it's their fault!

let's all polarize
let's pry the wound open
let's spread the plague
let's swell the abscess

with hasty judgments
simplify the chaotic
binarize the multiple
manicheanize the binary

let's sniff out enemies
dig deeper trenches
shoot at each other
insults, then bombs

let's plant in the peace
furrowed by war
the seed of a war
for us bored with peace

then as we die
weapon in hand
let's raise our arm
pointing the finger

and with the last breath
that snuffs out the heart
let's scream it out loud:
it's their fucking fault!

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

A couple of hours

In a couple of hours,
or maybe less,
a gray desolation
became a rainbow.

Understanding without enlisting

Let's run an experiment: for a week, let's jot down the topics people talk about around us, at the bar, in the town square, at the office. Gaza and Tel Aviv, Kyiv and Moscow, Tehran and Washington, whatever general is in the news. They've read three headlines and already handed down a verdict. Then let's notice how often people talk about the condo's boiler, the city budget, the waiting list for an MRI. Faraway wars matter, sure, but we have no way of checking them firsthand and no leverage over them — and meanwhile, plenty is going on right here at home.

The mechanism pays off: it generates attention, clicks, viewers, and votes. Politicians and the media chase whatever pays, and debate over a faraway conflict — easy to oversimplify, hard to verify — pays. I call it Sinister design, because the diversion works and the effect is dark.

Look, I'm not saying we should only worry about what's on our own doorstep. There are structural problems we can check for ourselves, and politicians have to answer for them. Artificial intelligence and robotics, for example: we all use them, and we can already feel their impact on society. And then there's the future of the job market, of pensions and wages. There are no sides to root for here, just issues to be managed. If we sweep them under the rug because they don't lend themselves to polarization, sooner rather than later we'll find ourselves facing an emergency, with decisions already made by others.

So before we raise our voices about a topic, let's ask ourselves three questions.
Are we giving credit to a claim whose validity we can verify directly, without relying on secondhand sources? If the answer is no, we have to suspend judgment.
Are we trying to pick out the good guys and the bad guys inside a tangle? Two-line explanations reassure us more than they hold up, whereas accepting chaos is exhausting but keeps us from falling victim to obsessions, dystopias, and assorted spin doctors.
Does this news inform us or stir us up? If it leaves us outraged, moved, or ready to pick a fight, it may be recruiting us instead of helping us understand: it's emotional (dis)information. And that goes for mainstream and anti-mainstream alike.

But then why always and only the same sides? There are plenty more in the world. That certain crises touch us more than others — for reasons of history, energy, alliances, or borders — may well be true: the subject matter concerns us. That this entitles us to root for Palestinians or Israelis, Russians or Ukrainians, Iranians or Americans, no. Justice and rights don't have a passport. Other wars and other minorities stay out of the main event, and not because they're a second-rate matter, simply because they draw a smaller audience. That isn't justice, or defending rights: it's self-interested selection. Learning more about certain crises — as subject matter that touches us — makes sense. Picking a side doesn't.

Here's my advice. If an issue fails the three tests above, let's not give in to cynical indifference, but let's not swallow partisan propaganda either. Understanding the subject is fair game; rooting for a side isn't. As for the time to choose and act, let's spend that on what we can verify.

I'm writing a saga about this, Sinister design. Start from the first installment or filter them all by label, then make up your own mind: don't let yourself be influenced, not even by me.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

The cheap excuse of age

City life is tailor-made for the young, especially after a certain hour. And that's as it should be. That's the tendency, not a hard rule.
Here's the problem I see: people of a certain age read this tendency as a ban, a prohibition on taking part in the city's social life, especially the nightlife.

This holds true even for those who, while no longer young, aren't exactly old either, and who still have a real emotional and psychological need — and the human right — to enjoy social activities of every kind. Not just the usual four couples of friends in the living room or down in the basement rec room. I mean really throwing yourself into the fray, among strangers, music, colors.

To justify themselves, they invent excuses, fooling themselves more than whoever's listening: I'm old, I'm tired, I'm not into the music, I can't handle alcohol anymore. And yet they risk a heart attack running or cycling in the hills on Sunday morning, polish off bottles of wine and whisky alone, and sink into drunken, melancholy thoughts in front of the fireplace, listening to Albano, Ricchi e Poveri, and Pooh, blubbering out of despair more than emotion.

I don't give a damn. I know the city is made for the young. But by law, IDs get checked to keep minors from drinking, not to ship fifty-year-olds home. If it isn't forbidden, I claim my right to take part. Not always, but not too rarely either. Mind you, I don't sneak into college parties like I did thirty years ago. I pick places, venues, and occasions, and if they pass the test, I jump in.

At times it feels like everything and everyone is telling you to go back home, you pathetic old shit. It's a feeling: it's our damned, dysfunctional, misplaced sense of inadequacy talking. Just shut it up. And if someone really does look at you that way: walk on by, he's the asshole.

Hang in there, don't give up. Sometimes, at some point, something happens, a small thing maybe, but one that hadn't happened in a long time. Then you realize that the kid you used to be, you still are to this day. When you get home you find yourself elated: "So it can still happen!" In front of the fireplace you pop open a cold beer, the last one, the umpteenth. You crank up Moby or Daft Punk. And what's slightly salting your beer are tears of joy.

Like I said, I don't give a damn, and I keep at it. If no place inspires me, worst case I take a nice long walk: Italian cities at night, without bewildered tourists or busy residents, are even more beautiful. I'll stay home when my brain or body has turned to mush. When I no longer need a cheap excuse to stay stuck in bed or in an armchair.

P.S. In Bangkok, it has to be said, it's easier than in Padova.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

The solution to idiosyncrasy

What works best for me at work rests mainly on three attributes: autonomy, asynchrony, and atopia. The "three A's." That is: independence from the system, from simultaneity, and from location.
That doesn't mean working with other people, sharing the same place, or talking in real time is ruled out. It means doing so only when it's constructive, natural, logical. Not out of habit, convention, or regulation.

There will surely be exceptions, especially in smaller companies, but as a rule, business organizations of a certain size and complexity come with social dynamics that I find extremely toxic.
What weighs on me most about those environments is the feeling of being forced to repress certain impulses — natural and normal anywhere else — in order to conform to a setting that, for the sake of coexistence, convenience, and connivance, turns artificial, synthetic, and fake. A stage on which people have to hide the traits that make them unique, slipping into a character uniform that constrains and flattens the spirit more than the tailored suit they wear does the body.

I can't take this double personality, demanded almost by contract, lightly. There's a primal, irrepressible force inside me that screams to warn me that all of this is wrong, that I am normal in my uniqueness, that there's nothing wrong with expressing it, that, on the contrary, smothering it is wrong and can even tip into something pathological.

Though I'm neither antisocial nor a misanthrope, I'm certainly well equipped to exist (and resist) for a long time in a solitary, self-sufficient way. And even to benefit from it. That's why the "three A's" way of working is the best fix for my idiosyncrasy toward structured professional organizations.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

On the edge of the cliff

Sometimes I feel like I'm teetering on the edge of a cliff. Beyond the edge lies the dark abyss of absolute despondency.
For years I believed — and only now do I realize the incredible, optimistic naïveté that drove me — that people, even when they make mistakes, were still able to correct their course, whether through their own analysis or with someone else's guidance.

I have to resign myself. An enormous part of the population — Italian for sure, but probably not only Italian — and perhaps even the majority of it, even though every day in their private lives they're forced to wade through the muddy swamp of a reality that is plainly, unmistakably and undeniably complex, the moment they move up a level — to political, social or even scientific questions — terrified by perspectives that necessarily involve accepting chaos, uncertainty and sometimes even chance, they cover their ears, shut their eyes, switch off the prefrontal cortex of their brains and give themselves over to the same old ridiculous, childish, absurd Manichean explanations that are fed to them by design. They then polarize into two opposing camps, leaving themselves wide open to those who manipulate them through the age-old technique of divide et impera.

This dynamic had revealed itself to me some time ago. It was a nasty blow, I admit, but it didn't make me lose faith in my fellow human beings. I thought, in fact, that by explaining things — and a bit of evangelizing — the lost souls could be brought back onto the right path. Forgive the messianic-sounding bit, but metaphors work better the stronger they are and the closer they sit to the individual's cultural roots (and maybe I'm fooling myself again).
Unfortunately, it was an outlook marked by an optimism comparable to the happy ending of a C-grade romantic flick.

Not only does explaining things get no traction on the minds of the polarized puppets. It even draws their sarcasm (the barroom kind, of course), their indignation and, if you keep at it, even their wrath. When you raise doubts about the position of someone lined up on any side of any polarized issue whatsoever — a fan of the Israelis or of the Palestinians, of Russia or of Ukraine, of Iran or of the USA, a conspiracy theorist or an "officialist" — it doesn't even cross their mind that you might be referring to a factor in the dispute that only makes sense if you take a certain level of complexity for granted. No, the simpleminded, polarized fan takes for granted that only the moronic binary reading is allowed, and so he immediately thinks you're AGAINST him and therefore WITH his enemies. When, after an exhausting and endless effort of clarification, you've managed to make him understand that you're not a fanatical fan (like him) but are simply dedicated to understanding the situation in all its complexity, and are therefore uninterested in the simplifying idiocy of the polarization itself, he treats it like a joke.

If you persist, and he realizes that you truly accept neither his absurd partisan stance nor the equally absurd opposing one, he starts to get indignant and accuses you of ethically unacceptable behavior. His distorted view of reality doesn't allow for chaotic, inevitably hybrid situations, so it doesn't admit disinterest in either of the two factions along with interest in the issue itself. He'd paradoxically be happier if you were on the other side of the barricade. That you refuse to put up the barricade at all he finds incomprehensible. You're a coward, a deserter. He forgets, though, that the war you're deserting was invented by him.
And if you still don't give up, the indignation sometimes even turns into wrath.

This kind of attitude, which I believed was the province of a minority of frenzied zealots, turns out to find room among the calm, silent majority too.
It's a tragic, discouraging, shocking aspect of the social reality we live in today.
Just when science and technology put in our hands tools that could be used to build that better world we've been fantasizing about for years, people decide to create perhaps irreparable rifts within the very social structure they live in and depend on.
A senseless attempt at a slow (and maybe not even that slow) collective suicide.
Pure madness.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

Managing chaos: antisemitism and anti-Islamism

We currently find ourselves at the crest of yet another wave rippling across that historic sea of accusations of antisemitism and anti-Islamism that Europeans have been hurling at each other, or fending off, for centuries with extreme virulence and indignation. So, who's right?

As usual, I suggest we not rely on broad categories, as arbitrary as they are poorly matched to reality. Let's leave binary readings like good-evil, good guys-bad guys, right-wrong to the cartoons. And if you resort to childish reasoning of that kind, go ahead and go back to watching cartoons: there's nothing wrong with that, as long as you, like good kids, don't play with serious things, because then all hell breaks loose. Socio-political questions — especially delicate ones like the one at hand — are made for people who can accept and handle chaos, complexity and randomness. For everyone else there are sporting events, our traditional recipes, or reality and talent shows.
So, let's stick to a serious approach and judge case by case. Here's the guideline I suggest applying to every single instance.

Accusing Israel, Israeli civilians or soldiers, or any individuals of the Jewish faith, of having unequivocally committed specific criminal or even ethically despicable acts — like striking innocent children or occupying other people's property — is, in my opinion, NOT antisemitism. Just as accusing Muslims of heinous acts of terrorism, or of not respecting and perhaps insulting the customs and values of the countries that host them, can NOT be considered anti-Islamism.

That's for the "no" part. Now let's get to the more sensitive part: the "yes" one.
Attributing responsibility for any geopolitical event to alleged Jewish cabals, Jewish lobbies, international Zionist networks or Mossad operations, off the cuff, without proof — because come on, they're surely behind it all, always — this, besides being slander, is YES, as far as I'm concerned, antisemitism. Of the same kind used a few decades ago to unleash pogroms or justify exterminations.

In the same way, leveling vague, sweeping accusations of barbarism, bigotry and backwardness at the Islamic world — because come on, it's obvious, just look at them — is YES, in my opinion, anti-Islamism. Of the same kind used in the past to proclaim crusades or launch witch hunts.

Personally, I stick to the first scenarios. And there are plenty of unequivocally criminal or ethically despicable acts for which to condemn one side or the other.
The second type of scenario, on the other hand, strikes me as not only sordid but also quite irresponsible.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.