mronzoni

I work at a very large University. I am the parent of a child who has just started secondary school, and of one in the middle of their primary school journey. I am currently taking what in the UK is called a Level 2 Adult Education course. In all four of those domains – and more – there is a conspicuous absence of  a streamlined place to access, or input, material – be it learning materials; homework; stuff to mark; lecture slides; lists of students; exam dates; you name it. Things are instead, scattered through a multiplicity of platforms and apps, with no particular rationale, order, or clear chain of command. [click to continue…]

This is a midsummer short and light hearted post, but I find that Summer is often the time when I am most reminded of my bodily existence, and of how naïve us philosophers are in forgetting (de facto, if not in principle) how much our thoughts and beliefs are embedded in our bodily experience. Indeed,often caused by our bodies. [click to continue…]

In his latest book, Technofeudalism, the maverick academic-turned unlikely Minister of Finance-turned enfant terrible of European politics Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism has ended. It has not, however, been destroyed by the workers of the world – it has been killed by capital itself. The idea, in a nutshell, is the following. As a response to the combined effect of the privatisation of the internet on the one hand, and the nearly no-strings-attached way with which states have injected eye-wateringly large sums of money into banks and large businesses after the 2008 financial crisis on the other, rent has supplanted profit as the main driver of the global economy. As Varoufakis put it, “Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies in the wake of the financial crisis and the pandemic have ended up supercharging big tech’s hold over every aspect of the economy.” Against the backdrop of a privatised digital world, post-2008 and then post-2020 public investments into the economy have not stimulated growth, because they have not triggered increased investments. Instead, they have enabled “cloudalists” to become digital rentiers, capable of exercising passive control over workers; over users who de facto work for them for free (by sharing and generating precious data); and crucially, over old-school capitalists. [click to continue…]

Michela Murgia – a very fine writer, and probably the most widely known feminist public intellectual within the Italian cultural landscape of the last couple of decades – died at the beginning of last month. She wasn’t very well known abroad, not even simply as a writer (her most widely acclaimed and awarded novel, Accabadora, was translated into English, and got some appreciative reviews, but that was it). I think she deserved to be, but that’s another story, and it’s now a bit too late for a celebratory obituary anyway. What I would instead like to share with you are two thoughts about how much potential the role she decided to incarnate as a public intellectual had…and yet how little it seemed to make a dent beyond the usual suspects. [click to continue…]

There are many reasons why I regularly worry about whether I might be devoting less individualised attention to my daughter than to my son. Some of these reasons are due to genuine, important differences between them, which are reasonable things for a parent to take into account and ponder about, although they do not obviously justify treating them differently. However, even the most uncontroversial “good” reasons (say, one child being ill,) interact with “bad” reasons (gender, first-born privilege, etc.) in ways that generate important complications and conundrums for parents, and thus present interesting questions. Still, I am not going to focus on those here. I had originally written a fairly detailed paragraph about my own “good” reasons, but then decided that my children are entitled to some privacy. So let me just stick to two of the most infamous “bad” reasons, even if that entails giving a partial view of our family life: the fact that one is a boy and the other is a girl, and the fact that the boy is also the eldest child. [click to continue…]

I had promised you a series on “The Little Things That Restore Your Faith in Humanity,” but then failed to deliver for months after the first item. It wasn’t because I forgot about it, got too busy or distracted, or saw no reason for optimism around me. It’s rather because the things that have caught my attention since are on the “big” side of the spectrum. This one  probably is, too, but…oh, well.

It’s the changing public opinion attitude towards strikes, and industrial action more generally, in the UK. Well, even more than that it’s the sheer fact that industrial action is back in the toolkit of political action, and with a vengeance at that – but there is no reasonable way this could be called a “little thing,” so late me make a separate post about it.

I live in Manchester, in a neighbourhood with a very high number of public sector workers, and whose nickname is “The People’s Republic of Chorlton.” So sure, the level of support – indeed enthusiasm – that I witness around me is most probably not representative. Still, it’s not only an echo chamber effect. Public opinion is by and large in favour of the current wave of strikes in the public sector (and in some areas of the private sector). Striking is no longer seen as a privilege which only public sector workers can afford engaging in without serious repercussions, and a nuisance for everybody else. Of course, the level of support is also a contributing factor to the level and spread of industrial action to begin with. This is especially true because the support seems to be resilient over time, even as some disputes in some crucial sectors stretch out; and because it seems to be correlated to beliefs about fairness, not to whether a particular set of strikes is disruptive or not. So, yeah, point taken: definitely not a little thing. Watch this space.

I have been researching around ADHD fairly actively for family reasons in the last year or so, and the Youtube algorithm has hence decided that I must be interested in neurodivergence more broadly. So, thanks to it, I have recently discovered two excellent channels on autism with lots of instructive and nuanced videos – Autism From the Inside by Paul Micallef and Yo Samdy Sam by Samantha Stein (I know, here we go again: isn’t it adorable how it’s 2022 and I have just discovered Youtube content creators?). That, and two insightful conversations I have recently had, got me thinking about the concept of autistic masking. [click to continue…]

There is something really lovely about the way “bless them/her/him” is sometimes used in the UK (or most of the time even? Also is it a pan-UK thing or predominantly Northern? And what’s the role that social class plays in this type of use?). I am not talking of when people use the phrase to praise or express delight for someone in an unqualified manner, but of when they use it, on the contrary, after having said something ever so slightly nasty about someone – basically, after having gossiped about them. The “bless them” declares the gossip bit concluded, by admitting “well, who knows why they did that, why they are like that, and what they are going through; I could have been them in similar circumstances; actually, I probably am them more often than I think.” Or that’s what I hear in it at least. It is so lovely because it acknowledges imperfection at both ends, and it’s one of the little things that restores a bit your faith in humanity. And since at the moment there aren’t many big things that do that, I think I am going to try and start off series on the little things. This is the first one of them.

PS The comments (thanks) teach me that there are similar expressions in American English – some involving the word “bless,” some not. Maybe that’s a universal feature of the English language, then (or at least it’s not only UK-specific). I am, however, pretty sure that it doesn’t exist in Italian, and that I have never heard of a phrase with quite exactly the same connotation in any other language I understand. That’s why I used to associate it, until now, to a very British way of showing compassion for fellow-humans.

As I wrote last month, the prospective results for the upcoming elections in Italy look very bleak. A right-of-right (sorry, horrible world play) coalition is set to win almost certainly, and might win two thirds of the seats in Parliament due to the existing, very problematic electoral law – which would give them the numbers to change the constitution. The most moderate, least populist element in the coalition is Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia – the fella who catapulted Italy into political ridicule from 1994 to 2011 (I still remember all those “How can you possibly have that guy as Prime Minister?” when I first moved to New Labour Britain in 2002…those were the days). Enough said. Some of my friends, family members, and Italian colleagues are in a state of constant panic, terror and disbelief. We might have the first female Prime Minister that Italy has ever had…and it’s going to be a fascist.

I am worried, too, of course, but not terrified. Some of that is certainly due to the fact that, bar a 2 year return between 2008 and 2010, I basically left the country 20 years ago. But, actually, I still care a lot. The fact that, living in the UK, I have enough to worry about, might explain my state of mind a bit more, but it’s still not enough. [click to continue…]

My friend Maria alerted me to this excellent obituary of Queen Elizabeth II, who died yesterday (as probably everybody reading this blog knows). The introductory section of the obituary ends like this:

“The queen was an abstraction: a role, like any other — and it was the person behind her, Elizabeth Windsor, who expertly played the part.

The world’s papers will be full of obituaries of the queen today.

This is the life of Elizabeth Windsor.” [click to continue…]

I mentioned a few weeks ago my fairly recently exploded passion for a bunch of Youtube video essay makers which used to  be called “Breadtubers” (I have been told in the meantime that the term is already a bit passé). As I wrote then, the quality of some of these essays – from an informative and argumentative point of view – is so high and innovative that I assign a handful of them as “readings” for my Gender, Sex and Politics class. Although (again, as a commentator noticed), my favourite content makers within this loose category of content creators are trans women, not all videos by them which I assign are about issues of gender identity. And yet, two videos by two of them, on what is actually a different topic, made me grasp a couple of important points about gender identity in a much more lived, visceral way than I had been thinking about before (as in: they didn’t change my mind, but they made me see and feel much more intensely something which I already sort of believed, but in a way I could not precisely pin down). I am referring to “Beauty” by Contrapoints creator Natalie Wynn; and “Food, Beauty, Mind,” by Philosophy Tube creator Abigail Thorn. [click to continue…]

The last-but-one Italian Government, led by the 5 star movement’s leader Giuseppe Conte, introduced the reddito di cittadinanza (“citizens’ income”), the first form of universal social welfare scheme that Italy has ever had. In spite of its name, it is not a universal basic income of sorts, but a means-tested guaranteed minimum income which, when relevant/appropriate, is supposed to be conditional on willingness to retrain and accept proposed job offers. This model of welfare provision is, by European standards, nothing new or particularly impressive; yet the Italian welfare state never had a comprehensive system of this kind in place – the status quo before the reddito di cittadinanza was highly piece meal and unequal, with unemployment benefits restricted to certain categories; disability checks very intricately regulated; and no entitlements whatsoever based on sheer need alone.

Now, I am not exactly new to prejudices against welfare recipients, not only by the wealthy, but especially by those who are only ever so slightly better off – I live in the UK. Yet, in a country where the family represents, de facto, the welfare state for many people, and where many families are increasingly incapable of covering that role, I wasn’t prepared for just the level of hatred against the policy which, however anecdotally, I encountered over several conversations this Summer. [click to continue…]

I discovered “Breadtube” relatively recently (I know, pathetic…) and I am completely hooked. Breadtube is a Youtube genre consisting in publishing long, complex video essays of left-leaning content, often aimed at debunking right-wing conspiracies or conservative arguments. The term is used to refer both to the genre itself and to the loose group of content creators in this genre. [click to continue…]