A bit of satire

I read about police raids in which some citizens, not for getting caught driving under the influence of cannabis, but simply for being found with small amounts of the substance, were charged as users. Well done! We really needed a nice crackdown on these JUNKIES!

"But it's a light substance..." whine these fucking differently addicted types! Light, my ass! Everybody knows that if you take one hit of weed you're doomed, your future is already written, or rather injected, dropped, snorted, straight toward the disaster of drug addiction. It's common knowledge that anyone who plunges into the abyss of hard drugs was condemned by that one hit off a joint, and not by the liters of wine, beer, and spritz he'd put away up to that point.

Alcohol is part of our tradition. It's good, nutritious, and healthy, like everything in our culinary repertoire: sausages, tiramisu, or pasta with four cheeses, for example. Okay, maybe those dishes aren't exactly healthy, but you get the idea. Wine and grappa, we know them, they're old friends of ours, how could they hurt us? Liver damage? Pfft, if anything alcohol strengthens the liver! Cancer? 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 all know, since they're not part of our tradition, are definitely bad for you! Because everything we do is noble, and whatever comes from outside is absolute evil. It's well known that cultures progress best when they're isolated and impermeable, not when they cooperate, interpenetrate, and integrate. Tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers should thank the statute of limitations running out on the crime of illegal immigration, otherwise those non-EU vegetables would get what they deserve too!

But what the hell were these naive fools thinking, walking around with half a gram of indica in their pockets? Life-sentence stuff, make that straight-to-the-asylum stuff! Risking their clean criminal record over half a joint when they could be sitting back, safe and protected by the law - enlightened, just, and magnanimous, forever be it praised - sipping shots of Scotch in a cellar stocked with enough whiskey to quench the thirst of a regiment of Scottish boozers? SUCKERS!

Not to mention the effects. Come on, can you even compare a little group of degenerates passing around a fat joint, with a dopey smile plastered on their debauched faces, while they harmlessly babble on, listening to music, thinking for themselves within the boundaries of their own minds, with a fine band of cheerfully obnoxious drunks, manfully itching for a fight, foaming at the mouth as they watch a soccer game on TV?
And the next-day condition, shall we talk about that? All those thrills alcohol gives you - the broken-up sleep, the pounding headache, the dehydration, the twisting in your gut - with THC or CBD you can forget about them! And it's not like they give you a discount for the incomplete package. Clever bastards!

Then they tell me that in some states cannabis is even used to manage the symptoms of psychiatric, neurological, or other conditions. Who do they take us for? Using plants or extracts to treat diseases? Since when? hahahaha
Forget it, guys, cannabis is a scam, what it promises is too good to be legal.
No, wait, I meant...too good to be true.

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

Feral in an urban context

In so-called developing countries, I often happen to see some truly unique individuals. The most incredible ones are those who live practically in the wild, yet within an urban environment.
They follow behavioral codes and develop survival tactics that for us regimented ones (someone will read "civilized") are totally foreign. They behave a bit like pre-agricultural nomads, but exploit all the possibilities that modernity makes available to them.
They may appear curious, funny, mysterious, but they are certainly full-fledged human beings, self-sufficient—indeed, certainly better than us specimens of "homo technologicus" at getting by in times of hardship.
Furthermore, although they are viewed with suspicion by passersby and are also targeted by police raids, they seem to cling to a sense of freedom and self-determination that is perhaps the real motivation behind their extreme choices.
I wonder then, why don't we see people like that here—or at least, almost never? Could it be that we carefully suppress certain traits inherent to human nature itself, so that that kind of individual does not appear in society? Would they bother us? Would they throw our system of rules and values into crisis? Would they scare us?
I find the simple question itself—its legitimacy and possibility—profoundly unsettling.

This post was machine-translated from Italian.

The last days of Socrates - Plato

All we know about Socrates was handed down to us by his pupil Plato - one of the most important western philosophers - as we have already seen when talking about the Symposium.
In this book Plato tells us about the end of Socrates' life: his trial, his imprisonment and his death by poisoning (not really a suicide, as this was actually the court sentence).
Socrates typical argumentative method is exemplified in four different sections.

Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future - Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche's work, unlike Plato's Symposium, does not read like a story, with a plot, characters, action and dialog. It's a collection of anectodes, philosofical thoughts, not necessarily easy to grasp and sometimes quite contradictory.