Duas coisas são infinitas: o universo e a estupidez humana. Mas, em relação ao universo, ainda não tenho a certeza absoluta.
(Einstein)
But the tune ends too soon for us all (Ian Anderson)
When the New Atheism thing was new, I wrote a piece saying that the people who supported it were pretentious and cowardly. They pretended to know what religion is, and said that it caused great harm. I said this was ‘intellectual cowardice’. The intellectual coward is one who chooses simplicity over complexity and difficulty.
One aspect of their cowardice related to Islam. Their popularity was a result of 9/11, and the widespread fear of religious extremism that ensued, but they didn’t dare focus on Islamic extremism; they wanted to say that religion in general was to blame, that mild-mannered liberal Christians were implicated in violence.
Now Richard Dawkins is trying to sound more nuanced about Christianity. A recent radio interview with LBC is the latest example. But until full repentance occurs, I will continue to associate the man with intellectual cowardice.
Dawkins now says that he is not, of course, a believing Christian, but a cultural one. He’s glad that the old faith is still around. ‘I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos.’ He notes that Christian belief is declining in Britain, ‘and I’m happy with that. But I would not be happy if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. So I count myself a cultural Christian.’ Unlike Islam, Dawkins says, Christianity is ‘a fundamentally decent religion.’
‘I don’t despise religious people, I despise what they stand for,’ Dawkins said at the ‘Reason Rally’ in 2012. ‘Mock them! Ridicule them! In public! Does Dawkins still despise what religious people stand for? I wonder what it feels like to realise you’ve been peddling muddle for decades, and that you don’t know what you think. Dawkins ought to say: ‘Sorry, I was intensely conceited to have held forth on this subject, which I now realise is rather complex. I promise to stick to biology from now on.’
The distinction between a believing Christian and a cultural Christian is dubious, because religion is culture. Belief is not, or not just, an invisible thing in one’s head – it takes the form of culture. A lot of people are not sure if they believe, or are not sure how to articulate their half-belief, but sometimes take part in Christian worship – even if it’s just singing the occasional carol, as Dawkins himself enjoys doing. Dawkins wants to categorise such people as merely cultural Christians, like him, not believing ones. But there is no clear distinction.
In Dawkins’ view, it is harmless and even healthy to participate in Christian culture a little bit, for there is a ‘beauty’ and ‘decency’ to it, but it is deeply mistaken to cross the line into ‘belief’. But there wouldn’t be any Christian culture if there weren’t plenty of committed believers, and there is no clear line between mild participation and tentative belief. In practice, someone who values Christian culture, and sometimes dips a toe in, and is more nuanced and honest than Dawkins, often admits to believing a bit too. I’m sorry if it confuses the sciencey mind, but religious belief just isn’t black and white.
Fareed Zakaria, in another of his spectacular programs "Global Public Square" (GPS), demonstrated, with numbers, which are the happiest countries in the world. Of course, a certain intellectual left will soon come to say either that the numbers are hammered, or that they do not match to the truth or, ultimately, and as they do not know English, the reports are not valid...
It's sad to have "moderate" intelligence...
How is it possible that people stubbornly insist that we, the Portuguese, are the best in the world? The numbers don't say that! The numbers! THE SCIENCE!
"Lord, forgive them because they don't know what they think, nor how they think, nor what they say, nor ETC!..."
Fareed Zakaria, em mais um dos seus espectaculares programas "Global Public Square" (GPS), demonstrou, com números, quem são os países mais felizes do mundo. Claro que uma certa esquerda, intelectual, virá logo dizer ou que os números são martelados, ou que não correspondem à verdade ou, em última análise, e como não sabe inglês, os relatórios não são válidos...
É triste ter-se uma inteligência "moderada"...
Como é que é possível que, teimosamente, se insista em que nós, os portugueses somos os melhores do mundo? Os números não dizem isso! Os NÚMEROS! A CIÊNCIA!
"Senhor, perdoai-lhes porque não sabem nem o que pensam, nem como pensam, nem o que dizem, nem ETC!..."
Lord Coe, the president of World Athletics, has come up with the daft and damaging idea that athletes should be paid for winning gold at the Olympic Games. In doing so, the track and field governing sports body would become the first to offer prize money in the history of the Olympics. The idea of rewarding competitors with pots of cash runs counter to the spirit of everything the Olympics supposedly stands for – which is why the International Olympic Committee has never awarded money for participating or winning a medal at the games. Competing should be glory and reward enough.
What is World Athletics proposing? Starting with the Paris Olympics this summer, track and field athletes who win gold in each of the 48 events will receive £39,360 ($50,000). World Athletics has also promised to extend cash prizes to Olympic silver and bronze medal winners at the LA 2028 Games. The awarding of prize money will be subject to ratification, which will include medal-winning athletes undergoing and clearing the usual anti-doping checks. Lord Coe says it is only right that his federation passes on the money it gets from the IOC every four years to reward athletes. Yes, but is this really the best and most sensible way of doing so? Why not funnel financial support to athletes in other ways rather than breaking with Olympic tradition in paying competitors for winning medals? His argument also ignores the fact that many medallists receive payments from their countries’ governments and from sponsors.
Coe himself acknowledges that it is ‘impossible to put a marketable value on winning an Olympic medal’, while going on to do precisely that. How long before someone points out that the prize money is not commensurate with the huge effort and commitment involved? After all, a championship-level footballer would easily earn more than £39,000 in just one week. The pressure would inevitably build for even more prize money to be offered to winners. The very essence of the Olympics – a competition in which amateurs compete for glory – would be left in tatters.
Coe has described the idea of Olympic prize money as a ‘pivotal moment’ for the sport as a whole. He is right but it raises the question of why World Athletics did not talk to the IOC in detail beforehand. Surely such a big change to existing competition formats merits wider discussion and agreement? Instead, Coe offered up the feeble idea that the IOC will ‘share in the principle’ of track and field gold medal winners earning prize money. Why would the organisers of the Olympics break with a 128-year tradition of offering no cash prizes to indulge the agenda of World Athletics?
It is no great surprise that the move has gone down well with some athletes. Greg Rutherford, who won gold in the long jump at the 2012 London games, described it as a ‘brilliant step in the right direction.’ No one can begrudge individual athletes for being in favour. The financial rewards for athletes tend to be negligible except for the lucky few, such as Usain Bolt, who became an international star with all the accompanying millions in sponsorship and advertising deals. No one is disputing the sacrifices of individual athletes but isn’t that the whole point of Olympic competition? To go that extra mile, not for money, but for the glory of the thing itself. Must everything in sport come down to money? Coe, who won gold in the 1,500 metres at the 1980 and 1984 games, is right to point out that the world has changed from his own days as an athlete on ‘the 75-pence meal voucher and second class rail fare’, going from one international race competition to another. It is also certainly the case that it is within the rights of international federations like World Athletics to make decisions based on the interests of those they represent. Yet there are bigger ideals and principles at stake. The Olympic Games already has problems aplenty, with fewer and fewer cities willing or able to spend the millions required to host the competition. The last thing it needs right now is an idea that undermines its very raison d’etre. Prize money for medals has no place at the Olympics.
Funny how only in the last years we learn something on what the germans suffered in the years post-war. 75 years after the end of the IIWW. Funny how our societies deal with these things. Or not...
Série sobre o pós guerra na Alemanha. Curioso como só nos últimos anos temos a percepção desta realidade e sempre com séries de origem alemã.
As locations go, they don’t get more humdrum than the address ‘Carrera 79B, #45D/94’. It is so anonymous it sounds encrypted. Nor, in reality, does it look like anything special: a flat roof, next to a shuttered language school, above a wall of graffiti, in a lower middle-class suburb of another Spanish speaking city. But then you notice the razorwire surrounding the nearby boutique. The armed guard outside the local bank. And you remember why this address, in the inner suburbs of Medellin Colombia, is notorious: this is where fugitive cocaine warlord Pablo Escobar was finally shot by cops in 1993 as he tried to flee across that roof.
Knowing that, everything looks different. Now the razorwire and the guards tell you that – despite Escobar’s execution, and Medellin’s supposed ‘recovery’ – this is still an unsafe city, surely more unsafe than anywhere in Europe. This is a city where cab-drivers point and mutter ‘peligroso, peligroso’ (dangerous, dangerous), urging you not to get out: not to mingle with the obvious addicts in the gutter, and the 13-year-old hookers outside the Jesuit church. And then you sigh and wonder why Latin America is always like this.Sketchy.
It’s a question that has vexed historians, anthropologists, criminologists, and philosophers, for decades. Something about the Spanish colonial inheritance (or Iberian: Brazil is certainly as bad) makes for peculiarly menacing cities and countries.
And they really are menacing. Just south of Colombia is Ecuador (indeed it was once part of Colombia). In the last year murders in Ecuador, already high, have almost tripled – as the country descends into an orgy of gang violence that has left the state virtually ungovernable. Meanwhile, of the top 50 cities in the world by homicide, the first seven are all Mexican (then comes New Orleans, USA). And fully 37 of the top 50 are in Latin America, with cities from Brazil, Honduras, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Guatemala and, yes, Colombia and Ecuador, adding to the list. Astonishingly, only three cities in the list are outside the Americas, and they are all in South Africa: Cape Town, Jo’burg, Nelson Mandela Bay.
By now most people will be reaching for a uniquely American explanation, perhaps involving cocaine and fentanyl, along with the USA’s libertine approach to gun usage, leaking weapons to the south. But then you spot the anomalies. For a start, Latin America’s reputation for violence long precedes the drug trade. In 1900, a British traveller in the Americas laconically noted that however bad Haiti might be (and he thought it was bad), it did not have ‘that knife-in-your back instinct which permeates so many of the Spanish-American republics’. Some 124 years ago no one was shipping narcotics across the Rio Grande.
If it isn’t cocaine and cartels, what else might explain the ‘knife-in-your-back’ ambience? Poverty and inequality? Certainly, parts of South America are poor. Colombia has a GDP per capita of $7,000, which is pretty dismal given the potential of this vast, majestic and lavishly fertile country. But then Vietnam has a GDP per capita of just $4,000 and you can wander around Hanoi or Saigon in a way which is simply impossible in Cali or Cartagena. Likewise, most of sub-Saharan Africa is notably poorer than Latin America and easily as unequal, yet urban Latin America is more dangerous than the 95 per cent of Africa which isn’t South Africa (which complicates any racial explanation, along with any attempt to blame it all on slavery).
Could it be faith? Iberian Catholicism? Some kind of fatalism induced by the religion of guilt? This is an enticing explanation when you look at the most violent country in southeast Asia – it’s the Philippines. That’s the only ex-Spanish colony, and it is uniquely and fiercely Catholic (it was also run by the USA for a while). And Manila is perilous and ‘knife-in-your-back’ in a way unimaginable in Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur.
But here again you run into questions, because not all of Catholic Latin America is so utterly messed up: Chile is quite devout, it is also quite peaceful and prosperous. Likewise, why is Nicaragua so nightmarish, when neighbouring Costa Rica is affluent, amiable and almost European? And what exactly is El Salvador suddenly doing right (under its tough new president Nayib Bukele), that nearby Honduras apparently cannot?
At this point the puzzle begins to seem insoluble. If it isn’t religion, drugs, race, slavery, guns, politics, or the proximity of the USA, what else might possibly explain it?Could it be the simple but monumental fact of European imperialism, the original sin of the modern world, as many on the left would have us believe?
Well, no, it couldn’t be that either, because again we butt up against insuperable anomalies. For example, the British were the greatest imperialists of all – the only equivalent in human history is Rome – and we were certainly capable of wicked neglect and violence (as Ireland and India can attest) yet no British colony, with the exception of South Africa, is as dangerous as anywhere in the Latin world. Meanwhile, Britain in her imperial heyday managed to establish many of the modern world’s most magnificent cities: Sydney, Hong Kong, New York, Toronto, Singapore. And Singapore and Hong Kong are incredibly safe, with Sydney not far behind.
Is it all too difficult to solve? Maybe, but there is one final and intriguing possibility, which has been tentatively suggested in recent years. Perhaps when we look at Latin American violence we are looking at a form of legacy: an inherited memory of punishing, hallucinatory cruelty, unique to America. The Spanish empire in the Americas began, after all, with the brutality of Christopher Columbus, in Hispaniola, slaughtering and enslaving the natives: feeding them to dogs, burning them alive. At the same time, the Portuguese in Brazil were no better, arguably they were worse.
Moreover, native American empires were bizarrely cruel – even before the Europeans arrived. The Muisca here in Colombia composed special songs that they sung in chorus as they murdered their own teenage boys. In Mexico the Aztecs pulled the hearts out of living prisoners and wore their flayed skins as suits, in central America the Mayans hurled virgins down wells and played ballgames that ended in head-chopping,
Then there’s the Moche civilisation of northern Peru (100 to 700 AD) which was insanely depraved and bloodthirsty – to an extent it is difficult to comprehend. Moche aristocrats used to cut off their own noses, lips, feet, as a sign of nobility. Moche women probably had sex with pumas in special rooms, other Moche apparently masturbated and sexually penetrated partly defleshed corpses.
During their most intense rituals entire Moche clans, cloistered in darkened pyramids, would engage in sodomy and fellatio in orgiastic celebration even as they watched their siblings and children being slowly bled to death in the centre of the chamber, all to honour a strange tarantula god (also known as the decapitator god). What’s more, most of this – as in so many pre-Colombian civilisations – apparently happened in a haze of hallucinogenic drugs. The favoured drug of the Moche was called ulluchu (we are still not certain what it was); other pre-Columbian civilisations eagerly consumed peyote, yopo, san pedro, ayahuasca, coca, mapacho, and so on.
Is this, then, the answer to the paradox of Latin violence? Is it some kind of cultural inheritance of drugged-up violence, descending the centuries and the millennia? An enormous epigenetic curse? It is tempting to say Si, but of course there is no proof.
However, even if we can’t firmly explain the Great American Violence, one man seemed to predict it, and that man was Simon Bolivar, the revered liberator of Latin America. In 1830, as he was dying of tuberculosis and raving in his genius, not far from Medellin, Bolivar wrote a letter to the first president of Ecuador, where he made six famous statements about his continent of revolution, South America:
1. America is ungovernable; 2. Those who serve a revolution plough the sea; 3. The only thing you can do in America is leave it; 4. This land will fall inevitably into the hands of the unbridled masses and then pass almost imperceptibly into the hands of petty tyrants, of all colours and races; 5. Once we have been eaten alive by crime and extinguished by utter ferocity, even the Europeans will not regard us as worth conquering; 6. If it is possible for any part of the world to revert to primitive chaos, it will be America in her final hour.
As we look at the gunshot citizens of Quito, and the schoolgirl hookers by the churches of Colombia, it is hard not to link to Bolivar’s sixth and darkest prediction. And if that in turn leads to a terminus of despair, remember that Bolivar also believed, throughout his life, that South America would eventually achieve great and wonderful things. It’s just a pity he died before he could tell us how this might happen.
Quando releio livros como este, confirmo o que se diz, à boca cheia, sobre os nossos vícios, defeitos e vicissitudes! Como é que é possível que pessoas qualificadas como Abel Mateus, Luis Valadares Tavares, Medina Carreira, Carlos Pimenta, Manuel Antunes, Costa Lobo, advirtam antecipadamente (em 2004!) para os problemas, décadas antes, façam a antevisão sistemática do que poderá vir a acontecer e depois, as nossas "elites políticas" (...) falhem sistematicamente.
(escrito quando empataram com o Benfica na Luz e asseguraram a presença na final da Taça)
Do que gosto mais neste Sporting, é a seriedade que a maior parte dos jogadores exibe em campo, sem "faz de conta", sem "quedas aparatosas", sem aquela característica tão latino-americana que ensombra, vicia e envenena o nosso campeonato.
Claro que há sempre um Nuno Santos com aquele feitio da Cova da Moura; um Geny Catamo com aquele ar de raça eleita, arrogante, que ofusca toda a sua técnica individual; ou Matheus Reis que parece querer fazer valer as suas origens; e, por vezes, um Paulinho que é uma pena, como eu digo, "cair tanto".
Existe também uma tremenda falta de eficácia nos momentos decisivos. E é também por isso que Gyokeres sobressai. Falha pouco.
Em compensação existe uma chusma de pessoas decentes: o capitão Sebastião Coates que prima pela eticidade em campo, os nórdicos (os povos que eu elejo sempre) Hjulmand e Gyokeres que não precisam de mais palavras para os definir na forma superior de passear pelo campo, o japonês Morita que é de uma invejável e sibilina constância e empenho. Adan parece-me ser, igualmente, uma pessoa séria. Gostava de ter um português neste lote. Daniel Bragança aproximar-se-á um dia? Talvez ...
Os outros, posso gostar de os ver jogar mas não reúnem as características humanas que me seduzem e que, na minha opinião, se sobrepõem às técnicas. Ponhamos as coisas nestes pés: não têm só pés. Têm cabeça e carácter.
"Last but not least" o homem que me fez voltar a ver e ouvir futebol: Ruben Amorim. Farto-me de o ver e ouvir e não me canso de o elogiar mesmo sendo - parece ser esse o caso - do Benfica. Porque não são todos assim? Simples, sem arrogância, bem educados? Claro que ajuda neste processo perceber de futebol e de homens. Mas a forma de ele estar em campo e fora dele não é despiciendo e faz com que a generalidade das pessoas encontre nele algo de diferente. Porque ele o é! Lá chegará o dia, infelizmente, em que as coisas correrão menos bem. Mas esse problema é, como eu costumo dizer, da carneirada, do rebanho. À semelhança do que se tem passado, injustamente na minha opinião, com Roger Schmidt este ano no Benfica, passará de bestial a besta em pouco tempo.
De mim só continuará a receber elogios. Parece já estar com o futuro destinado a um clube qualquer anglo-saxónico. Só podia. É assim, quando se é bom! Ainda bem por ele. Ainda mal pelo Sporting.
