alanjjohnstone
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The left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA) party topped the polls in Greenland’s election.
IA’s victory casts doubt over the future of the controversial Kvanefjeld mining complex, which lies towards the southern tip of the Arctic island. Although the party is not completely against mining, they campaigned against a project to dig up rare earth metals from what is one of the world’s largest deposits.
IA leader Mute Bourup Egede told public broadcaster DR that they would halt the Kvanefjeld mining project.
https://www.dw.com/en/greenland-left-wing-inuit-ataqatigiit-party-wins-election/a-57118506
Sarah Gilbert and Adrian Hill the scientists who lead the team that created the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, is set for a payday of more than £20m each as the biotech firm co-founded prepares to float on the stock market in the US.
Uğur Şahin and his wife, Özlem Türecim, the co-founders and chief executive and chief medical officer of Pfizer’s vaccine partner BioNTech, have seen their net wealth soar to about $4bn (£2.9bn)
Stéphane Bancel, the chief executive of Moderna, has seen his fortune soar to an estimated $4.3bn as the US company’s share price has soared. Two scientists who helped develop the technology for Moderna’s mRNA vaccine have also become billionaires. Prof Timothy Springer of Harvard Medical School and Dr Robert Langer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hold stakes worth $2.2bn and $2bn respectively.
Serial party-founder, George Galloway, launches a unionist party, All for Unity, which will stand candidates in all eight regions of the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_For_Unity
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-56662415
His fellow members include UKIP and Tommy Robinson supporters
Sleep with dogs and get fleas, as they say
“Why not just say that the SPGB thinks that ‘mind’ is individual?”
I chose to say, LBird
collectively as a class
Not as a hive mind like the Borg nor advocating a Spock mind-meld.
“why claim to be socialist, democratic or following Marx?”
For the record, can you suggest any political party, contemporary or historical, that has been more democratic than ourselves? Likewise, can you provide an example of a socialist party exemplifying socialism more than we do?
As for being Marxist, we accept Marx on some of his positions and reject other aspects of his ideas. Call it cherry-picking if you wish but as Robbo has already explained, we are not cultists.
LBird. i think i have made my position clear. As i said, i don’t really find any of this debate fruitful because i don’t believe it convinces people to become socialist nor is necessarily needed to be a socialist.
You may believe it is crucial, but my focus is elsewhere. I think there is a good reason why Marx did not dwell on his philosophical studies in later life and left his early works unpublished.
For myself, it was not anything to do with Marx turning Hegel rights side up but hearing members explain that me and my fellow workers collectively as a class, possess all that is needed to build a new social system where we would no longer need to sell ourselves on the labour market as wage-slaves. The SPGB propose part of the strategy to achieve socialism although we still debate and discuss it without declaring we hold the ultimate answer, but just another piece of the jigsaw.
NYT reports Israel mines Iranian ship in the Red Sea
A covert tit-for-tat maritime war appears to be ongoing.
My understanding is that non-members can already attend any SPGB meeting in person and, with the chair’s permission, address those present.
Indeed so. Once at a conference, a passer-by who happened to look through the window and was intrigued by what he saw popped in for a listen and asked permission to speak. I was the chair and since no delegates or members were waiting to speak, i permitted him to offer his observations. However, there is no guarantees and i am not sure whether his contribution was produced in the summary of the conference presented to the branches and members. Maybe it was but i simply don’t recollect.
If LBird was a member of a branch he could persuade it to put forward a resolution (or an item of discussion) which would be formally debated and then voted upon by a poll of the entire membership.
From my experience, the majority of SPGB members do not use this forum for whatever reason. Only a minority are contributors. As for the number of non-members versus members of the Party, i don’t know the figures.
Whether SPGB has a disproportionate share of egoists, i am not sure. But i do think members do have confidence in their views and are not reluctant to express them. We have a good number of auto-didactic, proud of being self-taught in many aspects of the socialist case.
According to yourself now, the SPGB has indeed been correct in its interpretation and reflects much of your own thinking.
In view of this admission, I consequently await your Form A, LBird.
Despite your disagreements with various members, you will still be eligible for membership, IMHO.
Even Robbo will welcome you as a party comrade, although you and he may never meet face to face, however, you will get the opportunity to share a few beers with ALB.
Imagine being able to attend our conferences in person and addressing the delegates directly, having your position recorded and forwarded to the whole membership to consider and respond to. It will mean an audience far wider than presently encompassed by this forum.
But as a party member, one responsibility is to create a healthy environment for membership growth which may mean re-directing your criticism and presenting other aspects of the party-case much more.
Jonathan Cook on Starmer’s first year as Labour Party
Starmer isn’t “too cautious”: he is ruthlessly tearing Labour apart
He wants to prove he is a safe pair of hands to the British establishment, in hopes that he can avert the kind of relentless vilification Corbyn endured. Then, Starmer can bide his time until the British public tires of Johnson.
Biden abides by Trump’s policy on land-mines
In retrospect i should have placed “elite” in apostrophes – “elite” for i was endeavouring to use your own terms which you favour when it comes to an understandable division of labour.
Whereas i don’t foresee specialised experts receive no special status or rewards to separate them from any others who may hold dedicated training or possess selected skills in the community to justify the term “elite”.
Geniuses like Da Vinci and Michaelangelo and Dickens and Shakespeare need fear nothing from being levelled down to mediocrity by us ignoramuses of the art and literature.
Will they alienate public sympathy as some believe has already happened?
XR is planning to step up its campaign against the banking system with a series of direct action protests and debt strikes in the coming weeks aimed at highlighting the financial sector’s role in the escalating climate crisis.
Bradbrook said it was time to “challenge a system that has destruction baked in and incentivises harm”, adding that it was being critiqued not just by protesters but by the “World Economic Forum, the Economist magazine, IMF … Prince Charles”. She continued: “It is no longer seen as radical and ridiculous to say the political economy needs to dramatically change. It has become a mainstream conversation … I think anyone saying we have to have what we’ve got because there are no better ideas has either got their eyes closed or they are just pushing the agenda of business as usual because themselves or their paymasters are making too much money.”
All i can say is making a section of the capitalist class culpable is exonerating the rest of them from complicity. It isn’t system change but amelioration.
It was finalising plans for action in the buildup to Cop26, the international climate meeting being held in Glasgow in November.
“XR’s job is to keep the pressure up on the climate and ecological crisis and the inter-related justice issues and we will carry on doing that,” said one of XR’s founders, Gail Bradbrook. “There are many rebels that want to see Cop do as well as it can, so creating the pressure on the streets can help.”
But she said the “Cop process” had so far failed to bring about the changes that were required to address the huge challenge of the climate and ecological emergency. “We need to look at the systemic issues around why we are failing to act and why we are carrying on killing our life support system,” she said.
‘seeming fixation’
Almost eight long years on the same topic, and i was trying to soften the conclusion to fixation and not make any psychological diagnosis of OCD
There are many things in the universe that i am blissfully ignorant of, such as the molecular structure of COVID-19 virus and very happy to leave to those who make a specialised study of it after they have spent years gaining the basic biological background knowledge to even attempt to investigate it. I happily delegate the responsibility of that to a scientific elite.
What i will do, however, is use my own learned experience to try and create the environment for that elite to operate freely within, without the constraints of capitalism being imposed upon them. That is what i consider to be my function as a class-conscious socialist.
That does not put me at the mercy of any intellectual elite but both of us operating with reciprocity. I want to free the scientist so that they can begin to free me.
Biden’s Saudi weapons ban
“The notion to ban the export of ‘offensive weapons’ that could be used in the war in Yemen must be seen as a compromise to this US tight-rope walk on the issue, but not actually realisable,” Andreas Krieg, a professor in the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/4/yemen-little-clarity-us-vow-end-aid-saudi-led-coalition
As they say, every cloud has a silver lining
In the week ending 19 March, 10,311 deaths were registered in England and Wales – the lowest since 2014 for that week…the remaining non-Covid deaths are running below every year in the past decade.
