by Emanuele Mastrangelo and Enrico Petrucci

Scotland. Yusaf get woke and went broke

First, the usual update from Scotland and its new hate speech law, which the Telegraph reports has caused First Minister Humza Yousaf's approval rating to drop 15 percentage points to around 30 percent within four months (1). While in the meantime the Scottish Tories are trying to get busy in the local parliament to repeal the law. However even CNN headlines "A hate crime law was meant to protect against prejudice. It ended up sowing further division".

Do not hope it will be a nail in the coffin of laws of this kind, because you well know that those who follow this agenda may well be at a loss. But it certainly signals a wake-up call: people are starting to get fed up.

England. Too much TV is bad for you

The Royal Museum in Greenwich takes the Netlfix Bridgerton series too seriously and declares Queen Charlotte (1744-1818) a "person of color" (2). A vexata quaestio because tracing back five centuries and 15 generations the family tree of the German noblewoman who came to the English throne in 1761 reveals that one of her ancestors was an Iberian Muslim. Who was therefore in all probability herself of Caucasian race... But that is enough to make the Queen of England a "mulatto." (3)

England. Show your boobs!

The cringiest story coming out of British museums this week is The Cult of Beauty exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, an exhibition that: "considers the influence of morality, status, health, age, race and gender on the evolution of ideas about beauty." And which as the Telegraph reports consists of displaying to the public the amputated breasts under formaldehyde of the exhibition's curator (once upon a time a lady). (4)

The exhibition is still open a few days, hurry, you don't want to miss it!

England. Insensitive Bones.

Also from the Telegraph and the unicorn world of British universities, news of an £18,000 grant at the University of York's Arts and Humanities Research Council on issues of gender and archaeology, including one entitled Bones Don’t Care About Your Feelings: Challenging Transphobic Invocations of Archaeology in (Social) Media.

That is, all that woke debate about archaeologists being used to assign a biological sex to skeletons found in an excavation based on anatomo-pathological details such as bones or DNA. This research aims to solve the "problem" of presuming the gender of the dead. (5)

England. Turn the other cheek or I'll send guards to your home

News reported on British social media and picked up by some smaller newspapers. British police, along with a psychologist, reportedly paid a "visit" to a British citizen guilty of posting the statement "christians must take the stand" on X regarding the stabbing of an Orthodox pope during a service in recent days (6). A news story, that of the stabbing, passed over in silence, although there was also a video of the attack. Even The Guardian in breaking the news and in spite of the video, obviously to dampen spirits, used the conditional "allegedly stabbed." (7)

This is a crazy trend! Here comes the Seasonal Gender

The case of a tiktoker reporting how her "gender" is subject to seasonal variations has been widely picked up by the Italian media (8). The case might seem like one of those isolated incidents bordering on Poe's Law (impossible to know if they are serious or are satirizing until you see the winking emoticon), but for those who follow the Machiavelli know that that of "seasonal gender" is a topic promoted by florid U.S. PhDs as we wrote last September. Talking about "seasonal gender" is Diane Ehrensaft, associate professor of pediatrics at UCSF, the University of California, San Francisco, as well as director of the Child & Adolescent Gender Center at UCSF's University Children's Hospital, Benioff Children's Hospital. The children are in good hands, come on. (9).

Italy. Wokeshit in green

From Milan comes the news of the restriction of public lawn mowing in order "to promote biodiversity, retain moisture, and mitigate the effect of heat islands," as reported by La Stampa relaunched by Dagospia, along the lines of other European cities. No one doubts that during the dry season limiting mowing can limit the drying up of soils, but the news smells like a wokeshit from a mile away, given the total disregard of the same municipal administrations regarding the health of trees, resulting in the slaughter of even centuries-old plants in tree-lined boulevards throughout Italy.

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From the municipality of Bologna, which prefers to cut down trees in Don Bosco Park to build a new school, instead of renovating the existing school (there are EU PNRR funds anyway), to the municipality of Rome, which regardless of the color of the administration has become famous for pruning the famous "lion's tail" maritime pines, facilitating their death, as if pests were not enough. And even the elms of Monteverde cannot sleep soundly, and many have already been felled en masse for safety reasons. And finally, the Milan municipality itself, which, as pointed out on social media by comedian Giovanni Storti of the famous trio Aldo, Giovanni and Giacomo, is proceeding to prune trees by pollarding, the fastest but also the most damaging way. And this is just as the municipality prides itself on protecting weeds in the flower beds as raised by the other comedian Maurizio Crozza in his April 19 broadcast.

Side note: weeds are a source of particulates, due to the production of pollen and the pulverization of thatch that dries up, as well as the sponge effect by which the bushes collect particulates from other sources, preventing street washing. A great system to increase the percentages of PM10 and PM2.5 in city air and then blame it on the FIAT Panda 1200 of that petty scumbag Fumagalli Brambilla.

In short, as long as municipal administrations leave public green spaces fallow but neglect tree planting, we can safely include these news items among the wokk of the week. And you are officially authorized to think all the bad things about it.

As usual, for the malicious people who think we make it all up, here are the sources:

 

Redattore del blog del Centro Studi Machiavelli "Belfablog", Emanuele Mastrangelo è stato redattore capo di "Storia in Rete" dal 2006. Cartografo storico-militare, è autore di vari libri (con Enrico Petrucci, Iconoclastia. La pazzia contagiosa dellacancel cultureche sta distruggendo la nostra storia and Wikipedia. L'enciclopedia libera e l'egemonia dell'informazione).

An essayist and popularizer, his publications include "Alessandro Blasetti. The forgotten father of Italian cinema" (Idrovolante, 2023). And with Emanuele Mastrangelo "Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia and the Hegemony of Information" (Bietti, 2013) and "Iconoclasm. The contagious insanity of the cancel culture that is destroying our history" (Eclectica, 2020).