Martes, 05/11/2019 – 21:59
The man who picked up his Princess of Girona award with a yellow bow on his lapel is a contrast that betrays the art of independence propaganda as effectively as Scott’s test dyed cocaine blue
Pay attention to this man. He is more than a man and more than a scientist. It is a living metaphor of Catalan entanglement. It is a contrast that betrays the art of pro-independentist propaganda as effectively as Scott’s test dyed cocaine blue.
The metaphor man is called Xavier Ros-Oton. He is from Barcelona, he is 31 years old and a mathematician. He has just received the Princess of Girona award for his work with complex equations that describe the evolution of one’s bedroom temperature as well as that of a high-risk investment derivative. This Monday, in Barcelona, he picked up the distinction from the hands of Princess Leonor, greeted the kings Felipe and Letizia, and cashed the check with the economic endowment of the award. All this he did with a yellow tie on the flap of the jacket.
How is it possible? And they didn’t stop him, prosecute and condemn him? Isn’t Spanish an authoritarian regime, a repressive dictatorship, a colonial tyranny? Is not Catalonia a subjugated, oppressed and pillaged country, stripped of rights and freedoms? Why did nobody stop the mathematician from expressing naturally to King Philip his rejection of the ‘procés’ sentence? Why did he not immediately withdraw greetings, smiles, honors and stipends? Thats weird.
Religion disputes
When political conflicts degenerate into religious disputes, when faith imposes itself on reason and clouds judgment, societies surrender to the abyss. It is not an exclusive Catalan or Spanish. The English writer Jonathan Coe, interviewed by Ramón Vendrell in EL PERIÓDICO, talks about ‘brexit’ and his words rhyme with the ‘procés’: “There are people who say that the day we leave the EU will finally wake up free. I ask : ‘Have you been living with the feeling of being oppressed by the EU for 40 years, as if you were a citizen of an African country under the colonialist yoke?’ (…) Austerity has led to underfunding health, to restricting rights … For certain politicians, ‘brexit’ is a fantastic solution so that people don’t get angry at those really serious problems. “
Let the metaphor-man put the final point. “Calculating is boring. The beauty of mathematics is reasoning,” Ros-Oton trusts Michele Catanzaro in an interview in this newspaper.
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