An amputated limb

It is often asked why prayer, miracles or alternative medicine can obtain medical results only in those cases where there is also the possibility for spontaneous remission; why those practices can’t, for example, restore back an amputated limb.

Modern medicine can’t either, but in many cases is possible to stitch back a freshly amputated limb.
This is amazing in itself, and it marks already some difference.

Now let’s take a bet.
Twenty years from now, who’s going to be able to regrow an amputated limb?
Rigorous research, double-blind tests, peer-review and systematic rejection of subjective experiences (with their huge limits, nonetheless), or “trusting your feelings”?

So, do you like freedom?

We live in a Free country, ooh, yes!
Freedom is good, freedom is great.
Ain’t it?
We rightfully loathe dictatorships like, say, Iraq under Saddam’s rule or 1920 Fascist Italy.
How terrible would it be, to live in such a situation?

Ten seconds, list me all the freedoms you’d miss!
…
Ehm… I can’t travel abroad?
I have to conform otherwise I may be imprisoned or killed?
I can’t say bad things about the Leader?
I have to attend the church / military parades?
I have to bribe the right people if I want to keep my business running?
I get involved into useless and bloody wars?
I can’t vote to decide which one of the two selected oligarchs gets to steal my money?
LOL!

Truth is, we are told that freedom is good, but we don’t have a clear idea of what that means… Actually, we the people would do perfectly well in an authoritarian state.
You don’t have to take responsibility for anything, plus usually you also get a straw man enemy to yell your frustration at.

Freedom is useful to question what your government is doing.
But we want to feel that we’re right, not to face our errors.
So giving away freedom can even make us feel better.
Not to mention that we also give away freedom when we allow our governments to spy on us and invade our privacy without a legal case.

Face it.
We don’t give a flying fuck about freedom.

All this chatter about freedom is feel-good propaganda.

On the other side, dictatorships get overthrown.
Why?
Money, of course.
Dictatorships lack the control of the free press, that can expose corruption and bribery, or question the choices of the government.
Eventually, dictatorships become so inefficient that they just crumble.

It feels almost ridiculous to say, but if ‘democracies’ are slowly replacing dictatorships, is not a matter of freedom, none really wants freedom.
It’s a matter of efficiency.

A Notupia

Our modern, western-style democracies are resembling more and more soft oligarchies, where the citizens can choose only between two candidates already selected by someone else.
We end up voting for someone that’s obviously corrupted only because the other guy is worse*.
Anyway, it doesn’t make the slightest difference: we end up giving power to someone that has other interests than ours.
It is just too easy to give up to the temptation.
The more power one person wields, the more ways he has not to respond of that power.
Scandals are everywhere, and people are disillusioned.

Now, whether you want to reform everything step by step or bomb the parliament, you need to know how to prevent this situation from happening again, what to put in place of this failed system.

I thought a lot about this, and I think something that might work.
The idea is: Have all top-ranking officers forfeit their money and privacy for the duration of the office.

Call me a nutjob, but I mean exactly that.
Upon confirmation of election results, the elected candidate will be required to give away all his material possessions to the state and relinquish his right to privacy.
At the end of his office, his right to privacy will be restored and he will be granted a salary equal to the minimum salary for full-time workers.
For three years more, the officer won’t be allowed any other income, whether he works or not.

This should be beneficial for the citizens because it makes very hard to bribe or threaten the officer without everyone knowing it.
Also, the officer has very limited options for unlawful behavior or personal gain beyond fame and recognition and since running an office would require such a personal sacrifice, most of the selfish bastards would be filtered out.

I’m serious.
The current system sucks.
How many politicians actually sell themselves to corporate interests?
How many of the taxes you pay disappear in some undisclosed pockets?
If you really want to change things and not have to face the very same problems in twenty years or so, you have to provide and alternative.
For us common citizens, what advantages has the current system compared to this?

I will try to answer in advance to critics that the idea may arise.

• Isn’t this an utopia?
  An utopia usually assumes that people are good and enlightened.
  Here we are assuming that politicians are bad and must be controlled.
  Duh.
• This does NOT address a lot of problems with current politics.
  True.
  Yet getting rid of a big slice of bribery doesn’t seem a bad thing.
• None will ever be willing to give away her privacy or her wealth.
  Stars of reality shows do give away their privacy.
  Soldiers may be asked to give their lives.
  Priests renounce to sex and romantic love.
  It’s not that strange.
  The founding fathers of every nation are brought as examples for their selflessness.
  Why should our generation lack such idealistic leaders?
  Idealistic people do exist, and are systematically kept outside politics.
• A country often does requires secrecy, especially when it comes to international affairs.
  The requirement for secrecy is overrated and just too abused already.
• This would prevent wealthier citizens from being elected, as they would lose their larger wealth.
  Yes.
  But right now he situation is even more skewed: only rich citizens make it to the higher offices: the common citizen has almost no sound chance of being elected and have her interests represented.
• Eroding privacy leads to a totalitarian state.
  In a totalitarian state, the government controls the citizens.
  The whole point of the proposed system is to allow the citizens to control tightly the government.
  Only a few volunteers would lose their privacy and only for the duration of their office.
• Your idea is not practical and ultimately useless.
  Ok, then let’s see it in a broader perspective.
  The underlying idea is that everything that reduces the personal power of a top-level officer is good, and everything that increases the control that citizens have on him is also good, and if this comes at personal sacrifice for said officer, it’s even better.
  You can push for smaller reforms in this direction.
• Our current politicians would never submit to this!
  That’s the whole point of it!

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*The more we are scared by an ‘evil’ the easier we are pushed into voting for the ‘lesser evil’ just to prevent the ‘greater evil’.
In this way we are manipulated by the two big parties to vote only for them, effectively maintaining the status quo.
Even if they are formally in competition, they feed each other.

The world in a cup

So, where in the world is this area?
Nowhere, actually.
Because what you see in the picture is not a world map.
I just took a detail of the source image, reduced it to a couple of colors and enhanced the edges.

And here is the original image.

My educated (ie: lazy) guess is that this is due to the self-similarity of turbulence… the very same rules can describe such different phenomena at such different scales.

Don’t know if this teaches us something important about Life, the Universe and Everything, I just think it’s awesome!

Filesharing is Illegal!

NOTE:Copyfight issues touch a way broader range of subjects, including among other things DRM, pharmaceutical patents and software patents. Here I want to focus only on music because it is what touches people most directly in their everyday life.

If you are reading this, chances are that you also download music from peer-to-peer networks.
This is illegal and you should of course refrain to do so.

But then *why* so many people do it anyway?

Roughly 43% of the connected people illegally download music.

And it would cost several thousands $ to legally fill an iPod.

Sometimes someone is caught and instead of being punished for breaking the law as deserved, pays for everyone.

43% of the people is quite a lot…
If they voted on this, they would probably legalize file sharing, even just to avoid the thousand $ fines.
This is the principle a democracy is supposed to work under: the interests of many prevail over the interests of few.

So why file-sharing is still illegal?
Obviously, because it damages the artists, thus indirectly damaging also the interests of that 43% people.
But is this the case?
There are good reasons to believe it is not: indeed, rarely artists make a living selling their CDs in the stores.

And why in the world so many artists are trying new economic models?

Big producers are boasting enormous losses due to file-sharing.
This is normal, free market kills obsolete companies.
When music can be distributed at no cost to an infinite audience, intermediaries are simply not required.

So why are they still here?
Surely not to give the due compensation to artists.

Is it paranoid to think that lobbying from big producers has gone too far?
Seriously, so many citizens have very good reasons for wanting file-sharing, why is it still illegal?
Why are laws, instead of being relaxed, becoming stricter and harsher?
Why are laws, instead of protecting the common citizen, protecting the interests of big producers?
We have to stop them before they stop us.

Next time you are going to buy music, think where your money is going.
Think whether it will support music and artists or it actually goes to music industry and a few big names.
Think whether your money is being used to pay lawyers and bribe politicians against your interest.

Think whether there are better ways to enjoy music.

Ego and Identification

Ego is the perceived image we have of ourselves.
As both individuals and groups.
What we think we are, our identity.
What sets us apart from the others.
What makes us unique.

What do you answer when asked “what are you?“
A combination of job, nationality, religion, political affiliation?
Are you a talent of yours, your knowledge, your success, your problems?
A goal in your mind, an ideal?
Are you your tastes, your choice of clothes, your choice of car?

The way we are taught to live, is to always assert our identity whenever possible, to inflate it, to cling on it.
Identity gives us the strength to achieve our goals.
We base our choices on it; without it we’re nothing, we’re lost.

When our ego, our identity is threatened, we defend it just as we were the ones under attack.

All this creates a few problems.

First, it prevents us to be anything else.
Changing is scary, it forces us out of our own bubble, out of our zone of comfort.
Any change that may threaten our identity is outright rejected.
Reducing the available options makes our choices simpler, and we feel safer.

Second, the ego is never satisfied, our perceived identity is never enough.
When we achieve our goals, we feel a sense of satisfaction, a strengthening of our identity, but it doesn’t last much, and it’s often not what we were hoping for.
So we want more.
We consume ourselves to fill a void that can’t be satisfied.

Third, we depend so much on this sense of identity, that we cannot afford to lose it.
To defend it, we will reject any information that would threaten it, it’s the infamous cognitive dissonance.
We struggle to reject reality when it clashes with our idealistic vision.

Should ever something we identify with be exposed as a lie, we would never be able to let it go. We would do everything to defend the lie, so dependent we are on our perceived identity.

Fourth, to pump up our ego, we have to prove ourselves that our identity
is better than the others’.
We want to feel that we are superior.
And guess what? If I am superior, it means that ‘the other’ is inferior.

If we have something that makes us feel like we are set apart from the others, it forces us to think that we are ‘more’ than the others.
The more we set ‘the others’ apart from us, the more we lessen them, the more we perceive the superiority of our identity.
We get angry when our ego is threatened and fight others in order to validate our beliefs against theirs.

History is full of examples of what happens when some people feel superior to others, and this is true for societies as well as for individuals.

To be updated…