Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“ Mr Trump's victory was a broad one as well. He won the young and old, men and women. He also won over the evangelical and hard-right conservative voters he had difficulty winning in 2016.” Background What liberals get wrong about Trump’s support

“Neither the respectable left nor the hardline liberals can explain how spiralling ‘punishments’ are meant to bring a quick end to the war, still less a lasting peace.”  Invasion of Ukraine: more on hypocrisy, warmongering and the innocent abroad

This is good! “Most critics are hardly capable of identifying the major problems of identity politics: firstly, its widespread disregard for the importance of intersectionality, knowledge and expertise (that is independent of the respective identity) and secondly, the lack of a critique of capitalist structures and socio-economic inequalities (beyond specific identities), which, in turn, prevents a comprehensive understanding of discrimination, oppression, exploitation and emancipation.” The poverty of mainstream universalism and exclusive identity politics

How calling someone a “class reductionist” became a lefty insult

"The dark star behind Brexit, without which it cannot be understood, remains the British people’s unreconciled relationship with the experience of empire. The empire is a huge and complicated subject that, to our enduring collective detriment, is barely taught and is thus also barely known and absorbed into public discourse. This is partly why Sunday was probably the first time that most people outside Bristol will ever have heard of Colston." — Martin Kettle, the Guardian

A liberal account of 'humanitarian intervention' The Liberal Defense of Murder

We are the good guys and Trump is the bad guy, they say. Yes, Trump is a mysogenist. But it was not him who perpetuated patriarchy, gender pay gap, violence against women, etc. Yes, he is anti-immigrants. But it was Obama who deported more people than any other president. Yes, he is a threat to international relations. But it was not him who invaded countries, fueling sectarianism, supported Israel, imposed IMF policies, established Guantanamo, carried out torture and rendition, created obscene inequality, mass incarceration in the US, supported the Egyptian military, and so and so forth. Trump is not an aberration; he is their product and now they disavow him. " The liberal establishment and their representatives are crying rivers of crocodile tears for the victims of Trump’s policies. In so doing, they hope to make political capital out of Trump’s crimes. But there is only one snag with their strategy: it rests on our memories being so short that we have forgotten all of...

Liberals are criticizing the Korean summit from the Right See also A Murderous History of Korea

Nancy Fraser: Marxism and feminism

Here is an antidote to those missionaries like Soros, Jolie and Gates  "If anticapitalist revolution is where identity politics began, it has since become something quite different, and is now invoked by certain liberals and leftists to serve distinctly non-revolutionary ends, Haider argues. It involves members of marginalised groups demanding inclusion, recognition, or restitution from above – a seat at the table. These demands are made in response to very real injuries endured by those groups. But their method, he says, ends up strengthening the structures that produced those injuries in the first place." Asad Haider And in the comments on the review I like this one by Nada89:  " ID [identity politics] helped people turn a blind eye to the fact Clinton is a corrupt political figure. Same with Obama - people cut him slack for being 'the first black American president' yet he was complicit with the usual pattern of international crimes inherent in US f...

Hungary Centrists/liberals, who like wars, austerity and status quo, and who presided over obscene inequality, and exploitation at hime and abroad, want to save "liberal democracy" even if that meant advocating an alliance with the neo-Nazis . Is this new?

"There has been a shift in the mood of liberals. Less than a decade ago, they were confident that progress was ongoing. No doubt there would be periods of regression; we might be in one of those periods at the present time. Today, liberals have lost that always rather incredible faith. Faced with the political reversals of the past few years and the onward march of authoritarianism, they find their view of the world crumbling away. What they need at the present time, more than anything else, is some kind of intellectual anodyne that can soothe their nerves, still their doubts and stave off panic. This is where Pinker comes in. Enlightenment Now is a rationalist sermon delivered to a congregation of wavering souls." John Gray's review of Steven Pinker's "embarrassing book".

 "Liberalism is okay with reducing murderously oppressive structures into mistakes and shrugging off the oppression of Indigenous people, as long as it has a progressive face." The Success of Wonder Woman proves liberals are OK with imperialism

" Turning and turning in the widening gyre   The falcon cannot hear the falconer;   Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;   Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,   The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   The ceremony of innocence is drowned;   The best lack all conviction, while the worst   Are full of passionate intensity." W. B. Yeats No, the Centre can still hold. The economic and political order since the 1980s, a form capitalism, has been accepted and supported by centre-right and centre-left governments of the same regime. The two movements which has opposed that order are now stigmatised as "populism". The revolutionary left is weak and divided.  Despite the crises (economic, social, theoretical, and political), Brexit, Trump, refugees, etc. there is no real threat to the established order to compel the Centre to resort to the fascist or semi-fascist forces. No, the general crisis can still be managed by the Libera...

" The fake anti-élitism of today (and this may be the origin of this mind-boggling verbiage about ‘populism’ that clearly doesn’t exist) is directed at the egalitarians, especially at that odd species we might call ‘liberal egalitarians’ some of whom are just modest social democrats." This is a good piece: The mystery of 'populism' finally unveiled

It is interesting to read what the intelligent, but worried, liberals from the ruling class think. Krugman even thinks that only "the people" could stop the slide towards "an American-type authoritarianism ".   How hypocritical of one of the defenders of the system. Krugman is officially known among the mainstream economists as someone who has been critical of this and that policy and how to mangae capitalism and the malfunctions within the system, i.e. a neo-Keynesian. He opposed what others called "the financial terrorism" inflicted upon Greece. He, as the Economist magazine argued, blamed most of the problems on Bush and his administration.

"It’s Brechtian, yes, but more than that, it opens up narratives into multiplicity and uncertainty." Winter Solstice

" In the land of Law and Justice [political party], anti-intellectualism is king. Polish scientists are aghast at proposed curriculum changes in a new education bill that would downplay evolution theory and climate change and add hours for “patriotic” history lessons. In a Facebook chat, a top equal rights official mused that Polish hotels should not be forced to provide service to black or gay customers. After the official stepped down for unrelated reasons, his successor rej ected an international convention to combat violence against women because it appeared to argue against traditional gender roles. ... "Yet nothing has shocked liberals more than this: After a year in power, Law and Justice is still by far the most popular political party in Poland. It rides atop opinion polls at roughly 36 percent — more than double the popularity of the ousted Civic Platform party."

" What a miserably grey one-dimensional place it would be if the dominant model of middle-of-the-road liberal secular capitalism became the only acceptable way of living." Assimilate now. Or else. See also "don't get too comfortable. Your existence here is conditional"

Sisi's Egypt