ZJW

Forum Replies Created

Viewing 15 posts - 61 through 75 (of 416 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • in reply to: Trump as president again? #256128
    ZJW
    Participant

    A couple of questions I’d like Trump’s lackey media (which takes it seriously) ask:

    (Fox News or Newsmax reporter:)

    1) Sir, what kind of status do you envision for Greenland once it has joined the US? Is it to be a state; or like Puerto Rico; or like American Samoa?

    [edit:] Or a domestic dependent nation, that is, an Indian reservation?

    2) Mr President, you have spoken of the ‘state of Canada’. Canada as it is now has ten states, which they call ‘provinces’, and three territories. All of them are represented in Canada’s ‘parliament’, which is their word for Congress. Sir, what I’m asking is why would Canada be just be one single state?

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by ZJW.
    in reply to: Stepping back from the digital. #256127
    ZJW
    Participant

    TM:

    Your #255505 and #255506

    ‘I also got a big parcel of KMT books from Taipei, one of which was speeches of Chiang Kai-shek, in which he let slip that Mao’s China had nothing to do with communism!’

    What book and what speech? Or just what speech, and of what year?

    ‘The KMT musical propaganda is as rousing, maybe more so, than Red Chinese songs and marches.’

    What is the (rousing) KMT musical propaganda you refer to?

    in reply to: Russian Tensions #256126
    ZJW
    Participant

    ‘Does Ukraine face a “Syrian scenario?’

    Article written by the anarchist Ukrainian group ‘Assembly’, published here by the WSWS:

    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/01/08/pdne-j08.html

    in reply to: Trump as president again? #256124
    ZJW
    Participant

    Here is a short video by Trump Jr during his visit to Greenland. Greenlanders’ heartfelt pleading to be bought and be free at last from Danish exploitation:

    https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/113801152970385739

    (I wonder if such masters as Riefenstahl or Eisenstein could have outdone it).

    And here are two online Greenland media you can read through Google Translate. Click link and the Danish will be English.

    https://www-knr-gl.translate.goog/da?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en

    https://www-sermitsiaq-ag.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en

    Greenlandic Broadcasting Corporation (the first link) actually has more content in Greenlandic than Danish, but Google does a much worse job of translating it.

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by ZJW.
    in reply to: Trump as president again? #256058
    ZJW
    Participant

    [The following is a lighthearted email I sent to some friends in the US.]

    Dear Multiple Recipient:

    11 minutes of Glenn Greenwald: https://rumble.com/v65vfvs-magas-h1b-debate-explained.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp .

    His riveting view of the transformations and flip-flops of both Trump and Sanders in the matter of H1B visas, and of the tensions (‘base’ vs ‘elites’) in the Trump movement. (The 2016 quote from Trump against H18 could go into a textbook, paraphrased as: ‘I am a capitalist. I am in competition with other capitalists. When both I and my competitors have the same legal opportunity to make money, I cannot pass it up, regardless of the consequences for actual or prospective employees. To do so could doom my business.’)

    Readers of the Guardian, the BBC, CNN and the like, for whom Steve Bannon is a crypto-fascist bacterium, will be surprised to find him presented (from 8:16) in a very positive light, as being particularly (left-) populist in the economic policies he unsuccessfully supported in the first Trump term before being fired. (Tax the rich/corporations, spend the resulting billions on rebuilding infrastructure and hiring workers.)

    Greenwald may be indispensable in his anti-neoconism, anti-Israelism, and defense of civil liberties, but at the end of the day, he is after all a USA-centric shallow left-populist journalist. Although what he says about a ‘traditional left’ position on immigration — something he has been repeating for years — has applied to one extent or another to the ‘tamed’ or institutionalised workers’ movement, it does not apply to the (at least ostensibly) social-revolutionary left. The notion, really just commonsensical, was that workers, including migrant labor (regardless of whether this migration was country-internal or borders had been crossed), rather than facing the employer as atomised individuals, must be organised into unions, so as to exert collective power so as to maintain or force up the price of labor-power (wages) that otherwise would fall due to the adverse effect of supply-and-demand.

    And even the Second International, although thoroughly reformist under some revolutionary packaging, passed no resolutions against immigration but only those consonant with the last sentence of the paragraph above.

    in reply to: Jimmy Carter has died #256001
    ZJW
    Participant

    Carter not an object of mourning in Taiwan:
    https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/6003565

    About how the breaking of relations was carried out, the riotous reception given Warren Christopher etc:
    https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2016/05/29/2003647366

    in reply to: Jimmy Carter has died #255992
    ZJW
    Participant

    The market-libertarians (brand: Reason magazine) salute him as the pre-Reagan:

    https://reason.com/2024/12/29/rip-jimmy-carter-the-passionless-president

    in reply to: “Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism” #255989
    ZJW
    Participant

    DJP:

    Excellent. I (or ‘we’ (ie including other forum readers)), I’d hope) look forward to it!

    And I am curious about the composition of the group of people with whom you read it.

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by ZJW.
    • This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by ZJW.
    in reply to: Trump as president again? #255988
    ZJW
    Participant

    Trumpists are suffering an entertaining fracture over import of skilled foreign labor. (The market-libertarian magazine Reason calls the two groups the ‘nativists’ and the ‘dynamists’.)

    Here some quotes from the press from ‘nativist’ Steve Bannon:

    ‘The H-1B program “[is] about taking American jobs and bringing over essentially what have become indentured servants at lower wages…the thing’s a SCAM by the Oligarchs in Silicon Valley,”

    ‘”H1B Visa Program Should be Zeroed-Out —Used to Constantly Drive Wages Down and Replace American Tech Workers —the Foreign Worker Replacements are Treated Like Indentured Servants…” Bannon posted Friday morning.’

    ‘“H-1B visas? That’s not what it’s about. It’s about taking American jobs and bringing over essentially what have become indentured servants at lower wages,” the former Trump adviser turned pundit said, referring to the visa program that allows immigrants in specialized fields to work in the United States temporarily.

    “This thing’s a scam by the oligarchs in Silicon Valley to basically take jobs from American citizens, give them to what become indentured servants from foreign countries, and then pay ‘em less. Simple.’

    As for the ‘dynamist’ side, see this Telegraph article titled ‘US culture breeds ‘laziness’ and ‘mediocrity’, says Vivek Ramaswamy as he backs migrant-hiring’: https://archive.ph/DgFB4

    in reply to: “Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism” #255923
    ZJW
    Participant

    DJP:

    Well I should think so, given that I emailed it to two participants of this forum on 5 April 2021. (Seem to have somehow forgotten you though.)

    ‘Fields, Factories and Workshops’ is by Kropotkin. Title of the text not needing ‘special importance’ attached to it has ‘forest’ in the title, not ‘fields’, as you may have realised later.

    If you were to say why no ‘special importance should be attached to’ this would already serve as a needed, however miniature, critique.

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by ZJW.
    • This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by ZJW.
    in reply to: “Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism” #255840
    ZJW
    Participant

    While waiting for Robbo to eventually write a piece about it, the so far only published reaction to ‘Forest and Factory The Science and the Fiction of Communism’ has been this: https://www.black-lamp.com/posts/the-cart-before-the-horse-on-labor-time-accounting-the-immediate-nature-of-the-transition-to-communism-and-scientific-utopias

    I found it very unfocused. (Seems to be a labor-voucher enthusiast.)

    in reply to: Harry Cleaver replies #255681
    ZJW
    Participant

    Harry Cleaver has a new book (2025) … or is it?

    https://brill.com/display/title/70910

    Chapters can be read online there further down the page at the per-chapter ‘download PDF’s.

    Book title:
    The Fragile Juggernaut —
    Marx & Engels on Capitalism, Class Struggle and Crisis

    in reply to: Do We Need the Dialectic? #255679
    ZJW
    Participant

    Re Alan’s https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/topic/do-we-need-the-dialectic/page/25/#post-97766 above from 11 years ago, this professor Lanza has just co-written — as vehicle for his views — a science-fiction novel with Nancy Kress.

    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_(novel)

    in reply to: Calculation in kind methods #255595
    ZJW
    Participant

    https://libcom.org/article/how-socialism-can-organise-production-without-money-adam-buick-and-pieter-lawrence

    On that page is posted ‘How socialism can organise production without money – Adam Buick and Pieter Lawrence ‘

    Three days ago a person bearing the handle ‘RJ7’ posted a three-paragraph comment, starting: ‘While I am sympathetic to the idea of getting rid of money, and its cousin “labour time”, there seem to be several practical issues, which prevent that ideal being implemented in any group of people larger than maybe 100.

    in reply to: “Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism” #255589
    ZJW
    Participant

    Robo wonders: ‘I wondered if anyone has had any interaction with them’.

    From the looks of that quote given by h.moss, just more leftist flotsam.

    Me, what I ‘wonder’ is why nothing ever came of the notion expressed by ALB (here: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/topic/two-ex-socialists-go-funny/page/6/#post-249333): ‘This is the sort of discussion — and the sort of people we should be discussing with […]’. regarding the article linked to in that thread titled ‘Forest and Factory: the Science and the Fiction of Communism’. This was nearly one year ago now.

    (Of the two writers (the one less responsible for the criminally repellent writing style, I believe) one can be contacted like so: https://designformanufracture.com/about .)

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by ZJW.
    • This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by ZJW.
Viewing 15 posts - 61 through 75 (of 416 total)