NM's blog

"A funny thing happened on the tube. Two young, fairly affluent looking racists on the Victoria Line started hassling three teenage hijabis, calling them "smelly foreigners". It didn't seem, from what I heard, to be a focused anti-Muslim thing. It was about getting a sadistic kick out of baiting them, and enjoying their outraged responses.

A woman was trying to talk the girls down -- because, though plainly not intimidated, they were obviously distressed -- saying "ignore them", and telling the young men to "grow up". When they resumed their 'banter' about having to share a tube with a bunch of "foreigners", an elderly black man sitting near them said, "who the fuck are you calling a foreigner?" Which was a good point: their actions were bewilderingly self-endangering, and they didn't look the least bit up to defending themselves. This guy was ready to get up and lamp them. I blurted out something like, "just get off the train you fucking pricks". I wish it had been a more clearly political response than this but, when my knee jerks, it swears loudly. The woman laughed and said "everyone point at the racists", and there was a ripple of a few people jeering them and telling them to "get off".

The backlash unsettled them. They stood there trying to look smug and defiant. I suspect there was a minority in quiet sympathy with the idiots. There was a lot of embarrassment and looking at feet -- and there is nothing the English fear more than embarrassment. There were also, initially, some irritated glances at the girls raising their voices. But the racists looked uneasy, isolated, nervous. They were lucky someone didn't deck them. The teenagers they'd tried to bait looked pissed off, rattled, but also far more confident than their harassers. Once the guys had left, an older man approached the teenagers, apologised to them and complimented them on how they'd handled themselves.

I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this. In other circumstances, I could imagine that going far more horribly than it in fact did."

— Richard Seymour, London 11 May 2017

I don't the way he called the girls, though: "three teenage hijabis". Why not three teenage Muslims wearing hijabs?

Comments

The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...

Ursula Le Guin on Capitalism

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries— the realists of a larger reality . Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. ... The name of our beautiful reward is ...

"A second position argues against transition, which is transitology itself. It is well known—especially among economists—as the sudden mobilization of a considerable mass of experts who are generally foreigners,generally Western, who come to preach the good word and to propose ready-made models of democracy. The science of the transition has become a financial windfall, a market. And the word transition has of course become a reflex of language, a term of reference, a call for tenders ( appel d’offres ) to which the whole society was supposed to respond. Consequently, the reticence that one can express is the following: our history is framed, transition is a heteronomy. Every democratic revolution is henceforth supposed to take a unique, imposed path, which is, at the same time, indistinctly democratic and liberal (or neoliberal). A more or less non-“negotiable” package. It is necessary to highlight the imposed character (and imposed from the outside) of this coming to t...

UK

"We are all in it together" A letter from a doctor to Boris Johnson published a few months ago: ' Johnson has contributed to thousands of deaths ' Related 'The greatest global science failure for a generation' 'Herd immunity' or lockdown

Putting a Racist in Their Place

Women and Sex Work in Syria, Tunisia, Morocco and the West

A long exchange How much is the condition of syrian women changing under the new regime? The condition of Syrian women under the new transitional government following the fall of the Assad regime is changing in a highly contradictory manner, marked by symbolic high-level appointments juxtaposed against a sharp decline in overall political representation, deteriorating legal protections, and a severe humanitarian crisis. While the interim administration promotes an image of inclusivity, women’s rights groups and activists express deep concern over an increasingly patriarchal and conservative political environment. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] The transition has impacted Syrian women across several distinct areas: 📉 Declining Political Representation Marginal Parliamentary Presence : In the transitional elections, women won just 6 out of 119 seats (roughly 4%) in the new parliament. This is a severe drop from the 10% to 13% representation they held under the Assad ...

Street art

Big Tech Takeover: Authoritarian Capture

An article subject to subscription . Read here then continue with some excerpts below. ******** Palantir is the data backbone of the authoritarian state, and Anduril is its autonomous warfare command system, turning information dominance into automated military power. Its Lattice platform connects satellite feeds, radar data and battlefield imagery into a single operational network, allowing military missions to be planned and executed at lightning speed. The company claims its systems can function at ‘level 5 autonomy’: launching, identifying targets, striking and returning without human intervention. [Starshield, SpaceX’s of Elon Musk] When NATO’s battlefield communications depend on infrastructure controlled by one man who openly endorses European far-right parties, defence autonomy becomes theatrical fiction. Other solutions such as GovCloud, from Amazon Web Services, or Azure Government, provided by Microsoft – in partnership with OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic – are now e...

"It is a peculiarity of capitalists and the bourgeoisie to think that we workers have no culture," adds the novelist, whose many tattoos include one of Karl Marx on his left arm. Argentine cleaner's double life as prize-winning novelist

China

This is a very engaging paper. Primitive Socialist Accumulation in China: An Alternative View on the Anomalies of Chinese 'Capitalism'