ALB
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Hrothgar wrote:it's worth noting that you are not repaying my general civility in kind, which implies you have no response to my arguments.
If I'd have been you, instead of posting long cringe-worthy self-justifications, I'd have simply said touché and moved on.As to your self-proclaimed "general civility" I remind you of your derogatory remark laughing at people who you said were going to have "mixed race" grandchildren, without considering that there will be such people on this forum as well as people you don't want them or yourself to mix with.As to your argument, it seems to have boiled down, in the course of the exchanges here, to the claim that humans have a "tribal instinct" and are able to recognise others with a similar genetic make-up to theirs (what you call "race") but without reference to their skin colour.Since humans are social animals they may well have something akin to your "tribal instinct" but it would be a general "instinct" to associate with fellow humans, in our complex modern society with different humans for different purposes; which is what happens. You have not shown that it can only take the form you want it to take. In fact, the fact that you have to propagandise for your preference and try to create a "racial consciousness" shows that it is not "natural" as, if it was, it would manifest itself spontaneously. But it doesn't. And hasn't. Quite the opposite. There's been what you call "race mixing" for tens of thousands of years.
Hrothgar wrote:you instead try and turn the tables on me.Rather successfully, I thought. You stand exposed as a sanctimonious hypocrite on this point. Better you stick to simple "racialism" instead of trying to be a feather plucker.
Hrothgar wrote:you go psycho at even a moderate slightCan that be a demeaning reference to people with psychological problems?
Report on the meeting by those who drew up the "Socialist Platform" here:http://www.independentsocialistnetwork.org/?p=2470What unscrupulous political operators the so-called "CPGB" are. True Leninists !
Ok, forget "peak oil" or agree to disagree on it and move on to global warming. I agree with you that this is happening, so how do you think that problem could be solved or at least mitigated?I must confess that I am beginning to think that your refusal to commit yourself on solutions is disguising the fact that you don't think there is one and think we are all doomed and thst the best an individual can do is to stock up on food and a gun and take to the hills to await the impending collapse of capitalism and/or civilisation.
Isn't Praxis simply the German word for practice? So Marx would simply have meant what we mean by practice. Giving it some other meaning seems to go back to Gramsci, the leader of the Italian Communist Party in the 1920s and 30s, or at least to those who have interpreted him. In a footnote to an article he wrote on Gramsci in 2007 Chris Harman (SWP) pointed out:
Quote:In this and other passages Gramsci used the Italian word ‘prassi’, which is translated in English‑Italian dictionaries as ‘practice’. Some people translate it as ‘praxis’, believing that gives it some deeper, almost mystical meaning. In fact, in Germany every medical doctor has a ‘praxis’.ralfy wrote:What you are asking for is beyond the scope of this thread given the thread title. Put simply, the question, "Whatever happened to 'peak oil'?" implies that there is no problem concerning peak oil, and since there is no problem, then there is no need to seek a solution. This makes your request illogical, unless you are now acknowledging that the question is irrelevant and that peak oil should be taken seriously. If so, then I suggest that you create a new thread where you mention that peak oil is a major issue and ask for solutions.This seems a bit pedantic. I would have thought that it made sense to discuss all aspects of "peak oil" on one thread.
ralfy wrote:I also do not understand why you argue, "even assuming you are right," as this makes me feel that I am wasting my time, i.e., having to give a solution to a problem that you argue does not exist.This is not just a dialogue between you and me. I may have started this thread but there are others on this forum who probably won't take the same position as me (in fact I was assuming some won't) and will be interested in hearing your solution to the problem you and they perceive.
ralfy wrote:Finally, I never believed that "the present world capitalist system" will solve the problem of peak oil. If any, I explained that the same system will fall apart because of such a problem.Well, at least that confirms that you are not a lobbyist for some rival source of energy to drive capitalist industry, e.g nuclearpower but it still leaves open the question of how you propose to deal with the problem. Are we to just sit around and wait for the capitalist system to fall apart? Or should we take to the hills, as the doomsters advise?
Just read the account in today's Times about the incident in Russia, where an argument about the 18th century German philosopher Kant ended in a shooting, which DJP has already drawn our attention to. It says that Kant
Quote:revolutionised Western philosophy by examining how the mind constructs our knowledge of the natural world and probing the limits of our empirical understanding of that world (…) Kant explains how reason makes experience possible by imposing structure on the data that our senses provide [emphasis added]So this discussion does have some relevance to contemporary events after all.
alanjjohnstone wrote:The real project would be to do an abridged version, Dietzgen For DummiesThis was already done by Fred Casey in his book Thinking that came out in 1922 and was used as a textbook by the National Council of Labour Colleges and so had a fairly wide circulation in radical working-class circles in the 1920s and 1930s.There are (of course) several copies in the Party library. It can also be read online, here:http://archive.org/stream/thinkingintroduc00case#page/n5/mode/2up
We once held the Summer School at Ruskin College, in Headington on the outskirts of Oxford. Don't know if they still do this or how much it would cost.
Still on the question of whether or not it makes sense to say that it was "true" until 1700 that the Sun moved round the Earth, I had assumed that this was the generally held view until then, but when discussing it with other members (yes, we're discussing this offline too, and if in Russia they can discuss Kant at a hotdog stall we can discuss helio- and geocentric models of the solar system in a pub) one member said that the view that the Earth went round the Sun had been defended in Greek times by a women philosopher called Hypatia. There seems to be uncertainty about this, but it was certainly proposed as long ago as three centuries before our era by another Greek philospher Aristarchos of Samos and also later by other Greek philosophers and by some Indian astronomers. See here.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeliocentrismThe question that now arises is: were Aristarchos, Seleucus, Hypatia, Aryabhata and others wrong or telling untruths when they argued, in their time, before 1700, that the Earth moved round the Sun? (Actually, I think DJP raised this point earlier in the discussion about, when there are two competing theories, how do you decide which is correct.)
twc wrote:Not according to Schaff p. 47, it was Raymond Aron.Curioser and curioser. Another positivist, but where does Einstein come into this, if at all?
No need for a pamphlet or at least to write a new one. It's all here in Pannekoek's 1937 article on "Society and Mind in Marxian Philosophy":http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/society-mind/index.htmAnyway, pamphlets are not needed so much these days when we've got the internet. So we could just provide a link somewhere to Pannekoek's article.
LBird wrote:How can a 'selection' be made from a infinite stream of potential sense-impressions, originating from the object, without a 'theory'?I was not challenging the statement that "theory [generally] precedes observation", i.e. that the observer has to have some idea what they are looking for. What I was challenging was the insertion of the word "always" in place of "generally".As to the what the participants here agree and disagree on. As far as I can see, we agree on what science is doing (whether it recognises it or not) — describing a part of the "infinite stream of potential sense-impressions" rather than discovering the world as it really is. We disagree over whether or not this theory implies that it was once "true" that the Sun moved round the Earth.
