Melhores softwares de geração de leads para 2025
Potencialize seu negócio com os principais softwares de geração de leads para 2025.
Tempo previsto
9/5/2025
Potencialize seu negócio com os principais softwares de geração de leads para 2025.
Gerar leads qualificados é a força vital de qualquer empresa em crescimento. Afinal, como esperar conquistar esses potenciais clientes que estão ativamente buscando por produtos e serviços como os seus (e eu sei que são melhores que os dos concorrentes!)?
Mas eis uma realidade que muitos conhecem bem: empresas em fase inicial de crescimento ou com orçamentos apertados enfrentam dificuldades para ganhar tração e captar contatos. A prospecção manual e as abordagens aleatórias já não têm vez em um mercado cada vez mais competitivo.
A boa notícia é que softwares avançados de geração de leads podem fornecer a vantagem necessária. Ferramentas de qualidade equipam as equipes de vendas para identificar clientes ideais, alcançá-los com campanhas direcionadas e converter contatos em leads reais.
Este guia definitivo vai explorar as principais soluções de geração de leads para o próximo ano. Apresento uma análise aprofundada de ferramentas consagradas e emergentes para ajudar você a encontrar a que mais se adequa aos objetivos e ao orçamento do seu negócio.
Imagine que você tem um negócio e deseja encontrar pessoas interessadas no que você oferece. Você poderia recorrer aos métodos tradicionais: montar um estande numa feira, fazer ligações frias ou até anunciar em jornais impressos. Mas, sejamos sinceros, isso é quase como atirar no escuro atualmente. É aí que entram as ferramentas de geração de leads — a maneira moderna e tecnológica de atrair clientes potenciais.
Uma ferramenta de geração de leads é um software ou sistema utilizado em marketing e vendas para atrair e coletar potenciais clientes (leads) para uma empresa. O objetivo é otimizar e facilitar o processo de identificar e engajar pessoas ou organizações interessadas nos produtos ou serviços oferecidos.
Principais características dessas ferramentas:
Exemplos populares: plataformas de e-mail marketing, anúncios em redes sociais, ferramentas de SEO e softwares integrados de prospecção. Estas soluções são essenciais em estratégias de marketing digital modernas, ajudando empresas a expandir sua base de clientes de forma eficiente.
Encontrar leads manualmente é caro e demorado. Mas com o software e as ferramentas certas, você economiza tempo e dinheiro, mantendo a qualidade dos seus contatos.
Apesar de ambos serem cruciais para vendas e marketing, cada um atua em momentos distintos do funil:
Objetivo: identificar e atrair potenciais clientes na etapa inicial do funil de vendas.
Funcionamento: recursos como data mining, formulários, landing pages, web scraping, segmentação e pontuação de leads.
Usuários: geralmente, equipes de marketing, que repassam leads qualificados aos times de vendas.
Objetivo: automatizar processos de vendas a partir dos leads já captados, focando em sua condução pelo funil.
Funcionamento: gerenciamento de relacionamento por CRM, automação de tarefas (como follow-up), sequências de e-mails, análise.
Usuários: principalmente equipes de vendas, para conversão eficiente dos leads em clientes.
Resumo: ferramentas de geração de leads focam na captação de potenciais clientes, enquanto as de automação otimizam as etapas de conversão. Ambas devem funcionar de maneira integrada.
Os melhores softwares reúnem funções que facilitam todo o processo de captação. Antes de escolher, confira esses atributos essenciais:
Automatiza a busca por potenciais leads por meio de algoritmos avançados e mineração de dados, coletando informações em redes sociais e outros canais para gerar leads automaticamente e garantir um fluxo constante.
Atribui valores aos leads conforme dados demográficos, comportamentais e níveis de engajamento, permitindo priorizar quem tem maior chance de conversão.
Permite criar mensagens e conteúdos personalizados para cada público. Seja por e-mail, redes sociais ou outros canais, adapta a comunicação para atrair e engajar potenciais clientes.
Acompanhe o desempenho das campanhas em tempo real, monitore taxa de conversão, nível de engajamento, atividades dos usuários e obtenha relatórios personalizados para aprimorar estratégias.
Garantem compatibilidade com seu CRM, plataforma de e-mails, ferramentas de análise e demais sistemas, facilitando a sincronização de dados e tornando o fluxo de informação mais eficiente.
Prefira softwares com interface intuitiva e suporte ágil, facilidades que diminuem a curva de aprendizado e contribuem para a efetividade da sua equipe de vendas.
Dica-chave: encontre uma solução alinhada à voz, aos objetivos e ao orçamento da sua empresa. Investir apenas em campanhas de grande volume sem foco no público-alvo traz poucas conversões.
Selecionar o software ideal pode ser desafiador com tantas opções no mercado. Para ajudar, confira os 20 mais bem avaliados até dezembro de 2023:
Ferramenta de automação de vendas e geração de leads para aumentar produtividade e visibilidade do funil de vendas.
Destaque: crie listas de prospecção e envie ações personalizadas com facilidade.
CRM com automação, captação de leads por formulários, chatbots e gerenciamento de pipeline.
Destaque: aplicativo móvel, captura fácil de leads e automação focada em vendas.
Plataforma de marketing completa, com automação de e-mails, gerenciamento de campanhas e integração com CRM.
Destaque: ótima integração com CRMs e sistemas de e-mail.
Solução completa para pequenas e médias empresas, com automação de vendas, marketing e serviços.
Destaque: gerenciamento de agendas, pontuação de leads e localizador de e-mails.
Plataforma para conversão de visitantes em ligações de vendas com automação e inteligência artificial.
Destaque: retorno automático em até 28 segundos para conexão instantânea.
Geração de leads outbound e busca de informações de contato. Integração fácil com CRMs.
Destaque: grande base de dados e simples de usar.
Ferramenta de prospecção para vendas, recrutamento e marketing, com segmentações detalhadas.
Destaque: permite buscar leads hipersegmentados por setor, porte, etc.
Solução com integrações para mídias sociais, CRMs e ferramentas de e-mail marketing (380+ opções).
Destaque: captação multisistema e integração simples.
Plugin para WordPress focado em converter visitantes em leads via pop-ups, páginas e ferramentas gamificadas.
Plataforma de vendas B2B que identifica visitantes do site, enriquece dados e oferece análises.
Banco de dados atualizado e preciso sobre empresas-alvo e contatos B2B.
Facilita a criação de landing pages de alta conversão e pop-ups com modelos personalizáveis.
Destaque: atende tanto construtores de landing pages quanto empresas que buscam personalização.
Plataforma de mensageria voltada para engajamento via chat ao vivo e chatbots.
Destaque: captura de leads via chats personalizados e recursos de IA.
Solução de automação de marketing com criação de páginas de destino, e-mail marketing e pontuação de leads.
Destaque: segmentação poderosa e automação de envios personalizados.
Rastreamento de visitantes do site e geração de insights sobre empresas interessadas.
Transforma visitantes do site em leads por meio de relatórios e integração com Google Analytics.
Destaque: simplicidade na captação e qualificação de leads.
Ferramenta de busca, validação e automação de disparo de e-mails para captação B2B.
Solução de enriquecimento de dados de contato (telefone, e-mail e redes sociais).
Destaque: alta precisão e ótimo custo-benefício.
Busca e valida e-mails rapidamente para montar listas básicas de prospecção.
Sistema de tickets para gerenciar e resolver solicitações de clientes, integrando captação de leads em suporte.
Destaque: alertas em tempo real sobre visitas e solicitações para abordagem estratégica.
Dica: teste o HelpDesk ou qualquer outro destaque com período gratuito e veja na prática o aumento do engajamento e conversão dos clientes!
Seja em vendas ou marketing, escolher a solução certa é decisivo para reter clientes no longo prazo. Além de captar novos leads, você potencializa seus processos sem precisar mudar tudo do zero.
As opções acima são as melhores do mercado, cada uma com seus recursos únicos. Pesquise, teste e descubra qual atende melhor seus objetivos.
Com a escolha ideal, seus visitantes e contatos têm muito mais chance de se converterem em clientes fiéis por muitos anos!
Engenheiros DevOps unem desenvolvimento e operações para garantir sistemas confiáveis.
Os engenheiros DevOps estão no centro do desenvolvimento moderno de software, atuando como ponte entre desenvolvimento e operações de TI. São solucionadores de problemas por excelência, combinando código, automação e colaboração para manter sistemas confiáveis.
Aqui, você vai descobrir o que engenheiros DevOps fazem, as habilidades necessárias para se destacar e como ingressar nessa carreira empolgante. E não esqueça dos benefícios! O salário médio de um engenheiro DevOps nos Estados Unidos varia de US$ 125.000 a US$ 133.000 por ano. Interessante, não? Vamos detalhar tudo isso!
O engenheiro DevOps é um generalista de TI com um conjunto de habilidades amplo, abrangendo tanto o desenvolvimento quanto as operações. Ele domina programação, administração de sistemas, gerenciamento de infraestrutura e o uso de diversas ferramentas DevOps.
Além disso, precisa ter fortes habilidades interpessoais. Os engenheiros DevOps são quem derrubam barreiras dentro das organizações, trabalhando com equipes diversas para promover colaboração e tornar processos mais ágeis.
Para destacar, o engenheiro DevOps precisa entender profundamente a arquitetura de sistemas e saber gerenciar e provisionar ambientes. Também é essencial ter experiência com ferramentas e práticas de desenvolvimento, como controle de versão, revisões de código, testes unitários e métodos ágeis.
Eles assumem diversos papéis, buscando melhorar a eficiência e reduzir a complexidade do ciclo de desenvolvimento de software — fazendo tudo funcionar em harmonia.
Os engenheiros DevOps têm diversas tarefas que garantem o bom funcionamento dos softwares. Veja algumas das principais responsabilidades:
São peças-chave no gerenciamento de pipelines de CI/CD, que automatizam o processo de construção, teste e implantação de código. Isso permite lançar novas funcionalidades ou corrigir bugs de forma mais rápida e eficiente, reduzindo erros.
Além disso, integram ferramentas como sistemas de controle de versão, frameworks de testes automatizados e ferramentas de implantação, mantendo altos padrões de qualidade. Monitoram e ajustam esses sistemas para atender demandas dos clientes e do negócio.
Os engenheiros DevOps também focam em Infraestrutura como Código (IaC), escrevendo scripts para gerenciar e provisionar infraestrutura de maneira automatizada.
Utilizam ferramentas como Terraform, Ansible ou AWS CloudFormation para definir, implantar e manter infraestruturas. Isso garante ambientes consistentes, replicáveis e escaláveis, tornando a gestão de sistemas complexos muito mais eficiente.
Monitoram a saúde e o desempenho de softwares e sistemas, configurando alertas para identificar e corrigir rapidamente eventuais problemas. Ao analisar tendências de desempenho, conseguem antecipar problemas e otimizar o uso de recursos.
Costumam criar dashboards e relatórios intuitivos, oferecendo insights em tempo real sobre o sistema para gestores e equipes, facilitando decisões informadas e desempenho máximo.
Gerenciam implantações e releases, garantindo transições suaves do desenvolvimento ao ambiente de produção. Automatizam deploys via pipelines de CI/CD e documentam ciclos de releases para rastreabilidade.
Implementam estratégias como blue-green deployment e canary releases, minimizando indisponibilidades e riscos em novos lançamentos. Quando surgem problemas, atuam rapidamente para corrigir e, se necessário, reverter mudanças.
A segurança é uma preocupação central. O engenheiro DevOps garante práticas de segurança incorporadas durante todo o ciclo de desenvolvimento.
Trabalha em conjunto com times de desenvolvimento, operações e segurança para detectar vulnerabilidades desde o início, reduzindo riscos de ataques e tornando os sistemas mais resilientes.
Para se destacar, é fundamental reunir expertise técnica e habilidades comportamentais. Veja as principais competências exigidas:
Conhecimento em linguagens como Python, Java ou C++. Não é preciso ser desenvolvedor full-stack, mas a compreensão sólida permite criar scripts e automatizar processos integrações — Python é muito usado para automação de infraestrutura e manipulação de APIs.
Gerenciar pipelines de integração e entrega contínua é fundamental. Domínio de ferramentas como Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD ou CircleCI é necessário para automatizar o build, teste e implantação, tornando os releases mais rápidos e confiáveis.
Familiaridade com Docker, Kubernetes ou Red Hat OpenShift, que facilitam o empacotamento e a implantação consistente de aplicações. Docker cria containers, enquanto Kubernetes e OpenShift fazem a orquestração em larga escala.
Experiência prática com serviços de nuvem como AWS, Microsoft Azure ou Google Cloud Platform é indispensável. Os engenheiros DevOps precisam saber provisionar recursos, configurar serviços e lidar com deploys nessas plataformas.
Compreensão de metodologias ágeis, Scrum ou Kanban. Essas abordagens aceleram e flexibilizam o desenvolvimento, alinhando o trabalho do engenheiro DevOps com ciclos curtos e iterativos.
Trabalho próximo com times de TI, desenvolvimento e stakeholders exige ótima comunicação. Explicar conceitos técnicos de forma clara e colaborar na solução de problemas é rotina.
Diagnosticar e corrigir problemas rapidamente, sejam builds quebrados, falhas na infraestrutura ou erros em deploys, é essencial.
O mundo DevOps está em constante evolução. É crucial estar atualizado com novas ferramentas, tendências e metodologias, mantendo-se aberto a aprender sempre.
Conhecimento em sistemas como Git ou SVN para rastrear mudanças no código, colaborar em equipe e resolver conflitos de versões.
Conhecimento dos conceitos essenciais: integração contínua, automação, monitoramento e entrega contínua — tudo contribui para uma pipeline de entrega eficiente.
Ser um engenheiro DevOps exige formação, experiência prática e aprendizado contínuo.
Graduação: cursos como Ciência da Computação, Engenharia de Software ou áreas correlatas são ótimos pontos de partida, oferecendo base sólida em programação e arquitetura de sistemas.
Aprenda ferramentas DevOps: busque cursos, treinamentos e certificações em ferramentas como Docker, Kubernetes, AWS e Terraform, abordando automação e nuvem.
Monte um portfólio: participe de hackathons, desafios de programação e contribua em projetos open source para mostrar suas habilidades no mundo real.
Comece em áreas relacionadas: muitos começam como desenvolvedores, administradores de sistemas ou engenheiros de QA, adquirindo experiência que facilita a transição.
Ganhe experiência: trabalhar em equipes pequenas permite lidar com várias funções e aprender rapidamente. Empresas maiores oferecem cargos especializados e desafios mais complexos.
Especialize-se: você pode focar em áreas como segurança ou computação em nuvem, tornando-se mais valioso para determinados setores.
Para crescer na área, dedique-se ao aprendizado contínuo e networking. Veja como avançar:
O setor de tecnologia avança rápido. Siga blogs, newsletters e faça cursos online para evoluir. Participe de conferências, meetups ou webinars para aprender com especialistas e conhecer tendências em DevOps.
Experimente novas tecnologias, crie ambientes de teste e mantenha suas habilidades afiadas.
O networking é fundamental. Participe de comunidades online como o Subreddit de DevOps ou grupos no Discord para ficar informado e trocar experiências.
Encontros presenciais e conferências também ajudam a ampliar o networking e encontrar inspiração.
Participar ou iniciar projetos open source fortalece o portfólio e aumenta sua visibilidade. Empresas valorizam profissionais engajados e dispostos a colaborar, além de ser uma oportunidade para encarar desafios reais e trabalhar em equipe global.
Comece com pequenas contribuições e, ao adquirir experiência, abrace tarefas maiores que destaquem suas habilidades.
Tornar-se engenheiro DevOps é uma jornada que combina técnica e resolução de problemas. Desde automatizar deploys até garantir o ciclo de desenvolvimento mais eficiente, o profissional DevOps simplifica fluxos de trabalho.
Seja vindo do desenvolvimento ou operações, há muitos caminhos para se especializar em DevOps. Ao adotar os princípios centrais da área e se manter ativo na comunidade, você estará preparado para crescer.
Assim como engenheiros DevOps são essenciais para a entrega eficiente de software, ferramentas como o HelpDesk também são indispensáveis para aprimorar o suporte ao cliente e otimizar operações em equipe.
Pronto para o próximo passo? Comece hoje mesmo a explorar cursos online e a testar ferramentas. O universo DevOps é dinâmico, e com dedicação e as habilidades certas, as oportunidades são ilimitadas.
Saiba como impulsionar o crescimento de vendas adotando estratégias e tecnologias.
Medir o sucesso de um negócio pode ser feito de várias maneiras. Isso inclui reconhecimento de marca, valorização de mercado e outros fatores. No entanto, um dos principais indicadores de sucesso é o crescimento de vendas.
Um aumento na taxa de crescimento de vendas mostra a rapidez com que a receita da empresa cresce, fornecendo importantes insights sobre seu desempenho financeiro. Para tomar decisões estratégicas e operacionais assertivas, é fundamental que empresas compreendam profundamente o conceito de crescimento de vendas.
Crescimento de vendas é a taxa de aumento nas vendas de serviços ao longo do tempo. Ele mede a receita gerada pela empresa através das vendas, normalmente comparando os resultados mês a mês, trimestre a trimestre ou ano a ano.
Esse crescimento reflete a demanda pelos serviços e o interesse dos clientes, fatores que determinam o potencial de sucesso a longo prazo do negócio. Altas taxas de crescimento são indicadores de boa saúde financeira, embora vários fatores – como concorrência, tendências de mercado e condições econômicas – possam impactá-las.
Para manter vantagem competitiva e estabilidade financeira, as empresas devem aumentar tanto o volume quanto o valor das vendas, ou seja, vender mais unidades e praticar melhores preços.
Medir o crescimento de vendas é essencial para empresas de todos os portes, pois indica o desempenho em relação a períodos anteriores. O acompanhamento e análise de dados de vendas ao longo do tempo permitem identificar tendências e padrões.
Esse monitoramento auxilia ainda na comparação de desempenho frente a concorrentes. Uma taxa satisfatória de crescimento mostra que os serviços ofertados são eficazes e geram receitas relevantes. Caso as vendas estejam em queda, identificar a causa raiz e agir rapidamente torna-se mais fácil com os planos de ação adequados.
Para calcular o crescimento de vendas, é necessário interpretar demonstrativos financeiros e outras métricas importantes. Entre as métricas-chave estão receita, volume de vendas e taxa de crescimento – fundamentais para identificar pontos de melhoria e otimizar estratégias comerciais.
Resumidamente, medir o crescimento de vendas é indispensável para aumentar a receita, manter relevância no mercado, inovar diante das tendências e alcançar metas e objetivos comerciais.
A taxa de crescimento de vendas reflete o aumento ou diminuição dos resultados do negócio em relação a períodos anteriores.
A fórmula é:
Taxa de crescimento de vendas = (Vendas atuais - Vendas anteriores) / Vendas anteriores × 100
Por exemplo, se uma empresa faturou R$ 500.000 no ano passado e R$ 600.000 neste ano, a taxa de crescimento é:
Taxa de crescimento = (600.000 - 500.000) / 500.000
Taxa de crescimento = 0,2 × 100
Taxa de crescimento = 20%
Isso significa que as vendas aumentaram 20% em relação ao ano anterior.
Essa fórmula serve para monitorar o desempenho comercial, identificar tendências de mercado, engajamento dos clientes e a eficácia das estratégias de marketing.
Há vários indicadores-chave para acompanhar o crescimento de vendas, incluindo:
Esses indicadores ajudam a visualizar o desempenho de vendas sob diversas perspectivas, identificando oportunidades de melhoria e definindo metas e objetivos mensuráveis.
Crescer de forma consistente exige abordagem estratégica. Veja algumas das principais estratégias para aumentar as vendas:
Alinhe produtos e serviços às necessidades dos clientes. Isso estimula compras recorrentes e atrai novos consumidores.
Incorpore tecnologias como automação, CRMs, e análises com IA em todos os processos. Isso otimiza rotinas, aprimora a experiência do cliente e garante vantagem competitiva.
Crie programas que premiem clientes por indicar outras pessoas para sua marca, ampliando o alcance por meio do marketing boca a boca.
Conquistar novos clientes pode custar até 25 vezes mais do que manter quem já compra. Ofereça opções adicionais e premium aos clientes atuais para aumentar o ticket médio.
Para manter o crescimento constante e assegurar vantagem competitiva e estabilidade, é fundamental combinar estratégias de vendas, atendimento de excelência e aprimoramento contínuo. Algumas práticas incluem:
Análise permite obter dados sobre atividades comerciais, produtos mais vendidos, comportamento dos clientes e tendências do mercado. O acompanhamento regular desses indicadores revela oportunidades e orienta decisões para promover constante crescimento.
Investir no aperfeiçoamento dos produtos faz a empresa se destacar no mercado e aumentar a retenção dos clientes. Por exemplo, editores de PDF que agora incluem assistentes de IA, oferecendo recursos como resumo, tradução e explicação automática dos conteúdos.
Ampliar o portfólio permite atingir novos públicos e gerar mais receitas, além de reduzir riscos ligados às mudanças de mercado e preferências dos consumidores.
Expandir a atuação – seja geograficamente ou em novos setores – abre fontes de receitas e fortalece a sustentabilidade da empresa.
Oferecer atendimento de excelência pode aumentar as vendas e fidelizar clientes. Segundo dados, 57% dos consumidores gastam mais com marcas de confiança e um aumento de 5% na retenção pode gerar até 25% mais lucro.
O crescimento das vendas depende do uso das ferramentas e tecnologias certas para ampliar operações e alcançar metas. Entre as principais estão:
Interpretam dados e criam relatórios sobre desempenho, tendências e comportamento do cliente. Exemplos populares incluem:
O CRM centraliza, organiza e acompanha as interações com clientes, otimizando a experiência e aumentando a fidelidade. O HelpDesk é um exemplo robusto, oferecendo sistema de tickets, atendimento multicanal, automação com IA, coleta de feedback e relatórios. Outras opções conhecidas:
Automatizam e otimizam o marketing em e-mail, redes sociais, anúncios e mais, personalizando interações e facilitando mensuração de resultados. Entre as soluções, destacam-se:
Escolha as ferramentas que melhor atendam à sua estratégia de marketing e que possam impulsionar a equipe de vendas.
Diversas empresas obtiveram crescimento excepcional ao implementar estratégias eficazes e focadas no cliente – histórias inspiradoras para quem deseja acelerar as vendas.
O Mercado Livre, fintech e marketplace líder na América Latina, registrou receita líquida de US$ 5,3 bilhões no terceiro trimestre de 2024, alta de 35% na comparação anual, e crescimento de 21% no número de compradores únicos. O principal fator foi o investimento em logística, experiência do cliente e tecnologia.
Consultoria em envelopes de edificações, a BE-CI superou desafios de comunicação interna e expandiu para 11 escritórios no sudeste dos Estados Unidos, multiplicando suas receitas.
Em suma, um alto crescimento de vendas é viável para empresas comprometidas com inovação operacional, diversificação dos produtos e excelência no atendimento ao cliente.
O crescimento de vendas é a base para o sucesso sustentável de qualquer negócio. Aumentos constantes nas vendas potencializam a lucratividade, abrem portas para novos mercados e fortalecem a posição competitiva.
Para alcançar crescimento robusto de vendas, é preciso implementar estratégias bem definidas, adotar tecnologias inovadoras e monitorar continuamente os resultados.
Em resumo, com foco em estratégias assertivas e uso de insights valiosos, sua empresa pode amplificar a taxa de crescimento de vendas e impulsionar o sucesso a longo prazo.
Potencialize seu negócio com os principais softwares de geração de leads para 2025.
Gerar leads qualificados é a força vital de qualquer empresa em crescimento. Afinal, como esperar conquistar esses potenciais clientes que estão ativamente buscando por produtos e serviços como os seus (e eu sei que são melhores que os dos concorrentes!)?
Mas eis uma realidade que muitos conhecem bem: empresas em fase inicial de crescimento ou com orçamentos apertados enfrentam dificuldades para ganhar tração e captar contatos. A prospecção manual e as abordagens aleatórias já não têm vez em um mercado cada vez mais competitivo.
A boa notícia é que softwares avançados de geração de leads podem fornecer a vantagem necessária. Ferramentas de qualidade equipam as equipes de vendas para identificar clientes ideais, alcançá-los com campanhas direcionadas e converter contatos em leads reais.
Este guia definitivo vai explorar as principais soluções de geração de leads para o próximo ano. Apresento uma análise aprofundada de ferramentas consagradas e emergentes para ajudar você a encontrar a que mais se adequa aos objetivos e ao orçamento do seu negócio.
Imagine que você tem um negócio e deseja encontrar pessoas interessadas no que você oferece. Você poderia recorrer aos métodos tradicionais: montar um estande numa feira, fazer ligações frias ou até anunciar em jornais impressos. Mas, sejamos sinceros, isso é quase como atirar no escuro atualmente. É aí que entram as ferramentas de geração de leads — a maneira moderna e tecnológica de atrair clientes potenciais.
Uma ferramenta de geração de leads é um software ou sistema utilizado em marketing e vendas para atrair e coletar potenciais clientes (leads) para uma empresa. O objetivo é otimizar e facilitar o processo de identificar e engajar pessoas ou organizações interessadas nos produtos ou serviços oferecidos.
Principais características dessas ferramentas:
Exemplos populares: plataformas de e-mail marketing, anúncios em redes sociais, ferramentas de SEO e softwares integrados de prospecção. Estas soluções são essenciais em estratégias de marketing digital modernas, ajudando empresas a expandir sua base de clientes de forma eficiente.
Encontrar leads manualmente é caro e demorado. Mas com o software e as ferramentas certas, você economiza tempo e dinheiro, mantendo a qualidade dos seus contatos.
Apesar de ambos serem cruciais para vendas e marketing, cada um atua em momentos distintos do funil:
Objetivo: identificar e atrair potenciais clientes na etapa inicial do funil de vendas.
Funcionamento: recursos como data mining, formulários, landing pages, web scraping, segmentação e pontuação de leads.
Usuários: geralmente, equipes de marketing, que repassam leads qualificados aos times de vendas.
Objetivo: automatizar processos de vendas a partir dos leads já captados, focando em sua condução pelo funil.
Funcionamento: gerenciamento de relacionamento por CRM, automação de tarefas (como follow-up), sequências de e-mails, análise.
Usuários: principalmente equipes de vendas, para conversão eficiente dos leads em clientes.
Resumo: ferramentas de geração de leads focam na captação de potenciais clientes, enquanto as de automação otimizam as etapas de conversão. Ambas devem funcionar de maneira integrada.
Os melhores softwares reúnem funções que facilitam todo o processo de captação. Antes de escolher, confira esses atributos essenciais:
Automatiza a busca por potenciais leads por meio de algoritmos avançados e mineração de dados, coletando informações em redes sociais e outros canais para gerar leads automaticamente e garantir um fluxo constante.
Atribui valores aos leads conforme dados demográficos, comportamentais e níveis de engajamento, permitindo priorizar quem tem maior chance de conversão.
Permite criar mensagens e conteúdos personalizados para cada público. Seja por e-mail, redes sociais ou outros canais, adapta a comunicação para atrair e engajar potenciais clientes.
Acompanhe o desempenho das campanhas em tempo real, monitore taxa de conversão, nível de engajamento, atividades dos usuários e obtenha relatórios personalizados para aprimorar estratégias.
Garantem compatibilidade com seu CRM, plataforma de e-mails, ferramentas de análise e demais sistemas, facilitando a sincronização de dados e tornando o fluxo de informação mais eficiente.
Prefira softwares com interface intuitiva e suporte ágil, facilidades que diminuem a curva de aprendizado e contribuem para a efetividade da sua equipe de vendas.
Dica-chave: encontre uma solução alinhada à voz, aos objetivos e ao orçamento da sua empresa. Investir apenas em campanhas de grande volume sem foco no público-alvo traz poucas conversões.
Selecionar o software ideal pode ser desafiador com tantas opções no mercado. Para ajudar, confira os 20 mais bem avaliados até dezembro de 2023:
Ferramenta de automação de vendas e geração de leads para aumentar produtividade e visibilidade do funil de vendas.
Destaque: crie listas de prospecção e envie ações personalizadas com facilidade.
CRM com automação, captação de leads por formulários, chatbots e gerenciamento de pipeline.
Destaque: aplicativo móvel, captura fácil de leads e automação focada em vendas.
Plataforma de marketing completa, com automação de e-mails, gerenciamento de campanhas e integração com CRM.
Destaque: ótima integração com CRMs e sistemas de e-mail.
Solução completa para pequenas e médias empresas, com automação de vendas, marketing e serviços.
Destaque: gerenciamento de agendas, pontuação de leads e localizador de e-mails.
Plataforma para conversão de visitantes em ligações de vendas com automação e inteligência artificial.
Destaque: retorno automático em até 28 segundos para conexão instantânea.
Geração de leads outbound e busca de informações de contato. Integração fácil com CRMs.
Destaque: grande base de dados e simples de usar.
Ferramenta de prospecção para vendas, recrutamento e marketing, com segmentações detalhadas.
Destaque: permite buscar leads hipersegmentados por setor, porte, etc.
Solução com integrações para mídias sociais, CRMs e ferramentas de e-mail marketing (380+ opções).
Destaque: captação multisistema e integração simples.
Plugin para WordPress focado em converter visitantes em leads via pop-ups, páginas e ferramentas gamificadas.
Plataforma de vendas B2B que identifica visitantes do site, enriquece dados e oferece análises.
Banco de dados atualizado e preciso sobre empresas-alvo e contatos B2B.
Facilita a criação de landing pages de alta conversão e pop-ups com modelos personalizáveis.
Destaque: atende tanto construtores de landing pages quanto empresas que buscam personalização.
Plataforma de mensageria voltada para engajamento via chat ao vivo e chatbots.
Destaque: captura de leads via chats personalizados e recursos de IA.
Solução de automação de marketing com criação de páginas de destino, e-mail marketing e pontuação de leads.
Destaque: segmentação poderosa e automação de envios personalizados.
Rastreamento de visitantes do site e geração de insights sobre empresas interessadas.
Transforma visitantes do site em leads por meio de relatórios e integração com Google Analytics.
Destaque: simplicidade na captação e qualificação de leads.
Ferramenta de busca, validação e automação de disparo de e-mails para captação B2B.
Solução de enriquecimento de dados de contato (telefone, e-mail e redes sociais).
Destaque: alta precisão e ótimo custo-benefício.
Busca e valida e-mails rapidamente para montar listas básicas de prospecção.
Sistema de tickets para gerenciar e resolver solicitações de clientes, integrando captação de leads em suporte.
Destaque: alertas em tempo real sobre visitas e solicitações para abordagem estratégica.
Dica: teste o HelpDesk ou qualquer outro destaque com período gratuito e veja na prática o aumento do engajamento e conversão dos clientes!
Seja em vendas ou marketing, escolher a solução certa é decisivo para reter clientes no longo prazo. Além de captar novos leads, você potencializa seus processos sem precisar mudar tudo do zero.
As opções acima são as melhores do mercado, cada uma com seus recursos únicos. Pesquise, teste e descubra qual atende melhor seus objetivos.
Com a escolha ideal, seus visitantes e contatos têm muito mais chance de se converterem em clientes fiéis por muitos anos!
Engenheiros DevOps unem desenvolvimento e operações para garantir sistemas confiáveis.
Os engenheiros DevOps estão no centro do desenvolvimento moderno de software, atuando como ponte entre desenvolvimento e operações de TI. São solucionadores de problemas por excelência, combinando código, automação e colaboração para manter sistemas confiáveis.
Aqui, você vai descobrir o que engenheiros DevOps fazem, as habilidades necessárias para se destacar e como ingressar nessa carreira empolgante. E não esqueça dos benefícios! O salário médio de um engenheiro DevOps nos Estados Unidos varia de US$ 125.000 a US$ 133.000 por ano. Interessante, não? Vamos detalhar tudo isso!
O engenheiro DevOps é um generalista de TI com um conjunto de habilidades amplo, abrangendo tanto o desenvolvimento quanto as operações. Ele domina programação, administração de sistemas, gerenciamento de infraestrutura e o uso de diversas ferramentas DevOps.
Além disso, precisa ter fortes habilidades interpessoais. Os engenheiros DevOps são quem derrubam barreiras dentro das organizações, trabalhando com equipes diversas para promover colaboração e tornar processos mais ágeis.
Para destacar, o engenheiro DevOps precisa entender profundamente a arquitetura de sistemas e saber gerenciar e provisionar ambientes. Também é essencial ter experiência com ferramentas e práticas de desenvolvimento, como controle de versão, revisões de código, testes unitários e métodos ágeis.
Eles assumem diversos papéis, buscando melhorar a eficiência e reduzir a complexidade do ciclo de desenvolvimento de software — fazendo tudo funcionar em harmonia.
Os engenheiros DevOps têm diversas tarefas que garantem o bom funcionamento dos softwares. Veja algumas das principais responsabilidades:
São peças-chave no gerenciamento de pipelines de CI/CD, que automatizam o processo de construção, teste e implantação de código. Isso permite lançar novas funcionalidades ou corrigir bugs de forma mais rápida e eficiente, reduzindo erros.
Além disso, integram ferramentas como sistemas de controle de versão, frameworks de testes automatizados e ferramentas de implantação, mantendo altos padrões de qualidade. Monitoram e ajustam esses sistemas para atender demandas dos clientes e do negócio.
Os engenheiros DevOps também focam em Infraestrutura como Código (IaC), escrevendo scripts para gerenciar e provisionar infraestrutura de maneira automatizada.
Utilizam ferramentas como Terraform, Ansible ou AWS CloudFormation para definir, implantar e manter infraestruturas. Isso garante ambientes consistentes, replicáveis e escaláveis, tornando a gestão de sistemas complexos muito mais eficiente.
Monitoram a saúde e o desempenho de softwares e sistemas, configurando alertas para identificar e corrigir rapidamente eventuais problemas. Ao analisar tendências de desempenho, conseguem antecipar problemas e otimizar o uso de recursos.
Costumam criar dashboards e relatórios intuitivos, oferecendo insights em tempo real sobre o sistema para gestores e equipes, facilitando decisões informadas e desempenho máximo.
Gerenciam implantações e releases, garantindo transições suaves do desenvolvimento ao ambiente de produção. Automatizam deploys via pipelines de CI/CD e documentam ciclos de releases para rastreabilidade.
Implementam estratégias como blue-green deployment e canary releases, minimizando indisponibilidades e riscos em novos lançamentos. Quando surgem problemas, atuam rapidamente para corrigir e, se necessário, reverter mudanças.
A segurança é uma preocupação central. O engenheiro DevOps garante práticas de segurança incorporadas durante todo o ciclo de desenvolvimento.
Trabalha em conjunto com times de desenvolvimento, operações e segurança para detectar vulnerabilidades desde o início, reduzindo riscos de ataques e tornando os sistemas mais resilientes.
Para se destacar, é fundamental reunir expertise técnica e habilidades comportamentais. Veja as principais competências exigidas:
Conhecimento em linguagens como Python, Java ou C++. Não é preciso ser desenvolvedor full-stack, mas a compreensão sólida permite criar scripts e automatizar processos integrações — Python é muito usado para automação de infraestrutura e manipulação de APIs.
Gerenciar pipelines de integração e entrega contínua é fundamental. Domínio de ferramentas como Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD ou CircleCI é necessário para automatizar o build, teste e implantação, tornando os releases mais rápidos e confiáveis.
Familiaridade com Docker, Kubernetes ou Red Hat OpenShift, que facilitam o empacotamento e a implantação consistente de aplicações. Docker cria containers, enquanto Kubernetes e OpenShift fazem a orquestração em larga escala.
Experiência prática com serviços de nuvem como AWS, Microsoft Azure ou Google Cloud Platform é indispensável. Os engenheiros DevOps precisam saber provisionar recursos, configurar serviços e lidar com deploys nessas plataformas.
Compreensão de metodologias ágeis, Scrum ou Kanban. Essas abordagens aceleram e flexibilizam o desenvolvimento, alinhando o trabalho do engenheiro DevOps com ciclos curtos e iterativos.
Trabalho próximo com times de TI, desenvolvimento e stakeholders exige ótima comunicação. Explicar conceitos técnicos de forma clara e colaborar na solução de problemas é rotina.
Diagnosticar e corrigir problemas rapidamente, sejam builds quebrados, falhas na infraestrutura ou erros em deploys, é essencial.
O mundo DevOps está em constante evolução. É crucial estar atualizado com novas ferramentas, tendências e metodologias, mantendo-se aberto a aprender sempre.
Conhecimento em sistemas como Git ou SVN para rastrear mudanças no código, colaborar em equipe e resolver conflitos de versões.
Conhecimento dos conceitos essenciais: integração contínua, automação, monitoramento e entrega contínua — tudo contribui para uma pipeline de entrega eficiente.
Ser um engenheiro DevOps exige formação, experiência prática e aprendizado contínuo.
Graduação: cursos como Ciência da Computação, Engenharia de Software ou áreas correlatas são ótimos pontos de partida, oferecendo base sólida em programação e arquitetura de sistemas.
Aprenda ferramentas DevOps: busque cursos, treinamentos e certificações em ferramentas como Docker, Kubernetes, AWS e Terraform, abordando automação e nuvem.
Monte um portfólio: participe de hackathons, desafios de programação e contribua em projetos open source para mostrar suas habilidades no mundo real.
Comece em áreas relacionadas: muitos começam como desenvolvedores, administradores de sistemas ou engenheiros de QA, adquirindo experiência que facilita a transição.
Ganhe experiência: trabalhar em equipes pequenas permite lidar com várias funções e aprender rapidamente. Empresas maiores oferecem cargos especializados e desafios mais complexos.
Especialize-se: você pode focar em áreas como segurança ou computação em nuvem, tornando-se mais valioso para determinados setores.
Para crescer na área, dedique-se ao aprendizado contínuo e networking. Veja como avançar:
O setor de tecnologia avança rápido. Siga blogs, newsletters e faça cursos online para evoluir. Participe de conferências, meetups ou webinars para aprender com especialistas e conhecer tendências em DevOps.
Experimente novas tecnologias, crie ambientes de teste e mantenha suas habilidades afiadas.
O networking é fundamental. Participe de comunidades online como o Subreddit de DevOps ou grupos no Discord para ficar informado e trocar experiências.
Encontros presenciais e conferências também ajudam a ampliar o networking e encontrar inspiração.
Participar ou iniciar projetos open source fortalece o portfólio e aumenta sua visibilidade. Empresas valorizam profissionais engajados e dispostos a colaborar, além de ser uma oportunidade para encarar desafios reais e trabalhar em equipe global.
Comece com pequenas contribuições e, ao adquirir experiência, abrace tarefas maiores que destaquem suas habilidades.
Tornar-se engenheiro DevOps é uma jornada que combina técnica e resolução de problemas. Desde automatizar deploys até garantir o ciclo de desenvolvimento mais eficiente, o profissional DevOps simplifica fluxos de trabalho.
Seja vindo do desenvolvimento ou operações, há muitos caminhos para se especializar em DevOps. Ao adotar os princípios centrais da área e se manter ativo na comunidade, você estará preparado para crescer.
Assim como engenheiros DevOps são essenciais para a entrega eficiente de software, ferramentas como o HelpDesk também são indispensáveis para aprimorar o suporte ao cliente e otimizar operações em equipe.
Pronto para o próximo passo? Comece hoje mesmo a explorar cursos online e a testar ferramentas. O universo DevOps é dinâmico, e com dedicação e as habilidades certas, as oportunidades são ilimitadas.
Saiba como impulsionar o crescimento de vendas adotando estratégias e tecnologias.
Medir o sucesso de um negócio pode ser feito de várias maneiras. Isso inclui reconhecimento de marca, valorização de mercado e outros fatores. No entanto, um dos principais indicadores de sucesso é o crescimento de vendas.
Um aumento na taxa de crescimento de vendas mostra a rapidez com que a receita da empresa cresce, fornecendo importantes insights sobre seu desempenho financeiro. Para tomar decisões estratégicas e operacionais assertivas, é fundamental que empresas compreendam profundamente o conceito de crescimento de vendas.
Crescimento de vendas é a taxa de aumento nas vendas de serviços ao longo do tempo. Ele mede a receita gerada pela empresa através das vendas, normalmente comparando os resultados mês a mês, trimestre a trimestre ou ano a ano.
Esse crescimento reflete a demanda pelos serviços e o interesse dos clientes, fatores que determinam o potencial de sucesso a longo prazo do negócio. Altas taxas de crescimento são indicadores de boa saúde financeira, embora vários fatores – como concorrência, tendências de mercado e condições econômicas – possam impactá-las.
Para manter vantagem competitiva e estabilidade financeira, as empresas devem aumentar tanto o volume quanto o valor das vendas, ou seja, vender mais unidades e praticar melhores preços.
Medir o crescimento de vendas é essencial para empresas de todos os portes, pois indica o desempenho em relação a períodos anteriores. O acompanhamento e análise de dados de vendas ao longo do tempo permitem identificar tendências e padrões.
Esse monitoramento auxilia ainda na comparação de desempenho frente a concorrentes. Uma taxa satisfatória de crescimento mostra que os serviços ofertados são eficazes e geram receitas relevantes. Caso as vendas estejam em queda, identificar a causa raiz e agir rapidamente torna-se mais fácil com os planos de ação adequados.
Para calcular o crescimento de vendas, é necessário interpretar demonstrativos financeiros e outras métricas importantes. Entre as métricas-chave estão receita, volume de vendas e taxa de crescimento – fundamentais para identificar pontos de melhoria e otimizar estratégias comerciais.
Resumidamente, medir o crescimento de vendas é indispensável para aumentar a receita, manter relevância no mercado, inovar diante das tendências e alcançar metas e objetivos comerciais.
A taxa de crescimento de vendas reflete o aumento ou diminuição dos resultados do negócio em relação a períodos anteriores.
A fórmula é:
Taxa de crescimento de vendas = (Vendas atuais - Vendas anteriores) / Vendas anteriores × 100
Por exemplo, se uma empresa faturou R$ 500.000 no ano passado e R$ 600.000 neste ano, a taxa de crescimento é:
Taxa de crescimento = (600.000 - 500.000) / 500.000
Taxa de crescimento = 0,2 × 100
Taxa de crescimento = 20%
Isso significa que as vendas aumentaram 20% em relação ao ano anterior.
Essa fórmula serve para monitorar o desempenho comercial, identificar tendências de mercado, engajamento dos clientes e a eficácia das estratégias de marketing.
Há vários indicadores-chave para acompanhar o crescimento de vendas, incluindo:
Esses indicadores ajudam a visualizar o desempenho de vendas sob diversas perspectivas, identificando oportunidades de melhoria e definindo metas e objetivos mensuráveis.
Crescer de forma consistente exige abordagem estratégica. Veja algumas das principais estratégias para aumentar as vendas:
Alinhe produtos e serviços às necessidades dos clientes. Isso estimula compras recorrentes e atrai novos consumidores.
Incorpore tecnologias como automação, CRMs, e análises com IA em todos os processos. Isso otimiza rotinas, aprimora a experiência do cliente e garante vantagem competitiva.
Crie programas que premiem clientes por indicar outras pessoas para sua marca, ampliando o alcance por meio do marketing boca a boca.
Conquistar novos clientes pode custar até 25 vezes mais do que manter quem já compra. Ofereça opções adicionais e premium aos clientes atuais para aumentar o ticket médio.
Para manter o crescimento constante e assegurar vantagem competitiva e estabilidade, é fundamental combinar estratégias de vendas, atendimento de excelência e aprimoramento contínuo. Algumas práticas incluem:
Análise permite obter dados sobre atividades comerciais, produtos mais vendidos, comportamento dos clientes e tendências do mercado. O acompanhamento regular desses indicadores revela oportunidades e orienta decisões para promover constante crescimento.
Investir no aperfeiçoamento dos produtos faz a empresa se destacar no mercado e aumentar a retenção dos clientes. Por exemplo, editores de PDF que agora incluem assistentes de IA, oferecendo recursos como resumo, tradução e explicação automática dos conteúdos.
Ampliar o portfólio permite atingir novos públicos e gerar mais receitas, além de reduzir riscos ligados às mudanças de mercado e preferências dos consumidores.
Expandir a atuação – seja geograficamente ou em novos setores – abre fontes de receitas e fortalece a sustentabilidade da empresa.
Oferecer atendimento de excelência pode aumentar as vendas e fidelizar clientes. Segundo dados, 57% dos consumidores gastam mais com marcas de confiança e um aumento de 5% na retenção pode gerar até 25% mais lucro.
O crescimento das vendas depende do uso das ferramentas e tecnologias certas para ampliar operações e alcançar metas. Entre as principais estão:
Interpretam dados e criam relatórios sobre desempenho, tendências e comportamento do cliente. Exemplos populares incluem:
O CRM centraliza, organiza e acompanha as interações com clientes, otimizando a experiência e aumentando a fidelidade. O HelpDesk é um exemplo robusto, oferecendo sistema de tickets, atendimento multicanal, automação com IA, coleta de feedback e relatórios. Outras opções conhecidas:
Automatizam e otimizam o marketing em e-mail, redes sociais, anúncios e mais, personalizando interações e facilitando mensuração de resultados. Entre as soluções, destacam-se:
Escolha as ferramentas que melhor atendam à sua estratégia de marketing e que possam impulsionar a equipe de vendas.
Diversas empresas obtiveram crescimento excepcional ao implementar estratégias eficazes e focadas no cliente – histórias inspiradoras para quem deseja acelerar as vendas.
O Mercado Livre, fintech e marketplace líder na América Latina, registrou receita líquida de US$ 5,3 bilhões no terceiro trimestre de 2024, alta de 35% na comparação anual, e crescimento de 21% no número de compradores únicos. O principal fator foi o investimento em logística, experiência do cliente e tecnologia.
Consultoria em envelopes de edificações, a BE-CI superou desafios de comunicação interna e expandiu para 11 escritórios no sudeste dos Estados Unidos, multiplicando suas receitas.
Em suma, um alto crescimento de vendas é viável para empresas comprometidas com inovação operacional, diversificação dos produtos e excelência no atendimento ao cliente.
O crescimento de vendas é a base para o sucesso sustentável de qualquer negócio. Aumentos constantes nas vendas potencializam a lucratividade, abrem portas para novos mercados e fortalecem a posição competitiva.
Para alcançar crescimento robusto de vendas, é preciso implementar estratégias bem definidas, adotar tecnologias inovadoras e monitorar continuamente os resultados.
Em resumo, com foco em estratégias assertivas e uso de insights valiosos, sua empresa pode amplificar a taxa de crescimento de vendas e impulsionar o sucesso a longo prazo.
O Papa que se despede enfrentou tsunamis de ódio, e deixou lições amorosas. Seus conselhos foram breves e profundos.
Francisco foi um excelente pai para a Igreja. Chamo-o assim, pelo primeiro e único nome, porque deixou em seu testamento que deveria ser a inscrição em seu túmulo: “Franciscus”.
Escrito na metade de 2022, o texto oferece o “sofrimento que esteve presente na última parte” da vida do Papa ao “Senhor, pela paz no mundo e pela fraternidade entre os povos”. Infere‑se que, desde então, a despedida esteve em suas preocupações.
É coerente sentir estranheza diante de um líder que telefonava para o pároco de Gaza, e que não se esquivou de pedir o desarmamento e o fim da guerra. Naquilo que chamava de “globalização da indiferença”, os homens passaram a consumir os horrores da natureza violenta sem tomar qualquer providência.
Certamente ele foi atingido pelos tsunamis de ódio que cobriram a comunidade humana nos últimos anos. Nesse sentido, nunca vi tanto descompasso entre católicos. Porém, não me surpreende em nada. Afinal, quem não está perdido?
O riso de Francisco vai fazer muita falta. Seu jeito simples de oferecer conselhos, e de ensinar a dar conselhos. Para ele, um sermão não deveria passar de oito minutos. Que respeito aos ouvidos, e ao tempo dos outros! “O senso de humor é um certificado de sanidade”, defendeu.
Pergunta-se, com razoável preocupação, o quanto as lições de caridade ensinadas por ele estão aprendidas, quanto internalizadas. Para que nenhuma geada queime a lavoura de novos cristãos, os cardeais têm agora o trabalho de escolher um Papa que nos ame.
Uns dias antes de morrer, no fim do ano passado, meu avô Jorge ouviu Ravel comigo. Dedico essa memória.
Reflexão psicanalítica sobre culpa, violência e identidade coletiva, unindo a simbologia cristã ao drama palestino atual.
Quando, às três da tarde da sexta-feira, Jesus suspira e entrega seu espírito a Deus, passamos a nos perguntar “o que fizemos?”. Para um distraído, deve ser nada além de uma culpa a mais para a coleção. Nós, freudianos, porém, compreendemos tal pergunta como a origem da civilização.
É uma questão de geolocalização, se é que me entende.
Onde estamos, exatamente, depois de termos assassinado o Criador? Se estivermos entre os que fazem a si mesmos aquela pergunta, tal qual no mito do parricídio, muito que bem. Algo assim tem potencial de nos deschucralizar. Mas se estivermos para além da fronteira da responsabilidade, estamos perdidos.
É neste último lugar que o indivíduo vibra com um Jesus que “senta o chicote” nos ladrões — sem se dar conta de que ele mesmo é o ladrão mencionado nas Escrituras. Vibra com o ultraje aos líderes fariseus, sem se dar conta de que o Mestre o ultraja no instante da leitura.
Escrevi sobre esse fenômeno, em um capítulo denominado “narcisismo das pequenas diferenças” (é um conceito psicanalítico). Em resumo, o ódio é ainda mais talentoso que o amor quando o assunto é unir seres humanos, formar exércitos, igrejas, e torcidas organizadas.
Quem abre uma bíblia impressa nos anos setenta, oitenta — traduzida por João Ferreira de Almeida, miolo rosa, cortado por um índice tátil — encontra a Palestina na seção de mapas.
Quer dizer. Até “ontem”, ninguém tinha qualquer dúvida quanto ao Jesus que matamos ser palestino. O que nos fez mudar de lado, além do dinheiro?
A filosofia de René Girard coincide com a prática cristã, quando da formação de uma religião a partir da violência, tanto quanto essa mesma violência gera a humanidade civilizada para os freudianos. Mas esse autor provoca particularmente quando o morto é Jesus. Desde que matamos um inocente, a roda da violência gira no vazio.
Se a Páscoa renova nos cristãos a esperança da ressurreição, que pudesse também renovar em todos nós alguma garantia de que, pelo menos uma vez por ano, perguntamos “o que fizemos?”.
A fotografia deste artigo, registrada por Mohammed Salem da agência Reuters e divulgada pela World Press Photo, foi a vencedora do prêmio World Press Photo do Ano. A imagem retrata Inas Abu Maamar, palestina de 36 anos, em um momento de dor profunda ao abraçar o corpo de sua sobrinha Saly, de apenas 5 anos, que perdeu a vida em um bombardeio israelense. A cena ocorreu no hospital Nasser, localizado em Khan Younis, no sul da Faixa de Gaza, em 17 de outubro de 2023.
Livro de ensaios do escritor peruano questiona raízes religiosas e políticas por trás da decadência cultural moderna.
Ainda que tenha visto o filme Pantaleão e as visitadoras (divertido e indicado!), pouco conheço dos romances de Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel da literatura — escritor peruano que despediu-se neste dia 13.
Gostava dele! Me recomendaram fortemente uma vez A casa verde — curiosamente um professor americano. Porém, este livro da foto, repleto de ensaios, reflexões e provocações, que ganhei em 2013, li e me foi bem marcante.
Um papo-cabeça aqui: como geralmente em cursos de comunicação a gente estuda Escola de Frankfurt, aprende-se que a culpa, por assim dizer, do esvaziamento poético visto nas artes ao longo da história, da decadência estética do que se entende por belo, bem como o fim da chamada "alta cultura", seria resultado da produção em série, da busca pelo lucro em escala, da indústria cultural: em suma uma consequência do capitalismo.
Pra minha supresa, este livro me revelou um ponto de vista diferente: a questão é política, que envolve a herança de um revanchismo contra o gosto da aristocracia (ou das altas classes) desde as revoluções.
TRata-se de um repúdio crescente à sociedade tradicional, após as grandes guerras mundiais, e, na sua essência, sobretudo: de fundo religioso — afinal, na origem de todas as civilizações, em todos os tempos, justamente dos ritos religiosos advieram e se desenvolveram as manifestações artísticas.
Parte-se da busca pelo sublime, das experiências místicas, que posteriormente formaram as bases do que entendemos por culturas. Um elo que virou apenas um eco na vida ocidental contemporânea, isto quando não totalmente banido, execrado, num mundo que, ao seu ver, culturalmente, caminha rumo ao nada.
Ou, como já observamos agora, para o conteúdo gerado por inteligência artificial.
The need for adaptation grows in the face of the evolution of personalized language models.
The discussion related to advancements in artificial intelligence, especially regarding the risks of human labor being replaced by robots and the creative potential that may offend those who consider themselves the crown of creation, seems affected by the phenomenon of polarization.
I recognize that this analysis is simplistic regarding the facts. On one hand, there's a perceptible unease caused by a new lunar race undertaken by the market in search of prestige and future profitability, which inevitably influences academic research. If research was once conducted with free software, today it is increasingly dependent on paid resources. On the other hand, in a stance that deliberately ignores cybernetics, part of the intellectual community offers resistance to the advancements of communication development.
In this context, those who wish to effectively keep up with the technological progress of language models like GPT and Gemini must face a learning curve that will certainly disturb their peace. It won't be surprising if, soon, each individual operates their own language model. Services like Google's Vertex AI already allow for the creation of highly personalized robots for a wide variety of tasks.
However, considering specifically the Portuguese language, one perceives that language models like the ones mentioned have little ability to grasp subjectivities and linguistic nuances. After all, if not even a human being is capable of fully understanding what users publish on the internet, what can be expected of the poor robot?
Recently, while driving down Brigadeiro Franco Street in Curitiba, I saw five city employees cutting the grass along the sidewalk. One of them held the mechanical mower, while the others served as mobile posts, holding a screen around the gardener. I thought, at that moment, about the last 300,000 years of human evolution synthesized in the scarcity of mobile supports, reducing the extraordinary human body machine to a mere screen holder.
It must be acknowledged, therefore, that certain routine activities—such as summaries and text generation from videos or audio—must, obligatorily, utilize artificial intelligence solutions. Otherwise, the physical and emotional intelligence of human beings is wasted on unrewarding jobs. Only someone who has had to edit hours of television or radio programs would have the authority to disregard the help of AI in these tasks, although this would reveal a penchant for martyrdom.
There is one last reflection that seems important to me and concerns a frequent technical distortion. It is not correct to generalize all of artificial intelligence by taking a specific language model as an exclusive reference—especially its free versions. Using ChatGPT is not the same as using the GPT model directly. Similarly, using Gemini's chat differs from exploring all the potentialities of the Gemini language model. Maximum extraction of the potential of these systems requires personalized execution, and this is precisely one of the tasks we develop at Lab Digital 2050.
AGI race heightens risks of military escalation & global cyberattacks.
A former White House advisor has warned about the potential dangers of developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and the risk of an arms race with China. According to him, the pursuit of control over AGI could lead to international conflicts. Experts fear that China might react aggressively to any attempt by the US to monopolize the technology.
The information was published by UOL on March 9, 2025, in the article Is Artificial General Intelligence arriving? It's hard to be certain. The article cites a document published by experts, including the former advisor, detailing concerns about an AI arms race.
Artificial General Intelligence differs from current AIs in its ability to perform any intellectual human task. This technological advancement represents a potential leap in the development of various fields but also raises concerns about its misuse, especially in conflict scenarios.
The document suggests that an attempt by the US to exclusively control AGI could provoke an aggressive response from China, such as a large-scale cyberattack. The experts argue that competition for AGI could destabilize international relations and increase the likelihood of conflict.
The concern lies in the possibility of AGI being used for the development of autonomous weapons and sophisticated cyberattacks, which could quickly escalate to direct confrontation. The experts advocate for international cooperation to ensure the safe and ethical development of AGI.
UFSC study shows prolonged tenure leads managers to favour conservative actions.
A recent study published in the *Revista Turismo, Visão e Ação* (RTVA) reveals that older managers with longer tenures in restaurants tend to be more risk-averse in their corporate decisions. The research, conducted by researchers at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), analyzed data from over 2,000 restaurants in Europe between 2014 and 2016.
The study, titled "Influence of Management Team Characteristics on Risk Decision-Making: Evidence from the Restaurant Sector," utilized the Amadeus database and employed the least squares method to analyze the relationship between manager characteristics – age, tenure, gender, and team size – and the companies' level of financial leverage, used as a risk-taking indicator.
The results showed a significant negative correlation between the age and tenure of managers and their propensity for risk. Older managers and those who had held the same position for a longer period demonstrated a preference for more conservative decisions, opting to maintain the status quo rather than adopting innovative or risky strategies.
Contrary to some expectations, the study found no significant relationship between the size of the management team or female participation and risk-taking. Although previous research has suggested a possible influence of these factors, the data analyzed did not confirm this hypothesis in the specific context of the restaurant industry.
The authors suggest that the risk aversion demonstrated by more experienced managers may be related to the prioritization of stability and the reputation built throughout their careers. Familiarity with the sector and a concern to preserve accumulated gains may lead them to avoid decisions that represent potential threats to the business.
The study's findings have significant implications for restaurant management. The research suggests that the composition of the management team can directly influence the strategy and performance of companies. Restaurants with younger managers may be more willing to innovate and take risks, while those led by more experienced managers may prioritize stability and financial security.
The researchers highlight the need for further studies to deepen the understanding of the relationship between manager characteristics and decision-making in restaurants. Investigating psychological factors, such as individual risk tolerance, and analyzing data from a longer period could enrich the discussion and provide more precise insights for the sector.
A sleepless night, rambling reflections, and a dash of humor on the dissonances of modern life.
I repeatedly fail. Even now, I failed in my intention to go to bed at 9:30 pm. For some reason akin to “what the hell! I don't sleep more than four hours anyway,” I surrendered to the drift of darkness. I fear a stern authority will weep to discipline me: “it’s not time to go to the bathroom.” Activities in general. The late-night chats have ended, covered in sand, disintegrated by a shock, incinerated. It’s a little sad. All that chaotic literature that brought me so many friends has gone mad, and speaks to itself in Mark's posts.
The book Maku sent me is well-written, of course, but it's read in super slow motion. The character begins to reveal herself through a desire to die. You don't find such honest people easily. Like toast with cream cheese and red fruit jam. It was the box, the jar. I switched to whipped cream. Whipped cream is foolproof.
This fractal, then: death and life explaining themselves poorly, speaking quickly and loudly, like Brazilian tourists with red lipstick and crossbody bags enchanting the world with smiling rudeness. My analysis, which follows, is sophisticated.
There are life’s discordances that are, it must be repeated, forces of nature. Discordances, in this text, are metaphorically Meryl Streep portraying Florence Foster Jenkins in the cinema, or any instrument that should vibrate a sublime "ooowooowooow," but ends up materializing Grandma Jephinha venturing off-key, without melody.
I like water because it doesn't waste time with stones or walls; it deviates, accepts a good tunnel, but, if necessary, breaks through everything. Water takes for itself lands that didn't even have a vocation for a swimming pool, resting there as a calamitous flood.
The regions of the world that are about to disappear need intellectual support to resolve issues of property, repatriation, and the return of predictable bureaucracies. You cannot erect an island on top of a two-story house; not even Japanese drainage cathedrals make a difference in the ocean. Such dangers equate our intelligence to nothing. Nature is one of the three notable sources of displeasure in Freudian psychoanalysis.
“And from all this out-of-tune instrument I was never an apprentice.” There's this verse in a Gabrielle Seraine lyric. And in her music too, when she sings “[out-of-]tune,” when she sings exactly “deceased,” the harmony shatters for a moment, like a little shit blowing a plastic flute. It's the valley before the peak, the “dark before the dawn.”
When the out-of-tune individual — the "medium" (of media, not of speaking to the dead) — emits noise, communication becomes clearer. Let's use the word "communication" as a future synonym for "spirit," a beautiful conception of Flusser's.
In the religions that deal with "spirits," note the similarity in the conduct of intentions: doors are opened and closed, people are stimulated to move their psyches, and even banal requests that are nothing more than predictable bureaucracies. One asks, promises, thanks, expels, infuses — all through the conjuring of human and intelligible words.
Accepting Jesus, renouncing Freemasonry, declaring victory, taking possession of the blessing, doing macumba for Dona Ida to die (children are very inventive) — all this requires speaking. From the spell of the Greek Father to the Seven Knocks on the Door of Grace prayer chain from Janine's people. Communication. Speech. Listening.
In some evangelical cults, faced with unsatisfactory communication, someone is likely to take on the role of the demoniac for the benefit of the group. The Catholic mass has so many communication resources that part of the sermon ends up being saved.
"Spirits" are an ancient, primitive subject. It was a way of keeping the dead nearby. Later, these dead became demons. History records in anthropological terms; I have here an original Frazer that I received from Luca. My point is: if spirits "are born" from domestic dead, it is natural that, before committing to events outside the home — speaking of spiritualist meetings, making wind — they are available in the family inventory.
There is power in psychoanalysis, in Transactional Analysis, in Narcotics Anonymous. But these endeavors require much more time, specialization, and opportunities for mistakes than can be achieved in a family, when a family is available. Family, of course, should be understood broadly.
A family that has understood the permanence of love, that has left the struggles for recognition for community practices, has a better chance of success in invoking powerful spirits.
The powerful spirit of the creator, for those who believe thus, has to make some difference. Is God dead? Don't be fooled. I write about communication. About conjuring, invoking, good communication. In the last line of the noise, "taking possession of the blessing," as well observed by Nina.
In Portuguese, "spirits" have been communication at least since 1976, when Cartola composed: "From each dead person, one will inherit only cynicism." From my tensioning, Flusser offers us a simplification: it's a lot of "spiritual battle" for little "talking like people."
Let's return. The relationship of the out-of-tune, the deceased — properly the word in question, noise, this thing that disturbs sleep — with clarity is not only poetry. The physics and computer engineering that support image generation proceed from the use of two very basic stages that do not harm each other.
To improve someone's skin in a photograph, you first need the caress of blurring, like a hyperope without glasses. Then, you have to add noise, something like an old TV without a signal. And then you can see better.
Thus, my suggestion for the group — laughter — is an appreciation of noise, along with a careful observation of the content of the disturbances. When this battery runs out, with more clarity, let us be arrogant in our pretensions of dignity.
Only I was going to write about something completely different. I'll make another post.
Lack of updates and context erodes reader trust.
A journalistic suite is the continuation of a news story in new articles that update previous ones. Something like: "Two people were injured in an accident"; then, "Men injured in accident undergo surgery"; further, "Men injured in accident discharged from hospital"; and finally, "Company responsible for accident involving injuries fined." All these sensational headlines relate to the same original event.
Not every type of news warrants a continuation. Some events and accomplishments have the momentum for a single appearance. However, to appear once or several times in the newspaper, the "thing" must truly be news, which basically means it's not advertising or propaganda – but that's a topic for another time.
In terms of format, a suite is no different from a new news story. After all, a continuation only exists when a new fact is revealed. But it's in style, from what I've observed, that the "marmita das suítes azedou" – meaning why they've lost momentum in recent years. ("Marmita das suítes azedou" is an idiom meaning roughly that the suites have gone stale or lost their appeal).
Let's take a police investigation as an example. Journalism of both good and poor quality is interested in criminal stories. However, in both types of quality, a flavor of vice remains, perhaps originating from the pleasure of "scooping" (when a journalist is the first to report something). It's a haste that hinders more than it helps: not infrequently, versions are presented that collaborate with a story one wants to tell, which may have nothing to do with what actually happened.
In the case of Armed man threatens Black youth in São Paulo, and police officer refuses to act because she's 'off-duty'; watch video (sense-based translation), for example. This is a story that quickly captured the attention of journalists and the public because a video proves not only the omission of a police officer but also her aggression against a young man. Here, whether the police officer was right or wrong is not under discussion. At the same time, due to the lack of suites, the broader context of the three-minute video was missing.
A story told because of its intriguing nature can yield minutes of viewership and an increase in website visitors. However, without continuity, it's shooting oneself in the foot. In 2023, the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report identified that Brazilians' trust in journalism is 43%, a decrease of 19 percentage points since 2015. Statistically, the downward trend may reach 41% in 2024. In this scenario, all resources of intelligence and integrity are welcome to improve these numbers.
Suites are an opportunity to assure the public that editorial choices represent, even if against the majority view, the vehicle's commitment to a story told from beginning to end, with all its nuances. For this, the editorial line as a whole, and even more so the reporters and editors, must approach investigative activity with the detachment of recounting things as they are, and not as they should be.
Introverted shift
The air of novelty that a New Year brings seems akin to the effect of renewing vows. It is, let's say, an opportunity. By analogy, a wedding ceremony itself is powerless to effect changes in a couple, in the sense of expanding trust and reciprocity, and the consequent happiness derived from these expansions. A ceremony in itself is nothing, but the couple's focus on achieving a better self-awareness is. With the new year, it's very similar.
It is entirely understandable to disregard the commercial calendar's timekeeping when one's intention is a free and fruitful life. A personal history should not (but often is) subjected to the mechanics of exhausting work: vacations, recesses, and holidays. Things of this category are very welcome, of course, but almost always correspond to the logic of industry and consumption. Hence the proverb: "The more you have, the less you are."
In these contexts, buying a new outfit for New Year's Eve can be an ambivalent act. On one hand, there's the obligation of purchase, the competition established with other party guests. On the other, there's a legitimate inclination towards self-care, and for the outward appearance to match the novelty of the innermost self.
To change the year within oneself requires a certain degree of the ridiculous. That is, to cross the line of the ridiculous. Instead of a costume, to dress in what truly corresponds to who one is. It's not about *pretending* to be, it's about being in essence. Something interesting is the fact that what one desires to be in the future can only be true if it is so right now. This is a very basic philosophical idea. It is also true that if something ceased to be, it is because it never truly was.
What I previously called ridiculous could also be called courage. To put on one's own shoes, to open one's chest: to think, speak, act, and celebrate from what one truly is, what always was, and will always be. But courage lies less in the behavioral aspect, which even a ham actor could interpret with utter cowardice, and much more in a permission for the individual spirit to communicate to the world what it came to do.
War Requires Illusion
This article isn't exactly hopeful at a cursory glance. It tends to make more sense when, through difficult conversation, we achieve some freedom to think and act about wars without the interference of armies. After all, those who promote war can do nothing for peace.
I remember my first lessons on World War II. Well, how could I forget them? At the time, I found it utterly unattractive to learn the years in which it began and ended. I considered the dates meaningless due to my inexperience in relating events. Moreover, my young age didn't differentiate between what fits into one, ten, or a hundred years.
Generally speaking, and for the sake of argument, the Second War followed the First. And it was called "world" because those who named it so considered the entire world to be limited to themselves. Elementary school knowledge that remains relevant today.
(Parenthesis: Those who lived through the 1990s know that, in terms of forensic pathology – people run over, stabbed, corpses in decomposition – television abundantly supplied us with violent images. In the city where I grew up, a woman drowned her two children in a well and then threw herself in after them. On the lunchtime news program, I watched the small bodies floating. Another case involved a daughter who, with the help of her girlfriend, killed her mother and grandmother. Not to mention the rape, murder, and robbery committed against an elderly woman living alone on Rua XV.)
Ultimately, those who died and those who killed had some kinship with someone close. They were, in any case, considered degenerate, not exactly counted as people. This is without mentioning national cases like the Candelária Massacre, the murder of Daniella Perez, and the murder of Índio Galdino. (End parenthesis)
This is my argument: it's difficult to impress a Brazilian child.
Those common murderers, though extremely dangerous, committed their crimes clandestinely. They were discovered, and then televised, arrested, lynched, or killed by the police. But what they told us about the extermination camps was entirely different, and often more terrifying. There was something wrong about multitudes being murdered in broad daylight.
What we know about the genocide of Jews is etched in black and white in our memories, both through photographs and the brilliant cinematic work *Schindler's List* (1993), directed by Steven Spielberg. Thanks to new technologies, some of these memories can touch us even more profoundly. Using digital resources, I myself colorized a photograph of child survivors of Auschwitz taken by Alexander Vorontsov.
It is difficult to look at them and say: “We despised their families to the utmost, we chose who would be enslaved and who would be killed and incinerated in our four gas chambers with crematoria.” Because that is precisely what we did, in the role of humans. Shouldering responsibility for that atrocity is a lifelong burden, and I don’t believe there’s any other way to deal with it than to carry it, with shame and remorse, until my last day.
Confronting this inhumanity, however, is not the same as stagnating in lament. It is precisely the opposite. And, to move forward even minimally, we must shed two convenient illusions. The first is that all responsibility can be attributed to the Führer. Let us, even if this discomfits us to almost unbearable levels, be consistent. No single man could have undertaken the Third Reich without assistance. In 1935, the Nazi Party enacted the racial discrimination laws, and Mr. Hitler was not alone – as official footage attests.
The other classic illusion is that the "world" of the Second World War did not prevent the genocide simply because it knew nothing. Now then. Upon further reflection, I don't even consider it an illusion anymore – since not every illusion is necessarily a misconception – but rather a blatant lie. With the illusion, we achieve a certain psychic relief, which frequently converts into proud satisfaction: "I would never have done something like that." With the lie, we maintained the idea that we possess a power that, in truth, we do not.
Since the Gulf War, another ridiculousity of the nineties, international military conflicts have also become television programs. This is not a figure of speech. Literally, wars are simultaneously television programs. One needs little intelligence – sometimes not even that – to understand that the images we consume are the creations of a single person. Someone holds the camera, chooses when to press REC, when to stop, from what position what he sees will be viewed, what enters or does not enter the frame. In the case of AI-generated content, someone will have to write the prompt. In this way, the media product of war integrates the general arsenal of war. Those with more or fewer resources to create and propagate stories consequently have more or less war power. It is fair to ask what the destructive reach of a weapon of this kind is.
Since the spontaneous constitution of a public sphere, and its progressive and irreversible decay, public opinion has been used to legitimize or delegitimize the actions of the State. If I convince Brazil that I am "good" and the other is "evil," then Brazilians tend to pressure their government in a specific direction, the product of which varies from support on digital social networks to proposals in the United Nations Security Council. Telling the best story, however, has nothing to do with telling the most accurate story. This quality criterion is restricted to citizens who are not easily moved by the appeals of the masses – people who, in each social circle, can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
On the path to the finally. So, if the world had known about the annihilation of humans in World War II, it would have acted to protect the Jews. I guarantee that with a clear mind, and three or four videos of the apocalypse in Palestine, one can guarantee with one hundred percent accuracy that it is a lie.
Not even the adequate terms to address war crimes in Palestine have been used appropriately in different parliaments around the world. The Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote that "the closer one looks, the more Netanyahu resembles Trump," in the worst sense. The article states that "about eighty percent of Israelis blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition government for the Hamas catastrophe, according to a poll by the Hebrew newspaper Maariv."
In Brazil, Congresswoman Carla Zambelli – a woman born to be a donkey and who will never become a mare – published an image depicting a US and Israeli eagle attacking a Palestinian rat. I am persuaded, by myself, not to expect this human project to grasp the enormity of its own bestiality.
Faced with nominal lists of thousands of civilians killed by Israel, the response of the “world” is so weak, languid, flaccid. Perhaps this is the moment for this awareness: we are incapable of preventing violence merely by knowing that violence exists. I am warning you now: in the coming hours, Palestinian children will be brutally murdered or maimed, and those who survive will have witnessed their families and friends explode. Knowing this changes absolutely nothing.
A few hours ago, a Palestinian boy went to retrieve a ball when a bombardment occurred directly behind him. His nephew’s back was injured. But the nephew is better off than Saleh al Qaraan, whose head was obliterated in the explosion.
Accustomed to daily encounters with animal posts on Instagram, I saw a tabby cat leap onto the lap of a Palestinian man, where the pale body of a dead child lay. The kitten nestled in, closing its eyes. This, alongside the mother, who, with the dead baby wrapped in white cloth, refused to cease kissing it. Or the countless videos of children experiencing panic attacks within hospitals.
On an individual level, my work or yours against the war seems insufficient. We cannot count on, at least not now, the prudence of the wise finding a space on the world leaders' agenda. But whether or not we defend Palestinian civilians, now, at every opportunity, speaks volumes about what we have learned about our own wickedness.
Reflection fosters new historical, sociological awareness to break cycles of religious, nationalist violence.
We could, with more than sufficient justification, spend the remainder of our miserable lives profoundly lamenting war. This wouldn't even seem inappropriate. Any human being who is troubled by murder has a high probability of being a decent person, even if they are grumpy. I propose yet another option: leaving the role of resignation to those who have retired from the work of creating the world.
It is naive to think that creation is a finished task. There is almost everything still to be done, especially regarding the consolidation of peace among peoples. This text may contain more or less than the necessary elements for clear support. Therefore, I anticipate and assure you that I am open to discussing it. I will avoid references and share only what lives within me.
The lynching of the innocent Jesus is, without a doubt, a testament to love. It is from this founding act of peace that the wheel of violence has spun in emptiness for two millennia. If, within us humans, there was a need to lacerate a body for the execution of a rite of passage, that desire was fulfilled. If Western civilization is founded on this act, and it is, then we can progress to the consciousness arising from this act: "What have we done?"
I have little or no desire, in fact none, to subject my reason to the religious interpretations of religious texts. In my conception of God, it is not even in his nature to promote small things or to privilege small groups. With this, I hope to have made explicit my conclusion that, regardless of religious perspective, if the human sacrifice of Christ is present, then we cannot—under any amendment—condone murder. This is, here, a sociological and historical issue more than a mystical one.
The Abrahamic schism between Jews and Muslims is also a sociological and historical issue, though not solely that. Father Abraham, what have you done? To delegate this civilizational question entirely to the realm of religion is tantamount to abdicating civilizational progress as a whole. One hundred percent of viewpoints on war founded on individual transcendence are invalid for a peace solution.
For us Christians, smoking that pipe has left our mouths askew. So many sermons and songs mentioning Israel, destined to occupy a certain origin of our faith, that now, when a country with the same name is at the center of a geopolitical dispute, we are tempted to solve the interpretation based on promises from our religion.
If the Bible holds any validity for Catholics and Protestants, in particular—and it does—I recommend a careful reading of the Book of Hebrews—my favorite, both for its excellent literary quality and its contribution to faith. Essentially, the text addresses the human system of violence containment that has failed miserably and presents a perspective of spiritual elevation through which every religious system unravels from a final sacrifice. This is when the ethnic, regional god of the Old Testament Israelites puts his universal plan into action. With the ethnic god, the ineffective methods of resolving human suffering also die, replaced by love.
This issue must be considered when constructing a Brazilian interpretation of the war in the Middle East. The influence of our religious beliefs on the political public sphere became even more noticeable in the last two presidential elections. If we want to make even minimal progress on the peace agenda, we must be able to redirect our individual emotions to more appropriate compartments. In this step, that which is undeniably transcendental must be subjected to a test of relevance: Does my perspective lead to murder? If so, that perspective should be accepted, respected internally, but disregarded for rational and public justification. One does not dialogue with murder. "Shall you kill?" "You shall not kill." End of discussion.
The guilt arising from murder, a problem we try to solve through submission to the divine plan of grace and other civilizational resources, may be nonexistent depending on the context in which death occurs. In wars, the murderer is integrated into an artificial mass formation, i.e., the army. In this adhesion to the army, the individual renounces his individual moral standard, which is replaced by the morality of the group. In this case, he can kill at will, without questioning why on earth he is doing it. Masses are dangerous formations, and their advantages, such as folklore, are nothing compared to their damage.
We have been steeped in violence for at least thirty-nine years, since I came into the world. To avoid losing sensitivity, I began to account for death using the International System of Units. In my calculations, we have had to bury approximately ninety-eight metric tons of human flesh provided by Hamas to the world. Competitively, Israel was even more generous in its banquet, serving us 450 metric tons of corpses—many still unburied. Complete solutions for the future of humanity, which resided in these people, have been reduced to rampant depression, when the brain turns off the light.
The stones of Passeio Público know that the nationalist and religious origins of the war quickly transformed into big business. Now, market rules prevail. This was never about a weakened United Nations. It is the negotiating ability of nations that is weakened, making diplomacy our barometer. The pathetic US veto of Brazil's resolution proposing humanitarian aid, followed by the pathetic offering of a new resolution by the same United States, led to the veto by Russia and China. The Israeli ambassador called for the resignation of the UN Secretary-General. We have the United States and Israel conversing only between themselves, while the rest of the world watches in stunned silence.
The basic constitution of a public sphere is formed by private individuals discussing based on reason. Rebellion is not reason. Submission is not reason. Intuition is not reason. Impulse is not reason. It is too early to estimate a date, but not to affirm that, in the face of such a humiliating defeat, global diplomacy will have to evolve its communicative and deliberative practices. We will have to elevate individuals above us who embody our trust in problem-solving—intelligent, ethical, and above all, creative leaders in their proposals.
Does Israel have the right to defend itself? No, it has the duty. Is Hamas a harmless confection? It doesn't seem different from a Rio militia, except for the planning, better weapons, and an ancestral grievance. Are they equivalent institutions? Regarding formal constitution, no. But in the decrepit character of murder, their results are not different, except for the sheer volume of bloodshed.
History records that Jews have been the object of irresponsible hatred perpetuated by numerous institutions. This hatred has manifested itself in different ways. Although it reached its apex in the Holocaust, it developed in more sophisticated—dare we say civilized—ways without losing its characteristic hatred. The creation of a state for this people, far from being mere acquiescence by the international community, does not hide the true purpose of countries keeping Jews away from their territories.
From the perspective of contemporary philosophy, the struggle for recognition lamentably culminates in the Jew. Exterminations targeting Black people, unrestrained foreigners, and all manner of unsubmissive individuals symbolically converge on the Jew. This interpretation is shared by authors who arrived at it independently. However, the Jew of the Bible, the Holocaust, and comedy is not the contemporary Israeli authority. This authority lacks unanimity even among Israelis themselves, let alone within the international community. Furthermore, an Israeli born in modern Israel is not necessarily Jewish.
If we have the liberty to question the historical content of the Pentateuch and other Jewish compendia—and we do—we can quickly arrive at the observation that their approaches disproportionately favor a messianic people who self-identify as chosen by God to rule over their brethren. Broadly and specifically, a fundamentalist Jew, similar to a fundamentalist Muslim, believes they are licensed to do as they please, because God not only authorizes but commands it. The entire salvific work that culminates, for Christians, in the death of Christ holds no validity for these fundamentalists; thus, for them, the wheel of violence revolves around their own special navel. While we shouldn't constrain another's religious belief—and we shouldn't—if that belief transgresses the civilizational code, we could at least count on the other's adherence to a discussion of the civilizational code.
The current Israeli government has the outward appearance of a state: it has a prime minister, elections, but its actions demonstrate that it is not a sufficiently developed democracy in its interactions with the world. This manifests as a refusal of dialogue. It is necessary to observe the emotional aspects of the relationship between Israel and the world. Even if the motivations intrinsically linked to the ethnic god and the practice of territorial conquest ordained by that god have been superseded, the emotional vestiges of these experiences remain. It is understandable, though lamentable, that present-day Israel is connected to the belligerence of its historical past.
As for Palestine, it is the new Jew—considering the philosophy of recognition mentioned earlier. Taken to its extreme, the idea that the abused has an immense potential to become the abuser could apply to a group, or even to mass behavior. Ten years from now, when I recall this war, unless something even worse surprises me, the image in my mind will be that of a Palestinian mother screaming that her children were hungry when they were murdered. The Palestinian people are subalternized in many ways and by many interests. Information about this people, presented in this article, is available as an annex on the YouTube channel Outras Terras Filmes (http://outrasterras.com.br).
Disturbing reflection on the Palestinian tragedy, the international role, and humanity's moral limits.
Some time ago, I searched for Palestine on Google Maps and found it in the middle of the ocean. At the time, I concluded that the world had ended, at least a certain project of the world, upon finding a people I love so much and who love me, drowned in the hatred in which someone, somewhere, had drowned them.
Today, after the murder of hundreds (the number is imprecise, but staggering) of Palestinians who were in a hospital, I realized that the world has ended for them, that the apocalypse, the end times, has arrived for those human beings. They witnessed shame, hunger, and then died.
Imagine with me. Suddenly, a foreign authority orders you to leave your home. Fleeing with nothing, your journey is one of thirst and hunger. Then you see rubble, dust, friends, and family sprawled on the ground, some dismembered, others unburied. Then you too die.
If this, which is true, does not also make it true that we have reached the end of the world, then what would constitute the end of the world? Natural disasters, however terrible, are at least honorable. No one can blame the volcano. Genocide with the support of religious groups is the end of the world.
The stance of the international community is insufficient. Humanity is excessively paralyzed in its reaction to wars; the powerful are not truly powerful. They are nothing more than men of the market! And a market of souls, as described in the Book of Revelation.
A genuine pursuit of coherence and personal change contrasts with empty, illusory market promises.
The invitation to transformation can stem from countless motivations. In business, for example, it might originate from the founders' or managers' need to increase productivity and, consequently, profits by creating a happiness-conducive environment. In government initiatives, boosting the morale of public servants and partners through a sense of security and recognition is a way to enhance creativity and accelerate project completion. These are legitimate motivations. However, these plans tend to fail miserably, despite excellent intentions, if the issuer of the invitation doesn't demonstrate that they have undergone the same transformations they propose, and that these transformations have brought them closer to a good life.
The term "good life" can be viewed from numerous perspectives, from the wise to the theoretical. It can be explored through the lenses of philosophy, democracy, and critical theory (Habermas is frequently associated with such research), but we are concerned with its accessible and humane version: a life that has found a sufficiently good path to lessen suffering. A life that suffers less is a good life.
Maturity, which clearly has little to do with age, always demands greater coherence. Coherence saves energy, saves time. The coherent universe uses its power to create lights, small and distant stars. Nature, coherent in its actions, doesn't think twice before unleashing the sea upon the continent when it must. One doesn't negotiate with a cyclone, with a volcanic eruption. Who has ever been able to schedule a meeting with the earth's depths and cancel an earthquake? The apparent chaos of the environment is, in truth, the coherence of life.
We, a fragile humanity facing the forces of nature and the suffering inflicted by others, learn, then, that coherence is an ally of life. It is coherent for an individual who believes themselves to be inferior to others to emit signals that organize the consummation of their perceptions. It is coherent for someone who believes, erroneously of course, that they are superior or better than others to construct scenarios that prove them right. The moral of the story is: every human life, wise to its very core, organizes the world to continue living. If the only way of life they have learned is one of subjugation, humiliation, and begging for affection, it is coherent to continue in that way, precisely to survive.
Civil defense, however, sends SMS alerts when the risk of severe storms is imminent. Receiving an invitation to transformation is like a civil defense alert. It's a warning that beliefs and behaviors are about to cause further harm. Is it possible to prevent it? Through coherence: most likely not. But it is possible to create contingency plans, future plans. It is possible to vacate dangerous areas of the soul, to move to higher, more sober, and refreshing landscapes.
As for me (in the following paragraphs, I choose not to use the traditional Freudian first-person plural), I no longer dare invite any brother (as I call other humans) to anything that might delay or interrupt their path.
Long before believing in improvements in the quality of analysis, research, or technique, I have a devotion to human freedom. It can go wherever it wants, and it will always have, whenever I am able and it is appropriate, my companionship.
If I possessed a universal truth, I would present it, and without any need for persuasion, it would be widely accepted. This is never the case, because what I understand as truth may make no sense whatsoever to my brother. But I have one truth or another, not universal, that is sometimes kind.
The truth is, I usually confess to my intellectual and political critics that I am in search of a map of coherence. And I can't wait to change my mind on what can be changed! In any case, I have accomplished the feat of being relevant to myself, which is a great deal. This saves me from falling for the rhetoric of imposters.
With this, I hope I have made it clear that I cannot, neither today nor in the future, promise that I have the revelation of a secret, an infallible method, a miracle that can bring laughter and money. I leave those promises to those who have experience with them: those who deceive and those who are deceived (and almost always pay, in money, for it). This does not, however, disqualify me as a salesperson. Under ethical conditions, as a telemarketing representative, I was the best at selling automatic debit payments at Tim Sul S/A, in some month of 2004, a year before starting my professional life in journalism.
When you hire me, you will remunerate me for what I can do for the transformation you seek for yourself and your business. And it will always be far more expensive than those who deceive. If coherence is a life differentiator, what more can be said of the market?
I am a little freer, and a little happier, today than I was yesterday. My realistic observation (although I am a serene pessimist) of life is a disillusioned sigh. When, at 15 years old, I suffered bitterly the end of a relationship that had been the best thing in my entire life, and that would never be repeated, because that was my only opportunity for happiness, and at that moment I only had to live in mourning until my solitary death, a friend who could have been my great-grandfather told me: “Vine, do you know what the advantage of being disillusioned is? It's not being deluded.”
At first, ceasing to believe in promises makes one uncomfortable. Later, it becomes a lifestyle so sincere, so honest, so coherent. I stopped demanding that others be what I expect them to be. And I don't care when they demand that I be what I am not. It goes in one ear and out the other. I still suffer, but in a good life, one that suffers less. In the end, who would have thought, I am a happy man, to the extent possible.
Honed intuition refines analysis, at emotional cost.
In Transactional Analysis (TA), the nagging feeling of suspicion, that "something's not right," is termed the "Little Professor" ego state. A contemporary translation might be "Little Professor." This version aligns with Eric Berne's aim to make TA accessible to children. When the Little Professor is brimming with cathexis, with psychic energy, we become aware of something unspoken. Faced with this psychic fact, we might say, "I think you need a hug." And the other replies, "Wow, I've been waiting for that for days."
Since we are dealing with the human mind, countless elements contribute to any analysis. I want to make it clear that the mere existence of this subjective reading device, this ego state, does not guarantee that the assessment of the circumstances is accurate, or even real.
I've often repeated an arrogant phrase from a political journalist: "Offering opinions is fine, but being right is even better." When the minimal scruple of the human condition exists and is heeded, even occasionally, the capacity, let's say, for prescience, is enriched. There's a price to pay for that.
"Discomfort is a frequent visitor," explains my TA supervisor, Maku de Almeida. As the quality of our observations improves and we discover that the Little Professor was right from the start, it's painful to admit that people we love so dearly still live miserably.
Fond, witty recall of neighborly life unveils joys, strife, ironies of past Christmases.
Godfather Pedro – the composite name for the dearly departed neighbor, Pedro Zotto. He and my grandfather, Jorge Camargo (Godfather Jorge in turn), built their houses in an undeveloped area of São José dos Pinhais, starting in the 1950s. They were such close friends that, besides their houses standing on corners of the same intersection of Avenida das Torres, they purchased mausoleums side-by-side for their retirement. Godfather Pedro moved to his final address some years ago. While the husbands were exceptionally close, their wives waged a perpetual war. Although comadres (godmothers to each other's children), they never missed a single opportunity to create the most hilarious chaos. "Very Crazy Neighbors," in their afternoon matinee. Their squabbles were so trivial that we always had the impression that, above all, the comical aspect prevailed. Comadre Ida also moved to her final address.
Both families endured the hardships characteristic of those who are poor yet possess a certain dignity. They were plundered, primarily, by religious ideas, by terrible illusions. For a lifetime, they attempted to resolve matters with spells: candles, prayer chains, alongside considerable religious intolerance. The only ones who remained unaffected by such nonsense were the godfathers, and the children.
One of the children's games I would have loved to have filmed was their weddings. There were bride and groom, parents of the couple, godparents, and of course, the priest. Juarez would secretly borrow Comadre Ida's black dress to use as a cassock. They also held exorcism ceremonies. On one occasion, the father of a child from the neighborhood saw his son playing a demon and lashed out with his belt. Not to mention the "macumba to die," which involved stones and some weeds. The freedom of childhood very quickly transformed into cultural imposition, and the games ended.
I count the dead, not a few, who leave me with both longing and anger. One of my neuroses is blaming the dead for their deaths; I do not forgive them for leaving me without them.
Last Christmas, Godfather Pedro's great-granddaughter was held in Godfather Jorge's arms. Jorge, as solid as an ancient oak, wept twice upon seeing the Zotto's old house demolished. And he wept again when he held the great-granddaughter, who is also his.
About thirty years ago, when the Christmas celebration was the same for those families of the heart, and the degeneration of life was in full swing, a relative of Godfather Pedro said to him a phrase that is repeated several times a year to this day:
—What a cursed Christmas, Pedro!
Controversial author during pandemic adopts media role, questioning psychoanalysis' science status.
Natalia Pasternak was a redhead who talked about coronavirus, as I recall from the pandemic. During the years she was on air, she lacked the foresight to acquire a proper camera and microphone. She was a journalistic source molded into a television personality, which is generally the rule for extended relationships with TV (Drauzio Varella, the benevolent doctor; Caco Barcellos, the infallible journalist; Gil do Vigor, the eccentric ex-BBB-economist).
I don't think that lady realized she was being used in the role of shrewish teacher (which she seems to play very well). She was useful as long as she granted immaculate seals of "science" to anything opposed to Bolsonaro (although any help against that president's ignorance was very welcome, anyway).
It doesn't take an infectious disease genius to state that dewormers aren't very effective against viruses. Moreover, it wasn't an intellectual or technical discussion, but the confrontation of a simultaneously biological and psychic health crisis. The journalistic framings, understandably, because we were all caught off guard, were almost always a separate disease.
Anyway, I challenge anyone to present me with a convert to Natalia's ideas (it's a figure of speech, don't waste your time). Is there anyone who, through the oracle (hm) of science (hm, 2) who spoke on Jornal Nacional, stopped taking chloroquine, or had the dignity to stop defecating early treatment through their mouth?
When science is placed in the role of god, whose perfection is an inseparable attribute, it merely changes the language of a religious experience, and, fatally, becomes a religion and denies itself. Science is expected to be able to refine Newton's Laws into the Theory of Relativity (in this case of physics, it is a substantial change).
Faced with the impossibility of criticizing the "science" that forced us into masks and social distancing (I don't dare to argue whether it was right or wrong), without doubting it, liberation through rationality is reduced to yet another sect.
I take pride in having been publicly humiliated when I challenged the shrewish "science" of the pandemic. I suffered, you can laugh with me, an involuntary transfiguration. I appeared before my listeners with a square mustache and a Hugo Boss uniform. But that never happened, not in the pandemic, not before, nor will it ever happen, in the company of true people of reason. In the company of these people, I am encouraged to doubt my shadow (which has been acting a bit strange lately, by the way).
Natalia overstepped when she preached from her pulpit (her latest book) that psychoanalysis is not science. Not that it is, anyway. And even less that psychoanalysis cares about that. Except in very specific programs such as those found at the University of São Paulo (USP), State University of Campinas (Unicamp), and Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR), it's hard to imagine the "scientific" community, a Natalia of life, bothering to review their own existence while applying psychoanalysis to a research object (because this is an individual cost in research in the philosophy of psychoanalysis).
Brazil has internationally observed research in psychoanalysis. The country shares some fundamentals with the French. It has been a hundred years since the English tradition denies psychoanalysis the status of science. This tradition is so disgruntled that there seems to be no intention of stopping research – see the irony – scientifically into what is scientific about psychoanalysis. Meanwhile, the German tradition is to correct what it considers to be insufficiencies in psychoanalysis. But so. Either it didn't happen or there is no record of shrewish behavior.
What can be written against Natalia's ravenous prejudice is in the latest publication by the full professor of Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology at USP, Christian Dunker. It's the latest gossip from the coronavirus-scientific-world. This group is to science what the Lava Jato coverage is to journalism.
Natalia Pasternak is the Mara Maravilha of psychoanalysis.
Nominations to the STF reignite public debate, demanding reflection on religion and politics in Brazilian democracy
When I heard, under the administration of the evangelical couple Bolsonaro and Michelle, about a Supreme Court Justice described as "terribly evangelical," I felt shame and fear. The shame pertained to the utilitarian practice of religion, whereby significant theologies, both large and small, are reduced to the opening of yet another unique branch of the latest global church in the neighborhood, or transformed into a political party.
One of the preliminary findings of my latest philosophical research is that Brazilian Pentecostals obtained "authorization" to participate in the public sphere, in their "Bible caucus" form, on the condition that they do not effectively integrate into the political culture except as a voting base.
This finding is based on the fact that, since the Constituent Assembly, speeches and texts funded by Brazilian taxpayers' money have been used to promote agendas of little or no significance, such as the obsession with sexual freedom and the poignant question of the end of the world.
The agreement with the current political power is that anything can be preached from the pulpit, at any cost (whether true or false, objective reality or childish fantasy, it doesn't matter), as long as that preaching favors obtaining votes.
In 2023, very sadly, Pentecostals holding office or employed in cabinets of this kind are not expected to contribute – broadly speaking, in general – to the promotion of public policies and the maintenance of dialogue. Even less are they expected to surprise us with any examination of conscience that would make them reflect on what they do with the cherished role we attribute to them. It is striking that we hold such affection for Pentecostals while they disdain us.
The fear I felt, on the other hand, was that the phrase "terribly evangelical," which expressed an arrogant and provocative stance, would worsen the quality of dialogue among Brazilians, which at that point was at extremely low levels. While the shame had to do with my intellectual and pacifist stance (something more individual), the fear was projected onto what is experienced in terms of the country. As it is expected that the worst fear will overcome us, the communication bridges between those who still believe in community life and the Pentecostals are shattered.
It will be necessary for Pentecostals, marked by their subjection to cultural imprisonment, the enslavement of ignorance, and, for these and other reasons, also subjected to an impressive amount of violence of many kinds, to give a sign that they are willing to collaborate with a balanced future. From our (my) side, patience has run out. Moreover, the patience of evangelicals with their leaders has run out.
Meanwhile, in terms of appointments, it is important to remember the consequences of that "terribly evangelical" comment. Another Supreme Court Justice was appointed by a president "demonized" by fundamentalists. This is Lula's ninth appointment. With the appointments by Dilma and Temer, there are five more. That is, there is a terribly Brazilian collegiate body. Not to mention the Justice yet to arrive.
Psychoanalysis explains electoral involvement relies on individual capacity to cope with collective suffering.
The word democracy appears constantly in the news, often coupled with the reality that it is problematic. We agree with the visibility of the topic, as well as with the reinforcement that "it is the best model among all political models, which, including democracy, are flawed".
When we research political communication in Brazil, we are attentive to the need to create opportunities for voters to integrate into public debate, culminating in the vote cast at the ballot box. For this to be possible, it is first necessary for the Legislature to guarantee a minimum degree of trust in the democratic process.
But financial investment is also necessary. That is, the dissemination of state campaigns – from party propaganda to electoral court announcements – requires cutting-edge research and media production capable of engaging Brazilians, and all of this costs a significant amount of money. But the results are evident. The abstention rate in the second round of the 2022 presidential election was 20.95%, the lowest in 16 years.
In Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis, we can find a deeper reason for disinterest in politics. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), the Viennese psychoanalyst writes about the methods by which human beings seek to avoid suffering. One of them is precisely to abdicate social relations. This decision, however, drastically reduces the amount of possible satisfaction for the individual.
In other words, denying the existence of the other does offer some degree of security against pain, while at the same time the pleasures brought by the other, only accessible when we recognize the other's importance, become limited.
Nature is a risk to human life – global warming and the imminent disappearance of some islands in Tonga are proof of this. Science can help in this regard. Our bodies, destined for degeneration, are also a source of difficulties. Science can help in this regard. But none of these sufferings, according to Freud, is greater than that caused by our contact with other people.
It so happens that the practice of democracy requires the other; it requires deliberation. Science can help in this regard.
Former Paraná Health Secretary negotiates with prosecutors, potentially avoiding conviction impacting political rights.
Federal Congressman for Paraná, Beto Preto (PSD), has until Monday (17th) to accept or reject a deal with the Public Prosecutor's Office (MP). The summons was ordered by the 1st Court of Public Finance of Apucarana (PR), relating to a case of administrative impropriety.
As a condition for closing the case, the MP proposes that Preto compensate for damages and pay a fine of R$ 25,000. In the lawsuit, the prosecution points to losses to public funds caused by a fraudulent bidding process in 2013, amounting to R$ 127,194.43.
Beto Preto headed the Health Department in Paraná during the pandemic. It was then that he made a name for himself in the election that took him to Brasília. He is currently on Governor Ratinho Júnior's shortlist for succession to the Iguaçu Palace. If convicted of an act of impropriety, he could have his political rights suspended.
According to the Public Prosecutor's Office, Beto Preto, then president of the Intermunicipal Consortium of the Ivaí Valley (Cisvir), contributed to a bid-rigging scheme by assisting a criminal organization led by the deceased businessman Marcelo Cernescu.
The then-president approved a bidding procedure without considering several irregularities. The scheme involved, according to the MP, shell companies and the contracting of services considered unnecessary because they should have been provided directly by the public administration.
In the initial petition, the prosecution describes illegalities in the bidding process for the contracting of an object described as "unnecessary, costly, and flagrantly illegal".
Furthermore, the elements gathered in the investigation indicate that, to achieve the illicit objectives, regardless of the contracting municipality, a similar modus operandi was employed, consisting of a joint effort between public officials and businessmen of the group to "assemble" bidding processes for the contracting of an unnecessary, costly, and flagrantly illegal object, whose acts bear clear indications of concealment.
—Initial petition of the Public Prosecutor's Office.
For the MP, the items in the bidding process do not justify hiring a private company, and it is a mere artifice "unequivocally created for the diversion of money from public coffers".
Congressman Beto Preto even had his assets frozen, along with the other defendants. Due to a change in the Administrative Improbity Law approved in 2021, the judge in the case ordered the unfreezing of the assets.
Micro-doc reveals Jenin camp reality, a symbol of Palestinian resistance in the West Bank.
Ten Palestinians were killed and one hundred injured by Israeli military forces in one of the largest operations against Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp in years.
Israel has illegally occupied the West Bank, where Jenin is located, since 1967. This represents 56 years of illegal occupation, violating international law.
Palestinians are the largest refugee group in the world. They have lived in refugee status for 75 years, both abroad and within Palestine itself, without the right to return to their regions of origin or even to move freely within their own country.
Palestinians have the right to resist the illegal occupation, the expulsion from their homes, and the chronic violence to which they are subjected.
We, writer and journalist Cassiana Pizaia, and analyst and journalist Vinícius Sgarbe, produced a micro-documentary about Jenin over a year ago, following two trips to the Middle East.
UFPR academic event addresses Bolsonaro, Lava Jato, and digital media with current, in-depth research.
The relationship between former President Jair Messias Bolsonaro and distrust of electronic voting machines is the first work presented at the 2023 Dissertation Seminar of the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR). It is being conducted by researcher Isadora Raquel Rupp, under the supervision of Professor Luciana Panke, PhD. The Seminar is an annual public presentation that begins this Monday (26th), in person, at the Federal University's Communication Department headquarters in Curitiba (Rua Bom Jesus, 650), and runs until Wednesday (28th). On Tuesday and Wednesday, the seminar will be held online, via the Communication Graduate Program (PPGCOM) channel. Dr. Rodrigo Eduardo Botelho-Francisco, PhD, is responsible for the event, along with Dr. Carlos Marciano.
There are 14 works in total, from the Culture and Politics lines. This means a considerable variety of premises, research objects, and methods.
The investigations "Is culture political? Is politics culture? Analysis of the news framing of the themes in the period before and after the 2022 elections," by researcher Sharon Jeanine Abdalla; "Facade Journalism: rhetorical strategies on health in the program 'Os pingos nos is'," by researcher Karina Pierin Ernsen Alves; and "Operation Car Wash in political conversation: analysis of comments on the Gazeta do Povo YouTube channel," by this reporter, are, along with the debut presentation, from the Political Communication line. The advising professors are Prof. Dr. Carla Candida Rizzotto, Prof. Dr. Kelly Cristina de Souza Prudencio, and Prof. Dr. Rafael Cardoso Sampaio, respectively.
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Tragedy in Paraná school exposes daily terror of gun violence, its effects on learning environments.
Of the sand statue,
nothing will remain
after the high tide.
—"Areia," Helena Kolody.
Last week, I made a small painting of Our Lady, using watercolor pencils. I used three colors that blended well: sky blue, water green, and a skin tone similar to my own, a light brown. Looking closely, I think she is pregnant, and this surprised both of us. I used that same canvas, the same stiff, high-quality paper, to write the instructions for the course I taught on online reputation. That painting and those lecture notes were my greatest contributions to communication in recent years. That is, we are dealing with a visual surprise the pregnancy of a virgin lady and a surprise of wisdom that the worst among colleagues should speak of reputation.
We are all tired of the news, ladies and gentlemen. The numbers are there for anyone who wants to see them. Personally, I’ve joined those who avoid knowing what someone somewhere wants us to know. All of us with great editorial and artistic talent now prefer that petty thefts and the cruelest abandonments be dealt with within each family, because we have nothing to do with it. We were, in good times, deluded by a seductive literature of intelligence and future. But our proverbs very quickly turned into chasing after the wind. We didn't have time to savor the harem of our beauties, or to eat and drink from the fruits of our labor. We violently set off to chase the wind.
We failed gradually and miserably. We were not avenged against our perpetrators, we honored people who wish us dead, we were victims of breathless negotiations. They shove our kindness and mercy up our asses. We are nothing to our enemies but their f*ck toys, Olavão guarantees.
We are no longer interested in the number of deaths on the highway. They were never interested in our truths about traffic violence. We want the fiscal issues and the robberies of legislators to remain as they are, putrid wounds for those who operate them. Power and money have melted such beautiful people, people we would invite to be godparents to our children. We could have forgiven everything, we could have overcome this difficult moment together, but now they have killed Helena Kolody.
Former student invades school and shoots student dead in Cambé, Paraná
Writer Cassiana Pizaia recorded the following on the subject:
"Helena Kolody School, in Cambé, is two blocks from the house where I grew up and lived until I finished college. Seeing students and teachers walking up and down the street was part of the daily life of a peaceful neighborhood.
Someone entering the school armed, killing a 16-year-old girl, injuring and threatening students is the inconceivable and unacceptable rupture of decades of normalcy, of everything that is believed to be the school space.
It is not an isolated case, a consequence only of a sick mind. It is replicated barbarism, stimulated by violent practices and discourses, which needs to be understood and fought at its origin and in the condescending digital structures that feed and reward it.
My solidarity to the families of the victims and to the community of Helena Kolody School and Cambé, forced to experience such horror".
Pioneering app streamlines complex adoptions, renewing hope for children lacking family prospects.
Brazil's first app for the adoption of children and teenagers is celebrating its fifth anniversary. The anniversary is being marked with a ceremony in the plenary of the Court of Justice of the State of Paraná (TJPR), bringing together founders, professionals, volunteers, and judicial authorities. The launch date of A.dot, May 25th, is also National Adoption Day. The event is being streamed online so that the A.dot network, now present in nine states across the country, can participate. Watch the full ceremony.
The President of the State Judiciary Commission for Adoption (Ceja) of Paraná and founder of A.dot, Substitute Judge Sérgio Kreuz, is the first to speak. He says that "A.dot is a project that involves not only public authorities, such as the Court of Justice, but also civil society. Indeed, as enshrined in Article 227, it is the duty of the family, society, and the State to ensure the child's right to have, to live, and to grow in a family environment".
He explains that "only those children and teenagers who no longer have any chance of adoption through traditional channels are included in the app. In other words, they are already there because they haven't found prospective parents in the national, state, or local registry. Therefore, these are extremely difficult adoptions that would normally not happen".
And he celebrates that "845 children and teenagers have been featured on the app during this period [of five years], many of them with disabilities. We have confirmed adoptions data: 133 have been made through this app".
Kreuz moves the audience when he states that Paraná has more than four thousand children waiting for adoption, "who anxiously seek a family." He adds: "I always say that the child who is in a shelter is the poorest of the poor. Because this child has lost everything. They have lost their friends, lost their relatives, even lost their father and mother. So, it is up to us, as a society, as a State, to make every effort."
The presentation by journalist and A.dot creator, Adriana Milczevsky, begins with: "I want to tell you that if you hear any noise during my speech, it's my heart". She comments on the relationship between professional editorial production and A.dot. "There are many communicators within the group, and Dr. Sérgio believed, as we did, that communication is a tool for transformation. Through the app, more than one hundred lives have become sons and daughters".
Vice-president of the TJPR, Judge Joeci Machado Camargo, proposes the following reflection: "We all believe that we can bring a little happiness, that we can bring a little of our work. But not our bureaucratic work [...], but from our hearts. We see children here who, in one way or another, are sheltered. And when we leave here and look at the streets? We will find homeless children".
Narcissistic speech reveals fragility; Dallagnol blames nation for his setback.
The news outlets are right to broadcast live the pronouncements of the former prosecutor and former federal deputy for Paraná, Deltan Dallagnol, this Wednesday (17th), but they are right with the caveat that there might be something sadistic about it on a national network. The decision to strip him of his mandate came out yesterday, and he defended himself today. As is common knowledge, he was ousted by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), which divides the opinions of serious people. Some consider it a legal error, while others defend the interpretation and vote of Minister Benedito Gonçalves. In this text, that discussion is over.
I had just arrived home from a university commitment when I turned on the television and came face to face with Dallagnol, alongside a rather intriguing group, explaining to Brazilians that evil had triumphed in Brazil because he had lost in court. Blatant narcissism, megalomania, Protestant fundamentalism, a bit of everything? Or, on the contrary, the absence of anything at all?
Frankly, I was expecting a striking speech, but I had no idea how striking it would actually be. It’s a historical embarrassment, fit for use in psychoanalysis and political communication classes. Could it work to the point of restoring his ridiculously inflated prestige? It could. Especially from the people of my state, I can expect them to make him mayor of the capital (even without any experience in governing, but sufficiently white and resentful).
I'm not in the habit of celebrating blunders in public life. I'm ashamed when our authorities are investigated or arrested, or anything of that sort. So there's nothing to celebrate in the ousting of this gentleman, just as there's no lament, at least on my part. Perhaps they forgot to tell him how things work in politics. Or had all politicians suddenly forgotten the way Dallagnol referred to and scorned them? What was this guy expecting? Was it with this naiveté that he led Operation Car Wash?
From the perspective of some friends who not only support Dallagnol but also have little or no regard for the Workers' Party or Lula, vehemently opposing the latter two, moral practice also applies when it’s necessary to imprison (or kill) a dangerous individual. Judging by the hero's words today, it is absolutely moral to remove him from public life as long as he is incapable of understanding that politics is a communal experience, and that what matters is what the other person thinks. That this is how things are built.
Setting himself up as a hero, this man’s speech doesn’t offend me, but it worries me in civilizational terms. Once again, a "brother", an equal, a "piece of shit like us", rants: "I will save you". Sir, I and the people I know didn't ask you for anything. You compared yourself to Joseph of Egypt (a round of applause for the Record TV series!), to Jesus. You know what you're missing? Reading the Gospels a bit more. There's something you interpreted à la Car Wash in the biblical text, if you know what I mean.
In recent weeks, I've been leaning toward the psychological perspectives of leaders' choices. Broadly speaking, those who are elected to govern run enormous risks – including that of being assassinated (e.g., Bolsonaro's stabbing). Becoming a passion of the masses requires offering them protection and assistance. When these elements become scarce or cease, and that leadership is no longer useful (after garnering more than 300,000 votes for a party, for example), then they are lynched by those who lauded them. On this point, there is indeed a connection with Jesus, because he was crucified by those who received him with palm branches.
The same press that reported Dallagnol as the country's salvation now exposes him in a humiliating role of a crying child. "But this only happens to me", "why don't they do this to Gilmar?", "even Beto Richa has a mandate". Then he transitions to a furious critical stance through which he will supposedly deliver all of Brazil from an evil he fears.
If we take it as truth that individuals are responsible for their own paths, we can then ask ourselves the child's question: "why does Beto Richa have a mandate and Dallagnol is ousted?".
Amidst awe and pushback, Freud's legacy endures, inspiring free psychoanalytic training.
Does Freud explain? Or does even Freud not explain? The fact is that the Viennese psychoanalyst is no longer alive to provide the explanations we might desire. Recently, reading one of his books, I encountered a witty footnote, something like this: “Couples can bond through love and violence. We must be prepared for this, because not all of us will be like that peasant woman who complains that her husband no longer loves her because he hasn't beaten her in two weeks”. Freudian literature is far from tedious.
The author is widely renowned, from psychoanalytic communities to the scientific academy, and in individual reading projects. To some, a sincere and generous genius, to others, a "madman". For anyone with any decent exposure to psychoanalysis, it is understood, regarding the previous point, that it doesn't really matter. For every great light, there exists a correspondingly great darkness. And, let's agree, one shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. "And it's all good", psychoanalyst Áurea Moneo (pictured below) would say with a smile. She is a professor of psychoanalysts in training, and a supervisor for practicing analysts.
Vinícius Sgarbe: Dear Áurea, I think there's tremendous power in psychoanalysis, as well as in anything else firmly believed in. Sometimes, I find quotes attributed to Freud online that he certainly never said or wrote. But it hardly affects me because I'm not consumed by jealousy. I think at this point, any help is welcome. Besides, Freud doesn't pay me to be his brand police—laughs. Tell me, my friend, how's your psychoanalysis going?
Áurea Moneo: Dear Vinicius, I believe that after so much time, the fact that he is still so remembered, with various quotes attributed to him, most of them typical of our contemporary era, is a clear sign of his brilliance. Perhaps one of the few icons who deserves such reverence, both from those who hate him because they don't allow themselves to admire him, and from those who genuinely admire him. He remains, more alive than ever, in our memory. And, in these times of narrative construction, he continues to fuel the desires of the unconscious, validating the words of anonymous authors.
Training of the Psychoanalyst To become a psychoanalyst, one doesn't need much more than an irremediable curiosity about people. That is, what drives training is the investigation of one's own life, where everything begins, and then of the scenarios around us, which are often, if not always, full of "others".
Broadly speaking, Freud is a starting point, a cartography for exploring wisdom and science. Is Freud the last word? Obviously not. Are other authors welcome? It depends on the author—laughs—but they are appreciated, of course.
Public Lecture This Thursday (11th) and next Thursday (18th), at 7:30 pm, Illumen, a center for training in clinical psychoanalysis, is promoting public lectures on psychoanalytic training. The first is titled "Self-Knowledge: Visions of Psychoanalysis", presented by Professor Anamaria Racy. On the 18th, Áurea Moneo will speak on "Emotions and Illness." Participants must register at the link below. It will be online and free. To learn more about Illumen, visit the website.
Informational overload & digital urges worsen mental distress & impair real human bonds.
Amidst the discussion surrounding "freedom of expression", and in the presence of relatives who believe that regulating the internet in Brazil will turn the country communist (whatever that means to them at this point), I think that, with or without legislation, "silence is golden". A basic tenet of wisdom.
My idea is original because I wrote about it in November 2021, without Byung-Chul Han's current influence on me. The fact, therefore, undeniable, is that we are subjected to an informational outrage. Han advances on Foucault, arguing that we have moved from biopolitics to psychopolitics.
In the era of production lines, the individual was subjected to a social organization that impelled them, through biopolitical "orthopedics", to wake and sleep, eat and enjoy, to do everything necessary for the body to fulfill its shift. Now, production is immaterial.
We are accustomed to, have "naturalized", the role of entrepreneurs of ourselves. Have you updated your LinkedIn? And your Lattes? We lack the "peace to read a book"—a famous statement by an artist about the quantum of anguish. Who really knows how to rest in 2023?
If culture has brought us the benefit of the instantaneous, video calls, for example, at the same time we ask ourselves if there would be a need for video calls if the people we love were close, if there was really any benefit; certainly there was and there is a malaise.
Will we be minimally civilized enough to recognize that the internet causes us feelings diametrically opposed to happiness? If we have lost the ability to find common ground between people and groups, we have failed miserably. The networks, through our utmost fault, are sinister places.
How much do platforms have to do with this? How can we hold accountable the producers who have discovered their talent in capturing audiences and generating income with content? It's both admirable and humiliating that influencers have overtaken journalism. But this recklessness is costing us dearly.
I don't think it's necessary to insist that the matter is extremely serious, urgent, and relevant, because I am persuaded that we are in the same boat. What can differentiate us is the reaction to the hole in the hull: some build lifeboats (I am of this lineage), others wait for a miracle.
The Bill mentioned in the first paragraph can be read in full.
Watch the Fantástico report "Perverse Challenges: How the Discord app became a tool to involve teenagers in an underworld of extreme violence".
Deep team insight fosters effective talks, boosting tangible business outcomes.
Presenters Kael Moro, attorney-partner at Vanzin & Penteado, and Bruno Nassar, CEO of Lexnautas, interviewed analyst and researcher Vinícius Sgarbe for the videocast Conexão Empreendedorismo (Entrepreneurship Connection). Below are excerpts from the conversation, converted into an article.
Communication is a relatively new science (in terms of establishing a field of academic research), but it is present in all areas of life. We believe that its definition can vary, depending on the role of the definer. For medicine, there will be one bias, for law, another, and so on.
However, we agree that communication occurs in the present moment, between human beings. This happens through words, gestures, and elements of a vast set of expressions. In our view, communication is not the property of communication scholars, but of all of us.
Furthermore, we emphasize that communication, although a recently established science (we write about journalism in the 17th century, and public opinion in the 20th century), is the product of other fields refined over centuries, such as philosophy and political science. In any case, we consider that listening to the experiences of communication users is more important than an epistemology of communication. From books, cinema, television, and radio, all conceived for mass distribution, to the interlocutor of artificial intelligence, users are the "owners" of communication.
We believe that it is a fundamental science for understanding social interactions, which includes the limitations of these interactions. Knowledge and refinement of this science are essential to improve the results of human relationships that translate into a "good life".
We understand that a significant part of business activity is susceptible to automated behaviors. In other words, what is communicated in this condition escapes the rational and emotional intelligence of the individual.
As much as we insist—and sometimes with convincing arguments, brilliant in rhetoric—that we are acting freely, very often it is nothing more than a loop of unassimilated experiences. This is the case of the entrepreneur who, at the end of the day, concludes: "exactly what I didn't want to happen happened again".
It is in this context that self-knowledge comes into play: by knowing ourselves, we shed light on the dark areas of our lives. This invariably means breaking free from automatic behavior and, with a little more work, taking the reins of the business and of success.
Autonomous entrepreneurs (from the perspective of freedom of life) are recognized by their peers and are capable of managing teams. When we worry about things that cannot be solved (because they are fanciful or irrelevant problems, for example), we diminish the happiness and performance of teams. When we have an analytical perspective, instead of an embellished leadership performance, we become capable of saying: "all my plans become successes".
Productive dialogue between communication and philosophy enriches scientific research and improves societal understanding.
I present some considerations to the discussion on transdisciplinarity. These are grounded in the development of two research projects carried out in different fields, namely philosophy and communication. The topic has the potential to be quite interesting.
Simply put, transdisciplinarity occurs when distinct fields of science collaborate mutually. But they don't merely influence or mention each other; they work together and are modified in the process. For example, the artist Ana Bellenzier researched art (one field) within geography (another field). Let's return to my impressions.
My first research project examines the reception of political communication within the philosophy of psychoanalysis. This accumulation of words might make it sound more complex than it is: I am conducting a psychoanalysis of Brazil's digital democracy (the conclusions are concerning).
Contemporary philosophy has allowed itself to pay attention to political life, and I would note that this is done through notably pragmatic approaches. The electoral use of religion in Brazil and the Covid-19 pandemic are thematic examples. It is an opportunity to analyze the present time.
In this context, psychoanalyzing the relationship between the Brazilian voter and politics is welcome in philosophy. This is partly because there are authors common to philosophy, politics, and communication, such as Flusser and Habermas. This fluidity constitutes a bridge to communication.
The conversation between the scientific fields of philosophy and communication has proven rich and promising. They are connected fields, although their historical constitutions are separated by about two thousand years.
My second research project focuses on the communication of voters critical of the Supreme Federal Court and its ministers. Although communication research is a consequence of philosophy, political science, etc., it is now established as its own field.
This is where we ask ourselves: what is communicative about this communication research? What differentiates it from research in sociology or psychology? The answers to these questions can make communication and philosophy appear quite similar. Why?
The most striking characteristic of the field of communication is that it is a kind of intermediate space, an open forum, where all contributions about communication are welcome (except the opinions of influencers—laughter). And philosophy feels very comfortable in such spaces.
Philosopher clarifies ethics vs. morals, illuminating traditional and common concepts.
A "moralist" can send shivers down one's spine. The term is demoralized for some of us. However, someone who is a moralist by profession, a moral philosopher, is not necessarily a fanatical hypocrite. Note: for one line of research, "moral" and "ethics" are synonyms. That's something.
In his second book, Dr. Gustavo França discusses the constitution of morality, debating how much of this constitution is the result of ruptures or continuities. In this episode of Sgarbe News of the Day, the conversation is engaging.
For França, "all societies have had morality. Moreover, one thing people have never needed was philosophers to teach them morality. Even I never needed that. My morality doesn't come from Aristotle, nor from Kant, it comes from my mother, my grandmother".
At 93, Habermas analyzes digital platforms, reflecting on traditional media's challenges.
In a recent article, Jürgen Habermas writes "Reflections and Hypotheses on the Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere". He is the author of a philosophy that informs various fields of research. At 93, he adds platformization to his previous considerations.
Fellow research group member, Dr. Nilton Kleina, jokes that, given his advanced age and continued writing, "this is precarity"—laughter. Be that as it may, the text clearly and categorically argues that platforms must be held responsible for the content published on them. The discussion offers much to unpack, and we are outlining the first stitches.
Habermas (2022) defines "traditional media" and "new media", essentially, with the former being responsible for content and having a certain commitment to cognition and aesthetics, and the latter being marked by the internet, the fragmentation of the public stage, and platformization.
In the scenario he analyzes, traditional media has been anticipating fewer and fewer newspaper and magazine readers since the advent of television. That is, it is not exactly news that print media has been shrinking every year. Still, television is traditional media.
The internet and platforms grant users the possibility of publishing their own content—ideally without prior censorship and with equal access. This promise already faces practical adversities—due to widely known facts. Now, something may bother us even more.
Under philosophical observation at least since 1962 (the year of publication of "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere"), Habermas now turns to the storming of the Capitol. He argues that, while the apparent motives are unacceptable, the event is the product of decades of dissatisfaction among the American people with politics. Distrust of politicians and the press also occurs in Germany, and there are similar effects throughout Europe.
By analogy, the crisis in journalism ( declining readership, less advertising, poor reputation) can be seen as a revolt, in response to the words we exaggerated, the acts we failed to denounce, and the cruel omissions we made in the name of good.
The public and advertisers have distanced themselves from our newsrooms, but you know this too. Distant enough to understand that they don't need us, or that they want revenge on us, like an immaterial sovereign we ceased to serve. They may, however, want us without needing us. In any case, for the broadcast audience, journalists and journalism are not blameless.
It is urgent for us to make it clear that politicians and journalism may share the voters' discontent, but the State funds politics, while journalism is subject to, at the very least, unfair market demands.
We argue that journalism has been and is ready for editorial productions (news, investigations, debates, opinion pieces, documentaries, etc.) with fundamental values of technique and human development. It is necessary to differentiate: journalism is journalism, a political party is a political party.
The behavior of traditional media companies in the face of this scenario lacks mediation. They could opt for a crusade against the platforms, which would bring temporary results, or find, together with the platforms, a way to untie the knot. And to employ journalists.
UEPG prejudice act discussion reveals admin issues & social tensions in Ponta Grossa.
The ten "racists" of the State University of Ponta Grossa (UEPG, PR) inaugurate a type of news for which I have to abandon my restrictions on the use of quotation marks, so I can comment in peace. That is, the festival of "allegedly" has begun with a bang in this week's journalism.
I recorded a video about two major annoyances related to the news of the matter, not exactly about the matter itself. The journalism students were basically attending a lecture they found unpleasant, and they abused the group's trust by posting awful stickers.
Whether they were operating under the city's conservative banner, we don't know. In 2017, a city council member threatened to arrest a drag queen who had a show scheduled there. It may be that the city's water is contaminated with ignorance, and a little bit of what I call "wounded agro pride".
I find it possible and probable, however, that it is a case of immature sarcasm, since by choosing to study journalism they might have some appreciation for letters. I can argue on personal and psychoanalytic levels (following Wilfred Bion) about humor corroding prejudices, perhaps later.
The state's main TV station reported the matter, and became emotional about its own action of signing a joint statement with the Union against the students. As a viewer, I appreciate it, but I didn't ask for anything. I prefer an analytical anchor, with their feet on the ground.
Regarding the "complaint" of racism at UEPG, I feel obliged to ask: was it the Ombuds Office that received the prints? If the proceedings against the students are administrative, what was the administrative path of the complaint? Or are we dealing with a complaint based on a morality superior to the regulations?
Another aspect is the legal one. And the situation gets a little worse. Sarney, Cardoso, and Lula signed laws on the matter. Broadly speaking, the ten "racists" of Ponta Grossa need to i. have offended an ethnic group, a race, color, or religion; and ii. have had the intention to offend. What was the objective of the conduct? What was the intent?
Added to another seven agronomy individuals from the same university, there are 17 Ponta Grossa residents featured in the newspaper for being the mouth, the arm, the leg of Paraná's "caipira-ism" (rural backwardness). I reiterate my argument that the Paraná native of this ilk is not fascist, he's worse, he's a "caipira".
The "caipira" who should be offended in these terms is not the one from "Jeca's Sadness" (a Mazzaropi film, released in 1961). Those 17 are not worthy of carrying the bags of a man from the countryside. The "caipira" I'm referring to needs Bia de Luna: "The most beautiful stupidity, and ignorance by choice."
In a social psychoanalysis, in an organizational transactional analysis, in religious terms of the Christian faith, from these roles that I can and do occupy, I understand that Ponta Grossa is sick.
Discussion on narcissism in psychoanalysis, highlighting Freud's interpretation and the social and personal implications. Critique of Freud's association between narcissism and homosexuality and the importance of contextualizing his theories. Analysis of the impact of narcissism on interpersonal relationships and mental health.
Narcissism is, to offer a simplified definition, the bare-bones, object-dependent provision. Further, for psychoanalysis, the narcissist makes of themselves their own object. When this is taken to its ultimate consequences, the individual can even become ill (both the individual and the system).
In a post-truth, postmodern world, there is a certain social appreciation for that which is capable of loving itself. Hollywood and Instagram preach "never give up on your dreams" (seriously, sometimes, give up). But that's okay.
Back in Vienna, a century ago, Freud left us with the dubious legacy of linking narcissism and homosexuality. Yikes. Then things get really messed up, as the writer Luca Rischbieter warns us whenever he can.
You might counter-argue that "for Viennese society at the beginning of the 20th century, homosexuality was considered an illness, so Freud cannot be judged by today's standards". Well. That's exactly what I'm trying to say.
If Freud's work is taken too literally, the reader runs the risk of missing the best of the theory. But how so? Hypothetically, let's put it this way so as not to frighten anyone, the individual has a submerged world within themselves, which not even they can access, the unconscious.
It turns out, however, that a significant portion, if not all, of an individual's decisions are made in the unconscious. Occasionally, but not infrequently, the one who has established themselves as their own object may have difficulty contributing to the community.
Not to mention that, crystal clear, a life that maintains infatuation, let's call it that, infatuation, with oneself to the point of being unable to recognize the other, also ends in divorces, misery, suicides.
The unconscious, the Id, those visceral experiences, everything that has been formed over the years, and very well hidden, requires a certain effort to be known. One of the techniques of psychoanalysis is to curse your mother (laughs). The narcissist of myth, the one who admires themselves, could then be "provoked" by the connection Freud makes between the "I deserve everything, and I am above everything" crowd with "go find a dick?".
Divergent views on life/death drive a wedge between fundamentalist Protestantism and psychoanalytic theory in Brazil.
Psychoanalysis doesn't demand a chair in the university. This doesn't mean it isn't a subject of research. Not surprisingly, Brazilian philosophy of psychoanalysis has an audience in many parts of the world. Right now, for example, at a seminar on public theology at the University of Edinburgh.
But what does public theology have to do with psychoanalysis? Well, that's a story that can be told in many ways. First, it would be necessary to define what public theology is, or even democratic theology. Basically, we have to look at the political use of religion.
Without unnecessary scruples, let's be direct. The Brazilian case that is highlighted in Scotland goes through the evangelical uprising in defense of Bolsonaro. We understand that religion, far from being replaced by a primacy of reason, as Freud wanted, is an inextinguishable part of life.
It so happens that two, let's say, conflicting things have their origins around the same time in the post-World War I era. One is the psychedelic version of Protestant Christianity, whose followers believe the world will end after a "rapture". And the other is psychoanalysis.
These two worldviews are proposed solutions to the problem of death. Both are motivated by the same thing, the fear of death, although they arrive at totally different, and, let's repeat, conflicting conclusions.
For an evangelical of that ilk, it is reasonable to tell a child that masturbation is a sin, while Freud and psychoanalysis are cursed. And, let us confess our sins, brothers and sisters, a psychoanalyst will have difficulty taking an evangelical seriously. Reciprocal prejudice.
But despite this, in 2023, it's easy to give a vote of confidence to the group that is less wrong.
Memoir reflects adolescent rejection as potent call to forge authentic self.
How much can you bear to be a whole man? How far will you go if you anguish when rejected by your eighth-grade classmates? When you take them into account, you repeat yourself as small and weak. You feel like half a rotten orange. More specifically. Part Fábio Jr. orange, part rotten fruit. So much so that few from the Ideal are intelligent enough to decipher.
As for the boys, Paulo would give you a free slap in the hallway during break. Years later, he'd record a gratitude video, unaware that he'd pierced both your kidneys with the same arrow; the gym teachers – two cretins – would take offense at your disrespect for the perfection of their diabetes; the weakling, the ugly one, the fag! And you, having to share your world with those kinds of shits.
You sent messages to the one you considered your friend, to tell him about your conversion to his religion, and were relegated to the role of irrelevance. He didn't even wish you'd go to hell to keep him company.
You remember perfectly the day Fernando told you: "I invite you to my party, but against the will of the majority, who want to forget you". That night, you were the embodiment of ridicule. Not only did you get dressed up to go to a place where you weren't welcome, but you wasted a Sprite and two books with terrible company.
Don't be the Ideal. And be grateful.
Sharp rise in cannabis prescriptions shows strong market growth in Brazil in just one year.
Since 2018, the sale of cannabis-based products has increased by 342.3%. Between 2021 and 2022, more than R$ 77 billion (approximately US$15.4 billion using an exchange rate of 5 BRL to 1 USD for illustrative purposes) were transacted. The figures are from a survey by the Cannabis & Health Portal released by Agência Brasil.
Last year, prescriptions increased by 487.8%. The number of doctors who recommended purchasing from pharmacies also rose, from 6,300 (2021) to 15,500 (2022).
The medical specialty with the highest number of prescriptions was neurology (33%), followed by psychiatry (26%), geriatrics (8%), general practice (5%), and orthopedics (3%).
5G tech advance menaces free TV signal in hundreds of cities; Paraná among most affected.
Low-income families in 439 Brazilian municipalities may lose their television signal after the implementation of 5G. 5G is a data transmission technology that promises extremely high speeds. Not all cell phones are equipped to use this technology. Even expensive and relatively new models are obsolete. The frequency used for 5G is the same one these families use to watch television.
The state with the highest number of at-risk municipalities is São Paulo (163), followed by Santa Catarina (36), and Paraná (33).
For families registered with the Single Registry for Social Programs of the Federal Government (CadÚnico) and currently have a working antenna, the federal government is providing free digital satellite dishes. According to the Ministry of Communications, about 1.5 million Brazilians meet these requirements.
International seminar examines religious impact on Brazilian elections, faith's link to political power.
Public theology is the topic of an international seminar at the University of Edinburgh, led by Dr. Ulrich Schmiedel. The Brazilian case of using religion for political purposes is being addressed by researchers Dr. Magali Cunha and Dr. Rudolf von Sinner. I highlight a statement by Dr. Cunha that combats prejudice against Protestants. Considered by some segments as the primary agents of contamination between state and religion in Brazil, historical records show that such contamination existed before evangelical churches.
Dr. Fatima Tofigui, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Religions of Qom, Iran, discusses the difference between "prophetic influence" and caliphate. For the former, the relationship with the invisible world is paramount, while for the latter, although based on prophetic words, the result of the experience is material power.
The central debate of Dr. Fatima's presentation is the legitimization of political authority based on prophetic words. One of the authors she cites, Mohammed Iqbal, defends Islam as a "religious experience" similar to others outside of Islam. Its meaning, therefore, would be restricted to an individual experience. This point would make it more difficult to maintain a divinely inspired democracy.
In the 1960s, authors wrote about theology and the Palestinian Cause, which has since ceased.
My contribution to the seminar is as follows. Prompted by Dr. Schmiedel, I attempted a definition of what "public theology" could be. I translate it into Portuguese below.
Public theology can be described as the amalgamation of the concepts of State, democracy, and spirituality. Nevertheless, it is crucial to inquire about the aspects that differentiate public theology from a theocratic state. In countries where religion holds a dominant position in the government, the term "public theology" may not be applicable as the prevailing theology is intrinsically associated with a specific religion. Hence, such theology cannot be categorized as public. Consequently, public theology belongs simultaneously to the State and the various spiritual experiences. Moreover, public theology is intimately connected to collective sentiment, which concerns the establishment of communities and the regulations that govern these communities (reviewed by Karine Porto Lopes Ono).
Public theology can be described as the fusion of the concepts of state, democracy, and spirituality. However, it is crucial to inquire about the aspects that differentiate public theology from a theocratic state, for example. In countries where religion holds a dominant position in the government, the term "public theology" may not be applicable, as the prevailing theology is intrinsically linked to a specific religion. Therefore, such theology cannot be categorized as public. Consequently, public theology belongs simultaneously to the State and to diverse spiritual experiences. Furthermore, public theology is intimately connected to collective sentiment, which concerns the establishment of communities and the regulations that govern these communities.
In 2017, Professors Dr. Kelly Prudencio and Dr. Carla Rizzoto organized the seminar "Mobilization of Public Opinion" at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR). In it, Recognition Theory and its derivations led to essential discussions in communication research that preceded the political phenomena of 2018. It was a kind of last gasp of rationality before the breakdown that often centered on religion.
What is Jair Bolsonaro's religion, for example? It is known that the former president took a side, and emphasized it through the performance of the former first lady, Michelle.
Whose responsibility is it to contain violence against women if not men's? Whose responsibility is it to combat racism if not white people's? Whose responsibility is it to combat fascism if not the fanatics'? And how can we persuade men, white people, and fanatics if not by talking to them? This is, for me, the dilemma of my century.
I consider the following verses by Vinicius de Moraes appropriate for this article.
Tell her I am deeply saddened, but I cannot go to meet her tonight.
Tell her there are millions of bodies to bury
Many cities to rebuild, much poverty in the world.
Tell her there is a child crying somewhere in the world
And the women are going mad, and legions of them are weeping
Longing for their men; tell her there is a void
In the eyes of the outcasts, and their thinness is extreme; tell her
That shame, dishonor, suicide haunt homes, and life must be regained.
Make her see that I must be alert, facing all paths
Ready to help, to love, to lie, to die if necessary.
A few days ago, I heard from a Bolsonaro supporter: "I'm starting to believe that the Bolsonaro supporter is worse than the PT supporter." To which I replied, "certainly the PT supporter is worse".
Pioneering Brazilian adoption app reaches milestone, fostering connections and building families.
A.dot has reached the milestone of 120 completed adoptions. The figure comes from the Court of Justice of the State of Paraná (TJPR), in the latest edition of its official report. A.dot is Brazil's first adoption app for children and adolescents, launched in May 2018. Due to bureaucratic issues, such as the notification model issued by the local courts, it is estimated that the number could be higher.
Available for iOS and Android platforms, access is restricted to those who are registered with the National Adoption and Foster Care System (SNA) of the National Council of Justice (CNJ). In this latest version of the app, verification is performed automatically, which consumed virtually all of the project's financial resources. Today, more than 12,000 users are authorized to access the platform.
In the first years of operation, the TJPR assigned teams to manually verify authorization to access profiles. Sending individual codes was a major headache at the time because, among other reasons, communication was done by email.
Between 2021 and 2022, the number of requests for initial meetings, when a prospective parent wants to meet the child in person, increased by 68%, from 138 to 232. Now in 2023, 46 trial cohabitation periods are underway.
A.dot gained national recognition after being featured on an episode of Globo Repórter.
Created as "a last chance" for profiles that deviate from the typical adoption requests (people with disabilities and sibling groups, in particular), the project faced setbacks. Even internally, there were concerns that the app might unnecessarily expose the children. This issue was completely overcome, and A.dot gained the attention of the Paraná State Council for the Rights of Children and Adolescents.
Two main challenges were top of mind: adherence to the Statute of the Child and Adolescent (ECA) and the General Data Protection Law (LGPD). In these and other instances, A.dot proved not only adequate to the requirements but also successful in terms of facilitating adoptions.
The application was created in partnership between the Conscious Adoption Support Group and the Court of Justice of Paraná (TJPR). The Group also promotes training for prospective adoptive parents, which is mandatory for adopters. Currently, this training is also undergoing digitization, using the Microsoft 365 platform.
Leading Brazilian journalist discusses challenges facing the profession in a project debating media's future.
In an interview with the Lab Jornalismo 2050® project, journalist Heródoto Barbeiro answers the question: "What is journalism?". The live stream was broadcast on the Outras Terras Filmes production company's channel last Friday (3rd). He was interviewed by me, Sgarbe. The ten questions and answers are also segmented in this playlist.
Heródoto was a professor of Brazilian history for over two decades before becoming a brilliant mind in journalism. He was one of the founders of Brazil's first all-news radio station, CBN. He also hosted, among other programs, the Roda Viva interview show on TV Cultura.
Heródoto's voice sounds familiar to me, and probably to most readers of this article. The enduring and serene admiration I have for him comes of age this year. In 2005, I listened to him daily on the national news while we prepared the CBN state news program. Even today, he says he conducts ten interviews a day. In other words, interviewing him is like celebrating Mass for the Pope.
Heródoto's spirit reminds me of Luiz Geraldo Mazza, a former political commentator for the local CBN. Regarding technology, Mazza used to say that there wasn't enough, that there needed to be more people doing live broadcasts of events. Both seem, in a Victorian and heroic way, unfazed by the advancements of platforms.
Critical look at the Left's moral retreat, ceding ground to digital opponents.
Why does the "far-right", as much of the media has agreed to label practically any disagreeable position—have so much more success on the internet than the left? To what extent have we, leftists, become the insufferable people we once sought to convert?
A classic poem by the author gains an audio setting, probing intimate feelings.
The day turned rainy.
The morning, however, was quite blue.
The day turned rainy.
Since morning I've been a little sad.
Anticipation? Sadness? Nothing at all?
I don't know: I was already sad upon waking.
The day turned rainy.
I know well: the penumbra of rain is elegant.
I know well: the sun oppresses, being so ordinary, an elegant person.
I know well: being susceptible to changes in light is not elegant.
But who told the sun or others that I want to be elegant?
Give me the blue sky and the visible sun.
Mist, rain, darkness—I have these within me.
Today I only want peace.
I would even love home, as long as I didn't have it.
I'm so eager for peace that I'm almost sleepy.
Let's not exaggerate!
I am indeed sleepy, without explanation.
The day turned rainy.
Affection? Tenderness? They are memories...
One must be a child to have them...
My lost dawn, my true blue sky!
The day turned rainy.
Pretty mouth of the caretaker's daughter,
Fruit pulp of a heart yet to be consumed...
When was that? I don't know...
In the blue of the morning...
The day turned rainy.
(PESSOA, 2016, p. 269)
Simple schedules prevent delays, boost output, build trust & enhance work ethic.
You may have heard someone say they wished the day had 48 hours. Those who say this are usually rushing to be late for their next appointment. This person may even live to apologize.
This is because they were the last to enter a meeting, because they couldn't arrive at the beginning of an important class, because they need more time to deliver a project agreed upon many days ago.
Being punctual may seem like a talent given to some, and lacking in others. But punctuality doesn't just depend on talent. On the contrary, what makes punctuality is order given to the things of the day. And it's something that can be learned and taught.
What do you think about arriving at an appointment scheduled for 9 a.m., only to be received an hour later? It will be difficult to find someone who likes to have their time abused by another person. And when we leave someone waiting for us? As much as our guest says "it's okay, no problem. There's no problem at all that you were late, I understand," they must have wondered if our time is really more important than theirs. Disregarding one's own time is already a bad thing.
Let alone the time of others, especially those who help us in our projects.
Having a planner is important for controlling commitments, tasks, and deadlines. A well-written planner helps prioritize activities, avoid forgetfulness, and increase productivity. Furthermore, it helps to organize a daily routine that translates into long-term goals. A planner can also be used to record ideas and jot down important insights during meetings and conversations. In short, having a planner at work is essential for gaining the trust of others.
From paper planners to electronic calendars, or group planners on the internet, planners are increasingly easy to use and integrate with cell phones and services like Amazon's Alexa. Therefore, as reminders are always close by, it becomes difficult, almost impossible, to miss an appointment. A simple planner can rewrite a professional life.
In the next column, we will talk about an elegant and assertive way to interrupt an appointment that has gone past the scheduled time.
Berne's method aids people and firms reinventing, facing inner truths.
When Eric Berne popularized Transactional Analysis, he introduced, among a host of theoretical and practical innovations, the possibility of accelerating voluntary processes of change. That is, given an okay position for both the client and the analyst, to make intentions for improvement a reality. A few days ago, I heard from a mentor: "You will never regret being kind". Or, from a supervisor: "In the end, what remains is the relationship between two people, between two human beings".
But despite this, Transactional Analysis sessions can and probably will disrupt things a bit before helping to resolve them. My perspective on this matter is that the simple act of ordering thought and action; the very simple act of repositioning what is more or less important; looking at how a day is divided as a portrait of how life is being divided; these elements already represent a considerable amount of work. Changing the order of things is like cloud seeding to induce rain. Truth, the very thing that compels us to be the best version of ourselves, is a force of nature, just like rain.
One cannot negotiate with floods and landslides, ask the volcano to wait a little longer because we haven't finished building the barrier. One cannot bargain with the gale to wait a while longer so that we can gather the laundry from the clothesline. One cannot hold back tears in the face of a Yanomami child with their ribs showing from hunger. Truth has the nature of natural tragedies. It doesn't ask permission to be true. It shows us life as it is, the world as it is, it shows you and me as we are when we are alone on our paths. All that darkness, which is the fear of abandonment, of aggression, of cruel words, all that darkness that makes us less divine in our relationships with others, all that darkness is dispelled by the truth.
Throughout my life, I have met some criminals (from a legal standpoint). Once, I asked one of them: "Why did you decide to go to jail?" He paid attention, and answered that he needed to find that answer. Our friendship began at that moment. They don't lie to me, and I don't lie to them either. With this, we are protected from each other. The truth, a force of nature, changes the landscape, cleanses the "viscous and dirty trail left by the impure sowers of hatred" (ESCRIVÁ DE BALAGUER, 2019, p. 25).
When truth manifests itself, one can expect an impressive amount of acid rain and thunder, like a violent eruption, or a most serene breeze accompanying the flight of a dandelion seed. But, whatever the case, it will occupy the appropriate space and definitively change the landscape. To improve is to face this force, to love it, to pray a novena asking for it to come soon.
Want to know more about how Transactional Analysis sessions can help you, your family, and your business finally find what you are looking for? If this is truly your moment of courage, schedule a time to talk about it.
Official data shows detailed view of the DF prison population, collected January 8-11, 2023.
The inmates in Brasília listed by the Federal District Penitentiary Administration Secretariat are separated, in the following chart, by sex and age. In the chart's first row, you can select which data you prefer to view. Three male inmates were removed from the sample due to inaccuracies in the Secretariat's report. The data refers to the period between January 8th and 11th, 2023.
Source: Department of Penitentiary Administration of the Federal District.
Reporter's Day: critical reflection warns of language impoverishment and profession's future challenges.
Journalist Fernando Rodrigues's post is a beautiful reflux on Reporter's Day. From now on, it integrates my sacred canon of the profession, like a Pauline letter with its dissonances.
Journalism, even if it doesn't utilize Critical Theory, from which one can name countless phenomena and behaviors, or any other theory, has within it a perspective on the world that asks objective questions, among which "why do we exist?".
The reporter of the future, unlike the pornographic (HAN, 2017), will have to, before very elaborate discussions, turn to vocabulary. It's as if the iconic vices of "summer vacationers" or "revelers" have gotten out of control.
Access to modest cultural products, like those offered by digital influencers, or even well-produced television programs with hyperboles that never end, or the impoverished rhymes of sertanejo music about an obsessive, if not violent, love, should be part of the repertoire. But, when these elements are the only lenses through which to see the world, there is no good communication, let alone journalism.
When U2 released the album "No Line On The Horizon", I commented to a songwriter friend that I had considered it sad, sadder than the previous one, back in 2008. Her answer struck me: "we are not getting better". "The Day of Creation", by Vinicius de Moraes:
On the contrary, we need to be logical, frequently dogmatic
We need to face the problem of moral and aesthetic positions
Be social, cultivate habits, laugh without wanting to and even make love without wanting to
Our profession requires more depth from us, not less. It requires more genuine empathy, not superficial talk about a subject that I don't even agree with that much, but I understand you (in reality, understanding nothing).
Suicide of the elderly, overcoming grief, childhood depression, pornography as a disease, bank violence are some of the topics that will be on the agenda-setting tomorrow. And they should not be treated with silly puns.
More like this: "Now that I am a complete man, I am full of emptiness".
Strength, reporters. Here, it continues like the Wild West
Scene of domestic desolation and haunting memories reveal the protagonist's intimate battles in the nineties.
The Saturday demons would come irrefragably, a reminder of the calamity of years past, when sandstorms, dragons, and beasts swept through the city, leaving an unmistakable trail of disaster. Since the Great Torment, in the mid-nineties, every seventh day of the week became a blister on the soul, so that on Saturdays, Xavier eternally retreated within himself and allowed himself to be consumed by shame for his extreme weakness, to the delight of his adversaries: counterfeit demons, to whom he offered respect more out of self-pity than fear.
The setting of this singular tragedy, the house, was a common cubicle made of accumulated bricks and clay tiles, its walls covered in concrete, quicklime, and overlapping coats of glossy paint. To the north, one side of the roof sloped down to the eaves in a design supported by three windows of oxidized iron and ambiguous glass, meant to block the wind and, with their quilted patterns, conceal the entrails of the small house.
Facing the first light of day, two gray-painted pine doors opened onto the kitchen and living room, which was more of a continuation of the former. The stove, the hanging cupboard, a table battered by the years, the blood-red pigmented floor. Another door from the kitchen to the living room, and there they were, obviously: furniture stained, varnished, sanded, re-stained, re-varnished, re-sanded, and paid for in installments.
The bookcase held the telephone, cheap picture frames, and knick-knacks gifted by cheerful friends. In its cabinets were boxes, and inside these more boxes, and inside these yet more boxes and folders with papers, bills to pay, receipts, report cards, newspaper clippings, diaries, love letters and trash, and dust, and recorded memories, important only to their owners. Beside it, the six-seat table for festive meals, for reading, for the makeshift office of a home managed by a systematic, detail-oriented mother, accountable for every word.
Then the hallway, from which flowed what were called three bedrooms and a bathroom. The sanctuary of a couple united despite controversial loves, notwithstanding the disenchantments of regular life; the room of Xavier and his younger brother, the parallel beds, the wardrobe, the place for the television. The television room. The family: father, mother, two sons, and the television.
To the south, a lean-to of asbestos fiber created the laundry room, or a covered back door, with a washing machine, and also where the third threshold to the kitchen was located. So many doors completing the sumptuous path of domestic inversions.
The outbuilding emerged from the backyard of overgrown grass and weeds, for in the mid-nineties there were still many backyards and one hundred and twenty-three orchards in the city. They lacked that grotesque pile of rotting beams and fiber roof battered by hailstorms, erected solely to protect the car from the mulberries that fell from the tree in the neighboring yard and also from bird droppings. After a few months of practice, the birds became so meticulous that they rarely missed the car, aiming their rears so that the droppings would pass through the holes made by the ice in the roof and hit the vehicle.
The brick wall seen at the far edge of the property was the ladder Xavier and his brother climbed to pick mulberries and play atop the rot, risking their lives on the most unstable ground of that touchy dwelling.
At the other extreme, where the facade faced the street, ran a low wall, and in a section of it, the small gate of old wood. Everything low, so any child could cross without the help of adults. All these elements – kitchen, television, shit, backyard – were planted behind the yellow ipê and bracatinga trees, two poor, unwavering, slender trees, lost in their immobile, vegetal form. Trees imprinted on the ground like a stamp, guaranteeing the transit of correspondence and eternally stretching with their long, slender branches, full of tiny leaves. The rectangle where the previous explanations fit, along with other rectangles, formed a neighborhood of new workers potentially controlled by the appropriate signification in each phase, and who in this last one had bought their own homes.
When everything was like this, exactly like this in every detail expanded by the repertoire and nature of signification of my readers, it was Saturday, mid-nineties, and the disaster announced itself when the day had passed. Due to the absurd displacement of signs and tropics, Xavier found himself alone as sulfurous, gaping fissures, illuminated by incandescent plasma, vomited forth unknown insects, mutations of wild wolves, and venomous reptiles. The heat melted every peace that had ever existed, the drought dried up every river, every vein of blood, until the viscera petrified.
(Continues)
Elections' backstage reflections raise queries on political aim, friendship, and digital future.
What campaign did we run, what did we “fight” for, what did we learn? My serene pessimism leads me to ask these and many other questions that bring to mind the book of Ecclesiastes. When Solomon, hypothetically speaking, concluded that there was nothing new under the sun, he had grown weary of the glory of wisdom. Therefore, we did more of the same, we fought for nothing, we learned more ways to maintain our point of view. But, wait a minute, ladies and gentlemen. That's not how I see it today, despite the evidence.
This Friday, we conclude the rounds of party political advertising, party alliances, the formation of political groups, the distribution of funds, election propaganda, the printing of papers. We launch ourselves, until Sunday, into that moment of suspension after an Olympic leap. The momentum, the bodily movements, the preparation, all have been given. Now, there's the wind of the news cycle, the gravity of the churches, a synapse or two dedicated to the protection of vital organs.
I found, within the 2022 electoral landscape, more specifically in the candidates and their associates, one whole man, one whole woman, perhaps a few more, but many of the living dead. That is, people who need a friend. Some years ago, almost twenty, during a formal meeting with artists from the city, I laughed so hard at a joke that I sprayed red wine over well-dressed people, furniture, and even the dog. That's when Dudson said "you need a friend" while helping me clean up the mess and quickly took me out of circulation for a moment.
I don't think I've stopped needing a friend. Not only do I need one, but I have enough to be that friend to others. You might ask "what did they spit on you, Sgarbe?". And it wasn't anything acidic or deadly, but a breath of old lady talcum powder. Personally, I adore the smell of well-cared-for elderly women, my God, how a well-coiffed crown inspires me! But I'm referring to a certain musty smell, a thick mildew, a colony of bacteria that might grow on an old piece of beet, every idea from the days of yore. That was the bad stretch of the race. But then, I looked up.
A few hours after the Webb sent us images of stars, I was passing through the darkness of Fabio's farm towards the banks of the Ivaí River. Encouraged by my friend, I looked up. And I felt totally alone before the Universe, except for the profound awareness of God. The bright, multicolored dots from the telescope were reproduced right there, before a flaccid neck craning towards the sky, with the naked eye. That's when I understood what my role in this year's election communication would be. Fabio proposes, among other things, that Paraná encourage and sponsor the opening of regional product stores in the metaverse. From the fetid old politics to the digital future, on an unpretentious trip to the North.
Author decries mass disruption in Curitiba, blasting rhetoric inciting further violence and bigotry.
No. This is not about normalizing the attacks we suffered with the interruption of Holy Mass in Curitiba last Saturday (5th). I even wonder. Do those who are not Catholic have any idea what a Mass is? It is God himself being killed again, it is communion with the sacrifice and with brothers and sisters in faith. It is a master reset of the founding act of civilization. I am not okay with interrupting Mass. No.
I am not okay with the feedback loop of violence against the individual, let alone against the individual's sacred space.
My parents wrote a book of blessings for me. Many pages with excerpts from the Scriptures, icons related to talents, love letters. When I showed it, a few years ago, to the analyst Michelle Thomé, she didn't touch that collage without first washing her hands. She leafed through it so carefully that it made me think: "that's how it's done". I imitate Michelle in this too. Yesterday, my sacred space was desecrated.
First, I know a powerful God who—for those who believe—was lynched while declaring his innocence. From Jesus Christ onward, the wheel of violence spins in the void. Or could the protesters (of the lowest category? Of course, but still protesters) have achieved the feat of disturbing an imperturbable God? If they have succeeded, I hereby surrender my Christian credentials.
No. Absolutely not. No way! My answer is no. I am not okay with the reaction of those who use the mark of Christ to murder. In my modest interpretation of Mosaic Law, "thou shalt not kill".
Yesterday, they stole my money, kicked my saint, burned my sacred ground, but it wasn't because they interrupted Mass. It was because I read—with these beautiful bright brown eyes I have—that "if someone had been armed at Mass, this wouldn't have happened". "This" what, murderer?
No. I am not okay knowing that there's someone in the world who is okay with emptying their gun into a Mass. Imagine the beautiful update to the Book of Acts. "When persecution came, the Christians started shooting".
No. Not this. Absolutely not.
Critique: News neglects depth, resorts to clichés, questioning relevance & trust erosion.
There's plenty of real-world data to support my hypothesis that the world is getting dumber. A reporter said this week that "the sun is shining in Cascavel" (it's been doing that for over 4 billion years). But you're here too. Maybe you've already noticed.
We have no more steps down to take.
Let's settle this matter once and for all, then. This same reporter said that "the city needs more latent action" in cleaning the plaza. I start my good morning with so much joy! 😂
I haven't watched TV in a long time.
Whenever I turn it on, it's just bad news.
Like Raimundos said in their song Liberdade de Expressão:
"I listen to the radio, and it's all crap, and on TV, there's nothing I like".
Deixa eu falar (name of the song).
What we have “achieved” is the realization that television journalism is retrograde, if not ridiculous. Disguised as Instagram, it manages to be even more ridiculous — to paraphrase Fernando Pessoa. The architect Fernando Camargo has just graduated from university. We have zero influence over him when it comes to news. His text, in the screenshot, is chilling.
The piece employs humor to show how skewed perceptions distort views of others' acts.
In the morning, as soon as he arrives in the kitchen for coffee, the husband finds his wife astonished, staring out the window.
—What a filthy neighbor! How can she be so slovenly? Look at the sheets on her clothesline, they're absolutely filthy! —she exclaims.
And it happens again, the next day. And the next.
—My love, have you seen how dirty the neighbor is? The sheets are all stained, what filth! —she insists, disapprovingly.
And the band plays on like this, time after time.
Until one day, the husband takes a cloth and cleans their windows. And those sheets become clean instantly.
British humour success: Philomena Cunk satirizes intellectual frailty, even within serious journalism.
Some years ago, Dr. Cida Stier took me along to a communications training session for Federal Highway Police officers. At the end of one of the theoretical phases, she proposed a roleplay (a kind of "theater" that simulates situations). The "cast" was a police officer and a reporter, with me playing the reporter. The scenario was: "a truck driver died in a rollover, there's a traffic interruption". In front of a large group, we proceeded as follows:
—Good morning, how are you? My name is Vinícius, I'm a reporter. What's your name?
After some back and forth, he gets to the point of telling me:
—A semi-truck rolled over. But we have little information, because we're on our way. — I ask: —Is the driver okay? — To which he responds: —Isn't he dead? — Not even the officer could finish the sentence without a hearty laugh. From then on, everyone laughed because, let's just say, the actors struggled a bit with the script.
I remember this episode when I watch the English character Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan), produced by the BBC. Philomena is an ignorant, yet equipped, documentarian. As a television presenter, her dialogues with interviewees are recorded on video. Her demeanor is absolutely exemplary: voice, clothing, gestures. But despite this, she's as thick as a brick. The episodes are memorable.
In one of them, she confuses King Arthur's "Camelot" with "cum a lot". In another, she films around Michelangelo's David and wonders if, due to its absence in the sculpture, people of that time had anuses. In the following one, she talks about George Orwell's predictions in the book "1984". She emphasizes that such predictions were made in the book using "nothing but words" – laughter.
Despite the BBC being one of the most prominent journalistic brands in the world, alongside ABC in the United States, TV Globo in Brazil, Deutsche Welle in Germany, and Franceinfo in France, Philomena's existence doesn't seem to me to be merely a comedic format. It is, above all, an invitation to learn to laugh at ourselves.
Some years ago, while visiting an advertising agency in Goiânia, the publicist Renato Monteiro told me that the first thing they did when a new ad project arrived was spend days crafting the most obvious interventions. If it was a campaign for funeral insurance, they'd come up with things like, "prices are dying to be seen", "buy before it's too late", or "who's going to worry about the nails in your coffin?" At that time, the job that was supposed to go on TV was selling a health plan for small businesses, with a minimum of seven employees. After the creative process, they had Snow White sign up for the plan. A brilliant piece!
In television journalism, there are many variables, as is common in all jobs subject to enormous pressures and instabilities. I believe that one of the biggest challenges in attracting and retaining talent is the organizational ability of reporters. Someone who can wake up every day at 4:00 am, start preparing for a news program that airs at 6:00 am an hour later, and repeat this activity daily for months or years, has a great chance of occupying the anchor position. For this reason alone, an exemplary employee would have been found. On the other hand, when the order variable is too rigid, creative work can sometimes be diminished. "Journalism is half business, half show", argued journalist Gladimir Nascimento.
Without hardship, without excessive narcissism, without power plays or psychological games out of control, with a sense of humor to laugh at oneself, television journalism can have intellectual survival.
You can watch Philomena on the BBC website and in a series that has just premiered on Netflix. The hashtag #philomenacunk on Instagram has some good clips.
Global outage on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp highlights media's vulnerability to Big Tech monopolies.
On the afternoon of last Monday (4th), three communication applications went offline worldwide. It’s unlikely that anyone missed it. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which reached the second, third, and fourth places, respectively, among the most downloaded globally in April of this year, suddenly stopped working – and took about seven hours to come back online.
The news – even on television – offered a technical explanation, which represents part of the problem. When reporters wrote or spoke about "DNS", they offered the public an engineering justification for the outage. We ask whether such information could effectively contribute to an individual's understanding of how the network functions.
Although the issue of "DNS", the digital address, summarizes, perhaps hastily, the reason for the problem, it is pertinent that the press discuss the aspect of big tech's responsibility in daily life. To what extent have individuals and companies become dependent on digital services for personal relationships and business practices?
Some headlines highlighted the decline in Mark Zuckerberg's fortune in the face of the access problem. Such fortune could be put to the test given the intention of compensation claims. For lawyer Kaique Yohan Kondraski Servo, however, "it would be difficult to prevail against Facebook, given the condition of fortuitous event or force majeure, which is what the platform defect resembles."
For some, being without these programs meant being "without Internet". With the Facebook failure, there was an increase in the number of complaints against telephone and internet providers. Some people even fiddled with their routers, trying to regain lost access.
In some phone plans, access to certain platforms is not charged. Even if the customer has no credit, they can continue browsing. This is "zero-rating", which has contributed to the idea of "walled gardens".
For the lead researcher of the Research Group on Political Communication and Digital Democracy (Compadd) at UFPR, Rafael Sampaio, "a change began to be felt starting with Web 2.0, when platforms started creating digital walls. People spend most of their time within these platforms. So, if that specific network stops working, the Internet as a whole also stops, in the user's experience".
What risks does this perception raise? How much do we, in the communications industry, contribute to the maintenance and even strengthening of these "walled gardens"?
Article urges Bolsonaro to firmly address Amazon violence after Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips' deaths.
Could the murders of Bruno and Dom be circumstantial? They could. Could the arrests be a charade orchestrated by organized crime? They could. Everything “could” be, has the potential to be. Even what we wouldn't want. But what we cannot do, President Bolsonaro, is instill cowardice in the Brazilian people.
I was barbarized — and it takes a great deal of barbarity to shock me, I'm a "serene pessimist" — upon hearing a little old lady, who is all love and service, ask: "But what were [the dead] doing in the Amazon?". Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
I understand, from Bolsonarista friends (of which I have many, and true friends at that), that the "average Brazilian", in their interpretation, is the one who asks these things. But, Mr. President, you are not an average Brazilian. You are the President of the Republic. For another four years?
I am often skeptical of the common grudges against you — this is a fact. I do not hate you, I don't even have a reason to (I am a scrutinized journalist), but I oppose any presidential action that is not in the direction of undoing closures with bloodshed.
Researchers cannot be blamed for researching. Moreover, it is "just and necessary" that they do so. I still don't understand why journalism (even if riddled with flaws of a basic, lexical, and syntactical nature) cannot serve a government (even so).
The deaths of these men lead me to a scenario where the lights go out, silence falls, and a band of amputees comes to grab our ankles to decide whether we will be devoured by their diseases. The wicked plant horrible warts on our faces.
Who will oppose a brilliant investigation? Who will oppose a rigorous punishment for the murderers or those who ordered the killings? Who will oppose a government that dismantles the incivility of human exploitation? Who will be offended by a "no!" to the market of souls?
President Bolsonaro, we have our differences, because I am much worse than you in practically every matter, but I invite you to give me governmental and social proof of what a "nation" is, after all. Make me itch to be nationalist.
Critical philosophical reflection decries online vulgarity; advocates restoring the sublime.
The infodemic is an unfortunate adjunct to Covid-19. For the World Health Organization (WHO), ignorance regarding the use of vaccines can mean life or death.
But this issue can be further stressed, because browsing the internet is like licking the floor of a purulent ICU.
Our rotten souls become a concern of social psychology, by which some of us can be classified as deceased. And who is vulnerable?
Compared to Instagram, Xvideos is naive. I am in the midst of an embarrassing read of the book "The Transparency Society", by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Initially, I thought that, based on the title, it would lead me to champion the causes of organized civil society regarding the transparency of public spending, or something along those lines. But, no.
The author steers clear of directly discussing politics, and makes me reflect on how shallow the images I access on digital networks are.
Let us remember that this is a philosophical discussion. If everyone is transparent, then everyone is equal in being transparent. Exhibition is productification, the commodity is a human being.
When "The Social Dilemma" documentary was recommended to me, I felt incredibly lazy. Everything I "have" to watch, that I "can't miss", is often a millennial generation hyperbole for anything. Whatever.
I wonder about the naiveté of those who didn't see Google begin to design social bubbles when it started presenting different results for the same search terms. A less cumbersome form of what would become the Facebook algorithm – a kind of special American sauce that nobody knows the recipe for.
Without the insolence of a moral recommendation, but in a movement for the return of the sublime, I think we would be happier in 2021 without encountering women trying cookie tea on the internet.
Marília Mendonça's music reveals marginalized female realities, questioning women's role in sertanejo.
A few years ago, I went to Superagui, on the Paraná coast, to spend New Year's. At that time, the island was full of interesting people. There are so many stories from those times. But one that has come back to me quite strongly now is the one about the woman with blue hair.
We were in the community's main square, an area no bigger than the living room of most of the wealthy people I've met in my life. We were drinking beer and cataia (a horrible cachaça that has a reputation for being hallucinogenic – but it's more hallucinogenic because it's cachaça than because of the leaves added to the recipe).
A haven for artists, journalists, and people who aren't bothered by the very simple accommodation and food, it wasn't uncommon to find someone there who had written with Paulo Leminski, another who had composed with Ivo Rodrigues, a multitude of homegrown poets, always someone with a guitar. It was then, talking to strangers, again, of course, that I said I didn't like country music. "The new stuff", I clarified.
A tall, thin woman in her early thirties, with very short blue hair, responded with laughter: "Did you know that the 'loose thread' on the suit jacket was a pubic hair?". We laughed a lot. Following that, she, very festively, talked about how country music, in her opinion, had an exclusively male framework. "The man is the protagonist all the time. If the woman rejects him, he doesn't respect her, he goes after her anyway".
For the blue-haired woman, women making music in a space that was exclusively male was a good thing, even if, well, the lyrics weren't exactly a paragon of beauty.
I kept that with me. I needed to think about it.
Years later, these days, it dawned on me how much women's music does a tremendous amount of good for my emotions, for my perceptions of the world. When I heard "Troca de Calçada" by Marília Mendonça, I remembered two things.
First, the prostitutes of Visconde de Guarapuava, in Curitiba, who work on a sidewalk. Then, the book A Ralé Brasileira (SOUZA, 2009) which deals with the "poor whore".
Chronicle unveils bureaucracy, high costs behind a common citizen's anonymous death in Curitiba.
Death stirs the imagination. Perhaps for this reason, there are so many assiduous readers of obituaries in newspapers. Through carelessness or malice, in today's edition, a near-namesake of the tragic playwright Nelson Rodrigues has died. “Nelson Rodrigues Chaves, 72, married to Teresa da Silva Rodrigues. Leaves children”. (Folha de S. Paulo, 06/17/07, pg. C6).
Was he Brazilian? What was his profession? Was he a doctor, an engineer, or a popcorn vendor? Perhaps he didn't even work and spent every afternoon by the window, next to a typewriter, reporting on the misfortunes of others and storing the papers in a cardboard box on top of the wardrobe. Or perhaps he had been convalescing for several months after bowel surgery when he discovered he had a degenerative disease that led to his death three months later.
Did he cheat on his wife? And if he did, did he enjoy it and do it again, or did he repent and confess? Did he steal anything, shoot anyone, fly to Europe, enjoy candied apples, buy cotton candy for the children, have a mutt named Bob? Did he collect stamps, fix everything with epoxy, hand-paint a collection of miniature pirate ships?
But the news is that the body of dear Nelson rests in the Vila Nova Esperança cemetery, in São Paulo, and here, in the land of Araucaria trees, people die too.
Thirty-eight kicked the bucket on Sunday while Curitiba slept on the couch after lunch. Housewives, epileptics, drowning victims, and the indigent, all “gone to a better place”, as the condolence book says. The data is from the Municipal Funeral Service (SFM) of the City Hall.
Dying is laborious and expensive. It's better to keep living. The Comunicare reporters went out to bury John Doe. John Doe, 23 years old, drug-addicted and prostituted.
The first task is to obtain the death certificate. If you die with medical assistance, it's one way; if you die alone, it's another way, and it's different if it's a violent death. We repeat, it's better to keep living. Since John was hit by a car, his body was taken to the Medical Examiner's Office. After that, with the certificate in hand, it's time to go to the Funeral Service. From there, you get the burial permit, a mandatory document for burial in any cemetery in the capital. Subtotal: the first headache.
John Doe now needs a coffin – well, his family does. And when the family doesn't exist or care, the State does. The price of this morbid product is set by the Funeral Service. There are 13 models, and prices range from R$171 to R$3,840. Off the price list, there are coffins of up to R$12,000, in solid imbuia wood, satin, lace, and golden handles. It depends on the client's taste, or the former client's taste. There are some for children, those who are too fat, those who are too tall.
It's worth advising that one should die without exceeding 80 kilos, otherwise, it's necessary to buy a special coffin, and that makes everything more expensive. Let's be very economical. The purchase of the cheapest coffin includes transporting the body to the funeral home, the "tamponamento" – as the filling of the body with cotton is called – the trip to the wake, and finally to the burial. But John's body needs a tanatopraxy – a type of embalming – which costs R$470. Subtotal: R$641 and some crying.
But John Doe was a very good man and deserves to be adorned with flowers to receive the last respects of his relatives and friends. Unpleasant-smelling chrysanthemums for R$144, a wreath of wilted flowers for R$120, and a tulle veil for R$15. Subtotal: R$279 and a sleepless night over the deceased.
In 1790, the creation of public cemeteries in Curitiba was first discussed. Before that, clergymen were buried in their chapels, the rich along with the clergymen, and the poor (including those who built the chapels) were buried six feet under wherever the body was least bothersome. Suburban burial – far from the town and in a shallow grave – required authorization in which the family committed to transferring their bones to a cemetery later.
And where will our dear friend be buried? If our friend were indigent, the State provides a place in the Santa Cândida Cemetery, and three years later, what's left of him goes to the ossuary. If he couldn't pay, the same applies. As that's not the case, for R$850, he gets a slot in parish cemeteries. But there are burial plots for up to R$14,000 to bury up to three people simultaneously. Since John Doe will have a modest farewell from the world of the living, let's put him in some cemetery named Saint Something. Subtotal: R$850 plus bureaucratic fees.
Farewell, John Doe. We’ll miss the money spent on your departure. Total: R$1,770, without any luxury.
Reflection explores balanced faith/reason, proposing healthy spirituality beyond structures.
We were talking in philosophy class about the scientist who leaves the laboratory and stops by Mass before going home. And I think about the respectful way we addressed this subject. Freud was also respectful enough to write about religion.
Although our dear psychoanalyst from Vienna regarded the relationship between religion and man as a “universal neurosis”, there are countless indications, for me, that he didn't lay his hands on the Spirit more than he could or should.
Being intelligent, rationalizing what is useful to rationalize, doesn't prohibit or contradict the experience of faith. Especially because, and we all know this, God is here, there, and everywhere, outside of time, doing His work, which is no small task.
Ethnic religion is one thing—the human impasse faced with another who may know what we don't, have what we don't—the “church signboard” is one thing. A life with God is something absurdly different. “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested”.
I also bring the terrible news that eternity has already begun, and that we will have to resolve things detail by detail until we are in the Glory of this earthly experience. Sooner or later, my brethren, we will be in a totally different project. And still together, one with another.
Article analyzes mutual respect, warning against psychological games in political discourse.
“I believe there is one story in the world, and only one. Humans are imprisoned – in their lives, thoughts, hungers and ambitions, in their greed and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too – in a web of good and evil. There is no other story. A man, after clearing away the dust and fragments of his life, will have left only the stark and clear questions: was it good or was it bad? Did I do well or poorly?”
“Why do we engage in psychological games?” asks the analysis. To which it replies, “to maintain frames of reference”. Let's elaborate, in other words. The unease one might feel during a political discussion indicates that there has been, to say the least, a triangulation of the roles we frequently resort to in order to maintain our worldview: that of hero, of victim (art will even incline towards "submission to the absurd"), or the one who sees themselves as favored, the one who "tells the truth to their face, no matter who it hurts, I speak my mind!". You played, you lost. There are no winners in this game. However, we bring the news that it is possible to express oneself, whatever the subject, without losing one's peace. Especially with peace at the price it is.
Evidently, philosophy, political communication, and psychology become urgently necessary for mediating the conflict that arises on digital social networks, in hallway conversations, or, oh what a bother, during family meals. When we write about such urgency, we refer to two things: the reinforcement of the practice of suspension, to try, at least, to understand the other according to their map (it's one of the things a therapist does during a session); and also a good dose of intellectual remedies against what cannot be overcome by reason.
It so happens that, although such reason refers – what a coincidence – to an idea of rationality, that is, of the possibility of reasonable justification, and that such reasonableness usually has science as its grammar, that is, a system that can be audited, it is not, and one might lament this, sufficient to encompass a significant portion of the electorate – which may include us.
We find it curious when they tell us "the electorate thinks such and such", as if academic or opinion polls were enough to explain things that today are a big banner of the "WhatsApp Uncle", but tomorrow, for this same dear Uncle, are worth less than dishwater. What we are suggesting is that there are things beyond algorithms, things that are older than language, older than speaking Portuguese.
Understanding others, in the sense of combining, adjusting the parts, is a key to fruitful political discussion. Given the precarious conditions of the digital platforms where these conversations take place, non-radicalization would be a great step forward.
When we opened this article with the theme "psychological games", it is because the resulting unease is what could be avoided. And it could be avoided in the following way: we don't enter into relationships with the intention of protecting ourselves, and we generally employ an enormous amount of energy for this purpose, but to transition to a state of grace, of intimacy, which is the opposite of playing psychological games, where one can be who they are without fear. It is to know without imposing.
The strangeness we feel has to do with a "bird's-eye view" gasping for air at the altitude. Do you like black, blue, colorful? You can express yourself, no problem. Regardless of who is your or our favorite, or which film director's work is relevant, no matter what it is, the dignity of the individual is a fundamental principle.
One should not, for very simple reasons of reciprocity, violate the space of the Brazilian taxpayer – who has been making untimely jokes for years, who occasionally overindulges in alcohol, who finds in the sound of the barbecue embers and the cell phone's ring the great soundtrack of the weekend – with accusations of lesser or greater intelligence, or even the absurdity of turning our ancestors into gods of extermination.
Furthermore, there is work. That is, there are things to be thought about, solved, implemented. There is a lot of work to be done, and if the individual cannot be who they are, we are lost. Then it's time to close up shop.
Sgarbe reflects on Freud, noting unease precedes theories; not all must be content.
In the first therapy session I ever attended, with psychologist and logotherapy professor Guilherme Falcão, I came to believe that "an approximation to science can be very dangerous, while a deep dive into it is not". I took this advice as truth.
I make this "opening" to argue that Freud and his unilateral, Viennese, Eurocentric, and century-old vision can sound strange when viewed from afar. Deep down, I think psychoanalysis serves some types of women and men just as pornography and conspiracy theories serve others.
I find in Freudian literature a contour in words for things I had already discovered through my own experience. There's nothing new, "it doesn't surprise us at all", as he likes to write. But it is, indeed, a relief in a world that insists on simplification.
Speaking languages, clarity in discourse, journalistic leads, even startup pitches, all of these serve social communication, but not necessarily communication itself. I argue that for certain aspects of life, especially those not published, a certain amount of repertoire is welcome.
Freud's bitterness in "Civilization and Its Discontents", for example, would it be capable of generating discontent in the reader? Of course not. Believing that this type of reading "gives" bad ideas is a bad idea. The fact is that it is a plural, rich library, capable of undoing any eventual excesses.
Last week, a close friend told me not to give so much importance to what is defended not only in science, but in rationalization as a whole. And it makes sense, because life can be a little more gelatinous, in the excellent sense of soft, sweet, colorful.
Reflection links fatal stress to modern politics, warning of passion's limits.
A woman I knew died because she couldn't control her nerves. On that morbid night, she argued until she lost her breath, recorded the fight with her cell phone, went to the hospital in an ambulance, and her heart stopped. Her name became an epitaph. For a lifetime, she couldn't cure herself of her neurosis.
I feel a sad pity when I remember her, and the role she occupies in this story. To be remembered, imagine, for the deadly degree of obstinacy, for taking to the ultimate consequences the pertinacity of conforming the world outside of her to the world within her. She failed miserably.
Politics reminds me of this behavior, in a good way and in a bad way. Good when we want better individual standards to be expanded to our families, and communities. Very bad when our world is a mess and we want to validate it at any cost.
The elections will not bring us the peace we seek so tirelessly (even though we apparently act in the opposite direction most of the time). Lula and Bolsonaro are, let's say, spokespersons for messages we hold onto so we have something to say, to defend, to be indignant about. And then what?
Our political vortex would need to stop being a vortex, to become fresh air that relieves our life in community. Cultural life, in which politics resides, exists to protect us from the forces of nature, and to constrain the lazy.
As for those of us who work, there would be little that would interest us in the lives of others beyond the choice of psychic, marital characters, or variations. However, we make ourselves hostages to our violence, and we have no solution for the phenomenon. We are like a controversial God.
This small animal that lives inside each of us, this primitive memory wants to bite, tear, kill, wants to argue to the death. Our peace cannot depend on politics, nor on medicine, or philosophy. Peace, I think, is very similar to faith.
Richa case shows dangers of political sycophancy, warning of isolation's consequences.
In January 2009, a few weeks after Beto Richa's reelection as mayor of Curitiba (77.2%), a woman fell from an overcrowded bus and died instantly. The way the newsroom learned about it was appalling. A listener called the radio station and said, "A woman died on the highway". To which the journalist asked, "Are you sure she's dead?". "Unless she can live without her head, she is," the listener retorted.
The news caused a commotion. The victim was a general services worker, on a bus route that had been showing signs of strain for quite some time, as it was excessively violent even by the standards of the capital. I myself attended the burial. It took place in a simple cemetery in the Metropolitan Region, with the deceased's colleagues in uniform, as if they had gone straight from the cafeteria to the funeral.
When the news reached José Wille's anchor desk at CBN Curitiba, the popular commentator Luiz Geraldo Mazza said something like this: "This woman's death is a result of the 77%". Not far from there, from the PSDB's jubilation over a record-breaking vote, an approval considered glorious, Richa went on to become governor of Paraná and, beyond that, to the back of a police van.
To this day, I haven't been presented with plausible reasons for Richa's arrest (I wrote for O Globo about the matter, more than once, which gives me a sense of the national press coverage on the subject). Whatever he did, he offended someone who doesn't take offense. A journalist who advised Richa during his time as mayor explained it this way: "The people around Richa isolated him. He lost his bearings, and he easily fell into what they wanted from him". It makes sense, because I heard something similar from Euclides Scalco. In fact, that morning Scalco was so unwell, so very unwell, that Hélio Pugliesi said to him, "Don't be so sad, my friend".
I think the bitter medicine is to avoid flatterers.
Article explores links 'tween journalism, psychiatry, social behaviors; unlocking novel communication perspectives.
I accepted Dr. Ana Babrilla's challenge to discuss these two subjects: journalism and psychiatry. Political communication in Latin America has been leaning towards this intersection, for example, the book that Chilean journalist Dr. Felipe Vergara Maldonado is writing with a European psychologist friend.
During the "1st Advanced Seminar on Political Communication" at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), I asked Maldonado which approach to psychotherapy was included in his research. He didn't know how to answer, which is an answer.
From psychoanalysis, which is unfathomable (so profound), to the simplification of behavioral theories, it is difficult to connect American lead-style journalism to psychic issues. It's not impossible. But it's difficult because the vastness invites hasty conclusions, such as giving some public figure the diagnosis of a mentally weak president.
Aren't the methodologies inherited from the social sciences, such as content and discourse analysis, sufficient to explain communicative phenomena? Yes and no. If it were exclusively yes, this article would be pointless.
Yes, because with such resources one can describe a multitude of emotions and feelings. No, because communication research may lack even deeper aspects, capable of making the contours of the objects clearer.
When Sigmund Freud draws a parallel between the worldviews recorded in history and the formation of the individual psyche [of the neurotic], he makes us look at animatism, animism, religion, and science.
Although animatism gains an exclusive name, it is often understood as a pre-animism phase. From pre-animism to religion, we deal, most importantly, with explaining the world under the "omnipotence of thought". Moreover, what precisely divides the first two phases is the outsourcing of the individual's understandings, in the figure of spirits, namely angels and demons. Witchcraft and magic belong in this paragraph.
When these worldviews are evoked, Freud uses the records that the anthropologist James Frazer made of totemic peoples, the aborigines of Oceania.
Julio Fachini, researcher of the philosophy of psychoanalysis:
As an observation, I mention that Freud identifies totemism in Melanesian, Polynesian, African, and American peoples, in addition to traces of totemism in several other cultures around the planet. For Freud, as for Frazer, and other anthropologists cited in Totem and Taboo (1913), the traces, vestiges, and inheritances of totemism seem to possess a character closer to the universal than limited to Australian aboriginal peoples.
It's more or less like this: what the human species experienced throughout history serves as a metaphor for personal development. That is to say, there is a "little aborigine" in each person, just as there is a "religious person" and a "scientist". Well, much more or less like this. Best-selling neuroscientists explain it with reptilian, limbic, and neocortex. Transactional analysis has a brilliant idea with Parent, Adult, and Child Ego States.
But it is only in the scientific phase, the last one, that one perceives the surrounding reality and conforms to it. It is when one stops making the Sun revolve around the Earth.
From here, one could discuss what post-truth is. The term has been vulgarly explained as the emotional and sentimental interest associated with a word or a text. From the psychoanalytic perspective, it is nothing new at all. Sad for journalism that didn't pay attention before.
It remains to be mentioned that the news audience is drugged, as can be proven by traces of cocaine in London's sewage or anti-inflammatory and antidepressant drugs in Curitiba's sewers.
France discusses "child psychiatry" almost every day. At the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, the government there provided ten therapy sessions for each child or young person between three and 17 years old.
There's something to think about regarding public behavior, isn't there?
Text critiques emotional TV anchor excesses, urging a return to classic journalism's best practices.
I am a viewer of a French channel, Franceinfo, which, for me, surpasses the BBC in visual terms, if not editorial. I pay attention to what they are doing (including having used the same soundtrack for a vignette that I used in my undergraduate project).
Here in Paraná, RPC innovated during the pandemic by showing all attempts to contact a source who didn't respond: something to be used as an international standard of quality. José Wille on Band is a relief. The Paraná Turismo channel is getting better and better at showcasing scenes from tourist spots in the countryside. What has been a bit off lately is the narrator saying "própia" instead of "própria".
But something that bothers me about local channels is the deficiency of the presenters — with rare and nameable exceptions. I reserve the right, however, to write that those who remain good at journalism belong to more "conservative" schools (lead, reasonable analysis, pertinent comments).
As a member of the journalistic community, far from my personal taste, I reaffirm the deficiency of the presenters.
It is crystal clear that languages change, and that it is necessary to speak the fluent idiom of each year. For these reasons, we started presenting the news standing up, we started saying "clica lá" instead of the correct "clique lá". And we also started begging to be accepted by the viewer.
A reporter mentioning what they "feel" about a subject should be a once-in-a-pope's-death occurrence. A natural event, a starving crowd, the state of alert after a bombing. But reporting that one has "sad news" for something inevitable, like a car accident, is an appeal detected by the audience, and one that shames the historical construction of journalism.
I presume there are influences from multiple directions. One is the internet's way of creating new "celebrities". But, dear reporter, you already have the station's brand. And putting on the whole act of being a "nice guy" hasn't helped the brand, nor the audience's perception of journalism. Therefore, let's return to Ivor Yorke's recommendation.
For Yorke, the television journalist presenter has to "display a certain arrogance". The translation is a tragedy because the word "arrogance" has negative connotations. However, I risk this paraphrase: "the television journalist cannot ask the audience what they want to know. He is the one who must know what the audience needs to know".
I will spare the "journalists" of a certain channel from having a live dialogue transcribed in this post that proves by A + B that television — although it didn't need to — is leaving something to be desired in the matter of repertoire, intelligence, and behavior.
Journalistic lab expands, supporting firms through organizational and personal change.
When we think about the name “Lab”, initially it had to do with experimental journalism. But not an experimental type unconcerned with market standards. The idea was to bring together these two things: the intellectual lineages of journalism, and the practices in broadcasting. We still think about this, because we believe in ways of doing, like precision journalism, solutions journalism, etc. But the Lab demanded for itself an irreversible change.
We began to realize that the transformations that are so dear to us in personal terms, always in the direction of happiness, were also possible in personal life projects, brands, and companies.
What kind of experiments are possible in such a broad laboratory? Well, this conversation could take a lifetime. So, let's go to our most orthodox laboratory test, which is historiographical. Who brought us to this moment?
Starting with the founders' parents, then the founders, the heirs, the people who passed through the firm—what does the history of these people have to do with what is lived today, or what relationship does it have with the challenges to be overcome? A company is strictly the people who work in it.
In this context, issues such as unhealthy leadership flows, inaccurate beliefs, small and large authorities with confused roles, recurrently arise. The price of transformation is extremely high. That is, eventually, with new music setting the rhythm, someone might get lost in the organizational choreography.
Transformation is the natural path of life, as well as something lucrative. Preventing or delaying it has no lasting effect. It is best that we are minimally prepared.
Learn a little more about our solutions in Organizational Transactional Analysis. Schedule a meeting.
WandaVision captivates with its deep narrative, exploring grief, personal fantasy, & universal emotional conflicts.
The WandaVision series took me by surprise, in a good way. I have a certain prejudice against superhero movies (a conservative thing), because they demand a level of knowledge I don't possess about the characters and because they frequently subscribe to the epilepsy lobby, with flashing lights and booming sound effects.
I enjoyed the weekly release, which makes me anticipate the next episode, contrary to the tendency to binge indefinitely. Every Friday, a new one comes out on Disney+. This break from the norm makes me pay more attention to the plot.
In short, a world is created by Wanda, based on her childhood experiences. Everything revolves around the creator; she lives in the fantasy of her own experiences and beliefs. Now, the provocation is that the non-hero individual does the same thing, doesn't he/she?
Or even more so. She is encouraged to undo the fiction she lives because it affects not only her own life but also the lives of those close to her. It's almost painful to think about it, isn't it?
One of the emotions that television can provoke is crying. I cried abundantly, profusely, silently, watching Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) go through a magnetic bowl and dissolve into countless versions of herself, a visual metaphor that brings me closer to the reality of Ego States, among other perceptions of the multitude of times within a single person.
WandaVision gives me a perspective on the Marvel Universe that no other work has successfully achieved. Art that it is, it walks through darkness, through grief, through farewell.
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"Bololo's" success highlights the crucial role of slang in linking communication and culture.
Last December, the company's end-of-year party was a Bermuda Triangle of musical styles. From team anthems to the sertanejo hits of the moment, everything played on the Saboto sound system. Except for my two attempts to drink and dance to Shake It Bololo ft. Classics of MPB. In both instances, the music was abruptly interrupted by someone (I don't know who) who clearly doesn't handle the popular use of Latin languages very well, especially street Portuguese.
Far from comparing MC Bin Laden to Marília Mendonça in terms of the importance of popularizing social themes, because you already know I was smitten with Marília a week before her plane crash, I’m convinced they are my most extravagant and useful recent discoveries for social communication research. Nofa!
Besides the danceable sound and ridiculously fun lyrics (because they are very funny, I almost always die laughing!), what “Bololo” (the remix version, linked in the first paragraph) brings me is concrete data: more than 26 million views; there’s a language of its own related to interacting with the world; it’s never boring.
Note, ladies and gentlemen, that if there’s a difficult type to deal with in the world, it’s not the neurotic, nor the hypochondriac, nor even the phony, but specifically the boring person. The boring person can also be called a “corner person”. You know the corner guy? Goes to the party and stays in the corner? Needs to be moved by forces beyond their control to anywhere other than the corner, because they're like a child who's pooped in the corner of the room.
For those of us who work in media production, there’s a part in “Bololo” where they repeatedly shout: “let the boys play”, which I hear as “let the guys publish.” Basically, very basically, I've been taking the word of “Bololo” with me wherever I go.
No song is more of a “coup d'état” of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) than “Bololo”. Love it or leave it, but let it serve as a flick on the ear regarding what is uniquely musical, fun, a language that I also want to understand, speak, and write fluently (one more? 😆).
Reflecting on Lula/Bolsonaro, author posits political choices reveal humanity's yearning for contentment.
I think about the "realization of a goal", the attainment of the desired object, and how psychoanalysis suggests this is never fully achieved—which isn't necessarily bad. But. I also think that Lula and Bolsonaro are tangential realizations, close to the idea of something. And what is that idea?
My intuition says that, deep down, sometimes too deeply and uselessly so, generally, we all want to be happy. Politics, as an effect of culture, has the clear purpose of protecting us from the forces of nature: hurricanes, floods, the aridity of hunger. Has it gone beyond that?
The most curious part, the "farce" that follows the "tragedy", is that incest, cannibalism, and homicide shouldn't even be debated outside the primitive recesses of each individual's mind, addressed with the refinements of psychological technologies. But one politician devours the other, and so it goes.
In recent years, we have experienced the inflation of artificial cultures: "sertanejo, that abject thing", as researcher Bruno Nichols defines it, left and right, progressive or conservative. Nonsense! Utter nonsense!
One of the most natural, wise, and intelligent types is always the pacifist. It is in the person "on the fence" that the future is built. It is from the one who "cultivates their own lavenders", as Professor Stella Siqueira Campos writes, that there will be a tomorrow. And there will be a tomorrow after October, again, and again.
Cervi, in dialogue, views journalism's role; religion focused on material gains loses purpose.
I was happy every Monday afternoon this semester. In an elective course at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), in a class of very few students, I received from Dr. Emerson Urizzi Cervi the impetus, so dear to me, to discuss journalism. Cervi has a sober journalistic style that reminds me of newsrooms that did not succumb to the allure of the internet.
Sgarbe: Dear Professor Cervi, the readers of this website would be bored if I didn't tell them that I wrote to you when I was still in high school and dreamed of being a journalist. I remember being interested in political communication. Well, as is the nature of self-fulfilling prophecies, here I am about to write my first article for your consideration. Having overcome the main emotional aspect of this conversation, I move on to the next. That is, the cold feeling that watching television journalism causes me. It is not, evidently, a matter of personal taste, but a collegial, collective, and communal dimension of journalism. Despite my conviction that it is not possible to do mass journalism as we conceived it decades ago, it is possible and necessary, it is just and necessary, that television journalism resort to the basic literature of what constitutes news. I refer directly to the "new generation", which has at its disposal reporters of excellent quality, and through whom, via interpersonal relationships, the DNA of journalism can be transferred. I am very seriously suspicious of any journalism that does not clearly address the "commercial-editorial" dilemma. And my first question is: which came first? The chicken or the egg? Is flabby journalism the product of a flabby community?
Cervi: Sgarbe, journalism is a human activity, constrained, limited, and empowered by the social context in which it finds itself. Twenty-first-century journalism will not be the same as twentieth-century journalism, which cannot be compared to nineteenth-century journalism simply because the society of each moment in which journalism is inserted is specific. We need to avoid some exaggerations if we want to understand the role of journalism in twenty-first-century society. The first is technological determinism. It is not technology that shapes journalism, but rather journalism that makes use of available technologies to shape itself. The second is the excessive centrality of journalism in the world.
Journalism is a professional activity and a social institution that integrates the so-called intermediary institutions. Journalism, by nature, mediates the relationship between people and people, people and institutions, people and more abstract social concepts.
So, journalism plays its role well when it manages to mediate social relations in a relevant way, that is, in a consequential way. Historically, mass journalism is an intermediary institution for social stability. It presents the expected rules and behaviors (of course there are cases of journalism used for revolutionary purposes, but this is not the rule). However, and here is an important element, the positive consequence of the intermediary role does not depend only on who mediates, but on the expectations of those who are at the "ends" of the intermediation processes - outside the direct scope of journalism - the sources, on one hand, and the public, on the other. If we want answers about twenty-first-century journalism, we need to ask the sources and the public what they expect from twenty-first-century journalism, not the journalists directly.
Sgarbe: When I read your paragraph, I thought", I have to come back with at least a few interviews in which I ask people what they expect from journalism". Obviously, this is not the case, but I had a reporter's impulse. I understand that to keep journalism alive, as has been done in other eras, we will have to deal with communities absurdly different from those we had ten or twenty years ago. These rapid changes, sometimes justified by technological contributions or even by the severity of a pandemic, have little to do with cell phones and vaccines themselves - items that are much more symptoms than causes. After the fascist uprising and Covid-19, we are in a post-war period. Let's go back a bit. After the First World War, we experienced the avant-garde art movements, among other less singular effects. Psychoanalysis and religious fundamentalism also came out of there. However, in the case of these last two, the results were completely different. For the former, the conclusion is that the end is inevitable and desired, while the latter clings to the harshness of a few phrases that encourage waiting for the return of the Messiah. I understand that, as is expected of history to repeat itself, our present has traces of those patterns. It is utopian, but it would be very good if individuals were able to deal with their internal problems before going on the public stage. Maybe in a thousand years. There are many scenarios and micro-scenarios on the screen, so I am aware that the following excerpt is imprecise. We are polarized more or less like this: on one side, the academy, the cult of scientific investigation (a few hours ago, I said that believing in science without restrictions makes science a religion - it didn't go over well with the group, but I don't care, in this case); on the other, the powerful God who will avenge the wicked and distinguish us from the perverse. I think both are delusional, for this reason here: what good is all this if what is sought is not peace? It will be very difficult to get answers from these people about journalism. Meanwhile, my bet is on precision journalism and a brilliant capacity for dialogue and good humor - with whomever.
Cervi: Well, if I understood you correctly, we have broadened the discussion, moving beyond journalism itself. If so, I agree with your proposal. If we take journalism for what it is: a professional activity with collective impact as its purpose, we will realize that it can only be understood when placed in front of other institutions, groups, and social norms.
The collective purpose of journalism is to meet society's demands for information.
When this purpose is successful, journalistic information serves as a social amalgam, shaping and uniting other social institutions. In other words, the purpose of journalistic information is social cohesion, not distension. The typical phenomenon of the 21st century is that journalism as a purpose faces competition from the dissemination of content and information with the opposite objective of social cohesion. An interesting discussion would be that of freedom as a right. Like any other, there are no absolute rights in any society. Ultimately, even the right to life is not absolute in many societies. What happened in the 20th century is that the struggles for the right to expand and democratize information, which are means, left the ends, which is social cohesion, in the background. It is necessary to bring the discussion about the purposes of freedom of expression back into the public debate. I understand that this was not what you proposed, so I'll stop here. Your proposal was to look at contemporary social conflicts from the micro level, the individual. And, in this case, you point out which institutions have the most impact on social behavior starting from the individual: the church, notably. Religion has the ability to cross from the private to the public sphere without the need for any filter. We will only understand personal conflicts at the beginning of the 21st century when we think about how religions are addressing the differences between spiritual power and material power. When religion focuses on material power, it is because it has already lost its essence, which is spiritual control. From then on, it tends to be increasingly involved in worldly issues and less in spiritual ones. All of society loses, but mainly religion is the biggest loser. Addressing individuals' crises, conflicts, dissensions, the formation of social bubbles from the role of institutions has a greater explanatory capacity than falling into technological determinism, which tends to be a dead end.
Prisão de Milton Ribeiro revela crise moral no governo e fragilidade ética em parte das lideranças evangélicas.
Bolsonaro's statement on Milton Ribeiro's arrest, which GloboNews is showing now, is excellent. Presidential. He basically says that if the Federal Police arrested him, there must be a reason. But my reflection doesn't have much to do with that.
What damage to the image of the government and pastors this Ribeiro has caused. I don't know him, I've had little interest in the Ministry of Education since Weintraub; I understood that these intellectual tragedies had their time, like a fever.
Unlike most of the evangelicals I know, some of whom are leaders, Ribeiro's ilk disgusts me with their contempt for what is human. Messianic, golden sprigs of creation, they fantasize that their religion covers the ignorance they live in and defend.
Still on Ribeiro's ilk, they are "ugly, weak, and blear-eyed" (SERAINE, G., personal correspondence). I've never seen such ridiculous megalomania: in churches, they hear that God will give them nations, that they will be recognized as servants of the Most High, that they will become rich. They are nothing but fools.
As for those new to the faith or the little ones, we have before us a scandal difficult to overcome. If the "more traditional church", so to speak, such as the Catholic Church, starts thinking of a way to advance for another two thousand years, what about these little neighborhood storefront churches?
Pandemic poses novel challenges to journalism, accelerating digitization and expanding remote workflows.
The digital transformation process has imposed itself on newsrooms with greater force since the beginning of the pandemic. Managers face business changes alongside the challenge of reporting on a unique political and health period.
Platformization as a business strategy, replacing the old pipeline, had been implemented, albeit under different names, since the creation of news websites for newspapers and broadcasters. Publishers understood relatively quickly that popular digital networks had, from a business perspective, a parasitic behavior, and that it wouldn't be possible to distribute content through them. Moreover, advertising budgets shifted dramatically, to the detriment of traditional publications. This led to a significant change in the way content was offered.
When Covid-19 arrived in early 2020, the variables of journalistic practice oscillated violently. From then on, in addition to the need to convert audiences into subscribers, there was a call for resilience in the core values of reporting. Maxims like "a reporter's place is on the street", which had been losing strength, completely collapsed. The challenge became maintaining the business, delivering coverage with periodicity, continuity, and aesthetics consistent with the broadcaster's standards, with practically everything done from journalists' home offices.
In an interview with Orbis Media Review, Luciana Marangoni, the editorial director of the RPC group in Paraná, says that "it is certainly the most challenging coverage in journalism since the invention of television". The rich discussions between editors and reporters amidst the newsroom cubicles no longer happen. In fact, the facilities are isolated, and teams are divided by color, with physical contact restricted to the bare minimum, and shift changes marked by the sanitization of surfaces and equipment.
In digital life, multi-faceted coexistence contracts are established, or, more recently, "fields of coexistence" are discussed. The idea involves the permeability of relationships. "We have already told very sensitive stories, such as the collapse of a building in Guaratuba, or the landslides and floods in Antonina and Morretes. But Covid-19 has to do with our families, with risks to everyone's health", notes Luciana. Before, the journalist's profession could well be left outside the home, but not now.
The editor-in-chief of the newspaper and the Bem Paraná portal, Josianne Ritz, misses the buzz of the newsroom. "I'm well adapted. What was bad in the beginning isn't anymore. I feel safe. And so, I didn't set up a special space, to maintain the buzz. I stay in the living room, with everyone".
In the publications edited by Josianne, production has increased since the isolation measures, a result that is also a consequence, for her, of the staff's long tenure. "I feared that the print closing process, because of the layout, could be complicated [by online work]. But we are closing even earlier. The rapport is somewhat atypical because we have worked together for a long time. The majority [have been here] for more than 20 years," she notes.
G1 Paraná was the first extension of TV Globo's portal to an affiliate. In February, it celebrated its tenth anniversary, with the milestone of over one billion pageviews. Executive editor Bibiana Dionísio, who has been there since the first day of operation, set up an office in her living room. "I understood that life goes on, that it's necessary to take care of nutrition, exercise, and mental health. This is the reality of the world now, and what can I do? Take care of my family, work, of course, but I enrolled in a communication and marketing course at USP, to learn new things".
According to Bibiana, the need for news grew because of the plague, but also because G1 gained relevance and prominence. "Every day we do the exercise of choosing priorities. Is this news better than that one? When we decide on topics that escape the tragedy, we have a good response from the audience. It's a way to contribute to other aspects of people's lives".
When the pandemic started, Bibiana's baby, Luísa, was one year and three months old. "Strength comes sporadically. There are weeks when it's possible to maintain a satisfactory pace, when things flow more easily. But there are also moments of physical and emotional exhaustion". Luísa requires a list of specialized therapies, such as physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy, "and this is experienced alongside work, family issues, life's issues, which haven't ceased to exist".
In a year of extreme measures, there hasn't been a single infection originating from RPC's headquarters.
Far from being simple or easy, resilience in the practice of journalism during the pandemic has become a form of survival.
Texto intimista revela reflexões sobre felicidade real versus aparência nas redes sociais e a busca por equilíbrio.
Today, our house smells somewhere between church incense (that's how they sell me the little stones at the Sanctuary shop) and fabric softener. Although I've never heard any complaints about the smell of cigarettes here, I feel like that rotten smoke had permeated the place over time. I quit smoking.
When I told Racca about using nicotine patches, he responded with a hearty laugh, saying "it depends where you stick it". I immediately pictured my mouth taped shut with duct tape. It would have been cheaper than buying the patches.
I miss you in all the intervals of my day. While filling my coffee mug, or going to the bathroom, or on my way to and from lunch, or when I dare to cook (if it were up to me, we'd live on simple things to prepare) – basically, my day consists of these activities interspersed with work – I only think of you.
For some years now, I've fallen into a terrible trap of appearing happy. That is, I think I bought into the idea of doing complex things, which demand a fair amount of intelligence, like someone playing with a "slinky" (remember slinkies?).
Anyway, I don't think the degree of difficulty of things is relevant, although I'm telling you this now.
In general, women and men with professional experience act like this, but they don't "strut their stuff". The trap isn't having "humble self-esteem" (I'm reading a book by Michel Esparza that's a punch in the mouth of pride), but thinking I have the detachment, the self-sufficiency, the happiness of Instagram. I don't, you know – laughs. I know that part of what you like about me has to do with this, anyway. If I could, I'd just stay with you.
For now, the two research projects I'm working on, at two universities, are taking a tremendous amount of energy from my reasoning. In one, I'm invited to look at the world in a "helpless" way, which is in philosophy. In the other, we're all in a new field of study and it seems like no one knows exactly where it's going (and that's precisely the "field", the instability of communication).
I can't wait to see you so we can do nothing but the things we already do, only whole because we're not missing each other. I dream of you telling me to fuck Instagram.
I'll always be waiting for you. A kiss.
Radio lessons: consistency, repetition, & aesthetics are key to audience engagement.
Communication projects are born from the need to tell someone something, hence the quest for "how to gain an audience". So, there are various types of publications. In this sense, they can be for a restricted audience, in the case of a house organ, which is a "company newspaper," for a niche of subscribers, or broadcast, when going out to networks, radio, and television.
Joke tellers are invariably good communicators. That's why I like to be around them at family gatherings. When they embellish the simple, they capture my attention. The best ones I've heard are improbable. "A nun was on the road holding a basket of chicks…"
On the other hand, being good with anecdotes doesn't mean having lasting success in personal or business communication projects. Famous profiles on YouTube and Instagram tend to have an expiration date when they don't professionalize.
Firstly, projects of brands, platforms, or politicians are communication projects.
Moreover, radio classes in journalism school present three fundamental aspects for building an audience. Let's borrow the idea from radio, because it applies broadly.
In other words, a communication project needs an opportunity to appear.
I see stillborns frequently. They are of the type "I'm going to post environmental law tips from today onwards", and the next post never comes. A striking project has to show up repeatedly.
And not only show up repeatedly, it has to have a reasonable interval between publications. In other words, a newsletter sent bi-weekly has a better chance of success than one sent solely at the whim of the sender.
Every time a publication is kept alive, with sacred periodicity, a little bit of public trust is deposited in that project. How to gain an audience? Little by little…
Photojournalism professor André Zielonka jokes that "mastering depth of field is what differentiates photographers from mortals". I agree with him on the idea that mastering aesthetics makes a striking difference between small projects and projects. Herbert Vianna:
I made use of this pamphleteering discourse / But my stupidity has a birthday
Finally, the clothing, the speech, the quality of the camera, the microphone, the setting. These variables have to be controlled for a satisfactory result.
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Dr. Souza's workshop explores inner child acceptance to overcome adult life's hurdles.
In celebration of Women's History Month, Célia Souza, PhD in education, is hosting the workshop "The Inner Child & the Feminine". In an interview with Lab Jornalismo 2030, Célia explains her choice of topic.
Sgarbe — What is your workshop about?
Dr. Célia — It's about the inner child and the feminine. It's about something I discovered as an adult. The inner child is a theory from analytical psychology. The child is an archetype, and its ideas are transposed to the collective. There are many facets, but we will address the wounded child, which is a personal experience. My wounded child blocked me in many actions.
S. — What does this have to do with Black female entrepreneurs?
C. — I'm a parenting educator, and there's a huge discussion about the life of a child. Many of us have lived through experiences where the child wasn't right, was stifled in their creativity, and so on. There are paradigms that neuroscience, child psychology, philosophy, sociology—which even has a dedicated field, the sociology of childhood—have been confronting. There are traumas that can be eased. You were a child, and your inner child stays with you for life. We hear things like:
—Shut up!
—You can't talk!
—Children should only obey!
—Children have to eat everything!
—Children don't do science!
And then the adult lives with childhood issues.
There's also the adult who hasn't grown up, and there's a boom in this issue. Many people are over 30 and can't leave their parents' house, can't work.
This inner child needs to be embraced, needs to be informed that it's not necessary for their journey to be marked by trauma.
The workshop is a partnership with the Afroempreender & Crescer mobilization. It's this Friday (11th), at 6:30 pm, at 450 Rua Marechal Deodoro, room 808. The ticket costs R$ 30. For information, the WhatsApp number is +55 96 98135-3284.
Journalistic automation boosts efficiency, yet human insight and deep analysis remain vital.
In 2009, under the title "Eweb: Standardized Digital Journalism", four social communication students from PUCPR (I was one of them) made a series of videos for the internet as their final course project.
In production, the cinematic technique is a university tragedy with hints of a pirated copy of 3D Max installed on a library computer.
It takes less than a minute of the first video for "user focus" to appear prominently. At a time when BlackBerrys were the only encrypted network, and journalists and advertisers were colonizing Twitter, reaching such a conclusion with the support of a communication degree is, at the very least, quite good.
Today, digital marketing and the business platform model suggest that journalists continue to do what they have always done ethically and intelligently.
I don't see people searching the internet for deeper analysis, for something that makes them reflect. Text on the internet will satiate the need for information that is up-to-date and can be passed on.
Michelle Thomé, in an interview with Eweb, in 2009.
Michelle Thomé predicted, in her own words, the first rehearsals of post-truth and quantum politics. Both are, very roughly, when opinions and facts carry the same weight. It's the "what matters is that I express myself" mentality.
But something remained the same. Journalist Luiz Oliveira was in charge of the digital section of the Gazeta do Povo newspaper, and for him, online text maintained the format created by Americans.
The lead, widely appreciated for its characteristics of information sequencing and reading time optimization, answers the basic questions:
what,
who,
how,
when,
where, and
why
(with some variation).
The year following the publication of Eweb, Sharon Jeanine Abdalla researched "Lead and Inverted Pyramid: The Influence of the American Model on Journalism in Paraná" for the Federal University of Paraná. She interviewed journalist Aroldo Murá G. Haygert.
There's no point in having a lead and these straightforward techniques if the newspaper is garbage. (...) The newspaper prioritized headlines, they had character counts, which was very difficult at the time. When you work with typography it's complicated; with the computer, today, it's easier to do that.
Journalist Aroldo Murá G. Haygert.
For over ten years, Eweb has been discussing the trend of journalism automation, starting with the lead. Once parameters are written and refined, real-world data could be updated automatically, either by search engines or by APIs (which are a type of connection between databases).
An example. The highway patrol would provide real-time data on the number of accidents, tickets, traffic arrests, etc. News websites would reproduce, through thematic panels, articles, notifications, whatever, content that dispenses with intellectual work. Robots would write:
"Two people were arrested for driving without a license during the holiday weekend";
"Traffic jam on BR-277 stretches for 2 km towards the coast, starting at the Botanical Garden";
"Emergency: Fog at the entrance to the Serra do Mar reduces visibility to 5 m";
The reporter spared from roadside reporting would have time to propose what machines couldn't do in an unprecedented way, like reporting on the transgenerational consequences of violent deaths. Do families repeat the pattern of dying on the road?
Or routine things.
How much does the government invest in educational campaigns?
How long do they last?
How is their reach measured?
What research is used for their creation?
Does the taxpayer speed because they pay tolls?
Do people who get speeding tickets enjoy driving?
When will telephone companies install internet access all the way to the beach?
The soundtrack used in Eweb is from the album "Deep Cuts", released in 2003, by the Swedish siblings of "The Knife". In 2020, French state television Franceinfo used one of the songs from this album for a program promo.
PUCPR scholars release book linking philosophy, psychoanalysis, and daily life with incisive insights.
Soon to be published, the book Philosophy, Psychoanalysis & Contemporaneity (Vol. II) is a read that tends to surprise those accustomed to a certain cultural pasteurization. We refer directly to a simplification trend so banal it's almost touching. But not in our book!
We, researchers from the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis program at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR), have written essays with analyses, interpretations, and challenges to prestigious theories, and we offer (with the exception of Sgarbe's text and my own) a delightful literary experience.
Below are a few excerpts of what's to come.
Starting with the work of researcher Jeferson Costa. He is the driving force behind the book. He not only conceived the publication but is also the link connecting the authors. Regarding the philosophical use of the word "libertinus", he explains, "we start from the hypothesis that this libertarian meaning has been preserved, at least within the contexts we will address in the scope of this work". Jeferson Costa, co-author of Philosophy, Psychoanalysis & Contemporaneity (Vol. II):
Libertinus is a word of Latin origin that indicated the condition of a freed person, that is, someone who worked forcibly for another person. Libertinus was a category, therefore, that referred to people who became free after having been enslaved or subjected to servitude by people considered free by birth. The category used to indicate such freeborn individuals was 'Ingenuus.' Therefore, the category libertinus came to define the action that metaphorically aimed at breaking the chains or resisting norms. This is how observant Christians defined the deviants. It is a fight against naiveté, both in the broad and current sense.
Julio Fachini describes a peculiar relationship with the founding act of civilization. He deals with the complicity of the blood brothers who murdered their own father. Julio Fachini, co-author of "Philosophy, Psychoanalysis & Contemporaneity (Vol. II)":
The brothers, united by common hatred, kill the father and celebrate the deed with a meal in which the father's corpse is the food; they devour him 'raw, flesh, blood, and bones' (FREUD, 2012, p. 214), in a cannibalistic rite that seals the spirit of equality through complicity in the act.
As for me, I went to Freud with new questions about the malaise experienced in contemporary democracy, with the generous guidance of Dr. Francisco Verardi Bocca.
I wrote things that, frankly, should amuse most of us. My contribution:
The degrees of factual certainty in the human sciences can be strange, because they are relative, uncontained, lacking small and large paths chosen solely by the writer. At the end of the day, you have an ordinary human being, who believes in things that even God doubts, who may not care about scientific technique, let alone Freud and a conception of the universe that doesn't consider the need for Our Lord Jesus Christ for what is uniquely human and earthly.
There are many more authors, who will be arriving soon. As soon as the book is ready to be read, criticized, rejected, cited, and other things of the nature of books, I'll let you know.
Digital Lab 2050 debuts in São Paulo with media labs, data analysis, & focus on human communication.
Lab Digital 2050 is launched at ISE Business School headquarters in São Paulo In a discreet meeting following a breakfast featuring red berry donuts, eight media labs were introduced to São Paulo’s intellectual community.
The president of the ISE Business School Board, Professor Dr. Carlos Alberto Di Franco, stopped by to greet us in friendship and mark the occasion. As a demonstration for the launch, the data analysis lab utilized a corpus of comments left on the professor’s YouTube channel over the past six months. Sentiment analysis was conducted using Microsoft’s artificial intelligence technology.
In the featured photo: Ágata Soares, Professor Dr. Carlos Alberto Di Franco, and myself.
Dr. Ana Brambilla and Raphael Müller. Photo: Vinícius Sgarbe.
ISE professors and Lab mentors Dr. Ana Brambilla and Raphael Müller gave presentations, acting as organizational sponsors. Müller recently returned from Barcelona, where he was engaged in activities at IESE Business School, University of Navarra. He argues that victory in life occurs when an individual's resources are utilized. “David, when he fought Goliath, for example, didn't use others' weapons. He wouldn't even have known what to do with them,” he contends.
Dr. Brambilla delves into the profound meaning of the genesis and development of a business, from a philosophical perspective. “The realization of an entrepreneur's potential is to become a business owner", she instructs. For her, "it is a source of pride to see a project conceived in our school come to life and reach the market with such strength. The enthusiasm of the managers, Vinícius and Ágata, is clearly the main fuel for a proposal that emerges with the noble and rare objective of improving human communication in its multiple perspectives”.
The Lab's founding partner, linguist Ágata Soares, explains: “We are launching the 2023 product line. This presentation officially marks the beginning of the company. We have invited people who are part of our development, many of whom are spokespeople for brands we enjoy working with, as well as representatives of international delegations, and Sgarbe’s mother”.
Curitiba-based entrepreneur Oberdan Pallu, psychologist Janine Sgarbe, and the director of institutional relations for the Master: Media Business program, Dr. Glaucia Noguera. Photo: Vinícius Sgarbe.
The director of institutional relations for the Master: Media Business program, Dr. Glaucia Noguera, writes: "The [course] Entrepreneuring in Journalism was created in 2020 to enhance the knowledge of media professionals who were already entrepreneurs or had the desire to start their own businesses. Sgarbe fit into both categories: for some years, he had been running his own projects, but he enthusiastically cultivated many other good ideas that remained on paper. Lab Digital 2050 was one of them, and it was shaped throughout the classes and mentoring sessions. Hosting the official launch in São Paulo is, for the Master: Media Business program, a source of great joy and satisfaction. Entrepreneurship involves significant risks, and on this celebratory morning, Sgarbe and Ágata proved that, with strategy and passion, dreams can become reality".
For me, Sgarbe, the company is born from a deep awareness that work should have a broad purpose, and that the "true values of life" that have ceased to be appreciated, as Freud invites us to observe, tend to be rediscovered through simplicity.
I am a veteran of the first class of the Entrepreneuring in Journalism course at ISE. A kind of "Sunday school" compared to the prestigious Master in Media program. Let it be public and known: rarely is professional work as well cared for as it is at ISE. I experienced something similar when I became a partner with journalist Cassiana Pizaia in our production company Outras Terras Filmes (Other Lands Films).
Unbalanced outrage can hinder effective communication, diminishing our chances of being truly heard.
Indignation is an important driving force, a conclusion I’ve reached through practical experience. When faced with injustice or disqualification, I get incredibly angry. It's an open invitation (DE ALMEIDA, Maku) to fall into the "less-than/more-than" existential position and start playing psychological games.
Although psychoanalysis and political communication offer some valid points regarding malaise, disillusionment, and the formulation of threats, it is in transactional analysis that I find the first roadmap to understanding indignation. My intention is to help us all become a little less indignant.
The "less-than/more-than" existential position, described by Berne, relates to the individual who feels at a disadvantage in relationships. “The other person earns more!”, “But that's because they're more attractive!”, “The hard work always falls to me!”, and so on. And if the other person is "more", then I am "less".
I ask: why do we "hate" an opposing "ideology" or corruption? Alright, there are several possible errors. When faced with a blatant mistake by others, what do we do? Shout? Impose our will violently? Well, of course not. And this is the "problem" with indignation.
When indignant, we think we have a free pass for uncouth behavior. And that's where the "persecutor" in psychological games enters the scene, to "speak the truth!", "Give it to them straight!", "You're going to have to listen to me!". What are the chances of an "indignant" person being heard? Low. Very low.
It matters little how important the message is if it doesn't reach the other person in the right way. In fact, the "right way" is the way the other person will understand. "Communication is what the other person understands".
Whether or not you’re against issue A, have chosen issue B as your cause, or have been called upon to clarify issue C, it is both possible and necessary to communicate effectively. Please, don't stop participating. We can talk about absolutely anything without raising our voices or harming our fellow human beings while thinking we are doing good.
Critic decries journalistic rigor's decline, citing technical and linguistic flaws fueled online.
I give up on the internet's "style guide", which the robot, in its dullness, doesn't understand Portuguese with passive voice. "A truck of marijuana was seized" became "The police seized a truck of marijuana".
But not only that, unfortunately. I've stopped nitpicking the "details" they offer me on the news. The anchors say "now all the details". And I used to think, "but isn't it 'information'?" Now, I watch the "details" and let it slide.
Not to mention the terrible conjugation of the imperative. It's "access" the site (acesse). Not "access" (acessa). Unless there is a change in verb tense. "You access the site to find out when the world is going to end for good", for example. But you want to speak incorrectly? Fine. Chew gum loudly, too.
UFPR researchers' work addresses Brazil's current political communication challenges.
Professors and researchers at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Kelly Prudencio (center), Carla Rizzoto, and Rafael Cardoso Sampaio have published the book "Collective Actors in Tension". In recent years, the three doctors have held prominent roles at the university, including coordinators of graduate programs. They are familiar figures in the Juvevê and Reitoria buildings.
The preface by the "Pope" of political communication, Wilson Gomes, states: "As I always say, we live in an open-air laboratory of innovative political experiences, of great impact (for better or worse) and accelerated. Paying attention to everything, keeping an open mind, and reinforcing convictions are essential attitudes (...)".
There are texts by journalists and researchers Helen Anacleto (master's colleague), Nilton Kleina (CBN colleague), and social scientist Bruno Nichols (friend from a deathbed), and a memorable list of others.
The scientific council includes the coordinator of the journalism program at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR), Suyanne Tolentino de Souza.
Suyanne was my television professor during undergraduate studies, Kelly and Carla taught Recognition Theory, and Rafael is my advisor in political communication. For my dissertation, we are preparing something about death threats against judges.
Sgarbe's intimate letter explores existential angst, grief memories, and seeking meaning amid pain.
Stiff gates, paths guided by impassive pines, such ambiguous silences, and a cold moon. I arrived at Limoeiro six years after my first visit, barely remembering how much this displacement is capable of embracing me, of harvesting me.
I've lost count of the words that have ceased to express me in these years. So many years have passed since the enormous precaution I took in securing myself with words. Today, I secure myself with nothing. A certain running alongside all things gives me the sensation that I remain alive, with some pulsation outside my body. But always in that way.
It rains heavily, all the windows stream in that way, half sad, half tacky. I have no signal to guarantee the transit of my ridiculous epiphanies. In fact, the ridiculous, the traversing of the ridiculous, has been a particular theme. God spoke to me about this at the beginning of the week, making a pact with me.
Always living hidden, loving hidden, as if my nature were not appropriate. Now. How can nature not be appropriate, if natural, if nature? This constant, immutable, invincible struggle against the permanent condition had come to an end. It was when I realized that so many convictions had come to an end. The struggle itself was an engineering for life, something I had clung to in order to live and that had now fallen apart like an old wagon. It was possible to hear the sound of the parts piling up on one another in the irrecoverable symphony of calamity. The time had come to definitively die to those false expectations of transforming the world or the world within me. I was definitively tired, having concluded that a plan to die in the flesh would be more useful than a plan to live in the soul—although previous attempts at both had failed before, now a kind of resignation about life and determination about death followed me continuously. I was willing to put an end to all of that, as indeed I did.
At 30, reality had proven frighteningly harsh to me, because any unsuccessful daydream would bring terrible consequences. It was necessary to think morbidly, focusing on complete destruction, without damaging the surrounding structures. A kind of implosion. Difficult to achieve when you are a communications executive and a correspondent for international news. Having conceived of this text as an autobiographical, testimonial fantasy has drastically diminished the dramatic quality of this account. Instead of recounting the blatant anguish of these days, I did what I was clinging to in the last hours, counting titles and tasks in order to forget the main reasons. Moreover, it is after them that I hurled myself in the face of all the miseries I wore, that I fed on, that I spent the night with. It is behind the reasons that I have been greater and lesser, it is where I am now. It is behind a reason that I died. My mind was disturbed when it finally lay in bed, saw itself alone again, remembered that it intended to write a little before dying. It remembered that its desire is to die. That death lurks and God watches closely, guards, saves, one day will give a sign. Yesterday or today, it repeated, an answer is on its way.
The answer will find me prostrate. Even holding onto the Eternal's arm, I feel the delay in rising. I miss the day I was called a woman. When they made me feel like I was something other than this. I will hide nothing from the Eternal, that is my agreement with him, so he will keep a new pact with me. At the same time, this devastates me, silences every signal I might emit. It makes me dead. It makes me, above all, want to die.
The anguish returned, but transformed. Analyzed, combed, clean, barefaced. Before, it presented itself intoxicated, legs tangled, suggesting foolishness. Now it comes alone, like a sober widow on the morning of the funeral, without masks.
It was necessary to locate all of that, since the main prisons had been established. I mean, the time was established, the most irreversible condition, the most stable – worryingly, most worryingly stable – was established. So the norms of description applied from the inside out, from top to bottom. It was possible to see the Portuguese teacher standing before me, gesturing slowly, in an effort to make me a less stupid writer when it came to drawing the exact location of my sadness. She would certainly have some compassion for me, good as she was, upon discovering that I was swallowed by the mediocrity of the simplest attempts, and that I hardly risked saying that the heart of my tragedy pulsed from a stolen kiss.
I hadn't yet realized how my recovery was going, or if there was even any recovery going on. In fact, terms like that, recovery, were the last things that interested me. So many relapses – indeed, a succession so bitter, recurrent, and tiring that it had left me for dead – had taken away any prospect that I was still living to live. It was as if I were playing just to finish the season, knowing relegation was imminent. I never liked soccer and I have no idea why I made this poor analogy with a sport that doesn't interest me at all.
From the day I buried Aunt Josmara I remember few details. I had kept little in the foreground, so that superficiality would be that very appropriate kind of anesthesia. It was the way to endure a Catholic funeral. Initially, I tried to avoid going, but civic obligations got me out of bed around three in the morning. My brother's voice tore through the cold night, saying with headline euphoria, "Aunt Josmara died”. How lucky I am not to have her fate, to be without anyone who loved her at that moment. We got out of bed and made a memorial, a photo and birthday candles floating on the shallow, slow water of a decoration. That ritual would have been enough. But it was necessary, not for me, but for the lives of others, that I suffer publicly. It wasn't long before my father came to pick me up. He didn't want to go with me. Then, her coffin dragged across the floor of the grave, making a heavy sound, the last of the inert body. Wood rubbing against cement, earth, sand. That's how I learned the sound of death.
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Text contemplates transcending pandemic trauma, proposing art and reconciliation as pathways.
Of all the things I read this year, one claimed that we are a generation that got thoroughly screwed. You know how selfish things are, it stuck with me, so I think it's true. It had to do with the successive economic and virological plagues. I don't think I was the only one who saw a motorcade of official vehicles, sirens blaring, with a message on repeat: "stay home". "Social isolation" instead of "physical distancing" makes you wonder. The world almost ended.
Just yesterday, I mean, in the broad scope of history, sports arenas were transformed into morgues; there was even talk that in Manaus people had died from lack of air. From high school, I carry with me a dear friend, Stella, cursed to work in healthcare, from whom I read, "you can believe in God without reservation until you see someone die of suffocation". To those who have faith, let us have faith despite the words of the prophet Jeremiah.
"If you are condemned to die, go and die; if you are designated for war, go and be killed; if you are designated to die of hunger, go and starve; if you are designated for exile, go into exile!"
I have the impression that from time to time God delivers us to the worst of ourselves, because, somehow, all of this came from his mind, and you know how selfish things are. But there's a lightness in the fact that the great art movements, the avant-gardes, are the result of what we overcome as humans. In art history, incredible beauty has served as a relief for the pains of mortality.
In 2021, I cursed in a violently violent way a large number of people who made me feel bad. I think it was an important step in the way I see things. "What does not become words becomes symptoms". Since the pepper had to burn someone, it might as well not be me. But this paragraph is a sin, not an infamy. And this is how I feel like a real person: "forgive me, because I am learning". Who knows, maybe you and I will make books and films based on this idea of reconnection. A shattered self-love is better than jumping out the window.
Ultimately, at the end of the day, at the end of time, what matters is how we treat people. And, thanks to God and the work of true friends whom I could list eternally, I understand that it's not about being the court jester, although for the Japanese the clown is the most intelligent person there is because they are capable of engaging everyone.
Communication is what you have in the already, in the now. I'm not going to be anything now that I haven't always been and always will be. I conclude that I am a terrible theologian and an even worse philosopher. But I assure you, my brothers and sisters, that asking for forgiveness is what sets my river back on course when I am lost. "But they are killing us!" So, go to them and ask for forgiveness. Go to them with the invitation to the exhibition.
Inovação escolar vai além da tecnologia: método japonês Soka aposta em cidadania global e relações humanizadas.
What is an innovative school for you? There is still a consolidated image of a space filled with technology and, often, with the use of expressive colors and furniture different from traditional school desks. But we believe that innovation goes far beyond this vision.
Innovation is solving problems with creativity and using available resources, whether they are technological and "modern" or not. In fact, innovative initiatives in education occurred long before the rise of technology. One of the most interesting examples of this is the Japanese educator Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (pictured). In the early 1900s, he began to apply concepts such as education for happiness, education for a creative life, and the importance of developing global citizenship with his students. "Instead of encouraging students to appropriate the intellectual treasures discovered by others, we must empower them to carry out the process of discovery and invention on their own", the educator argued.
These disruptive ideas for the time led to his punishment and forced him to leave his teaching position. But that didn't make him give up on the way he believed education should be. Years later, he created the Soka Gakkai organization, which today has schools in various parts of the world.
Currently, Soka schools do use technology and take advantage of resources such as desks with wheels to alter the classroom organization based on the objective of each lesson. However, technology is not yet the main star. At all ages, students have specific subjects and times to develop other skills:
"Habits of Mind" subject develops students' self-esteem and positive thinking skills.
Students study with the guidance of educators and peer support during "Study Skills" time.
Integrates various disciplines. Global Politics, Business Management, Environmental Systems and Societies, Theory of Knowledge, and International Proficiency in Portuguese Language and Literature are on the list. All are taught in English. Soka education has a primary focus on training global citizens and disseminating a culture of peace.
What the Soka school teaches us is that we need to go beyond technology to innovate. Being based on humanized relationships can be more revolutionary for a world with more citizens who transform their realities.
Chronicle records storm's impact on fields, poetically reflecting on humanity's bond with nature.
In the chicken yard, I find Jorge dressed for the fields. He swings his machete, striking at the bases of velvetleaf plants, which, when not considered a weed worthy of eradication, are said to be beneficial for hair health.
Adjacent purposes tend to be short-lived in the wild. If you want velvetleaf for your hair, cultivate it. Here, in the chicken yard, these weeds, sprung from finger-thick stalks, stubbornly resistant to pulling, are not welcome.
The drought kills trees in Campo Largo da Roseira. The larger trunks and branches fall first to the ground, then to the pile to be cut, and finally, they meet the stump. Finally, because from then on their fate is the fire, which itself isn't eternal. It’s a small stove fire operated by a city child as a recreational activity. From a world-altering tree to a bizarre toy. My God, we must care for nature.
And when the rain comes, furious. Lightning splits the trunk of the ivaí, Eugenia myrcianthes, delicious to the palates of mares. The wild peach tree has entire leaves and leaf margins, opposite phyllotaxy. The small fruits are yellowish like araçá. Jorge:
When it dies, the branches rest on the other trees for a while, but, tired of the imposition, they gave up.
The sounds of Saturday morning are similar to those of any other time or day, except for the roar of gasoline-powered brush cutters. There is a great accumulation of noisy machinery in the peace of the countryside. What a pressure washer or a vacuum cleaner is to the city, brush cutters are to the countryside. Birds, dogs, leaves, and cowbells sing symphonically.
Aroldo Murá, Paraná journalism icon, leaves a legacy of intellect, generosity, and ethical dedication.
Aroldo Murá, a true-blooded journalist, was sharp when it came to matters of intellect, with no patience for errors in logic or Portuguese grammar. He was implacable on these points, right up until the very end. During his time at the newspaper Indústria & Comércio (Industry & Commerce), he would deliberately dismiss the journalistic skills of newcomers, pushing them to craft compelling stories. A high point of this strategy was his immediate hiring of an intern who wrote a good note. The intern was Gladimir Nascimento.
It became customary to call the journalist Professor Aroldo Murá. He himself, not infrequently, referred to himself as "Professor". "Don't let the Professor down", he would say when commissioning a piece for his blog. In more than 60 years of news practice, alongside his gift of self, he was admired by students and colleagues, and reserved space in his editorials for classic and comical antagonists. The man knew how to provoke, often, and many other times he corrected himself publicly.
For contributors to his own blog, among whom journalist André Nunes, a loyal and ever-present friend, stands out, he habitually complained about absolutely every text that contained explicit or subtle criticism of any public figure. And he posted the texts anyway, without a single modification, even while exclaiming, "You're going to make me lose all my advertisers!"
In the late 2010s, he joined forces with the administrator and former State Planning Secretary Dr. Belmiro Valverde, architect Manoel Coelho, journalist Michelle Thomé, photographer Felipe Pinheiro, and others, and helped to establish the João Paulo II Education Center in a vulnerable area of Araucária, in the Curitiba Metropolitan Area. The school, at the time, was an institutional provocation taken to its ultimate consequences, providing a very high level of education, full-time. The cost per student was the same as in the public school system, but with funding from US philanthropy.
A few years ago, he called a long list of journalists and invited them: "Let's interview Luiz Geraldo Mazza". He received everyone with a lavish spread, and that afternoon the inner workings of Curitiba and Paraná were laid bare. It's all recorded on video. It was confirmed that the capital truly is a small city, with experiences both noble and infamous, as befits any inhabited city.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, through the Instituto Ciência e Fé (Science and Faith Institute), he promoted a series of online lectures with representatives of various religious beliefs. There was everything from the least known or popular to the Blessed Sacrament. The respect with which the Professor treated each guest and each question is a lesson in professional ethics and human sensitivity.
Journalism in Paraná loses a sage who was also generous. A father to countless "children", he always bid them farewell with a blessing in the form of a cross. Now, it is hoped that, given the advantages of proximity, he will ask God's help for Paraná and Brazil. And that he will intercede with the Creator for the life of journalism.
Reflection suggests purely rational research limits reality's grasp, overlooking emotional facets.
In high school sociology classes since the 2000s, it's likely you've heard of Auguste Comte's (1798-1857) "positivism". Basically, he argued that we — you and I — have reached a rational level that operates exclusively in the "now".
For him, imaginations, fantasies, have given way to scientific "facts". This is where he stands on one side, and Sigmund Freud (and I) on the other.
In the Freudian understanding, although we have reached the "scientific" layer of development, the things of yesterday (in terms of the evolution of the species) are indeed part of life. This is what we call the "psychic phase". What we learned hunting for lunch or gathering fruit, back in the "Garden of Eden", is within us and active.
You know when you "rationally" explain something to someone, and it feels like you're talking to a brick wall? Sometimes, I seriously suspect it has to do with the "psychic" life of the other person. It's when we "feel" things instead of thinking about them. I do it daily, perhaps even right now in this post.
Curitiba Archbishop decries radicalism after church protest re Rio deaths.
Protesters interrupted a Mass at the Igreja do Rosário (Rosary Church), in Largo da Ordem, Curitiba, this past Saturday (5th), around 5 PM. The information comes from the Archdiocese. The protest was motivated by the murders of Congolese attendant Moïse Kabagambe and supermarket worker Durval Teófilo Filho. Both are Black men cruelly killed in the state of Rio de Janeiro — the first beaten to death, and the second shot.
The incident at the church was recorded on video and became a topic of discussion amongst the lower ranks of the Curitiba City Council. Councilman Eder Borges (PSD) edited his own remarks preceding the images of the protest. Speaking about his colleague Renato Freitas (PT):
—A band of thugs, led by a PT councilman from Curitiba, invaded the Mass at the Igreja da Ordem (Order Church) today. (...) I will file a complaint with the ethics committee against this kid, because I will not accept the mocking of faith (SIC, the “invasion” was at the Igreja do Rosário, not the Igreja da Ordem).
In an interview with Lab Jornalismo 2030, the Metropolitan Archbishop of Curitiba, Dom José Antônio Peruzzo, responded that a "service of reparation" is being planned.
—The Igreja do Rosário has often been sought out by people of African descent, Catholic or not. There are stories of many slaves there, many of them buried there. They have always been well-received and respectful. In the current context, I don't believe the group went to the church for religious reasons, but rather they appropriated religious and racial arguments to politicize the location, the history, and the event.
Archbishop Peruzzo further stated that we are living in days of “radicalization and injustice. The deaths of Moïse and Durval have vile, stupid reasons. Every murder is always a mistake. At the same time, attacking and desecrating a church has something senseless and malevolent about it”.
Em texto bem-humorado, autor imagina encontro final com Deus e questiona mistério e falta de objetividade divina.
In 2088, I finally die of natural causes. I arrive on the “other side” and meet God (it seems). With apologies for the indiscretion, this “energy” (laughter) is younger, more beautiful, thinner, and more smiling than I imagined. When we look at each other, we both have a slight smile, suppressing laughter.
I begin speaking:
—Lord God, thank you so much for receiving me. I presume you are the Lord God. But, if not, please accept my respects. —In a respectful posture, I bow my head. I hold the sides of my trousers at my waist and bend my knees. I explain. —This is how we had to address Mrs. Regina. —He smiles and brings a hand to his mouth. —Very interesting space you have here, congratulations. The Freemasons are going to flip when they find out the Architect is a fan of Russian minimalism! —I make a finger gun. I smile idiotically. —Anyway, I have to ask a question because I promised myself I would while I was alive. —And the whole atmosphere changes because we had finally arrived at the sole purpose of the conversation. —Why the hell aren't you more objective?
Documento paranaense reforça que proteção à infância deve partir da prática política cotidiana, não só do papel.
The Ten-Year Plan for the Rights of Children and Adolescents of the State of Paraná (2014-2023), all 450 pages of it, landed in my lap. My impressions begin with the reverse: before listing the names of the people who actually did the work, there's an endless list of politicians. Annoying!
Having overcome that section, what one reads is a delight for academics, public administrators, and child advocates. The information is clear, even to the point of noting: "on such a matter, we have no information". But allow me to explain the reason for my comment.
Although that list of politicians makes me somewhat nauseous (because of the inverted hierarchy of things; the merit belongs to the technicians who wrote it, yet the authors' names come first!), their signatures are essential.
Not just the signature, but a commitment that goes beyond this: legislation does not change reality, plans do not change reality, but daily action does.
Cândido Machado analisa relação entre mídia e conservadores, criticando distância da imprensa das pautas populares.
The journalist Cândido Machado Neto and I graduated from PUCPR, back when we were discovering politics. In the elections for the Communication Student Center and the Student Union, we encountered corruption. Even ballot box tampering. Cândido, whom my family and close friends call Kiko, is recognized for his conservative views. He has a remarkable reach among young conservatives. We never stopped talking about politics, and we don't understand why people fight over it. In this publication, we are trying out a format inspired by The New York Times opinion columns.
Sgarbe: Kiko, few men in the world are more affectionate with me than you. Maybe Father Paulo. For years, we've discussed politics. I remember us talking about the role of man in the world, whether greater, lesser, or equal to that of a dolphin. Back at the PUCPR Student Union. Do you have any idea how much you change my point of view?
Machado Neto: I can't imagine, my dear friend. I still have issues with dolphins. My point about these pro-democracy texts is that they aren't truly about democracy. I'm going to use a crude phrase, but one that explains well what "democracy" means to so many people". Democracy is like a dick, everyone who has it in their mouth, sooner or later, sticks it up their ass". I am the author of this beautiful reflection that explains it well. The pro-democracy letters are signed by people who not only defend dictatorships but actively participated in financing them. With public money. How can these people talk about democracy? But we don't need to go to extremes, let's talk about our journalist colleagues. They talk about democracy, but they applaud arbitrary arrests, investigations outside any legal framework, persecution, and cancellations. Every day, some Bolsonaro supporter either has their account blocked or gets fined for the simple reason of being a supporter. You met Érica, who was a municipal school teacher and went to protest in Brasília. She ended up imprisoned for five months in Papuda. Meanwhile, in 2014 (you can look it up), the MST tried to invade the Supreme Court during a session, with sickles and machetes, and nothing, nothing, happened to any leader. I can mention the congressman who was arrested despite parliamentary immunity. Something inadmissible in our Constitution. A former president impeached who didn't have her political rights suspended (as the Constitution says) because the president of the Supreme Court at the time didn't want to. Is this democracy? Judges dictating how farmers should plant soybeans. It happened last week. Who the president should or shouldn't appoint to the Federal Police. Judges overturning tax decrees. Interfering in economic matters that are the prerogative of the Legislature. And I won't even mention the pandemic, where people were literally dragged off the streets, stores welded shut with lead to prevent them from opening. Vaccine passports, etc. We no longer live in a democracy. Those who say this, who defend this "democracy", are only defending their own dictatorship. Which one day will bite them too, because the monster of legal authoritarianism is insatiable.
Sgarbe: I understand that you're reacting to Pedro Ribeiro's text on democracy and my question. I'll make it clear, then. You change me. I think it has to do with our level of sincerity. A few months ago, I interviewed a woman who is now a candidate for federal deputy. She has a killer resume. But she told me something like, "we have to study so we can drink half a bottle of wine and question everything we've done". She fits in with us. About Érica. I had the opportunity to talk about her during a class at the university. I told the story in a way that even surprised me. You know I'm on the side of freedom. But back to politics. Is Bolsonaro a kind of Tiririca? Is he computed as a clown? Is it reasonable for someone to see him as "a vote against the system"? It seems coherent to me. But part of the communication is interrupted, thus useless for "everyone", when one argues that he has what it takes to be a president.
Machado Neto: I understand your point. I remember you saying that you talked about Érica at the Federal University. Bolsonaro isn't Tiririca, nor a clown. Bolsonaro is your father, my father, an ordinary person. He is not, and that's why the press loathes him, a social democrat, a socialist. Because the fetish of socialism is the biggest fetish of our press. I'll give you an example. The entire press said that he mocked, made fun of, a person dying from lack of air, from Covid. Even Renata said that. What is the truth? So, we have a media that is fetishistic. That thinks a president is not what he is, but what he appears to be. Unless that president is a simulacrum of a leftist leader like Lula. A press that doesn't give a damn about what the people think. The other day, look at this absurdity. Paulo Martins, Bolsonaro's Senate candidate here in Paraná, went to RPC. So, questions back and forth. A journalist there said that in the 2005 referendum, the people voted against the trade of ammunition and firearms. Paulo said no, that the people voted in favor, and it was a high turnout. She argued and got angry. The next day, she was issuing a correction, saying that the [candidate for] senator was right. Making a mistake isn't the problem here. The problem is the reporter being so detached from reality, so absurdly outside any political discussion. Tucked away in such a huge elitist bubble. That she didn't know that the people voted in favor of guns. You know why she didn't know? Because she can't conceive, in her Novo Batel Shopping Mall mind, of a society that is conservative. That defends families, civilian gun ownership, is against abortion. "It's absurd for it to be this way, they are just extremists". Therefore, the people could only have voted against guns, right? You see? The extent of the divorce our colleagues have from the real population?
Sgarbe: I think Bolsonaro is a parliamentarian. He should have stayed in the Legislature, in my view. It's the right stage for many of his themes. But I consider the Presidency to have a dual function, head of state and the people's "coach" - laughs. I don't want to "fight" for the Brazil of Ciro Nogueira, of Silas Malafaia, I don't even think Brazil is that important anymore, since Bolsonaro is president. A journalist didn't know how to interview Paulo Martins? Doesn't surprise me. Television journalism is a kind of living dead, it doesn't know if it's an Instagram Story, if it's the biggest broadcaster in the country, if it's a life diary that greets the ridiculous "beautiful photo" of a viewer who thought the moon was pretty. Even experienced reporters are losing patience with mediocre "anchors". But it's this journalism that was okay with Lava Jato. Every time Moro farted in his office, it made headlines. 😂
Machado Neto: I don't think Bolsonaro is ideal in anything. He's not a mass leader, nor does he resemble those intellectual mass leaders of the 1930s in either fascism or communism. And that's precisely his advantage. Bolsonaro, if he were a malicious person with the amount of influence he has over a gigantic portion of the population, if he were a bad person as the journalist with the generic foreign last name says, he would have already turned this country into a dictatorship. But those who have been turning this country into a dictatorship are precisely those who claim to want to protect democracy. "We will protect democracy even if we have to implement a dictatorship", they say.
Journalist analyzes opinion's critical role in democracy, warning radicalism and ignorance pose grave risks.
Sgarbe: Pedro, we've been talking for so long, and for so long we've never met in person, that I have the impression we're back in the 90s, with the idea of the web-friend — (laughs). Something that frequently unites us, back to the reality of this opinion piece, is journalism, especially, ironically, opinion pieces. This reminds me of my idol, Gladimir Nascimento. He prevented us, beginners that we were, from airing listeners' opinions without a criteria of respect for the individual expressing the opinion and for the one who would hear it. Something like Noah's sons covering up their old man who had passed out drunk. Having introduced the subject in the worst possible way, I ask if you think the press in 2022 is right or wrong to let so many jackasses pass as columnists, interviewees, etc. Shouldn't we avoid exposing these brethren to ridicule?
Pedro Ribeiro: Dear journalist Vinícius Sgarbe. In speaking with you, this old survivor of letters, or of the pen, as Nilson Monteiro says, feels gratified and certain that I will leave here with learning and knowledge. Having been honored as one of the "Voices of Paraná", in Professor Aroldo Murá's collection of personalities from Paraná, and now speaking with you, I even think I have a little importance or history in our journalism, where I started at Gazeta do Povo 45 years ago. A little. Just. Opinion pieces! You have no idea how many arrive for me per day at Paraná Portal. Each one is hair-raising. Therefore, after a filter, the ones I find interesting, I put a footnote: this article does not necessarily represent the opinion of this newspaper and is the sole responsibility of its author. Today, dear Sgarbe, with social media and so-called citizen journalism, everyone has contributed, in one way or another, with "opinion", to the construction of democracy and in the public sphere. Everyone has their reason. These are articles that, in many cases, spark debates, radical or not, and generate much controversy. Everyone who writes an article has full confidence that their opinion is correct and, sometimes, we have dogmatic examples. We can never confuse opinion pieces with journalistic reports, because, for me, journalism, although a space for counterpoint, its commitment is to the truth, to the reporting of facts, duly investigated. It is neutral. It has its values of freedom, dignity, respect, and openness to opposing viewpoints. Journalism, for me, my dear friend, is the pillar of democracy. Without newspapers, there is no democracy. It's difficult to have to, for example, tell a colleague that his article is nothing more than a press release of personal or corporate interest. He might be offended. I prefer to say that "the editorial board will evaluate it" (laughs).
Sgarbe: Today, I came across one of those podcast clips where a man says "only a fool doesn't change his mind". It even reminds me of the Free cigarette ad. I think that man is right. We can revise an opinion based on new facts. I'm reading a great book by Bion, "Learning from Experience", a psychoanalytic text. I frequently ask myself, daily, what have I learned, after all? One thing is that sarcasm can be very harmful to interpersonal relationships. With these relationships damaged, it becomes more difficult to transfer knowledge. I believe that sarcasm can even be a hindrance for those who are searching for truth. What I argue is that we, journalists, cannot bear the weight of a single point of view, we have to escape the slavery of "lacrolândia" [a pejorative term for excessively politically correct or "woke" culture]. A strong opinion is welcome — very different from the silly comments anchors might make because they have nothing to say. A strong opinion requires a strong individual, a "whole woman", a "whole man". It seems difficult for the 2022 journalist to understand that they don't need to, that they still don't need to, save the media's bacon, that the commercial and editorial roles are very well established. They have to do their job, be loved by their own family, by their friends, but they don't need to beg for success when reporting news.
Pedro Ribeiro: Abandoning a radical, intolerant thought and changing it with conviction is not shameful, on the contrary, it is knowing how to recognize that the earth is round and not flat, that life goes on. It's healthy, it's good for the soul. Reflecting and being self-critical about points of view oxygenates our brain and makes us follow a true path. Our country, one of the largest democracies in the world, demands this. It is a country that experiences and breathes freedom, at least in post-dictatorship journalism. What we see are some specific things like intolerance regarding electronic voting machines, coup attempts, small things that don't even scratch the democratic system. Nothing violent. Having an opinion is a right, but stupidity is unforgivable, because you have time to learn and innovate. As a journalist who writes editorials (opinion pieces of my own and of the newspaper's line of thought), I make mistakes and try to correct my mistakes and, sometimes, by changing my opinion. This is not shameful for me. Many friends ask me: are you going to vote for the thief? I answer with the puffed-up chest of a non-partisan journalist that I vote for whoever is the best and, in our case, today, for whoever is the least bad. The thief may have learned on the "pau de arara" [a torture device], with whips on his back, but the fool, the radical, is worse. This is my "opinion" and I can change it if someone proves to me that we will have, on the other side, an economic and social program for our country that privileges the thin layer of society and not the little more than 500 congressmen and another 55,000 authorities who have privileged jurisdiction. Secret budgets, tons of money from the Electoral Fund. This doesn't fit with my journalistic line of thought. In this case, I'm even radical and sometimes I overplay my hand. But I don't bend my knees. I see many fellow journalists today who have a correct line and pray by the book of good journalism like someone who swears with their hand on the Bible or before the Court, to tell the truth, only the truth. Our country is lacking in leadership. Brazil, today, is the reflection of its own rearview mirror, or mirror. Best regards, Sgarbe.
Sgarbe: Thanks for the lesson, Pedro! Best regards.
Governor condemns Brasília violence, while deputy defends protestors' motives; details inside.
At 6:44 pm this Sunday (8th), it's worth celebrating that the headlines don't carry any death tolls from the events in Brasília. The seats of the Three Powers were occupied and damaged by people whose descriptors are numerous and imprecise. From a basic political standpoint, anarchists. From a psychoanalytic perspective, primitives, or ignorant masses. In any case, no condition grants those people the noble titles of patriots or nationalists.
These ignorant masses are particularly wounded by their defeat at the ballot box, in a clear manifestation of fragility. That is, the cognitive restriction operated by forces such as Protestant religious fundamentalism and the misery of political representation culminates in this sadness: "in the past, I wasn't heard, I had a president I loved, but he lost the election despite my unrestricted support, this support cost me friendships and family relationships, I no longer have the energy to justify Bolsonaro's flight to the United States, and I don't know what to do with my time".
Given the facts about the omissions of the Federal District Security forces, the attacks against police officers and journalists at work – with video records – the calculated damage to public property is a minimal issue to deal with. I argue that breaking windows is a lesser loss than human lives.
Above all, however, the damage is moral, and prior to the concept of legislation. It is damage to the core of what identifies us as rational beings, an attack on the primacy of reason. It is serious, and its effects extend beyond Brazilian borders.
The Secretary of State for Industry, Commerce, and Services of Paraná, Ricardo Barros, defended the acts. In a live interview on CNN, he argued as follows:
"The Superior Electoral Court, Minister Alexandre de Moraes, tried to impose the credibility of the electronic voting machine. He issued a TSE resolution prohibiting criticism of the electronic voting machine. He silenced parliamentarians. He silenced several journalists who wanted to criticize. He did not convince society that the voting machine was reliable. If he had convinced society that the voting machine was reliable, and not imposed trust in the voting machines on society, we wouldn't have these people, who are Brazilians, who are there with their faces uncovered".
Challenged by the journalist interviewing him, he was embarrassed on air. I consider her attitude professionally immature, since she should have had the perspective of someone interviewing a career congressman who was the leader of the Bolsonaro government.
The governor of Paraná, Ratinho Junior, published on Twitter that he repudiates the acts.
Regarding Paraná, it is unknown whether Governor Ratinho Junior's stance of apparent neutrality, recently praised by Archbishop Dom José Antonio Peruzzo in a video, will continue to be neutral or whether he will authorize Barros' discourse.
Int'l firm Amco brings its novel bilingual method, viewing happiness as key to learning, to Brazil.
“The purpose of education is happiness. Every path is taken so that one may arrive at happiness. We believe it’s possible to shorten that path”, states Amco CEO, Guillermo De León, to Lab Jornalismo 2030. The company's main product is a bilingual education system present in 14 countries, arriving in Brazil shortly before the pandemic.
With a lavish white booth at the Bett Brasil fair in São Paulo, Amco welcomes visitors with virtual reality glasses. The experiences showcasing the pedagogical program are autonomous and individual. Despite this, teachers, administrators, and technicians are readily available and attentive.
“One of the most striking characteristics of the Brazilian market, compared to other countries where Amco operates, is the curiosity regarding pedagogy. In any case, we are ready for these discussions”, notes the country manager for Brazil, Mekler Nunes. “What Amco is doing by presenting itself at this fair is anticipating the possibilities of bilingual learning for the Brazilian reality”.
Nunes believes that those who visit the booth “discover that Amco has the maturity, the experience, and, more than that, an educational culture of great inspiration.”
With the slogan "Happy to learn", Amco sparks curiosity about the translation of this slogan into Portuguese. From this reporter's perspective, there is more than one possible version, such as "feliz para aprender" (happy to learn) or "feliz em aprender" (happy in learning). In any case, happiness is a central word, part of the organizational canon.
“Scientifically and academically, there are tools that measure and indicate intrapersonal and interpersonal socio-emotional tendencies quite concretely. This is complex and sophisticated; however, these studies have pointed towards competencies. We have 45 minutes [of class time] to land, to take things from the realm of ideas and bring them into practice. And our practice offers possibilities in this sense”, concludes Nunes.
The implementation manager in Brazil, Ágata Soares, reports that Amco's participation in the fair (held between May 10th and 13th at the Transamerica Expo Center) serves "to introduce ourselves. The company arrived in Brazil shortly before the pandemic, which postponed our participation in a public event”.
“Amco has a structure that enables everything from the presentation of the product to the delivery of the classroom in record time. After all, it is a model perfected over the last 25 years”.
Broadly speaking, Amco provides a complete package for schools, leading them to bilingual education (with English) from elementary to high school. More information can be found at this address: falecomigo@agatasoares.com.br.
Photo: Amco's global commercial director, Daniel Kahan, the implementation manager in Brazil, Ágata Soares, and the CEO, Guillermo De León.
German experience shows countering intolerance and extremism secures a peaceful future.
We have the matter of abuses to discuss – abuses against our communities that cannot and will not go unnoticed. I invite the reader to set aside reservations, because we are bigger than the Workers' Party (PT) or the Social Liberal Party (PSL). Last Sunday, President Jair Bolsonaro was democratically elected, and if we remain vigilant, it will always be this way: votes cast in reliable ballot boxes grant mandates to those chosen by the people. But I also invite the reader to consider a statement by German professor Hanna Knapp that I heard recently. I write about Germany so that we can compare ourselves to a country better than ours, not worse. It's a panorama. Germany – in addition to its historical importance – maintains a leading role in the European Union and is one of the largest economies in the world. This country, which from here on becomes part of our conversation, is attentive to refugee policies and the violence of neo-Nazi groups. The German Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, calls on US President Donald Trump for a cordial attitude. Such an attitude is broad and forward-looking, encompassing economic agreements and human rights.
Judging by the words of professors – Brazilian historian Francielly Barbosa researches the unfolding of Nazism in Curitiba – and the content of the news, we understand the German concern: they are working to prevent the tragic events of World War II from being repeated. Despite Germany being a democratic country with a free press, groups that condone crimes are prevented from propagating their ideas. This is where the "paradox of intolerance" comes from. A paradox is an "opinion contrary to the common one". An example helps us. Hypothetically, a group that assaults and kills (or that believes that assaulting and killing are paths to a better world) – in this example, a neo-Nazi group – must be combated so that it does not assault and kill. Germany and other countries have understood that intolerance must be offered to the intolerant. Hence the expression "paradox of intolerance".
The German experience is that, step by step, the death of millions of people can be reached. For those who understand the killing of humans as an irreparable atrocity, violent groups – right-wing, left-wing, abusers disguised as #lulalivre or #B17, and a huge list – should be close targets of our police and our community leaders.
Far beyond the election, the removal of an anti-fascist banner from a university is an alarm – and this actually happened in Brazil. One step, then another, then another. Now, if someone is effectively fascist, that person has problems with the police. That there is an ethical crisis in universities, no one doubts – we could mention the installation of electoral committees within them, for example. University students frequently enter the world of work lost. But, if university students cannot be anti-fascist, the ethical crisis is also in families, governments, and police forces. Last year, I conducted interviews with teachers, historians, police chiefs, and psychologists to discuss, journalistically, violent groups – but the editors to whom I offered the material did not consider the topic sufficiently relevant.
Personal thoughts unveil calm pessimism, courage facing longing, and a quest for self-knowledge in a drab year.
In 2022, I experienced the most delicious monotony. It's as if. Precisely. The "as if" of literature. It's as if I had applied color filters, noise reduction, lowered the lights, and decreased the contrast. It was a deliciously normal year, which, for me, means that I learned many new skills, and I could say: if we haven't seen each other in a long time, it's possible I've changed a lot.
I occupied myself primarily with politics, to which I dedicated two dissertations (one worse than the other). I also settled into what I call "serene pessimism". I find it amusing how much we, being human, are capable of erring through sheer stupidity (less through ignorance, more through stupidity). Not even a talking cat could be funnier.
I disagreed with practically everything I read on Instagram. Taken to their ultimate consequences, those pieces of advice can destroy years of civilizing progress. The world, at least in my view, needs more people talking, more people taking risks, more people saying yes or no without fear. It's quite the opposite of the narcissistic life.
There is no culture or civilization in lives lived for themselves. They are still in the omnipotence of animal thought. Sometimes, they are our colleagues, sometimes a lover, a family member, what a shame for all of us. The simplification of memes almost always reminds me of the laughter of the gallows.
Ultimately, what matters is a certain courage in the face of one's own desire. I don't know a single soul who has achieved success without confessing to themselves that they can do little and know even less. There's enormous power in this conversion to oneself. "But there's no revolt, no, I just want you to find yourself". I met the man who helped Peninha write that lyric. We sat on a wooden bench, remembering that life is also love, if it isn't only love.
Before God and his angels, before Satan and his demons, before the Church and the Great Cloud of Witnesses, before the most perfidious alley of a neighborhood overtaken by drug trafficking, before the prostitutes of Visconde de Guarapuava, before the priests of all religions, before the world without faith and the Holy See, before Our Lady and Saint Joseph, and all the apostles living or dead, before the cars on the highway, the stones of Passeio Público, before the Bolsonaro supporters in front of the barracks, before the Bolsonaro supporters with the wrong sign at the universities, before Patryck's photo printed on PVC, before the worst collection of books a house can have — Tag's —, before myself, I confess: I cannot change the world by shouting (although I am an excellent shouter).
I know in the depths and on the surface of my spirit that we can be very happy before we die. That human life can be worthwhile when we have our first kiss or when we make eternal plans. The message is: "You know what happens when greed takes over: the more you have, the less you are. Wisdom goes out into the street and shouts, and in the middle of the city, makes its speech".
The infinite help I receive hasn't stopped with me; abundant as it is, it has flowed through glamorous rivers and threads of life in rotten gutters. The life that resists battery acid, space travel in a vacuum, and the salty, oxygen-deprived depths of the oceans also shows up in therapy sessions. The more I find resources to destroy the ideas of others, the more I take hold of the mercy that is recurrently offered to me.
Whoever eventually thinks that I am part of a grand scheme is completely mistaken. Whoever eventually thinks of involving me in some grand trafficking is wasting their time. My life is truly indifferent to human things that are not connected to the greatness of our divinity. If I were to die now, and the final judgment were a single question, which would be "were you happy?", my approval would come from the answer "well, despite the Lord not having been exactly clear most of the time, I did everything I knew". And that's it. You could print my photos along with the "Novena of Saint Sgarbe". From the first to the last day of my Holy Novena, you will have to pray: "I am not Bono Vox, nor Madonna, I am an essential person for the people around me. For me to achieve [insert your intention here], I need to wake up early and sleep early, have an organized schedule, and avoid psychological games as much as possible. Through the intercession of Saint Sgarbe, may God cease to be an authoritarian and vengeful father, and become someone I make happy. Amen".
Little can resist a certain insistence. If the door doesn't open at all, not with prayer, not with spells, not with all the playful and special effects, our path is not there. "God's blessing enriches and does not bring sorrow". If that gentleman changed his mind about keeping his own word, it is a matter for him to review his own principles.
I know less and less about God, but this I know: he gives preference to those who surrender. It's better to say "I won't go" and go, than to be the first in line and not show up for work. The other day, I said to him, "and You are the most hypocritical of all". As usual, I was wrong. But I think he got the message.
Tirole's book & Paraná actions show real gains when people favor common good.
The idea of the common good tends to be commonly bothersome for those it inspires. In a good way. Before thinking from an economic standpoint (fully integrated with biology and the human sciences, as defined by Jean Tirole), I think about the excellent editorial section name that “common good” makes. Instead of “daily” or “every day” – the latter, a classic in my writing –, we could call news about potholes “common good”, quite trivial, quite human.
When I argue that “common good” is bothersome, it’s because, whatever role we occupy, we are invited to suspend – even if in a limited way – our understandings of the world. Read slowly what comes next. If it's what I think, it's what I think and it's mine. If it's what you think, it's what you think and it's yours. The catch is here: if it’s mine or yours, it’s not ours, it’s not common good.
"Economics for the Common Good" is the title of Tirole's book, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics. The copy that reached me is from Zahar publishers, with the seal of the French Republic. Supported by economic research, the text clarified something beautiful for me: at least in the laboratory, we are more often honest and generous than selfish (except when we have very bad examples around). And more: we tend to engage in causes that don't bring us rewards that sound like reciprocation, because we don't like to appear greedy. The trick: at the same time, when we go to the polls and are seen in the voting booth, we feel pleasure. Mail-in voting in the United States decreased participation. People really wanted to meet their neighbors on the sidewalk, wear a sticker on their chest.
Some years ago, Professor Belmiro Valverde Jobim Castor (author of "Size Isn't Everything", among other titles) searched for the poorest locality in Curitiba and its metropolitan region. He used the Basic Education Development Index (Ideb) figures as a parameter. He came across a very poor neighborhood in Piraquara. There, he established a first-world school, with philanthropic funding from the United States. Names like architect Manoel Coelho and journalists Aroldo Murá and Michelle Thomé signed on to projects. In operation, the João Paulo II Education Center began to offer full-time education, with three meals a day, at the same cost the government spent per child in the public school system.
The person who recommended the reading about the common good to me was the Secretary of Planning and Structural Works of Paraná, Valdemar Bernardo Jorge. He and a state team identified the municipalities with the lowest Human Development Index (HDI) and created the Paraná Produtivo program. In this, the program resembles Belmiro's education center, by leveling up: a business intelligence platform began operating with data collected from various sources, such as tables from the Parana Institute for Economic and Social Development (Ipardes), to make the strengths and weaknesses of the regions clear and measurable. It only works if the local actors want to participate, and if they are willing to share the advantages and risks. This is common good.
Curitiba event addresses screen impact on families, urging parental responsibility.
Theimpacts of technologies, screens, on family formation and early childhoodeducation are highlighted in the 6th International Family and EducationSeminar, right now, this Saturday (23rd). In Curitiba, the maximum allowedcapacity in the Poty Lazzarotto Auditorium of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum isfilled with participants, and there are also those following online.
Fivepresentations are expected throughout the day. The first (Angela, alreadycompleted) and the second (Ana Maria, in progress) address the pre-pandemicworld, when an unprecedented stage of digitalization was being experienced.
ForAna Maria Araujo de Venegas (Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Pontifical Universityof Saint Thomas Aquinas, Rome), equipment and network connections create a newrelationship between the individual and the world, whereby a cell phone iscapable of commanding us: "find a Wi-Fi now!".
Regardingwhat we experienced before the coronavirus, "medicine challenged deathmany times. With each new discovery, we started living longer", recallsthe speaker.
In aninterview with Lab Jornalismo 2030, the National Secretary of the Family,Angela Gandra Martins (Ph.D. in Law from the Federal University of Rio Grandedo Sul), believes that parents must assume responsibilities regarding theirchildren's education, because they are protagonists in education. It is not,however, about hierarchical control.
AngelaGandra Martins, National Secretary of the Family:
Weare talking about a life project that children freely choose, and for whichthey have the support of their parents.
Regardingthe use of technologies and the possible imbalance in terms of time dedicatedto them, Angela catches some parents off guard.
Angela:
Whenwe talk about the problem of screens, we are not only talking about whatchildren watch, but about the preference of some parents for their cell phonesto the detriment of family interaction.
For information about thecomplete content, whether or not there are places available for today, or otherservice matters, use WhatsApp, at this link. The Seminar agenda is here.
Emotional balance & affect crucial for journalists amid tech advances.
Backin the 2010s, the journalist from Paranaguá, Luiz Geraldo Mazza, commented on aradio station in Curitiba: "There's too little information, we needmore". Intelligent and hip, he's been reporting news since the 50s – andhe's still standing tall like an Araucaria tree. At the time, he was referringto a type of reporting that was replaceable. That is, how could a reporter'sdescription be better than a live video broadcast?
Thestones of the public walkway know that surveillance cameras and those attachedto cell phones have changed the way we consume news, because videos from thesecameras recurrently illustrate website homepages and prime-time television.
Integrationhas to do with interpersonal relationships and a sense of inner fulfillmentsufficient to navigate delicate moments.
Butnot so fast. This isn't the end of the activity, as happened with charging forparking tickets. The reporter of this decade is even more necessary than in theprevious one, since Mazza's dreams have come true. One of the most prominentchallenges is to remain relevant to oneself, to the purposes that led one tomark "Journalism" on the university entrance exam application.
Amultimedia reporter is not necessarily an integrated reporter. A multimedianewsroom is not an absolute synonym for an integrated newsroom. Multimedia isrecording video, writing for the blog, taking quality photographs. Integrationhas to do with interpersonal relationships and a sense of inner fulfillmentsufficient to navigate delicate moments.
TheThree Ego States
Inthe first pages of the book "What Do You Say After You Say Hello?",psychiatrist Eric Berne presents three types of what he called "egostates". We tend to recall analogous theories, searching for parallels. Onthe other hand, I invite you, the reader, to stay in the "here andnow" as a way to put into practice what transactional analysis (the nameof Berne's main theory) proposes. When we communicate from the "adult egostate", we analyze the environment objectively (while in the"parent" and "child" states, the mind is focused on pastreferences).
Farfrom needing ten pages of introduction, plus twenty on methodology and thirtythat no one wants to read anymore, transactional analysis offers an approach tobe applied immediately. It's a sophisticated simplicity that serves as aparameter for every sentence uttered by a reporter. It's when one can hold upto the mirror the old practice of "separating the wheat from the chaff,and publishing the chaff". It serves the profession as a whole, as aphilosophy of life indicated for journalists.
Inthe world of live streams and competitive newsrooms, there is also the delicateissue of post-truth. I call it delicate because, somehow, the conception ofthis idea is embarrassing. It's as if the renowned "bourgeoisjournalism", so-called by the Frankfurt School, lost its footing in theface of "network" communication, instead of "beam". Andsuch a network, like many of us who interact without any need for a matrixstimulus, such as a headline, for example, is more focused on how it feelsabout what it consumes than with the degree of accuracy of the reporting.
Whereis the Reporter?
Thecommunication academy has been looking at the issue of affectivity and callsthe relationship between advisors and researchers a "doubleexchange". But these are words from articles, more or less like bandanason the invisible man. A powerful and creative tradition of succession hasalways existed in learning relationships – in a more or less useful way. It issaid that in the past, the intern who had just arrived at the TV station wasasked to go to the competing station to borrow a "colorbar ruler". I'venever seen this happen in real life, but it's a type of humiliation that, evenimagined, is part of corporate folklore.
Whenyou leave the newsroom with a fixed idea for a story, there is no relationshipwith the source. There is the risk of fiction, superficiality, and, why not,malice. With the journalism profession in tow, the individual reporter hastheir own transactions amplified. It is theirs the relationship with the clientof the sponsored content, with the editor with whom they will discuss what isor isn't news, with the interviewee. At this point, reader, is where theintellectual and emotional health of the reporter has to do with those peoplefrom the network in the paragraph above who want to feel things and not collectthem.
Whenyou leave the newsroom with a fixed idea for a story, there is no relationshipwith the source. There is the risk of fiction, superficiality, and, why not,malice. A reporter prepared for emerging technologies is, first, aware ofthemselves and their vocation. Then they can use Instagram – and show thedifference a professional journalist makes.
Originally published in OrbisMedia Review.