ALB
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“We are social beings. We socially construct our mental/material world. We put that construct into practice. “
That’s what more or less what we’ve been trying to argue here. But this implies that there is something apart from them that human beings in society use to “construct”. The difference between us and our feathered friend is that he denies this. He argues that “our mental/material world” is entirely constructed by the human social mind out of nothing (and, therefore, that when it was the social consensus that the Sun moved round the Earth that was the case).
“Matter has no voice until our thinking gives it so… and yet… it still hurts when you stub your toe on it.“
Yes, but the second part is a step our feathered friend won’t take perhaps because stubbing his toe would undermine his argument that the outside world doesn’t exist until we create it.
Incidentally, you sound like a bit of a post-modernist since whoever else would talk of “ modernists” ( whoever they are!)?
Yes but that’s because they are opposed to civilian nuclear power and are trying to stir up opposition to it by associating it with nuclear weapons. Typical alarmist tactics.
Nuclear power stations are not “nukes” ie nuclear weapons. You can be against nuclear weapons (as all sane people are) while being in favour of civil nuclear power. This is an ill-chosen thread title..
The first three extracts are ok. The last one about the Civil War is more dubious. I wonder which historian wrote it? Do we know so that we can examine their credentials? I see someone has challenged them by asking for a citation. Of course there was a link with 1688. Whigs and Marxists, unite !
What’s worrying here is the Turkish ambition to expand its influence, not to say (Ottoman) empire, to incorporate Azerbaijan. If Turkey sends troops or arms Armenia won’t stand a chance and there’ll be another mass refugee problem.
I thought, TM, that it has been a very useful discussion with all angles being examined as different contributors made different points. We don’t often have controversial discussions here but we should, as that’s one of the reasons the forum is for. Most are with our feathered friend but after 5 years of discussing with a parrot this has become rather predictable and boring.
That’s just what is to be expected under capitalism and I am sure it is true that the military is seeking to use the technology for lethal purposes. But that’s the same with any new technology. Capitalism will misuse it, either for commercial or military ends.
5G technology allows faster data collection and analysis and will be an essential part of what comrades Rozanov and Shannon outlined computers could do in a socialist world. So we mustn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Incidentally, as I think has been pointed out here before, those behind that site and video are notorious conspiracy theorists and fake news distributors. See:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Globalresearch
Anything Michel Chossudovsky is associated with should be looked on with suspicion.
So he has gone and done it. The other thing is that if she is appointed she will have a say if the result of the election is contested and goes to the Supreme Court.
Another example of the flaws in “democracy” in the US — one of the candidates gets to appoint a member of the jury that will have to decide on the election result. That’s the sort of thing that the president of Belorussia would love to do.
She certainly knew her stuff. I thought this from the second article was good;
“There are those who accuse us of being, to say the least, “unpractical,” because instead of trying “to help where we can” we demand a revolution. I maintain that we Socialists alone are truly practical, because we alone dare to go to the root of the ill. Ask a doctor to cure a patient living under absolutely unhealthy conditiens in the midst of pestilential air and unsanitary surroundings. He will tell you you must change these surroundings if you would save the life of the individual. We but apply to many, to all individuals — i.e., to society — what the doctor applies to the one. We say so long as human beings are the slaves they now are — whether they be the slaves of wealth or of poverty — this disease must continue.”
And in fact the instance she was writing about of child prostitution is still a problem 135 years later and for the same reason she said : poverty forcing some children to sell themselves for sex.
A further attempt by the present Vote Leave government to emulate Trump and place its supporters in a position to pursue its agenda:
I know you don’t like the BBC, Alan, but you’re going to like it even less.
“Merchant capitalism”, where those with money invested it in trading ventures which make a profit by buying cheap somewhere and then selling it at a higher price somewhere else, did precede capitalism as we know it — the investment in production by wage labour to make a profit out of the unpaid labour of the workers (what Marx translations into English call “surplus value”). But essentially as one of the ways in which the original (“primitive”) accumulation of money that was the other condition to a landless proletariat for the take-off of capitalism.
I am not sure, though, of the extent to which the money acquired by merchant capitalists was invested in capitalist production in Spain and what we now know as Italy. Wasn’t it rather lent to the rulers of absolutist states? Somebody must know.
Yes, TM, your namesake described well in the middle of the 16th century, what was going on at the time in his Utopia with “sheep eating people” as people were driven off the land to make way for sheep raising for wool to export, so creating one of the conditions for the development of capitalism — a landless proletariat.
The Tudor State made some attempts to deal with this, eg the Poor Law, but basically it was obliged to let capitalism develop. This doesn’t invalidate that in the end the autocratic state that the divine right of kings sanctioned proved to be an obstacle to the further development of capitalism. Hence the pressure to overthrow it in order to permit capitalism to spread more and more rapidly Hence in England the Civil War or English Revolution or whatever you want to call it, which resulted in the victory of what later in France was called the “bourgeoisie”.
According to the Cromwell Association, there is some controversy about his social and economic status quoting one historian that
”when Cromwell lived at St Ives, as ‘his standing … was essentially that of a yeoman, a working farmer’, and he was “even in danger of moving down ‘from the gentry to the “middling sort”’. Morrill is quick to point out that Cromwell never actually left the ranks of the gentry – he retained the lineage, education and social network of the well-born – but, in economic terms ‘Cromwell was not, then, as he is often portrayed, the typical country squire’.“
Farmer Oliver? The cultivation of Cromwell’s image during the Protectorate
Not that it really matters any more than Lenin’s.
