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The Vindication of the “GIO Festival”: “BroadwayWorld” Celebrates Marina and the Umberto Giordano Theatre of Foggia SOURCE: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vindication-gio-festival-broadwayworld-celebrates-sardella-ph-d--8zzce/ SOURCE: https://www.letteremeridiane.org/2026/08/la-rivincita-del-gio-festival-broadwayworld-celebra-marina-e-foggia/ The GIO Festival has been, to put it mildly, overlooked by Rai3 Puglia and several regional outlets. Yet the festival dedicated to Umberto Giordano — promoted by the Chamber of Commerce of Foggia together with the Municipality and the Province, and supported by the Apulia Region and the Fondazione Monti Uniti — has achieved a remarkable vindication, landing on the homepage of BroadwayWorld thanks to the world première of the opera Marina, staged on 5 June at the Umberto Giordano Theatre in Foggia. This is no small feat, considering that BroadwayWorld is among the most influential American platforms devoted to theatre and the performing arts. The transatlantic debut of the opera by Foggia’s great composer did not escape the attention of Luciano Magaldi Sardella, who submitted to the editorial board of Lettere Meridiane an in‑depth and compelling contribution, reproduced below. In the article, the author masterfully reconstructs the extraordinary story of Giordano’s first opera, composed in 1888 and left without a staged production for 138 years, until its historic performance on 5 June at the Giordano Theatre. Above all, he recounts how the inaugural edition of the GIO Festival has restored Foggia to the centre of the international operatic stage, through the rediscovery and valorisation of Marina, the involvement of major musical institutions, and the attention of the American press. It is a stimulating reflection on the cultural and identity‑driven renaissance of a city that, for far too long, bore Giordano’s name on the façade of its theatre without managing to turn it into a lever of international visibility. (g.i.) + + + + + There are moments in the life of a city when past and future clasp hands upon the stage of the present. Foggia experienced one of these moments on the evening of 5 June 2026, when the curtain of the Umberto Giordano Theatre rose upon Marina, an opera composed in 1888 by a young man of twenty‑one — Umberto Giordano — then a student at the San Pietro a Majella Conservatoire in Naples. After one hundred and thirty‑eight years of silence, that score finally found its first scenic breath in the world. “It is not an ordinary event. It is a turning point. A void filled. A story rewritten.” Umberto Giordano, one of the most celebrated verismo composers of the fin‑de‑siècle — born in Foggia, author of masterpieces such as Andrea Chénier, Fedora, Siberia — had remained, until now, the only great Italian opera composer without a festival entirely dedicated to his oeuvre. A paradox that weighed like a historical injustice upon a city that bears his name engraved on the pediment of its most beautiful theatre. This is the extraordinary journey of Marina, Giordano’s first opera, which after 138 years of oblivion received its world première in scenic form on 5 June 2026 at the Umberto Giordano Theatre in Foggia, as the opening event of the GIO Festival — the inaugural edition of the Giordano International Opera Festival. The manuscript, preserved in the Frederick R. Koch Collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, has travelled an astonishing path: from the elite libraries of America’s East Coast to the beating heart of the Daunia. On the night of 5 June 2026, at the Umberto Giordano Theatre, that silence was finally broken. The GIO Festival was conceived in Foggia as an ambitious cultural project promoted by the Chamber of Commerce, the Municipality, and the Province, with the support of the Apulia Region, aiming to transform the artistic legacy of the verismo composer into a driver of territorial development and cultural tourism. Under the artistic direction of conductor Gianna Fratta and violinist Dino De Palma, the event at last fills a historical void. Its model is explicit and ambitious: a project inspired by the great festivals dedicated to Italian composers — such as the Verdi Festival, the Puccini Festival, the Rossini Opera Festival — while maintaining a strong territorial and participatory dimension. In other words, Foggia formally claims its seat at the table of the greats. And it does so with the credentials required: an unrepeatable world scenic première (parallel to the concert première at Milan’s Teatro Dal Verme, recorded by the prestigious opera label Decca Classics), a high‑quality operatic production, and the support of leading cultural institutions (Teatro dell’Opera di Milano, Fondazione Teatro Petruzzelli of Bari). The festival benefitted from the collaboration of the Orchestra of the Conservatoire and the Chorus of the Fondazione Teatro Petruzzelli of Bari, the Umberto Giordano Conservatoire of Foggia, the Fondazione Monti Uniti, and the Fondazione Apulia Felix. A network of excellence that lent the event national resonance and stature. The Umberto Giordano Theatre is a nineteenth‑century jewel of rare beauty — the oldest functioning horseshoe‑shaped historic theatre in Apulia. Yet for decades it lived in a state of semi‑clandestine cultural marginality, relegated to the periphery of the operatic routes that matter, hindered by long interruptions in its use from 2007 to 2014, including recent fire‑safety compliance requirements. Some referred to it, with a mixture of condescension and provincial resignation, as a “provincial theatre”, destined merely to bear Giordano’s name. That label is now destined to fall. It is precisely in Foggia that this youthful gem received its first scenic staging, placing the city on the international map of opera. A positioning without precedent in the city’s recent history. The Giordano Theatre recorded a full house for the historic première of Marina, welcoming hundreds of spectators, while many more followed the performance from outside via a large screen installed for the occasion. The production met expectations with full artistic dignity: the staging transposed the narrative to the First World War, heightening the opera’s dramatic and realist character. On the podium, the Symphony Orchestra of the Umberto Giordano Conservatoire conducted by Matteo Dal Maso. Sets and costumes by Alfredo Troisi; lighting by Massimo Russo. An ensemble of talents worthy of the name the theatre proudly bears. The definitive seal of this moment’s historical significance arrived from across the Atlantic. BroadwayWorld, the world’s most influential outlet for live performance criticism and reporting — with over 5.5 million monthly views — dedicated exclusive coverage to the event, publishing a complete photographic gallery of the world scenic première curated by Chloe Rabinowitz and a substantial critical review by Rachel Stone. The American article emphasised the historical value of the undertaking and the bond between the composer and his native city, highlighting the musical quality of the score, deemed surprisingly mature for the composer’s age. For the first time, the Umberto Giordano Theatre appeared on the New York‑based site alongside institutions such as the Los Angeles Opera House, Houston Opera, and BBC Classical Music at the Royal Opera House. It is its natural place. It should have been there decades ago. Until now, the world knew Giordano through his Milanese triumphs, not through the youthful opera written between Foggia and the Naples Conservatoire — the lost (and later rediscovered) Marina of 1888. Let us be clear: this is no minor detail. BroadwayWorld does not grant exclusive galleries to provincial theatres. It does so for events that shift the coordinates of musical and theatrical history within the circuits that matter. This time, those coordinates shifted to Foggia thanks to the GIO Festival, in the name of Umberto Giordano. For the record — and for those who may not yet know — the GIO Festival is a new and ambitious biennial event conceived by the Chamber of Commerce of Foggia, with the aim of celebrating the genius of Umberto Giordano and transforming it into a powerful engine of development for the entire Capitanata. Biennial means continuity, planning, vision. It means that Foggia does not intend to be a meteor in the operatic firmament, but a stable and recognisable presence within the international festival circuit. Andrea Chénier, Siberia, and Fedora had already carried Giordano’s name to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York for more than a century, where his works are still performed to great acclaim. Now Foggia itself — not merely its scattered operatic legacy — claims its rightful “place in the sun”. The composer whom his city struggled to recognise in life, and whose name it preserves on its theatre, its square, and its conservatoire, may finally become the lever of an unprecedented cultural, economic, and identity‑driven renaissance. The GIO Festival 2026 is not, one hopes, a point of arrival. It should be the first chapter of a new story for Foggia, for the Capitanata, and for the cultural South of Italy. The Umberto Giordano Theatre is no longer merely an architectural jewel to be preserved: it has now become a place of creation and inspiration, capable of attracting international press attention and hosting events that enter the annals of world opera. To those who still whisper that Foggia is a provincial city, the answer is now written upon the world’s stages: on the evening of 5 June 2026, the periphery became the centre.

“Socialism Was Good in Theory” That sentence assumes the theory was never seriously challenged. It was. Long before the Soviet Union existed, before Lenin seized power, and before socialism had been tested on a national scale, major thinkers were already attacking its foundations—from very different directions. Five of them stand out. Tocqueville: Equality Can Become Servitude In 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville drew a sharp distinction between democracy and socialism. Both spoke about equality. But Tocqueville believed they pursued it in fundamentally different ways. Democracy, in his view, sought equality while preserving individual freedom. Socialism risked achieving equality by expanding the power of the state over the individual. His warning was essentially this: equality is not automatically liberty. A society can pursue equality so aggressively that it begins sacrificing the independence that makes political freedom meaningful. Bastiat: Follow Where Redistribution Leads Two years later, Frédéric Bastiat attacked socialism from a different direction. His question was deceptively simple: What happens when the state acquires the authority to take from some people and give to others in the name of justice? Bastiat called this “legal plunder.” His concern was not merely that redistribution might be expensive. It was that once government becomes the instrument through which competing groups obtain benefits from one another, politics can turn into a permanent struggle over who controls the machinery of redistribution. The problem, therefore, wasn’t simply how much the state redistributed. It was the principle that made redistribution legitimate in the first place. (bastiat.org⁠) Nietzsche: Equality Can Become Resentment Nietzsche approached socialism neither as an economist nor as a constitutional theorist. He attacked its psychology. He saw modern egalitarian movements as part of a much older moral impulse: resentment toward exceptional individuals and suspicion of strength, ambition and hierarchy. For Nietzsche, the danger was not simply that everyone might become economically equal. It was that a culture could begin treating excellence itself as something morally suspect. The goal would cease to be lifting people upward. It would become bringing the exceptional downward. Böhm-Bawerk: Challenge the Economics Then came Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. In 1896, he turned his attention specifically toward Marx’s economic system. His criticism was not primarily moral or political. It was technical. Böhm-Bawerk argued that Marx’s theory of value did not adequately explain how the labor values developed in Capital could be reconciled with the actual prices Marx subsequently needed to explain. In other words, he attacked socialism where it claimed to possess a scientific economic foundation. The argument became one of the central criticisms of Marxian economics and helped launch a debate that would continue for generations. Mises: The Calculation Problem Then, in 1920, Ludwig von Mises attacked an even more fundamental question: Even if socialism is morally desirable, how would a socialist economy actually know what to produce? A functioning economy has millions of competing uses for scarce resources. Build a bridge or a hospital? Use steel here or there? Produce more machinery or more consumer goods? Under private ownership and markets, prices for capital goods provide information about relative scarcity and opportunity costs. Mises argued that abolishing private ownership of the means of production also removes the genuine market prices necessary for rational economic calculation. The problem wasn’t simply that socialist planners might make bad decisions. It was that the system deprived them of the very economic signals required to systematically compare those decisions. (Mises Institute⁠) And that was the sequence. Tocqueville challenged the political premise. Bastiat challenged the moral and legal mechanism of redistribution. Nietzsche challenged the psychology behind egalitarianism. Böhm-Bawerk challenged Marx’s economic theory. Mises challenged the possibility of rational central economic calculation. Five different thinkers. Five different objections. And all of them came before the Soviet Union had demonstrated what large-scale socialist government would actually look like. So “socialism was good in theory, but bad in practice” is not an argument. It is a historical claim that requires you to explain why these theoretical objections were wrong. The interesting question isn’t whether socialism had critics. It did. The interesting question is whether socialism ever adequately answered them” - ChatGPT

Why Therapy Culture Is Making Us Weak Why, despite unprecedented mental-health awareness and therapy language, does mental health seem to worsen? If both “the cure” and “the disease” expand together, we should ask what culture produces them. Modern therapy culture often teaches us to prioritize feelings, explain flaws through trauma, and treat negative emotions as reactions to others. Carl Jung proposed a different order: consciousness—judgment, values, and will—should govern the unconscious, including instincts and emotions. Health means understanding these forces without letting them rule. Today that hierarchy is frequently reversed: emotion outranks reason, and “lived experience” can outrank evidence. Jung warned this resembles “psychological Bolshevism,” where lower impulses overthrow higher faculties in the name of freedom. Nietzsche cautioned that “for every drive wants to be master.” The key question isn’t only where feelings come from, but whether we govern them. Therapy culture can also weaken self-criticism, treating conscience, guilt, and shame as oppressive rather than corrective. With “concept creep” (trauma/harm expanding to cover normal discomfort), personal agency can shrink: if everything is done to us, responsibility becomes harder to exercise. This can spread socially: victim identities bond through grievance, replacing judgment with collective resentment. History shows where that leads. The defense is older than therapy: govern yourself before demanding the world be changed.

The Psychology of the Modern Leftist Once you understand the psychology of the modern leftist, the last decade of the woke revolution makes more sense. The endless outrage, hypersensitivity, and rejection of rational debate may reflect something deeper than ideology: a crisis of self-worth expressed as a moral crusade. “Leftist” is a broad term, but here it refers to socialists, collectivists, LGBTQ activists, and similar movements. What unites them may be more than politics; it may also be a psychological orientation. Modern leftism can be associated with feelings of inferiority, low self-esteem, powerlessness, guilt, self-hatred, and resentment. These feelings may be repressed while still influencing behavior. The hypersensitivity to language illustrates this. Words once used without negative intent can become symbols of oppression through activist campaigns. Ironically, those most offended are sometimes privileged academics rather than the minorities they claim to defend. Many leftists identify with groups perceived as weak or disadvantaged. This may reflect genuine compassion, but it can also involve projecting personal feelings of weakness onto others. Strength, success, competition, and rationality can consequently become objects of suspicion. Western civilization, America, and other symbols of power may be treated similarly. The criticism can also be inconsistent. Flaws condemned in Western societies may be excused when found in socialist regimes or traditional cultures. This suggests that resentment may sometimes play a role alongside genuine moral concerns. Self-reliance, personal responsibility, and merit are often viewed skeptically, while collectivism is favored. Objective truth can also become threatening because it creates distinctions: some arguments are better than others, and some people succeed while others fail. When equality of outcome becomes the moral standard, truth, merit, and individualism may be attacked—not necessarily to uplift the oppressed, but to reduce psychological discomfort. When victimhood becomes central to identity, problems may no longer simply be discovered; they can become necessary to sustain that identity.

Why Good Times Make Weak People The pinnacle of tyranny is a society in which people are controlled without force because they love their servitude. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World explored this idea. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, its citizens are controlled not through terror but pleasure. Soma provides instant relief from discomfort—a “holiday from the facts.” Huxley’s people are not prisoners but satisfied customers: the State produces children, promiscuity is normalized, and entertainment fills every empty moment. As Neil Postman observed, Orwell feared that truth would be hidden from us, while Huxley feared that we would become so distracted that we would no longer care about it. The Softening of Man Good times can make bad times possible. When safety and luxury become normal, people can lose sight of the struggles that created them. Andrew Lobaczewski argued that prosperity can weaken profound reflection. Pleasure becomes dominant, while uncomfortable truths are dismissed because thinking about them requires effort. Those who think critically may even be ridiculed. This creates a dangerous cycle: societies lose the capacity for psychological reasoning and moral criticism, allowing catastrophe to develop unnoticed. Sterilizing Genius Nietzsche understood that comfort, elevated above all else, can destroy the qualities that made civilization possible. Struggle, ambition, discipline, passion, and courage helped create prosperity—but prosperity can weaken the virtues that produced it. The Odyssey illustrates this. The Lotus-Eaters simply lose the desire to return home. Odysseus must drag his men back while they weep to remain. He rejects Calypso’s offer of immortality and endless comfort, choosing the difficult path home. We admire that choice because comfort without purpose is not a life worth admiring. Nietzsche imagined the endpoint in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a society where safety and sameness become the highest ideals, producing “no shepherd, and one herd.” Anyone who seeks greatness becomes an aberration.

Why Weak Societies Choose Tyranny The pinnacle of tyranny would be a system that allows politicians, elites, and bureaucrats to control a population without force or coercion because the people love their servitude. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, an eerily relatable dystopian novel, with this idea at the forefront. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, there is no overt oppression. The state does not have to stamp on human faces with its jackboots or erect an inescapable surveillance state. Rather, the people of Brave New World happily chain themselves with meaningless pleasure and distractions. The authorities do not rule through terror and rage, the central elements of 1984, but instead give the people everything they ever wanted. A pharmaceutical called Soma becomes the opiate of the masses. Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, likens it to Christianity without tears. While religion requires years of moral training, Soma allows citizens to achieve peace simply by swallowing tablets. It is the perfect escape from reality, a holiday from the facts. Lenina, the female counterpart to the protagonist Bernard, cannot comprehend why he refuses Soma, preferring discomfort to something that can remove it. When Bernard states, “I’d rather be myself, myself and nasty, not somebody else, however jolly,” Lenina sees this as a sort of pathology and repeatedly encourages him to take the wonder drug. Bernard explains, “I want to know what passion is.” He understands that there is more to life than merely being content, craving genuine experience, including suffering and intensity, rather than being emotionally regulated by the World State. Lenina’s bewilderment stems from her conditioning to regard unhappiness as a technical problem, encapsulated in the society’s common saying that “a gram is better than a damn.” The people of Brave New World are not captives but satisfied customers. Children are produced by the scientific state, relieving people of the responsibility of parenthood. This grants them the ability to engage in promiscuity, where everyone belongs to everyone else, while filling their free time with cheap entertainment and endless sporting events—what would be referred to as slop today. As Neil Postman observed, Orwell saw totalitarianism through the lens of fear, while Huxley saw it through pleasure. There was no need to ban a book in Brave New Worldbecause there was no one who wanted to read one. An abundance of low-quality information rendered censorship unnecessary because no one could hear the truth through all the noise. Huxley threw shade at civil libertarians who passionately opposed tyranny because they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. Humanity in its rawest form is portrayed by John the Savage, an outsider free from the World State’s conditioning. Upon coming face-to-face with this spiritually neutered society, he completely rejects it: “I don’t want comfort, I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.” Huxley’s dystopia is not imposed on an unwilling population but instead requested by a hollow one. Which leads us to the question: How do people become so weak that they get on their knees and beg for totalitarianism? Good times make bad times possible. Once a certain level of luxury and safety is achieved, people start to resemble the hobbits from the Shire. They are so far removed from evil that they forget it even exists and become defenseless in the face of it. Andrew Lobaczewski, who studied the psychology of totalitarianism from inside Poland’s communist takeover, wrote: “During good times, people progressively lose sight of the need for profound reflection. They lose the capacity to differentiate human nature, and emotion begins to dominate intellect. Once a critical mass starts operating on the pleasure principle, any excess mental effort seems like pointless labor.” Lobaczewski warned that it is not as simple as some people losing the ability to think rationally. It is worse, because those people then shame anyone capable of doing so. A clever, liberal, and merry individual is a good sport. A more far-sighted person predicting dire results becomes a wet blanket, a killjoy. The ability to have uncomfortable conversations without emotion taking over is, in Lobaczewski’s view, an indicator of whether a society’s future will be good or bad. It is easier to think about pleasant things. This leads people to eliminate any data or facts that cause them discomfort. That becomes a habit and eventually a custom accepted by society at large. Once the general populace accepts that inconvenient truths should be left unsaid, it becomes incapable of reaching correct conclusions. After all, how could you ever describe a picture that you refuse to look at? “Catastrophe waits in the wings of the communities that lose the capacity for psychological reason and moral criticism,” Lobaczewski wrote. “It is on the other side of this weakening of thought that the processes of the generation of evil are intensified at every social scale until they give rise to bad times.” It is precisely man’s dreams of happiness that can lead to chaos and suffering. This hedonistic view of happiness contains the seeds of misery, feeding the eternal cycle whereby good times give birth to bad times. Friedrich Nietzsche viewed socialism as demanding comfort for the greatest number of people possible. To question whether it is good for the masses to live in comfort has become a form of heresy. This reveals the spiritual atrophy that so many suffer from. Considering only the weak believe comfort to be a virtue, it is what Carl Jung would describe as the infantile dream state of mass dependency: the desire to gently slip back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care. Except this lack of friction has consequences. The perfect state destroys the soil in which great intellect grows. Genius, struggle, passion, strength, and wisdom are required to build a safe and abundant society. Yet once a certain level of comfort is achieved, it can destroy the very virtues required to obtain it. Nietzsche observed that it is the warmest heart that aims to alleviate suffering and hardship but fails to realize that it thereby wills the destruction of its own foundation. Comfort breeds mediocrity, which is then called good. Small people want one thing above all: that no one hurt them. We have taken this pathology to such a degree that we now obsess over hurt feelings and call this virtue. Pleasure, in its proper place, is a byproduct of meaningful goals, not a goal in itself. Aristotle saw that pleasure and comfort distort perception and proper judgment. While they do not cause us to misjudge something like geometry or mathematics, they can destroy our ability to decide what is worth pursuing and, therefore, what to do. Consider The Odyssey. Homer depicts Odysseus’ men on the island of the Lotus-Eaters, where they taste the fruit and lose all desire to go home. Much like Huxley’s Brave New World, they are not imprisoned. Rather, they simply stop wanting anything more. Odysseus has to drag his men back to the ships while they weep to stay. This is what comfort can do to men. It empties them of purpose. We intuitively understand this but fail to apply it to our own lives. We must make the same choice as Odysseus when he refuses Calypso’s offer of endless comfort and immortality. He knows she is more beautiful than his wife Penelope waiting at home. He knows that he and Penelope will grow old and die, a fate he could avoid by staying with Calypso. No one who reads these stories wishes he had stayed. We want him to choose the hard way home because if he took the offer, he would stop being admirable. Yet staying is exactly what our modern society asks of us. We are told that the island is the good life. But what happens to the man who caves to this temptation? In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche imagines a risk-averse society taken to its logical endpoint. The elimination of all struggle produces a man so diminished that he fails to possess even self-contempt or higher aspiration. Safety and sameness become the highest goals, creating “no shepherd in one herd.” Anyone who seeks to be anything more than normal becomes an aberration to be dealt with. Or, as Nietzsche puts it, they have “made the wolf a dog in man himself, man’s best domestic animal.”

A Manifesto Written Like Scripture** Marxism is not merely an economic theory; it resembles a religion for those filled with resentment. The Communist Manifesto opens with spiritual language, declaring that “a spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism,” indicating a spiritual war rather than an economic agenda. While supporters claim it seeks to redistribute wealth for equity, the text itself lacks words like “neighbor” or “love” in a positive context. Instead, it frequently uses terms like “violence,” “overthrow,” and “abolish,” emphasizing destruction rather than construction. Marx's concrete proposals focus on seizure and confiscation, with little mention of a classless utopia. He advocated for the “ruthless criticism of all that exists,” suggesting a totalizing worldview that dismisses the possibility of reform. Marxists often argue that true communism has never been realized, yet historical figures like Stalin and Mao embodied the totalitarian ambitions outlined in the Manifesto. Bertrand Russell noted that Bolsheviks resembled religious fanatics, quoting Marx like scripture. He drew parallels between Marxism and religion, with Marx as a Messiah and the Communist Party as a Church. The Manifesto states that its goals can only be achieved through the “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions,” indicating a desire to destroy the current world. Interestingly, many Marxist leaders, including Marx himself, came from privileged backgrounds, contradicting the narrative that Marxism serves the oppressed. This pattern continues today, with Marxism appealing primarily to educated individuals from affluent families who face financial stress for the first time. Marxism shifts the concept of sin from individuals to the bourgeoisie, absolving its followers from personal accountability. This doctrine promotes pride, envy, and resentment, elevating hatred of the wealthy as a virtue. It lacks a pathway to forgiveness, viewing class origin as a crime inherited from ancestors. Ultimately, Marxism is not an economic theory but a destructive religion that justifies violence against entire classes in the pursuit of a misguided salvation.

Marxism: A Religion of Destruction and Resentment Marxism is not an economic theory. It is a religion for destructive and resentful losers. The *Communist Manifesto* opens with spiritual language. Marx and Engels declare that “a specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism”—and that “all the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance” to exercise this specter. Academics and useful idiots claim that the doctrine aims to redistribute wealth in order to create a more equitable world, erasing the distinction between the haves and the have-nots. It is all about love and compassion, guys. Yet, in the roughly 12,000 words of the authorized *Communist Manifesto*, Marx does not use these words of positive affirmation. “Neighbor” is not mentioned, “redistribute” does not appear, and “love” is used twice—but not in reference to loving anybody else. Now consider the opposite. “Violent” or “violence” is used seven times; “overthrow,” nine times; “radical,” fifteen times; “force,” “forced,” or “forcible,” forty-seven times; and “abolish” or “abolition,” sixty-one times. The doctrine is presented as something achieved through violence, revolution, and theft. The one place Marx gets concrete is in his list of ten measures, and every one of them involves a seizure, a confiscation, or an abolition. Of the classless heaven that is supposedly meant to follow, he says almost nothing. Rather, writing to Arnold Ruge in September 1843, Marx claims that his program is “the ruthless criticism of all that exists”—that everything is worthy of criticism—and builds his work from there. Perhaps he was echoing a line from Goethe’s *Faust* that had caught his attention: “All that exists deserves to perish,” a line spoken by a devil. This is another pattern in Marx’s thought. He is not a reformer aiming to make a tweak here or there. His language is totalizing: all, every, everything. Marxists constantly claim that real communism has never been tried. They argue that totalitarian psychopaths such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were merely defects or deviations. Yet their attempts to control everything, down to thought itself, echo the dogma of the *Communist Manifesto*.

Strong words in @insidehighered about @UGent's letter suspending @nathancofnas: "Ghent argues that Cofnas’s criticism of Arday as “mentally disabled” and a "worthless scholar" was “an intentional and serious disturbance of the peace” that may violate “the Belgian Criminal #HigherEd #FreeSpeech #AcademicFreedom #BE

"Ghent (@Ugent) argues that Cofnas’s criticism of Arday as “mentally disabled” and a "worthless scholar" was “an intentional and serious disturbance of the peace” that may violate “the Belgian Criminal Code.” It is ludicrous (and dangerous) to suggest that accurately accusing a #Ghent #Cofnas #AcademicIntegrity #BE

THE GERMAN MEDIA ARE TRYING TO TOPPLE MERZ. Day after day, the same pattern: Scandal. Crisis. Division. Weakness. “Merz under pressure.” “Government in chaos.” “Germany isolated.” This is no longer normal criticism. It has become a permanent campaign of political destabilisation. https://t.co/m6zfSxqzxn #Merz #Germany #MediaBias #DE

🚨🇷🇴ROMANIAN SENATOR: “THIS WAS A COUP D’ÉTAT” Romanian Senator Andrei Dîrlău is making an extraordinary accusation about the annulment of Romania's 2024 presidential election. He alleges that multiple institutions — including the presidency under Klaus Iohannis, Romania's Supreme Council of National Defence (CSAT) and the Constitutional Court — were involved in what he describes unequivocally as a: “COUP D’ÉTAT.” His argument is explosive. Dîrlău says the election was cancelled because those in power “didn't like the result” and argues that the process that followed leaves Romania's current political leadership without democratic legitimacy. And Romania's election annulment didn't go unnoticed internationally. JD Vance subsequently used Romania as a central example in his criticism of the state of European democracy. Whatever your view of the original decision, cancelling a presidential election is one of the most consequential actions a democracy can take. It therefore demands an extraordinary level of evidence and transparency. What evidence justified overturning the vote? Who made the decisions? What role did each institution play? And ultimately: Were Romania's democratic institutions protecting an election — or overriding the will of its voters? A serving Romanian senator is now calling what happened a coup d'état. That allegation cannot simply be waved away. Romania deserves answers. @andrei_dirlau #Romania #Coup #Democracy

Hello everyone, the code for Aracne2 has been on GitHub for a few months now — a modular CMS for editing and publishing TEI corpora. A companion volume, published by FedOA Press, covers its origins, architecture and features in detail. Code (MIT): https://github.com/orazionelson/aracne2 Site and documentation: https://orazionelson.github.io/aracne2/ Volume: https://doi.org/10.6093/978-88-6887-439-1 The underlying idea is to take a corpus from raw transcription to a citable digital edition without forcing the person editing the text to become a sysadmin as well. In brief: – schema-aware XML editor, with validation per document and across a whole collection; – staged editorial workflow with versioning and a clean split between working copy and published copy; – named entities linked to authority files (Wikidata, VIAF, GeoNames, ORCID, GND and others); – bibliography with BibTeX/CSL-JSON/Zotero import and DOI resolution; – facsimiles and zones for text-image alignment; – XSLT-driven public site generator, with configurable indices and search portals; – LOD and OAI-PMH for harvesting, deposit to Zenodo, Dataverse, Internet Archive and git forges; – audit log and fixity, plus policy pages aimed at projects preparing for a CoreTrustSeal review. Architecturally, there are two distinct data layers: PostgreSQL for platform state (users, roles, plugins, audit), eXist-db for TEI documents, stored natively and queried in XQuery. Python/FastAPI backend, Vue 3 frontend, fully containerised. Every integration is a plugin that mounts without a restart, so a deployment can stay minimal or grow along with the project. The AI side is there but optional and can be switched off: in-editor assistance (explaining validation errors, normalising bibliography, tagging named entities), local RAG over the TEI P5 Guidelines, and a read-only MCP server that lets an external assistant query the corpus. Anyone who cannot or would rather not send their texts to a cloud service can run the whole thing locally with Ollama. Aracne2 is the third iteration of a line of tools that began in 2008 with MaRa, the scripts written to mark up the Angevin Registers, continued with Aracne (2016-2026, built entirely on eXist-db), and arrives at this rewrite. The FedOA Press volume reconstructs that trajectory at length. It is all free: you can download it and try it locally with a handful of commands. Aracne2 is open to experiment and ready to be put to the test on new projects — reports, criticism and proposals are all welcome.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's Minister of National Security, has publicly called for the nightly killing of 30 to 40 Palestinians in Gaza, describing many of them as not even human, a statement that has sparked significant controversy and criticism domestically and internationally. #ItamarBenGvir #Gaza #Völkermord

AI generated reviewing and criticism is a fantastic new factor. Not always right, not always unbiased, but fast and cheap, and often with a broader knowledge base than many human reviewers. Never leave home without it in 2026. #AI #TechTrends #FutureOfReviewing #Therearenospecificcountriesmentionedinthetweet.Therefore #theresponseis: (Nocountrycodes)

Interesting that a Cambridge student formulerad the problem that resulted in the Jason Arday scandal better than most others. Academia did not investigate accusations of plagiarism (supported by clear evidence) because the criticism came from “the wrong people”. Shameful #Academia #Plagiarism #JasonArday #Basedonthetweet #therearenospecificcountriesmentioned.Therefore #theresponsewouldbeanemptystring. However #ifyouwanttheformatasperyourrequest: (nocountrycodes)