Kafka In Amadora

Cinco anos de crise (de 2008 a 2013) fizeram com que os portugueses mudassem a sua percepção do estado social. Três investigadores estudaram os comportamentos de quem trabalha e de quem está ou ficou sem emprego e concluíram que houve um aumento da vontade de intervenção do Estado nos apoios sociais, mas não acompanhado por uma vontade de os portugueses pagarem mais impostos para suportar esse aumento. [ Público (2016)]

“I’m personally branding myself according to what I want to do in the world,” said Maya Zuckerman, a transmedia producer (that is, a producer who works across digital platforms) whose LinkedIn profile identifies her as a “Media Entrepreneur, Story Architect, Culture Hacker”. “ But to be honest I change the title on my LinkedIn every few months and try to see what hits.” [Sam Slaughter (2015), The New York Times] Even permanent workers are subjected to frequent changes of job title, location and roles. In an environment of hotdesking, weak social ties, short-term projects and strictly regulated speech, so as to maintain the correct mindset, it seems that any evidence of attachment to place or identity must be regularly swept away in order to keep the work surfaces clean and hygienic. [Non-Stop Inertia (2011), Ivor Southwood]

Pale males are the last group it’s OK to vilify. I am hideously white. The BBC was called hideously white by its former boss Greg Dyke, and the West End stage hideously white by Andrew Lloyd Webber. This week the Football Association was dismissed by critics as a bunch of “old white men”. Note that it is not the BBC or the theater that is hideous, but their whiteness. Such are the routine humiliations of my group. Fashion in collective abuse seeks comfort in crowds. In choosing pale males for ritual contempt, identity politics has found a target that it hopes will confess its “guilt”. Were someone such as I to take offence, demand redress or protected space, I would be bidden to shut up, get a life and not be so sensitive. I might turn to Kant and universalize the judgment. What if I were to follow “hideously” with black, female, Jewish, Arab, obese, disabled or Welsh? I doubt there are many selection panels that do not instinctively mark down any pale male applicant. The chair begins:

To my friends: My work is done. Why wait? – George Eastman After giving yourself these titles: good, self-respecting, true, sane, conforming, high-minded, take care not to get others in their place; and, if you do lose these titles, be quick to return to them. Adventure yourself then upon these few titles, and if you are able to abide in them, abide like a man translated to Islands of the Blest; but if you perceive that you are falling away and losing control, go bravely away into some corner, there to recover control, or even depart altogether from life, not angrily, but simply and freely and with self-respect, having done at least this one thing in life, to have made your exit thus. [Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations – Book Ten] Nico Rosberg has stunned Formula One by announcing his retirement, just five days after the 31-year-old became the sport's 2016 world champion. "Since 25 years in racing, it has been my dream, my one thing to become Formula One World Cha