Search LBO-Talk Archives

1156 [lbo-talk] Hijacking carbon footprints of old LA -- rank: 1000

CELEBRATING THE "HUMAN FOOTPRINT" The Channel 4 documentary Human Footprint denies mankind's positive side and reduces all our output to waste, writes James Heartfield http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3201/ Herbert Girardet and the plastic concept of sustainability http://www.uel.ac.uk/risingeast/archive03/academic/heartfield.htm

Document Size:	5121
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Apr 27 11:37:39 PDT 2007

1157 [lbo-talk] Hijacking (was: Patrick Bond on climate change) -- rank: 1000

Doug, citing Treasury Secretary Sir Nicholas Stern, tells me: "You are keeping very strange company", because the grass roots of the Republican Party are on his side, not mine! Get with the programme Doug, the whole of the European ruling class has been committed to your position for some time. You are part of a consensus that embraces everyone from the far-right, like the late Edward Goldsmith to Al Gore ... enjoy. The dominant ideas were ever those of the ruling class, I say. If I re ...

Document Size:	8211
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Apr 26 12:55:12 PDT 2007

1158 [lbo-talk] rural depopulation (was growth in National Parks) -- rank: 1000

Lester Brown writing in the Guardian yesterday points out that it is official policy in both China and America to retire one-tenth of cropland, though he misunderstands the reason for it as environmental rather than economic.

Document Size:	4960
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Apr 26 05:22:23 PDT 2007

1159 [lbo-talk] Hijacking (was: Patrick Bond on climate change) -- rank: 1000

"What I've said, many times, is that U.S.real wages have spent most of the last 35 years going sideways and down" For my part, I think that is very bad news indeed. But if one thinks that climate change is the most pressing concern then you really ought to be pleased about that, since to date income growth correlates pretty closely with energy consumption and greenhouse gas emission. If - according to your hypothesis - incomes had risen, then the planet would be in much worse shape. &q ...

Document Size:	6909
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Apr 25 16:10:45 PDT 2007

1160 [lbo-talk] Hijacking (was: Patrick Bond on climate change strategy) -- rank: 1000

Doug, I think there is a kind of slippage in your language, despite what you say to Wojtek. When you are in 'climate change' mode, you (demagogically?) lump workers and elites together as "you, me and the rest of us in the handful of rich countries". First off, handful implies few, but there are more than a few rich countries if you count West Europe, Japan, Korea. And in population terms, that is much more than a few. More to the point, though, if were were not in climate change mode, ...

Document Size:	6510
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Apr 25 09:14:38 PDT 2007

1161 [lbo-talk] Patrick Bond on climate change strategy -- rank: 1000

Doug asks "James, do you still think that climate change isn't really a problem?" To be a pedant about it, I would say that climate change has been a problem, though a productive one, throughout human history. I read in the paper today that archeologists have mapped the farms and meadows men worked centuries ago which are currently ten metres below the north Sea. Assuming you mean anthropogenic climate change, I say, I am not a scientist, but I suspect that it is cobblers (like eugenic ...

Document Size:	5667
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Apr 24 13:06:33 PDT 2007

1162 [lbo-talk] Patrick Bond on climate change strategy -- rank: 1000

Patrick, since you propose free electricity supply for the 'couple of billion people' who lack it (a proposal I applaud), of around 2kilowatt hours per day (which seems a bit stingy to me since UK consumption is 3,880kwhrs annually, or 10.6 kwhrs per day), you are proposing an increase in domestic supply of four billion kilowatt hours per day. I am not convinced that you can achieve that but cutting out waste in the aluminium industry. In any event, if we succeeded in transforming people's livi ...

Document Size:	5560
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Apr 24 12:01:24 PDT 2007

1163 [lbo-talk] Patrick Bond on climate change strategy -- rank: 1000

I agree with Patrick Bond - we must demand massive increases in energy supply. Wojtek wrote: > [WS:] By why on earth would you want subsidize > consumption of energy? Patrick replied: "Because a couple of billion people don't have access to household electricity, Wojtek, and it would be *great* from the standpoint of public health, gender equity, economic development and other merit goods if they did."

Document Size:	5103
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Apr 24 10:04:41 PDT 2007

1164 [lbo-talk] Modernization, Not Westernization -- rank: 1000

"The correct path would have been to modernize without equating it with Westernization," says Yoshie, but I am not sure that the example she gives, adoption of the Latin alphabet is necessarily a wrong step. After all Hungarian, which is a turkish language survives quite happily with the latin alphabet, and arabic script is no less alien to the Turkish language. An Ethiopian friend explained to me (can this be right?) that Coptic is written right to left, having originally been the oth ...

Document Size:	5408
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 23 00:40:29 PDT 2007

1165 [lbo-talk] Rethinking liberalism -- rank: 1000

"As I understand it, the anti-roads protests germinated out of the opposition to road expansion projects that affect many people." The Newbury by-pass, which was the road proposal that gathered most opposition, was consistently supported by the people of Newbury who voted for it in every local election. They wanted heavy traffic redirected from their town centre. It was opposed for the most part by people from out of town. The road protests in general were much more ideological in char ...

Document Size:	6649
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 22 11:27:42 PDT 2007

1166 [lbo-talk] Rethinking Liberalism -- rank: 1000

"Few Iranians would think that their country would be better off over all if they traded their government for, say, the government of Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Jordan, Pakistan, South Africa, Turkey, or another country in this league, all of which have their own problems." Well the few Iranians I have met would appear to be them, then. All say that they would prefer almost anyone to the present regime - though not many favour western intervention. I am all for resisting the temptati ...

Document Size:	5363
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Apr 21 07:30:19 PDT 2007

1167 [lbo-talk] gender & work time -- rank: 1000

Doug wrote: "Yeah, these are all valid objections, but it's interesting that despite similar data from many countries around the world, some people think they just *know* otherwise. Sometimes the things that people "know" just aren't true" Sorry, maybe I bumped into this thread half way through, but what in particular did you have in mind as the things that some people know but are not true? James

Document Size:	4948
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Apr 21 00:52:58 PDT 2007

1168 [lbo-talk] Limits of European Unification -- rank: 1000

My paper on The Limits of European Unification is published in Hillel Ticktin's journal of Socialist Thought, Critique. http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section~fulltext=713240928~dontcount=true~content=a777252188~db=all

Document Size:	4946
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Apr 17 13:30:56 PDT 2007

1169 [lbo-talk] Moscow Protests -- rank: 1000

A new Russian revolution? Get real James Heartfield Another Russia, the anti-Putin campaign group, commands the front pages of the Western press. But it hasn't impressed the Russian people. http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3090/

Document Size:	4782
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 16 10:33:07 PDT 2007

1170 [lbo-talk] 300,000 rally against Turkish government -- rank: 1000

Yoshie writes: "It's a good question whether secular Western leftists choose democracy under the AKP or its demise at the hands of the secularist military in Turkey." But many Turkish leftists I know are secularists even though they fought against the military. They know that Ataturk's Republic was deeply conservative but still support secularisation. Of course it is something of an hysterical reaction, given that Erdogan's 'Islamism' is about as Islamic as Angela Merkel's Christian De ...

Document Size:	5356
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 15 10:26:23 PDT 2007