As certain as the Sun that daws in the Morning, with the new Italian Right-wing government there is a new refugee scandalous crisis.
A NGO ship full of immigrants, after picking them in the front of the Libyan Coast, came in front of Italian coasts asking for a safe port. Crisis ensures.
Considering that only in the last 30 days over 10.000 immigrants came illegaly in Italy, it is not like it is the first time. As always, the NGO ship menaced that all the people on board are basically dying, that the government should take them and if they are not they are complicit in killing hundreds.
Now the ship came to the port after an agreement where they could let disembark only children and ill people before leaving... and after the first thing happened the ship refused to leave the port. To add to the confusion, a newly elected MP from the left-wing opposition, born in the Ivory Coast, is right now aboard the ship.
Another mess in the Mediterranean migratory crisis, who has no end in sight and has a lot of very powerful forces that try to obstacolate every immigration control.
Armin
2yr ago
Uncanny how these results continue to be replicated in every society and every culture and moment.
Almost if wokeness have some kind of biological factor.
Armin
2yr ago
I do not think so, because dog whistle means saying some words while you are trying to send an hidden message to your group
Here is more hiding the true meaning of common words in order to have the power to pursue radical policies.
Armin
2yr ago
I was reflecting on how western politicians today use terms and words that have double meaning with the media and the electorate, with one meaning the one that people usually understand, while the other is academia-made and is often a true example of Motte-and-Bailey.
For example, terms like minority;
Minority for the common man (and the electorate!) means a group that is inferior in numbers in comparison to a majority. So, if you survey with a poll the opinion of the people, it appears that the majority (!) is in favour of helping minorities (because it is the right thing to do!).
Meanwhile, the de facto academic term for minority is "a group that is ontologically oppressed, and so it needs social justice in order to destroy the oppressive hierarchy of the majority"
This has as a consequence;
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That politicians and their class of activists have the second definition in their minds, and do policies that follow it.
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Meanwhile you (an individual in a debate, a party, a media organization) cannot dispute the effect and the reasoning of the former set of policies because, if you do, everyone and your mom assume that you are against the minorities as affirmed by the common sense definition, and so you are a political extremist!
This manipulation of language at a core level create a situation where extremists do policies that are extreme and unpopular while being elevated as sympathetic moderates, and the moderates that try to oppose them for whatever reasons are labeled as political extremists.
I have no idea if this kind of method to do politics was common in the pre- internet or pre-neoliberal era or whatever, but it creates an insurmountable situation where, unless the people "begin to notice", it is impossible to oppose the manipulators, starting from the point that the manipulators have probably the majority of media and capital behind them.
Armin
2yr ago
Because the radical left operates on pure Conflict Theory.
Why they should concede that the enemy does something right, if this does not help the inevitable march of progress?
The only times someone should concede something is when it helps the cause. Saying that the right is sometimes right does not help the left.
Armin
2yr ago
I do not understand why young leftist activists do politics at all, when all they need is to wait for the trillionaires doing the exactly same thing
Armin
2yr ago
I need to correct you on one point:
Progressives definitely hate the all Czech cast in Czech media, if they notice that;
The progressive influence on these regards is, apart from the UK, very weak, but they sometimes make the point that they really do not like the native cast.
Armin
2yr ago
If you do not consider the UK Europe, Germany is probably the wokest country in the continent.
Armin
2yr ago
I remember very well the "based zoomers" meme of some years ago.
Gladly to hear that finally people understood that it was bullshit.
Armin
2yr ago
I am curious, because I saw it written many times here, but had no chance to investigate more.
What happened to the Alt-Right movement, and what makes it very different from the dissident right of now?
Armin
2yr ago
Reading this, i had a shiver along my spine, imagining the role that my people and country would have in this liberal utopia:
A people deprived of its mythos and ancestries in the name of building an inclusive future, where all our two millennia-old symbols and texts are modified in order to accomodate other people that share nothing with us.
Supported and put together only by a foreign ideology that had no presence here until the end of the nineties, and completely alien to our political tradition, and where dissenting against it (probably for purely self-interested reasons, being a nation and all of that) can make you fall in the enemy camp, represented by the non-liberal ideology or culture of the day, that is probably way nearer and similar to our culture than the Washington D.C dream.
All of this in exchange of...
Absolute self-expression, that is the thing the we do not have and made us way more saner and healthier than the anglosaxons
And good urbanism... oh, we have that.
The cherry on the top is that we are supposed to reach this marvelous future not as the metropole that absorb capital and resources and bright people, but as the peripherical nation that had 30 years of stagnation and decline, and that is approaching other decades of stagnation and decline, while receiving only the poorest and less fit of the people of the third world.
Yeah, this is hell for us, not the future.
Armin
2yr ago
All the Germans students I met voted Greens and considered racism the greatest European crisis.
Armin
2yr ago
The German Deep State is non existent, and if it exist, it is pro-american
Germany is more of a giant factory firm who needs to sell cars than a nation. In front of challenges their èlites will back down.
Armin
2yr ago
Inspired by a comment from Twitter;
Everyone is talking about the US relative decline, but they are really flexing his power in a way that we have not seen from Iraq
In one year they;
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Destroyed every possible reconciliation between Europe and Russia
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Became a next exporter of natural resources and the ones from who a lot of allies depend
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They basically sent a fuck off to Germany, and the Germans not only are not complaining, but are applauding
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They strongly limited the military of power of Russia with few money.
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China is slowing her growth, and they created a ring of allies in the Pacific
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The cultural grip on the West is becoming stronger, and the US successfully fused Neoliberalism and Leftism in a zombie ideology who is, against all odds, successfully working
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The pro-Atlantist view have never been so strong.
I doubt that these strategies will work or be healthy in the long term, but it is incredible to see how an ill and polarized country can still do whatever it wants without any reaction.
Armin
2yr ago
You are following the free-market fallacy.
In the ideal world where the market of the ideas is completely free and inefficient, that would be a great idea; join the nation that you want to live in depending on what you believe.
But, as in academia and in the economy, real life is different; the result of demolition of nationalism and national belonging in the upper-middle class and intellighenzia had the effect of ensuring monopolism.
There are no tens or hundreds of states with different ideas, but an overbearing assimilation to a stronger ideology who does not tolerate deviation from the standard, and assimilate everything in her path.
We have a world under a Monopoly of ideas, not freedom.
Your thesis would be compelling if we ignore the natural tendency of the human to create conflict and to have a sense of belonging.
Armin
2yr ago
Italian native speaker here.
Her accent is not only Roman (so perceived as "low class), but it also a very working class one.
Armin
2yr ago
Yeah, Warsaw hoped that, being the eastern vanguard and one of the biggest spenders-helpers on Ukraine they would receive something in exchange from Bruxelles-Washington
Nothing happened, and Bruxelles continued to go on
Gays are more important than NATO.
Armin
2yr ago
Early Soviet and communist education, for how much it was insane, was founded on the idea that Socialism was superior because it was more rational, and that maths and logic could improve the capitalistic education system.
A good chunk of it was tossed away with Stalin, but at least they produced a very good STEM system.
This is beyond communism or left-wingism, is purely emotional-based policy made by emotional people and women.
It is not Lenin, it is the insane Church Lady with mental ilness.
Armin
2yr ago
The war between the future Italian Government and the EU is beginning.
After a question by a student, the Commission President von Der Leyen, said that the EU will use "all their instruments, as happened against Hungary and Poland" against Italy in the case of "democratic backsliding".
As always, after this, accusation from every part came, with the Left defending it and the Right attacking it. Notice that von Der Leyen is part of the CDU(PPE), but their policies have always been center-left.
Apart from this phrase (von Der Leyen is not new at speaking too much with the wrong words at the wrong time), it will be noteworthy to see what will happen if Italy enter the bad boy group with Poland and Hungary, especially when also Sweden and Spain will probably see governments with the hard-right inside or at the helm.
The instrument of "follow liberal human rights or sanctions" can work against Warsaw and Budapest, but against all these countries?
What will happen will define how democracy will function in the EU, and if parties that are not part of the PPE-PSE-Liberal-Green megagroup will bow and assimilate to the center-right, or will follow the Orban line.
For now, it looks like the Italian Goverment will follow a moderate line, considering that economic recession is behind the corner and the debt is exploding again.
Armin
2yr ago
I do not think that the European Green movement will collapse.
Apart from total collapse, the core of the Greens are insulated middle-upper class, academics and feminists. They were not massively popular from the beginning, but they can decide on policy thanks to the support of Washington and of media-friendly popular culture.
For instance, from the beginning of the war, the popularity of the Greens in Germany only grew.
Armin
2yr ago
The main focus of the New Left is the analysis of hierarchies, power and how different groups and concepts and words interact with each other in the creation of hierarchical organization, born from the desire of finding, analyzing and deconstructing every structure that can remotely generate fascism again.
While sex is a biological function, and so is extremely difficult to dismantle without sounding as a crazy ideologue, power was the perfect word to use.
If rape = power we switch the focus from "maybe males biologically leans to lust, sex and degeneration, and that is life" to "Patriarchy and male dominancy derive only from the fact that exist a hierarchy of male power that provokes rapes, oppression or discrimination"
If it is the second case, this hierarchy can actually be deconstructed through education, word-renaming and all the usual instruments, causing another crack in the Hierarchy.
Armin
2yr ago
Notice that, if rape is about power and not sex, the rhetoric can push on the notion of deconstruction of the hierarchy, and not on concepts like self-control like religions of old (that are bad because they are hierarchical).
Rape is about power, not sex = another instance of academics trying to do their distruption of eternal fascism.
Armin
2yr ago
I know that complaining about Reddit is an old thing here, but I am still surprised how Reddit Brain, the one that always pop up in subs like politics and news, react when there is some news about Hungary.
Apart from the total ignorance about Hungary and the fact on the ground, how is possible that posts about third-tier countries (no offense to Hungarians) are so upvoted in /r/all?
Is there is some sort of algorithm, or the average reddit man is totally on on the neocon train "whatever we do not like is a threat to democracy?"
Reading about the FTX dèbacle and what the founder and his friends thought (especially about their EA space) made me understand how much utterly alien is to me the entire EA movement.
Watching the videos, the blogposts, all the infos that are getting out, made me reflect on "how" they think money should be used by rich people in order to maximise happiness and saving people and in particular the entire world.
Maybe it is because of my particular illiberal upbringing (Euro-mediterranean Catholic family), but I cannot fathom how this ideology is, for my eyes, "Utterly Evil".
How can you, a rich person, focusing yourself on improving astract things as the entire world, financing no-profits and calculating metaphysical moral earning based on how much money you are investing in EA?
Why not helping your community, focusing on art, infrastructure and knowledge, instead of giving money to global moral enterprises? It utterly repulse me on a philosophical and moral level, and this is probably the reason I never bought in EA.
If this is the alternative to the woke/progressive view, I have no idea of how the Western World can remotely fix its problems. Am I the only one who feels like this?
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