Young Master Smeet
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Mostly Eliane Radigue: of your two, the first is a little busy for my taste, but the second was cool.
The British are pretty much sticking an oar in: British navy goes to Guyana
“HMS Trent – a ship used for “defence diplomacy” according to the government – will take part in joint exercises with Guyana after Christmas.”Now, Guyana is a former British colony, a Commonwealth member and ‘ally’ of Britain: of course, sending a ship could just be dancing for the British public jingos, but it is also sending a message, and British oil firs presumably stand to benefit from the oil in the current Guyanian territory.
@Almamater
Seriously, nothing was moved, nothing was deleted. I used the ‘close thread’ function to prevent any further posting to the old music thread, and then I started a new thread in a different forum, and provided a link and asked people to post there. I have not moved any music, no music have I moved, there was no movement of music, the music stayed where it is, it is immobile, I have not moved any music.
No music was eliminated, nothing was removed, as ALB has said, the music thread is still there, it is still visible, nothing was deleted, nothing was moved, there was no censorship.
Please, just post nice music links in the new music thread. Start a new thread if you like (in Off topic, please). Feel free to discuss music here, preferably in a socialist context.
Nothing was moved to the new thread, people just started posting there, I cannot merge topics across different forums (else I would just have moved the whole music thread to off-topic.) I simply closed the thread in this forum, and started a new one in the off-topic forum.
@Almamater
The reason I suggested moving the Music thread to off-topic is precisely because there are no limits to what goes in the off-topic forum, leaving the general forum for discussions of socialism.
My own collection of atonal drone music might not make the cut of most people’s definition of music.
@Paula
1: I didn’t delete the music thread.
2: I Closed it, and asked users to use the New Music Thread:
which they have been doing so.It seems to me that off-topic is a better place for the music thread, as the forum’s purpose is the discussion of socialism and the socialist party, it’s not a music forum.
@DJP,
I agree that I think the decentralisation argument isn’t sufficient (Cockschott, IIRC, would argue that if it can be calculated at the firm level, it can be computed at the global plan level).
For von Monkeys, IIRC, the issue isn’t consumer goods, but rational (and we will come back to that word) use of intermediate goods. He concedes that a socialist commonwealth can decide between 100 hectolitres of wine and 2000 hectolitres of oil, i.e. it can make consumer choices. But the production methods are opaque.
e.g. to produce the wine we can either use these two methods
Grapes….| 300 | 3000
Water……|1000 | 100
Wood……| 100 | 300With both methods producing the required quality and quantity of wine. Monkeys says we cannot rationally choose between the two without some sort of price metric, with knock ons for gluts, bottlenecks and shortages further down the production line.
As Robo says, we can use the law of the minimum, regulated stock control, etc. Cockschott says Kantorovich’s linear algebra can do the job.
My usual example of this is a sodoku in which one square is incorrectly filled in, after that all the other squares are filled in wrong, but they are filled in incorrectly while applying the rules correctly.
Now, Monkeys’ rationality is a flexible thing: in his introduction to a book about the Incas, a complex moneyless economy, he shifts the goalposts to say that this required tyranny to achieve. But usually, in rationality Monkeys is actually assuming his conclusion, a utility maximising market relation.
For instance, we could argue that so long as the goals of society are achieved, it doesn’t matter if a better productive method is available, our rationality is based on outcomes, not infinite ever increasing efficiency and sparing of labour.
Up at Wood Green today, smaller than previous gatherings there, I handed out a smattering of leaflets (there was a separate Fight Imperialism, Fight Racism grouplet that joined the march). They held a rally in Crouch End that I cycled past on my way home.
Some thoughts:
The Liberate Palestine angle does seem to predominate over stop the war or peace, maybe that’s just SWP successfully getting their branding out.
I wasn’t keen on their talk of booing MacDonalds and other businesses they feel support Israel, I think consumer boycotts are bad politics in any case.
I thought his argument was more that the working class was an active agent in its own creation, not simply a passive victim of impersonal forces, and so working class actors, in their own self interest, drove the creation of the wages system.
@Thomas More
Could you please start including some text (more than just one sentence) when you post a link: to give people confidence that they are not linking through to a harmful site, and also to comply with the purpose of the forum as a discussion place. I’m going to start binning posts that contain nothing more than a link.
This reminds me of the David Peace novel Occupied city which uses a framing device of a serial killer thriller to look at unit 731 (and also casts a pall over the serial killer genre by posing it against the backdrop of the world war and the atrocities of the Japanese army).
Wikipedia has a useful article on the Unit (I see that several of its members were princes, so it was clearly supported to the highest levels of the regime).
I suppose we should look at the world context of Japan as a dictatorship developing late and expanding it’s own colonial sphere: while looking at it’s mighty rivals, this line from the wikipedia article is chilling: “Japan started its biological weapons program in the 1930s, partly because the use of biological weapons was banned in interstate conflicts by the Geneva Protocol of 1925; they reasoned that the ban verified its effectiveness as a weapon.” I’d guess racist attitudes to the Chinese and other colonised peoples would have played a part, the idea of killing off ‘different’ people often appeals to colonisers.
