Welcome to Korallen Debates!!

You already know what Korallen is and what to debate is, even if Korallen is not what it should be and even when we are not usually able to debate peacefully... Before explaining better what Korallen Debates is, we will tell you something more important: reasons to join Korallen Debates. We want you to write the reasons you would add!

- To meet international students and do something new in that decadent place
- To politize the ambience and our lives a little or, who knows, to depolitize them even more if you wanna argue about it and you success convincing the others that politics is shit
- To learn to debate debating. After some days ending up in pitched battles, maybe we will learn that it is not the way
- To drink, smoke and talk as always, but not alone
- To put on the table the question of Korallen legal haven on tobacco laws: Do you hate smoke in Korallen common spaces? Have your say and restore the original meaning of "free-smoking area" which has been turned over to "free to smoke wherever I want". You can try to democratically remove smoking from this meeting places.
- To train and improve your english: writing in the blog, and speaking and listening in the meetings at Korallen. This is just one more chance to bleed those who speak English well, learning from them for free and with no effort while they waste their time and harm their ears trying to understand us.
- To spread your word and show the others you are right, or maybe, to discover new truths and to be ideologized in the other's sectarian thinkings.

Korallen Debates is just the idea of meeting and discussing in one of the common spaces of Korallen dormitory. At first it has been thought as a place for political debate around our ideas, about articles we want to comment, about a discussion you started with a friend and you want to put in common... but the space is opened to any kind of topics. The question is to feel free to give your opinion, and to think that whatever you could say can be interesting for the other and can lead to interesting conversations. Korallen Debates would be, firstly, a periodical meeting in Korallen where anybody interested will bring his/her ideas to start debating. On the other hand, Korallen Debates is also this blog, a 24 hours opened space for non-stop debates. We suggest you to write here whatever you want, to show links to articles, videos...

Every kind of ideas and initiatives are welcome and can have here the place to be pinned up and elaborated. For example... do you want to show us a great movie or documentary you have watched?? Try to ask in the campus if we can be allowed to arrange a cinema forum to watch it in the big screens with computer and projector. If you succeed, chose a day and advertise it here and with the mailing list!!

See you soon. A date for the first K. Debates will be published soon!!! Don't miss it.

Globalization

I will break the ice with a little comment on one of the debates i'm most interested on. That about globalization. What is this? Is it good or bad? God or the devil?

One of the existing views which has elaborated a critical conception of what globalization is, has been the so-called "anti-globalization" movement. It is really and ambiguous and equivocal concept; it could be curious to know which idea comes to the mind of each of us when we read or heard this word. Anti-Globalization. How is your first thinking? Is it good, or bad?

A logically linked and interesting question could be: where does our idea of what anti-globalization is come from? (shit, for sure i wrote this question in a horrible English!! how would you say that?? SOS) You could notice easily to what extent our meanings of "anti-globalization" are meanly filled by the mass media. For most of us it is not common to hear our relatives or friends talking about the "anti-globalization" movement, and too often we haven´t read nothing or not too much about it in different sources than the conventional channels or newspapers. To sum up, for most of us "anti-globalization" is just a small and blurred piece of reality drawn by these very little pluralistic corporations (the media). Whose interests, it is to say, are far away from a commitment with transparency and objectivity. The problematic question is that this movement, often presented as a radical and even violent left-wing group of people, is something quite different from this: a very eclectic and plural conglomerate of ideas, denunciations and demands coming from a huge amount of people from all over the world. Movilised, making democracy, they are shouting that our hitherto unheard-of rich, technologic, and forward-looking world cannot continue fomenting mass poverty, hate, war, environmetal degradation or women oppresion.

It can be stated that there is a high degree of utopic thinking in the idea of removing all this huge problems from our world. Utopism can be a strenght as an a ideal to be pursued, or a hindrance, if it impedes us to look to the ground we are walking on. On the other hand, they denounce that we are witnessing an inexcusable stagnation or even the deterioration of these undesirable dynamics. Thus there would be a great scope for action in order to reach crucial changes: "Another world is possible", it is said. Of course, another necessary question would be: How?

The term "anti-globalization" fits with a biased representation of this questions which discredits the whole "movement of movements", lying to the citizenry and distorting the public opinion. A better idea is given by the more correct term of "alter-globalisation". It has two main advantages. Firstly, it widens the meaning of "globalization": it is not a question of globalization or not globalization (in favour or against, as often presented), but a question of which kind of globalization. Secondly, it covers a wider range of groups of people and ideas which have hope in the possibility of a better world. Ecologists, feminists, NGO's and thousands of many kinds of popular associations around the world with one thing in common: this hope and their effort to find a better world.

A few days ago in Brussels I was having a walk and I saw some papers advertising a demonstration with the occasion of a Global Day of Action, the 26th of January. I saw it too late to take part, it had already finished. I enter in the webpage of the World Social Forum 2008 (more info here) and I find a map which shows some of the coordinated actions which were happening this lasts weeks around the whole planet. It is something absolutely exceptional in the history, not a group of brainless saying stupid things. It is much more. But what? What is going on? Why are they protesting? what are they demanding? I think we should, at least, take a chance to know it better.

"From the Zapatist uprising in 1995 and the Seattle demonstrations in 1999, a worldwide alliance of movements against neo-liberal globalisation, war, patriarchy, racism, colonialism and environmental disasters appeared." (WSF2008.net). The World Social Forum meets in January, coinciding with and protesting against the World Economic Forum which usually takes place in Davos. In this second one, the most powerfull governments and private groups meet to "talk about their issues", issues which are the concern of everybody but are not solve democratically at all. Thousands of people are having their say on that. What about you?