[Young Master Smeet]

Ah, the roll of Honour:William Dumas (Socialist Party)Philippe Duron (Socialist Party)Jean-Pierre Gorges (Republican)Isabelle Attard (Green)Abstentions: (All Democratic Republican Group, which is a bit like the Lords' cross benchers, and doesn't whip).François AsensiAlain BocquetMarie-George BuffetJean-Jacques CandelierPatrice CarvalhoGaby CharrouxAndré ChassaigneMarc DolezJacqueline FraysseNicolas SansuThey don't appear to have spoke in the debate:http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/14/cri/2015-2016/20160065.asp#P663465 

[Young Master Smeet]

Here's the link to ONs:http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/subnational-health2/excess-winter-mortality-in-england-and-wales/2014-15–provisional–and-2013-14–final-/stb-ewm.htmlAnd, a quick search for scholarly articles:

Quote:

Conversely,Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands appear to suffer far less from excess winter mortality.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1732295/pdf/v057p00784.pdf

[Young Master Smeet]

Oh, dear:http://sputniknews.com/world/20151125/1030715073/moskva-cruiser-syria.html

Quote:

The Moskva guided missile cruiser outfitted with S-300F Fort anti-air systems took position off the coast of Latakia. Its early warning systems and air defense array will provide adequate cover for the Russian Aerospace Forces elements in Syria,"

https://www.rt.com/news/323379-s400-russia-syria-airbase/

Quote:

Shortly afterwards, the MoD announced three steps to be taken following the attack on the Russian Su-24 bomber, including providing aerial cover by fighter jets for every airstrike, boosting air defense by deploying guided missile cruisers off the Syrian coast near Latakia coast, and suspending all military-to-military contacts with Turkey.The S-400 is Russia's most advanced anti-aircraft defense system. It is as an upgrade of the S-300 Growler family, designed and developed by Almaz Antei. The S-400 is employed to ensure air defense using long- and medium-range missiles that can hit aerial targets at ranges up to 400km. The S-400 is capable of hitting tactical and strategic aircraft as well as ballistic and cruise missiles. The system includes a set of radars, missile launchers and command posts, and is operated solely by the Russian military.

So, when Russia downs it's first Turkish jet…

[Young Master Smeet]

Frankie Boyle Nails it

Quote:

It’s not an insult to the dead to wonder why France, a $2tn economy, couldn’t make a better offer to its disenfranchised youth than a bunch of sick bullies grooming them on the internet. It’s not apologism to try to understand why something happened. When Syria’s drought kicked in, 25% of the population became unemployed. The vast majority of the country’s livestock has died over the past decade. A lot of Isis are farmers with nowhere to go, their entire industry destroyed – you’d think they’d have more sympathy for journalists. Those who think radicalising a youngster has nothing to do with climate – have you seen Tatooine?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/23/frankie-boyle-fallout-paris-psychopathic-autopilot?CMP=fb_gu

[Young Master Smeet]

That tended to get circulated more, from what I've seen, which is an old dirty trick of taking a split second shot and making it seem that Eagle and Watson spent their whole time looking away from Corbyn.

[Young Master Smeet]

ALB wrote:

But the government and the lickspittle media are determined to bomb Syria. Poor Jeremy. He's doing his best to be a voice of sanity but he's attacked relentlessly and stabbed in the back by some of his own MPs.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmhansrd/cm151123/debtext/151123-0001.htm#1511232000639Hist contribution yesterday was interesting, trying to lift things away from gung-ho militarism, and suggest that security comes from solving other of the world's problems.

Quote:

We are naturally focused on the immediate threats today, but it is disappointing that there is insufficient analysis in the national security strategy of the global threats facing our country and people around the world, including inequality, poverty, disease, human rights abuses, climate change and water and food security—[Interruption.] I have no idea why Conservative Members find food security such a funny subject. The flow of arms and illicit funds enables groups such as ISIL to sustain themselves and grow.

[Young Master Smeet]

There are plkenty of options, if dealing with IS is your objective, that don't involve military force.  Attacking their money supply, and the oil trade in the ME, dealing with the support IS are getting from Saudi and Turkey, withdrawing UK military from the region generally as a sign of good faith, etc.  Practical assistance for the Iraqi government in civil society governnance. The simple question is, why does the UK need to be able to project it's force into the ME?  IS is not an existential threat to Britain, and we can ask many questions about the value of the number of lives that will be saved by bombing IS rather than spending the same sum a different way.

[Young Master Smeet]

I'll re-phrase, rule 5, and given the reason for its existence, might need re-examining in the light of the advent of online communications.

[Young Master Smeet]

Quote:

Further you are failing to address the OP:  the election of a moderator

Sorry, I thought I'd covered that, in my mind clearly: the conf. res. endorsing the current procedures would also need to cover the appointment of moderators.  Apolgies for omission.  Although, the constitutional standing of this forum, generally, is germane to the question of how we select moderators.My main point was, though, that there does need to be some amendment to rule, currently nothing in rule about EC removing people from fora (and also establishing the rule 31 appeals proceedure was applicable), given to how central they are becoming.  Also, we do need to emphasise that party members have different rights to non-members when it comes to suspension, etc. since rule 5 already applies, in spirit if not in word.

[Young Master Smeet]

It should be noted, what Marx was arguing against was:

Charlie wrote:

Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms.

However, as he notes in Capital 3:

Charlie wrote:

the price of things which have in themselves no value, i.e., are not the product of labour, such as land, or which at least cannot be reproduced by labour, such as antiques and works of art by certain masters, etc., may be determined by many fortuitous combinations. In order to sell a thing, nothing more is required than its capacity to be monopolised and alienated.

I'll throw in an extended quote, that may be more or less useful:

Charlie in the Grundrisse wrote:

The value (the real exchange value) of all commodities (labour included) is determined by their cost of production, in other words by the labour time required to produce them. Their price is this exchange value of theirs, expressed in money. The replacement of metal money (and of paper or fiat money denominated in metal money) by labour money denominated in labour time would therefore equate the real value (exchange value) of commodities with their nominal value, price, money value. Equation of real value and nominal value, of value and price. But such is by no means the case. The value of commodities as determined by labour time is only their average value. This average appears as an external abstraction if it is calculated out as the average figure of an epoch, e.g. 1 lb. of coffee = 1s. if the average price of coffee is taken over 25 years; but it is very real if it is at the same time recognized as the driving force and the moving principle of the oscillations which commodity prices run through during a given epoch. This reality is not merely of theoretical importance: it forms the basis of mercantile speculation, whose calculus of probabilities depends both on the median price averages which figure as the centre of oscillation, and on the average peaks and average troughs of oscillation above or below this centre. The market value is always different, is always below or above this average value of a commodity. Market value equates itself with real value by means of its constant oscillations, never by means of an equation with real value as if the latter were a third party, but rather by means of constant non-equation of itself (as Hegel would say, not by way of abstract identity, but by constant negation of the negation, i.e. of itself as negation of real value). [15] In my pamphlet against Proudhon I showed that real value itself – independently of its rule over the oscillations of the market price (seen apart from its role as the law of these oscillations) – in turn negates itself and constantly posits the real value of commodities in contradiction with its own character, that it constantly depreciates or appreciates the real value of already produced commodities; this is not the place to discuss it in greater detail. [16] Price therefore is distinguished from value not only as the nominal from the real; not only by way of the denomination in gold and silver, but because the latter appears as the law of the motions which the former runs through. But the two are constantly different and never balance out, or balance only coincidentally and exceptionally. The price of a commodity constantly stands above or below the value of the commodity, and the value of the commodity itself exists only in this up-and-down movement of commodity prices. Supply and demand constantly determine the prices of commodities; never balance, or only coincidentally; but the cost of production, for its part, determines the oscillations of supply and demand. The gold or silver in which the price of a commodity, its market value, is expressed is itself a certain quantity of accumulated labour, a certain measure of materialized labour time. On the assumption that the production costs of a commodity and the production costs of gold and silver remain constant, the rise or fall of its market price means nothing more than that a commodity, = x labour time, constantly commands > or < x labour time on the market, that it stands above or beneath its average value as determined by labour time. The first basic illusion of the time-chitters consists in this, that by annulling the nominal difference between real value and market value, between exchange value and price – that is, by expressing value in units of labour time itself instead of in a given objectification of labour time, say gold and silver – that in so doing they also remove the real difference and contradiction between price and value. Given this illusory assumption it is self-evident that the mere introduction of the time-chit does away with all crises, all faults of bourgeois production. The money price of commodities = their real value; demand = supply; production = consumption; money is simultaneously abolished and preserved; the labour time of which the commodity is the product, which is materialized in the commodity, would need only to be measured in order to create a corresponding mirror-image in the form of a value-symbol, money, time-chits. In this way every commodity would be directly transformed into money; and gold and silver, for their part, would be demoted to the rank of all other commodities.

[Young Master Smeet]

Actually, I think my analogy is wrong.  It's more like if SI redefined a metre as 1/299,792,457th or 1/299,792,459th of C light would still travel at C, and objects would have the same lengths, rations, etc. what we call a metre would change.  Ultimately, though, all lengths would never be resolvable to all measurements.

[Young Master Smeet]

Well, lets start, Marx' value theory depends entirely on this premise:

Charlie wrote:

In order to calculate and compare the areas of rectilinear figures, we decompose them into triangles. But the area of the triangle itself is expressed by something totally different from its visible figure, namely, by half the product of the base multiplied by the altitude. In the same way the exchange values of commodities must be capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantity.

Everything else is built of logical extrapolations from this [premise. The only common substance is human labour, etc.  So already we see that the transformation problem isn't a fatal issue, it's a question of building up the logic to link this value to price.  Now, I'd normally tend to argue that value, as conceived by Marx is a form of essence, per Hegel's logic.

Charlie wrote:

. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.

If it is that abstract, then it is never going to manifest in its true form int eh real world, we will only ever get the pale shadow that is price.  To my mind it doesn't matter if we cannot link prices directly to values, all we need is a rough correlation and a matching trend. To return to Marx's geomtrical example, a metre is defined as:

SI wrote:

The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second

Now, even if we set up a laser in a vacuum tube, and replicate the experiment that won't be a metre, present in the room, that would be a beam of light, equal to one metre, and, of course, if we replicate the experiement on a space ship, or on Jupiter, relativity tells us that, in fact, the two metres would appear be different to us, liekwise if light were travelling through an atmosphere, but the abstract metre would be behind them all.

[Young Master Smeet]

Hmm, what we need perhaps is an amendment to rule five:

Rulebook wrote:

5. Members have the right to attend at meetings of Branches other than their own, and speak with the permission of the Branch, but shall not have the right to vote thereat. Central Branch members, however, shall be informed of a party vote and forwarded a voting paper and shall be allowed to vote through the post or at any one Branch meeting on production of membership card. All members may attend the meetings of the Executive Committee, Delegate Meetings, or Conferences, and with permission may contribute to the discussion.

After "Delegate meetings"  insert: "Authorised online party forums,".Backed up with a conference resolution to the effect that a member may only be remopved pernmenantly from a forum via rule 31 and also enshrining the current forum standings orders at the same time (with an additional description of the appointment of moderators).

[Young Master Smeet]

Moderating a forum is hardly sampling democracy.  And no, this isn't a public debate, this is a party propaganda place where people can meet party members (and where the party also debates).  Besides, letting non-members take on party responsibilities would be a bad example of democracy: the main lesson needs to be that people need to join a party.

[Young Master Smeet]

Vin wrote:

Young Master Smeet wrote:

not someone off the street.

Why not? 

We don't know if a passing person can chair; we don't know if a passing person might be a political opponent out to sabotage, etc. we need a certain confidence in a chair.

[Author]

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