Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Novecento, Bernardo Bertolucci's epic Part 1 Part 2

British capital: productivity and profitability 

Yet abortion rights in Ireland and Poland, for example, are still fewer than those in Tunisia!

A guide to the Jewish billionaires in Trump-Russia probe

What kind of political discourse, with what social and po­ litical effects, is contemporary tolerance talk in the United States? What readings of the discourses of liberalism, colonialism, and impe­rialism circulating through Western democracies can analytical scru­ tiny of this talk provide? The following chapters aim to track the so­ cial and political work of tolerance discourse by comprehending how this discourse constructs and positions liberal and nonliberal subjects, cultures, and regimes; how it figures conflict, stratification, and dif­ ference; how it operates normatively; and how its normativity is ren­dered oblique almost to the point of invisibility. Part of the project of this book, then, is to analyze tolerance, espe­ cially in its recently resurgent form, as a strand of depoliticization in liberal democracies. Depoliticization involves construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require political analysis and

England Why are so many young mums struggling with depression?

After Obama has "liberated" Malala Angelina Jolie, a woman coming from the heartland of the West and imperialism, is on a mission to "save and rescue" girls and women who are "unfit and cannot help themselves". She is also urging young people to "promote tolerance ." Tolerance ? Where was that "tolerance" when US imperilaism was invading Iraq and Afghanistan, and droning weddings, using torture and rendition, and orphaning girls and women?  Didn't she and her ilk tolerate those criminal actions?

The political economy of a long depression

Pinker is, after all, an intellectual darling of the most powerful echelons of global society. He  spoke to the world’s elite  this year at the World’s Economic Forum in Davos on the perils of what he calls “political correctness,” and has been named one of  Time  magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”  His new book is Bill Gates' favourite book of all time! Pinker claims to respect science, yet he blithely ignores fifteen thousand scientists’ desperate warning to humanity.  It should be added that Pinker is an apologist of the US imperialist violence and he is Islamophobic. The grim takeaway ... is that racist violence against African Americans has not declined at all, as Pinker suggests. Instead, it has become institutionalized into U.S. national policy in  what is known as  the school-to-prison pipeline. Pinker  unquestioningly propagates one of the great neoliberal myths of the past several decades: that “a rising tide lifts all the boats”—a phr

The criminal Tony Blair has refused to personally apologise to the Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who was tortured in a jail in Libya following a rendition operation mounted with the help of MI6 ... Compare that with this: "When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust. There were hardly any Jews left in Poland, and Brandt, who as a socialist* [sic] was persecuted by the Nazis, was completely innocent of the crimes for which he was apologizing. But in doing so—with his historic kniefall von Warschau (Warsaw Genuflection), he was recongnizing the moral responsibility of the German people, whom he led as chancellor... Of course not everyone agrees that even atonement is due. Historian John Keay put it best: 'The conduct of states, as of individuals, can only assessed by the standards of their age, not by today's litigious criteria. Otherwise, we'd all be down on t