Skander Kacem
  • The Homestead Hypothesis: Can Planned Settlement Reverse Territorial Decline? (26 Jan 2026)
    Youth unemployment exceeds 49% and the coast cannot absorb more migration. This essay examines whether conditional land allocation -homestead model- in Tunisia's interior offers a realistic path forward; or whether water scarcity, unclear tenure, and bureaucratic gridlock make it another well; meaning dead end.
  • Monarchy for Beginners Or What the Gulf Knows (That Ben Ali Didn't) (19 Jan 2026)
    If dictatorships are temporary, monarchy is the upgrade. Why dictators fall and monarchs endure: a sarcastic blueprint of clerics, clients, cousins, guns, and the trick that turns citizens into subjects.
  • The Capture of Mecca (17 Jan 2026)
    How the Islamic sacred places moved from shared inheritance to centralized control and what a neutral Mecca, governed like the Vatican, might have changed.
  • When ‘Sahih' Becomes Authority (13 Jan 2026)
    Hadith scholars claim method, not faith. But when doubt is heresy and the output is noise, we're not dealing with science. We're dealing with a second canon.
  • The Graveyard Managers: On Decline, Identity, and the Privatization of History (08 Jan 2026)
    Explore how insecurity transforms civic belonging into tribal identity. A comparative look at the Arab Golden Age, the modern West, and the policing of the past.
  • The War After the War (05 Jan 2026)
    The war doesn’t end with treaties. It moves into archives, language, and schools. On history, power, and the cruelty of narrative monopoly.
  • The Imported Identity: Why Berber is Not Just Amazigh (25 Dec 2025)
    Why replacing Berber with Amazigh in Tunisia imports a purity myth that erases our complex history of contact, mixture, and coastal continuity.
  • The Gradient Ladder (23 Dec 2025)
    We didn’t dissolve the racial ranking; we refined it. From the history of European assimilation to the biased lens of social media algorithms, explore how society traded a theory of bloodlines for a theory of gradients and why the 'drawbridge' of privilege remains as guarded as ever.
  • The Victim Stance and the Problem of Closure (19 Dec 2025)
    An analytical essay on the victim stance: how pain becomes currency, how it spreads across politics and private life, and why the refusal of closure corrodes justice, redemption, and accountability.
  • Why the Apologies Never Come (17 Dec 2025)
    Why did the world punish the Nazis but ignore colonial crimes? This essay argues that accountability is a function of power, not morality. From the missing archives to the Thiaroye massacre, discover why the colonial bill remains unpaid.
  • When Discrimination Becomes an Alibi (15 Dec 2025)
    When a file is pushed up or buried, the harm is procedural. So why do we treat suspected racism like a psychological mystery instead of auditing the deviation and fixing the queue?
  • From Distance to Friction: Rethinking How Inequality Is Produced (14 Dec 2025)
    The privilege walk produces guilt, not change. Inequality isn’t about where you start, but the friction built into the system.
  • Ghosts with ID Cards (11 Dec 2025)
    Tunisia has street names, ID cards, and utility meters. What it lacks is a live connection between people and places. Citizens exist on paper but remain invisible to institutions. They pay bills but cannot build credit. They move but cannot carry their history. They live in neighbourhoods the state cannot count and will not serve. This is not a technical failure. It is a political choice.
  • Are We Living Inside a Prisoner’s Dilemma? A Thought Experiment on Trust and Society (10 Dec 2025)
    Why does modern life feel so transactional? This essay examines the Prisoner’s Dilemma as a social pattern and how our systems quietly erode cooperation.
  • From Dido to the Fall of Rome: A Tunisian Fable (08 Dec 2025)
    How Dido's curse was fulfilled not by Hannibal, but by the Vandals. A Tunisian story of prophecy, adoption, and the sack of Rome in 455 CE.
  • Mass Deportations Are Inevitable: Are We Ready? (07 Dec 2025)
    Mass deportations are coming to Europe. The difference between crisis and opportunity is timing. A strategy for the Tunisian diaspora.
  • The Homeless Mind (03 Dec 2025)
    The curse of the polyglot: speaking three languages means being a refugee in all of them. On linguistic colonization and intellectual homelessness.
  • What Comes After Islamophobia? (30 Nov 2025)
    From Judeophobia to antisemitism to the camps. Why 'Islamophobia' follows the same trajectory that once failed to protect Jews.
  • Inherited Curricula: A Call for Intellectual Self‑Respect (28 Nov 2025)
    Why teaching Kant and Hume without their racism is amnesia. A call to place European thinkers alongside Ibn Khaldun, Zera Yacob, and others.
  • Citizens of the Library (27 Nov 2025)
    How Latinization erased the origins of Ibn Sina, Al-Khwarizmi, and Ibn Rushd. Medieval translation as assimilation and identity erasure.
  • The Architecture of Survival (26 Nov 2025)
    How Tunisian proverbs formed a counter-machinery to colonial decrees. The colonizer had laws; the colonized had sentences passed through generations.
  • The Bureaucratic Hallucination of Migrationshintergrund (24 Nov 2025)
    Germany's unstable definition of 'migration background' varies by state and year. Once applied, the label calcifies even as definitions change.
  • The Irony of the Savior (07 Nov 2025)
    The paradox of Western civilization awaiting a Savior who would likely come to dismantle it. Where would a return actually happen?
  • The Imperial Boomerang (05 Nov 2025)
    How techniques of domination tested abroad eventually return home. The normalization of violence at the periphery sets domestic precedents.
  • Western is a Status, Not a Geography (02 Nov 2025)
    Why 'Western civilization' has no fixed borders. Examining how the label expands to include conquered territories while demanding assimilation.
  • The Sarcasm of Repetition (25 Oct 2025)
    When history repeats itself, is it prophecy or a schedule? Examining how the 'cycle of violence' narrative absolves oppressors of choice.
  • How Made in Germany Became Made by Someone We Won't Hire (20 Oct 2025)
    The hidden labor behind German engineering. How Werkverträge and temp agencies exploit skilled workers while corporations claim innovation.
  • Fuck your darija. We speak Tunisian. (16 Oct 2025)
    Why Tunisian is a language, not a dialect. Deconstructing the politics of 'darija' and the case for official recognition of Tunisia's native tongue.
  • Forecasting Customer Lifetime Value Using RFM-Analysis and Markov Chain (01 Mar 2022)
    Customer Lifetime Value quantifies the total present value of all future cash flows from a customer relationship. Using Markov chains to project multi-year value.
  • From RFM Analysis to Predictive Scoring Models (06 Jan 2022)
    From describing the past to predicting the future. Which customers will purchase next year? How much will they spend?
  • Customer Segmentation and Profiling: A Managerial Approach (03 Dec 2021)
    Treating all customers the same way guarantees mediocrity. The other side of segmentation: when business logic drives the groupings directly.
  • Customer Segmentation using RFM Analysis (25 Oct 2021)
    Who are my customers? Which ones deserve my attention? Three deceptively simple questions that most businesses still struggle to answer.
  • SKU Clustering for Inventory Optimization (15 Oct 2021)
    The goal of inventory management is to order the right amount at the right time. Grouping products by sales velocity and volatility using hierarchical clustering.
  • Plotting with Seaborn - Part 3: Multivariate Visualization (18 Sep 2021)
    What happens when you need to make the same comparison across twenty different categories? Part 3: FacetGrid, PairGrid, and small multiples.
  • Plotting with Seaborn - Part 2: Distributions & Statistical Plots (07 Sep 2021)
    Beyond displaying values: understanding distributions, finding outliers, and comparing groups statistically. Part 2: distributions and statistical plots.
  • Plotting with Seaborn - Part 1: Foundations & Essential Plots (23 Aug 2021)
    Matplotlib gives you control over every pixel, but that control costs time. Seaborn handles the tedious work. Part 1: foundations and essential plots.
  • GitHub Crawler: Beyond Basic Scraping (04 Jul 2021)
    When scraping makes sense, when it doesn't, and how to do it responsibly. Building a GitHub user crawler with async programming.
  • Introduction to Web Scraping with Python (25 Jun 2021)
    An introduction to extracting data from the web. HTML structure, DOM traversal, and building a working crawler with Python and BeautifulSoup.
  • Common Metrics Derived From the Confusion Matrix (15 Jun 2021)
    The practical side of classification metrics. Precision, recall, F1, MCC, and the implementation details that textbooks skip over.
  • The Confusion Matrix: Why Accuracy Is a Dangerous Illusion (07 Jun 2021)
    A fraud detection system with 99.9% accuracy might be worthless. Why scalar metrics hide what matters, and how to think about errors that aren't symmetric.
  • The Least Squares Method (01 Jun 2021)
    Deriving the normal equations by working backwards from what we want to achieve. The foundation of linear regression, explained geometrically.
  • Linear Algebra for Machine Learning (23 May 2021)
    Gilbert Strang's MIT lecture series changed how I think about linear algebra. Notes on the mathematical machinery behind modern machine learning.