ALB
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Nobody has told us what Freud’s explanation of Auschwitz etc would have been. That humans are natural born killers? Or what?
Personally I don’t think the Marxian methodology is that scientific mainly because as Popper says you can’t create an experiment to disprove his theories.
Yes, I too thought that that was over the top and certainly cannot be said to apply to all Marx’s (and our) theories even if Popper’s definition is assumed to be valid.
Perhaps this could/should be the theme of a thread of its own?
Something more positive — and more up to date — from Generation Z:
“Starmer’s Labour won the support of just 20.1% of registered voters on July 4th. No administration since the introduction of universal (male) suffrage in 1918 has ever governed with the support of a lower share of the total electorate.”
That means that when things go wrong for the government (as they inevitably will) 4 out of 5 people will be able to say “don’t blame me. I didn’t vote for them”.
No. No state has an interest in a wider war in Europe. Not the European NATO members states. Not Russia. Certainly not the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Estonia.
In any event Trump is not that indifferent to NATO. He just wants the European members to pay more so that the US can pay less.
You are letting your imagination run away with you.
Two comments on the new government’s proposedNational Wealth Fund under which the government will put up a quarter of the cost of a green infrastructure project provided private capital puts up the rest.
“This is going to sink or swim based on its return generation. If it loses money it’ll be in trouble. It’s absolutely critical that it makes money” (an inside “source” quoted by the Times, 15 July).
“Labour has made a virtue of ‘derisking’ private sector investment. The danger is a state that will end up underwriting corporate profits while nationalising losses in the rush to fix a longstanding gap by throwing money at private finance” (Mehreen Khan, Times Economics Editor, 16 July).
Trump and Zelensky speak to each other on the phone. Trump apparently urges a negotiated settlement:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/19/politics/donald-trump-zelensky-phone-call-2024/index.html
Front page of today’s The Times:
https://x.com/hendopolis/status/1814047796309491773
They fought the state and the state won.
She also stood as a candidate in Manchester Central in the general election and got the same sort of vote, both in terms of numbers and percentage, as we did in Clapham and Brixton Central:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/constituencies/E14001352
We have had a stall there quite a few times in the past as this photo shows.
Incidentally, the gazebo must be in the possession of one of the comrades or ex-comrades in the North East, so no need to buy another one if you can track it down.
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/10048538/4909977401695655865
This from the Financial Times is relevant under the headline;
“Donald Trump will demand Russia-Ukraine peace talks, claims Viktor Orbán
Hungarian prime minister says Republican candidate will rapidly push to end the war if he wins US election.”https://www.ft.com/content/44493fa9-d8f2-4407-94ac-a072c1976ca2
Actually, in his 1920 polemic against full state capitalism and socialism, Mises conceded that monetary calculation could not measure use-value. He also conceded that a socialist society would have no problem in deciding what to produce (what use-values to produce). His criticism was that it wouldn’t be able to decide “rationally” what methods and materials to use to produce them.
Monetary calculation, he wrote in chapter 2 of that article,
“can never obtain as a measure for the calculation of those value determining elements which stand outside the domain of exchange transactions. If, for example, a man were to calculate the profitability of erecting a waterworks, he would not be able to include in his calculation the beauty of the waterfall which the scheme might impair, except that he may pay attention to the diminution of tourist traffic or similar changes, which may be valued in terms of money. Yet these considerations might well prove one of the factors in deciding whether or not the building is to go up at all.
It is customary to term such elements “extra-economic.“ This perhaps is appropriate; we are not concerned with disputes over terminology; yet the considerations themselves can scarcely be termed irrational. In any place where men regard as significant the beauty of a neighborhood or of a building, the health, happiness and contentment of mankind, the honor of individuals or nations, they are just as much motive forces of rational conduct as are economic factors in the proper sense of the word, even where they are not substitutable against each other on the market and therefore do not enter into exchange relationships.”And
“Any extension of the sphere of monetary calculation causes misunderstanding. It cannot be regarded as constituting a kind of yardstick for the valuation of goods, and cannot be so treated in historical investigations into the development of social relationships; it cannot be used as a criterion of national wealth and income, nor as a means of gauging the value of goods which stand outside the sphere of exchange, as who should seek to estimate the extent of human losses through emigrations or wars in terms of money? This is mere sciolistic tomfoolery, however much it may be indulged in by otherwise perspicacious economists.”
(I had to look up “sciolistic” too.)
Some of his followers, and others, have disagreed with this and have tried to put a price on everything.
While governments can’t control or change the way that the capitalist economy works, they can control how the armed forces (the essence of the state of which the government is the executive) are used. It is difficult to see what more help the American government could give to Israel as its proxy against Iran, but it’s possible that a Trump administration might divert military resources from Ukraine — bringing that war to an end — to Israel, risking one with Iran.
Talk about a choice between two evils. Both war-mongers but differing on which war to promote.
