ALB
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Just read it and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be from what you said. It’s only saying that this explanation is “plausible” ie not entirely unreasonable and so possible. It is not saying that it was the explanation.
I can see, however, why vegetarians and others opposed to meat-eating might want to dismiss it out of hand !
Here is Peter Joseph’s take on this (from the same podcast mentioned on the thread on him);
“… a lot of people out there are drawing great relief knowing that Trump will no longer have any national power. It is not a time to be complacent. Nothing has actually improved in the broad view. We just have had four years of general regression with neither the public nor the political establishment actually learning anything, as far as I’m concerned. We are simply back to a square one.”
That was my point. Why didn’t the authoritarian leader there appoint her minister of superstition or religion or culture rather than of health. He must have known that she was a bit of a nutter.
By the way didn’t know that Buddhists were into shamanism.
Here’s Peter Joseph puting exactly the same as us on the so-called “Great Reset” in his latest podcast
So the great reset was put forward by Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum, if I remember correctly. He started talking about this around the beginning of COVID-19 in early 2020. Here’s what it says on their actual website, “To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country from the United States to China must participate, and every industry from oil and gas, to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a great reset of capitalism.” Yes, the great reset of capitalism. Which makes no sense at all since capitalism is actually the fundamental problem, effecting sustainability and all other such issues that this great reset professes to address.
I suppose it’s good to see more conversation, especially when it comes to the environment, but the very fact that the limits of debate have been set and that this is really about preserving capitalism, even though they want to create some idealized version of it called stakeholder capitalism, all this simply reveals another well-meaning pro-establishment spasm in the end. No different than all the climate conferences and biodiversity conferences that accomplish nothing because everyone refuses to look at the system structure as the actual problem, the economic system. It’s actually quite comical if you think about it, “We want to change the world, but not capitalism.”
And of course this notion of stakeholder capitalism is one from a long line of nonsensical, qualifying adjectives that people amend before the word capitalism to try and pretend like some sub distinction would ever make a meaningful difference. You see all over the place, crony capitalism, responsible capitalism, vulture capitalism, the social entrepreneur. My favorite is conscious capitalism, as if it ever could be given the very nature and incentives of the structure, once again. It doesn’t matter who’s in the positions. It matters what the structural incentives are.
Just to be clear here, this stakeholder capitalism is defined as “a system in which corporations are oriented to serve the interests of all their stakeholders. Among the key stakeholders are consumers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and local communities. Under this system, a company’s purpose is to create longterm value and not to maximize profits, and enhance shareholder value at the cost of other stakeholder groups.” I’m not even going to address the insurmountable idealism in that vague description other than to say, you can never take the core incentive out of the system if the system remains in any respect or form. It is nonsensical to say that somehow corporations are going to orient themselves respecting everybody in this kind of stakeholder environment and the ecosystem without maximization of profit and hence, exploitation. You can’t have capitalism without exploitation and profit and hence, exploitation. If those things are removed, then you’re in a completely different system by default.
So this great reset thing is just another spasm, a well-meaning joke, a ploy in fact to sort of pretend like we can make capitalism better when all empirical evidence shows that we can not.
Well, well, the latest exercise of “sovereignty”:
Would you believe it — a government minister in Ceylon has been advocating, and actually took, a quack remedy against covid, the minister of health no less.
How do idiots like this get into such a post?
The end of this story is that she has now got covid. Hopefully, this will discourage others from taking snake oil from a shaman.
Measured opinion of Patrick Cockburn in the events in Washington in 6 January;
“The Democrats and the largely Trump-hating media want to portray the alt-right rioters as “domestic terrorists” who had staged an abortive “insurrection” in order to stop Biden taking office. Clearly, some members of the mob would have liked to do just that, but, despite the impression given by all those blood-curdling video films, this was not a “coup” in the sense of an organised attempt to seize power.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/capitol-riots-9-11-trump-biden-inauguration-b1791256.html%3famp
Another executive decision by Biden and not a bad one as it happens:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13805172/biden-oval-office-redo-beau-trump-churchill-chavez/amp/
Talk about voting for what you don’t want and getting. And then ….
I’d get proper medical advice. I think I read somewhere that people with diabetes are more vulnerable if they catch the virus.
What do you mean by “held fully accountable”? I though they were by being voted out of office. Or are you wanting a mass treason trial?
A French minister has been forced to retract after making the faux pas of using the term “privilèlge blanc”.
A comment (in the bit behind the pay wall) from Jean-Luc Mélechon, “leader of the radical left Unbowed France party” (who got 20 percent of the votes cast in the last presidential elections):
“The three or four people who believe in the existence of white privilege have never seen a poor white”.
Touché.
They don’t put up with that nonsense over there.
I want to ask you, ALB, if, knowing that this is capitalism, where profit directs everything, had you absolutely no trepidation in being vaccinated at all, in case of any reactions? Do you have an informed or a blind faith in the medical establishment today?
Sorry for the late reply, TM, but I got the answer to 18 minus 13 wrong and got denied access for 24 hours.
I have no faith whatsoever in so-called “complementary” or “alternative” “medicine”. So, all that is left is the evidence-based medicine that has proved it works despite being applied under capitalist conditions but that applies to lots of things we have to use today under capitalism. It is best of course to be careful about all these things and weigh up the available evidence.
When offered the jab I jumped at it, partly because if you refused you’d be unlikely to get a second chance.
As I don’t like needles being stuck in me, the only trepidation I felt was about this. But it didn’t hurt.
But don’t you think the ballot box demands a majority of the populace to gain said class consciousness?
We are now getting to the heart of the matter. The answer to your question is Yes. But this is because the existence of a socialist-minded majority is one of the preconditions of socialism. How could a non-coercive, non-state society involving a high degree of voluntary cooperation work unless most people wanted and understood it? People cannot be led or forced into socialism.
It is precisely because we think there must be a majority in favour of socialism that we think using the ballot box makes sense. Without it, neither a minority-led insurrection nor a minority-led general strike could or would lead to socialism (your article has eloquently described where a minority-led seizure of power has led historically — a form of state capitalism as in the old USSR). With it, a general strike would be unnecessary (except perhaps as a back up). If there is a majority for socialism, why not take the easiest way of the ballot box as the way for the organised majority to express this and win control of political power (needed, if only to stop it being used against them)?
Not all syndicalists take the view that obtaining a socialist majority under capitalism is impossible. But in its heyday, before WWI, its main advocates did and held that the “masses” needed to be led or pushed by an “active minority”. It us true that many of these were anarchists who had infiltrated and taken over the trade Union movement. It also explains why after WWI so many went over to Bolshevism and Leninism and not a few even to fascism as doctrines which attributed a key role to an active minority as a “vanguard” or “spearhead” (to use their terminology). A position we have always rejected and opposed.
