I am "Italian"

I have never been a nationalist in my life. Localism and tribalism are feelings that are not only foreign to me, but also disturb me a little. Identifying as Italian, however, always gives me a special satisfaction. It is not a matter of pride, but of opportunity, resources, and heritage. It's not about patriotism, it's pure and hard "game theory".
Can you even fathom it? When people ask you "Where are you from?" and you answer "Italy", you are dumping Rome, Venice, Naples, Florence, Milan, Palermo on them. The Roman Empire, the Church, the Renaissance. Poets, musicians, explorers, philosophers, painters, sculptors, scientists, directors, athletes. The Dolomites, Lake Garda, the Cinque Terre, the Amalfi Coast, the Costa Smeralda, Mount Etna. The Colosseum, Milan Cathedral, the Rialto Bridge, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the ruins of Pompeii, the Trulli. Spaghetti, pizza, bruschetta, cappuccino. Ferrari, Armani, Ferrero.
You don't even need to make a list: "Italy" is the label on a package whose contents everyone knows. It's a knockout blow, a checkmate, an unstoppable offensive.
Then they know that maybe they have an asshole standing in front of them. But he's an Italian asshole. Can you beat that?

P.S. By the way, to the question "Where are you from?", even though I speak English quite well, I always answer "Italia!" or "Italiano!", in Italian of course. And you immediately start with a good laugh.

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Portrait

I'm sitting on a stool at the counter of a Thai place, sipping the Negroni the bartender has just served me—this Negroni is good. After a few minutes, the same bartender hands me a notepad that smells like 1980s middle school. On the open page, there's a pencil sketch.
It's a face, in profile.
I drop my jaw in surprise, and then I smile at him.
That face is mine.
I don't know how much it looks like me, but it's definitely me. And the less it looks like me, the more I like the idea, because it means that by observing me and unleashing his creativity, he managed to imagine me in his own way.
I don't even know if it's a good drawing, technically speaking. I like it, but I don't know much about it. I can have a competent opinion on a text, a thought, a film, a piece of music, but I understand very little about drawing. To me, all efforts of GENUINE creativity are wonderful. My niece's drawings have always seemed like works of art to me, in their own way.
In a world where you have to stay alert and slip away so you don't end up posing as an extra in some fucking "video story," stumbling upon someone who draws your portrait while you don't even notice is a pleasant blast from the past. A blast from the past that, in the disorientation of the present, feels like a good omen for the future.
Kudos to the "bartista".

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The inversion

The flow of information between voters and politicians has now almost completely reversed.
The latter, precisely because they are political professionals, should, based on their own knowledge, experience, and skills, have formed their own vision to present to the citizens.
Partly out of culpable incompetence, partly out of cowardly convenience, and partly out of insidious calculation, many politicians have stopped proposing their vision and have instead decided to pander to the demands of the electorate, just as they pick them up in the square, at the bar, or at the beach. Demands that they often fuel themselves, through compliant media, by preying on ancestral phobias, inferiority complexes, and tribal instincts.
Not only do they abdicate their guiding role, but they end up defeating the very purpose of their function: reconciling collective needs with individual interests.
And it is precisely to this, paradoxically, that they owe their success.
I find all of this vomit-inducingly dystopian.

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Hunting sucks, sure, but...

Personally, hunting horrifies me. The poor little animal minding its own business, programmed by evolution to perceive approaching animals, sounds, smells, colors, and weather changes as danger signals, struck by a bullet that nothing in nature, inside or outside of it, could have helped it avoid, strikes me as the victim of an immense act of cowardice. Especially nowadays, when we can no longer make the excuse of survival to riddle poor, defenseless beasts with lead.

Never, therefore, would I have thought of speaking up in favor of such a practice. And yet...

The hostility against hunters, in fact, seems to me to be used in an instrumental way, serving as a scapegoat.

Let me explain. What right does a society that nevertheless uses other ways to kill, enslave, and exploit animals have to point the finger at hunters? They are always quoting the Gospel. How does this sound then? Let him who is without sin cast the first stone! 

In most cases, the hunter's prey has lived the best possible kind of life, according to its nature, right up until the moment it was shot. And what it receives is a coup de grâce, at least that is the shooter's intention.

Why would leaving a fish to suffocate, trapped in a net or inside a bucket, out of water, until death by asphyxiation comes to put it out of its misery, be a relatively "more ethical" crime? 

And what about an animal born in a dirty cage that remains there, in pitiful conditions, until it is taken to the slaughterhouse? Is the guilt staining the hunter really more serious? 

In reality, those who consume animal products should actually be forced to hunt the beasts themselves. There would be several advantages. People would realize that the ground meat they use to make meat sauce is actually minced meat from the leg of a being they saw alive in its natural environment, not just an abstract "ingredient" bought in packages at the local supermarket. Moreover, people would eat only as much meat as necessary, since they wouldn't find it on the shelves but would have to obtain it through hard work. And then it would be preferable precisely as a moral matter: you let the animal live free until you personally take the responsibility of killing it to gobble it up. You don't make it suffer needlessly and sadistically in a tank or a pen. Nor do you delegate the dirty work to a system hidden behind the scenes. You do it yourself.

One suspects that the campaign against hunters is actually fueled by the giants of the fishing or livestock industries. To convince people that the bad guys are the ones who actually practice the least harmful activity, and to keep getting rich off their eco-mafia practices, while even passing themselves off as the "less cruel" alternative.

I have to quote Nietzsche again, but what can you do, he wrote things over a hundred years ago that are still relevant today, and I fear they will remain relevant for a long time to come. 

"Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule."

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Tradition

• Tradition is the result of a long sequence of improvements. And it is itself susceptible to future enhancements.
• Tradition is like a bookmark: it serves to remind us how far we have come, it does not signal the end of the story.
• The tradition you adore as an immutable fetish has been handed down to you by an unbroken series of generations, through various passages. If at any of these levels someone had thought they had reached the finish line, something more primitive would have been entrusted to you. You have a duty, as well as a responsibility, toward your descendants to leave the doors open to change, just as they were left open by those to whom you owe what has been handed down to you as a gift from the past.
• Tradition is a lot, of course, but it is not everything.
• The traditions of different cultures should never be pitted against one another: they are all complex, articulate, and sophisticated chains of adaptation to specific realities, anchored by their first link to the same hook, of which every further addition is a piece added to a unique mosaic.
• Tradition can act as a brake on the present or an accelerator for the future: it all depends on which pedal you decide to press.
  

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The history books of the future

And here we are, for the umpteenth time, being called to the polls by our political class to do for free the job that they, with their super-salaries, are supposed to do.
Another question for constitutional scholars thrown at voters. In other words, the core of the state machinery fed to a team of laymen, some of whom even suffer from an acute form of functional illiteracy and are incapable of understanding a newspaper headline containing more than five words (by the way, this too is at least partly the fault of politicians).
At the same time, they keep us away from ethical or practical issues on which even a guy with a fifth-grade education whose life revolves around the stadium and the local pub could form a competent opinion, whether "Yes" or "No": euthanasia, same-sex marriage, cannabis decriminalization, the introduction of Uber-like services, and so on and so forth.
An ideal referendum question should focus as much as possible on the voter's "political sentiment," not on their supposed expertise in jurisprudence or quantum mechanics, and the answer should be almost immediate. If I ask a passerby in the square: "Assisted suicide: Yes or No?", "Same-sex marriage: Yes or No?", "Decriminalization of cannabis: Yes or No?", that person will almost certainly be able to give me an answer right off the bat, without spending weeks pretending to prepare to tackle a question they still won't be able to answer with full awareness. A political class (honestly I don't even feel like making too many distinctions between the parties) that no longer even feels ashamed of publicly displaying its incompetence, inadequacy, caste privileges, and even a pinch of cowardice when faced with the most important decisions for the country.
I truly hope that the history books of the future condemn them harshly, as they deserve. And that our descendants know them for what they were, just as the worst emperors, popes, or tyrants of the past are presented to us.
Personally, I would feel ready to curse them from the bottom of my heart, were it not for the fact that I am not superstitious and do not believe it would work. Anyone who is, please do it for me too.

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Kidnapping

There are, besides us, numerous species that live in symbiosis with others, or that hunt to get by. However, I am not aware of any of them practicing animal husbandry, at least not of so many species and as pervasively as we do.
We practically seize animals for the purpose of slavery and exploitation, for food, industrial, or even recreational ends. But we don't just seize a certain number of specimens. No, we seize entire species, for all generations to come, and even play Duplo (Lego is for more mature kids) with the bricks of their genome.
Probably in the past this eco-mafiose practice was necessary for us to survive and climb the food chain. It is certainly no longer necessary.
Eco-mafiosi to continue existing might even be fine. Just for the whim of it, well, I'd rather say no.

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The pain in the ass

One of the most important lessons taught to us by the greats of the past is the primacy of doubt over certainty.
The cult of doubt, however, is a pain in the neck. It forces you to always stay on top of things, to rack your brain trying to understand every topic of discussion without bias or superficiality. You do this if the activity is your passion. It's not an attitude suited for mental sluggards, the eternally busy, or single-minded fanatics.
For these people it is much easier to have rock-solid certeints to rely on, while from their trench they fire bursts against imaginary enemies. And it's even better if such certainties are provided in pre-packaged bundles of the fewest possible types, preferably two, so that whoever wants to use them knows exactly which one to choose.
Actually, not choose, collect. It's convenient to make the choice once and for all, abandoning oneself to one or the other extreme of an increasingly polarized society. From that moment on, you always know who to turn to whenever you need the right package for you to interpret what is happening.
Vedo gente molto preoccupata per come l'AI rischi di educare le persone a smettere di pensare. Ma come? Chi è appassionatamente curioso e ama il ragionamento, la ricerca e la comprensione, userà l'AI solo per le attività più meccaniche e meno interessanti. I pazienti affetti da sindrome della certezza polarizzata, invece, avevano già smesso di pensare da tempo. L'AI li aiuterà semplicemente a continuare a non ragionare, facendo anche meno fatica.

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The most important thing

Besides health - an obvious truism - the most important thing we possess as individuals is a characteristic that we might define as a mix of reputation, integrity, and honor. Blending the terms, we will therefore call it "rep-eg-or".
And, mind you, when I say "most important," I mean more important than money, property, social status, acquaintances, and anything else you can think of, except the aforementioned health. It is the currency with which you acquire the trust of others. In my opinion, this comes before everything else.
The rest, if lost, can be recovered, perhaps partially. "Rep-eg-or" cannot. It is like health, or even more so, it is almost like life itself. You only have one at your disposal. Better yet, rep-eg-or is the best leverage to rely on to put back together any other wealth that may have been lost.
It is the most important thing you possess: do not sell it out, voluntarily, to the highest bidder for thirty pieces of silver.

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Good and bad

On the international chessboard, there are no "good guys" and "bad guys." There are only power dynamics which, combined with real or perceived threats, more or less legitimate ambitions, and latent or sudden opportunities, determine relationships of alliance or hostility.
At any moment, this dynamic and unstable system can make one subject look "bad" and another "good." With the next shuffle of the deck, however, the situation can flip or be completely turned upside down.
Keep your certainties in check: they are fortresses made of "Briscola" playing cards, with foundations of butter. Just a candle flame or a spring sunbeam is enough to make them collapse.

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Peace and war

• When wars break out, one may be concerned for the fate of poor innocent victims and above all, if the theater of military operations is relatively close, for one's own safety. 
  Many Italians, who are always at the cutting edge, despite being relatively close to the chaos, have decided to be anxious exclusively about the price of gas.
  If the water—or rather the kerosene—were to reach their asses, they would finally understand the true disasters caused by conflicts.
  Let's hope they remain in their blissful ignorance, given that near their asses are our own as well.
• It would already be something if the "strategists with other people's wars" would stop hiding behind the word "peace" when they are simply hoping their favorite wins.
  Peace, the kind that by not contemplating armed confrontations does not provide for winners or losers, is not an abstract ideal for Franciscans or Buddhists: it is a concrete situation necessary to live a life worthy of the name.
  Peace is the only sensible goal of realpolitik.
• Perhaps, however, the true value of peace is fully understood only by peoples or generations that have experienced war.
  That is why, after eighty years without bellicosity, Europeans' hands are starting to itch again, and instead of being horrified by the prospect of a conflict, they are rooting for this or that warmonger.
  When what is instead a precious achievement is taken for granted, forgotten crypts open up in dusty corners of our psyche, from which sinister ancestral impulses re-emerge like monsters.
• However, these tragic events serve some purpose: people finally learn a bit of geography.
  Hormuz and Kharg are challenging names, to be sure, but the difference between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, at least that much, is perhaps finally clear.

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At a walking pace

Have you ever wondered why, as soon as we use a means of locomotion, even simply a horse, a carriage, or a bicycle, the chances of having any kind of accident increase, while they are practically zero when we encounter other pedestrians while walking?
If the answer seems obvious to you, it is probably not the correct one.
The explanation, as is often the case, is provided by the evolutionary mechanism that has shaped our body and mind to handle events that take place at our natural speed: a walking pace. At any speed higher than that, events occur that our system is not designed to handle.
A totally natural dynamic experience can therefore only be enjoyed in an upright position, by walking. The bike is much better than motorized vehicles, of course, but it is nonetheless less natural than walking.
If you want to enter into symbiosis with the nature that surrounds you, tuned to the most natural configuration possible of your system, lace up your shoes and go for a walk.

This post was machine-translated from Italian.

Evolution of disinformation

Disinformation is a technique that everyone has used. Those in power, those who rebel, allies, enemies, religions, lobbies, cults, companies, mafias, drug traffickers.
Forever.
Then came the first plot twist.
Just when people thought that a tool like the web could make information more distributed and therefore make it easier to unmask the usual suspects, the opposite happened: taking advantage of the new technology, many other actors entered the disinformation mechanism. Even on an individual basis. Often in the service of a handler, but sometimes even for nothing more than personal gain.
We have reached the point where it is hard to listen to anyone at all, and we should remain skeptical of any kind of information, except for what we gather firsthand with our own senses.
And here is the second "coup de théâtre".
Just when the disinformation system reached its peak complexity, people, instead of increasing their level of general distrust to ensure their own intellectual independence, decided in a totally irrational way to condemn certain sources as "fake" and instead elevate others to a Delphic oracle, without any concrete proof, simply based on their own sympathies. It is a deviant behavior that affects both supporters of official theses and those of "alternative" sources. That is, in most cases, dry media waste and wet media waste. 
What behavioral psychologists like have warned us about through the surprising results of their brilliant experiments is increasingly evident: Daniel Kahneman: humans, far from possessing the baggage of rationality they love to boast about, are confused, fearful, and emotional little beasts, acting according to guidelines dictated by ancestral impulses that have nothing to do with logic or rigorous reasoning.
After centuries of theological disputes, philosophical debates, and scientific research, this, ladies and gentlemen, is the current reality. And it is a realization that has the effect of a cold shower, in winter, in the mountains, out in the open.

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Systemic factionalism

Political factions in Italy are not so much dedicated to putting forward proposals as to systematically criticizing the actions of their opponents.
And citizens, depending on the side they arbitrarily chose, find criticisms of the "others" well-founded and those directed at their own faction unacceptable. It is an absurd attitude, yet adopted by people as if it were a martial, superior, unquestionable duty.
In reality, most criticisms, towards any faction, contain a grain of truth.
And it is just as true that, unless accompanied by proposals inspired by a forward-looking vision, they are totally unproductive.
Besides, criticism of one's own actions is a free favor done by an opponent, and it could be used in a Machiavellian way to adjust one's course and defeat them.
Unfortunately, alas, geniuses like Machiavelli have not been born in Italy for a long time.

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The dots

Yo, those who, to explain every flashpoint of conflict, point an indignant finger at oil, the US, and the Seven Sisters (and often they are right), and who then get furious like beasts if you dare to question the insane model "A hydrocarbon-powered car for everyone, actually two, or even three!", I wonder, do they just stare blankly at the dots, or do they actually know how to connect them?

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A bit of satire

I read about police crackdowns following which some citizens, not for having been caught driving under the influence of cannabis, but rather for being found in possession of modest amounts of the substance, have been reported as consumers. Well done! There was really a need for a nice crackdown on these JUNKIES!
"But it's a soft drug..." these fucking differently toxic whiners keep repeating! Soft my ass! Everyone knows that if you take a puff of a joint you're doomed, your future is written, or rather injected, dropped, sniffed, toward the disaster of drug addiction. It's well known that whoever plunges into the abyss of hard drugs was condemned by that puff of a joint, and not by the liters of wine, beer, and spritz they drank until then.
Alcohol is part of our tradition. It is good, nutritious, and wholesome like everything belonging to our culinary range: sausages, tiramisu, or four-cheese pasta, for example. Okay, maybe these dishes aren't exactly super healthy, but you get what I mean. Wine and grappa we know them, they are our old-time friends, how can they hurt us? Liver damage? Pfft, if anything alcohol fortifies the liver! Cancer? Oh come on, it's wine, not asbestos!
Marijuana, on the other hand, is a recent intruder, like hummus, green tea, or spirulina which, as we know, not being part of our tradition, definitely do harm! Because everything we do is noble, and what comes from outside is absolute evil. It's well known that cultures progress best when they are isolated and impermeable, not when they cooperate, interpenetrate, and integrate. Tomatoes, potatoes, and bell peppers should thank the expiration of the crime of illegal immigration, otherwise even those non-EU vegetables would end up the way they deserve!
And besides, what were these clueless folks thinking when they walked around with half a gram of indica in their pocket? Stuff that merits life in prison, or rather an asylum! Risking their criminal record for half a joint when they could be chilling safely and protected by the law - enlightened, just, and magnanimous, praised be it always - sipping shots of scotch in a cellar crammed with enough whiskey to quench the thirst of a regiment of Scottish tipplers? SUCKERS!
Not to mention the effects. Can you compare a group of individuals passing a fatty around, with a dopey smile stamped on their vicious faces, as they blabber helplessly while listening to music, thinking autonomously within the confines of their own minds, to a nice gang of cheerfully obnoxious and virulently quarrelsome drunkards watching a soccer match on TV with foam at the mouth?
And the next-day conditions, do we want to talk about them? Those emotions that alcohol gives you - broken sleep, a pounding head, dehydration, internal cramps - with THC or CBD you can forget about them! Yet they sure don't give you a discount for the incomplete package. Clever them!
Then they come and tell me that in some states cannabis is even used to manage the symptoms of psychiatric, neurological, or other conditions. But who do they take us for? Using plants or extracts to cure diseases? Since when? hahaha
Forget about it guys, cannabis is a scam, what it promises is too good to be legal.
No, wait, I meant... too good to be true.

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Ugly beast

Complacency, especially when it is the object of one's attitude towards habits, customs, or ideas rooted in one's native culture, is a beast.
It leads us to state or do things against our own interests, to the advantage of someone who is often richer and more powerful than us.
It convinces us to do free propaganda in favor of those who harm us while benefiting from it.
One day we will regret it, inevitably, bitterly, and irremediably.
The most absurd thing is that we already know it, but we don't care.

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Cherry picking

Anyone wishing to conduct a historical, social, or (geo)political analysis should always start without preconceptions, gather sources of various orientations, evaluate them, cross-reference them, test them, and check the reliability of those who disseminate them, only then to analyze them, extract the key points, and arrive at a conclusion. However, that conclusion must always be handled "with kid gloves," keeping in mind that the consulted sources are second- or third-hand and the true motivations of those who curated them are unknown.
The climate of polarization that now characterizes any debate has wiped out even the last traces of the method just outlined.
The new guidelines, used both by armchair experts holding court at the local bar and, unfortunately, by many professionals, have now become entrenched like this: 0) if you don't already have the conclusion ready, you don't even start the research; 1) simplify complexity by polarizing the problem with the most ridiculous Manichaeism you are capable of; 2) decide which pole to root for based on the starting conclusion, the one from point 0; 3) look for sources that corroborate your totally arbitrary position, cheerfully giving zero damns about verifying their truthfulness and reliability; 3) discard the ones you dislike, for no other reason than the fact that you dislike them; and 4) thus reaffirm the conclusion you had already reached at the beginning anyway, namely point 0.
It might seem paradoxical that a conclusion is packaged right from the start (point 0) and also that it takes all that work to go from the starting point to the starting point (point 0 again): trust me, within the polarized paradigm, it is empirically demonstrable that this tactic works great.
There are also auxiliary techniques that can come in handy: insults, shouting, moral blackmail, targeted changes of subject, far-fetched comparisons. There are tons of them, try asking ChatGPT. In fact, if you don't have time for the tedious proposed process, you can ask your favorite AI agent to give you the exact conclusion you were looking for, complete with junk sources attached.
P.S. You might be wondering what the title means, assuming you are one of the two or three people who made it to this point in the story. If you like English, these are two key expressions: "Cherry picking" and "Fact-checking".
The first, a wonderful metaphor, refers to the choice of sources, done just like when you want to pick cherries from a tree: you only take the ones you like best.
The second concerns checking the facts cited by the sources. You obviously don't need it, because you carefully hand-picked the sources and, since they serve to confirm the conclusion already written at the beginning, they have no need to be subjected to further filters.
Moral of the story: remember cherry picking well, so you can use it when needed. But remember fact checking even better: to stay as far away from it as possible!

This post was machine-translated from Italian.