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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months ago

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How finfluencers destroyed the housing and lives of thousands of people

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The crash of 2008 imparted many lessons to those of us who were only dimly aware of finance, especially the problems of complexity as a way of disguising fraud and recklessness. That was really the first lesson of 2008: "financial engineering" is mostly a way of obscuring crime behind a screen of technical jargon.

This is a vital principle to keep in mind, because obscenely well-resourced "financial engineers" are on a tireless, perennial search for opportunities to disguise fraud as innovation. As Riley Quinn says, "Any time you hear 'fintech,' substitute 'unlicensed bank'":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

But there's another important lesson to learn from the 2008 disaster, a lesson that's as old as the South Seas Bubble: "leverage" (that is, debt) is a force multiplier for fraud. Easy credit for financial speculation turns local scams into regional crime waves; it turns regional crime into national crises; it turns national crises into destabilizing global meltdowns.

When financial speculators have easy access to credit, they "lever up" their wagers. A speculator buys your house and uses it for collateral for a loan to buy another house, then they make a bet using that house as collateral and buy a third house, and so on. This is an obviously terrible practice and lenders who extend credit on this basis end up riddling the real economy with rot – a single default in the chain can ripple up and down it and take down a whole neighborhood, town or city. Any time you see this behavior in debt markets, you should batten your hatches for the coming collapse. Unsurprisingly, this is very common in crypto speculation, where it's obscured behind the bland, unpronounceable euphemism of "re-hypothecation":

https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/10/rehypothecation-may-be-common-in-traditional-finance-but-it-will-never-work-with-bitcoin/

Loose credit markets often originate with central banks. The dogma that holds that the only role the government has to play in tuning the economy is in setting interest rates at the Fed means the answer to a cooling economy is cranking down the prime rate, meaning that everyone earns less money on their savings and are therefore incentivized to go and risk their retirement playing at Wall Street's casino.

The "zero interest rate policy" shows what happens when this tactic is carried out for long enough. When the economy is built upon mountains of low-interest debt, when every business, every stick of physical plant, every car and every home is leveraged to the brim and cross-collateralized with one another, central bankers have to keep interest rates low. Raising them, even a little, could trigger waves of defaults and blow up the whole economy.

Holding interest rates at zero – or even flipping them to negative, so that your savings lose value every day you refuse to flush them into the finance casino – results in still more reckless betting, and that results in even more risk, which makes it even harder to put interest rates back up again.

This is a morally and economically complicated phenomenon. On the one hand, when the government provides risk-free bonds to investors (that is, when the Fed rate is over 0%), they're providing "universal basic income for people with money." If you have money, you can park it in T-Bills (Treasury bonds) and the US government will give you more money:

https://realprogressives.org/mmp-blog-34-responses/

On the other hand, while T-Bills exist and are foundational to the borrowing picture for speculators, ZIRP creates free debt for people with money – it allows for ever-greater, ever-deadlier forms of leverage, with ever-worsening consequences for turning off the tap. As 2008 forcibly reminded us, the vast mountains of complex derivatives and other forms of exotic debt only seems like an abstraction. In reality, these exotic financial instruments are directly tethered to real things in the real economy, and when the faery gold disappears, it takes down your home, your job, your community center, your schools, and your whole country's access to cancer medication:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/08/greek-drug-shortage-worsens

Being a billionaire automatically lowers your IQ by 30 points, as you are insulated from the consequences of your follies, lapses, prejudices and superstitions. As @[email protected] says, Elon Musk is what Howard Hughes would have turned into if he hadn't been a recluse:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/112457199729198644

The same goes for financiers during periods of loose credit. Loose Fed money created an "everything bubble" that saw the prices of every asset explode, from housing to stocks, from wine to baseball cards. When every bet pays off, you win the game by betting on everything:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_bubble

That meant that the ZIRPocene was an era in which ever-stupider people were given ever-larger sums of money to gamble with. This was the golden age of the "finfluencer" – a Tiktok dolt with a surefire way for you to get rich by making reckless bets that endanger the livelihoods, homes and wellbeing of your neighbors.

Finfluencers are dolts, but they're also dangerous. Writing for The American Prospect, the always-amazing Maureen Tkacik describes how a small clutch of passive-income-brainworm gurus created a financial weapon of mass destruction, buying swathes of apartment buildings and then destroying them, ruining the lives of their tenants, and their investors:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-05-22-hell-underwater-landlord/

Tcacik's main characters are Matt Picheny, Brent Ritchie and Koteswar “Jay” Gajavelli, who ran a scheme to flip apartment buildings, primarily in Houston, America's fastest growing metro, which also boasts some of America's weakest protections for tenants. These finance bros worked through Gajavelli's company Applesway Investment Group, which levered up his investors' money with massive loans from Arbor Realty Trust, who also originated loans to many other speculators and flippers.

For investors, the scheme was a classic heads-I-win/tails-you-lose: Gajavelli paid himself a percentage of the price of every building he bought, a percentage of monthly rental income, and a percentage of the resale price. This is typical of the "syndicating" sector, which raised $111 billion on this basis:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-housing-bust-comes-for-thousands-of-small-time-investors-3934beb3

Gajavelli and co bought up whole swathes of Houston and other cities, apartment blocks both modest and luxurious, including buildings that had already been looted by previous speculators. As interest rates crept up and the payments for the adjustable-rate loans supporting these investments exploded, Gajavell's Applesway and its subsidiary LLCs started to stiff their suppliers. Garbage collection dwindled, then ceased. Water outages became common – first weekly, then daily. Community rooms and pools shuttered. Lawns grew to waist-high gardens of weeds, fouled with mounds of fossil dogshit. Crime ran rampant, including murders. Buildings filled with rats and bedbugs. Ceilings caved in. Toilets backed up. Hallways filled with raw sewage:

https://pluralistic.net/timberridge

Meanwhile, the value of these buildings was plummeting, and not just because of their terrible condition – the whole market was cooling off, in part thanks to those same interest-rate hikes. Because the loans were daisy-chained, problems with a single building threatened every building in the portfolio – and there were problems with a lot more than one building.

This ruination wasn't limited to Gajavelli's holdings. Arbor lent to multiple finfluencer grifters, providing the leverage for every Tiktok dolt to ruin a neighborhood of their choosing. Arbor's founder, the "flamboyant" Ivan Kaufman, is associated with a long list of bizarre pop-culture and financial freak incidents. These have somehow eclipsed his scandals, involving – you guessed it – buying up apartment buildings and turning them into dangerous slums. Two of his buildings in Hyattsville, MD accumulated 2,162 violations in less than three years.

Arbor graduated from owning slums to creating them, lending out money to grifters via a "crowdfunding" platform that rooked retail investors into the scam, taking advantage of Obama-era deregulation of "qualified investor" restrictions to sucker unsophisticated savers into handing over money that was funneled to dolts like Gajavelli. Arbor ran the loosest book in town, originating mortgages that wouldn't pass the (relatively lax) criteria of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This created an ever-enlarging pool of apartments run by dolts, without the benefit of federal insurance. As one short-seller's report on Arbor put it, they were the origin of an epidemic of "Slumlord Millionaires":

https://viceroyresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Arbor-Slumlord-Millionaires-Jan-8-2023.pdf

The private equity grift is hard to understand from the outside, because it appears that a bunch of sober-sided, responsible institutions lose out big when PE firms default on their loans. But the story of the Slumlord Millionaires shows how such a scam could be durable over such long timescales: remember that the "syndicating" sector pays itself giant amounts of money whether it wins or loses. The consider that they finance this with investor capital from "crowdfunding" platforms that rope in naive investors. The owners of these crowdfunding platforms are conduits for the money to make the loans to make the bets – but it's not their money. Quite the contrary: they get a fee on every loan they originate, and a share of the interest payments, but they're not on the hook for loans that default. Heads they win, tails we lose.

In other words, these crooks are intermediaries – they're platforms. When you're on the customer side of the platform, it's easy to think that your misery benefits the sellers on the platform's other side. For example, it's easy to believe that as your Facebook feed becomes enshittified with ads, that advertisers are the beneficiaries of this enshittification.

But the reason you're seeing so many ads in your feed is that Facebook is also ripping off advertisers: charging them more, spending less to police ad-fraud, being sloppier with ad-targeting. If you're not paying for the product, you're the product. But if you are paying for the product? You're still the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#adfraud

In the same way: the private equity slumlord who raises your rent, loads up on junk fees, and lets your building disintegrate into a crime-riddled, sewage-tainted, rat-infested literal pile of garbage is absolutely fucking you over. But they're also fucking over their investors. They didn't buy the building with their own money, so they're not on the hook when it's condemned or when there's a forced sale. They got a share of the initial sale price, they get a percentage of your rental payments, so any upside they miss out on from a successful sale is just a little extra they're not getting. If they squeeze you hard enough, they can probably make up the difference.

The fact that this criminal playbook has wormed its way into every corner of the housing market makes it especially urgent and visible. Housing – shelter – is a human right, and no person can thrive without a stable home. The conversion of housing, from human right to speculative asset, has been a catastrophe:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Of course, that's not the only "asset class" that has been enshittified by private equity looters. They love any kind of business that you must patronize. Capitalists hate capitalism, so they love a captive audience, which is why PE took over your local nursing home and murdered your gran:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

Homes are the last asset of the middle class, and the grifter class know it, so they're coming for your house. Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that's where the money is" and We Buy Ugly Houses defrauds your parents out of their family home because that's where their money is:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor

The plague of housing speculation isn't a US-only phenomenon. We have allies in Spain who are fighting our Wall Street landlords:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#fuckin-aardvarks

Also in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights

The fight for decent housing is the fight for a decent world. That's why unions have joined the fight for better, de-financialized housing. When a union member spends two hours commuting every day from a black-mold-filled apartment that costs 50% of their paycheck, they suffer just as surely as if their boss cut their wage:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

The solutions to our housing crises aren't all that complicated – they just run counter to the interests of speculators and the ruling class. Rent control, which neoliberal economists have long dismissed as an impossible, inevitable disaster, actually works very well:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

As does public housing:

https://jacobin.com/2023/10/red-vienna-public-affordable-housing-homelessness-matthew-yglesias

There are ways to have a decent home and a decent life without being burdened with debt, and without being a pawn in someone else's highly leveraged casino bet.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

Image: Boy G/Google Maps (modified) https://pluralistic.net/timberridge

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abr · 10 days ago

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La parola è carbon credits. In sostanza, puoi comperare il Paradiso emissivo anche se pecchi di emissioni: basta comperare "crediti" accumulati da chi prometta per iscritto che sta riempiendo Papua o il Kalimantan di nuovi alberi. Oppure comperando "crediti" da chi ne abbia in eccesso: come ha fatto Stellantis da Tesla.

Praticamente (era) la versione odierna delle indulgenze medievali; il soldo cade nella borsa e l'anima del defunto peccatore vola in Cielo.

Solo che nell'era dei derivati non potevano farsi sfuggire l'occasione della specula: han creato una BORSA DEI CREDITI, così che la similitudine passa alla bolla dei tulipani olandesi del Seicento.

Far diventare "un mercato" una operazione artificiosa centralista artificiale imposta per legge, per consentire agli amichetti finanzieri di specularci sopra, non trasforma una operazione dirigista superstatalista manipolatoria in "LIBERO MERCATO". Questo lo lasciamo pensare agli anticap-pati.

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dragoneyes618 · 11 months ago

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Thoughts Upon Reading The Wish Novelization

I still haven't watched Wish yet, but I've read the novelization, and here's my thoughts about it. Because I am the kind of person who wonders about random background unimportant details and asks way too many questions about how things work. I've noticed that I'm not a very good companion to watch a movie with. ;)

Asha's grandfather is one hundred. She is seventeen, meaning he was eighty-three when she was born (give or take a year).

To compare, take the Madrigals from Encanto. Isabela and Dolores are 21; their grandmother is 75.

So wouldn't Sabino be kind of too old? Wouldn't it make more sense for him to be Asha's great-grandfather instead? Or did Asha's parents and/or grandparents get married late or something?

Also is Sabino her mother's father or father's father?

Never mind, it says on the wiki that he's Asha's father's father. So that answers that. Also that Asha's father's name was Tomas.

And now the wishes! Okay, so everybody gives up their wish when they turn eighteen. Why eighteen? In the medieval period in Spain the age of adulthood was not eighteen. The medieval period anywhere, really. I read that in Spain people were considered under their parents' jurisdiction until the age of twenty-three for men and twenty-five for women, unless married (which applied to both men and women). Most certainly not eighteen. Then again they weren't going to make the main characters in their twenties. But then they might as well have just had the age be sixteen or whatever.

And then you just...forget your wish? What's the point of that, then? Why would you want it to be granted? If you don't remember it anymore you have no desire for it anymore.

And the wish ceremony is only once in a lifetime, but what if your wish changes? What you wish for at eighteen is probably a lot different from what you wish for at forty.

What if by the time your wish is granted you don't want it anymore? After all, you moved on because you had no memory of wanting it!

Like that lady who wanted to create the best dresses. Why would she want to create them? Presumably that was her job. Maybe she's a seamstress from a family of seamstresses. Or something. But then her wish to create the best dresses is taken from her and she has no memory of ever wanting to make them. She has no desire or drive to at all. So she becomes something else. She does a different job. Maybe she becomes a baker or something. Then all of a sudden she's granted the ability to make the best dresses, after years and years of doing something else because she had no desire to create dresses anymore. Now what?

And there was that one wish of someone holding a baby. Presumably the wisher wished for a child. Does that mean the wisher will remain infertile until and unless Magnifico grants the wish? And how would that work anyway? Would a baby just appear out of nothing onstage?

And Sabino's wish. It seems that his wish was to create music with his lute. It would've been a lot simpler if his wish had been worded that way instead of "create something to inspire future generations." Magnifico was actually right that ideas can be dangerous. Of course, Sabino would never hurt anyone, but the people he inspires might, or the people they inspire might, and so on and so forth. For all Magnifico knows, Sabino's inspiration is a rebellion or something, instead of simply music.

And now Magnifico. A name like Magnifico is a bit on the nose, no? I assume that was not his original name. Maybe he renamed himself after gaining magic. A magnificent name for a magnificent sorcerer king!

He was not born a magician. It says that when he was young his family was attacked and he didn't have magic then. Where did he get magic from then?

And I'd like to know a bit more about this "great loss" he suffered, wouldn't you?

He founded Rosas. Why did he pick the name Rosas then? Isn't the way these things usually work is naming the kingdom or city or whatever after some derivative of his name?

And what exactly does the king's apprentice do? Apprentice to a sorcerer, but there weren't any other sorcerer's around in Rosas, were there? What happened to the other apprentices, and if you've ever read the Wings of Fire series I'm worrying that the same thing that happened to the dragonmancer apprentices in that series happens here. (Spoiler: They died.)

And Amaya, the queen, knows exactly who Asha is. Alright so it makes sense that she'd know the name of whoever was applying to be the next apprentice. Also I thought it was so sweet that she was giving Asha advice.

But apparently she's been watching Asha and knows how she acts and feels and so on. She's the queen and Asha is a random person in Rosas. I get the feeling it's a pretty small kingdom. It must be, though, for everybody to be able to gather once a month. Probably that one town is basically the whole kingdom.

Also I wonder whatever happened with that poor guy who had the interview right before Asha.

And Magnifico seemed to trust Asha very quickly and then revealed his true motives to her also very quickly. Did he think she would agree with him but drastically misread her intentions?

You know a lot of the wishes could have been fulfilled on their own. Like Simon's wish was to be a loyal guard. He could have fulfilled that wish by.....joining up with the king's guards and training with them and becoming one of them. Obviously he's already loyal if he wants to become a guard in the first place.

And I want to know how Amaya and Magnifico met! I want to know more about them in general!

My guess is that they met and married only after Magnifico became king because she constantly calls him mi rey.

Although on the other hand maybe they were married before that and she calls him that because she's so proud that he became king.

Also you'd think Amaya would have had some questions after Asha's interview. Like "if Asha isn't being your next apprentice why did you want her to sit with me then."

And it seems that that weird green forbidden magic changed Magnifico. He could be reasoned with, before. But afterwards he threatened Amaya. I thought he truly loved her, but he was willing to hurt her with magic. I think the magic changed him, made him worse. And once you embrace it, there's no going back....

But Amaya seems to accept evil Magnifico with surprising ease. Once she sees that apparently it's impossible to undo the magic's influence she just...accepts it. Like you'd think she'd try to talk to him or something. Like even after he's in the mirror you'd think that she'd try to talk to him and ask him what he was thinking and see if he knows of any way to undo the forbidden magic now that he can't harm anyone else. But nope.

I did think that part was kind of funny, though. She's like "Well you do love mirrors!" She's seen quite enough of him staring into mirrors and preening over how handsome he is.....

But also Asha figured out that the queen was on her side and would go against her own husband just from seeing how changed she looked after realizing what Maginifco was doing? Aren't queens, like, trained never to let their true emotions show in public?

Also random but Magnifico says he granted fourteen wishes last year but he grants wishes once a month. What are the extra wishes?

Maybe, in addition to the monthly granting, sometimes he grants an extra wish on notable occasions, like the anniversary of the kingdom’s founding and holidays and so on. Which might be why everyone expected Sabino's wish to be granted - he was surely the oldest one there, and a 100th birthday is indeed an occasion.

And also why is sixteen year old Dahlia working in the palace kitchen? Is she apprenticing to someone? Do her parents work there?

Also I think it's funny how half the kingdom has a crush on Magnifico despite him already being married. Like Amaya is literally right there.

And then the ending with Asha being a fairy godmother. Crossovers aside, I don’t care about that, and I want an answer that is not bashing the movie, please, why did they word it that way? Why did Asha's friends say she should be their fairy godmother as opposed to "You'll help us all fulfill our wishes" or "you'll grant everyone their wishes" or so on? Asha is very much a human, not a fairy at all. and it's not her magic, it's the star’s magic.

So the fact that they specify fairy godmother implies that fairy godmothers already exist in the universe of Rosas. Which is maybe a clue as to where Magnifico got his magic from.

Back to Magnifico I wondered why he didn't immediately suspect that the light was Asha.

Although I thought it was funny how everybody was cheering the light and he was like "No, it wasn't me, it's a traitor!"

Like somebody figures out his true colors, he reveals his true motives (didn't he worry she would do something or tell people?) and then literally that night somebody's meddling with magic. He didn't suspect her?

When Magnifico and his guards showed up at her house I thought he'd finally come to that conclusion. But then it turned out Simon told him.

Also how did they escape on the king's horses? They're unfamiliar to the horses and likely have less experience riding. Shouldn't the horses reject them in favor of their own riders, or at least be slower and confused? Like it should have taken them longer to get the horses to trust them and let them ride them.

And Magnifico kind of doomed himself in the end. Overnight he went from a beloved wishgranting king to one trying to destroy all of them and blot out the stars. Made it pretty easy for the population to celebrate his defeat. As opposed to what he had until then, which was the word of one random teenager against him.

Especially considering his wife was against him! That definitely convinced a lot of people. Amaya seems pretty popular.

I wonder what the everyday people were thinking. One day out of the blue there's a traitor, who seemed like a nice ordinary girl but she meddled with magic which the king says is illegal and he's the king so his word goes. Then the king starts doing creepy magic and people's wishes start being destroyed and he tries to kill Asha.

Also does Bazeema have a crush on Gabo or something? She kept popping up right next to him.

And I wonder what Asha's mother's wish was.

Also Magnico states that he doesn't even charge his people rent. But how does that even work? Every kingdom and country in history has charged taxes. You need money for a kingdom to function. Basic. How does Magnifico pay his guards, then? Pay his servants?

Maybe he uses wishes as payment. Like with his guards, maybe they have to work for X amount of years and then he grants their wishes. Plus while they’re working for him they get food and a place to live and so on. Magnifico using wishes as payment wouldn’t completely solve the money question, but it would go some way to.

Also, the fact that Magnifico didn’t charge rent, nor presumably any other form of taxes, suggests that he really really wanted people to live there, to the point of forgoing any money he could make from them, so he could have their wishes….

Also say what you will about the ending but I think it could actually make sense for Magnifico in the mirror to be the Evil Queen's mirror. So they didn't destroy this mirror, right? It stayed in the palace. It's still there for the next generation of rulers, and the next. It gets handed down throughout the centuries and eventually they forgot the story behind it; they just know that their family has a magic mirror that can tell them anything. Because he has magic and can use it to find out anything. Now Rosas is in Spain and I think Snow White is in Germany but this could work. Back in the day royal families from different countries married each other all the time to create alliances. So somebody from the royal family of Rosas married Snow White's ancestor and brought the mirror along. And the mirror was passed down through a few more generations until it came to the Evil Queen. The Evil Queen was royalty by marriage, so the mirror could have belonged to her husband. It could have already been in the palace when she came.

Also I was thinking! Magnifico's changed green magic that turned Simon evil! Isn't that sort of like what happened to Magnifico in the first place?

And I also want to know how long ago Magnifico founded Rosas. It must be pretty recent; it's still a very small kingdom. This is probably why he's so eager for people to visit and move there.

Sabino is 100 years old; presumably he moved to Rosas in his lifetime and wasn't born there? Maybe he knows about how it was founded and so on.

Imagine being older than the kingdom you live in! Quite an accomplishment! (Most kingdoms aren't new, so....)

So Magnifico can grant literally any wish, which he uses to encourage people to live there. Okay but this is literally any wish. Maybe this is another reason why people are coming to Rosas! They want their wishes granted! Literally any wish! Never mind the wishes to fly or swim or whatever! Where are the wishes for things like endless wealth or to be king, things which people have most certainly wished for over the centuries? Where are the desperate people traveling to move to Rosas to get their wish fulfilled? Where are the wishes like "I wish my dead brother was alive" and "I wish my fatally ill wife was cured of her illness" and "I wish my son who got run over by a cart last month was completely healed?"

#wish #wish 2023 #disney wish #princess asha #asha #wish asha #king magnifico #queen amaya #bazeema #gabo

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firewalker · 1 year ago

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Definizioni

Carnivoro: una persona che mangia solo o quasi esclusivamente prodotti animali. Scelta sconsigliata.

Onnivoro: una persona che mangia qualsiasi tipo di alimento.

Onnivoro sociale: una persona che mangia prodotti vegetali nel privato, ma che non si fa problemi a mangiare carne, pesce e derivati in occasioni sociali.

Flexitariano: una persona che mangia prodotti vegetali, ma saltuariamente inserisce anche carne, pesce e derivati

Pescetariano: una persona che mangia prodotti vegetali e pesce, talvolta anche derivati di animali terrestri come latticini, uova, miele e altri prodotti animali minori, escludendo le carni degli animali terrestri.

Latto-Ovo Vegetariano: una persona che mangia esclusivamente prodotti vegetali e derivati animali come latticini, uova, miele e altri prodotti animali minori. Necessita di integrazione di B12.

Latto-Vegetariano: una persona che mangia esclusivamente prodotti vegetali, latticini, miele e altri prodotti animali minori ma esclude le uova. Necessita di integrazione di B12.

Ovo-Vegetariano: una persona che mangia esclusivamente prodotti vegetali, uova, miele e prodotti animali minori, ma esclude i latticini. Necessita di integrazione di B12.

Vegano: una persona che mangia esclusivamente vegetali e che esclude qualsiasi prodotto animale. Necessita di integrazione di B12.

Crudista: una persona che mangia solo prodotti che non devono essere cucinati. Nella maggior parte dei casi la cosa si concretizza in una dieta vegana con una scelta di alimenti inferiore. Scelta sconsigliata.

Igienista: una persona che segue strampalate indicazioni riguardanti la produzione di muco, le depurazioni e l'idiosincrasia per partito preso per questo e quell'altro alimento. Scelta sconsigliata.

Fruttariano: una persona che mangia solo frutta, o dice di mangiare solo frutta. Scelta sconsigliata.

Brethariano o respiriano: una persona che per problemi mentali è convinta di poter sopravvivere senza mangiare nulla, nutrendosi della luce del sole. Non è una scelta, è una patologia mentale.

Pick one. Or more. Occhio solo alle derive dannose.

NB: non conosco nessuno, né so se esiste una definizione nel caso in cui qualcuno dovesse scegliere di consumare prodotti vegetali escludendo tutti i prodotti animali mantenendo però il miele e gli altri derivati animali minori (che sarebbero poi il polline, la propoli e cose simili). Comunque questo qualcuno avrebbe bisogno di B12.

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t-annhauser · 1 year ago

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siamo tutti Gregor Samsa

Se c'è un risvolto buono dell'essere completamente fuori dai giochi, fuori dalle consorterie alle quali è bene aderire per avere una seppur minimo supporto in qualche ramo della moderna divisione del lavoro, è che non devi prendere partito e non devi niente a nessuno. Prendere partito è l'inizio di tutte le relazioni tossiche che si possono intrattenere con la realtà, da lì comincia la lunga discesa verso la deferenza obbligatoria e cointeressata che è la fonte di ogni cronica perdita di amor proprio. Perdere l'amor proprio sembra una cosa da niente, ma quando questa perdita si cronicizza e l'immagine che si ha di sé comincia a distanziarsi troppo dalla propria volontà per aderire alla volontà altrui, si finisce senza accorgersene per diventare cinici e distruttivi, carichi di odio e di risentimento. Gregor Samsa una bella mattina si risveglia scarafaggio, noi ci risvegliamo zerbini: certe colleghe mi raccontavano cose assurde riguardo alle loro precedenti esperienze di lavoro, umiliazioni alla "diavolo veste Prada" che oggi fanno così spettacolo per esempio nelle dinamiche sadomasochiste dei vari Masterchef e derivati, dove godiamo a vedere la gente trattata male e sotto pressione: be', alla fine si erano convinte che per umilianti che fossero state quelle esperienze di lavoro erano pur sempre servite a formargli il carattere, e ne andavano anche fiere, se le appuntavano al petto come spillette degli scout. Sia detto questo comprendendo che tutti noi, per poter vivere di qualcosa, dobbiamo pur trovare dei compromessi, ma la perdita di amor proprio è la madre di ogni sciagura e purtroppo abbonda in questo mondo moderno che in superficie fa grande sfoggio di rispetto e di inclusività, e dietro ai grandi paroloni ci sommerge da mattina a sera di pubblicità idiote e ci persuade con modelli culturali a dir poco fantozziani (il lavoratore di Amazon come paradigma: ho trovato lavoro grazie ad Amazon così posso curare la mia sorellina malata, sia lode a Bezos, sempre sia lodato).

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falcemartello · 1 year ago

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Dall’eco-ansia all’eco-razzismo

Di Marcello Veneziani

L’angoscia si esprime oggi in due modi: ego-ansia ed eco-ansia. Siamo angosciati per l’io e per il pianeta; di tutto quel che sta nel mezzo – persone, famiglie, società, nazioni, popoli, culture, religioni, civiltà, umanità – ci interessa sempre meno.

L’eco-ansia è la patologia dei nostri giorni, una specie di infiammazione ecologica. I malati più acuti sono i ragazzi, poi vengono i media e tutti gli altri; ma ne patiscono anche alcuni ministri. La nuova linea di discriminazione tra i buoni e i cattivi, gli insider e gli outsider, è quella: se ti affibbiano il marchio di negazionista ambientale sei fritto, come il pianeta; hai perso ogni rispetto, non puoi coprire alcun ruolo, devi solo nasconderti.

Ma cos’è l’eco-ansia? E’ un fenomeno non solo italiano ma occidentale, trae suggestioni dal movimento di Greta Thunberg, però non nasce dal nulla: alcune emergenze ambientali e climatiche toccano reali alterazioni dell’eco-sistema. Quanto però queste dipendano dai comportamenti umani è da verificare: alcune di più (per es. la plastica nei mari), altre assai meno (i mutamenti nell’ecosistema). E poco dipendono da singoli stati e singoli paesi, di modeste dimensioni, come il nostro. L’eco-ansia è divenuto improvvisamente ossessivo, monomaniacale, con un giacobinismo ideologico e un fanatismo patologico.

Ma la sua motivazione originaria, la salvaguardia della natura in pericolo, è sacrosanta. Ed è più coerente con una visione del mondo conservatrice e tradizionale, in cui è un bene primario la difesa, il rispetto e l’amore per la natura, a partire dalla natura umana. Il legame profondo tra l’uomo e la terra, le sue radici, il suo habitat, i suoi luoghi originari e identitari sorgono non a caso in una concezione della tradizione, nei suoi legami spirituali e biologici, naturali e culturali. A lungo questa visione della natura ha trovato come suoi avversari il capitalismo e il comunismo, il mercato globale e la pianificazione statale socialista, figli entrambi della rivoluzione industriale, e legati entrambi a una visione utilitarista, produttivista e antinaturale. Alla fine degli anni ottanta, in Processo all’Occidente, analizzai questo scontro tra la difesa della natura e i suoi nemici ideologici, sovietici e mercantilisti.

Poi con gli anni è avvenuto qualcosa: da una parte l’insensibilità verso i temi della natura in pericolo da parte di una “turbo-destra” liberista e ipermercatista, dall’altra la sostituzione di madre natura con la maternità surrogata dell’ambiente, termine più asettico che può valere per qualunque habitat, anche una fabbrica. Da lì nasce il ménage à trois fra eco-ansia, progressismo radical e capitalismo “eco-sostenibile”.

Il risultato che ne è derivato è questo ambientalismo allarmato, antinatura, ideologico e funzionale al nuovo capitalismo globale e allo sfruttamento del business ambientale. Al massimalismo ideologico e al suo profitto politico si unisce così l’eco-speculazione. La strategia pubblicitaria delle grandi aziende alimentari non vanta più le qualità dei prodotti ma il fatto che siano eco-sostenibili; vantano la loro buona coscienza ecologica oltre alla buona coscienza ideologica (gli spot con dosi obbligate di mondo verde, ma anche nero, gay e arcobaleno). Il pregio principale del prodotto è che non nuoce all’ambiente ed è ideologicamente conforme; non conta la qualità del cibo ma i rifiuti e gli effetti ideologici derivati. All’industria del food eco-sostenibile si è aggiunta la cosmesi e la moda eco-sostenibile; grandi marchi vendono vestiari, scarpe, creme eco-sostenibili. L’eco-sostenibile leggerezza dell’essere… Ma il core business dell’eco-ansia è nei farmaci, nella sanità e nelle cure psicanalitiche. Viene monetizzata l’ansia. Per non parlare della riconversione verde dell’industria e delle case, dei trasporti e dell’energia. Un business enorme sullo spavento diffuso e sulle nuove norme obbligate da adottare.

Sulla nuova pandemia chiamata eco-anxiety e sul suo target giovanile, ho scritto nel recente libro Scontenti. L’eco-ansia investe la salute mentale; vi si accompagna un disturbo psichico chiamato solastalgia, generato dal cambiamento eco-climatico. I sintomi e gli effetti dell’eco-ansia sono: attacchi di panico, traumi, depressione, disturbi da stress, abuso di sostanze, aggressività, ridotte capacità di autonomia e controllo, senso d’impotenza, fatalismo e paura, spinta al suicidio. E un grande senso di colpa ambientale. Il popolo degli eco-ansiosi reputa il futuro “spaventoso”.

Gli eco-ansiosi sono considerati malati virtuosi, i loro disturbi sono ritenuti lodevoli perché denotano sensibilità green. I colpevoli invece sono quegli adulti che hanno così malridotto il pianeta e non patiscono eco-ansia. L’umanità viene nuovamente divisa in buoni e cattivi, e dopo i no-vax, i no-war, ecco i no-eco: da una parte le vittime gli eco-ansiosi, dall’altra i negazionisti, gli eco-mostri, che minimizzano il problema da loro creato.

La follia ulteriore di questa drammaturgia ambientale è che non produce effetti concreti sull’ambiente: una volta esaltata la minoranza benemerita degli eco-attivisti e vituperata la minoranza maledetta degli eco-negazionisti, non viene fuori alcun risultato pratico in tema di degrado ambientale. Si è solo usata un’ennesima discriminazione ideologica per sostenere un nuovo, manicheo eco-razzismo da cui trarre profitto politico. Allo stesso tempo l’eco-ansia dirotta il mondo dalla realtà: l’incubo è il clima, concentriamoci sul riscaldamento globale, il resto è irrilevante o meno urgente. Non pensate più all’economia e alla politica, alla società reale e all’economia, alla famiglia e alle ingiustizie, alla disumanizzazione e alla fine della civiltà; è in ballo il pianeta da salvare. Tra l’io e il pianeta c’è di mezzo il vuoto; di quello spazio se ne occupa la governance globale. Voi pensate al clima, agli animali e ai ghiacciai, e al vostro io angosciato. Il mondo si va disumanizzando, ma il tema su cui concentrarsi è il clima. L’importante è salvare il pianeta; e se l’umanità è di ostacolo, salviamo il pianeta anche a prezzo dell’umanità.

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