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Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

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231 points rntn | 5 comments | 02 Apr 23 17:19 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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hunglee2 ◴[02 Apr 23 17:47 UTC] No.35413150[source]▶
I think we (Americans and Europeans alike) wholly underestimate how Americanised European culture is becoming.

This is an observation rather than a criticism as I don't know whether this is 'good' or 'bad' but it is noticeable phenomena manifest through language, and probably an unintended consequence of the dependency of Europe on US communication technology, leading to the import of US communication styles, political priorities and cultural values.

France have always been conscious of this, no doubt as a result of their centuries old conflict with England, but it is interesting now to see Italian nationalists responding similarly. It's futile of course, as neither Italians, French nor any combination of European countries can or will make an internet independent of the US

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_vbnz ◴[02 Apr 23 17:59 UTC] No.35413290[source]▶
Yeah, it was shocking here in Stockholm when there were BLM protests in 2020.

It's like people are more involved in US politics than their national politics.

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kevin_thibedeau ◴[02 Apr 23 19:25 UTC] No.35414151[source]▶
They awarded Obama a Nobel before he ever had a chance to do anything. There is a whole magic negro thing going on with Europeans intent on demonstrating that they aren't bigots. Right until the point they have brown immigrants entering their own country.
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tpmx ◴[02 Apr 23 19:41 UTC] No.35414304[source]▶
> They awarded Obama a Nobel before he ever had a chance to do anything.

That one was the celebrity-hungry Norwegian Nobel Committee's fault. They award the peace prize.

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1. kevin_thibedeau ◴[02 Apr 23 19:44 UTC] No.35414334[source]▶
Obama got a reception like he was the Pope on his first European trip. It spans more than just the Nobel committee.
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2. arlort ◴[02 Apr 23 20:07 UTC] No.35414588[source]▶
That's got more to do with Bush than anything else
3. sobkas ◴[02 Apr 23 20:27 UTC] No.35414821[source]▶
> Obama got a reception like he was the Pope on his first European trip. It spans more than just the Nobel committee.

First not being Bush wrote a lot of checks he couldn't cash. People believed for some reason that he was leftist, and later discovered how much to the right, American "left" is. And American media also distorted a bit what was actually happening. Neither democratic nor republican media would show their beloved leaders(you can guess which media support which president) in bad light.

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4. giobox ◴[02 Apr 23 23:43 UTC] No.35416646[source]▶
> People believed for some reason that he was leftist, and later discovered how much to the right, American "left" is.

What nonsense. That US Democratic Party politics often leans more right than many popular European parties on the left is not some modern post-Obama discovery, and was widely understood long before Obama's presidency. Literally read any political memoir or history by a left-leaning European politician who interacted with the US and Democratic party leadership prior to Obama and you will pick up a sense of this.

I can accept arguments Obama may have been treated with much more interest and excitement than perhaps he warranted in European media at that time, but I see little evidence this was because his politics were misunderstood - Obama's policy positions were generally easy to articulate. I think a simpler explanation might well lie in the obvious historic nature of the event; he was the first black man to hold the office, and the first Democratic president after two terms of Bush. These facts alone are "newsworthy" by the standards of modern media.

"leftist" is an absolutely terrible classification to use in any debate about politics, given its generally only ever used reductively and is almost devoid of any actual meaning.

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5. blahedo ◴[03 Apr 23 04:22 UTC] No.35418527{3}[source]▶
But even here in the US, on both the left and the right, Obama was frequently painted as much more leftist than he ever ever actually was or claimed to be. Wishful thinking on both sides, I guess. Europeans that weren't following US politics exceedingly closely could be forgiven for being surprised at Obama's more-centre-right-than-expected policies even if they knew in general that the US Dems would be comfortable among the centre-right parties of Europe.