do not fight losing battles

If you are trying to empty a flooding titanic with a small cup of water, you will sink. If you have a linear income and your enemy has an exponential, you’re pwned. Screwed. Finito. It just won’t happen.

If you are faced with a losing battle, do not fight.

I am not advocating that anyone should just lay down and die. But try to find another battlefield where the conditions are different. If fighting means dying, turning your back and trying something crazy might actually enhance your chances.

how to educate your parents

It was the awesome Aninha (just the few will know which one) that told me that it is you who must educate your parents, not the other way around, but we thought at the time this was a quote, we still didn’t figure whose.

It’s harder and more painful than it should be, for all the wrong reasons, of course. Maybe it is even a worde idea than it sounds. And those are just my field notes. But either way: Principles of educating parents.

how about a fourth way?

[This comes from a very old notebook and i do not believe most of it any more, i'm posting it here anyway as to exemplify some of the roads whereby my head has come up with ideas i'm posting shortly...]

At the height of the last financial crisis it was “in” to say the moment heralded the “end of capitalism” and that this, in turn, represents the downfall of the last ideology amongst the 2 we used to have. We are supposed to be the age without options. The people without faith in big plans and big ideals, the guys who will say that business-as-usual is as-good-as-it-gets. The ones who will stop daydreaming and “just do a little better”, go fixing the problems with an ant’s strategy, bit by bit, without looking at the big picture and attempting changes where it really hurts.

I don’t buy it. I don’t buy any of it. Beginning with the stupid claim that there where only two ideologies.

off with the lizard

The vast majority of actions and institutions all around me are out of fear. Be it as it may, fear is not freedom.

Fear is stable. Fear is predictable. To chose non-fear is hard. Difficult. Fear sells. Fear convinces. It is easy to make fear look like “just human”, to make it compassion-worthy. Be it as it may, fear is not freedom.

It is not ideology that ties us to fear (nor Enlightenment, nor Logics, nor Neo-Liberalism/Neo-Socialism). It is not immorality (nor naughty, nor corrupt, nor ignorant). And, in any way, it is not an enemy to be fought.