Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The winning side

Note that capitalism is not mentioned even once. The article in the Culture section! Is it not sociology in photography lenses?  ‘Utopia and dystopia’

‘Be honest’, Dimon said, ‘He [Trump] was kind of right about NATO, kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Trade. Tax reform worked. He was right about some of China.’ —Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan In other words, classic liberal-capitalist policies,  à l’américaine . This is why  Trump continues to be a problem and not just a calamity .”

A brief-history of the Arab ballad

“Indifference, silence – that's the most terrible thing that could happen. On a poster I wrote: 'All of this happened because you stayed silent.'" —   Russian artist and activist Yelena Osipova

Whistleblower David McBride jailed Related Australian troops: killing civilians for practice

It is not a radical analysis, but it  is an important development/attempt to maintain American hegemony, supremacy over China and stability at home .

You'll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion, when the mood of Beethoven's or Bach's music becomes the mood of your whole life … when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings … when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors … when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than the politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you; when you communicate with your fellow workers in foreign countries directly, and no longer through diplomats... — Wilhelm Reich,  Listen, Little Man!

Rules of the game

“None of the chapters is a polemic. Rather, for the most part, the book constitutes a simple statement of bald facts of which many western readers will be shamefully ignorant .”

In social life there are  degrees   of power and degrees of falsity.   The more the masses of people adhere to truth, the less power-mongering there will be;  the more imbued with irrational illusions the masses of people are, the more widespread and brutal individual power-mongering will be. —Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism From the same source: Open avowal of dictatorship is much less dangerous than sham democracy. The first one can fight; sham democracy is insidious. It was one of the greatest errors in evaluating dictatorship to say that the dictator forces himself on society against its own will. In reality, every dictator in history was nothing but the accentuation of already existing state ideas which he had only to exaggerate in order to gain power.

A ‘group’ that “held an attachment to forms of hope that placed faith in the capitalist system to fulfil their dreams . “I develop a political economy of emotion and hope that traces how capitalist systems continue to capture the attention of the very people harmed by them.”  I would use ‘forms of the capitalist system’ rather than ‘capitalist systems’. There is only one globalised capitalist system, albeit with different form in different countries.

" Buy when there's blood in the streets,  even if the blood is your own . " —Baron Rothschild

   فيلسوف المثال والواقع السوري

The dish “is in the crosshairs of certain city dwellers who look upon shawarma vendors with a jaundiced eye, as forerunners of a foreign invasion. Their reactions speak volumes about the crises in the Middle East and their repercussions in Cairo, but also about regional geopolitics, migratory streams, the refugee problem, the economic crisis plaguing the country and the fervent nationalism which is surfacing again as a result. Shawarma “has become a symbol of xenophobia and rampant nationalism. ”

  "Israelis are unified to eliminate this evil from the world,” said Prime Minister Netanyahu in November 2023. “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.” The point was not what Amalekites did to Israelites, but what Israel was told by God to do unto Amalek. “Go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." The enemy is construed as one with whom those  waging holy war  cannot possibly live in peace. The First Crusade constructed the Muslim as such an enemy. That image was bequeathed to future generations and lives with us today. Believing themselves to be authorized by a suprahuman authority, holy warriors deem their enemies subhuman and treat them with deliberate inhumanity. The crime of crimes since the twentieth century is  genocide , which is currently aided and abetted by elites in the collective West. When  Pope Franci...

The Marxian emphasis upon relations and contradictions within a totality yields, when property executed, a unity of analysis and synthesis. The initial response of the social scientist trained in the bourgeois framework of thought is to misinterpret this simply because of the difficulty posed by the relational and dialectical way of proceeding… In the first place, disciplinary boundaries make no sense whatsoever from the Marxian standpoint. The technical division of labor is obviously necessary but its social representation is to be rejected. But at this point the Marxian challengers encounter a peculiar difficulty. We live in a world in which the bourgeois framework for organizing knowledge is hegemonic. Individually, we must appear expert in some discipline and to some degree conform to its rules if we are to be listened to or even to gain employment. 1 The Marxian challenge has therefore to be mounted within the existing framework for knowledge which makes it appear that there is a...

The FEDS are investigation  the University of Massachusetts Amherst for anti-Palestinian bias

A very good piece by the historian Vincent Brown

These same Arab nations  [sic] are now pivotal in stopping Israel from further escalating the war after Iran’s missile and drone attack. *The states decided not the nations. And those states are by no means representative of their respective population even when measuring representation by bourgeois democracy.