Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

German chemicals delivered to al-Asad regime The most important bit in the news is not that the chemicals were delivered at the height of the war (after all the German company might have thought/had the good intentions as a company making profit that the chemicals would help save Syrian lives), but that shares in the company have fallen, which is almost a disaster for some Germans! While the lawmakers and human rights institutions investigate the matter, my solidarity go to those shareholders who have been affected.

A liberal view on migration, i.e. one that avoids to deal with the structure of global capitalism, the nation state, power relations between states, and capitalism under/uneven development. And at the present situation a major factor is the low growth of the economies of the advanced capitalist countries and its impact on the power relations at home, including the rise of the far-right. Thus the usefulness of an external enemy: the monstrous alien. How the West is withdrawing into a bunker of its making

"Hong Kong's Last Battle"

A liberal view Saving capitalism to make it work for the many? I wonder when did that ever happen in history and how it would work. Robert Reich: "It's America's economic system that's broken"

This cannot be accurate, for these kind of surveys do not show the wide difference between classes in major issues.  Such a survey is merely a snapshot that refletcs the blockage towards full capitalist  "development" and therefore the dominance of bourgeois norms (e.g. sexual and gender norms), the failure of modernisation of the 1950 and 1960s, the development of rentier economies, especially in the Gulf, instead of industrialisation  on the one hand and the defeat of the 2011 revolution on the other. As for the threat of the US and Israel, the Arab world is still a very strategic battleground where local ruling classes and international ones have major and common interests in restructuring or preserving the existing order. Major questions that could be included in the survey, and that could   provide a picture beyond the symptoms, are the type of politcal regime and economic system the Arab countries need, and how should the wealth be exploited and distributed, etc

Do not allow public issues as they are officially formulated, or troubles as they are privately felt, to determine the problems that you take up for study. Above all, do not give up your moral and political autonomy by accepting in somebody else’s terms the illiberal practicality of the bureaucratic ethos or the liberal practicality of the moral scatter. Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues – and in terms of the problems of history making. Know that the human meaning of public issues must be revealed by relating them to personal troubles – and to the problems of the individual life. Know that the problems of social science, when adequately formulated, must include both troubles and issues, both biography and history, and the range of their intricate relations. Within that range the life of the individual and the making of societies occur; and within that range the sociological imagination has its chance

"How to Run a Caliphate" Related: Approximately 11,000 Kurdish fighters lost their lives fighting IS No, Channel 4, Islam is not responsible for Islamic State