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1336 [lbo-talk] Allies and the Holocaust -- rank: 1000

ALLIES AND THE HOLOCAUST 'You go back to the 1930s, to the start of the persecution ... and it was only in 1939 that they got round to doing something. They said this has got to be stopped.' Tony Blair in 2004 (quoted, Observer 16 January 2005). The lesson that the British Labour Party leader learned from the Holocaust is that the Allies were right to take on Hitler to save the Jews (and by implication, the Coalition of the Willing was right to take on Saddam Hussein to fight persecution in Iraq ...

Document Size:	9073
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Jan 23 11:10:04 PST 2005

1337 [lbo-talk] Henry Jackson Society explained -- rank: 1000

from http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAED5.htm Humanitarian interventionists dig in In his new book Anti-Totalitarianism, Oliver Kamm makes a shrill and inconsistent defence of the Iraq war. by James Heartfield Two weeks ago, a motley gathering of parliamentarians, pundits and academics announced themselves as the Henry 'Scoop' Jackson Society in the Palace of Westminster. A small flurry of newspaper reports tried to divine the meaning of the argument they initiated over the discipl ...

Document Size:	6410
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Dec 18 06:06:20 PST 2005

1338 [lbo-talk] Re: Cuba's painful blah blah -- rank: 1000

John Thornton: "This doesn't tell me why you think washing clothes at some sort of public institution is preferable to washing my clothes at home. Nor does it address the question of cooking meals at home." I'm with Carrol on this, if I understand him right. The private sphere, home and hearth, is a relatively recent invention, in human historical terms, insofar as the greater part of productive life was socialised in the industrial age, leaving just those tasks of reproduction of labo ...

Document Size:	6466
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Aug 30 00:20:02 PDT 2005

1339 [lbo-talk] Cuba's painful blah blah -- rank: 1000

Joanna: "Some of the tools that were developed after capitalism (notice I said "some," not "all") were developed ONLY in order to rationalize production in such a way that workers could have less and less power over (and knowledge of) the work they were doing." In my mind that is to conflate the two simultaneous processes, production of goods, production of profit. Under capitalism new technologies, being legal property of the capitalist, are presented to the labour ...

Document Size:	7939
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Aug 28 15:37:27 PDT 2005

1340 [lbo-talk] Cuba's painful transition from sugar economy -- rank: 1000

Forgive me, Joann, but I think this is quite wrong. It seems to me that Marx demonstrated 138 years ago not only that technology (or 'forces of production') can be distinguished from 'relations of production', but that they must be, if socialism is to be a possibility. He showed that the *illusion* that capitalism and technology were synonymous was one of the central ideological claims that served to shore up the existing society. Furthermore, he gave a compelling account of how, under capitalis ...

Document Size:	7397
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Aug 28 12:55:57 PDT 2005

1341 [lbo-talk] Cuba's painful transition from sugar economy -- rank: 1000

Carrol Cox's logical argument against GM technology (below) does not neet the prefix GM, being just as coherent an argument against *all* technology. Step away from the keyboard, sir... The error is crassly undialectical. Carrol assumes first that all capitalist society is hell, sorry, "totally indifferent to human needs" and second, that capitalism is ubiquitous, and that therefore everything that happens is "totally indifferent to human needs". But if that were true, " ...

Document Size:	6448
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Aug 28 08:38:32 PDT 2005

1342 [lbo-talk] Cuba's painful transition from sugar economy -- rank: 1000

Michael Perelman: "But everytime I have looked at the data, the US is not the leader in yield" But then yield isn't the only measure of productivity. Yield is output per acre. Where land is plentiful, like the US, there is less pressure to increase yield. In Europe, where land is less plentiful, yields are high. On the other hand, output per labourer is high in the US. Between 1948 and 1994 farm output increased 2.37 times, but labour input reduced by two thirds. (Agricultural Producti ...

Document Size:	6058
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Aug 28 04:14:31 PDT 2005

1343 [lbo-talk] Cuba's painful transition from sugar economy -- rank: 1000

Carl writes: "The question is not: technology, are you for it or against it? It is: what kind of technology are you for? E. F. Schumacher and all that." That would be the E.F. Schumacher who was chief economic advisor to the National Coal Board 1950-1970, when deaths from the application of his 'intermediate technology' there were running at twenty a year. ( http://www.dmm.org.uk/names/index_19.htm ) The same E.F. Schumacher who wanted to stop technology transfer to the Third World, ...

Document Size:	6207
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Aug 28 01:52:50 PDT 2005

1344 [lbo-talk] Cuba's painful transition from sugar economy -- rank: 1000

Dwayne >The urge to fly from modern systems, instead of moving through them >to even greater, fairer things is, I think, an indication of deep >weariness and confusion. to which Doug adds "Yup. And that's one of the sadder symptoms of the erosion of Marxism: nostalgia and despair." I tried to argue that agri-business's did good as well as bad in 'two cheers for agri-business', Review of Radical Political Economy, June 2000. Michael Perelman wrote a rather snooty reply, I thoug ...

Document Size:	5368
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Aug 27 12:20:20 PDT 2005

1345 [lbo-talk] Robin Cook -- rank: 1000

Carl qestions my assertion: 'Cook's role as architect of New Labour's ethical imperialism was promptly forgotten by the left ...' But here is 'Stop The War Coalition convenor Lindsey German' saying 'Mr Cook had set a good example and would be "sorely missed". ' http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4128718.stm

Document Size:	4843
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Aug 7 12:44:01 PDT 2005

1346 [lbo-talk] Blair's plans, Robin Cook -- rank: 1000

The WEEK ending 7 August 2005 FROM 'BUSINESS AS USUAL' TO 'THE RULES OF THE GAME ARE CHANGING' Last week Number Ten commented that it fully supported the argument put by the Prime Minister's wife Cherie Blair, in Malaysia that it would be wrong to curtail civil liberties in the face of the threat of terrorism. The Prime Minister promised to a 'battle of ideas' against extremists. On Friday, the Prime Minister used his Press Conference to announce an extraordinary package of measures to silence e ...

Document Size:	11195
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Aug 7 10:15:40 PDT 2005

1347 [lbo-talk] Motives of the London bombers -- rank: 1000

Hussain Osman's life in Italy described in the Guardian - indicating that his outlook was much more a product of Western civilisation than Eastern: ...he attended school and, according to a former girlfriend interviewed by the newspaper La Repubblica, hung out with friends at a spot near the entrance to the Villa Borghese park, not far from the tourist-packed Piazza del Popolo. His nickname was "Bambi". "We called him that because of his big dark eyes, like those of a fawn, and hi ...

Document Size:	6609
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Aug 2 03:08:02 PDT 2005

1348 [lbo-talk] London Bombers motivations -- rank: 1000

Osman Hussain's lawyer Antonietta Sonnessa told BBC News what his motives were: "The justification for it was to do with Muslim women and the way that they've been treated." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4737067.stm

Document Size:	4854
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Aug 2 00:29:52 PDT 2005

1349 [lbo-talk] Book Reviews -- rank: 1000

Tommy Kelly asks This is my review of Ormerod when it was published: The Death of Economics, Paul Ormerod, Faber and Faber, £6.99 pbk As a one-time economic forecaster, Paul Ormerod has written an exposé of economics as it is practised that is readable and funny. His thesis is compelling: economics does not work. He shows how the models of economic behaviour used by academic economics are so divorced from reality as to be useless as a guide to the economy. In particular Ormerod shows the absurd ...

Document Size:	6835
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Aug 1 13:55:19 PDT 2005

1350 [lbo-talk] Anti-suburban snobs -- rank: 1000

Off on holiday for a week, so can I pre-emptorily concede every single point to John, Wayne, Wojtek, Doug, Joanna and Jordan. James

Document Size:	4706
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Sep 25 02:21:15 PDT 2004