Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Mosul's children were shouting beneath the rubble. Nobody came.

" [Y]ou don’t bring about major political change simply by changing people’s minds. It’s their interests that need to be assailed, not their opinions. " Universities can’t get critical leverage in a situation of which they have become an integrated part, any more than a Picasso hanging in the lobby of the Chemical Bank can make an implicit comment on finance capitalism. By and large, academic institutions have shifted from being the accusers of corporate capitalism to being its accomplices. They are intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries." — Terry Eagleton Terry Eagleton was forced to retire from his post as John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester University in July 2008 Death of the intellectual

Yet in 2015, only eighty-one thousand workers participated in strikes, and only 170,000 days were lost to labor action.  These figures  represent the fewest strikers and the second-smallest loss to productivity since records began in 1893.  “The legal framework works against workers,” argues Chris, an IWW organizer. “It’s tailored toward management, but also toward compromise. If you reject that framework, then you can operate in a way that is actually really effective.” The rise of the unorganizable

" To be sure, Miéville, like everyone else, concedes that it all ended in tears because, given the failure of revolution elsewhere and the prematurity of Russia’s revolution, the historical outcome was ‘Stalinism: a police state of paranoia, cruelty, murder and kitsch’. But that hasn’t made him give up on revolutions, even if his hopes are expressed in extremely qualified form. The world’s first socialist revolution deserves celebration, he writes, because ‘things changed once, and they might do so again’ (how’s that for a really minimal claim?). ‘Liberty’s dim light’ shone briefly, even if ‘what might have been a sunrise [turned out to be] a sunset.’ But it could have been otherwise with the Russian Revolution, and ‘if its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them." The Russian Revolution: What's Left?

Book review: The Long Depression by Michael Roberts   (a pdf file)

More on precise air strikes and the higher moral objective to save civilisation.  Some collateral damage is worth it.

"China has already overtaken in per capita GDP or in PPP all of the world's other largest developing economies - India, Indonesia and Brazil. By 2020 China's per capita GDP will be higher than several Eastern European countries. As China has 19 percent of the world's population, quite literally never in human history has anything approaching such a large proportion of the world's population had its conditions of life improved so rapidly. That will be the astonishing measure of China's success in achieving "moderate prosperity" - it is, without comparison, literally the greatest economic achievement in human history." What China achieving 'moderate prosperity' means

London I have received an email saying that the attack, which took place yesterday, was "an attack on the values of democracy and openess".  Theresa May, the PM, has said that "the attacker was inspired by the Islamic faith". The intellectual disability (or the fundamentalist discourse) of some people are just disgusting. Has the PM said something else? Yes, she spoke about "the oldest democracy", "freedom", "forces of evil", and some other things of that nature. The ones we heard after the previous attacks. Update: the Prime Minister also said that "we saw the worst of humanity." She is not pretending to be ignorant; she is just a representative of an imperialist and chauvinistic regime for which the rhetoric of "humanity" is a PR for public comsumption. More than 200 people just drowned in the Miditerranean

Iraqi militias have no place in Iraq, says Muqtada al-sadr

How World Cup workers are deceived  ... and exploited

What we found is a phenomenon that explains, with remarkable clarity, the rise of Donald Trump — but that is also much larger than him, shedding new light on some of the biggest political stories of the past decade. Trump, it turns out, is just the symptom. The rise of American authoritarianism is transforming the Republican Party and the dynamics of national politics, with profound consequences likely to extend well beyond this election. The rise of American authoritarianism

Minor news items do not appear on the BBC fronpage Or When the objective is part of a supreme civilisational mission, collateral damage is worth it. Mistakes happen! Let's remember that we have to terrorize the terrorists there so that they don't kill us in the West.

Surprise! Surprise! British banks handled vast sums of laundered Russian money