Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“More than half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 can be linked to just 36 fossil fuel and cement producers, according to a report from the Carbon Majors database.  “The top five state-owned emitters — Saudi Aramco, Coal India, CHN Energy, National Iranian Oil Company and Jinneng Group — accounted for nearly a fifth of all global emissions in 2023.  “The top five investor-owned emitters — ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, TotalEnergies and BP — made up 5 per cent of emissions.  “The report’s findings are based on a database that traces the emissions from production and combustion of products from 180 of the largest oil, gas, coal and cement producers from 1854 to 2023.” Source: the Financial Times

Shaul Magid, Peter Beinart, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Pankaj Mishra

“From Iran to Turkey, from Egypt to Iraq, they kept writing, kept challenging, refusing to be erased .” Related Women and gender

“What Alice and Rebecca did could be massively groundbreaking and change universities’ ability to exploit their staff. I can see why Oxford would want to keep them quiet.” Sham contracts

and more borrowing, more cronysm, more complicity in mass murder, more spending on 'defense',  welfare cuts and more  On 'Starmer's Britain’

 Lashes of tyranny

“Had he [Öcalan] betrayed the Kurds? Could the self-dissolution of the PKK be understood as anything other than a total capitulation? What factors prompted the decision? ”

“The myth of ‘Western values’ died in Gaza. Myths do not die. They are debunked or refuted. They often persist for a long time and are adaped to new contexts; they are part of a belief system. I remember well after Iraq and Afghanistan how people invoked ‘democracy’ and ‘Western values’ in a way not dissimilar from what the Bushes and Blairs and later the Obamas and Bidens articulated them. Recently, a student at the ‘best’ European university in social sciences told me that the myth of sectarianism in the Middle Ast is still being repeated. A white liberal, ‘MeeToo’ English woman what Russia was doing in Ukraine was ‘a Russian thing. It's in their history’. Zelenskyy's recent rise in ‘popularity’ among many is built upon ‘the myth of Western values’ defending Ukraine against an authoritarian Russian regime. Myths are strentghned through amnesia. History is brushed aside and Pavlovian conditioning is enforced.  We should remember how the emergence of ISIS was analysed. How ...

“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” he exclaims in the “final prayer” of Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon was an atheist; praying to a higher authority would have struck him as ludicrous. And why pray to his body? Did Fanon have some sort of mystical belief in the wisdom of the flesh? Not at all. He was asking his body not to show him the path of enlightenment but rather to rebel against any inclination toward complacency or resignation. The body, in his view, is a site of unconscious knowledge, of truths about the self that the mind shies away from uttering, a repository of desire and resistance. Fanon’s relationship to reality is fundamentally one of interrogation: “Anyone who tries to read in my eyes anything other than a perpetual questioning won’t see a thing—neither gratitude nor hatred. Yet Fanon’s manner of interrogation was not that of a skeptic. “Man,” he writes in Black Skin, White Masks, is not simply a “no,” but “a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies.” His ...