She talks of free kindergartens that are open for longer, of maternity leave paid for by the state rather than the employer, and of reducing the tax burden on people with children… She promises to cut, not raise taxes. On foreign affairs, she is fervently on the side of Ukraine (there is a striking ambivalence in Italy about sending arms), declaring herself ‘on the side of a proud nation that is teaching the world what it is to fight for freedom’.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-giorgia-meloni-the-most-dangerous-woman-in-europe
This surely sounds terrifying. How can the people of Italy support such scary, unhinged beliefs? What is the world coming to if people who are for kindergartens and child tax credits can just go and get themselves elected?
But hey, we can’t complain. For years, our side has called the ultra-neoliberal Obama a socialist and even a communist. Now we are at the receiving end of this rhetorical flamboyancy, and every mildly conservative politician becomes a new Hitler.
The adult thing to do is to start by assessing your own contribution to any problem, and ours is quite large. And it’s not in the past. We continue engaging in rhetorical flourishes about groomers, pedophiles, and “cultural Marxists.” There was, for instance, a recent and very pathetic eruption of silliness over the statements of a Spanish minister who supposedly “justifies sex with children.” The minister in question is a complete idiot. But she never justified sex with children and, in fact, said the exact opposite.
These exaggerations are fun in the process but there is always a price to pay for them, and it’s pretty high.
Clarissa's Blog 
The media is just going to end up totally normalizing the word “far right” to the point it’s a meaningless term.
I used to think of anything far right being ultra nationalistic and bad. Now it just means anything that disagrees with the neoliberal narrative.
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By the way Clarissa, did you hear about that shooting of a draft officer in Russia?
I just don’t see how Putin is not pissing himself right now. He’s arming a lot of disgruntled people who do not have a lot to lose. That’s a very dangerous combination.
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Please ignore, posted in the wrong thread. This is the right one:
https://clarissasblog.com/2022/09/26/two-options-for-russia/#comment-577539
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No, I’m in class since morning and didn’t see it. Wow.
This is all so crazy. Russians were living normally, looking forward to the weekend, preparing for vacations. And then they went and started to self-destruct. Why? What for? So incredibly stupid.
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I like her!
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Giorgia Meloni is not far right, she’s a conservative. Admittedly, her party has roots in a far-right formation but that goes back to over 20 years ago. The party changed out of all recognition under her leadership. During this campaign she was able to persuade a large number of conservative-minded voters: her share of the vote went from 2% in 2013 and 4.4% in 2018 (the two previous election years) to 26% and now she has turned her party into the first political force in the country, leading a right of center coalition with 44% of the vote and a majority of seats in both the House and the Senate. Expectations are high and she has a hard task to achieve. All eyes are on her: as a woman, as a conservative, as a relatively young politician who is anti-globalisation and anti-woke. Almost every other politician wants to see her fail.
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And she also had her daughter at 40, which makes me like her even more. Imagine if we could have her in Italy, DeSantis as president of the US, and Arestovich as present of Ukraine. Young, smart, conservative, anti-woke – that’s the future of the world.
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\ conservative, anti-woke
I am a liberal and not woke because I am against weirdness instead of real politics.
In Israel “conservative” = “right wing” = “against Palestinian state ever and against separation between religion and state.”
If America went woke and many politicians became neoliberal, it doesn’t turn “liberal” into something bad. There are numerous conservatives worldwide who are as neoliberal as it gets.
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This is a great question.
In Canada, there’s a teacher who wears gigantic prosthetic breasts with erect nipples to class. What’s a liberal principle that can prevent him from doing it? If individual freedom is above all, how do we argue that he shouldn’t be doing it?
As somebody said on Twitter, how does the idea that women in Iran shouldn’t wear a hijab if they don’t want to fail to lead to the Canadian guy with prosthetic breasts?
If individual choice is THE foundational principle (which in liberalism it is), how do you keep the nation-state? If it’s all about choice, why will anybody choose to live in bad places?
Look at the anti-family article I linked the other day. Liberalism inevitably ends up being anti-family because there’s no bigger constraint on individual freedom than the unchosen obligations of family.
And what about the unfreedoom of biology and genetics? Those prevent us from exercising our will. How does liberalism not end up denying the biological sexes or genetics?
These are not rhetorical questions. Nobody has been able to show what is to prevent the belief that individual freedom is the most important thing of all doesn’t lead to wokeness.
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How fast would a well-endowed actually-female teacher have been fired for coming to work braless?
#maleprivilege
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Meloni is pro-Ukraine! Glad to see a right winger who supports Ukraine and seems to be good on other issues as well. Europe especially tends to be a total political disappointment.
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Yep. Rachel Maddow just spent an hour giggling and talking in her trademark hypermanic style about how Giorgia Meloni is Mussolini’s daughter because her Fratelli d’Italia party supported the Italian dictator 90 years ago. She didn’t mention a single policy that Meloni ran on.
Does that make Biden a proxy slave owner because the Democrats once strongly championed slavery?
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Democrats never got over that slavery thing, though. 150 years on, they still can’t see black people as capable, thinking, self-discerning, independent people who can run their own lives.
It sounds like Fratelli d’Italia has gotten over the Mussolini thing. But I don’t know enough about Italian politics to say for sure.
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