Searching for Oman: Towards a disconnected 2023

 Al Jazeera English

Back in 2013, I went camping for three nights in a remote area of Oman at the invitation of some Arab friends living in Dubai. They had overestimated my hiking abilities, but made sure I did not fall off of any precipices.

We slept by a stream five hours away from where we had left my friends’ cars. There was no mobile phone reception, and a lone Omani shepherd was the only other human we encountered over the course of our stay. I spent the days watching the stream, wandering around some boulders and small caves, and eating a lot of nuts and canned tuna.

With no digital stimuli keeping me unnaturally alert at night, I slept an unprecedented 10-plus hours under the stars. My seemingly eternal state of agitation dissipated, and life became magically surreal in its simplicity. Then the nuts and tuna ran out, and it was time to drive back to Dubai, the internet, and everything else that is wrong with the world.

In the decade that has elapsed since then, the Oman camping excursion has attained an almost mythical status in my mind, with the stream symbolising a sort of pre-technological Eden where it is possible to clock 10 glorious hours of slumber on three consecutive nights – a feat that, post-Oman, I never managed to replicate. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

‘Tis the season: The post-World Cup Christmas blues

 Al Jazeera English

When the World Cup kicked off in November, I was rooting for Mexico. Having resided off and on in the coastal town of Zipolite in Mexico’s southern Oaxaca state since the start of the pandemic, I had already amassed a good quantity of Mexican football shirts, and I watched the games at a café on the beach, where a television had been set up on a table in the sand.

A traditional Mexican blanket was hung to deflect the glare of the sun, and an altar was erected below the TV comprising burning incense, a green candle bearing the image of Jesus Christ, an enlarged photograph of Mexican goalie Guillermo Ochoa, and assorted good luck charms. A small audience would gather with the beer the Mexican TV commentators in Qatar had encouraged us to imbibe on their behalf, and the 90 minutes would pass in animated camaraderie, with plenty of hollering and colourful Mexican swear words.

Little did we know that, upon the elimination of the Mexican team, Morocco would replace Mexico in our hearts – in my case rather literally. With the help of a laundry pin, a piece of paper, and red nail polish, I amended the MEXICO emblazoned across the chest of one of my jerseys. The letters OROC took the place of EXI, and I was ready to go. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Mexico and the unbearable whiteness of advertising

 Al Jazeera English

Scrolling through Facebook recently on my phone in Mexico, I came upon an advertisement informing me in Spanish: “The moment has arrived to renew yourself.” A company based in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo León offered to loan me up to 250,000 pesos — more than $12,000 — to pursue the plastic surgery of my choice. An image of a bikini-clad white woman with blond hair provided additional encouragement.

A perusal of the company’s Facebook page revealed that she was not the only white person selected to promote these surgically focused financial services. In fact, not a single non-white person had been chosen to embody “renewal”. This in a country where the vast majority of people are not white, and where a soaring national poverty rate — nearly 44 percent at the end of 2020 — means most folks could never afford a $12,000 loan.

And yet the Nuevo León firm is scarcely alone in its extra-white marketing approach. Generally speaking, the chromatic composition of Mexican advertising exists in glaring defiance of the physical diversity of Mexico’s primarily mestizo (mixed heritage) and Indigenous population. As is the case elsewhere in Latin America and in other countries subjected to European colonial depredations, the Spanish colonial legacy in Mexico has meant that lighter skin is associated with societal superiority and economic advantage. And what is the point of advertising if not to make people want to be something “better” than they are? READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

El Salvador’s war on itself: The siege of Soyapango

 All Jazeera English

On December 3, Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador who is also a Bitcoin influencer and the self-dubbed “coolest dictator in the world”, took to his favourite platform for governance, Twitter, to announce that 10,000 soldiers had surrounded the Salvadoran municipality of Soyapango.

According to the tweet, which came accompanied by a video set to dramatic music, “extraction teams” from the police and army had been tasked with removing gang members from the area “one by one”.

The following day, Bukele tweeted another annoying video to accompany the news that “more than 140 gang members” had already been arrested in Soyapango, El Salvador’s most populous municipality and a satellite city of San Salvador, the country’s capital.

And the day after that, he reported that the Soyapango operation had entailed the largest concentration of troops in Salvadoran history — no small feat in a nation whose 12-year civil war, which ended in 1992, killed upwards of 75,000 people. . . .

Of course, in his euphoria over the unprecedented mobilisation of an entire army division, Bukele failed to explain why a president should derive such delight in effectively waging war against his own country. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

‘Hardcore’: The Mars of Elon Musk

 Al Jazeera English

Not long after commandeering Twitter in October for a sum of $44bn, Elon Musk – who is also the CEO of SpaceX and the self-branded “Technoking” of Tesla – dispatched an ultimatum to Twitter employees giving them two options. The first was to commit to being “extremely hardcore” and working “long hours at high intensity”. The second was to quit.

Musk had already fired approximately half of Twitter’s workforce – since anyone with a mere $44bn to spare on buying a social media platform is clearly in the business of pinching pennies. . . .

On the surface, writing about Musk should be like shooting fish in a barrel. The 51-year-old US-based South African live-tweets his bowel movements, makes penis jokes, gets off on anti-Black racism, and builds not-so-self-driving electric cars that crash into parked emergency vehicles. Unfortunately, this particular fish happens to be the richest person on the planet, who wields disproportionate control over terrestrial matters like the stock market and Donald Trump’s Twitter presence and who is now determined to make humanity a “spacefaring civilisation” as well – whether we like it or not.

As Musk told Time magazine, which shamelessly crowned him “Person of the Year” in 2021, the “next really big thing is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring the animals and creatures of Earth there”. According to Time’s obsequious writeup, Musk predicted colonising Mars within five years. Eventually, rocket ships would shuttle 100 people at a time to the Red Planet and then travel back to Earth, powered by Made-in-Mars fuel. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The massive hypocrisy of the West’s World Cup ‘concerns’

 Al Jazeera English

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently came out against a ban on rainbow armbands at the World Cup tournament in Qatar, which various European team captains had intended to sport in support of LGBTQ rights and against discrimination. Blinken flagged the ban as “concerning” and a restriction on “freedom of expression”.

The secretary’s scolding came on the heels of another rather “concerning” development on the world stage: a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in the US state of Colorado that killed five people and wounded 18 others. This, in a country that fancies itself the global role model in terms of respect for freedom of expression, human rights, and all that good stuff – and yet where it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to exercise their right to not be massacred at nightclubs, elementary schools, places of worship, shopping malls, and so on. . . .

Indeed, as this year’s World Cup host, Qatar has come under intense US and European fire on the issue of gay rights as well as migrant worker exploitation (not to mention the violation of the apparent human right to drink beer in sports stadiums). After all, Orientalism dies hard – and what better backdrop for the release of pent-up Western chauvinism than a football tournament in a bona fide Middle Eastern desert, enduring Orientalist symbol of Arab backwardness and resistance to progress? READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

World Cup 2022: Capitalism can’t kill football — try as it might

 Al Jazeera English

A week or so before the kickoff of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, I was walking in the coastal city of Zihuatanejo in Mexico’s southern Guerrero state when I passed a group of children playing football with a plastic Coca-Cola bottle. They were as gleefully animated as any group of children playing football anywhere, while the Coke bottle was, I thought, regrettably appropriate in a world governed by corporate toxicity.

It was particularly appropriate, perhaps, given that Coca-Cola and football go way back. The company, which has been an official World Cup sponsor since 1978, entered into a formal association with FIFA in 1974 – although its logo has saturated World Cup events since 1950. The partnership was initially ostensibly meant to promote youth development programmes, since there is clearly nothing better for youth development than ingesting sticky brown liquid that is bad for human health.

Of course, that alliance is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of global capitalism’s efforts to suck the soul out of football and eradicate any remnants of primordial joy by monetising and commodifying everything on and off the field. Given the deluge of corporate propaganda that we call “sponsorship”, the uninitiated football spectator would be forgiven for thinking Adidas was a football team – or that matches are waged between Emirates and Etihad airlines. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

It’s time to call US democracy what it is — a failure

 Al Jazeera English

Polls closed on Tuesday evening in the United States’ latest democratic spectacle: the midterm elections — a topic the rest of the world has already had to hear far too much about and will continue to hear about, as some of the results may take days or weeks to confirm.

What we do know is that the “red wave” promised by Republicans did not exactly pan out; while the GOP is likely to take control of the House of Representatives, a deadlock looms in the Senate. The outcome of the crucial Senate race in Georgia will likely be postponed to a December run-off.

The delays and uncertainty mean the timing is ripe for a new cycle of election denialism, with growing mistrust in state institutions suggesting it will be increasingly difficult for the US to keep up democratic appearances.

In this year’s race for the Senate, House and other offices, a majority of Republican candidates have denied or cast doubt on President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. So we will likely see quite a lot of politicians triumph in an electoral system they themselves have denounced as fraudulent. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

US midterms: Why abortion never gets old as a hot election topic

Al Jazeera English

Fifteen years ago, I had an abortion in the southwestern Turkish town of Fethiye, where I had been intermittently residing as part of my self-imposed exile from the United States. The procedure was performed in a gynaecological clinic by a Turkish doctor who whistled, sang songs and joked about my distinct lack of fortitude compared with his patients from surrounding villages – who, he said, were in and out of his office with no anaesthesia or whining.

While this will not be music to the ears of the so-called “pro-life” crowd, the experience remains one of the high points of my entire existence – which would have undoubtedly gone swiftly downhill had I been forced to reproduce against my will.

Had I pursued the abortion in the US, the extraction of a blob of cells from my uterus would have entailed far more bureaucracy, stigma, and money (and probably no whistling). Still, I would have had it much easier than a poor woman, especially if she was not white. Such, after all, is the nature of “equality”, “women’s rights”, and similar empty concepts that the US specialises in.

Indeed, in the self-appointed land of the free, reproductive freedom was never fully born; you might even say it was aborted. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The Darién Gap: A deadly extension of the US border

Al Jazeera English

This year, a record number of United States-bound migrants and refugees have risked their lives to cross the Darién Gap, the 66-mile mountainous stretch of spectacularly inhospitable jungle between Colombia and Panama. According to Panama’s National Migration Service, more than 151,000 people, including at least 21,000 minors, made the crossing between January and September.

The trek can take more than a week, with perils ranging from precipitous ravines and flash floods to vipers and ultra-poisonous spiders. There are also man-made contributions to the landscape, such as unexploded ordnance courtesy of the US military, which practised dropping bombs over the Darién as part of its Cold War mission to make the world safe for capitalism.

Then, as now, a world safe for capitalism is a pretty dangerous one for humans. And, as the US continues to maniacally fortify its borders to ensure that poor people will never have the same freedom of movement as corporate capital, that sociopathic policy plays out over migrant bodies more than a thousand miles away in the Darién Gap. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.