From Volare to dhimmitude

Sanremo Festival. Source: RAI TV via Facebook

Politically correct submission is the new normal. Italian Pop Music Competition won by a guy called Mahmoud. Imagine that. The week-long Sanremo Music Festival is the most important event of Italian television, and it has been for decades. Including obsessive media coverage and assorted side scandals. (I’ve previously discussed a Sanremo scandal that didn’t happen: an obviously Satanic-themed song no one but yours truly seems to have identified as such.) If you’re old enough you may remember , the 1958 Festival winning song by Domenico Modugno that stayed atop the US Billboard Hot 100 for 5 weeks and sold 22 million copies across the planet. But those were different times,…

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Reshuffling. Or: About The Capricious Voter

Philippines, electoral advertising in the streets

Pretending to change the rules of the game while being predictable and misinformed. Recent General Elections in the UK and France, plus local mayoral races in Italy, represent good examples of a puzzling trend: voters ostensibly voting to upset the forces in power, or at least those forces that seem stronger at the moment, as if the unwashed masses wanted to evade control (while actually failing at it). As if moderation and wisdom were embodied by an erratic behavior that isn’t fully committed to any cause or political project, instead rushing to support the latest movement or political figure promising “change”, then at the next opportunity punishing that very same party…

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More crowd counting lies, less common sense

CGIL rally. Rome, Circo Massimo, 2009

Women vs.Trump, NYT vs.Trump In my last article I discussed the crowd sizes for the Presidential Inauguration Ceremonies in Washington DC, offering my rough estimates: O 2009: 500;   O 2013: 350;   T 2017: 300 (in thousands)   while according to the mainstream media you’d have to believe the following baseless reconstruction: O 2009: 1800;   O 2013: 1000;   T 2017: 250 or some unspecified number in the low 100s (of thousands)   Most news outlets chose to contrast Trump’s crowd with the Women’s March against him, where a large number of people gathered to express their anger against the newly elected President, on the Sunday following the Inauguration. My…

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Anti-Establishment: sometimes it means NO to reform. The Italian Referendum case

Matteo Renzi perplexed

2ND UPDATE – DEC 05 – RENZI RESIGNS. FINAL RESULT: NO 59.11%, YES 40.89%   To be honest, since the result was already in the bank, after the initial projections I serenely went to bed. Here we are, the morning after a result that is slightly better than I predicted (57-58% in my FB wild guess). Kudos to Renzi for resigning immediately: this is not typical of Italian politicians, who tended to find excuses to stay in charge even after a defeat. He kept his promise instead.   Our future remains very uncertain, Italian politics is a mess, to put it mildly. We’ve got a PD (Democratic Party) that is still…

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The Old Establishment Crank beat the Fresh Populist: does it matter?

Renzi and Bersani

A guy beat another guy in a Primary: big deal! Here’s a quick recap to understand some aspects of Italian politics; we can use what follows as a starting point, departing from there to get into more general stuff. In Italy the Partito Democratico (the most important party, founded in 2007) tried to mimic the US Democratic Party even in the choice of the name. It’s actually the inheritor, through a complicated series of transformations, of the defunct PCI (Italian Communist Party). Many things changed through the last 2 decades, but a strong sense of partisan commitment and a political apparatus that takes no prisoners are still a mainstay, a…

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