alanjjohnstone
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I’ve always been sceptical of New Age quacks
The opium trade
“There would be a backlash from the poppy farmers, drug lords and the public if the Taliban bans the opium production. The Taliban has benefited the most from opium production over 20 years.”
“Farmers are faced with a looming threat of drought. Farmlands and orchards are badly affected and that will force many farmers to grow poppies because it remains the only lifeline,” Abdul Ahad, the governor of Helmand province,
Afghanistan is the largest opium producer in the world, accounting for more than 80% of global production between 2015 and 2020, and generating millions of dollars annually.
An estimated 6,300 tonnes of opium was harvested in Afghanistan last year, an amount that can produce up to 290 tonnes of pure heroin. The amount of land given over to poppy production rose by more than a third between 2019 and 2020, to 224,000 hectares (553,516 acres).
Such radical revolutionary actions – letting down car tyres
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-59254298
On another related topic thread on Belarus on the forum, an anonymous poster commented
“In politic and baseball is very hard to predict anything”How right he was with how events have developed.
There are the weaponisation of migrants by the Belarus regime at its borders with the Baltic States and Poland in retaliation of EU sanctions.
Now Lukashenko warns it will cut gas supplies to Europe.
“We are heating Europe, and they are threatening us,” he said, referring to a Russian gas pipeline that runs through Belarus and into the EU. “And what if we halt natural gas supplies? Therefore, I would recommend the leadership of Poland, Lithuanians and other empty-headed people to think before speaking.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59246899
As a side note, I was not aware of the unique position of the Russian city of Kalingrad (Konigsberg), an isolated enclave, separated from the rest of Russia
There is already a war taking place – a war of words. The battlefield is the internet.
https://dissidentvoice.org/2021/11/chinas-vision-on-common-prosperity/
Common prosperity is NOT common ownership
It is an article on how Cuba is promoting anti-racism but it does not acknowledge its own racial problems.
I refer you to a post of mine
https://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-dream-is-over.html
Who knows for sure, is the real question
“…If climate change was to reach 3°C, most of Bangladesh and Florida would drown, while major coastal cities – Shanghai, Lagos, Mumbai – would be swamped, likely creating large flows of climate refugees. Most regions in the world would see a significant drop in food production and increasing numbers of extreme weather events, whether heat waves, floods or storms. This likely scenario for a 3°C rise does not take into account the considerable risk that self-reinforcing feedback loops set in when a certain threshold is reached, leading to an ever-increasing rise in temperature. Potential thresholds include the melting of the arctic permafrost releasing methane into the atmosphere, forest dieback releasing the carbon currently stored in the Amazon and boreal forests, or the melting of polar ice caps that would no longer reflect away light and heat from the sun…”
https://issuu.com/globalchallengesfoundation/docs/gcf-annual-report-2018
The authors of the Nature study acknowledge that the science of tipping points is complex such that there is great uncertainty as to how they might unfold, but nevertheless, argue that the possibility of cascading tipping points represents “an existential threat to civilisation”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0
“To err on the side of danger is not a responsible option.”
“Our analysis suggests that the Earth System may be approaching a planetary threshold that could lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions—Hothouse Earth. This pathway would be propelled by strong, intrinsic, biogeophysical feedbacks difficult to influence by human actions, a pathway that could not be reversed, steered, or substantially slowed.
Where such a threshold might be is uncertain, but it could be only decades ahead at a temperature rise of ∼2.0 °C above preindustrial, and thus, it could be within the range of the Paris Accord temperature targets.
The impacts of a Hothouse Earth pathway on human societies would likely be massive, sometimes abrupt, and undoubtedly disruptive…”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6099852/“…Because the consequences are so severe — perhaps
the end of human global civilisation as we know it —
“even for an honest, truth-seeking, and well-intentioned investigator it is difficult to think and act
rationally in regard to… existential risks”…Even for 2°C of warming, more than a billion people
may need to be relocated and In high-end scenarios,
the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to
model, with a high likelihood of human civilisation
coming to an end…”https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_a1406e0143ac4c469196d3003bc1e687.pdf
ALB, is the process of feedback loops fully understood?
I believe the climate science is lacking in many of those and some feature extreme worse scenarios
TS – You however clearly do support the terrorists who are targeting schools
Let me make it very clear that on this very forum topic I stated violence by the anti-coup factions is counter-productive but I know you avoid the truth.
page/4/#post-215361
page/4/#post-215716
page/5/#post-216193
page/5/#post-216238
page/5/#post-216323
page/5/#post-216519In message page/6/#post-221726, I make the very same criticism of the so-called opposition government in exile as does your video source.
I could also refer you to an article I wrote where I explained
“…The only way to counter the coup is non-violent civil disobedience of one kind or another to win over the state’s forces of coercion…”Or you could go to our blog where it has it condemned the hypocrisy of various countries condemning the coup while supporting Aung San Suu Kyi. You will also find a post critical of the Rohingya armed resistance
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2018/05/arakan-rohingya-salvation-army-no.html
TS As usual you mistake an analysis of reality for support for one or other government.
However, once again your own bias partisan views show you reply to a post that merely draws attention to the dire humanitarian crises the people of Myanmar faces and ignore that I have previously explained that the coup has been a success and should now be treated as a fait accompli and our concern should not be on talk of sanctions but to alleviate the poverty ordinary working people of all the ethnic groups are suffering.
But an honest debate is not your style. Slander and smear are your preferred argument.
Our only hope is that when the collapse of civilisation has begun and the extinction of ourselves as a species is imminent, homo sapien – the thinking animal – will out of stark necessity take socialist remedies without realising it is socialist ideas that they are adopting.
At times I am dismayed and despondent about the future but unlike the past, it is something that can be changed.
At my advancing years, I have witnessed great progress in attitudes and beliefs. Being Scots like myself, we see the inevitable decline of the Orange Lodge, for instance, with football fanatics rather than religion propping it up. We watched as the SNP, a fringe party in our youth, displace an entrenched Labour Party and become the ruling party of Scotland.
But broader, we have seen women’s equality, gay liberation, anti-racism and secularism become mainstream beliefs among most of our fellow workers.
That shift in opinion should offer hope that ideas evolve, even within a generation.
The downside is we also saw them all being incorporated and integrated within the ruling class, emasculated of any radicalism and now used in identity politics in the vying for political power.
And as usual, you are an apologist for a despotic murderous military regime, who not only politically repress the population but through economic corruption oppress them also.
One of Xi Jinping’s rare visits outside China was to offer Aung San Suu Kyi 4billion yuan of development money and diplomatic support for her anti-Rohingya policies in Jan 2020
OZY, I think you put the finger on the real problem we face, not only that but what problem the environmental emergency faces, too
Our weakness is that for most of our existence through world wars, global recessions, widespread poverty and mass hunger we have never managed to make socialism an immediacy, an aspiration to achieve a solution right now. Socialism has always remained an answer for the far-off future and reform of capitalism, no matter how shallow or how radical, receives the support of our fellow workers as they perceive amelioration of the System as realistic. The squabble among themselves for what is the “better” strategy and socialism simply does not appear on their radar. We are not part of the mainstream media narrative nor involved in the protest movement debates, not even on the fringes of it.
It is a frustrating truth. And for me, it is like battering one’s head against a brick wall.
People want something done now and socialism isn’t seen as that. Even the Trotskyist immediate transional demands are outside the policy transitions of the eco-campaigners.
Our answer sounds like science-fiction as much as the billionaires’ space migration fantasies are.
If our fellow workers feel happier with easy-to-follow ABC steps, it may be useful to present that clear blueprint of socialism they appear to wish for.
Biden and the food banks
Supply chain disruptions, lower inventory and labor shortages have all contributed to increased costs for charities on which tens of millions of people in the U.S. rely on
A shameful statistic on the ignorance of the British public concerning the Holocaust.
However, I would have liked to see figures that included knowledge of the attempted extermination of the Roma and the scale of the atrocities against Russian POWs which was nothing like the luxury of Colditz.
