Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The new frontiers of control Related UK prison population third highest in Europe

 

 By the Syrian Lamis Kan

Although today there are almost 14000 known nuclear warheads - less than the 50000+ in 1986  - the ’colossal threat is still hanging over our heads’. “Three hundred and eighty million years passed between the appearance of visible life and the moment a butterfly learnt to fly... and then another 180 million years before nature produced a rose, with no other purpose than being beautiful. It took another four geological eras for human beings — unlike our Pithecanthropus great-grandparents — to learn to sing better than birds, and even be able to die of love. It is by no means glorious that men’s talents have ensured, in the golden age of science, that such a colossal, multi-millennial process could return to its original nothingness with the push of a button.” A beautiful depiction by one of the greatest modern novelists

Arrived in LA seeking fame and fortune but ended up being ground down

Thirty-three years after the fall of the Berlin wall, bloc-thinking is back. The democratic “West” against the authoritarian “East”. Authoritarian alliances in the “West” recede into the backdrop, critique of liberal democracy’s chronic shadows grow silent. States recently accused of threatening democracy and the rule of law are embraced. They belong once again to the democratic “We”. With the war in Ukraine, authoritarianism in the “West” is externalized to the Putin regime. But authoritarian populism has been growing in Europe for a long time in the midst of liberal democracy, in states that claim to be illiberal, but not only there. The pandemic has intensified this neoliberal-authoritarian transformation. When uncertainties increase and bring about the compulsion to control, all sides take recourse to identitarianisms, as if there had never been a critique of it. If we want to understand democracy in a fundamentally different way — without the nation, without the people, without bl

“ There was no reference to apartheid , and no reference, even, to a fifty-five-year-long illegal occupation. Worse, he drew on racist anti-Palestinian tropes about Israel having been founded in an empty land, in wilful denial of the Nakba. To add insult, all of this was delivered in the presence of Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador, with her own  track record  of egregious racism—including opposing Jews marrying Palestinians.”

“Sir Keir’s record shows his evolution into an unabashed authoritarian. As a young lawyer from a Labour-voting family, he dedicated significant time and energy to liberal causes, using his natural diligence to win a number of worthy cases against powerful interests […] his identification with socialists and environmentalists was always secondary to his ambition and the conformist reflexes that came with it.” A Journey to the Right

 

Global capitalism is what it is not only because it is global but, above all, because it is capitalist. The problems we associate with globalization - the social injustices, the growing gap between rich and poor, ‘democratic deficits’, ecological degradation, and so on - are there not simply because the economy is ‘global’, or because global corporations are uniquely vicious, or even because they are exceptionally powerful. These problems exist because capitalism, whether national or global, is driven by certain systemic imperatives, the imperatives of competition, profit-maximization and accumulation, which inevitably require putting ‘exchange-value’ before ‘use-value’ and profit before people. Even the most benign or ‘responsible’ corporation cannot escape these compulsions but must follow the laws of the market in order to survive - which inevitably means putting profit above all other considerations, with all its wasteful and destructive consequences. These compulsions also require

“ We remain a profession with amongst the highest number of unpaid working hours, and we are still well above the international average for hours worked by teachers. This is simply unsustainable and can only lead to burnout.” Unmanageable workloads, stress and level of trust in teachers are key factors

We should add the international economic situation to this good analysis. Heading for victory, despite dismal record

I think this is worth a read. Islam after the West

“The last Muslim intellectual”

Through its very existence, the apocalypse locked in the death silos of the richest countries reduces our hopes of a better life for mankind. Let it be known with what barbaric inventions, and for what petty purposes, they wiped out the life of the universe. –Gabriel García Márquez, 1987

“A labour movement United on Ukraine”