Young Master Smeet
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Nothing was moved to the new thread, people just started posting there, I cannot merge topics across different forums (else I would just have moved the whole music thread to off-topic.) I simply closed the thread in this forum, and started a new one in the off-topic forum.
@Almamater
The reason I suggested moving the Music thread to off-topic is precisely because there are no limits to what goes in the off-topic forum, leaving the general forum for discussions of socialism.
My own collection of atonal drone music might not make the cut of most people’s definition of music.
@Paula
1: I didn’t delete the music thread.
2: I Closed it, and asked users to use the New Music Thread:
which they have been doing so.It seems to me that off-topic is a better place for the music thread, as the forum’s purpose is the discussion of socialism and the socialist party, it’s not a music forum.
@DJP,
I agree that I think the decentralisation argument isn’t sufficient (Cockschott, IIRC, would argue that if it can be calculated at the firm level, it can be computed at the global plan level).
For von Monkeys, IIRC, the issue isn’t consumer goods, but rational (and we will come back to that word) use of intermediate goods. He concedes that a socialist commonwealth can decide between 100 hectolitres of wine and 2000 hectolitres of oil, i.e. it can make consumer choices. But the production methods are opaque.
e.g. to produce the wine we can either use these two methods
Grapes….| 300 | 3000
Water……|1000 | 100
Wood……| 100 | 300With both methods producing the required quality and quantity of wine. Monkeys says we cannot rationally choose between the two without some sort of price metric, with knock ons for gluts, bottlenecks and shortages further down the production line.
As Robo says, we can use the law of the minimum, regulated stock control, etc. Cockschott says Kantorovich’s linear algebra can do the job.
My usual example of this is a sodoku in which one square is incorrectly filled in, after that all the other squares are filled in wrong, but they are filled in incorrectly while applying the rules correctly.
Now, Monkeys’ rationality is a flexible thing: in his introduction to a book about the Incas, a complex moneyless economy, he shifts the goalposts to say that this required tyranny to achieve. But usually, in rationality Monkeys is actually assuming his conclusion, a utility maximising market relation.
For instance, we could argue that so long as the goals of society are achieved, it doesn’t matter if a better productive method is available, our rationality is based on outcomes, not infinite ever increasing efficiency and sparing of labour.
Up at Wood Green today, smaller than previous gatherings there, I handed out a smattering of leaflets (there was a separate Fight Imperialism, Fight Racism grouplet that joined the march). They held a rally in Crouch End that I cycled past on my way home.
Some thoughts:
The Liberate Palestine angle does seem to predominate over stop the war or peace, maybe that’s just SWP successfully getting their branding out.
I wasn’t keen on their talk of booing MacDonalds and other businesses they feel support Israel, I think consumer boycotts are bad politics in any case.
I thought his argument was more that the working class was an active agent in its own creation, not simply a passive victim of impersonal forces, and so working class actors, in their own self interest, drove the creation of the wages system.
@Thomas More
Could you please start including some text (more than just one sentence) when you post a link: to give people confidence that they are not linking through to a harmful site, and also to comply with the purpose of the forum as a discussion place. I’m going to start binning posts that contain nothing more than a link.
This reminds me of the David Peace novel Occupied city which uses a framing device of a serial killer thriller to look at unit 731 (and also casts a pall over the serial killer genre by posing it against the backdrop of the world war and the atrocities of the Japanese army).
Wikipedia has a useful article on the Unit (I see that several of its members were princes, so it was clearly supported to the highest levels of the regime).
I suppose we should look at the world context of Japan as a dictatorship developing late and expanding it’s own colonial sphere: while looking at it’s mighty rivals, this line from the wikipedia article is chilling: “Japan started its biological weapons program in the 1930s, partly because the use of biological weapons was banned in interstate conflicts by the Geneva Protocol of 1925; they reasoned that the ban verified its effectiveness as a weapon.” I’d guess racist attitudes to the Chinese and other colonised peoples would have played a part, the idea of killing off ‘different’ people often appeals to colonisers.
Dear All, drunk on power as I am: I’m closing this thread, it is substantially off topic: General should be used for discussion/topical debates.
The forum scope is:
The SPGB web forums are operated by the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) and are intended to promote discussion of matters related to the SPGB, the World Socialist Movement, and socialism in general.
Simply posting music videos is not discussion.
I’ve created a new thread in Off Topic, please post any music related links there (unless it is for substantial discussion of the lyrics/context meaning of the song.
This seems to set out the terms of this debate
“James Hansen of Columbia University in the US published a paper with colleagues in November which claims temperatures are set to rise further and faster than the predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In his view, the 1.5°C target is dead….
“To regain some control over Earth’s rising temperature, Hansen supports accelerating the retirement of fossil fuels, greater cooperation between major polluters that accommodates the needs of the developing world and, controversially, intervening in Earth’s “radiation balance” (the difference between incoming and outgoing light and heat) to cool the planet’s surface.”
Part of the issue, if I understand it correctly, is how much latent warming there is in the system, even if we hit net zero.
The actual article by Mann proposes: “(1) a global increasing price on GHG emissions accompanied by development of abundant, affordable, dispatchable clean energy, (2) East-West cooperation in a way that accommodates developing world needs, and (3) intervention with Earth’s radiation imbalance to phase down today’s massive human-made ‘geo-transformation’ of Earth’s climate. Current political crises present an opportunity for reset, especially if young people can grasp their situation.” (Indeed, he recognises the political nature of the question, but his solution is a party not funded by “special interests”.
This is a useful article: “However it is becoming clear that Israeli military intelligence had collected specific information on how Hamas could invade. Additionally, they had evidence of what assets and techniques Hamas were likely to use, and what Israeli facilities and possessions would be targeted. From, observing rehearsals, they also had information about the level of violence Hamas terrorists were willing to inflict.”
But: “The assessment about Hamas appears to have been dismissed for three key reasons.
“First, a belief that Hamas did not have the capabilities to carry out the attack, nor the intention to do so because it would fall outside of their historic pattern of behaviour.
“Second, these beliefs about Hamas were not thoroughly challenged within Israeli intelligence nor through sharing the assessment with international partners who might have had useful intelligence on this.
Third, Israeli defences, be they deeply buried sensors, walls, or automatically defended sections of the border, were considered to be too strong for Hamas.”
This has fed conspiracy theories that Israel let the attack happen, I think the author of this article is probably closer, that groupthink and over-estimation of their own defences (plus the policy driven need to take troops to the West Bank) are to blame.
The added coincidence of the Nova festival (which added to the overall chaos of the situation) probably aggravated the plan.
But, this also tells us something, even in practical terms, when someone says “what else should Israel do?” well, maybe simply improving it’s intelligence and assessment programme would be a good start, certainly better than destroying all the homes in Gaza.
Of course, another option is Iron Fertilization of the oceans, but that seems likely to be less effective, and runs into a similar problem that despite the nonsense of national ownership of bits of the sea, the oceans are a global commons, and should be managed as such.
