twc
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Q: “Aren’t all apes African (an artificial concept, however useful for some purposes)?”
A: “Africa” and “Eurasia” are nothing more than regions on either side of an isolation barrier to interbreeding.
The textbook example is the evolution of Darwin’s finches (and tortoises) on the distinct islands of the Galápagos archipelago.
Q: “Why are we not the sub-species to Neanderthals?”
A: This boils down to:
- Q: How did later (70,000 years ago) African Homo sapiens out-compete earlier Eurasians?
- A: This is active research.
- Q: What is the evolutionary impact of 65,000 years of isolation on Australian Homo sapiens?
- A: None. Australians had cohabited with Neanderthals and Denisovans in Eurasia. They are [just another] Eurasian variant.
- Cultural evolution is more significant than biological evolution for Homo sapiens from the Upper Palaeolithic onwards.
Modern Homo sapiens comprises one gloriously mongrel species.
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by
.
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by
-
This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by
Neanderthals are recognised as a separate species Homo neanderthalensis of the genus Homo.
Since Homo sapiens cohabited with Neanderthals in Eurasia, this arguably makes living Eurasians, and not extinct Neanderthals, minor sub-variety/varieties of African Homo sapiens.
In any case, the overriding socialist position, as always, is that “working men have no country” — Communist Manifesto.
Karl Marx on Henry George
Letter of June 20 1881 to Friedrich Sorge in New York
* * *
…Theoretically, Henry George is utterly backward.
He has no inkling of surplus value, and so wanders about in the superseded English fashion by speculating about its component parts as if they had an independent existence—about the relations between profit, rent, interest, etc.
His fundamental dogma is that everything would be just fine if Ground Rent were paid to the State.
This idea was first conceived by bourgeois economists, being advanced (if we disregard a similar demand at the end of the 18th century) by the radical followers of David Ricardo, soon after his death.
As I wrote back in 1847 in my anti-Proudhon book [The Poverty of Philosophy]: “We can understand why economists such as James Mill have demanded that Ground Rent should be paid to the State as a substitute for Taxes. This is a frank expression of the hatred of the Industrial Capitalist for the Land Owner, who appears to him as useless—superfluous to the scheme of bourgeois production.”
We [Marx and Engels] made the appropriation of Ground Rent by the State one of the transitional demands in the Communist Manifesto, where we remarked that transitional demands could only be contradictory measures in themselves.
But, turning this desideratum of the English radical bourgeois economists into a socialist PANACEA and declaring Land Tax to be the solution to all the antagonisms inherent in the present [capitalist] mode of production was the prerogative of [economist] Jean Colins, who proclaimed this great ‘discovery’—his ‘anti-landed property theory’—which has since been advocated month after month by his remaining disciples, who call themselves ‘collectivistes rationnels’ [rational collectivists] and who, naturally, applaud Henry George.
All “socialists” who support a Land Tax scheme have this in common—they aim to leave wage labour and hence the capitalist mode of production in existence, while bluffing themselves and others that if Ground Rent were transformed into a State Tax all the abuses of capitalist production would disappear.
The whole scheme is a squib, decked out as socialism, to save the capitalist régime and, indeed, to bolster it on an even broader basis.
This self-same cloven hoof (at the same time ass’s hoof) is unmistakably revealed in the declamations of Henry George.
And coming from an American it is all the more unpardonable. Henry George should have asked himself the opposite question: How did it come about that in the UNITED STATES, where land was relatively — i.e. by comparison with civilised Europe — available to the great mass of the people and TO A CERTAIN DEGREE (again relatively) still remains so, that capitalist economy and its corresponding enslavement of the working class have developed even more rapidly and shamelessly than in any other country?
On the other hand, George’s book, like the sensation it created in your circles, is significant because it is a first, if unsuccessful, attempt at theoretical emancipation from orthodox [bourgeois] political economy.
For the rest, Henry George does not seem to know anything about the history of the early American ANTI-RENTERS [the great land-grabbers] who were rather practical men than theoretical. In other respects he is a talented writer (with a talent for YANKEE aggrandisement too) as proven by his article on California in the Atlantic.
Naturally Henry George exudes the repulsive presumption and arrogance that is the telltale hallmark of all PANACEA-mongers without exception.
* *
(My translation)
The Socialist Party has one case — its Object and Declaration of Principles — its sole practical purpose and only reason for its being.
Lizzie45 urges suppression of the Party’s case to placate public timidity “People fear change, particularly proposed change which is untried and untested.”
Can Lizzie45 propose a change, that’s been tried-and-tested over the past century, that did not inexorably bind the working class tighter to capital?
The capitalist mode of production thrives on capitalism-friendly public timidity.
The past century has demonstrated, as decisively as any social action can be evaluated, that every conceivable alternative to the Party’s defensible case that has been “tried and tested” has spectacularly failed — even if concessionally judged on its own timid terms — the timid working class that voted for it and, moreover, it has emboldened the capitalist class that under the might of capital managed to finess and defang it.
Thomas and Alan might therefore consider what they already deeply know —
Willful suppression of the Party’s Object and Declaration of Principles eviscerates its sole defensible case.
In the interests of ‘mass understanding’ of the ‘origin, history, development, and by WHOM and WHY’ of ‘non-objective’ mathematics.
Take Number Theory…
Pythagorean triples (3, 4, 5), (5, 12, 13),… were known in the Old Babylonian Empire, in Middle Kingdom Egypt, in 5th century BCE Greece (Pythagoras) and in 1st century BCE China.
Oxford/Cambridge mathematician Andrew Wiles recently proved a mathematical theorem proposed by lawyer Pierre de Fermat (17th century France) that
Theorem: “There are no analogs of Pythagorean triples in [integer] powers higher than 2.”
[Abel Prize: https://youtu.be/cWKAzX5U85Q%5D
Challenge…
Please identify a recognised form, or preferably forms, of mathematics that you would ban by reason of ‘mass understanding’ of ‘origin, history, development, and by WHOM and WHY’?
Stopping Socialism — Justin Haskins and Donald Kendal
Video 1.
What is Socialism?
[October 2020]Video 2.
3 Unstoppable Arguments Against Socialism
[July 2021]Video 2. Timestamps
- 01:58 Socialism NEVER Works
- 06:58 Scandinavian “Socialism”
- 14:39 The Big Finish — Socialism is Evil
Adam, he quotes you directly multiple times.
I downloaded the Kindle version (US $3.99)
Apparently he has argued with us over the web.
He’s from The Henry Dearborn Institute for Liberty, “an association of pro-liberty professionals” and also a “research scholar” at a “leading free-market think tank”. In 2017, Newsmax TV named him one the nation’s “top 30 Republicans Under 30”.
His moral case against socialism — as proclaimed in our Object and Declaration of Principles — is that common ownership and democratic control of the world’s means and instruments of production will allow a world majority to impose its democratic decision against the will, morality, conscience and individual rights of “minorities”.
Here are his seven specific instances that “Socialism is Evil”.
Socialism’s Seven Deadly Sins
Socialism is evil because it forces socialists to commit the following “immoralities”.
- Meat — either ban killing animals or encourage (force) Hindus to kill cows, and Muslims and Jews to eat pork against “religious teaching”.
- Contraception and abortion — either force nuns to violate their “holy vows” or force feminists to violate their “secular beliefs”.
- Gambling — either criminalise gambling or force Mormons (of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) to act against their “conscience”.
- Alcohol — either go dry (and lose [state] revenue!) or force assorted Muslim, Protestant, Seventh Day Adventist sects to drop their prohibition.
- Arms — either support the right of “citizens to bear arms” or violate the individual liberty of [US] gun owners.
- Parenting — either violate the right of hard-line religious parents to instill “Christian, Jewish or Muslim” values into their kids” or push their kids into socially necessary jobs against their “unique desires and dreams”.
- Racism — “For Americans and Europeans, [socialism] should be a particularly troubling thought since they are far outnumbered by the rest of the world … Asia would alone have the power to decide how the world’s resources are used”.
He is willing to lay down his (or a working-class proxy of his own) life to defend the “individual freedom” instilled in him by his “morality instilling” parents to protect his ruling class’s monopoly of the world’s means and instruments of production.
The working class seeks no war between capitalists and their nations. The working class has no nation. It has a world to win!
The Juice Media’s “Honest Government Ad” on Net Zero by 2050.
The first part.
The basis. Humans have never reconciled their recently acquired (biological) consciousness with their anciently acquired (biological) instincts.
The claim. Humans are psychologically “screwed” because our flexible consciousness has shamefully conceded to our inflexible instinct (since our instinct can’t concede anything) that we act ‘bad’ despite knowing ‘good’.
The solution. Celebrate our consciousness, and we remove the biological impediment, the foundation of our psychological angst.
Griffith’s associates (from Wikipedia). Charles Birch was a Templeton (religious prize) winner. The radio shock-jock Alan Jones and the concept of “shame” are irreconcilable.
Capital, Vol 1, Afterword to the Second German Edition (1873)
* * *
- Meine dialektische Methode [= dialectical method] ist der Grundlage [foundation, base] nach von der Hegelschen nicht nur verschieden [different] sondern ihr direktes Gegenteil [opposite]
- My [= Marx’s] dialectical method is fundamentally not just different from Hegel’s — it is its diametrical opposite.
Conclusion. Hegel’s dialectic is Idealist. My dialectic is Materialist.
* * *
- Für Hegel ist der Denkprozeß [thought process] den er sogar unter dem Namen Idee in ein selbständiges [standalone] Subjekt verwandelt [transforms], der Demiurg des wirklichen [the real], das nur seine äußere [outer] Erscheinung [appearance] bildet [forms].
- For Hegel, the process of thinking, which under the name of “the Idea” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurge [= creator of the universe] of reality, which is merely its [= the Idea’s] phenomenal form of appearance.
Conclusion. For Hegel: The Ideal is subject. The phenomenal world is the form of Appearance of the Ideal as Essence.
* * *
- Bei mir ist umgekehrt [vice versa] das Ideelle nichts andres als das im Menschenkopf [human head] umgesetzte [realised, apprehended] und übersetzte [translated, interpreted] Materielle.
- With me, on the contrary, the Ideal [mind] is nothing other than the material [phenomenal world] grasped by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.
Conclusion. For me: The Ideal is nothing more than how we grasp the material world as process.
alanjjohnstone wrote “Here is a video on its [Cuba’s] vaccine programme” …
Lurking behind the France 24 video on Cuba’s Covid 29 vaccine program, i.e. the next video in the playlist, was France 24‘s video to mark the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune.
