alanjjohnstone
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“With God’s help we will extend Jewish sovereignty to all the settlements as part of the Land of Israel, as part of the State of Israel,” Netanyahu said in Sunday’s speech in the West Bank settlement of Elkana, “This is our land,” Netanyahu said in his speech in Elkana. “We will build another Elkana and in another Elkana and another Elkana. We will not uproot anyone here,” Netanyahu said.
Mystical? Spiritual?
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-49513802
Gail Bradbrook , who has a PhD in molecular biophysics, explained how she came up with the idea for Extinction Rebellion.
“I’ve been focused on trying to start civil disobedience since 2010 and tried lots of things that didn’t work. So I actually went on a retreat and prayed deeply, with some psychedelic medicine…it was a really intense experience. I prayed for the codes for social change…and within a month, my prayers were literally answered.”
Political?
Simon Bramwell said he felt an “acute sense of loss” after protests in Bristol in 2015 that saw campaigners living in trees that were cut down to make way for the Metrobus. They were opposing the construction of a new bus lane that connected to the M32, along with several new bus stops and a bridge. The protestors claimed the land was some of the most fertile in the area but ultimately they were moved on and the work took place. The protest led – in part – to the formation of Extinction Rebellion and its new approach to demonstrations.
“The acute sense of loss saw me meeting up with Gail Bradbrook to build campaigns of civil disobedience”, said Mr Bramwell.“We started this thing in my house with 12 of us saying ‘let’s do this’, and within a year it’s gone global.” Bradbrook said
But how much influence can the founding members of XR exercise?
Extinction Rebellion now claims to have 100,000 members on its database, 130 groups across the UK, and a presence in 59 countries.
Whose house are they now meeting in to make decisions? Of those 130 UK groups, just how open and public are they?
I have previously expressed concerns on democratic practices within XR and how accountability is an issue. I still seek reassurance.
“In the near future we are stuck with people like Trump and his fellow moron Bolsonaro in Brazil with his utterly cavalier attitude towards the fate of the Amazon.”
If you ever wondered why Evo Morales of Bolivia, a supposed leftist, has not been subject to the same vilification as other alleged progressive leaders, it is because he is carrying out corporate policies in the Amazon.
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2019/08/evo-murderer-evo-murderer.html
Is the environmentalist movement the end of class politics?
For sure, we rightly continue to make capitalism culpable for the climate crises but when it comes to the need for social change our previous emphasis on working class exploitation appears now to be superfluous in convincing people to end the capitalist system.
And the traditional organisations of workers such as the unions are standing aloof to the eco-problems, if not actually taking side with the State and the polluters, who are more often than not, their employers.
Has the focus of Marxian economics now shifted?
No longer is it the extraction of surplus value from our toil, but the externalities of capitalism in making the environment pay the price for profits and capital’s expansion.
Can we appeal to the eco-activists on the case of rising class consciousness based on wage-slavery? Or is there now a better opportunity to present the arguments for the end of capitalism built on the anti-capitalist environmentalist movement?
How can we effectively merge both approaches so it resonates with an audience that primarily concentrated on the climate issues?
Just thought I throw that thread of thought into the pot.
I think when it comes to the case for democracy both Remainers and Brexiteers have an argument
There was a referendum where the majority voted to leave the EU, no matter what reason. May then Johnson both say they have been trying to honour that result. I do note that referenda have been a favourite tool of despots in the past as has suspending parliamentary procedures.
Hard Remainers believe that another referendum should be held, believing the will of the people has now changed.
The Soft Remainers still hope for some sort of membership of the EU at least for the time being in the form of an agreed deal.
The Scottish Nationalists have spotted an opportunity on technical grounds to disregard the 2014 referendum and hold another one and they too are hopeful that there has been a shift in opinion due to Brexit. With the drop in the pound they are now committed to break the link with sterling which previously they were reluctant to do.
So all I can say is that a referendum is simply a snapshot of how people feel at a particular moment in history…and it can be different the next moment in time.
schekn, is performing a great service to the SPGB.
He is actually engaging in debate and discussion with us on this topic. Despite the extensive support of eco-activists no-one else is, especially from XR. We are invisible to them, well below their radar. schekn, is the best we’ve got and we should appreciate him taking time to offer his perspective, rather than simply ignore us.
As for pessimism, I may well be projecting my feeling of ennui into everything I read
“My non-science-based prediction is that XR will disappear after a few years…”
XR may go but my prediction is that another movement will arise…the Friday strike school students growing up, hopefully as you also hope like me, into political maturity.
For our comrades heading for Wigtown, a bit of info I never knew of nearby town
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-49523006
A very interesting critique of XR, reflecting the views of some here that pessimism isn’t positive politics.
“…claims made by Roger Hallam are not, as he contends, based on climate science. They are based on extrapolations and interpretations that do not form part, as such, of the ‘climate science consensus’. The models used by climate scientists and the reports and scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) do not make it possible to assert with any degree of certainty that mass starvation will start in the next decade or that six billion people will die from starvation or slaughter during this century…These exaggerated claims, in fact, make Hallam an easy target for climate change deniers, who can portray him as either a nutcase who is just peddling fiction to foster “global warming hysteria”, and/or as an unscrupulous political activist who (mis)uses climate science to serve his political aim of overthrowing the current economic, social and political order. Either way, his claims about what “science” allegedly says do not necessarily serve the cause of climate action…”
“…At the same time, using alarmism as a political tool is understandable, maybe even justifiable. Climate activism, it has to be said, has so far been a resounding failure, in the sense that despite all the awareness it has generated it hasn’t changed almost anything to the world’s trajectory of ever-increasing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). In order to finally mobilise people on a wider scale and convince them that drastic action must be taken urgently, the climate movement probably needs to step up a gear. Making shocking claims about impending catastrophe can be one way of doing so. When people start getting scared, it can be hoped, they will maybe start moving…This “be afraid, be very afraid” approach has already been tried of course, in particular by American scientist Guy McPherson, who has for several years now been warning about “near-term” (i.e. by 2030) human extinction. This claim has gained him few friends in the scientific community, and it has also failed to attract mass following – but that’s probably because he offers no hope of salvation whatsoever: we’ll just all be dead in about ten years time and that’s it… ”
“…Extinction Rebellion, on the other hand, seems to be more successful at attracting people and having an impact on the public conversation, probably because the movement’s claims are catastrophist rather than apocalyptic, as it asserts that we can still change course and avert extinction if we really want to. In his interview to the BBC, Roger Hallam declared, for instance, that “we can do whatever we like in our societies if we’re prepared to undertake the costs” or that the UK could be at net-zero carbon emissions by 2025. These claims are no more supported by science than those about the starvation and slaughter of six billion people in the next decades, but at least they make it possible to spur people into some sort of action….”
“…‘human overshoot’, i.e. the crossing by humanity of multiple ‘planetary boundaries’, which destabilises the Earth system and puts at risk the planet’s hospitality to living things. This predicament cannot be understood through climate science alone, and requires a much broader understanding of a myriad of complex systems and of their interactions. Based on this broader understanding, the claims made by Roger Hallam do not seem so implausible anymore. The outcomes he predicts if we don’t change course are by no means certain, but they are certainly within the range of possibilities, regardless of whether humanity’s energy and material throughput continues to rise as foreseen in most climate models and scenarios or becomes constrained earlier than expected as a result of fossil fuel depletion. The probability of their occurrence, in fact, tends to be rising over time rather than decreasing. Unfortunately, all this cannot be fully and unequivocally “demonstrated” scientifically. Human overshoot and the very real risk of social and environmental ‘collapse’ that it entails can be discussed and documented at length, but any attempt at modelling the world’s complex systems and their interactions can only be inherently partial and incomplete, and the consequences and outcomes of human overshoot cannot be investigated and tested empirically at any meaningful or reliable scale. To some extent, there is therefore inevitably an element of “belief” in the minds of people who think they have grasped the human predicament, and in the predictions they make, publicly or not, about the future….”
“…The movement and its leaders should however probably be careful when claiming that this or that is going to happen by such or such date because “the science says so”…Science is never so unequivocal as to support detailed and time-bound predictions about the fate of the world…”
“…Extinction Rebellion, and climate activists in general, should also be mindful that trying to scare people into action also conveys the significant and inherent risk that scared people may move in the wrong direction, i.e. towards survivalism rather than resilience, selfishness and exclusion rather than solidarity, frantic resource-grabbing rather than conservation, violence rather than cooperation, etc. The prospect of ecological and societal collapse is apparently already being hijacked by ‘eco-fascist’ murderers, and it looks like parts of the political right in the West may be in the process of flipping from denialism to the instrumentalisation of climate change for their political aims. As liberal democracy keeps degenerating and becoming dysfunctional and unable to meaningfully address the various aspects of the human predicament, it is therefore possible that more and more people may get lured, in Western countries, towards some form of right-wing radical environmentalism, which would somehow acknowledge human overshoot but vow to reduce it by scrapping excess people from the surface of the Earth – or at least preventing them from achieving or maintaining Western levels of energy and material throughput…”
Diane Abbots pennyworth.
Ignoring her hyperbole she doe touch upon what has been said on the forum and not much in the media – a pro American trade deal Brexit
The point on urban locations for met measurement equipment is very well known one for a very long time. Usually for the reason of the effect of buildings they are often at airports, out in the open. There are diverse locations for measurements, I can’t see how polar and sea temperatures are urban. I have enough trust in that aspect of scientific community methodology and that community itself is a collection of different professions, overlapping but also with distinct focus that ensure a certain amount of check and balances when it comes to raw data.
However, my issue is that the projections are global, as Brian said.
We do know that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as other regions. But what about the other regions around the world. Global warming isn’t uniformly equal everywhere and the projections are averages as said, so that means some are higher, some are lower.
What it appears to me to be happening and I am not sure whether it is due to the lack of infrastructure but already the extreme climatic influences are damaging much of the poverty-stricken parts of the planet.
We are a world socialist movement so lets not allow our relatively unaffected local climate make us complacent or any less outraged. Let us not follow the denialists and begin to split hairs and cherry-pick facts to challenge the prevailing science. Let us assume that the overwhelming evidence is that we are suffering climate change and accept the consensus opinion of the consequences.
Personally, as I have made clear, I think that the scientists are not being alarmist, although some of the media is in its reporting, but on the contrary the scientists are erring on the side of caution. What they do not know to quantify, may well be the tipping points that lead to the thing they all dread – runaway climate change and game over.
The anti-imperialist Left have rewritten history in Syria, blacking out any connection with the Arab Spring.
Our SOYMB Blog has documented the evolution of peaceful protests leader-free as in the current case of Hong Kong and then in response of the State repression there was the militarization of protests by what transformed into the Syrian Free Army. The blog has explained how this places the resistance into the hands of its foreign sponsors and removes grassroot democracy
Even when I cite George Galloway who revealed the State murder of jailed dissident it makes no impression.
The Left prefers to place the blame on imperialist interventions and insist from the start that they placed snipers in the protests against Assad’s regime to escalate the conflict.
I was actually not too impressed with the article’s analysis you linked to. The opposition did not arise recently but goes back to the early days of Chavez and the attempts to overthrow him.
“Guaidó’s political party, Voluntad Popular, is extremely liberal and a member of the Socialist International.”
I spluttered on my cup of tea when I read that.
No mention that there are puppet masters pulling the strings of it and him, hence his practical disappearance from the political scene when he failed to produce the goods. The article is very simplistic in its explanations.
It should be exposing that it is a division between two aspiring ruling elites to control Venezuela but repeats the error of the Left by taking the side of the right-wing.
“Bankers’ biggest fear” is that “the nomination goes to an anti-Wall Street crusader” like Warren or Sanders, Politico reported, quoting the CEO of a “giant bank” who said: “It can’t be Warren and it can’t be Sanders. It has to be someone centrist and someone who can win.”
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/wall-streets-2020-nightmare-just-might-be-coming-true/
We have highlighted the issue of accountability before and here is another example.
The Heathrow Pause group says the action is “to highlight the incompatibility of Heathrow Airport’s expansion with the government’s own legally binding commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050”.
The group – a splinter of the Extinction Rebellion movement but separate from it – plans to fly what it calls “toy drones” within the exclusion zone specified by the Civil Aviation Authority.
