It is time again to deal with some short topics I have in my development folder which are not enough for a blog post by themselves. I do not want to be one of these bloggers putting out something every day, whether they have anything to write about. I write when I do have something to write about.
The big problem with online discussion is all these people trying to attract attention and make a living as bloggers. It is a very shaky way to make a living. This leads to bad writing, looking to get attention and a cult following, without any substance.
I try to create articles actually worth reading and even saving, even if they do not come out on a regular schedule or rapid clip. Occasionally I put out an ‘Odds and Ends’, which always get pretty well read. They are mostly somewhat lighter subjects.
Cutting the Bull
A lot of my articles start out as a response to a blog I read. Often they are developed from conversations I have over the net on Twitter or someone’s comment box. Recently someone referenced Bullfighting, which is a big topic for me.
I like bullfighting. I do not like the bullfighting business. La Corrida is steadily dying in Spain and Mexico because of the crooked sleazeballs who have control of it.
Tickets cost too much for ordinary people. They can’t see the matadors they really want. Fights are rigged with bulls being drugged.
I am especially offended by the way women are treated, who want to be matadors. They can’t get bookings anywhere even though everyone wants to see them. Hilda Tenorio and Mari Paz Vega are having a hard time making a living. Conchi Rios seems to have given it up.
The public in Spain still supports bullfighting but amateur bullfights are now much more popular. The are usually organized by city councils on public holidays, the proceeds going to charities. They are called Novilladas.
You have to be a professional bullfighter to fight full grown bulls over four years, and that is all controlled by the Bullfight cartel. But amateurs with some money can fight in Novilladas, including women. They fight half grown bulls.
Novilleros have to pass a course at a bull fighting school so they know how to do it without getting killed. They are not paid but there is usually prize money for the best fights. They cover their own expenses including BYOB. (Bring Your Own Bull.)
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There is a big campaign to ban bullfighting but it gets a big fight back in Spain, especially in the south. It is said that if Spain ever banned bullfighting Andalusia would secede from Spain.
What is really weird is that much of the campaign to ban bullfights seems to be funded and coordinated by a large pet food company. The participants are the more loopy types of animal rights fanatics.
If you examine the rhetoric of these people it becomes clear that their issue is not that they esteem animals, but that they hate humans. This is always the real impetus behind veganism. It has nothing to do with human health or resource conservation.
It has been noted that the animal rights advocates are the same type of arrogant people who want to appoint themselves as the spokespeople for any disadvantaged group. The advantage in animal rights for these people is that the animals will never tell them to fuck off, you do not speak for us, as human subjects often tell such people.
I could actually create an entire blog on the ethics of using animals, but not here. An animal has no rights because it cannot conceive of rights. Humans have some basic obligations to animals, which are really obligations to ourselves.
Does a chimpanzee have rights? Does a bull have rights? Does a rat have rights? Does a fish have rights? Does a mosquito? Does a bacteria?
Humans are not merely a superior animal. We do not merely do some things better than animals, we are qualitatively different from other living beings. Rights only make sense in relation to us.
I am sure I could argue this with an animal rights fanatic for the rest of eternity and get nowhere. That is the definition of a fanatic.
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But meanwhile, back at the bullring, there are other ways of being mean to poor helpless little bulls. There is something called Rejoneada, fighting the bulls on horse back. The misognynists who do not want women to fight on foot are happier with women doing this. Animal rights people are even more upset at this, because now horses is involved.
But this allows Lea Vicens and Ana Maria Barrado to make a living doing this, despite the great expense of training and maintaining a string of horses. Lea is an especially brilliant horse trainer and rejeonadora. She runs some great social media accounts, though I mysteriously have trouble staying connected with her; the shadow keeps striking.
Thank heaven for auto translate. Lea is always full of news of her bullfights, and her horses and her other pets at her ranch. She has a tame bull who lets her ride him. She also has some zippy comments about the anti bullfighting crowd.
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There is also something called Recortez, loosely translated as “cutting”. That is where the two legged participants dodge or jump over the bull. It is said that in Recortez the bull dies of old age.
As with Noveiladas, most Recortez exhibitions are in support of charities. Doing it for money is frowned on and most Recortadores are amateurs. Women seem to have an easier time participating in this. Check it out. Of course, the animal rights yingyangs do not even like this.
Bullfighting remains very popular in Spain, but is becoming decommercialized. It is thought that it will be the bullfight businessmen who wreck the Corrida, not the animal rights fanatics. The Novilladas and Recortadasare increasing in popularity.
I first got interested in the subject of women bullfighters some time back when I happened to see a very good documentary on POV on the troubles of Eva Florencia. She was an Italian girl who went to Spain to become a bullfighter, showed real talent, but finally had to give up on it.
Let the Girls Play
My bullfighting interest is part of a general interest I have in women doing athletics. This is not out of some high minded ideal or intellectual interest. I am an old guy who likes to watch strong young women do exciting things.
I have, therefore, some theory regarding women in athletic events. They have really about ten times the entertainment value. In most sports, I do not know why anyone would bother with male athletes if there was anyone else to watch.
Male athletes tend to be arrogant, overpaid dorks. But perhaps heterosexual women and homosexual men like to watch them. There is a greater supply of them.
There are still fewer good female athletes available in most sports. However, they work for less and have fewer ego problems. They would thus be more profitable to employ in commercialized sports.
I suspect a lot of the problem is that sports organizations and sports networks are usually run by men. Many of them are former professional athletes. They are afraid no one will want to watch them, or their existing business plans would be sidelined, if women got a foothold.
I have noticed that with multisport events; Olympics, Pan Am, Commonwealth games, women get more air time than men. Canadian women get more medals than the men. As well, when someone shoves a mike in their faces, they usually think of brighter things to say.
League of Their Own
This leads me to say something about the new women’s ice hockey league, the PWHL. This has been a long time coming, but seems to be what the women players in North America have wanted. It really could have happened over a decade ago.
I have written much more on this topic, HERE. Women’s hockey has been developing for decades now. The problem has been in forming a league where they can make a living playing outside the university system and international competition.
I believe the women were not really astute in getting their own league going. First, they had the idea that the NHL (National Hockey League) should build a WNHL for them. They were strung along for years by NHL.
NHL kept saying they did not want to start a women’s league while there was already one in operation. This was disingenuous; there was no way women players would dissolve what they had on an empty promise from NHL management. So a series of women’s leagues operated over the years, but kept failing.
When one league fell apart, there was a frantic effort to cobble another together, just to have someplace to play, and without thinking it through, long term. The CWHL survived for twelve years before folding abruptly in 2019. The problem was it was set up on a non profit model and could not attract investment or expand. As is often a problem with Canadian non profit organizations, it seemed to have come to be all about creating a job and income for one person.
This was further complicated when a rather sleazy individual with a “startup” mentality created an alternative league. It changed names a couple of times. It was noted for promising salaries and benefits it could not deliver, and for its degrading work conditions.
The best players disdained this league. When CWHL folded they instead created a union to organize their own exhibition games while they kept up discussions with NHL. It is sad that they seemed to have ignored a better possibility to organize a league, offered by Billie Jean King.
Early this year NHL executives tried to get the union and the startup to merge. They offended the players, who finally got over the NHL and took up the King offer. The PWHL was formed and will start playing in January next year.
The startup was bought out by PWHL and abruptly folded, leaving a lot of players in the lurch. The financial details are secret, but it seems the ‘starters up’ were paid a small sum to get lost. PWHL likely settled some unpaid bills to avoid bad optics.
So now North American hockey women have a proper league to play in, with proper pay and supports. As well, I hear news that a Canadian women’s basketball league will begin games in 2025. This also seems to be put together in a proper way.
The moral of this story seems to be that when you create new institutions in a proper way, without letting grifters and opportunists get mixed up in it, and without chasing after delusions, the right things happen.
The Latest Ukrainian Joke
Now I turn to a somewhat grimmer subject and one I have not written about for awhile. Right now everybody is focused on Gaza. The Ukraine war is still there and I need to sum up recent progress soon.
I have written about Ukrainian jokes, which were popular in Canada when I was young. A new style of Ukraine joke has been invented by the Nazi government in Kiev and its NATO backers. The latest hee-haw is that Ukraine has not lost the war, it is just ‘stalemated’.
What is really funny is the kind of people who buy into this kind of thing. They are usually ‘liberal’ types who are also usually pro Israel. I got into a brief exchange with one such people who I follow to keep up with the discussion on Basic Income.
Last year he was asking me why I could possibly think that Russia is winning the war. I almost regret asking him recently if he thought Ukraine was still winning. No, he said, it is now in a stalemate with Russia.
Talking to this person on this topic is a lot like the Monty Python skit about the Dead Parrot. He gave me a sketchy history of the war so far. Ukraine had been driving Russia back but has recently stalled.
I decided to briefly sum up the Ukraine war in reality land. Russia withdrew from Kiev after Kiev made a deal with it. As soon as the Russians drew back, Boris Johnson made the famous trip to Kiev to order them to tear up the agreement.
So, Russia waited a bit. Why, I don’t know. Then Ukraine started attacking so Russia had to reorganize its line and begin calling up troops. It built a defence line which is now five layers deep in places.
This summer, after NAO had trained and equipped some new units for it, the Ukraine command squandered it in frontal attacks on these lines, with no result. Ukraine now has no further reserves. The Russian army is now squeezing the Ukies out of several key defence points along the line.
What has been shown by this war is that we are in a historical period where the kind of military technology in use strongly favours the defence. This is according to the theory of an old British general and historian.
World war two favoured the attacker and blitzkrieg type tactics. The present time is like world war one. It is all about defence, attrition war, a counting game.
In world war one, the front barely changed for four years. Then Germany abruptly collapsed from within. This is how the Ukraine war will end.
The Ukraine war is now pretty much done. The Nazi yingyangs have used up their manpower on pointless frontal attacks. The Russians have learned how to do this kind of war.
Give Russia a few years and it will grind through the whole of NATO with little cost to themselves. The NATO countries are incapable of organizing production to supply an army in an attrition war. They cannot find troops wiling to get themselves killed over this nonsense.
My liberal fan of Nazi regimes replied to this with ‘DNRTL’. I sent a final message suggesting he take some time and read it. Also, that he take some time and broaden his information sources about international news.
The Ukraine war will likely go on for some time yet. Nothing really new is happening. I will not write any more about it until it is clearer what the end game will be.
Visiting the Old Basic Income Crowd
I had not attended a public event of any kind for almost four years. I was attending them less frequently before the pandemic. I found them increasingly less interesting.
However, I heard that some sort of tech company was sponsoring a meetup in Toronto of Basic Income advocates. It was close enough for me to get to easily. It would give me a chance to see these people in person again, and see these new people.
I had been working on a new paper on BI, so I reworked it slightly so as to address the theme of the forum; how to move forward with the Basic Income idea. I brought along a few copies of it. You can find it HERE.
My own theme is that UBI advocates need to listen to the criticisms of their idea which have been brought up in recent years. They should be seen, not as a demand to drop the idea, but an invitation to think it through a lot better. Especially, to rethink their advocacy strategy.
I do not think some of them recognized me at first, in my snazzy high quality Draeger ‘over the head’ N-95 mask. I was disappointed that so few of these people masked up. I seemed to put a lot of them off by being masked.
Alas, this says something bad about the character of these people. They are worried about what people think rather than what makes sense. They are externally directed people, rather than self thinkers.
They are not the people who can lead a movement to a better political/economic system. They are the kind of people an existing system recruits to put forward a false reform. As I said in my paper, they have probably put implementation of a UBI back by a generation.
I sat and listened to their presentations. I did not take notes and I do not remember much of what they said. So, none of it would be anything original, but a rewording of what I have heard many times before.
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I thought of how to ask them a question. My credibility was damaged when the chair collapsed under me. I had the usual dilemma of a fat person needing to get up; waving off all the idiots trying to ‘help’ me to get up so that I could actually get up.
Useful tip; if you have taken a fall, you never, ever, want someone pulling you up. If a person really cannot get up under their own power, they need an ambulance and a stretcher. This event showed how few people have been taught first aid.
The house provided me a much sturdier chair. I got to pop a question; what effect would a UBI have on employment? This seemingly tame question revealed much.
It generated a considerable debate between my old acquaintance Evelyn Forget and this Floyd Morinescu character. I liked Floyd even less in person than in his writing. His idea is that unemployment is a great thing.
Evelyn thought that employment is good for people. She thought that a good Basic Income would make it easier for people to find good jobs. This is closer to my own thinking and I was pleased that she clearly won the debate.
There was a little reception after all this. The problem with these is that whoever I would really like to talk to, everyone else also wants to talk to. I soon got tired of everyone cringing away from the weirdo with the mask, who reminded them of what they want to pretend is over.
Plus I could not partake in the nibblies. So I folded a few samples up in a napkin to nibble as I walked home through the pleasant autumn evening.