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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31632 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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The first month of the new Italian Government and Parliament has passed, and we had a bit of small culture wars that were in majority very amusing;

The first African-born and black member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Aboubakar Soumahoro, was elected for the Italian Left and Green Alliance. Soumahoro is know as a farming trade unionist, fighting for the rights of African-born illegal farmers working in the Italian, especially southern, fields. He was elected in an iron-granted center-left coalition college, and was one of the star of the Left, entering the Parliament with dirty boots, symbolizing his struggle for farmers. Ensuring elegies by left-wing journals, anti-racism as a flag, and promising a lot of progressive/left reforms etc

After less than 15 days, one center-left newspaper drop the bomb: Soumahoro's wife, chief of one of the immigration NGO that were part of this left-wing affiliated network of NGO and trade unions, stole millions of euros in public money destined for illegal immigrants, using them to buy property, dresses, Gucci handbags etcetera. While the immigrants and ex-collaborators of Soumahoro denunced, immediately after, that Africans were left without heating, food and water, and obliged to work in the fields under terrible conditions.

Immediately there is a storm, the Italian Left MPs denounce him, and other newspapers let know that there were a lot of doubt from many people in the coalition when Soumahoro was candidated, and at the end it was a forced decision from the top. Soumahoro first says that he does not know anything, than he published a video where he cries on camera. He went then to a TV transmission, saying that he does not know anything, and that his wife is autonomus. After a bit he suspended himself.

Way to go, I guess.

Another minor war was on credit card payments. The government permitted private business to not accept electronic pament under a certain sum, and the entire cadrè of center-of-left journalist began a 20 days straight, that is still going on, campaign of how much they hate cash and how much they use only credit and debit cards when they pay, and how much they hate people using cash.

Useless to say, this was not a very good tactic when a good chunk of your population or does not have a credit card at all, or struggle to mantain their small business in front of high taxes and high cost of energy.

Fratelli d'Italia reached 32% of popularity in the last polls.

The government permitted private business to not accept electronic pament under a certain sum,

Is this a tactic for avoiding VAT?

Fratelli d'Italia reached 32% of popularity in the last polls.

In most places it seems like it is unusual for a party to keep gaining in the polls like this (~+4% in two months) after an election win. Is this normal for Italy or is there some other mechanism explaining this?

Most places like where..?

It isn't so unusual in Europe at all for that to happen. I don't know what it's like elsewhere, but it doesn't look that unusual to me.

It isn't so unusual in Europe at all for that to happen.

This was basically the question. The "In power -> Less Popular" flow is obvious in US/Canada, and also what seems like the UK.

Not OP but it's a valid question not even borne of ameri-centrism. It seems rational to me that most of the worldwide electorate believes politicians until they're in power and don't do what they say.

what seems like the UK.

The UK has had Conservative rule for such a long time now that I don't see how this follows. People keep voting for them. Their party is a hugely succesful one. How exactly does it seem like in power -> less popular applies there?

It seems rational to me that most of the worldwide electorate believes politicians until they're in power and don't do what they say.

Why? The world is a pretty big place, and most democracies don't look like the Anglo ones do.

Probably the rest of the Italian right wing camp flocking under the banners of the leader of the pack?

I also believe that this is inevitable and that we will find ourselves in some government-backed social credit "crypto" dystopia in the not-so distant future

I see this as the most major threat to human welfare that is coming our way and it's much more tangible than AI risk or climate change or what have you, because the tech exists right now and the will to use it is there right now also, the only reason we are not already in such a tyranny is inertia. It wouldn't take much to get us there, just 5 years and a couple of crises.

Sadly the only way out that I see is to induce a circulation of elites and replace the managerials by the rising technocapitalists. They alone have the power base to challenge the established elite and the potential ideological commitments to prevent them from being a cure worse than the disease. But what a tall order this is.

The problem besides the dystopian control aspect is the destruction of the price signal. We already see a lot of weakness in price function with government putting thumbs on scales, etc. But social credit system goes further.

Social credit system effectively replaces market transaction. In doing so, it replaces effectively allocating scarce resource with allocating scarce resources based on what the government believes is best (which I think is less efficient).

Consider the classic I, Pencil. The argument was no one in the world can fully build a pencil. But via market transactions, a vast swath of people can interact to build a pencil. Moreover, if there are disruptions (eg Forrest fire destroying a lot of trees) prices send signals to change the composition of pencils (eg if I’m a pen manufacturer, then I raise the cost of wood pencils and likely increase the production of say plastic pencils; the public reacts on the margin to buying more plastic pencils thereby rationing the now more scarce wood.)

The brilliance here of course is that consumers don’t need to know why wood pencils cost more; they just need to shift their consumption. In the end reality trumps belief (despite how one might feel that pencils should be wood ultimately there will be a shift — either perm or temporary to plastic pencils because wood pencils relatively become more expensive)

Stated differently the market is of human action if not human design.

But let’s say social credit system replaces money. Let’s say the person in charge decides wood pencils are better and gives bonus points for manufacturing wood pencils and punishes people for raising prices on wood pencils. What happens there? Well, I the pencil manufacturer follow my incentive and keep the cost of the wood pencil the same. But reality is still reality and there is only so much wood. Thus, there is either a shortage of pencils (as consumer patterns don’t change) or there is a shortage of another good that uses wood. And maybe the person in charge of the social credit system institutes a cross subsidy for that other good further distorting the picture.

Prices are an elegant spontaneous order system that clears markets precisely because it doesn’t require human design (just human action). As communist bloc showed, economies are too difficult for human design. Social credit system is again trying to put human design back into the system which will cause the same problems.

The psychological mechanism is less "Orders from above" and more "I am an enlightened journalist who is above the deplorable working class who votes right wing and likes cash", I guess.

A lot of them like it for the same reason. You don't have to be terminally online to recognise that at least a third of the populace creams their pants at the idea of pushing others around.

I help out at a farmer's market on the weekend (it's challenging, good exercise, and a great way to meet women) and when covid hit it was necessary to get an eftpos device, and a lot of people only carried their cards. But over the past six months the trend is starting to go back to cash, and by far the reasoning most often cited is "we have to use cash more or the government will completely control us".

And while farmer's markets are a libertarianish concept, you get people from all over the political spectrum and all walks of life - teachers, bankers, small business owners, labourers and traders (those are the professions of the first five people I can recall saying they are using cash because of government control.) Farmer's markets were rated essential in my state during covid however, which might be skewing things a bit. But I think it opened up a lot of people's eyes to the issue of authoritarianism.

Because taxes are very high, a lot of the Italian economy is a bit grey, especially SMEs and local shops and sellers, and the population is old. A lot of people doing so can evade a bit of taxes.

Do they really? Utopian weirdos hate cash more than random normies like it, I think.

Corner store owners selling kebab aren't really representative of all plebes, I guess. I'm sure the guy who doesn't wanna shell out the cash to debit card providers prefers cash. I'm not sure rando dockworkers or truck drivers do.

I’m American working class, not Italian or even European, but the social norm over here is for blue collar workers to carry around quite a bit more cash than their white collar counterparts.

They do so out here, too. I just think there's a pretty wide gap between preferring cash and hating debit cards, credit cards, what have you. It's just not really a political issue here, and I pray it will elude Moloch's notice.

I think cash is a way of understating income for tax purposes. The benefit of this tax evasion is customer price is cheaper.

They would now! If they would two years ago.. Not a clue.

Corruption in Italian politics? Say it ain't so. Nobody could've guessed.

No, but really, do people out there genuinely expect politicians not to be dirty? Insofar I've talked to Italians, this kind of behavior is more norm than exception.

It is unclear from the summary that he, rather than his wife, did anything wrong, nor is there anything stating that his wife took advantage of his position in order to misappropriate the money. Anyhow, in fact I expect that neither politicians nor their wives will steal public funds, because in fact such incidents are exceedingly rare.

He did nothing, from what we know until know. The problem is purely political, because the deputy that was elected as a symbol of the fight against oppression of immigrants in the fields and against the right-wing rhetoric of NGO that steal public money in the name of inclusion and integration actually has a wife who is chief of an NGO that stole money for this reason and who imported immigrants to work in the fields.

He did nothing, from what we know until know.

He is either extremely dim or he must have known what was going on and failed to prevent / right it. Both possibilities are quite damning.

What percentage of Italian politicians do you believe profitted several millions from corruption? If this number was trully above 50, that is it was expected, Italy would be much poorer than it is.

Italy would be much poorer than it is.

Not sure why this keeps popping up, but Italy is the 8th largest economy in the world by GDP, and 30th on per-capita GDP. Those are respectively 3rd and 12th in the EU, and Italy is almost exactly average for per-capita GDP in the EU (behind France, Germany, Benelux, and Scandies but ahead of the Iberians and far ahead of eastern Europe). Certainly there are impoverished areas and populations, but on the whole Italy is a wealthy country, and corruption at the higher ecehlons of society would certainly amout to millions.

I expect a painfully large amount of them to wish they could, and to grasp the opportunity to do so if they should get one.

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