Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Surprise! Surprise! MeToo founder: Campaign now 'unrecognisable' Without addressing power structure and power relation in society as a whole, you won't get that far.

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”   —Thomas Paine, Common Sense

قناة الجزيرة تُسْكتُ الماضي

It was “the strange God” who perched himself on the altar cheek by jowl with the old Gods of Europe, and one fine day with a shove and a kick chucked them all of a heap. It proclaimed surplus-value making as the sole end and aim of humanity." —K.M.

"Lopéz Obrador is a bigger threat to liberal democracy than Bolsonaro," says an FT headline. For the defenders of capital nowadays even a social democrat, an Obrador in Mexico or a Corbyn in the UK, is a threat to capitalism. It shows how fundamentalist the bourgeoisie has become. It also demonstrates that despite the recent events since 2006 and a possibility of an another recession, the global bourgeosie feels triumphant.

In an interview with Al Jazeera in October last year, he said: "It was such a different world then. Britain was a different country. It was a country with a heart. We have lost some of our early love for each other. "And today, 'immigrant' is a dirty word, it's ridiculous." Harry Leslie Smith

What is better, robbing a bank or founding one? The Deutsche Bank

The rise of hipster colonialism

"The failure of modernization theory to explain political, social, economic, and cultural processes in the Middle East and Muslim countries beyond it seemed to US establishment scholarship as less related to the theoretical fallacies of modernization theory itself and more a function of the exceptionalism of Arab or Islamic cultures more generally. While the rest of area studies and anti-establishment Middle East scholars were turning to dependency theory to underdtand socioeconomic and political processes unfolding in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Samir Amin, who is primarily Middle East scholar, is a pioneer theorist of dependency ...), mainstream Middle East Studies was turning to Islam and culture, ignoring the central attribute of imperial connections to the region that are primarily defined by oil, it was not the nature of US imperial interest in and control of oil production that was seen as "exceptional" about the region, regulating the types of its ruling reg...

From Leonardo Padura's The Man Who Loved Dogs , pp. 220-21

Tunisians to the Saudi Crown Prince: "Tunisia is not for sale", "No to the murderer", and "Our land is not a destination for you to wash off your sins." A charge has been filed to a high Tunisian court against Bin Salman and the Saudi crimes, including the ones committed in Yemen. US, UK and other "democracies": hand-shaking and hugs, arms deals, hundreds of billions of dollars,  and decades of support of the Saudi autocracy.

"All colonial wars for the last twenty-five years have been fought in the interest of capital; fought to ensure markets that would guarantee more profits for European capital. Capital has become very powerful, all-powerful. Capital decides the fate of humanity." — Jean Marais in This Earth of Mankind , a novel by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018) Bertolucci's epic Novecento

Baptism Could an eccentric group, born out as a reaction to state violence, now ineffective, be  "our" new born-again "freedom fighters"? At the annual “Free Iran” conference that the group stages in Paris each summer, dozens of elected US and UK representatives – along with retired politicians and military officials – openly call for the overthrow of the Islamic republic and the installation of Maryam Rajavi as the leader of Iran. At last year’s Paris rally, the Conservative MP David Amess announced that “regime change … is at long last within our grasp”. At the same event, Bolton – who championed war with Iran long before he joined the Trump administration – announced that he expected the MEK to be in power in Tehran before 2019. “The behaviour and the objectives of the regime are not going to change and, therefore, the only solution is to change the regime itself,” he declared. The main attraction at this year’s Paris conference was another longtime MEK ...

Amazon, Google & Big-Techs Productivity Paradox

"There is no state in Lebanon" There is a state in Lebanon. It is present in other spheres, but obviously it is not there when it comes to social inequality. In fact it perpetrates social inequality like in many other countries, including rich ones (look at poverty in Britain or France, for example). Labaki, the director, does not criticise the state. A critique of the state in the review is Ms Naggar's addition. Also, there is a lot of "emotional extortion" instead of including a bigger picture of the state structure and social relations which spawn such social diseases. I have found this review (in Arabic) much better. 

"Opposition Labour Party plots overthrow of Capitalism" —Reuters Note the use of the verb "to plot", which is defined by Oxford Dictionary as "a plan made in secret by a group of people to do something illegal or harmful." It is scary: we have just discovered that there is "a plot", "a secret plan", that Corbyn, McDonnell and their guerrillas have been organising a parallel underground organisation and an armed wing of the Labour Party in order to overthrow the system, possibly with the support of Cuba and China, with promises from North Korea that she will send advisors once the new regime is estabilshed.

CLR James, critical theory, and the dialectic

Condemn one and absolve the rest Related: Are We ISIS?

"Nine in 10 UK adults (91%) said that having sex with someone other than their partner was cheating," The following survey might not be accurate, but there is some truth in it:  Deep conservatism in the so-called liberal society. "Street and sexual life in the UK"