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.