Young Master Smeet
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Just come across this:http://helpkobane.com/blog/2015/10/29/agricultural-report/A fascinating breakdown of the agricultural resourcesof the Kobane canton.
Quote:Before the 2011 war and the subsequent attack by Daesh a total of 1,639, 400 hectares of collective agricultural land was in use. 60, 000 people worked in farming and agricultural industry, totaling 40% of the total labourers in the district. 70% of the economy of the canton was directly reliant on agriculture, while 30% included trade and industry. As a result of the agricultural industry in and around Kobane alone, around 40% of Aleppo’s wheat supply came from Kobane alone. The disruption of the agricultural industry has had a detrimental impact not just on Kobane but other surrounding cities reliant on this industry for their own food supply.(back fo a fag packet maths suggests this agriculture was enough to sustain 16 million people.Now, while people are getting excited by democracy, clearly, so long as they are scratching around trying to remove mines and restore that agriculture to it's previous levels, socialism is out.
Shelley wrote:May curses blast thee; and in thee the breedWhich forces, which compels, a world to bleed;May that destruction, which ’tis thine to spread,Descend with ten-fold fury on thy head.Oh! may the death, which marks thy fell career,In thine own heart’s blood bathe the empoisoned spear;May long remorse protract thy latest groan,Then shall Oppression tremble on its throne.Yet this alone were vain; Freedom requiresA torch more bright to light its fading fires;Man must assert his native rights, must sayWe take from Monarchs’ hand the granted swayOppressive law no more shall power retain,Peace, love, and concord, once shall rule again,And heal the anguish of a suffering world;Then, then shall things, which now confusedly hurled,Seem Chaos, be resolved to order’s sway,And errors night be turned to virtue’s day.Link to the digitised copy:http://poeticalessay.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/(Seems a bit overloaded at the minute, for some reason)….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYDArl–Qp0Who buys IS's oil? Assad!?! Bomb their refineries, they just sell crude. Noticeably, a big source of income is extortion, kidnapping and racketeering: they're just a criminal mob, nothing special, all they had was a good PR dept.
yes, as the article I linked notes:
Quote:There's nothing unusual or exceptional about the Iraqi insurgency. The rise of ISIS was logical and predictable, almost boring in its replication of old paradigms. ISIS are warlords and brigands who burst into a power vacuum of severe political and military fragility and exploited the apparent weakness for momentary gain. It's a pattern as old as warfare itself. ISIS will die slowly suffocated and picked apart by more powerful elements around it, a fate shared by an ignominious catalogue of shortsighted plunderers long relegated to the crematorium of history.IS are murdering 'informants' all over the place, their hold on their territory and their troops is shaky…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_San_Fernando_massacreWell, that wasn't what I was looking for, but it will do…
http://www.napalminthemorning.com/isis-syria-hezbollah-ypg-kurds/
Quote:To lay out something telling, Turkey has set up armed observations posts on their border overlooking the Kurdish position near ISIS territory. The Kurds have made clear their intent to cut across the remaining expanse near Turkey and completely cut away ISIS from the Turkey/Syria border and sever ISIS’ supply lines. In response, Turkey has made a reflexive policy of shelling the Kurds whenever they get too close. If ISIS were in fact some terrifying threat, you think Turkey would be overjoyed the Kurds want to push them from the Turkish border. Except, in effect, Turkey is now defending ISIS from the Kurds. Chew on that one for a bit. It says far, far too much on multiple levels.and,
Quote:I’ll reemphasize what I’ve laid out before – ISIS represents a menace to civilians, but they do not represent a genuine threat to nation-states and standing confederations. They are, in a rather marked sense, tightly bound by sectarian and national lines. They are a minor-league entrant in a proxy war that involves a rogue’s gallery of local players (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bashar Al-Assad, Iraq’s Shia Government, Iran) and foreign powers jostling to assert some kind of foothold (America and its allies, Russia). But as is the perennial tragedy of war, the true victims of any conflict are not the combatants, but the civilians. ISIS has relentlessly brutalized noncombatants within its holdings, a region that has little to no political or economic capital. The stretch of terrain they control constitutes the Sunni tribal badlands in Iraq and Syria, a territory that has been rendered effectively ungovernable.IS is in fact just another warband, a phenomena we have seen so many tinmes, and, atrocity aside (and in fact, they ain't even got much on that front, compared, say, with the Mexcian drug cartels)
Galloway wrote:If I'm Mayor: free transport for police will be restored & extended to fire ambulance and all key essential workersIf I'm Mayor, every apprentice will have a free bus pass. That's a firm promiseIf I'm Mayor…I will refuse to end check-off payments for trade union dues. That's a firm promise @unitetheunionFrom his twitter feeds. He also promises regular Town Meetign events…
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/27/opinions/opinion-roundup-socialism/index.htmlAt least one commentator talks a little sense:
Andrei S. Markovits wrote:People of very different political persuasions have called themselves socialists. French political theorists of the 19th century used the word to connote a system in which there was only communal property. Later, Karl Marx and collaborator Friedrich Engels appropriated the term and redefined it as a system in which there would be no private property, which to them was the source of all inequality, injustice and evil.Marx and Engels used the words "socialism" and "communism" interchangeably and believed such a system would create heaven on Earth. But they never really told us how one would transform capitalism and arrive at socialism. So people had to figure it out for themselves.So, apart from the silly snides, at least Sanders is getting such things talked about on mainstream US media…
LVT is a tax on the full rental value of land (the difficulty being determining what the rental value is apart from the actual commercial transactions the tax is meant to stop). It wouldn't deter people who were looking for the appreciating asset value of properties, and since it would be meant to replace all other taxation, property owners might not object too strongly.
robbo203 wrote:Well no YMS I can't really go along with this. You talk of "causeless events" as if to rule such a thing out of the question. Everything that exists must have a cause. But must it? The principle of indeterminism is somethimng that is pretty much well established in physics and when we are talking about physics these days we are talking about some pretty weird stuff, stuff that seems far removed from the mechanical determinism of traditional Newtoniam physics . Like the theory of "entanglement", for example, which I still cant quite get my head aroundWell, irrespective of the probablistic character of quantum states, energy cannot be created or destroyed, so for a signal to be transmitted down my nerves to a from a neuron to the fingers of the meatbot requires energy, and that energy can only be obtained by transformation.
Quote:It strikes me as a little odd that a hardline materialst like your good self would rule out indeterminism. Afterall if everything must have a cause then what "caused" matter. God? .As I see it, determinism and indeterminism coexist as a kind of yin/yang of the cosmos Mechanical determinism is valid up to a point in the same sense that Newtonian physics is valid up to a point – that is up to the point at which Einsteinian physics kicks inNo, Newtonian physics is wrong, it's just it's wrongness isn't important at a certain scale. Who cares where the universe comes from, it's always been there.
Quote:All this ties up with the question of free will and by extension moral choices. As John Horgan has noted to argue that all our choices have prior causes and are therefore determined and not free, but "caused", is to entirely miss the point, The point is what "causes" them? To reduce an explanation as to why Joe Bloggs has chosen not to kill a stranger for his money, to the gyrations of subatomic particles, or perhaps not even that, (which is what physical reductionism boils down to really) just seems to me utterly absurd.Tha absence of free will does not absolve us from moral choice, since we understand that mental processes are part of causation, and we want to avoid pain for meatbots.
DJP wrote:When we consider what people really mean when they talk about "free will" are they really talking about some proposed freedom from the laws of physics? For the most part it turns out that they are referring to nothing more than the capacity to regulate our behaviour and to act freely, without coercion, according to our desires, beliefs and values. I think this is the only meaningful way to go. Defining 'free will' in this second way might not be as magical as the first but it does allow us to about 'free will' and lets us avoid the silliness of thinking that our thoughts play no casual role in world (what is called 'epiphenominalism).Absolutely, our thoughts, the algorithms and processes of our mind can cause events in the world, and without immediate external causes, so long as the mind processes keep on running. Although there is a furtehr question of how much of what we think of as conscious cognition is just retroactive accounting for decisions taken deeper in the nervous system that we have no real control over.
http://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/English/Registrations/PP110Our full registered details…
Hmmm, I suppose we could change our name to SPGB (Socialist Party of Great Britain) (actually, that's 6 words, we could register that…
description = registered nameI suspect since NO2EU is not an acronym of the party name, but the name itself, and EU is in common use, they will be unaffected. I suspect if we formally changed the name of the party to Just SPGB they would have to allow that, since it would be our name, what they are kiboshing is acronyms of party's full names.
