Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

I agree with some of the comments: it is blaming the symptoms (the products) rather than the causes . The collapse of the older order. Next, war?

The worst things that the US has done have always happened through political institutions and practices - not through strongmen

Angela Davis's speech Restoring King "There is no figure in recent American history whose memory is more distorted than Martin Luther King Jr. "

"Prospective imperialists can turn to his  authorized biographer  Niall Ferguson for answers. Harvard’s specialist in restoring the devil’s reputation — having done so previously for the  House of Rothschild  and the  British  and  American  empires —  argues  that if we weigh the good (the United States winning the Cold War) against the bad (the “loss of life in strategically marginal countries”), Kissinger comes out a hero. Fortunately, those of us unwilling to perform that calculus have Greg Grandin’s  Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman .  The book avoids the trap of simply enumerating Kissinger’s crimes and actually takes its subject’s worldview seriously. Since the actual trial of Kissinger will never happen and the intellectual trial has  already  taken place, Grandin follows a different path: he traces how Kissinger’s ideas have come to dominate American fore...

"As we know, Trump supporters tend to be white, tend to be older, tend to be male, tend to live in households with slightly higher income, and tend to have less education. Interestingly, his base is also significantly more likely to be self-employed overall, among other whites, and among other Republicans. In key respects, Trump represents the revenge of Joe the Plumber — and indeed Joe supports him. Many feel more comfortable casting his bid as some abhorrent anomaly. But Trumpism is no oddity. Instead it’s the expression of the anxieties of the petit bourgeoisie and a result of a break between two wings of the capitalist class in the Republican Party that began with the emergence of the Tea Party." The Revenge of Joe the Plumber

Liberal crap Putting the blame on those who did not vote.  Clinton is not a friend of women; she is part and parcel of a criminal state. A state that implemented reactionary policies on wages, working conditions, commodification of women, imperialist policies towards women in the Middle East and elsewhere through killing by drones and IMF adjustment prgrammes, corporate lunder and exploitation, support of theocracies that oppress women... She is not a friend of women. Nor is Mother Theresa a friend of the poor. Those who have been staunch defenders of the status quo wanted a continuation of the very same neoliberal injustice at home and abroad. The 50% or so who did not vote are fed up with the dictatorship of the two-party system. Conversely, those who wanted the status quo, the affluent and the rich support and backed Clinton to the hilt. Paraphrasing Brecht, the liberals wish they could dissolve the people and elect another. Richard Seymour: " This is part of a genre ...

The Financial Times:  "Social class, defined today by one’s level of education, appears to have become the single most important social fracture in countless industrialised and emerging-market countries." Richad Seymour: "This is, of course, the way that social class is talked about in the US, but it isn't a helpful way to proceed. Apart from overlooked the glut of uneducated managers, supervisors, CEOs and owners, and forgetting the deliberate expansion of higher education to skill up workers, the trope allows on e to say that the working class are a bunch of thickos. Trump's support came from diverse social classes. Education wasn't that big a predictor of the outcome either: college graduates were *overrepresented* in Trump's support (in part because they are overrepresented in the electorate). The big thing that happened with the working class in this election is that most of them didn't vote."  Richard Rorty, a philosopher and social...

The Birth of the American International Relations

What the American Left Doesn't Understand About Fascism

The US national anthem is a celebration of slavery?

A Brief History of Scientology

" All human societies, whether tacitly or overtly, assume that nature has ordained their social arrangements. Or, to put it another way, part of what human beings understand by the word ‘nature’ is the sense of inevitability that gradually becomes attached to a predictable, repetitive social routine." Those who create and re-create race today are not just the mob that killed a young Afro-American man on a street in Brooklyn or the people who join the Klan and the White Order. They are also those academic writers whose invocation of self-propelling ‘attitudes’ and tragic flaws assigns Africans and their descendants to a special category, placing them in a world exclusively theirs and outside history—a form of intellectual apartheid no less ugly or oppressive, despite its righteous (not to say self-righteous) trappings, than that practised by the bioand theo-racists; and for which the victims, like slaves of old, are expected to be grateful. They are the academic ‘libera...