Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"In recent weeks, some people have optimistically predicted that the Covid-19 outbreak will force governments to build  fairer economic systems." I have a problem with the language in the title and in the sentence above. "Fairer economic society" means a society that is already fair should become fairer. That is what the comparative form means.  "What history can teach us about building a fairer society after coronavirus"

"The professional who moves to a neighbouring city for work is not usually described as a migrant, and neither is the wealthy businessman who acquires new passports as easily as he moves his money around the world. It is most often applied to those people who fall foul of border control at the frontiers of the rich world, whether that’s in Europe, the US, Australia, South Africa or elsewhere. That’s because the terms that surround migration are inextricably bound up with power, as is the way in which our media organisations choose to disseminate them." How the media contributed to "the migrant crisis"

Reviewing The Age of Catastrophe by Henrich Winkler

"For the sceptical reader the whole strategy of the book looks like this. Take a highly selective, historically contentious and anachronistic view of the Enlightenment. Don't be too scrupulous in surveying the range of positions held by Enlightenment thinkers - just attribute your own views to them all. Find a great many things that happened after the Enlightenment that you really like. Illustrate these with graphs. Repeat. Attribute all these good things your version of the Enlightenment. Conclude that we should emulate this Enlightenment if we want the trend lines to keep heading in the right direction. If challenged at any point, do not mount a counter-argument that appeals to actual history, but choose one of the following labels for your critic: religious reactionary, delusional romantic, relativist, postmodernist, paid up member of the Foucault fan club." The Enlightenment of Steven Pinker And also a review of  Pinker's previous book on "the decline of ...

"We formed an alliance with Stalin right at the end of the most murderous years of Stalinism, and then allied with a West German state a few years after the Holocaust. It was perhaps not surprising that in this intellectual environment a certain compromise position about the evils of Hitler and Stalin—that both, in effect, were worse—emerged and became the conventional wisdom." — Thimothy Snyder, a Professor of History at Yale, US. An interesting perspective. Stalin vs. Hitler: who was worse? Who killed more: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?

"[I]f the condition for granting religious liberty is, in effect, conformity to secular public norms, what kind of liberty is this?" Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492-1900 A book review