24-April 2023 : LAB 44% / CON 29% / LDEM 11% / GRN 5%

[leftieliberal]

Jul 16, 2023 14:31:52 GMT mercian said:

Jul 16, 2023 9:21:26 GMT steve said:

bendo
Firstly welcome.

It's a bit akin to the right wing media rage when Emily Thornberry posted a picture of a white van.

Out of touch with reality champagne socialist they spewed.

Actually Thornberry was brought up on a council estate and her brother at the time of posting the photo was you guessed it a van driver.

I believe she should be addressed as Lady Nugee

Thornberry has lived in Islington since the early 1990s. In July 1991 she married Christopher Nugee, of Wilberforce Chambers,[84] in Tower Hamlets, and they have two sons and a daughter. Nugee later became Queen's Counsel, then a High Court Judge, when he was knighted, at which point Thornberry became entitled to be styled Lady Nugee, but does not use the title. Nugee later became a Lord Justice of Appeal.

So she just happens to be married to someone who was a successful barrister and is now a Lord Justice of Appeal. I suppose that debars her own achievements in your view.

[Danny]

Jul 16, 2023 14:00:43 GMT alec said:

That's what you don't seem to understand; covid infects your T cells, and other parts of the immune system that work to produce them. Vaccination does not - it stimulates their production.

You do seem to be trying to have this both ways. The vaccines we used this time cause the production in the body of virus proteines, which the body then attacks as a proxy for the real thing. If vaccinations stimilates production of T cells, then so must actual invasion by virus.

Now it might be that the virus can directly attack T cells and destroy them, but you just said it must also stimulate their growth. So at worst its going to be a balance of those two effects, and certainly you cannot claim the overall effect for everyone will be worse off.

The problem with all your posting in this respect is that although certain kinds of harm has been demonstrated in some people, it has nothing like being demonstrated in most. And that sort of conclusion is frankly not new. We know most people, the great majority, have always survived covid perfectly fine with no interventions at all. Hint, approximatele all the working population. So why on earth were they locked up without trial for months? Why do you keep supporting that massive waste of resources?

[Danny]

Jul 16, 2023 14:23:10 GMT mercian said:

Biggest popular vote for anything in the history of the country. It's as close to the will of the people as you're going to get. Over 17 million votes.

Surely not...There was a much much bigger majority to stay in the EU on the previous occasion. By comparison the leave vote barely passed. it should not have passed at all had it required an absolute majority of the population to support it.

[domjg]

Jul 16, 2023 14:23:10 GMT mercian said:

Jul 16, 2023 7:03:43 GMT steve said:

mercian
" will of the people" really?

youtu.be/xmnvF--MOjU

Biggest popular vote for anything in the history of the country. It's as close to the will of the people as you're going to get. Over 17 million votes. In 1997 Blair got 13.5 million and that was widely seen as a massive vote.

Binary choice. Know what? The remain vote would also have been the largest vote for anything. A referendum is not a party political election but I thought that would be obvious to anyone with half a brain.

[alec]

Danny - "You do seem to be trying to have this both ways. The vaccines we used this time cause the production in the body of virus proteines, which the body then attacks as a proxy for the real thing. If vaccinations stimilates production of T cells, then so must actual invasion by virus."

Sorry, but that's absolutely pathetic. You have no idea how childish your understanding of this is, and I hesitate to use that comparison for fear of offending children.

[Deleted]

Jul 16, 2023 9:05:45 GMT pjw1961 said:

Jul 16, 2023 8:13:37 GMT colin said:

The point of the "socialism" part is a much more equal distribution of available resources. At the moment the distribution is wildly skewed with tiny elites consuming a vast proportion of the worlds resources. A major redistribution would indeed provide more food and housing for the masses, at the expense of a lot less for the elite, but also less for the relatively privaleged like citizens of developed countries. 
www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/richest-1-grab-nearly-twice-as-much-new-wealth-as-rest-of-the-world-put-together/

You are correct that the Western lifestyle is unsustainable. For humans and nature to survive it needs to end. We need to live more simply and with less "stuff" - most of which is pretty useless anyway and we are driven to purchase by the consumerist lifestyle promoted by the owners of capital. This means developed countries need to be significantly poorer and developing one somewhat richer until equality is achieved (which will also remove the driver for economic migration incidentally). That's the "Green" part. 

Will we do this? Probably not. Democracies won't vote for it and dictatorships are run by despots who tend to have other self-aggrandising priorities. Therefore I agree humans will likely choose to walk into disaster and let nature do the cull for us. Hence why I said you and I are among the gloomier people on his site. Optimists are hoping technology will solve everything - I don't believe that - while most people simply ignore the whole thing - until their house is flooded or goes up in flames. 

If developing countries become richer-which they will, consumption will increase-which it will , and the degradation of the natural world will continue.

[Deleted]

Jul 16, 2023 9:25:40 GMT shevii said:

Jul 16, 2023 8:13:37 GMT colin said:

Could-but wont.

What difference is green-socialism going to make ? Will it reduce the population; or the food and houses we need-or all the stuff that the era of tech has made us addicted to and reliant upon ?

I was going to comment on your post yesterday and how that squares with you mostly voting for Tory or soft Labour governments (Blair once and perhaps Starmer) but felt it would be over personal without really achieving anything.  So your fatalist quote about human nature to some extent covers this, even though I would still argue that doing what you can is better than doing nothing and that alternative governments would be doing more- just as New Labour was putting money into some Green projects and giving grants out for insulation as well as healthcare and education having a similar effect on a smaller scale to the solution for Africa.

But taking a few of your points- an overseas aid budget under "Green socialism" or just the Green Party might be wasted but seems less likely to be used as a political tool to keep regimes friendly to us, and more likely to get to the heart of the problem, which, as has been explained, is about empowering women, healthcare and education in the third world.  Net zero in a short space of time (as is the Green Party policy) will certainly help delay mass extinction while other policies take effect and even if the Labour commitment is wobbly it is hard to see it being worse than the Tory one.  Greens would undoubtedly take action on "all the stuff we are addicted to" by taxes, regulations against inbuilt obsolescence and encourage a repair culture. Plastics would likely disappear very quickly.

I would agree with you though that no party seems to be that bothered about population control as a key target and this remains a key issue to saving the planet.  I hate the Tory hostile atmosphere on refugees and the way this is carried out, but I am set apart from most on the left in my opinion that we need controls on immigration to keep our population down and preserve our green spaces. Even if this doesn't change the world situation we can still protect our own green spaces beyond a few biodiversity projects. The Green Party policy, basically to let any refugee in who wants to come, would be dangerous in my opinion and that applied equally to Corbyn's messaging on this.  People leaving the country (even if these are the best and brightest) and births v deaths does still give us some flexibility though to develop a humane policy.

Others have pointed out trends on population which suggest, once a country gets comfortable, births v deaths will trend downwards so that's where the effort needs to go, just going to be too late for our current crisis I think.  The human race has the answers now which no species had in the past.  We may even have the ability to have prevented or mitigated previous mass extinction events, so it's a tragedy that because of greed those solutions are not being enacted when we are so close to being a force for good.

I do actually agree with your fatalism but I don't think that means that individuals should stop trying with their lifestyles or pushing governments or their own political party to do the right thing.

Thanks for this thoughtful post shevii

I don't really believe that the world will achieve net zero-and even if it does that will mean even more pollution and mining etc

I doubt very much whether we can function now without plastics. 

[pjw1961]

Jul 16, 2023 18:39:59 GMT colin said:

Jul 16, 2023 9:05:45 GMT pjw1961 said:

The point of the "socialism" part is a much more equal distribution of available resources. At the moment the distribution is wildly skewed with tiny elites consuming a vast proportion of the worlds resources. A major redistribution would indeed provide more food and housing for the masses, at the expense of a lot less for the elite, but also less for the relatively privaleged like citizens of developed countries. 
www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/richest-1-grab-nearly-twice-as-much-new-wealth-as-rest-of-the-world-put-together/

You are correct that the Western lifestyle is unsustainable. For humans and nature to survive it needs to end. We need to live more simply and with less "stuff" - most of which is pretty useless anyway and we are driven to purchase by the consumerist lifestyle promoted by the owners of capital. This means developed countries need to be significantly poorer and developing one somewhat richer until equality is achieved (which will also remove the driver for economic migration incidentally). That's the "Green" part. 

Will we do this? Probably not. Democracies won't vote for it and dictatorships are run by despots who tend to have other self-aggrandising priorities. Therefore I agree humans will likely choose to walk into disaster and let nature do the cull for us. Hence why I said you and I are among the gloomier people on his site. Optimists are hoping technology will solve everything - I don't believe that - while most people simply ignore the whole thing - until their house is flooded or goes up in flames. 

If developing countries become richer-which they will, consumption will increase-which it will , and the degradation of the natural world will continue.

Which wasn't what I said - I was talking about an equality of living standard at a lower level across the board, not the developing world reaching current Western levels. However, what you suggest is much more likely in the short term until the climate catastrophe causes world economic collapse, when everyone will get poorer the hard way.  

[steve]

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