Political Critique: Are the media the main allies of Matteo Salvini?

It is an innovation in the relationship between politics and communication. Mateo Salvini, Deputy Prime Minister of Italy and Minister of the Interior since 1 June 2018, seems to have understood more than others, also of Grillo’s supporters who seemed to be at the forefront of the field, the extemporaneous and volatile nature of contemporary political communication, as well as how to relate to it. Salvini’s efforts are all aimed at a constant production of “novelties”, newsworthy information, dictating the agenda to newspapers and online media in particular, with outbursts against the enemy of the day, in an attempt to dominate the political scene with a sort of ubiquity.

Salvini acts in a decidedly linear way. Generally he rants the loudest, the way Trump does in the United States, he waits to see what “effect” this has, and once he has fired up his supporters, once the controversy is unleashed, he stands his ground with a “decisionist” and unrelenting attitude, head-on, further reinforcing his image as a strong man in charge. This is how he prevents a real debate on the issues he raises from taking shape, because yet another rant immediately shifts the attention to another issue, and so on.  [...]

This interpretation also stems from an intelligent analysis of the new relationship between economy and media. The success of social networks has also entailed a decrease in profit of the press. The economic policies of today’s press is also driven by the logic of click-baiting, i.e. the constant need of editors to publish articles capable of attracting repeated views. And so, of attracting investments of advertisers, which have become increasingly pivotal in ensuring the economic sustainability of a newspaper.  [...]

In other words, it is a communication tactic whose only objective is to outstrip the media’s role as fact checker and address the audience directly and that, however, employs these same media outlets which have become mere carriers of information. The fact that Salvini is behind the exponential growth of his party, not the other way round, is, by the way, indicative of how the new media-driven political economy is a decisive factor in the personalization of politics, in the rise of parties constructed around a single personality and in the redefinition of the party system in a “populist” sense.

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The Atlantic: Trump vs. NATO: It's Not Just About the Money

If the president’s problem with NATO was only about money—about more equitable “burden-sharing” among allies, as Trump’s NATO ambassador told reporters in a recent briefing—he might have refrained from repeatedly exaggerating the imbalances in NATO contributions. He might have claimed victory this week in Brussels for spurring Canada and NATO’s European members to commit to an additional $266 billion in military spending by 2024, even if that leaves some countries short of the target 2 percent of GDP. Or he might have stuck to the 2-percent goal in Brussels, rather than abruptly informing stunned European leaders that he would now like them to spend 4 percent of their GDP on defense—more than the United States itself presently devotes to its military. [...]

As Trump seems to see it, allies—with their free-trade deals and military alliances and unending expectations of preferential treatment—tie down the United States, Gulliver-like, and infringe on its sovereignty. They cynically take advantage of their superpower patron while cloaking their naked self-interest in the high-minded language of multilateralism and shared interests. They flourish by exploiting America’s largesse and sapping the United States of its strength. (Hence, perhaps, why Trump is blasting Germany for buying gas from Russia—and not from the energy-rich United States—while depending on the United States to defend it from Russia.) Trump’s gripes about the “$151 Billion trade deficit” with the European Union or the U.S. spending “at least 70 percent for NATO” are really just numerical ways of saying the United States is getting screwed by supposed friends who are laughing all the way to the bank. [...]

IThese ideas of Trump’s, moreover, are not new; they appear to be among the president’s core convictions. In 1987, he took out a full-page ad in several newspapers calling on the U.S. government to “tax” allies such as Japan and Saudi Arabia so that the American economy could “grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom” and whose “stake in their protection is far greater than ours.” In a 1990 Playboy interview, he argued that “our country needs more ego” because “our so-called allies” have “outegotized this country” and made “billions screwing us” by controlling “the greatest money machine ever assembled and it’s sitting on our backs.” A President Trump, he said, “wouldn’t trust anyone. He wouldn’t trust the Russians; he wouldn’t trust our allies.” (Ahead of this week’s NATO summit, Trump deployed strikingly similar language, accusing America’s allies of being “worse” than its adversaries by “robbing” the U.S. “piggy bank.” He also lamented that the United States disproportionately supports NATO even though it “helps [the Europeans] a lot more than it helps us.”)

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Vox: Forget the Rust Belt. Florida is now Trump’s strongest swing state

Trump’s state-by-state approval rating has significantly dropped over the past year and a half. In January 2017 he had a net-positive approval rating in almost every state in the country, except California, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhodes Island. That’s far from the case now. [...]

As you can see, Trump is currently polling better in Florida than he is in Arizona, Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Utah, Nevada, or North Carolina (all states that proved crucial to his 2016 presidential win). [...]

In Florida Trump’s voter base isn’t comprised of the overlooked white working-class voters who figured prominently in postmortems of the 2016 election. As Michael Grunwald wrote for Politico, the “economically secure retirement meccas” that delivered Trump his presidential victory are giving Republicans hope they can stave off a possible “blue wave” election in 2018:

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The Atlantic: Trump’s Betrayal of Britain

This is a moment when America’s closest security partner badly needs American help. In 2016, 51.9 percent of the British public voted to quit the European Union. The leaders of the “Leave” campaign assured voters that the U.K. would easily and speedily negotiate a favorable new relationship with the truncated EU. They promised, too, that a post-EU Britain would negotiate new trade pacts with the United States and Canada. In the words of the Vote Leave campaign’s manifesto: [...]

Every U.S. president from Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama favored an integrated European economy with Britain on the inside. President Trump favored Brexit in 2016. Having gotten his wish, he has turned his back on his Brexiteer friends. The Leave campaign imagined that Brexit Britain would seamlessly transition from the EU to a new Anglosphere trading future. Instead, negotiations with the United States have barely begun—no surprise in this chaotic administration. (The chief trade negotiator for agriculture did not even take office until March 1.)

As Thomas Wright noted in Politico, rather than negotiate a U.S.–U.K. free trade pact, Trump has hit Britain with bogus national-security tariffs on steel and aluminum. His administration offered the U.K. an open-skies agreement on passenger aviation inferior to what the U.K. had enjoyed as a member of the EU, and is dropping broad hints that Britain may have to dismantle important elements of its cherished National Health Service as part of any future U.S.–U.K. trade deal.

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Salon: Why is Donald Trump so sweet on Vladimir Putin? It might just be personal financial gain

So why does Trump pander to Putin? He won’t criticize him and incessantly flatters and coddles him. He has winked at the annexation of Crimea, threatened NATO, suggested that the G7 should readmit Russia, and done nothing to prevent Russian meddling in U.S. elections. [...]

Throughout the 2000s, Russians bought many apartments in Trump Tower and $100 million worth of Trump properties in Florida. But these sales dropped precipitously in 2014 after the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian oligarchs for the Crimean incursion. Lifting sanctions would likely restore these sales, and the profits would flow through a trust run by Trump's sons, with the president as sole beneficiary. Indeed, Trump admitted that he’d “be looking at” lifting them.

Trump has many business aspirations in Russia that Putin can make or break. In 1986, Trump met with the Soviet ambassador about building a luxury hotel in Moscow, and announced a potential Trump International complex there. At the 2008 Russian Real Estate Summit, Trump touted plans for condos and hotels in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sochi. In 2011, he licensed his name to an aborted Azerbaijan hotel for $1 million and promoted a Trump Tower in Kazakhstan. Even as he campaigned for the Republican nomination, Trump signed a letter of intent to build Trump Tower in Moscow. [...]

“America first” ideology has actually put Russia first. Leaving the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Iran nuclear deal and Paris Climate Agreement lost America international forums where it communicated, led and influenced. Cutting the State Department’s budget and foreign aid weakened America’s global clout and allowed Putin to expand Russia's sphere of influence.

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Quartz: The EU countries that desperately need migrants to avoid shrinkage—and those that don’t

Though there were more deaths than births across the European Union (EU), the population increased by 1.1 million in one year, to 512.6 million people. The increase was due to net migration, according to Eurostat. Population trends in EU countries aren’t at all consistent. While Malta, Luxembourg, and Sweden saw a large increases in population growth, Lithuania, Croatia, and Latvia saw their population shrink significantly. [...]

For countries at the bottom of the table, a lack of migrants is contributing to a population decrease. In Lithuania, Latvia, and Romania, an increase in net migration could help reverse population decline. And while the populations grew slightly in Poland and Slovakia, restrictive immigration policies have dampened the growth. The same is true for Slovenia, but the country was one of many to respond to the refugee crisis by building fences. [...]

There are, however, some European countries whose growth is not dependent on migration. In Ireland, France, and the Netherlands, population growth was down in 2016 because of natural increases rather than migration. And the 2018 data from Eurostat shows that across the EU, the highest crude birth rates, which measures the rate of birth to the population, in 2017 were recorded in Ireland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and France. (The fertility rate measure the rate of birth to women in a reproductive age).

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Quartzy: Beyond the straw ban—three easy ways to eat with the planet in mind

This one is a little counter-intuitive, but many frozen fish actually have a smaller carbon footprint than fresh fish. “It’s much better, and much cheaper actually, to go to the frozen section where you have vacuum-packed things like sockeye salmon,” Paul Greenberg, author of The Omega Principle, Seafood and the Quest for a Long Life and a Healthier Planet, told Terry Gross on Fresh Air. Greenberg explained that fish that are processed and frozen on fishing boats, like much of the Alaskan salmon catch, can be held at temperature for long periods with very little additional energy input, especially in contrast to the expense of flying fresh seafood around the world. [...]

As Dana Gunders, author of Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook, told Quartzy earlier this year,  “No matter how organically or sustainably the food was grown, if you’re not eating it, it was all for naught.” Americans waste about a pound of food a day per person and people with the healthiest diets tend to waste the most—about half of all produce ends up in the trash, and food is the single biggest contributor to landfills. [...]

While we’re talking about banning straws—which while wasteful, are irreplaceable for some folks with limited mobility or sensory issues—let’s talk about disposable coffee cups. Americans use more than 100 million disposable hot coffee cups each day. That doesn’t even take iced lattes into account. Fancy reusable coffee cups, like the one from Yeti, may seem a bit much, but at around $30 each you’re much less likely to lose it than a cheaper model. Their BPA-free plastic lids actually get clean, are supposedly leak-proof, and don’t hold the grossly lingering flavor of stale coffee, so they can double as your seltzer cup once you’ve caffeinated. Yeti also makes a separate straw lid that is reusable and perfect for keeping your wine spritzer ice cold.  Stay up-to-date with Quartzy on Facebook  Follow us

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IFLScience: Archaeologists Have Found The Oldest Copy Of One Of The Most Important Stories Ever Told

The Greek Culture Ministry has announced the discovery of the oldest written extract of Homer’s Odyssey. Initial analysis of the slab strongly suggests it dates back to around the third century CE during the Roman era, although the team is yet to confirm this through scientific techniques.

The clay tablet, engraved with 13 verses of book 14 of the epic poem, was unearthed near a ruined Temple of Zeus during a three-year excavation in the ancient city of Olympia, Greece. This grand temple was also once home to the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, a since-destroyed colossal statue that is considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. [...]

Homer – if he existed – wouldn’t have actually written the story in the same way we think of an author writing a book today. The story was most likely composed orally and was more likely intended to be heard than read. Since most stories were transmitted this way, it’s actually pretty lucky we have any stories dating from Ancient Greece at all. This new discovery is important because it's the closest we have come to the original story, or at least when it was first written down, as like most stories told after the event and passed down orally, it's very likely that the story changes bit-by-bit with each retelling.

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IFLScience: The "Mystery" Of The Bermuda Triangle Has Been Solved

During an on-air interview with news.com.au, one Karl Kruszelnicki – a well-known science communicator out of Australia – notes that the number of vessels and aircraft that disappear in the area “is the same as anywhere else in the world on a percentage basis.” [...]

According to Kruszelnicki, the myth behind the Bermuda Triangle began when several high-profile military convoys – and their subsequent rescue missions – went down in the region between the First and Second World Wars. In reality, terrible weather and less rigid boats and aircraft ensure plenty of disappearances. [...]

Bodies and wreckage were never found in most cases, but this isn’t surprising considering that it’s a massive body of water that’s incredibly deep. Even today, the wreckage of planes and boats are rarely located despite massive advances in reconnaissance and tracking technology.

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