ALB
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I assumed that that’s what it is meant to mean but it’s not what it means literally. And is the term Climate Delayer or Climate Change Delayer?
It looks as if it’s a term you ought to discard as quickly as you picked it up !
Alternatively, we could use it to throw at anybody who campaigns for the problem to be tackled within capitalism as they are delaying the establishment of the only framework within which it can rationally and lastingly dealt with ie the common ownership of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources.
And so too therefore will the pink boats and other expensive equipment as well as the glossy leaflets.
But what is this new thing, a “Climate Change Delayer” ? What do you have to advocate or do to earn this epithet ?
Delaying climate change seems like a good idea to me.
All this week the Times has been wreaking its revenge on XR for blockading its printing presses last weekend. It has been publishing the names and occupations of those arrested and what a list of “petty bourgeois” they make.
But more relevant is the article published on Thursday about who has been financing XR. One is “Ben Goldsmith, the financier and environmentalist” and “government adviser”, a trustee of the “Children’s Investment Fund Foundation” which gave XR a grant of £137,000. The CIFF was set up by “the hedge-fund manager Sir Christopher Hohn”.
Why would these members of the capitalist class finance an organisation like XR? In any event, after XR’s latest stunt, it appears they are no longer going to. The Times’s article is headed “Blockade backfires on climate activists”.
So it looks as if they are pissing off capitalists as well as workers. Quite an achievement.
If we want to go down that road a much quicker way would be gene therapy in which a person’s genes are altered to remove some manifest defect. I know this raises ethical problems too eg over what is a “defect”. But I don’t think that anybody would deny, would they, that the genetically-inherited condition Huntington’s Disease, with the horrible fate that awaits those who are going to get it, is something that should be eliminated?
I don’t think Dawkins can be branded as a Social Darwinist (Darwin couldn’t be either) any more than as a eugenist and racist like that idiot Podur does.
The objection to him is that he gave credence to biological determinism as the view that human behaviour is to a large extent determined by human biology. The title of his book of “The Selfish Gene” does this as it gives the impression that there is a gene for selfishness. In fact he argued that the basic unit of biological evolution is the gene rather than, say, a group — an argument for experts in the field to settle for themselves on the basis of the facts. We can just note that in every book he published since that one Dawkins has backtracked on his original claim so as to take account of other influences on biological evolution.
In politics he is not a rabid rightwinger but a wishy-washy middle of the road liberal.
As for Darwin, the “survival of the fittest” does not mean the survival of the strongest in the day to day struggle to survive but the survival in the long run of those with biological characteristics that are the best for surviving in the environment that a group of life-forms finds itself in.
Social (or rather Anti-Social) “Darwinism” has nothing to do with Darwin but was an ideology concocted in the last decades of the 19th century to defend those capitalists who emerge the most successfully from the economic competition amongst them to make the most profits.
What a stupid attack on Dawkins. Dawkins wasn’t advocating eugenics ( as artificial selection to produce humans with particular characteristics) but merely pointing out that this is theoretically possible. Read again what Dawkins tweeted:
”It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work fo
rhumans? Facts ignore ideology.”This is not saying that eugenics should be tried but that, if it were to be, it would in theory work. I don’t think that this can be denied. Whether or not it should be tried is a quite different matter.
The author’s bid to deny that artificial selection has worked with other animals and with plants is pathetic and is indeed based on ideology not fact. The results of artificial selection are all around us, not just in domesticated animals but also in the foods we eat. In fact Darwin got the idea of natural selection to explain the evolution of species from observing how pigeon fanciers bred different types of pigeons.
Of course it “works”. He does have a point that the technique is being misused to produce shows dogs and cats but that’s a different matter.
We have our bone to pick with Dawkins over his Selfish Gene book but he is not an advocate of eugenics nor a racist (nor an islamophobe) as claimed by those who have put him on their list of speakers to be banned and shouted down.
Yes politics is a dirty game. Also another example of the point Marcos is always making that, as far as elections are concerned, the US is a banana republic — that ruling applies only in one state. Other states can make different rulings.
If Malcolm X had that would have been unfair as none of Obama’s ancestors had been slaves working on a plantations in the US.
Recent podcast on the Bund in Poland in the inter world war years of the last century which explains the rationale of their opposition to the Zionist project of setting up a “Jewish Homeland” in Palestine. Their view was that Jewish people should stay were they were and work to better conditions there — that was their homeland — in theory through socialism but in practice through pro-worker reforms within capitalism.
There is a transcript there too.
Interesting but I wonder why those who edited and collated the results of their experiment left in the mistake that robot was the Greek word for slave though they did question it. Perhaps to show that robots can make mistakes?
According to this, the word robot was thought up in 1920 by someone speaking Czech (did someone mishear Greek for Czech?);
https://www.npr.org/2011/04/22/135634400/science-diction-the-origin-of-the-word-robot
I was at a meeting on Zoom yesterday evening organised by the local Humanists addressed by a speaker from the Black NonBelievers (speaking from Atlanta). It was an interesting talk in itself. She referred to the “Black” community and to only “women of colour”. I see from Wikipedia that this is a feminist thing, probably to get round the “latino/latina” problem. But the Wiki entry also says that it covers other “NonWhites” (to use terminology of apartheid era South Africa) and not just “Blacks”.
This reminded me of this statement quoted by Wiki from a Labour Party Black Section from in the 1980s (the heyday if the Looney Left) to justify counting people from Cyprus as black;
”Black” is a political concept. It is used to include all racially oppressed minorities. Each geographical area, therefore, is likely to reflect its own “black” communities. In most areas this will inevitably mean people of Afro-Caribbean or Asian descent. However, in Haringey, forexample, Cypriots have chosen to be, and are, involved in local Black Sections.
Labour Party Black Sections, 1985
That’s not a good term. Personally, I don’t like it at all as it’s so obviously artificial and right on. At one time the word used in the US by everybody was “Negro”, then it was “Colored” (also in respectable use on Britain till the 1970s) as still in NAACP, now it’s “Black” or “Afro-American” . If you want to be pedantic neither is strictly accurate but they are not so artificial and pretentious as “people of colour”. Incidentally, to complicate things quite a few of those called “Latinos” would otherwise be categorised as “Black”.
As Marcos has pointed out, all this “racial” classification is a mess and absurd. Everybody is “mixed race” insofar as in prehistoric times there were separate “races” of humans, including “Europeans” (mixed even in historical times with people from Central Asia or from the African side of the Mediterranean).
The best term for all of us is “human being”.
Where the view that “men in general oppress women in general” can lead:
[From the part behind the paywall] “Feminists often treat misandry as a joke. I found it interesting to explain that we have good reason to reach that point,” she said. In the book, she notes that “allegations of misandry are a … way of silencing the sometimes violent and always legitimate anger of the oppressed towards their oppressors.”After all, wouldn’t you hate those who you thought were oppressing you?
