ALB
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That's actually how Paddy was chosen as our "Leader" at one Conference. The idea was repeat the exercise every year but you have to pay £25 every time you make a change and there's a certain amount of bureaucracy is involved. But if you want to be our Leader it can be arranged. When registering him we did make it clear in a covering letter that it was for the purpose of the Political Parties Act only.Meanwhile, the 16 November having past and despite our letter, the Electoral Quango has gone ahead and removed "SPGB" as one of the registered variants of our name.
alanjjohnstone wrote:I vaguely recall a long time ago DannyL when he was a regular orator at Hyde Park becoming involved with some radical Muslims speakers there and the idea of a formal debate was raised…and we shit our pants – so to speak – scared that the debate would become a physical confrontation and HO would be damaged and no more was said about the possibility.I'm no sure about that anecdote. We have confronted radical Islamists in debate, at various universities in the 1990s. I recall the late Eddie Grant saying after he had done one that the last time he had seen an audience segregated into men and women at a meeting was at a synagogue. At one anti-war demonstration in Hyde Park our stall happened to be next to a radical Islamist one. The young people (men) of Bangladeshi origin were fascinated to hear the atheist case presented. They had never met one before. The perils of living in a secular society, nothing of course compared to the perils of an atheist living in ISIS-land.
alanjjohnstone wrote:Fisk at his best again bringing some perspective to the problem…and asking a poignant question ….if the French could retaliate by taking out an arms depot and training base, why didn't they do it a week ago rather than in revenge attack?…Maybe because they didn't want the Syrian army to get to Raqqa first, i.e before their proxy pawns on the ground:http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/11/syria-aleppo-army-lift-blockade-kuweires-airport.html
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
