[Politics] Italy elects a 'far right' government

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

Stating the obvious these day's is unfortunately for many considered to be "Far Right " therefor for those Giorgia Meloni is "Far Right " . Her quotation from G.K. Chesterton hit the nail on the head

". Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face "

You need to do a bit more reading.

Meloni is supportive of the anti-gender movement, a belief born in the mid-1990s in the circles of the Opus Dei in order to condemn any social position other than that approved by the Catholic Church, which oppose gender studies.[96][97][98] She is supportive of changing the Constitution of Italy in order to make it illegal for same-sex couples to adopt children.[99] In March 2018, Meloni criticized The Walt Disney Company for the decision to represent a gay couple in the musical fantasy movie Frozen II, writing on her social networks: "Enough! We are sick of it! Take your hands off the children."[100][101][102]

Meloni has been accused of xenophobia,[103][104][105] as well as Islamophobia.[106][107] In August 2022, she reposted a pixelized video on Twitter that shows a woman being raped by an asylum seeker. The victim of the violence decried the publication of the video and she declared she was recognised by the video posted.[108] After receiving backlash, Meloni defended herself by accusing other politicians of not having condemned the rape itself.[109][110] She has criticized Italy's approach towards illegal immigrants,[111] endorsing the Great Replacement, a white nationalist conspiracy theory.[112][113] Meloni is opposed to the reception of non-European migrants and multiculturalism.[114][115] She believes in a planned mass migration from Africa to Europe for the purpose of replacing and eliminating Italians.[116][117][118] Meloni has been criticized due to her statements on vaccines and COVID-19, such as not vaccinating her daughter,[119][120][121] and claiming the probability of someone aged 0–19 dying from COVID-19 to be the same as being struck by lightning.[122][123] In her 2021 biography book I am Giorgia, she wrote that Russia under Vladimir Putin defends European values and Christian identity.[160]

 

[Bakero]

That list is to put it blunt is pure drivel.Take..

The cult of tradition.

Cult? Jargon. That covers most parties on the right and some on the left with tradition, to what? Economic, political or social? I think the one stating doing things for the sake of it was new Labour under Tony Blair's mission statement.


14Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Oh dear, I think you need to read Orwells 1984.

If you think the words of Umberto Eco are pure drivel, I'm not sure how you cope with the average thread on NSC.

I'm not sure what you mean by saying "cult of tradition" is jargon. You might find it useful to read the full article in which he first posited the list https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/. You'll need to register for a full account to read it. Look into traditionalist thinkers past and present for a greater insight into what he's saying.

As for reading 1984, I've done so twice. Twenty-odd years ago in English and I reread in Spanish a few years back. I'd wager that Eco was more than familiar with it too.

 

[GT49er]

You need to do a bit more reading.

Meloni is supportive of the anti-gender movement, a belief born in the mid-1990s in the circles of the Opus Dei in order to condemn any social position other than that approved by the Catholic Church, which oppose gender studies.[96][97][98] She is supportive of changing the Constitution of Italy in order to make it illegal for same-sex couples to adopt children.[99] In March 2018, Meloni criticized The Walt Disney Company for the decision to represent a gay couple in the musical fantasy movie Frozen II, writing on her social networks: "Enough! We are sick of it! Take your hands off the children."[100][101][102]

Meloni has been accused of xenophobia,[103][104][105] as well as Islamophobia.[106][107] In August 2022, she reposted a pixelized video on Twitter that shows a woman being raped by an asylum seeker. The victim of the violence decried the publication of the video and she declared she was recognised by the video posted.[108] After receiving backlash, Meloni defended herself by accusing other politicians of not having condemned the rape itself.[109][110] She has criticized Italy's approach towards illegal immigrants,[111] endorsing the Great Replacement, a white nationalist conspiracy theory.[112][113] Meloni is opposed to the reception of non-European migrants and multiculturalism.[114][115] She believes in a planned mass migration from Africa to Europe for the purpose of replacing and eliminating Italians.[116][117][118] Meloni has been criticized due to her statements on vaccines and COVID-19, such as not vaccinating her daughter,[119][120][121] and claiming the probability of someone aged 0–19 dying from COVID-19 to be the same as being struck by lightning.[122][123] In her 2021 biography book I am Giorgia, she wrote that Russia under Vladimir Putin defends European values and Christian identity.[160]

TBF, that really does look like a cut-and-paste job from Wiki!


Of course, that doesn't necessarily preclude the possibility it could be right!

 

[Billy the Fish]

Italy maybe but the French re-elected their own president with nearly 60% of the vote just six months ago. It doesn't sound like too many people are unhappy with their government

Remind me what % of the vote Macron got in the first round? (Both times he's been elected)

Of course the winner of a two horse race is going to get >50% of the vote

The French presidential election isn't really a fair comparison to a parliamentary election.

 

[The aloof gatekeeper]

Liverpool, Tottenham, Man City and Chelsea coming up in the next six matches. Let's not start sucking each others' dicks quite yet.

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

TBF, that really does look like a cut-and-paste job from Wiki!


Of course, that doesn't necessarily preclude the possibility it could be right!

It is a cut and paste job from wiki. A highly appropriate reply in the circumstances.

If anyone wishes to defend Mussolini with a bit of Chaucer, I suspect Wikipedia will again be my friend.

There are a couple of men in their late middle age who post on here, who apparently had normal or even leftish early lives, who seem overly keen, now, to pile in, full square behind any right wing nutter, racist or gobshite at large, with positive approval, on NSC. I find it most queer.

 

[Swansman]

Liverpool, Tottenham, Man City and Chelsea coming up in the next six matches. Let's not start sucking each others' dicks quite yet.

Is that an order from the Italian government?

 

[carlzeiss]

You need to do a bit more reading.

Meloni is supportive of the anti-gender movement, a belief born in the mid-1990s in the circles of the Opus Dei in order to condemn any social position other than that approved by the Catholic Church, which oppose gender studies.[96][97][98] She is supportive of changing the Constitution of Italy in order to make it illegal for same-sex couples to adopt children.[99] In March 2018, Meloni criticized The Walt Disney Company for the decision to represent a gay couple in the musical fantasy movie Frozen II, writing on her social networks: "Enough! We are sick of it! Take your hands off the children."[100][101][102]

Meloni has been accused of xenophobia,[103][104][105] as well as Islamophobia.[106][107] In August 2022, she reposted a pixelized video on Twitter that shows a woman being raped by an asylum seeker. The victim of the violence decried the publication of the video and she declared she was recognised by the video posted.[108] After receiving backlash, Meloni defended herself by accusing other politicians of not having condemned the rape itself.[109][110] She has criticized Italy's approach towards illegal immigrants,[111] endorsing the Great Replacement, a white nationalist conspiracy theory.[112][113] Meloni is opposed to the reception of non-European migrants and multiculturalism.[114][115] She believes in a planned mass migration from Africa to Europe for the purpose of replacing and eliminating Italians.[116][117][118] Meloni has been criticized due to her statements on vaccines and COVID-19, such as not vaccinating her daughter,[119][120][121] and claiming the probability of someone aged 0–19 dying from COVID-19 to be the same as being struck by lightning.[122][123] In her 2021 biography book I am Giorgia, she wrote that Russia under Vladimir Putin defends European values and Christian identity.[160]

So what actually is the probability of an under 20 that hasn't been Covid 19 vaccinated dying compared with an under 20 that has ?

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

So what actually is the probability of an under 20 that hasn't been Covid 19 vaccinated dying compared with an under 20 that has ?

Vaccination will certainly reduce the viral load and the risk of spreading. Young people are certainly less likely to die than the old if they catch Covid, but they can spread it just as easily. Because they circulate and socialize more, the young are by far the greatest spreaders, and more likely to infect and kill and older person than other older persons.

And the greater the expression of antibodies among the community as a whole, the stronger the herd immunity.

Arguing that young people are not at risk of death from Covid therefore should not vaccinate is therefore illogical and wrong.

Likewise, death from lung cancer due to smoking is very rare in the under 20s. This does not mean that the under 20s need not be discouraged to smoke.

Now, since you clearly like a quiz, tell me whether you think it is, on the whole, a good or bad thing to support Putin and homophobia, and whether supporting Putin and homophobia can be ignored, alongside their campaigning against measures to assist herd immunity against Covid, when making an overall assessment of that person's fitness to be a political leader?

 

[carlzeiss]

I haven't seen the evidence of her promoting homophobia other than opposing same sex couples adopting children .

As to her supporting Putin , I really don't know , . I did find this article interesting though .

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/world/europe/meloni-italy-russia-ukraine.html

Victorious Meloni Faces Early Test of Italy’s Resolve on Russia

The hard-right leader Giorgia Meloni has been a full-throated supporter of Ukraine, but her coalition partners have sounded like apologists for Vladimir V. Putin

As for the reasons for vaccinating young people .

My 20 year old daughters 2nd jab may well have saved random older folk , if so all well and good . I won't be posting details here though , sure you will understand






.

 

[Wardy's twin]

... to expand a bit on this:

Humans adhere to paradigms, which can be explained as worldviews that we generally take for granted. Examples include that we divide the year into four seasons or a day into 24 hours. We take these as true without questioning them... similarly we think "to go to work is the right thing to do because otherwise I can't buy things and I'd starve = work is good" or "this paper with numbers on has value because if we think it doesn't, we're in trouble and our world collapse".

We don't want paradigms to change, we object to it. But they sometimes change anyway, because we always exchange symbols (such as words or sounds or pictures). Symbols are coded information, we take the information (not necessarily true or false, just information) and our brains process it for us, and there it turns into thoughts. As long as the exchange of symbols remain the same, paradigms usually do as well.

If we go back some 500 years ago, before most people could read, our exchange of symbols generally looked like this:
Individual <--symbols--- Priest

Sure, when we interacted with each other it was like it always has:

Individual <-----symbols------> Individual

But since the only outside influence, who had a greater set of symbols and more power to distribute those, the priest would also control that indvidual-to-individual interaction, as they had received their symbols not from reading and not from the press and not from (other than very selective God-loving) art.

Hence, God was God.

Then some weirdo thought it would be nice if people in general could also read because societies where becoming more complex and the need for other information than "God is God" were necessary. This meant new forms of symbol/information exchange:
Individual <--- Book saying God might not be God

Of course, as with every paradigm shift, there was a lot of resistance that later grow into chaos. As God was no longer (not always at least, this was a centuries long process) God, the King was no longer King, and the French revolution happened and created new paradigms, most of which still exist today (democracy is good, can't live without a parliament, the right-left political scale will always be with us and whatnot).

With the advent of telecommunications - TV, radio, phones, easier way of travelling - people in the 20s and 30s received another new way of exchanging (and receiving) symbols. Among other things, there were movies, and since Jews - who generally did not adopt Christian values and kept their own set of symbols - were pioneers in eg film making, the new set of symbols/information was kind of a culture shock for the current paradigm in a lot of European countries. For instance, things like sexuality were not as taboo in the Jewish community as they were in prudent Germany. Hence people got angry again, there was even this bloke (Hitler) who started a party for all of those who hated the new information and those who spread it. The old world was trying to resist the new. Eventually we reached acceptance that things like naked women, psychology and people with different skin colours actually would not kill us, and a new paradigm was created where these things were accepted (at least more than before).

In the last twenty years, yet again the exchange of symbols has changed in a remarkable manner and here we are in a crisis, not really knowing what to do with the world, we're not even quite sure who to blame, but lots of people sure know they feel uncomfortable in a world without norms and set paradigms, so they desperately try to go back.

The thing is that "nazism and/or racism will never rise again because..." is also a paradigm, and could also be changed if people receive symbols telling them that it is the way to go. Ultimately, racism is not evil by nature - nothing that won't kill us is - just like being nice to your mother isn't good by nature: there's no laws in universe controlling these things, the perception of what is good or bad are just human inventions - which also means they could change. Today we think robbery is bad, tomorrow - if the we receive enough symbols that incidate it - we could think robbery is good. "We'll never turn into nazis again" is a promise as strong as "We'll never lose our faith in a Christian God". It is easy to say, but there's nothing that supports those takes other than the current paradigm. The unfortunate reality is that our brains are merely computers made out of meat, and could be programmed with symbols/information.

Unfortunately, the new symbol exchange system (the Internet) stood and weighed for years between becoming a free symbol exchange, which would have been pretty cool, or mainly an exchange between what I call "superindividuals" (governments, religions and corporations) which do not behave as humans nor necessarily wants us to thrive, and as things turned out the latter model is winning, meaning we as individuals have a very low level of impact (comparable to when only priests could read and write) as the amount of symbols received from superindividuals (which are not rarely contradicting each other, creating a further crisis in the creation of new paradigms) exceeds the exchange of symbols between human individuals. What finally will be is not really in the hands of the many - for "good" or "bad", I suppose.

We'll land into... something... sooner or later. But for now it is a bumpy ride and people want to go back to when it wasn't all that bumpy.

A tad too complicated...it's a bit more simple. Mankind is an animal a pack animal that responds to strong leadership when they say they can take you to the promised land and part of that strong leadership process is to identify someone to blame outside the pack so that people can vent their anger against them (and not at the leadership when they get it wrong). Threats (real or imagined) to economic status is the fertile ground that grows these strong leaders when they see the opportunity to improve their own position rapidly. In Italy there is a perceived threat from the number of immigrants hence fertile ground and yes tied to a weak economy.

 

[The Clamp]

To be fair, she’s rather fanciable.

 

[hans kraay fan club]

I haven't seen the evidence of her promoting homophobia other than opposing same sex couples adopting children .

So, other than suggesting that people should be prejudiced against, for no reason other than their sexuality, you seen no evidence of homophobia?

 

[Weststander]

Another far right party wins the largest vote, this time Austria. In this case, allies of Viktor Orban. No surprises …. inwards migration was the biggest issue. It will dominate European politics for an age.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rdygy5888o

 

[Berty23]

Is it like here where the people with lots of immigrants don’t mind it as much as those areas with fewer immigrants? For example Clacton which is one of the whitest areas in the country but can’t stand immigrants.

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

Is it like here where the people with lots of immigrants don’t mind it as much as those areas with fewer immigrants? For example Clacton which is one of the whitest areas in the country but can’t stand immigrants.

 

[nicko31]

Another far right party wins the largest vote, this time Austria. In this case, allies of Viktor Orban. No surprises …. inwards migration was the biggest issue. It will dominate European politics for an age.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rdygy5888o

Falling birth rates, we need immigration

 

[loz]

Having just spent 3 weeks travelling round Italy I was surprised how proud they seemed to be at being in the European Union, with duel flags on all the town halls, where there was an Italian flag there was a EU one next to it.

I was surprised because Farage and his mates are always telling us countries like Italy want out ?

 

[carlzeiss]

So, other than suggesting that people should be prejudiced against, for no reason other than their sexuality, you seen no evidence of homophobia?

Can't say I can , anyway our own Sir Kier has been praising the Italian pm recently and I can't imagine him doing that if he thought that she was a homophobic nazi

 

[Berty23]

Falling birth rates, we need immigration

This is the big issue that people don’t seem to appreciate. Birth rates mean that unless people work longer and longer then we can’t afford pensions etc. I would be interested to hear the response from people who are anti-immigrants to a question like “do you support immigration if it means you can retire at 66 rather than 73?”

Or
Would you rather having some immigrants joining the economy to allow you to retire at 66 or ban immigrants and work until you are 73?

We could work on the wording but it would make people think a bit more.

As 68 year olds
“Would you rather care for your 93 year old parents with dementia at home and have fewer immigrants or have sufficient care workers and have some help?”

That sort of thing.