David Paenson

I very much enjoyed Sarah Bates’s insightful article on online dating (“Love me Tinder, love me true?”, January SR), and it’s very refreshing that a socialist magazine takes up such subjects on the borderline between the personal and the capitalist system we live in.

There are a couple of points however I tend to disagree with. Sarah writes “Tinder is a mirror held up to our society — one based on the buying and selling of love, sex and relationships as commodities.” But Tinder doesn’t actually sell relationships, it provides, at a price, a platform for people to meet up.

Socialists should completely reject the concept of UBI for one main basic reason: it takes class struggle out of capitalism.

Instead of fighting for higher wages, against privatisation of the NHS, schools and all the rest and for higher benefits and less means testing, workers would be sidetracked into an endless and pointless discussion on how to best balance UBI.

Michael Lavalette’s article in October SR is a telling example.

David Paenson
Frankfurt, Germany

Parrington’s article in my view suffers from two main weaknesses.

One is his attack on what he calls “the standard view that the genome changes only very gradually”. Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel says that experience does have an effect on genes, but solely within the brain, and quite categorically rules out experience being carried over to the next generation through the genes.

Kandel, like so many others, sees no problem in accepting both tenants: conservatism when it comes to DNA reproduction and extreme flexibility within one’s own life span.

Unconvincing
I can’t really agree with Sally Campbell’s assessment that 1984 was a “strong production” (June 2014). A lot of the dialogue was almost inaudible, the same flashing lights effect repeated over and over again.

The acting was unconvincing — for instance, not even the feeling of real sensuality in the love scene — and always the same library scene, even when the couple were out in the country enjoying nature.

"Will enough energy be available to meet the needs of a growing world? How can security of the energy system on which the world depends be protected? What will be the impact of climate change?" These are the three questions which the author aims to answer in this 800-page volume.

It's worth considering if they are the right questions. What are "our needs"? It's only in one single short paragraph towards the end of the book, for example, that Yergin mentions the possibility of an alternative transport system.

He makes it seem as if Dawkins was going on about a gene for selfishness. The simple point Dawkins is trying to make is that both change and continuity in the living world have genes as their material basis. He readily concedes that human behaviour could, or even will, change the environment in which we live. This could have an effect on which genes are favoured.

Dawkins leaves ample room for human will and should not be dismissed out of hand.

David Paenson
Frankfurt, Germany