Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"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