Dave B
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There was a ‘report’ in 2016 quoted from below;
Government Response to Home Affairs Committee Report: ‘Anti-Semitism in the UK’
Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government by Command of Her Majesty
December 2016
We broadly accept the IHRA definition, but propose two additional clarifications to ensure that freedom of speech is maintained in the context of discourse about Israel and Palestine, without allowing antisemitism to permeate any debate. The definition should include the following statements:
It is not antisemitic to criticise the Government of Israel, without additional evidence to suggest antisemitic intent.
It is not antisemitic to hold the Israeli Government to the same standards as other liberal democracies, or to take a particular interest in the Israeli Government’s policies or actions, without additional evidence to suggest antisemitic intent.
<ol start=”5″>- ‘Zionism’ as a concept remains a valid topic for academic and political debate, both within and outside Israel. The word ‘Zionist’ (or worse, ‘Zio’) as a term of abuse, however, has no place in a civilised society. It has been tarnished by its repeated use in antisemitic and aggressive contexts.
Antisemites frequently use the word ‘Zionist’ when they are in fact referring to Jews, whether in Israel or elsewhere. Those claiming to be “anti-Zionist, not antisemitic” should do so in the knowledge that 59% of British Jewish people consider themselves to be Zionists.
If these individuals genuinely mean only to criticise the policies of the Government of Israel, and have no intention to offend British Jewish people, they should criticise “the Israeli Government”, and not “Zionists”. For the purposes of criminal or disciplinary investigations, use of the words ‘Zionist’ or ‘Zio’ in an accusatory or abusive context should be considered inflammatory and potentially antisemitic. This should be communicated by the Government and political parties to those responsible for determining whether or not an incident should be regarded as antisemitic.
Response
The Crown Prosecution Service will consider the words ‘Zionist’ or ‘Zio’ for inclusion as part of its current guidance for prosecutors. The guidance covers lessons from practice and reflects on the changing nature of language and terminology in relation to anti-Semitism. As with all terminology, consideration would be given to all the facts and the specific circumstances of its use.
The rise of anti-Semitism 6. Police-recorded antisemitic crime is almost non-existent in some parts of England, as illustrated by the data provided as an Annex to this report. We question why some police forces, operating in counties in which thousands of Jewish people live, have recorded few or no antisemitic crimes. The NPCC should investigate the causes of this apparent underreporting and provide extra support, where needed, to police forces with less experience of investigating antisemitic incidents.
<ol start=”13″>- It is concerning that the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) is not able to provide reliable baseline figures on the prevalence of self-reported experiences of antisemitic crime. The majority of British Jewish people live in Greater London, so a national sample would have to be prohibitively large in order to obtain reliable data on antisemitism. CST figures, while valuable, may reflect trends in reporting as well as overall prevalence. The Home Office and the Office for National Statistics should commission enhanced samples in Greater London and other areas with large Jewish populations, to ensure that the CSEW can collect reliable data on the prevalence of antisemitism.
————————
I suppose at issue is this;
Antisemites frequently use the word ‘Zionist’ when they are in fact referring to Jews, whether in Israel or elsewhere. Those claiming to be “anti-Zionist, not antisemitic” should do so in the knowledge that 59% of British Jewish people consider themselves to be Zionists.
You could have also said;
Anti Germans frequently use the word ‘Nazi’s’
….in an accusatory or abusive context….
when they are in fact referring to German’s whether in Germany or elsewhere. Those claiming to be “anti- Nazi” , not Anti German should do so in the knowledge that 59% of Germans consider themselves to be Nazi’s.
and that ;
they should have criticized “the German government”, and not “Nazi’s”
if that sounds outrageous, then;
“….for hosting an anti-racism conference in 2010 at which a speaker made a comparison between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and the Nazis’ treatment of Jews. That violated another of the IHRA examples.
But again, what none of these anti-semitism warriors has wanted to highlight is that the speaker given a platform at the conference was the late Hajo Meyer, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who dedicated his later years to supporting Palestinian rights. Who, if not Meyer, deserved the right to make such a comparison? And to imply that he was an anti-semite because he prioritised Palestinian rights over the preservation of Israel’s privileges for Jews is truly contemptible…….”
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2018-08-08/labour-crisis-israel-anti-semitism/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Cook
Donning a ‘left-wing’ costume.
They have a ‘prejudicial’ principles against discrimination against ethnic and ‘racial’ groups.
For them it axiomatic to criticize Zionism.
The BBC and the ‘Guardians’ of the Deep State have an interest in undermining the Corbynistas.
As much as the threat to US lead foreign policy as any left orientated economic policy changes.
As with their selective and deceit by omission reporting of recent events in Brazil,
Venezuela and Syria.
Real Anti Semitism in the UK is of course a load of bullocks and you have to look very hard at the fringe far right to find it.
I worked in a factory near Harpurhey in the 1980’s and still do in fact.
That was North Manchester ‘heart of darkness’ when it came to racism and Bernard Manning country; an interesting character perhaps.
There was anti ‘Afro-Carribean’ and ‘anti Asian hard racism there then.
The sort of demographic of the employee catchment area.
All the way up to the top; never mind middle management.
Not that there was many that worked there.
The factory manager used the ‘N’ word, in its common meaning, at a works social at the table I was so happened to be sat at in front of about 20 people.
He came over to our table and was referring a young machine operator who rose up due to his talent and intelligence.
There was a non religious ‘jewish’ person who worked there as well and he had ‘jewish’ name, was known to be of ‘jewish’ ethnicity and although I hate to say it but ‘looked’ ‘jewish’.
Nobody ever gave him a hard time over it.
I have never had any personal first hand experience of anti-semitism.
Works of Karl Marx 1874
Conspectus of Bakunin’s
Statism and AnarchySchoolboy stupidity! A radical social revolution depends on certain definite historical conditions of economic development as its precondition. It is also only possible where with capitalist production the industrial proletariat occupies at least an important position among the mass of the people. …………………………… But here Mr Bakunin’s innermost thoughts emerge. He understands absolutely nothing about the social revolution, only its political phrases. Its economic conditions do not exist for him. As all hitherto existing economic forms, developed or undeveloped, involve the enslavement of the worker (whether in the form of wage-labourer, peasant etc.), he believes that a radical revolution is possible in all such forms alike. Still more! He wants the European social revolution, premised on the economic basis of capitalist production, to take place at the level of the Russian or Slavic agricultural and pastoral peoples, not to surpass this level […] The will, and not the economic conditions, is the foundation of his social revolution
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.htm
Lenin 1905
This absurd idea boils down either to the hoary Narodnik theory that a bourgeois revolution runs counter to the interests of the proletariat, and that therefore we do not need bourgeois political liberty; or to anarchism, which rejects all participation of the proletariat in bourgeois politics, in a bourgeois revolution and in bourgeois parliamentarism.
From the standpoint of theory, this idea disregards the elementary propositions of Marxism concerning the inevitability of capitalist development where commodity production exists. Marxism teaches that a society which is based on commodity production, and which has commercial intercourse with civilized capitalist nations, at a certain stage of its development, itself, inevitably takes the road of capitalism. Marxism has irrevocably broken with the ravings of the Narodniks and the anarchists to the effect that Russia, for instance, can avoid capitalist development, jump out of capitalism, or skip over it and proceed along some path other than the path of the class struggle on the basis and within the framework of this same capitalism.
page 44
All these principles of Marxism have been proved and explained over and over again in minute detail in general and with regard to Russia in particular. And from these principles it follows that the idea of seeking salvation for the working class in anything save the further development of capitalism is reactionary. In countries like Russia, the working class suffers not so much from capitalism as from the insufficient development of capitalism. The working class is therefore decidedly interested in the broadest, freest and most rapid development of capitalism….
http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/TT05.html#c6
Whether enough of this [ ….Russian Mir… ]commune has been saved so that, if the occasion arises, as Marx and I still hoped in 1882, it could become the point of departure for communist development in harmony with a sudden change of direction in Western Europe, I do not presume to say. But this much is certain: if a remnant of this commune is to be preserved, the first condition is the fall of tsarist despotism — revolution in Russia. This will not only tear the great mass of the nation, the peasants, away from the isolation of their villages, which comprise their “mir”, their “world”, and lead them out onto the great stage, where they will get to know the outside world and thus themselves, their own situation and the means of salvation from their present distress; it will also give the labour movement of the West fresh impetus and create new, better conditions in which to carry on the struggle, thus hastening the victory of the modern industrial proletariat, without which present-day Russia can never achieve a socialist transformation, whether proceeding from the commune or from capitalism.
I think Whinstanley of leveller fame had a clear enough concept of communism and the exploitation of labour.
If you read some of it carefully enough it also had proto historical materialist concept.
It wasn’t available to Karl and was discovered and ‘published’ by Bernstien of all people at the end of the 19th century.
The labour theory of value pre-dated Karl by sometime Eg Benjamin Franklin of all people.
It is a man of the New World – where bourgeois relations of production imported together with their representatives sprouted rapidly in a soil in which the superabundance of humus made up for the lack of historical tradition – who for the first time deliberately and clearly (so clearly as to be almost trite) reduces exchange-value to labour-time. This man was Benjamin Franklin, who formulated the basic law of modern political economy in an early work, which was written in 1729 and published in 1731. He declares it necessary to seek another measure of value than the precious metals, and that this measure is labour.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch01a.htm
Karl’s contribution as to labour power being a commodity itself tied up some loose ends and resolved some theoretical conundrums.
Lenin didn’t break any rules or theory by introducing state capitalism after Russian feudalism.
Other than the pitfall of the Bolsheviks taking on the theoretical historical economic function of the capitalist class.
All that happened was that rather the [super-structural] ideology of the Bolsheviks re-shaping the economic [base] of capitalism.
On a road to ‘socialism’.
Bolshevik economic [base] , state capitalism, went on re-shape or degenerate
Bolshevik ideology.
You could argue with the Bolshevik position they were already half way there on that before they started.
- I. Lenin
Eleventh Congress Of The R.C.P.(B.)[1]
March 27-April 2, 1922
The state capitalism discussed in all books on economics is that which exists under the capitalist system, where the state brings under its direct control certain capitalist enterprises. But ours is a proletarian state it rests on the proletariat; it gives the proletariat all political privileges; and through the medium of the proletariat it attracts to itself the lower ranks of the peasantry (you remember that we began this work through the Poor Peasants Committees).
That is why very many people are misled by the term state capitalism. To avoid this we must remember the fundamental thing that state capitalism in the form we have here is not dealt with in any theory, or in any books, for the simple reason that all the usual concepts connected with this term are associated with bourgeois rule in capitalist society.
Our society is one which has left the rails of capitalism, but has not yot got on to new rails. The state in this society is not ruled by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat. We refuse to understand that when we say “state” we mean ourselves, the proletariat, the vanguard of the working class. State capitalism is capitalism which we shall be able to restrain, and the limits of which we shall be able to fix. This state capitalism is connected with the state, and the state is the workers, the advanced section of the workers, the vanguard. We are the state.
State capitalism is capitalism that we must confine within certain bounds; but we have not yet learned to confine it within those bounds. That is the whole point. And it rests with us to determine what this state capitalism is to be. We have sufficient, quite sufficient political power; we also have sufficient economic resources at our command, but the vanguard of the working class which has been brought to the forefront to directly supervise, to determine the boundaries, to demarcate, to subordinate and not be subordinated itself, lacks sufficient ability for it. All that is needed here is ability, and that is what we do not have.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm
But you don’t need to be a Marxist to know that;
‘Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely’
Capital is a dense read.
That makes it a playground for intellectual bullshitters who come up with a load of esoteric intellectualized mumbo jumbo about what it is all about.
Which they do so the worse thing you can or could do is read other intellectuals interpretation of it.
I have read it.
But I started out as an ordinary comprehensive educated member of the working class and a chemist, and we don’t read books really and certainly not books like that.
Later in life I started reading the 19<sup>th</sup> century fictional classics for another reason.
So I have read them all of all of them; Austen, George Elliot, Bronte’s Hardy, Dickens etc etc.
I think that helped when I went to capital as I had got used to complex grammar, big sentances and all that type of shit that you get in those kind of books.
And I hadn’t been corrupted by reading stuff on Marx by intellectuals and they stuff they write is truly a load crap.
At the end of day capital is an analysis of capitalism.
But capitalism is shit and most people already know it without reading capital and what they think is shit about it is mostly accurate and is in Capital.
So they understand it better than they think they do.
Socialism or communism is much simpler and you couldn’t stretch an analysis of that or even a criticism of it [It doesn’t take long to do the greedy and lazy thing]
over more than one side of A4.
So it is take it or leave it or; socialism or barbarism
On the mangers of transnational capitalist class co-ordinating their activities to deal with problems or whatever.
Has anyone read the below.
I am about half way through it and it does mention climate change here and there.
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/giants-global
I suppose what was interesting for me was that Sweezy in his 1942 book,
which I finished a couple of months ago, touched on the subject as a tendency or prediction.
It is not mentioned in the Giants book even though references earlier discussions of the idea.
Sometimes you feel as if you have read books in the wrong order and should have read Giants first.
I suppose after having some fierce arguments of this with some of my climate change denial friends this idea of it being a hoax has to be addressed and can’t just be hand waved away like ‘christian creationism’.
A part of the problem is that a few individual scientists can come up with sensational theories and the press, for a story, will leap all over it.
Often omitting the consensus scientific opinion or more skeptical viewpoints of the majority.
But it can lead to the impression that it is more of a universally accepted theory than it really was.
If this one is a hoax it would be unprecedented in the modern scientific community.
It is not just people from the discipline itself that are raising the alarm but ‘reputable’
scientists from other disciplines that have looked into it accept that there is an issue.
Eg
A lot of people from other disciplines are better qualified to review it than I am and they mix in university staff rooms and have better idea when it comes to self serving sensational hoaxers and sincere scientists.
I think the real problem for climate change deniers is personal and I know them.
A lot of them have money and disposable income and they want to shop; I
think that is a stress relieving neurotic disease and a substitute for having a more meaningful life.
And thus climate change operates for them as a barely subliminal personal criticism of conspicuous consumption and lifestyle choice.
Conspiracy theories themselves in general are a product of a justified, to a considerable extent, belief that the ruling class manipulate and falsify evidence to control us.
The acid rain scare wasn’t a false scare.
The main problem was release of nitrogen and sulphur dioxides which can go on the to form Sulfuric acid and nitric acid, which is much much more acidic than carbonic acid that is formed by CO2.
I suppose they did go on to do something about that but it was a problem that was much easier to deal with than ‘capturing’ CO2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain
Not read the link.
The problem with capitalism is that it panders to and encourages the worst aspects or susceptibilities of ‘humanity’ for its own ends; the search for profit and accumulation of the means of production and thus [economic] power.
This shorter link should be of more interest for perhaps no other reason than Epicurus was the subject chosen by Karl in his younger academic career.
The ‘communistic’ content of Epicurus, along with it being misunderstood as decadent consumerism, is often overlooked.
http://thephilosophersmail.com/perspective/the-great-philosophers-3-epicurus/
Socialists to easily fall into the trap of allowing the capitalist class and it advertising industry and general ‘culture’ to define what is abundance and thus undermine a central plank of our case.
It is worth bearing in mind that they have been doing these predictions for at least 10 years.
The predictions from then to where we are now have of course all been wrong; it is significantly worse now than it was predicted to be 10 years ago.
5C increase would be catastrophic for places that suffer heatwaves.
People without air conditioning, or the young and old, start to die of heatstroke at 50C
At 55C they will dropping like flies in their millions in places like India.
As far as CO2 capture is concerned anybody should be able to realize that digging up a tonne of coal in a massive digger in an open caste mine and dumping it into a truck and ‘burying’ another 5 tonnes of CO2 that is a gas at atmospheric pressure or above -80 C, or whatever,is a problem?
The whole thing needs to be read carefully as business managers at universities are chasing after economic impact research grants.
It was initially looked at with a view to selling C02 as a commodity to be later released into the atmosphere when you pop open a can.
The whole point is as we know too well the prime directive of capitalism is short term profit not rational decisions; or even long term rational decisions re the profitability of capitalism.
The international capitalist class are fragmented into ruthlessly competing economic blocks.
They are , or the capitalist economic system, is endemically incapable of co-operating even to prevent their own obvious destruction.
I think it is expected that small changes in temperatures is expected to make droughts, when and where they occur , much more severe.
And with more evaporation and thus rainfall floods also much more severe.
Which might still be a small problem in Surrey but is likely to have more dramatic life affecting impact in places like India and Bangladesh.
It is expected in general for there to be more severe extreme weather events.
I think it is generally accepted that predicting the effects of ‘small’ changes of global temperature on local or regional weather events is difficult.
Watching hurricane events making landfall in the US, which is all that ‘matters’ might be one to watch in the next ten years.
It would appear that I am also a flexitarian.
There is for me an ‘ascetic’ element in that I don’t like the cruelty of factory farmed and bred animals.
I suppose that should include diary products and the way it is produced.
I have less of a problem with lamb for instance in the sense that sheep are bit more of a natural animal in more of a natural ‘environment’?
And they can or often are cultivated on land that isn’t fit for anything else.
I think capitalism for its own reasons has a tendency to encourage the consumption and production of ‘high value’ products be it rolex watches
or the Deleonist ‘filet mignon’ paradigm.
Actually that can affect non meat products like perfectly formed apples and exotic fruits like kiwi or whatever.
Creating and cultivating new desires and needs which requires more and more labour time value, as the value of current needs and wants falls due to increased productivity, also undermines a fundamental plank of socialism; the potential for abundance.
There is also the aspect that the satisfaction of a desire is often disappointing.
I worked in a chocolate factory for six months were you could eat as much as you wanted of anything that was rolling of any of the production lines.
It doesn’t take long before even the smell of it starts to make you gag and it took me years to get over it.
The problem is;
………every ton of coal burned produces 3.7 tons of CO2, the sheer volume of CO2 that must be disposed of makes CCS inherently impractical and overly expensive……..
That is close from the number I got from doing a basic chem equation.
It is a bit less for natural gas/ oil as it has hydrogens in it.
Not sure about the thermodynamics of energy per tone of coal and natural gas/ oil.
It is a bit more practical if you can pipe it locally to a suitable underground ‘storage’ location.
The scientific geological conditions of it remaining there and not leaking are not yet fully established.
I think at the moment it takes, energy wise, about 1/4 of a tonne of coal to capture the CO2 from burning a tonne of coal.
Theoretically they could drive that down.
The ‘plant’ infrastructure costs are enormous as well and need to build new power stations rather that bolt stuff onto old ones. But that could change.
On shore wind power in the correct location is now cheaper that nuclear.
The tree huggers have been a problem I think in the past for instance objecting to turning the outer Hebrides into a giant wind farm which I believe they are now starting to do?
Same with tidal energy eg barrages in the Bristol channel area.
[actually they did a big study on that, maybe the ‘Swansea barrage project? which was interesting as they costed the project in person hours so it had a lot of labour theory of value in it.]
The scientists/ engineers in the past haven’t helped much I think probably because nuclear and fusion research looked more ‘interesting’ than windmills.
The only option now I think is geo-climate-bio engineering ; which is a potential ecological Frankinstien; monster and the tree huggers will hate that.
It could be quick and inexpensive and easy to switch off.
The whole subject is highly polarised from all sides of the argument and it is really important to be sceptical.
I went to a lecture on the sun a couple of years ago by one of the world’s leading experts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucie_Green
She is really amusing.
The basic state of theory was that they had no idea at all about how it works or even why it is hotter on the surface of the sun than the inside.
Thus this sun spot data based on very limited ‘correlations’ on a relatively limited time scale and between sun spots and global temperature is highly conjectural.
I think current ideas of periodic mini ice ages is now being attributed to massive volcanic eruptions well away from Europe.
And detailed information on that or what was going on in Indonesia or Philippines in 1690 can be surprisingly difficult.
They tracked at least one down to a large volcanic eruption out there somewhere with the help of the gravel monkeys and radio carbon dating burnt trees etc.
Along with spikes in sulphur dioxide in Greenland ice sheet cores etc.
They can date the layers due to seasonal snow deposits and thus layers like tree rings.
It was later that they matched it up with some original ancient text written on bamboo sheets strung together which the used as paper.
The long term changes in climate is a phenomenon known about fairly recently.
Which is due the instability or variability in the earths orbit when looked at in terms of circa 100,000 years.
I remember stuff in the 1980’s about an impending ice age I think it was partly connected to that.
There appears to have been a time when the earth was almost all under ice sheets except at the equator.
Theories vary but most appear to see the cause as CO2 being removed from the atmosphere.
It is all fairly well understood by the current climate change people.
The current rate of change of CO2 in the atmosphere is unprecedented.
They can track that back at least 100,000 years from the Greenland Ice Core Project.
There are trapped air bubbles in the ice.
Squirt a bit into a modern mass spectrometer and it will tell you loads of stuff.
I really think it is too late to worry about it anymore the ship has struck the Berg and is sinking; might as well party on now.
It will probably start to really kick in in about 20 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_core_project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/discoveringGeology/climateChange/general/causes.html
https://phys.org/news/2018-05-ancient-scientists-climate-deep.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth
I think the technology is already available now to produce enough electrical energy from not burning fossil fuels.
It would probably take about 40 years to put in place which would admittedly involve consuming more fossil fuels to do it.
As to cars and stuff that would require the material scientists to catch up on better and better batteries and there appears to be a new generation of vanadium batteries coming on stream.
For planes etc
It is possible to produce organic carbon based fuel by stripping out CO2 from the atmosphere and using solar derived electricity.
And then it would just a case of steady state recycling.
That has a kind of 4 billion year working principle to go on.
It is that captured CO2 that we are using now.
I have been told that ships used to operate on wind power for sometime?
One of the biggest runaway greenhouse gas effects is feared to be release methane form warming northern Arctic tundra regions.
Once that gets started properly it will be game-over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions
I think the whole situation is a case of the so called ‘perfect storm’.
There used to several hoped for feedback processes that might slow the negative effects down.
Like the sea as a heat and CO2 sink etc.
As well as increased levels high white cloud formation reflecting light back.
But it looks like that is not going to happen.
There are some proposed Climate engineering or climate intervention methods eg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering
Clearly controversial ?
There was a team a Bristol University who were doing basic feasibility studies by flying balloons up and pumping aerosols out.
Although could work most of that out by using basic physics.
They were attacked for it even though they themselves thought climate engineering was a desperate and reprehensible approach.
The iron fertilisation was another one that would be cheap and easy.
Huge expanses of the ocean are deserts for photosynthetic phyto plankton because the surface water lacks just small quantities of stuff like iron.
There are also plenty nutrients deeper down but there is no circulation as the warmer water is at the top and is lighter.
The richer parts of the various world oceans are where you get upward flows of sea water which brings the good stuff to the surface for various reasons.
Germany has been making rapid progress on re-newables focusing a lot on windpower
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/renewables-cover-about-100-german-power-use-first-time-ever
As I was flying over it last year on a clear day using fossil fuel you couldn’t help noticing the huge number of turbines.
The cost of production and efficiency of that kind of thing has improved recently.
As has solar so grid electricity produced by solar is a lot lower than that obtainable by fossil fuel in lots of places like California so much so that the capitalists themselves are getting into it for profit.
Although I agree with most of the climate change people that is probably too late as we have gone beyond the tipping point with runaway effects.
Methane emissions from tundra and reduction in light reflecting and thus cooling ice sheets.
It is probably brace for impact and all, a bit unfortunately, just too late.
And just a bit too much easily extractable fossil fuel; otherwise its price would have risen more sharply and made alternatives more economic.
The idea of capturing Co2 and burying is a load of bollocks when you look into it.
