Italian newspapers have given extensive coverage to the visit by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who traveled to several Arab countries to discuss ways of ensuring the flow of oil to Italy. Yet only a handful of Italian outlets have paid attention to the reactions published in the (limited) English-language Arab press. And the most common question has been: “Why is a Western country coming to ask for help against actions carried out by the West itself?”
Given the current, frankly absurd policies, political commentators—even the most sophisticated ones, and in fact especially them—keep telling us that MAGA voters are, at best, rednecks, and at worst “white trash.” That may well be true. But if we want to take the argument seriously, we also need to ask where these people actually come from.
Only one day has passed, and already the “unpredictable” has done exactly what was expected, promising to “bring Iran back to the Stone Age,” that is, to destroy its civilian infrastructure. The problem, at this point, is very simple. What does a people that lives with electricity, drinking water, and civilized services do when it is suddenly thrown back into the Stone Age, when there is no more food, and not even drinkable water? Simple: it flees hunger, and it emigrates. And so Trump is working to create another, immense wave of migration toward Europe, like the Syrian one, but larger.
Many people think that Trump is “unpredictable” or “moody”, whereas I believe that, if one wishes to understand how to “read” him, Trump is not only highly predictable and consistent, but is in fact pursuing a policy, dictated by American “big money”, that has been consistent and essentially unchanged at least since the Obama era.
As you may know, I am a great admirer of open source software. And this dates back to the early ’90s, when the limits of shareware were reached, and it was clear that that model could not hold. But in recent years, doing OSS has become increasingly difficult, for a very simple reason. Generally speaking, OSS — the real kind — is created by individuals who work on it in their spare time. Now, the interesting question is: WHICH spare time? And HOW MUCH spare time?
When people say Italy never misses out on anything, they rarely grasp just how far that can stretch. Here's the proof: Italy faces its own Epstein-style scandal. But it's worse, because the silence from the press is total—and some suspect that key figures at the top of print media are entangled in a pedophile network.
As time goes by, a fundamentally harmless invention is taking hold, and its danger does not so much lie in what it actually does—after all, it is nothing more than a statistical language model—but rather in what people believe it does, or might one day do. In other words, there exists a kind of hype surrounding its supposed dangerousness. But that is not what I intend to discuss.
These days, the internet feels like an archipelago of holy wars, so much so that the very first thing you do, when you interact with someone, is try to figure out which particular crusade they are enlisted in, just so you can avoid the “triggering” moment – that precise instant when the fellow loses his grip and the holy war slips out. At which point you get the inevitable: “I just couldn’t help myself, sorry.”