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My recent piece "Delusion" (https://niccolo.substack.com/p/delusion) has gotten a lot of interest and attention, and people like Rod Dreher of The American Conservative have said some really positive things about it and this Substack in general - https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/lying-liars-of-the-ruling-class-wokeness/.

That was very nice of him and I appreciate it.

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Jun 25, 2022·edited Jun 25, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo

Two things on Meloni.

Most likely she's a fraud. She's politically smart enough to copy popular political positions that 5 Stars and Salvini had in the past and had to become quiet about, to get a seat in the power room of Italy. She's also politically smart enough to never support policies that would radically alter the direction for Italy. Namely the vassallage status via NATO and the EU.

I say smart, because the liberals who run Italian institutions see her as much less of a threat than Salvini. This is a fact and liberal media in Italy regularly mentioned they'd prefer her over him. At the same time, it's hard to know what she really believes in and whether she'll be able to achieve anything of value if she ever manages to become Prime Minister. I don't have my hopes up tbh. The most likely scenario isn't that she's smart enough not to to show red flags for liberals, but simply that she's just innocuous enough.

Very interesting the part on Russia and good to see over there intellectuals aren't just whoring themselves to the woke empire like the rest of Europe is doing.

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Jun 25, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo

Always like Saturday morning coffee with Soldo's Top 5. Thanks especially for fleshing out the "decolonize Russia" article from earlier this week with the discussion of Russian intellectuals.

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Jun 25, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo

Daniel Humm's roast chicken with foie gras and truffles is the single best dish I've ever eaten. It's a shame he's apparently a cuck. As to the treatment of staff, all I can say is meh. The thing all the truly great chefs have in common is that they came up in a brutal system that very effectively separates the wheat from the chaff. You hear these guys talk about their childhood and they're practically kitchen slaves from 14 on. The strict hierarchy, the division of labor, the military discipline... these are the traits of things that actually WORK. Whether it's a restaurant, a business, a government, the kumbaya shit just doesn't produce results the way the fuhrerprinzip* does. You get to charge $500 for a meal only when your restaurant is a mercilessly run expression of a single exceptional man.

*Intentionally using this word as everyone knows Nic is an insane Nazi

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Jun 25, 2022·edited Jun 25, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo

I am tempted to say that the situation at Stanford seems very Soviet, but from anecdotal and literary sources the Soviet Union in 1970s and 1980s was full of underground, dissident and transgressive energies. Stanford, by contrast, sounds truly grim and joyless.

It is clear that the woke, diversity and safety agendas are now being used to disrupt the formation of social capital within the privileged strata. The elites (or at least the lower grades of the oligarchy) are now exposed to aggressive surveillance/policing from the gatekeepers of the education-credential-industrial complex. Naturally occurring solidarity of any kind is problematic and faced by a trade-off between the wellbeing of the individual members of the future elite and control the system prefers the latter.

A woke elite formed by experiences of conformism, social isolation and reduced trust will, over time, find itself in competition with rivals from a shadow elite that is consciously antagonistic to their values. It will also find itself attempting to manage subordinates that are either resistant or indifferent to the moral authorities before whom the Stanford grads are being taught to kneel. It is hard to see how the US could ever flourish with people like that running anything.

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Jun 25, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo

Web 1.0 and Dances With Wolves have much in common.

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Jun 25, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo

Most Italians know Meloni is a traitor pretending to be a nationalist...... a fraud.... for lack of better wording, always playing with words, but actions have shown again and again her loyalty to Atlantic view of the world.....

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During the Cold War the West initially excluded Russia from the global economy. Russia was unable to buy US dollars, could not participate in international trade of any great consequence and could not pay back its Lend Lease obligations accrued during WW2. Russia's oil was exported only to Warsaw Pact client states. Russia's economic growth and development was constrained.

From 1973 things thawed. An end to the Yom Kippur war (to a great degree orchestrated by the US to provide cover for an expected spike in oil prices that was negotiated in secret with Iran and Saudi Arabia) was arranged via shuttle diplomacy. Nixon lifted restrictions on the USSR buying dollars and Chase Manhattan opened a branch in Moscow.

During the 1970s and 80s the USSR exported oil and took out loans from the West. By the late 1980s the slump in oil prices coincided with a crisis in the Soviet energy sector (declining productivity plus disruption to Siberian gas pipelines due to sabotage) led Gorbachev to seek Wall St finance to rebuild the Soviet economy. Wall St refused and the USSR was finished.

During the Yeltsin era the US co-operated with the Kremlin and the new class of oligarchs to financialise state assets and siphon the capital to the West. Putin and Medvedev disrupted the plunder, though they did pay back the last Lend Lease obligations.

Yet today the West clearly aims to crush Russia: isolate it economically and prepare for its eventual dismemberment. Why?

Because the US is weakening economically and militarily. The US is no longer a net creditor, but a net debtor. US industry has been outsourced while it urgently needs to reassert its hold over the client-states who finance the US bond market. The US has also failed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya and its army appears to lack combat reliability.

Putin's Russia is a greater potential threat to the US than the USSR ever was because it represents a viable model of state-capitalism that is highly attractive to the commodities and energy exporting countries. To make matters worse, Putin's military successes and the development of hypersonic weapons and advanced air-defense systems gives Moscow a military edge to supplement the economic strength of Russia's natural resources.

In short, the progressive weakening of the USA is the key driving force behind the escalating belligerency. The depthless stupidity and ideological fixations of the Beltway are only secondary factors.

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Jun 25, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo

-->"I have no interest in defending Greek culture. What interests me is the ideological capture and the changes that stem from it."

Yet, that's just it. The prog/woke/left loves diversity--they demand conformity.

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Jun 25, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo

Heard Fazi speak at an event here in Ireland some years ago. He self-described as anarchist. Oustanding point was the power of the Eurocrats. Everything had been tried to get rid of Berlusconi as PM, he said: Magistrates (mostly leftiist) and examinations, law suits, political moves, but nothing worked. Then Berlusconi baulked at the EU Commission/ECB austerity strategy - and he was gone in jig time, just like that.

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Jun 25, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo

The second article really hit me. The DIE folk always talk about diversity, but essentially create a monoculture. They falsify history to claim diversity and multiculturalism was common in ages past, but it was not like this. Back then, when a new concept from a foreign culture arrived, it was adopted and adapted slowly to suit the circumstances, genuinely creating something new and diverse. Yet when we go to the modern diverse cities of London, Paris, Berlin and Toronto they are all the same sterile places, with the same sterile multinationals, with the same sterile people who hold the same sterile ideas. These are cities you visit for their past, not their future (if they even have much of that). It is soooo frustrating. They preach equality and enforce the lowest common denominator. Modern diversity is nothing else but entropy. It could have been so much more, but it isn't. Eternal shame upon them.

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Jun 25, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo

What year did the final pagan generation graduate from Stanford?

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Poland Hungary --> Poland & Hungary

historical --> historic

effectively --> in effect

(resolves ambiguity - was it an effective/efficient selection? NO...)

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Jun 26, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo

If you have ever lived under Communism, Cuba for me when young, stuff like Stanford, like the entire woke cosmology, is very familiar.

Destroying fun and joy is the point...a way of demoralizing people, especially people who may have claims to high points in the social hierarchy.

Put differently, if you can't bring everybody up, you bring everybody down.....and the outcome is what is known as "equity".

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On Italy

Brothers of Italy has a multi-year history of support from forces of the most bigoted American right behind it.

There are strong suspicions that the party used Cambridge Analytica services between 2013 and 2018 (services that the party could not afford to pay for on its own) then strong ties with Steve Bannon in the Trump era

It is difficult to say how the elections will go next year, Italy has always been the object of particular attention from the intelligence or the US powers: remember Stay Behind, Gladio, Aldo Moro, the massacres orchestrated but carried out by local neo-fascist groups in collaboration with the mafia, a long history of blood to change the direction of history.

The same propaganda around the war in Ukraine has the effect of radicalizing voters in two camps, and Meloni has understood which part to stand and does the job (in contradiction with the sentiment of many of his constituents).

In Italy we change everything in order not to change anything 🤨

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founding
Jun 26, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo

The political Gnosticism of the liberal imperium still posits that America is indispensable, a beacon and a promoter of humanistic values. This cloak is getting threadbare. True, the American people are still deceived, but everyone else sees the tattered reality of America’s foreign policy. It is more than realpolitik, it is the indefensible actions of a failing empire.

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