Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

India Modi rules, Harvard doesn't Aristotle: “Even if they have no share in office, the poor, provided only that they are not outraged or deprived of their property, will be quiet enough.” … “prevent the lower from getting more; they must be kept down, but not ill-treated. … Friendship [among members of the ruling class] we believe to be the greatest good of states and the preservative of them against revolutions.” Jlowry: " We should avoid designating India or any other capitalist state as a democracy . They are oligarchies i.e. states where the rich rule as opposed to democracies where the poor or unpropertied rule. As Aristotle notes in his ”Politics” it is quite inadequate to define democracies as the rule of the majority and oligarchy as the rule of the few; it is rather that the poor are many and the rich few, which is why he notes that the mark of a democracy is selection by lot, that of an oligarchy election by ballot , which the rich will usually win. Wal B...

London " Graham recounts how Mohamed Atta, a leader of the World Trade Center attack, was for years before 9/11 a ferocious critic of high-rises. A holder of degrees in both architecture and urban planning, he regarded such buildings as destructive of cities’ ancient virtues – as do many conservationists and urban activists, and as, in some ways, does Graham himself."

Mother Theresa has been made a saint by the Pope. "MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of  poverty . She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go?" — Christopher Hitchens A new exposé of Mother Theresa shows that she —and the Vatican—were even worse than we thought

A new exposé of Mother Theresa shows that she —and the Vatican—were even worse than we thought

Latin America "The End of Post-neoliberalism"

"Its perhaps understandable why xenophobic rhetoric appealed to some Brexit supporters.  Resolution’s Bell  found that even though pro-Brexit voters weren't from places that had  ​recently  gotten poorer since the mass immigration wave, they were from places that had  ​historically  been poor — going back to the 1980s. These people have good reasons to be angry about the status quo. They’re looking for someone to blame, and immigrants are an easy scapegoat." "Irrational Xenophobia, not Real Economic Grievances" Here is what is missing in the analysis above: Support for UKIP "is even higher among the self-employed and business owners than the working class, and that is quite high even in the professional and managerial classes, who because are their substantial numbers actually provide the biggest bloc of UKIP’s class-based support . For all of these reasons the Conservatives, not Labour, have most to fear from UKIP ... Working class voters are a li...

Designing for the One Percent

Sunday between noon and 1pm on 104.4 FM (London) Or resonancefm.com (worldwide) Iran: Background article by Kaveh Ehsani Survival Through Dispossession: Privatization of Public Goods in the Islamic Republic More: Tehran, June 2009 by Kaveh Ehsani