Young Master Smeet
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Lbird,the problem is, that your position is the elitist one here, since censorship requires a censor that hides information from the democratic polity.
The philosophical objection is the same as the practical one. Censorship requires enforcement (and the ability to enforce); someone has to know what will be said (in advance) in order to operate the censorship. That is, someone must always be 'exposed'. There is no way of knowing what has been wrongfully suppressed, nor of knowing what has been suppressed. It also denies the basic principle of democracy that a minority (opinion) has the right to try to become a majority opinion. That principle alone means that democracy must 'self deny' itself and place restricting expression beyond in its powers.The only abridgement to 'free speech' is the principle of freedom of association, which says I don't have to hear someone's speech if I don't want to, or, if we are gathered to hear speech, that we only hear it in the prescribed manner (or, put another way, when there is limited bandwidth, we have to democratically control that bandwidth and the manner of its usage, free speech is for the commons). Thus at meetings we have chairs, who must be obeyed, for example.On with philosophy, and we can make a distinction, per Austin, between speech and speech acts. The famous 'Shouting fire in a crowded theatre' (originally introduced in the US courts to abridge first amendment rights, throuigh the 'clear and present danger' test) the reality is that that test it has nothing to do with expression, but actions. "I believe there is a fire in this theatre" is an expression of opinion, whereas "shouting fire" is raising a fire alarm.Needless to say, even a socialist society will need to protect itself from dangerous behaviour. The difference between these three illustrates how difficult that is:1) I hate smurfs.2) Smurfs have a harmful effect on our community.3) I believe the world would be a better place without Smurfs.4) Kill the smurfs!That illustrates how grammatical mood is not naturally aligned with the effect of the speech act (3 in particular is a declaration of a belief but one that in a certain context could be seen as having the same effect as 4).
I believe The Monument does relate of an incident in which there were calls to expel members who voted against someone's expulsion…back in the 1930's….
There are empty homes (whether they are fit for use is another question), but the market isn't providing them. "Free at the point of use" has a recognisable resonance with the NHS, and homes will have to be "paid for" in effort come what may. The NHS makes a good 'wedge' for socialist ideas that otherwise are hard to crowbar into debate.
Just a note that the London election blog is up and running, mostly with letters to the press.http://spgb.blogspot.co.uk/A sample:
Quote:Another letter has been published today:Dear Friend, an election must be coming. Jeremy Corbyn has been appearing in print around the shop calling for rent controls as a means of curbing the housing crisis. Rent controls, though, have never worked, and never will. They are an attempt to fix the market, and market rates will out, with landlords either letting their stock go to wreck or withdrawing from the market to protect their profit rates. The only solution to the housing crisis is to build enough homes for all; but the market is patently failing to do this, and never will. If there were enough homes for all, how could a landlord collect rent? No one can help taking up space, or needing shelter, and no-one should have it denied them because of market whims. Just as no-one can help falling ill, and should not have health care denied them because of market whims. We need housing free at the point of use. The only way we can get this is through the common ownership of the wealth of the world. Anything less will always see profit (and rents) put before people's need. Bill Martin Socialist Party Parliamentary Candidate for Islington North.In the Islington Gazette no online letters page, but there is an e-edition here.Lbird,My turn to be baffled. I thought we were talking about socialism/communism where there will be no "socio-economic class, proletarians, who sell their labour to exploiters" and where there will only be one community, without classes?
Ah, so, Lbird, you don't think that people who don't work should have any say in the scientific process?
Yes, and where you seem to ascribe power to a one sided abstract 'community' distinct from its members, I see democracy as being the concrete individuals coming together to perform definite concrete activity, the alignment of subjective consciousness and being and the realisation of the self through the other. An 'individual' is merely the indivisible part of a whole.
Quote:That's just plain bollocks, YMS. Mengele was a well-educated scientist, who retained his links to the research department of his university, and supplied results to his mentor, a respected professor whose name you can look up.Hardly a refutation of my point that scientific freedom is different from research ethics, and in fact it tends to substantiate my point that it was Nazi state + death camps and the authoritarian regime that made Mengele possible, not science.
Quote:So, no democratic control by workers, then? Just an 'voluntary, free' individualist paradise (tm. Bourgeois Productions, 1600-1900).Free association = democracy, no free association, no democracy.
I believe this is relevent to the debate:http://existentialcomics.com/comic/66
The BBC has been very keen in reports to ensure that Allied bombing is given the credit for the liberation of Kobane (and absolutely no mention whatsoever of the politics of the Kurdish forces), the one thing that could actually forge some vague hope in the whole affair.Of course, hope is needed after the most recent Daesh murder, which sems to have been deliberately horrific. And sucesful, Daesh want to provoke and widen the war, to drag others into their cesspit. That Jordan has immediately responded with hits own pair of murders (presented here in the media as some sort of understandable retaliation, rather than as an act of barabrity in its own right) is not a good sign.Also, I note this other dispiriting stoy:http://www.juancole.com/2015/02/massacre-reprisals-collaborators.html
Quote:As extremists from the Islamic State group are slowly driven out of northern Iraq, members of one of the groups that suffered at their hands – the Yazidis – began to take revenge on locals they say collaborated with them. This week several villages were looted and burned with around 70 locals kidnapped or killed.So the cycle of violence continues. People whose brains are to all intents and purposes identical to our own feel it is useful and sensible to execute their fellow humans and cause grief to their relatives.
Quote:If we supporters of workers’ democratic control of the means of production (OK, just me) replace ‘Bible’ with ‘research papers’, ‘Latin’ (the ‘unknown tongue’, for those ‘individualists’ here who have no knowledge of history) with ‘maths’, and ‘priests’ with ‘scientists’, and ‘grace’ with ‘physics’, this might give us Communists some indictors of ‘how’ the claims of ‘string theory’ might be available to most workers, for their consideration and determination.The research papers are available to everyone already: you can go and get them from your local public library. As I believe I've mentioned before, in socialism such papers would be freely available (indeed, we could even extend access where at present commercial demands of publishers make access limited — it's not the scientists that are the problem, but capitalist markets. I doubt we could do without the mathematics, though. Some science popularisers have made a good crack, but after a certain point it is necessary. After all, Einstein could only make his discoveries after Riemann's mathematics made them possible…I believe your Mengele example, aside from being ad absurdam is a category error. He is not an example of scientific thinking (or scientific thought) but a question of research ethics (and power). In a society without an armed central power, his sort become an imjpossibility, and any science that exists will be on the same vo,untary free associating basis that all social activity is undertaken with.
See, where I'd say a woman on her own on an island thinking about stars is engaged in social production of science (or art) and you're model seems insufficient and to exclude vaste swathes of social effort. Society is wherever people are. You stand for the undemocratic curtailment of thought and the production of ideas, whereas I am for communal production. You would have us serve under King nose count, whereas I am for practical democracy of co-operating human beings.
LBird,that is different, democratic control is different from setting out limits. What you're saying is that artists will only be permitted to write what has been democratically agreed? The very act of creation will be subject to this democratic control? And no one will be allowed to be alone with paints and a brush lest unauthorised art occurs?
