Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

It is a good summary. “ With the husk of revolutionary language retained, capitalism has encircled the very idea of leftist transformation. Pepsi may have  figured out how to create a resurrectionist Pepsi Generation in the 1960s , but now brands conjure group identities from inchoate public feelings by tailoring messages towards those who want to feel radical; Buzzfeed structured its entire business model around this approach for more than a decade. Change without change.” You may only to create an account to read the article.

I liked the movie. In the original title ‘back’, not ‘skin’ is used.

 Has the time come for a new wave of decommodification?

ore corporate management models, they increasingly use and exploit cheap faculty labor ... Students increasingly fare no better in sharing the status of a sub ‐ altern class beholden to neoliberal policies and values’ (Giroux, 2014, p. 20). The implications of this go far beyond the university itself, resulting in what Giroux, one of the leading writers on this topic, has called ‘the near‐death of the university as a democratic public sphere’ (p. 16). In these assessments, neoliberalism, in its impact on Higher Education, is associated with a range of other terms or ‘discourses’: The ascendancy of neoliberalism and the associated discourses of ‘new public management’, during the 1980s and 1990s, has produced a fundamental shift in the way universities and other institu ‐ tions of higher education have defined and justified their institutional existence. The traditional professional culture of open intellectual enquiry and debate has been replaced with an

If people themselves have been commodified, what is surprising in commodifying citizenship? "Jalal is an Iraqi telecoms executive with fluent English and a Harvard degree. His wife is a surgeon. Well-off by any standards, they have always loved to travel, and have a particular fondness for Lake Como in Italy. But their Iraqi citizenship has often caused them visa problems. So, a few years ago, Jalal (not his real name) and his wife applied to become nationals of a second country: Antigua. After ten months of form-filling and “due diligence” (background checks and the like), they ploughed several hundred thousand dollars into property and a development fund on the Caribbean island, and in return got passports which entitle them to visa-free travel to 130 countries, including most of Europe. They send the citizenship consultant who helped them become Iraqi-Antiguans a card whenever they are in Como, to show their continued gratitude." — the Economist magazine, 02 July 2018

American culture and the liberalization of hijab (You need free registration to read the piece)

Liberal Totalitarianism

"Universities are businesses. Students are customers. The more customers, the better the business does. And of course, the best way to retain a customer is to keep her happy. I’d suggest that happiness for students might arise from challenge, from hard work fairly rewarded, or from the acquisition of new skills. But there is of course a quicker route: you keep students happy by not failing them. And then – surprise! – when they graduate they are not literate, or numerate, or knowledgeable enough to perform the work they have been studying for." 'The difficulty is the point'

Angela Davis's speech Restoring King "There is no figure in recent American history whose memory is more distorted than Martin Luther King Jr. "