ALB
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When and who did you speak to at Head Office? Shelley has always been highly regarded in the socialist movement. This article quotes his attack on "commerce" in Queen Mab which he sees as a product of selfishness in the sense of people wanting to sell their surplus for money rather than give it to others to satisfy their needs:
Quote:Hence commerce springs, the venal interchangeOf all that human art or nature yield;Which wealth should purchase not, but want demand,And natural kindness hasten to supplyFrom the full fountain of its boundless love,For ever stifled, drained, and tainted now.Commerce! Beneath whose poison-breathing shadeNo solitary virtue dares to spring,But Poverty and Wealth with equal handScatter their withering curses, and unfoldThe doors of premature and violent death,To pining famine and full-fed disease,To all that shares the lot of human life,Which poisoned, body and soul, scarce drags the chain,That lengthens as it goes and clanks behind,Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,The signet of its all-enslaving powerUpon a shining ore, and called it gold:Before whose image bow the vulgar great,The vainly rich, the miserable proud,The mob of peasants, nobles, priests and kings,And with blind feelings reverence the powerThat grinds them to the dust of misery.But in the temple of their hireling heartsGold is a living god, and rules in scornAll earthly things but virtue.and
Quote:All things are sold: the very light of HeavenIs venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love,The smallest and most despicable of thingsThat lurk in the abysses of the deep,All objects of our life, even life itself,And the poor pittance which the laws allowOf liberty, the fellowship of man,Those duties which his heart of human loveShould urge him to perform instinctively,Are bought and sold as in a public martOf undisguising selfishness, that setsOn each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign,Even love is sold; the solace of all woeIs turned to deadliest agony, old ageShivers in selfish beauty's loathing arms,And youth's corrupted impulses prepareA life of horror from the blighting baneOf commerce; whilst the pestilence that springsFrom unenjoying sensualism, has filledAll human life with hydra-headed woes.I think this makes him at least a "proto-socialist".
This will please Vin:https://twitter.com/SimonCapewell99/status/665799046209081344?lang=no
Jeremy Corbyn's take on this:http://labourlist.org/2015/11/jeremy-corbyn-calls-for-political-settlement-to-end-syria-conflict/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LabourListLatestPosts+%28LabourList%29and one from our blog:http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/neither-god-nor-state.html
All true, but sometimes any publicity is good publicity. And some people will see a half-empty glass where others see a half-full one.
Not a bad caricature of yourself, Private Fraser Actually of course is means two things. That those who read the book would have been introduced to us. And that Party members are not inclined to read books by Ferguson given his TV performances.
What's wrong with these nutters? Anyway, I'm not going to Paris for the climate change demonstrations there on 1 December. Not sure about going to the one in central London on 30 November either. And some people think fascism is still the main threat to rational civilisation.
Looks like a good article opposing this dangerous and disturbing nonsense but here's a link to it which works (I think):http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/Don't know why Robbo's doesn't (at least not for me)
ALB wrote:I don't believe this one from today's Daily Mirror website:http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/isis-savages-gun-down-200-6798484It sounds too much like German troops bayoneting babies in WW1 and don't think even the koran would authorise such a mass killing of children.This has since been debunked. Another example of bad journalism (or good journalism from the point of view of war propaganda):http://observers.france24.com/en/20151113-daily-mirror-massacre-200-children-islamic-stateIt was still a film of a massacre but of captured prisoners of war not children. Still savagery of course.
Things sound bad both in the US and here. Ironic that so-called "safe spaces" should have resulted in the growth of intolerance or been a cover for it. Best to leave this policy well alone.
perspicacious wrote:Capitalism is a natural by-product of human nature and has been around since the dawn of time.Nul point for that one. That's not a redefinition, just an old chestnut.Even supporters of capitalism recognise that it's not always existed and had a historical origin in what has been called 'the long 16th century'. For instance, from today's papers:http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4611701.ece
Forgot to add that if Cameron had his way and EU migrants were barred from getting tax credits(no chance of that happening though) they would have an income below the meagre official "poverty line" and not be able to survive in a fit state to work. Incidentally, I don't think there is anything in the EU Treaties stopping him barring non-EU migrants receiving tax credits, eg Filipino nurses, so why doesn't he do it? The fact that he is not thinking of doing this suggests he wouldn't do it to EU migrants even if Britain withdrew from the EU. In other words, it's all a bluff to try to steal votes back from UKIP.
Talking, seriously, about tax credits when Cameron claimed on Monday that some 40% of recent migrant workers to the UK are "on benefits" most people would understand (and were meant to understand) that they were "workshy scroungers". But he himself admitted that most of these would be receiving tax credits, i.e would be working and of course in low-paid jobs so the government would be subsidising low-paying employers. A critical analysis of his demagogic claim here:http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/fact-check-43-eu-migrants-claim-benefits/21964
