lunedì 8 agosto 2016

Dibattendo EMH Eric Falkenstein Justin Fox Tim Harford

Notebook per
Dibattendo EMH
Eric Falkenstein Justin Fox Tim Harford
Citation (APA): Harford, E. F. J. F. T. (2014). Dibattendo EMH [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Parte introduttiva
Nota - Posizione 7
Definizione 2 categorie di scettici: 1. i contrari ideologicamente e 2. i consulenti che non avrebbero niente da consigliare Shiller: hindsight bias Perchè esiste una regolamentazione e una banca centrale se vale EMH? Nel momento in cui reputi buone alcune regole cesi di credere a EMH! MIT Chicago Mason. Sapendo che il mercato è imprrfetto (pur considerandolo il meglio a disosizione) le regole ci saranno sempre come segno di speranza e di cammino verso la xfezione Krugman e LTCM Le bolle possono coesistere con EMH? The peso problem
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 7
The Price Isn't Always Right justin fox
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 8
"security prices at any time 'fully reflect' all available information."
Nota - Posizione 8
FORMULAZIONI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 18
Finally, if all one means by "efficient market" is a market that's hard to beat, that's not such a wrongheaded idea at all
Nota - Posizione 19
ACCORDO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 21
Robert Shiller -- a long-time critic of the efficient market hypothesis -- cobbled together an inflation-adjusted index of U.S. real estate prices going back to 1890 and found that (a) in the past, prices had declined for decades on end and (b) the rise in real home prices since 1997 was by far the sharpest on record. From these two pieces of data he drew the common-sense conclusion that the rise in housing prices wouldn't go on forever and was likely to be followed by a sharp fall.
Nota - Posizione 25
SHILLER
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 30
In Defense of Efficient Markets eric falkenstein
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 31
you make many gracious acknowledgements to the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH), such as the basic implication that it is very, very difficult to outperform the market.
Nota - Posizione 32
CONCESSIONE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 34
This is not a minor acknowledgment, but basically is the EMH theory.
Nota - Posizione 34
CONCESSIONE DECISIVA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 37
I think this distaste for efficient markets comes from two sources. First, many people distrust the "invisible hand."
Nota - Posizione 38
MANO INVISIBILE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 38
Secondly, there are critics (stockbrokers, talking heads on CNBC, financial journalists) whose livelihood depends on markets being wrong;
Nota - Posizione 39
CONFLITTO D INTRRESSE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 40
Government fails more often than markets do
Nota - Posizione 40
GOVERNO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 42
Yet I think government power should be minimized, because government failure is far more common than market failure, as the I.Q. of a group is diminished by centralized interaction.
Nota - Posizione 43
IQ GROUP
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 45
Shiller did not predict an aggregate housing decline; instead, he merely stated the recent increase in home prices was unlikely to continue.
Nota - Posizione 46
SHILLET
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 48
Now, compare this modest warning by a lone economist to the forces promoting home lending from all directions. It was not just a Wall Street phenomenon, but one pushed by our government, legislators, regulators, and even academics (for evidence, see Stan Liebowitz's "Anatomy of a Train Wreck").
Nota - Posizione 50
LONE ECONOMIST
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 57
The market diagnosed the bubble
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 60
ket prices, not legislators, instigated the end of the insanity. How quickly are failed governmental initiatives usually stopped, once identified?
Nota - Posizione 61
IL MERCATO SI È CORRETTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 63
That you were able to find one person in 2004 and turn his measured warning into something that would have drastically reversed the regulatory emphasis on weakening underwriting standards is classic hindsight wisdom.
Nota - Posizione 64
A POSTERIORI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 67
Markets Can Do Many Things Well, But Not Everything justin fox
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 74
This reality is why over the past two centuries we've developed central banks and financial regulations. Yet it is a reality almost completely ignored by the efficient-market approach to finance.
Nota - Posizione 75
BANCHE CENTRALI E EMH
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 75
The housing bubble was driven by the market
Nota - Posizione 76
BUBBLE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 81
I'll be honest: I don't know what exactly the new rules should be.
Nota - Posizione 81
REGOLE? Boh
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 86
The big lesson that came out of the confluence of the efficient market hypothesis and the capital asset pricing model (which holds that stocks with higher sensitivity to market fluctuations will deliver higher returns) was that you should hold a widely diversified portfolio, preferably in some kind of index fund.
Nota - Posizione 87
COME INVESTIRE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 89
Jack Bogle's "cost matters hypothesis," which states that: No matter how efficient or inefficient markets may be, the returns earned by investors as a group must fall short of the market returns by precisely the amount of the aggregate costs they incur. It is the central fact of investing. So I invest in index funds not because I think the market is all that efficient, but because index funds charge the lowest fees.
Nota - Posizione 93
FEES
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 94
passive approach
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 96
Why Most Market Regulation is Useless And/Or Harmful eric falkenstein
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 98
As George Will writes, most regulation is championed by a confluence of Baptists and bootleggers, the first group with high motives, usually naïve, and the second more cynical group who hide behind them.
Nota - Posizione 99
TEGOLAZIONE DANNOSA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 100
Regulatory efforts fall into three categories. The first is exemplified by things like short-sale downtick prohibitions, Glass-Steagall, and mortgage disclosure requirements, all of which are really irrelevant to protecting the retail investor.
Nota - Posizione 101
3 TIPI DI REGOLE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 105
A second type of financial regulation is downright counterproductive, because it sows the seeds for future problems.
Nota - Posizione 105
PROBLEMI FUTIRI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 113
Without regulation, markets correct themselves
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 115
In the bad old days prior to much financial regulation, or even a central bank, we had crisesevery twenty years: in 1819, 1838, 1857, 1873, 1893, and 1907. After a couple of years, though, things always got better, and growth was strong over this period.
Nota - Posizione 117
REGOLA DEI 20 ANNI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 119
Businesses lobby for regulation to stifle competition Much regulation is really about preventing competition,
Nota - Posizione 120
INCUMBENT
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 124
For the 95 percent of investors who have no conceivable investing alpha, the best strategy is to avoid costs from overtrading, and avoid risk by diversifying.
Nota - Posizione 125
STRATEGIA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 129
Bold regulation is the triumph of hope over experience,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 132
Back to the Myth of the Rational Market justin fox
Nota - Posizione 132
TITOLO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 133
So Eric, you're saying that some financial regulations are pointless, some are counterproductive, and some actually do good. Sounds about right to me. But it's not what the die-hard rational marketeers of the 1970s and 1980s were saying.
Nota - Posizione 134
TI CONTRADDICI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 139
Financial regulation is not going away
Nota - Posizione 140
TITOLO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 141
MIT economists think markets are imperfect, therefore we need regulation. Chicago economists think markets are perfect, therefore we don't need regulation. George Mason economists think markets are imperfect, therefore we don't need regulation.
Nota - Posizione 143
TRE SCUOLE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 146
Richard Thaler offered this verdict: While imperfect, financial markets are still the best way to allocate capital. Even so, knowing that prices can be wrong suggests that governments could usefully adopt automatic stabilising activity,
Nota - Posizione 148
THALER
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 150
We Need Less Regulation, Not More eric falkenstein
Nota - Posizione 151
TITOLO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 153
I agree with Kling, in that when you say something is imperfect, it should always be asked, "compared to what?" Some theoretical nirvana where a social planner
Nota - Posizione 154
COMPARE TO WHAT
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 175
Krugman Reviews Book He Didn't Read eric falkenstein
Nota - Posizione 175
TITOLO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 176
Justin Fox noted that I didn't read his book, because if I did he would have noted Fox's rather balanced treatment.
Nota - Posizione 177
LE AMMISSIONI DI FOX
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 184
Krugman demonstrates he has strong opinions disproportionate to any evidence, and displays the measured analysis of an anonymous blog commenter.
Nota - Posizione 185
GAFFE KRUGG
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 195
The quintessential collaboration between big money and academic superstars was the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, whose partners included Scholes and Robert Merton, with whom Scholes shared another finance Nobel. L.T.C.M. eventually imploded, nearly taking the world economy down with it. But efficient-markets theory retained its hold on financial thought.
Nota - Posizione 197
KRUGG LEGGENDA LTCM
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 198
If he actually knew something about hedge funds in general, or LTCM in particular, he would know that Merton and Scholes where marketing props. The strategies LTCM employed were neither derived by, or managed by Scholes and Merton. The LTCM strategy had nothing to do with a tweak to the Black-Scholes option formula.
Nota - Posizione 200
NOBEL PROP.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 207
It is much smarter to approach markets as if markets are rational. As there are literally thousands of prices in thousands of markets, some are too low or too high, but it is not obvious which because most are priced 'just right' given the information available. If you think it is easy, as implied by an irrational market, you don't check your assumptions enough. Several, perhaps hundreds, prices are wrong, but it takes a lot of smart analysis to figure out which.
Nota - Posizione 210
EMH È PIÙ SMART
Nota - Posizione 211
L IPOTESI PIÙ DIFFICILE DA CONFUTARR
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 217
The theory has esteemed detractors, but that's about it. Indeed, it seems ultimately a semantics debate (ie, 'efficient' implies 'perfect' to some).
Nota - Posizione 219
SEMANTICA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 223
Such a book has its place on the bookshelf, but it is not part of the intellectual debate, more like learning about Hitler's childhood, which is interesting but really doesn't explain the concentration camps or Operation Barbarossa.
Nota - Posizione 224
INFANZIA DI HOTLER
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 231
'Education is an admirable thing, but is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.'
Nota - Posizione 232
INSEGNARE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 234
Do Crashes Support or Disprove 'Rational' Markets? eric falkenstein
Nota - Posizione 235
TITOLO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 235
Noneconomists tend to think 'rational markets' is patently absurd, pointing to various asset bubbles such as the internet bubble,
Nota - Posizione 236
BOLLE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 242
To assert markets are irrational or inefficient, however, one needs to propose a measure of 'true value', and then show that actual market prices diverge from this.
Nota - Posizione 242
TRUE VALUE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 245
It is essential to have a specific alternative, because how do you know they are wrong unless you know the right answer?
Nota - Posizione 245
RISPOSTA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 249
One big issue in tests of whether prices are 'right' or not is the Peso Problem. The term 'peso problem'
Nota - Posizione 250
PESO PEOBLEM
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 269
So why can’t market participants also be considered rational and yet have their collective opinions vary wildly over time and space?
Nota - Posizione 270
VOLATILE MA NN IRRAZIONALE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 283
Prices fluctuate more than we would like. But is it too much?
Nota - Posizione 283
TROPPO VOLATILE?
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 287
How to make money from a Nobel cause tim harford
Nota - Posizione 288
TITOLO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 296
Fama and Shiller disagree with each other.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 298
it’s hard to beat the market, and you should probably be suspicious of people who claim to be able to pull off the trick.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 304
a second reason to disbelieve the EMH is the experience of the dotcom and subprime bubbles.
Nota - Posizione 304
BOLLE

Are markets efficient? eugene fama

Notebook per
Are markets efficient?
eugene fama
Citation (APA): fama, e. (2016). Are markets efficient? [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Parte introduttiva
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 2
Are markets efficient? By eugene fama
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 4
What is the efficient-markets hypothesis and how good a working model is it? Fama: It’s a very simple statement: prices reflect all available information.
Nota - Posizione 5
EMH
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 6
Thaler: I like to distinguish two aspects of it. One is whether you can beat the market. The other is whether prices are correct.
Nota - Posizione 7
FORTE E DEBOLE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 7
Fama: It’s a model, so it’s not completely true. No models are completely true. They are approximations to the world. The question is: “For what purposes are they good approximations?” As far as I’m concerned, they’re good approximations for almost every purpose.
Nota - Posizione 9
APPROSSIMAZIONE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 13
Richard Thaler, you give the example of the 1987 crash, when stock prices fell 25 percent, as an example of how prices can be wrong in some sense.
Nota - Posizione 14
ESEMPIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 15
I don’t think anyone thinks that the value of the world economy fell 25 percent that day. Nothing happened. It’s not a day when World War III was declared.
Nota - Posizione 16
NESSUNA NOYIXIA IL GIORNI DRL CROLLO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 16
Fama: It was a time when people were talking about perhaps an oncoming recession, which turned out not to have happened. In hindsight, that was a big mistake; but in hindsight, every price is wrong.
Nota - Posizione 17
AVPOSTRRIORI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 20
Robert Shiller. His argument was, “Prices fluctuate too much to be explained by a rational process.”
Nota - Posizione 20
SHILLER
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 21
Fama: Shiller’s model was based on the proposition that there is no variation through time in expected returns. But we know there is variation in expected returns. Risk aversion moves dramatically through time. It’s very high during bad periods
Nota - Posizione 22
DIFETTI DI SHILLER
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 23
Do bubbles exist? How do we define bubbles? Thaler: I have two examples. The first is house prices.
Nota - Posizione 24
ES DI BOLLA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 26
Fama: What’s the bubble? The up? The down? The subsequent up?
Nota - Posizione 26
INDEFINIBILITÀ
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 33
Fama: That’s an anecdote. There’s a difference between anecdotes and evidence, right? I don’t deny that there exist anecdotes where there are problems. For bubbles, I want a systematic way of identifying them.
Nota - Posizione 34
ANEDDOTI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 35
All the tests people have done trying to do that don’t work.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 48
The point is not that markets are efficient. They’re not. It’s just a model. The question is, “How inefficient are they?” I tend to give more weight to systematic things like failure to adjust completely to earnings announcements, or momentum, than to anecdotes, which are curiosity items rather than evidence.
Nota - Posizione 50
IL PUNTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 98
Whereas I think the rational thing to do, because prices reflect available information pretty much, is to be a passive investor.

sabato 6 agosto 2016

La macchina del non senso

Qual è il guaio della Sinistra? I suoi intellettuali.
Prendete il catalogo di saggistica Einaudi (una prestigiosa casa editrice con una chiara storia di militanza): metà è da buttare, e sono generoso. E un caso? No.
Roger Scruton (Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left) cerca di mappare il ciarpame prodotto da certa intellighenzia. E’ ammirevole il coraggio con cui mette le mani nella discarica:
… for example the stunning ‘nonsense machine’ invented by LacanDeleuze and Guattari, the scorched-earth attack on our ‘colonial’ inheritance by Edward Said, and the recent revival of ‘the communist hypothesis’ by Badiou and Žižek…
L’ autore ha un dubbio:
… there is more to Habermas’s theory of communicative action than his inability to communicate it?…
Non si capisce perché classificare la discarica “di sinistra” e parlare quindi di Intellettuale di Sinistra (IS) accomunando cose eterogene. Scruton ha una risposta:
… Why, therefore, use the word ‘left’ to describe the writers considered? Why use a single term to cover anarchists like Foucault, Marxist dogmatists like Althusser, exuberant nihilists like Žižek and American-style liberals like Dworkin and Rorty? The reason is twofold: first the thinkers I discuss have identified themselves by that very term. Second, they illustrate an enduring outlook on the world, and one that has been a permanent feature of Western civilization at least since the Enlightenment, nourished by the elaborate social and political theories that I shall have occasion to discuss in what follows…
La caduta del Muro ha fatto sperare che questa creatura molesta (IS) ci avesse liberato della sua presenza. Speranza vana, dopo pochi anni è tornato alla grande:
… Within a decade the left establishment was back in the driving seat, with Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn renewing their intemperate denunciations of America, the European left regrouped against ‘neo-liberalism’, as though this had been the trouble all along, Dworkin and Habermas collecting prestigious prizes for their barely readable but impeccably orthodox books, and the veteran communist Eric Hobsbawm rewarded for a lifetime of unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union by his appointment as ‘Companion of Honour’ to the Queen…
Sebbene IS ami la rivoluzione, non manca in lui la vena del burocrate (recentemente riscoperta grazie alla manna della cultura sussidiata):
But for whatever cause, left-wing politics has discarded the revolutionary paradigm advanced by the New Left, in favour of bureaucratic routines and the institutionalization of the welfare culture…
La critica al neo-liberismo è ormai un filone che tira più del fantasy:
…As a result, books critical of market economics began to enjoy a new popularity, whether reminding us that real goods are not exchangeable (Michael Sandel: What Money Can’t Buy) or arguing that markets, in current conditions, cause a massive transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest (Joseph Stiglitz: The Price of Inequality, and Thomas Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-first Century)…
Oltre a non funzionare, il neo-liberismo (naturalmente con spesa pubblica al 50%) ci degrada moralmente:
… And from the ever-fertile source of Marxist humanism thinkers extracted new arguments to describe the moral and spiritual degradation of humanity in the condition of free exchange (Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, L’esthétisation du monde: vivre à l’âge du capitalisme artiste; Naomi Klein, No Logo; Philip Roscoe, I Spend, Therefore I Am)…
La storia raccontata dall’ Intellettuale di Sinistra è una storia di Buoni contro Cattivi, forse è per questo che non convince i più avveduti:
… Leftists believe, with the Jacobins of the French Revolution, that the goods of this world are unjustly distributed, and that the fault lies not in human nature but in usurpations practised by a dominant class. They define themselves in opposition to established power, the champions of a new order that will rectify the ancient grievance of the oppressed…
Il potere è sempre malvagio quindi criticando non sbagli mai. Nemmeno le vittime non finiscono mai quindi il facendo del vittimismo non sbagli mai. La loro liberazione è una faticaccia infinita, l’ IS non rischia certo la disoccupazione:
This literature, seen at its most fertile in the writings of Foucault, represents as ‘structures of domination’ what others see merely as the instruments of civil order. Liberation of the victim is a restless cause, since new victims always appear over the horizon as the last ones escape into the void…
L’agenda rinnovata dell’ IS (lo schema è sempre quello marxista) basta inserire nuovi soggetti):
… The liberation of women from male oppression, of animals from human abuse, of homosexuals and transsexuals from ‘homophobia’, even of Muslims from ‘Islamophobia’ – all these have been absorbed into the more recent leftist agendas…
Peccato per quella cattiva convivenza tra eguaglianza e libertà: oggi come ieri è il sassolino nella scarpa dell’IS:
… The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead, and what should we allow ourselves by way of constraining them?…
Fortunatamente, contro le difficoltà teoriche, l’ IS ha forgiato un’arma segreta: il diritto a non spiegarsi. Tanto la storia è con lui, questo fin dai tempi di Marx:
… Marx dismissed the various socialisms current in his day as ‘utopian’, contrasting ‘utopian socialism’ with his own ‘scientific socialism’ that promised ‘full communism’ as its predictable outcome. The ‘historical inevitability’ of this condition relieved Marx of the necessity to describe it…
Ovviamente una storia di “buonicontrocattivi” finisce con l’ “evisserofeliciecontenti”: Marx lui no, non era utopico, lui era sc-sc-scientifico:
There will be no division of labour and each person will live out the full range of his needs and desires, ‘hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, tending cattle in the evening and engaging in literary criticism after dinner’…
Ma finché IS fantastica nella sua cameretta nulla di male, i guai cominciano quando esce e intende realizzare l’impossibile: a quanto pare occorre un bel po’ di violenza per assecondare il normale cammino della storia:
The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible….
Concentrato sull’utopia IS ha avuto l’accortezza di inserire tra i diritti umani quello di non rispondere alle obiezioni mosse:
Marx’s theory of history had been put in question by MaitlandWeber and Sombart; his labour theory of value by Böhm-BawerkMises, and many more; his theories of false consciousness, alienation and class struggle by a whole range of thinkers, from Mallock and Sombart to PopperHayek and Aron. Not all those critics could be placed on the right of the political spectrum, nor had they all been hostile to the idea of ‘social justice’. Yet none of them, so far as I could discover when I came to write this book, had been answered…
Perché perdere tempo con risposte e spiegazioni quando abbiamo stabilito che la verità non esiste e che è tutto un gioco di potere?
… The theories of the rule of law, the separation of powers, the right of property, and so on, as these had been expounded by ‘bourgeois’ thinkers like Montesquieu and Hegel, were shown, by the Marxian class analysis, to be not truth-seeking but power-seeking devices…
Se “obiezioni” e “spiegazioni” sono fuori gioco, questo non deve ritenersi per il “mito”, che invece è centrale nella messa a punto della dogmatica di sinistra. Ecco un esempio preclaro:
Since the class-theory is a genuine science, bourgeois political thought is ideology. And since the class-theory exposes bourgeois thought as ideology, it must be science. We have entered the magic circle of a creation myth
Il diritto a non rispondere alle obiezioni, il diritto a non spiegarsi hanno fatto dell’ IS un vero illuminato d’altri tempi:
This Gnostic revelation was so clear that no argument was necessary, and no argument possible, that would provide it with a justifying proof. All that mattered was to distinguish those who shared the vision from those who dissented… It is this feature that justifies the charge made by Eric Voegelin, Alain Besançon and others, that Marxism is a kind of Gnosticism, a title to ‘government through knowledge’…
Naturalmente a un tipo del genere spetta un posto di tutto rilievo:
…Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.
Un’ altra arma segreta della New Left è la centralità delle “parole” (ovvero: i fatti sono secondari). Nulla di nuovo sotto il sole:
… the communist conviction that you could change reality by changing words…
La nuova rivoluzione sarà una congiura parolaia:
… They conjure the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance. As a result Newspeak developed its own special syntax, which – while closely related to the syntax deployed in ordinary descriptions – carefully avoids any encounter with reality or any exposure to the logic of rational argument…
L’ IS sa bene come bisogna lavorare sodo per respingere un nemico quanto mai insidioso:
… to protect ideology from the malicious attacks of real things…
Noi siamo “parlati”, solo l’IS “parla”. Noi non contiamo, contano le forze parolaie che ci manipolano:
… Newspeak prefers to speak of forces, classes and the march of history, and regards the actions of Great Men as acceptable subjects for discussion only because Great Men, like Napoleon, Lenin and Hitler, are really the expression of abstract forces, such as imperialism, revolutionary socialism and fascism…
Quando i fatti s’incaricano di smentire l’ IS, lui come reagisce? Di solito con l’arroganza del risentito, in questi casi adotta Nietzsche come nume tutelare:
… Looked at with the superman superciliousness of Nietzsche, resentment may seem like the bitter dregs of the ‘slave morality’, the impoverished loss of spirit that comes about when people take more pleasure in bringing others down than in raising themselves up…
In casi del genere è necessario annichilire tutto: i fatti non esistono. IS si trasforma in Mefistofele:
… call to mind the words of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, when called upon to explain himself: Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint – I am the spirit who always denies, the one who reduces Something to Nothing, and who thereby undoes the work of creation. This essential negativity can be perceived in many of the writers whom I discuss…
Come non sentire in molti IS la “voce del nulla”?:
And when, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had ‘capitalism’ as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice…
CONCLUSIONI PERSONALE
Scrivere questo post è stata una passeggiata, il tono sarcastico è il più facile da mantenere, non richiede sforzi, tutto fluisce naturalmente. Ma forse proprio lì casca l’asino.
Il libro di Scruton è meticoloso, brillante, chiarificatore, semplice, credibile, verosimile, ha letto tutto cio’ di cui parla (impresa titanica)… ma è anche il tipico libro che ho deciso di non leggere più: manca del principio di carità. Se si puo’ parlare in modo costruttivo di Hitler e delle molte cose ammirevoli proprie della società che ha forgiato, si potrà salvare qualcosa nell’opera di Althusser? E vabbè, ogni tanto bisogna prendere un po’ di ossigeno, le mie viscere pensano in realtà proprio quello che Scruton dice a chiare lettere e ogni tanto è mio diritto farle sfogare. Prometto però in futuro di non indulgere troppo a queste pratiche, e nel frattempo mi dissocio sia dal libro che dal post (nonostante le viscere).