NM's blog

The absence of questioning the colonialist foundations of Israeli politics

Antifa — short for “anti-fascist” — is a decentralised, leaderless movement of far-left individuals who stand against what they see as fascist and rightwing entities.  It is “a label for people who have a certain ideology [who] believe violence is justified to fight against fascistic entities within our society”, including the government or specific organisations, said David Schanzer, director of Duke University’s Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security.  Antifa does not have a membership list or a doctrine, and it does not raise money, hold meetings or have a website, as an established organisation would.  The “consensus” among US terrorism experts was that it was “an ideology” that “has not manifested itself organisationally”, Schanzer said Is antifa a terror threat?  Data shows leftwing extremists have posed a relatively minor security threat to the US over the past three decades, particularly when compared with violence from rightwing groups, although ...

Inequality in Chile  is 43 in the gini index. It is higher than the world average of 38. It is lower though than in Brazil or Colombia (around 45), for example. Contra la violencia– gathering of music, dance and speeches in front of Palacio la Moneda. It was in that palace that Salvadore Allende ‘was killed’ by a US-backed Pinochet's coup in September 1973.  A chat with a middle-aged Chilean man: Gaza, genocide, the US, Chile, the left, the right and far-right. He seemed a progressive man. A street in central Santiago should be named Street of Opticians. Tens of opticas shops line up the street. I have never seen such a number of opticians in one street.  A chat with a Venezuelan man. A vet by profession, but is not allowed yet to work in Chile, for he has been in the country for only two months. He is doing some illegal work as celebrations decorator and sells some handicrafts he makes. He thinks that Maduro of Venezuela is an authoritarian who wrecked the country and th...

This profligate spending on America’s militarization, coupled with tax cuts for the rich and “preemptive” strikes on Iran, laid bare just how little US conservatism has actually changed in the era of Trump. Samuel Moyn   observed that  Trump had revealed himself to be a “politician of American continuity” rather than a harbinger of change. Like his Republican predecessor, Trump has fused militarism with neoliberal economic policies (deregulation, privatization, tax cuts), which last time around produced a global financial crisis and two failed wars that enriched a select few. In the Bush era, contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater became the brazen faces of disaster capitalism. Today that mantle has been passed to private prison firms like CoreCivic and surveillance tech companies like  Palantir , which has quickly become the new avatar of the burgeoning police state. Two decades after the war on terror, we are in danger of entering what has been  described ...

I have selected the following, as the article is for subscribers only Samuel P. Huntington’s greatest contribution to the world of ideas was the phrase “Davos man.” This was his term for the capitalists to which our globalized socioeconomic order had given rise: highly educated, generally English-speaking people who profited from the world of borderless trade and travel, represented by the attendees of the yearly economic  conference  held in the small Swiss town of the same name. Huntington … was less sanguine than Fukuyama about how total liberalism’s victory had been. For him, the ideological struggle between communism and liberalism had not proved the strength and appeal of the latter but confirmed that no single universalist worldview could claim purchase on the lives of people across the globe. “In this new world the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conflicts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically defined groups,” he writes in...

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“ In trying to solve the puzzle of why people vote in politicians that do little to improve their living standards, Seymour goes for a psychological explanation. “this dismissal of the primacy of the economic is not just surprising coming from one of the foremost Marxist intellectuals in Britain today, but rests upon empirically spurious claims. “Seymour only tangentially acknowledges the role of elites in the rise of disaster nationalism. While he does point out that its political economy is mainly about furthering the interests of domestic capitalists, that is never really explored. “To get a full picture  of the social forces driving the rise of the far right and likely to benefit from it, we need more systematic and comparative analysis of party elites, their donors and their actual economic policymaking when they enter office. This could help better explain the apparent contradiction of the far right as both a rejection and reinforcement of neoliberalism. We also need to bette...