1. R.I.P. Nuance and Critical Thought. These are the first casualties of populism and now it is all there is. As a former professor of Latin American Studies I was going to write something objective about Cuba but you know what? Fuck that.
2. All the educational and critical threads I wrote, with links to the pdf files of original documents, reports and books... *major* waste of my time. It was all I could do. I'm still an immigrant and as such, my activism in the USA has limits.
3. With today's funeral of Nuance and Critical Thought, I will refrain from this line of "action" because, in the end, it was no action at all. Hundreds of hours thrown down the toilet, like our work destroyed by Bolsonaro's fascist mob.
4. To those my age feeling defeated, what I can say is that all the well funded and methodologically sound studies (and if you are reading this, you know I shared them a dozen times and all you have to do is ask) show long term political trends.
5. One of them is a slow but constant rejection of democracy by large segments of society. The second is a rise of populist politics (which makes sense with the masses shifting even more than usual away from any public conversation) and the promotion of charismatic leaders.
6. These charismatic leaders are groomed institutionally to play the role of galvanizing the masses against the organized institutional democratic system. With the pendulum going from a clearly fascist rhetoric to a ..
7. ... pseudo-left/revolutionary one, the result is a negative feedback loop on democratic institutions trust and respect.
8. The long-term effect is the establishment, mostly by electoral paths, of authoritarian regimes superimposed over the now dysfunctional democratic institutions. This process makes the undoing of democracy opaque to the masses.
9. In time, there will be real #resistance organization, clandestine, engaged in grassroots activism at extreme life risk for years. Once, this lead to eventual democratic recovery. Now... I'm not sure we have time given the environmental disaster.
10. Wait... did I say "we"? No: you. I'll be long dead by then. I got tired of the endless "where did we get it wrong" rabbit hole. I really apologize to my daughter and to the children who don't have a clue about all this.
11. That said, so long and thanks for all the fish.
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