NM's blog

“The final report of the Water Commission includes this calculation: “We estimate that over £85 billion has been extracted from the English water system by shareholders and affiliated parties since privatisation.” Given the parlous, creaking, under-invested condition of Britain’s…”

The dark art of spinning a war

Review of  Un Historien à Gaza: Un témoignage de première main  

and the British government sowed the seeds of civil war

By Richard Seymour QAnon is more than a global phenomenon of recreational conspiracism. It has not only recruited millions of believers, but utterly upended their lives, alienated them from their families and induced dreams of gory civil war. As a recanting QAnoner put it, from the inside it looked as if ‘everyone else was living in a dream world’. QAnon is a conversion-machine designed by no single hand, turning agnostic thrill-seekers into devotees of the apocalypse, transforming the ideological debris of conspiracism into a cohesive authoritarian subculture and translating the attentional surges thereby generated into profit for far-right entrepreneurs. As QAnon expanded, it drew the attention of an emerging ‘alt-tech’ scene, eager to secede from the tech giants that had capitulated to the ‘woke’ and capitalise on the demand for a stigmatised form of right-wing socialising. Launched in September 2018 with investment from the billionaire Mercer family and the millionaire YouTuber and...

Twelve years after 2013 coup

A report from Miami, Florida

Brexit and myths of Englishness

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? —Langston Hughes, “Harlem: A Dream Deferred”

“ Haji Agha  is not merely the name of a fictional character —it is a title that embodies a social type deeply rooted in Iran’s historical class structure…  a kind of historical alliance emerges between religion,  the bazaar , violence, and the state apparatus, whose goal is to suppress public awareness, preserve class hierarchy, and sustain exploitation.”

Sharaa’s authoritarian centralisation stumbles in Suweida

A long [6400 words] but good summary and analysis by Adam Shatz . Here is a selection: – The United States has given its imprimatur to Israel’s regional hegemony. – When Trump made plain that he wanted Israel to stop bombing [Iran], Netanyahu had little choice but to acquiesce. – Israel also appears to be pursuing a long-range plan to weaken, if not to render defenceless, the other states in the region, so that none is in a position to challenge it. The instability and precariousness of such an order are evident to American and European politicians, but they prefer to remain discreet about them for fear of being accused of sympathy for Hamas or antisemitism. – For all Trump’s triumphalism, the ‘twelve-day war’, far from having ended Iran’s search for a nuclear weapon, may accelerate it. – Israel now has control of the airspace over Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria – almost boundless room for manoeuvre – and has always favoured unilateral military assertion over diplomacy. – Netanyahu ...

Santiago, 15 July 2025  

"Inequalities in access to vacations have remained stagnant in France for around forty years. Four out of ten French people still cannot afford to go on a trip. In a context where poverty in France has reached 'a level unmatched in nearly 30 years,' according to INSEE [ L'Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques],  this trend is unlikely to reverse."

By Richard Seymour At the origin of modern political conspiracism lies a myth of subversive power, first fabricated in response to the French revolution. In 1797, two books appeared simultaneously. These were Abbé Barruel’s five-volume Mémoire pour servietterr à l’histoire du jacobinisme, and John Robison’s Proofs of a conspiracy against all the religions and governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies. Both attributed the revolution to a centuries-old conspiracy of secret societies (from the Order of Templars to the Freemasons), responsible for an assault on religion and political authority. This theory of totalitarianism avanta la laettere is the template from which modern conspiracy narratives – from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the ‘New World Order’ – are cut. Conspiracy theory today, says Fredric Jameson, is an attempt to represent the ‘social totality’ at the level of fantasy in a way that evades ‘liberal an...

By Richard Seymour Disasters are supposed to pull us together. They are supposed to produce a wave of euphoria among survivors once the worst has passed, forging in the ruins a ‘city of comrades’. Rebecca Solnit shows us how disasters can spawn ‘disaster communities’ and even, by disrupting the ordinary misery and alienation of daily life, inflame utopian desires.  It isn’t necessarily so. A ‘city of comrades’ is only likely to appear in special circumstances, where the disaster doesn’t disperse the community, where the community was not already split along multiple faultlines (class, race, religion), where there were already traditions of self-help, mutualism and solidarity, and – in some instances – where the disaster is not inflicted by other human beings. What happens when the misery is ‘anthropogenic’, the resources for self-help are negligible, social trust is in the gutter, and the expected reflexes of decency and charity fail to materialise? In his work on disasters over se...

  There could be a happy world, where cooperation was more in evidence than competition, and monotonous work is done by benevolent and beneficent machines, where what is lovely in nature is not destroyed to make room for hideous machines whose sole business is to kill, and where to promote joy is more respected than to produce mountains of corpses. Do not say this is impossible: it is not. It waits only for men to desire it more than the infliction of pain. There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere. — Bertrand Russell , Last Essay: 1967

Palestinians force to leave and Israeli settlers move in . This is a pattern being repeated in villages across the Jordan Valley in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. We're in Mu’arrajat, which until a week ago had a population of around 500 people.

I won't miss waiting for the next financial disaster because we haven't dealt with the underlying causes of the last one. Nor will I be disappointed not to experience the results of the proto-fascism that's rearing its grisly head right now. It's the utter idiocy, the sheer wrong-headedness of the response that beggars belief. I mean, your society's broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No let's blame the people with no power and no money and these immigrants who don't even have the vote, yeah it must be their fucking fault. So I might escape having to witness even greater catastrophe. — Iain Banks , Scottish author (1954-2013)