Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Sarkozy/Juppé (status quo), or Trumpette? "The FN has become the party of the working class,” says Bruno Cautrès, a political sciences researcher at Paris-based Sciences Po Cevipof. “The party offers a double explanation for their malaise: Europe has failed to protect their jobs from globalisation and failed to protect their way of life from Muslim immigrants.”  (the Financial Times) England :  Neoliberal vultures contnue their plunder, "legally".  Virgin Care and the NHS Branson's Virgin Rail profits Crony capitalism Branson, The Stuntman

The Financial Times:  "Social class, defined today by one’s level of education, appears to have become the single most important social fracture in countless industrialised and emerging-market countries." Richad Seymour: "This is, of course, the way that social class is talked about in the US, but it isn't a helpful way to proceed. Apart from overlooked the glut of uneducated managers, supervisors, CEOs and owners, and forgetting the deliberate expansion of higher education to skill up workers, the trope allows on e to say that the working class are a bunch of thickos. Trump's support came from diverse social classes. Education wasn't that big a predictor of the outcome either: college graduates were *overrepresented* in Trump's support (in part because they are overrepresented in the electorate). The big thing that happened with the working class in this election is that most of them didn't vote."  Richard Rorty, a philosopher and social...

Génétiquement, les Maghrébins ne sont pas des Arabes

"[T]he Intruder, characteristically an asylum seeker, an illegal immigrant, or increasingly a legal immigrant, who has been added to the ranks of the category of 'criminal’ while being housed and ‘protected’ by the Incompetents, enslaved as they are to doctrines of ‘Political Correctness’. Migration is therefore a central issue here. And neoliberalism contributes to the revival of far-right politics through the global, structural changes that it has carried through over the last 40 years. In particular, it is the connection between domestic socio-economic change, as reflected in the rescaling of welfare assistance, and the compulsions toward labour market flexibility, with the accompanying sense of individualized social insecurity for workers (Theodore, 2007: 252–53).  Neoliberalism, then, has rested upon the opening up of labour  markets within the mature capitalist economies to competitive pressures on the social wage through both offshoring production sources in low...

Making and Unmaking of the Greater Middle East It is a good essay, but I wonder why one in concluding a 30-page essay does not insert three lines on the role of Russia and its support of the Assad regime.

After Brexit, here we have another product of neoliberalism (a form of capitalism). So far the effect has been in the two most aggressive countries where neloliberalism have been implemented.  " Trump has won because a (just) sufficient number of people are fed up with the status quo.  Apparently 60% of voters asked at the polling booths reckon that the country “is on the wrong track” and two-thirds were fed up and angry with the Washington government – something Clinton personifies. Like the vote of the Brits for Brexit, against all expectations, a sufficient number of voters in America (mainly white, older and in small businesses or working in failing industries in smaller central US states) have overcome the vote of the youth, the more educated and better-off in the big cities.  But remember hardly more than 50% or so of eligible voters turned out to vote.  A huge swathe of people never vote in American elections and they constitute a sizeable part of the wor...

Winter , chapter 2 from Banquet of Seaweed by Haydar Haydar

The Twenty-First Century Victorians

Islamic State vs. Al-Qaida Note: In the first paragraph, a wrong translation of "Rumiyya", an Islamic State's publication.

Russia falls into old habits

Keep it leaking!  Exposing the powerful, the criminal, the corrupt, etc is not whistleblowing; it is the voice of dissent, and it should be encouraged and supported. Whether it is the Panama Files, or the banks and the politicians, or the oligarchs and the politicians, or the theocratic regimes and the Western governments ... in essence it is more facts about the real nature of the capitalist democracy. What we see, after all, is the tip of the ice-berg. "ISIS and Clinton Foundation are both funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar"

England In a recent report on HMP Bedford, inmates claimed it was  easier to get hold of drugs than clothes or bedding . (the BBC online)

Why did one of the 20th century most influential thinkers fade from significance?

" Spain’s first Twitter hate-crime arrest was that of a 19-year-old student in Valencia who greeted Carrasco’s death with the tweet: “That’s the way! Kill them all.” The applause that greeted the murder in certain quarters owed much to the mindset of Spaniards who were fed up with politicians lining their pockets while they themselves scrabbled for jobs, had homes repossessed or coped with dramatic falls in income, according to Ángela Domínguez. Carrasco’s tyrannical reputation – and the corruption rumours – had helped make her a target. “Part of society saw it as an almost necessary ritual,” she said. “There is a shared responsibility.” Although people in León complained privately about Carrasco, few had dared to confront her. Perhaps they feared that, without a pistol in their hand, they were always bound to lose. Rosa Seijas, who sued over the fixed exam system, sees a cowed society that has accepted cronyism as inevitable. “Everyone complains, but nobody does anything,” sh...

Jessica Ellis replying to Michael Moore

Engaging Books Series

"Thus, increased specialization has led to increased alienation between not only professors and the general public, but also between the professors themselves.   All of this is very unfortunate. Ideally, the great academic minds of a society should be put to work for the sake of building up that society and addressing its problems. Instead, most Western academics today are using their intellectual capital to answer questions that nobody’s asking on pages that nobody’s reading. What a waste." Academics writes rubbish nobody reads Or Prof, nobody is reading you

“The connection between the human condition and labour is frequently forgotten, and for me was always so important. At 16, I went down a coal mine in Derbyshire and spent a day on the coal face – just watching the miners. It had a profound effect.” What did it make you feel? “Respect,” he says quietly. “Just respect. There are two kinds. Respect to do with ceremony – what happens when you visit the House of Lords. And a completely different respect associated with danger.” He says: “This is not a prescription for others, but when I look back on my life I think it’s very significant I never went to a university. I refused to go. Lots of people were pushing me and I said, ‘No. I don’t want to’, because those years at university form a whole way of thinking.” And you feel free from that? “Yes.” John Berger: 'If I'm s storyteller, it's because I listen'

Trade is no longer rising

When Western governments, "NGOs", CIA, etc pour money and agents in some countries to influence elections outcomes and make sure that the winner is their ally, does no make it to the news headlines, but considered conspiracy theory. When suddenly something is unearthed because there are elelection in a Western country and rivals are at each others' throes, then it is news. “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.” Hillary Clinton, 2006