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Tikopia
In addition to their islandwide system of multistory orchards and fields, social adaptations sustained the Tikopian economy. Most important, the islanders’ religious ideology preached zero population growth. Under a council of chiefs who monitored the balance between the human population and natural resources, Tikopians practiced draconian population control based on celibacy, contraception, abortion, and infanticide,…
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Ri(n)voluzioni
From 1970 to 1990 the total number of hungry people fell by 16 percent, a decrease typically credited to the green revolution. However, the largest drop occurred in communist China, beyond the reach of the green revolution. The number of hungry Chinese fell by more than 50 percent, from more than 400 million to under…
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“La confusione sarà il mio epitaffio”
A: […] Siccome per loro la guerra è la re-li-gio-ne… B: Ma perché non devono poter pregare? A: Hanno costruito moschee in tutte le città d’Italia! B: Tranne a Livorno, allora. A: Come? B: [Citando il quotidiano locale di qualche giorno prima] “L’imam chiede la moschea”. A: E la sinagoga cos’è? (Frammento di conversazione udita…
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Non durerà per sempre
You see, professor, I think you were right with your lesson. Yeah, you told us that things are not going to be so easy as they used to be. Right, we saw that, too. It is what’s happening. You know, I remember when we came here from Yugoslavia. I was a child; I was 10…
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Reinventare l’alienazione
The fact that the ideological distinction is artificial was first spotted by Albert Camus, who pointed out that both Western industrialism and its communist version achieve similar results through similar means – industrialization and specialization of labor. In the 1950s, in Défence de L’Homme Révolté, Camus accurately predicted that if the communist experiment were to…
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Falsa libertà
The habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world where both liaisons and loneliness are products of conveyance. To “gather” for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He comes to believe that political power grows out of the capacity of…
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Alta Immobilità
Beyond a certain level of energy, used for the acceleration of any one person in traffic, the transportation industry immobilizes and enslaves the majority of nameless passengers, and provides only questionable marginal advantages to an Olympian elite. No new fuel, technology, or public control can keep the rising mobilization of society from producing increased harriedness,…
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Come un gol in trasferta
Dovrei capitare più spesso dalle parti della rassegna stampa della Camera. Oggi ci sono andato per la prima volta, e ho subito scoperto che “Le preghiere dette con un malato valgono doppio.” In caso di parità immagino si vada ai rigori.
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Michael Pollan: dal punto di vista delle piante
And agriculture suddenly appeared to me not as an invention, not as a human technology, but as a co-evolutionary development in which a group of very clever species, mostly edible grasses, had exploited us, figured out how to get us to basically deforest the world. L’agricoltura improvvisamente non mi è apparsa come un’invenzione, come una…
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Cosa si è fatto veramente Silvio Berlusconi?
Non starò a parlare di certi video che circolano su YouTube, che vogliono infondere il sospetto (e quindi, nel gergo complottista, “dimostrare” la certezza) del fatto che l’aggressione a Silvio Berlusconi sia una montatura. La mia, se si vuole, è una risposta di metodo: prima di affermare certe cose, persino dei dubbi, vanno cercati dei…