Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Societal repression in Egypt The Tentacles of autocracy Yes, a good point about the horizontal repression in society, and the class character of it. It is Freud meeting Wilhelm Reich meeting Weber and Marx. Missing: How long would the current regime and its state repression in Egypt along with the socio-economic structure and power relations last if international capital, Western states, the IMF, the  Paris Club, etc cease their support?  Six months? A year? Two years?

In English and Arabic Alain Badiou on the Egyptian revolution آلان باديو عن الثورة المصرية

"The melancholy songs of Pashaei represent the gloomy mood of a generation that feels it has got the blues. This “blue generation” feels cheated by a corrupt autocracy and has little faith in existing political ideologies. The main distinguishing feature of their political sensibility is the lack of any form of emotional attachment or sense of belonging to the political institutions or culture of post-revolutionary Iran. The blue generation inscribes itself in the short temporality of the last ten to fifteen years, therefore its experience of post revolutionary Iran has been of rampant corruption, lack of social freedoms, government inefficiency, religious tyranny, and curtailment of basic individual rights." A "Blue" Generation and Protests in Iran

Rough sleepers in England rise for seventh year Who owns London?

Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer

India: Minister refuses to retract statement on Darwin's theory

Capitalism realism means "a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian - where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone - is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we're lucky that we don't live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it's better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc."  — Alain Badiou And as Mark Fisher commented: "The 'realism' here is analogous to the deflation