Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Pessimist Monbiot?

السياسات الجنسية والجندرية

" Soon, the United Kingdom will consist of Buckingham Palace, the City, some satanic mills in the north and some desiccated farms elsewhere. So, the debate over the Empire has the soothing quality of a dream world in which it seems alive again, brought to life by the question of how bad, or occasionally good, it was." Empire of Ethics

Why attacking Afrin would a major blunder and Solidarity with Afrin, al-Ghouta and Idlib

“There is a history there, but I am mystified by such a widespread fear of Muslims among ordinary Burmans, so I throw up my hands. But it’s been fanned and cultivated and whipped up by Buddhist nationalists who have their own particular agenda, and by Rakhine who have their own history and anxieties that are deeply rooted and realistic, and by the military, for whom all this helps to solidify their claims to power and control of the economy and state. These attitudes are there and they are deeply rooted but they have been politically mobilized like no one has ever seen. The Rohingya were quite passive historically but now they have become a point of public mobilization. Yet if one wanted to get upset about an “outside” economic threat in Myanmar then the Yunnan Chinese population, and the Chinese companies that control all of northern Burma, would be the source of a more realistic and palpable concern of economic domination than the Muslims have ever posed." An interview with J C

Iran: Ismail Abdi back in prison

“all the successive governments of Tunisia after 14 January have devoted themselves to the same economic and social choices of the Ben Ali regime, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. (…) We are fed up with false promises and can no longer wait. We can no longer live without social welfare, without free access to healthcare, free education and social housing. We can no longer live without hope for change.” Tunisians oppose the IMF  The IMF in a few words

Societal repression in Egypt The Tentacles of autocracy Yes, a good point about the horizontal repression in society, and the class character of it. It is Freud meeting Wilhelm Reich meeting Weber and Marx. Missing: How long would the current regime and its state repression in Egypt along with the socio-economic structure and power relations last if international capital, Western states, the IMF, the  Paris Club, etc cease their support?  Six months? A year? Two years?

In English and Arabic Alain Badiou on the Egyptian revolution آلان باديو عن الثورة المصرية

"The melancholy songs of Pashaei represent the gloomy mood of a generation that feels it has got the blues. This “blue generation” feels cheated by a corrupt autocracy and has little faith in existing political ideologies. The main distinguishing feature of their political sensibility is the lack of any form of emotional attachment or sense of belonging to the political institutions or culture of post-revolutionary Iran. The blue generation inscribes itself in the short temporality of the last ten to fifteen years, therefore its experience of post revolutionary Iran has been of rampant corruption, lack of social freedoms, government inefficiency, religious tyranny, and curtailment of basic individual rights." A "Blue" Generation and Protests in Iran

Rough sleepers in England rise for seventh year Who owns London?

Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer

India: Minister refuses to retract statement on Darwin's theory

Capitalism realism means "a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian - where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone - is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we're lucky that we don't live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it's better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc."  — Alain Badiou And as Mark Fisher commented: "The 'realism' here is analogous to the deflation

The New Spirit of Capitalism

"... the strongest evidence that Trump’s electoral victory was not an uprising of the forgotten working class against economic distress brought about by neoliberalism and globalization is the evidence that  Trumpism is a pre-existing condition.  It has unfortunately been with us all along, as the resurgence of atavistic  revanchist white supremacism helps to make clear." Well, this piece has made me question a few things. Trumpism: A Pre-Existing Condition, Not a Response to Neoliberalism and Globalisation

"Although global in its causes and manifestations, left-liberalism found its purest expressions in the United States and Britain. The catchword was inclusion, which came to replace equality. Inspired by sociologists such as Anthony Giddens, the new Anglophone center (New Labor and Clintonism) focused on including more people at the table. Over three decades, inclusion increased in terms of race, gender, and sexual orientation — but the table itself shrank. So yes, Black and Latino men and women, even Muslims, got prominent positions at institutions they could previously hardly dream of; but the Black and Latino prison population in the US increased, as did the number of Muslims bombed, embargoed and starved by the United States." The Rise of the Leninist Right