rodshaw
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From a working-class point of view, was leave/remain the non-issue we said it would be? In terms of the WSM’s core aim of abolishing capitalism, obviously it was, but there are so many ways things are going to be more awkward for a lot of people. Even the problems for business and trade are going to cascade down to the workers – more general frustration all round.
Also, if many of the British working class as a whole will be worse off, to balance that out is there any section of the working class anywhere in the world that will be better off?
In other words, with hindsight could we have regarded voting remain as a ‘beneficial reform’, or at least an attempt to not make things worse?
Problem with this ‘rational attitude’ is, if it’s rational for you to wait and see what happens to other people, it’s also rational for them to wait and see what happens to you, ergo, it’s a quasi-antivaxxer argument.
I disagree. As we are seeing by people’s different attitudes here, some think it’s rational for them to wait, some think it’s rational to take the plunge. It may depend on your circumstances. If you have a fairly healthy diet and lifestyle, live in a relatively low-risk area and are obeying the social distancing rules, it may be more rational to wait if you’re afraid of potential long-term side effects. If you have bad health and/or diet, live in a more high-risk area or do a high-risk job, it’s probably more rational to have the vaccine.
I think far more people will consider it reasonble to have the vaccine than to wait.
Whether to be a guinea pig, or be one of the first in line for a new treatment, I’m sure would be one of the issues faced by people in a socialist society. It would be interesting to see how that played out. I daresay much like today, with some willing and some not, but without the financial and political complications. If only.
Can anyone give me some info on the history of long-term adverse effects from vaccines. One of my neighbours, though not anti-vax per se, isn’t going to have a Covid vaccine because it’s unproven and there’s no way of knowing of adverse effects in the longer term. He would (quite sensibly) rather remain healthy than have tens of thousands of pounds of compensation lobbed at him years hence (assuming liability could be proved).
Frankly I think he’s got a point.
Fair enough. It’s maybe unfortunate that the word ‘medieval’ as a derogatory term is pretty much in common usage. But I suspect many people who use the word casually don’t really think the Middle Ages were all bad, it’s just one of those expressions whose meanings have become skewed and is maybe not to be taken too literally.
“NOTTHATWEWOULDBEALLTHATCOMFORTABLEREADINGINTHECLASSICALROMANWAYNORHANDLINGINTERMINABLYLONGSCROLLSBECAUSETHESPINEDBOOKWEALSOOWETOTHEMIDDLEAGES
Just demonstrating that reading as the Romans were used to would not be so easy.”
Well, yes, quite. Nobody would write like that now. But that misses the obvious distinction between the capital letter forms themselves, unsurpassed for over two millennia, and the way in which they’re presented.
But I’m not particularly bigging up the Romans over the Middle Ages, and I agree they’re a fascinating period.
Quite how relevant this is to socialism I’m not sure, apart from the Morris connection and the fact that in a socialist society we’d have more time to appreciate the good things of the past (if we were interested in looking back).
“The letters you are now typing in are one of the Middle Ages’ many legacies to our humanity.”
Yes indeed, more or less. Lower case is derived from the Carolingian minuscule, circa 9th century. Italics came into use in the 15th and 16th centuries.
But our upper-case letters were perfected in the Roman era.
Good idea. Do you suggest we use some method in addition to our usual outlets, and go for wider distribution?
Looks like there is now going to be a deal in case of no deal:
“The word Vaccine is wrong, the original virus came from horses instead of cow, it was horsepox instead of cowpox”
Someone, somewhere is probably setting up a campaign right now to have the word changed, on the ground that it’s unfair to horses.
I don’t know whether it’s because the pandemic has made people more health-conscious, or just because a few ex-footballers have recently been diagnosed with dementia, but it looks as if heading may be on the way out. Health-wise, that can’t be a bad thing.
I often wonder what football would be like in a socialist society. Would it just be a runabout in the local park, or would there still be organised matches with proper rules? How about one village against another, in a sort of pre-industrial free-for-all?
Another journalist, Matthew Syed, singing the praises of capitalism in yesterday’s Sunday Times.
“Join me in a toast to capitalism – still our only hope for progress”
In part he’s writing in criticism of Mark Carney’s Reith lecture in which he said we should move away from market norms to “moral norms”.
What in fact he’s railing against is the big, dominant corporations that keep the smaller players out of things and lead to corruption. All free markets need is better people in them, he says.
He mentions socialism but to be fair, the type of “socialism” he compares free market capitalism with is the rigid, centralised state control which we in the WSM would call state capitalism.
“It’s easy to forget how systems of free exchange miraculously assemble technology such as toasters without any single person having a clue about what’s going on”.
He concludes that we should liberate the virtues of free exchange. “It’s a though that strikes me every morning when I use my pop-up toaster”.
There’s no mention of the poverty, unemployment, racism, war, environmental destruction and other ills that are the product of the wonderful system he supports.
And as if a sane, democratic, free socialist society wouldn’t have the nous to produce toasters! And they would have more of a clue about what’s going on, too.
“As with providing healthcare, building emergency hospitals, reducing unnecessary work and travel, the pandemic offers signs of what can be done and how it can be done quickly if the urgency was there.”
Not to mention the speed with which vaccines were produced from several quarters. Things like this could probably be done even more quickly in socialism with a concerted effort rather than multiple competing efforts.
The pity is that it’s not just the capitalists who vaunt their system as the best possible. You have journalists such as Liddle in The Sunday Times saying the same thing, because it produces good as well as bad.
And sadly the ‘move towards socialism’ desired by a significant minority of millenials is at best a watering-down of capitalism’s worst effects while leaving the system itself intact.
