Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

" A funny thing happened on the tube. Two young, fairly affluent looking racists on the Victoria Line started hassling three teenage hijabis, calling them "smelly foreigners". It didn't seem, from what I heard, to be a focused anti-Muslim thing. It was about getting a sadistic kick out of baiting them, and enjoying their outraged responses. A woman was trying to talk the girls down -- because, though plainly not intimidated, they were obviously distressed -- saying "ignore them ", and telling the young men to "grow up". When they resumed their 'banter' about having to share a tube with a bunch of "foreigners", an elderly black man sitting near them said, "who the fuck are you calling a foreigner?" Which was a good point: their actions were bewilderingly self-endangering, and they didn't look the least bit up to defending themselves. This guy was ready to get up and lamp them. I blurted out something like, "j

Young white men [and women] are being radicalized

A colleague  of mine at Oxford was asked to see an undergraduate who was falling behind in her work. The student – a Muslim – explained that she had been suffering from depression and was being treated for it by her GP. My colleague believed the student’s explanation placed her under an obligation to ask the student whether she was being radicalised. A young colleague, an Arab, told me that when he tried to book a room for a seminar, he was informed that this was no longer permitted on security grounds: he had to get a ‘senior’ academic to confirm the real purpose of the meeting. Another young colleague was told that she had to carry out a security ‘risk assessment’ for a feminist seminar she was convening; she refused, and was repeatedly pressured to comply. A librarian was asked for a reference by another university: ‘Are you completely satisfied,’ they wanted to know, ‘that the applicant is not involved in “extremism” (being vocal or active opposition to fundamental British

"One can disagree with, say, historian Orlando Figes’s conclusions without querying the seriousness of his research, but his assertion in  A People’s Tragedy  that “hatred and indifference to human suffering were to varying degrees ingrained in the minds of all the Bolshevik leaders” is simply absurd (and his disapproving fascination with their leather jackets curious). In Russia, Virginia Woolf wrote in  Orlando , “sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them”. Of course this is a literary flourish, a common and unsustainable romanticised Russian essentialism. But even so, the formulation feels prophetic for this particular Russian story. Chernyshevsky’s dots describe the revolution itself. Pravda’s blank hole contains tactics. Unsayables are by no means all there is to this strange story, but they are central to it." Why does the Russian Revolution matter? See also this in the New York Times

The Violent American Century

The Arctic as it is known today is almost certainly gone by 2040 .  The capitalist mode of production will liberate it from ice. The good news is that " an ice-free Arctic ocean promises a shortcut for shipping between the Pacific coast of Asia and the Atlantic coasts of Europe and the Americas, and the possibility of prospecting for perhaps a fifth of the planet’s undiscovered supplies of oil and natural gas."

In this new Gilded Age, robber barons are no longer the villains