Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

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

Trade war and depresssion

"Obama sang the praises of American multiculturalism but deported more undocumented immigrants than any previous president. Now Trump has stripped Obama’s policy of its already threadbare human face." "American carnage"

"Trial runs for fascism are in full flow" Exageration? 

New York congressional primary

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

Madeleine Albright's nostalgia to  The Good Old Days

One of the paradoxes of social life in late capitalism is that, even as more and more people abandon certain types of drug -- alcohol, tobacco, ecstasy, sex -- addictions  ar on the rise .  The number of alcoholics, opioid addicts, gamblers , social media addicts, porn addicts and so forth shows a secular increase. In other words, the drugs of sociability are declining, while the drugs of solitude are gaining ground. What kind of problem is this?  Trump says, massacre the dealers . The Duterte option . Liberals, with the soft paternalism of the moral reformer, say treat the disease . So we murder the problem, or we medicalise it. Hard cop or soft cop; either way, the problem is being suppressed . Toxicity in late capitalism

I listen and listen again. I hear this or that voice. I read sentences and behind the lines. I read arguments and counter-arguments. My impression is that Trump and his clique, and so far backed mostly by the Israeli regime, are building dossier and a creating a context for a war with Iran. It will be very interesting to watch, especially the position Putin's regime will take. Of course nothing is certain yet, but similar patterns lead to similar results. In the interim a few things could happen and  change the descent towards another madness: Trump might go before that, for example.

Indifference and Hypocrisy

The likely U.S.-led strikes on Syria will be another spectacle .

There were real differences between neoliberals and conservatives on the family. Although they converged around the idea of family responsibility, there were different motivations and different inflections to this convergence. Social conservatives saw the family and its moral order as foundational to any social and economic order. Even when they became converts to the free market, as was the case with Irving Kristol, they saw the family as the necessary foundation on which market freedom needed to rest. They were also more often than not invested in a particular vision of the family – patriarchal, heteronormative, monogamous. Ideas about responsible fatherhood and the need to reinstate the place of men within the family come from this conservative tradition. Neoliberals had a more minimalist understanding of family responsibility. For them, family responsibility meant that the family or the couple should be the primary source of economic security and in this way function as a subst

The Real Views and Aims of the Putin-gate "Skeptics"

"Free trade" or protectionism?

The Saudi predicament

Pessimist Monbiot?

Corpus Separatum?

The latest from the book of hypocrisy The so-called international community, world leaders and others talk about "peace" and condemn Trump. Orwellian. Imperialist criminal states that supported a settler-colonial states for decades with different means, in collaboration with so-called Arab leaders who have been complicit and sanctioned one betrayal after another from Camp David to Oslo, disagree with Trump!

After nearly a year of the Trump presidency, do you regret your criticisms of Barack Obama?  "Oh, no. I told the truth. When I said drone strikes are crimes against humanity, when I said Obama bailed out Wall Street rather than Main Street — I shall forever support that. I was just speaking to the reality that people are hurting, and we have to do the same thing under Trump as we did under Obama. They tried to make me the darling of the liberal establishment. I refused it. "  — Cornel West, in an interview with The New York Times

Labour movements and popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt Joel Beinin explains what happened. He begins with the dire situation in Egypt today.