Hello there, it’s you again!
I want to thank you all my friends for visiting me here. The notion alone makes me feel a lot less lonely. Please feel free to leave comments, pictures, memes, whatever cheerful or meaningful considering the situation. We would probably all feel more connected. Or don’t, just read and then write privately or call. Whatever makes you feel more comfortable.
Comfortable for me is to try and have no anxiety and avoid routine. Sadly last night it took me four hours to fall asleep. I was concentrating very hard on something. I shouldn’t say but there you go. How much did I lose since the beginning? Well I think, now that I peeped into my accounts, enough to buy a lovely flat in London. Who cares, fate will deal with things. and what comes down will eventually come back up. But last night the internet connection was gone and I could not check, and so I started having visions of poor me homeless like the Little Match Girl. Oh boy, that was a real fight. I think there were three of us in bed. Hans Christian Andersen, the positive happy go lucky old me (e.g. what comes down will eventually go up, don’t move and enjoy the sun), and the other me who wanted everybody else to shut up so I could sleep. Bloody internet. I still have ADSL conection here. The (high speed?) fiber is just outside the gate, but the telecom company says they haven’t yet had time to prepare a rental contract with the company that brought the fibre here. Italy for you. Responsible for my anxiety attack.
Pity because I thought I would sleep like a log. I had gone walking in the fields to avoid police, carabinieri, army and, as we say here, sailcaz. It had been a nice walk, slightly spoiled by a twitter conversation I had found myself entangled with on the topic of personal data usage to identify contacts with infected. Now that I think about it let me tell you from my non-expert point of view. There is a current trend among Italian politicians to aggravate the loss of personal liberties with the desire to infringe GDPR. The current message to steer public opinion in their favour is as follows. If Korea, China, Hong Kong etc have successfuly curbed the spread of the virus by using personal data collected through smartphones and GPS systems (no way they can isolate the effect of that particular measure as it was introduced with several others which we havent yet in Italy), why shouldnt we do the same?
Well, my answer is, because of GDPR! What Korea has done is to publish everybody’s past and current whereabouts together with information about whoever else they crossed paths with. That is frankly intolerable given that we are currently staying home except for very serious reasons or for food shopping and going to doctors or chemist. So please fine those who infringe restrictions but do not advocate the right to snoop into my private life without prior adequate legislation and setting up of institutions to ensure my data would only be utilised for tracing my contacts in the context of coronavirus scare, but not for other purposes, and definitely not sold or ‘passed on’ to private companies. And the enabling legislation should be clearly time framed within definite and measurable benchmarks. I never cease to remind people that the’temporary legislation’ that was passed in Italy to help with the search for the kidnapped politician Aldo Moro is still in place more than 40 years later. Unfortunately almost all Italian politicians aim for an ever larger control of the state over the individual. Likewise for the individual’s wealth. But that’s another story.
Yep, this thing bugs me a lot. I was a teenager (you, bad guys trying to figurehow old I am) during the years when the Radical Party was fighting to grant respect for human rights. Yep, we got right to divorce in 1974 and right to (but difficult to implement) have an abortion. Every now and then I stop to think that my kids take all this for granted. I guess we took for granted the right to vote for women which our parents weren’t born with but had to fight for. Basically I am part of a generation that followed the trend to ensure that human rights were granted, respected, protected. My children are now part of an era in which their right are diminished or threatened. I brought them up well and I assume they are aware and express their position adequately and maybe more than that. But I am on twitter and I see the sheep, the faithful, the idiots. OMG do I fear what is coming.
So yes my walk was a little bit spoiled by a young ‘faithful’ who was ready to give up his personal data just because a charming politicians said so with his bovine expression.
But not spoiled to the point that I could miss this sunset.
