Search LBO-Talk Archives

511 [lbo-talk] Conservatism -- rank: 1000

Somebody Somebody wrote "Reactionary populist in these terms means things like being anti-EU" (ok, there were some other conditions) Then I am a reactionary populist, too (no surprises, there, then, you might say). As it happens, though there is a lot of left wing opposition to the European Union the Communist Party of Britain ran on a No2EU programme here, and the French Anti-Capitalists scuppered the Treaty on the European Union a while back. The kind of people in the UK who are in ...

Document Size:	4956
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Sep 15 03:23:20 PDT 2009

512 [lbo-talk] Conservatism -- rank: 1000

Jim F. writes "Bill Buckley and...National Review pretty self-consciously attempted to blend ...traditionalist conservatism...with what may be described as Manchester liberalism ... associated with people like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman." Yes, and that's not completely daft. Intellectually the market liberalism seems to be made of very different stuff from authority, deference and tradition, so that intellectually the mix looks like a dog's breakfast. But in ...

Document Size:	6488
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Sep 15 02:14:47 PDT 2009

513 [lbo-talk] Signs of the times -- rank: 1000

Doug writes 'It's not even clear how many are "working class." I suspect a lot are what we used to call petit bourgeois.' in which case Myles comment that it is 'an economic version of Stockholm Syndrome' doesn't make quite so much sense. But granted that the active protestors are not working class, would you say that working class people are for health care reform? There is - as I think Michael Pollack said- a world of difference between where the British working class was when the NH ...

Document Size:	5269
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Mon Sep 14 19:00:51 PDT 2009

514 [lbo-talk] Signs of the times -- rank: 1000

Andy asks "How would you characterize somebody who is visibly unhealthy? " well, I would hope I would have the good manners not to.

Document Size:	4573
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Sep 14 10:29:29 PDT 2009

515 [lbo-talk] Conservatism -- rank: 1000

Doug wrote "Ah! A stage-ist approach to evolution. Engels was clearly a species-ist. " Yes, a species-being-ist

Document Size:	4517
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Sep 14 09:47:05 PDT 2009

516 [lbo-talk] Signs of the times -- rank: 1000

Andy274 "I went through Union Station early yesterday evening and the first thing that struck about the crowd there was how the population of morbidly obese in DC had suddenly shot up" Miles thought that opposition to health care was 'an economic version of Stockholm Syndrome' Elsewhere I read a columnist refer to the opponents of healthcare reform as 'mouthbreathers'. I can't help but thinking that one reason that the U.S. left has not made many inroads in the masses is that it cannot ...

Document Size:	5254
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Sep 14 09:20:23 PDT 2009

517 [lbo-talk] Conservatism -- rank: 1000

No, it is the U.S. use of the word conservatism that is weird. Anyone who has read Carlyle or Burke (or de Maistre) knows that Conservatism is about tradition and authority, and decidedly not about free markets (though it is about the rights of property, somewhat). What is sometimes called conservatism nowadays, i.e. free markets, is not conservatism at all, but 'Manchester liberalism'. Dennis writes > I used to read Scruton in The Salisbury Review. Weird Brit rightist > thought from the 8 ...

Document Size:	6111
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Sep 14 08:58:26 PDT 2009

518 [lbo-talk] Signs of the Times -- rank: 1000

Sure does look like a lot of angry people, though. From here, it seems quite remarkable that you cannot get a popular movement around social health care (which is close to a religious belief in the UK). Is equality such a turn-off to Americans?

Document Size:	4682
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Sep 13 12:38:54 PDT 2009

519 [lbo-talk] Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books. -- rank: 1000

One Oxford Dean told a friend of mine that it would be cheaper to give every student a limitless amazon account than run a library...

Document Size:	4840
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Sep 5 17:21:36 PDT 2009

520 [lbo-talk] baby thoughts -- rank: 1000

Eubulides writes "The notion that James' assertion bears no resemblance to old ideas in -the history of- the metaphysics/cosmogonies of nature is as ridiculous as James' statement." Can't fault the logic there!

Document Size:	4663
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Sep 4 02:57:01 PDT 2009

521 [lbo-talk] baby thoughts -- rank: 1000

It was the global warming question that led Bruno Latour to doubt his own insistence that science was a social construct "I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show "the lack of scientific certainty" inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a "primary issue." But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument-or did I? ... dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to ...

Document Size:	5334
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Sep 3 04:57:44 PDT 2009

522 [lbo-talk] Baby thoughts -- rank: 1000

Rudy writes: 'science accumulates deeper knowledge over time - a progressivist notion long ago rejected by philosophers and sociologists of science' - more fool them, then. But wouldn't you agree that the Kuhn - Feyerabend - Latour development is one of diminishing returns? (besides, didn't Latour recant recently?) But you write 'While a fundamentally unknowable Nature - which is what I think you mean - may not change by dint of our changing conception of it, that which we treat, explore and rep ...

Document Size:	7222
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Sep 3 00:29:32 PDT 2009

523 [lbo-talk] Baby thoughts -- rank: 1000

Shane says: 'Abstraction is an intellectual process. "man" and "nature" and "science" here are all pure abstractions. "Man" can abstract himself from "nature" only *abstractly*. But *activity*, by humans and by all other creatures, is always the concrete activity of real individual social beings. How can there be "science" without scientific activity? It is absurd to claim that "science," alone among human activities, is " ...

Document Size:	6797
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Sep 2 15:32:49 PDT 2009

524 [lbo-talk] Helmand Export business -- rank: 1000

ITN news reports tonight that two thirds of all heroin in Britain is imported from Helmand Province, Afghanistan: which just happens to be that part of Central Asia currently patrolled by British troops. Is this a coincidence? Are they perhaps there as a security force to keep the supply lines open? Come to think of it, thousands of underpaid overworked troops in miserable conditions. Maybe they are the supply line.

Document Size:	4876
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Sep 2 14:24:35 PDT 2009

525 [lbo-talk] Baby thoughts -- rank: 1000

Rudy says "James, can you point to an aspect of nature that all of us humans confront, experience or understand in anything like the same way - esp. across space and through time? " I am not sure what your question means. But there is no reason to think that our scientific understanding of nature should not deepen over time. Nature's own laws do not change by our knowledge of them. I like Collingwood and Keith Thomas (but the feminist standpoint theory is tedious - as is the misreprese ...

Document Size:	6400
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Sep 2 13:34:45 PDT 2009