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Showing posts from October, 2017
This is an exageration . Banks, hedge funds, etc, have found in London a safe haven. Panama Files and Roberto Saviano, and others, have demonstrated that Britain financially "is the most corrupt country on earth", the most deregulated financial hub and most aggressive neoliberal economy in Western Europe. Where will banks and their associates find a better place?
Homosexuality Salman al-Odah, a leading Saudi cleric with 9 million Twitter followers, said in  an interview with a Swedish newspaper  April 30 [2016] that even though homosexuality is considered a sin in the Torah, Bible, and Quran, according to Islam the punishment comes in the next world, not this one. "Those that say homosexuals are deviants of Islam, they are the true deviants and their actions are a graver sin than the homosexuals themselves,” he added, in a  statement on his website . [T]here is no prescribed execution for homosexuality in the Quran or in Islamic law. Instead, scholars say, the Quran implies that retribution is in the hands of God. As for the  hadith , the sayings attributed to the prophet Mohammad, there is much dispute as to whether he prescribed a particular punishment for sodomy. President Abdul Fattah Sisi [supported and armed by the West], who ousted Islamist president Mohammed Morsi in 2013 and brought back a more secular Egyptian regime, ha
The Syrian novelist Roza Yassine Hassan A Syrian novelist and writer, Roza studied architecture but has been working as a journalist for years , writing for various Syrian and Arabic periodicals. Her first novel Ebony won the Hanna Mina Prize and her third novel Guardians of the Air was long-listed for the Arabic Booker Prize in 2010. In 2009, Hassan was chosen as one of the Beirut39, a group of 39 Arab writers under the age of 40 chosen through a contest organized by Banipal magazine and the Hay Festival. 
"High inequality could threaten global capitalism," says an international criminal institution that played a significant role, at least in the last forty years, in creating that inequality and plunder. An interview with Michael Roberts World's witnessing a new Gilded Age My advice: the representatives of the capitalist system should do something about the new Robber Barons to save their criminal system so that criminal action go on as usual, but more legal and more accepted by the general public.
Some interesting arguments, examples and proposals by George Monbiot. However, I don't think they are enough because first, and as he himslef doubts it, the Labour Party is not the radical agency that can carry out the change. Furthermore, Monbiot is not addressing the entrenched power of the capitalists and the elite, ownership and the state, and the reaction of these three. It seems that Monbiot hopes for a peaceful change, excluding any conflict. Also, he has taken examples from small wealthy countries where neolobiralism has not taken root as in the big Western European ones, especially Britain. These big countries have another important characteristic which effects their socio-economic policies; they are imperialist states. Article 1 Article 2
Spain: how much of state violence will be used? "To move forward we need to understand: why are regions, states and peoples beginning to re-pose the question of national self-determination now? For Spain and Italy it is clear: the mixture of austerity, corruption and political sclerosis at the centre has limited the reality of regional democracy. It has pushed autonomous regions such as  Catalonia  towards independence and places such as Lombardy and Veneto towards seeking fiscal autonomy from an essentially dysfunctional central state." The big picture Catalonia, Lombardy, Scotland ... Why they fight for self-determination now?
"Under Xi, it seems that the majority of the party elite will continue with an economic model that is dominated by state corporations directed at all levels by the Communist cadres. That is because even the elite realise that if the capitalist road is adopted and the law of value becomes dominant, it will expose the Chinese people to chronic economic instability (booms and slumps), insecurity of employment and income and greater inequalities. On the other hand, Xi and the party elite are united in opposing socialist democracy as any Marxist would understand it.  They wish to preserve their autocratic rule and the privileges that flow from it.  The people have yet to play a role.  They have fought local battles over the environment, their villages and their jobs and wages.  But they have not fought for more democracy or economic power." Xi's taking full control of China's future and an article by the author of The Party: The Secret World of the Chinese Commun
"Finance, in a certain sense, is there to keep people from becoming too comfortable, too secure. But, as you say, when you take away people’s comfort and security, you may not like the reaction you get." Disrupters
"While countries like Zimbabwe, Malawi and El Salvador have recently banned child marriage, it remains legal in the US - and half of states have no set minimum age below which you cannot get married." (the BB website) Why? Because many Americans, and Westerners, are busy "liberating" Muslim women!
"Anglo-Saxon anthropologists who with good reason translated moral idea into social fact, reserved ‘culture’ for primitive societies and ‘civilization’ for modern societies. So there is a good deal of  interference on the line and fog on the road. Let us try a clarification."   Civilisation, a Grammar
The cause is almost entirely "human activities" after the industrial revolution . What are these human activities? Who carried out the industrial revolution? What type of economic system which is responsible for it? Are global corportaions, in collusion with governments, looking for higher profits responsible? Or, is it smoking cigarettes, farting, barbecuing, etc responsible? Impartiality of the BBC!
This was said before the most violent era in modern history and before the greatest inventions. "What a chimera then is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feebla earthworm, repository of truth, sewer of uncertainty and error, the glory and the scum of the universe." — Blaise Pascal
"Since Europeans didn’t always think of themselves as ‘white’, there is good reason to think that race is socially constructed, indeed arbitrary. If the idea of ‘white people’ (and thus every other ‘race’ as well) has a history – and a short one at that – then the concept itself is based less on any kind of biological reality than it is in the variable contingencies of social construction." How 'white people' were invented
The big powers and their imperialist institutions decide. [S]ome recognition means the state "enjoys some of the benefits of being a state such as access to the World Bank, the IMF, and the International Olympic Committee."  "It's essentially impossible for a group to become independent and claim its own statehood unless others, other powerful states, are willing to support it" The cases of Somaliland, Kosovo, and East Timor
Monje also recalls a conversation with Guevara from the pre-Bolivia period. Che had said: ‘Hey, Monje, why don’t you get a guerrilla war going in Bolivia?’ ‘What will it get us?’ Monje asked. Che accused him of cowardice. No, Monje said, you’ve just got ‘a machine-gun stuck in your brain, and you can’t imagine any other way to develop an anti-imperialist struggle.’ The nine (or so) lives of Che Guevera
"[I]f the condition for granting religious liberty is, in effect, conformity to secular public norms, what kind of liberty is this?" Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492-1900 A book review
"We live in an age that has simultaneously witnessed the breaking up of national and state order, and what appears to be the bolstering of such order. Beyond the domestic confines of revolution and counter-revolution, such as we've witnessed in Egypt, Syria and Bahrain to name but a few, the dynamic of popular revolt against centralised authority and the often-brutal reaction to such challenges is by no means confined to these localities. The Spanish state, an alleged liberal democracy, has reacted to the vote with  vicious violence , including allegations of torture and sexual assault against protesters." Similarity and seperation: Kurdistan to Catalonia
Pentecostalism "The attractiveness of this cosmology lies in its seductive promise: that demons — not politics — are to blame for the world’s troubles. And that they can be vanquished through prayer." The spirit of late capitalism
"The question that emerges clearly and forcefully is one of justice. What does justice for Muslims mean in the face of US [led] state violence?  The answer, as you can imagine, is complex, but it is certain that endless wars, militarism, and intervention will not bring justice." 16 years into "the war on terror" and institutionalized Islamophobia lives on
The Spanish state / the state as an instrument of repression " The crime of sedition has been in every Spanish penal code since 1822 and carries a potential prison term of up to 15 years. It amounts to rebellion against state decisions or national security forces." (the BBC website)
One of the main problems with the disciplinary quality of contemporary academia is the way in which the fragmentation of disciplines carries over into a fragmentation of analysis. Despite the best efforts of well-intentioned intellectual laborers everywhere, “interdisciplinarity” rarely succeeds in its aims, often remaining littlemore than the sum of its parts. Reading Social Reproduction into Reading Capital
"[L]ike many other brutal dictators all over the world, Franco partly owed his long, dark reign to powerful friends in Britain." Franco's Friends
The Catalan referendum "This concern with identity and recognition unites separatists, creating a coalition of conservatives, progressives and radical anti-capitalists with no common project beyond independence." Short Cuts
Accurate in describing today's mainstream economists " The nearer to our time the economists whom we have to judge, the more severe must our judgment become. For while Smith and Malthus found only scattered fragments, the modern economists had the whole system complete before them: the consequences had all been drawn; the contradictions came clearly enough to light, yet they did not come to examine the premises and still accepted the responsibility for the whole system. The nearer the economists come to the present time, the further they depart from honesty”. — F. E. 1843
"I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on."  — George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938