An overview of world and spanish affairs: Introduction

 Writing this blog has, in the past, been a way in which, by expressing my opinions, I took the opportunity of organizing my thoughts and to express arguments to support my ideas. This is time-consuming and, given the few number of readers, I decided to stop doing that for a long time. Now I am coming back to it in a time of huge trouble due to existing wars which menace the future of mankind. We are also experiencing the first symptoms of climate change in the form of extreme phenomena which break records of all kinds all around the world. Now I am retired, although still having lots of scientific collaborations with many people and taking a lot of my time. Nonetheless, perhaps it is worthwhile to take part of my time to express my thoughts and put them on (digital) paper. I will try to do that in a collection of writings of which this particular one acts as a preamble. I think that unfortunately most of the things that can be read about world affairs are an oversimplified version and flooded by intentional propaganda which tend to support one or other view and convince the reader of whatever they want to convey. Oversimplified pictures are easy to take away from these readings. Arguments  seem compelling but hide a part of the reality that might generate doubts in the reader. Very often this, quite understandably, creates suspicions in the readers that tend to disregard everything they read as intentional and are the perfect ground for people accepting crazy conspiracy theories and fake news. Distinguishing truth from propaganda or simple lies seems harder that ever, despite the higher than ever capacity of accesing to information from multiple sources. Newspapers are often  deeply  constrained, since the standard is that people go to sources where they can  read things that reinforce their already formed views. Thus, there are left and right oriented newspapers wireless and television sources. People ONLY read or watch the sources corresponding to their own political orientation and that reinforces their previous views.  This also puts the media under pressure if some of the journalists offers something that looks like "outside expectations". I've read comments by readers menacing with discontinuing their subscriptions when reading something that did not suit their taste. 

I am afraid that my views do not go in line with any of the big options fully and I  see a lot of grey areas contrasting with the black and white picture frequently advocated by others. Hence, I will not be surprised if some reader does not agree with any of my ideas. I will even be surprised if that does not happen to all readers in one way or another. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that my perspective and political orientation is rather on the left. For me the left does not imply  compliance to a given paradigm of what should be done. It is clear from my previous words that this hardly happens in my case. The left-political orientation in my case means that I care for the well-being of everybody and specially those that are poor or marginated by society. Economy is important, but total wealth is only an indicator and does not show that every member of the society is in a good situation. Wealth should be shared and everybody should be guaranteed a minimal standard of living which includes healthy food, housing, medical assistance and also access to leisure. This does not imply  in my case that everybody should have the same level of income or the same number of square meters in their houses. Differences are possible provided a threshold of decent resources is provided for all. Apart from economical resources, my hypothetical utopical society should provide the freedom for everyone to have the beliefs that they want to have and to express them openly and also to carry on the initiatives that they want to have with only ONE big limit: All these thoughts and acts  should not conflict with the capacity of others of doing just the same thing. Obviously there should be rules and methods to enforce this. This is provided by the LAW, a necessary ingredient in all societies. The laws, however, should reflect the views of the VAST  majority of the population and never conflict with the basic rights that I expressed previously. In some sense the set of basic rights have already been expressed in the list of human rights and I am not pretending to be original on that. Unfortunately, these rights do not hold in many places and even in rich societies there are people that do not have a proper house and the resources to provide healthy food for them and their families. Hence, there is a long way to go, and my views on what is positive or negative for the society have a lot to do with whether we are approaching or not to this ideal. In summary, given this very general background,  I aim that my opinions are consistent with this explicitly stated goal.