alanjjohnstone
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By coincidence the BBC has an article on Anglo-Indianshttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20857969Slavery, Nazism and Apartheid introduced a whole legal classification of degrees of "race-mixing", sufficient reason i think to declare that we are all mongrels.Out of Africa or multi-regional origins of human beings, does it really matter much these days? I believe there is even some evidence of Neanderthal and Homo Sapians mixing.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiregional_origin_of_modern_humansIt is racism and discrimination against fellow workers that we stand together and oppose. We oppose discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, age, physical and mental ability, religion, caste and, of course, class. Perhaps in the future we may add we oppose specism but right now it is the divisions fostered by capitalism which hinder human solidarity that we fight against.I think there is also evidence that taller people get preference in the job market and get higher up the career ladder. Symetrical beauty is more desirable than asymetrical looks according to psychological tests. So perhaps some "instinctive" reactions to appearance do exist at a certain level. But they are over-ridden by social factors, otherwise we wouldn't have had Napoleon.Preference for thin or plumper partners depends on cultural conditions, stout equals well fed and healthy which also means rich. Maybe it is the same with height.I read somewhere that in the past native American men preferred women with big backsides because in times of food shortage, he could have a slice of cheek to eat but i could be repeating an urban myth.
i just want to comment on the situation i have often come cross often and that is light skin is better than dark skin. Throughout the world there are various cosmetics and applications for both sexes to lighten the skin (some quite dangerous). Black appears not to be beautiful for dark skinned black people.This is i think not one of aesthetics or race but class. Think back to why we call the aristocrats blue-bloods – because pale skin that showed the veins revealed that you did not work in the fields under the sun or become weather-beaten.Similarly in Third World light skin denotes someone who is city bred, works in an office or school, not outside, doing manual labour.Every successful movie star or singer seems to be light skinned, the menial domestics remain darker. Michael Jackson was no isolated victim and that is the tragedy.Lighter skinned blacks has been demonstated to have better jobs and be higher up the pecking order than blacker blacks in such places as Cuba and Brazil. Thus again reinforcing the cultural class aspirations of the poor with a demand for skin lightening products.Many everyday popular brands re-focus their advertising to the alledged skin lightening qualities of their products such as Nivea to exploit the local market and increase profits. Where in the West it is usually about anti-ageing claims, elsewhere its the blackness of skin.As for kids looking like parents, from anecdotal evidence a lot of asian women want light skinned, big nosed, round eyed mixed parentage babies. Cosmetic surgery in Asia for the more "western" look is big business.
I notice that for a local election we aren't standing a local man. The rest of the candidates are SW post codes, ours BR.It's not the case or the face but his place that will determine some votes cast.
I understand what you are saying but to continue for the sake of argument i came across these comments“Right to work” has a long and fascinating history — it could stand in for the whole drift of political language over the past 150 years. The phrase was coined (as the “droit au travail”) by the French socialist Louis Blanc and became a slogan in the 1848 French Revolution, which was the first revolution in which workers demanded jobs rather than bread. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the “right to work” was a fundamental principle of socialism, and it’s set down as an article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, where it refers to the right to have a job with fair and decent working conditions and protection against unemployment.But the phrase was co-opted at the beginning of the twentieth century by opponents of the labor movement, who wanted to depict themselves as defending the interests of workers, rather than of employers. One of the earliest examples of this use of the phrase that I’ve found came from a 1903 editorial entitled “The Right to Work” in the Baltimore American, which attacked labor for paralyzing business and denounced their demands for fair wages and limited work hours as a kind of tyranny: “Any organization, whether or laborers or capitalists, which interferes with a man’s right to work when he pleases, where, how long, and for what wages, is unjust and un-American.” In the decades following that, the phrase became a watchword in the fight against the closed shop and the union shop, until “right to work” laws were sanctioned by the Taft-Hartley Act over President Truman’s veto in 1947……Labor and its supporters sometimes call them “right-to-freeload” laws. That isn’t inaccurate but it stresses the conflict between workers and makes bad guys out of the ones who won’t pay union dues, while it leaves the employers off the hook. Others have called them “corporate servitude laws.” That plays well to the liberal benches, but it’s not going to be very persuasive to the people in places like Michigan or Wisconsin who are on the fence about these questions — including a fair number of Republicans, as the California Labor Federation discovered in its successful campaign this year against a Republican-backed proposition that would have virtually banned union political activity. Those voters are sympathetic to working people but they don’t bristle whenever they hear the word “corporation.” And they don’t think of working as a Wal-Mart associate as “servitude,” just as a really crappy job. Like too much of the rhetoric of the left, the name is designed to make liberals feel good about their moral values, rather than to widen support or dispel the image of liberal sanctimoniousness.There are a couple of points you need to make about these laws. First, they’re designed by employers to break the power of unions by pitting workers against workers. And the laws tilt the playing field — employers can effectively compel stockholders to contribute to their agendas, but unions are blocked from calling on their members in the same way. But I don’t know that we need a new name for them — that’s all covered by that fine old phrase “union busting,” which was the criticism raised against Taft-Hartley — and not just by Labor, but by Dwight Eisenhower. Even in a bad era for unions, the phrase still sounds ugly and makes opponents of labor defensive (it played a bit part in the anti-Prop 52campaign). Of course “right-to-work” is so deeply anchored by now that a lot of the media are going to keep using it, but in that case you at least you can insist that they prefix it with “so called” or stick it in quotation marks—as in “so-called ‘right to work’ states,” and so on…"http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/decoding-political-buzzwords-2012?paging=off
When i have heard similar statements from the barracadist/insurrectionist factions i usually ask if they know how to fire a rifle much less know how to drive a tank.(Some fall into the trap of going against their over-emphasis of uneven development of consciousness justifying a leadership case by saying there will be desertions and disaffection within military ranks which is our own conclusion that with command of the state we would control an army who would also be influenced by socialist ideas. I have met some ex-squaddies who became leftists after leaving but none ever imagined a rvolutionary civil war)In all my long time associating with the left i know of just one, a then WRP member, who seriously followed up his belief that the revolution would be an armed one and had joined the local Paras TA unit to learn how to handle weapons.I have to admit he was always welcome on the picket line. When one scab, a known member of various right wing fascist groups crossed a picket line by brandishing a knife, he got his just desserts from a good kicking when he got caught unawares delivering mail in a dark tenement after the strike…no witnesses but we all knew who did it…As another asise off topic , I also remember an ex RSM tell me that if the Russians had invaded all it would mean for the likes of him and i would be that our postman caps would have a red star instead of the crown on it.
Off topic, a bit more on the survivalists, or preppers are they are increasing called…preparing for the inevitable collapse.There has been a misleading history about the Second Amendment with cherry-picked quotes to suggest that the men who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights wanted an armed population to do battle with the U.S. government. The actual history indicates nearly the opposite, that the Framers were deeply concerned about the violent disorder that surfaced in Shays’ Rebellion when poor veterans and farmers rose up in western Massachusetts. The revolt was subdued by an ad hoc army assembled by wealthy Bostonians in early 1787, just weeks before the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia.George Washington, who followed Shays’ Rebellion closely, was alarmed by the spreading unrest. Any review of Washington’s writings in the years after the Revolution show him fretting about civil and economic chaos. It is within the context of these concerns that the writing of the U.S. Constitution must be understood. The Second Amendment could be viewed as mostly a concession to the states, ensuring the right of a “free State” to arm its citizens for the purpose of maintaining “security” through “a well-regulated Militia.” The key Framers were mostly well-to-do white men, many possessing African slaves and/or land on the frontier inhabited by Native Americans. These American aristocrats opposed radical challenges to the post-Revolution social order. The concept of the Second Amendment’s “well-regulated Militia” was primarily intended to maintain “security” in the states, not undermine it. There were fears of more uprisings by poor whites or, even more frightening to many Framers, slave revolts or frontier attacks by Native Americans.Thus, with the Second Amendment in place in 1791, President George Washington and the Second Congress turned to strengthening the state militias through the Militia Acts of 1792. Their urgency related to a new anti-tax revolt in western Pennsylvania, known as the Whiskey Rebellion. Once the militias were strong enough – and with negotiations with the rebels failing – President Washington personally led a combined force of state militias to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. The rebels were scattered and order was finally restored. In other words, today’s reinvention of the Second Amendment as some ultra-radical idea of the Framers to empower the population to violently challenge the established order and overthrow the government amounts to revisionist history, not the actual intent of the Framers.On the Right, the idea of armed insurrection is mostly embraced by alienated whites angry about federal action in defense of minorities that address the legacy of white supremacy. They envisage fighting government bureaucrats intent on trampling the “liberties” of “real Americans.”On the Left, some are equally lost in fantastic conspiracy theories, obssessed by dreams of some glorious revolution in the future and wait for the inevitable collapse of The System, followed by a popular insurrection that somehow brings Utopia to the world.Extracted from herehttp://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13579-the-price-of-revolutionary-illusions
"…This is not the familiar question of whether our machines will put us all out of work. In fact, the question is whether we will start doing more and more intellectual work for free or for barter, becoming more like our ancestors. Instead of producing food or housing for ourselves or for barter, we will be producing content and amusement for one another, without engaging in explicit (taxable) financial exchange. Yes, there is a so-called gift economy, but there is also an attention market that may not be fungible or priced – a distributed, many-to-many economy that harks back to the old days…The trouble (for economists and traditional businesses, at least) is that this future disturbs traditional notions of economic growth. Companies that provide content will increasingly find themselves competing with individuals who offer entertainment for free."http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/201212271132754429.html
Is there any difference between the vanguard and the avant-guarde?'It is we, artists, who will serve you as avant-garde: the power of the arts is in fact most immediate and most rapid: when we wish to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble or on canvas;…and in that way above all we exert an electric and victorious influence…'http://bak.spc.org/subversion/utopia.htmlNot so much as offering leadership but igniting the imagination…so could we call ourselves avant-guarde socialists.
Brian, since the said website appears to be very much a "survivalist" one, it can hardly say everything is going to be alright !! Grab your assault rifle under your 2nd Amendment right and head to your cabin in the hills with its cellar stocked full of canned goods while the world and the economy goes to hell is its message.Perhaps though they may have a point. Didn't Luxemburg say the choice is either socialism or barbarism?Capitalism as a functioning world system may well collapse for a variety of reasons other than the working class abolishing it…environmental destruction, uncontrollable war, spread of disease…It is an irrational system as we see when we have oil, coal and gas industry in their own business interest but also against their individual interest as human beings act to under-play the global warming threat of their emissions in much the same denialist fashion as the tobacco companies criminally corrupted cancer research findings and their own culpability in the deaths of their own family and friends in the craving for corporate profits. Its a crazy world full of crazies.
Technically, the conference instructs *the party* not to use photos but I imagine it did not expect the local council to be putting up photos of candidates on websites. So can it be applicable?There is no reason why the council would substitute an explanation for the non-appearance a photo, and will more than likely state "photograph unavailable"Why should a photo garner more votes? Our case is that you vote us if you understand and agree with our ideas. Surely, if a person who decides his or her vote on the presence of a photo of our candidate it is a vote we do *not* want. It's not a popularity or beauty contest but a gauge of socialist consciousness and a measure of our own effectiveness as a party.As I said on the Vaux blog, we follow up with an explanation with a press release to local newspapers and the websites covering the election, and hope it is worthy of them reporting it. "The Party That Puts Principles Before Personalities" or whatever. It would have been worth a paragraph in the text of election leaflet but I imagine it is already printed.I withdraw my suggestion on Vaux that we get Danny to wear a V for Vendetta mask, (or put a bag over his head!!) . In retrospect that suggestion would make him a joke candidate but not having a photo of him would not.
A veteran Militant/SPEW member, leader of the Anti-Poll Tax Federation, quoted in Burns book Poll Tax Rebellion after the riot as saying “We are going to hold our own internal inquiry which will go public and if necessary name names”. Not that i would accuse him of being a police grass, of course!! After all he has Peter Taaffe vouching for him !!
Thanks for the link. The Subversion issue it was from had an article about the mid-90s postal strike wave.Although i didn't write anything about them for Subversion, i acted as an on-the-spot informant for them, in touch by phone, exchanging insider info. Edinburgh had 2 branch officials on the national executive who provided details of negotiations and who were also instrumental in instigating walk-outs so the line between unofficial and official at times were blurred. I remember one mass meeting where one of those EC members explained for legal reasons he had to disassociate the union from the strike and instruct us to return to work but when he did he told us we were to make a lot of noise and throw things at him…nothing more lethal than leaflets…and to ignore his statement and stay out. The press who had been excluded from the meeting dutifully reported that he was heckled in an attempt to end the strike. On another occasion we were on the verge of actually occupying the sorting centre to stop management scabs who had been brought up from England from working but the problem of the security of the registered mail and the cash held us back and would have led most likely to a police attack and criminal charges. But it was an example of how militant it had become. Another strike saw me being the SWP hero of the day when i defended them at a mass meeting for exposing some union/management collusion which the union said was just Trot propaganda whereupon i verified the truth of them. Anybody who has taken strike action know how the SWP hang around the picket like vultures selling their Socialist Worker, and never ever one to be had free from them.Anybody interested can read two articles about the strikes that i did write for the IWW's Industrial Worker, not many strikers these days start with a quote from Dietzgen…lol.Others written for Counter-Information, an Edinburgh free-sheet, i'm afraid have disappeared.http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2009/12/wobbly-days.html
