I would say that the Nationalist Party’s difficulties are directly linked to the emerging growth of this phenomenon and what it represents
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March 29, 2014 at 10:45am
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https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=403822833063162&set=a.403819236396855.1073741838.397839913661454&type=3&theater
Aw ohh yahhh int eeee ta vera tijjak selili qal bf eee tinsiex urih il pic hahhaha
– an actual comment, lifted from there.
How any woman can be attracted to a man with plucked eyebrows is beyond me
Something tells me that is not their audience. Now where did I put my hairspray…
They’re not trying to attract women.
They’re not attracting men either. I say that as a gay man.
The author of the article the below quote was taken from was not talking about Malta but as soon as one starts to read the article one recognizes the horror of words sounding so very true.
“Mediocrity is excellent to the eyes of mediocre people” wrote the French essayist Joseph Joubert. Perhaps mediocrity has some way to go before it usurps excellence itself but certainly it is fair to say that, in the public mind, it enjoys equal billing with the adequate, the average and the acceptable, as opposed to their opposites. And that is a direct result of its influence. Through mediocrity’s eyes, the glass is always half-full.
http://inside-politics.org/2012/05/21/an-essay-on-mediocrity/
What do you expect from someone burdened with a name like “Wedley”?
PN has contributed to the problem. They took on a decimated country and championed economical well-being which many interpreted as “making many at all costs/by all means”.
“making money at all costs/by all means”.
Pavlovian conditioning of a generation brought up on superficiality; MTV role models, Die hard and Rambo movies.
The victory of body over brains.
How was the Nationalist Party’s angle of ‘family and traditional values’ going to win over this bunch of narcissistic, egotistic muppets.
Let me draw a concept map. Tabatha White and Jozef will understand.
Mintoff>Cultural Revolution >Xarabank>Labour
What these artists of the Second Republic are unable to accept is that public comments on their art are also art.
The expectation that their art must be met only with applause or silence by all and sundry is self-deluded narcissism.
In time, I think it will take the name of “Selfie Art” or “FB Art” and will probably be supported through grants from the future Ministry for Education, Culture and Lingerie.
How would they know? How should they know, when at the other end of the spectrum you have this:
http://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/kzt186685_n.jpg
Tackiness at both ends.
Is Kitten from Malta lost for words or daren’t he speak! He’s been shooting his mouth off for years, an expert on everything, God bless him, and now a deadly silence!
It’s not just him. No one in Malta, not in my lifetime, has ever or will ever rock the boat. No one. Except Daphne, which is why everybody hates her. Do you think the hamallagni will go away just by voting out this lot?
I think the hamalli and their aesthetic values are ghastly, and I have earned to the right to say so, because I come from the same background.
Meanwhile, scores of Maltese “intellectuals” have skirted the problem for forty years. The Nationalists take pride in having had Peter Serracino Inglott on their side. Yes, I will mention the dead. This is a famous man we’re talking about, not some ordinary person.
What did he ever do to fight the idiocracy? Nothing. You don’t create civilisation from the comfort of the lecture hall or the literary salon. You go out before the crowd and condemn the idiots and their idiocy.
What did Oliver Friggieri ever do? And Kenneth Wain? And Joe Friggieri? And Mark Anthony Falzon? They wrote for the cognoscenti and preached to the choir.
Therein lies the problem.
Videocracy, the film to watch. It depicts Italy’s descent into the same form of barbarism, where popular consent is the ticket to stardom or more probably a generalised 15 minutes of fame.
The only difference being that Labour had access to the radical chic, compounded the gay lobby and by default, encompassed the ‘arts’ scene.
Ever noticed that their facebook profiles are chock loaded with Mediaset productions?
I agree with Daphne that the PN was outdone by this phenomenon, and that’s something it has to identify as being the main source of the haemhorrage in consent.
What happened in Italy, may well be happening in Malta at a faster rate, what is termed ‘sdoganare il costume’, in English that would be having behavioural models approved at border customs.
Like any cultural revolution, restoration starts with the silent majority. Call it the Renaissance.
Baxxter, watch Lele Mora’s clip closely, what’s on his phone.
The epilogue;
Berlusconi was found guilty of tax evasion, Mora was found guilty of white slavery, Fabrizio Corona, guilty for blackmail.
To this day, Italy struggles to find herself. To understand Malta, a bleak comparison with precedents set there always tends to provide some explanation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjxq2gIctWo
You are right, Pablo. If these “artists” demand that their art must always be met only with applause, they are free to migrate to North Korea. Over there, every ‘artistic’ event is met with applause.
These people are now living in the digital age and should know how the arts or the world function. Tragically, their mind is stuck fast.
No. Not evey artistic endeavour in North Korea is met with applause. There are no artistic endeavours to speak of, only officially sanctioned performances scripted by the government.
Art?
Now stick an ‘f’ in front of it.
There. that’s more like it.
Though the previous administration had many successes, I believe its greatest failure was that of not providing the greater part of the generation that grew up between 1987 and 2013 with an education that gave them the ability to THINK for themselves.
Its greatest failure was not providing socio-intellectual barriers. Because this is what it’s all about.
Every country has its yobs and hamalli. But there are pockets where the intellectually superior (by which I mean the self-aware) can take refuge.
In Malta it’s wall-to-wall hamallagni: on the airwaves, on the internet, in government, and in every form of media production.
The Nationalist Party never rebuilt the structures that were destroyed in Mintoff’s Cultural Revolution. It just flooded the place with money, and called it progress. I wonder if they know any better themselves. Zewg partiti tal-hamalli. How nice.
HPB you have nailed it. The implications of ‘hamallagni’ are deep and, as we can notice, have an adverse effect on aspects such as sexuality, family dynamics, child protection, and social behaviour.
I always say that “Malta has branched out in a very weird way” ; contemporary Malta bears striking similarities to travellers’ communities and is at odds with what is acceptable within a civilized society.
I think they should all have been carted with Randall and Carmelo and castrated.
Of Man and weeds
In general weeds grow faster than other plants because weeds are plants that are adapted to disturbed habitats. (Mainly Southern Harbour area)
In nature disturbed habitats occur wherever something messes things up. (Dom Mintoff)
Since disturbed habitats are generally short-lived, weeds must reach reproductive maturity in a hurry and make lots of seeds so that some of their offspring have chance of dispersing to a newly disturbed place. (Births in Southern and Harbour areas are double those in remaining areas – Demographic Review 2010)
Unfortunately gardening and agriculture are disturbances (that’s why Eddie Fenech Adami’s ‘rikonċiljazzjoni’ failed in 1987 – it just produced more weeds)
Human activities have provided weeds with opportunities for success on a massive scale. (Xarabank, Bundi Show, One Productions etc.)
It is said that vinegar is a natural weed killer.
If they don’t drink to that – I will
Demographics is the big Maltese taboo, even bigger than Dom Mintoff’s sacrality or decolonisation.
I don’t expect the Nationalist Party to ever win another election, because they spectacularly fail to take demographics into account. I doubt whether they have anyone who can understand a graph since Cachia Caruana left.
What you say is true. That’s fact. The C2DE demographic is the fastest-growing, at twice the rate of the ABC1. Now let’s make an intelligent deduction, based on another fact, also taboo: The C2DE demographic is Labour’s core vote. Deduction: Labour’s core vote is growing at twice the rate.
And the NP fools hand out stipends and build MCAST campuses, so their political adversaries can have it easy and squeeze out more of their own.
@ bob-a-job
I’ve often compared the two, especially going through current events and having had to deal with people types who are remarkably similar.
The weeds that are easiest to pull out are the ones that create a linked rooting across a stretch. The sandier or looser the surface, the easier it is for the whole string of linked weeds to be pulled out. The superficial sort. No deep roots. They also look different: The red stalk variety have a carroty smell.
Then there are the ones where the root goes deep and gets thicker beneath and longer above. These are best uprooted when the ground has soaked over a number of days. When the earth is dry these break on the uprooting and the weed just gets stronger and thicker again.
There are weed family types.
But the worst are the seeds, as you say, they blow everywhere with no containing them.
Severely cold climates arrest growth. Hot climates have them flourish fast.
Gas flame burning is a bother: the flame isn’t strong enough or the weed still too “wet.”
Acid on plants stifles the growth but persistent roots take off again in three years.
Treatment by glyphosate may burn some plants in the vicinity for a short while, but has the better controllable result and keeps the area weed free for months.
Reflecting the heat off the ground instead of attracting it into a dark surface helps.
Bio measures, as much as one may prefer to use these, are not as effective as a radical glyphosate.
One may get rid of the weed by changing the surface.
A thorough raking helps reduce the root network that isn’t visible from the surface.
Some weeds have their moments and 3 monthly appearances after which they stop spreading and just grow.
Other weeds just keep on coming, growing under and through walls.
Some are clingy.
Some grow inside a bushy tree or up a trunk, twirling around the branches and end up stifling growth.
So much more to say.
Interesting that you mention it.
Actually do you know what it is?
For years we’ve had to make allowances for hamallu behaviour and “those more unfortunate than us” – which amounted to the same thing and not to what it should have.
It started, from what I was able to observe personally, in 1983. School Honours would be conferred not on the person actually voted in but, with quiet and direct intervention of the School Head, on one of “those more unfortunate than “x” so as to set an example.”
Accepting their attitude, behaviour and speech at school, “because they didn’t know better.”
Accepting the loud hamalli on the beach, because in a democracy the beach is free for all and one would have to wait until 11pm before a disturbance of the peace report was possible, by which time…it was sometimes easier just to vacate the place.
Then life progressed: expect the hamallu crowd to invade and possess any cool hangout not just the beach.
Money brays and provides title?
We have long since been pushed indoors or to the territorial extremities.
People in their 20s and early 30s wouldn’t notice this because the school class was already a changed scenario. They too found it less necessary to open a book. Clubbing and partying a right. Education, if insufficiently obtained at home, was obtained on the streets where the dumb blond was supplanted by the sculpted hamalla/ hamallu..
The hamallu invasion happened as they grew up. Even their syllables are now different without their families noticing precisely when this happened.
The blind (and deaf), the accepting and the silent:
Those that accept for business to proceed.
People influencing each other with the over-riding message that religion was no longer linked to State and that therefore values could fall by the roadside.
I’ve had it with tolerance and allowances on this score:
I refuse to mingle with this fake newly-acquired-but-stunted social graces crowd for any reason: far less clutter in the aftermath.
As you say Daphne, it’s not a rich/ poor; North/South, left/right thing.
It’s an attitude that entered as a handicap, and on that ticket, and appears to have sadly become the lifestyle choice of the majority.
Spot on Daphne. Young adults nowadays are more concerned about their looks and image.
They do not give two hoots for their country or, more so, for the Nationalist Party, the only Party which had the best interests of young people at heart. Education, jobs, IT, scholarships abroad through our membership of the EU, you name it they had it.
Whoever is in the age bracket from 30 downwards thinks that the 70s and 80s were horrible fairy tales. At times I also think that the students’ stipend is making the situation worse, turning these students into lazy bummers.
The Nationalist Party has laid everything for them on a silver plate. It’s a pity that the country is going to the dogs but in a way I am glad so that these same young people will wake up and realise that we were not reading them horrible fairy tales.
How about the PN work on the social pact?
Start at the very beginning, Burke’s inquiry. A timeless piece.
Just when you thought you’d seen it all … https://www.facebook.com/nellas.fotography/media_set?set=a.572319476147087.1073741911.100001071200730&type=3
Bhal dejjem HPB laqghat il-musmar fuq rasu rigward id-demografija.
Il-Partit Nazzjonalista lanqas kien kapaci jerga jibni l-unika fortizza li kellu madwar il-port.
L-stess post li kien ipprova jeqred Mintoff malli telgha fil-gvern billi waqqgha blokk shih ghalxejn bhala tapttija ghal meta kienu tefawlu t-tqiq.
Malli rega` nbidel il-gvern dak li ma rnexillux jaghmel Mintoff ghamluh in-Nazzjonalisti ghax komplew il-missjoni tieghu billi qerdu r-ruh tal-Arciperku. Ghax il-bicca kbira tal-postijiet li nholqu jew gew battala nghataw nies mill-Kottonera b`tendenzi Laburisti.