Whether it would work in practice is another matter but it might be worth trialling on a lower level, such as local elections, to see what the outcomes are.
Book I’m reading - Aethelred the Unready by Richard Abels
Another book on one of the Anglo-Saxon kings of England, who I hadn’t heard about until I first bought a Penguin Monarchs book. Aethelred is notable as the monarch who lost the kingdom to Viking invaders, so it’s an interesting read about a lesser-known part of English history.
Quote I’m pondering: – “When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.” – Jean-Paul Sartre
That’s all for this week.
Until next time,
Tom