ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
It’s us versus the gang of five in Barnet & Camden too:
https://www.barnet.gov.uk/sites/default/files/statement_of_persons_nominated_-_gla_barnet_camden.pdf
In Lambeth & Southwark it is us against the gang of five:
Nominations closed yesterday but those standing in the two constituencies we are contesting — Barnet & Camden and Lambeth & Southwark — have not yet been officially announced.
We will have at least 5 opponents: the gang of five (Labour, Tory, Liberal, ReformUK and Greens) who are standing everywhere). The first four standing for capitalism more or less as it is and the Greens for going back to the smaller scale capitalism of yesteryear.
Yesterday also, our 15,000 election leaflets were delivered to Head Office. Distribution will start next week after Easter.
It looks as if you didn’t reach the end of that article on “Quantum Quackery”:
“interpretations of quantum effects need not so uproot classical physics, or common sense, as to render them inoperable on all scales—especially the macroscopic scale on which humans function. Newtonian physics, which successfully describes virtually all macroscopic phenomena, follows smoothly as the many-particle limit of quantum mechanics. And common sense continues to apply on the human scale.”
And of course there will be some movement within the body that corresponds to “emotion” — don’t parts of the brain light up on scanners or something? But I don’t think Eros, Thanatos or Qi cause (or are the result of) anything like that.
“you’ve just solved one of the greatest mysteries in science”
It wasn’t me. It was Newton. And it works for human life, even if not for galaxies or subatomic particles.
The same cannot be said for Eros, Thanatos and Qi.
Of course physicists know what gravity is. It’s the attraction between things that have mass. Here’s a simple explanation (but note the error that Newton presented his theory in 1867 rather than 1687):
But nobody knows what “Eros” or “Thanatos” or “Qi” is.
If that’s too simple try this on quantum quackery:
https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1997/01/22165024/p37.pdf
I believe the advice is that, if you are in hole, you should stop digging. But now you are saying that “Eros” and “Thanatos” are like gravity or magnetism.
But these are measurable and can be explained in physical terms. So how are Freud’s “psychological forces” measured and how can they be explained in physical terms?
By the way, quantum mechanics is an explanation of phenomenon observed in the movement of sub-atomic particles and has no application outside that field.
By coincidence yesterday BBC Radio 4 broadcast a discussion about an exchange of correspondence in 1932 between Einstein and Freud on why war and what to do to stop it. This gives this thread some contemporary interest rather than being a subject of abstract curiosity of a forum member.
The programme can be listened to here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001tr2s
Einstein was writing as a pacifist. One of the passages from Freud that was read on the programme was that humans are born with “the instincts to destroy and kill, which we assimilate as the aggressive or destructive instincts”. By “we” he meant “psychoanalysts” and which rules out as completely utopian a free society without a repressive state. That was why Reich rejected the existence of such “instincts”, though on philosophical rather than scientific grounds.
“Reich said that by the age of ten in this society most children have at least one type of neurosis.”
I wasn’t going to take part in this thread (as we’ve been here before) but this is too much. Why do you keep quoting Reich as if he was any sort of authority on the subject. We know he ended up a raving lunatic seeing sexual energy as the basis of the universe but even before that he was engaged in dubious speculations.
It may well be true “by the age of ten in this society most children have at least one type of neurosis” (depending on what you mean by “neurosis” — and BD will be able to advise whether this is still a concept psychiatrists use) but it won’t be for the reason Reich gave — misdirection of some mysterious “sexual energy” that has never been found any more than the “qi” of traditional Chinese medicine has.
We missed this one. Well-known leftie Owen Jonas has left the Labour Party and now opposes it but not reformism of course. In fact his case seems to be that the Labour is longer a reformist social-democrat party.
Said to be the last Corbynista in any high office Jamie Driscoll, the North of Tyne Mayor, has an article in this weekend’s i paper. He was deselected for talking to Ken Loach and is standing against Labour as an Indeoendent.
Of course his programme is just common or garden reformism but he does have a point about the “magic growth bunny”.
Reeves herself has admitted that if there is no growth — if she can’t magic it into existence – the Labour government will be in an impossible situation and will have to impose austerity:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68602668.amp
Governments can’t decree growth. That depends on how capitalist enterprises judge the prospect of making an adequate profit. She might be lucky and growth might happen but it wouldn’t be anything to do with the Labour government might do. It would just be a coincidence.
On the other hand, she might be unlucky ..
Report from Medway (Kent):
40 people at a protest meeting this morning outside the factory gates of the arms manufacturer BAE Systems in Chatham who supply guidance systems for the Israeli planes bombing Gaza and its population. Green Party flag and local Trades Council banner evident and chants of “Stop arming Israel”. No other leafletting except us.
One of our opponents in Barnet & Camden:
I think I posted this the last time we discussed this:
