Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"But for every Syria or Iraq there is a Singapore, Malaysia or Tanzania, getting along okay despite having several “national” groups. Immigrant states in Australia and the Americas, meanwhile, forged single nations out of massive initial diversity. What makes the difference? It turns out that while ethnicity and language are important, what really matters is bureaucracy. This is clear in the varying fates of the independent states that emerged as Europe’s overseas empires fell apart after the second world war. According to the mythology of nationalism, all they needed was a territory, a flag, a national government and UN recognition. In fact what they really needed was complex bureaucracy." Is there an alternative to countries?

Arabic literature I haven't read Zaat , but it souns a good novel.  " Zaat  by Sonallah Ibrahim Sonallah was born in Cairo, became a Marxist in his youth, and spent several years in prison during the 1960s for his views. His novel  Zaat  tells the tale of modern Egypt though the eyes of its heroine, Zaat, during the periods of the three presidents Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak. It goes from the optimism of the early years following the revolution to the full-blown capitalisation and corruption of Egypt in the 1980s and 1990s of the last century. Expertly crafted, each of the chapters narrating Zaat’s life, marriage, work and social life is interspersed with a series of newspaper clippings and photograph captions detailing the political and economic events of the day – corruption cases, financial scandals, torture, foreign debt – that graphically lay open the banal thuggery of the rulers and the greed and stupidity of the nouveau-riche. Poignant, yet darkly hilarious at

The Top 10 Philosophers's Fictions

Review of The Happiness Industry , a book by William Davies "What Davies recognises is that capitalism has now in a sense incorporated its own critique. What the system used to regard with suspicion – feeling, friendship, creativity, moral responsibility – have all now been co-opted for the purpose of maximising profits. One commentator has even argued the case for giving products away fre e, so as to form a closer bond with the customer. Some employers have taken to representing pay increases they give to their staff as a gift, in the hope of extracting gratitude and thus greater effort from them. It seems that there is nothing that can’t be instrumentalised. Yet the whole point of happiness is that it is an end in itself, rather than a means to power, wealth and status. For a tradition of ethical thought from Aristotle and Aquinas to Hegel and Marx, human self-fulfilment springs from the practice of virtue, and this happens purely for its own sake. How to be happy is the chie

The Middle East and North Africa "Why do governments last? What kind of governments last? Increasingly, studies on the stability of regimes in the Middle East/North Africa region focus on how elites enfold the middle and working classes into socio-political orders. Such enfoldment happens through turning the state into not merely an instrument of violent class rule through extraction, but also part-and-parcel of everyday social reproduction." Critical Readings in Political Economies: Resilience

A new exposé of Mother Theresa shows that she —and the Vatican—were even worse than we thought

Allende's Poet

Britain  Via Michael Roberts The Keynesian economic advisors to the British leftwing Labour opposition leadership are ditching Corbyn and McDonnell as fast as they can.  Several Keynesians resigned in June from the economic advisory council, including Thomas Piketty.  Now Keynesians David Blanchflower and Simon Wren-Lewis have come out in support of Owen Smith, the MP running against Jeremy Corbyn in the leadership election. Apparently they reckon Corbyn is 'unelectable'. David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, and Simon Wren-Lewis, a professor at Oxford University, were both members of Labour’s economic advisory committee. Blanchflower said Smith had been better at "consulting businesses and economists" in three weeks than Corbyn’s leadership had over the last nine months. Wren-Lewis, who was still a member of the committee until meetings were suspended in June, wrote on his blog: “What seems totally

Law and Order

They make this "finding" look like a surprise. They conclude their finding with an already-bankrupt solution.  What do ordinary citizens in the Arab world really think about the Islamic State?

Syrian Booknotes

الأشقر يُشرِّح الربيع العربي وانتكاسته ويُعرِّي اليسار "الزائف" 

01 August 1944 The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising