alanjjohnstone
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Matt, i hope you don’t mean you will have to permanently re-edit my posts so not taking up your valuable time. If it is, i’m content with the inconvenience and others will just have to bear with it.
I know full well the hard work you put in behind the scenes (or should that be screens ) i don’t want to distract you from that
In a lengthy article, Jonathan Cook, does a fair summary of the campaign to vilify Corbyn as an anti-semite.
Too long to cite extracts except to say it highlights Israeli racism.
Over half of respondents said they agreed to some extent with the statement: “Most Jews are better than most non-Jews because they were born Jews.
Seventy-four percent of respondents said they get at least a little disturbed by hearing conversation in Arabic in public.
Another 88% of respondents said they would be disturbed to some degree if their son were to befriend an Arab girl. The number climbed to 90% when respondents were asked about their daughter befriending an Arab boy.
Between 70-80% — said they knew “very little” or “nothing at all” about the Armenian, Cambodian or Rwandan genocides.
According to the poll, secular Israelis are far more tolerant of Arabs than religious Israelis. The results indicated the more religious the respondent, the more likely they were to reject the non-Jewish minority.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-poll-shows-strong-anti-arab-sentiment-among-israeli-jews/
VM, Libcom has a forum far better than our own but they also have little traffic. Same amount of regular posters as us and not many new visitors from the public.
I think SPGB members are wearying of talking to ourselves, hence the few participants.
So rather than improving the appearance of the forum, i’d suggest we look again at its purpose.
It is not reaching out to our fellow-workers and attracting them to make enquiries about our ideas (albeit there are a couple of notable exceptions) Making it more user-friendly could help but i’m not too hopeful.
It’s not providing a fulcrum for members to debate and discuss topics apart from a handful of us who believe disagreements are a healthy process of acquiring further knowledge.
However, i have come to appreciate the forum’s usefulness in sharing information and interpreting it. A quick survey of the popular threads indicate this.
Perhaps as an Information and Data-bank might be a better reason for this forum’s existence.
For comradely chit-chat perhaps we can devise something else as i think the SOCIAL part of the SOCIAList Party is important.
Matt, my snags have either appear to been fixed by your good self, or the magic of computers has done it.
Getting tough with Yellow Vests
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/29/dutch-yellow-vest-protest-broken-up-by-mounted-police
The reputation of the meat industry will sink to that of big tobacco unless it removes cancer-causing chemicals from processed products such as bacon and ham, a coalition of experts and politicians warn today.
Led by Professor Chris Elliott, the food scientist who ran the UK government’s investigation into the horse-meat scandal, and Dr Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist, the coalition claims there is a “consensus of scientific opinion” that the nitrites used to cure meats produce carcinogens called nitrosamines when ingested.
There is evidence that consumption of processed meats containing these chemicals results in 6,600 bowel cancer cases every year in the UK – four times the fatalities on British roads – and is campaigning for the issue to be taken as seriously as sugar levels in food. The meat industry claims nitrites are essential to combat botulism and infection. But Malhotra said Parma ham producers have not used nitrites for 25 years.
Not sure if people/countries really care about Venezuela either. The exodus of millions is not receiving the humanitarian attention it deserves.
As for why the US/UK are involving themselves, albeit by proxy, is not for directly capturing resources. Yemen has no significant supply of oil or raw materials. It is the poorest of the Arab states. Apart from the mercenary reason that US/UK can sell weapons to the Saudis and Gulf state, this is a war of gaining political control of the region. Yemen is strategically located. Saudi and the Emirates seek to expand their presence and minimise Iranian influence in the region. As they are the US/UK partners in the area, they are supported diplomatically and logistically and a convenient blind eye turned to their military excesses.
But we are not to assume that the UAE and Saudi Arabia are singing from the same songsheet. They have their own individual interests to promote. See this blog post.
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-emirates-in-yemen.html
Looked on google for that message…got to reinstall wordpress it said….no idea how but if it has no visible problem, i’ll try an ignore it
There is also a lack of visitors to Libcom forum
As for code, it is a side effect of copying then pasting. I never used them. They automatically appear
The Americans, however, have a different version of events.
<p>Even when i edit i’m still getting code on my posts</p><p>I also have this appearing</p><p>”Failed to load plugin: wordpress from url https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/plugin.min.js”</p>
<p>Its all down to costs</p><p>https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-coal-epa/u-s-limits-on-coal-plant-mercury-emissions-too-costly-trumps-epa-idUKKCN1OR1BS</p><p>Mercury and Air Toxic Standards, or MATS, enacted under former President Barack Obama, coal-burning power plants were required to install expensive equipment to cut output of mercury, which can harm pregnant women and put infants and children at risk of developmental problems.</p><p>Using a different cost analysis to evaluate whether the regulation is needed, Trump’s EPA has decided, its reassessment showed the cost of compliance with MATS was between $7.4 billion to $9.6 billion annually, while the monetized benefits were between $4 million to $6 million, concluding, ” it is not ‘appropriate and necessary’ to regulate HAP (Hazardous Air Pollution) emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants… because the costs of such regulation grossly outweigh the quantified HAP benefits.”</p>
A change in alliances
So now that the US has abandoned the Kurdish cause, the YPG seeks help from the Syrian government and appeals to Assad.
https://www.dw.com/en/syrian-army-enters-kurdish-held-town-of-manbij/a-46884468
<p>Subsidising global warming and meat-eating</p><p>https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/28/revealed-industrial-scale-farms-receive-millions-in-subsidies</p><p>£70 million in subsidies in 2016 and 2017 include individuals and companies running:</p>
- Feedlot-style beef units, rearing thousands of cattle in outdoor yards
- So-called mega-dairies, with herds of up to 1,800 cows
- Intensive egg producers using cage housing systems
- Poultry mega-farms and pig units which keep thousands of animals permanently indoors
- Livestock units that have been found guilty of pollution and animal health breaches
<p>Intensive poultry farms across the UK received the most money in subsidies, at £32m. The operators of pig and dairy factory farms were given £18m and £16m respectively, while the figure for intensive beef farms was £2m. The total sum received could be higher. The actual amount of subsidies is likely to be higher, principally because large numbers of pig farms in the UK are believed to fall below the size threshold for requiring a Defra/EA permit. Many such farms house their pigs indoors and would, therefore, be considered intensive by most experts, but are absent from the data.</p><p>Taro Takahashi, a researcher at the University of Bristol and Rothamsted Research, explained, “The question, though, is whether these funds are indeed improving the environment and ecology of our countryside to sufficiently justify the investment – and research to date has been inconclusive either way.”</p>
<p>Wiesenthal Top Ten anti-semites</p><p>http://www.wiesenthal.com/atf/cf/%7B54d385e6-f1b9-4e9f-8e94-890c3e6dd277%7D/TOP-TEN_2018REPORT.PDF</p><p>in at Number 4 – Corbyn</p><p>Number 5 – The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine</p><p>Number 6 – Airbnb</p><p>Number 7 – a German bank called the Bank for Social Economy</p><p>Number 8 – Bishop Gayle Harris</p><p>Number 9 – Sweden’s Karolinska University Hospital</p><p>And at Number 10 Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters</p><p>Reasons for labelling the above antisemitic at the link</p>
