Working on something

 I'm writing something.

My main writing "technique" nowadays consists on something kinda childish, maybe, but I am not ashamed to describe it:

I think, then I play. I pretend I'm a youtuber sharing my ideas and a few people - but mainly you - are watching.

Then I write... When I stumble on a contradiction, I go back to thinking and playing.

That's it.

Am I Missing Something?

 

Simple Drawing

"Marry me, I love you" (Fernando Spagnuolo)

Greed for Virtue, Good Seeds, and the World we Have Now

People want to be good. But because of vanity and because of politics, sometimes it is easier to appear as good. And, if the person can convince others, I don’t know, maybe she can convince herself. This is a question as old as mankind – only the means of showing virtue changed. Now it’s all very fast, people want to show all their value in one picture or small text on social media.

There is a way of showing virtue that I, personally, after living four decades, came to consider as not honorable at all, to say the least, and it is used by the mainstream academic world, among other people. It consists in showing you care so much for the ones you consider more vulnerable, that you don’t even consider important to defend the rights of anybody else.

You are claiming that nobody cares so much as you, because you are the one that cares so much for the oppressed, that you even view the rights of the groups you don’t consider oppressed as some kind of “luxury”, you will not let it stop you in your virtuous quest.

You are trying to make yourself a hero without much hard work of finding real positive solutions, you just subtract groups of people from the list of people deserving of consideration. Just by doing that, you can be seen by a big group of people, who are led by momentary emotions more than reason, as virtuous.

But this is an unreal, unidimensional vision of the World. Life is not like that. The World is not neatly divided in two easily identifiable groups of oppressed and oppressors. There are different kinds of conflict, different types of pain, of struggling.

This black and white vision those people have, surely will lead them into very strange positions. Because there are different types of oppression, and those people start to make a simplistic mental scale, from biggest oppressor to most oppressed. And this leads to contradiction.

Like when you care for homosexuals, but there is one thing you care more about, that is, the ethnicities you consider most oppressed. What if an authoritarian group, like Hamas, rules a region inhabited by people that are “oppressed” in your scale – the Palestinians – and fights against a people who are “not oppressed” in your scale – the Israelis – but at same time they tyrannize the homosexuals among them?

You have to stand with Hamas, or at least turn a blind eye to their deeds, otherwise you would be “aligned” with the “not oppressed” people, and breaking your priority that is "race". Then you end up supporting a hell in the life of the homosexual Palestinian, which appears as twice oppressed in your list. Doesn’t seem the least bit smart. That’s why having a set of values as priority is always more coherent than dividing people in different groups of rights.

And why do people fall in these strange mental situations? Because they are trying to solve the problems of the World by basically focusing on all that is negative. Thinking it is alright to break all rules if it is in the name of the right people, as if taking chances with “tearing down the wall” having nothing to put in its place was more righteous than admitting that the present society is not made only of bad things, and there are positives aspects to work with.

If we believe it is wrong that people have their rights neglected and abused, then we should try to everyday get a little closer to a World where everybody is respected. And we should do so by acting in a way that is more and more alike the way people should act towards people, and not “doing wrong in the opposite direction of the tide to make things right”.

Because whenever you do wrong, you can’t control the consequences of it, and you can’t exempt yourself of the bad consequences when they happen. And if you don’t believe there is right and wrong, then why are you fighting for anything at all?

I know that working with patience and acknowledging the rights of everybody may not give the feeling of vindication that some people desire. I mean, when we read about, or see in movies, some monster injustices of the past, like the horror of slavery, we may be filled with emotion and a strong feeling that there should be some drastic accounting, some vindication.

But the thing is that it is not possible to go back in time and undo those things, nor is it fair to take revenge on the people who are here in the present and you think they somehow represent those perpetrators because of their ethnics, but they didn’t do any of those things.

The academic people say that we have a system now that is result of that situation of old, that there are vestiges everywhere. And by saying that they justify "revolt by any means".

But here it is important to make a distinction. Of course the past reflects in the present, but the present and the past being connected doesn’t mean they are morally equivalent. So you can raise awareness for the situations you think are still not fair, but you can’t walk around wanting to punish the normal everyday people as if what they do as they go on living their lives was morally equivalent to having slaves or something, because it is not.

Some people use episodes of violence against minorities to try to push the idea that “nothing changed” since the old times of terrible oppression. Those episodes exist and must be denounced, justice and acknowledgment must be pursued, but no, we are not living in the old times.

With all the flaws our society still have, we have people going to jail for murdering people of color, we have women successfully denouncing harassers, even sometimes big companies having to respond for wrong deeds and so on. We are far from perfection, but those are verifiable facts. We have a society where you can speak against someone who is higher than you in a social hierarchy. By the way, what we have is those matters is far more than what they have in China or Iran.

So even if there is a connection of the past with the level of opportunity someone has today, you can denounce when you believe the opportunity is not enough, but not talk about people driving a car to their work as if that was morally equivalent to having slaves, or supporting slavery.

Moral is about thinking of the consequences of your acts, and the consequence of living a stable honest life in the present is not the strengthening of the bad aspects of our society in the future, it is simply the continuity of a world where more things can be brought to discussion, where things still can get better. You can’t punish that.

The vindication you can have over the cruelties of the past, is to build a society where everybody can thrive and prosper, and where violence against minorities is punished. You can’t label people who did nothing as “oppressors”. Especially If you know nothing about them, or how they deal with their communities, or what values they have in their families.

By neglecting the problems of people who you don’t consider “priority” because you don’t see them as the most vulnerable, you are punishing individual growth, therefore standing against one of the main ways that mankind has to walk towards freedom.

Because the quest of humankind for freedom, for a better condition, is not made only of flags and political ideologies. It is also made of individuals, families, and their ethical and moral values. Cultural changes a lot of times happen in an organic way, from people to people. Mankind is not totally guided by politics.

Individual growth can spread to more and more people. Not as fast as slogans, but it does. This is not any baseless abstraction, we all know that the people that immediately surround us can have more weight in determining if we are going to grow or not than politicians. The respect or disrespect in workplaces, for instance, that is not always correctable by law. The self-esteem that people get from their families, and so on. Whole cultures on how to behave towards the other.

And the main form of spreading values still is first family, then community. Of course sometimes a person diverges and veers to a different direction than that of his family, for better or worse, but still, in general, family remains the main instrument of continuity that humans have.

Politics can help, and is so many times necessary, but there is this other, not less important, to say the least, form of making a better World, that is simply living up to high values. After all, you can always have good laws in theory and nobody abiding them. No political change can, all by itself, make a better World.

If in the past you had too much tyranny, the way to make things different is people growing and showing it is possible to be in a better position and still don’t forget to care for others. You can’t be so negative as to think that absolutely everybody that prosper will be a selfish person who will only take and not give, and not care at all for the vulnerable.

Why must we believe that nobody who grows in the workplaces is to be trusted to make a better World but people who grow in political parties are?

Think. If we are supposed to believe that students that come from well-to-do families can have empathy for the oppressed, why is it so hard to believe that people who achieve some individual growth in non-academical areas can have empathy too, and care for the vulnerable, just having a different approach, less ideological? Why does academia have to be the only place where people who were not born in vulnerability must be believed when they say care for others? Because they have a “unified speech”? Other people also share consistent values, older and more battle-tested.

Of course, for people who always want to quantitatively grow their influence over other, this other aspect of human evolution is not so interesting, so they dismiss it as unrealistic, even naïve. Their way of evolution – their “revolution” – has a promise of changing things fast. But if you throw away the consistency of values that slowly grow with mankind, anything that goes fast can change things for worst – fast. As many examples around the World show.

And I am in no ways a specialist in that, nor am I thinking I solved the matter, but it occurs to me – and I want to share it because I believe it’s worth the thought – that this may be one of the reasons for Antisemitism.

The Jews have important historical characters and inspiring religious figures, but still, after so many times in History refusing to be assimilated by what was around, they built a worldview where traditional values, individual worth and immediate relationships cannot be nullified by waves of “isms”. Still, they are criticized for an "ideology" - Zionism - that only says they need to  have a home in their ancestral homeland. A right they legally acquired in the UN 80 years ago.

They’ve built their communities in America and a prosper country in Israel not so much through political ideology as through families, communities, and personal relationships. This is not wanted in this Political Word.

People don’t lose power when they refuse to go with the “right” modern ideology, they lose power when they think modern ideology is their only savior. And I believe this is something important for the whole World to think about.

Nowadays we live in a World where anyone can be targeted for having said the “wrong thing”, and nobody will be defended by the big groups of “rebels” unless it is someone who they agree with. That is, everybody quiet, and only one group of “official rebels” speaking. Yes, official. Your University is not in an alley.

That is, not so much for new ideas, individual creativity.

On the other hand, to be fair, a big part of the World of capitalism also don’t seem to be really aware of what is at stake. Free commerce is one of the things that make up a free Society. But there are other values, freedom of speech, of opportunity, equal respect for everybody, and the need to defend the rights of people you disagree with when they are neglected.

If someone with a lot of money and political influence starts to play against these values, the laws of supply and demand, all by themselves, without higher moral values, won’t save us from going into a strange new kind of authoritarian world.

One instance of a thing that doesn’t seem to give people an instantaneous self-label of “defender of the most oppressed” and at the same time doesn’t represent a big issue to the huge quantity commerce, but definitely affects human life and free society is the rights of people on internet.

What can a person do if she is suddenly cut off from the big social medias? A lot of people are talking about the need to take certain kind of content from internet, dangerous content. I agree there is dangerous content, especially when it appeals to children and teenagers, and there is a need to deal with some of these things through law.

But there is another side to this coin. Why so little – or nothing at all – is spoken about the right that people should have to defend themselves if they believe they were “cut off” by wrong reasons – or no reason at all? Where is the right of someone to be in internet?

If they cut you off, you get into a maze of artificial intelligence conversations – never a real person – and without strong laws, hiring a common lawyer to fight that giant would be a desperating waste. Where is the political concern for that? People seem to like it when it happens with someone they don’t like, but they don’t see how this can affect the individual freedom, the right to be in the “arena”.

We don’t know how these guys – the bosses of big tech companies – think. To be very honest, I feel like they might live in a different planet. Does it make any sense? Anyway, maybe their whole ideology is that if people are using something, it’s because that’s what they want. Maybe they would say that, if people’s desires, coupled with an algorithm that seeks to increase interaction, lead everybody in a certain direction, it’s not their fault at all.

But we must think about the consequences of it. If the algorithm works to increase profit at any cost, it may decide that cutting off people with new ideas helps the machine to run smoother. It could happen automatically, by an algorithm that have a whole galaxy of data and a “will” to increase a few determinate variables – time of consumption, money.

Not to mention the possibility of it being used deliberately for political gain. There is a lot of money in politics.

But where would be the constitutional base for what I am saying?  Well, if you walk on a restaurant, can people refuse to serve you with no reason? Can a posting service refuse to send your letter? Can a bank refuse to take your money?

There is a reason for the universality of these laws. There is no peace without it.

I am not saying these things to bring up any kind of despair. On the contrary. My whole point is that despair is the greatest enemy of humanity. When people think that there is nothing in the civilization to work with, that nothing that exists currently is worth defending, they can make the awful bet of wanting to see it all fall hoping that “maybe” something better takes its place. History, wisdom and logics shows us how insane that is.

You can respect people who fought for Civil Rights in the past, and some of the people who fight for them now, and at same time acknowledge that we live in a different moment in History, and unfortunately some of the historically legitimate causes started being used for a larger and less clear political agenda. And that there are new issues to think about.

Offering simplistic solutions for problems that happen far away, where the consequences don’t affect you, screaming about wars that happen in the other side of the world while not giving a damn for the rights of individuals that stand right next to you is not only hypocrisy, but also helps to kill good seeds.

There has always been good seeds, and the good people of the past, not only the bad, made the World we have today.

The East Of Me (little poem)

We all hurt by the cold and the heat

Needing faith is by far no defeat

I just wonder how people can't see

The East of me

Many times i'm just walking along

With a smile I just got from a song

And I know there's a way to be free

In the East of me

They all come and they all disappear

In the morning our place is still here

And it's always you first that I see

In the East of me

16 Points About "Genocide" and Other Things

Now that there is a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas, now that we got to the point where a terrorist organization finally signed a deal that says it must disarm and have no more political role – a deal that, if upheld, will set Gaza and Israel free of this terror – journalists, leaders, academic people, and protesters in streets and internet just want to talk about what they call a “genocide”, that they say is what Israel is doing.

Here are 16 points about this subject, that reinforce (and a lot of times repeat) what I wrote before.

 

How can the right moral stand be the one that shows no future?

Even the leaders of the World that tried to show virtue recognizing a Palestinian state said that Hamas should have no role in it – even if they offered no solution for how it should happen.

Now people in the street are mixed: some are openly supportive of Hamas, pretending they don’t know that Hamas – or Hezbollah or any of those groups – will never bring freedom and dignity to people while in power. Other people avoid the subject of terrorism, focusing on Israel alone.

If the ceasefire is upheld and Hamas is gone from power, a new future can start to be built. But if the protesters and the leaders who stand with them have their ways, then what? Israel, a nation of 8 million people should simply disappear? Then the different terror groups in the region will magically agree and build a decent country?

Or will there be just more blood? And who they will attack, since their political power come from attacking people?

If some of these people were asking for Israel to withdraw from Gaza, well, Israel started doing so, with the condition that Hamas will disarm so there won’t be a terrorist organization at Israel’s doorstep working night and day to destroy it.

 

Disagreeing with the main protesters about the causes of things doesn’t mean you don’t care for tragedy

The word “genocide” has been gaining traction from emotion. Of course, they show images, and some of these images are real. Not all, by far, but some are. Images of suffering. Because it’s a war.

The word “genocide” was coined in 1948 – right after the Holocaust, the intended destruction of all Jewish people that result in the death of 6 million – nearly half of them.

Deaths in wars are tragic, but not every bad word apply to every tragedy. Looking for clarity in words is not coldness – is seeking the truth.

We must refuse the emotional blackmail that is being done, when they try to make us feel that, by not demonizing Israel, we think lives doesn’t matter.

If someone believes – as I do – that Israel had no choice but acting to destroy Hamas – the deaths don’t cease to be tragic – but the cause changes.

A genocide is an intent to destroy a people, it is not a strike – with the collateral harm that always exist in such situations – on an armed threat that intends to destroy you. Simple as that.

 

If Israel wanted a “genocide” why did they sign the ceasefire deal? And why did they give them Gaza in the first place?

No, they did not resume the war. Hamas is a treacherous enemy and they do try to break the dividing line and inflict harm on Israeli soldier – to which Israel responds, because just “hoping they stop breaking the deal” won’t work with Hamas.

Israel has videos of Hamas members, armed, on the wrong side of the line.

And if they wanted a “genocide”, why did they sign the deal? Why did they stop their full attacks? By the way, why did they even give back Gaza to the Palestinians in September of 2005?

 

Hordes of armed, masked men invaded a small country randomly killing as many as they could, with cruelty. Those were the first moments of a war.

There has been a certain refusal to clearly pinpoint that moment as the start of the war, as if a terrorist attack that kills more than a thousand, rapes, burns, and takes more than two hundred as hostages was not a war declaration.

There was no open war between Israel and Hamas in Oct 6^th, 2023. There was a ceasefire from previous conflicts. Then the massacre, and then the war.

Doesn’t a massacre carried by a terror organization that rules the neighboring region count as a declaration of war? Then it is a declaration of what?

 

Imagine October 7^th was in your city

It is easy to just put in a drawer of “bad things that happen in the World” when it was so far away.

But imagine it was in your city. Imagine you knew there was hate against you in the neighbor region, but something happened in a way you could never have imagined.

Imagine it was your door neighbor, the daughter of the baker, a teacher you had, a baby in the family of a friend.

The next day everybody is in chock, pain, anger, despair. The government announces the country is in war, now. Of course it is in war.

 

When Israel was created, the Jews accepted two states, the Arab leaders didn’t. And they refused it again later

In 1948, the World was coming out of a major shift in geopolitics. Two World Wars had redefined the Globe. The Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empire had ended, and the Brittish Empire had entered its irreversible decline.

There were regional conflicts, violence, displacements.

The solution for the dispute for Palestine, between Jews – who dreamed of going back to their ancestral homeland all along two thousand years and had begun doing so – and Arabs – who were the majority there – was the division of it in two. The Jews said yes, the Arabs said no.

Then the War of Independence. A big number of Arabs had to leave Israel, and at least the same number of Jews had to live other countries in the Middle East, not to mention the exodus from Europe.

In the end of the Age of Empires, less than one percent of the Middle East for the Jews. All the rest for Arab muslins.

And ever since, every time Palestinians leaders were offered a two state deal for Palestine, they said “no”. They remain firm in their resolution of “never recognizing Israel”.

Isn’t this one of the things the United Nations should be tirelessly working for – the recognition of Israel by Arab Countries – since the UN agreed with its foundation in 1948?

 

October 7^th don’t end by itself. By the way, ever heard of “Conquer the Galilee”?

It took more than a day for the Israeli Army to send the terrorists back, to stop them. They were determined to go as far as they could. Now imagine if they took a village, and stayed there with all the people as hostages?

No doubt they would love to do it if they could, and imagine the nightmare – an even worst nightmare – that this kind of crisis would cause for Israel, with villages as hostages and the insane demands of terrorists?

Hardly they would plan of taking Tel Aviv soon and destroying the government, they would more likely create chaos in the country, advancing more and more.

Hezbollah also attacked Israel, so Israel fought them in South Lebanon, and there they found everything ready for operation “Conquer the Galilee”, an invasion of Israel from the North with more – and maybe bigger – attacks like October 7^th.

 

Israel has proven it does a lot to mitigate civilian harm

They make what no other army has ever made. They throw leaflets, make calls to residences of people, post on social media where they will attack, so people can evacuate. Giving up the element of surprise. Nobody does that.

They also ensure that aid comes into Gaza. They showed countless times the huge amount of trucks that come in bringing aid. The press don’t show that – again, if it was fake, say it’s fake, but instead, silence.

Although the press loves when Israel creates any measure of control to be sure the aid will not go to Hamas to exploit it. Then the press says “Israel is blocking aid”. Simple as that.

Israel chose to fight on the ground too, not only by air, so they could be more precise. And more than nine hundred Israeli soldiers lost their lives.

 

There is a power against Israel that is much larger than Gaza

I really don’t understand why so little is spoken in the press about the ties that these terrorist groups have to Iran. It is not like the dictatorship of Iran disguises their hatred for Israel – the Ayatollah talked about it many times openly, calling Israel a “cancer” and saying it “will soon exist no more”.

Their connection to the terrorist groups have been documented – they train them and they fund them – and there is no doubt. The “double role” of Qatar isn’t so subtle either.

Isn’t this part of the story? It is what Israel has been saying for so many years. At least listen. If it seems false, say it. But instead, silence. Why?

 

When radical extremist ideology put its hands in weapons, the result can’t be beautiful

There is a sad true about the Middle East that maybe most of the news people think is “too abstract” to make a story: the radical extremist version of Islam is ever growing, and more and more people think Jews don’t deserve to live, and that violence is a good way to solve any problem, and martyrdom is an achievement.

The result, of course, is that people’s lives gets worse and worse, being watched and controlled by armed masked men dressed in black, having no right to say anything. Fathers and brothers killing girls for honor, homosexuals force to hide or flee or get killed, dissidents tortured and murdered.

And of course, these groups take all the resources that could be invested in making people’s lives better, and use it to build their terror infrastructure. And after making people’s lives hopeless, somehow they teach people to take all the frustration and direct it against the “enemy” – the Jews, America, the West – based on promises of bliss after the “victory”, or even paradise after martyrdom – yes, some people really believe that.

That this all results in War and suffering should be no surprise for anyone.

 

Israel do have military power, but only if they use it

Israel is not among the five greatest military powers in the World. By the lists I found in internet, not even among the ten. At least not in quantitative terms. But they do have an amazing – unique – human power, the talent and dedication of each individual. So they always innovate and achieve things that could have seem impossible, like surviving alone surrounded by sworn enemies.

But this is because they use their strengths when needed, otherwise it is like having no strength.

When someone invades a building and kill someone, you have to go after him, you don’t say, “maybe he will never do it again”, and you don’t say, “it is not necessary to respond, let’s just increase the safety of buildings”. If certain things go unresponded, you can surely expect the evil and the danger to grow exponentially.

Israel’s history is a story of wars and terrorist attacks. Bombs on buses, on restaurants. People being stabbed in the streets.

Now is a chance like no other to start bringing peace to the region.

 

Evil forces always increase the cost of their defeat. For everybody.

Some people talk about “apartheid”. But Israel is a state with freedom where people of all ethnics and religions can be who they are, vote and be voted, and work anywhere.

Yes, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are poorer than Israelis in general, and yes, Israel watches over what is happening at its borders. But one thing is not the cause of the other.

How can people have good lives if their leaders only care about taking all the resources and invest in their agenda? And how can Israel not watch, having a sworn enemy there, that attacked so many times?

And the big dilemma is that, the more the time passes, more people adhere to the Terror ideology, more structure is built for the terror group inside the cities. More and more the terror is mixed with the lives of people. More and more they increase the cost, in lives, that will take for their defeat. This is precisely their strategy.

Isn’t the discovering an unbelievably huge maze of tunnels, a true underground city, with electricity, air circulation, metal doors, at least an interesting thing for the news? Why nothing is said about that, or about missiles stored in schools, or terrorism classes in schools?

I repeat: now the deal was signed, will the World allow Hamas to break the deal, rearm and increase the cost of their defeat once again?

 

Giving away the protection of your people is not an option

After the killing has started – and Hamas started it – “doing nothing” means forsaking your people. How would you feel if in the future you had to look back, knowing you didn’t fight the enemy and your people suffered hell because of it?

Such a trade-off, giving away the fate of your people to chance for a momentary peace, surely is not being proposed by a good hand.

And indeed the monster who is proposing this dilemma will not, no matter what you do to “appease” him, he will not stop doing evil by his own decision, doing evil to other people and to his own people.

There is no real peace coming from giving terrorism what it wants. They oppress their own people, they kill dissidents, one group sometimes fights the other in huge bloody civil wars, and they aim for a global domination.

They say it in their own words: “first Israel, then America”. They want it all. How far can they go? Well, if nothing is done, it is obvious that they won’t stop causing pain to everybody.

Iran only doesn’t have a nuclear bomb because Israel stopped their nuclear program with precise strikes.

There is so much more that the World should be doing against terror, against the teaching of extremism, even to children – but no, nobody should be asked to forsake their own duty of protecting their people, most likely to no gain at all.

 

All this focus on only one pain is making a people the big pariah. Again.

You have to wonder why Israel attracts so much anger when it fights back. In the very recent Tigray War, in Ethiopia, more than half a million died. Approximately half a million died in the Civil War in Syria. 240 thousand in Afghanistan. 300 thousand in Sudan. More than 300 thousand in Yemen.

All this sudden surge of “caring for each person who dies” makes no sense at all. The fact is that, when Israel fights, some people find their perfect villain: someone successful, someone who believes in the individual freedoms, someone who is Jewish.

And all the discomfort with these “different” people – that for some reason, seems like was never really gone – comes back to the surface, and you have Jewish young people being harassed in colleges, Jewish families being offended and threatened in public spaces, attacks to synagogues and shootings. Jewish people dying in places like the United States and Australia.

And news people talking about these killings as if they couldn’t see the relation between the way they talk about the conflict in Gaza and the rise of Antisemitism.

 

And how can it be “genocide” if Gaza can’t simply say “we just want to live our lives and mind our business”?

What country who was being victim of a “genocide” wouldn’t accept the offer of just saying “peace”, “long term peace”, “peace for good”, “let’s each of us carry on with our own lives”.

People in Gaza can’t say that because of the ideology that Hamas is imposing on the region.

Genocide is the killing with the intent of eliminating a people with basis of who they are. The Palestinians are not being eliminated, Israel signed a ceasefire agreement, there is a terrorist group that started this.

So how is this a genocide? If it was, you would have a “victim” claiming for peace.

So, seriously, Gaza, please say “we want to coexist in peace”.

 

Seems like a lot of people don’t want us to think seriously about dictatorships and death ideologies

Something strange is happening here. Most news people, and World leaders, talk about numbers and so on, but seem to be totally unable to differentiate between a democracy and a bloody dictatorship, in qualitative terms. Even slaveholding countries don’t have to answer for how they treat people.

Iran being invited to preside commissions of human rights. Everybody a “brother”, no matter how many people they killed.

Nobody seeing the difference between things. All a flattened ground for money and commodities to go from here to there, without much thinking about nothing.

Perspective