Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Labour anti-Semitism crisis escalates as Jeremy Corbyn admits to sharing Hitler’s vegetarian belief The "Antisemitism" Panic How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisis

The future of our earth looks bleak, capitalism will be established in space in the near future. So will tax havens! " To evangelists of asteroid mining , the heavens are not just a frontier but a vast and resource-rich place teeming with opportunity. According to NASA, there are potentially 100,000 near-Earth objects — including asteroids and comets — in the neighborhood of our planet. Some of these NEOs, as they’re called, are small. Others are substantial and potentially packed full of water and various important minerals, such as nickel, cobalt, and iron. One day, advocates believe, those objects will be tapped by variations on the equipment used in the coal mines of Kentucky or in the diamond mines of Africa. And for immense gain: According to industry experts, the contents of a single asteroid could be worth trillions of dollars."

Everything Must Change: South Africa’s Fork in the Road See also Marikana massacre: the untold story of the strike leader who died for workers’ rights

Two amusing headlines by foreignpolicy.com,  Thursday, April 28 " U.S. servicemembers who were involved in the October 2015 strike on an MSF hospital in Afghanistan will receive counseling and letters of reprimand..." " Despite a conflict in South Suden [sic] that has left 50,000 dead, Washington is still hesitating to impose sanctions and an arms embargo on the country..."

A good analysis, but with a utopia. "But for all the clarity of this historical continuity, it cannot deliver us from the particularities of the present. The most obvious difference between the pre- and postmodern circulation struggles is the contemporary primacy of the “race riot.” That term too easily forgets the great inversion that occurs sometime after the world wars. From the nineteenth century on, the racialized riots of the United States featured white mobs attacking not just African-American but famously Asian and Latin American groups — events among which the Zoot Suit Riots are only the best-known example. It’s not until the ‘60s that the phrase fastens its current meaning. There is something bizarre and perhaps obscene in the extent to which the political memory of “the sixties” is in the US dominated by the free speech and antiwar movements. This is not to diminish such projects, but rather to underscore the historical forgetting of the great rebellions of Watts, N...

Britain Jeremy Hunt doesn’t understand junior doctors. He co-wrote a book on how to dismantle the NHS

The Iraq War Never Ended: An Interview with Anand Gopal

No, you cannot separate race from class

  Europe’s Joint-Smoking, Gay-Club Hopping Terrorists What if “radicalization” doesn’t look anything like we think it does? The Abdeslam brothers, with their sudden escalation from dancing in nightclubs to killing in them over the course of a few months, seem to challenge this picture. They also raise a deeper and more troubling question for those seeking to understand the genesis of terrorist acts: What if they were not “radicalized” and underwent no dramatic metamorphosis at all? What if their violence had only the most tenuous connection to what they believed, whatever that was? What if the story of how they came to be involved in terrorism had no real coherent narrative arc? What if the script of terrorism doesn’t always feature the drama of radicalization? According to one of the two friends who filmed the nightclub footage, the Abdeslam brothers “were nice people.… I suppose you could say they lived life to the full.” The other friend, going by the name “Kar...

Revolutionary care: Castro's doctors give hope to the children of Chernobyl

"In his story, Fischer quoted a UW philosophy professor saying Heller was so dedicated “He would have lived in a barrel, if necessary, to devote himself to teaching.” That’s a great tribute to the man, but an indictment of the system that it almost came to that." Gifted professor’s ‘life of the mind’ was also life of near destitution

US: Structure and Conjuncture

'My soul is in Damascus': portraits of life on the refugee trail

The Smug Style of American Liberalism

"The warmongering, corporate-funded, pro-privatization Democratic Party leadership has long made it loud and clear that it is thoroughly corrupt and reactionary." — Ben Norton

Self-Proclaimed Leftist Slavoj Žižek Makes Right-Wing Remarks About the Syrian Refugee Crisis See also The 'Taharrush' Connection: Xenophobia, Islamophobia,  and Sexual Violence in Germany and Beyond

Crisis in Brazil "The Workers’ Party believed, after a time, that it could use the established order in Brazil to benefit the poor, without harm – indeed with help – to the rich. It did benefit the poor, as it set out to do. But once it accepted the price of entry into a diseased political system, the door closed behind it. The party itself withered, becoming an enclave in the state, without self-awareness or strategic direction, so blind that it ostracised André Singer, its best thinker, for a mess of spin-doctors and pollsters, so insensible it took lucre, wherever it came from, as the condition of power. Its achievements will remain. Whether the party will itself do so is an open question. In South America, a cycle is coming to an end. For a decade and a half, relieved of attention by the US, buoyed by the commodities boom, and drawing on deep reserves of popular tradition, the continent was the only part of the world where rebellious social movements coexisted with heterodo...

Why our landed gentry are so desperate to stay in the EU

Keynes and Bretton Woods — 70 Years Later

'Though conclusive evidence is hard to come by, it is difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida.' — Terry Eagleton