Sciascia, btw, is one of the biggest thinkers and writers of '900. It is not really defined by his mafia-related novels and takes. He used to be friend with Borges, and was regarded as one of the top men in humanistic culture. Disclaimer: I was born in a town (Campobello di Licata) near his town (Racalmuto), but I'm not saying this because of this fact.
If you never read Sciascia, I suggest you starting from his last, tiny novel: "Una storia semplice". I believe there are English translations that can be found around as ebook or used on eBay.
As an aside, do you use dvorak as your keyboard layout? The ' for 1 typo is quite rare with qwerty, but I could see you meaning '1900s, though that becomes two characters in a short space.
Thanks for the recommendation!
For those who don’t know: the film City of God is based on this, and it’s a great movie. One of my all-time favorites. The directing, acting photography and storytelling are all very well done. Worth anyone’s time.
Why wouldn't an up and coming government administration want to take professional photos and engage in all the other trappings of legitimate government?
My mom, who is from Italy, has some great lines about the Mafia:
"Italy will never go bankrupt b/c we have the Pope AND the Mafia"
I once asked her how the Mafia was reined in and she mentioned:
"The Mafia was once trying to kill some judge or politician and they blew up several hundred meters of highway to do it. They also killed a lot of innocent people and the outcry was so big that the Carbinieri(Italian FBI) got involved."
Carabinieri have been involved with (and occasionally fighting) the mafia since late 1800s. That's got nothing to do with how we got to the current situation of relative tranquility.
What happened between the end of the 1980s and the 1990s was that, because of continuous feuds among mafiosi that produced too many civilian victims, political connections broke down, particularly with a few especially vicious bosses. Laws were passed to isolate the worst offenders, new connections were brokered with more moderate mafia leaders, and eventually the "bad" bosses were magically found, hiding more or less in plain sight.
Carabinieri are actually military-status police force in Italy, which is a different setup from the FBI in the US.
Calling them the Italian FBI, is ironically quite funny, because in Italy they’re the butt of a lot of jokes - "carabiniere" is a common stand-in for "someone dumb".
Do all countries have something like an Italian mafia? Is there a German or British mafia of a similar scale and sophistication, but we just call them something else?
The 2020 adaptation of ZeroZeroZero, mentioned in this article, is one of the best crime shows I've ever seen, with basically zero buzz. Pretty interesting reading the reason for the authenticity.
Won’t work for any popular site. You can try that easily by using extensions to set the user agent. If you are not checking the public list of IPs that Google publishes for the crawler you are doing it wrong.
Given to how many people its existence must be incredibly infuriating, it's so odd that it's not being chased down with more haste than pirate bay was. I mean I'm glad it's not, but kinda surprised.
They pushed them out of Italy, which forced mafia to adapt in the US, eventually becoming richer and stronger. A much more powerful transnational mafia returned back to Italy.
What exactly Leonardo Sciascia mean in his "Porte Aperte" is the fascism merely "anesthetize" the mafia rather than eradicating it (gaining temporary Sicilian consent through illusionary repression)
The purpose of democracy is to create stable governance with peaceful transitions of power, so that people feel confident about the future and are willing to invest in long term things that require long term stability. It's not because we think the plebiscite are really wise and effective at governing, they're not, but stability is more important and ultimately more humane than government which is truly effective but not stable in the long run.
Mafia exists because legal entities refuse to take responsibilities —- oh it’s too expensive to do X so we will leave it alone or legalize it. So eventually the underground takes over and Mafia becomes quasi governments.
To eradicate you need a stronger central government that is willing to send its probes into the deepest of the society and has a strong hand. Unfortunately this also has unforeseen consequences as well so is not everyone’s cup. Some societies prefer a stronger central government and some don’t.
I don't doubt that a fascist regime can solve problems like organized crime effectively. This is because they don't need to care about human rights or the rule of law. The problem is that once the mob is gone, the fascists stay.
I don't think they actually pushed the mob out, but evidently they did succeed in pissing off the mob enough to make the mob happy and willing collaborators with the Allies.
With Putin's Russia transition to authoritarian and recently becoming fully totalitarian, the Russian Mafia of 90s (with the 90s being the most democratic time in Russian history), is pretty much no more. FSB and police have replaced them in the protection and extortion domain. Thus nowdays an arrested colonel of FSB or police may easily have a couple cubic meters of money (euro and dollars) at home, to the envy of many mafioso around the world. Or Chechnja - instead of many smaller (and poorer and less organized) warlords of 90s, now there is only one with personal army of 40000 and exploiting the whole region in the style of the most cruel mafia.
Sciascia, btw, is one of the biggest thinkers and writers of '900. It is not really defined by his mafia-related novels and takes. He used to be friend with Borges, and was regarded as one of the top men in humanistic culture. Disclaimer: I was born in a town (Campobello di Licata) near his town (Racalmuto), but I'm not saying this because of this fact.
If you never read Sciascia, I suggest you starting from his last, tiny novel: "Una storia semplice". I believe there are English translations that can be found around as ebook or used on eBay.
As an aside, do you use dvorak as your keyboard layout? The ' for 1 typo is quite rare with qwerty, but I could see you meaning '1900s, though that becomes two characters in a short space. Thanks for the recommendation!
Truly great Italian literature. Also “The day of the Owl” is another famous Sciascia’s book with old mafia theme.
Nit: I suppose you mean 1900s, not just "'900". I mean, one could reasonably suspect that good writers existed in Italy in early 10th century, too.
Reminds me of the story of Andre Camara, who photographed a favela drug war in the mid 80s.
Take away: criminals are vain too.
For those who don’t know: the film City of God is based on this, and it’s a great movie. One of my all-time favorites. The directing, acting photography and storytelling are all very well done. Worth anyone’s time.
I could watch it once a year, indefinitely.
I have to rewatch what, been a decade.
1 reply →
Same thing with the Taliban: https://apimagesblog.com/blog/2021/10/4/taliban-portraits
By the way, there is a Taliban who looks exactly like Christian Bale: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/976/cpsprodpb/13EB0/pr...
Why wouldn't an up and coming government administration want to take professional photos and engage in all the other trappings of legitimate government?
2 replies →
Yup, they want to be documented. Tale as old as time.
My mom, who is from Italy, has some great lines about the Mafia:
"Italy will never go bankrupt b/c we have the Pope AND the Mafia"
I once asked her how the Mafia was reined in and she mentioned:
"The Mafia was once trying to kill some judge or politician and they blew up several hundred meters of highway to do it. They also killed a lot of innocent people and the outcry was so big that the Carbinieri(Italian FBI) got involved."
Carabinieri have been involved with (and occasionally fighting) the mafia since late 1800s. That's got nothing to do with how we got to the current situation of relative tranquility.
What happened between the end of the 1980s and the 1990s was that, because of continuous feuds among mafiosi that produced too many civilian victims, political connections broke down, particularly with a few especially vicious bosses. Laws were passed to isolate the worst offenders, new connections were brokered with more moderate mafia leaders, and eventually the "bad" bosses were magically found, hiding more or less in plain sight.
> the Carbinieri(Italian FBI)
Carabinieri are actually military-status police force in Italy, which is a different setup from the FBI in the US.
Calling them the Italian FBI, is ironically quite funny, because in Italy they’re the butt of a lot of jokes - "carabiniere" is a common stand-in for "someone dumb".
Depends how your bubble portrays the FBI to you, I suppose.
Do all countries have something like an Italian mafia? Is there a German or British mafia of a similar scale and sophistication, but we just call them something else?
There used to be, but afaik modern networks are largely led by Balkan groups across the whole of Europe.
Most just call them the government.
In The Netherlands it’s called D66.
in Iran it's called IRGC
The 2020 adaptation of ZeroZeroZero, mentioned in this article, is one of the best crime shows I've ever seen, with basically zero buzz. Pretty interesting reading the reason for the authenticity.
where is it mentioned?
ZeroZeroZero is by Saviano, article is about Sciascia.
My bad, went down rabbit hole and got my writers/links confused.
Off topic, but I'm always amazed by Archive.md/.is/whatever. To this day I don't understand how they manage to bypass a lot of paywalls.
The mystery about the owner makes it even more intriguing.
I think archive has mostly news, random articles and such.
And as they say nothing is more worthless than yesterday's news.
I assume they just pretend to be the Googlebot so the site just gives the text.
Won’t work for any popular site. You can try that easily by using extensions to set the user agent. If you are not checking the public list of IPs that Google publishes for the crawler you are doing it wrong.
Maybe they have a paid account? I don’t think there’s much magic behind
Publications could use watermarking to encode the name of the account an article is being served to, but they don't seem to. I wonder why.
thetimes.com has a paywall if you visit it from the UK, and full content if you are in the US.
entonces, US-based archive.org "bypasses" this paywall as well:
https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.thetimes.com/culture...
I just assumed they copied it into their own db
Given to how many people its existence must be incredibly infuriating, it's so odd that it's not being chased down with more haste than pirate bay was. I mean I'm glad it's not, but kinda surprised.
There has been some dns resolver issues, some DNS resolvers wont return the address to the sites like archive.is or sites like Annas Archive
The music or movie industry lobby is much more aggressive I’d assume.
Modern version has spawned TV show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Saviano
Saviano is exactly one of the "antimafia professionals" that Sciascia complained about.
Sciascia Died in 89, Saviano was 10 years old and wouldn’t start writing until the early 2000s.
3 replies →
It angers me that Fascist Italy could push the Mafia to the brink of extinction but Democratic Italy can’t.
They pushed them out of Italy, which forced mafia to adapt in the US, eventually becoming richer and stronger. A much more powerful transnational mafia returned back to Italy.
by "they" do you mean Mussolini?
What exactly Leonardo Sciascia mean in his "Porte Aperte" is the fascism merely "anesthetize" the mafia rather than eradicating it (gaining temporary Sicilian consent through illusionary repression)
The purpose of democracy is to create stable governance with peaceful transitions of power, so that people feel confident about the future and are willing to invest in long term things that require long term stability. It's not because we think the plebiscite are really wise and effective at governing, they're not, but stability is more important and ultimately more humane than government which is truly effective but not stable in the long run.
Mafia exists because legal entities refuse to take responsibilities —- oh it’s too expensive to do X so we will leave it alone or legalize it. So eventually the underground takes over and Mafia becomes quasi governments.
To eradicate you need a stronger central government that is willing to send its probes into the deepest of the society and has a strong hand. Unfortunately this also has unforeseen consequences as well so is not everyone’s cup. Some societies prefer a stronger central government and some don’t.
I don't doubt that a fascist regime can solve problems like organized crime effectively. This is because they don't need to care about human rights or the rule of law. The problem is that once the mob is gone, the fascists stay.
One Mafia pushed the other out. No improvement for normal people.
Did they? I’m pretty sure that’s just political propaganda of the regime.
I don't think they actually pushed the mob out, but evidently they did succeed in pissing off the mob enough to make the mob happy and willing collaborators with the Allies.
1 reply →
I learned about it in the article.
> Under Mussolini, Moorehead argues convincingly, the Mob merely became dormant.
I did some googling and seems like this is a popular belief.
That’s just the state mafia replacing the other.
With Putin's Russia transition to authoritarian and recently becoming fully totalitarian, the Russian Mafia of 90s (with the 90s being the most democratic time in Russian history), is pretty much no more. FSB and police have replaced them in the protection and extortion domain. Thus nowdays an arrested colonel of FSB or police may easily have a couple cubic meters of money (euro and dollars) at home, to the envy of many mafioso around the world. Or Chechnja - instead of many smaller (and poorer and less organized) warlords of 90s, now there is only one with personal army of 40000 and exploiting the whole region in the style of the most cruel mafia.
How about America? And what about Trump?
2 replies →
They can, they just don’t do it. This is the case in every western „liberal democracy“.
They just loooooove the campaign contributions.
Why does that anger you? Democracy is fundamentally unable to solve such issues.
Nearly every democratic country in the world is a counter example to this, what do you mean exactly?
13 replies →
Please elaborate I think there’re quite a few examples that contradict this