by Emanuele Mastrangelo and Enrico Petrucci

Canada - Your Panda causes pollution, my private jet doesn't, you dirtbag!

Private jets and climate change are a mismatched pair when it comes to the environment. In February 2023 he had caused a stir with the statement of billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates who, roughly pressed (“are you a hypocrite?”) by BBC journalist Amol Rajan about his private jet travel, had replied dryly, “I am not part of the problem.” In short, the oligarch's private jets (he owns four of them plus a helicopter) would not be questionable, because he pays for the cause, philanthropically, of course. Who pays the piper calls the tune...

Now a similar story comes from Canada, notably about its ambassador for climate change, Catherine Stewart. The expenses of her office have been made public and it turns out that for a three-day trip from Ottawa to Toronto (distance: 350 km) she used a private jet and spent 9,000 Canadian dollars. Bye bye, beggars.

Blind casting / 1 - “Gladiator 2”: the good “black” emperor vs. the bad pale faces

Ridley Scott after “ Napoleon ” has not yet decided to return to science fiction, a genre in which he certainly is better at. So he perseveres with historical films, this time messing with ancient Rome: and here is the sequel to "The Gladiator". And already Denzel Washington is causing discussion as Macrinus, an emperor of Punic and Berber (therefore white) origin born in Caesarea (now Cerchell in Algeria), who proclaimed himself emperor after the assassination of Caracalla in 217 and was deposed after a rebellion in 218.

But it is not enough to have raped the ethnic origin of a historical figure, however minor. In fact Macrinus/Washington and associated gladiators will fight the pair Geta & Caracalla just as Decimus Maximus Meridius fought Commodus in the first film (how original...). The pair of imperial brothers are portrayed as two pale, metrosexual sociopaths who look like the ancient Rome version of the droogs in "A Clockwork Orange".

Closing the short-circuit is the historical fact: Caracalla and Geta are sons of Septimius Severus, the first North African emperor in Rome's history, a native of Leptis Magna and Berber by mother's side. In recent years much is being invested in the misconception of “North African = African = Sub-Saharan,” going so far as to paint a Septimius Severus who looks like Samuel L. Jackson in a portrait commissioned by English Heritage for an exhibition in 2021, an operation that also raised some hype. But today this wokeshit is no longer fashionable; the important thing is to maintain “whiteness” as the woke source of all evil.

Blind casting / 2 - tanned Carthaginians and Normans

And while for “Hannibal Barca,” a Netflix series, Denzel Washington has again been cast as Rome's archenemy (so that the “black-good” VS “white-bad” binomial can be renewed) woke clouds are also on the horizon for the announced film on the Battle of Hastings. Indeed, a new historical waffle is brewing that will make Hollywood's wokeshit a kid's joke compared to the prowess of the BBC, which has already promised color-blind casting for a production about the battle that in 1066 made Saxon England a Norman fiefdom. We imagine late viewers entering the theater laden with popcorn, sitting down and after a few moments asking their neighbor, “Excuse me, but is this Hastings or Zulu Dawn?”

Swezistan - Race is a social construct

That race is a social construct is not something we say, but we are reminded by the abstract of an academic sociology paper that has stunned the world with its groundbreaking results: “white faces” are perceived to be more Swedish. An article by Dr. Sayaka Osanami Törngren, an associate in ethnic relations and international migration at the University of Malmö in merit of swedishness, was published in Sociology Compass. The obvious result is how even new generation Swedes perceive the “whiter as more Swedish.” The abstract's conclusion should be noted:

«Despite these small differences in the perception of skin color among Asian, White, and Latino faces, faces self-reported as White were rated as significantly more Swedish by the respondents compared Asian and Latino faces. All these results contribute to the understanding of not only how race matters in Sweden but also to the understanding of constructivist nature of race».

For those who want to read the entire article, here is the reference: Osanami Törngren, S., & Nyström, M. (2024). "What does racial ascription have to do with perception of Swedishness?" In Sociology Compass, e13237. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.13237.). What does racial ascription have to do with perception of Swedishness? In Sociology Compass, e13237. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.13237

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Femminista JK Rowling vs. Transgender: atto secondo e terzo
Males vs. Females

Two news stories well tell the woke short-circuits regarding inclusiveness at all costs.

In Germany, a trans man sued the McDonald's he worked because they would not allow him to use the women's locker room, yet met the demands of another employee of the Muslim faith, who did not want men in the locker room. It will be wonderful to see the DEI managers at McDonald's break out in a cold sweat as they consult the intersectional discrimination chart on whether an Islamic woman or a transgender male has more right to be heard.

And yet another “women born female” versus “women born male” case, this time coming from Australia. Being brought to justice is an entrepreneur who had made an app for organic women only, challenged for discrimination by a male user who nonetheless feels she is a woman. Will Australian law be able to answer the question of “What is a woman?”. Please refer to "Brave New World 2.0" video for insights on the Tickle vs. Giggle case:

 

But on the “trans women” vs. women (without quotes) issue, there are more than just legal issues for those with money to spend on lawyers. The Daily Mail, with its usual sensationalist tabloid slant, devoted several articles to the outcomes of the Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act, SB132, signed into law by ultra-woke Governor Newsom in 2020 and allowing those who identify as women to be transferred to a women's prison.

A solution with predictable outcomes, from the parricide and matricide who... sexually entertains his 25-year-old cellmate in a (seemingly) consensual manner to a case of a robber and rapist who allegedly raped his cellmate. The trans man accused of the rape, Tremaine Carroll, appeared in court in a wheelchair and became a banner of trans activism (remember the chart above? Trans and disabled: a thousand points higher than the fallen woman!). Although Carroll was eventually transferred to a men's prison, for the time being victory went to the proponents of woke ideology, with a federal judge dismissing the lawsuit brought by feminists from the Women Liberation Front against California's SB132 law.

Chicago – Re-fund the Police

In Chicago for the Fourth of July there were 86 injuries and 19 fatalities from the shootings that accompanied the week of the national holiday. This is actually half good news: homicides would be down 7 percent in the first half of 2024. And 2023 had seen a sharp reduction from the previous year, down from 709 to 617. A turnaround after the tenure of Lori Lightfoot, famous for her Diversity, Equity, Inclusion score and for cutting the local police budget by 80 million under the BLM's slogan “defund the police.” In contrast, Brandon Johnson, the new mayor in office from May 2023, though a Democrat seems to be taking the crime issue more seriously than his intersectional predecessor, so much so that he requested federal support after the July 4 shootings.

Editor of the Centro Studi Machiavelli “Belfablog,” Emanuele Mastrangelo is editor-in-chief of “CulturaIdentità” and has been editor-in-chief of “Storia in Rete” since 2006. A military-historical cartographer, he is the author of several books (with Enrico Petrucci, Iconoclastia. La pazzia contagiosa della cancel culture che sta distruggendo la nostra storia e 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).