Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"The Orlando shootings did not happen in a vacuum: we are being killed every day. We are being killed by a lack of social housing and increasingly punitive welfare reforms . We are being killed by inhumane austerity cuts to life-saving mental health services. Systematic homophobia, transphobia and racism come from the top. They come from policies ingrained with intolerance, and from right-wing and neoliberal ideologies. Only a grassroots, militant movement from the bottom up has any chance to disrupt it: the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house." 'All Cops are Bastards.  Even the Gay Ones'

"It may seem absurd to conflate the fear and hatred of Muslims with the fear and hatred of Jews when the two groups are united in the popular imagination only by their fear and hatred of each other. But they both appeal to the same dark archetype in the European imagination: swarming, sinister, lecherous, and dirty . Both are supposed to have subverted the elites to strike at the common people. Both are supposed to constitute an existential threat to civilisation."

Brexit, China, the Fed and the global recession

F: Hu Feng's Prison Years

Sovereignty, Brexit and Power: Lessons from 1975

While the French police says that most of the violence in France was caused by Russian football fans... " If the psychic energies of the average mass of people watching a football game or a musical comedy could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be invincible. — Wilhelm Reich .

Orlando mass shooting: US President  Barack Obama  described the attack as "an act of terror and an act of hate". Nothing new here. Obama and co will continue to wrongly describe such acts and talk superficially. " According to Omar Mateen’s father, the reportedly Islamic State-supporting terrorist had expressed revulsion  at the sight of two men kissing. His co-workers have described  his anti-gay comments . Omar Mateen could have chosen many clubs, full of people laughing and living, but he chose a LGBT venue. This was homophobia as well as terrorism. It is not enough to simply condemn violence: we have to understand what it is and why it happened . " It wasn’t only Sky News at fault. In the New York Times’ original reporting, it didn’t even point out that a gay club had been targeted. The Daily Mail didn’t bother to put the atrocity – the worst terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 – on its front page, instead  opting to stir up xenophobia  over Turkish

Saadat Hasan Manto

Sander's Defeat is no Great Loss to Progressive Politics

" Such visitations of providence as these no government can do much either to prevent or alleviate." It did not end anytime soon. Famines recurred in 1869 and 1874. Between 1876 and 1878, during the Madras famine, anywhere from four to five million people perished after the viceroy, Lord Lytton, adopted a hands-off approach similar to that employed in Ireland and Orissa.  By 1901, Romesh Chunder Dutt, another leading nationalist, enumerated 10 mass famines since the 1860s, setting the total death toll at a whopping 15 million. Indians were now so poor - and the government so indifferent in its response - that, he stated, "every year of drought was a year of famine." The British Rule and the Famines in India. The Orissa Famine as an Example.

“If more Englishmen do not come out & unequivocally condemn this violence, people will think those drunk extremists represent all of us.”

!أنا لا أصلّي أنا أتوضّأ، دون صلاة، وهذي شمالي أعفّ وأطهر ممن يصلّي نهاراً ويسرق في الليل خبز عيالي ... !أنا لا أصوم أنا صائم منذ ستين عام أجوع وآكل لكنني لا أبسمل عن لقمة بالحرام ... أنا لا أزكّي فمن أين لي؟ وحتى لحافي.. قصير على أرجلي؟ — كاظم حجّاج

" With football, by contrast, there can be outbreaks of angry populism, as supporters revolt against the corporate fat cats who muscle in on their clubs; but for the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham." Football: a dear friend to capitalism

"Britain is a toxic place" I agree from experience, Michael.

" Benzema received less tentative backing from the maverick Socialist politician and former Education Minister Benoît Hamon, who  said  Benzema had “evoked a reality.” We are, he continued, a nation in “denial over the rise of intolerance.” In today’s France, he concluded, “we can all too easily say that we don’t like Benzema because he has the mug of an Arab.” This is the same France, Hamon had no need to add, where former President Nicolas Sarkozy referred to Arab youths as “ scum ” and whose interior minister, Brice Hortefeux, once  joked  that : “One Arab is OK. It’s when there are more that there are problems.” "Does French Soccer Have an Arab Problem?" Related The culturalization of social antagonisms Anti-Muslim Racism from Above and From Below Racism: the achilles heel of middle class liberalism " I sure as hell would not be able to sleep soundly if I thought my fate rested upon the European liberal middle classes."

"War is the continuation of business by other means." — Bertolt Brecht  "War is business and business is good for America," [ Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Canada, Israel, and others] "The latest Global Peace Index report finds that the economic impact of violence to the global economy was $13.6 trillion in 2015 in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP). This is equivalent to $5 per day for every person on the planet, or 11 times the size of global foreign direct investment (FDI). The toll of violence is typically counted in terms of its human and emotional cost, but the financial damage to the economy is yet another additional factor to consider. When counting the economic impact one must look at the costs of preventing and containing violence, as well as measuring its consequences. This is important because spending on containing violence, while perhaps necessary, is fundamentally economically unproductive. How do you "add up" the cos

Leading Olympic expert Jules Boykoff takes the 2012 Olympics in London as a case study of corporate greed and popular resistance against Celebration Capitalism .

The development of capitalism has good news for "the developing countries". How the West will continue to rule. " As the next industrial revolution unfolds, the model for economic growth that arose alongside globalization will offer a less certain path toward development. Though new technologies will not completely erase the benefit of cheap labor, they will reduce the number of opportunities countries have to industrialize, diversify and grow their economies." The Rise of Manufacturing Marks the Decline of Globalization

" Fighting the state is hard enough without navigating a maze of middle class entitlement. And as a result these movements fail to offer me anything that can realistically improve my life or make surviving capitalism easier." Nicole Vosper on the Guardian

Europe's Solidarity Crisis: A Perspective from Greece