NM's blog

“The final report of the Water Commission includes this calculation: “We estimate that over £85 billion has been extracted from the English water system by shareholders and affiliated parties since privatisation.” Given the parlous, creaking, under-invested condition of Britain’s…”

The dark art of spinning a war

Review of  Un Historien à Gaza: Un témoignage de première main  

and the British government sowed the seeds of civil war

By Richard Seymour QAnon is more than a global phenomenon of recreational conspiracism. It has not only recruited millions of believers, but utterly upended their lives, alienated them from their families and induced dreams of gory civil war. As a recanting QAnoner put it, from the inside it looked as if ‘everyone else was living in a dream world’. QAnon is a conversion-machine designed by no single hand, turning agnostic thrill-seekers into devotees of the apocalypse, transforming the ideological debris of conspiracism into a cohesive authoritarian subculture and translating the attentional surges thereby generated into profit for far-right entrepreneurs. As QAnon expanded, it drew the attention of an emerging ‘alt-tech’ scene, eager to secede from the tech giants that had capitulated to the ‘woke’ and capitalise on the demand for a stigmatised form of right-wing socialising. Launched in September 2018 with investment from the billionaire Mercer family and the millionaire YouTuber and...

Twelve years after 2013 coup

A report from Miami, Florida

Brexit and myths of Englishness

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? —Langston Hughes, “Harlem: A Dream Deferred”

“ Haji Agha  is not merely the name of a fictional character —it is a title that embodies a social type deeply rooted in Iran’s historical class structure…  a kind of historical alliance emerges between religion,  the bazaar , violence, and the state apparatus, whose goal is to suppress public awareness, preserve class hierarchy, and sustain exploitation.”