Another One About A Country That Doesn't Want To Be Destroyed

 I'm always looking for clearer and more direct ways of expressing how I see the conflicts Israel is in. So here we go.

Any sane person would avoid war if possible. It has to be the last resource. And yes, even as a last resource, It is difficult.

So, some people may say that we should never wage war, no matter what. 

But what if you are seeing destruction in your country, caused by an external force who makes clear it will never listen to any proposal of coexistence?

That is what Israel saw in so many terror attacks they suffered, culminating in October 7th, 2023, the massacre that Hamas, a terror group promoted by Iran, perpetrated, starting the current war.

And since then, other groups tied to Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houtis in Yemen, and Iran itself, fired thousand of missiles towards Israel.

A lot of people can't accept this war as a necessary one, because of the proportion of the tragedy on the side of Gaza, and  there is also tragedy in Lebanon. Much more people died on that side, do Israel must be wrong, they think.

But this is a result of how this war is carried by the different sides. One side invests in protection of their people, the other side is controlled by Iran and their proxies, investing only in the protection of terrorists, building tunnels under cities and endangering their people by being always mixed with civilian life, knowing that it will slow Israel.

A victory for Israel would inevitably look like what we are seeing, because even with the Idf trying their best to minimize civilian harm - more than any country has done in any war - the other side tries its best to mix combatants with civilians, terrorist infrastructure with civilian environments, to make Israel look bad. What we are seeing is Israel winning in the only way possible, fighting. It's either that, or not fighting at all.

But then, some people may still think that, because of the tragic quality of the result of this conflict, we should, even with the danger over Israel, go back to "no war at all", somehow. After all, even children are dying, right?

Yes, and it is terribly tragic, but whenever there are aggressive violent regimes growing, threatening and attacking others, it will bring tragedy to the people under these regimes. We must extend our empathy to people, but if we don't fight at all, we are giving to this horrible regimes all they want.

 Israel has a future to protect, they can't accept that they should neglect the minimal safety of their own families, or should they? Yes, it's hard, isn't it?

And the truth is that we, in the West, don't have the same need that Israelis have for clarifying what is possible and what is not in the reality of the Middle East.

There are 42 Arab countries,  one Jewish State. Two billion Muslims, fourteen million Jews,  and there is a constantly growing ideology of radical religious view and of extreme Jew-hatred.

Are we saying that “Israel must not fight back because the enemy cannot destroy Israel because Israel is stronger”? But is Israel stronger if they don’t fight back?

But in the West even the people who are not in the hallucinated group that waves Hezbollah flags, the ones who just oppose all wars, they don't really need to present a better solution.

Let's face it. We can be like some “cool” World leaders. In October 7th, all we needed to do was to “condemn” it. Then when Israel fights back and war brings its pain, we condemn that too. If Israel stopped when we condemned it, then Hezbollah could have launched their prepared Operation “Conquer the Galilee” and massacred more Israelis,then what? Easy, we condemn that too. What if Iran finally builds nuclear bombs and starts threatening Israel with them? What if they  throw them? We keep condemning all that. What if different radical islamist groups fight between themselves and massacre their own people, like the half million people dead in the Syrian Civil war? You know the answer. Condemn, and you're fine. You were righteous all along.

But Israel can't give themselves this luxury. From the moment when

October 7th started there was  a situation of war and their children were dying. They were already  navigating a world of danger where safety and peace don't come by waiting. What “doing nothing” would look like from their point of view?

Should they simply watch their people die in many attacks and try to calculate that the death of their own people is a necessary evil in order to avoid war at any cost?

Or maybe they should just count their own dead, waiting until it gets to a number that would justify a defensive war in the eyes of the West? Can't you see how insane that would be?

So what can be done? Well, Israel did the only thing they could do: defining the source of the threat - the terrorist groups and Iran - and doing what is strictly necessary to reduce their power of aggression.

Nobody can know all the exact "What happens ifs" of the future. You know you are fighting for the right side, by the way your side fights and by what your side represents.

The Idf shows to the World the concrete measures it takes to mitigate civilian harm - although it obviously can't be perfect. And they are clearly saying that when there be no more terrorism, there is no more war.

The other side is also clear, when they say that they will never be satisfied while Israel still exists.

Which one is fighting for a reality closer to the hope we all should have: A future where, for the first time in History, no child dies from war?

There are insane terrorist leaders in this World, with a global view of victory against "the West". They are recruiting and training people, and getting equipped, and they have powerful allies.

They have a vision of future that should look dark to all of us. And sooner or later, they will need to be confronted, for the sake of Humanity. Or not?

As for doing all you can to avoid the tragedies of war, why don't we turn our eyes to the important people who kept inviting Iranian leaders to glamorous things while all this was growing?

My living room TV and China

The tv in my living room started a series about China, to show this "milennar culture with an eye to the future". The communist party seems to be one of those "nobody is perfect" things that will "naturally" get better with time. 

The guys seem really focused on the huge and "impressive" things China has been doing, and the "modernity" it shows.

I'd just like to note - and this is about the regime, not the people - that, in extremely controlled societies, colossal structures have among their functions, make the common man feel totally impotent to defy the system in any way. Pharaoh and the likes knew that.

More Than One Dimension

Why so many people don’t take it seriously when Israel warns us – and they’ve been warning and showing a lot of stuff – about the oppressive regimes, the authoritarian theocracies, the bloody dictatorships that threaten entire regions and the World?

I think a lot of us are afraid to call these things “evil”. Some people think this would be too “judgmental”.  But we know that the consequences of a small group of people having absolute arbitrary power over a country are bad for the people there. So how do people deal with this contradiction, knowing that certain forms of power cause pain and at same time not wanting to “judge too much”?

Some people prefer to think that these undesirable forms of power are simply result of “inequality”. Like, life conditions are worst there, so we have no right to say that people’s attitudes are right or wrong.

But “life conditions” is not only a matter of how much money a country has compared to the United States of America, it is also – and I believe it is more – about how the leadership of a country does their job.

Doesn’t it make a real difference? Are people treated with dignity, are they respected in their rights? Do they have freedom and opportunity to try to make the things that can improve their lives and bring them happiness?

Iran’s economy is strongly controlled by the government. Just like everything else. Should we really go on believing that the lack of freedom of people is all caused by the fact that someone else has more money, even if Iran, in general terms, is very far from being a miserable country when it comes to summed resources?

Are we really forbidden to use our discernment, use the accumulated experience of humankind through history, to notice that some patterns – arbitrary power, violence, blaming everything on an external enemy, preaching to “take back” something that was “lost” in the past by “any means” – all necessarily lead to darkness, suffering.

Iran has not only their own violent army, they have proxy groups acting against whoever they don’t like. Terror groups, groups formed by masked man who long gave up wanting anything for their lives excepts the prizes for violence. Making attacks that it would be insane for the attacked not to respond to.

But still, many people feel that standing in the side of the one who “have more money”, no matter the specific conditions that led to conflict, no matter the insanity that is going on, or how dangerous some agent has become for the region and the world, will always be “kind of wrong”, simply because of the different economic conditions.

In this case we are – a lot of us without knowing - echoing a materialist point of view. A point of view largely shared by Marx himself. Because he was the guy that proposed that everything should be seen through the lens of who has the “capital”.

Classical Marxism believed the economic differences between groups of people – namely who owned and who didn’t own the means of production, the factories and other things that can turn money into more money – these difference would lead to social contradictions, social struggles, that would have consequences in the economy and so on.

Those movements of forces, disputes between “classes of people” would change the landscape, and while there is still imbalance, new contradictions would always appear, and the conflicts and struggles would lead to new contradictions that would lead to new struggles and so on, until the only end possible: an equilibrium being reached, means of production belonging to everybody and nobody at the same time.

They believe this economic struggle was the real truth behind all the Historical processes. To put it very simply: one dimension was really relevant, the Economic Dimension. All problems are generated by economic imbalance, and what diminishes imbalances is always good in the long term, because will lead to the good equilibrium.

Therefore, it would make no sense to judge individual actions that people take in their struggles, if it leads to more balance. A substitution of very old human notions of what is ethical or not to do towards the other, for an abstract vision that looks a lot like a simple mathematical graph.

Nowadays of course, their language changed, got more sophisticated. A lot of things evolved in the world of science and knowledge, the jobs of people changed, and they don’t want to look like old school bearded factory picketers, they want to look modern.

So now they give importance “not just to money simply”, they speak of the existence of “complex systems of culture” – ideologies, intellectual life, religion – all these producing different types of “hegemony”, but of course, they always end up pointing to their old enemy: the “capitalist Western World”, mainly the United States, and, disproportionally and obsessively, Israel.

How can it, in the end, look so much like their old talk of materialistic imbalance? The Capital now is different, companies act and have money in different countries – and the biggest companies don’t seem to be loyal to nobody.

And although the United States still have the bigger Economy, China is coming fast, they openly aim for Global Leadership, and their vision of government is not democratic, they don’t believe in individual freedom as much as us. The number of people they have under their authoritarian power is immense. Human lives, as I said before, is something even more real than economy numbers.

Also, how many people live under absolutist theocracies, or in countries more and more infested by extremist religious groups, how many people are getting more and more radicalized?

What happens in these situations is much more than “hegemony”. It’s one thought. One direction. Everything else is smashed.

So what the Anti-Western people are saying is that absolutist powers over a huge number of people is not that bad, when it stands against the supposed “hegemony” of the West. But in the West at least there is more than one thought allowed, more than one direction to be tried.

There is freedom of Religion is the Western World, the press is much more free than in other places. And the Academic World, although not free from its own hegemonic thought, which is bad, is not obliged to be aligned with the government, which is good.

And let’s not forget that the money in democratic countries is not so obliged to the political leaders as the money is state-controlled economies. That makes a difference. So why treat the West as a “big hegemony”, and the others as “complex”?

Of course nobody in his sane mind desires a Global War – God forbid – but there should be a clear message that certain things are not acceptable. Endorsing and supporting a regime like Iran’s, siding with extremists when they say Israel should be wiped out – we must be clear that we don’t accept these positions.

Terrorism has caused so much pain, saying that a country should not exist can’t lead to a good end. Iran needs to be clearly considered a big enemy of peace. Yes, Terrorism is urgent, it must be dealt with right now.

It is clear that the Marxist’s problem is not really with “Hegemony”, or “the power of people over people”, is precisely with the West. They are still seeing the old Economic Scale more than anything, and refusing to really see what is not shown by the gpd numbers, that is, powerful dictatorships, and a World where the United States don’t give all the cards. Not by far.

Yes, in the History of mankind there is the horrible slavery of black African people in the hands of some Europeans or descendants of Europeans, but there is also oppression everywhere, in all old Kingdoms and Empires, not only in the West.

See how the academic people use their concept of “complexity”, of “many things to consider”. When anything bad happens in a country that they consider “oppressor”, they will say that this bad fact that happened is a perfect reflection of “many things”, and it proves that virtually everything in this country is wrong.

But when we see bad things, massacres out of nowhere, terror groups oppressing their own people, women subjugated, homosexuals condemned to non-existence, when this things happen in a country they don’t “want to judge”, then they say there are “many things” that we are not taking in consideration if we “judge”.

Two very different uses of the expression “many things”.

That is, in their “sophistication”, they use their concept of “complexity” to relativize everything that they don’t want us to apply our discernment to, and then it all falls happily back to that old mathematical graph.

And I think this unidimensional line of thought doesn’t affect only the Marxists. Think: how many people who are not interested in communism – or religious extremism, for that matter – look at the news, see a bunch of economy numbers on one side, and a lot of reports of conflicts, and numbers about conflict, and they think that it is all a matter of richness and poverty.

How many of us – I, for sure, in a certain time of my life – have the feeling that it all somehow boils down to economy? Like, poverty, lack of jobs, shortage of investment, it all causes bad economic situations and these lead to those “strange aggressive behaviors”.

How many people seem to believe that a Global Development, a rise of the “good indices”, is the solution for everything? More commerce, better investments, people will get out of misery and “naturally” start looking for the real good things for their lives…

In my opinion, people who think like this, are being just as materialistic as the Marxists. Of course, they don’t believe that the only solution is struggle, clash between classes, that will lead to equilibrium. They don’t believe the flat world of communism, that everybody needs to have the same, they believe a collective growth, that’s all.

But think. If someone believes that the economic dimension is so much more important than everything else, to the point that a normal person doesn’t even need to think about the rest, just keep going and letting an abstract idea of developments do its “magic”, and believing that every possible confrontation is “unnecessary” because soon the “indices” will fix everything – then this person is being just as unidimensional as the Marxist.

Because a solution has to have to do with the cause, and if money is solution for everything, then the cause of every awful violent deed is lack of money. We are falling in the same relativism of the communist, that don’t believe anything must be “judged”.

The difference being that we believe that everybody can “grow together”, and the Marxist believe that the faster way – or the only way – to bring “development” to the poor is to take down the things that keep some people “having more than others”.

In this case, the difference between us and a radical Marxist is just the result of a calculation. We would be forever arguing about the same weird mathematics, that just sees one variable as really relevant. We can’t prove they are justifying Evil if they just “solved and equation differently”.

The difference should be more than that. It should be a qualitative difference. Different parameters, different language, different things brought into the reasoning. Not just see “money” and “development” as a magic answer that makes everything else irrelevant.

We should consider the consequences of the choices that people make as much more diverse than just “going up” or “going down” as if there was one, and only one, Universal Ladder that everybody is climbing.

 Imagine simply sending more money to regions where there is an insane leadership. It will not magically make people’s lives better.

There are so many other factors we should consider when we think about the World. The extremist propaganda, so strong in so many places, children being educated for hatred, arbitrary power of leaders, people having the right to kill others.

“Oh, the indices account for that”. Maybe, but the “indices” also give an illusion that we just need to make one variable, “development”, grow. In most people’s mind, it’s about money. But there is not one Universal ladder that everybody is climbing. Reality has many more dimensions that that.

Some people watch the news and, for some reason, they seem to have come to believe that “real adults” care mostly about Economy.

Then they tend to doubt that aggressive leaders would really go very far in their stated violent goals. As if they think that “everybody will someday be satisfied with some money”.

Well, I don’t know if those leaders have well finished plans for, say, the next one hundred years. But not having a perfect plan doesn’t mean someone is playing.

Think. If in a “kingdom”, there is one thought, that is, “we do all to fight our enemies”, then what is expected of the leadership? What everybody in the system expects of the person immediately above? That they work for it, and work well. Where can this end? We don’t know.

We have to deal with things like violence, terror, hatred, propaganda, miseducation, misleading for what they are in themselves, not as “delays in development”.

 If we say we care for life, we must acknowledge that there exist, in this World, whole different realities where life doesn’t matter. How can we expect a country like Israel to defend itself from Iran – who sworn to destroy Israel – and their terrorist subgroups, and blame Israel for all the tragedy of this war, if we know Iran has created a reality where life has no value?

We heard those leaders say, “we are proud when our people die”, “we are a people of martyrs”. Israel is not the one in charge of these regions where life has lost its value, became disposable, and are we going to expect them to give up their defense when brutally attacked? How are we going to change these realities, these dark realities? It’s horribly sad, but where were the leaders of the World while this death-loving kingdom was being created?

We have, with all ethics and with all care possible, to protect the ground where life is valued. It’s the only hope for the World.

So yes, we should consider “many factors”, but not say “oh, there are many factors” just to prevent people from discerning right and wrong in specific human actions, and then throw it all back to the same mathematical graph that does not contain any guarantee of life improvement for nobody.

We should indeed see right and wrong in the each of the many factors, because that is what changes things, and that is what valuing human life in all its richness is.

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.