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dweenlander wrote:

By the way, my post has been flagged as offensive. You are clearly more experienced on this site than I am, would you happen to know why that might be?

I noticed that too and so has one from AlexW. I can't see why in either case but any forum member can flag any post. Whether the moderator takes any notice is another matter. In any event it will be some forum member not the moderator who will have done this.

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Hrothgar wrote:

having reviewed the thread you've linked to, it looks to me like he was running rings round you

If you think he ran rings about us, I challenge you do to the same test we asked him to do but which he ran away from:

Ed wrote:

`Hi Tom would you be willing to try out this quick game it's designed to help people see the ridiculousness of race.Downloadable version (better)http://www.gamesforchange.org/play/guess-my-race/Online versionhttp://www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_01-sort.htm

Let us know how you got on.

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SocialistPunk wrote:

Mehdi Hasan made some insightful points, one in particular aimed at, Damian Green, as a rebuttal to Green's mantra about chemical weapons being illegal. Mehdi asked why the Tory government of 1988 turned a blind eye to Saddam Hussein's use of chemical agents against his own people and Iran. Can anyone guess what Green's answer was?

What was it? That that was then, but now is now? Can't have been that the West was supporting Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war, can it?

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Here's a picture of what it used to look like till a couple of years ago:http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarflondondunc/540301763/The removal of the bricked wall (originally built at the time the Anti-Nazi League were fighting the National Front and the NF were retaliating against any organisation with "socialist" in its name) is a huge improvement. More passers-by venture inside. Personally, I don't see the need to waste any money changing anything else. The improvements have been made. Let's leave it at that.

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

A very interesting interview with a Syrian anarchist here.http://truth-out.org/news/item/18617-syrian-anarchist-challenges-the-rebel-regime-binary-view-of-resistance"….The left has been very hostile to the Syrian uprising, …."

Has it? It would have been helpful if he has defined what he means by "the left" and/or given some examples. As far as I can see, on the contrary, most of "the left" are very enthusiastically (and very naively) in favour of the rebels. See, for instance:http://www.mail-archive.com/marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/msg22091.htmlThey love taking sides in wars, even proxy ones, instead of the socialist position that no war is worth the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood.

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LBird wrote:

Seems 'this nature' (a part of 'reality') is 'non-observable', according to Dietzgen, too, ALB.

Sorry I can't help you with Schaff (heard of him, but not read him), but I'm a bit surprised that you are digging yourself into another hole by trying to defend the concept of "non-observable reality".This goes against the whole basic premise of Dietzgen's theory (and Pannekoek's too): that the only "reality" is the ever-changing "world of phenomena", i.e what "appears" and which humans can "perceive" in one way or another.  Deitzgen and Pannekoek argue that only what can be observed/perceived can be the object of "understanding" or "knowledge". What can't be observed is not part of "reality". "Non-observed" is of course not the same as "non-observable" which means what cannot be observed.To imagine that there is some part of "reality" behind what can be observed/perceived is metaphysics:

Quote:

Dietzgen was a thoroughgoing empiricist and materialist. For him all knowledge was derived from sense-perception and what human beings perceived had a real existence independent of their perception of it.The Nature of Human Brainwork (1869) presents an empiricist theory of knowledge derived from a rejection of Kantian dualism. Kant had claimed that Reason (=science, knowledge) could only deal with the world of experience, but the world of experience, according to him, was only a world of appearances or, to use a word derived from Greek meaning the same, a world of ‘phenomena’. Thus science could never come to understand the world as it really was, the world of what Kant called ‘things-in-themselves’ of which he supposed the world of phenomena to be but appearances. For Kant, there were two worlds: a world of phenomena, which was all the human mind could come to understand, and a world of things-in-themselves beyond human experience and understanding.For Dietzgen, to posit the existence of a second world beyond the world of experience was simply metaphysical nonsense. ‘Phenomena or appearances appear – voilà tout.’ The world of phenomena was the only world; phenomena were themselves real, the substance of the real world. Phenomena, however, says Dietzgen, do not exist as independent entities; they exist only as parts or the entire single world of phenomena. The world of reality is a single entity embracing all observable phenomena, past, present and future. Reality is thus infinite, having no beginning nor end. It is constantly changing. The universe and all things in it consist of transformations of matter, which take place simultaneously and consecutively in space and time.

Or as Pannekoek puts in Lenin As Philosopher:

Quote:

In the word phenomenon “that which appears”, there is contained an oppositeness to the reality of things; if we speak of “appearings” there must be something else that appears. Not at all, says Dietzgen; phenomena appear (or occur), that is all. In this play of words we must not think, of course, of what appears to me or to another observer; all that happens, whether man sees it or not, is a phenomenon, and all these happenings form the totality of the world, the real world of phenomena.

So, to talk of "non-observable reality" is either metaphysics or nonsense (the same thing, actually).What you have confused is the distinction Dietzgen makes between the external world of phenomena and our ideas about it. But of course our ideas, thoughts, even illusions and hallucinations, are also part of the world of phenomena and so also of "observable reality" (a tautology).

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Is this what you've got in mind?

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Hrothgar wrote:

But you're welcome to it, if you want your children and grand-children to mix with Africans and Asians.  Please proceed.  Don't worry, you won't hear any objection from me [though I will be sat somewhere (somewhere very far away, I hope) shaking with laughter]. 

You're a nasty shit underneath, aren't you? What's laughable about somebody wanting to mix with whoever they choose?

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LBird wrote:

‘non-observable reality’.

That's an oxymoron, surely? Certainly not a concept Dietzgen or Pannelokek would have subscribed to. 

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Hrothgar wrote:

There is only one truth.  There may be different ways of interpreting or assessing the truth, but the fact remains there is one truth and one truth only.  'Validity' in any perspective depends on its proximity to the truth.  The more objective we approach an incident or problem, the more truthful our analysis or conclusions are likely to be, and thus the more valid.  Objectivity cannot be decoupled from social values, admittedly, but we can achieve a large degree of objectivity using the right methods.

Please don't rise to this bait here, LBird! But refer him to the other threads we have on this , e.g.:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/pannekoeks-theory-scienceLet's see if we can get him off his nasty obsession.

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Hrothgar wrote:

I would say that what you refer to here are ethnic differences rather than racial differences.  I have no particular problem with the presence of white Europeans in Britain.

What is the problem you have with the presence of non-white Europeans and/or white non-Europeans in Britain? In fact what are your definitions of "white", "European" and "non-European"?And, while you're at it, what is the difference you make here between a "race" and an "ethnic group"?

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Gene Sharp was once the editor of Peace News. His book From Dictatorship to Democracy was reviewed in the March 2012 Socialist Standard:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1291-march-2012/book-reviewsIt has some relevancy to what has subsequently happened in Egypt and Syria.

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ALB wrote:

But during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war they supported Iran as the "anti-imperialists" because the West was supporting Iraq, despite Iraq's use of chemical weapons: (….)It's clear that the use of chemical weapons in Syria is just a pretext for taking action to weaken the government side in the civil war to aid the rebels with a view to bringing about "regime change".

By coincidence there's a letter in today's Times from Tory grandee Norman Lamont making the same point:

Quote:

Sir, Your leading article (Sept 3) about Syria and chemical weapons refers to the need "to uphold international norms and legal prohibitions that have held since 1925 on the use of chemical weapons". Your editorial memory is curiously selective. The West has in the past turned a blind eye to the use of chemical weapons. In 1988 Saddam Hussein used mustard gas and sarin against Iranian'troops, killing 20,000 and leaving 100,000 wounded. A recent article in the US magazine Foreign Policy claimed that US officials who gave Iraq intelligence about Iranian troop movements, did so in the knowledge that the Iraqis would use chemical weapons. The Iranians even flew some victims to British hospitals and tried to raise the issue in the UN. The West was indifferent. You are right: the use of chemical weapons is, indeed, horrific and unacceptable. But if you wish to carry conviction with your arguments, should you not at least acknowledge the West's position in the past has been woefully far from consistent?LORD LAMONT House of Lords

As the Times is read by "top people" the elite policy-makers and their mouthpieces in the media who want to bomb Syria know full well what cynical hypocrites they are.

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mcolome1 wrote:

The Trotskyite during the Iraq war they made a call to provide support to Saddam Hussein because he was an anti-imperialist,

But during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war they supported Iran as the "anti-imperialists" because the West was supporting Iraq, despite Iraq's use of chemical weapons:

Quote:

Author Barry M. Lando says, by 1987, the U.S. military was so invested in the correct outcome, that "officers from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency dispatched to Baghdad were actually planning day-by-day strategic bombing strikes for the Iraqi Air Force." Iraq used this data to target Iranian positions with chemical weapons, says ambassador Galbraith.According to retired Army Colonel W. Patrick Lang, senior defense intelligence officer for the United States Defense Intelligence Agency at the time, "the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern" to Reagan and his aides, because they "were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose." Lang disclosed that more than 60 officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian deployments. He cautioned that the DIA "would have never accepted the use of chemical weapons against civilians, but the use against military objectives was seen as inevitable in the Iraqi struggle for survival." Despite this claim, the Reagan administration did not stop aiding Iraq after receiving reports affirming the use of poison gas on Kurdish civilians.Joost R. Hiltermann says that when the Iraqi military turned its chemical weapons on the Kurds during the war, killing approximately 5,000 people in the town of Halabja and injuring thousands more, the Reagan administration actually sought to obscure Iraqi leadership culpability by suggesting, inaccurately, that the Iranians may have carried out the attack.

It seems that the US ruling class is a bit selective in its condemnation of the use of chemical weapons. That's ok as long as the side they want to win uses them, despite the "international community" drawing a so-called "red line" in 1925 against their use.It's clear that the use of chemical weapons in Syria is just a pretext for taking action to weaken the government side in the civil war to aid the rebels with a view to bringing about "regime change".

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dweenlander wrote:

In addition I would recommend Michael Heinrich’s An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital – which focuses largely on Vol. 1 and contains some marvellous stuff on the labour theory of value. 

If this is the sort of stick Heinrich's gets for challenging the falling-rate-of-profit theory of cyclical crises then it sounds as if he is worth a read:http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/economic-crisis/the-unmaking-of-marxs-capital-heinrichs-attempt-to-eliminate-marxs-crisis-theory.htmlI think I'll start with the article of his they criticise:http://monthlyreview.org/2013/04/01/crisis-theory-the-law-of-the-tendency-of-the-profit-rate-to-fall-and-marxs-studies-in-the-1870s

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