mirrors to outside

North South and Migration: “do-workshops”

Sat, 12 May 2012 19:51:45 +0200

One characteristic of an event as the Spring Council of the EGP is that even in between of so many meetings to attend, now and then you can't but wonder why do you attend one of them. The answer, naturally, is that you always expect to be surprised. As I was in two of the workshops that I attended yesterday and today. The North-South collaboration and the Migration workgroup one's.

The surprise came from the character of both workshops. Workshops as usual are a moment to build on a paper that has been previously drafted. Or it could be a moment to explore relevant ideological differences, in order to wrote a reasonably consensual draft of a document after. Now, this was not the case.

Few minutes after starting the workshop on North-South collaboration, guided by Elisabeth Meuleman (@elisameuleman), actually, the coordinator has nothing more to say, and the word was given to the public. And few minutes after the migration workshop started, we the attendants were thinking in possible campaigns to illustrate our viewpoints on migration. You could call these two workshops, (a novelty in my experience of the EGP) "do-workshops", workshops in which actually you are not anymore public, but actually must participate.

The reason that this came to happen in the North South collaboration workshop is that it was actually a follow up on a decision that the two green belgium political parties have taken. Both Ecolo and Groen have decided to allocate (and manage) 1% of their budget into international cooperation projects. And yesterday we were asked: what should we do? Should we expand this idea? Should we coordinate it in Brussels, or in each country? What should we do with the money? What criteria can we set for taking projects in? All interesting, and non trivial questions... Triggered by a decision that I strongly believe every other green party should follow.

In the case of migration, one of the most contentious issues in the european politics, Ska Keller (@skakeller, workgroup coordinator) decided early on to collect campaign ideas on consensual issues, rather than disagreements. So we had an exchange on what is actually going on in our own countries and a good moment to reflect on what have we done ourselves and how much of it makes sense in the european context.

If you ask me, that is what workshops in a congress should be.

the power and the glory

Sat, 12 May 2012 18:34:11 +0200

Talking in the gangways with some new Irish friends, here in the spring council of the European Green Party in Copenhagen, we got to talk about political power. My interlocutor, a lawyer that has become active in the Irish Green Party recently, told us what her husband said when she join the greens: "well, you can't be accused of doing it because of the money nor because of the glory".

And that was actually the issue of a very inspiring talk yesterday. In a plenary session we heard two ministers of environment, from Finland and from Denmark. They talked about what greens actually do, once in government. In particular, the danish environment minister, Ida Auken, addressed the relation of the greens with power. And she was great. I don't believe that anybody hearing her would ever doubt again about taking part in government. Ida manage to dispel that almost freudian dilemma from many greens, which seems to want, and not to want, to assume power. To quote her: "don't ever ever ever think that you can do more in opposition than in government' Actually, you should stop reading this lines of me, jump to twitter and search for her name, since you will come across many quotes from her speech yesterday. Let's not repeat here her plea. Just go to twitter and find it.

What I do want to talk about here, is about a little piece of her speech. It turns out that Ida, even coming from a politically active family, went through a moment in which she did not want to have kids and saw our future as bleak and hopeless. But in one way or another, she did stand up, started a political career, and eventually she did take the risk of participating in government. And her message today is clear, and inspiring. Go and take your chances! And actually this is it. Because politics might be, up to a point, about having the right answer to the present question. Of course we greens believe that we know how to deal with the current crisis. But actually, politics is not that at all. Politics is actually a jump in the void, a bet. A bet that if we get into it, it will be work out. Actually many of us do not take this jump at all. Many of us prefer, or decide, to stay in our little comfort zones, criticizing from our outside position, instead of taking the risk of compromise and take -some- power. And yesterday we have a window into a person that risked it, and it work out.

Inspiring, that is.

The future, the EU, us

Fri, 11 May 2012 18:32:02 +0200

If you get to think about a green, you will imagine -right away- some starry-eyed young idealist that spend most of his or her time thinking in the future of our planet. A bleak future, that is. Now, out of experience I can tell you that if you put two of these together, you will get -right away- a debate on the finer aspects of how this future will look like, should the greens get in power. Wondering about the state of the art of the last details of that future, I walked in the session "the future of the eu", in the spring council of the European Green Party, right now in Copenhagen.

Let it be said that these kind of sessions are quintessential in the councils of the EGP. Or so you would think when looking at the formal agenda of every council, normally dominated by many similar "working paper" sessions. The idea, a very european one, is that sessions in a council are the culmination of a long consultation and discussion process, where different and contrasting views have been made -sometimes painfully- to coincide and fit in a shared document. As a matter of fact these sessions are quite relaxed and not so crucial, since attendants know each other, and are likely to have already explored their differences and leaving the ones that are unbridgeable behind. Still, given the all present need of greens to argue with each other, these sessions open a rare window in the most interesting dilemmas of the green movement.

And so it was this time.

One of the most interesting dilemma of the greens is our connection with the european project. Because today the day there are very few greens that would believe in europe as a problem. You could say that euro-skepticism is not a very green thing. Today we believe that europe is a big part of the solution to almost any problem in an european country. And at the same time we surely recognize the shortcomings of the project as it is right now. Greens are constantly being concern with that famous democratic gap of the EU. We constantly harp on the commission and her unelected powers to be. And still, we think that the EU is the way to go. I can see it in the faces of my fellow congress goers. We are actually happy to be here, to feel ourselves europeans. Funny thing. Because the very abstract and almost non existent thing of being european inspires us, meanwhile we criticize the very concrete and real european institutions. Ours is a very interesting spagaat, also to be seen in the document being perfected.

Looking in detail at the text, and the discussions that this session was still dealing with, you could see that for almost every single sentence that would explain that the EU is the institution capable of implementing our most treasured ideas, few lines before or few lines after, there would be a sentence explaining yet another wrong thing that the EU is right now.

Of course, it feels ok. Because when we greens get to think about this issue, that is exactly how we feel. Our texts are likely to be the most honest texts that political parties today write. They reflect our doubts and our dilemmas. But right now, when I am hearing the environmental minister of Denmark, a green, extolling us to show the right way instead of criticizing the wrong one, I wonder if we should not leave our dilemmas for a while, and focus in bringing out our agreements. This council is still beginning, and the final vote on our vision for the future of the EU will be the Sunday. We'll see how far are we then.

A first take on privacy

Tue, 8 May 2012 12:55:45 +0200

One of the nice things of being member of a green party as the dutch GroenLinks, is that there are workgroups for pretty much everything. One of the bad things of such a party is that after few years being an active member, you end up participating in pretty much every workgroup, since all of them overlap and have crossed interests. That's why few days ago I found myself sitting in the bi-monthly meeting of the ICT workgroup. Being more civil than what I normally am, I was keeping my mouth shut up to the moment when the issue that I was invited for would come to the order of the day. I would lie if I say that I was paying full attention to the discussion, but at one point I did manage to catch "c'mon people, we all know that privacy does not exist". And with that, all my intentions of stay calmed and aloof went flying by the window. Gotta join the fray.

The funny thing with this fray is that even when opposing it, I actually fully agree with the statement. Surely being a data-miner, I am well aware of what you can get to know with a live internet connection, few programmer skills and basic statistical knowledge. Or simply with google and common curiosity. The question is: do we accept reality as it is? Just because it is? Or do we fight it to make it as we want? This question, rather silly and almost puberal if you want, is The question behind the discussion on privacy and policy. Let's state it from the start: whoever has online time can find whatever he or she wants about whoever else. Privacy, in any functional sense of the word, stopped existing several years ago. Question is: are we going to do something about it?

For me it is an actually bothering question. Because I rather encourage whatever technological development I'm aware of, than attempt to put breaks on it. Mostly nothing good comes from governments intervening with science and technology. And mostly it is simply impossible for governments to do much about it, besides helping with funding. Technological advances have this way of crawl forward, in despite of government or mass intervention. And still. The issue of privacy might be one of these few issues on which governments are at the right side when attempting to protect citizens against... well, technology. It is simply not Ok to know that some PR agency employee in a cubicle can look at whatever is known about you, in order to design more effective PR. On the other side, nobody will deny that full access to your body condition will improve the work of doctors anywhere, any time. Perhaps those two extremes are the ones that make the privacy discussion difficult. Where does the middle lie?

And not only that. As brought in later in the discussion of my fellow party members (fellow party members sounds so old fashioned lefty that I love to write it in a reflection on modern technology), internet technologies do power an emancipation process of persons in need of expert advice. Think in people affected by any other disease. It is very likely today the day that these people would check google before going to the doctor, becoming far more critical with whatever a doctor has to say afterwards. A big deal of the information that is to be found in internet comes from people that has effectively leaved behind their own privacy. We will found, if we look, countless fora with people openly talking (or rather commenting, blogging and twitering) about their diseases, the advices that doctors have given, and their effectivity. If you care to look, you will find that the health sector, among many others, has become crowd sourced. With all the risks that it brings. After all, the seven years that takes to become a doctor are not only spend in learning how to scare patients with authoritarian behaviour, but also in knowing what works and what's dangerous. The combination of information technologies and the loosening of privacy standards are a great -and also a very dangerous- cocktail.

Last but not least, let it be said that the relevance of this discussion has already consequences in the political innovation field. Let's not talk more about Wikileaks, the obvious example. Europe today (and without doubt other continents later) is being raided by Pirates. A group of parties, that is, that has made of the privacy discussion their key flag. Right now they have obtained relevant gains in Germany, the old house of Marx. Perhaps the privacy discussion has to offer yet another revolution?

only for male feminists, #11

Mon, 7 May 2012 16:46:47 +0200

"This relation has to end because I'm loosing myself in it" She said. And my son, reading the message on his side of the chat screen, came down with wet eyes to us, his also baffled parents.

Baffled. I must confess that at first I was not amused by the statement of the otherwise sweet girlfriend of my -11 years old- son. How can you possibly talk about loosing yourself at this age? After all, I was faced with the first time (and not likely the last one) that a girl does breaks my son’s heart. Not bloody likely that I would have any sympathy to spare to the one that has made him sad in all the days after. And I mean sad. It's already couple of weeks after and I only manage to extract shallow smiles. It is a cliche, but nevertheless true: the eyes of my son are sad, and I can't do anything about it

Anyhow, very few parents that I am aware of have managed to do anything at all. Arguably, being in love -or in the lack of it- are very individual experiences, and nothing that I would do can help my son. He has to go through it as all of us have, I guess. All of us. Thinking in all of us is when I came to think again on the words of my son's ex, the girl of 11 perhaps loosing herself up in a relation. I realized that I dismissed her statement way too easily. Actually, I am guilty of doing what I hated grownups doing when I was 11 myself. Very few adults that I knew then understood that being a child is no impediment to experience whatever might be called adult feelings, and concerns.

And you have to tell me is if there is any other feminist concern more important that the one of loosing oneself in a relation.

Let's stay out of the life of my son -and his ex- for a second. If I look around, most of the relations that my friends have tried have succeeded -or failed- due to that single aspiration, easy to track to the birth of the emancipation movement. The aspiration of being yourself on your own, and not on a relation. The need of being somebody, and not just a wife. An aspiration that has gave us a whole set of problems that we didn't have before. You know that cliche about our ancestors: their life's mission was to get married, to produce a family. And then we came along, and told history that women are more than a baby factory, that relations do not have to end in families, that every individual has the right to pursuit happiness... on her own. A great thing, all of it. And problematic as hell. Problematic as any declaration of independence, as any shout of desire, of revolution. Feminist statements, just like declarations of independence of countries that have long suffered under a colonial power, are great. But then, after the liberation, comes the real thing. The decades of struggle to become -in the case of the countries- a functional country. So in the feminist movement. We are all still in the struggle. We are still trying to balance our individual desires and our wish to love, to commit ourselves to somebody else. We are still trying not to loose ourselves.

So I confess, I still resent the ex of my son. Of course I do. But I wish her good luck in that search that she is beginning. We are all searching, dear one. Good luck to you.

only for male feminists, #10

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:19:38 +0200

When I think in a sidekick, I think in something as the Lone Ranger and Tonto, that perfect example of racial profiling. Or their spinoff The Green Hornet, with Kato. I really believe that if I would see any such structure in a tale, movie or TV series, I would immediately recognize it, and despise it. And not only racial but also gender or social profiling. I don't like Married with Children, do I? I am, after all, smart enough to recognize when prejudice becomes just another source for mindless fun.

Now, am I?

Few days ago meanwhile couch-potatoing before falling sleep, I was looking at the Mentalist, a series that I actually like. As it happens, my brain begun to wake up at seeing, for hundredth time, the face of incomprehension that Lisbon puts to one or another of Patrick's brilliant antics. For those of you that don't follow The Mentalist, Teresa Lisbon is the head of a detective's team helped by Patrick Jane, an ex con-artist. Needles to say, Patrick and his creativity is actually the central character of the series, since his tricks are the ones that manage to get the bad guys, folding in the process the traditional approach of his boss Lisbon. My brain actually begun to complain when realizing that this is not the only series that I like where the male has the creative mind meanwhile his female counterpart is the by-the-book-boring-boss-that-in-the-end-always-recognize-the-brilliancy-of-her-partner... but there are more. In a second I realized that my beloved House is precisely the same, not to mention Castle, Criminal Intent, or even Bones. Is it a simple coincidence that in those series women are the ones capable of only following rules when solving difficult problems? In all of these shows, women are the square ones, the ones that only have logic and old fashioned methodologies to face the brilliant insights of a male partner.

So there I am, a self-named male feminist, enjoying series lead by brilliant men coupled with boring women. How stupid-er can you get? Way to go, Inti!

What actually bothers me most in the narrative arch of these series is the bloody photocopied female role. The narrative of every chapter is the same: a problem is presented, the man offers a daring theory, the woman explains that they can not implement it, and that it is childish even to try, then the man does it anyhow, and after a tense while, he is proven right. Most telling is the body language shared by these shows. If you have seen Castle, or House, or The Mentalist, you can right away remember the facial expression of Becket, Cuddy or Lisbon, at hearing the last theory of Castle, House or Jane. It is actually the same. A mix of unbelievingness and incomprehension, hinting already at the fawning that will come right after, when the weird theory turns out to be right. It is not too far away from the face of Homer Simpson thinking in a donut, actually. Homer can not even begin to understand what unbelievable magic has created a donut. It is beyond his poor peanuty brain. But he knows he wants it. This portrait of the male as a desirable unknown is actually not very different than the portrait of the woman that our societies used all along the medieval ages, up to recently. A fundamental insight of feminist theory is to recognize how society defined women as the threatening other, that one that is hard to understand and accordingly threaten us. The subtext of that line in feminist theory is that the rest of the society was, to say the least, too stupid (or too powerful) to integrate the otherness of the women in a productive collaboration. Have we turned the tables here? Are we actually saying that women are too stupid to understand men? Appalling message, to say the least.

At least we have the good wife. And saving grace.

only for male feminists, #9

Wed, 4 Apr 2012 18:26:26 +0200

Maybe due to my argumentative nature, surely inherited from my italian -dramatic- genes but surely justified by my dialectic education, the truth is that I love an argument. Or a contradiction. And that's why, actually, most of these columns on being a male feminist are designed to shed some light in the conflicts and dilemmas that such double allegiance brings along. Now, I say most of them. Because today I do not want to write about a conflict, a dilemma or a contradiction. I simply want to share some of the pleasures of my position.

Take any day, around 1440. My working period is about to end, and I am about to jump in my bicycle. In a short while I'll be arriving to the doors of the school of my son, and with other parents I'll be counting the minutes to 1500, when Ayden will show himself up, one of the many drops in the flow of kids running out of the school. Actually, it is like a wave, breaking into the broad and wide world. This single moment justifies whatever pain, conflict or contradiction has been brought along by being the father-at-home. This moment, repeated pretty much every day in the last 8 years, with pretty much the same kids, brings pretty much the same wow feeling every time.

Would it be the empathy across the years? Would it be the vague remembering of the pleasure of coming out of school, like a bat fi-na-lly flying away from its cave and into the twilight? The sense of stretching wings that have been flexed, folded and forgotten... under the eyes of teachers and others, under the pressure of a building definitively not designed for flying? It might be. It might very well be that I like so much to see those kids because I remember that moment of freedom at last.

But it might also be that I have been seeing this group several years already, and I can see, if I care to look, how the years have been forming the faces, the rhythms and the movements of this particular flock of small birds, almost ready to fly on their own by now. I can remember how each of them looked like few years ago, and see how fast they change, and how fast they don't. It is possible to see the man that will be in the face of the kid that is. The twinkle in the eye of that girl looking at her smaller brother is actually the same one that she will give to her own kids in ten or twenty years from now. The irregular running of the other I'll recognize today as in decades from now, as I did past year in one or another park.

So every other day, around 1500 I pity my fellow -non feminist- males. As a matter of fact, I pity my beloved wife, who only once a week get the chance of being here, and whom probably can not recognize every dolphin in this pod, every sardine from this school... swimming away. Away from school and into life.

Tortillas mexico-españolas con cátara

Tue, 3 Apr 2012 12:46:32 +0200

por diógenes

-prepare cintas de lechuga, poco aceite, poco limon y sal
-prepare octavos de tomate, mas aceite de oliva y sal
-ralle suficiente queso, de vaca y con capacidad de derretirse. preferiblemente gouda beleggen en holanda, pero la variedad es infinita. nada de brie, nada azul. quesos duros de cabra funcionan bien.
-ni se le ocurra hacer octavos de los aguacates que se consiguen en el norte de europa, decepción garantizada. múdese al sur de europa o a sur américa o limítese a suspirar (mientras prepara el resto) por las frutas exóticas que llegan inmaduras a estas latitudes. refuerce su identidad latina.
-caliente una sartén con mantequilla. agregue cintas de tocineta. al empezar a sudar, agregue granos de maíz. sacuda la sartén de tanto en tanto, mantenga el fuego alto hasta que los maizes casi salten, y tienen el color deseado, ya no amarillo sino tostado.
-sofría ajo y cebolla en una olla pequeña. agregue "chilli beans": frijoles, caraotas rojas o como quiera se llamen en el lingo local. hablamos de una variedad pequeña y roja de Phaseolus vulgaris. deben estar hervidas hasta ser comestibles de antemano. ponerlas de la lata a la olla es un pecado... menor.
-tenga en la mesa una variedad de salsas picantes, o no. Por ejemplo "Brinjal aubergines pickle" de Pataks, "Ginger pickle" de Rajah y Sambal Djeroek de Koningvogel. un poco de Cátara Doña Flora viene bien, sobre todo en las fisiologias de estos europeos del norte. la presencia de tabasco es casi obligatoria.
-en una sartén caliente ponga cintas gruesas de tocino (25x4x2 cmts) sin curar. La idea no es freirlas, asi que no agregue mas grasa que la que ya tienen. deles una sola vuelta cuando el lado expuesto se haya vuelto dorado. cuando a punto de estar listas, agregue salsa de soya y deje evaporar, pero no quemar. corte las cintas en bocados.
-a discreción: sofría un par de pechugas de pollo a la manera de su preferencia, y haga bocados con ellas.
-sirva la escalivada de berenjenas, la de pimentón y la de puerro que preparo días atras y que ha defendido a sangre y fuego de su familia en los dias previos. Ya que estamos en esto, agregue unos cuantos tomates secados al sol y preservados en aceite. algunos multiculturales extremos pedirán aceitunas y corazones de alcachofas marroquíes. decida donde poner su propia linea fronteriza al intercambio cultural.

-sirva cada uno de los componentes mencionados arriba en su propio cuenco, en la mesa
-en el último minuto caliente tortillas mexicanas (ni españolas, ni tacos) en una sartén (en el horno no, y si en el microhondas, José Doroteo Arango Arámbula le saldrá en la noche). cuidado que si se sobrecalientan no se pueden enrollar. sirva una tortilla por persona, instruya a los participantes en el adecuado doblado-enrollado. decida si explicar que mas de lo conveniente de ingredientes por tortilla lleva a una desastroso (pero divertido para el resto de los participantes) final. proporcione suficientes servilletas. recuerde que con la salsa de su preferencia se pinta el interior de la tortilla antes de agregar el resto de los ingredientes. el relleno clasico es frijoles, cerdo, maiz, queso, aguacate (maldita sea!). Cualquier otra combinación es bienvenida a estas alturas del proceso globalizador.
-planee para dos tortillas por persona normal, tres para los intis presentes y quizas mas para los neardenthales que siempre se colean. hablamos de tortillas grandes, alrededor de treinta centímetros de diámetro.

A green vision on labour migration

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 16:15:17 +0200

Think about any european country, or if you prefer, think about the country of europe in which you happen to be right now. Now imagine that as of today, all migrants with a job are back to their countries of origin. Just think about it for few seconds. How many of your coworkers will not be around anymore? Go for a walk in the street, and imagine how many shops and business will be undermanned or simply unable to open. Our economy is unthinkable without the work of the many migrants staying in or passing by europe. Bring the same thought to about fifty years ago. Wasn't it the same? Wasn't it that Europa had a huge array of nationalities in her workforce? Imagine 50 years from now on. Do you think is it going to be different?

We don't think so. We believe that the european workforce is intrinsically intertwined with those persons that have come to europe from other places, for a while or for their whole life. The european labour market is unthinkable without its migrants. That is why it is the task of the european institutions to facilitate this very european trademark.

Facilitation is a easy word to say, but it can be interpreted in many -contradictory- ways. When we greens think in facilitating the diverse labor place that europe is, we actually think in four guiding principles:

1) Labour migration, understood as the flow of persons that immigrate in or emigrate from europe, is a phenomenon with a long historical tradition and a clear positive balance. Europe can not be understood, would not be what it is now, and has no sustainable future without her working migrants.

2) Not only labour migration, but all sorts of it are phenomena that produce change, disruption with old ways. Migration is change. We know that all in all, the changes that migration has brought along were and are needed and positive for the european society. But we also see that labour migration, certainly in time of economic crisis, brings immediate dilemmas that need to be addressed.

3) Knowing that all in all there is definitive positive effect from migration, but faced with the short term costs that migration brings along, we state that the goal of migration policy is to facilitate and improve the historical flow of persons that come to and go from europe to work. Some of the very pillars supporting the european model, like the retirement and the health care systems would not function without the work of migrants. Europe must be ready to address the problems of today to reap the benefits of tomorrow.

4) With the experience of decades in governments across very many different european countries, and very many different levels, greens migration policy is driven by knowing that migration is a beneficial event. But when we green talk about benefit, ours is not the conservative version of it, driving huge flows of migrants into europe, so that they would solve our problems and go away (as conservative governments did in the eighties). Neither is in our benefit the liberal agenda of today, which pretend that migrants should be welcome, but left alone to figure out a whole new society themselves. We greens think that policy that produce benefit from migration is committed policy. It is policy that recognize the value of diversity in the work place, is policy that supports the inclusion of the worker in the society at large, is policy that facilitates migrants to bring in their social capital, their education, their networks. And it is policy that allow the migrant to move that social capital, made or improved in our countries, to the world at large. We greens do not feel entitled to own persons, nor to characterize them by the place where they happened to be born.

it’s not that bad

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 09:59:48 +0200

Monday. Busy Monday, that is. Beginning at 730. Breakfast, lunch box and kid in school at 830. Meet with associate at 900, be back home at 1300, cook dinner, deal with incoming email, start working on weekly agreements with associate (if there is time left), get kid from school at 1500, be before 1525 in guitar lesson, aikido lesson starting at 1645, go back home at 1800, just in time to warm up dinner, wife arriving 1820. Mondays are under the sign of being efficient, or efficient enough to complete the agenda of the day. I actually manage, mostly. Even if it puts me on the edge. As today.

Past week I arrived at the school at 1455 and they were already out. In the street, a huge cement truck, surrounded by people with uniforms matching the logo displayed in the truck, arrange the kids in a row and get some photos. My son's included. It might be that I wanted him to get on his bike soon, to get to his lesson on time. It might be that it's Monday and my patience is not what it should be. It might be lots of things. But I experienced the unexpected photo session as yet another violation of privacy. Who are these people? Why must my son be in a photo that a cement company is making? What's this all about? But Ok, before my growing discomfort becomes a rage and I get concrete enough to do something, it's all over. We can leave.

A while later, biking to the guitar less, I get to know that the cement company organized traffic awareness sessions in the school of my son. I guess it's ok, then. Some sort of contact-with-the-community program, reach out or whatever. I guess that the photos will end up in some internal bulletin, if at all. The whole thing it's not relevant. And maybe it's even ok. And still, the bad taste on the mouth remains. Why was I not informed before hand? Are we not owners of our image? Tja. Do I really care? Actually, even later on, I realize that I don't.

I tend to believe that pretty much every privacy discussion nowadays goes along the same way that my midday anger flare did. We live busy schedules, and our skin has grown thin. We are far less tolerant to any real or pretended invasion of our private space than few decades ago. Not surprisingly. If you are the whole day running, playing catch up with your own agenda, everyday... Why would you tolerate anybody else poking into your messy life? As a matter of fact, you don't. You complain, and mostly, the complain has effect. If I would ask the director of the school, it is likely that I would not only get an explanation, but also an apology. And still, if you give yourself a little time, you might realize that it is not so serious after all.

Take the case of the electronically stored medical data. To many people seems logical to consider personal medical data as private, making the creation of a national database of medical records a core issue in the privacy discussion. It has been repeatedly said that medical data shouldn’t end up in a digital database. Sure, the consequences of mistakes in the creation of the information are serious. If a doctor writes down wrong information, depending, it might costs the patient's life. But what has privacy to do with this fact? And for all what matters, why is people so allergic to the words database and virtual together? Hundred years ago, a medical mistake would have had the same consequences. That situation has not worsened with the electronic transfer of information. Some problems have been solved with it, and some other problems have appeared. But are we worse off because medical instances have access to medical information electronically stored? Of course not. If anything, we are better off.

I have no doubts that the extended access that many institutions have of the unmeasurable flow of data can be misused, in many ways. But I also believe that most of these risks are in no other place than in our imagination.

The social democrat revolution is also a salami

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:54:06 +0100

Already a decade ago, when I begun to show interest in european policy, my friends working in Brussels introduced me to the salami method. The salami, that italian way to make lots of cheap meat taste ok, turns out to be an excellent descriptor of European institutions modus operandi. The idea is that nobody actually likes a salami, but nobody refuses a thin slice of it. Europe is not supposed to advance with great jumps forward or dashing policy changes. Not at all. Europe bureaucrats are supposed to know what is going to happen in the next decade and they offer a thin slice of it once in a while. So that we can swallow it.

It actually should not surprise me that in each electoral cycle we get offered yet another thin slice of the big thing.

This time, I spotted a slice in the forthcoming french elections. For us europhiles, one of the goals in our own political activism is to go for discussions that play at the european level, and make them lively and interesting. Which is a difficult task, because people seems to be more attached to their own countries than to the more or less artificial idea of Europe. Now, one of the things that we try to do is to get politicians from the same family but from different countries, actually campaigning for each other. We greens with an european taste do create for every election of the European Parliament european-broad campaigns, with some success. Now, it looks like even the social democrats are getting there. And that should be a rather relevant slice of the real thing.

But we should not get our hopes to high, or too thick. The piece of news that motivate me to write was a report of a meeting in Paris, where social-democrats leaders from Germany and from Italy (I guess from other countries as well, but the press did not mention them) signed a joint program, the renewal of the European dream. The french socialist candidate for the presidency hosted the event, and called for the start of a social-democrat revolution. A revolution that will control the markets creating a financial tax to finance a second Marshall plan for Europe, launching a European central Bank along the way and aiming at enforce contract complaints regarding environmental and labour regulations.

But now, we are talking about social democrats. And the whole thing gets very funny. I mean, how in god's name would the social democrats launch a revolution? Actually, they are the inventors of the oldest political salami, since social democrats are a dawn-of-time-split from the revolutionary communists, choosing for reform instead of revolution. I actually wonder which normal social democrat voter would be motivated by a promised revolution. Maybe in France is different, but... Are social democrat voters so gullible? Actually to me it seems that to call for a new Marshall plan is not only an insult to our intelligence, but to the rest of the world. The original Marshall plan, what we might call today a global effort of international help, did rebuild a Europe literally burned by war. Is it possible that those social democrat leaders think that a comparable plan is more needed in Europe today that, say, in Afghanistan?

Anyhow. It does seems to me that the social democrat manifesto is good news. At least in achieving the goal of european political integration. Because it might actually be part of a trend. Earlier in this month we had Merkel supporting Sarkozy in his own campaign, a move that many political analysts criticize as foreigner intervention in national politics. It might be that the social democrats own move is the way that they analyze the growing interest of the national voter for a european political dimension. It might be that we have that slice washed down already.

I wonder what the next slice would be.

only for male feminists, #8

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:13:14 +0100

Which image could possibly be more trodden that the housewife going hysterical on the dirt of the house, brushing or sucking it away as she would like to do with her frustrations? I guess none. I suppose that this is why most of South American telenovelas begin with one or another woman handling the broom or the vacuum cleaner, and sighting about their destinies. I guess that there is no other image that makes more people brows frown than this one. Even an old chapter of Sex and the City is (might be) more interesting.

Or so I believed, up to the moment that I caught myself (with indeed a vacuum cleaner in a hand and a brush in another) cursing the lack of care of the co-habitants of my house, namely my son of 11 and my wife, the one with a full time office job. I believe that if I would not have stopped myself, few seconds later I would have begun to plan a conversation in which I would have accuse them of heartlessness. Just like my mother. And when you are (or, more precisely, you believe you are) a post-modern, progressive and athletic male of forty-few years old, to discover yourself doing exactly what your mother did about 25 years ago, it's serious.

What's interesting of this moment in my -more or less normal- life is that nothing, not a single tiny bit of my lifestyle has been forced upon me. I still resent some of the complaining that my mother did, but I also recognize that she had plenty of reasons to complain. Not me. The amount and kind of paid work I do, I choose. The amount of house-holding I do -accordingly- I also choose. I could do a bit more of work any time and pay a cleaner maid (or a he-maid). Any time I could ask Ayden to help. I could even ask (even if I know what the answer will be) Chantal to do some more cleaning. But that's not the issue. The whole being annoying and offended at a dirty floor that has to be cleaned by me, has nothing to do with any rational calculation. As a matter of fact, I believe that has nothing to do with some cultural trait, or some emancipation tenet. Could it be that the work of cleaning the dirt of others is, in itself, insulting?

I live already more than a decade with Chantal, so I have quite some experience in doing the house. There is no denying the sense of completion, of achievement, that a clean house gives. But that is after. The feeling of stooping into the kitchen floor to remove some goo that somebody else let fall and never care to remove itself... still feels demeaning to me. And that is, in itself, weird. In my life I have worked in very many varied situations. Once I chopped greens for hours without end in a salad bar, another time I tried to introduce bored adolescents into the delights of Newton's laws. I expended months boiling carcasses of wild rats in order to catalogue their cleaned skulls into a museum collection, or squeezed my brain to explain what a standard deviation is to a chemotherapy researcher. I can tell you that all these jobs (and others that I don't even want to begin to remember) had their low points. But every time I could tell myself that I was getting somewhere, that I was changing some aspect of reality in the direction that I wanted. Somehow, that long term goal of cleaning the floor of my kitchen escapes me.

Contrary to most of what I want to write, I have no way out of this one. Actually, the lines above here are just to wonder if my feelings are shared at all. Am I the only idiot that likes to live in a clean house but don't like to clean it himself... and happens to be the responsible for it's cleanliness? Am I the only one troubled by the idea of subcontracting this to somebody else, as if the work that I think is demeaning can be given to somebody else for the right price? Why doesn't that answer satisfy me? Am I a masochist or a silly idealist? Or even worse, would those two states of minds be intrinsically linked with each other?

only for male feminists, #7

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 21:43:34 +0100

The mise en scene is so cliche that it's a joke in itself. Minimally, the players are me and any other north-european woman, even if more players can be added to the plot. The scenario is ubiquitous, it might be the entrance of a public building, the exit door of a train, a table for two in a restaurant. We players are middle aged, trained to behave properly in such contexts. Properly meaning fluidly, among other things. My partner knows what she is supposed to do, and so do I. So there we go: I move towards the handle of the door or the back of the chair. Confident. With the side of my eye I see her doing the same. I dare not hesitate, so I move on. And on she goes! Time to stop? My movement, suddenly, becomes less fluid. I am stopping. And so does she! Then I go on, but she as well! What's going on here? Isn't it me the one to open the door for her? To displace the chair? The two of us are like badly managed puppets. Our movements are not fluid anymore, we stumble. Any pretense of elegance is gone in seconds of doubt. I look into her eyes, and I see half part of embarrassment, half of doubt, and two parts of annoyance. I can read her mind, so loud she is thinking now: "what is he doing? I am not handicapped!" On her anger, I recoil. Mostly I mumble some apologies. Or not.

It is definitively awkward. And funny, if you are looking (and aren't one of the players).

Back in 2000 I was in Caracas for a visit. My sister had just got Laura Esquivel's "between two fires". My skepticism for all Garcia Marquez' copycats was gone pretty fast, after the first pages. I remember Esquivel making a point that we have read many times after. The generation of her grandmother opened the emancipation road, her mother's walked most of it, her own generation was pretty much ready with it. Women earned positions undreamed off. As it should be. And still, valuable knowledge went missing. Esquivel, being in real life a successful Mexican politician, wrote about the cooking. Her grandmother was probably the last in a long line of guardians of a whole culture, condensed in ingredients, recipes, histories. Her mother, rightly rejecting the roles that men expected women to fulfill, did not learn to cook. Esquivel herself had nobody to teach her, when she wanted to know. Women were, and are, better off. But cooking traditions went endangered, and the quality of our life is not what it could have been. Would McDonald have so many clients if we all would know how to cook a few traditional dishes? Something like it happened in England after the war. The prolonged scarcity made people forget their rich culinary history. Almost up to the nineties, to talk about english gastronomy was a bad joke. Only recently a new generation of chefs has re-discovered the old recipes.

I believe that we need somebody to rediscover gallantry.

Perhaps the key lies in discover, maybe even re-discover, that emancipation can not make us independent. An emancipated person is a free person. Free from the bondages of old, from the roles that trapped women (and men) in non communicating boxes, free from all the submission that was expected from us. But somehow, down the line, we have translated that freedom as independency. And there we go -faster and faster- in a lonely road. So fast that we are not able anymore to accept the wish of somebody else to help us. A road that claims that we must be independent, that we can't rely in others. That would be submissive.

I wish somebody would remind us that gallantry is no submission, but interdependency.

Schizophrenia and Verdonk, Groenlinks and Kunduz.

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:55:26 +0100

To the annoyance of most of my political friends, we have to recognize that when talking about politicians and their professionalism, i.e. their capacity to do their job of communicators, the populists always run with the price. I mean, this is true almost by definition. The core strength and the original sin of our democracy is that a politician is supposed to represent. And representing is best done by populists, those that don't really care about contents or ideals, but care, understand and reproduce the opinion... of the masses.

In the past days I was thinking in one of those populists that occurred in this (second) adoptive country of mine. She is all gone from the limelights, so I guess that she wasn't that great a populist after all. Few years ago, though, most of us seriously wondered if she would be the first dutch woman to become prime minister. At least for a while, she did seemed to capture the soul of this country, with her vastly appealing attitude and her slogans. One of them was "neither right neither left, but straight through the sea". Past week, looking at the run up and run off the congress of my beloved green party, I had to think in Rita Verdonk again, and her wishes to steer a straight line, no suspicious curves whatsoever.

The thing of this bizarre slogan is not the content. After all pretty much every politician today wants to be as ideology-free as possible. The funny thing is that it reveals a profound schizophrenic nature in this nice flatlands. That slogan says that the helms-woman will not hear anybody else, will not bend, will not compromise. It was a very popular slogan. But hold it right there: am I not in a country in which politics is compromise, is extended hearings, is protracted negotiations? Am I not in a country where every citizen is proud of its "polder model" where teams talk and talk and talk... And talk once more... Up to the moment of achieving consensual solutions? Yes, that is the country were I live. How comes that straight through the sea was so appealing?

Well, it was appealing in the same way that the Kunduz debacle, enacted by my very much debating party, was appealing for the dutch media. In the running up to the last party congress, the media focused in the struggle occurring inside groenlinks, where pacifists and neo-interventionists debated and debated around Afghanistan. That is what dutchies do, actually. They argue, and argue, and argue. So the media looked with attention to our arguing. And then, once the congress happened, and as expected, a feeling of remaining disagreement floated in the air, the media almost crucified our... Great... Leader... And why? By lack of leadership, of course. Because our Jolande Sap apparently did not lead the party... straight through the sea... Never you mind that there is nothing as foreign to the dutch as a big leader.

If you ask me, we are all going nuts. Schizophrenic, to be precise. Because you can not have both, can you now? Or you have a leader that tells you where to go (which in my experience would be a very un-dutch thing to have), or you have discussions that are never really solved. Discussions that might open possibilities and development, but that definitively do not offer simple solutions. Perhaps the polder model, after all, is what has lead this country to the schizophrenia of today. Because it is possible to argue for a long time about how to stop the sea. It is possible to agree into building a dam, it is possible to create and defend that almost mythical polder. But when talking about afghanistan, and a couple of more complicated issues of today's global town, there is no silver bullet, no dam. What there is, is a diversity of potentially good solutions. If we are to embrace modernity and its diversity, we do have to embrace discussion, but we might as well forget straight leadership and easy answers. The hard questions are here to stay, and our waters are not to be fared... straight.

only for male feminists, #6

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 09:13:08 +0100

I have tried, but I can not remember myself ever telling my parents to be in love. In the first years, to my embarrassment and surprise, they knew before I knew myself. Later on they heard from others, to my embarrassment now disguised as anger at their not-so-futile attempts to be informed on my private life. Even later they just knew. I simply can't see myself telling my mother, or my father: hey, I fall in love with...

Yesterday, biking towards his guitar lesson, Ayden said "I'm in a relation".

Finally my constant biking in this flat country has paid back. I did not fall, I didn't even slip away in the patched ice. I wonder if Ayden perceived me as cool as I want him to perceive me. I hope that in any case he didn't see the maelstrom of memories, poems and novels, faces and hands, and more, that traversed my mind in few seconds. How did he get here so far? Are we really here already? Like falling asleep in a train, and wake up suddenly. Not necessarily past your stop, certainly not yet in the depot, but having lost the rhythm of the travel, being scared by the inhuman speed of a train. How did we get here so fast?

Without having mercy with the confusion of his father (or unaware, hopefully), Ayden went on asking advice on acquiring a present to the girl of his dreams (Does he dreams with her? What does he dreams?). I know that we went on biking and I believe I manage to congratulate him and to offer reasonable alternatives. After the lesson we walked together to a shop of his choice, and still in shock I financed (since I'll get the money back, by his own wish) the chosen present.

In the dynamic of these, my columns on being a feminist and stay-at-home parent, this is the moment where I flex the narrative, where the twist should appear. The situation, hopefully shared by my audience, should be placed now in the perspective of the contradictory forces of modernity. I should be able to describe how my past, the latino-macho tradition, bounces and rebounces with my present, the european pseudo-progressive and not-yet-quite-emancipated-but-working-at-it individual. As a matter of fact, when I begun writing this, I have a couple of ideas that sounded pretty ok, at least in my mind.

But to be sincere, probably as any other parent at any other age, patriarchal or matriarchal, egalitarian or authoritarian, in Asia, in America or in Africa, I am at loose for words.

My son is in love.