Livorno This time Luca Ribechini, the man of the committees, the great enemy of the municipal administration, the pain in the ass as he calls himself, who has always, by choice, not really been politically correct, has stumbled upon the worst language of the last millennium.
In the political diatribe on the fumes produced by ships in port, which on Saturday saw 4 candidates (Barale, Cosimi, Guarducci and Pezone) sign a commitment to limit non-essential maritime traffic, Ribechini called the secretary of the Democratic Party Federico Mirabelli a dyslexic, who in a speech on Tyrrhenian he had contested that commitment by underlining that it would be a mistake to descend into a conflict on a local scale between work and the environment.
«Today the Secretary of the Democratic Party returns to declare in the city press that we at Porto Pulito want to reduce port traffic indiscriminately – he wrote yesterday in a comment on his social profile with the emblematic title “Dyslexic party or Goebells party? ” –. Well, at this point there are two cases: either you are not capable of reading a simple text, or you give it a deliberately partial reading. The inability to understand the meaning of the simple term “cruises”, a sector which is also very clearly mentioned in our document as the least essential, to be restricted pending concrete measures against naval fumes, would suggest a banal diagnosis of dyslexia”.
Ribechini’s words were a bit reminiscent of those films from the 1980s or 1990s in which people quietly laughed at jokes about “faggots and fagots” or that widespread language in which the word “mongoloid” was used to “nicely” offend someone. This is stuff that fortunately a new and civilized sensibility has erased for at least twenty years, despite the fact that there has been no shortage of slip-ups, even by well-known politicians, think of Beppe Grillo’s statement on autistic people a few years ago.
It is no coincidence that the Italian Dyslexia Association immediately responded to Ribechini in civil tones. «Dear Luca, we would like to clarify an important piece of information, in comment on his post, remaining completely extraneous to the legitimate political debate. Dyslexia and other specific learning disorders (DSA) are a neurodivergence, a characteristic of neurobiological origin that does not prevent the realization of the specific skill (reading, writing, numbering or other) but requires longer times and greater loads of attention . Declaring that failure to understand a text implies a diagnosis of dyslexia is incorrect, because dyslexia is not due to a cognitive deficit. This statement is therefore detrimental to the dignity of people with DSA who, in Italy, are estimated to be three million. We invite you to read carefully what DSA are and how to talk about them, and to modify the text of your post, avoiding using the word dyslexia in a derogatory sense.”
But Ribechini, perhaps distracted, perhaps focused only on Mirabelli and the dem world, put a worse patch than the hole (without modifying the text of his post): «Thanks for the clarification – he wrote –. In fact, as he will have understood, the most likely diagnosis is not dyslexia, but much worse. He shows full solidarity, in any case, with the people who suffer from it.”
And his new gaffe was highlighted by the dyslexics association: «His expression “much worse” indicates that dyslexia is, in his opinion, an evil: as we were saying, it makes no sense to use neurodivergence (but the same would be with a disability) with a derogatory meaning, in a discussion that has nothing to do with these complex and delicate issues”. L
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