Dawn

Dawn

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

When you look at [ultra]modern Spain, it’s hard to believe that only 40 years ago it was considered to be part of the developing world. Yet the truth is the country paid a very high price for the stultification of the Franco years, when it was effectively closed even to the rest of Europe, never mind the world. One of the lingering consequences of this is that certain concepts have yet to take root in the minds of the Spanish people. These include:-

High reward equals high risk: To be sure, there are plenty of other people elsewhere who haven’t yet got the connection; but the recent stamp fraud here suggests there’s a higher degree of gullibility here than in other countries at a similar stage of economic development.

There is a quantitative difference between high probability plus low consequence - on the one hand - and low probability plus high consequence, on the other: This lack of perception – which may well explain the Spanish attitude towards risk - was well in evidence this week when I saw a woman driving with one hand on the mobile phone at her ear and the other on top of the gear stick, while her kids bounced around in the back seat.

When an agent works for one party and tries to work for the opposing party, there is a conflict of interest: It’s an major irony that in Spain – where fraud may well be statistically more prevalent than elsewhere in Europe – agents will tell you they can be trusted when they are being paid by the party to whom you are ‘opposed’. It’s an even greater irony that they actually believe what they are saying and expect you to. And then get offended when you tell them that, whilst this may very well be true, you are not going to go forward on this basis.

The Basque Country ….. In response to the nice post from Katie A., I would say that I wish the Basque people well with whatever aspirations they have, merely provided they accept current realities and do things democratically. I certainly can’t pretend to have anything like a full understanding of the situation there but sometimes wonder if, like the Scots, they would be less interested in full independence if someone else were subsidising them and not the other way round.

As for Alexsu . . . well, my friends in MI5 and the CIA tell me he’s a 37 year old, unmarried member of the Basque Diaspora, having been raised in Mexico and educated in Peoria, USA. He has a blog in which, while telling the rest of us we are too stupid to understand the complexities of the Basque situation in Spain and France, he presumes to draw conclusions about developments in that so-much-easier-to-understand place, the Balkans. If it weren’t so pathetic, it would be funny. Ya está. It’s too easy and it’s not going to change his hermetically-sealed mind.

PS. Hits to my blog have been a record 190 so far today. Perhaps I should keep on upsetting Basques. Whilst I am still alive….

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