Bijou Drains
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Even still, hardly credible in many ways. Charities and special interest groups profit from exaggeration. Lots of clicks and money is made from cruelty stories. There was a story going the rounds about dogs in Portugal being put on fishing hooks to act as bait for sharks. Turned out to be a whole load of bollards, but the perpetrators of the hoax made millions. “Charitable work” is very often an adjunct to capitalism. Monetarising natural human empathy and understanding to pay the wages of chief execs and charity “nomenklatura”. I generally don’t give anything to charities, not from a spirit of meanness but because I’d rather give what I can give to others directly to them, where I can.
In terms of animal cruelty, I don’t think it is a rising issue, if anything it is falling. Historically bating and killing animals for “sport” was a widespread practice, bear bating, dog fights, cock fighting, bull fighting, fox hunting, badger baiting, etc were common and acceptable practices. Attitudes have changed, however practices have moved underground and again, due to capitalism have been increasingly monetarised.
I worked in Social Work out in the The West of Northumberland in the Cheviots and the edge of the Pennines in the 80’s and 90’s. Most of the hill farmers and sheep farmers despised the hunt. They would come through farms, destroy things, often the hounds would attack sheep dogs and generally cause mayhem to both man and beast. They tolerated them mainly because they were tenant farmers and couldn’t upset the land owning classes. Also the hunt would take any ewes which had died naturally, which happens as part of the life cycle especially in the winter. The cost of hygienically disposing of the animal carcass could have tipped their farm over the edge, so the hunt taking dead animals to feed their hounds was often the difference between eating or not eating.
The farmers knew how to attract and kill a fox which had become a danger to live stock in a very effective and quick way. Foxes that take chickens, etc. are often injured or moving to the end of their lives, often diseased or very ill. At night time they would run a bit of polyurethane foam against a piece of glass which creates a noise which is very similar to a dying rabbit. The older or diseased fox would come out and the fox would be shot very quickly and relatively mercifully. The idea that the whole of the countryside would be over run by foxes if the hunt was stopped, has been demonstrated to be absolute nonsense.
“The only would-be bashers of Rome today are the 100% IRRATIONAL conspiraloons”
Tell that to the good people of Tuam County Galway
I don’t think your numbers actually add up at all.
“billions have watched animal torture online”.
If as you say that billions (i.e. two or more billion people) have been watching animal torture that would mean that at the very least nearly 1 in 4 people of the world’s population of 8.1 billion people are watching animal torture. Taking this even further an estimated 2.2 billion of the world’s population have no access to the internet, leaving approximately 5.9 billion people have access to the internet. This would mean that more than 1/3 of the people who are connected to the internet are watching animal torture. Going further approximately 14% of the world’s population are aged under 8 years old (UNICEF Data). So that figure of 6 billion people would come down to a little less that 5 billion people who are likely to have access to the internet are likely to have the wherewithal to access animal torture due to age. You can reduce that figure even further by introducing the fact that at least 1% of the population have dementia (WHO figures) and the fact that globally it is estimated that approximately 2.2% of the world’s population have either a moderate or profound Learning Disability, i.e according to WHO definitions they have an IQ of less that 49. Add to that the 22% of the world’s population who are either vegetarian or vegan and your (or rather the figures/organisation you quote) are starting to look pretty silly.
Billions of views do not in any way add up to “Billions have watched”
I would have thought that a thinking Socialist would have enough about them to at least question the figures they have been fed through alarmist reporting. It does little for the credibility of our case for socialism when we have members posting such clearly implausible nonsense on our forums
There are lots and lots of websites and supposed charities who are milking the good will of people for their own ends. Perhaps you should read through some of the sites below:
https://www.worldanimalprotection.org.uk/latest/news/fake-rescue-report/
Just doing a little calculation, and I do accept that this is difficult for many reasons as we only were standing one candidate in three candidate wards, however this is one way of calculating things.
Looking at the Brixton North Ward and you add up all of the multiple partys’ leading vote, then add on the votes of single candidates you could argue that this was the equivalent of a first preference vote.
This would mean adding
Labour 1415
Green 1388
Independent 372
Conservative 261
LibDem 215
Reform 189
Socialist 77
TUSC 53Giving a total of 3,970 first preference votes (arguably). That would make the Socialist vote around 2%, which would be very encouraging. I know there are a large number of caveats, but the campaign team need to be congratulated.
It would be interesting to see if any of the voters who voted Socialist had only chosen one candidate. I wonder if any of the team at the election could gauge that kind of information from the count?
After out voting TUSC in Brixton North I was tempted to paraphrase the old Norwegian commentator’s phrase and say “Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Dave Nellist, you boys got a hell of a beating”, but I won’t.
Genuinely though, how can the Trots argue that putting forward the straightforward socialist alternative to capitalism will not attract workers and that workers need to be lead to Socialism by a vanguard party, using reforms as enticements, when we are getting more or at least very similar support as their reformism?
Given the very clear impact on space travel on the physical health of space travellers, perhaps as Socialists, we should be actually encouraging Messers Branson, Musk and Bezos in their space adventures.
Maybe we can even persuade them to combine their efforts so that all three of them travel together in a long and very unhealthy trip as far as possible. I’d actually recommend one so far, that they don’t even make it back to Planet Earth.
“ The root idea traces back to the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when some “genius” proposed that there might be a kind of emergent intelligence in collective betting behavior”
Which is presumably why the bookmakers are all impoverished and the punters are rolling in money.
Sometimes Comrade Cheery Arse’s on going pessimistic posts about the end of the world, actually get me to the point of thinking that the end of the world, would be a blessed relief from having to read his endless posts about the end of the world.
As well as the vital question about how owns AI (as Musk implies AI will possibly become a crucial element of the means of production) there are a number of other issues.
AI may possibly make use of all human knowledge that is available through computerised sources. Human knowledge goes much further than that.
As a simple example, how much of what is held in our party library? Perhaps, at an optimistic guess, about 25% of it. What about oral and other sources of knowledge, how much lived experience is held on the internet? There are many other examples.
Not only does this lead to huge gaps in terms of AI’s data, it also biases the data it uses due to the fact that what is digitized tends to be information that is useful to the ruling class and is dominated by those who have the financial and technological wherewithal to digitise their information.
Another issue with AI is that it will always give you an answer, even if it has no information. I have never found an AI system that can respond “to be honest mate, I haven’t got a clue”. So, a bit like a Reform Party Spokesperson, AI just makes shit up.
I have a couple of mates who are in the RCP. Got to know them from being in political circles back in the early 80s. They’re fine to meet up with for a couple of pints as long as you talk about music, football, the weather, etc. Like most left wingers they are pretty thoughtful, kind and compassionate people. Whenever you try and talk to them about politics above a base level they can become really doctrinaire, fixed and seem to be only communicate their politics through a series of stock phrases. A lot of research into cults shows that they use fixed terminology and ideas which not only creates group cohesion, they all know the terminology and can only really discuss things with fellow adherents, but also provides a barrier for them to communicate with others who don’t use the proscribed phraseology. I think this happens in left wing groups. I am pretty sure (but cannot be certain) that we do this far less than the leftist groups. The Standard is always very readable and accessible, our leaflets are usually well developed and accessible as is most of our literature. If you read the red topped newspapers of the leftist groups they are usually very simplistic and based on phrase mongering and rabble rousing. They often produce a monthly “Theoretical Journal”, which is badly written as it is impenetrable.
The 1980’s version of the RCP was an even more extreme version of that presentation, even the leftists thought that they were a bunch of headcases. I think the 80s RCP’s place as the complete fruit loops of the left wing spectrum has been taken on by the Revolutionary Communist Group (they publish Fight Racism/Fight Imperialism), which was the party from which the 1980s RCP emerged. The Revolutionary Communist Group was a split from the IS/SWP who left the SWP in the early 70s. Their Guru was David Yaffe, who interestingly recently resigned from the RCG alongside another member saying they had “lost confidence in the current RCG leadership. It is intransigent, dogmatic, formalistic and bureaucratic.” they “had been ignored”.. You would have thought that being in the RCG for 45 years would have got them used to being ignored.
RCP is the rump of the Malignant Tendency who in the 1990s decided that they didn’t want to stop being boring inside the Labour Party. They originally called themselves “Socialist Appeal”. Ted Grant and Alan Woods became their guru. Peter Taffe became the guru for the members of Militant that decided to be openly boring, they became SPEW.
It all happened when Militant had a big party meeting following the expulsion of a couple of hundred members of Militant. The discussion at the meeting was about coming out as a fully independent political party or to remain a clandestine organisation within the Labour Party. The Majority became SPEW. The Minority became Socialist Appeal. (“Those in the Majority”, “Those in the minority”, I’m sure I’ve heard this somewhere before?)
In reality the dispute was between Grant and Taffe about whose turn it was to play Lenin in their ongoing cosplay Russian Revolution historical reenactment society.
Socialist Appeal were eventually expelled from the Labour Party in 2021, but they took their time to take the hint and tried to remain within the Labour Party. In 2024 they decided to start an open “party” and, presumably based on the fact that the original group of Trotskyists in the UK called themselves the RCP, they called themselves the RCP.
This was despite the fact that there was also a 1980-90s group who called themselves the RCP (lots of whom ended up bizarrely became right wing libertarians with their top boy, Frank Furedi appearing to be a devotee of Victor Orban and one of their illustrious “revolutionary leaders” now in the House of Lords) and that there is also another group called the Revolutionary Communist Party (Britain – Marxist Leninist), which was/is a group who are heavily influenced by Hardial Bains. Bains had more political positions than you could shake a stick at, Stalinist, Tankie, Maoist, Hoxharist, Castroist, etc.
I put all of this info as an attempt to provide an explanation as to why:
a) Your poor chatbot, when trying to explain the RCP, doesn’t know whether it’s Pancake Tuesday or Sheffield Wednesday.
b) Why AI is actually a bit shit (As an experiment I asked one AI system why Spider-Man always has a big smile, and I was told it’s because Spider-Man has a happy and cheerful disposition, which is odd, because Spider-Man, hasn’t even got a mouth!!)
Presumably the coalition will also be campaigning to ensure that the Local Authority Pension Schemes also refrain from investing in non ethical funds. So perhaps that includes anything associated with the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, anything associated with the Arms Industry, the South American meat production industry which is destroying the rain forest, cocoa production (heavily implicated in child and slave labour), Social Media industry that are involved in child sexual exploitation, big Pharm, mining companies involved in mining for rare earth currently destroying and polluting huge tracts of land, agricultural conglomerates that are buying up and destroying countless ecosystems, Amazon and similar on line sales companies that are creating environmental destruction on an incredible scale, the garment industry which is polluting rivers amd killing workers across the world, shipping companies that pollute our rivers and seas, fishing conglomerates that are taping the natural environment for the profit of the few. Maybe they can even try to use the Local Authority pension scheme to persuade Elon Musk and his cronies to stop using massive amounts of the earth’s resources so that him and his buddies can have a little trip into outer space
Perhaps they can move all of the pension fund monies into ethical investments, bloody good luck with that!
Apparently we should listen to these clowns. We should understand that our problem is that we are too unrealistic, we should recognise that they are the practical people, and sadly we’re the dreamers. We have to invest our energy in small steps, short term goals.
We should concentrate on the symptoms not the cause. We should be realists. Capitalism can be ethical, politicians can be principled, billionaires can use their wealth for the greater good, unicorns can run playfully on lush meadows, rainbows actually do have pots of gold at their end, Newcastle United can win the Premier league and Mayo certainly can win the All Ireland Football Championship.
As if
Article on RTE news re the mineral wealth of Venezuela. The Irish state broadcasters some how manage to spot facts and occurrences that the BBC inadvertently overlook. If I was a cynic I could even think the BBC were deliberately ignoring things, heaven forbid!
https://www.rte.ie/news/2026/0105/1551529-venezuela-oil-industry/
The stock market gangsters are starting to discuss sharing out the spoils.
BRIAN JACOBSEN, CHIEF ECONOMIC STRATEGIST, ANNEX WEALTH MANAGEMENT, BROOKFIELD, WISCONSIN:
“This was a matter of when, not if. I’m sure people will debate the political and legal angles, but from an investing perspective, this could unlock massive quantities of oil reserves over time.”
