Twenty-five hundred years of philosophy flushed down the toilet

As with domestic politics, international conflicts, even court cases, so with protest marches: same story.

On one side: "The police arbitrarily and systematically charge peaceful people who aren't doing anything wrong. It always happens!"
On the other: "With the police, no ifs, ands, or buts, always!"
That ubiquitous always, used, precisely, always.

Most of the population irreparably polarized along the fault line of a reality simplified in a tragicomically Manichean way. And at every level: from the factory worker to the politician, from the clerk to the executive, from the student to the professor, from the reader to the writer. The teachers indoctrinate and the pupils fall in line: on this side of the rift or that.

There are the good guys (us) and the bad guys (them). Grendizer and Vega. Japanese cartoons. Anyone who stops to think is lost, sidelined, ignored, or laughed at. Twenty-five hundred years of Western philosophy (but also Eastern, Southern, and Northern) flushed down the toilet.

Here they are, our intellectuals: the prophets. And here's the result: their disciples.

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

Simplified Complexity: Politics vs. Technology

Just as politics and the media cater to the ordinary person's need to be reassured, reducing a reality that is in fact complex and hard to grasp to simplified patterns — case (1), so the classification of the data used to train machine-learning systems (that is, AI) simplifies a complex reality to make it more computable, and therefore better suited to the needs of the market, of politics, and of the military — case (2).

The consequences are atrocious in both cases.

In case (1), people who live in this reassuring imaginary layer, simplified by design, build their lives, private and public, on false premises.

In case (2), technological applications, used in the pivotal areas of society, learn and interpret reality on premises that are just as false.

I'll take the liberty of summing up the situation in a few lines of verse with, let's say, a rather popular flavor.

Shit's sour over there (1)
and shit's bitter over here. (2)
Of sweet among this shit (1, 2)
there ain't a single shit. (0)

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

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.

Managing chaos: fascism and anti-fascism

Another prominent victim of the average (mediocre) individual's inability to accept and manage chaos is the debate on fascism and anti-fascism. Or rather, on fascism and non-fascism. The distinction will be clarified at the end.
Those who feel they belong to the socio-political groups accused of sympathy for fascism deny, out of convenience, that fascism exists. Those who, on the other hand, identify with the factions devoted to anti-fascism accuse the former en masse of being fascism apologists.

As usual, I have to say everyone is a little right and a little wrong: that's the fate of someone who's at ease handling chaos and is called on to assess the positions of people who, unable to appreciate the extreme complexity of reality, need simplified models to make it easier to understand, only to end up not understanding squat.
The first group is wrong to deny that fascism exists. They're right, though, to reject the polarized explanation resting on the traditional political camps: "fascism is all on the right and anti-fascism all on the left" (using those terms has the same effect on me as nails screeching on a chalkboard). The others, obviously, are right and wrong the other way around.

Okay, so what's the explanation without the simplifications? Here it is. Fascism as a well-defined political force no longer exists. As an attitude, though, it very much does.
What it makes sense to call fascism today is really an atavistic, creeping, cross-cutting cultural trait of Italian society. A trait that predates the twentieth century, probably present already in the Renaissance, and maybe even earlier. The ventennio, the twenty years of Fascist rule, embodied it as the hallmark of a specific political movement, gave it a name, and blended it with other components, customizing it.

This is the source of all the misunderstandings, mix-ups, and confusion. And those who by nature can't grasp the nuances of a complex reality, instead of accepting their limits, try to get past them through simplified interpretations. Simple, then, but unfortunately wrong.

If you stop thinking of fascism as a political force and identify it instead with an intolerant, overbearing, aggressive, sly, opportunistic, and cowardly attitude, you'll realize (unless you're a hopeless case) first of all that fascism is alive and well, and second that, even though it may at times be more frequent within certain socio-political groups than others, it's still a cross-cutting phenomenon.

Washing your hands of it — by denying fascism exists in one case or declaring yourselves anti-fascists in the other — isn't enough, my friends. To be sure you're not fascists, you have to make sure you really aren't. And the only way to do that is to behave like non-fascists.
Always.

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

Talent

Let's be honest: the world is full of ordinary people, if not downright mediocre ones.
Finding a person with talent in a field — be it music, literature, critical thinking, art, science, or sports — is a rare event.

Yet a lot of people reason in a very strange way. Although they accept without batting an eye the total absence of talent in most people, from these special cases — those with talent in a single field — they expect talent across the board. That is, someone who sings well is expected to have excellent communication skills. A good writer, a political vision. An athlete, moral integrity. And so on.
And yet it's a matter of basic probability: if it's rare, as it is, to find a person who is talented in one field, just think how hard it must be to find one with talent in multiple fields!

Maybe someone is thinking of Leonardo da Vinci as a counterexample. Fine, da Vinci was an incredible figure, with an eclectic talent. But he lived five centuries ago. And people still talk about him as a case that's more unique than rare!
If anything, his is an example that proves the very point just made.

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

Fun according to me

I've always known how to have fun, in any place and any way, at any moment. I also go to the typical places for fun. Not all of them, mind you, but some. I recognize them right away: they have some ineffable quality that satisfies my instinct.
I go there on my own, too. I've always loved doing that. Sometimes I may seem aloof, absorbed, even gloomy. It's only appearance. Maybe I'm tipsy, and having a grand old time in front of the stage of my mind. Besides, I observe and listen. The music, of course, but not only that.

I know what fun is. I know it better than the person who smiles at everyone and "plays" the extrovert. I have earned a degree, a master's, and a doctorate in fun. All honoris causa, of course. I simply don't have fun in a prescribed, pre-established, prefabricated way. In general, "pre-anything" gives me hives.

For me, fun is something spontaneous, instinctive, creative. My idea of fun is, like pretty much my whole lifestyle, a form of art — forgive me for saying so. It's a somewhat unusual, exotic form of art, though, one that seems to belong to other shores. A bit like the African masks, the Japanese prints, or the Tahitian dances that made their astonishing, disruptive entrance onto the European cultural scene of the nineteenth century.

I don't think I'll ever stop trying to have fun. Nor stop succeeding at it, if all goes well. It's even possible that I'll drop dead having fun.
Yes, come to think of it, I really hope that's how it ends.

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

Emotional (dis)information

The news should convey information. Add to what the viewer knows. Nothing more and nothing less.
If, when you watch a newscast or a video, it hits you emotionally instead — outraged, angry, saddened, euphoric, or moved to pity — you're the target of manipulative techniques designed to rally support for some cause. The aim may be political, economic, military, strategic in general. What's certain is that nobody is trying to inform you.

Government bodies, propagandists, the so-called "spin doctors" are masters at using these techniques, and they rely on compliant media to carry them out.
I'm not talking only about state TV and state newspapers. You're a victim too, you who think you're drinking from the pure springs of that flashy bluff called anti-mainstream.
The techniques are sly, but the effects are so blatant that they become harmless, as long as you're aware of them and keep your guard up.

To escape the spell, all you have to do is ask the question implicit in the opening: does this news hit me emotionally? If the answer is "yes": switch off the squawking box right away, use the filthy rag to wipe your ass, or set your phone down on that pile of papers that are blowing away.
Discipline yourself to run that simple test every time. And act accordingly when the answer is yes. Don't worry: what you give up isn't real knowledge.

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

They sense the weather

Every so often I end up overhearing, without really meaning to, the conversations of a small group of young people. These kids often take on a serious tone, or maybe a self-serious one, almost offended, with a strong tendency toward indignation. When I manage to catch, in passing, what they're talking about, I realize it's just chatter, almost always about people who aren't there.

Of course, gossip has always existed. But this strikes me as a less innocent version of it. It doesn't involve little old ladies and old men whose souls have been hardened by time and events, but kids who should be swept up in healthy youthful enthusiasm.
Nor can it be generational self-pity: with a few exceptions, any one of them would only have to climb two or three levels up the family tree to find people whom life dealt far worse conditions and circumstances.

So why do they do it? The first reaction of an older person watching them might be the usual accusation: "They're spoiled kids!" I have the impression, instead, that they seize on silly incidents as a pretext to seek validation, comfort, and empathy from their peers.
But that's only an interpretation of the symptom, which just pushes the problem further back. What inner, intangible ogre is tearing their souls apart? Why in this particular period of history? And why this generation in particular?

Perhaps, if you'll allow an uncomfortable quote: "They're like animals, they can sense the weather changing!" Here, of course, the "weather" isn't the climate, but history.
And what they're feeling is nothing more than the natural unease of facing a future that, as perhaps never before, looks packed with uncertainty.

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

Wars and simpletons: part two

You can find part one here.

Let's spell out why the simpletons who root for one side or the other in a war, convinced as they are that they're guided by sharp analytical and geopolitical insight, actually don't understand a fucking thing. Worse, they're more or less knowingly playing into the hands of some filthy propagandist.

Remember, we're not talking about fans of Putin or Zelensky, of Israelis or Palestinians, of Trump or Khamenei. There's no "or" here, only "and": we're talking about ALL of them. About anyone who oversimplifies issues that are in fact complex and whose roots are lodged deep in the rocky soil of history. History they ignore, of course, apart from a few scraps filtered in on purpose here and there. And which, just as obviously, they can't analyze in any way that's remotely useful to the debate.

In war, any war, everyone has a little right on their side and everyone is very much in the wrong. There's no right or wrong. There aren't good guys and bad guys either. Or rather, none of that exists in absolute terms. You can only talk about it in relative terms: relative to each side's motives, which are driven by survival, security and prosperity, and therefore by domination. These are viewpoints that are subjective and partisan by nature, selfish and ruthless. Also, why not, ancestral, primordial and tribal.
Often, as in feuds between families or clans, conflicts have gone on for so long that nobody remembers anymore why they started. They get handed down from generation to generation, as if they were part of the genetic code.

Besides, the tangle they're caught up in is far more chaotic than the spokespeople for each side make it out to be, or than their supporters perceive it to be.
Finally, in every war, communication is always polluted by censorship and propaganda. ALWAYS. So if you read or hear something that seems to prove one of the combatants right — maybe your favorite — or to prove the other one wrong, know that it's not information confirming or refuting your partisanship — which is misplaced anyway, by its very nature. You're actually the target of crude advertising. The kind we call propaganda.

So if you pick a side, not only have you not understood a fucking thing, you're also complicit, as a mouthpiece for a sleazy megaphone.
Go on, if you feel like it. But now that you know, you can no longer afford to pose as a champion of justice.

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

Wars and simpletons

There are plenty of poor deluded souls: a great many, far too many.
You see them squaring off in two camps of public opinion, artfully manufactured on the battlefield of a conflict, a feud, or a dispute.
With the stubborn certainty of a mule, they always know who's right and who's wrong. Each side accuses the deluded on the equally bogus opposing side of naïveté or malice. They charge the other camp with being enslaved to propaganda, and they wave around the sources lined up on their own side as the keepers of pure truth.
They root for their team, putting on that pathetic and irritating air of misunderstood analysts.
The tragicomic twist in all this is that they're right. Every one of them is right. The accusations they hurl at the "enemies" are true. They're true on both sides, though.

The reason for this idiotic polarization is well known: the inability, typical of certain simple minds, to handle chaos, the complexity inherent in every area of reality, not just social but also anthropological, biological, natural. It's a complexity they deal with every day in their miserable little lives, yet paradoxically can't accept when it comes to events unfolding at a higher level, and therefore an even more complicated one.

We could watch them with tenderness and leave them to wallow in their pathetic little simplified kiddie pool for children who can't swim in rough water.
The problem is that their numbers aren't negligible. They're massive, and so they influence the society the rest of us have to live in too. Those who wield power, whether political, media, or financial, know this and act accordingly, feeding the polarized explanations to these self-proclaimed sharp minds. That way, power slips out from under the oversight needed to make it do its job for the benefit of the community rather than itself.
It's the "divide et impera" of Roman memory. Still extremely relevant and effective today.
Unfortunately, it's a self-reinforcing spiral, a vicious circle, an almost irreversible trend.

Still, we have a duty (moral, human, sacred in a secular sense) to keep trying. If it turns out to be in vain, at least we'll have nothing to blame ourselves for.
And if it ends in catastrophe, we'll be able to point the finger and say: "We told you so!" A slim consolation is always better than fat and base inaction.

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

Uncontrolled immigration: the theories

I read a provocative cartoon. It went more or less like this: <<Who wants uncontrolled immigration, according to the populists? The "bleeding-heart progressives." But who really wants it? The "industrialist-capitalists" (meaning anyone who needs a pool of cheap labor).>>

I've never been much of a conspiracy theorist, but I'm more convinced by the second thesis than the first. First of all, because it makes more sense. Why, after all, would ordinary people, based on their political views, want uncontrolled immigration, with all the public order problems that come with it? The others, the ones in the second scenario, have very concrete interests in importing low-cost workers. And besides, as the Americans say, if you want to get to the bottom of something, "follow the money." And it's pretty clear where the money trail leads.

Careful, though: this completely undercuts the other conspiracy theory on the subject. The one about ethnic replacement, which, according to fans of the wildest hypotheses, is supposedly being pursued by the usual pluto-Judaic-fascio-Marxist-supercazzolous-cabal-with-scappellamento-to-the-right-as-if-it-were-antani.
Anyone who wants low-cost labor is interested, as the very phrase says, in the cost of that labor, not in its ethnicity. Ethnic replacement would be, if anything, a consequence and not the goal of the mechanism.

Paradoxically, once the replacement had taken place, the "industrialist-capitalists," or whoever stands for them, would go looking for very Christian marginalized whites to save on labor costs, thus setting in motion a process of ethnic replacement in reverse.
A vicious circle, in short. The usual dead end that people blunder into when they believe in fanciful theories just because they have, well, the appeal of fanciful theories.

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

Sinister design - part seven: going to extremes

You can read part six at this link.

The imbalance that generates polarization feeds — and is fed by — a socio-political-media vicious circle through which polarization itself gets amplified and heightened rather than eased or calmed.
In the long run, this unstable process, geared toward constant growth, can only push things to the extreme.
Right now we're at one of the peaks produced by this mechanism, and its effects and symptoms are plain to see in the tone and level of the debate in the public arena.
A debate I'd sum up like this: bullshit hackery screamed at the top of its lungs.

You can find the other installments of the "Sinister design" saga at this link.

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

Uselessly amazing

After reading this I suddenly realized that some pieces of information can be jaw-droppingly amazing and yet utterly useless:
"The time between Biden's birth and Lincoln's presidency is less than the time between Biden's birth and his own presidency."
Wow! And yet...Who cares?

How much it hurts

how much it hurts to realize
that you have wounded someone
without meaning to
without noticing

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

The double problem of heat

Heat is an objective, physical problem, and one that individuals pretty much can't solve. Our mental reaction to it, though, is subjective, arbitrary, and at least partly controllable.
When it's really hot, like right now, our system senses it and reacts in a biologically predictable way. Our mental reaction, though, depends entirely on us.

These days I feel the heat like everyone else. I sweat, I get tired, I look for relief somewhere cool. But I wouldn't say I'm suffering. Not like most of the people I interact with, at least.
I'm probably just lucky; my system handles it a little better than average. But I think that's a negligible factor.
The fact is, I don't think about it, I don't talk about it, I don't complain. I take what you might call a Buddhist or meditative approach. I don't do it entirely on purpose. By nature, I always keep my mind focused on some goal: a line of reasoning, a memory, a fantasy. It's a bit like focusing on your breathing when you meditate. That keeps the thought of the heat at a distance. And it doesn't nag at me.

Being hot is a problem. Thinking about it obsessively and negatively, complaining, doesn't solve it. It makes it worse. It adds a second problem, if you can put it that way. And this second problem doesn't depend on the climate, but on our own minds.
It's a normal, human mechanism, but that doesn't make it inevitable. Falling into a victim spiral is addictive. It makes us suffer and satisfies us at the same time. Complaining about it to others then serves two purposes. First, as the saying goes: a trouble shared is a trouble halved. Second, we look for understanding, sympathy, and empathy from whoever's listening.
Unfortunately, though, this mechanism requires our mind to be totally focused on an unpleasant condition — being hot, that is — and that makes us suffer.

It may sound counterintuitive, but to bear the heat better, to suffer it less, you have to let the body shoulder it, while keeping the mind anchored to more pleasant thoughts, or at least more useful ones.
As your garden-variety sage of platitudes would say: having one problem is bad, but taking on two is even worse.

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

I'm not vegan, if anything I'm an herbivore

For the past ten years or so I've eaten nothing but things that come from the earth: vegetables, grains, legumes, fruit. No meat, no fish. I also avoid eggs and dairy, although every now and then I find myself eating some in spite of myself.
So you're vegan, then? NO!
What do you mean? And here comes the usual, extremely pedantic (and wrong, I might add) classification, halfway between the bureaucratic and the anthropological: if you eat eggs and dairy you ARE vegetarian, if you don't eat those either you ARE vegan.
Like I said: NO!

First of all, a vegetarian diet shouldn't include eggs or dairy. And if you thought about it for a second, you'd see that right away. Do eggs grow on trees? No. Does milk gush out of plants? Nope. They're animal products. The root of the word "vegetarian" is "vegetable," so eggs and milk are NOT included. Real vegetarian eating is actually what people commonly (and wrongly) call vegan. And what people commonly call vegetarian is, in nutritionist jargon, called ovo-lacto-vegetarian. So NOT vegetarian.

Okay, fine, but let's get back to the point. Why can't you be called vegan if you eat like a vegan? For exactly the reason you just gave, buddy. Because I EAT LIKE a vegan, but I'm NOT a vegan.
What does that mean? What's the difference? Okay, first off, I'm no expert on the subject, but from what little I know, veganism is an activist movement that fights to defend animal rights. Rights that include the right not to be used for food. It's a group that lobbies at the political level, applies social pressure, practices evangelizing, and looks after its own marketing. It goes without saying that if you're fighting for the right of animals not to be exploited for food, you can't eat animal products.
Did you catch the subtlety? A vegan isn't vegan because they eat only plants; they eat only plants because they're vegan. If the difference (which is huge) isn't clear to you, I suggest you pick your high school logic textbooks back up.

Consequences of all this (my take on each in parentheses):
- A vegan might be salivating when they see a steak, but they still force themselves not to. (I often eat sitting at the table with omnivores, and their plates don't tempt me at all. If I felt like eating meat, I'd eat meat. I don't choose my menu out of principle but out of taste.)

- If it seems to you that vegans bust your balls, it's because they're committed, by choice, to social pressure and evangelizing. It's the social role they've assigned themselves. They bust your balls, yes, but they're consistent with their own principles. (Like I said, I often eat with people who order meat or fish and I don't bust anybody's balls. If anything, the exact opposite happens: there are people who break my balls. Besides, I sympathize with animal rights, but I understand that there are ancestral habits that can't be ignored.)

- The vegetarian diet (the real one, see above) is called vegan because vegans have proven to be very skilled at marketing. And the people who can't fucking stand vegans fell for the trick like suckers, ending up doing their advertising for them. (I didn't fall for it, and what I write is the proof. I also try to do my part in spreading the word, but, believe me, it's like emptying the ocean with a teaspoon.)

- Veganism is a fairly recent movement (mid-twentieth century) and a Western one (it was founded in the United Kingdom). Yet in the East, millions of people have eaten only plant products for millennia and never dreamed of calling themselves vegans. (I've favored plant foods ever since I was a kid. It's a personal trait of mine, one that sets me apart even from other members of my family. As an adult I went on to cut animal ingredients out of my diet completely, freeing myself from social conditioning and learning to listen to my body, after spending longer or shorter periods in environments devoted to vegetarianism, in the Far East itself. I've never had anything to do with modern veganism, with its activist vocation and Western stamp.)

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

Too little for too much

There's a lot of talk about low wages. People busting their asses for a boss for a little over a thousand euros a month. An insult, really.
I gave it a try (briefly, to be honest) at being a high-end servant, complete with titles, livery, and assorted bullshit. I even earned enviable salaries, let's say the kind that would make the average Italian today stop complaining.

And yet I always felt cheated. 8 hours or more at the office, 5 or 6 days a week, barely a month of vacation a year. A horizon as far off as retirement day, by which point the best part of life will have been wasted between open-plan offices and company cafeterias, with only enough energy left to decide how to rest.

They were asking for the most precious thing I had: the freedom to run my own days. Every morning when I woke up, I felt my stomach squeezed in the jaws of a vise as invisible as it was physically real: I couldn't make sense of the kind of life I was living. No raise, bonus, assignment, title, or role would have made up for what I was giving up.

Besides, at the companies where I worked I was always treated pretty well, all things considered. I even met some good people, a few of whom I've stayed in touch with. So it wasn't a matter of the wrong workplace. It was really my own personal incompatibility with that kind of life.
The decision to walk away from everything, which seemed like madness — especially back when a permanent contract was practically ironclad by law —  was, for me, the easiest one I could have made.

I've always preferred being a permanent temp, with nothing to hold onto, sometimes broke, but carefree, serene. Even, why not, happy.
So far, through ups and downs, I've gotten by. Maybe one day it'll end in catastrophe. I'll accept it precisely because up until the moment before, I'll have done what I wanted. If you can't live long, it's better to at least live well.

To sum it all up in an aphorism, I could say: "The price of my freedom is material poverty, because I said no every time I was offered money to give it up."

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

The time trifles steal

When all such nonsense
one day you've forgotten,
a wasted life
will be your gravest remorse.
Now, though, you worry
over those very trifles,
not of the time
they've stolen from you.

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

Evolution vs creationism: complexity

Many creationists argue that the complexity of advanced organisms is proof that a creator exists, because only a deity could have created something so complicated.
In reality, that's not true. If anything, complexity is rather a sign of the absence of a plan, not of its presence. Evolution proceeds without a plan, without even a goal, through tiny, incremental steps of adaptation over extremely long stretches of time, adding one piece at a time at random, with no direction.

That's exactly why evolution so often ends up producing solutions that are absurdly complex.
If there were a creator devoted to efficiency, you'd expect the same functions to be carried out by structures simpler than the ones we find in nature — which are outsized, redundant, almost ridiculous in their complexity.

So the complexity typical of certain structures in nature can't be used as conclusive proof of the creationist hypothesis. 

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

Our kind of progressivism

A short reflection on progressives in Italy. First, the name. I call them that for lack of a better term: "left," just like "right," now make anyone who says them sound pathetic.

Their problem, because it's obvious that for a few years now they've had one, is partly about identity and partly about approach.
In a world where the proletarian and working class of the past no longer exists, they've had to, by their very nature, identify new battles, new underdogs whose rights need defending.
This is the source of the first problem, because the groups they've taken up the cause of are heterogeneous, with demands that often clash with each other (for example gender minorities and immigrants from places with an extremely traditionalist and often bigoted cultural background), and that are opposed even by their traditional voters.

I actually agree with some of their positions. First of all because they're often anti-populist, and that alone is a merit.
What I don't agree with is the method they use. And that's where the second of the problems I mentioned comes in.
You can't force views on society that, however right they may be, are still revolutionary compared to old, deeply rooted ways of thinking. People need to be guided toward modernity with humility, understanding, explanations that are easy to grasp. They shouldn't be insulted, looked down on, snubbed, and made to feel backward just because they're hesitant in the face of change. Even where change is necessary or even inevitable.

I've read some reactions from distinguished Venetian intellectuals and artists to the victory of the "right-wing" candidate for mayor. Haughty rants, contempt for the rabble, indifference to the problems of ordinary people, from people who don't realize they don't have the same problems as those folks not because they have a better idea of the world, but only because they're privileged, and think that privilege will last forever.

This isn't working. If this is how they communicate, or rather their very rulebook of conduct, they'll end up more and more detached from an electorate that struggles to understand what they're even talking about. Even when they're actually trying to get a good message across.

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

Come, come

Come, come,
I am a wall
on which someone
has painted a passage.
Come, come,
go straight ahead,
fall for the trick,
enter the tunnel!

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

To whom...

To those who neglect
their own integrity,
it will seem normal,
perhaps even virtuous,
to turn into falsehood
an unwelcome truth.

To those who instead nurture
the seed of deceit,
it will appear natural,
and maybe even shrewd,
to turn a convenient
falsehood into truth.

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

One word

If what you want to say
can be said in one word,
say it in one word.

The group illusion

Political, economic, or religious groups don't exist in the real world. They're a product of our minds.
Of course, even though these groups are not physically real, they are treated as such, and people identify as members of one or more of them. These individuals do exist—they are real—and as they declare their affiliation with a group, we are led to assume the reality of the group itself.
That's where the illusion starts, but it doesn't end there. We profile groups, and so end up with a fairly precise set of characteristics associated with each one. So we tend to attribute that set of characteristics to all the group members, as if they were not unique human beings but just repetitions of a certain pattern. A procedure that would appear unacceptable if it were applied to us is cheerfully used to simplify the rest of the world.
This might be fine under certain circumstances. However, we need to keep in mind that hardly any of those group members will be correctly described by that specific set of features. In fact, the majority of them might not fit any of those attributes at all.
This distinction is not just important; it is fundamental. The consequences of this mental trap can be socially disastrous.
Groups can be very useful as conceptual tools. Always be careful not to take them too seriously though.

Sinister design - part six: collective madness

You can read part five at this link.

But Sinister design also has a side effect that, who knows, might even backfire on the people feeding it.

We Italians, and maybe not just us, are slowly and relentlessly sliding into an abyss of collective madness. We now live in a virtual world where we believe we're caught up in struggles that are further and further removed from the fabric of our own lives, crises of which we know only what propaganda feeds us, whichever faction we take our cues from.

We used to fight over the fence we shared with the neighbor, the price of eggs, the boiler service. Now we end up out in the streets telling each other to fuck off in the name of faraway countries, peoples, and events.

Not to mention the time and energy we give away for free, uncritically swallowing partisan directives, when for far more reasonable and paid requests we have no problem flipping our boss the bird.

The power of propaganda is truly incredible, and so is the thoroughness of the brainwashing it manages to pull off.

Goebbels looked like a loser who, without the rise of Nazism, would have been doomed to obscurity. But it's incredible how much talent, even the malignant kind, historical events can leave buried or bring to light, completely at random.

They beat the Nazis, sure, but consultants, spin doctors, and platforms studied those propaganda techniques with a fine-tooth comb.

You can find the other installments of the "Sinister design" saga at this link.

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

The pathological disorder

I'll never understand what drives people who already have plenty of money and keep wanting to pile up more.
I think it's a pathological disorder, because it makes no rational or practical sense.
For me, money has one big advantage: you no longer have to worry about making it. You can finally devote yourself to everything else. That is, the beautiful part of life. 

P.S. I'll confirm all of this once I've finally crossed the poverty line.

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

Accepting chaos

People often struggle to accept the elusiveness of a reality that is extremely complex, globalized, and interconnected, where a seemingly minor event in some obscure corner of the globe can upend their comfortable lives thousands of miles away.
So they tend to prefer explanations that are both easy to grasp and fascinating to follow. A bit like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster, when the more fitting cinematic model would really be the existential dramas of arthouse cinema.

The most typical of these explanations involve monolithic mass-control plans, run by a small group of super-powerful individuals, all in agreement with each other, to screw over us billions of poor pawns.
Reality, of course, is much more like a chaotic tangle, where countless control schemes, power blocs, bureaucratic cliques, random events, opportunism, hunches, visions, mistakes, strokes of dumb luck, and power struggles all get woven together. It's basically what happens every day in our own small, insignificant lives, scaled up to the global level. We ourselves are tiny nodes in an extremely complex graph, and we see it firsthand every single day: how can we think the whole world could be boiled down to an anime storyline?

The more you can accept, understand, and handle chaos, the more you keep your feet planted on the ground and the better your chances of staying afloat. Follow the master-plan theories, on the other hand, and you get lost in a parallel virtual reality that can easily turn into a real madhouse.
My advice: stay out of it. Better confused than insane.

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

Sinister design - part five: displacement

You can read part four at this link.

But then notice: the polarizations that work best within the mechanism are precisely the "displaced" ones.

The examples are the usual ones. Two peoples are fighting a real war thousands of miles from here. Meanwhile, back home, two factions spring up, "displaced" ones, you might say, that act out a conflict whose roots, motives, and ideals belong to ecosystems totally foreign to our own. That makes them hard to grasp in their finer cultural details and anthropological recesses. These are the most buried and ancestral elements of the dispute, and for that very reason the most fundamental. This elusiveness is why the whole issue gets simplified in a banal, pathetic, and sadly ridiculous way.

The same thing happens with other issues, displaced onto dimensions other than space: fascism and anti-fascism on the time dimension, viruses and vaccines on the scientific one, capitalism and communism on the economic one.

What makes these polarizations effective is precisely how elusive the topics are. They're far removed from the concrete parts of the lives of the people who take the bait, so they persist, since they can't be directly verified.

The motto is well known by now: "Let them squabble over displaced issues. Then it'll be easy to fuck them over in their own backyard."

You can find the other installments of the "Sinister design" saga at this link.

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

Bleak outskirts, Sunday evening

Bleak outskirts
Neon lights
Fine rain
Freezing wind

Greasy puddles
Fogged-up windows
Soggy cardboard
Sodden soles
Quick steps
Squish squash

Damp breath
Stuffed-up nose
Crows posing
Squashed cockroach
Faded posters
Unlit traffic light
Faded crosswalk
Scrawny flowerbed
Ripped-out umbrella

Creaking hinges
Frayed doormat
Flickering light
Muddy footprints
Worn stair treads
Shiny handrail
Stink of mold
Rusty latch
Yank at the door

Dim light
Dirty dishes
Busted slippers
Torn curtain
Drops on the window

Half a bottle of red
Leftover frittata
Stale bread
Blackened moka pot
Leaking shower
Crusted toothpaste

Unmade bed
Yellowed book
Moth batting
Wild staring eyes
Lucid insomnia

Dawn breaks
It's already Monday

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

Crime news

The real squalor is the media feeding tragedies to the public as if they were soap operas.

And the public devouring them like chunks of meat thrown into a tiger cage.

It's disgusting. Both the media vultures and the morbid citizens.
God, what a sick world.

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

Wake up, people!

Just because you slap "Wake up, people!" at the end of a sentence doesn't mean the bullshit you just spewed suddenly turns into genius.
It's still bullshit, followed by "Wake up, people!"
So, if you do the math, that makes two pieces of bullshit: 1) the one you wrote before "Wake up, people!" and 2) "Wake up, people!"
P.S. Wake up, people!

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

The scam

A lot of people are convinced that, for a few centuries now, a fresh wave of arrogant science, crass materialism, and cold atheism has been trying to sweep away the noble edifice of a philosophical-religious tradition that has always existed, one that is, in a sense, innate to European culture. Maybe even to human nature. I'm obviously talking about all the schools of thought inspired by idealism, whether secular or religious.

Life, our own nature and the nature around us, the urge to fulfill ourselves in the world we discover all around us: this is the real starting point, the fixed foundation on which to build any cultural structure. And the drive to understand all of it is the kind of curiosity that has guided human activity for tens upon tens of thousands of years, since long before anyone talked about science, materialism, or atheism. That, for me, is the tradition that matters.

It was only a little over two thousand years ago that the ravings (beautiful and interesting ones too, mind you) of idealists and their various mystical-metaphysical spin-offs started catching on in Europe. It wasn't a single party but a family of ideas that blended together over the centuries and ended up telling us more or less the same thing. They told us that everything we see and hear isn't real; worse, it's filthy matter to steer clear of. The senses deceive us, and the universe has to be interpreted through storytelling, or even through science fiction. Higher ideas are all that counts. The idealized horse, which you will never see, matters more than the ones you've happened to see in real life: gorgeous, sure, but insignificant. And then the body is garbage, while the soul is sublime. The life we lead is contemptible, so it has to be lived in self-contempt, in guilt, repentance, and atonement, preferably somewhere near a cave, sneering at the assholes enjoying the shadow show on the back wall, while waiting for the sublime, true life that will come after death, which is therefore not the end but the beginning of real existence.

Older spiritual and anthropological outlooks (animistic, Dionysian, polytheistic) at least celebrated nature and life, with all their limits and all their fears. In Europe they were pushed aside, or bent into shape, by abstract ideas, demiurges, Manichaean entities. It's all cheap junk, and my mind (and not just mine) has its legitimate doubts about it. Those are doubts the bad teachers have never managed to dispel with honest arguments. They've always been forced to retreat into underhanded, absurd, and above all unfalsifiable answers, which makes them, for anyone who measures ideas that way, intellectually petty by definition: higher knowledge, holy spirits, faith, miracles, revelations, the kingdom of heaven, the Last Judgment.

Blaming science, atheism, and the rest is like looking at the finger instead of the moon it's pointing at. We've always seen the truth with our own eyes, heard it with our ears, touched it with our fingers, and breathed it in through our noses, long before that family of ideas tracing back to Plato and his heirs gained strength in Europe. And it's a gorgeous reality, not something to be wary of.
Anyone who rejects idealisms and their offshoots, religious or philosophical, is only trying to understand this reality. Questioning idealistic systems is a perfectly normal result of this noble, ancient, human activity.
Idealism wasn't the victim of a cowardly stab in the back. It was idealism that attacked human nature. And finally, with the arrival of the modern era, some people have started avenging it again.

The deception had already been dented by Galileo and other poor devils who were shunned, thrown in the slammer, or even burned at the stake. That wasn't because they were fighting "idealism" from an armchair, but because they dared to look and say what they saw. Later, Darwin with natural selection and Nietzsche with the transvaluation of values shook the edifice to its foundations. Popper, for his part, in a world more and more dominated by science, showed that what can't be falsified isn't science. None of them closed the file. They just made it harder to pretend that junk is still untouchable.
It's incredible how many people still slip on the sludge that's left of it.

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

The aquarium

No matter how hard you try to explain to someone splashing around in an aquarium
that they're splashing around in an aquarium,
they won't get that they're splashing around in an aquarium,
precisely because they're splashing around in an aquarium.

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

The real conspiracy

I've never understood why people who can't resist the lure of conspiracy theories, instead of dealing with cases that can't be verified (the moon landing, 9/11, the pluto-Judaic cabal, and so on), don't focus on the conspiracies that are right there in plain sight, and have been for centuries, if not millennia.

I'm talking about the petty, cowardly, underhanded, criminal brainwashing of little kids and teenagers, carried out for religious, patriotic, military, or political ends.
Who the fuck, as an adult, would ever believe in kingdoms of heaven and last judgments, in supremacy over peoples who live on land beyond arbitrarily drawn borders, in supreme causes worth getting yourself killed for, in flawed systems of government, if those beliefs hadn't been planted in people's heads while their minds were still forming, still vulnerable and unable to judge what's best for their own well-being?

I think it's the most squalid, heinous collective crime ever committed, and one that's still being committed on a global scale. A piece of filth that all of us, having been through it ourselves, should rise up against. And above all, we should keep our kids safe from it.
Ironically, it's often the parents themselves who offer up their children as a sacrifice on the altar of social convenience. The same parents who might get outraged if their kids bring home a failing grade in math. The shame of a bad grade, no; taking advantage of the vulnerable and mental manipulation, yes. Insane. An abomination for which I can find few acceptable justifications, but plenty of ugly motives.

The time has come to wake up: conspiracy theorists of the world, unite! Drop your pointless speculation about things that can't be verified and point your finger at this glaringly obvious outrage. Finally fight for a better world. Save our young people from organized, legalized indoctrination, whether mystical or secular.

Future generations will thank you for it. If you care about being remembered for choosing the right side of history, this is your moment.

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