Paragone and Carnival (Maffè)
(… it seemed licet …)
(… the dialectical dimension of piddino is the own goal. My tactical dimension is the vilification of a corpse. I know, I'm a bad, arrogant, resentful person. Or you could see it this way: I know how to wait, because I know it will be worth it punishment. As we said a thousand and once, I don't like being unduly aggressive! Because I have to use violence on you, of course: verbal, with the risk of being on the wrong side and the certainty of violating my principles, when I know that you will eliminate yourself alone? Then, however, when things end as they must end, when the facts prove my reasons, there are two cases: either I have forgotten, or I don't forgive. And lately I don't often forget. Many friends who have been following us for a short while don't will understand, only two – if I remember correctly, Paolo and Nat – witnessed some of the episodes that I will report: the history of this blog, the history of the Debate, of the community, is a very long story, it took place over time, with the its ups and downs, its victories and its defeats. However, one thing has always been clear to me: I had an idea in my head and I tried to convey it with intellectual honesty. Others also had their own ideas in mind, let's be clear! However, I don't know how committed they were to spreading or concealing them… )
Comparison
And so Paragone, an old friend of this blog (as we will see), where we affectionately nicknamed him "er Cotenna" (everyone here has had a nickname: remember "er Melanzana"?), and so Gian finally came out : in the end, he was nothing more than a gatekeeper ! The declared aim (by him) of his political activity was the interception of dissent to prevent its channeling towards structured political forces, towards mass parties capable of directing it towards subverting the balance of power! In short, a regressive operation, a defense as strenuous as it is subtle of the existing…
Imagine my surprise!
I would never have imagined it… or maybe I would?
Meanwhile, his being a gatekeeper was an obvious "of which" of his having passed bag and baggage among the Orthopterans, the gatekeepers par excellence , as I explained to you (unheard) at the time . But I believe that the vast majority of Italians, and also of the readers of this blog, have not yet understood the nature of Orthoptera even after the DECISIVE vote of von der Leyen:
(which everyone saw too). On the contrary! Perhaps among those who bawl most against the EU, there will be many who have given this EU a last breath of vigor by voting for the orthopteran gatekeepers !
At the time, therefore (we are talking about 2013), I was not particularly surprised to note that my friend Gian, a revolutionary, said one thing and did another. The opening of the Cage in September 2013 was the straw that broke the camel's back. I had been offered many guarantees, the possibility of opening a debate on at least equal terms, in a less rigid context than that of Rai, etc. etc. I had actually asked for very little, and was promised, to attract me, a lot. But things weren't exactly like that: obviously what they wanted was not to give me the opportunity to speak, but to take advantage of the following I had (almost two years after opening the blog the numbers were already high, even if we hadn't yet defeated the Sole 24 Ore…), and also, if possible, make me look like a slightly crazy lunatic, in an attempt to discredit me, and above all to discredit the theses I supported.
When I reread (and you should too) what I wrote then, on the one hand I'm struck by the fact that, all things considered, I was already thinking in a fairly political way:
on the other, the fact that, probably, I too was ensnared by the mirage of "semomijonism":
I don't know if you followed my advice at the time to unplug him, and if you did, I don't know what outcome this advice had. Between us, I don't think we were "mijoni", and in any case Cotenna's thesis was precisely that I " didn't pierce the screen " (!), and didn't bring audiences (!), in short: the exact opposite of what they said all other authors or hosts. I still have to understand how to follow the auditel live while it is being conducted, but one day I will understand. As I tell you in the aforementioned post, and as I had written on Twitter five days earlier, it was clear to me that that broadcast would be a trap. It was built to be so, I was aware of it, just as I was aware that it would be the last: even the prestigious TvBlog reported it in great detail (needless to say that I knew nothing about this whole debate on the Debate at the time: I had more to to think about). This is evidence of the fact that, unbeknownst to me, I was already a character at the time.
To avoid any misunderstanding, I would like to point out that relations remained cordial. I wouldn't want anyone to infer from the direct, personal way this blog is conducted and written here that I transform political issues into personal issues! Of course, politics is made by people, but there are those two magic words that I always repeat to you (objective dynamics) that should make us put aside our animosities and resentments. After all, I said it: "without poisoning ourselves". So, when I found him next to me in the Senate, relations were, obviously, cordial, as they should be between colleagues. However, the fact is that we strictly kept a character so… how to say… haut en couleur from the important chats (or which we considered important: let's say from the top chats), and his modus operandi , which was very detailed on the dear old "dimo famo", excluded him from the most important meetings. Whether he wanted it and was aware of it or not, it was precisely his ostentatious vocation as a barricade that neutralized him, prohibited him from accessing places of power (or what remains of it in a colony), and therefore prevented him from influencing, from leading in fact the battles that he conducted so well (but less so than us!) in chatter!
The doubt as to whether it was there or did it didn't stop me from sleeping at night. The important thing was that he didn't ruin what we were doing. The resistance to the ESM was possible not thanks to, but in spite of him, and by scrupulously avoiding involving him, for example!
Now the friend has pulled the plug himself, with reasons that deserve careful analysis:
So the reasoning is: I found a party to fight a battle (which being a political battle requires numbers), but then, when I see that other parties support it coherently, I dissolve it, because the coherence of the others takes away space for the dissent that I want to express.
Seems to me there's a lot that doesn't add up, right?
Meanwhile, Gian's party is called (or called) Italexit: a brand that has been much discussed, but which embodies a battle absolutely worth fighting. It is not clear how the fact that the Italian Parliament has given a sign of vitality makes this battle meaningless. It's not easy to understand what happened. Maybe whoever raised this banner expected to have more following? Or was he the first to not believe it, to not be able to argue the reasons for a certain political proposal (and perhaps for this very reason he was unable to increase his own consensus)? What is certain is that a certain discontent has been brewing for some time. The members complained about the lack of a clear political direction , so to speak, that is, they felt taken for a ride. Or, again, they began to understand that the purpose of the project was not additive (to give hope to disappointed voters stuck in the quicksand of abstention) but subtractive (to remove that zero point which, especially in single-member elections, could allow the centre-right to prevail on the centre-left)? And that in this case, once the objective was achieved, the natural consequence was to throw away betraying the militants who had made it possible to achieve it?
I don't believe in such perfidy. I repeat: objective dynamics. What Paragone says is right: unfortunately for those who want to change things there is only the League. Deal with it.
But will this illustrious and resounding thud be enough to defeat the "famous party supporters"?
Obviously not.
And so let's move on to something else.
Maffè Carnival
"The fact that the State is starting to make direct issues for savers is not good news: the State must issue for institutional investors because evaluating the State's risk is not an easy thing for small savers. It is not enough to look at the rate of interest, we need to look at the risk, and how can a small saver correctly evaluate the risk of the Italian Republic? This is the signal we must give. BTPs are still a financial instrument: we are no longer in the 80s, we have the freedom of capital, from my point of view the correct education for an Italian saver is: to take diversified, well-balanced financial instruments, where the risk is well assessed. I personally have never liked the idea of investing directly in a BTP and have never will never be liked. That the State starts selling securities directly to savers is not mature news, it is news, so to speak, still from the Republic of provincial savings… Rates are still negative from a real point of view, you talked about increases in rates: true, but we are still in the territory of essentially negative or neutral rates. So the message, dear savers, is: the State is never an excellent interlocutor when it comes to investing."
( here , from 1:47).
Hearing such a rambling petition of principle on a public broadcaster (to the palpable embarrassment of the presenter) on the day the auction of the first BTP value started bothered me a lot. I decided to let it go. Stalling is a tactical option whose validity cannot be overstated. Having stalled, today I can say that if for Carnevale Maffè "the State is never an excellent interlocutor when it comes to investing", for the Bank of Italy the bank chaired by Carnevale Maffè seems not to be an excellent interlocutor when it comes to deposit your savings. History will then judge. The small Italian provincial saver will not be able to evaluate the risk, but apparently this is a widespread disease.
I have fond memories of him. A year or so after the episode I mentioned above (the opening of the season of La Gabbia in September 2013), the friend we are talking about here wanted to meet me for dinner in Milan. I was with two of you, who will remember it (and I think they understood then that the blog was an important thing). The topic was the usual one: how good you are, how beautiful you are, of course your theses are a bit extreme, but you are very beautiful, you are very good, but… you have exhausted your driving force! Come join us, you will have a larger audience, your ideas will have more resonance, of course you will have to guard your prose a little, but you will benefit from it, etc. etc.
I replied with a polite but firm: "We'll let you know, we'll call!"
Shortly afterwards Econopoly was born:
The following year I sent Il Sole 24 Ore to publish :
Incidentally: in 2015 I made 800,000 pages per month alone, imagine if I needed to find myself in such company! But even there the argument was the same: expressed not as "don't punch holes in the screen!", but as "you've now exhausted your potential!".
We saw it!…
It remains a great mystery to me how an editorial group connected to an important employers' association can (or has done, I don't know their latest events) make use of certain rumors:
Evidently these voices will have an audience!
Which makes me think, and here I conclude, that representative democracy perhaps doesn't work that well, because I don't think I represent the public of this stuff (while bibliometrics, all things considered, needs to be re-evaluated, because when you say "it's not worth a acca" refers, evidently, to the h -index).
(… in short: I'm not saying that you necessarily have to be my friends! I'm just saying that you better choose your enemies well. If you want some advice: choose them who are impatient and forgetful …)
(… friend, here is a provincial saver who has put everything in BTP and has something to tell you …)
(… let's wait for the next one soon …)
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2023/12/paragone-e-carnevale-maffe.html on Sat, 30 Dec 2023 19:42:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.