Bijou Drains
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To put to bed (nail bed) the toe nail question, which misses the point any way. Growing toe nails are not a product of activity within the brain, therefore your question is irrelevant, as the brain does not have any impact in terms of toe nail growth. The actions I raised were actions which were based on observable brain activity.
The point I was making is that the Skinnerist approach (perhaps L Bird might read some of Skinner’s work, as it is pretty clear he has not) is that ALL human behaviour is rooted in learnt behaviour in terms of on going operant conditioning, i.e. as a result of trial and error and that behaviour that is rewarding is maintained and non rewarding behaviour is eliminated.
There is clear evidence that this is not the case and that some (not all, but some behaviour) is based on instinctual responses. The example of I have given is of a new born baby instinctivly making first eye contact with its mother (or mother subsitute). The fact that this behvaviour occurs within moments of birth in the vast majority of children, indicates that this is an instinctual response rather than through operant conditioning.
An even more clear example of this is the suckling instinct in new born babies. In the Skinnerist approach the explnation is that new born babies would latch on to this rewarding experience as a result of a random action the child performed. I am afraid if the life and death of babies was resultant on the chance of a baby selecting a random action of suckling during the first few hours of life, we would see a hell of a lot more dead babies in the first days of birth.
For a even more obvious example of the fact that instinctive behaviours are present in mammals, the cat and cucumber response is pretty clear, see link (I have got to say that I for one do not find the response funny, as some of those filming this do).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7vML9C3PZk
This does not mean that I think that not behaviour is not fully conscious, just that some behaviours are instinctual.
As to the question of conscious behaviour and unconscious behaviour (in Freudian terms). It seems to me that humans do behave in ways that are influenced by thoughts that that could be described as sub conscious. An example of this sub consconscious activity is the Stroop effect.
And Ladies and Gentleman, this year’s 2022 Boris Johnson Award for “never answering a straight question” goes to……. drum roll….
Yes it’s L Bird!!!!
L Bird speaks – “thank you, thank you, your applause is warm and generous. First I’d like to thank my imaginary chum Karl Marx, he is so helpful to me in my hard work, the fact that in my mind he always says what ever I make up about him is really the bed rock to my fantastical personal little world.
This is a great honour to me, I hope that your can trust me to make sure I don’t ever answer a straight question”
Audience – “We trust you L Bird, honestly we really trust you”
Not for the first time, you have tried to muddy the waters; I will resist your fatuous attempts to be insulting.
I will clarify the question for you. When a baby smiles to its mother for the first time, is that a behaviour (as in your definition of a behaviour it is a conscious human action). Here’s a clue, the smile is clearly not a conditioned response.
I will also ask you another question, is a person who has Tourette’s syndrome, who lets out a loud barking noise on regular occasions, displaying behaviour?
Since ‘biology’ (eg. breathing) is fixed, we have no choice, so it’s not a ‘behaviour’
Any behaviour that is fixed, is not a behviour?
Apart from the obvious comment that breathing is not fixed, we can stop and we can choose how we breathe (we can chose to breathe heavily or shallowly, we can chose to breath through our mouths or through our noses), such a definition has other problems.
According to your definition, a new born infant has a suckling impulse, presumably this is not a behaviour?
Jumping away from something hot often happens involventarily, is this too not a behavoiur.
In terms of the sub consious mind, many things we do is not consviously chosen, does this not deserve the catogory behaviour.
Is all behaviour social? This implies that anything you do on your own is not behaviour. Does not mean that mean that masturbation is not a behaviuor (assuming of course you do it on your own)?
As to Skinner, I often surprised that a number of Socialist hold him in some degree of esteem, considering some of his opinions, for example:
“It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.”
I suppose a different way (and simpler way of expressing it) is that people’s thinking is a reflection of their brains, in the smae way that teh speed a car can travel is a refelction of the car’s engine. The difference is is that a brain is impacted very much on what has happened to it before that point, a car engine might get slower by use, but it is unlikely to get quicker.
Im terms of MS’s point, which is valid, we also need to be careful about the pure behaviourist (Skinnerist) assumption that all behaviour is learnt. It clearly isn’t. For instance, following birth, we didn’t learn to breathe by trial and error. If that was true there would be a lot less of us.
In a sense this would be entirely predictable, the areas of the brain they have looked at are largely influenced by the impact of attachment experiences.
As these attachment experiences are largely based on our interactions with other human beings and how we develop views on those other human beings, our brain architecture will reflect this.
To put it another way, because, to a large extent, our brain architecture is patterned by the events we experience, and the events that are most influential in the development of the brain are social experiences, it is therefore highly likely that our thoughts and views are very likely to conform with the understandings we have developed as a result of our experiences.
Politics is largely about society, and our social views are based on our social experiences and that these social experiences are reflected on our brain architecture. It would not be any great leap to expect that our brain architecture would be closely related to our political viewpoints.
The problem with the research report is that it misses this out and it could be implied that political opinions are somehow hard wired into our brains and that they cannot be changed.
An excellent and moving play/musical, I would recommend any one going to see it if it is on in the local area,
Ironically the main lyricist (Alex Glasgow) was a Trotskyist, so according to Leninist theory the miners he eulogised were part of the Labour Aristocracy who were benefitting from the “super profits” of imperial exploitation.
That said, Alex Glasgow produced some wonderful songs
The result that Putin originally envisioned is clearly not where he is now. Ukrainian has not been a walkover and rather than intimidating Sweden, Finland, NATO, et al, it has made the the Scandinavians more western facing and NATO more bullish.
To make an comparison Stalin under estimated Finland and this influenced Hitler to attack the USSR. I hope the U.S. and the Europeans don’t make the same assumptions.
I think the rest of the world knows that Boorish and his mates are effectively the Tory Party 3rd 11, after the failure of Cameron et al, May et al, left the Tory party in the hands of the back woodsmen and small business faction of UK capitalism.
I used to have a van, but I’m still in the party and I sold the van!
If your suspected infiltrator was a spook, part of me thinks fair play to him. At least he got 4 years of fairly easy wage slavery and a period of four years’ company with interesting and amiable people. He may have actually learned something and in that respect they have more to fear from us than we should fear from them!
Due to our democratic approach the most damage he would have made is one vote in a vote of many.
You’re absolutely right that our openness is a great protection. Our principles, our procedures and our anti authoritarian approaches are also hugely protective. Fact is he could have won the “names in the hat” raffle to win be the “leader” of the party and it wouldn’t have mattered.
I often wonder if the plod and the spooks were daft enough to infiltrate us. Let’s face it most of the information they would need is in the public domain and if they had infiltrated us they would have had to pay party dues to get information that was freely available.
Also the SWP accusing anyone of using Orwelian tactis is a little bit of the pot calling the kettle dirty arse.
Re the SWP, I’m just re reading Tariq Ali’s book “Redemption”. I would recommend reading it if you can get a copy of it. I think I’m enjoying it more this time around because the expose of the sexual proclivities of their “leaders” are now fully out in the open.
Anyway the SWP have a persecution complex, they’ll be made up that the Spooks were infiltrating them, they would have been distraught if they hadn’t been infiltrated!
I think ALB’s view that Putin could quite easily occupy the Donbas is probably not quite as straightforward as it looks.
The Donbas has an area of about 60,000 sq km, which is over 4 times the size of Northern Ireland. It is estimated that The Provisional IRA had a maximum strength of about 2 – 3,000 active members during the Troubles. That tied down up to 30,000 members of the British Army, not including the RUC and other quasi military bodies.
Although the IRA was reasonably well funded, it’s funding would be minuscule in comparison to a similarly based Ukrainian insurgency group. A Ukrainian insurgency campaign could be very costly (in troops and material) for Putin.
The little know anti USSR guerrilla campaign in the Baltic states between 1945 – 1953 cost the USSR an approximate 30,000 lives. This would be even more costly.
If ALB is correct in saying former Captain Ben Wallace is suggesting that NATO should March on Moscow, he’s not only a fool, he clearly never studied the work of Montgomery when he was at Sandhurst.
Montgomery said “the first law of military strategy is Don’t March on Moscow”. Although Montgomery was a vain, opinionated, racist )and possible Penderast). I’d rather trust him in terms of military strategy than the jumped up fuckwit who currently holds the office of Minister of Defence.
I’ve always been a little confused when members/sympathisers say, why don’t you do this/that/the other, with regard to various activities that the party undertake. Over the years I’ve seen comments like, why do you organise debates when we should arrange cooperative forums? Why do you have election campaigns as opposed to leaflet drops? Why do you arrange paper sales at left wing rallies as opposed to anarchist book fairs? Etc.etc. etc.
The thing is, none of these things re mutual exclusive. We can do leaflet drops and also do elections, we can attend left wing rallies as well as anarchist book fairs. We can do all of these things (the fact is, we SHOULD all do all of them, it’s not like we are short of a bob or two)
That some members think that it is worthwhile for them to carry out election campaigns, does not stop the critics of that type of activity from undertaking the kinds of activity that they think we should undertake. I cannot perceive the EC or the Party at large blocking the critics from undertaking the activities that are suggested. To those comrades who criticise this activity, go out and do it the way you think it should be done, no one is stopping you.
I do not wish to be harsh, but to reiterate “the critics” are not being prevented from doing what they suggest.
We are not some Leninist clique that needs to have some prescribed way of campaigning. We have the funds (within reason) for individual groups and members to do whatever they chose to do. If you’re not happy with election campaigns and think that we should do something else, what is to stop you organising and doing that activity yourself? The Party at large and the democratic structures of the Party are not stopping you!With regard to the campaign and the results, congratulations to all of the party members that got involved with the campaigns. In term so of results, the result that the Possibilist candidate received more or less the same number as the Impossiblist candidate, is pretty significant!
I acknowledge that it is difficult to extrapolate from small numbers but, if we got a 1.5% result in a General Election, in the way that we got in Clapham East, based on the last election turnout, that would give us 480,212. I for one would be ecstatic with that!
