Joho the Blog
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September 16, 2007
The Beppe Grillo blog (in Italy's top five) quotes the International Herald Tribune [pdf]:
The petition wasn't no stinkin' online jobby where signing requires scrolling two inches in order to click on a box. People lined up in 200 towns to sign an honest-to-pete, atom-based piece of inconvenience. And there are physical meet-ups. Sounds like an effective blending of the digital and the analog, with all the pleasures and difficulties of the latter. [Tags: beppe_grillo politics italy petitions ] Posted
by D. Weinberger at September 16, 2007 10:25 AM
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Comments
It's not exactly a petition. The signatures are formally supporting a "Law by Popular Initiative (Legge d'Iniziativa Popolare)". This is a law that, according to Italian laws, has to be discussed by the Parliament when non-elected citizens are able to raise at least 50,000 signatures.
The 50,000 signatures goal has been nicely exceeded.
The funny (and sad) thing is that almost ALL of the important columnists of national newspaper are portraying this event as fruit of 'reaction', 'anti-politics', 'conservatorism', 'anteroom of fascism'. Funny (and REALLY) sad is also that many of the so-called major Italian bloggers are diminishing the thing because Beppe Grillo never engaged in on-line discussions with them, 'doesn't represent the internet dynamics' (?) although he is widely using a service based on citizen participation like meetup.
sounds italian.
Posted by: enrico milic | September 16, 2007 06:09 PM
Hi well Beppe is actually 10th in the World and 1st in Europe according to Technorati ;)
Posted by: Gianni Sala | September 16, 2007 06:42 PM
I wrote about the V-Day (in English) at http://www.gnuband.org/2007/08/29/remember_remember_the_8th_of_september_vaffanculo_day/
It is extremely interesting the quantity of Italian which Grillo was able to mobilize. Most of Italians are disgusted by Italian politicians.
What was also interesting is that no radio, no television, no newspapers spoke about the event before the event. So all the people knew about it via blogs or word of mouth. Now televisions, newspapers, radios are keeping speaking about this, mainly for re-casting/re-framing it as a vanishing, populist fad.
The proposals for which more than 300.000 signatures were collected in few hours all over Italy were to promote 3 bottom-up proposals of laws:
1) A citizen that has been judged guilty cannot run for the Parliament.
2) No citizen can be re-elected for more than 2 times. The rules is valid, retroactively.
3) Members of parliament are chosen directly by the citizens and not by the political parties.
See more at http://www.gnuband.org/2007/08/29/remember_remember_the_8th_of_september_vaffanculo_day/
Posted by: paolo | September 28, 2007 11:11 AM