Thomas_More
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A friend in Switzerland salvaged a sackload of beautiful old hardback books of English literature the university had attempted to burn. He saved all but the most blackened from the bonfire and struggled through the streets with the sack until his dad picked him up in the car.
Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Byron, Wordsworth, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, all blackened but salvageable.
A closing bookshop near here too, i was told, had a huge skip outside full of books just thrown away.A lifelong lover of printed books, like William Morris btw, were I a teenager or in my twenties I would be distraught at their disappearance (which doesn’t bother people on this forum). Fortunately, I’ll be dead before books disappear, and I have hundreds, and can still obtain those I want.
So benefit claimants who don’t want to take weight loss injections or pills in order to make them more acceptable to job interviewers won’t get any sympathy from the Socialist Party. Got it.
I’m not an anti-vaxxer, but that doesn’t mean I support an uncritical, all-accepting approach to Big Pharma. Like everything under capitalism, its priority isn’t health, but capital accumulation. If the two sometimes coincide, then there is some good; but the majority of drugs we would not need in socialism, where life’s balance would be restored, plus humanity’s healthy relationship with nature.
Fortunately, the govt has no plans that I know of to force the unemployed to take these drugs, but if they did, it would take this form:
“I don’t want to take the drug.”
“That’s fine. No one is forcing you. Your benefits will stop, that’s all.”
“But I can’t live without them. I’ll be on the street.”
“Yes, but hey, no one is forcing you.”
Disconnected thinking is typical, for example:
“I’m depressed and anxious. I haven’t enough money to live on.”
“Forget about money. Let’s just concentrate on your depression.”
(I have personal experience of that one).
You are missing the point. This isn’t about the dangers of obesity. It’s about the possibility that, to throw those not producing surplus value for the capitalists back onto the wage-slave market, the taking away of “benefits” (dole payments) could be used to threaten those who refuse to take the drugs; drugs from which there has been already a death and debilitating side-effects not yet fully examined.
As for a healthy lifestyle, for many that is not much of an option under capitalism, where other factors can often be behind obesity and bad health, and where leisure in a healthy sense is not available to all, nor is time and stamina for vegetable gardening on top of the day-to-day stresses of “the mortal coil.”
Not to mention lack of finances.Of course you could side with the tennis-playing, horse-riding bourgeois, and just say: “Get down the job centres, you lazy workers, and lose the flab; take the dangerous drugs or lose your pittances.”
Germany, Poland, Scandinavia and the Baltics seem intent on war and may want to prosecute it without Trump’s US.
Yes, but that can come in the course of conversation, them not being the fanatics who spout God and Jesus at everyone, but nominal believers with whom the subject wouldn’t come up unless mentioned, and without rancour.
Yes. Obviously fanatics like fundamentalists, with their talk of “God’s plan” etc., are out.
It’s just that a lot of people are only nominal in their religious beliefs, which they really don’t think about much, and they also despise the “religious nuts.”
These nominal believers aren’t interested in philosophy or dialectical materialism, or the history of atheism etc , but they might support the idea, practically, of a socialist society. On the other hand, telling them they can’t join us unless they become materialists is bound to put them off.
Yes, the non-existence of self was hammered out during Buddhism’s Personalist Controversy, and negates the popular belief in reincarnation, since there is no “self” to “transmigrate.”
Most humans’ desire for self-perpetuation meant that this insight was never adopted by Buddhism as a religion, nor was it of any use to the rulers of regions adopting Buddhism. So the insights of real Buddhist thought were reserved for the monks of the universities, and the labouring folk chloroformed with the religious dross.
” “there can be no non-material things acting upon us” – energy, time and gravity all act upon us, but are definitely not matter. It would be better if you used the word “physical” perhaps.”
But these are all properties of matter. They are not non-material, although not what we commonly think of as matter. Energy is propulsion, time is ageing, and gravity attraction. These are but terms for properties, emanations and functions of matter. Similarly, mind is a function of matter, not distinct from it.
But the theist sees it as a non-material property, i e. “soul.”If this is irrelevant to us, then let us welcome theists as members, for what would be the objection?
