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Michael Dansbury's avatar

Paddington Bear Nationalism for the Spaniards: "the Blitz spirit". It was like this after the race riots in Britain last summer when a whole load of idiots went and tidied up the mosques. The Guardian produced a cartoon of hooded riot policeman standing in front of foreign temples reciting Churchill's 'Never Surrender' speech. The idea that nationwide race riots shouldn't be happening at all, and that we're resembling more and more a third world souk passed notice.

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MA's avatar
May 1Edited

An interesting piece. The whole thing brought to mind the ongoing issues with the collapse of the electrical infrastructure in South Africa. Load shedding has been ongoing since 2007, and yet the only major incidents of protests that I am aware of were in 2023. Failure has become normalised and people have adjusted to it. With this in mind, it is sadly not surprising to hear about the acceptance of dysfunction in Spain. It is why I am somewhat saddened to think that even if there was widespread power failure in the UK in the depths of winter, the public would likely accept it to some extent.

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Carlos Collarte's avatar

Really good piece, guys.

On day 1 after the blackout apart from the resilience images, the focus of the media and the society went away from everything that happened behind all that: people died, business lost their inventory, people couldn’t go back home, people got trapped in the middle of nowhere, etc.

In twitter Spain and, as a consequence, in the real world, there is a part of the population that is unable to understand that there is an existence apart from their own and their tiny little worlds that just cover a few blocks and a limited knowledge of anything outside of it. Little by little communities are dying and with it goes the capacity of turning the moral decline that comes alongside the economic one.

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Reckoning's avatar

There was a big blackout in North America in August 2003. Luckily the weather was nice so it was something of a party atmosphere. Lots of barbecues and people chatting with strangers. I wandered down to my local parish and there was a one year memorial Mass for a Portuguese lady. The family was nice enough to welcome strangers and offered plenty of delicious food. It wouldn’t have been nearly so nice in the winter, or if it had lasted much more than a day or two.

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jesse porter's avatar

True wisdom looks far down range to what the shortsighted are blind to.

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Federico Sorel's avatar

Observing how common the 'main character syndrome' is among Spaniards was one thousand times more blackpilling than the masses' sheepishness.

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Jon Marr's avatar

Incompetence sounds unlikely to me in a modern developed grid system, they are monitored real time per second I am told. Perhaps a softening up, like a body blow in boxing, to see how the masses will respond to mass control through energy withdrawal.

It seems to me that COVID was a dry run to ascertain if pretty much the entire world could be put under house arrest, without political due process. It turned out that they could, with almost no resistance; each person walking willingly into their allocated cage. So perhaps, this is the thin end of the new 'normal'. Or, perhaps it's time to wake up.

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