Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“This is the supposed ‘natural condition’ of mankind, in which everyone is at war with everyone else, much as Thomas Hobbes described in his ‘Leviathan’, during the middle of the seventeenth century. But the state of nature is not in fact a ‘natural’ condition; it is a historical conjuncture”  Notes on Syria and the Coming Global Thanatocracy

"Johnson’s command of detail when it comes to his projecting himself is unmatched. The would-be leader of the country’s independence revolution is a narcissus who sees no further than his own reflection. The shine is wearing off, however. Most papers declined to act as his mirror. Mogg "is an extraordinarily wealthy hedge fund speculator who has made tens of millions without the ability to sharpen a pencil let alone manufacture one." A halitosis of a rotting body politic

Learn the Danish values or ...

We know the American war crimes in Iraq, but We may never know if the British committed war crimes there Why? Because the British forces are (almost) perfect.  The last person in Britain to be prosecuted for crimes committed by forces under their command was in 1651 during the civil war.

Rodinson "mobilised Ouzegane’s point of being less concerned about whether Muslim dogmas were true or false, than with seeing Islam principally as a social and political instrument... Rodinson considered Islam as neither a good nor a bad ideology a priori, but rather insisted on the need to produce analyses of the religion that account for its social conditions in which it developed. As he wrote at the beginning of the his book  De Pythagore à Lénine , ‘the best way to comprehend nothing of a phenomenon is to isolate it, and to consider it, from either the interior or the exterior, as if it is the only one of its type." The Thinker and the Militant

Fly Emirates! Tortured, detained, disappeared: United Arab Emirates abuses rife in southern Yemen

Inglorious Empire -What the British Did to India  By Shashi Tharoor, Penguin 2017 Excerpts, part 3 of 3 "The historian Andrew Roberts rather breathtakingly claimed, given this background, that British rule 'the modernisation, development, protection, agrarian advance, linguistic unification and ultimately the democratisation of the subcontinent'." p. 175 "The construction of the Indian railways is often pointed to by apologists for Empire as one of the ways in which British colonialism benefited the subcontinent, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries also built railways without having to go to the trouble and expense of being colonised to do so... "In its very conception and construction, the Indian railway system was a big colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns on capital for 5 per cent net per year, unavailable in any other safe investment."

We are the good guys and Trump is the bad guy, they say. Yes, Trump is a mysogenist. But it was not him who perpetuated patriarchy, gender pay gap, violence against women, etc. Yes, he is anti-immigrants. But it was Obama who deported more people than any other president. Yes, he is a threat to international relations. But it was not him who invaded countries, fueling sectarianism, supported Israel, imposed IMF policies, established Guantanamo, carried out torture and rendition, created obscene inequality, mass incarceration in the US, supported the Egyptian military, and so and so forth. Trump is not an aberration; he is their product and now they disavow him. " The liberal establishment and their representatives are crying rivers of crocodile tears for the victims of Trump’s policies. In so doing, they hope to make political capital out of Trump’s crimes. But there is only one snag with their strategy: it rests on our memories being so short that we have forgotten all of

Japan's demographic crisis No sex, please

Inglorious Empire -What the British Did to India By Shashi Tharoor (Penguin 2017) Excerpts, part 2 "The sight if Muslim and Hindu soldiers rebelling together in 1857 and fighting side by side, willing to rally under the command of each other and pledge joint allegiance to the enfeebled Mughal monarch, had alarmed the British, who did not take long to conclude that dividing the two groups and pitting them against one another was the most effective way to ensure the unchallenging continuance of Empire.", p. 101 The tendency to separate was apparent in British attitudes from the start. Indeed, it had been evidenced in the only already-white country the British colonized, Ireland; instead of assimilating the Irish into the British race, they were subjugated by their new overlords, intermarriage was forbidden (as was even learning the Irish language or adopting Irish modes of dress) and most Irish people were segregated 'beyond the pale'." p. 102 "Laws h

Israel A liberal Israeli paper unlike any Western liberal one

Fiat workers to strike over Ronaldo signing Good, but not enough.

Free ebook “Freedom of movement is a fundamental human right, not something that can be restricted by a racist or nationalist government. Borders are not natural divisions between people or benign lines on a map. They are mechanisms for some groups of people to claim land, resources, and people, while fundamentally excluding other people from access to those places. They create and exacerbate inequalities and they protect the economic, political, and cultural privileges that have accrued over the past few hundred years through the spoils of colonialism, capitalism, and most recently economic globalization.” Excerpt From: Jones, Reece, “ Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move .” Verso. 2016 Capital, "a thing", is free to move anywhere. A human is not. This is one of the ironies of social progress after hundereds of thousands of years of human evolution.