Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

David Lay Williams’s contribution “inverts the common conservative argument that arguing against economic inequality is somehow contrary to the thrust of classical Western thought. If anything, it’s the casual and lazy dismissal of concerns with economic inequality that constitute an intellectual deviation and decline from the norm.” Note how a universal topic like economic inequality does not include non-Western thinkers from China to India, from Latin America to the Middle East and Africa. Williams just restricted his research to Western European thinkers. The reviewer himself mentioned a couple of non-white intellectuals and activists, but not a single non-Westerner came to his mind.

“Colonial constructions of the ‘threat’ and who are considered to be of ‘good character’.” A threat to a modern construction called the nation state. Would a Labour government undo so many of cruel anti-migration laws and mark a more ‘progressive’ chapter in migrant rights? The    Migrants’ Rights Network is not optimistic

Main points in this very illuminating piece . To what extent are Nairn’s argument and dissection relevant to today’s Britain?  Britain is … a description of the projection of imperial power out of a core whose boundaries remain misty, miasmic, and amorphous. There is, therefore, something very anachronistic about Britain: it is a nation which seems to exist with one foot in modernity and another in a mutant feudal-imperial past. Scotland had been forced to share an admittedly rather cramped first-class carriage dominated by England — it had  not,  however, been kicked into the luggage hold. The Scottish historian Tom Nairn (1932-2023) proclaimed  that: “Scotland will be free when the last minister is strangled by the last copy of the  Sunday Post .” For Nairn, there was no guarantee of justice in independence, only the possibility. Indeed, the current dominance of a Conservative, rather than a progressive, opposition in the devolved parliament supports this conc...

A free ebook Black Women Lives' in Britain

"Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them? Tracing conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution, Robin argues that the right is fundamentally inspired by a hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market, others oppose it. Some criticize the state, others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality. Despite their opposition to these movements, conservatives favor...

Britain The Tories just dropped a privatization bombshell

Britain May emerged as the preferred candidate of the Tory establishment. Her job, it seems, is to organize the transition to a new form of Conservative politics with less emphasis on austerity and economic competence and more on racist populism. Amid a record period of declining living standards and economic stagnation, the currency of politics today is resentment; it is never just “the economy, stupid.” Theresa May's Le Pen Moment

Britain Our way of life: "Everything must go"