Mescolanze

Il simbolo dell'italia è forse la pasta col pomodoro - pomodoro americano, pasta cinese, ma combinazione assolutamente ed esclusivamente italiana. Che la peculiarità dell'Italia sia proprio nell'unire cose di provenienza diversa era stata capita benissimo dai romani: l'imperatore Claudio sottolineava come i romani fossero un miscuglio di tutte le razze, e che per questo erano diventati più forti dei greci che invece non si mescolavano mai. La cosa era stata ripresa anche da alcuni intellettuali fascisti dei più intelligenti (o meno stupidi) che rendendosi conto che non potevamo certo rivendicarci la purezza della razza, sostenevano al contrario che la superiorità italiana era dovuta all'aver fuso greci e latini. L'idea è riportata anche all'inizio del film "pane e tulipani".

Happy decrease

The therocians of happy decrease gain every day more approval. They correctly address the problem that resources are not infinite, and that it is necessary to begin to reason about the decrease of the richness of the world. The ideas of these people meet those of the environmentalist, in particular the old idea sponsored in particular by WWF, that GIP doens't consider environmental assets and that it is necessaty to consider in economical polithisc also the ecological footprint.

The fact that we are consuming more resources than are available in the world and that growth cannot increase indefenitely are self-evident, and most countries in the world (not Italy) are considering seriously these problems. Nonetheless, I think that this line of reasoning is incomplete.

1) Rent is distributed very unequally among people, in particular in countries such as USA, UK and Italy (much less so in Germany. Sweden and other social-democratic countries). In the United States, 10% of the population own (and consume) about 90% of the national wealth. This means that should the remaining 90% of the people halve their income, the GIP and therefore the consumption of resources would decrease globally only by 5%. To my knowledge this arithmetical fact has not been even considered. It means that reducing inequalities of income - a traditional aim of the socialists - can reduce the consumption of resources without touching anyway the standard of living of people and even increasing the average income per person.

2) The supporters of the footprint have understood the fundamental yet rarely appreciated that GBP measures income and not assets; boradly speaking, GBP depend on the increase of assets, and not on asset in itself. Referring to the well known logistic curve, GBP is proportional to the tangent to the curve, whereas any point of the curve is the asset in a give moment of time. Growth at the beginning is slow, in the middle part is rapid, at the carrying capacity it is slow again, but now the assets are enormously larger than at the beginning. The supporters of the idea of the happy decrease do not stress the fact that we can decrease the growth without decreasing the asset - we can be very rich without increasing our richness. Of course this means a complete rearrangement f the economic, since in free market economy profits - the engine of the economic system - depend fundamentally on the increase of assets and not on assets per se(this is the reason why GBP, although obviously faulty, is fundamental in economy).

Idiozia

In greco idiotes deriva da idios (sé stesso) e significa: "colui che pensa solo a sé stesso", ovvero colui che non pensa alla cosa pubblica ovvero qualunquista. Il termine passò subito a significare "cretino" "beota", in quanto chi pensa solo a sé stesso forse crede di fare i propri interessi, ma in realtà si fa passare tutto addosso e quindi va contro i propri interessi. Gli italiani, temo, sono idioti.

Fascist architecture

Although most architects coming from the school of the University of Rome are thrown into ecstasis when considering italian architecture of the fascist period, in particular the important examples of Rome, I personally believe this architecture to be rather horrible. Of course, the fascist regime contracted only excellent architects, the rationalism of Libera and Michelucci was very "modern" with respect to the current architecture of the time, but buildings such as the Palazzo delle Poste in via Marmorata and Ostia, although quite nice, sounds to me rather false. The main problem is size: the moderately large buildings of Latina and Sabaudia, although somewhat rethoric, retain reasonable proportions and are quite tolerable; the huge buildings of Rome put everything out of scale. In particular, the immense Morpurgo's Palazzo della Farnesina is a perfect representation of the illusory ambitions of the regime: a secondary power, with few colonies, a stunted economy and inconsistent army, with the ambition to compete with countries such as England or the United States; the Palazzo della Farnesina seems a puppy dog barking at a big mastiff. Morevoer, such enormous proportions are completely unfunctional: the exact opposite of true rationalism, and something that reminds instead the pompous architecture of late XIX century ("architettura umbertina"); fascist architecture is fundamentally the provincial umbertine architecture in the squared cloths of European rationalism - exactly as the fascist regime was a conservative provincial regime boasting to be revolutionary.

Chiesa

Si imputa spesso alla Chiesa di mescolare il potere temporale con il potere spirituale. Tuttavia, la Chiesa non si comporta in modo molto diverso dagli Stati Uniti che fanno i loro interessi politici anche attraverso il cinema, i format televisivi ecc. Il problema vero è che mentre Stati Uniti, Gran Bretagna, Francia ecc. sono stati nazionali, la Chiesa cattolica è un'entità universale; ci troviamo quindi nella situazione di avere un debole stato nazionale che ospita un potente impero universale (del resto la Chiesa è l'erede diretto dell'Impero Romano); un impero e uno stato nazionale non potranno mai avere rapporti equilibrati, come invece tutto sommato hanno per esempio Sati Uniti e Italia nonostante l'enorme disparità di peso politico ed economico.