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Showing posts from September, 2017
"The app-based platforms are convenient, and customers benefit from cheap rides. But why should venture-capitalists monopolise the platforms? The New Economics Foundation has called for the Mayor of London to  pioneer a mutually owned, public alternative to Uber . This would be an excellent start, and introducing a taxi platform to London’s labyrinthine, expensive public transport system would hardly be a huge addition." Uber Red
There is an irony in this, as Farris observes. The European feminists’ insistence that migrant women’s autonomy would be furthered by the work of domestic service defined as liberating the very household drudgery that these feminists had long sought to escape. There is both a racist and a sexist element to this, Farris says, because “they reinforce the conditions for the reproduction at the societal level of Muslim and non-Western migrant women’s segregation, traditional gender roles, and the gender injustice they claim to be combating.” The Culture Veil
"Like anyone who has lived through war, I dream that future generations will one day be at peace, will abandon the weapons of war. But I know my dream is impossible. As a writer and especially as a veteran, I know that underneath the beautiful green meadows of peace are mountains of bones and ashes from previous wars and, most awful to contemplate, the seeds of future wars." The First Time I met Americans
"Baraka wasn’t concerned with whether white musicians imitate black musicians. His quarrel was with a society that allows some to rake in profits at the expense of others, a process that has consistently and aggressive." Why Culture Matters
Capital expansion has no religion "The treatment of the Rohingya is sometimes described as a crime against humanity. But we need to interrogate its sources. If we bring in some of the larger trends affecting modest rural communities, two major facts stand out. One is the far larger numbers of Buddhist smallholders who have also been expelled from their land in the last few years. And the other is the fact that large-scale timber extraction, mining, and water projects are replacing the expelled." Is Rohingya persecution caused by business interests rather than religion?
Yes. An Egyptian filmmaker is planning a rejoinder to the Hollywood blockbuster  American Sniper , with a film focusing on the "other side of the story" - the Iraqi fighter said to have killed dozens of American soldiers during the occupation. ' Iraqi Sniper': An Egyptian film-maker plans a response to American Sniper
الكتابة كفعل تحرري عند غسان كنفاني وإميل سيزار (Writing as a liberating act in the writings of Ghassan Kanafani and Aimé Césaire)
If the "civilised" treat their own people in this way , then one should understand the indifference to the 400,000 Iraqi children or the similar number killed by a Syrian regime they did not want to remove. Or, the 500,000 to a million killed in a genocide in Rwanda. Mechanisms have included sanctions, aid, debt, celebrities "saving Africa and defending human rights" ... There are exceptions though when  there is a profit to make out of some people or a demographic need combined with hostorical guilt (Germany). In the mid-19th century British capitalism deliberately legalised opium trading in China that turned millions of Chinese into addicts and made British commerce huge profits. The Chinese fought an unsuccessful war against the British to stop the trade. Well, in the 21st century there is another legal opium trade operating in the heart of America. It has produced an opioid epidemic across working-class middle America. And it has been created by big pharm
Religion Fights Back From Fields of Blood — Religion and the History of Violence by Karen Armstrong
Politicians and pundits in the West, observes Zarni, long ago adopted Aung San Suu Kyi as “their liberal darling — petite, attractive, Oxford-educated ‘Oriental’ woman with the most prestigious pedigree, married to a white man, an Oxford don, connected with the British Establishment.” " Burmese nobel prize winner turned an apologist for genocide " (?) Those liberals and leftists who had a brilliant analysis of the regime in Burma and knew very well that the Lady broke up with the regime or that the regime was dismanteled.  Who else is a Nobel Prize winner that comes to my mind? Sadad of Egypt and Obama.  See also Earlier this year, when a team from the  United Nations Human Rights Commission carried out research  into alleged human rights violations in Rakhine state, it refused to use any photographs or video it had not taken itself, because of the problem of authenticating such material. Their report gives meticulous details of their methodology.  Yet its fin
"Varoufakis explains how he gradually convinced Tsipras, Pappas, and Dragasakis not to follow the orientation adopted by Syriza in 2012, then in 2014. He explains that along with them, he worked out a new orientation that was not discussed within Syriza and was different from the one Syriza ran on during the January 2015 campaign. And that orientation was to lead, at best, to failure, and at worst to capitulation." Varoufakis Account of the Greek Crisis: A Self-Incrimination
After decades of robbery, plunder and selling of Arab oil on the cheap to the West, another big sell-off is coming. Heads must roll if the Arabs want to control their wealth. Saudi Arabia's big privatization plan to go head
" The post-67 radical movements in the Arab world can also be called 'creeping': no 'big nights,' no general strikes or coordinated revolution ..."  Actually, there were general strikes (in 1978 in Tunisia, for example) and there were "bread uprisings" in Tunisia and Egypt. The problems was that the left was already weak as a pole of attraction, the Islamist organization had attracted more members and had more money. The balance of forces was significantly in favour of the regimes (there were brutal and also supported by external powers to maintain stability). Despite their superiority, a few Islamist organisations either adapted to the regimes repression and containment or were crushed (Algeria with the help of the French), or both (i.e. they joined the regimes parliament in spite of being repressed, e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt). Also missing in the summary the blunder of the Iraqi Communist Party in the 1950s althought it was the bigg
See comments in the previous post.
An example of how we do business in Britain A BBC Panorama undercover investigation , has just reported that  abuses and assaults on asylum seekers by G4S staff in a detention centre near Gatwick Airport. Many have heard of the Olympics 2012 scandal by the same security firm. However, the trail of crimes of G4S is long and that has not prevented the British government from encouraging crime.  What other examples do we have: the crimes of the banks (triggering the 2008-09 crisis and austerity), HSBC banks money laundering, Panama Files, a court ruling that selling arms to the Saudi monarchy is legal (although we know it used in killing Yemenis), most aggressive neoliberal regime and the second least regulated product market in the EU 
I have just finished reading The Mosaic of Islam  (the ebook version) I have some comments and a couple of corrections. 
P. 38: "most Muslims do not understand Islam correctly." I find this shocking. It assumes that there is a correct Islam. There is a historical Islam not a correct or a wrong one. As Ahmad Shahab put it beautifully there are contradictions and coherence of what Islam is in most Muslims. It has been the case in most of Islam's history. And the spectrum is so wide from Mauritania to Indonesia.. 
 P. 58: There is no socio-political explanation of the reason(s)/background behind the emergence of Muhammaed and Islam. There is no mention at all of the state and the character of the new society as if the changes in the juriprudence just sprung from a Caliph's brain with no connection to the material life. 
P. 66: "Part of the reasons where there is so much chaos ..." How does the beginning of the chaos in Libya (an uprising and NATO inte