Mailwatch(ed) Forum

Italy has 100 years afer the last fascist came to power decided to elect another fascist.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63044973

The government may contain Italy’s two previous clowns of destiny; Berlusconi and Salvini. Meloni doesn’t appear to be a flash the cash populist on economics. A nasty bigot with Thatcherite house keeping, Italy is now run by Ann Widdecombe.

To be honest the 2008 government was pretty fash.

They are horrible scroats that need wiping out of politics but it’s got as much stability as a Jenga tower on a cliff.

Meloni has asked Draghi to stay on a minister for grownups to calm market fears and deal with Berlin, Paris and Brussels. His price is that Meloni’s government plays ball on NATO and Ukraine. So not as a bad as Putinite Salvini as PM. Meloni will have more time untroubled for domestic war on wokes.

https://nypost.com/2023/10/23/news/ital ... ce=twitter

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has dumped her sleazy TV presenter boyfriend — after a lewd audio recording surfaced of him asking a woman if she would be interested in group sex.

“Listen, I wanted to tell you something. Do you want to join our group? Will you join our working group?” Andrea Giambruno, Meloni’s boyfriend of 10 years, is heard asking a woman on the tape aired on the Italian show “Striscia La Notizia” (“The News Spreads”).

When the woman, a colleague of Giambruno’s, responds favorably, he explains that there is a catch.

“You have to give us something in return,” Giambruno, host of Italian talk show “Diario Del Giorno” (“Daily Diary”), tells the woman.

“My expertise?” the woman cheekily replies.

The spirit of Silvio lives on I see

What is it with far right geeks and Tolkien?

https://jacobin.com/2024/02/giorgia-mel ... sm-fantasy

Meloni loves fantasy fiction. Most of all she loves the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, the Oxford professor whose genre-inaugurating Lord of the Rings trilogy has always been associated with the far right in Italy. She has posed next to statues of Gandalf. She has quoted Tolkien in her articles and in her speeches. “To me,” she has said, “Lord of the Rings is not fantasy, more a sacred text.”

If only she were just a joke.

The battles she picks are a mixture of farce and menace. She has attacked the civil rights of same-sex parents — a party spokesperson described surrogacy as “a crime worse than pedophilia” — and banned lab-grown meat. She has cleansed the national broadcaster, RAI, of center-left voices and appointed far-right figures to important positions in Italy’s large and influential cultural sector. Naturally, right-wing extremists throughout the country have been emboldened by her presence in office. In one corner of Rome, ministers cluster around colored ink drawings of orcs and elves. In another, young men gather to give fascist salutes.

I'm sure putting fascist cranks in charge of culture is going to work well for Italy. It's not like it's got a big internationa tourist sector or anything.

"Men of the West" - that line has a lot to answer for.

LOTR can be read as a western European far right wet dream - the good guys are white, based on the Romans (Numenor, Gondor) or the Anglo-Saxons/Vikings (Rohan). The Hobbits are bucolic middle Englanders. War is waged on the horrible hordes of inhuman orcs and "swarthy men" from the south and east. Dwarves are generally OK but they do keep to themselves and have a lust for money. And so on.

Read a little deeper though, and the cracks become apparent. The "high men" of Gondor and Numenor were a bunch of elitist arseholes whose snobbery alienated huge swathes of people and sent them to support the baddies. The good guys have to bury old differences and work together to defeat said baddies. There's a constant theme that the days of great heroes are coming to an end, and that what follows will be much more egalitarian. The most dangerous things are arrogance and lust for power. And so on.

It also appeals to those who believe in the "great men" theory of history. Simplistic nonsense, harmless in fiction, not so much in real life.

I'd also throw that LOTR became popular amongst a lot of hippies in the 60s/70s.

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Mon Feb 26, 2024 1:03 pm I'm sure putting fascist cranks in charge of culture is going to work well for Italy. It's not like it's got a big internationa tourist sector or anything.

To prove we’re the real party of law and order, and if you want to see how we deal with criminals, get along to the Colosseum on Wednesday afternoon!

The Weeping Angel wrote: ↑Mon Feb 26, 2024 5:32 pm I'd also throw that LOTR became popular amongst a lot of hippies in the 60s/70s.

More due to the quasi-mystical stuff, Tolkien's hatred of industrialisation, and the idea that all the hobbits were stoners.

Obama liked reading comics with Spider-Man and Conan giving what’s what to the baddies. I wouldn’t read too much into it.

Andy McDandy wrote: ↑Mon Feb 26, 2024 6:14 pm

The Weeping Angel wrote: ↑Mon Feb 26, 2024 5:32 pm I'd also throw that LOTR became popular amongst a lot of hippies in the 60s/70s.

More due to the quasi-mystical stuff, Tolkien's hatred of industrialisation, and the idea that all the hobbits were stoners.

The idea that Tolkien would’ve been down with concentration camps strikes me as spectacularly dumb aesthetically, before we even get to the politics.

I’ve a fantasy nerd friend who I’m seriously tempted to send this essay to, just to watch him tear his flowing locks out. Although as a German speaker I think he might be even more offended by the Atreju conference nicking the name from The Neverending Story.

More pragmatically, Ayn Rand doesn't have any crossover appeal and HP Lovecraft has too many big words after the initial attraction of his unhinged racism

Tolkien had some pretty odd obsessions by our modern standards.
The main one of linguistics and northern European folklore are best known, and the source of his greatest work.

He also had the old rose tinted specs for the old times, in a proper binmen style.
Vehemently opposed to Vatican 2 - Proper Popes.
Extremely nimby about any development in rural areas - Proper millers, peasants and gentry.

But he was from a generation when decent chaps knew not to drone on and on about their obsessions.


His great misfortune is the way Euro white supremacists have seized upon similar subject areas as "aar kulture".

MisterMuncher wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2024 12:35 pm More pragmatically, Ayn Rand doesn't have any crossover appeal and HP Lovecraft has too many big words after the initial attraction of his unhinged racism

I read The Fountainhead when I was nineteen and while nobody outside of the Objectivist movement is likely to cite Rand as a great prose stylist I can at least see the basic appeal of it. A man willing to pursue his own artistic vision despite mockery and rejection from the establishment, banding together with a few likeminded souls to stand together against the indifference of the mainstream etc. How many teenagers have started bands with that mindset? Hell, some of ‘em were even great bands. The problem then arrives with the deeply weird attitude to sex and relationships - aside from the infamous ‘I can’t believe it’s not rape’ scene, one of the major female characters spends a great part of the book pursuing a self-loathing quest to destroy the hero because she believes herself unworthy of him and cannot bear living with that knowledge - there’s also Howard Roark’s epic courtroom speech where he justifies blowing up a housing project because the builders fucked with his designs and the jury lets him off.

As for Lovecraft, I’ll happily still read him, but mother of the gods you have to put up with racism with ranges from the subtle to the remarkably unsubtle.

I've read about objectivism, and am none the wiser. It seems to be a posh way of saying "I am a thick, selfish bastard", but maybe I'm missing some nuance.

As for her work, if John bloody Galt and all his engineer and architect buddies are hiding in Galt's Gulch, who in that group is doing all the cooking and toilet cleaning? It's just more "Great men" bollocks.

Lovecraft though, one almost gets the idea that he was such a massive racist because it's what he supposed was expected of him. He was a raging snob for certain, but at times his racism is so cack-handedly obvious that one has to wonder what he's thinking - "OK, black people are bad, but why are they bad? I don't fucking know. Maybe they don't drive very well?". His wife was Jewish, so it seems he overcame that prejudice fairly well. I'm inclined to say that he expressed racist attitudes because he either didn't know better, or because he thought those were the attitudes he should express, given his position in society.

There's a decent little sci-fi book from last year called "Liberty's Daughter" set on a Rand-esque Libertarian seastead that gets pretty deep into the whole mess of "who's cleaning the bogs in yer utopia?" and "how great are these Great Men who want to keep all their greatness to themselves?".

There is also, of course, Bob the Angry Flower.

https://www.angryflower.com/348.html

There’s always something delightfully hokey about Rand’s plots. The fact that in The Fountainhead the master plan to convert the masses to collectivism hinges upon the dastardly wiles of a socialist architecture critic is a particular favourite.