Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

New York congressional primary

"The current UK government nevertheless continues to drive outsourcing into the state’s most complex and socially essential service domains. It’s enough to make Leonid Brezhnev blush." "Why public sector outsourcing is less efficient than Soviet planning"

At the British Library, London Sex, Botany and Empire

Britain The historical gain that the fundamentalists have not privatised yet. Or, they have partially privatised, along with a steady creation of private healthcare. Imagine how much profit a Branson could make if it is given to him and thus he speeds up  commercial travels to space!

The consevatives and the oppressors of yesteryear, portray themselves and teach their children today that they are pioneers of "liberation and freedoms." "(Southern Indian women, whose breasts were traditionally uncovered, found themselves obliged to undergo the indignity of conforming to Victorian standards of morality; soon the right to cover one's breasts became a marker of upper-cast respectability and efforts were made to deny this privilege to lower-caste women, leading to such missionary-inspired colonial curiosities as the Breast Cloth Agitation from 1813 to 1859 in Travancore and Madras Presidency.)"  The Indian Penal Code, "drafted by the British imperial rulers in the mid-nineteenth century criminalizes homosexuality under Section 377; creates a crime of 'sedition' under which students shouting slogans have been arrested; and applies a double standard to the commission of adultery."  "The irony is that in India there has

Excellent! A must read. " ‘The deterioration of the intelligentsia,’ Arthur Koestler wrote, ‘is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat. They are symptoms of the same fundamental process.’ One clear sign of intellectual infirmity is the desperation with which centrists and liberals, removed from the cockpit of American power, forage for ideas and inspiration on the lumpen right.  What differentiated the Western model from many Asian, African and Latin American networks of women’s groups and indigenous peoples, or alternative development and environmental organisations, was its indifference to ‘economic and social rights’: what Moyn defines as ‘entitlements to work, education, social assistance, health, housing, food and water’. Focusing on the violations of individuals’ rights by states, human rights groups valuably documented the crimes of the Contras in Nicaragua, the army and death squads in El Salvador,

" Turkey has been under a state of emergency since a failed coup in July 2016, with 107,000 public servants and soldiers dismissed from their jobs. More than 50,000 people have been imprisoned pending trial since the uprising." The BBC is lost in translation. In the very same paragraph , "coup" and "uprising" were used to mean the same thing. We know that what happened in 2016 was a coup and the major Western powers were slow to condemn it. They played watch-and-see first. In these elections, the HDP has scored above the 10% threshold that will aloow it to enter parliament despite its leader being in prison. The 2016 coup: an analysis by Stratfor "Regardless of whether Erdogan is at its helm, Turkey will continue down its expansionist path, a path that was unlikely to be short-circuited by a haphazard coup led by a motley group of Islamists and nationalists. Turkey is on this course, at this stage in history, because geopolitics wills it. B

A photograph by Hadeer Mahmoud, Cairo Metro, 07 April 2016

Grenfell Tower (the residential tower in London, which was destroyed by fire in June 2017, resulting in 71 deaths) is named after Francis Grenfell , a murderer and Marshal who served in committing crimes in Egypt and South Africa and other colonies of the British Empire. One should be proud of tens of names which adorn public places in England!

"Ultimately, the greatest power of Fahmy’s adaptation is its ability to provide the audience with few obvious escape points, fewer firm assumptions to which to return safely. Even the characters’ best dreams for themselves seem illusory, almost ill-gotten. “Let us get out of Cairo. Out of the Yacoubian Building,” Busayna muses to Zaki, “we’ll be free. We’ll be together.” But few in this world have the luxury of escaping their own history: that history lives above you, works at your feet, sticks to you like the residue of centuries, and is liable to kill you in the end." A new adaptation of the Yacoubian Building