alanjjohnstone
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-53246899
As promised up to three million Hong Kong residents are to be offered the chance to settle in the UK and ultimately apply for citizenship.
About 350,000 UK passport holders, and 2.6 million others eligible, will be able to come to the UK for five years. And after a further year, they will be able to apply for citizenship.
At the moment, British National Overseas Passport holders have restricted rights and are only entitled to visa-free access to the UK for six months.
Under the government’s plans, all British Overseas Nationals and their dependents will be given right to remain in the UK, including the right to work, for five years. At this point, they will be able to apply for settled status, and after a further year, seek citizenship.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said there would be no limit on numbers or quotas, telling MPs that the UK would “not duck” its international obligations when it came to Hong Kong.
I have no issue with such a policy but cannot help but see the double standards and hypocrisy as the UK has been ducking international obligations to welcome desperate vulnerable refugees for a long time. Or how the UK government ducked its international responsibilities to the Chagossians.
For those from Hong Kong it will be a very expensive process – up to £10,000 for the application process.
China consumes more pork per capita than any other nation.
Half of the world’s pork is eaten in China, and the acceleration has been rapid. In the 1960s China annually consumed less than 5kg per capita. By the late 1980s this was 20kg and has since tripled to over 60kg,
Zhenmeat is throwing its marketing behind one product in particular, created with the Institute of Alternative Protein in Beijing, a meat-free alternative to pork tenderloin, which is popular in hot pot.
Matilda Ho is the founder of Bits x Bites, China’s first food technology venture capital group. She has backed four different protein companies, from plant-based to cell-based.
She says it is easy to overstate climate worries as a reason for Chinese consumers to switch from animal protein.
“Taste will always be the driver for consumers to convert their behaviour. It won’t be environmental concerns.”
David Yeung of OmniPork says, “This isn’t just about consumer trends, it’s about climate change, the pandemic, swine fever. Governments will have to look at this, not just as consumer choice or a trend – but about sustainability of the planet.”
Bruce Friedrich is the co-founder of the Good Food Institute, which researches and promotes meat alternatives, explains, “… if you can make crops which mimic the way meat tastes and smells and looks, and scale that up, it will become cheaper than animal meat. Then it becomes not just for vegetarians and ‘flexitarians’ (those who cut meat consumption by going meat-free on certain days) but for everybody.”
An essay by Jonathan Cook expressing the hypocrisy of Starmer
Our blog did a very long series of diverse posts on religion under the title of Sunday Sermon
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/search?q=sunday+sermon
However, to address this immediate question, this one might be relevant
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2013/04/sunday-sermon-casting-out-caste.html
I think when it comes to hinduism, what is being meant by Mutual Aid is that there is no established church or agreed doctrine or ritual, but a series of various diverse festivals and that it is very much a life-style religion. A way of life for many Indians, just as is the many guru cults such as Amma, the hugging mother. I never visited her ashram but saw it from a distance and it is the size of a small town.
Christianity and Islam were originally popular escapes from the caste system and the innumerable pentecostals, adventists sects which have sprung up is evidence of how low-status hindus embraced them but in practice they all still practice it informally such as in marriage etc.
But the question is, should we treat religion with one approach fits all or should we acknowledge differences of degree. Is Islamic beliefs the same as the Quakers.
We had a previous discussion on Early Christian Communism
https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/topic/jesus-was-a-communist/
Isn’t becoming a socialist a series of stepping stones?
We attend the Diggers and Levellers celebrations so we do see that we can link early socialistic ideas to modern day socialism.
https://countercurrents.org/2020/06/its-not-just-meat-all-farm-and-food-workers-are-in-peril/
COVID-19 outbreaks are now reaching far beyond the meatpacking industry. Migrant farmworkers in fruit orchards and vegetable fields, long the targets of intense exploitation, are seeing their health put in even greater jeopardy as they’re pushed to feed an increasingly voracious supply chain in pandemic-time.
The current public-health crisis in food production and processing has grown directly out of the drive for profit. In recent decades, the overriding goal of the agriculture and food industry—a sector whose pace and production were once strictly dictated by the seasons and the weather—has been to turbocharge profits by maximizing output per hour per worker.
It doesn’t have to be like that. In a system motivated by nutritional goals rather than profit, a much more widely dispersed workforce producing at non-exploitative rates of output could easily produce enough food to meet this country’s needs.
Planet of the Humans may have dropped out of the conversation but there are still some who wish to promote its message
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/29/arctic-heat-overwhelms-green-infighting-issues/
what has 33 years of green advocacy wrought? Answer: Record high CO2 in the atmosphere and nearly 80% dependency upon fossil fuels, same as 50 years ago.
And now there is the counter-attack by the capitalist apologists – no longer climate change denialists, more that they do not envisage disaster or catastrophe.
Michael Shellenberger’s book ‘Apocalypse Never, Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All’
Shellenberger promotes industrialization as humanity’s savior.
“While industrialization causes a short-term rise in carbon emissions, in the long term it’s beneficial to the environment as people move to cities, allowing farmland to revert to nature, and as prosperity enables them to switch to cleaner and more compact forms of energy.”
He actually suggests capitalist entrepreneurs saved whales by discovering cheap substitutes for whale oil, like petroleum
The Democratic Party’s GND
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/29/democrats-climate-crisis-carbon-emissions
The plan has no chance of passing a Republican-controlled Senate, and would be a difficult sell even for some Democrats if their party took back that chamber and won the White House.
A sad indictment on our fellow-workers.
“There is a general anti-science, anti-authority, anti-vaccine feeling among some people in this country – an alarmingly large percentage of people, relatively speaking.” – Dr Anthony Fauci, explaining why herd immunity will not be achieved in his view.
We see this American worldview in many things , from politics to religion.
Guaranteed Income
Eleven cities are pledging to explore direct cash payments to help residents deal with economic insecurity.
The cities that have joined the initiative also include Los Angeles and Atlanta, St Paul, Minnesota; Jackson, Mississippi; Newark, New Jersey; Oakland and Compton, California; Shreveport, Louisiana; Columbia, South Carolina; and Tacoma, Washington.
It’s not yet clear how much money the cities might hand out, or how many residents might actually receive a check in the near future.
“It’s not scary. It doesn’t destroy our country. It doesn’t destroy work ethic. It makes us stronger,” said Michael Tubbs, the mayor of Stockton, California, which launched a small guaranteed income experiment in early 2019, offering $500 a month to 125 residents to spend on whatever they chose. Most often, they spent it on food.
Melvin Carter, the mayor of St Paul, said the aim is long-term change, not just a “Band-Aid” over the next few months.
But as he explains – it all comes down to financing such schemes and we know the money will not be there without strict means testing.
Robbo, What i am careful about is that when i placed a link to WSPUS in comments it is not spamming or trolling but i ensure it is relevant to the article.
I think one area which we have been slightly amiss is the actual history of socialism in the USA which many American politicos are not too sure about. They do not perceive an evolution of thought or understand the variety of ideas.
It is as if Marxist Archive website was not there.
Whereas Debs is sometimes cited, De Leon is invariably invisible. The IWW pioneers are often forgotten about. Keracher is unknown.
Of the Trots, Shachtman, Cannon and Draper are never mentioned by the DSA activists or progressives. (some of their articles are helpful insights for various periods of labour history, imho, ) as if they never existed. Even modern writers like Mattick and Bookchin are not well-known.
Too often when it comes to contemporary political commentaries i find it is all about re-inventing the wheel.
We have to honestly acknowledge our miniscule size but just as just one sole writer can have a place in theory, we should present the WSPUS in its rightful position of influence.
I Rab’s biography is a useful book to cite from. Less so i think being Sam Leight’s two books of radio shows but some may disagree and suggest they could be re-edited.
DarrenO’s and ALB’s next project could be doing what they are doing with the Socialist Standard and when finished do the same with the Western Socialist…i know …it is demanding too much but can only hope.
I’m sorry if you don’t subscribe to the idea that you have to understand what motivates your political rivals. As for not highlighting the non-socialist elements, i see little need when the exchange is within this forum, frequented by mostly members and sympathisers who surely don’t require disclaimers and caveats.
But as i said, with very limited resources, we have to decide who we should be aiming our message at.
Should we focus upon any particular sector of our fellow-workers? If so, which? If so, how?
For our organisation it has been an almost eternal question and we should not cease addressing the issue and including references to those who claim to be socialists and are having a certain amount of success with those claims.
With the WSPUS having stagnated for decades, we see some small signs of progress but they need a target for their campaign.
Another article promoting the DSA and Sanders
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/06/28/many-young-people-socialism-american-apple-pie
what does democratic socialism mean? Does it mean, you know, real socialism, or just Scandinavian social democracy? No, I think democratic socialism actually means fighting for socialism, and fighting to preserve democracy and expand democracy through socialism. Democratic socialism, in case people are wondering, actually, is not a term that means halfway to socialism. And it doesn’t mean nicer, gentler socialism. It’s a term that actually just is intended to differentiate our contemporary movement from the 20th century authoritarian socialism of Stalin and Mao.
My point was to highlight the membership numbers not the content of the ideology.
Our own success has been a mirror of an increased popularity of the left such as the immediate post-WW2 Britain and later the 60s and 70s.
These periods offered us an opportunity to grab on to the shirt-tails of a growing leftwing trend and boost our own numbers. Our diminishing influence is also an echo of the decline in the Left.
We have debated if we should break this correlation and appeal to the wider, broader audience or focus our campaign on a smaller but a supposedly more receptive one.
It has been a discussion we have held a few times in the past but IMHO, one that has not been fully resolved.
The NYC local DSA branch is the largest socialist organization in the United States, with over 55,000 members (as of April 2019), and multiple branches in each of the city’s five boroughs.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/06/27/streets-ballot-box-new-yorks-political-revolution
