alanjjohnstone
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A contrite, remorseful financial speculator
Regard mobile phones, it won’t be our generation that will either benefit or suffer but those growing up with such technology which will determine if they are boom or a bind upon society. People our age are adopting it, perhaps adapting a bit to them, but not fully evolving with the technology. Just watch a youngster’s finger-action when texting…
But personally, despite not being someone who carries a mobile on a daily basis, I do recognise the convenience of them.
I go shopping and I see people taking pictures of what they want to buy to send to friends for advice, or to check prices with other retailers or online suppliers.
For kids, it is no more notes from teacher to take home but texts to parents direct from the teacher. A closer monitoring than I ever had in school.
I recall why I bought my first mobile. Car breakdown service wanted mobile number to give the tow-company to locate me. (I was landline phoning from a nearby petrol station)
Then I had to update another time when the car insurance companies wanted pics of a bump and the damage to both cars. So it was more than just talking as phones now had built-in camera and video.
The Finnish government on Wednesday released its evaluation of the two-year experiment in which 2,000 randomly selected unemployed people were paid 560 euros per month. The researchers summed up results as “small employment effects, better perceived economic security and mental well-being.” Participants in the experiment said they “had fewer health issues, fewer experiences with bureaucracy, and better financial well-being than the people in the control group. They experience fewer issues related to mental stress, depression, melancholy, and loneliness. They also estimated that their functional ability was better.” The UBI recipients also “felt that their financial situation and their ability to influence it was better. Their trust in other people and different institutions was higher, and they were more confident in their own future and their ability to influence societal issues.”
France will discard 10 million litres of beer due to expire, undrunk, with consumers in coronavirus lockdown, the national brewers’ association said
An audience of 40-ish non-socialists is not to be sneezed at, Paddy, if it had been a physical meeting. The fact that it was a virtual “meeting” makes little difference in my view.
What i found useful was the parts of your explanations he centred upon hoping for fuller details…governance in the sense of how decision-making is enacted, the perennial human behaviour question related to the nature of voluntary work.
I guessed he was a constitutionalist when he went on about inalienable rights and then I saw his other podcasts had that as the topic. For many our own D of P is such a document so we cannot knock his belief in such an idea.
It is hard to elaborate on what the positives of capitalism are and which parts of it will be adopted although adapted without appearing if we are just another version of capitalism, as he kept suggesting to you. Perhaps there is an opening for a speculative article called, “Capitalism – what we’ll keep and what we won’t” but I think it would set the cat among the pigeons for all manner of dissenting voices.
It always helps our case to recognise what are the areas of concern to those coming to our position whether from the right or the left, (and they usually coincide despite their supposed political differences) for the first time so we can concentrate our case.
I always enjoy your analogies…from your first, the zoom lens close-up to our world-view (particularly when we are now in a world of selfies) and then the porsche and the push-bike revolutionaries.
I hope you and he do have a return interview.
We’ll also need to collate a list of similar podcasts willing to let us present our arguments and offer members up to be cross-examined and interrogated. Without outdoor meetings we lack that challenge.
Another term being used
“minimum vital income”
David McWilliams: I think it is fair to say that capitalism – in the course of this unprecedented crisis – has been suspended. We are not going back to where we were, to business as usual. The state has come back, and this episode will not be forgotten by the electorate. I don’t know where we are going, but one thing seems clear: we are not going back.
Yanis Varoufakis: I like this phrase: capitalism has been suspended. The last time capitalism was suspended in the west was during the second world war, with the advent of the war economy: a command economy that fixed prices. The war economy marked the transcendence of the standard capitalist model. But what we see now is not so much the suspension of capitalism. The rules of capitalism may have been suspended – all those sacrosanct policies are gone, the neat separation of fiscal and monetary policy is gone, the idea that public debt is a bad thing is gone.Full article here but seems a debate about government policy and not anything beyond capitalism
(As an aside to another discussion, we forgot the Commonwealth of Independent States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_Independent_States)
I worked alongside an ex-WRPer who attended one of their political study courses at THE WRP country residence which was called the “white house”
He recollected how Healy walked into the room accompanied by a stunning-looking young woman.
Intrigued, he asked , “Who’s she?”
“His driver” was the answer
“Surely his driver should be a six-foot-something bodyguard and not a five-foot-nothing beauty?”
A smirk and a wink was the response.
And thus began his process of disillusionment.
Sadly, my friend still held a belief in the need for political leadership.
Another ex-WRP I worked with, was the only person I knew who believing in armed revolution joined the Territorials for his military training, not just a run-the-mill unit, but the Para territorials. I’m led to believe on weekend exercises the unarmed combat was the punch-ups he had with all the other squaddies. It served him and us well, though, when during a strike he personally and privately dealt with a neo-Nazi scab.
I was always surprise when the WRP dissolved they embarked upon the Reclaim The Streets campaign.
https://countercurrents.org/2020/05/the-scourge-of-authoritarianism-in-the-age-of-pseudoscience
An interesting read by one who usually rails against GM farming and Monsanto but on this occasion he casts his critical eye over the pandemic which also reflects ALB’s suspicions about being monitored.
As a comedian I rarely find him funny but as a political commentator he has some worth. Here he shares your concerns, ALB, about the surveillance society being facilitated by COVID-19
LEE CAMP: While Pandemic Destroys So Many Lives, The Surveillance State Celebrates
It is still at the speculation stage but an option being considered is for the government to cut the proportion of furloughed workers’ wages it pays to from 80 percent to 60 percent.
The credit for the blog post should go to Mark Curtis, who over the years have done great service in exposing the UK’s nefarious foreign policy.
YMS, some in the SNP have been promoting UBI for quite a while, but never ever quite fully committing itself to it. Our Socialist Courier blog as far back as 2017 reported that Glasgow and Fife local authorities were intending to carry out an experiment with it. Never happened, AFAIK, but I may be wrong.
The Institute for Public Policy and Research has warned “our modelling shows that far from being an anti-poverty measure, a UBI could increase relative child poverty in Scotland.”
https://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2018/05/ubi-no-panacea.html
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation also projected a similar consequence
https://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2018/04/ubi-or-not.html
ALB, now that the peak of their pandemic crisis is moreorless over, the economic bounce back to normal the Chinese economists expected to happen has failed to materialise, I have read.
Why?
Because the economies of those other countries which the US general says was purposefully brought into a recession, are not yet buying products. Effective demand has dropped and China has not recovered its market.
So very much a case of cutting off ones nose to spite ones face it appears if the general is correct.
