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Coordinates: 22°59′19″S 43°14′48″W / 22.98861°S 43.24667°W / -22.98861; -43.24667

Rocinha as viewed from within Rocinha

A hilly road in Rocinha

Rocinha, 2008

Rocinha, 2010

Rocinha (Portuguese pronunciation: [ʁoˈsĩɲɐ], little farm) is the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and is located in Rio's South Zone between the districts of São Conrado and Gávea. Rocinha is built on a steep hillside overlooking Rio de Janeiro, and is located about one kilometre from a nearby beach. Most of the favela is on a very steep hill, with many trees surrounding it. 69,356 (census 2010)^[1] people live in Rocinha, making it the most populous favela in Brazil, the second in Latin America and the ninth in the world.

Although Rocinha is technically classified as a neighborhood, many still refer to it as a favela. It developed from a shanty town into an urbanized slum. Today, almost all the houses in Rocinha are made from concrete and brick. Some buildings are three and four stories tall and almost all houses have basic sanitation, plumbing, and electricity. Compared to simple shanty towns or slums, Rocinha has a better developed infrastructure and hundreds of businesses such as banks, medicine stores, bus lines, cable television, including locally based channel TV ROC (TV Rocinha), and, at one time, a McDonalds franchise.^[2] These factors help classify Rocinha as a favela bairro, or favela neighborhood.

Community[link]

There are a number of community organizations at work in Rocinha, including three neighborhood associations and numerous NGOs and non-profit educational institutions.

Rocinha is home to most of the service workers in Zona Sul (the South Zone of Rio). Within Rocinha you can find numerous NGO's staffed by both Brazilian and Foreign teachers, volunteers, and workers. The diversity of people that inhabit this area, and the lodgings they live in in this densely populated area make it a unique environment for social movements to arise within.

2011 police and military operation[link]

In November 2011, a security operation was executed where hundreds of police and military patrolled the streets of Rocinha to crackdown on rampant drug dealers and bring government control to the neighborhood.^[3]

Size[link]

Rocinha is the largest favela in Brazil and one of the most developed.^[4] Rocinha's population was estimated at between 150,000 and 300,000 inhabitants in 2000s (decade);^[5] but the IBGE Census of 2010 was counted only 69,356 people.^[1]

In literature[link]

Robert Neuwirth discusses Rocinha in his book entitled Shadow Cities.^{[citation needed]}

In mass media and popular culture[link]

Many celebrities have visited Rocinha, including Mikhail Gorbachev (during the Earth Summit of 1992) and actor Christopher Lambert. Contrary to popular belief Michael Jackson did not shoot the first version of the music video for his single "They Don't Care About Us" there. This video was instead shot in the favela of Dona Marta, another neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. Some episodes of the Brazilian television series Cidade dos Homens (City of Men) were filmed there.

The 2008 film The Incredible Hulk featured an aerial take of Rocinha, an impressive low-altitude helicopter footage that gives a fair idea of the immensity of the favela and its complex assortment of seemingly endless chaotic constructions.^[6] Rocinha is also the setting for a map called "Favela" of Infinity Ward's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It was also featured in the 2011 film: Fast Five.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Rocinha

• FavelaDaRocinha.com

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Olavo de Carvalho

Olavo de Carvalho
Born	29 April 1947 Campinas, Brazil
School	Realism, Scholasticism, Phenomenology, Conservatism
Main interests	Metaphysics, Epistemology, Politics, Religion, History, Symbology,
Influenced by Aristotle, Louis Lavelle, Thomas Aquinas, Julius Evola, Gottfried Leibniz, Edmund Husserl, Xavier Zubiri, René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Mário Ferreira dos Santos, Viktor Frankl, Eric Voegelin, Ludwig von Mises, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu Bernard Lonergan, René Girard, Léopold Szondi, Constantin Noica, Otto Maria Carpeaux, Wolfgang Smith, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Miguel Reale, Leo Strauss, Mortimer J. Adler
Website	olavodecarvalho.org

Olavo Luiz Pimentel de Carvalho (Campinas, April 29, 1947^[1]) is a Brazilian journalist,^[2], and essayist on several issues like the history of astrology and mysticism; the history of revolutionary mentality; and philosophical anthropology,^[3] known for his conservative political stances, and for being a vehement critic of leftist.

Career[link]

Now living in the United States in the state of Virginia, he is an international correspondent and writes a weekly column for the Brazilian newspaper Diário do Comércio. He also teaches philosophy on a free course to over 1000 students online. Carvalho has previously written for several other magazines and newspapers, such as Bravo!, Primeira Leitura, O Globo, Época and Zero Hora,^[4] and taught philosophy to a smaller circle of students, while still living in Brazil. He also translated to Portuguese works of important philosophers of the 20th century, such as the Romanian Constantin Noica, the Spanish Xavier Zubiri, the French René Guénon, the German-American Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss.^[5][6] He has commented and developed researches and theories on the works of Aristotle.^[7] He has also delivered lectures on his own work and on the work of several of those philosophers mentioned above.^[8]

In 2009, Carvalho was the founding President of the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought.^[9]

He is the host of the popular weekly show "True Outspeak" on Blogtalkradio.^[10]

Opinions[link]

Carvalho's study of the revolutionary mind has been well regarded in Brazil by people such as Roberto de Oliveira Campos,^[11] Paulo Francis,^[12] and Bruno Tolentino.^[13]

He sees a characteristic of the revolutionary mind in the inversion of the perception of time. He says normal individuals, based on common sense, view the past as something immutable and the future as something that can be changed (it is contingent, as de Carvalho puts it). However, the leftist revolutionary sees the utopian future as a goal that eventually will be reached no matter what and the past as something that can be changed, through reinterpretation, to accommodate it.^[14]

Carvalho also points out that because the revolutionary believes implicitly in a future utopia where there will be no evil, this same leftist revolutionary believes that no holds should be barred in achieving that utopia. Thus, his own criminal activities in achieving that goal are above reproach.^[14]

However Carvalho believes that by the definition of revolution, the American Revolution was not a revolution at all because, for him, the Founding Fathers were men who held themselves (not just others) to high moral standards and in no way tried to usher in a novel experimental utopian system by centralization of power, basing their actions and policies on older English traditions and common law, and modeling the new Republic on these tried and true common sense precepts.^[14]

Carvalho collaborates with Ted Baehr, Paul Gottfried, Judith Reisman, Alejandro Peña Esclusa and Donald Hank through the Inter-American Institute. He is also a friend of American political analyst Alan Keyes.

According to Carvalho, Karl Popper's open society defines itself as "not recognizing any transcendent values and by leaving everything at the mercy of economic conveniences – conveniences that are something alleged even to justify the very demolition of the free market and its replacement by the welfare state, based upon taxation and debt." Carvalho believes that the free market doesn not make men good by itself, as it does not train them to be moral. Alone, it does not bother to defend itself against socialism. According to Carvalho, Christian values protect the free market system, not the other way around.^[15][16]

Science[link]

Olavo strongly criticized Isaac Newton, seeing him as a source of a "formidable stupidity", and has attempted to refute Inertia Law with philosophical arguments.^[17] Moreover, according to him, "Galileu and Newtons's science belittled the observation of natural phenomena in favour of formulating mathematical models with no relation to empirical reality".^[18]

Another target of criticism is darwinism. According Olavo, "all he [Charles Darwin] did was to venture a new explanation for that theory [evolutionism] — and his explanation was wrong. No one else, among the self-proclaimed Darwin’s disciples, believes in 'natural selection'. The theory in vogue, the so-called neo-Darwinism, proclaims that, instead of a selection mysteriously oriented toward the improvement of the species, all that happened were random changes. (...) 'intelligent design' is not only the final touch of the Darwinist theory, but also its fundamental premise, discreetly spread throughout the whole argumentative edifice of The Origin of Species". He goes on saying that "darwinism is genocidal by itself, from its very roots. It did not have to be deformed by disloyal disciples to become something it was not".^[19]

Olavo also accuses Georg Cantor of confusing “numbers with their mere symbols” in his works about transfinite numbers, and calls his math a “play on words" and a "false logic".^[20][21]

Works (in Portuguese)[link]

• A imagem do homem na astrologia. São Paulo: Jvpiter. 1980.
• O crime da Madre Agnes ou A confusão entre espiritualidade e psiquismo. São Paulo: Speculum. 1983.
• Questões de simbolismo astrológico. São Paulo: Speculum. 1983
• Universalidade e abstração e outros estudos. São Paulo: Speculum. 1983.
• Astros e símbolos. São Paulo: Nova Stella. 1985.
• Astrologia e religião. São Paulo: Nova Stella. 1986.
• Fronteiras da tradição. São Paulo: Nova Stella. 1986.
• Símbolos e mitos no filme "O silêncio dos inocentes". Rio de Janeiro: Instituto de Artes Liberais. 1992.
• Os gêneros literários: seus fundamentos metafísicos. 1993.
• O caráter como forma pura da personalidade. 1993.
• A nova era e a revolução cultural: Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci. Rio de Janeiro: Rio de Janeiro : Instituto de Artes Liberais & Stella Caymmi. 1994^[22]
• Uma filosofia aristotélica da cultura. Rio de janeiro: Instituto de Artes Liberais. 1994.
• O jardim das aflições: de Epicuro à ressurreição de César - Ensaio sobre o materialismo e a religião civil. Rio de Janeiro: Diadorim. 1995.
• Aristóteles em nova perspectiva: Introdução à teoria dos quatro discursos. Rio de janeiro: Topbooks. 1996.
• O imbecil coletivo: atualidades inculturais brasileiras. Rio de Janeiro: Faculdade da Cidade. 1996.
• O futuro do pensamento brasileiro. Estudos sobre o nosso lugar no mundo. 1998.
• O imbecil coletivo II: A longa marcha da vaca para o brejo e, logo atrás dela, os filhos da PUC, as quais obras juntas formam, para ensinança dos pequenos e escarmento dos grandes. Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks. 1998.
• Coleção história essencial da filosofia. São Paulo: É Realizações. 2002-2006.
• A Dialética Simbólica - Ensaios Reunidos São Paulo: É Realizações. 2006.
• Maquiavel ou A Confusão Demoníaca. São Paulo: Vide Editorial. 2011.

Collaborations

• Arthur Schopenhauer - Como vencer um debate sem precisar ter razão: em 38 estratagemas (dialética erística). Introduction, notes and comments by Olavo de Carvalho. Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 1997.
• Otto Maria Carpeaux - Ensaios reunidos, 1942-1978. Edition, introduction and comments by Olavo de Carvalho. Rio de Janeiro: UniverCidade & Topbooks. 1999.^[23]
• Émile Boutroux - Aristóteles. Introduction and notes by Olavo de Carvalho. Rio de Janeiro: Record. 1999.

References[link]

External links[link]

Online books

• "A Nova Era e a Revolução Cultural: Fritjof Capra e Antonio Gramsci" (complete text)
• "Aristóteles em Nova Perspectiva" (excerpt)
• "O Jardim das Aflições" (Cap. VI, § 16-17, Epicuro e Marx)

Others

• Official website
• Mídia Sem Máscara - Electronic newspaper with political analysis, edited by Olavo de Carvalho and other collaborators
• True Outspeak - Radio program (streaming)
• Seminário de Filosofia - Website with transcripts, audios and videos of Olavo de Carvalho's courses
• The Philosophy Seminar (English)
• The Inter-American Institute: For Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought (English)