State of the Discussion

In French, it's compulsory to use an article in that sort of construction - "non à la guerre". cf. "vive la France". I guess that Spanish is similar.

I would have changed "four words" to "three words" in the translation.

What caught my eye was the obvious inconsistency of referring to a three-word phrase as four words. 

I read that and just assumed that the phrase in Spanish had four words. That kind of difference between languages being not at unusual.

See, in German (because you studied that), "von dem" ("from the") being rendered as "vom" -- two English words becoming one in German. Differences between English and Japanese can be even larger, as I'm sure lj can attest.

Just idle curiosity, but I wondered what did the translation:

In short, the position of the Government of Spain can be summed up in four words: no to war.

What caught my eye was the obvious inconsistency of referring to a three-word phrase as four words. Dumping the statement into different tools produced either "no to war" or "no to the war". In English there's a subtle difference in the meaning of those. I don't speak Spanish, so don't know if there's the same article vs no article thing (and the original has an article).

And completely off topic, the one thing I regret about my education choices over the years is spending four semesters on German in college. Four of Spanish would have been much more valuable for me, in practice. Unfortunately, at that time and place and my majors, the College would only let me count German or Russian.

there is a tendency in the West to assume that soft=weak.

Something that anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Aikido would know is nonsense.

You can see that in the current administration, where the whole idea of soft power is considered an oxymoron, so much so that they have gone to eliminate any agency that might engage in it.

That's of a piece with their seeing everything as transactional. If you treat every interaction as unrelated to every other, then you have no allies. Merely temporary and expedient cases of aligned goals. If you have no allies, then soft power is meaningless, whether it is an oxymoron or not.

That elision is reveals a bit more about the Spanish politics involved.

La ciudadanía española siempre repudió la dictadura de Sadam Hussein en Irak, pero no por ello apoyó la guerra de Irak, porque era ilegal, porque era injusta y porque no supuso una resolución real a casi ninguno de los problemas que pretendió resolver.

Del mismo modo, nosotros repudiamos al régimen de Irán que reprime, que mata vilmente a sus ciudadanos, particularmente a las mujeres.

There is a little back story to the Iraq part, Spain was part of the coalition of the willing in 2003 and the PM, Aznar, a conservative and a staunch ally of Bush, but there were train bombings in Madrid that the ruling party first blamed on ETA, but was later revealed to be a home-grown Islamist cell, something that seemed to be suppressed by the government because they knew it would f-up support for the deployment. (that summary doesn't really do justice to all of the ins and outs)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings

Aznar was kicked out for Zapatero, the socialist candidate, who had campaigned against the deployment and withdrew Spanish troops when he got in office.

GftNC - I don't think that the author was trying to assign some sort of essential caring nature to women. I saw her as arguing that the men around her were attacking Butcher's accomplishments by saying that she was being too "soft," where soft is the devalued side of the binary under patriarchy, and thus belonged to women and other varieties of deficient people (children, mama's boys, homosexuals, etc.). They hated her because her success undermined their paradigm of how to be a winner as a man.

And that patriarchal paradigm (as youknow) is still very much with us. It's why work associated with emotional labor (nursing, teaching, child care, human resources) is still coded as female and is still assigned less economic value.

But in Butcher's case at least, the recipe for how to be a successful musher did change to reflect the importance of caring in creating a good dogsled team, and male mushers had to look to other aspects of their sport if they wanted to use it as a way to assert their masculinity.

I feel like I should mention Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing here as well, since this is an excellent example of the sort of "negging" she was illustrating in that book... "Yes, she won, but she was too easy on her dogs and the dogs would have won by more if they were being mushed by a man."

I might be misunderstanding, but I kind of feel that the strength and excellence of _all_ people should necessarily be grounded in their caring and empathy and the challenge is to extend that to men rather than giving women an 'out' for not exhibiting those traits.

While I understand that we have to think about neurodiversity and understand that people have different brain chemistries and such, I feel like I'm dealing with some people who put out a self diagnosis as an excuse for not being empathetic. I find this happening with a few Westerners that I interact with here in Japan, so I don't know if they are picking up signals here of a system that is being imperfectly adopted here, or if this represents something in the system.

I realize that this creates the classical double bind that women and minorities always have to deal with, but I don't think the solution is to have people in those categories behave without caring and empathy, but to make sure that caring and empathy be something that is more or less required of all people.

I notice Lindsey Halligan is already under investigation by the Florida Bar….

Oops! In today's NYT (it's not worth a gift link - it's early in the month and I only get 10):

Florida Bar Retreats From Statement Saying Lindsey Halligan Was Under ScrutinyThe Florida bar said that it had “erroneously” made that assertion, disclosed in a letter last month, and that no investigation into Ms. Halligan was pending. The Florida Bar, which examines attorney conduct in the state, retreated on Friday from its earlier assertion that it was investigating Lindsey Halligan, a former U.S. attorney in Virginia who brought politically charged cases against some of President Trump’s foes.
The bar, in a letter dated Feb. 4, told a nonprofit organization called Campaign for Accountability that it had opened an investigation after the group filed complaints about Ms. Halligan related to her work as a federal prosecutor.
The letter said: “We are aware of these developments and have been monitoring them closely. We already have an investigation pending.”
The New York Times and other news organizations reported on the letter, and the Florida Bar told outlets like CBS News that “it does not provide comment on active cases.”
But on Friday, a spokeswoman for the bar, Jennifer Krell Davis, said that in writing the letter, her organization had “erroneously” stated “that there is a pending bar investigation” of Ms. Halligan.
“There is no such pending bar investigation,” Ms. Davis said in a statement, adding that her organization had received a complaint against Ms. Halligan, and “consistent with standard practice, the bar is monitoring the ongoing legal proceedings underlying the complaint.”
After Ms. Davis’s statement was sent, Ms. Halligan texted a New York Times reporter, stating that the article published in the outlet a day earlier was erroneous. She added that the bar had clarified that no investigation was pending.
Ms. Davis declined to comment further when asked why the bar had taken a day to determine that the statement was erroneous, what led to the determination and whether she had been contacted by Trump administration officials.
After the letter was disclosed on Thursday, Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, responded on social media, saying, “It’s time to end partisan law-fare and re-evaluate the need for a unified Florida Bar.”
And on Friday, responding to the bar’s backpedaling, Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on X that the “‘investigation’ of Lindsey Halligan is totally fake news.”
“Lindsey not only did nothing wrong — she did a great job!" Ms. Bondi wrote.
The question of ethics investigations into Trump administration lawyers drew attention earlier this week when the Justice Department issued a proposal saying it would seek to pre-empt state bar investigations into ethics complaints against department lawyers.
Some lawyers considered that action a veiled threat to usurp the authority of state courts and bar disciplinary bodies to police the conduct of lawyers.
Campaign for Accountability had filed complaints in Florida and Virginia against Ms. Halligan over her work as an interim U.S. attorney last fall. While in office, she convinced grand juries to indict the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.
Both indictments were later thrown out by a judge who found that Ms. Halligan’s appointment was unlawful. Other federal judges raised questions about statements Ms. Halligan made to grand jurors, and questioned her signing of court documents as U.S. attorney even after a judge had ruled her appointment invalid.
The executive director of Campaign for Accountability, Michelle Kuppersmith, said on Friday that she had not heard directly from the Florida Bar, but questioned its latest remarks.
“It’s hard to reconcile this latest statement with the bar counsel’s previous letter saying there is an investigation pending,” she said. “If there is no longer an investigation into Halligan, the question is why not, given that three judges indicated she engaged in conduct that appears to violate ethics rules.”

“You can’t just stop funding the Pentagon!”, I hear you cry? Fine. Just don’t pretend you’re serious about opposing the Trump Regime.

Fine. Just figure out a way to do it without hanging the troops out to dry. They don't deserve collective punishment here, and a lot of them are paycheck to paycheck.

The deMAGAfication of the US government needs to be the sole priority of the Democratic Party as soon as it regains any sort of power. In particular, if Democrats take the House, they must refuse ANY funding for the "Department of War" until the Department of Homeland Security is abolished and its agencies returned to their original departments. Except ICE: abolish it and replace it with a new, MAGAt-free organization.

"You can't just stop funding the Pentagon!", I hear you cry? Fine. Just don't pretend you're serious about opposing the Trump Regime.

--TP

Admittedly it seems to be standard corruption for this administration. And so, easy to overlook (not in the "accept".sense). But I try to resist letting that become so normalized that it doesn't merit mention.

This piece from High Country News nails a lot of the gender dynamics floating beneath the surface in the Lebrecht/Wang exchanges:

https://www.hcn.org/issues/58-3/a-champion-iditarod-musher-proved-that-caring-and-trust-win-races/

Not that Wang and Ididtarod champion Susan Butcher have similar ethoi - far from it - but rather that both get met with the same sort of dismissive criticism because they excel in ways that defy the expectations of how a woman of extraordinary skill and accomplishment should act within a conservative, patriarchal field of human endeavor.

As our part of the planet turns toward the sun this year, I remember the shy Laureli who didn’t get Susan Butcher’s autograph. Who heard people speak poorly of a woman who knew what she was doing and was doing it well. This spring, I think that if Susan Butcher could change the way thousands of dogs are treated leading up to and during a 1,000-mile race across Alaska, maybe we can spur change through our work and actions, too. Through care and our own feminine instincts, even if some people call us witches. 

When I heard they (she?) awarded a nine-figure contract to an 8-day-old company, a big thought bubble with a question mark showed up above my head. It's not funny enough to be an Onion article, but it is ridiculous enough.

WHo is going to investigate, bring charges?

Well given that Trump has axed her (no matter the temporary face-saving position), there's obviously no problem for FBI folks to investigate, and the AG to bring charges. In short, she's lost the royal favor, so she's fair game.

Besides which, think how effective the brouhaha would be in keeping Epstein off the front page. Don't have to say more than that to get Trump on board.

More details from Bodnar's wikipedia page

On January 14, 2026, it was reported that former United States senator Jon Tester had successfully convinced Bodnar to run as an independent candidate for Montana's Class 1 Senate seat, facing off against Republican incumbent Steve Daines in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.[14] The news broke after a text message, allegedly sent by Tester to a confidant, was leaked to the Missoulian in which Tester criticized the Democratic Party, calling it "a poison in his attempts to get re-elected". The sender of the text message, purported to be Tester, further argued that Bodnar would have a stronger chance at defeating Daines running as a political independent than Democratic state legislator Reilly Neill, who was the then-frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.[15]

According to the NYT:

By waiting until the very last moment to withdraw, Mr. Daines essentially cleared the field for his chosen successor by denying others the chance to file to be on the ballot.

Don't know how well that will fly. Seems that all of his successor's opponents are going to run against the idea of a hand-picked successor who has not had to face any opposition. I know a few people who got really upset when Harris got the nod without having gone through a primary, and in that case it wasn't even her fault or Biden's intention to put her in that position.

Hopefully the Democratic candidate is someone who can exploit this opportunity.

Daines, the incumbent US Senator up for reelection this year [in Montana] withdrew from the Republican primary today.

I saw a bare mention of that, but no details. Any idea why?

I know it says Texas, but in Montana... Daines, the incumbent US Senator up for reelection this year withdrew from the Republican primary today. The US Attorney for Montana filed for the Republican Senate primary at the last minute. Sheehy, the other Republican US Senator from Montana reportedly broke the hand of a uniformed Marine veteran as the vet was removed from a committee hearing room this afternoon.

This may be a rare instance in history where a greater percentage of the people in a country being bombed are pro bombing than the people in the country doing the bombing.