Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Corruption and plunder in Britain: the example of Branson "What all this resembles is a looking-glass version of capitalism. The public are handing money to private businesses for them to take a clip and pay us back the rest. Just in case that wasn't ludicrous enough, remember that Virgin's parent company is listed in British Virgin Islands, a sunny tax haven that is a stop pretty far from Wigan. And as we've seen repeatedly with the east coast line, the ones who don't make a profit can simply walk away, dumping their service back in public hands. Heads they win, tails you lose. Branson is not the sole offender here; he's simply the most flamboyant representative of a completely rotten system for siphoning money from the public into private hands. The entire industry, as Treasury adviser Shriti Vadera put it in 2001, is peopled by  "thinly capitalised … profiteers of the worst kind" . And as a former investment banker, she'd know what those

Islam and Modernity: Can We be Muslims in the West? Islam et modernitë: peut-on être Musulmans en Occident? See also Feminists are failing Muslim women by supporting racist French laws

The Scientific Assassination of a Sexual Revolutionary: How America Interrupted Wilhelm Reich's Orgasmic Utopia

A Brief History of Scientology

"When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burka rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. Coercing a woman out of her burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It’s not about the burka. It’s about the coercion. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political, and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It’s what allowed the US government to use Western feminist liberal groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy cutters on them was not going to solve the problem." — Arundhati Roy ( see extract from her book here )

Racism, Pure and Simple

Capitalism On productivity, growth, investment and profit

Egypt This is how a Chatham House fellow reminds us of Rabaa's massacre. No mention of the military and financial support of the Egyptian regime. No mention of the Muslim Brotherhood role in working with the regime and especially with the US and the SCAF from days one so that Mubarak goes, but the regime stays. And calling those criminals in the imperialist camp as "a democratic club" that Egypt is far from is just adding insult to injury.

This is generally a good summary, but I think the author is wrong on the class nature of Trump's supporters. The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics

Economic performance in two dimensions: How Europe beats the US

Domenico Losurdo: Ernst Nolte and the Development of Revisionism

Sometimes you find surprises in the gutter press " But not every part of the resistance was grateful. De Gaulle’s supporters in Paris  feared either a communist seizure of power or a mirror of the bloodbath that was befalling the August 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Through the Swedish consul they negotiated a truce with the German military governor on 20 August, but this was not observed by the insurgents who threw up barricades in a revolutionary reflex and continued guerrilla warfare, seizing weapons from the panicking Germans." The forgotten heroes of Paris, 1945

You see, it's not about whether you are a Muslim or a Roman Catholic or nomally Socialist, but what class interests you represent/defend in maintaining the status quo. "Sadiq Khan urges Labour to ditch Corbyn"

That media of "our liberal democratic society" Sounds of Blairite Silence