ALB
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alanjjohnstone wrote:During my time working in air traffic control decades ago,
When I used to work in Luxemburg, decades ago too, our trade union organised the staff working for Eurocontrol, the European air traffic control organisation (above a certain height). Among other things, they used to train people from outside Europe. I remember one of them telling me that the trainees they had from Saudi Arabia thought that the world was flat because that was what the koran taught. I don't fancy a plane I'm in being guided by anyobody who thinks that (but I must have flown over so-called Saudi Arabia once on my way to visit relatives in Australia) and I pity the poor sods in Syria who are going to be accidentally bombed by pilots who believe this, though come to think of it they might bomb the Saudi royal palace thinking they are bombing Damascas.
If this report is true, that Turkey has shelled an air base recently captured from the Islamists by the Kurdish nationalists with Russian air support, this would represent a major escalation of the proxy war between Russia and Turkey:https://www.rt.com/news/332380-turkey-shells-northern-syria/Watch out for Russia's next move.
Marx wrote:Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.From the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htmTo say that "Nature is man's inorganic body" is an odd way of putting it as that would mean that what is normally regard as "organic nature" (life forms) is being classified as "inorganic". Which might explain why some people misinterpret this and have him say that man actively creates "organic nature" from "inorganic nature". But as far as I know Marx never used the term "organic nature" or, if he did, it would have been in the sense of what Darwin studied.Once again, Pannekoek is clearer than Marx on this, if only because he was writing for publication and had the benefit of the advances in understanding since 1844. See, for instance, his Marxism and Darwinism.
I don't think he put the word "reality" in inverted commas to emphasise it but, rather, to say that it wasn't really "reality". Pannekoek was not arguing that there was nothing out there independently of consciousness. For him, there was and this was "the continuing, ever-changing world of phenomena" as a whole. That was all that "existed", the only reality if you like. A "phenomenon" was a part of this. What was a mental abstraction was not the phenomenon but the namings and descriptions of it by humans. This is well explained in easy-to-follow terms in that chapter 3 of his book (here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1938/lenin/ch03.htm ).So the "gravitational waves" that have now been detected rather than just predicted will be a mental construct, but not the phenomena this term and the theory behind it are attempting to describe/explain. They will long have existed as part of reality, for more than a billion years according to the estimates.
Email letter from another member about this:
Quote:Dear ComradesThe obituary on Jimmy Hill (February Socialist Standard) failed to mention his role as consultant and mediator of a ‘rebel tour’ to apartheid South Africa to play football in 1982. There was also omission of his defence of football manager Ron Atkinson’s use of the word ‘nigger’ in an off-air 2004 television transmission for football .I am also very surprised that we devoted so much space to the death of David Bowie .JoelHere's Anton Pannekoek (writing in 1938) on what we are doing (and what we are not doing) when we talk of "gravity" and its "laws" (it's from Chapter 3 of his book on Lenin As [Crap] Philosopher):
Quote:Gravity, physicists said, is the cause of falling. Here cause is not something preceding the effects and different from it; cause and effect are simultaneous and express the same thing in different words. Gravity is a name that does not contain anything more than the phenomena themselves; in denoting them by this word we express the general, the common character of all the phenomena of falling bodies. More essential than the name is the law; in all free movements on earth there is a constant downward acceleration. Writing the law as a mathematical formula we are able to compute the motions of all falling or thrown bodies It is not necessary now to keep the phenomena all in our head; to know future cases it is sufficient to know the law, the formula. The law is the abstract concept our mind constructed out of the phenomena. As a law it is a precise statement that is assumed to hold good absolutely and universally, whereas the phenomena are diversified and always show deviations which we then ascribe to other, accessory, causes.Newton extended the law of gravity to the celestial motions. The orbit of the moon was “explained” by showing that it was pulled by the same force that made stones fall onto earth; so the unknown was reduced to the known. His law of universal gravitation is expressed by a mathematical formula through which astronomers are able to compute and predict the celestial phenomena; and the result of countless predictions shows the truth of the law. Scientists now called the gravitation the “cause” of all these motions; they saw it as a reality floating in space, a kind of mysterious imp, a spiritual being called a “force” directing the planets in their course; the law was a command somehow present in nature which the bodies had to obey. In reality there is nothing of the sort; “cause” means the short summary or compendium, “effect” means the diverse multitude of phenomena. The formula binding the acceleration of each particle to its distance from the other ones, expresses in a short form exactly the same course of things as does a lengthy description of the actual motions. Gravitation as a separate something pulling and steering the bodies does not exist in nature but only in our head. As a mysterious command permeating space it has no more real existence than has Snell’s law of refraction as a command to the light rays on how they have to go. The course of the light rays is a direct mathematical consequence of the different velocity of light in different substances; instead of by the command of a law it can equally well be represented by the principle that light, as it were an intelligent being, chooses the quickest route to reach the aim. Modern science, in an analogous way, in the theory of relativity renders the motions in space not by gravitational force, but by prescribing the shortest road (the “geodesic”) in the distorted four-dimensional space-time. Now again physicists came to consider this warped space as a “reality” behind the phenomena. And again it must be stated that, like Newton’s gravitation, it is only a mental abstraction, a set of formulas, better than the former, hence more true, because it represents more phenomena which the old law could not explain.The same goes for gravitational waves. It too "is only a mental abstraction, a set of formulas, better than the former, hence more true, because it represents more phenomena which the old law could not explain."
Vin wrote:ALB wrote:Oh no, what have I done !you to blame this time, then
I suppose so but under normal circumstances it should be possible to have a rational discussion as to whether "gravitational waves" have always existed waiting to be "discovered" (as the original report suggested) or whether some stream of phenomena in principle observable has now come to be observed, and labelled "gravitational waves". In other words, the phenomenon always existed and it's just that it has now been described, more accurately/usefully in terms of being able to predict the way it will continue to manifest itself. But, unfortunately …
Actually, have scientists "found", "discovered" gravitational waves or have they, rather, come up with a more accurate description of what has been observed?
This news item from today's papers is probably the explanation behind the radicalism of the Independent's journalists, at of the one who choses the Quote of the Day. The paper is likely to be closed:http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/feb/11/independent-owner-considering-closing-national-print-titlesMaybe there is a connection between the industrial class struggle and political class consciousness ….
Article in Wednesday's papers about Peer-to-Peer lending which is supposed to be an alternative to banking. Actually, both are based on the same principle of people with money who don't want to use it themselves for the time being lending it to people who do need money for something. Banks are not doing anything essentially different from the P2P companies. They too are financial intermediaries. In both cases the money has to be there and, as Lord Turner points out, the borrowers need to be checked to see that they will repay any loan. Banks, No one has yet come up with the theory that P2P lenders can create the money they lend out of thin air.http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/10/former-city-regulator-warns-peer-to-peer-lending-lord-turner
No. The Party would make itself ridiculous if it tried to control what members say on twitter, their blogs, etc just as we would if we tried to control their letters to the press, conversations in pubs, etc. If members express anti-socialist views there are other ways in the rulebook of dealing with this
Actually, not only was chapter 1 of Capital not an analysis of capitalism (and not meant to be), but even when, in the following chapters, Marx introduces capitalism as a system of commodity production based on wage labour he is still working with a model which he knows is not the same as actually existing capitalism. He openly recognised this in the following footnote in chapter 9 on "The Rate of Surplus Value":
Quote:The calculations given in the text are intended merely as illustrations. We have in fact assumed that prices = values. We shall, however, see, in Book III., that even in the case of average prices the assumption cannot be made in this very simple manner.So, Marx only gets to analysing capitalism as it really is by stages (simple commodity production, capitalist commodity production on the assumption that prices = values, capitalist commodity production with the averaging of the rate of profit).The footnote is here.I think that he had in fact already drafted Volume III before Volume I was published (in 1867).
ALB wrote:According to this, from an Iranian news agency, the Kurdish nationalists have been getting air support from the Syrian government and Russia for these advances against the so-called "moderate" Jihadists:http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13941119001478More on this from the same source:http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13941121000772
jondwhite wrote:Surely a domain name to attract people is not as good as a high Google ranking?The US comrades have that in hand too:
Quote:comrade S … has agreed to create the site and take the technical measures needed to get it high on the lists of sites that people get when they do the search.
