The Power of Victimisation and Color in American politics. In an episode of “Black in Latin America”, a series on race aired on PBS on the 3rd of May 2011, Harvard Professor of Black Studies, Public Intellectual and television personality Louis Gates Jr. went on an intrepid exploration of race somewhere deep in the guts… Read more: Identity: An American Ideological Franchise

If the academic production of ChatGPT is indistinguishable from academic work by students and scholars, it is because academia has become a ChatBot factory.  Academic administrators can look forward to the days when ChatGPT writes papers for student and then grades them for their instructor. Without any academic readers or writers involved, the quality of… Read more: ChatGPT and the End of Intelligence in Academia 

(Micro Mega) Fra le tante esternazioni di Alessandro Orsini delle ultime settimane – qualcuna anche corretta – ce n’è una che ho trovato abominevole: quella pronunciata a inizio aprile, quando il professore ha affermato che “un bambino può essere felice anche in una dittatura”. Una frase che risuona da settimane nella mia testa, mentre i… Read more: Sui bambini e le dittature

With Darian Meacham (Open Democracy) Technology that can recognise the faces of enemy fighters is the latest thing to be deployed to the war theatre of Ukraine. This military use of artificial intelligence has all the markings of a further dystopian turn to what is already a brutal conflict. Read on Open Democracy

(Deutsche Welle) It is easy to lose sight of the manner in which the invasion of Ukraine has shifted from the supposed intention to neutralize military targets to the wholesale slaughter of civilians, the targeting of civil infrastructure and the desertification of the country. Read on Deutsche Welle.

The American Woke Machine and the Kremlin War (Jewish Journal with Monika Osbourne) It should come as no surprise that once progressive American social justice paradigms, brewed in the guts of academia and activism, weighed in on the conflict in Ukraine they quickly became instruments of the Kremlin’s agenda. For the American woke, Ukraine can… Read more: Ideological Bedfellows and Useful Idiots

(Deutsche Welle) The crisis in Ukraine is threatening to become a new war at the gates of Europe. But the threat has yielded political dividends for the US as NATO’s supremacy is reasserted and Nord Stream 2 is on the verge of collapse. Read on Deutsche Welle.

(Deutsche Welle) Twenty years have passed since the Boston Globe report on the sexual abuse of children by members of the Boston Archdiocese of the Catholic Church. The time since has only lengthened the catalogue of horrors, with untold numbers of cases of children abused at the hands of the church across the globe. Read… Read more: The Catholic Church cannot police itself

Un manifesto in dieci punti. (Micro Mega) Le piattaforme di social media e gli strumenti di informazione digitale sono per l’Europa la cosa più vicina a una vera sfera pubblica, transnazionale e multilingue: la proverbiale agorà europea. Gli ormai quasi due anni di crisi sanitaria globale hanno notevolmente accelerato la migrazione delle nostre vite verso… Read more: Per una cittadinanza europea digitale.

(Open Democracy) Social media platforms and digital information tools are the closest thing that Europe has to a true, transnational, multilingual European public sphere: the proverbial European agora. The now almost two years of life in a global health crisis has greatly accelerated the migration of our lives to virtual environments, moving workers from European… Read more: A ten-point manifesto for a Digital European Citizenship

(Micro Mega) La violenza assassina a cui abbiamo assistito a Utoya il 22 luglio 2011 e poi in decine di episodi simili – un “jihadismo ariano” che ha tutti i segni della brutalità scatenata da ragioni religiose – ha fatto ampio uso della Rete per diffondere il proprio Vangelo del terrore. Una minaccia eversiva alimentata… Read more: Breivik e i suoi apostoli

One of the first spheres of political influence into which Bannon ventured in Europe was the Vatican. Before he took the role for which he would become famous at the helm of the Trump presidential campaign in 2016, Bannon had spent a decade at the helm of Breitbart News building a propaganda machine that had… Read more: Steve Bannon’s Church and the Construction of a European Christian Right

(Politico.eu) In Europe, the natural allies of Trump’s brand of conservatism — defined by its xenophobia and calls for a “return” to national greatness — are to be found on the far right. It’s understandable, then, that politicians across the political spectrum interpreted Grenell’s comments as a declaration of allegiance to right-wing populist, nationalist and anti-EU… Read more: US envoy to Germany is a threat, not a joke

(Politico.eu) For many Germans, the country’s post-war reconstruction was as much moral as it was economic and political. The effort to atone for the crimes of World War II — and to stamp out anti-Semitism — has defined the country’s politics for the last 50 years. Read on Politico.eu

(Politico.eu) One of the problems of Anglophone attempts to read France’s sécularisme through its English false cognate is the conflation of two very different projects. Where American secularism has mainly been interested in protecting religions from the state, the French version is meant to protect the state from religion. In his article “France’s secular ayatollahs”… Read more: The Value of French Secularism