alanjjohnstone
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“…were you people who felt no need to rationalise your consumption in this way, and who would happily consume animals who have been deliberately tortured (as in the case of the Korean dog-meat industry), then I wouldn’t even speak with you at all…”
We can widen such a debate into a broader context. We are happy to use the technology you and I are using depends upon the pain and suffering of child workers. As you say everything is connected. Ye without sin, cast the first stone…as scripture says
Social change is coming even under capitalism. Several provinces in China have outlawed dog and cat meat. Across Asia as a whole such consumption is falling. The campaign against eating veal is due to the torture of calves to produce the quality of the meat and despite this, the demand for the product in the US is growing.
LBird, I was suggesting that the trigger for change and the strength of various social movements have not been originating in class struggles.
Perhaps that is why they have failed but the mass involvement of people have been in the environmental movement and as we see now, anti-racism resistance. The “self-activity” of the masses has had only a limited influence (albeit a very welcome one) on the organised unions. Economism, for the want of a better word, has failed to motivate the masses politically, even if economics and material conditions are the underlying causes of the discontent and dissent.
If we are to make them revolutionary working class struggles we have quite a task as they are viewed presently as stand-alone one-issue reformist campaigns. To make them class-based I think means transforming the socialist movement into a general umbrella movement to muster all people and all political and economic struggles under one banner.
I suppose i’m harkening back to my earlier “situationist” sympathies – the revolution of everyday life.
Investors are indeed happy
https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/worst-global-recession-investors-200609050251659.html
Not sure if he actually owned slaves, his wife’s family did and Nelson was pro-slavery
But Edinburgh also have a monument, 140 foot high, to the politician held responsible that postponed the abolition of the slave trade for 20 years
Scotland’s first black professor, Sir Geoff Palmer, professor emeritus at Heriot-Watt University, has called for plaques on Scotland’s statues to give a truthful account of their links to the slave trade and said the move could help educate and change attitudes against racism.
“I don’t want statues to be taken down. My view is you remove the evidence, you remove the deed.”
“I hate Indians,” Churchill told his secretary of state for India, Leopold Amery. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” Amery accused Churchill of having a “Hitler-like attitude” toward Indians, but Churchill was unmoved. Amery recorded in his diary Churchill saying that “the starvation of anyhow under-fed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks.” He even seemed to view the catastrophic famine as a reasonable punishment for India’s high birth-rate, telling his war cabinet that the famine was Indians’ own fault for “breeding like rabbits.”
Approximately 3 million Indians died in the famine.
Britain declared a state of emergency in Kenya in 1952 to protect its system of institutionalised racism that they established throughout their colonies so to exploit the indigenous population. Churchill being your archetypical British supremacist believed that Kenya’s fertile highlands should be only for white colonial settlers. He approved the forcible removal of the local population, which he termed “blackamoors”. 150,000 men, women and children were forced into concentration camps. Children’s schools were shut by the British who branded them “training grounds for rebellion”. Rape, castration, cigarettes, electric shocks and fire all used by the British to torture the Kenyan people under Churchill’s watch.
On race: Churchill said ‘the Indians in East Africa are mainly of a very low class of coolies, and the idea that they should be put on an equality with the Europeans is revolting to every white man throughout British Africa’.
Churchill spent some time in Afghanistan. While there he said “all who resist will be killed without quarter” because the Pashtuns need “recognise the superiority of race”. He believed the Pashtuns needed to be dealt with, he would reminisce in his writings about how he partook in the burning villages and people’s homes:
“We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.”For Churchill, the Soviet Union was a ‘tyrannic government of these Jew Commisars’, a ‘worldwide communistic state under Jewish domination’, ‘the international Soviet of the Russian and Polish Jew’, or just ‘these Semitic conspirators’.
In 1937, Churchill told a royal commission that he did not think that a great wrong had been done to either the “Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia.”
Referring to whites, he added: “I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
One of his biographers, John Charmley, said that Churchill believed white Protestant Christians were top of the heap, followed by white Roman Catholics, while Indians were higher than Africans.
“Most of the natives who have died are of a semi-savage nature and do not attach any sentiment to marking the graves of their dead,” Maj George Evans observed. His conclusion? “I consider the erection of individual headstones would constitute a waste of public money.”
A letter signing off on the plan was authored by the chairman of the then Imperial War Graves Commission, Winston Churchill.
https://www.dw.com/en/hitlers-dogs-görings-lions-how-the-nazis-used-and-abused-animals/a-53698708
Jan Mohnhaupt – Tiere im Nationalsozialismus (Animals in National Socialism)
Hitler had millions of people killed, but he loved his dog Blondi. How do you reconcile a love of animals and racial fanaticism?
“For leading Nazis, animal protection and crimes against humanity were not a contradiction in terms,” Mohnhaupt writes
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) said that economic growth in the US peaked in February and has since entered its first downturn since 2007 to 2009.
“The committee recognizes that the pandemic and the public health response have resulted in a downturn with different characteristics and dynamics than prior recessions. Nonetheless, it concluded that the unprecedented magnitude of the decline in employment and production, and its broad reach across the entire economy, warrants the designation of this episode as a recession, even if it turns out to be briefer than earlier contractions,” the NBER explained
Did lockdowns work?
Yes according to this study
Lockdowns have saved more than three million lives from coronavirus in Europe, a study estimates. The team at Imperial College London said the “death toll would have been huge” without lockdown.
An interesting read on the State and COVID-19
https://critisticuffs.org/texts/love-of-the-state-in-the-time-of-covid
“We only have to look at how little enforcement has been necessary to mobilise people to follow the official guidelines to understand how productive a popular mandate is.”
“But I thought a truce had been called between vegetarian propaganda”
I’m, as previously, focusing on the working conditions of fellow-workers.
Indeed you are correct that much of the seasonal agricultural work is performed by migrant workers and the fact that world-wide both are predominantly migrant workers and both share many similarities.
But as I have tediously no doubt pointed out previously, the effect of a slaughter-house upon the mental health is very different from the back-breaking toil in the fields. You don’t hear the fruit and veg cry on in pain. That is a big difference.
Munch’s painting, the Scream, is INMHO perhaps a graphic depiction of what emotionally is the suffering for abattoir workers. Munch lived between a slaughterhouse and a lunatic asylum.
Another article offering the view of those who work in abattoirs, a job the local Irish are reluctant to take
Life as a meat plant worker is a low-wage, bloody business, workers told the Guardian.
“It’s horrible killing cows, when you see how they do it,” says Florin, a Romanian worker who has been employed in a meat plant in the Republic of Ireland for more than five years said. “They kill it – shoot it, cut the neck, cut the legs. I don’t like it. The cow is slow, an emotional thing. And you see the blood, and they go from being alive to being in pieces. That’s the way. When you see the conditions – it’s a dirty and nasty place, nobody is happy.” Temperatures in the factories can hover at 4C, with industrial ceiling fans that circulate cool air to keep the meat free of microbes. The job is repetitive and tough; workers take painkillers to get through their shifts…
…migrants make up the vast majority of the workforce in the meat industry is also a problem, with many travelling from Timor-Leste, Lithuania, China, Poland, South Africa, Romania, Bulgaria and Brazil to work… life is hard. Workers feel intimidated and vulnerable, and are unable to stand up for their legal rights, he says. “People are not being treated with dignity and respect.”
Another pro-UBI article
But this mentions how Iran tried to introduce its version between 2010 and 2011
Although Iran was the first to adopt an income program at a national level, it ended up facing backlash and was reined in after some argued that it disincentivized work, a notion which was later dispelled. When first introduced, the program was widely rejected by the public as it replaced large state subsidies to energy and grain, yet overtime support for the program grew as Iranians saw a 29 percent median household income increase. The gain equated to a $1.50 increase per day for households, which in the U.S. would equate roughly to an extra $16,389 annually.
Having sung the praises of UBI the article adds its reservations.
UBI alone would have limited impact on improving the precarious lives of workers and isn’t an end-all-be-all policy. Questions of workers’ relationship to production would still remain.
Biden courts the black vote
https://apnews.com/0d94ad3a16e00afeffcdd14690a50ff3
Biden plans to travel to Houston to meet with the family of George Floyd and will provide a video message for Floyd’s funeral service.
The man partly responsible for draconian laws such as 3 strikes and life
