NM's blog

The term “ is being picked up again now to justify the latest western onslaught in the Middle East .” 

“More on the crisis of liberal expertise. This exchange over Yuri Slezkine's review on the "Western civilization" is a good illustration of how some scholars of Ukraine have managed to miss not only what has happened in the world since 2022 — saying without irony that the West offers an alternative to Russian barbarism in Ukraine, after Gaza and Iran, is simply nauseating — but also the developments within Ukraine itself (or perhaps still strategically obfuscating them). Slezkine's response at the end, on why Ukraine is an ethnonationalist state, is very strong.” —Volodymyr Eshchenko’s comment on Why ‘the West’?

‘Power without a throne’ There is mention, for example, of  Macron's government support of Haftar .

Published in 1967, Guy Debord’s analysis of the society of the spectacle posited that lived reality had “receded into a representation.” In its “concrete manufacture of alienation,” Debord contended, the spectacle obscured social contradictions. But the reproduction of society without consent now involves the formation of a “hyperspectacle”: the reality of contradiction itself becomes an image, a domineering abstract presence; the commodity’s colonization of life is such that it now extends to social contradiction itself. The more we observe Trump’s abstract spectacle of contradiction, the more we struggle to understand the concrete contradiction that has produced it. Amid intensifying alienation, the Trump administration pursues a new geostrategy. —  Juliano Fiori ,   February 19, 2026

“I talk in the book about the special kind of sado-masochism it takes to spend six years reading alarmist literature that imagines people like me to be a genetic nightmare and cultural failure. Yet I find the complexes and psychoses that afflict white supremacists as they contemplate Eurabians both interesting and funny, if I can use that word about something so serious. You never know when porn studies methodology will come in handy, but it does again and again: literature that imagines the Great Replacement can most easily be likened to a snuff film, in which erotic pleasure occurs at the death of the Other. This is why I talk in the book about the erotics of ethnic horror, a literary genre that best fits Great Replacement literature.” Description Interview and excerpt 

Both conservative and liberal economists, in other words, continue to frame economics the way Lionel Robbins defined it, as the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends, which has rightfully earned the discipline the description of being the dismal science. For both schools, efficiency remains the prime consideration. Rather, the economic  problematique  should be, according to Deaton, the way his fellow Cambridge economist Keynes defined it: “how to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty.”