alanjjohnstone
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11% of the electorate voted in Tunisia’s parliamentary runoffs. Sunday’s runoff vote was however higher than December’s first round, which had a participation rate of 8.8%.
887,000 voters cast ballots from a total electorate of 7.8 million, the electoral commission said.
“We don’t want elections. We want milk and sugar and cooking oil,” said Hasna, a woman shopping in the Ettadamon district of Tunis
Russia’s new law on “LGBTQ propaganda,” in effect since December, effectively outlaws any public expression of LGBTQ behavior or lifestyle in Russia, and has resulted in book and film bans across the country.
The law punishes what has been called the promotion of “nontraditional sexual relations.” It prohibits dissemination in any medium, including advertisements, books, films and media. By “nontraditional,” the Russian authorities mean any sort of sexual activity between two men, or two women. “Brokeback Mountain” is on the blacklist. It includes books by Stephen Fry.
Any person who says something positive about love between two men may be forced to pay a fine. Anybody who praises a film in which two women kiss could end up in court. Anybody who publicly supports a friend who is considering changing gender, especially on social media, is committing an offense.
These examples, and many others, are now forbidden in Russia and can be punished with a fine of up to 5 million Russian rubles (around €65,000/$70,700).
https://www.dw.com/en/russia-bans-lgbtq-friendly-content-under-new-law/a-64516061
Michael McCaul, the new chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the US House of Representatives says the odds of conflict with China over Taiwan “are very high” after a US general caused suggested a war would happen in two years’ time. General Mike Minihan, who heads the Air Mobility Command, wrote: “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”
McCaul told Fox News “I hope he is wrong… I think he is right though…The odds are very high that we could see a conflict with China and Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific,”Just to clarify, would that be the original CPGB formed in 1920?
Or the very much later CPGB that publishes the Worker Worker?ALB – “…the effects of a rise to between 2 and 3 degrees will be worse if it happens under capitalism…”
I think my point is that under capitalism the effects of even the very modest 1.1 (or thereabouts) rise are being under-reported and it is only “some” parts of the world that are escaping the impact because of the division between “rich” and “poor” nations and the ability to cope.
And despite the pledges and promises to aid those less developed countries, very little is being done. The funds being made available are in no way near enough, even if in the ideal world they are not being squandered by capitalism’s corrupt governance.
I think as a world socialist movement it is more incumbent upon us to highlight the disparity being one human family.
And remind those who aren’t as yet feeling the effects that it is only a matter of time before they too will be dispensible victims.
We witnessed the callousness of capitalism during the Covid pandemic where life and death decisions were imposed on the vulnerable elderly in care homes.
Those classed as “essential” workers were being sacrificed to take risks to keep the system running.Human extinction is a wildly exaggerated scenario, but perhaps the once often-quoted dichotomy “socialism or barbarism” is not so far-fetched that we should not raise its possibility if action is not taken immediately, sharing a similar grave concern as Greta Thunberg and XR that we may be too late to stop the tipping points and feedback loops.
Share the World – Spare the Planet.
My concern is that some may have a parochial view of the consequences of climate change in that the effects are being measured by the impact upon the developed economically advanced nations that can so far ‘weather’ much of the changes (pardon the pun).
The hurricanes, floods and droughts are compensated by rather generous state-underwriting insurance. Various government spending programmes are being put in place to provide climate-resilient infrastructure. When supply chains are broken, the Western-based corporations can put in place alternative ones, with the costs passed on to the consumers who although suffering from a cost of living assault, still do not spend the same higher proportion of income on necessities as those in the lesser developed countries do and in addition, have assistance form a welfare-state to act as a buffer.
In all, it leads to a more complacent attitude to what is happening, a situation is seen as less urgent, something that has not yet been fully felt…or appreciated
Compare this with what is taking place and is linked to climate change if the scientific consensus is to be accepted.
The Horn of Africa suffering the fifth season of failed rains. Pakistan is subjected to both drought and floods. The Sahel the increasing desertification. Southern Africa extreme weather events. Caribbean islands facing intensifying hurricanes. Central America, the expansion of the Dry Corridor, as it is called. Amazon to Argentina climate influenced disruption. Increasingly regular typhoons in the islands of Indonesia and the Philippines. China was also inflicted with both drought and floods.
Farming and agriculture fail because they cannot adapt crops quickly enough. Energy outages because of the water shortages for hydropower plants.
The result is the breakdown of vulnerable societies with bloody civil wars, mass movements of peoples, widespread hunger and famine, of rising disease. Not in the thousands. Not in the tens of thousands. But in the millions of victims.
Climate change refugees are something that is now occurring, not the future
And as Mike Brown has just said on Spintcom, we have not even reached 1.5C much less 2.0 or the reliably predicted 2.5-3.0C for the year 2100.
Is it alarmist? Is it catastrophism? No, I don’t think so. For the media and the politicians and, yes, I dare say also for some of the climate scientists, out of sight, out of mind.
Today those who are suffering are the expendable poor.
As world socialists, we do not turn a similarly blind eye. If we do not stand with those who are helpless, who will? Wall St? The City of London? The stock exchanges and commodity markets around the world?
We aren’t exaggerating the misery of millions. We are giving them their voice.
And we are forewarning those others who still have the belief that they will be immune to the devastation that is very likely still to come to their relatively secure and comfortable lives.
XR Japan suggest we do face a catastrophic future. Is it climate alarmism?
FYI, Once again, this thread is straying into a breach of forum etiquette
7. You are free to express your views candidly and forcefully provided you remain civil. Do not use the forums to send abuse, threats, personal insults or attacks, or purposely inflammatory remarks (trolling). Do not respond to such messages.
A few questions for you
TS – Your confused interpretation of socialism is as nonsensical as the claim that you have a “party”.
Can you define what YOU mean by socialism?
TS -…an ineffectual and irrelevant “party”
What political party are you a member of?
If not a member of any, what political party (past or present) do you judge to be the closest to your own political beliefs?TS – At least the ideas I hold are reality based and allow me to make accurate predictions about the world
What were those accurate predictions and when were they made and what political-economic ideas were they based upon?
OBCW places guilt upon the Syrian government for the 2018 Douma chlorine gas attack based on 70 environmental samples as well as 66 witness statements and technical data that simulated the trajectory of the cylinders and disbursement of gasses.
In retaliation to recent Israeli killings in the West Bank, a Jerusalem synagogue was attacked and several worshippers killed. Rockets fired from Gaza resulted in an Israeli air strike.
Does the violence bring the prospect of peace any closer? Does it increase the possibility of victory for either side?
Or does it merely polarise the communities and continue the tit-for-tat killings?
A point to note is that all 5 police officers involved in the beating were african-americans, something to emphasise to BLM that police brutality is State brutality not necessarily racist.
TS has already shown that he has no interest in what Marx says so I will not be surprised if he dismisses what Engels says about enterprises owned by the government.
“…The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with…”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm
The financial cost of hosting the refugees is also coming out of the UK foreign aid budget.
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2022/10/foreign-aid-robbing-peter-to-pay-paul.html
Membership of NATO will in effect bring Ukraine under its nuclear umbrella so Zelensky and Putin know the nuclear war consequence of the expansion of NATO.
Unfortunately, we do not have unbiased news reporting sources, just as we weren’t in the Syrian civil war, which does make us vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation.
