ALB
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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.Another quote for the file, about one of the new banks set up to challenge the oligopoly of the established ones (from yesterday's Times):
Quote:Metro takes far more in deposits than it lends to customers. Deposits are now £5.1 billion, compared with £3.5 billion in loans, making its loan-to-deposit ratio 69 per cent at the end of 2015. The model, Metro says, is ultra-safe, but it also makes it difficult to generate profits, because banks normally make money from charging more on loans than they pay out in interest to depositors.Metro Bank in fact made a loss in 2015 as in previous years. They seem to be using deposits to expand their business (more branches) than for loans to others. A sensible start-up business strategy maybe, but not something that could properly be described as "ultra-safe". In any event, they are not creating anything out of thin air.
Our US comrades are to it, according to this email:
Quote:… an idea that has been accepted by the other WSPUS members active on our forum. It was reported in the US press that as a result of Bernie Sanders calling himself a socialist internet searches on the word "socialism" have surged. [The] idea is to take advantage of this by creating a new website using the domain name whatissocialism.org (or .net) specially designed to attract people who do these searches.As an aside, I see Mason describes Sanders as "the first serious leftwing candidate in the history of the Democratic Party" but what about FD Roosevelt? Isn't Sanders advocating the same sort of "New Deal" policies? I know he's denouncing billionaires and calling for a political revolution but didn't FDR do much the same?
There does seem to be an anarchist at large in the i paper, as a comrade has just pointed out that its Quote of the Day for the previous issue (5 February) was:
Quote:As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognise nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others. JOEL BAKANBakan's book and film The Corporation are very good but the irony here is that the i paper is owned by a Russian oligarch … by means of the legal construct of a corporation.
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=13941119001478
In a book on Women and Socialism by a US Trotskyist (member of the ISO) which we've been sent for review, the author Sharon Smith reveals that others in Germany and elsewhere took the same attitude as us towards the Women's Movements that demanded votes for women on the same terms as men:
Quote:For example, the early-twentieth-century German women's suffrage movement did not challenge the property requirements that denied working-class men the right to vote — knowing that such requirements would also deny voting rights to working-class women. Maintaining such property requirements could only strengthen the political weight ol the middle and upper classes, while the working class would remain politically voiceless.And describing discussions within the Second International:
Quote:The issue of whether to fight for "universal" or "partial" women's suffrage was a strong point of controversy. Some women's suffrage organizations demanded (and in some European countries, won) partial suffrage for women—with voting rights based upon property holding and the payment of taxes (that is, restricting voting rights to those women of financial means). But in many of these same societies, male suffrage was also partial, denying working-class men the right to vote. Thus, partial suffrage merely increased the voting power of the upper classes.
