ALB

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  • in reply to: Banks cancelling accounts: Is it Orwellian? #244976
    ALB
    Keymaster

    So Farange has had his account with Coutts closed. But how did he get to open one there in the first place?

    “To open an account all UK clients and expats are required to save £3m+ or borrow (such as through a mortgage) or invest more than £1m with Coutts.”

    Over £3 million in savings. Not bad for a populist ranter.

    in reply to: Banks cancelling accounts: Is it Orwellian? #244949
    ALB
    Keymaster

    Weren’t some of the funds of the NUM “sequestrated” during the miners’ strike to pay the state the fines that the courts had imposed? Straightforward “confiscation” has been much more common (and of course that is what the working class will do to the physical assets of the capitalist class once they win control of political power).

    For the moment I think they have only frozen Russian financial assets. Sequestrating or confiscating them would be tricky legally and might set precedents they don’t want.

    One of these would be to undermine the role of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency used to settle international payments. In fact even freezing Russia’s assets may have done this, as other states may now be less inclined to hold their financial reserves in dollars if they can avoid this in case this should happen to them.

    in reply to: Banks cancelling accounts: Is it Orwellian? #244945
    ALB
    Keymaster

    Is this because of their views or because they have had payments in from Russia? The banks are shit-scared of being fined for breaking sanctions. Even if the UK authorities let them get away with it the US authorities might not.

    Let’s see if Laurence Fox has his closed. In any event, his party can’t accept donations from abroad (nor can we).

    ALB
    Keymaster

    That’s not the impression George Orwell had of the ILP of which he was a member for a while. This is what he writes of them in The Road to Wigan Pier:

    “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
    One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus.
    The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured ‘Socialists’, as who should say, ‘Red Indians’. He was probably right–the I.L.P. were holding their summer school at Letchworth.”

    Your old dad must have been the odd one out if he didn’t wear sandals.

    ALB
    Keymaster

    So Engels made crude jokes about male homosexuality that might have gone down well in the gentleman’s club he frequented when he worked in Manchester and were probably echoed in working men’s clubs up and down the country.

    So what? Does that invalidate his writings on politics, economics and history? At the time — and for many decades after — most people were against it. I am sure Darwin would have been and I dare say Einstein too. Are their scientific findings to be rejected too? It’s a classic ad hominem argument.

    Even as late as 1953 C. L. R. James (who I think was associated with News and Letters) in his book on the author of Moby Dick Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, saw homosexuality as a vice of a degenerate ruling class.

    in reply to: Russian Tensions #244911
    ALB
    Keymaster

    Counterfire is a breakaway Trotskyist group from the SWP. If he’s one of them I don’t suppose he’d be interested in us or, for that matter, us in him.

    Even so it can’t be a bad thing that sone Trotskyist groups are not taking sides. Trotskyy was of course a Ukrainian by today’s standards. Not that Ukrainian nationalists have claimed him as one of theirs. They prefer Stepan Bandera.

    ALB
    Keymaster

    I am afraid I wasn’t allowed to open the link to the article. Maybe because it is a Russian registered site and, here in the “West, many such sites are blocked in case they contain “disinformation”. The way to deal with “disinformation” is to expose it as such not to ban it. But the West wants a monopoly to propagate its own “disinformation”.

    in reply to: The Bible and the benefits system. #244894
    ALB
    Keymaster

    What we said about this in 1911.

    Did Jesus ever live?

    in reply to: The Bible and the benefits system. #244860
    ALB
    Keymaster

    Here’s what that unsafe site says about the book.

    A novel about the true history of Christianity

    978-620-0-48933-3

    The Yellow Cow is a tragic-comic humanist novel about a young man from Ireland (Eire) named Llywelyn O’Dweyer, whose purpose in life is to acquire wisdom. Living in the early years of Christianity, he can see that this religion is just a copy of many others, all much older. He knows that Christ never existed and that his story is mostly copied from the biography of the god Mithras. Llywelyn decides to discover the true history of Christianity, but he has to abandon his purpose of finding out who founded Christianity, and where it happened because Christians are destroying the entire Greco-Roman culture and murdering anyone who dares to denounce their evil plan. When Llywelyn was about to give up his quest, he had a series of dreams that showed him the answers to all his questions. The young man organizes these dreams into four stories, each with a female protagonist, including Hypatia of Alexandria, the smartest woman of classic times. The last story sheds light on Llywelyn O’Dweyer’s questions, and the reader will be in for a surprise at what it says about who founded Christianity, why and where this religion came into being.
    Authors
    Paul Costa Gavin
    Book language
    English
    Published on
    2023-06-13
    Publishing house
    JustFiction Edition
    Number of pages
    316
    Price (EUR )
    €66.90

    in reply to: The Bible and the benefits system. #244845
    ALB
    Keymaster

    This book looks amusing but I doubt if anyone on benefits will be able to afford a copy:

    https://www.morebooks.shop/shop-ui/shop/book-launch-offer/4866fe693aa2aaa9dddaa58d388c83e5a43d97c3

    in reply to: Russian Tensions #244844
    ALB
    Keymaster

    Another document for the dossier being built up against Greta Thunberg for taking sides in a war:

    Zelenskyy meets Greta Thunberg in Kyiv to address the war’s effect on ecology

    She is now completely discredited and has turned into a common or garden politician.

    in reply to: No need for shoddy in socialism. #244828
    ALB
    Keymaster

    William Morris wrote somewhere that adulteration would be inconceivable in socialism as a society where production was directly for people to use, and asked why on Earth in such a society would substandard stuff be produced?

    This also means that there would be no need for Trading Standards officers either.

    in reply to: Russian Tensions #244810
    ALB
    Keymaster

    Not content with turning against the Russian-speaking minority, the Ukrainian nationalists now want to deal with the Hungarian-speaking minority. And we’re supposed to support the Ukraine regime to uphold “democratic values”.

    Ethnic cleansing? A Ukrainian journalist proposes solving the ‘Hungarian problem’ with resettlement scheme

    in reply to: Coiner of the word communism. #244763
    ALB
    Keymaster

    I have now read that article on General Caffarelli and while he is reported as saying “I contend that the laws that sanction property sanction a usurpation, a theft”. But he then went on to say that, as it would be inconvenient to abolish them, the best that could be done would be to modify them to make them less unfair. So Napoleon probably didn’t hear the case for common ownership, after all, at least not from Caffarelli.

    in reply to: Labour Party facing bankruptcy #244754
    ALB
    Keymaster

    It was, actually. Having said that, those who vote for the raving loony monsters are making a point — a protest against conventional politics and its irrelevance to the life of ordinary people, taking the piss out of its empty election promises by making absurd ones. It’s an alternative to abstention and going fishing on election day. Understandable if not particularly constructive.

Viewing 15 posts - 1,381 through 1,395 (of 10,416 total)