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Showing posts from December 18, 2016
" In the land of Law and Justice [political party], anti-intellectualism is king. Polish scientists are aghast at proposed curriculum changes in a new education bill that would downplay evolution theory and climate change and add hours for “patriotic” history lessons. In a Facebook chat, a top equal rights official mused that Polish hotels should not be forced to provide service to black or gay customers. After the official stepped down for unrelated reasons, his successor rej ected an international convention to combat violence against women because it appeared to argue against traditional gender roles. ... "Yet nothing has shocked liberals more than this: After a year in power, Law and Justice is still by far the most popular political party in Poland. It rides atop opinion polls at roughly 36 percent — more than double the popularity of the ousted Civic Platform party."
Bare life in Aleppo and in the Mediterranean and "Demystifying the Syrian Conflict" At the time Erdogan receives a Syrian child who got out of Aleppo ...
Syria Massacring the arguments of those who have been supporting the Assad regime and Russia's intervention, orgasmically celebrating "the liberation of Aleppo". Justifying the unjustifiable Also,  Stop the War Coalition's failure to actively campaign against the wars crimes of Syrian and the Russian regimes " My friends in Aleppo would rather die than captured by Assad's militias." — Zeina Erhaim, a Syrian journalist Here are some of the arguments put by those who defend the Syrian regime: Apart from "the terrorists" of the armed rebel forces, "The Assad family belongs to the tolerant Islam of Alawid orientation. • Syrian women have the same rights as men to study, health and education. • Syria women are not forced to wear the burqa. The Sharia (Islamic law) is unconstitutional. • Syria is the only Arab country with a secular constitution and does not tolerate Islamic extremist movements. • Roughly 10% of the Syrian populat
"In the same way that Robinson [Crusoe] was able to ob­tain a sword, we can just as well suppose that [Man] Friday might appear one fine morning with a loaded revolver in his hand, and from then on the whole relationship of violence is reversed: Man Friday gives the orders and Crusoe is obliged  to work. . . . Thus, the revolver triumphs over the sword, and even the most childish believer in axioms will doubtless form the conclusion that violence is not a simple act of will, but needs for its realization certain very concrete preliminary con­ditions, and in particular the implements of violence; and the more highly developed of these implements will carry the day against primitive ones. Moreover, the very fact of the ability to produce such weapons signifies that the producer of highly developed weapons, in everyday speech the arms  manufac­turer, triumphs over the producer of primitive weapons. To put it briefly, the triumph of violence depends upon the pro­duction of armam
"Chesnais finishes his book with two themes. One is a lament on the lack of Marxist study in universities and the lack of journals in which Marxist studies of capitalism can be published. This is true enough, and I am glad not to have been an undergraduate university student in the past few decades! Even apparently radical journals such as the UK’s  Cambridge Journal of Economics  are basically rather conservative in outlook, and are dominated by a facile Keynesian approach that dismisses a Marxist perspective out of hand if it upsets their advocacy of ‘progressive’ policies for the capitalist state to consider. Repeating radical consensus nonsense will get a pass; revealing the imperial mechanism of power has to jump a hundred hurdles to be an acceptable journal article. Such is the almost universal climate in academia today, despite the evidently destructive outcomes from the system they claim to be analysing. [6]  Ironically, this is why the most trenchant and incisive critiqu
العلوية السياسية
Two young English men in their early twenties in a conversation - I have been drinking every night since Thursday. - Really, - yes. -... Arsenal [the football club] was shit... Me: I consider that part of "our British values"
" What a miserably grey one-dimensional place it would be if the dominant model of middle-of-the-road liberal secular capitalism became the only acceptable way of living." Assimilate now. Or else. See also "don't get too comfortable. Your existence here is conditional"
"When Theresa May sets off to embrace the autocrats in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the other Gulf countries, the democratic opposition in these countries will be even less heard." — Anna Lehman, the Guardian, 18 December 2016 Ah, because this embrace is a new thing! Previous governments were champions of "human rights", trying to overthrow those autocratic families and were always supporting progressive oppositions until Brexit and Theresa came.

Elegy for a Doomed City

"As Hitchens said, those who secretly cheer Assad’s takeover of Aleppo don’t know what they are talking about. Or they forgot what it is like to live under a regime that kills and tortures in times of peace as it does when it is embattled. People in Syria rose up because they wanted their country to be free. What happened later, including the rise of extremism and lawlessness, was a product of the way the regime responded to the demands of young men and women." Note : Christopher Hitchens supported the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq thus he was the camp of "the liberal defence of murder".  Using Hitchens' argument for the Syrian situation excludes the fact that an uprising/a revolution aimed at overthrowing the regime. It also implies that there is no way for the Syrians, or any other people who rise up against dictatorship, to achieve anything without the help of the Western imperialism. The "Western states" should always do something. No t
Against liberal nostalgia "[T]he neoliberal variant of capitalism was not the result of a a “corporate coup.” It is the result of the familiar, systematic workings of a capitalist state seeking to resolve a crisis and restore the system to 'health'... ... to say that the last thirty years of neoliberal policy were not simply the result of a “corporate coup” does not mean that Donald Trump is simply a “boilerplate” Republican. If he were, how could we explain the tremendous fight the GOP establishment waged against him? Trump did   not receive a single donation   from a Fortune 100 CEO, while a broad range of top military brass and   establishment Republicans  — including George Bush, Mitt Romney, Colin Powell, Paul Ryan, Hank Paulson, Bill Kristol, and others — either endorsed Clinton or suggested they couldn’t support Trump. All this indicated a wide-ranging consensus among the capitalist class behind Clinton, founded upon maintaining the status quo abroad (“free trad