Sciascia, btw, is one of the biggest thinkers and writers of '900. It is not really defined by his mafia-related novels and takes. He used to be friend with Borges, and was regarded as one of the top men in humanistic culture. Disclaimer: I was born in a town (Campobello di Licata) near his town (Racalmuto), but I'm not saying this because of this fact.
If you never read Sciascia, I suggest you starting from his last, tiny novel: "Una storia semplice". I believe there are English translations that can be found around as ebook or used on eBay.
silcoon 2 hours ago [-]
Truly great Italian literature. Also “The day of the Owl” is another famous Sciascia’s book with old mafia theme.
nine_k 2 hours ago [-]
Nit: I suppose you mean 1900s, not just "'900". I mean, one could reasonably suspect that good writers existed in Italy in early 10th century, too.
alexpotato 2 hours ago [-]
My mom, who is from Italy, has some great lines about the Mafia:
"Italy will never go bankrupt b/c we have the Pope AND the Mafia"
I once asked her how the Mafia was reined in and she mentioned:
"The Mafia was once trying to kill some judge or politician and they blew up several hundred meters of highway to do it. They also killed a lot of innocent people and the outcry was so big that the Carbinieri(Italian FBI) got involved."
pizza234 2 hours ago [-]
> the Carbinieri(Italian FBI)
Carabinieri are actually military-status police force in Italy, which is a different setup from the FBI in the US.
Calling them the Italian FBI, is ironically quite funny, because in Italy they’re the butt of a lot of jokes - "carabiniere" is a common stand-in for "someone dumb".
weinzierl 14 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of the story of Andre Camara, who photographed a favela drug war in the mid 80s.
Take away: criminals are vain too.
articulatepang 14 hours ago [-]
For those who don’t know: the film City of God is based on this, and it’s a great movie. One of my all-time favorites. The directing, acting photography and storytelling are all very well done. Worth anyone’s time.
barrenko 14 hours ago [-]
I have to rewatch what, been a decade.
noduerme 13 hours ago [-]
From 2002. It's crazy how happy I was to have 360p mpeg rips back then. I'm gonna have to re-pirate it tonight.
Why wouldn't an up and coming government administration want to take professional photos and engage in all the other trappings of legitimate government?
inglor_cz 5 hours ago [-]
One interesting thing about the situation is that Islamic religious authorities used to have conflicting views on permissibility of portraits and depictions of living beings in general, which is also why so much Islamic medieval art is abstract. Abstract art was religiously safe.
Ubiquity and practicality of photography basically destroyed the restrictive side of the conflict. As you can see, even the Taliban seems to be on the permissive side now.
(IIRC some of the most extreme forms of Islamic State in Syria/Iraq tried to ban photography of humans and animals.)
Yup, they want to be documented. Tale as old as time.
rayiner 8 hours ago [-]
Do all countries have something like an Italian mafia? Is there a German or British mafia of a similar scale and sophistication, but we just call them something else?
j3th9n 17 minutes ago [-]
In The Netherlands it’s called D66.
Carrok 8 hours ago [-]
Most just call them the government.
nosafemode 7 hours ago [-]
in Iran it's called IRGC
sooheon 11 hours ago [-]
The 2020 adaptation of ZeroZeroZero, mentioned in this article, is one of the best crime shows I've ever seen, with basically zero buzz. Pretty interesting reading the reason for the authenticity.
oriettaxx 8 hours ago [-]
where is it mentioned?
ZeroZeroZero is by Saviano, article is about Sciascia.
reddalo 14 hours ago [-]
Off topic, but I'm always amazed by Archive.md/.is/whatever. To this day I don't understand how they manage to bypass a lot of paywalls.
The mystery about the owner makes it even more intriguing.
LordHeini 5 hours ago [-]
I think archive has mostly news, random articles and such.
And as they say nothing is more worthless than yesterday's news.
amouat 13 hours ago [-]
I assume they just pretend to be the Googlebot so the site just gives the text.
dewey 11 hours ago [-]
Won’t work for any popular site. You can try that easily by using extensions to set the user agent. If you are not checking the public list of IPs that Google publishes for the crawler you are doing it wrong.
ventegus 3 hours ago [-]
thetimes.com has a paywall if you visit it from the UK, and full content if you are in the US.
entonces, US-based archive.org "bypasses" this paywall as well:
Maybe they have a paid account? I don’t think there’s much magic behind
blast 2 hours ago [-]
Publications could use watermarking to encode the name of the account an article is being served to, but they don't seem to. I wonder why.
jama211 14 hours ago [-]
I just assumed they copied it into their own db
moffkalast 13 hours ago [-]
Given to how many people its existence must be incredibly infuriating, it's so odd that it's not being chased down with more haste than pirate bay was. I mean I'm glad it's not, but kinda surprised.
nosafemode 7 hours ago [-]
There has been some dns resolver issues, some DNS resolvers wont return the address to the sites like archive.is or sites like Annas Archive
dewey 11 hours ago [-]
The music or movie industry lobby is much more aggressive I’d assume.
Saviano is exactly one of the "antimafia professionals" that Sciascia complained about.
newsclues 7 hours ago [-]
Sciascia Died in 89, Saviano was 10 years old and wouldn’t start writing until the early 2000s.
lormayna 7 hours ago [-]
It's not about the year of birth, it's about the role. Saviano creates his own career with mafia and now is acting as opinionist to any other option (i.e. now about the constitutional referendum that "will enforce the mafia").
Falcone, Borsellino, Livatino, Don Puglisi (just to mention people that paid with their own life) fight heavily against mafia, but they never converted this fight in a career.
newsclues 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe it’s lost in translation but my argument is semantic.
Saviano may be the type that was warned about but not the one.
null_deref 14 hours ago [-]
It angers me that Fascist Italy could push the Mafia to the brink of extinction but Democratic Italy can’t.
viktorcode 13 hours ago [-]
They pushed them out of Italy, which forced mafia to adapt in the US, eventually becoming richer and stronger. A much more powerful transnational mafia returned back to Italy.
oriettaxx 8 hours ago [-]
by "they" do you mean Mussolini?
What exactly Leonardo Sciascia mean in his "Porte Aperte" is the fascism merely "anesthetize" the mafia rather than eradicating it (gaining temporary Sicilian consent through illusionary repression)
markus_zhang 2 hours ago [-]
Mafia exists because legal entities refuse to take responsibilities —- oh it’s too expensive to do X so we will leave it alone or legalize it. So eventually the underground takes over and Mafia becomes quasi governments.
To eradicate you need a stronger central government that is willing to send its probes into the deepest of the society and has a strong hand. Unfortunately this also has unforeseen consequences as well so is not everyone’s cup. Some societies prefer a stronger central government and some don’t.
mikkupikku 10 hours ago [-]
The purpose of democracy is to create stable governance with peaceful transitions of power, so that people feel confident about the future and are willing to invest in long term things that require long term stability. It's not because we think the plebiscite are really wise and effective at governing, they're not, but stability is more important and ultimately more humane than government which is truly effective but not stable in the long run.
karmakurtisaani 9 hours ago [-]
I don't doubt that a fascist regime can solve problems like organized crime effectively. This is because they don't need to care about human rights or the rule of law. The problem is that once the mob is gone, the fascists stay.
locallost 14 hours ago [-]
One Mafia pushed the other out. No improvement for normal people.
silcoon 10 hours ago [-]
Did they? I’m pretty sure that’s just political propaganda of the regime.
mikkupikku 10 hours ago [-]
I don't think they actually pushed the mob out, but evidently they did succeed in pissing off the mob enough to make the mob happy and willing collaborators with the Allies.
> Under Mussolini, Moorehead argues convincingly, the Mob merely became dormant.
I did some googling and seems like this is a popular belief.
nkrisc 13 hours ago [-]
That’s just the state mafia replacing the other.
trhway 12 hours ago [-]
With Putin's Russia transition to authoritarian and recently becoming fully totalitarian, the Russian Mafia of 90s (with the 90s being the most democratic time in Russian history), is pretty much no more. FSB and police have replaced them in the protection and extortion domain. Thus nowdays an arrested colonel of FSB or police may easily have a couple cubic meters of money (euro and dollars) at home, to the envy of many mafioso around the world. Or Chechnja - instead of many smaller (and poorer and less organized) warlords of 90s, now there is only one with personal army of 40000 and exploiting the whole region in the style of the most cruel mafia.
pandajoy 11 hours ago [-]
How about America? And what about Trump?
y-curious 8 hours ago [-]
America doesn’t have bribery! It has “lobbying”. This has been a problem long before Trump made it shameless.
cucumber3732842 6 hours ago [-]
This. We do't have bribery have made the bribery above the table to "legitimize" it and make the useful idiots and enablers simp for it. The "pure" act of lobbying is only the tip of the iceberg. There's all sorts of incestuous revolving door and distasteful but not illegal dealigns between government and the industries government favors.
If I had a nickle for every time I read a "if you don't like your tax dollars being spend on <obvious handout bullshit with negligible positive impact on anything> then you should go vote about it" or "if you do't like the govermet squashing <something> at the obvious behest of <entrenched interest> just vote harder" comment I'd be rich enough to buy an entire train worth of boxcars to put those comment's authors on.
MrBuddyCasino 14 hours ago [-]
They can, they just don’t do it. This is the case in every western „liberal democracy“.
alecco 13 hours ago [-]
They just loooooove the campaign contributions.
blell 13 hours ago [-]
Why does that anger you? Democracy is fundamentally unable to solve such issues.
Etheryte 13 hours ago [-]
Nearly every democratic country in the world is a counter example to this, what do you mean exactly?
dauertewigkeit 12 hours ago [-]
Not true. Organized crime operates largely where people have money, i.e. in Europe, it's mostly UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Sweden...etc.
null_deref 11 hours ago [-]
I’m no expert on global crime stats, but it feels like organized crime used to be way more 'in your face.' Back in the day, the countries you mentioned including Eastern Europe, you’d hear about car bombings, public shootouts, and blatant protection rackets. Doesn't the relative disappearance of that kind of chaos suggest things have actually improved? Look at the UK, for instance the fact that average police officers patrol without firearms feels like a pretty strong indicator of a more stable society, doesn't it?
mikkupikku 10 hours ago [-]
Organized crime doesn't like publicly visible violence. That's bad for business. They only resort to that when they feel they have no other choice. They do shit like bomb judges and get into shootouts with the police when they have to exert their power, not when they feel secure and business is good.
A better measure of organized crime is the sort of crime they profit from, like the general availability of illegal drugs, trafficked women, etc.
null_deref 7 hours ago [-]
But aren’t car bombs and public shootouts between different crime groups an unavoidable by product of existing organized crime?
It seems to me there always be someone who thinks he can get more money by leaving a group and creating one of their own or some other group trying to expand revenue and territory
mikkupikku 7 hours ago [-]
Not necessarily. Intra-gang violence can be done in more private ways, public terrorism is a choice but not an inevitability. Gang splits are also less likely to occur when the government is corrupt and working with some gangs but not others; the intra-gang violence can be disguised as law enforcement action and the overwhelming power of the government makes them a powerful ally that deters competition from even trying.
null_deref 7 hours ago [-]
Interesting take. I think I have lived in an environment that makes it harder for to imagine stuff like that can happen
blell 12 hours ago [-]
Hell, Belgium is basically a narcostate at this point.
koverstreet 9 hours ago [-]
If you think Belgium is a narcostate - oh my :)
People lose touch with reality when life becomes too rich and comfortable, and they become too focused on security. You miss all the other corrosive influences on society.
I've travelled the entire United States, multiple times over, and seen quite a bit of Europe and South America, and I'm in Colombia now.
Latin America, and Colombia in particular would be far more of a "narcostate" according to the popular Northern definition - but perception often isn't reality.
I've never seen the gripping poverty and desperation that's common in the United States anywhere in Latin America; even the poorer communities here tend to be vibrant and well functioning, with families and little farming communities everywhere that are living life well. The fabric of society functions pretty well - health care and healthy food is far more available, far less conflict with government apparatuses (try walking into a DMV anywhere in the states, vs. walking into a government office in Latin America - I think you'll find it enlightening).
The security-obsessed mindset in the United States and Europe leads people to want to stamp out the mafia and cartels, but if you look at the actual outcomes I think it's pretty clear that that approach fails in the long run. Look at Mexico for the worst example of what can happen - being next to the United States the pressures have been high, and it hasn't worked, and cartel violence is absolutely ludicrous.
When people have more of a "live and let live" approach, things tend to stabilize in unconventional arrangements that are on the whole much less toxic to society. So Colombia, which does have cartels, doesn't have the same level of warfare or violence that affects the average person as Mexico does - where you'll regularly see a half dozen army/swat guys on patrol in a pickup with M-16s. Even so, you don't feel the same level of tension about that in Mexico vs. seeing a LEO presense in the United States, where that often means outright harassment for the populace.
There's a lot more to having a functional society than just eliminating elements that run contrary to "popular order".
And Belgium is great :)
luqtas 8 hours ago [-]
> I've never seen the gripping poverty and desperation that's common in the United States anywhere in Latin America; even the poorer communities here tend to be vibrant and well functioning, with families and little farming communities everywhere that are living life well.
with all the respect but what a naive paragraph. i suggest you to go away from touristics places or get into a poor part of any big city in Latin america. the stuff is nasty. what you are comparing is relatively stable rural families that would be an akin to a rural medium class on the USA... you can almost say in 100% of the cases a medium class North American is equivalent of someone from the upper class here. in term of goods/comfort, not work. and if you still romantize as a traveler these poor communities on the backcountry, i suggest to try a week or 2 of their work. just take the routine of a +40 y/o man to check what being 'medium class' is about. being on the hunger line with a bare house is poverty and Latin America has many examples
koverstreet 7 hours ago [-]
Have you seen the poorer parts of the United States? Or walked around the Tenderloin? Or seen what meth has done to parts of the rust belt, and the farming communities that have been hollowed out and eviscerated across the midwest?
Ever been to a reservation?
luqtas 4 hours ago [-]
you are comparing a marginalized demographic against people who belong to the middle class on Latin America. it's totally out of sense. we also have cracolandia and favelas and people dying of diarrhoea and dying of hunger in some regions.
please, don't visit a country with probably tourist type of visit and sum up a whole continent on socioeconomics or whatever category your empirical sociologic observation was
Ok, if you're actually from Latin America, I should apologize - I don't mean to say that those kinds of issues don't exist (and actually, I have seen some - Honduras) - I often assume I'm talking to someone from the states, and Americans have gotten insular and really out of touch, and most have no idea how much things have changed over the past 50 years.
That said, I'd rather live in middle lower class Latin America that Estados Unidos any day. The food is probably going to be better - too many places in the States Walmart is the only practical option now - health care won't bankrupt you, and people in Latin America are almost universally better educated and less depressed on social issues.
And I think a lot of that can be traced to a culture that's a bit less authoritarian, because people understand the history of why that doesn't work. Just going to war with the Mafia or the narcos is a trite answer, but it usually doesn't solve things in the long run.
Edit - also, you really should compare the poorer parts of the big cities you're talking about to Detroit or New Orleans or the Tenderloin. In my experience, people in Latin America can also have a skewed perspective. The world is a big place.
null_deref 13 hours ago [-]
Please elaborate I think there’re quite a few examples that contradict this
Rendered at 22:26:24 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
If you never read Sciascia, I suggest you starting from his last, tiny novel: "Una storia semplice". I believe there are English translations that can be found around as ebook or used on eBay.
"Italy will never go bankrupt b/c we have the Pope AND the Mafia"
I once asked her how the Mafia was reined in and she mentioned:
"The Mafia was once trying to kill some judge or politician and they blew up several hundred meters of highway to do it. They also killed a lot of innocent people and the outcry was so big that the Carbinieri(Italian FBI) got involved."
Carabinieri are actually military-status police force in Italy, which is a different setup from the FBI in the US.
Calling them the Italian FBI, is ironically quite funny, because in Italy they’re the butt of a lot of jokes - "carabiniere" is a common stand-in for "someone dumb".
Take away: criminals are vain too.
By the way, there is a Taliban who looks exactly like Christian Bale: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/976/cpsprodpb/13EB0/pr...
Ubiquity and practicality of photography basically destroyed the restrictive side of the conflict. As you can see, even the Taliban seems to be on the permissive side now.
(IIRC some of the most extreme forms of Islamic State in Syria/Iraq tried to ban photography of humans and animals.)
ZeroZeroZero is by Saviano, article is about Sciascia.
The mystery about the owner makes it even more intriguing.
And as they say nothing is more worthless than yesterday's news.
entonces, US-based archive.org "bypasses" this paywall as well:
https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.thetimes.com/culture...
Falcone, Borsellino, Livatino, Don Puglisi (just to mention people that paid with their own life) fight heavily against mafia, but they never converted this fight in a career.
Saviano may be the type that was warned about but not the one.
What exactly Leonardo Sciascia mean in his "Porte Aperte" is the fascism merely "anesthetize" the mafia rather than eradicating it (gaining temporary Sicilian consent through illusionary repression)
To eradicate you need a stronger central government that is willing to send its probes into the deepest of the society and has a strong hand. Unfortunately this also has unforeseen consequences as well so is not everyone’s cup. Some societies prefer a stronger central government and some don’t.
https://historycollection.com/the-mafias-secret-role-in-help...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborations_between_the_Uni...
> Under Mussolini, Moorehead argues convincingly, the Mob merely became dormant.
I did some googling and seems like this is a popular belief.
If I had a nickle for every time I read a "if you don't like your tax dollars being spend on <obvious handout bullshit with negligible positive impact on anything> then you should go vote about it" or "if you do't like the govermet squashing <something> at the obvious behest of <entrenched interest> just vote harder" comment I'd be rich enough to buy an entire train worth of boxcars to put those comment's authors on.
A better measure of organized crime is the sort of crime they profit from, like the general availability of illegal drugs, trafficked women, etc.
People lose touch with reality when life becomes too rich and comfortable, and they become too focused on security. You miss all the other corrosive influences on society.
I've travelled the entire United States, multiple times over, and seen quite a bit of Europe and South America, and I'm in Colombia now.
Latin America, and Colombia in particular would be far more of a "narcostate" according to the popular Northern definition - but perception often isn't reality.
I've never seen the gripping poverty and desperation that's common in the United States anywhere in Latin America; even the poorer communities here tend to be vibrant and well functioning, with families and little farming communities everywhere that are living life well. The fabric of society functions pretty well - health care and healthy food is far more available, far less conflict with government apparatuses (try walking into a DMV anywhere in the states, vs. walking into a government office in Latin America - I think you'll find it enlightening).
The security-obsessed mindset in the United States and Europe leads people to want to stamp out the mafia and cartels, but if you look at the actual outcomes I think it's pretty clear that that approach fails in the long run. Look at Mexico for the worst example of what can happen - being next to the United States the pressures have been high, and it hasn't worked, and cartel violence is absolutely ludicrous.
When people have more of a "live and let live" approach, things tend to stabilize in unconventional arrangements that are on the whole much less toxic to society. So Colombia, which does have cartels, doesn't have the same level of warfare or violence that affects the average person as Mexico does - where you'll regularly see a half dozen army/swat guys on patrol in a pickup with M-16s. Even so, you don't feel the same level of tension about that in Mexico vs. seeing a LEO presense in the United States, where that often means outright harassment for the populace.
There's a lot more to having a functional society than just eliminating elements that run contrary to "popular order".
And Belgium is great :)
with all the respect but what a naive paragraph. i suggest you to go away from touristics places or get into a poor part of any big city in Latin america. the stuff is nasty. what you are comparing is relatively stable rural families that would be an akin to a rural medium class on the USA... you can almost say in 100% of the cases a medium class North American is equivalent of someone from the upper class here. in term of goods/comfort, not work. and if you still romantize as a traveler these poor communities on the backcountry, i suggest to try a week or 2 of their work. just take the routine of a +40 y/o man to check what being 'medium class' is about. being on the hunger line with a bare house is poverty and Latin America has many examples
Ever been to a reservation?
please, don't visit a country with probably tourist type of visit and sum up a whole continent on socioeconomics or whatever category your empirical sociologic observation was
edit: since ur in Latin America and if ur not reading anything, i recommend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Veins_of_Latin_America
That said, I'd rather live in middle lower class Latin America that Estados Unidos any day. The food is probably going to be better - too many places in the States Walmart is the only practical option now - health care won't bankrupt you, and people in Latin America are almost universally better educated and less depressed on social issues.
And I think a lot of that can be traced to a culture that's a bit less authoritarian, because people understand the history of why that doesn't work. Just going to war with the Mafia or the narcos is a trite answer, but it usually doesn't solve things in the long run.
Edit - also, you really should compare the poorer parts of the big cities you're talking about to Detroit or New Orleans or the Tenderloin. In my experience, people in Latin America can also have a skewed perspective. The world is a big place.