O livro sagrado

No livro sagrado do islão, os versículos sobre a guerra são muitos e estão espalhados por 12 capítulos. Mas é preciso entender que a interpretação desses versículos é complexa e ambígua. A própria ideia de “guerra santa” é uma invenção dos europeus. Sempre que os “jihadistas” resolvem atuar (e não uso o termo terrorismo de propósito, porque aí não falaria só de Islão), lá vem o mundo muçulmano em massa dizer que não vale a pena “colocarem-nos a todos no mesmo pacote”, porque o islão deles não é o nosso, ou que aquilo que fazem não é sequer “islão”. O problema é que, qualquer que seja a justificação que se apresente, a lógica religioso-belicista destes grupos é baseada em leituras de versículos do alcorão que estão escritos e traduzidos e que apelam à guerra, à violência e morte aos infiéis.

É preciso admitir que não existem estudos suficientemente conhecidos sobre o pouco que se tem feito para estudar a formação e evolução da noção de guerra no Islão ou que examinem de forma crítica as variadas perspetivas islâmicas sobre esta matéria. Acresce a esta lacuna científica, uma tradição clássica islâmica que desenvolveu a sua própria visão canónica sobre a formação e evolução da guerra sagrada, havendo algumas variações entre as escolas legais, mas com uma visão mais ou menos uniforme sobre o significado e aplicação da guerra divinamente orientada. E a verdade é que os estudiosos da guerra santa na civilização islâmica têm demonstrado uma tendência para aceitar de forma acrítica, e sem desafiar, estas perspectivas já normalizadas.

Versículos bélicos

Os versículos sobre a guerra são muitos e estão espalhados por 12 capítulos no Alcorão, contudo, é preciso entender que a exegese desses versículos é complexa e ambígua por uma série de razões: 1)porque a revelação foi sendo transmitida durante 23 anos ao Profeta Muhammad e aos muçulmanos, sempre oralmente; 2)porque os registos dessas revelações estiveram em materiais de vário tipo, desde peles de animais a folhas de plantas, entre outros, e são produto de discursos de retórica e dialéctica, dentro de determinado tempo e contexto situacional; 3) porque a compilação destes manuscritos aconteceu mais de 100 anos após o desaparecimento do Profeta; 4) porque a redação do Alcorão foi ainda mais tardia e provavelmente obedecendo a critérios de seleção, organização e abrogação questionáveis; 5) porque a apresentação dos capítulos não é cronológica: as últimas revelações aparecem primeiro, e as primeiras revelações surgem no fim; 6) porque houve versículos omitidos ou integrados em capítulos onde se pensava, à época, fazerem mais sentido (e de acordo com os interesses religiosos e políticos do momento e das facções que existiam); 7) porque a linguagem poética dos árabes pré-islâmicos merece sempre uma análise cuidada pela multiplicidade de interpretações e traduções; 8) porque há necessidade de conhecer o pensamento, a organização social, política e económica dos árabes pré-islâmicos para que a exegese do alcorão seja analisada por analogia ou contradição a algo que já existia; e, finalmente, 9) porque as interpretações e traduções posteriores à redação do alcorão acabaram por permanecer numa ordem que se tornou hegemónica na versão dominante da canonização islâmica que não passou do século XII/XIII depois da morte de Averróis, quando no Islão se fecharam as portas da Ijtihad, ou o processo de análise humanista.

São inúmeros os exemplos que refletem todos estes pressupostos de complexidade. Para dar apenas um, no capítulo 16, versículos 125 a 127 diz-se:

(125)Convida (todos) para o caminho do teu Senhor com sabedoria e sermões belos, e discute com eles nas formas que sejam mais belas e mais graciosas: pois o vosso Senhor conhece bem quem se desviou do Seu caminho, e aqueles que recebem os Seus ensinamentos.(126) Se os punis, então puni-os do mesmo modo com fostes atormentados. Mas se persistirdes pacientemente, isso será melhor para o paciente.(127) Sejai pacientes. A vossa paciência existe apenas através de Deus.

Estes versos, entre muitos outros, foram largamente discutidos por terem suscitado dúvidas sobre se o verso 125 estaria cronologicamente ligado aos restantes dois. Existem várias versões que indicam que esse teria sido revelado noutros contextos e noutro momento da história do Islão. Uma discussão interessante mas que não posso, por razões óbvias, prolongar neste artigo. Mas para além dessa polémica, é também curioso perceber que o verbo ‘aqaba surge três vezes nestes versículos sendo o seu significado alternar, punir ou punir de volta, no sentido de retribuição em função de algo que foi feito, ou vingança, dependendo da tradução. Nestes excertos, as palavras associadas ao verbo são “punição” e “tormento”. Se utilizarmos o verbo nestas variadas possibilidades de interpretação, o versículo poderia tomar outra forma e entendimento.

Para além das questões de cronologia e interpretação/tradução, é preciso perceber o pensamento e a organização social, económica e política na arábia pré-islâmica. Em linhas gerais, os árabes (ou nómadas) não partilhavam de um significado transcendente aplicado ao ato de guerra, nem havia algum tipo de recompensa numa vida para além desta. Os beduínos permaneciam sempre num estado de guerra, e as lutas ocorriam, salvo alguns meses do ano, e alguns locais sagrados, para afirmação da honra, para a dinâmica económica e o prestígio social. O parentesco era o que determinava a aliança entre os grupos. Contudo, quando falamos de guerra não estamos necessariamente a falar de combate. A Guerra pode ser um estado ou uma condição entre grupos humanos. A Guerra-Fria, por exemplo, não se reflete num combate direto entre as partes envolvidas. Do mesmo modo, a Jihad – que significa literalmente, ultrapassar-se a si mesmo, procurar, explorar, aguentar dores extraordinárias ou inimigas, não tem a ver originalmente com uma guerra no sentido de combate. Muito provavelmente, a Jihad aqui teria de ver com o exercício de ultrapassar um modo de pensamento e ideologia pré-islâmica para uma outra trazida por Muhammad. Porque na verdade, a palavra árabe para luta é qital, e a de guerra é gharb. E a ideia de “guerra santa” é uma invenção dos europeus.

Para se entender a Jihad no sentido FUNDACIONAL (e não FUNDAMENTALISTA, como propôs M. Arkoun) é preciso entender a transição de uma cultura de parentesco para outra baseada numa ideologia de comunidade religiosa – a Umma, e perceber que este não foi um processo simples. Não só o conceito de Deus único veio abalar todo um sistema de crenças já existente, como a própria aliança de grupo veio destruir a ideia de aliança por parentesco que até então existiu. E tão difícil e penosa foi essa transformação na sociedade árabe do século VII que encontramos inúmeros capítulos onde o conceito de Jihad é utilizado, desde contextos de não agressividade até aos de militância. E tanto mais ele é utilizado quanto maior se revela a incapacidade de os muçulmanos se defenderem dos que ameaçavam a possibilidade de existência de uma comunidade islâmica.

Esta é a razão principal, para Reuven Firestone, para que o alcorão esteja repleto de chamamentos para a guerra por parte de muçulmanos que tinham dificuldade em ultrapassar um modelo de lealdade tribal para outro, fundamentado na fraternidade religiosa. Por outras palavras, os seguidores do Profeta que se recusavam a levantar para se defender eram os que seriam incapazes de ultrapassar os tais descrentes (kafirun) ou fitna (hipócritas), que hoje são designações atribuídas aos que não seguem a interpretação radical jihadista, onde todos nós, incluindo muçulmanos que não pensem nem ajam da mesma maneira, estarão inevitavelmente incluídos, e serão, como consequência, alvos a abater. Por isso Firestone considera que ao longo do processo de revelação vamos encontrar no Alcorão capítulos que vão desde a postura não agressiva até uma outra de militância absoluta. Para este professor na Graduate School of Judaic Studies na Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, a evidência qurânica sugere que a comunidade muçulmana não tinha uma opinião homogénea em relação à luta durante o percurso da liderança de Muhammad, e que depois da sua morte, e na redação da revelação houve um agrupamento de versículos a partir de temáticas, algumas omissões e/ou substituições, e todo um processo de edição que revelou a existência de interesses de grupos distintos dentro do Islão. Tudo isto contribuiu para um tipo de exegese que acabou por tomar uma forma hegemónica que se canonizou como sendo a versão fiel da revelação, recebida ao longo de 23 anos da vida do profeta, continuando a ser oralmente transmitida durante mais de dois séculos, em períodos em que os muçulmanos estavam longe de ser alguma comunidade de interpretação homogénea, como de resto nem hoje são.

Valores éticos e morais

O que é de facto curioso é que os princípios de pluralismo e inclusão, e outros valores éticos e morais que o Alcorão também transmite, assim como a liberdade de um ser humano não ter sequer uma religião, nunca aparecem nos discursos dos radicais islâmicos. Ou aquela parte onde revela que se Deus quisesse que fossemos todos de uma só religião não teria permitido a existência de sinagogas, igrejas e mesquitas, mas que é efetivamente porque através dessa pluralidade, nos podemos conhecer melhor uns aos outros e, cada um no seu caminho, superar o outro, na via da consciência social, ou do bem comum, nada dito é referido pelos jihadistas. Nem mesmo os versículos que combatem a ignorância e empurram os muçulmanos para a procura do conhecimento, “nem que para isso tenham de ir até à China”, e outros parecidos com esse que estimularam todo um esforço para o conhecimento da filosofia greco-helénica, depois traduzida para o latim para os Europeus, da álgebra, das matemática, da caneta, da astrologia e da astronomia, que tanto serviram para os Descobrimentos, ou o humanismo dos Buyidas que acabaram por influenciar o século das Luzes na Europa; enfim, todos estes avanços civilizacionais que só foram possíveis em função de uma revelação qurânica e de uma religião chamada Islão, são referências que nunca surgem como parte de discursos dos radicais islâmicos.

Ora, é precisamente chegados a este ponto que precisamos saber definir, de uma vez por todas, que a honestidade intelectual para o estudo e a interpretação do processo de violência no alcorão só poderá ser devidamente estudado se conseguirmos separar o discurso FUNDACIONAL do discurso FUNDAMENTALISTA. Porque um pressupõe princípios éticos e morais de uma religião que representou um avanço civilizacional incontornável, e o outro está predisposto a destruir tudo o que não obedece a uma hegemonia anti-civilizacional.

O fracasso do discurso pluralista e cosmopolita, de valores e princípios éticos que os milhões de muçulmanos advogam como não sendo o dos radicais islâmicos, deve-se ao fracasso intelectual dos próprios muçulmanos. É um trabalho que não pode ser deixado a leigos mas sim aos saudosos Fuqaha (juristas formados nas Humanidades); aos pensadores e estudiosos do Islão, e aos próprios muçulmanos que há muito deixaram de se dedicar a uma honesta exegese do Alcorão. Porque está na hora de fazer a mudança positiva: a que passa da leitura sincrética e literal, para uma outra multidisciplinar e de honestidade intelectual; aquela que recupera toda a poética da beleza qurânica.

Original: http://visao.sapo.pt/opiniao/bolsa-de-especialistas/2015-12-11-A-violencia-no-alcorao

Yes sir.

Sofre-se

"Quanto mais claro é o conhecimento do homem, quanto mais inteligente ele é, mais sofrimento ele tem; o homem que é dotado de gênio sofre mais do que todos." - Arthur Schopenhauer

Luaty Beirão

Na cleptocracia chamada Angola.

Esfera de Dyson - Is anybody out there?

Depois de descobrir mais de uma centena de mundos alienígenas ao redor de outras estrelas, o astrônomo americano Geoff Marcy decidiu que era hora de apostar na busca por civilizações extraterrestres. Supercivilizações, na verdade - com tecnologia incomensuravelmente superior à nossa.

A hipótese é a seguinte: supercivilizações precisam de megafontes de energia para alimentar seus hiperequipamentos, ultrafamintos por eletricidade - está pensando que teletransporte, viagens no tempo e outras supertecnologias são econômicas? Não sabemos, mas provavelmente não. A regra de que não existe almoço grátis fatalmente vale para o Cosmos todo: quanto maior o desenvolvimento, maior a demanda por energia. Por exemplo: qualquer megacivilização que se preze já se expandiu para além de seu planeta natal e colonizou outros mundos, pelo menos dentro do seu próprio Sistema Solar. Aí que os gastos com energia vão mesmo para a estratosfera - se escoar soja do Mato Grosso já demanda um oceano de diesel, imagina transportar matéria-prima entre um planeta e outro.

Desnecessário dizer que diesel não resolve o problema num caso desses (nem no nosso, mas essa é outra história). O jeito mais racional de obter energia nessa escala absurda, imaginam os cientistas terráqueos, é apelar para o Sol. Ou seja, explorar ao máximo a radiação emitida pela estrela-mãe do planeta em questão. Mas não, painéis solares como os conhecemos não dariam nem para o começo. Os nossos amigos de uma hipercivilização com comércio interplanetário precisariam de painéis grandes. Grandes mesmo. Mastodônticos, com centenas de milhões de quilômetros de extensão. A coisa formaria anéis em torno da estrela, como esta mandala aqui ao lado.

O conceito é conhecido como Esfera de Dyson, assim batizada em homenagem ao físico e matemático britânico que primeiro apresentou o conceito, Freeman Dyson, hoje com 90 anos. Ele partiu do pressuposto de que todas as civilizações tecnológicas constantemente aumentam sua demanda por energia. Pensando em termos terráqueos, se essa tendência (que existe hoje em nossa própria civilização) continuar por tempo suficiente, chegará o dia em que precisaremos de quase 100% da energia emitida pelo Sol para mantermos nossas máquinas funcionando. Quando essa hora chegar, a melhor solução seria construir essas instalações espaciais cosmofaraônicas em torno de nossa estrela - daria para transmitir a energia via micro-ondas, sem fio, direto do espaço para os planetas em que houver colônias. Dyson apresentou a noção num artigo publicado em 1960 na revista Science, mas a inspiração original veio da ficção científica, que já na década de 1930 falava do assunto.

E agora chegamos ao ponto que interessa. Se os escritores de ficção científica e Freeman Dyson estiverem certos, e alguém lá em cima já tiver construído uma superestrutura dessas, não seria tão difícil detectar a presença de uma delas hoje mesmo, usando os melhores telescópios disponíveis aqui na Terra

É exatamente isso que Geoff Marcy, da Universidade da Califórnia, quer procurar. "Estamos buscando estrelas que fiquem completamente escuras por um tempo e depois brilhem de novo", diz o americano. "Essa mudança drástica no brilho aconteceria se uma civilização cobrisse sua estrela com anéis para coletar sua luz. Esperamos detectar essas esferas Dyson ao procurar por estrelas que mudem de brilho dramaticamente." Loucura? Sim. Só que Marcy pode se dar ao luxo de propor coisas nessa linha. Ele construiu uma reputação de cientista de primeira grandeza a partir da década de 1990, quando começou a descobrir os primeiros planetas fora do Sistema Solar. Por pouco, ele não foi o astrônomo que encontrou o primeiro mundo extrassolar, descoberto pelo grupo rival de Michel Mayor, do Observatório de Genebra, em 1995.

Marcy, contudo, foi responsável pela descoberta do primeiro sistema com múltiplos planetas e já soma mais de 110 planetas descobertos. No momento, ele trabalha na equipe do satélite Kepler, da Nasa, que já encontrou milhares de planetas-candidatos durante sua missão de observação de apenas uma pequena parte do céu. E a proposta de procurar sinais de civilizações avançadas está sendo levada a sério. Marcy recebeu um financiamento de US$ 200 mil, que estão sendo pagos entre 2013 e 2014, para procurar por elas justamente nas estrelas observadas pelo Kepler. São cerca de 160 mil estrelas monitoradas constantemente pelo telescópio orbital, mas Marcy deve se concentrar em apenas mil delas, as que pareçam mais amigáveis à existência de planetas potencialmente habitáveis (ou seja: estrelas médias, como o Sol, nem muito ofuscantes, nem muito apagadas).

"O Kepler já descobriu mais de 2 mil novos mundos em torno de outras estrelas, a maioria deles menor que duas vezes o tamanho da Terra, e muitos que provavelmente têm água [o ingrediente mais fundamental para a vida]", diz Marcy. "Essa enxurrada de planetas quase do tamanho terrestre oferece a primeira oportunidade para que nós, humanos, procuremos outras espécies inteligentes."

Nova tentativa

Não é a primeira vez que astrônomos tentam encontrar sinais de Esferas Dyson. Um esforço anterior, conduzido por Richard Carrigan, pesquisador do Fermilab (instituição americana de pesquisa de física de partículas), usou dados do satélite IRAS para tentar encontrar sinais de radiação infravermelha. Essa era a radiação esperada caso houvesse não anéis, mas uma esfera completamente fechada, que envelopasse um sistema solar inteiro - e não deixasse escapar luz visível, só calor, na forma de radiação infravermelha.

Os resultados foram, bem, inconclusivos. "Obtivemos 17 candidatos ambíguos dos quais quatro eram ligeiramente interessantes, mas ainda questionáveis", afirma Carrigan.

De posse dos dados do Kepler, Marcy acredita que pode fazer melhor. Além disso, ele pretende usar tempo do Observatório Keck, no Havaí, para coletar espectros de luz de seus mil alvos, na esperança de detectar um outro sinal de vida inteligente - raios laser. É a última moda na busca por transmissões extraterrestres. Até hoje, a maioria das pesquisas se deu em frequências de rádio, imaginando que as civilizações os usariam para tentar se comunicar conosco. É o que o Seti faz desde a década de 1960. O programa de Busca por Inteligência Extraterrestre (Seti, na sigla em inglês) aponta suas mega-antenas , os radiotelescópios, para alguma região do céu. E tenta captar qualquer coisa que pareça ter sido transmitida por alguma forma de vida na tentativa de se comunicar com a gente, tipo sinais de rádio com frequência que se repetem, que pareçam um código morse interplanetário.

Mas e se os ETs estiverem usando pulsos de laser, em vez de ondas de rádio? Essa é a segunda grande aposta de Marcy. Ele aponta que os militares americanos já estão usando cada vez mais laser, em vez de rádio, para se comunicar com suas espaçonaves. "Lasers são mais eficientes do ponto de vista energético, e eles permitem que dois grupos se comuniquem com mais privacidade", diz o astrônomo. Isso acontece porque o laser, por ser uma forma de luz "organizada" (os físicos chamam de "coerente"), precisa ser apontado na direção do receptor do sinal, pois "vaza" muito pouco em outras direções. Já as ondas de rádio se propagam mais livremente para todo lado.

Bem, mas qual é a chance de uma civilização distante estar apontando seu laserpointer para nós? Marcy na verdade nem está contando com isso. Ele aposta que os ETs estejam usando lasers para se comunicarem entre si, com suas espaçonaves, colônias etc. Se tivermos sorte, uma dessas transmissões pode, por coincidência, ser disparada na nossa direção. Por enquanto, haverá limitações na busca. "Estamos desenvolvendo novas técnicas, com novos detectores e telescópios, para buscar sinais alienígenas no infravermelho e na luz visível. Vamos torcer para que eles estejam transmitindo nessas frequências!". A busca nas outras frequências (ultra-violeta e raios-x), mais complexa, fica para uma próxima.

Até agora, houve um sinal esquisito de laser detectado em 2009 na Austrália, mas não tiveram como confirmar sua suposta natureza artificial, porque ela não se repetiu - a exemplo do que já tinha acontecido com as buscas por sinais de rádio. Em 1977, um radiossinal com cara de artificial, formando padrões aparentemente repetidos, foi detectado em Ohio, levando o operador do radiotelescópio a anotar "Uau!" em seus relatórios. Mas o fenômeno nunca mais aconteceu de novo.

Bom, a verdade é que, se somos ruins para prever o futuro da humanidade, calcule o desafio de especular sobre o que estão fazendo civilizações alienígenas bem mais avançadas do que nós. Marcy se dá conta do tamanho do problema. "Talvez eles não transmitam ondas de rádio ou qualquer outro comprimento de onda de luz", afirma. "Mas não podemos buscar tipos de comunicação que não fomos capazes de imaginar. Precisamos empurrar nosso potencial para tentar fazer descobertas, sem saber de antemão se há alguma chance de sucesso." Pois é. No fim, estamos limitados pela nossa imaginação. Ainda bem que, pelo jeito, ela tem combustível de sobra.

utm_source=redesabril_jovem&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=redesabril_super">Super Interessante Brasil

A professional astrologer realizes astrology isn’t real

Rudolf Smit loved astronomy as a child, and now he loves astrology… but he no longer believes it’s real. There was a time when he was a full-time consulting astrologer and widely admired astrology author. Founder of the Society of Practising Astrologers in the Netherlands and deeply passionate about a belief he found quite beautiful, Smit authored an astrology handbook and wrote popular articles for Dutch astrology publications like Earth & Cosmos and The Planets Speak.

The planets failed to reveal the shock that was to come.

In a moving autobiographical essay on his website Astrology and Science, Smit tells his story. Born in 1942, he began to fall in love with astrology in the late 1960s, but not without a healthy dose of skepticism:

[I] bought myself a booklet about my Sun sign… [M]uch of what I read did for a great deal pertain to me. I was truly astonished… But at that point some skepticism crept in. What if I would buy all the other nine star sign booklets? I took a personal bet that after reading those booklets I would discover in each of them descriptions that would fit me. And indeed, so it occurred…

But then I happened to visit the parents of someone I knew… Two days later I found in my mail a nicely drawn up horoscope… which made me feel flabbergasted. She had written things which were quite specific to my character and situation in life, and which she could not have known.

But I was still not fully convinced. So I did something else: I sent my birth data to a well-known astrologer and asked him to write an analysis purely based on those data, hence without ever seeing me. Six weeks later I received his nicely structured, six-page description which fitted me miraculously well. I was elated and the die was cast: from now on astrology had me firmly in its grip! This was the beginning of an exciting time.

Smit began casting horoscopes for himself and his friends, who were impressed with his accuracy. This comes as no surprise today to those familiar with the now-famous Forer (or Barnum) Effect in psychology

[T]here was that wonderful feeling…of having encountered a miracle…This was truly astonishing, and I felt elated.

He began taking clients and plunged into astrology as a profession:

A wonderful time followed. Everybody was full of optimism and felt that it would be only a matter of a few years before astrology was fully accepted by society.

One day, a very strange thing happened during a client session:

All seemed to go pretty well; she was nodding all the time while saying, “yes, yes, you are so right…” But then I said something like: “well Ms Johnson, we….” She interrupted: ” Sorry, my name is Petersen, not Johnson.” I then experienced a terrible sinking feeling, because I then saw before me the horoscope of a Ms Johnson, but the person before me was surely not this Ms Johnson! Apparently I had taken the wrong chart from my file cabinet! Truly, I have forgotten how I got myself out of this most embarrassing terrible mess, but apparently I had managed the situation pretty well, because she went away a happy client. After seeing her out I sat in my study, confused thoughts racing through my mind. How is it possible to do a correct reading based on a wrong chart? Did not all textbooks tell us that a horoscope is unique, that is, only fitting its native and no one else? If so, how on earth could I have made correct delineations based on a totally wrong chart? I was completely puzzled.

But this was his life. His livelihood. His very human brain pushed away doubts sufficiently to allow him to practice for a while longer… but his early skepticism was returning. Through the 1970s, he worked to examine systematically just how well horoscopes correlated with reality, desperately hoping to prove astrology worked:

It took me a number of years to carry out these projects. I succeeded, but to my great chagrin the test results were contrary to all hopeful expectations. One did not have to be a professional statistician to find out that many, if not all, statements in astrological text books, fell flat when tested on a great number of horoscopes. For example, I tested the statement that in the charts of people who had died an accidental death, there would be a remarkable incidence of Progressed Ascendant to Mars, or of Progressed Mars to the Ascendant. Sure, there were a few (but the word says it all: a few), hence not an overwhelming number which could confirm the textbook statement. And so it went on and on.

Still, the love of his beloved practice remained strong, and Smit continued casting horoscopes until a fateful friendship began with another research-minded astrologer. Geoffrey Dean, whose later work disproving astrology makes him well known today in skeptical circles, was speaking at an Australian astrology conference with Smit. Dean gave Smit a draft paper of his to review, which impressed Smit with its objective, rigorous approach. But his pleasure was soon shattered:

One chapter though gave me that terrible sinking feeling again. Not because he had written something wrong, but because there was the sense of immediate awareness that he was so right! And that was the moment when the penny dropped. The sudden realisation how I had been doing my readings and why I had been so successful…

In this chapter Dean discussed about 20 factors that affect “personal validation” or the way a client personally assesses or validates an astrological reading… These factors included things like the Barnum effect (seeing specifics in generalities) and selective memory (ignoring errors), most of which I did recognise, that is, I had the strong feeling that indeed I myself had been a victim of most of them.

Smit then quotes from a chapter in Dean’s paper on “Cold Reading” about tricks not widely known in those days before the Internet. It was a great shock to see these laid out so bluntly:

1. Watch the eyes and hands for signs that they say yes and no.
2. Make the reading happy and positive.
3. Be a good listener.
4. Loosen the client’s tongue with flattery.
5. Discover the problem and then tell the client what she wants to hear…

Usually neither the reader nor the client is consciously aware of this communication process, which therefore can result in a reading that seems mysteriously perceptive. The point is that a skilled cold reader can produce a totally convincing reading very similar to a chart reading (and probably more accurate) but without using a chart. In which case it cannot be claimed that astrology plays an essential part in the reading process.”

For Smit, those words struck a harsh blow. It felt to him as if “the bottom had been kicked away from under” his existence. He knew at that moment that his life’s work had been an illusion:

[Without] ever having been consciously aware of it, I had been an excellent cold reader… Now it also became devastatingly clear why I had had excellent sessions based on the totally wrong chart. Sympathy, cold reading, and the nice astrological symbolism had done the trick, not astrology itself.

There were more shocks to come. Dean showed Smit letters from clients praising the accuracy of his horoscopes – “So true it is amazing!” “You know me inside out!” But Dean had stumbled upon the same discovery as Smit, causing him to give up his practice:

[I]n 1980 [Dean] found to his amazement that clients were just as happy with a reading that was the opposite of the authentic reading. Like me he had discovered that any chart would do provided the astrologer is sensitive and caring.

Smit was plunged into depression. It took sizable strength of character to close his practice and start completely over in life. His painful emotional struggle was eased somewhat when he learned he was not alone, that other honest astrologers had discovered the same phenomenon and given up their practice. These included David Hamblin, one-time chair of the Astrology Association of Great Britain. Ever the researcher, Smit now had to know…

…why astrology still exerts so much attraction to so many people. In other words, why do astrologers still go on believing whereas the evidence against it is mounting and mounting? …I conclude that astrologers go on believing because the apparent match between horoscope and client is such an extremely persuasive situation that it is easy for them to ignore every evidence against astrology — as indeed it seems they have always done…

Though no longer a believer, Smit remained drawn to astrology, conducting investigations as editor of Correlation – Journal of Objective Research into Astrology. He is now retired from a career as editor and translator at a scientific and technological laboratory, and has created the website Astrology and Science as a research archive.

“[A]strology has undeniable appeal,” Smit writes, that “satisfies the longing… to feel part of the universe.” I hope he’s remembered his childhood love of astronomy, and discovered how to satisfy that longing in ways that fulfill his truly courageous demand for truth.

Original: bogardiner.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/a-professional-astrologist-realizes-astrology-isnt-real/

Vasco Pulido Valente .....

À esquerda e à direita anda por aí muita gente indignada por causa do protectorado de que Portugal sofreu e, segundo alguns patriotas sem mancha nem tumor, continua a sofrer. Isto deixa um indivíduo de boca aberta por duas razões.

Primeiro, porque de maneira geral foram esses mesmos patriotas que levaram Portugal ao protectorado de Bruxelas. Depois, pela total ignorância da história deste pobre país desde pelo menos o fim do século XVIII. Toda a gente se esqueceu que em 1807 a Inglaterra meteu D. João VI num barco e o despachou para o Brasil? Ou que Junot acabou corrido por um corpo expedicionário inglês? Ou que o embaixador de S.M. Britânica tinha assentode jure no Conselho de Regência que ostensivamente governava o Reino?

E ninguém se lembra que na guerra contra os franceses (que durou até 1814) o general Beresford comandava o exército português com a ajuda de umas dezenas de oficiais que trouxera de Inglaterra e que o nosso Tesouro pagava? E também ainda não é claro para a cabecinha nacional que o triunfo do liberalismo em 1834 não passou de uma conveniência da Inglaterra que ela, de resto, financiou e forçou as potências conservadoras, como por exemplo a Áustria, a engolir? E o progressismo indígena também se esqueceu que a guerra da “Patuleia” se resolveu com a intervenção da esquadra inglesa (ao largo do Porto e em Setúbal), por uma invasão de um exército espanhol assalariado por Londres e por um “protocolo” de Palmerston, que determinava quem podia, ou não podia, entrar no governo?

E a seguir desapareceu o protectorado? De maneira nenhuma. A Inglaterra e, com a autorização dela, a França continuaram a sustentar a maravilhosa paz da Regeneração; e a promover ou liquidar ministérios de acordo com o grau da sua subserviência e a mandar nos territórios de África de que Portugal, na sua ingenuidade, se julgava dono. E finalmente, em 1892-1893, não hesitaram em suspender os víveres de que a nossa miséria humildemente se alimentava. Os patriotas que hoje se arrepiam com o protectorado dos credores deviam pensar que o único período em que não houve protectorado algum em Portugal foi durante a Ditadura de Salazar, cujos benefícios não se distinguiram na história da Europa. Mas voltar a 1928 não parece uma política muito inteligente.

Do original: publico.pt/politica/noticia/protectorado-1708092

What I believe

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” — Stanley Kubrick"... Stanley Kubrick

Black cat

Bocage

Não lamentes, ó Nize, o teu estado;
Puta tem sido muita gente boa;
Putissimas fidalgas tem Lisboa,
Milhões de vezes putas teem reinado: Dido foi puta, e puta d'um soldado;

Cleopatra por puta alcança a c'roa;
Tu, Lucrecia, com toda a tua proa, O teu conno não passa por honrado :
Essa da Russia imperatriz famosa, Que inda ha pouco morreu (diz a Gazeta) Entre mil porras expirou vaidosa:
Todas no mundo dão a sua greta:
Não fiques pois, ó Nize, duvidosa Que isso de virgo e honra é tudo peta.

Richard Dakwins

Do you think about ageing and death?

Yes. I don’t relish the process of dying, partly because doctors are not vets and are not allowed to put you out of your misery. But as for being dead, I think my attitude to that is … Mark Twain said it humorously when he said: “I was dead for billions of years before I was born, never suffered the smallest inconvenience.” One of the things that is potentially frightening about death is eternity, but eternity is what’s frightening, and it is so frightening that the best way to spend it would be under a general anaesthetic, which is what’s going to happen.

Prémio nobel, activista do ateísmo, profundamente anti-religioso e defensor do cientismo.

Entrevista ao The Guardian

David Jay

Cada guerra é uma destruição do espírito humano - Henry Miller

David Jay: davidjayphotography.com

Entrevista e fotos do site original com o fotógrafo David Jay: www.npr.org/2015/05/25/408505821/its-not-rude-these-portraits-of-wounded-vets-are-meant-to-be-stared-at

O futuro

Umberto Eco - Ouvimos senhor.

Era abril quando entrevistámos Umberto Eco no seu apartamento em Milão. Atendeu o intercomunicador e abriu a porta de casa, revelando a sua alta figura e a cordialidade que seria uma constante durante a conversa. De eterno cigarro apagado entre os dedos - desistiu de fumar mas não se desfez do gesto - ofereceu café e sentou-se na sua poltrona de cabedal. Falámos da infância, da escrita, de jornalismo - central em "Número Zero", o novo romance que saiu em maio em Portugal. Mas falámos também da Europa e dos longos processos migratórios que a configuraram. Para Eco, estamos a atravessar um deles e não será um caminho fácil nem desprovido de desafios. Eis alguns excertos da entrevista.

1. CULTURA NÃO QUER DIZER ECONOMIA

"Desde a juventude que sou um apoiante da União Europeia. Acredito na unidade fundamental da cultura europeia, aquém das diferenças linguísticas. Percebemos que somos europeus quando estamos na América ou na China, vamos tomar um copo com os colegas e inconscientemente preferimos falar com o sueco do que com o norte-americano. Somos similares. Cultura não quer dizer economia e só vamos sobreviver se desenvolvermos a ideia de uma unidade cultural."

2. UM GRANDE ORGULHO

"Quando atravesso a fronteira sem mostrar o passaporte e sem ter de trocar dinheiro, sinto um grande orgulho. Durante dois mil anos, a Europa foi o cenário de massacres constantes. Agora, esperemos um bocado: mesmo que o mundo hoje seja mais veloz, não se pode fazer em 50 anos o que só fomos capazes de fazer em dois mil. E mesmo indo nessa direção, não sei como os países europeus poderão sobreviver: estão a tornar-se menos importantes do que a Coreia do Sul, e não apenas do ponto de vista industrial. Culturalmente, está-se a traduzir mais livros lá do que em França."

3. A COMISSÃO DAS PESSOAS SÁBIAS

"Entidades nacionais como Portugal ou Itália tornar-se-ão irrelevantes se não fizerem parte de uma unidade maior. Mas nada disto se constrói em pouco tempo. O problema da Europa é estar a ser governada por burocratas. Uma vez, uma instituição europeia - não me recordo qual - decidiu criar uma comissão de pessoas sábias. Estava lá Gabriel García Márquez, Michel Serres e eu próprio. Os outros convidados eram burocratas europeus. Cada reunião servia para discutir a ordem de trabalhos da reunião seguinte. Aquilo era o retrato da Europa: pessoas a governarem uma máquina autorreferencial. Porém, é o que temos. É como a democracia segundo Winston Churchill: um sistema horrível, mas melhor do que os outros."

4. UM PROCESSO QUE CUSTARÁ IMENSO SANGUE

"Estou muito preocupado, não por mim, mas pelos meus netos. Escrevi-o há 30 anos: o que se passa no mundo não é um fenómeno de imigração, mas de migração. A migração produz a cor da Europa. Quem aceitar esta ideia, muito bem. Quem não a aceitar, pode ir suicidar-se. A Europa irá mudar de cor, tal como os Estados Unidos. E isto é um processo que demorará muito tempo e custará imenso sangue. A migração dos alemães bárbaros para o Império Romano, que produziu os novos países da Europa, levou vários séculos. Portanto, vai acontecer algo terrível antes de se encontrar um novo equilíbrio. Há um ditado chinês que diz: 'Desejo-te que vivas numa era interessante'. Nós estamos a viver numa era interessante."

5. A ÉTICA DA REPÚBLICA

"Não se deve perguntar porque haverá derramamento de sangue: é um facto. Vejamos a França. É o caso típico de um país que acreditou poder absorver a migração. Porém, por um lado, impôs logo aos migrantes a ética da República; e, por outro, arrumou-os nos bairros remotos. É muito raro encontrar um migrante a viver ao lado de Notre-Dame."

6. INTEGRAÇÃO E ÓDIO

"Porque é que um muçulmano em França se torna fundamentalista? Acha que isso aconteceria se vivesse num apartamento perto de Notre-Dame? A sua integração não foi completa nem poderia ser. De novo, é um facto. A migração a longo prazo pode produzir integração mas a curto prazo não, e a não-integração produz uma reação, que pode ser de ódio."

7. NO SENTIDO EM QUE HITLER NÃO ERA A CRISTANDADE

"O inimigo é sempre inventado, construído. Precisamos dele para definir a nossa identidade. A extrema-direita italiana acredita que são os ciganos ou os migrantes pobres, ou o Islão em geral, ainda que o Islão possa assumir muitas formas. Ora, o Estado Islâmico não é o Islão, no sentido em que Hitler não era a cristandade."

8. RESPOSTA: NÃO

"A Idade Média não existe, porque tem dez séculos. É uma construção artificial. De qualquer forma, vemos que é uma época de transição entre dois tipos de civilização. E provavelmente - falávamos de migração - estamos numa era de transição, que é sempre difícil. A questão é: houve alguma era que não fosse de transição? Resposta: não. Mas houve momentos em que cada um vivendo no seu país não se apercebia de que havia uma transição a acontecer no mundo."

9. CHAMA OS BOMBEIROS

"Qual o papel do intelectual hoje? Não dar muitas entrevistas! [risos] Falando a sério, penso que é duplo. Primeiro, é dizer o que as outras pessoas não dizem. Não é dizer que há desemprego em Itália. Segundo, não é resolver os problemas imediatos, é olhar para a frente. Se um poeta está num teatro e há um incêndio, não se põe a recitar poemas: chama os bombeiros. Pode é escrever sobre incêndios futuros."

10. PERDA DO PASSADO

"É impossível pensar o futuro se não nos lembrarmos do passado. Da mesma forma, é impossível saltar para a frente se não se der alguns passos atrás. Um dos problemas da atual civilização - da civilização da internet - é a perda do passado."

Artigo Original: Jornal Expresso Diário - expresso.sapo.pt/internacional/2015-09-07-Acontecera-algo-terrivel-antes-de-se-encontrar-um-equilibrio.-Migracao-e-refugiados-por-Umberto-Eco

Steve Jobs

Do ponto de vista humano não há comparação entre o Jobs e o Bill Gates. A cultura popular fez de um um visionário cool e do outro um tótó. Coisas.

Oscar-winning documentary director Alex Gibney got considerable media attention earlier this year for his HBO film “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief,”which threw open the doors on the bizarre and abusive internal world of L. Ron Hubbard’s celebrity-centric religious denomination. Now Gibney is back with another newsworthy film, “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine” — and in case you were wondering, yes, he does see some parallels. But despite some negative pushback from Apple loyalists, this documentary is far from being a hit-piece on the company’s legendary founder, the most beloved entrepreneur of the information age. (In fairness, Jobs was also the only beloved entrepreneur of the information age. Will people light candles in the street when Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg departs this mortal coil?)

I recently had lunch in New York with Gibney and Fortune investigative reporter Peter Elkind, who collaborated on this film (after covering Jobs and Apple for years) and first worked with Gibney a decade ago on his breakthrough exposé “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.” Almost everything I have to say about the film and my own perception of Steve Jobs becomes clear in our conversation, so I don’t want to clutter things up by throwing in a truncated review here. But I think we can say that “Steve Jobs” is a surprisingly quiet and reflective film that seeks to take the measure of an exceptionally complicated public figure who was idolized by different people for different reasons.

Drawing extensively on Jobs’ own public utterances, and through interviews with many people who knew him or worked with him, Gibney seeks to penetrate the shroud of mystery and mystification around this driven and single-minded man. First and most obviously, Jobs was an undoubted design and marketing genius with an unparalleled gift for creating technological gizmos that were not merely useful or fun but that people loved. Despite his well-known lack of modesty, Jobs himself would never have claimed that technological innovation in itself was his great strength. He understood how to make machines that appealed to people, or perhaps the other way around, and how to sell them.

“Steve Jobs” is also a portrait of someone whose sense of mission, and perhaps of world-historical purpose, was so strong that he didn’t let anything get in the way. Not his personal life, not his oldest friends and longtime co-workers, not the working conditions of his direct employees at Apple or the labor and environmental practices of his subcontractors in China. He defined himself as a new kind of CEO running a new kind of company. But beyond ingenious sloganeering and advertising campaigns that invoked Gandhi and Einstein and Picasso and Martin Luther King Jr., the content of that “newness,” and the precise nature of the values that Apple supposedly embodied, remained frustratingly and deliberately vague.

Gibney and Elkind and I started by talking about Jobs’ well known aversion to philanthropy, which he perceived as a distraction, and perhaps – in the case of his great rival and sometime partner, Bill Gates – even as a sign of weakness.

Alex, what was the actual phrase Jobs used, when he talked about why he didn’t devote himself to philanthropy?

Alex Gibney: He said it was a waste of time.

Right. So my premise is this: Jobs was a revolutionary, or at least he saw himself that way. He was someone devoted to transforming human society and human consciousness, as he understood it, and he could not afford to get distracted by lesser concerns. And as with so many revolutionaries, the effects of his revolution are both good and bad.

A.G.: I’m not sure I can go with the idea that he was a revolutionary. But certainly changing the world was what he had in mind. He thought that his contribution was to make people comfortable with machines. That would change everything, and he should only focus on that. Anything else really was a waste of time, and you only fuck yourself up by trying to do all these different things. That’s what everybody else does, that’s for other people. If you focus on the one big thing, that’s how you change the world.

Peter Elkind: Do you think that was a rationalization? Or that was what he really believed?

A.G.: Well, I don’t know. But I think it was what he really believed. Whether or not he came to believe it — so many people, when they have a mission, come to believe something in a way that may have started out as a slogan. You know, L. Ron Hubbard, not to make a random comparison, started Scientology as a scam.

And as you have said previously, he came to believe it. He got seduced by his own creation.

A.G.: That’s right. Now, I don’t think Steve started Apple as a scam. But he understood early on the power of marketing. The idea of the computer as a bicycle for the human mind — I think that was something he believed. He believed in making people comfortable with these machines, which is why he spent so much time thinking about how to design them a certain way, how to make them so user-friendly and interactive, and why he spent so much time studying the Zeitgeist. What do people like? He thought about that an awful lot.

Well, I remember when the iPad came out and a lot of the initial reaction in the tech press and the business press was somewhat negative. “What is this device for? It doesn’t perform any useful function that we can’t already do with other things!” And that was entirely missing the point. Jobs created machines that people liked, whether or not they offered something brand-new in terms of usefulness or applications.

P.E.: Yeah, it was getting them closer to the boost in technology. It was bigger than a phone and easier to manipulate than a PC or a laptop. So it was deeply consistent with his operating philosophy.

A.G.: There’s a clip in the movie where he’s demonstrating the iPad and he says, “It feels so good in your hand.” He gave a lot of thought to stuff like that: How does it feel in your hands? How does it look?

So whether or not we use the term “revolutionary,” you agree that Jobs would have understood giving away money to end hunger in Africa or whatever, on the Gates model, as a distraction from his central mission, from his history-changing life purpose.

A.G.: Yeah, stuff like that was a bullshit, feelgood distraction. It’s not really changing anything, and it’s more important to focus on the mission. That’s where real change happens.

P.E.: At one point, he did start a foundation. He hired a guy to run it and he spent a lot of money designing a logo on it – and that was pretty much the sum total of what he put into it. [Laughter.] He just wasn’t interested. It didn’t intrigue him.

How much of his mocking attitude toward Gates was about that? Oh, Bill is going around the world giving money away or whatever. He’s clearly not serious about the mission of advancing technology.

P.E.: Oh, I don’t think Jobs would ever have asserted that Bill Gates was not serious about technology. He was a huge pioneer in that world, albeit doing something quite different in approach from what Steve did. I think he was dismissive of Gates’ foundation work as something he did to make himself feel better. I think it’s a fascinating counterpoint to Steve’s approach. Here’s a guy, Bill Gates, who is the classic computer nerd, as opposed to Steve who is, like the coolest guy in the world. And who is really doing things to make the world a better place?

A.G.: I mean, Gates was seen as the corporate shill. That’s how Jobs always presented him: The company man.

P.E. Yeah, the corporate shill who saved Apple at one point! They had such a weird relationship.

A.G.: I think an interesting angle on Steve is his whole relationship to the counterculture. It’s like the lawyers I know who work on corporate mergers and acquisitions, and then go out on the weekends and bong up and go to music festivals in tie-dyed T-shirts or whatever. Steve took what he wanted and left the rest. That’s what he did with Zen and what he did with the counterculture. So this stuff about being communitarian, worrying about disparities between rich and poor, concern for the environment — he was like, fuck all that. The focus is great machines that will become an extension of people. You focus on that. He got the focus part of Zen without any of the other stuff. And to some degree that did account for the success of Apple, because he was so focused.

Well, and he brought from the counterculture this suggestion of alternative values and cultural transformation, without ever defining what that meant. But he clearly believed that this wasn’t about the office or the business world or “productivity” or whatever. It was something much larger.

A.G.: I think he became ever more convinced that he was changing society. He did not think of himself as a businessman who was just making money.

His metaphor of the computer as a bicycle for the human mind is so striking. Because the bicycle was more than a technological innovation. It used existing human power to transform the human relationship to the physical world.

A.G.: It amplifies human power so extraordinarily, and the computer, in Steve’s analogy, amplifies the power of the human mind.

Yeah. Notice that he does not compare it to the automobile, which is powered by an external source of energy. He’s trying to make the point that he saw technology as powered by human intellect and ingenuity, not by the chips and the circuits and the electrical current.

A.G.: There’s an interview in the film that he did with NHK in Japan, where he talks about the relationship between the computer and the humanities, and that his goal was to explore and release creativity. It’s certainly true that a lot of people in the film business migrated to Apple very quickly. Macs were great with images in a way that PCs weren’t in the beginning. I think that was true with writers and artists too. The creative types were early Apple adopters, even when Apple had a very small proportion of the market. I had a PC for many years, and then I joined a company that was using Apple machines and I switched over reluctantly. But then I really did start to feel that by using this computer I was taking on the man. I was “thinking different.” How brilliant is that?

So here’s the reason that I brought up that idea of Jobs as a revolutionary. You’ll see why I didn’t want to explain it earlier. After I saw the film I knew that his attitude about philanthropy reminded me of some dim and distant parallel. It took me a while to figure out what it was. There’s a famous anecdote about Lenin telling the writer Maxim Gorky that he loved to listen to Beethoven’s “Appassionata” sonata but thought it was dangerous, because beautiful music might make you soft and feel love for other people, when the task of the revolutionary is to “strike without pity.” And I see that in Steve Jobs. You have to stick to the plan, because the purpose here is to transform human consciousness and human society, and that’s more important than being nice. To extend the metaphor even more outrageously, I would argue that the reason people were grief-stricken when Steve Jobs died is pretty much the same reason why people lined up for hours in Red Square when Lenin died. Revolutionary zeal and commitment is tremendously seductive, whether we think the revolution is good or bad.

A.G.: Well, I would take a different view about why they lined up for Steve as opposed to Lenin! [Laughter.] But I do think there’s something interesting there about the revolutionary quality of Steve Jobs, and the ideological quality of Steve Jobs, whether that was inchoate or totally thought through. He really had ingested the libertarian ideology of Silicon Valley, which is like: You have to be ruthless! You have to thin the herd! I remember hearing the electricity traders at Enron talking about that, when Peter and I made that movie. If you didn’t thin the herd, bad things would happen. You had to be lean, you had to be mean, you had to be tough. You kick ass, and you don’t worry about that other shit, because that other shit is what makes you soft. I think he did believe that.

That’s why people in Silicon Valley idolized him, but the reason most people turned out when he died was because he was Daddy. We grew up with him, and he was the singular personality you could attach to technology. We saw him grow old with those devices, even as he kept introducing us to new ones. We worried that we were going to lose those devices when he was gone, and when somebody has been with you through all that, the blue boxes and the Apple II all these clunky devices going up to the iPhone and the iPad — he was there for that whole ride, and he was the face of it.

He was the human face of technology and he was also the badass who got a kick out of parking his Mercedes with no license plates in a handicapped spot. When you’re tough and you’re mean, you get shit done. You go through life with your elbows out. So there are the business people who idolize Steve for being a tough, ruthless motherfucker, And then there are the consumers who idolize him because he’s this soft and gentle guy, the humanities guy who makes you feel happy about these machines.

Yes, absolutely. I don’t need to belabor the point, but I will continue to insist that all of that is more closely akin to the relationship between the revolutionary dictators of the Soviet Union and the public than you might think.

A.G.: You may be right. Because the public is saying, this is all gonna be beautiful, everybody’s gonna be equal, there’s not gonna be the rich and the poor anymore …

Yes, while the political class understands what’s really going on. They admired the leadership for their ruthlessness, and for the fact that if they were standing there that meant they hadn’t gotten shot yet. [Laughter.]

Peter, you have made a very detailed and granular case in your reporting about Apple’s questionable compensation packages, especially the back-dating of stock purchases. You have also written about the Silicon Valley industry-wide practice of corporate collusion in the employment market, in which Apple was instrumental. Did Steve Jobs commit crimes?

P.E.: I think what they did with back-dating was illegal. Steve was not charged and other people took the fall for that, but I think he knew what was going on.

A.G.: If you look carefully at the answer that he gives in the SEC deposition and he’s talking about how the Apple board should have just come to him and offered him more money, he says something like, “I wish they had come to me. Then I would not have had to go and do things.” I took that as pretty close to an admission of guilt. I think the collusion thing was illegal too. There was a column by Jim Stewart in the New York Times where he basically called Steve out for being a criminal. He said that we have to revise our idea of him, and that if you look back at the trail of emails, you have to conclude that Steve Jobs was a criminal.

Peter, reporters for Fortune magazine do not typically get asked to expound on morality. [Laughter.] But I want to offer you that chance, because one of the ways that capitalism is under the microscope a bit these days is because of questions about what kinds of moral behavior it enables and rewards. You have covered a lot of CEOs and executives. When you look at Steve Jobs, how do you evaluate him as a moral agent in that context? Was he typical? Was he better? Was he worse?

P.E.: Wow. I mean, you gave me an out there at the beginning! How do I judge Steve as a moral businessman? I don’t think he set out to be evil or to do evil. I think he had his eye on a singular purpose and singular goals, and didn’t care a lot about the rules in getting there. That’s what the stock option back-dating episode was all about. That’s what his concealment of his illness from shareholders was all about, and what lying about it subsequently was all about. He wanted to accomplish certain specific goals, and was willing to do whatever it took to get there. That was a pattern, and I don’t think there was a compensating impulse, be it conscience or guilt or noblesse oblige, that led him to do charitable work or to pay people in China more than he had to.

A.G.: You know, Robert Reich makes a compelling case that there used to be a tacit understanding that corporations were supposed to take care of their employees, they were supposed to look out for their customers. There was a social role that you had, as a company.

P.E.: That’s right. There are a lot of stakeholders involved with any company. It’s not just the investors.

A.G.: One of the things about Steve Jobs is that he gives us an opportunity to look at the disjuncture between that world and the world he claimed that Apple represented, the “Think different” world of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Gandhi.

Seeing that ad campaign in your movie, it just looks completely shameless, I have to say. What the hell does this computer company have to do with Rosa Parks?

A.G.: Because the rap that most people give in the corporate world, including people who defend Steve’s practices at Apple, is that we have no choice but to pursue profit as relentlessly and aggressively as possible. It’s out of our hands. That’s a far cry from “Think different,” which ought to involve making choices. What should workers get paid? How should the environment be treated? Yet the funny thing about Jobs is that he was idolized for refusing to accept that they couldn’t make better product. He was ruthless when it came to insisting on a beveled edge for the iPhone, right? But when it came to paying workers 10 cents more an hour in China — no way. That’s outside my pay grade.

P.E.: Well, ruthlessness was not what he articulated, and that’s an important distinction. The ruthlessness was reflected in the behavior, not in what he said. He would never have said that the only purpose of a corporation was to generate profits.

A.G.: Yeah, I think he really believed he had humanistic values, and that’s the part I think is so weird. When he’s talking to [tech journalists] Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg about the Gizmodo incident [when reporters got hold of an iPhone prototype left behind in a bar], he says that people were telling him to let it go. “I couldn’t let it go. Just because we became a big company doesn’t mean we give up on our values.” And I’m thinking, if your values lead you to pull strings with the cops and get them to kick down a reporter’s door and seize all his computers, what is so great about those values?

No one ever challenges him on that, not then or any of the other times he brings that up. What in Christ’s name are you talking about, Steve? What values? Can you explain what they are?

A.G.: Right. People ask me all the time what question I would love to have asked Steve, and that’s it: “Please define your values.”

Just as the ads with Gandhi and King look worse and worse the more you think about them, “Think different” starts to take on a weird new significance. Here’s this guy who created a turning point in his career and his company’s history with an ad attacking his competition by using George Orwell’s “1984” as a touchstone. But what is “Think different” if not a profoundly Orwellian statement — a form of Newspeak? Because what it really means is entirely the opposite. It means “think the same.” It means embrace a new kind of conformity in which we congratulate each other for our individuality, and express it by all buying the same gadgets.

A.G.: Peter’s former colleague Joe Nocera, who wrote about Jobs and Apple many times over the years, talks about how that new conformity expresses itself in the reader mail on his articles: How dare you attack Steve Jobs? How dare you associate him with terrible labor conditions in China?

Alex, you have flirted with a more personal style, or a personal mode of expression, in other films. But this one is not just personal but introspective. What was it about this subject matter that drove you in that direction?

A.G.: When I originally approached Peter to help me out on this, I think he was properly skeptical. How many books and movies do we have to have on Steve Jobs? So instead of doing “the Steve Jobs story,” I felt I needed to create a reflection of Steve Jobs, and a reflection on Steve Jobs. As we made the film, there were two parts of it pulling against each other, and the only way to bring them into alignment was in the first person. The first part was: What do we think of this technology? And the other one was: Who was Steve Jobs? At the end of the day, the only way of getting at that was to be somewhat personal about it.

The fun of doing this was that instead of doing a straight narrative you could tell a discursive tale that moves around in unexpected ways. Even though it’s roughly chronological, all along the way you are seeing images of Steve as an older man juxtaposed with him as a young man. So it just seemed right. The movie is about him, but it’s also about us. We were along for the ride he took us on. You can’t blame Steve for everything that’s right or wrong about the smartphone. He was willing to take so much credit for it, so it’s fair to examine that. But we have to examine the way we are.

Sure. All three of us were adults and working journalists or filmmakers long before this technology emerged. But how many times a day do we check those devices in our pockets? We are as addicted to Steve’s gizmos as anybody.

A.G.: I like the line I put in the film about how it feels like the Ring in Frodo’s pocket. In uncomfortable situations, we’re like: Oh, maybe I got an email! Maybe there’s a text I can look at!

P.E.: Here’s how I feel about this movie. There have been a lot of facts put out there about Steve Jobs. There are more than a dozen books about Steve, and all of them either focus on the facts or they take some deliberately provocative angle on some aspect of his history. But there hasn’t been a lot of complexity or understanding or rumination about Steve. People tended to see him in black-and-white terms, and he was a very complicated guy. One thing the film does is to look in the mirror, as Alex describes, and explore what our role is in this brave new world.

You know, the moment in this film when I saw some vulnerability or uncertainty in Steve Jobs was when he is asked about all the suicides at Foxconn, the Chinese supplier where iPhones are made. I mean, his answer is terrible. He just says that the number of suicides is not statistically more than you would expect. But he actually looks troubled, as if he kind of understands that he should be saying or doing something else.

A.G.: I think he was troubled, but I also find it interesting that his immediate response was that it was no big deal. What he says is true, statistically. But you’ve got to wonder — if you build a huge factory and people there are committing suicide …

P.E.: You want the reaction to be, “I’m going to do something about this.” Whether it is systemic or endemic or part of the culture or statistically understandable, you want the reaction to be, “This is terrible and I’m going to do something about it. I have power, I have money, I can help change this.”

A.G.: I think the more instructive thing is — yeah, he is taken aback at that moment. But he never went to China. He never saw that factory or any of Apple’s other suppliers. He never, ever, ever went there. The Chinese activist in our film who specifically took on Apple, both on labor and environmental issues, could not get anybody at Apple to talk to him until Steve Jobs resigned. Now he’s quite happy with the ways Apple has changed. He says they have made a lot of positive changes, in terms of both labor and the environment. He was able to talk to all the other companies who had manufacturers and subcontractors in that region. But he couldn’t even get a hearing at Apple until Steve Jobs was gone.

To go back to my original wacko thesis, if you say: “Who gives a shit if we are pouring poison into the rivers and people are jumping out of our buildings? We are transforming the world!” Well, that is a Leninist position to its core. You have to break eggs to make the omelet, and the omelet is the world we have now, where everybody stares at these tiny screens all day long.

A.G.: I think Steve saw it this way: He wanted to make those beautiful products, and he wasn’t going to be able to make them and make money unless they did it in China. And he didn’t want the undertow on the bottom line from doing anything more than other companies were doing about environmental damage or labor conditions. When it came to the beauty of the product, no effort was spared. When it came to challenging standard corporate practices, he didn’t really give a shit. And in that sense your theory is correct, because even when this stuff got pointed out to Steve, he intensely believed that those were peripheral issues. Funny things happen to people when their sense of mission clouds their view of the world.

Artigo Original: www.salon.com/2015/09/03/alex_gibney_on_steve_jobs_he_was_ruthless_when_it_came_to_a_beveled_edge_for_the_iphone_but_paying_workers_more_in_china_no_way/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Kiyiya Vuran Insanlik, uma migalha no oceano.

Kiyiya Vuran Insanlik

O Kiyiya Vuran Insanlik é apenas mais uma vítima num inarrável oceano de dor e sofrimento.

Why dos the universe exist ?

Spoiler: An answer is not given.

Lima Pereira

Quando os jogadores à Porto o eram de facto.

Never .....

Abomináveis monstros.

Palmira. 240 - 2015. Só duas linhas para mencionar os abomináveis monstros psicopatas e desumanizados que destruíram um património da humanidade.

Roberto Saviano

Não são apenas os fanáticos religiosos que lançam "fatawas". As máfias mundiais organizadas que escravizam milhões de pessoas no mundo inteiro e que controlam governos e instituições são bem mais perniciosas do que os cinemas e as séries televisivas retratam. Este jornalista e escritor teve a coragem, com grande sacrifício pessoal e familiar de dedicar a sua vida a denunciar a podridão das organizações criminosas que atormentam as nossas sociedades como cancros malignos, resilientes e devastadores. Este sim, pode dizer que "cojones" maiores do que um touro Andaluz
. Respect.

When I tell some Italian friends I am going to interview Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, the mould-breaking book on Naples’ notorious Camorra crime syndicate that has meant he is now guarded round-the-clock, I mention that I plan to ask him how he gets by, how he copes with having to plan every aspect of his life to the finest detail, only going outdoors with a squad of carabinieri to protect him from vengeful camorristi. In short, how does he live?

“He lives well,” my friends tell me knowingly. And here is part of the Saviano paradox. As a journalist, he has showed extraordinary defiance and courage in speaking out about some of the more bestial of his fellow Neapolitans. Gomorrah sold 10 million copies around the world after it appeared in 2006, becoming, surely, one of television’s most compelling series ever. It gave him, at just 25, the sort of profile and financial security beyond the dreams of most journos, but also death threats, the need for his family to effectively disappear and scant prospect of anything but the briefest of romantic liaisons. And now, evidently unfulfilled by crossing swords with some of Italy’s most unpleasant people, he has gone global with Zero Zero Zero, a book about the international cocaine trade.

“My mother always told me I was a bit of a one for getting into fixes, a bit dumb, restless and impulsive,” he admits when we meet in a chic London hotel. This time he is travelling light, seemingly with just one heavy. When he travels to Mexico, he has 10, in Italy, seven. He has twice asked the Italian authorities if it might be safe to lift the guard, but they say no. It has become a symbol of the Italian state’s willingness to take on organised crime, so in any case is unlikely to be dropped.
The son of a geochemist mother and a GP father, Saviano was brought up in Casal di Principe, on the outskirts of Naples, in a golden age of organised crime killing. He saw his first corpse at the age of 12 (“I remember it didn’t bother me … I felt grown up when I saw bodies”), but the rage was fired at the age of 16 when the local priest, Don Peppe Diana, pinned a notice on local churches bearing the words: “Because I love my people, I must stay quiet no longer.” Days later, he was shot in the face in his own church. Bad enough, but the local papers proceeded to smear the man, claiming the “playboy priest” was a camorrista himself, had been caught in bed with two women and so on. People seemed indifferent, says Saviano, still scandalised, so he started writing, his guiding principle – apart from his own ambition, he admits – being “this is why this story is important for you”.

A degree of early success led him to Gomorrah, the book that changed everything, for good and bad. “I know the heroic answer is to say I would write the same book again, but I wouldn’t, or at least not in the same way.” A life of confinement, of having to plan everything at least three days in advance, as he has for nine years, is weighing on him. He has spent extended periods in the United States, Sweden, Rome and the idyllic tiny island of Filicudi, at a time when there were countless Camorra hitmen on the loose. He has had trouble sleeping, suffers from agoraphobia, can only with the greatest difficulty, say, go out for a pizza, and feels a permanent tension inside himself, compounded by what he has inflicted on his family. His mother and brother moved away from his home area. “They are sweet and don’t go on about it,” he says, “but this is my great guilt. For me, it is a job, but they have to live it, the danger, the jokes ....”

Intriguingly, he talks of how Salman Rushdie and other international fugitives (such as Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho and Iranian women’s rights campaigner Shirin Ebadi) call one another to ask for and offer advice about safe places to go and how to cope. Rushdie told him some supporters won’t be happy till he’s dead. “He said they love you because you are a martyr, but if you don’t die, it’s as if you are betraying them. He also said that you free yourself from the inside, by getting rid of guilt … and then he said there is one thing you must do to win – you must party!” That will have to wait. He remains a long way short of self-pity, and talks of the absurdity of feeling, as he did initially, that somehow the world owed him. “I’m very privileged,” he says, acknowledging he is a prisoner also of his topic, but that many have been killed and imprisoned for their work “and I’m still here!”.

Writing Zero Zero Zero, which, amid the encyclopedia of human tales contains numerous episodes of appalling cold-bloodedness from around the world, seems to reflect the bug he can’t shake. “It’s as if I’m saying ‘here I am, you haven’t beaten me’.” And off he goes, talking with compelling urgency about what a great drug cocaine is for criminals (he has never tried it). “If I gave you a bag of diamonds, it would be almost impossible for you to sell it,” he says excitedly. “But if I gave you a bag of cocaine, you could probably sell the contents before you leave this hotel.”

So, about those critics. Tall poppy syndrome is alive and well in Italy. Saviano achieved the status of a near-saint for standing up to the Camorra, and initially he was a sacred cow, uncriticised and unchallenged, a phase now behind him, but his adoring public survives. He is often used to provide credibility to some of Italy’s less demanding shows, yet in general he does raise standards. One television presenter puts it like this: “If a programme has a mass audience, does that mean it is an audience of cretins? Saviano, when he was on, did what an intelligent person can do: he spoke to everyone.” Critics say his journalism has had too much help from the police and magistrates, that he is not a real intellectual, that he is a mere teller of stories, light on analysis, that he has besmirched the name of Naples, that he has sold out.

Is this snobbery, I ask? “Yes. They can’t bear me being popular,” he says. “Besides, I like being a bit of a contrarian. The extreme left hate me, the Berlusconiani hate me … I manage to reach a lot of people, which is bellissimo. It is true something has changed, but I went on TV and talked about Dostoyevsky and the viewing figures went crazy. It’s not easy to retain both authority and popularity, but I’m trying.” And as for his fellow Neapolitans, he says many are guilty of the victimism of which their northern neighbours accuse them. He says it is absurd to criticise those who shoot the messenger, rather than the criminals responsible for – when Saviano was growing up –  around 500 murders a year.

So, with a second and third series of Gomorrah on the way and a TV adaptation of Zero Zero Zero on the horizon, Saviano ain’t backing down. He says he wants to become anonymous, as he currently is in the US, yet he is promoting a book about the global drugs trade. Fatally (and we must dearly hope not literally), he can’t help giving a damn, and on Wednesday last week he spent an evening exorting a not obviously radical but adoring Intelligence Squared audience to lobby the UK government about money laundering. He has been assailed by requests to go into politics, which he refuses (“I just don’t think it is my trade”), although – normally soft-eyed and friendly – his look darkens when he talks about the future of Italian politics. He is visibly anxious to find a solution to his imprisonment, and admits he dreams unrealistically of going to, say, Australia and maybe teaching. But you sense even if that country did offer sanctuary, this most Olympian, unquiet of souls would soon be looking for an itch to scratch.

Do original, copied from: independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/roberto-saviano-interview-gomorrah-author-on-how-writing-a-mouldbreaking-book-on-organised-crime-cost-him-his-freedom-10366189.htm

"Killing moon" - Echo & Bunnymem -

Formed during the late '70s in Liverpool, England, Echo & the Bunnymen’s music combined '60s psychedelic rock sprawl with post-punk experimentation. Its songs were seemingly guided forward by singer Ian McCulloch’s opaque and gloomy lyrics, rather than the other way around. By 1984’s Ocean Rain, the band—led by guitarist Will Sergeant and McCulloch— cast a more focused eye to pop structure and arrangement. That album’s lead single and centerpiece, "The Killing Moon", is, without question, their most widely known and loved song. It's sweeping and romantic, instantly identifiable from its opening mandolin doodle to its sweeping, upward modulating chorus.
For his part, McCulloch goes big—invoking fate, the stars, love, and death. It's the perfect synthesis of lysergic imagery and widescreen pop. During the '80s, the Bunnymen stood out among many of their new wave peers because they favored guitars rather than synthesizers. "The Killing Moon" is hardly a minimalist "band in a room"-style recording, though. It’s a sophisticated pop production that uses classic sounds (a string section) and then-new technology (studio effects) to imbue simple chords with epic scope. Aaron Leitko in 200 songs from the 80s - Pitchfork

O paradoxo Banach – Tarski

"This charming man," - Smiths -

"This Charming Man" is the story of the serendipitous meeting between a young man stranded by the side of the road and a dashing bon vivant in a pristine automobile who comes to his rescue. It’s a scene so quintessentially Steven Patrick Morrissey it would border on parody if it weren’t for the fact that "This Charming Man" was the second-ever single released by the Smiths. There are references to, subtly and overtly, English modernist author Henry Green’s Loving, the 1972 Laurence Oliver film Sleuth, and avant-garde filmmaker Jean Cocteau (the Moz-designed single sleeve features a still from 1950’s Orphée). The song itself was initially written out of jealousy for Rough Trade labelmates Aztec Camera by guitarist Johnny Marr, and was the band’s first bid for a "hit"—"something upbeat and in a major key," according to Marr. It was a modest success upon release in 1983, but hit number eight on the UK charts in 1992 when it was reissued, becoming the Smiths' highest chart placement ever. It features one of the most beloved guitar tones of  the decade, one of Morrissey’s most honeyed and obtuse vocal takes, and one of the most memorable romantic exchanges in pop music history.
But I’ve always wondered: On what side of the car door is Morrissey in this story? He’d no doubt tell you he’s not even in the picture, but we know that can’t be entirely true. From a narrative standpoint, he’s the boy with the flat bicycle tire, and in 1983, that made sense. Vulnerable, a little lost but not completely naive, he’s the iconic outsider  that made the Smiths a beacon of light for so many lonely young people. But listening today, it’s impossible not to hear him as the driver, a smug and cocksure yet wholly  irresistible old rake. "We all want to grow up and move on and appear to be different to people. And we want people to see us in a different way," he said in 1997, bearing down  on his forties. "But, I don't know, I think the personality is very, very strongly cemented, and we just bear whatever shortcomings we have and learn to live with it." He, of all people, should know so much about these things. So perhaps it’s best to just call "This Charming Man" exactly what it is: A perfect song by a perfect band. - Zach Kelly in 200 songs from the 80s - Pitchfork

Seven massive misconceptions you have about communism (and capitalism)

1. Only communist economies rely on state violence.

Obviously, no private equity baron worth his weight in leveraged buyouts will ever part willingly with his fortune, and any attempt to achieve economic justice (like taxation) will encounter stiff opposition from the ownership class. But state violence (like taxation) is inherent in every set of property rights a government can conceivably adopt – including those that allowed the aforementioned hypothetical baron to amass said fortune.

In capitalism, competing ownership claims are settled by the state’s willingness to use violence to exclude all but one claimant. If I lay claim to one of David Koch’s mansions, libertarian that he is, he’s going to rely on big government and its guns to set me right. He owns that mansion because the state says he does and threatens to imprison anyone who disagrees. Where there isn’t a state, whoever has the most violent power determines who gets the stuff, be that a warlord, a knight, the mafia or a gang of cowboys in the Wild West. Either by vigilantes or the state, property rights rely on violence.

This is true both of personal possessions and private property, but it is important not to confuse the two. Property implies not a good, but a title – deeds, contracts, stocks, bonds, mortgages, &c. When Marxists talk of collectivizing ownership claims on land or “the means of production,” we are in the realm of property; when Fox Business Channel hosts move to confiscate my tie, we are in the realm of personal possessions. Communism necessarily distributes property universally, but, at least as far as this communist is concerned, can still allow you to keep your smartphone. Deal?

2. Capitalist economies are based on free exchange.

The mirror-image of the “oppressive communism” myth is the “liberatory capitalism” one. The idea that we’re all going around making free choices all the time in an abundant market where everyone’s needs get met is patently belied by the lived experience of hundreds of millions of people. Most find ourselves constantly stuck between competing pressures and therefore stressed out, exhausted, lonely, and in search of meaning. — as though we’re not in control of our lives.

We aren’t; the market is. If you don’t think so, try and exit “the market.” The origin of capitalism was depriving British peasants of their access to land (seizure of property, you might call it), and therefore their means of subsistence, making them dependent on the market for their survival. Once propertyless, they were forced to flock to the dreck, drink and disease of slum-ridden cities to sell the only thing they had – their capacity to use their brains and muscles to work – or die. Just like them, the vast majority of people today are deprived of access to the resources we need to flourish, though they exist in abundant quantities, so as to force us to work for a boss who is trying to get rich by paying us less and working us harder.

Even that boss (the apparent victor in the “free exchange”) isn’t free: the market places imperatives on the ownership class to relentlessly accumulate wealth and develop the forces of production or else fail. Capitalists are compelled to support oppressive regimes and wreck the planet, as a matter of business, even as they protest good personal intentions.

And that’s just the principle of the system. The US’s particular brand of capitalism required exterminating a continent’s worth of indigenous people and enslaving millions of kidnapped Africans. And all the capitalist industry was only possible because white women, considered the property of their fathers and husbands, were performing the invisible tasks of child-rearing and housework, without remuneration. Three cheers for free exchange.

3. Communism killed 110 million* people for resisting dispossession.

*The number cited is as consistent as it is rooted in sound research; i.e., not.

Greg Gutfeld, one of the hosts of Fox News’ “The Five” and a historical scholar of zero renown, recently advanced the position that “only the threat of death can prop up a left-wing dream, because no one in their right mind would volunteer for this crap. Hence, 110 million dead.” In declaring this, Gutfeld and his ilk insult the suffering of the millions of people who died under Stalin, Mao, and other 20th Century Communist dictators. Making up a big-sounding number of people and chalking their deaths up to some abstract “communism” is no way to enact a humanistic commitment to victims of human rights atrocities.

For one thing, a large number of the people killed under Soviet communism weren’t the kulaks everyone pretends to care about but themselves communists. Stalin, in his paranoid cruelty, not only had Russian revolutionary leaders assassinated and executed, but indeed exterminated entire communist parties. These people weren’t resisting having their property collectivized; they were committed to collectivizing property. It is also worth remembering that the Soviets had to fight a revolutionary war – against, among others, the US – which, as the American Revolution is enough to show, doesn’t mainly consist of group hugs. They also faced (and heroically defeated) the Nazis, who were not an ocean away, but right on their doorstep.

So much for the USSR. The most horrifying episode in 20th Century official Communism was the Great Chinese Famine, its death toll difficult to identify, but surely in the tens of millions. Several factors evidently contributed to this atrocity, but central to it was Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” a disastrous combination of applied pseudoscience, stat-juking, and political persecution designed to transform China into an industrial superpower in the blink of an eye. The experiment’s results were extremely grim, but to claim that the victims died because they, in their right minds, would not volunteer for “a left-wing dream” is ludicrous. Famine is not a uniquely “left-wing” problem.

4. Capitalist governments don’t commit human rights atrocities.

Whatever one’s assessment of the crimes committed by Communist leaders, it is unwise for capitalism’s cheerleaders to play the body-count game, because if people like me have to account for the gulag and the Great Sparrow campaign, they’ll have to account for the slave trade, indigenous extermination, “Late Victorian Holocausts” and every war, genocide and massacre carried out by the US and its proxies in the effort to defeat communism. Since the pro-capitalist set cares so deeply for the suffering of the Russian and Chinese masses, perhaps they’ll even want to account for the millions of deaths resulting from those countries’ transitions to capitalism.

It should be intuitive that capitalism, which glorifies rapid growth amidst ruthless competition, would produce great acts of violence and deprivation, but somehow its defenders are convinced that it is always and everywhere a force for righteousness and liberation. Let them try to convince the tens of millions of people who die of malnutrition every year because the free market is incapable of engineering a situation in which less than half of the world’s food is thrown away.

The 100 million deaths that are perhaps most important to focus on right now are the ones that international human rights organization DARA projected will die climate-borne deaths between 2012 and 2030. 100 million more will follow those, and they will not take 18 years to die. Famine like the human species has never known is in the offing because the free market does not price carbon and oil-extracting capitalist firms  have, since the collapse of the USSR, become sovereigns of their own. The most virulent anti-communists have a very handy, if morally disgraceful, way of treating this mass extinction event: they deny that it’s happening.

5. 21st Century American communism would resemble 20th century Soviet and Chinese horrors.

Before their revolutions, Russia and China were pre-industrial, agricultural, largely illiterate societies whose masses were peasants spread out over truly vast expanses of land. In the United States today, robots make robots, and less than 2% of population works in agriculture. These two states of affairs are incalculably dissimilar. The simple invocation of the former therefore has no value as an argument about the future of the American economy.

For me, communism is an aspiration, not an immediately achievable state. It, like democracy and libertarianism, is utopian in that it constantly strives toward an ideal, in its case the non-ownership of everything and the treatment of everything – including culture, people’s time, the very act of caring, and so forth – as dignified and inherently valuable rather than as commodities that can be priced for exchange. Steps towards that state of affairs needn’t include anything as scary as the wholesale and immediate abolition of markets (after all, markets predate capitalism by several millennia and communists love a good farmer’s market). Rather, I contend they can even include reforms with support among broadly ideologically divergent parties.

Given the technological, material, and social advances of the last century, we could expect an approach to communism beginning here and now to be far more open, humane, democratic, participatory and egalitarian than the Russian and Chinese attempts managed. I’d even argue it would be easier now than it was then to construct a set of social relations based on fellowship and mutual aid (as distinct from capitalism’s, which are characterized by competition and exclusion) such as would be necessary to allow for the eventual “withering away of the state” that libertarians fetishize, without replaying the Middle Ages (only this time with drones and metadata).

6. Communism fosters uniformity.

Apparently, lots of people are unable to distinguish equality from homogeneity. Perhaps this derives from the tendency of people in capitalist societies to view themselves primarily as consumers: the dystopic fantasy is a supermarket wherein one state-owned brand of food is available for all items, and it’s all in red packaging with yellow letters.

But people do a lot more than consume. One thing we do a huge amount of is work (or, for millions of unemployed Americans, try to and are not allowed). Communism envisions a time beyond work, when people are free, as Marx wrote, “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner… without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” In that way, communism is based on the total opposite of uniformity: tremendous diversity, not just among people, but even with in a single person’s “occupation.”

That so many great artists and writers have been Marxists suggest that the production of culture in such a society would breed tremendous individuality and offer superior avenues for expression. Those artists and writers might have thought of communism as “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” but you might want to consider it an actual instantiation of universal access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

You won’t even notice the red packaging with yellow letters!

7. Capitalism fosters individuality.

Instead of allowing all people to follow their entrepreneurial spirit into the endeavors that fulfill them, capitalism applauds the small number of entrepreneurs who capture large portions of mass markets. This requires producing things on a mass scale, which imposes a double-uniformity on society: tons and tons of people all purchase the same products, and tons and tons of people all perform the same labor. Such individuality as flourishes amid this system is often extremely superficial.

Have you seen the suburban residential developments that the housing boom shat out all over this country? Have you seen the grey-paneled cubicles, bathed in fluorescent light, clustered in “office parks” so indistinct as to be disorienting? Have you seen the strip malls and service areas and sitcoms? Our ability to purchase products from competing capitalist firms has not produced an optimally various and interesting society.

As a matter of fact, most of the greatest art under capitalism has always come from people who are oppressed and alienated (see: the blues, jazz, rock & roll, and hip-hop). Then, thanks to capitalism, it is homogenized, marketed, and milked for all its value by the “entrepreneurs” sitting at the top of the heap, stroking their satiated flanks in admiration of themselves for getting everyone beneath them to believe that we are free.

Retirado do original (copied from the original): salon.com/2015/07/02/7_massive_misconceptions_you_have_about_communism_and_capitalism/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow