Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 Is it compatible with capitalism?

 “ This tension between “equality” and “property” rings through subsequent history and still shapes much discussion today.” It’s true, we ignore parts of our history

I think arguments that reinforce irrationality and conservatism always find millions of followers. Those millions of people have their prejudices, and their opinions on subjects like Marxism, socialism, human nature, etc are based on lack of knowledge and miseducation or material interest. The contradiction lies in this: in their daily life people generally make rational decisions, but when it comes to subjects like capitalism, hierarchy, human nature, socialism, ‘ordinary’ people have irrational ideas about those subjects. Their ideas has been built over many years, and often since childhood. Most people do not break away from what was inculcated in their minds at home and at school. Like a Muslim preacher who gains fame by hitting the right neurones of a Muslim mind that prone to conservatism, John Peterson is a Western preacher for a Western audience that too has its own conservatism and prejudices. And the more capitalism as an economic and social system enters into crisis and ...

A very engaging review The students were  furious . For the first week of class, they read the polemical first chapter, which argues that human rights are not eternal universal truths, but rather a set of political claims that emerged in the 1970s amid a crisis of the moral authority of communism. They simply would not believe that their own highest ideals dated not to the Bible or “the golden rule” but to the age of disco. As it turned out, the students had a preconceived notion of what it meant to have their preconceived notions challenged, and it did not include historicizing their own moral commitments. This provoked reflection about what historicizing something means and how legitimacy for moral claims is constructed. The Inequality of "Human Rights"

A book review  "In one of No Enough's most important insights, Moyn suggests that the gradual abandonment of equality in favour of a minimalist focus on securing a basic minimum has made human rights unthreatening in a neoliberal age. Moyn’s account of the compatibility of human rights and neoliberalism is powerful and astute. Human rights did little to alter the course of neoliberal reform, offered no real alternative to it, and did not demand egalitarian distribution either at the national or transnational level, he argues. Moreover, human rights and what he terms their “economic rival” shared the same moral individualism and the same suspicion of collectivist projects such as nationalism and socialism. Consequently, even social and economic rights became adjuncts to humanitarian philanthropy, which viewed global poverty through the lens of humanitarian suffering, not structural inequality.  
Moyn provides a strikingly original account of the ways in which demands for a...