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Giorgia Meloni is the newly elected Italian prime minister who accounted for 100% of the Female delegation to the recent G20 summit (yup, 19 men and 1 Goddess).
Ms. Meloni is the one whom the press tries to smear as "far right" at every turn, mostly because they're terrified absolutely shitless every time she opens her mouth—as they damn well should be.
(...not that the phrase "far right" even means all that much anymore—Like "bigot", it's been bandied around well past banality, beyond dilution, to the brink of complete meaninglessness).
If you haven't had the pleasure, shock, and awe of seeing Ms. Meloni deliver rhetoric in her trademark crescendo that swallows every other vibe in the room as she escalates it... Do take a moment.
This Woman gives me LIFE.
Here are 2 selections of Ms. Meloni's astounding—and, if I dare say, beautiful—use of words as ballistic weapons.
1/
A basic statement of purpose. Recentering Italians' individual pride in their real selves and real lives—even with an explicit GC nod thrown in there, because of course there's a GC nod in there.
https://twitter.com/columbumishima/status/1591548270446530560
2/
A forceful denunciation of the exploitative French practice of appropriating half the currency reserves of the francophone West African countries that use the CFA franc. (The "crescendo that swallows the whole room" thing is especially astounding here. I'll admit to just putting this on loop for... um, a large number of repetitions.) https://twitter.com/rakgadi_em/status/1594254618942476288
She has also issued equally forceful condemnations of Putin's war crimes and of the French refual to accept even a couple hundred of seaborne migrants (of whom Italy has already taken in almost 100,000) who have turned up on French shores.
She's just incredible. I'm hopelessly deep into the shameless fangirling and still sinking deeper fast..
Her party is anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage. But she's a woman so you're ok with that.
I do believe that trying to paint her as a fascist was entirely due to the smear campaign leftists are throwing at everyone who doesn' t kiss their ass (on top of the terrible fact that she is a GASP woman), but let' s not pretend like she' s without a doubt one of the good ones just because she' s charismatic and a woman.
I am all for giving her the benefit of the doubt, though, which is more than I usually reserve for politicians, but I think I need a little bit more time to see how she is going to fare before giving her my support.
She' s good at talking, but actions? It' s still too early, and I much prefer seeing her DO something and fix some of the shit happening in my country than listening to her speeches and then succeeding in nothing. She' s been the boss only for a month, and so far she had to deal with emergencies that are in her chords, but I want to see how she solves at least one of those problems, and deal with things outside of her preferred field.
So far, I like the fact that she' s telling the French president to go fuck himself and calling him out for the hypochrite he is. I like that she' s trying to stop migrants from coming to our country, even though she hasn' t been successfull yet. I like the fact that she is indeed centering Italians: we' ve spent years feeling like we were an afterthought in our own country, mostly due to the EU and the EU-loving leftist parties and their bullshit, so it' s nice to be centered in the debate of how to better this country for US. I like that she is against gender bullshit.
But most of all, I like that she is pissing off leftists in more ways than one (starting with the SEVERE decision of using her title in the masculine form... I don' t know if that news reached outside Italy, but leftists and "feminists" went apeshit over that and I thoroughly enjoyed it).
I also like the fact that many members of the Italian "leftist think thank" are showing their colours when it comes to her: the other day a comedian here just made an entire speech about how she' s making shit up about the criticism she has received for bringing her daughter to Bali, and pretended like nobody was criticising her for it when for two days it seemed like there was no other news besides that. This is the same guy who tried to sell the lie that every single migrant is a resource because the money from their taxes is astronomical... too fucking bad that most of them do not work and don' t pay those taxes, but nobody is supposed to say that out loud.
Oh, and her feud with Roberto Saviano is just the top. I can' t stand the guy, he' s the typical leftist intellectual who is always the victim and never does anything wrong, and I am craving someone to put him in his place publicly. If it' s GM, then awesome.
I do believe she is thinking about modifying abortion laws, though. She has repeatedly said she doesn' t want to do it, but saying it doesn' t actually mean anything. I am not sure what she would have to do to change it, and I don' t think that law' s position is as precarious as Roe/Wade was in the USA, but determination can make everything happen, so I just hope she was sincere.
starting with the SEVERE decision of using her title in the masculine form
Could you elaborate please? I read la Repubblica and il Corriere regularly, and various other Italian-language outlets more sparingly, and I can't immediately recall seeing Ms. Meloni's title styled as anything other than "la Presidente del Consiglio", which is a perfectly canonical rendering of that title for a Woman.
BTW that unobtrusive little definite article, la, is actually the only grammatical element of Ms. Meloni's title that's even sex-marked in the first place.
• Presidente is a single invariant form. (Italian has preserved a shockingly big stockpile of sexed titles—ranging from markers of achievement/expertise/authority, like dottore/dottoressa or professore/professoressa, all the way to a bunch of random non-hierarchical identifiers like studente/studentessa—but contains no such word as "presidentessa" or any analogue.)
• Il Consiglio is not Ms. Meloni's title at all. Rather, this is a collective body of appointed ministers that is a pretty close analogue of the U.S. "Cabinet".
She asked to be referred to as "il Presidente" instead of "la Presidentessa" (or "la Presidente"), and all Hell broke loose. Feminists immediately started to criticize her for being a traitor, while leftists in general ignored her and kept calling her how they wanted. These are the same people who would faint if you dared to "misgender" someone because if you want to be called in a certain way, then everyone should comply. Two instances were particularly hilarious: the first is about a TIM, a former politician, who obviously had to insert himself into the conversation and playing the victim, saying that he has wanted to be called a woman all his life and GM wants to use the masculine desinence. Another was about one of the biggest proponents of the schwa: if you don' t know what it is, it' s this letter ə, which some "intellectuals" are trying to make happen in Italy. Basically it' s used to replace the masculine and feminine desinences and make everything "neutral". Well, this moron had the freaking nerve to complain that using the masculine desinence was grammatically incorrect and we should aspire to speak our language correctly.
I think GM did it half because she wanted to troll leftists and half because she finds it sounds better, but the fact that this was what these idiots focused on was incredibly amazing. A war, a migrant crisis, Covid, unemployment, general malcontent, economic and social issues, the EU using us as puppets, and the entire left was focused on a two-letter definite article.
It was such an event that even the Accademia della Crusca (a collective of intellectuals who study the Italian language) were brought into the conversation to comment on this. It was ridicoulous.
Definitely ridiculous. "La presidente" is, in fact, a neologism—but, much more importantly, Ms. Meloni is not doing anything more scandalous than... WAIT FOR IT make sure you're sitting down for this!... using an ordinary, grammatically regular noun, in the standard way that ordinary grammatically regular nouns are used not just in Italian but in ALL Romance languages.
Sexed personal nouns are actually the exception, and a fairly rare exception at that. Most personal nouns are just like other random nouns (for things like tables and chairs and stuff)—with a single, invariant 'grammatical gender' that has absolutely NOTHING to do with sex or gender identity
The whole label of 'grammatical gender', in fact, is an extremely unfortunate misnomer that is fundamentally inapposite and horrendously misapplied in at least 99.9% of all cases.
If Europeans had any goddam logical sense about this stuff, they would stop talking about 'masculine' and 'feminine' (and in some cases 'neuter') nouns entirely, starting RIGHT NOW, and would just start labeling the noun classes by actually workable names e.g. 'class 1/2[/3]' or 'first/second[/third] declension'.
Una persona, for intsance, is absolutely alws a noun of the second type (popularly mislabeled as FeMiNiNe), across the entire spectrum of Romance languages. A Girl or Woman is una persona—as is a boy or man. There is absolutely no scandalous systemic sissification of European boys or men afoot, of course; the real scandal is the stupid-ass lying label 'FeMiNiNe'.
Likewise, any victim of a crime or disaster in Italian is una vittima.
Nobody, of course, is insinuating that men are never victims—and the non-argument made in the press in this hour's desperate attempt to scandalize Giorgia Meloni is exactly as stupid and inane as "Italians don't think men are ever victims, because grlammar!", to identical extremes of absurdity, for precisely the same reasons.
And so forth for most personal nouns, including (traditionally/formally) il presidente.
More of these are type one (i.e., mislabeled as mAsCuLiNe ) than type two (FeMiNiNe), but only because type one is the grammatical default for these languages in general—as evinced by its being used for mixed-sex groups of people and so forth.
Absolutely none of it has any gender-identity significance at all—any more than the fact that your kitchen table will decide to transition if you move between France (la table) and Italy (il tavolo).
I would actually enjoy reading an article from some local alt rag in Nice or Ventimiglia, written not only in complete seriousness but in complete alarmist seriousness, about the burgeoning gender-identity crisis among kitchen tables😅😅😅 which, again, would not be any more stupid than trying to scandalize il presidente here.
Perhaps ironically, it's the US and UK press that actually deserve a longer leash this time—because English has absolutely nothing that 'looks gendered' but actually isn't sexed or gendered in any way at all (in the manner of, like, 99.97% of Italian nouns).
English nouns that are sexed are ALWAYS sexed for some explicit, purpose-oriented reason—at least historically, for older coinages. So, if it's some native-English-speaking journalist who's bedwetting over Il Presidente, then... that's actually totally understandable and reasonable tbh (...although it's rather less understandable why somebody who doesn't understand the basic rudiments of Italian grammar would be assigned to cover Italy, but, whatevs).
If the bedwetters are actually Italian journalists whose native tongue is Italian (or some southern variant of it), then they have absolutely no excuse for this bullshit yellow journalism. In that case, that's disrespectful both to Giorgia Meloni and to the linguistic patrimony of Italy in general.
and, yes, very aware of the schwa or lack of one.
Actually, one of the best and easiest ways to identify the accent of a foreign English speaker—according to certain luminaries at least (this phrasing admits possibilities with just one luminary, who may or may not suspiciously resemble me)—is to selectively pick out all the vowels that English speakers devolve and merge into 'schwa', isolate them as much as you can, and listen very carefully to how your speaker pronounces those vowels.
The amount of bandwidth available with this method is just ridiculous (in the best possible sense of that word). E.g., I can positively identify speakers of at least 16 different nationalities just from listening super duper attentively to exactly how they do or don't pronounce the very last 'e' in Victoria's Secret.
Random, only slightly related:
Are you familiar at all with the "transatlantic" or "mid-atlantic" accent? AKA the accent of everybody in Old Hollywood, or in those WW2 Allied propaganda shorts with a salesman-ish voice describing various pieces of US ordnance and artillery over the crackling of celluloid, kinda thing?
Are you familiar at all with the "transatlantic" or "mid-atlantic" accent? AKA the accent of everybody in Old Hollywood, or in those WW2 Allied propaganda shorts with a salesman-ish voice describing various pieces of US ordnance and artillery over the crackling of celluloid, kinda thing?
Not really. I don' t have ear for accents and linguistic subtetly unless they are incredibly obvious, and I don' t watch many movies in original language to begin with. I prefer reading the English subtitles to see the original dialogue, but I prefer earing Italian voice actors over the original 9 times out of 10.
If the bedwetters are actually Italian journalists whose native tongue is Italian (or some southern variant of it), then they have absolutely no excuse for this bullshit yellow journalism. In that case, that's disrespectful both to Giorgia Meloni and to the linguistic patrimony of Italy in general.
Nope, the ones I have seen were all Italian. It was politicians, former politicians, opinionists and celebrities more than journalists, though. Journalists decided to behave according to their political status: left wingers decided to call her with the feminine article either to piss her off (even though I doubt she actually cares as much as these people think) or to show how feminist they think they are since they believe that a woman wanting to be called with a masculine title is anti-feminist and they have the duty to fight it. Which is hilarious, because I remember clearly 10 years ago a huge debate among female politicians about how using the feminine version of a title was anti-feminist, because it brought attention to the sex of the person instead of on the merits and talents alone.
Right wing journalists, on the other hand, tended to use the masculine article to mock leftists' s tantrum, which seems to me like a very appropriate reaction.
Point is, though, that lacking respect for her is exactly the reason why they are doing it. And they want to show it as publicly as possible.
I'm now going to pay more attention to her. Thanks for pointing her out. Love how she speaks without a prompter, so articulate and of course she would win Italy's top spot because she is a fabulous orator. A tough cookie. Strong and self-confident.
Curious what her policies are which make the MSM call her "right wing". Now that we progressive GC women are called "right wing" we should always be scepticle about that term, and find out the specifics.