Craig, your “banning” doesn’t seem to work. Those apostate and freeborn etc. idiots have just cropped up again on the other thread about banning trolls – again with vile antisemitic comments. Sigh.

As always i support you Craig.

The guy is Spooky (larry)

Larry your derailing days are over

Such people are like a dog which barks at whoever passes by his property.That’s because it’s their job

You are completely right, Craig. I am writing from St. Petersburg RU on a short trip, and the perception here of the exchange arrangements is logical and consistent with what we are hearing from people ‘in the know’ in the USA and in the UK both officially and unofficially.

Larry watches too much TV and reads too many US blogs. Some people in the USA yearn for the Cold War and for confrontations all over the place – it was or maybe still is a comfortable way to look at designated ‘enemies’.

Let Larry be bitter and twisted elsewhere.

Craig,

I’ll be very glad to be rid of “Larry”. His thread hijacking was tedious and disruptive, but his treatment of other contributers was utterly obnoxious. Good riddance to him.

Many thanks.

Bye bye Larry, have a nice day.

Seems the ‘Dumbass’ is Larry . However, Craig there are companies on the Internet who advertise for these kind of people to disrupt blogs such as your own. The wage is pretty good to be a full time Troll.

“It is rather indicative of a very deliberate technique he has used scores of times, that of claiming I hold an opinion which he believes will devalue my other arguments in the mind of other readers, when I do not in fact hold that opinion.”

This is pretty much the technique your bodyguard of mass immigration advocates use on anyone who asserts (a) the simple historical and biological fact that there is such a thing as a British race comprising mainly the descendants of those who settled Britain at the end of the last ice age, and (b) that immigration to Britain at a time when the fertility of the indigenous British people is well below the replacement rate by millions of Asians, Europeans and Africans whose collective fertility is substantially above the replacement rate will result within a generation in the replacement of the majority of the indigenous British people by people from elsewhere and the descendants of people from elsewhere.

In particular, anyone stating these simple facts on this blog can confidently expect to be accused of holding racist or “racialist” beliefs.

Short of having to register to post I don’t see how you will be able to do this. As you say he does seem to work 24/7 and IP address blocking is very easy to circumvent. If someone decided to repeat post it’s very easy to make comments on a blog almost unusable.

Glad he is gone, will make reading the comments section alot more fun rather than reading through his nonsense.

Alfred: be assured that the British have forced themselves into virtually every inhabited corner of the world over the past couple of centuries so the chances of the delightful British gene becoming extinct is pretty much zero.

there is such a thing as a British race comprising mainly the descendants of those who settled Britain at the end of the last ice age

Quite right. Bloody Romans and Normans – let’s kick ‘em out and get breeding.

I support your decision. It is just regrettable that some people who could bring an American or other interesting perspective to a discussion, have nothing better to do than be offensive.

Larry (the team) does not care. He has an agenda and that appears to try and de-value the postings made my Mr Murray. Now, why would anyone want to do that? Check his IP see what U.S prison he is in.

The best you have done Craig.

“be assured that the British have forced themselves into virtually every inhabited corner of the world over the past couple of centuries so the chances of the delightful British gene becoming extinct is pretty much zero.”

Glad to see MJ refrains from a direct charge of racism but his/her technique remains to “accuse me of holding opinions which I do not in fact hold, and which he[she] thinks will call my judgement into doubt.” Specifically, I refer to the silly suggestion that I adhere to a belief in a “British gene”.

Incidentally, although, during their heyday, the Brits got around, the fact remains that there are probably twice as many Pakistani’s + Bangla Deshis as there are those of direct British descent throughout the world. And at 400 million the increase alone in Africa’s population during the last 30 years dwarfs the 160 million odd Brits worldwide.

Anon at 8:48 is me, if anyone doubted it.

Re: Philip’s comment “Quite right. Bloody Romans and Normans – let’s kick ‘em out and get breeding.”

I defined the British race as “comprising mainly (let me emphasize “mainly”) the descendants of those who settled Britain at the end of the last ice age”

According to the analysis of mitachondrial DNA, which I trust more than anything likely to be asserted with out evidence here, is that the Norman and Roman contribution to the British gene pool is quite small. However, I certainly did not deny that those of partly Roman (or Roman slave) or Norman descent were not British. Far from it. As a British citizen, I am proud of my own Norman descent. The Normans were undoubtedly are remarkable people who contributed greatly to Britain’s architectural heritage, if nothing else.

As for “kick them out” another example of accusing me of “holding opinions which I do not in fact hold, and which he[she] thinks will call my judgement into doubt.”

For anyone interested in facts rather than rhetoric, here’s some information on Bryan Sykes who has conducted the most extensive studies of British genetic heritage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Sykes

Re Dani:

“However, Craig there are companies on the Internet who advertise for these kind of people to disrupt blogs such as your own. The wage is pretty good to be a full time Troll.”

Can you give me a url for one of these companies please. All I need to do is modify a “social science jargon generator” and I could be quids in If it can get past a peer reviewed journal a blog should be a piece of p**s.

Craig, you tit. 911 was an inside job. Come on, an intelligent well informed man like you should know that. Look at all the facts.

Not sorry to see Larry go. The vast majority of his comments were totally irrelevant – things like accusing anyone who criticised any action of the US, Israeli or British governments of favouring suicide bombings.

He very occasionally made a relevant point or argument, but not often enough to justify all his other time wasting and attempts at smears.

Alfred wrote “(a) the simple historical and biological fact that there is such a thing as a British race comprising mainly the descendants of those who settled Britain at the end of the last ice age, and (b) that immigration to Britain at a time when the fertility of the indigenous British people is well below the replacement rate by millions of Asians, Europeans and Africans whose collective fertility is substantially above the replacement rate will result within a generation in the replacement of the majority of the indigenous British people by people from elsewhere and the descendants of people from elsewhere.”

This is the same tired old argument used by bigots and racists for centuries. “The Irish Catholics are outbreeding us”, “Those black and Asian immigrants breed like rabbits” and the Daniel Pipes argument that “The Muslims are outbreeding non-Muslims and will take over Europe”

The truth is there has never been any culture in the past thousand years that did not include large numbers of immigrants and that did not include the mixing of cultures.

The Irish Catholic immigrants to Britain in the 19th century did not outbreed the Protestants in the long run, because as new generations of them got better educations and better jobs they had less children – and because they were influence by the society they moved into as much as they influenced it.

In other words immigrants have more children because they’re poorer, worse educated and come from societies with no welfare state, so have more children to avoid them all dying before adulthood and to look after their parents when they’re too sick or old to work (an alternative to the welfare state).

However the second and third generations become better educated, better off and have less children – and become integrated into the society their parents moved to, influenced by it as much as influencing it. So they’re are plenty of people in Glasgow who look Pakistani but talk English in a Glasgow accent.

The same is true of every wave of immigrants – including the current one.

Dear Craig

This is the price of fame, people hate you.

If you offer opinion and suggestions then the dim will always attack you and want to stick a label on you.

I experienced similar tactics by people at university.

Deliberately distorting the truth.

Yours sincerely

George Laird

The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

What took so long?

Such people destroy blogs and the enjoyment of them by others, scumbags, good riddance.

Re: “This is the same tired old argument used by bigots and racists for centuries.”

Here we go. The totally intolerant Liberal response. “You’re just a racist bastard.”

Then “The truth is …”

Yeah, it always adds force to an argument to begin by saying what you’re going to say is “the truth” — not.

“In other words immigrants have more children because they’re poorer, worse educated and come from societies with no welfare state …”

This may very well be true, but why should the British, who occupy a very small and crowded country, be compelled to move over an make over half of some cities already, and more than half the country eventually, to an endless stream of people from else where. Objection to this need have nothing whatsoever to do with bigotry. But getting that idea through the head of a Liberal bigot would take more explosives than required to bring down the Twin Towers.

And why not. Liberalism is all about liassez faire. Willliam Ewart Gladstone’s family fortune was based on the driving of slaves, a very Liberal free market business. Today Liberalism is all about screwing the workers. Wage arbitrage: send the capital and technology to the slave plantations of Asia or bring the Asians to the west to undercut the incomes of the native population.

Wonderful clip here of Malcolm Muggeridge expressing precisely the only sane view of Liberalism:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__nHqyLfeFE

Well done but I expect he’ll be given another guise shortly

IMHO you should severely moderate the comments on this blog, restricting comments to those which will add something to the particular topic being discussed.

I think you should ban everyone from this site.

Alfred, do you have any views on the banning of the construct known as ‘Larry from St Louis’. That is what this thread is about. Why are you attempting to introduce a completely different subject here? Is that not a little reminiscent of what the subject of this thread might do, albeit in a more truncated and virulent manner?

Incidentally, there is a valid critique of the manner in which corporate capitalism uses immigration as a tool to divide-and-rule and keep a permanent pool of workers out of work and keep wages down – it’s called exploitation by transnational corporate capitalists. It has nothing to do with mitochondrial DNA.

It’s the economics, my man, it’s the economics. When, at one point, I suggested that people unite to campaign for higher wages for everyone doing a particular join in a particular place, you laughed at my idea. The idea, Alfred, is called solidarity. It’s the one thing they – transnational corporate capitalists – fear, i.e. people getting together and telling them to where to get off, and it’s one reason why they would quite like your theories because your theories do not threaten them ideologically.

In other words, your dies are another diversion, as you’ve rather amply demonstrated on this thread.

Good riddance to the construct, ‘Larry from St Louis’, btw.

It’s a pity to have to do this, but I agree Craig. Quite aside from someone else using his nickname as of recently, even when I was fairly sure it was the same old Larry, his posts recently took on a much greater level of unpleasantness. Posters regarded as Muslim were challenged about their “support” for 9/11, and there was a definite whiff of anti-Islamic feeling generally. And, of course, torrents of ill-mannered abuse, quite unprovoked.

Alfred wrote: “Wonderful clip here of Malcolm Muggeridge expressing precisely the only sane view of Liberalism”.

Would that be the same Muggeridge who thought Brian was Jesus in the Python film “The Life of Brian”? Oooops, that’s a pretty fundamental mistake to make.

George Laird, welcome back! And Dani, how does one apply to be a troll? Does one have to send-in a CV with examples of successful trolling exploits? Is there a training scheme where one, for example, learns to use repeated vowels (eg. Baaaaaaaahhhhhhh!) as an example of a lexicographical battering-ram and the construction of an almost Mediaeval totemism against a selected target? Are trolls studying Noam Chomsky and excavating the memes of a supposed (albeit disputed) ‘primal language’? Has someone, somewhere undertaken a PhD on trolling, its motivations, its tactics, it paymasters? Interesting…

“Alfred, do you have any views on the banning of the construct known as ‘Larry from St Louis’. That is what this thread is about.”

Yes, Suhayl, that is what I have been on about all along. Craig banned Larry for a style of argument that is consistently practiced here, as I have just demonstrated. So Craig’s justification seems inadequate, unless he intends to ban everyone, as Alan Campbell suggests.

Personally, I would have banned Larry on the grounds that he is a tedious bore who engages in nonsense.

As for my ridiculing your suggestion that everyone should “unite to campaign for higher wages,” I don’t recall doing so. But I dismiss the idea now as totally clueless.

How do ordinary folk in Britain get higher wages when they’re competing with Asians working in Asia for 3% of Western wages and with a mass influx of Asians and others for whom declining British wages are enormously better than what they’d earn at home? If you’d met a payroll in an industry subject to wage arbitrage you’d know the idea is daft.

The only way to prevent wages falling so fast, and I said “to prevent wages falling” not to make wages rise is either to limit the supply of labor (stop immigration to Britain, or is Britain no longer a democratic country run in the interests of the British people — obviously in your view it should not be) or impose a tariff. But if you impose a tariff and thereby slow the deterioration in living conditions for the mass of the population you will suck in even more immigrants, unless you impose severe restrictions on immigration. Not that that has much to do with this thread, but you raised the issue.

Yeah, they’ll be back, they will, as ‘Linda from Las Vegas’, the nom du jour of the hooker who hovers around the one-arm bandits: “Need a hand, sir?”

“Would that be the same Muggeridge who thought Brian was Jesus in the Python film “The Life of Brian”? Oooops, that’s a pretty fundamental mistake to make.”

Since those who made the film acknowledged as much, what is your point?

Yes, but Alfred, your core argumentation tends to rest not on such such economic discourse – which would be a valid discourse, and actually, you have made some good points in that last post which tend to reinforce my basic point which is that transational corporate capitalism is the problem that needs to be dealt with, but on the interior of cellular structures. When I shake someone’s hand, I tend not to ask them, first-off, “Excuse me, sir, can you tell me about the state of your mitochondria?”

At least, not in Glasgow, I don’t. Perhaps in Vancouver it is different and people there chat over cocktails about their Golgi Bodies.

Other blogs have ongoing open threads where Truthers of all kinds can blather away amongst themselves. Whether messages are transferred automatically by IP to these threads or the blog owners manually do it, I don’t know. It does seem to work, though.

You are SO “Liberal”! Ban ‘em, censor ‘em……. No worries, Craig, you still have your fanatical disciple to support your views and give you comfort.

here in the US, on ‘elance’, which matches writers with employers, I saw an ad from the GOP to hire people to troll (my word, not theirs) Democratic boards.

Don’t know about UK politics, but maybe something similar happens where you are.

Confucius he say “when appealing to authority, make sure authority is credible”

Alfred wrote “the simple historical and biological fact that there is such a thing as a British race comprising mainly the descendants of those who settled Britain at the end of the last ice age”.

Sorry Alfred, you’re wrong. Not because I think you’re racist, but because I have a PhD in archaeology.

It would seen just, while the issue is under discussion, to allow Larry to respond in his own behalf. Then, maybe a vote? Or perhaps not, otherwise this could become simply a tedious Liberal echo chamber.

Suhayl said:

“When I shake someone’s hand, I tend not to ask them, first-off, “Excuse me, sir, can you tell me about the state of your mitochondria?”"

No neither do I, so at least we have something in common!

Ceiteag said,

“Sorry Alfred, you’re wrong. Not because I think you’re racist, but because I have a PhD in archaeology.”

Ceiteag, sorry it’s you who’re wrong. I have a Ph.D. in molecular biology.

where does the term ‘troll’ in this sense come from?

Alfred said ‘maybe a vote’. B****r that, for too liberal for me. It’s Craig’s blog, so what he says goes.

For Craig, and other left-leaning despisers:

Left-Leaning Despisers of the 9/11 Truth Movement: Do You Really Believe in Miracles?

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20039

No need to comment – its beyond discussion.

9/11 was completely and totally provably an inside job. You cannot have floor-on-floor collisions during a collapse and that collapse take place at free-fall speeds (for even 1 second of the collapse). There is a fundamental law of physics (conservation of momentum) that states so. To put it another way, every 18-month old child knows that bumping into things slows you down.

The collapses WERE controlled demolitions.

Without any doubt whatsoever.

There are a thousand other pieces of supporting evidence, not least the unexploded nanothermite explosive found in samples of the WTC dust.

When we have passed through whatever nightmare faces us in the short term into a better, holier, more truthful world, the cowardice of all persons of authority on this issue will stand as proof of the Orwellian nature of what some people are calling ‘end times’.

How could such a taboo against truth have held together in the public domain?

Rather like our collective inability (or reluctance) to ask the most basic of questions about the core issue of our culture. Why do we allow privately-owned interests to create our money out of nothing for us when our government could simply create it for us itself at no interest?

We ‘borrowed’ about £1 trillion pounds from banks that did not have it in order to give it ‘back’ to them. The truth is there is only one party doing any giving and that is US. And we are handing all the wealth of the world over to a group of parasitical mind-controlling magicians that produces NOTHING USEFUL WHATSOEVER.

Having given them the money we now owe it to them multiplied by any multiple they choose (as it is they, not us, that set the interest rates).

We destroy the lives of our children and our grandchildren in order to keep banking swine in the manner to which they are accustomed. We pay the cost of our own and our descendants’ slavery and no one in public life says a single bloody word in protest against the most outrageous scam imaginable.

These people not only own ALL the material world in which we move (remember even if you’ve paid off your mortgage to them, you only have ‘freehold’ on your property. This is not ownership).

“The Crown” (i.e. the banking cartel in the City of London) can step in and take it off you any time they choose.

They completely (it would seem) control our minds and our actions.

Do they own our very souls?

No Christian should conform to these untruths, to these injustices, to this negation of care for neighbour, to this contempt for and abuse of brother and sister.

A true Christian is the greatest and most effective enemy of these forces.

For these forces are Satanic.

And if we continue to collude with them we harm ourselves grievously in ways we will, very likely and unfortunately, shortly come to appreciate.

Alfred, who said I was a liberal? Are you?

Oh dear, guys, I don’t have a PhD in anything, though aspects of my work have been the subject of various PhDs, as I keep discovering in a flash of illumination: “Gosh, is that what I was thinking when I wrote such-and-such! Now I know.” Actually it’s probable that I was thinking something along those lines but I’ve since forgotten – a necessary forgetting.

Is that okay, that I don’t have a PhD? Can I still address people’s ribosomes?

Neil Barker, who is this “fanatical disciple”? Are you talking about Brian from ‘The Life Of…’? Or are you referring to Craig Murray’s hypothetical pet tortoise? Are you a fanatic, Neil Barker? Where are you? Who are you? Do you live in Equatorial Guinea or Congo-Brazzaville? Do you wear pale-coloured suits?

Anonymous at 1058pm and Duncan just before, please don;t take this wrong way, but there’s a thread entirely dedicated to exploring the events in NYC and DC in late 2001. 1300 comments and mounting.

Or, Neil Barker, are you perhaps dreaming of the Old Man of the Mountains and his cult of Hashashim? Alamut, and all that. Assassins… you know any? False wigs, Dubai hotels, tennis rackets. The modern version. Not Congo-Brazzaville, then.

All who wish to be considered for being banned from Craig Murray’s blog please write out their single-issue placard, form a quiet, orderly queue by the door, and wait until Craig has time to make an assessment. Alternatively, if you just leave, I expect that no one will try to stop you.

Goodnight, Alfred. It’s late here in Alba. Give my salaams to the lysosomes.

rich – “where does the term ‘troll’ in this sense come from?”

It seems to be acquiring a wider/diluted meaning here, but http://catb.org/jargon/html/T/troll.html is a decent take on older uses.

Which sort-of answers the question – “it comes from usenet”. I don’t know if it originated there, I suspect it may have been used in some of the older role-playing stuff, but I never did that.

I used to see folk-etymologies that claimed it was either a properly-spelled fishing technique or a corruption of “trawl” – cast a wide net & see what you catch, sort of sense.

Alfred – Allow Larry to respond ? he’s had a hell of a long time to do that, and it seems to me he’s made his attitude very clear. I think Craig’s been extraordinarily patient, I’d have done it long ago. Vote ? To get technical, this is not a democracy, liberal or any other kind. This is an absolute dictatorship. Craig has all the power there is, we posters have none. Simple fact of blog-comment life, the way things work.

Alfred said “Ceiteag, sorry it’s you who’re wrong. I have a Ph.D. in molecular biology.”

Earlier, you had said that you were proud to be able to trace your descent from the Normans. So on your own analysis you are not therefore “indigenous British”, and should therefore fuck off back across the Channel without further delay.

Alfred, i’m not a liberal. I believe in restrictions on trade. I’m a socialist, just not one who is obsessed with race the way you are. I don’t split the world into the “British race” as if it were only white people (which is ridiculous anyway – there were black sailors on Nelson’s ship at Trafalgar and anyone born in Britain is British) and other people.

I notice you didn’t respond to historical examples like Irish immigrants to the UK in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Tell me please whether we are now a Catholic country who all speak Irish Gaelic? We’re not. We won’t be a Muslim country who all speak foreign languages due to the current wave of immigration either.

It’s extremely hard for you to convincinly argue that you’re not a racist while talking about race and the “British race”.

If you don’t allow immigration and still

have free trade with China and the US and Russia and Indonesia then the only result will be that jobs won’t go to immigrants here – but to equally exploited workers in those countries.

You’re failing to recognise that immigration is not the key here. The only solutions are 1) protectionism (which, in moderation, is not a bad idea) or 2) making EU trade deals with countries like China conditional on them allowing independent trade unions, having higher minimum wages etc.

This isn’t a free speech issue. Larry’s spam was making comment threads unreadable and that clearly was the intention

On my own blog, I regularly erase comments, posted by paid Keyboard Monkeys, that link to commercial websites. Larry’s prodigious spout easily falls into the same category

As it happens, I am one of Craig’s readers who has questions about 9/11 but unless you’re somehow mentally deficient or a deliberate liar it is clear that Craig has taken a different position on the subject. If and when Craig decides to post on 9/11 I’d be happy to join in the debate. However, posting about 9/11 underneath Craig’s posts on other important issues is just distractive spam afaic

Bye bye Team Larry. If you actually had something to say, even if I didn’t agree with it, I’d miss you but, as it is, good riddance

People like Larry need to be banned, these type of people are ten a penny on internet forums. They have no real argument at all they just lie about what others say. I have seen it so many times, I just usually put them on ignore as they have nothing to add to any kind of discussion. Like your blog,keep up the good work.

and to those fellow conspiraloons calling upon Craig to see the Light about 9/11…

very little would be served by Craig’s conversion

aside from ensuring Craig and his views on other important issues received even less mainstream attention

and after that, if David Shayler’s career as a Truther is any guide, would come the claims to divinity and the leg-shaving

Re Duncan’s post:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20039

If anyone thinks it possible to be for the people against an exploitive and manipulative elite while accepting anything that Bush-Cheney and co had to say about 9/11 should read this article carefully.

Yet, although an excellent summary of the evidence against the official 9/11 conspiracy theory, it strangely says nothing about the Craig’s theory that the steel columns of the Twin Towers were not being bolted together properly – LOL.

I see elsewhere, someone takes issue with the business of LOL, =), etc. I used to think them kind of silly too. – the other day a girl told me here mother signs here emails LOL in the belief that it stands for “Lots of love” – LOL.

But this is a totally bland medium, which does not allow even the application of styles to text, which means that the emotional context of a statement is easily misunderstood. Thus, there is something to be said for such gadgets.

For example, if I say in response to Suhayl’s question “Can I still address people’s ribosomes?” with “talk to the trees if you feel like it – LOL” then it indicates I am not speaking with gritted teeth as in “you SOB,” which might otherwise be suspected.

StefZ – there is http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/the_911_post.html if you do fancy it. From January to earlier this month, good grief … though I don’t know if you’ll find much energy left for it (I certainly don’t have any, but it was never really my thing anyway).

Free speech … it could be argued as such (and usually is in such situations), but I’d take your main point that it was tending to put others off exercising theirs. He’s not the only person who might want it.

To go backthread a little; the meaning of ‘troll’, as I’m familiar with it, is that it’s a person who cannot be dealt with constructively, someone who will generate endless amounts of noise for purposes that have nothing to do with the free exchange of ideas. Someone with whom there is nothing to do except give up, if you place any value on your own side of the conversation. Ah. Which leads me to stumble onto The Point – Larry made it obnoxiously clear that he didn’t value anyone else here ?

There _are_ an infinite number of monkeys out there, and life’s too short.

Larry: “By the way, why don’t you think Obama and his chief of staff go after the 911 conspirators?”

Can’t make head nor tail of this at all. Perhaps we’re not supposed to. Is there a brain in the Larry bot?

The Gripe say:

Re: voting on Larry’s continued access

” B****r that, for too liberal for me. It’s Craig’s blog, so what he says goes.”

Sorry sir, I forgot, we’re all here to say “yes sir, yes sir, three bags full sir.”

I’ll try to remember.

” B****r that, for too liberal for me. It’s Craig’s blog, so what he says goes.”

“Sorry sir, I forgot, we’re all here to say “yes sir, yes sir, three bags full sir.”

You haven’t been reading it, have you ?

para. 2 above, “I wish more people who disagree would comment.”

So you’re only following orders after all.

Incidentally, if the Romans weren’t enough to pollute the Vital Fluids you’re so bothered about, after sending a whole occupying army and controlling the whole continent for hundreds of years, I can’t see what chance anybody else has got.

Joseph says:

“Earlier, you had said that you were proud to be able to trace your descent from the Normans. So on your own analysis you are not therefore “indigenous British”, and should therefore fuck off back across the Channel without further delay.”

Oh dear, I seem to have stirred some shit, or do I mean shits?

What’s sad about this is that it suggests they don’t teach anyone anything any longer in British schools other than political correct hate speech.

I mean, otherwise, people would know the meaning of fairly common terms such as “race”, “indigenous”, etc. Then they would make silly, muddled and ill-tempered statement such as the one I have quoted.

Given Larry’s reappearance on this blog and the current abysmal standard of comments, Craig, please consider editing comments before publishing them. Juan Cole for one seems to do this very successfully so that the comments on his blog represent a range of views and are of a high standard. Most readers presumably are here to be informed about foreign policy and human rights – not to have to wade through off-topic comments by right wing nutters and conspiracy theorists.

—-”it’s you who’re wrong. I have a Ph.D. in molecular biology”——-

You have a PhD in molecular biology and you talk about a British ‘race’. Pull the other one.

Hey Stefz,

Re: “9/11…

very little would be served by Craig’s conversion

aside from ensuring Craig and his views on other important issues received even less mainstream attention…”

So you’re saying to have credibility we’ve all gotta be liars?

That’s interesting. God, maybe it’s true. The mainstream media have got folks so thoroughly screwed up that only a lie seems like the truth.

OK, keep up the 9/11 lies everybody.

To the biologically unaware Stephen Jones

Re; “You have a PhD in molecular biology and you talk about a British ‘race’. Pull the other one.”

Race: “An interbreeding group within a species.” (Websters Collegiate Dictionary).

It’s a question of gene flow.

There is not and never has been much gene flow between pyronyang and Timbuku, which means that the people of those two cities differ considerably in gene constitution and may thus be considered of different races.

However, you can draw distinctions more or less where you want, provided you define your criteria, which is what biologists do.

For example, in India, wheat used to be grown from locally saved seed. Over time, through various selective processes, each region, district or valley had its own particular strain of wheat, known as a “land race”. These land races were particularly well adapted to the local conditions.

You see the same kind of differentiation among all organisms that are widely spread. That’s why you can often tell a Scotsman in Canada, or a Ukrainian or whatever, from distinctive facial features.

Very glad to see you banning the troll at last, St. Loony offered nothing but disruption.

My guess is that the sad freak will go for disruption nonetheless, which does actually betray what the underlying motives were all along. There’s no part of, “Bugger off, you’re not welcome” that can be understood by people like that.

This excellent blog has been dragged down way too long, and decent posters felt obliged to quit because of the mindless and offensive trolling. It simply had to be stopped.

Duncan,

Sorry if I falsely smeared you as a Liberal. It’s just that you fling the “racist” epithet like a liberal.

I don’t have the energy now for further explication of the biology of human variation, or the relationship between mass immigration and the preservation of a culture and way of life. But think about this: what would Canada be like today if there had been no mass immigration? Then explain why Britain is immune from the same kind of racial and cultural transformation?

But on trade, I agree that we need tariffs and immigration controls — if that’s what you said. Then Asia and Africa can develop in their own way, and we can maintain not only our existing way of life and something like our existing standard of living but also the technical and engineering skills we need in order merely to survive in a competitive world.

“I don’t have the energy now for further explication of the biology of human variation, or the relationship between mass immigration and the preservation of a culture and way of life”

How about explaining the relationship between “the biology of human variation” and “the preservation of a culture and way of life” ?

QUOTE I have put up with this now…..

I am not prepared to put up with it…

I am also deeply sucpicious…

spend more time on this blog than me… UNQUOTE

It’s all about YOU, Craig, isn’t it?

Richard:

“How about explaining the relationship between “the biology of human variation” and “the preservation of a culture and way of life” ?”

That’s easy. Replace one lot of people with another and you replace one culture with another. That’s why I mentioned what happened in Canada. Same in Tasmania, and countless other places ethnically cleansed by both white people and brown.

Quite an impressive list of last words for a troll Troll he was (even an archetype Troll) and banned he got. Nothing more to say actually. Just for your peace of mind: Every blog has plenty of them secretly buried in the killfile. No need to justify or think twice about it.

You just can’t argue with them. That’s what makes them Trolls. The only thing you can do is ban them and forget them. Everything else is just helping them throwing dirt on you,

“Replace one lot of people with another and you replace one culture with another”

What on _earth_ ?

Replace. Yes. If you remove one entire set of people from an area and hoick another bunch in, with no contact between them, the culture of that area will become different. Is that even worth pointing out ? What’s the relevance ?

You’re back to your zero-sum games, aren’t you. Is ethnic cleansing the only way you see different people relating to each other ?

You keep saying you have no problem with “other races”, but every time we go round this circle, you seem to keep pointing towards utter xenophobic paranoia. What about the possibility that people might come from other parts of the world and just kind of live here and be part of this culture ? You know, help to preserve it ?

Or is the absence of other races an important part of the thing, for you ?

Instead of banning people, you should be discussing the verdict of the airport plot, which I seem to remember you dismissed at the time. But I guess it doesn’t fit the narrative, does it?

Thinking of Canada, where Alfred lives, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metis_people_(Canada) looks like a fun bundle of worms.

(What’s not mentioned there is that, I think the Red River valley was where a lot of the victims of the Clearances got flung off to. McKenzie ? Can’t remember; John Prebble, somewhere. And, a generation later, rebellion against the Crown … well fancy that, who’d have thought it ?).

Sorry to appear thick, Alan Campbell, but surely this thread/post is about banning trolls, and a post about the UK airport plot might yet come about? Please remember that discussion about anything isn’t what Loony from St. Larry really about. His (or their) job was to disrupt, offend and detract. Nothing else. Unwelcome as his miserable presence was, that negative pull had become a significant part of this entire blog, surely worthy of a post (not to mention a ban).

Craig’s example of St. Loony pretending CM held positions which were not in fact taken is spot on. One could spend all day denying positions assigned to oneself. For instance – have you seen _anyone_ here make a claim about the existence of Lizzard People one way or the other apart from St. Loony himself? Yet a preponderance of threads contain scoffing references to posters here, as if such a notion held popular sway. St. Loony is a liar, a cheap propagandist, and an unsophisticated mischief-maker.

Not sure why you think banning trolls and discussing certain subjects in a reasonable fashion should be mutually exclusive.

Richard,

Try to contain the epithets and instead think clearly.

Race in Britain is a numbers game. The indigenous population is shrinking, which might be a very good thing given that Britain is a small resource-poor country.

A reduction in population would reduce the economic pressures on the population: less competition for jobs and hence better wages, less competion for housing and hence lower rents, less need for new infrastructure, hence lower taxes. In time, the population might even manage to reproduce itself without further decline.

However, if you bring in millions of people from elsewhere, people many of whom have a totally different culture from the British, then you get replacement of a declining population by a growing immigrant population and the replacement can occur remarkably quickly, although it is masked for a generation because of the lengthy post-reproductive life of the indigenous population.

I have not been to Leicester where I attended school in decades, but I understand that there the indigenous British are now the minority. It seems fairly safe to assume, therefore, that if the immigrant community of Leicester does not dominates the local culture already it nevertheless influences it substantially. And in any case, if the trend of population replacement were to continue at the pace of recent years, the indigenous British would simply disappear in Leicester and many other cities, and with them much of their culture. Black history month, I assure you, was not an item on the curriculum when I was in school.

I am afraid you have bought into the NuLabor inspired program of ethnic cleansing by psychological and political means. It gives rise to a rather more easily managed population, a population more accepting of the antidemocratic form of government now being imposed on the western nations, a population less imbued with a belief in the liberty of the individual, or perhaps without any real belief in the liberty of the individual . Does a girl subject to genital mutilation have any individual liberty? Does a girl made suicidal by the knowledge she is to be sent to Pakistan to marry a cousin she may hate have any individual liberty?

As for your ramble about the Red River and all that, I don’t get the drift.

What epithets ?

Does anyone here really believe that the 911 hijackers are still alive?

Bugger off, St. Loony – you’re not welcome. And that’s official.

Craig, he’s probably amazed that he lasted this long and has been laughing at you heartily every day. Didn’t I and others tell you all this several months ago? I’m not sure how your blog works behind the scenes, but banning his IP address is the right thing to do. Make them jump through as many hoops as possible. Yes, he/they will keep returning, but you will be irritating them whether they like to admit it or not. When you see the lengths they go to it should become obvious they are paid freaks. Who is paying them and why is the question. The answers are quite obvious. For example, Larry the Lamb is primarily here as a 9/11 truth debunker and works directly or indirectly for the CIA. You all need to wake up to the fact, if you haven’t already, that the internet is crawling with government shills. If, I hope, you can all see how controlled the mass media is, then simple logic dictates that as fragmented internet media grows the powers that be will seek to disrupt it. This is information warfare plain and simple.

Richard,

“what epithets?”

xenophobic paranoia?

Anyhow, although most blogs allow a measure of hesitation, deviation and repetition — deviation and repetition, at least, it seems to me we have digressed too far.

Obviously Craig can delete or exclude whatever and whoever he wants — provided he has the means. And clearly no one is voting to keep Larry. So that’s it for Larry, I should think.

But to make this a more interesting place, there needs to be more diversity of opinion, not less. The trouble is that anyone who expresses anything that deviates significantly from the Murray – Liberal line is liable to excoriation rather than civil engagement.

Another problem is with the software. It is a string of comments often with little coherence. Other programs allow participants to anchor comments to other comments to which they refer, thereby avoiding a muddle of different interactions in one long string of comments.

But rebuilding a web site is a pain.

Alfred, you may not have noticed but this is a thread about banning a certain Larry, not about your bizarre hobbyhorse.

If Craig wished to discuss the genetic make-up of the British, or relative immigration rates, he can open a thread on it. If he doesn’t and you still want to discuss them then open a blog of your own and those that want to talk with you will do so.

ok, I’ve read Craig’s post and skimmed the comments. Alfred bemoans the coming loss of the British race to fast-breeding immigrants.

I’d like to smile and say in America we don’t have that problem: http://dailytocque.com/images/real_america.png — but considering how nasty things are here and how our official policy seems to have turned 180 degrees away from “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind,” I guess the only thing I really have to share with you all is the pang of my loss.

Some people above, may I hug them, suggested that Larry be given the opportunity to defend himself, and then the decision be put to a vote by the community. Yo! Yo! Yo! I vote yes on that one. As an American, all this “troll” talk — of course the righteous have the right to hunt and kill them off — sounds just like US predator drone policy, and the new assassination-by-president, which I think SUCKS. I bury my head in shame. I kinda liked the part about all men being created equal, that’s the part I thought America got blessedly right, even if it took us a while to apply it, and even though it seems to have gone by pretty fast. Instead, can’t we actually TRY to come up with a fair due process, as if this blog were the world and we were all equal people in it, Larry and Craig included? Really, I think Craig was right, it’s more fun to debate someone with a different opinion than yours. And to quote somebody,

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, which is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” ~John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty”

Come on, colliding with error could be fun, like a bumper car demolition derby– ? I’m sure I’m not crazy.

As to why the immigrants may be breeding faster than you, could it be true that “the more ye judge, the less ye love?”

Full circle. Love you all, thanks for letting me sit in now and then.

Stephen Jones,

Re: “Alfred, you may not have noticed but this is a thread about banning a certain Larry…”

Do you have a reading disability or what?

In the comment immediately preceding yours I stated:

“Anyhow, although most blogs allow a measure of hesitation, deviation and repetition — deviation and repetition, at least, it seems to me we have digressed too far.”

I then went on to comment on the Larry question.

Oh, and re your earlier comment, you needn’t be so informal. You can address me as Doctor.

When ‘Larry’ first appeared it was at the mention of 9/11. As I recollect, ‘angrysoba’ appeared at the same time, apparently answering the same dogwhistle.

I initially felt (and said) that they should be banned, or that you should introduce some form of moderation. However as time went on I began to feel that there was some value in allowing their postings. It was useful to see what triggered their activity – terms like ’9/11′, ‘Israel’, ‘Gaza’ seemed to be a high priority. I wasn’t kidding when I said that we might guess the truth of some propositions from the alacrity of the denial – the Sunstein Effect.

It is also important for honest posters to the blog to develop the discipline of ignoring professional trolls, other than collecting the unwitting testimony I’ve mentioned, because ‘Larry’ will be back. He may sound oafish but his methods are carefully honed and – as I demonstrated with word counts of troll-related versus on-topic posts – quite often successful in drowning discussion with noise.

“Has someone, somewhere undertaken a PhD on trolling, its motivations, its tactics, it paymasters?”

Here’s a link to Sunstein’s paper if you haven’t already read it.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585

Someone needs to do that PhD, Suhayl.

——”I then went on to comment on the Larry question.”—-

And then spent the next fifteen posts propagating your crackpot ideas.

Banning posts or posters that persistently derail threads is not censoring ideas you disagree with. If Craig decides to open a thread on Oppeheimer’s somewhat sloppy research, then I’ll be quite prepared to discuss it with you.

Mr Campbell

Well they finally got a conviction for the airport bombers. I am not surprised if you keep having re trials you will get the result you want in the end. 3 re trials is a travestry of justice the jurors must feel pressured as hell to find them guilty. If I tried you 3 times for something you didnt do I am sure I would get a guilty plea. Most of them didnt have passports and no plane tickets were bought. These were some sad people who fantasised about being big men. I have often fantasised about clearing out the previos government of war criminals and self serving bastards. If I chat with a mate about it down the pub and I am overheard I have committed a conspiracy. I am guilty If I carry my fantasy a little further and look up how to make a bomb on the internet then they have proof. I am sure that some of these people had ill intent against the UK. My concern is how the previous barstards Gordon and Blair made thinking a crime. The conspiracy laws have always been around but the new terrorism laws and some of the new sex offences and racial hatred all make thinking in your own brain a crime. I used to watch futuristic sci fi films and laugh when they punished people for thinking bad thoughts well here we go these fuckers made it a reality. A mans home is no longer his castle and free thought is now a crime aswell.

Steve at 0714am, that’s spot-on. I think the next set of convictions will be of people who research the efficacy of magic spells in relation to facilitating the remote-controlled dissolution of the fabric of the war economy, or those who attempt to trigger remote switches installed at the time of construction of the Terry Farrell building in order to levitate Legoland. Gosh! What would Neil Barker do then?

Jim Follett, at around 130am, no, it’s all about YOU. Your country needs YOU. Who are YOU? Where are YOU? Are YOU with Neil Barker? Do YOU wear a raincoat on sunny days?

Meinus, welcome back! Always a joy to read your comments.

Vronsky, thanks, I’ll check out the link. I think I might have read it already, somewhere, but let’s see…

9:45 a.m. here in Dimona.

Does anyone here believe that no Jews were killed on 911?

Steve,

Of course they stupidly made “martyrdom videos” which probably make their apologists and amateur legal advocates look a bit stoopid.

http://hurryupharry.org/2010/07/08/another-isoc-president-convicted-of-terrorism-offences/#more-35817

The surest way to get rid of a troll is to completely ignore him or her. It seems that many here were, and still are, incapable of that.

The proof that ignoring them works is that they become more and more shrill when you do it.

No, Vronsky, I hadn’t read it before, that was a different paper. Looks fascinating.

Alfred, yes, ‘LOL’ used to mean ‘Lots of love’ when people used to write postcards/ letters, etc., so one can understand how the woman’s misconception arose.

Incidentally, once again, you implicitly compare the historical situation in places like Tasmania with that in the UK. This is so wild, it makes one wonder just what you might be smoking, Alfred.

If the UK is being culturally colonised, it’s by the global, US-dominated culture of dumb-down and crass materialism, supermarket monopoly capitalism and dog-eat-dog individualism. It’s got nothing to do with intracellular structures, or the colonial settler extermination of the Tasmanian language, or the herding of the Indian peoples onto reservations. Oddly, I don’t hear you condemning that sort of colonisation, which really is linked to the other economic factors which have changed the face of Britain over the past 35 years and which has a direct impact on people’s daily lives. Once you’ve lost manufacturing and the concept of ‘society’, it’s very difficult to bring it back. But no, you’re interested only in almost Pre-Raphaelite visions of a pristine ‘Britannia’ who ruled the waves and appeared on the rear surfaces of coins. Is this a dominatrix thing? Perhaps, then, you and Jimmy Giro, on another thread, ought to get together and bemoan the rise of Harriet Harman and the Zanu-PF-socialist-Marxist-Baader-Meinhoff-Gang-Red-Army-Faction-aunties’-rhododendron-bushes-nucleolar-protoplasmic-disruption-of-the-subterranean-way-of-life-of-invertebrate-hermaphroditic-nematodes- which proves that immigration is an inherent and eternal moral evil.

Meanwhile, you might wish to listen to some of Richard Robison’s excellent English folk tunes – vibrant proof, if any were required, that a love of English culture in whatever form that might take, is entirely compatible with a love for contemporary England/Scotland/ Wales/ Britain.

On the subject of talking to trees, do you believe in vegetal consciousness, Alfred (and no wise-cracks, mind!)? I know it’s perhaps not your specific field, but it’s an interesting topic nonetheless.

Meantime, say shalom to the cytoplasm.

Massa Craig

I jussa heer tell ’bout you bannin’ ol’ Larry from offa dis heer blog.

Dat meen iffa Larry heads back heer to St Lou me an’ Mass tungsteen in big truble.

We bin joyin’ Larry’s wife for munths now anna we dun drunk all his licker too!

Jussa hope to God yawl Larry gettin’ expens from Massa Silverstein’s cathouse!

Piracy, murder, daylight robbery, grand theft, kidnapping, assault and now this and where is the Foreign Office, yelling its head off in support of its NATO ally? I see, hear not.

http://www.imemc.org/article/59095

This is outrageous, unlawful behaviour by the Israelis yet again.

I have always said that Israel knows no law.

I didnt say that they were saints but more fantasists and I said I was sure they harboured ill will to the UK. Bill dont be duped by the hype that has arisen over the terrorist threat. Yes I know for sure that we have people in this country that want to commit atrocities. But the capabilities and the organisation of these is hyped for political. Financial, and career reasons. Budgets can be cut if you cant prove you are essential. MI5/MI6 anti terrorist command, Military intel units, Local police and councils and charities all get huge sums of money to counter the terrorist threat. If they told the truth and said that terrorists were individual opportunists that are mostly upset by the UK’s and Americas colonisation of Afgahistan and Iraq who have been radicalised into doing amateur acts of terrorism with limited training and technology. I grew up in the days of the IRA. They were organised serious terrorists who got weapons and funding from America, Lybya, Syria, and possibly Russia. They had military spec explosives. Assault rifles and a command structure. If this bunch are so organised and systemic why do they have to get their materials from B&Q or the local hairdresser supply shop. Iraq and afganistan is awash with explosive and weapons. Pakistan is awash with guns. Syria,Iran Somalia yemen all have a plentiful supply of explosives and weapons. Anyone knows how easy it is to drive through the channel tunnel with a boot full of anything. Or to dock a boat in a small marina after a rendevous with a foriegn registered vessel somewhere in the ocean. I know of pubs where you can buy or rent guns. Why havnt any of the suspects that have either been successful or thwarted by the authorities ever been in possesion of any military or industrial explosives or had any weapons more deadly than a coke bottle or laptop. Dont get me wrong these nutters are dangerous and will kill the poor people killed in 7/7 prove that. But I dont want my emails read and stored. My liberty temporarily curtailed whilst an over zealous cop searches me for no good reason other than targets or my right to buy a bottle of water from tescos and take it on a plane. Or even more scary the Governments right to keep putting me in front of a court until they get the decision they want just to keep me safe. We didnt have these restrictions at least on the mainland during the peak of the IRA troubles so why now.

Now what am I gonna do? No more Larry to spit at?

I suppose we now have to create the ‘spot Larry prize’, s/he who’s first to spot his syntrax defiling this blog wins a cup of tea.

Ignoring trolls leaves their bile to be perused by all an sundry, does it not?The argument to ignore trolls does not work for the average tabloidally trained mind.

I say engage trolls at the same level they are at, challenging their pathetic interferences does not only lower one’s blood pressure on hot days, it also shows that the dumbass is exactly that.

Steve – ‘Dont get me wrong these nutters are dangerous and will kill the poor people killed in 7/7 prove that.’

There may be a few dangerous nutters around, but the 7/7 accused were duped into taking part in a mock attack. They were completely innocent. Even the dangerous nutters generally need to be picked up, used and manipulated by the security services to become any threat at all. Well, they don’t really become threats because they are inevitably ‘caught’ at the last minute and their would be explosives are just duds. Still, you get the picture. The reason as to why all this is happening now is to support the police state agenda. Soon to be a European police state…

Steve, okay. But you seemed to be thinking it was wrong to convict these people.

Bill – ‘Steve, okay. But you seemed to be thinking it was wrong to convict these people.’

Without ‘wrong’ false flag attacks; ‘wrong’ wars; ‘wrong’ torture; ‘wrong’ picking up and manipulation by MI5/Mossad; then there wouldn’t be any people in the dock in the first place. The question I ask myself is can what has happened be justified on a geo-political level? Was the 7/7 false flag attack necessary for our security? The answer I come up with is no. It’s just a corrupted, evil power base becoming more corrupt and evil.

Ingo, the best way to deal with trolls, in my opinion, is identify; insult; boot off.

Deranged posters are best banned.

Bill

In a sense I am saying its wrong to convict some of the airplane plotters. If the first two juries didnt find enough evidence why did the third. Some of these people may have been innocent. A friend who gave a lift to a friend who bought something. Someone who knew these nutters were plotting something but didnt know what. A hundred reasons why they may have been innocent. You cant keep putting people in Court until you get the result you want. If people could have full re trials as appeals as often as they wanted after being found guilty eventualy they will get a jury stupid enough or a lawyer/judge sharp enough to find them innocent. Dont get duped. It isnt a big false flag operation as people state but groups of disorganised nutters pissed off about us invading places at whim. I dont want to live in a police state on the off chance something might happen. Should we ban all cars in case we have an accident or maybe we should intern all muslims just in case a crazy minority of criminals do something stupid. Life is a risk lets live for gods sake not lock ourselves in bunkers in case the sky falls in.

So. Farewell then

Larry from St Loius

It would seem that

You have been banned

But were you a troll

Or a spy?

We will never know

Alfred – I agree about digression, but (we risk a vicious circle of mutual trolling ? in search of the Last Word) you say ethnic cleansing, I ask why you insist on that and what about the other possibilities ? and you say more ethnic cleansing. I do consider it paranoid. The Metis stuff – I thought it was interesting, basically – various bunches of people were ‘cleansed’ from their original places, and they get together & settle down to live together over the generations. It’s an alternative, see ? One of the possibilities that isn’t paranoid.

I agree with your comment on software, too. Threading would make this kind of spinoff easier to handle (for those who are used to it; it might be even more confusing for those who aren’t, but I daresay they’d get used to it in time). But, again, yes, solutions based on Craig spending his time rebuilding software are … well, we don’t decide his priorities. All these nuisance posts are, if nothing else, successful in wasting some of his time anyway.

But, Suhayl, I must protest pedantically – my tunes are not just English, there are also large numbers of Scots, Shetland, Swedish, and more. It’s all good. But, The F Word has become more or less unusable, ‘traditional’ seems clearer. “Whatever you do, don’t mention the horse” (silly band names #73: No Horses – “you ain’t never heard us singing”).

Another digression, yes. How much can you say about a decision that someone isn’t worth engaging with ? I appreciate it, that Craig did give it hard thought & was reluctant, but the risk here is of getting swamped with timewasting gibberish, and worse. Back to software, again – I wanna killfile ! But this system doesn’t give us one each, so a blog-proprietor is forced to do it unilaterally.

Steve – remember military grade high explosives were planted on the London underground and under the back seat on the top deck of a London bus – not HMTD not TATP not hair dye or chapati flour or citric acid or heat tablets – no plastic explosive and military detonators were used.

It’s a hot day here in Dimona.

So are you people also suggesting that 7/7 was an inside job?

Since “software” was mentioned … he’s become a zombie ?

Mark

I am not sure what incident you are referring to? On 7/7and 21/7 homemade explosives were used luckily during 21/7 they cocked the recipe up or they stored it too long or someone gave them the wrong recipe in the first place. Maybe I have missed an attempted bombing or bomb plot in the meantime but I cant think of a UK mainland AQ bombing or attempt that has used military explosives and detonators. I am not up on all incidents so you coulod be correct. I also forgot to mention the homemade sarin plot that never was.I am sure they could have got the genuine article from Iraq if they looked hard enough. Maybe Iran could throw in some radioactive material to help make a dirty bomb. The negative evidence of no plots using credible explosives or NBC agents proves that they are not a credible risk. I appreciate if they did it it would be a terrible thing but if you are crazy/fanatical enough to blow yourself up on a train surely you would be crazy/fanatical enough to do it properly with a nuke or nerve agent or a big fuck off bomb. And if there was a big AQ organisation out there surely it would be in its own interest to arrange the correct tools for their agents to do the job properly. 9/11 was a spectacular and grotesque incident but it was arranged on the back of a fag packet and cost a few plane tickets. They used nothing more technical than a stanley knife. In afganistan and Iraq they have heavy duty machine guns RPG’s and surface air missiles kindly supplied by the CIA. Lets not get too worked up and loose are freedoms we have battled for over 1000 of years just to protect ourselves from a few nutters. If we get the hell out of Iraq and Afganistan and stop threatening Iran and Somalia/Yemen. Tell Israel to wind its neck in. These AQ people wont have anything to moan about.

Maybe the responses answer so many questions eh?

Re steve

“and surface air missiles kindly supplied by the CIA”

How many of these do you think they have left?

It has been a long time since they had CIA support (ISS is of course another matter)

I don’t recall any reports of stingers (FIM-92) being used for a long time.

Paul

You may be correct that they dont have the same Sam’s that the CIA provided but this technicality dosnt disprove my central point.

If proof was needed that the FCO is in the control of Israel, here it is.

UK removes blog post praising late Lebanese cleric

AP – 09 July 2010 13:38:36 By RAPHAEL G. SATTER

Britain’s ambassador to Beirut angered Israelis and embarrassed officials in London after writing a blog post praising the late Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon’s top Shiite cleric, who supported Hezbollah’s and other militants’ attacks on Israel.

Frances Guy, who has served nearly four years as the Britain’s ambassador in Lebanon, made her tribute following the cleric’s death late last week. Writing in a blog carried on the Foreign Office’s Web site, she called Fadlallah a decent human being and a “true man of religion.”

“Lebanon is a lesser place the day after,” she wrote. “If I was sad to hear the news I know other peoples’ lives will be truly blighted. The world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints. May he rest in peace.”

Officials in Jerusalem were furious. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor described Fadlallah as an extremist who inspired “suicide bombings, assassinations and all kinds of wanton violence.”

“The British ambassador must decide whether promoting terror and giving it religious justification can be considered a heritage to be cherished,” Palmor said.

Britain’s Foreign Office said the posting had been removed “after mature consideration.” A spokeswoman declined to elaborate. Guy could not immediately be reached; the embassy said she was out of the country.

/….

http://www.mail.com/intl/Article.aspx/world/europe/APNews/Europe/20100709/U_EU-Britain-Lebanon-Fadlallah?pageid=1

Wasn’t trying to disprove anything, if anything it suggests the fear they inspire is exaggerated. As people often suggest to lose our freedoms is a victory for them.

Re somebody

And CNN

CNN has sacked a veteran Middle East editor after she wrote on Twitter that she “respected” a late senior Lebanese cleric said to have inspired Hezbollah.

“I don’t recall any reports of stingers (FIM-92) being used for a long time.”

There was actually a buy-back scheme by the CIA at the end of the Afghan War. Not all of them were recovered though, I expect.

“If proof was needed that the FCO is in the control of Israel, here it is.”

Don’t be daft. If someone in the FCO were to write a glowing obituary of someone in the Tamil Tigers or an Afrikaans seperatist such as Terreblanche they would get into trouble for it. That wouldn’t mean that the FCO is “controlled” by Srinhalese chauvinists or the ANC.

It’s remarkable that a member of the FCO was gushing over a terrorist in the first place.

Re Jones:

buy-back?

No shit!!!

That is the strangest thing I have ever heard

“at the end of the Afghan War.”

Afghan-Soviet War, naturally…

On the Stinger Buy-Back programme:

http://www.stinger.com.au/stinger-articles/1994/3/8/cia-bungles-plan-to-buy-back-missiles-from-afghan-rebel-forces/

Israel can seriously (and I mean seriously) embarrass any British government by divulging top secret information, even, silly things like why were certain communications from Whitehall designated ‘not for South Africa Eyes’ – thus we have to ‘comply’ period.

Liberalism in Brit-speak refers to the belief that, to quote another poster, we have to restrict others’ rights to hold (let alone express) opinions which we, as Liberals, deem harmful.

It’s all to protect society, don’t you know?

Craig is a genuine Liberal.

And a self-important, deluded narcissist who hides his baggy chin in all his photos.

“Israel can seriously (and I mean seriously) embarrass any British government by divulging top secret information, even, silly things like why were certain communications from Whitehall designated ‘not for South Africa Eyes’ – thus we have to ‘comply’ period.”

Eh?

Steve,

regarding your discussion with Mark Golding. From my memory (admittedly fallible), the reports shortly after the 7/7 bombings were of military grade plastic explosives, with discussion of how advanced the detonation system had to be for simultaneous explosions; the announcement of home-made explosives didn’t occur until about six months later.

Does anyone else remember this?

“regarding your discussion with Mark Golding. From my memory (admittedly fallible), the reports shortly after the 7/7 bombings were of military grade plastic explosives,”

Dunno, surely the reports would be easy enough to find. Were they speculative or were they actual lab-tested results that were being reported?

QUOTE With genuine reluctance, I find myself obliged to ban Larry from St Louis from commenting on this blog UNQUOTE

Craig, your power does not extend to banning people from the internet. As long as you have a blog, the only way to ban people is to restrict comments to your own comments – maybe this would suit your purpose better. Get real, and watch out for those damn Zionists!!

Thanks for the link Jones!

QUOTE I find myself obliged UNQUOTE

Do you talk like this in real life?

Smith,

sorry, I don’t remember. I do remember being surprised later when I heard the explosives described as home-made, because it contradicted what I thought I knew.

Does anyone else remember this?

Yes I remember that Clark, but I think the source of the military explosive story was an Israeli analyst rather than the police on the ground.

Lord tosser Ogilvie

Craig dosnt own the internet but he does own this little bit of it and if he chooses to ban someone who is a complete pain in the ass then he can. As for talking in real life comment only an idiot or tosser would not understand the difference between spoken and written english.

Smith (another Zionist troll?) is deluded.

Israel complained strongly and the FCO (legal advisor Sir Daniel Bethlehem QC late advisor to Sharon and Foreign Secretary Hague a Conservative Friend of Israel since the age of 15) caves in.

CNN were put under pressure to sack Octavia Nasr -

“That message spawned an intense fit of protest from Far Right outlets, Thought Crime enforcers, and other neocon precincts, and CNN quickly (and characteristically) capitulated to that pressure by firing her. The network — which has employed a former AIPAC official, Wolf Blitzer, as its primary news anchor for the last 15 years — justified its actions by claiming that Nasr’s “credibility” had been “compromised.”

http://1158munich.blogspot.com/2010/07/octavia-nasrs-firing-and-what-liberal.html

Smith at July 9, 2010 2:06 PM,

it seems that you were incorrect when you referred to Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah as a “terrorist”. Actually, he had survived various terrorist attempts upon his life:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Hussein_Fadlallah

Craig dosnt own the internet but he does own this little bit of it and if he chooses to ban someone who is a complete pain in the ass then he can

um, no he doesn’t and no he can’t. Get your tongue out of his anus.

Ben Newsam,

You are wrong in your character assessment because discernibly, publicly, obviously and observably, Craig is exactly as he says on the tin, a former Queens Ambassador, with privileged knowledge, that he has unselfishly shared with others to further the course of human rights.

The British ‘back-office’ dug a hole for itself in maintaining the ‘special relationship’ and agreeing / participating in illegal wars that have killed/maimed our young serviceman in unacceptable numbers, without full protection and in suicidal deployment arrangements/strategies (with the disgust from our top commanders) and murdered/maimed/orphaned/traumatised and malnourished thousands of innocent children.

A huge price to pay and one that will take a century for our own children to admonish.

So Craig tells of our regular deliquents to get lost. and suddenly there is a new batch; it’s like cutting off the Hydra’s head. Anyone remember “Alias Smith and Jones”? Is this going to be a “Good Cop, Bad Cop” scenario? Jones, I’m very sorry if I’ve wrongly accused you; that looks like quite interesting stuff about the stinger missiles. Smith, my suspicions about you are rising already.

And a nice new batch of pond life, calling itself things like Ben Newsam and Lord Ogilvie.

‘struth. We’ll just not hold our breath waiting for that Hamlet script, then ?

Craig is completely justified in banning those who make a nuisance of themselves (just as I have on my blog). For a cogent defense of the right to blogban, Charlie Stross’s reasoning is hard to beat:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/06/moderation-policy.html

It’s a pity Larry did the things Craig identified, ‘cos quite often Larry would pick up a wobbly point that someone gave which really did deserve some scrutiny.

Larry was actually good on 9-11 in his stance as pro-narrative (like Craig) and doggedly pursued the matter, in the process extract good counter arguments from the likes of MJ etc. This goes for other conspiracy issues too.

Sure Larry engaged in the usual Zionist tricks of false and baseless accusations, flicking his modern day yellow stars of ‘anti-Semite’ at all who unlike him vomited at the thought of licking BB’s crack, but really Craig, by banning him and his old hat, paper thin amateurisms, you are letting the ant topple the elephant.

While my oasis of silence is deemed irrelevant to the Zionist scum that be – thereby never being in a situation of pressure to ever ban anyone – I think banning people is a mistake… May I use the term Pandora’s box.?

Don’t be suspicious of weird comment timings Craig. Some of us are insomniacs you know.

Why not give Larry a yellow card (as indicated previously, he’d probably understand the significance of that)

What’s the guessing Eddie pops back up?

Thanks for the Charlie Stross link, mike.

“Your freedom of speech does not compel me to publish your words”. That’s a lot in a nutshell.

Btw are you people no-planers or plane-huggers? Do you believe that a plane crashed at the Pentagon?

It is amazing his comments to 9/11

I know you dont really care for discussion on 9/11 Craig but you should take an oppourtunity to look at the AE911 truth website run by Architects etc…

These are people with scientific backgrounds querying the percieved wisdom of fantasy explanation supported by mainstream media and are far from the crackpots the media uses to judges everyone who questions anything about 9/11.

An just to be plain, this would all be about the people question Conspiracy theory NO1 as defined by the USA government…

digging you head in the sand on this is just like digging your head in the sand on the Oaklahoma city bombing…didnt happen the way they said it did

regards and have a good weekend all

“Oaklahoma”

Ha ha!

The guy is a dolt.

Craig was wrong to support the Lib Dems, though, but that will never be apologised for while he instead laments their terrible propping up of the Tories.

Steve/MJ,

Explosives:

ctv.ca/generic/WebSpecials/london_attacks/index.html

http://archives.tcm.ie/irishexaminer/2005/07/14/story664838892.asp

You might also want to consider a previous post where I detail ‘terrorists’ killed at Canary Wharf on 7\7 – a story that ‘died’ almost immediately and nearly ‘lost’ without trace albeit for the great work of a lone analyst professor and of course ‘Bridget and Ant’ who I am greatly indebted.

I say to you Dov Weisglass the sweet smell of a brand new day is in sight.

a conspiraloon: I don’t think Larry was that good on 9/11, he was rather ill-informed (unlike angrysoba, who could hold an argument).

I think it’s important to remember however that the Larry entity was in fact more than one person (this became abundantly clear on the 9/11 thread where they clashed and cross-posted at one point) and the slightly cogent one from the early days may well not be the more tedious manifestation that was banned yesterday.

anon: yes, the Canary Wharf story is fascinating.

Dealing with trolls.

Registration needed to post.

Registration offers censorship facility.

One post and you need never here from them again. No more slime trails across your consciousness.

Surely there’s blog software that offers this facility.

Anent 9-11 – my personal stance is that I remain unconvinced by the official US government narrative (no explanation for the no-fly of US warplanes and several other gaping holes of consistency); but neither am I convinced by the White-House-conspiracy narrative in its various forms. I would generally go along with the argument that it would be difficult to keep the conspiracy a secret in government circles. What would be of more value would be to assemble a list of possible (and plausible) explanations. I would rather compare and contrast these in order to get closer to the truth, which I dont believe has yet emerged. This is because I’m a skeptic, which in the eyes of the trolls makes me a conspiraloon.

Well better a conspiraloon than a soulless, dead-eyed arse-licking toady.

“I would generally go along with the argument that it would be difficult to keep the conspiracy a secret in government circles”.

Personally I think very few people in government circles were involved. There may in fact only have been one. That would undoubtedly be Cheney, on account of his documented refusal to lift a stand-down order in respect of scrambling jets to intercept the Pentagon plane until it was just 10 miles from Washington.

Browsing through all the comments underneath your post about Trolls in general and Larry in particular, I find the whole comments section infested by trolls, starting with someone from Canada who calls himself “Alfred”, then a few “somebody”s, “anonymouses” and so on. It’s always about 9/11 and 7/7, or “race”, or the “jews”, no matter what you wrote in your blog post, and it’s really getting boring now.

I think I simply stop reading the comments now, which once used to be really great. But that was years ago.

It’s a fight you can’t win, you actually need to ban certain IPs directly from the server.

“Anent 9-11 – my personal stance is that I remain unconvinced by the official US government narrative (no explanation for the no-fly of US warplanes and several other gaping holes of consistency)”

Oh, it’s always 9/11 round here!

Anyway, planes *were* scrambled on the day. Not from Andrews AFB because it wasn’t a NORAD (or NEADS, I could be mixing this up) “alert” site. The planes that were scrambled flew out of Langley and Otis (and only later from other sites). None of the planes were given enough time to intercept their targets and they were often still chasing planes that had already crashed by the time it became known that yet another plane had been hijacked. I think there were only ever four fighter planes in the air during the whole attack (two pairs of planes) so it is hardly surprising that they didn’t intercept any of the airliners.

There was no “stand-down” order. There is no single claim at all of a stand-down order, it has simply been extrapolated out of thin air.

“you actually need to ban certain IPs directly from the server”.

That’s absolutely correct. There’s a particular discussion board I habituate that focuses on pretty controversial and divisive topics. It’s very heavily moderated. There are two main rules: you’ve got stay on topic and you’ve got to be courteous. Any posts that break these rules are removed. Persistent offenders are banned by blocking their IP address. The result is a hugely informative, enlightening and well-mannered discussion forum.

Suhayl, asks:

“do you believe in vegetal consciousness, Alfred (and no wise-cracks, mind!)? I know it’s perhaps not your specific field, but it’s an interesting topic nonetheless.”

The only evidence I recall was published many years ago in the annals of the Journal of Irreproducible Results, which recorded a study that purported to demonstrate Pavlovian conditioning in the leaf-curl response of Mimosa pudica. It seems that, today, journals published by Elsevier Science have now taken responsibility for publishing results in the exciting field of vegetal psychology:

http://tiny.cc/vvg4u

As for comparison between the fate of the natives of the city of Leicester and of the island of Tasmania, I suppose if only half the indigenous population of my father’s home town of Leicester has been disposed of I should not call it ethnic cleansing, rather partial ethnic cleansing ?” sounds like partial birth abortion, another policy quite acceptable to the liberal establishment, whether nominally Conservative, Liberal or Labour.

But this light years off topic, and anyway you are merely pushing the settler line, so there is no scope for agreement.

“There is no single claim at all of a stand-down order, it has simply been extrapolated out of thin air”.

I beg to differ. Check out the testimony of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta to the 9/11 Commission.

@ MJ

I remmeber Larry (at least I think it was Larry) that gave you a good stretch on the passenger lists.

Richard Robinson, yes, sorry, I remembered later today, when I didn’t have internet access, that your wondrous box of songs contains lots of ones that aren’t English. Thanks for reminding us all of that. It’s a super resource.

Yes, I think anyone can post under any, or no name, so the hydra may well be on the loose!

Btw, whoever asked about eddie, he’s never gone away but still pops-up from time-to-time (he doesn’t like hats). Alfred Burdett has been commenting hereabouts for some months (he likes cellular organelles and ‘Tales from Great Britain in the Time of the Ice Age’).

Vronsky, that was a fascinating article, esp. as it was written from the point-of-view of a pro-US Government stance. Of course, the question is, how many of these tactics suggested as info-weapons by the authors are used, not just against ‘conspiracy networks’ in order ostensibly to reduce a drift towards extremism, but against valid political websites like this one which engage in a sustained critique of power. I suspect the same, and different, tactics. While, with the ‘conspiracy’ groups, the idea posited is to diversify available narratives and expand epistemological space, with rational anti-war/ anti-imperialist sites/ groups, the idea would be to disrupt, dishearten, sow internal division and in fact to generate ‘extremist’ positions and responses in order to discredit the site in the eyes of rational anti-imperialists – what’s the acronym again? – in other words). Same subcontractors, though.

—-”Don’t be daft. If someone in the FCO were to write a glowing obituary of someone in the Tamil Tigers”—–

The Norwegian government sent their International Development Minister to Anton Balasingham’s funeral in 2006, and the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu sent this message as condolence: “one who won the hearts and minds of Tamils the world over”.

They’re both still in the same jobs.

“I remmeber Larry (at least I think it was Larry) that gave you a good stretch on the passenger lists”.

That was angrysoba, bless him.

Alfred, thanks for the ‘vegetable’ link, will check it out.

“disposed of” in relation to Leicester is just silly. Some of your dad’s pals might have moved to Scotland, where they are very welcome, btw, or to other towns and cities in the UK, like Nottingham or Peterborough. Many are still in Leicester. In Yorkshire, the textile industry hired lots of workers from S. Asia in the post-war period, and they’re still there, in those towns. It’s no surprise. The inhabitants of Leeds have not been “disposed of”. Richard Robinson’s tunes are/ were on the Leeds University website – and excellent tunes they are, too. The oil industry brings lots of different types of people to Aberdeen, including some from Leicester. Some parts of Andalusia now are almost wholly ‘English’, but no-one’s been “disposed of”.

“I beg to differ. Check out the testimony of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta to the 9/11 Commission.”

If you can show me where he uses the words, “stand-down order”. That would be good.

@ MJ

“That was angrysoba, bless him.” – yeah, like I said, Larry gave you a good stretch on the passenger lists”

“”I remmeber Larry (at least I think it was Larry) that gave you a good stretch on the passenger lists”.

That was angrysoba, bless him.”

Again, this was something that came from DRG reading a “victims list” and thinking it was a flight manifest when it never was and had never claimed to be.

Of course, once a rumour was up and running it became the de facto Truth that needed to be debunked.

DRG: “There were no Arab names on the manifests that CNN reported!”

AS: “They aren’t the manifests. They’re victims lists.”

MJ: “Then where are the manifests?”

AS: “Here.”

MJ: “How do you know they’re real?”

“Richard Robinson’s tunes are/were on the Leeds University website”

Were, for a long time. Now, it has been disposed of, if you like. Zombified. It all looks fine until you actually try and see any of the material, then it 404s. But it won’t go away. Undead ! Invasion of the beancounters ! http://livetunebook.qualmograph.org.uk/ is what works now.

Leicester, ethnic cleansing ? This is completely surreal. Where are the refugee camps ? [sour], and again, the Canadian preaching Anglo Culture doesn’t agree with “the settler line”. It doesn’t make rational sense.

Richard,

Re: “I agree about digression, but (we risk a vicious circle of mutual trolling ? in search of the Last Word) you say ethnic cleansing, I ask why you insist on that and what about the other possibilities ? and you say more ethnic cleansing. I do consider it paranoid.”

For the reasons you state, I hesitate to respond. However, so far as deviation is concerned, most of the last 50 post have been totally irrelevant, so what the heck.

I don’t actually like the term ethnic cleansing, genocide is more explicit. And as noted in response to Suhayl, it is incorrect to say that the indigenous population of my Father’s home town of Leicester has been genocided, in reality it has only been half genocided.

You, and most people here seem to think that because I believe, as do most of the indigenous people of Britain (see the very clear-cut opinion survey results on immigration), that the British in Britain should not be displaced in large part by people from elsewhere I must dislike people who are of non-British ethnicity. This is the point I made originally, many people here do what Craig asserts that Larry does, which is to accuse others of “holding opinions which [they] do not in fact hold, and which he[she] thinks will call [their opponent's] judgement into doubt.”

Actually, I am not suggesting that that is what you are doing. But the modern lib-left mind is generally unable to grasp that people may want and are entitled to have a homeland if the can get it and hold it. And when I say “entitled” I merely assert that this is the law of life. Those who like the Tasmanians just give up cease to exist, they become extinct. This is natural selection at work. The weak go to the wall.

The notion is often expressed here that the British are some kind of colonizing racist monsters (I refer specifically to comments by Avatar Singh, and Suhayl’s Viking history of the English). That was a natural view for the losers to take in the days of British supremacy, but today the British are not supreme, they are hardly anything: a small people (less than half as numerous as the Pakistanis or the Bangla Deshis, one thirtieth as numerous as the Indians) in a small country (one sixth the size of Pakistan, one thirtieth the size of Canada) subject to domination by many foreign influences.

In fact, my view of the British, my own people, is not that they are some kind of master race, a totally deluded notion if anyone holds it, but that they are a rather hopeless lot: ripe for the taking. Some, of course, are people to whom I am strongly attached. But the idea that I like dislike non-British or non-white people is a total non-sequitur and is, furthermore, entirely false. Canada, where I live, is a multiracial society and that’s fine with me. On a fine summer day, I can walk down Government St. here in Victoria and see beautiful women of just about every ethnicity in the World. Better still, I can see them at the beach: the cutest yesterday being a pair of, I think, West Indians.

im intrigued as to the explantion of we had 4 groups of planes in the air already, correct me if im wrong but the nearest afb is minutes, its an afb, its taksed with protecting the capitol, are u suggesting a measurley couple of jets from the base are tasked with this duty?

anyway as to 9/11, pick on the stuff that allows you minimal distraction at the onset and challenge what ios provable.

wt7 didn’t fall down by fire…fact

explosives are the only explanation fitting its collapse. By addressing everything relating to wt7 you open all sorts of cans of worms…

I told you to be suspicious Craig!

I’m afraid you’ll only begin to tackle this if you resort to registered users and ban those accounts that case problems.

I know I’ve posted from at least three different IP addresses, so no point banning by IP.

Alfred,

you are again inciting spurious argument. If this is deliberate, I’d regard it as trolling. If you are unaware of it, then I think you should examine your feelings.

Easy – you ban by email address – just need email to logon ok some people have multiple email accounts but you then match to IP address – best solution.

What Viking history? Oh, you mean the publisher, Viking. I thought you were asserting that I thought the English have horns! And if you care to recall, it was me who pulled Avatar Singh up about his comments on ‘the English’. I have never argued that an group of people people are “colonizing racist monsters” (I note thast you use North American spelling convention, rather than British spelling convention). I know you’re not racist, Alfred, I’ve said that before.

But I do disagree with the parallels you seem to draw b/w what happened to the native peoples of America/ Australia and the situation in the UK today. I also think that instead of directing your fire at transnational corporate capitalism which is responsible for much of the dynamic (it being the dominant economic system today), you attempt to seek essentialist reasons for your disatisfactions about the way you imagine Britian to be and you find them in biology and something which attempts to project backwards, Britishness to the last Ice Age. The woolly mammoths would find your argmentation amusing.

Nonetheless, may your passegiatas in Victoria, British Columbia always be filled with pleasant and fruitful imagery.

angrysoba: I’m not sure who DRG was on the thread and I don’t recall the interchange (link?), but my point was that the official passenger manifests have never been published. The 911 Commission did not request them and they are not in the public domain.

Clark, says

“you are again inciting spurious argument. If this is deliberate, I’d regard it as trolling. If you are unaware of it, then I think you should examine your feelings.”

Yeah, don’t trouble yourself with any explanation of your seemingly spurious allegations. Maybe it’s you who needs to see a shrink.

Smith wrote: “It’s remarkable that a member of the FCO was gushing over a terrorist in the first place.”

A significant number of prominent members of the Israeli governments were terrorists themselves or related to terrorists. It was the Israelis that killed British in the King David Hotel terrorist action. However Zionist terrorists seem to have a get-out-of-jail free card.

The interesting thing about this blog is that all mention of 9/11 is supposed to be hived off onto some thread no one looks at. Yet 9/11 is the key to New World Order, the war on terror and the reason why Britain and other Nato countries find themselves killing Pakistanis and Afghans and Iraqis and tolerating Israeli genocide against Palestinians. So shouldn’t we be looking at 9/11 before all else? I think so. At least we should be willing to look at new evidence as it arises. Or are folks happy to live in a world where the proletariat can be murdered at will be the elite in order to buffalo the masses into their imperialist agenda?

Alfred,

I could explain, but I really don’t want to get into an argument. And it’s rather public here. Are you sure you wish me to proceed?

Suhayl asked: “What Viking history?”

A history of England for the perspective of the Vikings, where the English are all piratical scum as you outlined elsewhere.

There is that massively long thread, Alfred. It’s to stop the subject taking-over everything else that I think Craig decided to try to allow it – as with other subjects – its own space. Also, lots of ‘trolls’ were attempting to turn everything towards the subject in order to portray the site as a ‘conspiraloon’ (interesting neologism) site. There is much more to these imperialist wars than the events of late 2001 in NYC and DC. Much more. Systemic subjects, economics, war generation, etc. But you know this. So what are you suggesting? And why?

Clark asks:

“Are you sure you wish me to proceed?”

No I’m not sure at all Clark. It’s true I don’t know what you are talking about, but I’m sure it’s off topic — LOL.

I did not outline that – ” piratical scum” – at all – that was someone else, avatar singh, I think. Please do not ascribe views to me which I never, ever espoused or expressed. Those views are the antithesis of my views. That’s exactly what ‘Larry’ used to try to do, constantly. What’s come over you, Alfred? Why are you behaving like ‘Larry’ all of a sudden?

“However Zionist terrorists seem to have a get-out-of-jail free card”.

And the worst of the lot – Menachem Begin – got the Nobel Peace prize.

Alfred,

I really enjoyed our discussion that included your experiences of the effects of globalisation upon your business. I enjoyed it far more than the “race” discussion, which has been repeated on a number of threads, and now here.

The former discussion included your personal experiences, whereas the latter doesn’t; you couch it in scientific terms. However, I sense that it is the latter discussion that stirs deeper feelings on you.

Typo on = in

Suhayl said,

“There is much more to these imperialist wars than the events of late 2001 in NYC and DC. Much more. Systemic subjects, economics, war generation, etc. But you know this. So what are you suggesting? And why?”

As for the why, there you go again, suggesting I have an ulterior motive, thus discrediting what I say.

What I said was that 9/11 was the key to the present war to establish the new world order. Perhaps I should have said the enabling event.

Obviously the official 9/11 conspiracy theory is nonsense. Anyone who is scientifically literate knows this. And there is good political evidence too. If the official theory held water, there would have been a proper judicial inquiry and those responsible for the failure of America’s air defenses would have paid the penalty. As it was, they were, I believe, all promoted instead.

Exposing the 9/11 fraud is thus essential if there is to be any hope of preventing the creation of a global empire, which will be the most corrupt the world has ever seen.

So why not go and discuss it all with Glenn and angrysoba on the appropriate thread, a thread which I’m sure many of us check-out on a regular basis? And it is you, Alfred, who is using tactics which ‘Larry’ used. I am not suggesting anything, simply pointing out what is evident.

Suhayl,

True, you didn’t call the english piratical scum, but you painted a picture of victorian england that was laregely false. A land of dark satanic mills were the faces of the poor were not only ground but underground — oops, I am exaggerating slightly. However, the point is, you falsely portrayed the english working class as horribly exploited whereas in fact they were among the wealthiest working people in the world. Moreover, you entirely ignore the role of victorians in creating the modern world of publicly funded schools, hospitals, etc. and in fighting for human rights beyond the borders of their own country. There was a lot in the victorian world for the british to be rightly proud of, including the growing acceptance of the right of indians and other peoples of the empire to govern themselves.

“If you can show me where he uses the words, “stand-down order”. That would be good”.

The precise terminology is not used but is implied in the following exchange:

“There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, “The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to, “The plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the vice president, “Do the orders still stand?” And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?”"

The “orders” referred to are clearly orders not to scramble fighters and can therefore be reasonably construed as stand-down orders. Unless you wish to argue they were telephone orders for pizza or something.

OK, Suhayl, I’m a troll who believes that the british nation are entitled to a homeland of their own, and you’re a settler activist seeking to crush any discussion of that right.

As for deviation, take a look at your own totally fatuous irruption about vegetal consciousness. LOL

Benjamin Disraeli called it “two nations”. Although much of what you’re saying is not incorrect, Alfred, and I agree with much of it, it’s a complex picture. The threads to which you allude were to do with colonialism. Why are you going on at me, jumping from this to that without fully answering my points?

Alfred – “it is incorrect to say that the indigenous population of my Father’s home town of Leicester has been genocided, in reality it has only been half genocided.”

Where are the refugee camps for the survivors ?

No, don’t answer that (not that I think you were likely to). I’m sorry, I just give up. I can make no sense of your comments whatsoever. In form, they appear to be answers to the points I was trying to raise, but in substance, they don’t answer anything, they dodge around them, while flinging out the same assertions time and time again, in an increasingly wild manner. Your Ph.D. thesis must have been a lot of fun.

Suhayl,

I have upset you. I am sorry. You have slightly irked me too, as a matter of fact. So why don’t we call it quits on this round.

I am off for lunch. Have a very pleasant evening.

Cheers.

How many of you here believe that the phone calls of the passengers on the 911 planes to their family members were faked? You really have to be an idiot to believe that.

Okay, Alfred, have a super lunch. Sorry about the vegetal thing, it was just a slightly surreal joke.

“How many of you here believe that the phone calls of the passengers on the 911 planes to their family members were faked?”

Given that it was not possible to make cell-phone calls from planes flying at cruising speed and altitude in 2001 you can count me in on that one (along with fellow idiots the FBI).

Oh damn, another point to settle.

Richard asks about the remnants of the indigenous population of the city of Leicester: “Where are the refugee camps for the survivors ?”

Then, unreasonably it seems to me, he says “don’t answer.” Why not? Why ask? You don’t wish to be know?

The facts are simple enough. In 1901 Leicester had a population of 211,579, virtually all indigenous Britons. Today it has around 279,921 people (2001 census) of whom more than half are reported to be non-indigenous. So that leaves 139,960 thousand indigenous Britons in Leicester, decline of 71,618 since 1901.

So to answer your question: Where are the refugee camps for the survivors ? (a) there are no refugee camps, which seem to be a figment of your imagination, and (b) the remaining indigenous Britains of the city of Leicester are still living more or less where they lived before.

As for the missing 71 thousand, Suhayl says they all went to live in Leeds or somewhere. However, while there migration within the UK, the overall trend is for displacement of indigenous britons on a substantial scale by non indigenous people.

Sorry of this boggles your mind. It seems simple enough to me and the great majority of Britons who oppose further mass immigration.

My point, of course, was that “genocide” is a ridiculous word to use.

“How many of you here believe that the phone calls of the passengers on the 911 planes to their family members were faked?”

Sure they were faked. Here’s an informative CBC interview with Prof. David Ray Griffin about the cell phone calls, which even the FBI concluded were impossible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjImLL4NnwA

“Today it has around 279,921 people (2001 census) of whom more than half are reported to be non-indigenous.”

Jebus on a moped – of course they’re indigenous, indigenous TO THE PLANET EARTH!

So MJ, what sort of technology did they use to make the phone calls?

It’s been 9 years – surely such technology would now be commercially available, no?

Don’t you understand that scientific and/or technological discoveries occur in parallel with one another?

Have you heard Roger Ebert talk? They used fancy current technology to use his movie review monologues to recreate his voice after he lost his voice box. He still doesn’t sound much better than Hawking. Why don’t they just give him your super-secret lizard people technology?

Are you really that much of a moron?

“even the FBI concluded were impossible.”

No, they didn’t. Is this the same FBI that took part in the mass murder?

Richard,

Wikipedia defines genocide as

“systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group”

Many would say Britain’s immigration policy under NuLabor as it affected the city of Leicester and other towns and cities in Britain was genocidal by that definition.

But maybe it was not systematic — just total bloody stupidity.

Alfred,

classification is a function of the mind. You chose to classify the displacement of people in, say, Leicester as “genocide”. To most people genocide involves mass-murder; ie they classify differently from you. If you wish to avoid appearing racist, and to avoid starting an argument, use a less antagonistic classification.

But there are numerous other examples of you choosing antagonistic language. So it seems that you want to start heated arguments.

Alfred has had this discussion on another thread, at length. For the record, I find his views incomprehensible. I also note his reappearance at a time of some chaos, his strange segue into 9/11 and his failure to apologise for misquoting Suhayl.

@mikecobley: too right. Unfortunately the far right don’t like this idea: or at least, they think it’s an idea, not a fact.

“classification is a function of the mind.”

No, Clark, classification is a function of the meaning of the words used in the classification. I’ve given a defensible definition of the words I use.

Anyhow, yer off topic. And Techie, and anyone else who challenges me on anything but the Larry question.

Incidentally Tech, I did apologize to Suhayl. I said I was sorry to have upset him, and he wished me a pleasant lunch, which I’ve had and I’m now going to the beach so cheers, probably for good, as most here would seem to wish.

“So it seems that you want to start heated arguments.”

I don’t think so, I think he just wants to say his thing over and over and over again. While dismissing all challenges, granted.

How it works for him to be so happy and all in a nice multicultural society thousands of miles away while preaching division and mutual paranoia to us is not clear to me, and very probably never will be. But, as with the previous iterations, it goes nowhere, makes no rational sense to me, and life’s too short for it.

Gosh, this is becoming a long thread, ain’t it! Still, its very pleasant to discourse on trolls, the facilitated transport of xenobiotic concepts across the blood-brain barrier and other assorted phenomena. I do wish I were on a sunny beach promenade, though, supping from an ice-cream cornet, listening to fey Edwardian popular songs and watching the, ahm, rollers roll in…

… reminds me of Al Stewart song.

The usual “liberal” argument in favor of censorship. It was a bad argument then and is a bad one now. Craig is only willing to permit comments that are made in a way he likes. Like I said – usual liberal crap. Murray is a sanctimonious hypocrite.

“Sanctimonious hypocrite”. Hmmm, I like that: accurate and apposite. I shall put it as a heading over a photograph of Chinless Murray on my blog.

Who are these people? Personal attacks on the host of this blog, so predictable, so slapstick. Pathetic, guys. Really transparently pathetic. Do you wear raincoats on sunny days?

“So MJ, what sort of technology did they use to make the phone calls?”

Heck, maybe they didn’t.

“It’s been 9 years – surely such technology would now be commercially available, no?”

The technology was first tested in 2004 so you may well be right.

Alfred,

I’m not trying to get rid of you; as I said, I enjoyed what you wrote about globalisation, publishing and the BP oil blowout. I learned from that.

Words and their meanings are products of mind, so those sorts of classification proceed from mind, but I think there are non-linguistic classifications that proceed from mind also; the words come later. So maybe you meant “Yes, Clark,…”. Yes, your definition of “genocide” is “defensible”, but you could have chosen a word that wouldn’t need defending.

The relevance of this to the Larry question is that you could just state the problems of immigration as you see them without starting a big argument by using terms like “genocide” in a very borderline fashion or appearing to support the BNP. Only you know your motivation for doing so. Others may think that you are deliberately trying to be disruptive.

I hope you enjoyed your visit to the beach.

Apostate?

Obviously Larry has been reinvented as Alfred. It seems to me that the intelligence services are so afraid of Craig’s blog.

“Obviously Larry has been reinvented as Alfred”.

No no no. Alfred is far too articulate to be Larry. “Zionist Troll” is Larry, plus a couple of anons.

Clark, Alfred is not Apostate, if that’s what you meant. They had a big bust-up on another thread over some historical matters and historians, etc. and what those historians might have represented. Alfred is interesting, if oddly incongruous, often frustrating and somewhat elusive. And there’s the BNP thing. I’m not sure quite what he sees in this blog though. But anyway…

But you’re right, Ruth, they are targeting the blog, no question. One must never underestimate the power of the state and those it chooses as its partners. But this lot are not very good, are they? I mean, if their tactic is to get extremists to become more prominent on the boards and thereby discredit the blog, it seems to me that there are just too many decent people – from all walks of life, of various political persuasions and hailing from all parts of the world – hereabouts (not that I’m including myself among those; my forte is to ask about vegetable consciousness, raincoats and such-like) who refuse to just hate groups of people because of who those people are, but who won’t pander to imperialist narratives.

Vronsky’s correct (I think it was Vronsky) that we learn from the ‘trolls’ in an oddly inverted manner, by that which they tend to attack most. Yes, they divert discussion, but the main – the central – thing is, they have not succeeded in stopping Craig the Whistleblower from maintaining a public presence, now supported by many more people around the world, a number of whom are engaged in rational activist politics in the real world as well as in cyberspace.

Suhayl,

no, I was just calling Apostate, to see if he was here!

Clark do you have an Ouija board? Make sure you’ve got Father Ted with you.

Yes, “Zionist Troll” is obviously Larry. Not sure about “Craig Oldfield” and “Piers C Structures”.

Of course it was daft of me to call Apostate; he’d be unlikely to answer. I must be a dingbat.

Steve – ‘It isnt a big false flag operation as people state but groups of disorganised nutters pissed off about us invading places at whim.’

Well, this was a false flag operation actually. The powers that be needed some convictions to help justify the war and police state agenda. I agree that these were disorganised nutters, but they would have done nothing if MI5 hadn’t picked them up and used them. What especially makes this a false flag operation is the fact that these ‘terrorists’ were given the customary ‘Al Qaeda’ tag and when you hear that in the mass media you know it’s complete and utter bullshit. ‘Al Qaeda’, as a terrorist organisation, is nothing more than a CIA media fiction. Wake up to the truth.

Ask yourself this. Where the hell are these ‘terrorists’? Where are they? How many illegal immigrants get into this country? How easy is it to get into this country? And yet this devilish, worldwide ‘SPECTRE-esque’ organisation hell bent on our destruction never gets through to harm us? Ha ha ha ha ha. Well, apart from the ‘one off’ spectacular coordinated attacks of 9/11 and 7/7. Odd that… No, they seem to just focus on more Hollywood plots don’t they, which our security services rescue us from. Phew! Moreover, the shoe bomber and the pants bomber made it on to aircraft all kitted up supposedly. Yet they didn’t use the plane toilet to do their dark deeds? They sat in front of all the passengers ejecting smoke on a no smoking flight? Hmm… How can anyone on this blog with a few brain cells and no hidden aganda not see the truth in large neon lights? No wonder things are as bad as they are. WTF!

Well, here he is. Thanks so much, Clark.

Craig’s blog is of major importance in the fight against the erosion of our liberties and the abuse by the state of its people and those around the world.

It’s really not surprising that such attacks against this blog are being made.

In my experience the first step taken by state agencies is to try and remove the target and then failing this they demean, smear or degrade.

Ruth – ‘In my experience the first step taken by state agencies is to try and remove the target and then failing this they demean, smear or degrade.’

Exactly, not forgetting the additional tools of intimidation and harassment, which they also frequently employ like the gutless morons they are. :-0

I hope you are keeping well Ruth.

Oh dear. Such delusions of grandeur. Can you please get it into your conspiracy-addled heads that MI5, CIA and Mossad possibly have more important things to do than write scurrilous stuff on this site to irritate a bunch of lefties. Is it beyond your comprehension that there are lots of people in the world on the internet who have very different opinions to you? Get over yourselves. They’re not agents of the state. They just can’t stand your opinions and have the right to express their anger/differences/contempt. If you don’t like it, go back to the pre-internet age.

Sure thing Al… :-0

Larry will just come back in another guise, under another name.

Just look at his postings – its his job – that’s his mission.

CB

What a hoot! Anyone who criticises Craig Murray must, of course, be an agent of some Zionist organisation. Please, you are only massing his monumentally inflated ego.

Suhayl,

my apologies. Actually, I thought “Craig Oldfield” and “Piers C Structures” were Apostate. I still do. I don’t believe that Jaded is Apostate; the style is different.

It wasn’t meant to be like this! Originally, you couldn’t get an Internet connection without identifying yourself somewhere. Then the IP addresses ran short so the ISPs introduced “Dynamic IP addresses” and Internet anonymity was born.

Suhayl, you’re identifiable, you’re a published author. Craig is identifiable, he’s a public figure. I have put up a little web page to identify myself to some extent, with contact details for anyone who wants to know more. I believe in standing up and being counted, and I’m glad to live in a country where I can do so in relative safety.

Foolishness is widespread and Internet anonymity compounds the problem, which plays into the hands of the Hard State. Power doesn’t *need* to work hard to discredit a site like this; the ‘Open Door’ policy attracts all sorts of fools who, emboldened by anonymity, waltz in and make a mess.

I second cyberjounalist.net at July 9, 2010 6:34 PM. Registration via valid e-mail only.

So, all opponents are not only Zionist agents, they are also one person (since there couldn’t possibly be many people who hold the opposite view from yours, obviously).

What a bunch of weirdos!

“I second cyberjounalist.net at July 9, 2010 6:34 PM. Registration via valid e-mail only.”

I’ve been doing some stuff with Drupal recently. You can set that up to require email + password; it then generates a password and sends it to email, requiring it to work. It then won’t allow any more registrations with that email; one name per address.

It wouldn’t prevent abuse, but it’d make non-abuse so much the easier default as to make it clear when tones of voice were taking the piss. But then, it is anyway, before long, isn’t it ? No point taking the piss if no-one notices. It all makes work for the admins to do.

The only blogs I’ve seen without this kind of noise are those with serious moderators giving the yes/no to each and every post, maybe even intervening to give public details of how they think people are contravening … it all makes work for the admins to do.

Another thing about requiring login is, it gives you per-user session memory. It would be possible to set up an interface where people could decide they just plain didn’t want to read anything written by specified usernames, which would then be filtered out and invisible. I don’t know of any implementations of this … it all makes work for the admins to do.

Fantasy cricket, eh ?

If I say you’re a troll then you’re a troll. You’re all banned!

Ban everyone, Craig! You know it makes sense!

MJ: “The “orders” referred to are clearly orders not to scramble fighters and can therefore be reasonably construed as stand-down orders.”

The orders were more likely to be shoot-down orders. This is what I mean when I said the “stand-down” has been extrapolated out of thin air. Has anyone at all backed up the claim that they were given or passed on or questioned a “stand-down” order? I don’t believe they have which is why Norman Mineta’s testimony is always cited. Remember that in this situation he’d just arrived and wasn’t sure what was going on.

“I’m not sure who DRG was on the thread and I don’t recall the interchange (link?), but my point was that the official passenger manifests have never been published. The 911 Commission did not request them and they are not in the public domain.”

No, your point originally was that THERE WERE NO ARAB NAMES ON THE FLIGHT MANIFESTS. Since it has been pointed out that you are not using a flight manifest as evidence for your “No Arab names” claim you have moved the goalposts to questioning whether you have ever seen the flight manifests in question. Now, what would a flight manifest look like, do you think?

Like this? Oh, look whose name is at number 13:

http://www.911myths.com/index.php/Image:Flight_11_Manifest_a.jpg

Alfred says, “Sure they were faked. Here’s an informative CBC interview with Prof. David Ray Griffin about the cell phone calls, which even the FBI concluded were impossible.”

Oh dear! Prof. David Ray Grifffin is now cited as an expert on cell phone and voice-morphing technology. Of course, few of the calls were actually made from cell phones most of them were made by airfones and the only conceivable way in which these could be “faked” is if they were playing a hoax on their family members who received the calls or if their families went along with this elaborate wheeze.

Heh conspiraloons – here’s your voice-morphing technology, OVER EIGHT YEARS after 911. Keep in mind that Roger Ebert’s speech was widely recorded.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMyxgSLESz8&feature=related

Alfred wrote-”This may very well be true, but why should the British, who occupy a very small and crowded country, be compelled to move over an make over half of some cities already, and more than half the country eventually, to an endless stream of people from else where. Objection to this need have nothing whatsoever to do with bigotry. But getting that idea through the head of a Liberal bigot would take more explosives than required to bring down the Twin Towers. ”

well one thing i can promise you- I will get all of those paksitan , bangaldeshi and india immigrants out of uk if you can promsie me that you can get all of those english immigrants who have moved to outside england in last 50 years alone -and not last 200 years.

you have spread like a pest and accuse others of coming over to your country when you have destroyed their country. the msiot immigration to uk is happening because uk was and ius instu,mental in destrying the cultur. economis and wealth of otehr countriews in last 30 years-i am not talking baout last 200 years.

massive tranfer of money has happend in last 30 years from third world improvished by uk sponsored nealiberalism and ,money briought o uk and cayman island alls tolen money -uk is living off the money of the third world today. itis a protaction racket that is what uk is living off and calls it service industry.

===========================================

the Corporation of the City of London, is virtually a self regulating and selfserving parasitic organisation so called this financial center has turned into into a self-regulating state like the Vatican.(ofocurse for the anglosaxon protestants only God is money and nothing else.).

The ruthless advantage-seeking was racheted up around 1980 and it may have been inspired by the fact that insiders in Lloyd’s of London were facing bankruptcy, conspired to offload their losses onto 34,000 foreigners and women and got away with it.

==================================================

A perfect example…I watched the show “Reaper” this last year. In one episode the devil is running a company whose business is the corruption of souls. When explaining to his son how his business works, this is his exact quote…

“Did you know, beginning in the late 19th century, corporations were granted all the rights of the individual, but none of the annoying responsibilities. They lack, almost by design, any kind of moral compass, conscience, or compassion. Basically, corporations are a way to enact sociopathic behavior on a grand scale. In short, they’re what makes this country so damn great.” this is what is called so called democracy in entgland-a corportocracy which has been exported all over to the benefit of parasitic english .

‘Larry’ and his pals are certainly still here, as ‘Zionist Troll’, ‘Jim’, ‘Petra Dean’, etc. Of course those elements of the state would wish to disrupt the main medium of communication of a senior Foreign and Commonwealth Office official who turned into a whistleblower.

If the state infiltrates trade unions and activist groups like CND, CAAT and environmental groups, even little ones, even very obviously ‘harmless’ ones, it would be crazy not to try and infiltrate and disrupt cyber-based discussion forums. Anyone who has engaged in activism on the ground is aware of this dynamic.

It’s interesting that Alan Campbell seems not to have read widely on this subject, but seems to enjoy suggesting that to posit the obvious is a symptom of delusions of grandeur. No, it’s realism. Mr Campbell, perhaps you would do well to read the link which Vronsky provided earlier in this thread. There are many other articles on the subject.

The world of information is hugely contested; propaganda is as important as guns-on-the-ground. And in the end, that is what it is about. The cyber-trolls – though some will simply be independent mischief-makers – are part of the imperialist war machine. No, we won’t go away, we won’t leave the web. We’re here to stay. And so are ‘they’.

Avatar Singh, while your anti-imperialist analyses are often spot-on, here wrt corporatism, offshore eceonomics, protection rackets and the City of London, and of course I agree with you wrt your comments on S. Asian communities in Britain and British ex-pats elsewhere, your tendency to essentialise (as in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘parasitic English’) risks being assigned as simply the other side of the coin which people like Alfred like to spin. It plays into the hands of those who want to deploy racial analyses of historical and contemporary world events. I write this as a ‘comrade’ because I think you have very important things to say and I think that they would be more powerful still if you lay-off the essentialism a bit.

“The orders were more likely to be shoot-down orders”.

I see. So while shoot-down orders were in place the USAF did nothing, even though it had ample time to follow the orders, intercept the plane and shoot it down. Only once the orders were lifted did the USAF do anything, even though it was now required not to. You’d be better off pursuing the pizza theory.

“your point originally was that THERE WERE NO ARAB NAMES ON THE FLIGHT MANIFESTS”.

As originally published there were not. The first lists were published, by the Washington Post and others, on Sept 12, before the FBI had released the names of the alleged hijackers. No Arab names were on the lists. A couple of days later, when the FBI had released the names, the same lists were in circulation but were renamed ‘victim lists’. It stayed that way for several years, until the Moussoauri trial in 2007, when the FBI suddenly came up with new lists that included the alleged hijackers’ names. None of the lists in circulation appear to have come directly from the airlines. The 911 Commission did not ask for them as evidence.

All this may or may not be significant. Without seeing the verifiable and original lists it’s impossible to say. I haven’t argued anything other than the above and am not sure which goalposts I’ve moved.

MJ,

regarding your comment of July 9, 2010 4:38 PM, could you specify the location for that; it’s a long thread now, but I’d like to take a look at it.

MJ,

and regarding your 11:19 post above, I felt that Angrysoba’s reply to you was mis-representative of your argument. He lost some credibility with me on this. But this really belongs on the 9/11 thread; I won’t continue it here.

Clark: I was pretty sure the ‘clash of the Larries’ happened on the 911 thread but I’ve just checked and it’s not there. It must have been on another thread but I don’t know which one. I know that I distinguished between them by calling the wittier one ‘Louise’, which might be handy for search purposes.

Point taken about 911 stuff straying onto this thread, apologies to you, Craig and all.

No, its not “realism”. Its just the usual bunch of sad haggard masturbating bloggers needing to feel so important that their crazed theories and opinions merit James Bond being after them.

The wilder shores of Shaylerville and Ikeland beckon…

So you’re happy, glowing and never masturbate, alancampbell. Thanks for letting everyone know.

Otherwise, CAAT being infiltrated by BAe was quite interesting. I’d say it was mainly a corporate spy thing in activist circles, apart, of course, from the policeman who recently admitted to infiltrating the animal rights movement. And so on.

There’s little doubt that corporations use bloggers and other writers – viz the Guardian piece on the proposed Tesco in Norfolk, or any recent piece about BA, where the first comments are inevtability anti-union and pro-management.

‘Larry’ was certainly doing something beyond his own personality (the different styles were fascinating). Apostate et al are BNP. Whether M15 would bother, with all of this going on, I wonder.

Dear friends,

Many of us recognize the importance of the Internet as the new battleground for Israel’s image. It’s time to do it better, and coordinate our on-line efforts on behalf of Israel. An Israeli software company have developed a free, safe and useful tool for us – the Internet Megaphone.

Please go to http://www.giyus.org, download the Megaphone, and you will receive daily updates with instant links to important internet polls, problematic articles that require a talkback, etc.

We need 100,000 Megaphone users to make a difference. So, please distribute this mail to all Israel’s supporters.

Do it now. For Israel.

Amir Gissin

Director Public Affairs (Hasbara) Department

Apparently only 40,000 people have so far signed up. 40,000 Larries!

Otherwise see they’re reporting on the decision to find the Smash EDO protestors not guilty and calling it anti-semitism. Very sad that all those Larries should be willing dupes of a murderous regime, I think.

“The wilder shores of Shaylerville and Ikeland beckon…”

Now, that, Alan Campbell, is a typical – almost a textbook – tactic in the manual of ‘How to be an Internet Troll’.

It is fascinating that your normally one-liners seem now to have expanded into more than a paragraph. But always, the same, deeply cynical, tone.

I agree with technicolour, most of this activity is likely to be undertaken nowadays by private enterprises on behalf of corporate concerns. However, as, I think Richard Robinson or Clark suggested earlier, the state is likely to be only one of these outfits’ customers.

Furthermore, the state itself has now become so enmeshed with, and outsourced to, private military imperialism, it matters little except that all of these ‘trolls’ are serving imperialism and war. Ultimately, the killing of other people. Bottom line. That is what I am against, and they are for. So, while I am suspicious, I am not cynical.

Whereas, from your posts over these months, I see no reason to alter my view that you evince a deeply cynical attitude which can only be supportive of imperial power.

Megaphone, Camera and Hasbara are all old news and are dead ducks. All part of the Israel Project.

Zionist Israel is a failed state and will go down the pan inevitably.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Project – take with a pinch of salt as this page has probably been heavily edited by its supporters.

Thanks, anonymous poster at 1247pm. Very interesting. I think we ought to infiltrate the ‘megaphone’, begin to diversify the epistemology. I can’t do it, because I’m not anonymous and because I want to be accountable for what I say/ write. You, on the other hand, are anonymous. And perhaps there are 500,000 of you. But I suspect they would have the facility to block such interference with their outsourced state propaganda. Worth a try, though. Or maybe there needs to be a kind of CAAT/ CND, etc. of the internet, an organisation dedicated solely to countering imperialist propaganda. Now, there’s a business opening there for someone… I raise a toast, then, to the anti-troll trolls!

Yes, someone I know and respect intimated to me that once a foregrounded troll identity is out of the picture (well, sort of), another of the ‘sleepers’ suddenly tends to become more aggressive. Well, let’s see what happens.

“Old trolls never die, they just get new usernames”

To troll, or not to troll, that is the question.

“Go ahead. Make my day, troll”.

“Play it again, troll.”

“Whereas, from your posts over these months, I see no reason to alter my view that you evince a deeply cynical attitude which can only be supportive of imperial power.”

OMG you’ve seen through me.

But actually I “evince a deeply cynical attitude” which can only be due to reading the ravings of self-aggrandising nutters.

“I see. So while shoot-down orders were in place the USAF did nothing, even though it had ample time to follow the orders, intercept the plane and shoot it down. Only once the orders were lifted did the USAF do anything, even though it was now required not to. You’d be better off pursuing the pizza theory.”

So much wrong with this. Where to start?

How much time did the USAF have between being told a particular plane was hijacked and that plane crashing? Very little.

The incident happened at about 10:30 but the object that was only ten miles out turned out to be a medevac helicopter. Mineta’s testimony seemed to refer to that even though he got his timeline wrong.

Shootdown orders hadn’t actually been given until all the planes had crashed.

I don’t know what the pizza theory you’re talking about is.

“As originally published there were not. The first lists were published, by the Washington Post and others, on Sept 12, before the FBI had released the names of the alleged hijackers. No Arab names were on the lists. A couple of days later, when the FBI had released the names, the same lists were in circulation but were renamed ‘victim lists’.”

So, you are saying the full passenger lists WERE published? Do you have a link for this?

“It stayed that way for several years, until the Moussoauri trial in 2007, when the FBI suddenly came up with new lists that included the alleged hijackers’ names. None of the lists in circulation appear to have come directly from the airlines. The 911 Commission did not ask for them as evidence.”

Usually flight manifests won’t be made public unless there are very compelling reasons to do so (The Moussaoui trial would be a good example). The 9/11 Commission may not have asked to see the passenger manifests in open session (perhaps, I don’t know, the commissioners would already have looked at them) because they weren’t assessing which people on the manifests were most likely to have carried out the hijackings. They already knew who was responsible. Others who testified such as Dick Clarke had already seen the manifests much earlier.

However, you are incorrect to say that the “new lists” (i.e the actual manifests) didn’t surface until 2007. Terry McDermott had been shown the mainfests by the FBI (you can trust the FBI because they are the ones skeptical of OBL’s involvement, apparently) and has a photograph of one of the manifests in his *2005* book, Perfect Soldiers. There’s a lot of information in that book about the hijackers (ever read it?)

“All this may or may not be significant. Without seeing the verifiable and original lists it’s impossible to say. I haven’t argued anything other than the above and am not sure which goalposts I’ve moved.”

You have moved the goalposts because in our first exchange you said:

“ICTS also provided security at all the airports from which the alleged 911 hijackers boarded the planes. Since none of them appeared on the passenger lists we must assume they managed to do this without tickets or boarding passes.”

And

“The passenger manifests of the 911 planes were released by AA and UA. None of the names of the alleged hijackers appears on them.”

(Earlier you said, “None of the lists in circulation appear to have come direct from the airlines” – a complete contradiction and a strange evidence-free assertion).

When I asked you for a link you provided me with a link to “What Really Happened” which then went to a CNN web address.

MJ: “The passenger lists were published by CNN but those links are now dead. The lists are however reproduced here:”

Here’s the address:

http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/victims/AA11.victims.html

The “victims” thing is a dead giveaway.

So, again, what we have is DRG labouring under the misconception that the CNN victims list was the flight manifest when actually those flight manifests were being held by investigators (presumably the FBI) who went through them to take off the names of the suspects. The lists without suspects were then published by MSM sources and clearly labelled “victims list”.

The actual flight manifests were probably first glimpsed by the general public when McDermott published Perfect Soldiers but not seen by very many until the trial of Moussaoui after which they officially entered the public domain.

You, on the other hand, stated as fact that the names DID NOT APPEAR on the manifests and later back-pedalled to say that as far as you were concerned the issue simply hasn’t been resolved.

“However, as, I think Richard Robinson or Clark suggested earlier, the state is likely to be only one of these outfits’ customers.”

Not me, I think. “likely” captures my attitude, though, as distinct from “is”.

What I mean is, the paradox. The more someone approaches misrepresentation as a serious professional business, the less one would expect to be able to prove it.

I can’t see that the existence of astroturf/propaganda operations is in doubt, nor that there are bodies looking to take advantage of such a market opportunity, or that funding can be shown (both commercial and governmental) for such generally/euphemistically-described purposes (this didn’t start with the internet, of course). But to ascribe any particular post to such, is in the nature of things (he goes recursive !) likely to be a matter of likelihood.

Another thing I can’t see is, that it makes much practical difference. The only thing to do about a time-wasting fuckwit is to not let them waste your time, whether their satisfaction in it comes from a wage or a chip on the shoulder.

Which is not to dispute the point Vronsky (I think ?) and yourself and others have made, that there could be interesting analyses to be done on the detailed nature of various posters’ fuckwittery, and I’d be interested to see hard results if anyone comes up with any. Though I can’t see how one could trust anything that starts from a situation like this, where we don’t even reliably know what individual is posting what.

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous bullshit

Or to take arms against a sea … *splosh*.

Knut the Great, he knew it.

“self-aggrandising nutters” Alan Campbell, whenever.

You’re really sounding more and more like the dear not-so departed, aren’t you, Alan? The aggression, the constant accusations of lunacy, the yelling of “Witch!” anytime there’s any criticism of imperialism. Predictable. But I’m glad you’re come out of your shell.

“I’m glad you’re come out of your shell”

He’s crabby ?

How would you describe yourself, alan campbell? If you want to insult me, by the way, last time I looked I was an anarcho-green-conservative-socialist-liberal-freetrade-fairtrade-libertarian. I think.

forgot to add “hedgehog”

“He’s crabby ?”

oiy’ leave my shell out of it :p

(still thinking) which would make me Alan Clarke. Oh dear. Perhaps I’ll just stick with the hedgehog.

Ah. Yes, I didn’t think of that. I apologise, sandcrab.

Ah, now I get it, technicolour, that’s why you’re ‘technicolour’, right?! Whereas, if you’d been ‘Eastmancolor’, you’d have been somewhat blue (in the Howlin’ Wolf/ Odetta, Smokestack Lightnin’, rather than the David Cameron/ Glasgow Rangers Football Club, sense). Of course, you’ve Anglicised ‘Technicolor’…

Alan Clark, the politician, you mean, not Allan Clarke, the lead singer of the Hollies? Now that is nightmarish. Yes, definitely, stick with hedgehoggery! Somehow, I hear Trevor Howard, that stalwart of the British feature film, striding around bearing a horsewhip and muttering, “Damned hedgehoggery!”

Suhayl

I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Judging by the pretentious sixth-form drivel you write (I read the reviews), I can assume Mossad got to your brain through the internet.

Alan, envy is a terrible thing.

That’s interesting, alan, because I read Boyd Tonkin’s review in the Independent, which picked out Joseph’s Box for a piece on the alternative Booker, and describes it as a “waywardly extravagant” novel “which drives us deep into the history and myths of Europe and south Asia alike”.

Honestly, how childish (in fact, most children are not so silly).

“How much time did the USAF have between being told a particular plane was hijacked and that plane crashing? Very little”.

In the case of AA77 about 40 minutes (picked up by radar heading toward Washington 8.59am, impact 9.37am). Quite a lot?

“The incident happened at about 10:30 but the object that was only ten miles out turned out to be a medevac helicopter”.

You’ve lost me.

“So, you are saying the full passenger lists WERE published? Do you have a link for this?”

I’m saying the first lists were published on Sept 12. I have no firm views as to their accuracy or completeness. I believe the Washington Post was among the first, not sure whether they’re still up.

“Terry McDermott…has a photograph of one of the manifests in his *2005* book, Perfect Soldiers”.

Golly. Must be genuine then. Am I the only person who’s curious where he got them from?

“”The passenger manifests of the 911 planes were released by AA and UA. None of the names of the alleged hijackers appears on them.”

(Earlier you said, “None of the lists in circulation appear to have come direct from the airlines” – a complete contradiction and a strange evidence-free assertion).”

Fair point. Certainly contradictory. I do give some credence to the Sept 12 lists because they were published so quickly and before names had been named. It’s hard to believe that they could have been put together in such a short time without input from the airlines. It remains the case however that the official manifests have never been published, or at least have not been explicitly cited as such.

You are correct however to show that I started discussing this subject in a loose and imprecise manner that did not do justice to all the facts and their implications.

“So, again, what we have is DRG labouring…”

Who or what is DRG? You mentioned that yesterday. Was it a poster on a thread I missed?

I was at first unhappy about 9/11 discussion being quarantined on another thread – it seemed like a surrender to the Sunsteiners – but from the irrelevant discussion appearing here it was clearly a good idea. I was careful on the 9/11 thread to include links to what I believed to be the most worrying evidence of US collusion in the attacks – this evidence is mostly in the realm of mathematics, engineering and physics.

The circumstancial evidence suggestive of collusion (i.e. mysterious coincidences, unlikely chances) is mostly refuted by angrysoba, apparently by reference to a check sheet of standard responses. Angrysoba is non-technical and therefore cannot or will not engage with the scientific evidence, but I believe that his other material at least has the merit of demonstrating that some ‘truther’ lines are weak and not worth following.

Anyway, to discuss 9/11 go to that thread. Assess the relative objectivity of the protagonists, and read the links. If you want to add anything, add it there. The topic is a red herring (deliberately?) here.

Vronsky: you’re right. Apologies (again).

angrysoba: let’s shift this over to the 911 thread.

well, have fun, it was a pleasure to read such an open minded webversation anyway.

For anyone needing a link to the 9/11 thread, here it is:

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/the_911_post.html

Richard Robinson said:

“How it works for him [Alfred, that is] to be so happy and all in a nice multicultural society thousands of miles away while preaching division and mutual paranoia to us is not clear to me, and very probably never will be. But, as with the previous iterations, it goes nowhere, makes no rational sense to me, and life’s too short for it.”

Sorry, Richard, I gave you an explanation, but I cannot give you an understanding.

But don’t worry, it takes all sorts to make a world. There are musicians in my family. They sometimes have trouble with explanations too. Something to do with being hyperemotional perhaps.

Ruth said,

“Obviously Larry has been reinvented as Alfred. It seems to me that the intelligence services are so afraid of Craig’s blog.”

Oh sure, I work for MI13, call me Larry, Alfred, whatever.

So, hey, Ruthie, when you’re in town, give me a call and I’ll take you for a spin in my Aston Martin. Then you can come up to my place and see my sketchings (of vacuum cleaner parts).

Just now I’m waiting for HQ to send out a cute secretary and a wireless operator, while I work at recruiting my network.

I just joined the yacht club, which means a coupla hundred thou on expenses for a decent boat. Then I’ll be able to get close the Admiral, a heart surgeon by trade, very social. He’ll certainly be an asset. He’s already promised to nominate me for the Golf Club ?” that’ll be another 25 grand on expenses for the entrance fee, plus beverages, of course. But it’ll be worth it. I’ll be able to check the bunkers for al Qaeda.

Actually, if anyone here’s an intelligence asset, it would make more sense to assume it is Craig:

“Say old boy, if you’re tired of dealing with that shit Karimov, why not consider a career change. You know your prospects in the FCO are limited ?” Egypt next, Pakistan or some other place where you can’t drink the water. At best, a posting to some dreary place like Ottawa or Canberra. You know Paris, Washington, the other top spots, are reserved for the toffs.

“But the security services are always in need of a good man. You could be the British Chomsky. They could fix you up as Rector at one of those Scottish Universities: hotbeds of separatism and Anglophobia ?” keep an eye on them. You could have a blog, write books, go on the lecture circuit, get close to the central Asian emigres, befriend them, like Chomsky with his Latin American leftie friends. Get to know their contacts, back home. Then shop ‘em.”

A more plausible scenario, don’t you think. And there you go Suhayl, good set ups for a thriller. The first one’s been taken by Graham Greene of course, but why not use the second?

It helps in understanding if you can make an explanation comprehensible, factual, logical and credible, Alfred. That’s basic. Are you bored? Because this is quite boring.

What do they play, Alfred? The musicians. Weirdly, I was just trying to post something over on the ‘Doune the Rabbit Hole’ thread about very old songs. One of the links was to Gaelic metrical psalms – shudderingly powerful and evocative – from the Isle of Lewis.

Thanks, Alfred, I’ll think about it – though I don’t tend to write espionage thrillers, it’s not my cup of tea – I do enjoy watching such films though, if they’re good.

Well, one kind of understanding, I should have said; the intellectual kind. Interesting that you are yourself, Alfred, aiming for emotional understanding(“they’re coming to get you! it’s genocide!”) and no-one here feels the same way. Nor are your facts logical or consistent enough to persuade them intellectually, it seems.

Never mind.

MJ said:

“Alfred is far too articulate to be Larry. “Zionist Troll” is Larry, plus a couple of anons.”

Thanks MJ for distinguishing me from Larry. No offense intended Larry, but I don’t wish to take responsibility for any nonsense but my own.

Suhayl said:

“Alfred is interesting, if oddly incongruous, often frustrating and somewhat elusive. And there’s the BNP thing. I’m not sure quite what he sees in this blog though… ”

Well, thanks for the “interesting” but why the “elusive.” I have been entirely upfront in what I have said about immigration, yet you and several others have jumped to the conclusion that because I share the opposition to mass immigration of the great majority of the British population I must be a racist, or a “racialist”, as you put it. There’s no rationality in this. It is precisely the offense of which Craig has accused Larry: namely, ” holding opinions which I do not in fact hold, and which [you] think will call my judgement [or moral integrity] into doubt.”

Alan Campbell said:

“Is it beyond your comprehension that there are lots of people in the world on the internet who have very different opinions to you? Get over yourselves. They’re not agents of the state. They just can’t stand your opinions and have the right to express their anger/differences/contempt.”

For me it’s the laughs that bring me back.

In fact this thread provides the only example I know of an empirical fact deducible by means of a syllogism:

Premise 1: A joke thread contains nothing but nonsense

Premise 2: Everything on this thread is nonsense.

Hence this is a joke thread.

Just the kind of thing ol’ Bertie Russell would have seen as a major breakthrough in epistemology. LOL.

(P.S. My apologies if anyone said anything sensible.)

‘Trolls are now being openly employed by governments in countries like the U.S. and Israel specifically to scour the internet for alternative news sites and disrupt their ability to share information.’

‘Trolls use a wide variety of strategies, some of which are unique to the internet, here are just a few:

1) Make outrageous comments designed to distract or frustrate…

2) Pose as a supporter of the truth, then make comments that discredit the movement: …..then post long, incoherent diatribes so as to appear either racist or insane.

3) Dominate Discussions: Trolls often interject themselves into productive web discussions in order to throw them off course and frustrate the people involved.

4) Prewritten Responses: Many trolls are supplied with a list or database with pre-planned talking points designed as generalized and deceptive responses to honest arguments. 9/11 “debunker” trolls are notorious for this.

5) False Association: ….For example: calling those against the Federal Reserve “conspiracy theorists” or “lunatics”. Deliberately associating anti-globalist movements with big foot or alien enthusiasts, because of the inherent negative connotations. Using false associations to provoke biases and dissuade people from examining the evidence objectively.

6) False Moderation: Pretending to be the “voice of reason” in an argument with obvious and defined sides in an attempt to move people away from what is clearly true into a “grey area” where the truth becomes “relative.”

7) Straw Man Arguments: A very common technique. The troll will accuse his opposition of subscribing to a certain point of view, even if he does not, and then attacks that point of view. Or, the troll will put words in the mouth of his opposition, and then rebut those specific words. For example: “9/11 truthers say that no planes hit the WTC towers, and that it was all just computer animation. What are they, crazy?”‘

“But don’t worry, it takes all sorts to make a world. There are musicians in my family. They sometimes have trouble with explanations too. Something to do with being hyperemotional perhaps.”

[tries to keep a straight face] Your family tends towards getting hyperemotional ?

Ah, the cackling of the gremlins.

The Uncertainty of the Poet

I am a poet.

I am very fond of bananas.

I am bananas.

I am very fond of a poet.

I am a poet of bananas.

I am very fond.

A fond poet of ‘I am, I am’-

Very bananas.

Fond of ‘Am I bananas?

Am I?’-a very poet.

Bananas of a poet!

Am I fond? Am I very?

Poet bananas! I am.

I am fond of a ‘very.’

I am of very fond bananas.

Am I a poet?

technicolour – “Poet bananas!”

I like that ! Neat piece of work.

not me! Wendy Cope.

Richard Robinson said:

“[tries to keep a straight face] Your family tends towards getting hyperemotional ?”

Yes, what you might call musical. You know, they play with expression – like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB76jxBq_gQ

Not like Derek Paravicini. A genius obviously: if you gave him the date he could probably calculate in a second the day of the week when Caesar crossed the Rubicon. But when he plays, where’s the tone colour, touch, rubato, etc.?

I’ll give you the link in the next post, since two links in one post chokes the software.

Here’s Derek (see above):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhdGNSGjQSU

Angrysoba said:

“Oh dear! Prof. David Ray Grifffin is now cited as an expert on cell phone and voice-morphing technology.”

Angry, the self-confessed “footsoldier for the 9/11 lies movement” (I’m not kidding, see his website masthead), a useful member of the Craig Murray bodyguard of liars.

Ruth, could you please post the link to that piece from which you’ve quoted; I’ve read some things like it, but not entirely the same text, so it’d be interesting to read the whole. Thanks very much.

Alfred, yeah, I know, it’s the jokes. I actually respect your integrity (even if I find your ideas… ‘perplexing’ would have been a better word than ‘elusive’… as a totality). The fact that we (or indeed many others, on all sides) disagree on this or that has never been a problem for me – so, once again, Mr Campbell is entirely inaccurate. You are, of course, the antithesis of ‘troll’.

Technicolour, I am not a banana, I am a pineapple. A pineapple I am…

And here’s one more thing before everyone goes off to discuss mango juice:

Avatar Singh said:

“massive tranfer of money has happend in last 30 years from third world improvished by uk sponsored nealiberalism and ,money briought o uk and cayman island alls tolen money -uk is living off the money of the third world today. itis a protaction racket that is what uk is living off and calls it service industry.”

Av, I gotta to ask, do you type exclusively with your thumbs or did you spill coffee over your keyboard?

Av is another of Craig’s Anglophobic race warriors. He accuses the English of destroying India, Pakistan, Bangla Desh, etc., etc. Actually, of course, there were no such countries until the British (a) created them, and (b) made them independent states.

He rants about the UK living off the wealth of the third world. And be it noted that neither Suhalyl nor Techie have anything negative to say about such hate speech. Suhayl explicitly endorses much of it.

But here are some facts. The Indian sub-continent is more than a dozen times the size of the UK, it is vastly more fertile, it is more than thirty times as populous. The wealthiest citizens of India are wealthier than anyone in Britain. The wealthiest 60 million Indians have more wealth than all the British put together. Oh, and India has nukes, plus a space program, whereas the Brits never even put a ballistic missile into production.

So who’s really threatened here and by whom?

I knew that would be the response, which is one of the reasons I called avatar singh’s post “the other side of the same coin”. The English this, the English that. Whereas, in reality, whether it’s the Duke of Westminster of the (Dukes of Steel) Mittals and (Dukes of Everything) Tatas and whatever, it is transnational corporate capitalism this, transnational corporate capitalism that… Why does everything have to be tribalised? Ah well, what can one do?

Not many people are like Alfred, you know. Always a good thing to remember after spending a bit of time on this board.

“not me! Wendy Cope.”

Well, thanks for passing it on. I hadn’t known of her.

“…have anything negative to say”.

Truth is, Alfred, you completely ignored what I wrote about it, just as you did last time around on the same roundabout.

was a contender for the Poet Laureate and it would have been good if she’d got it, I think; except for the fact that it’s not her style.

Suhayl,

Here’s the link:

http://thecurrentaffairs.com/disinformation-tactics-the-methods-used-to-keep-you-in-the-dark.html

Avatar Singh from what I’ve seen there has been a

“massive tranfer of money has happend in last 30 years from third world improvished by uk sponsored nealiberalism and ,money briought o uk and cayman island alls tolen money -uk is living off the money of the third world today. itis a protaction racket that is what uk is living off and calls it service industry.”

Has the intelligence services with the remit to protect the economic security of the UK taken the idea way beyond legality and indulged in massive frauds laundering the funds into a vast web of companies with links all over the place?

Does the government within the government or the hard state run a shadow economy milking the UK economy to finance it? I think it does.

“So who’s really threatened here and by whom?”

If you don’t like it when people suggest your comments tend towards xenophic paranoia, try not asking questions like that.

Alfred,

you wrote “The Indian sub-continent is [...] more than thirty times as populous [as the UK ...]. The wealthiest 60 million Indians have more wealth than all the British put together.

So, you’ve chosen a sample of the richest members of a large group, equal in number to the entire population of a much smaller group, and summed each group’s wealth.

Assuming similar wealth distributions in both groups, the Indian subcontinent would have to be a fraction as wealthy as Britain for its top 60 million to turn out to have less wealth than the entire British population.

You’re a scientist. Was this a mistake?

sduhayl this mittal or uneelcted manmoahn singh the traitor is as much an anthema to me as any british petroleum but fact is that neoliberalism was started by thatcher at a time when england shoudl ahve gone bankrupt as it was producing nothing but it changed the tack and exploited japnese through propaganda to bring factories to uk and thus destroy japan and it has always acted as parasite on the rest of the world. that neoliberalism was a means to keep englsnd not bankrupt through manipulation of stolen money brought to LOndon and cayman islands.

” The modus operandi of Britain is to make country and regions unstable and install british stooge with explicit instruction to bring the money -looted ones -to Britain from where it is not going to go anywhere else.

Some oligarch Jews (like thee criminal U.K.-based fugitive oligarch Boris Berezovsky)

were the stooge of British in Russia and they brought so many ill gotten money to uk. So did the Kuwaitis-who brought 4 billions of pounds within a week of first Iraq war problem in august 1990 -so has continued the massive loot of the rest of the world by the English .race through this money protection racket . It is money protection racket in the sense that those eliete’s money is protected only when it is made to be lodged in British London banks. The witness, who appeared on the Rossiya channel with his face hidden and was referred to as Pyotr, accused 61-year-old Berezovsky of killing Alexander Litvinenko because the former security officer knew how the exiled tycoon had obtained political asylum in Britain in 2003. This thief boris berezosvky is a terrorist as well who calls for violet end to Putin-the president who is one of the most loved of his countrymen compared to any in the world.

As someone said “We live in a world where criminals are good guys and patriots are villains: where Berezovsky is a liberal “human rights” activist and Putin is a moral monster.” that putin who is one of the most popular leader of any in the world.

In fact Britain is running a protection racket in the world through the help of american army-(because Britain is a third rate country with fourth rate army so it cannot do it on its own).

What Britain does is let the other countries be made instable (Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan etc) then let the british stooge be installed there-those people who have no following in own country and with strict instruction to those stooges that they will bring the money to britan,-that is how London has enriched itself in last 15 years after fall of soviet union. Billions of soviet money have flown illegally to London and the british court -kangaroo court if ever there was any -have not let the money go citing “it will harm england’s balance of payment”?

That is why british media gets incensed if the traitors like soviet spies are not left safe in Britain -because then the whole business of protection money racket and money that Britain gets is in jeopardy. That is what explains influx of foreign money to London and how London has overtaken new York in stock market. Forget about service industry -british are the most ill mannered race what service can they provide except protection racket on back of american arms? Britain is looting even usa. Through it is usa which has worked hard (through illegal invasions ) to make other countries unstable so that Britain can get money from protection of stooge elites of those countries..

the modus operandi of Britain is to make country and regions unstable and install british stooge with explicit instruction to bring the money -looted ones -to Britain from where it is not going to go anywhere else.

Some oligarch jews were the stooge of British in Russia and they brought so many ill gotten money to uk. So did the Kuwaitis-who brought 4 billions of pounds within a week of first Iraq war problem in august 1990 -so has continued the massive loot of the rest of the world by the English race through this money protection racket . it is money protection racket in the sense that those elite’s money is protected only when it is made to be lodged in British London banks.

”

This is how the british and Americans now conduct their battle for “hearts and minds” ?” by making local satraps so widely and deeply despised that they are totally dependent on their Washington overlords for their sheer physical survival. The real “benchmark” the Iraqis have to display to the Americans’ satisfaction is an infinite capacity for obedience.”

“In the aftermath of President Abraham Lincoln’s defeat of the London-backed slave-holders’ Confederate insurrection, the London-linked New York faction of U.S. finance unleashed a predatory looting of the physical assets of the territory formerly ruled by the defeated Confederacy. That operation, which was described then as “carpet bagging,” is a term that pointed to the style of the personal baggage, in which the travelling, locust-like predators carried their personal effects.”

A very famous news mogul-Mr.R. Hearst (Jewish proprietor of Hearst news group))- had been stopped from running for american presidency in 1916 because he might not have been inclined to rescue england in the 1st world war. Anyway, the southern constituency was pressing hard for america to come to rescue england who was staring defeat and thus loosing the prospect of enslaved nations who would have been feed from defeat of england. America did come to aid of england and it was called end of isolationalism. But this end of isolationalism would be tolerated only when it suits english interest against others and not in case of others like freedom for Irish people in northern Ireland (an occupied part of Ireland).and that British agent Wilson intervened on side of Britain in name of spreading democracy at point of gun! Woodrow Wilson was re-elected in 1916 on a promise to stay out of the Great War.

Think of that-Britain was looting two third of the world at the time and killing starving millions of people-and this Wilson comes to Britain rescue in name of protecting democracy! And that is exactly what these bastards mean when they utter democracy-that is a code word for them to attack other countries for furtherance of british interest. Then if two millions Iraqi are killed -starved -it is price worth paying. Somebody can legitimately ask than what to do with 60 millions English people and then it would be worth the price to save the world from English rapacity.

“The First World War was by far the bloodiest conflict in human history up to that time. Schwartz and Skinner noted, “Woodrow Wilson proclaimed a war for democracy against ‘Prussian dictatorship,’ but that was propaganda. Germany had civil rights, an elected parliament, competing parties, universal male suffrage, and an unparalleled system of social democracy.” Germany was far more democratic than either the British or French empire.”

An Anglophile to the core, ku kulx klan stooge Wilson didn’t care about the fate of the Russians. His concern was in keeping German forces split along two fronts. The payoff worked: Russia’s provisional prime minister Aleksandr Kerensky kept the Russians involved in the war.

In 1916, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected to the presidency chiefly on the strength of a slogan: “He kept us out of war.” By 1917, the peacenik prez was leading the charge against Germany, jailing antiwar activists, and exhorting Americans to fight a “war to end all wars.” In 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the voters: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Behind the scenes, however, he was maneuvering to do just that ?” and by the end of 1941, we were fighting a two-front war, embracing “Uncle” Joe Stalin as a fellow “anti-fascist,” and planning the internment of the Japanese-American population.

” When this English edition of Professor Stanislav Menshikov’s book has been printed, Russia’s President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin will have delivered his landmark May 10, 2006 “state of the union” address. The President’s address will have marked the probable close of what had been the demographically murderous, greatest carpetbagging swindle in history. The carpetbagging which Professor Menshikov’s book describes, is the post-1989 looting of the territory of the former Soviet Union, a looting that, in fact, has also been the predatory ruin of most of the East European territory of the Comecon outside Russia then and now.”-

alfred nobody will want to come to your wet windy rathchet island belive me they come only because england has destroyed other economy and for last 50 years it ios doing through another mechanism called leibralisation and gloablisation which enriches rife w elites to ploot the masses then theat elite is asked to come to uk to bring money.

half of all london sells of houses is to forenners thsoe foreiners who come form poor country-why does your countrynot invistigate where the money comes fromause uk knows that it is stolen money after all where willt he british atooge in afgansitan or iraq will bring money to_ofocurse to uk-that is why people with stolen money get immediate citizenshuip in your wet cold country.

STOP OKING NOSE INTO OTHER COUNTRYAND THEN WILL NEVER COME TO SEE YOUR COLD WINDY COUNTRY.

suhayl i write about anglosaxon for the simple reason that the French use that term to denoate particualr of enlgish men and their attitude and diffenetiate betwene not only welsh and scots from english peopel but also all straind of english peopel from a type which dominates the english pysche which is one of anglosaxon. jsut klike usa is not full of anglosaxon -majority are nonanglosaxon-but the main discourse there runs with anglosaxon attitude and not say iraish or italain attitude or jewish attitue the same way in english history itis anglosaxon way which has bene predominant except during early phase of norhtman attack after 1066. the masses of enlgish think of themsleves as anglosaxon and have hcanchrterstic of that mixture.

jsut liek majority of bnorth indians have aryan chahractherstic -that does nto mean in racial genetic way but in cultural and philosphical way. there is a anglosaoxn way of thinking jsut liek ther eis a scots way or german or celtic way of thinking.

that is what i mean and i donto groups that in genetically racial way becaus I know nobody of health is of pure race.

for me i associate more with poor or average spanish or gemran anr evenenglish man rather than expalotative idnia n of manmoahn singh variety

now i will not reply to the thread unless very compelled because itis really waste of my time and such trolls like alfred are not worth bothering about .

Ruth asks:

“Has the intelligence services with the remit to protect the economic security of the UK taken the idea way beyond legality and indulged in massive frauds laundering the funds into a vast web of companies with links all over the place?”

Well has it or not? Anyone can postulate anything, but what is the point if you have neither an answer or even a suggestion of how you might come up with an answer?

Clark wrote:

“You wrote “The Indian sub-continent is [...] more than thirty times as populous [as the UK ...]. The wealthiest 60 million Indians have more wealth than all the British put together.

So, you’ve chosen a sample of the richest members of a large group, equal in number to the entire population of a much smaller group, and summed each group’s wealth.”

Yes, obviously, but so what? What I said was true and entirely clear. I concealed nothing and sought to deceive no one. My point was that India is vastly richer than Britain in natural resources, in human resources and in capital resources.

Avatar (Thumbs) Singh writes

“neoliberalism was started by thatcher at a time when england shoudl ahve gone bankrupt as it was producing nothing but it changed the tack and exploited japnese through propaganda to bring factories to uk and thus destroy japan and it has always acted as parasite on the rest of the world …”

Well that’s interesting. If Margaret Thatcher saved England from bankruptcy and presumably thus saved the population from widespread starvation by inventing neoliberalism, I will think more kindly of her in the future.

Saying that Britain produced nothing in 1979, is simply silly. Manufacturing output in the UK then accounted for about 16% of GDP, as today. During Margaret Thatcher’s term in office manufacturing investment was virtually zero and manufacturing output was stagnant or declining.

As for exploiting Japan through propaganda, nuts. Britain simply invited the Japanses auto companies to build plants in the UK, as they have done in Canada, the US and throughout the World. This was a business arrangement the Japanese car companies must have expected would be profitable. As far as I know it was. This is not exploitation, it’s just business. The only thing exploited was the inability of the management of British car companies to produce reliable cars efficiently. As a result the profits of manufacturing went to Japan rather than staying in Britain.

It is in way embarrassing to find myself commenting on this nonsense. This, for example.

“In fact Britain is running a protection racket in the world through the help of american army-(because Britain is a third rate country with fourth rate army so it cannot do it on its own). …”

“Cannot do it on it[s] own.” Exactly. And you think some other country is going to waste their resources to make Britain rich?

Oh, and Willian Randold Hearst was not a Jew. He was a pro-Nazi anti-Semite.

I’ll leave the rest of the Avatar’s theses to be parsed by Craig Murray’s stalwart band of gatekeepers.

The purpose of this thread was to discuss banning Larry. It has become obvious, however, that the question is inconsequential. The level of debate, the gang attacks against anyone who goes against the fundamentally anglophobic line of the blog, makes this a place where few knowledgeable people would wish to contribute. If Craig Murray does not recognize this as a problem, then the case is hopeless. Might as well ask Larry to moderate the site, as anything — it could n’t be more damaging to the reputation of someone formerly entrusted to represent the UK abroad. Alternatively, future threads should stick with safe subjects such as fruit juice.

Avatar Singh, that massive bloc of conspiracism looks like it has been copied and pasted from the brain of Lyndon Larouche!

You may be happy to know (you’ve probably already been informed by the mailing list, though) that those fruitloops have successfully infiltrated the Democratic Party once again.

http://www.kesharogers.com

—–”You’re a scientist. Was this a mistake?”——-

I very much doubt it; he simply pulled the figure out of his ‘arse. The GDP of the UK was nearly double the GDP of the whole of India in 2008.

——”makes this a place where few knowledgeable people would wish to contribute”——–

Well you’re doing your best to prove that true.

—–”future threads should stick with safe subjects such as fruit juice.”—–

Even if they do we can count on cranks like you to come along and derail them.

Angrysoba, thanks for that info on the LaRouche Democrat. Shocking, but more shocking that the media has left it untouched.

Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right …

I know you think that Craig Murray has some sort of impeccable human rights record – at least with respect to his time as an Ambassador. But it’s quite obvious to me that he bends the world to fit into his preconceived notions, and I doubt his ability to assess evidence.

The one thing that took the cake for me is his belief that a preponderance of students at the University of Michigan believe that the invasion of Iraq was a manifestation of end-times Christianity. I spent three years there – and I’m otherwise from the Midwest. I can assure you that I never met anyone with such silly goose beliefs, and that anyone like that tends not to be able to shut up about it, and that anyone like that in Ann Arbor would tend to be shunned and thereafter adjust his or her worldview. Ann Arbor is not exactly a hotbed of liberalism, but it’s not remotely a hotbed of apocalyptic Christianity. I never met a Christian there, and I have a particular sensitivity to such conversations.

Nonetheless Craig Murray relies on the wrong source to come to the wrong conclusion that Ann Arbor is full of students who believe that Jesus saves. For whatever reason, he simply wants to believe that.

Stephen Jones said:

“…he simply pulled the figure out of his ‘arse. The GDP of the UK was nearly double the GDP of the whole of India in 2008.”

Not according to the CIA Factbook.

India GDP World rank 5: $3.69 trillion

UK GDP World rank 7: $2.149 trillion

http://tiny.cc/bnvro

Does no one here know how to check facts?

Clark,

Re: Assuming similar wealth distributions in both groups, the Indian subcontinent would have to be a fraction as wealthy as Britain for its top 60 million to turn out to have less wealth than the entire British population.

You’re a scientist. Was this a mistake?

Not a mistake just hype, I expect. I read it somewhere but cannot verify it on the Web. But income distribution in India is certainly different from in Britain, since 35% live on a dollar a day, which would not support life in Britain.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6257057.stm

What is correct is that India’s GDP on a purchasing power parity basis is much larger than Britain’s, This suggests that India’s capital resources are larger than Britain’s, since otherwise one would have to infer that the Indians get a better return on capital that the Brits, which seems unlikely.

But, yes, you raise a good point.

Avatar Singh,

your point about rich criminals being welcomed into Britain reminds me of the “special treatment” that was (sorry, is) extended to Alisher Usmanov.

Alfred,

I’m glad you can see the problem with that statistic, and I hope you’ll be examine sources a bit more critically in future.

“CIA Factbook”- this made me laugh. I can’t think of another organisation more dedicated to warping facts. Not that I’m contesting the figures, they may well be right, it’s just the concept of the CIA publishing a “Factbook”. I take it the “Liesbook” is classified!

another fake Larry – Alfred, by the sounds of it. So cheeky, Alfred. And to comaplin about other people derailing the thread! Tell us about the genocide in Leicester again? Actually, no, don’t.

Technicolour,

I think that is the “real” Larry. His true agenda is becoming clear, though he has little chance of advancing it with such thin gruel.

Mmm. I don’t think ‘our’ Larry would have ever written anything like “I have a particular sensitivity to such conversations”. Or actually, any of the other words he uses – thereafter, nonetheless etc (though I note ‘silly goose’ is thrown in as a sop). I’d bet you a fiver, Clark

What do you think? Rain today?

Still, you could be right. Point quite interesting, which makes it annoying.

If there is a ‘gang’ hereabouts, it’s the ‘gang’ which prefers to attack all aspects of Craig Murray’s provenance and activism and which attempts constantly to imply that only extreme views are posted here and that everyone who posts here has extreme views. That is patently untrue.

Many of us, it seems to me, attempt to view matters in a balanced way, yet for our pains we still are termed ‘lunatics and extremists’. It strikes me that this is a tactic and that those deploying it are not interested, really, in engaging in debate but simply in hyperbole and damning by association.

This thread is about trolling, and so, whereas normally discussing the matter it might be considered pandering to distraction, all of this discussion about their methods is very relevant.

Thank you, Ruth and Vronsky, for providing excellent links on the subject.

I note that as soon as a lot of people had announced their support for Craig Murray’s attempted (not very successful) ban on specific trolls, there seems to have been a concerted effort to:

a) Diminish everything about Craig Murray. Attempt to imply that he is incompetant and possibly even insane.

b) Re-introduce the subject of the attacks on the USA which occurred in late 2001. This is precisely one of the the reasons Craig gave in his post for attempting to ban ‘Larry’ – who I see now is back under the original moniker.

c) And Alfred, you re-introduce your own, personal hobby-horse, yet again; this seems to be a merry-g-round of disruption; and you fling around figures and assertions, many of which you then find unable to back-up, the point, it seems to me, being simply to fling them around – rather like the MSM does – and then possibly retract it, quietly, sometime later. But of course, the impact has been made by the initial assertion. You also repeatedly attempt to ‘tar’ people with the same ‘extremist’ brush, regardless of what they write and regardless of the fact that they spend time on these boards challenging those to seek to essentialise every dynamic in the world, challenging anti-Semitism, anti-Englishness, and yes, challenging imperialism. Then, when someone points out something about your ideas, you act the victim and become angry.

It’s very clear that this is what is happening. And it’s no surprise at all.

avatar singh; as Suhay’s pointed out; if you’re rich enough the world’s your oyster. Doesn’t matter what your nationality is. Don’t think the UK differs from anywhere else in that.

Furthermore, Alfred, while paying lip-service to the banning of ‘Larry’, the entire thrust of your argumentation seems geared towards the opposite – with the exception, of course, of your seeming absolute ‘scientific’ certainty regarding the attacks on the USA of late 2001. Two sides of the same coin, again.

You – and I, and most others – have been able to say anything you wanted to say on this blog. Yes, you have been challenged, and will continue to be challenged, on certain matters – as have we all – that is what debate is all about. Yet still you protest ‘censorship’, when the agenda of ‘Larry’ et al clearly has always been provocation, disruption of discourse and character assassination of Craig Murray, rather than debate. Why defend those who pursue such agendas?

although, avatar singh, you’re quite right about the UK providing a home for stolen money & gangsters.I guess they want to live here because it’s relatively safe and has some kind of international cachet (chokes).

“The book ends on a predictably darker note, with a trail of dead and extensive legal action. The

moreAlfred – “Britain simply invited the Japanses auto companies to build plants in the UK, as they have done in Canada, the US and throughout the World. This was a business arrangement the Japanese car companies must have expected would be profitable”

A more successful culture from the other side of the world outcompeting our quaint indigenous practices, in our own homeland ? That’ll do nicely, Sir.

If Thatcher “bought into the NuLabor inspired program of ethnic cleansing”, all is indeed lost. Up to and including the sanity of anybody who tries to think about any of this.

I was wondering the other day if Goebels believed his own propaganda; or whether he was rubbing his hands together chortling “It’s amazing! They’re swallowing it!”

Alfred,

If you aren’t an intelligence service operative, what are you?

“If you aren’t an intelligence service operative, what are you?”

Ruth, I have never seen him round NWO HQ, so don’t worry.

Ruth, he’s someone who wants to persuade you that genocide is happening in Leicester! On another thread there’s someone who wants to persuade you that ‘it’ is all the fault of ‘FemiNazis’. Perfectly normal.

I mean, otherwise MI5 et al would surely have to rename themselves the “misleading facts, spurious accusations, and outbursts of random anger” services…

“If you aren’t an intelligence service operative, what are you?”

A missionary, I think. He sees the light and must preach it to the heathen.

There are many lights, including ignis fatuus and the oncoming train.

I must say, I’m touched by this faith in human nature. The idea that nobody could emit idiocy unless they were paid for it makes me feel all young again.

And *that* brings me back to the underlying damage that Larry does … hoping I don’t need to expand on that.

never knew that name for will o the whisp, thanks, Richard. Now remembering Kenneth Williams, fondly.

Yes, missionaries. Very easy to attach yourself to a single cause, obviously. Have been tempted to go for the fiduciary duty on corporations myself, but it’s not quite so exciting as shouting ‘genocide!’.

and, of course, shouting ‘genocide’ and trying to turn nationality against nationality is not precisely a cause. Or if it, is, a rather black one. “Hans, we are wearing black and have little skulls and crossbones on our caps. Has it ever occurred to you we might be on the wrong side?”

“the “misleading facts, spurious accusations, and outbursts of random anger” services…”

The Ministry of Silly Talks ?

Expect a tirade, anytime soon.

Yeah, Leicester seems like quite a harmonious place, compared to some. So does the Isle of Lewis, to where my publisher has re-located. Although I hear from friends there that Stornoway can have its moments…

Barra is a lovely island, wonderful beaches. The Atlantic rolls in, its undertow strong enough to pull a house down fathoms. But the inland-facing coast is tranquil, with lilting, turquoise waters.

There is an almost constant, low-grade wind which makes the roads actually quite dangerous for pedestrians. Because normally, you hear cars coming behind you before you see them and if you can’t hear them…

I met a film director in Leicester once. He was aged, and had directed some key social realist – but also musical and evocative – films of the 1930s and 1940s in India/ Pakistan. He’d introduced actors and actresses who’d later become enormously famous stars. But partly due to political factors and partly, the crass decay of the film industry in Pakistan, he was frustrated that his work largely seemed to have been forgotten, studied by film students and known to those working in the film world, but not more widely, except to those of his own age-group.

Zia Sarhadi was his name. There’s material on YouTube if you want to check it out. He died a couple of years later (late-1990s). ‘Hum Loag’ (‘We People’), 1951 was one of his key films. ‘Nadan’ was another. ‘Footpath’, another. He was also a lyricist and wrote songs for Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle and many others.

I talked with him about all this while we were sitting in a new shopping-mall in Leicester, watching the escalators slide up and down, up and down, everything shiny, reflective. He was the oldest entity in the mall.

I say all this to illustrate that there are many narratives and many histories which overlap and are intertwined in very profound ways. Rather than erect barriers and constantly try to seek fissures and divisions, it is better sometimes to listen to the wind and to the songs of old men.

Say goodnight to the folks, Gracie.

Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you ?

I find it either sad, or funny (can’t decide) that alan campbell for example, deigns to pop in and leave one line comments on a blog full of nutters. Perhaps, it occurred to me, he & Alfred just want attention?

Go ahead, alan, say a bit about yourself. Share with us!

Lads, I’d love to be able to join you in your splendid conspiraloon isolation. It would make the world seem a much simpler place and help me feel so much more significant and self-important, but no thanks.

PS what happened to those troubling late night phone-calls from Mossad?

“Lads, I’d love to be able to join you in your splendid conspiraloon isolation. It would make the world seem a much simpler place and help me feel so much more significant and self-important, but no thanks.”

Well, no-one’s forcing you to make these posts, are they, if you really don’t feel you have anything to say ?

Good point.

——”Not that I’m contesting the figures, they may well be right, it’s just the concept of the CIA publishing a “Factbook”.”——-

It’s an absolutely excellent source of information. You shouldn’t let your prejudices run away with you.

Here’s an interesting post from Postman Patel about trolling, Scotland Yard and

Dame Neville-Jones:

‘Race Riot in Whitehall 14/7/07 – nicely cooking

Odins girl88 on her(?) curious website “Idid it for the lulz” http://odinsgirl88.blogspot.com/ on Friday, 1 June 2007 points to two very curious videos posted by SalafiUK who registered as a You Tube contributor on 29th May. (“I did it for the lulz”. This usually refers to deliberate trolling behavior intended to harass Internet users for the amusement of others….said to derive from the much used acronym LOL for “laugh out loud” – hence “lulz” has the triumphant cry of the schadenfreudist, revelling in the misfortune of others.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=nFnR6bUGCvo

Upon which she comments :

“Some enterprising muslim has bodged up a video to advertise the forthcoming “Muslims against British Oppression” march aka “Please don’t lock us up for having child porn and bomb making equipment” march…..Please flag it and report as hate speech. Thanks.”

To the casual viewer this decently made short video might be seen as a short direct call to action for the “Muslims Rise Against British Oppression Demonstration”: Outside 10 Downing St Fri 15th June 2.30pm – 5pm

There is also another video from the same mysterious source.

If these fillums represent the propaganda of the Muslim jihad then my name’s Osama Bin Laden.

Quite whose propaganda they DO represent and quite why jihadist watchers like odins gal 88 spot them so quickly … well the Sphincter of the Yard may have more information…maybe even the Lady Dame Jane Patricia Neville Jones Fan Club at the RUSI – who are incidentally well placed just off Whitehall to watch it all go down.

—–”I read it somewhere but cannot verify it on the Web.”——

Yea, you’d have to Google “GDP India” or “GDP UK”.

The figures you are giving from the CIA factbook are PPP figures. The nominal figures are here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29

PPP figures are useful when making a linear comparison in a country’s GDP over the years since exchange rate fluctuations wouldn’t completely distort the figure if the PPP was altered every year.

They are misleading for nearly everything else, as the basket of goods and services is skewed towards one particular spending profile (and is very much biased to inflate countries that have cheap services).

——”What is correct is that India’s GDP on a purchasing power parity basis is much larger than Britain’s, This suggests that India’s capital resources are larger than Britain’s, since otherwise one would have to infer that the Indians get a better return on capital that the Brits, which seems unlikely.”——-

You’ve absolutely no idea what PPP is. What has the cost of a haircut or a loaf of bread got to do with return on capital?

Stephen Jones,

thanks for the clarification; it seemed odd that you defended the CIA Factbook figures when they apparently contradicted the figures you quoted yourself.

Like I said, I don’t assume that the CIA Factbook is misleading; the concept just made me laugh. Y’know, they’re usually quite keen on covering stuff up…

SIXTY MILLION INDIANS WEALTHIER THAN THE ENTIRE POPULATION OF BRITAIN

Clark,

On reflection, it seems likely that the above statement is correct, give or take a few billion.

Last night I was distracted by discussion of GDP numbers. But wealth and income are entirely different things and do not have the same relationship with one another in different economies.

The BBC document I linked to last night

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6257057.stm

asserts that India’s wealthiest 5%, or around sixty million people, own 38% of the nation’s wealth. For that 38% of national wealth to exceed the aggregate wealth of all Britons, India’s total wealth would have to be at least 2.6 times that of Britain, which seems entirely reasonable.

Much of the wealth of India, as of any country, consists in land and buildings. India is ten times the size of the UK and likely has at least ten times as many buildings. That difference alone, would probably mean a several-fold difference in total wealth. But actual numbers are hard to come by and probably don’t mean much anyway.

That India’s total wealth relative to Britain’s is much greater than its GDP relative to Britain’s would not be surprising. A greater proportion of wealth in Britain than in India is in the form of financial assets (stocks and shares held directly, or indirectly through insurance policies or retirement funds). Such assets yield a higher return (i.e., contribute more to GDP) than land and buildings, which are likely the predominant component of wealth in India. The reason is that all financial assets are supposed to yield income, whereas if I own a house and live in it, I have wealth but derive no income from it. Equally, if I have a small landholding and live off the produce, I have wealth but no income that is recorded in GDP statistics.

So I stick with the assertion that India is very much wealthier than Britain in natural resources, human resources and capital.

As for your admonition to check my facts more carefully, I would say that I always do try to check my facts. I suppose I can try to try harder.

But yes, I make mistakes. What is life but an unending struggle to correct mistakes? At least I try to acknowledge mistakes when I find them.

Ruth,

I guess I should be flattered that you think I in intelligence. It sort of implies I must be sort of really intelligent.

However, such speculation is futile without evidence.

Unfortunately, my old school buddy Postman Patel is no longer around to vouch for the fact that I am not really that intelligent at all.

However, he did post this prescient article about Iraq on my web site before the Shock and Awe began.

http://canadianspectator.ca/stuff/beekeepers.html

So unless you think Edward was working with the intelligence community, your thesis seems highly questionable.

Technicolour,

you’re on, though it’ll have to be a virtual fiver, as we’re unlikely to get confirmation one way or the other.

Rain tomorrow, in the South-East, methinks. I certainly hope so, it’s been dry for too long. Raincoats and dark glasses all week for some, though, as Suhayl will confirm!

Alfred,

exactly. India is much bigger and more populous, so you’d expect it to have more wealth. But you can do the same thing with random numbers.

Generate 60 million random numbers (between 0 and 100, say), and add them all together, call the result “A”.

Now, generate 30 times 60 million random numbers (using the same random number generator, 0 to 100). Pick the 60 million *highest numbers* from this second set and add them all together; call this “B”.

“B” is very nearly certainly much bigger than “A”.

*This* is what you should have spotted; nothing to do with wealth or GDP or buildings, just pure statistics.

Tedious and obvious as this is, I suppose someone should point it out.

If India is about 2.6 times as wealthy as Britain, but has over 30 times the population, Indians on average are much poorer than Britons. If we use GDP the situation for Indians is much worse.

But we all knew that anyway.

thanks clark for facts & fiver!

Here Alfred is the source of the figures the BBC gives in its link:

http://economics.uwo.ca/faculty/davies/workingpapers/thelevelanddistribution.pdf

Be aware it’s a 56-page .pdf.

If you go to pages 51 to 52 you’ll see figures for World Wealth for all countries in the survey. Using official exchange rates (which is what the survey recommends you use when dealing with the high percentiles of income distribution) you’ll find that India has 0.91% of the world’s wealth, and the UK 5.94%. Using PPP figures the UK still comes out ahead, with 4.71% to India’s 4.14%

Technicolour,

you haven’t won the fiver yet. It remains in a state of quantum superposition pending inspection of Craig’s server logs, at the minimum.

In any case, for most of history India (or the area which is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) was wealthier than Britain.

When envoys from the Court of James I (VI of Scotland) visited Jahangir’s Court, there was no doubt which was the more advanced civilisation.

It was only really from the time of the Industrial Revolution, which, of course started in Britain, that the relative wealth shifted. Same with China. Of course the gradual colonisation of India – which in Britain accompanied and paralleled the Industrial Revolution and accelerated after the loss of the American colonies – was a double-edged sword. India (and I mean India, not the other two) is only now recovering to a position where it can claim once again to be a real power. That’s not all Britains’s ‘fault’, of course, but colonisation definitely played a major part in it.

Same but also very different, with China.

Overall, taking the long view, maritime imperial colonisation was probably not good for India. But it happened, it’s over and we – whether in Britain or India, Pakistan, Bangladesh – and the world we inhabit are all part of the result.

Romila Thapar is a good start – and much more – on the history of India.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romila_Thapar

Stephen,

Thanks for pointing out the link within the link.

I see the national wealth numbers given are for 2000. But according to the CIA World Fact Book, India had a real growth rate 2007-2009 of over 7%. At that rate the economy and quite likely wealth would have doubled between 2000 and now, whereas the UK had a negative 4.8% real growth rate in 2009, and likely rather slight real growth during the 2000-2010 period. Therefore, India’s real wealth versus Britain’s could have doubled since 2000. So I may not have been so far out in my estimate.

However, such figures should probably be taken with a certain amount of salt, which may be why the Fact Book does not provide estimates of national wealth.

One reason I question the data is that it seems unlikely that India’s GDP to wealth ratio would be higher than Britain’s. It seems to me it should be the other way round, since a larger share of wealth in India is in land which likely yields a rather low return on investment.

Clark,

You say “*This* is what you should have spotted; nothing to do with wealth or GDP or buildings, just pure statistics.”

No, you’re wrong. The result of the operation you describe will be about three billion plus or minus a very small percentage every time.

Think about it some more.

And obviously the average wealth and income in India is less than in Britain, but it was quite clear that I was talking about aggregate wealth and income.

Suhalyl,

You say “In any case, for most of history India (or the area which is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) was wealthier than Britain.”

Hasn’t India always been wealthier than Britain? It has always been ten times the size, or larger including Pakistan and Bangla Desh. And it has always had vastly more people.

Maybe I am simply antidiluvian in my physiocratic belief that land and the people it supports is the basis of all wealth and its only useful measure.

Yes, I suppose it’s just me. I should value my car, my savings account and whatever more than my children.

——”One reason I question the data is that it seems unlikely that India’s GDP to wealth ratio would be higher than Britain’s”——-

What do you mean by this?

——-”Hasn’t India always been wealthier than Britain?”——-

Not after the British had been in charge 100 years.

Actually the standard of living of the average Indian peasant was higher than that of his British equivalent until the second half of the 19th century. The change initially ocurred because under British rule the Indian peasant actually became worse off.

“Yes, I suppose it’s just me. I should value my car, my savings account and whatever more than my children.” Alfred

No, Alfred, I’m sure you rightly value your children above everything.

Alfred,

you haven’t specified which operation, the one that leads to A or the one that leads to B. But since you’ve specified approx 3 billion, you presumably mean A. B comes to nearly 6 billion (ignoring wild coincidences; in fact anything between 0 and 6 billion is possible for A or B, but vanishingly unlikely).

6 billion is much greater than 3 billion; are you sure I’m wrong?

But this all assumes that we are using a random number generator that has an equal probability of producing each number between 0 and 100. Wealth isn’t distributed like that; less and less people hold more and more wealth. This amplifies the disparity by making A smaller and B many times greater.

But Alfred, at least I did think of it. I think that you may have missed it because the figures you found suited your argument.

Compare Historical Data of Countries side by side -

http://www.indexmundi.com/

g/g.aspx?c=in&c=uk&v=65&v=67&v=94&v=118

“The result of the operation you describe will be about three billion plus or minus a very small percentage every time.”

I notice Clark did not say “generate 60 million random numbers 30 times.” – he said “generate 30 times 60 million random numbers” which IS analogous to your comparison against the top 1/30th of the *whole* of India.

(not the top 1/30th random subset of India)

Assuming equal distribution of random numbers the first value would be about 3 billion, but the second value would be about 5.9 billion.

(100 + (100-100/30) )/2 * 60 million

Sandcrab,

thanks. I’d overlooked that my language could be misinterpreted. Yes, I did mean “generate 1800 million random numbers, pick the highest 60 million and add them up”.

“Cherry picking of the data”?

Sandcrab,

excellent link. What hit India around 2007?

Clark,

OK, when you said: “generate 30 times 60 million random numbers (using the same random number generator, 0 to 100). Pick the 60 million *highest numbers* from this second set and add them all together; call this “B”.

I thought you meant repeat the first operation 30 times then pick the set of 60 million numbers with the highest sum. I am not sure that this was a sensible reading, but it seems feasible.

Reading it as you intended, no doubt Sandcrab, who I suspect is vastly more numerate than I, has the correct answer.

But this stems directly from the normal distribution. The larger the population the longer the tails, which would have been a simpler way of explaining your point. However, your approach has the merit of originality.

Your inference seems reasonable, although I’m not sure if anyone has actually shown wealth distribution to be gaussian.

But, interesting thought this may be, it does not negate my original point that if the wealthiest 60 million Indians have more wealth than everyone in Britain combined, then India, in some sense, must be a much wealthier country.

I guess we have once again shown that with statistics one can prove anything.

“No, Alfred, I’m sure you rightly value your children above everything.”

Sometimes one wonders!

Sandcrab said:

Compare Historical Data of Countries side by side -

http://www.indexmundi.com/

g/g.aspx?c=in&c=uk&v=65&v=67&v=94&v=118

Yes, an interesting page, but the GDP numbers are different from those provided by the CIA World Fact Book!

Another reason, perhaps, to judge wealth on physiocratic principle: i.e., by population, which allows of more credible international comparisons than GDP or national wealth.

——-”But, interesting thought this may be, it does not negate my original point that if the wealthiest 60 million Indians have more wealth than everyone in Britain combined, then India, in some sense, must be a much wealthier country”——-

Except the figures show that Britain has more wealth than everybody in India combined.

—–”Another reason, perhaps, to judge wealth on physiocratic principle: i.e., by population,”——

What on earth do you mean?

I had a webscry, but didnt find out what happened to India’s economic figures in 2007 Clark. An apparent 40% drop in ppp(!) i guess there might have been an exchange rate economic whoopsadaisies which millions of people got screwed by the cash counters.

“if the wealthiest 60 million Indians have more wealth than everyone in Britain combined, then India, in some sense, must be a much wealthier country. ”

Only in the sense that it has 30 times the population, that is all the measure would demonstrate, and one single point on the plot of India’s wealth distribution curve – if we could actualy determine between us or out there, a meaning and value for wealth in India.

Population on the other hand is easy to define and relatively simple to estimate, so it shouldn’t help or hinder accuracy to quote economic figures in relation to it or not.

Im pretending to be a clever dick tonight.

Alfred,

what are we going to do with you? My argument has nothing to do with gaussian distribution. I picked a random number generator for its utter simplicity. It has equal probabilities of producing any number from 0 to 100. That’s not gaussian, ie clustered about a mean. Its distribution ‘curve’ would be a DEAD STRAIGHT HORIZONTAL LINE, not a bell shaped curve. I picked this as the clearest demonstration that you were reporting upon NOTHING BUT an artifact in the analysis method.

As per my 9:38 link, the problem with this analysis gets many times worse if we use realistic wealth distribution curves.

(bangs head against desk and then counts to ten…)

Sandcrab,

thanks for keeping me sane.

We’ve looked at this all sorts of ways, and Britain turns out to be wealthier in terms of money than India every time and in every way, and per capita, Britain turns out to be vastly more wealthy. I’m not the least bit surprised. On this matter, Alfred has been talking nonsense to Avatar Singh and Suhayl Saadi.

On the statistical matter Alfred has been talking nonsense to me for umpteen posts, on a matter that I made as simple as I could, and didn’t involve opinions in any way. I really thought that the correspondence between my analogy and Alfred’s “richest 60 million Indians out of thirty times that” was pretty obvious, but Alfred has managed to misinterpret this in at least two different ways.

Several commenters have attested that they find Alfred’s use of the term “genocide” (in relation to Leicester!) completely incomprehensible, on more than one thread.

Some threads back a lengthy argument ensued when Alfred appeared to be a BNP supporter, but later sort of wiggled out of it.

It looks like a communication problem of improbable magnitude. This is “You can call me Doctor” Alfred.

Alfred, what should I do about you?

Yes, well while pulling weeds in my front garden it occurred to me that wealth distribution could not possibly be Gaussian since half the population has essentially nothing, or in the States less than nothing when one subtracts debt from assets.

What does have a gaussian distribution are the means of multiple samples of 60 million numbers between whatever and whatever, which for reasons unaccountable to me you wished me to investigate.

In fact the proportion of the population in any wealth bracket is unlikely to show any neat statistical distribution since the distribution is affected by things like taxation policy, inheritance laws and the structure of the economy of each particular country.

But don’t let me prevent you from banging your head on the desk. It might do you good.

The point you raise may be fascinating but it does not alter the by now generally agreed fact that, as I originally asserted, the aggregate wealth of India measured on a PPP basis is substantially greater than Britain’s.

“The poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for 5 percent of global income. The richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of world income.”

http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/

poverty-facts-and-stats

So, the wealthiest 1/5th consumes 3 times what the other 4/5ths do *combined*

The poorest 2/5ths consume just 1/20th *between them* That means the poorest 1/5th consumes less than 1/40th total, or 1/30th of what the top 1/5th consumes.

Within the bottom 1/5ths there cant be much room left for variation (above the point where people die from starvation and neglect). But within the top 1/5 wealth disparity is still massive going all the way up to families with their own private service and fleets of cruisers and jets.

Try wrapping your head around *those* stats

Clark,

You say, several commenters have attested that they find Alfred’s use of the term “genocide” (in relation to Leicester!) completely incomprehensible, on more than one thread.”

Come on Clark, don’t be so gutless, speak for yourself, you don’t have to rely on Richard Robinson or anyone else to justify what you are saying.

Concerning the use of the term genocide, tell me this: if Hitler had exterminated only half the Jews would that not have been genocidal?

And tell me this, if entire cities in Britain become essentially entirely devoid of those of long British descent as will happen with continuation of recent past rates of immigration, will you still deny that there has been no replacement, ethnic cleansing, genocide — I don’t give a damn what you call it — of the indigenous population?

The thing about the BNP is that I questioned the consistency of those such as Craig Murray who advocate Scotch or Welsh nationalism while deriding British Nationalism. I also pointed out the interesting fact that while most people here seem to oppose the war in Afghanistan they regarded as anathema the BNP which to my knowledge was the only British Party asserted a policy of immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan.

You must also know that I have repeatedly stated here that I believe the BNP is a security services front designed to smear the policies that they supposedly support. As evidence I have pointed to the clownish behaviour of the Party leader — his supposed gaffes involving racist remarks that are videoed and broadcast on the Web, the nose pulling the idiotic marmite stunt, all this notwithstanding that Griffin is a polished operator, a Cambridge-trained lawyer with a good brain.

I think, therefore, that you personal attack on me is scurrilous and dishonest.

“by now generally agreed fact that, as I originally asserted, the aggregate wealth of India measured on a PPP basis is substantially greater than Britain’s.”

Actualy the figures we found did not show it is ‘substantially’ greater. The figures i came across estimates they are within 10% of each other now. What is remarkable is that they are even close to each other considering that, with all things being equal (which Clarks equal distribution model should have demonstrated) India should have 30 times the purchasing power of UK (to support/share with its population)

Sandcrab,

Concerning how the rich live, I see an Indian by the name of Mukesh Ambani has built or is building a 27 story private residence. It will, in fact, be the height of a 60 story building to accommodate high ceilinged rooms. It has a helipad, obviously, and six stories of car parking.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/06/05/indian-billionaires-house_n_50712.html

But, the British a parasitizing the third world, according to Avatar Singh and are, it would seem, criminally to blame for all India’s poverty.

Sandcrab,

yes, that is the state of the world. This is something we must try to change.

http://www.stallman.org/images/cartoon-economists.png

Alfred,

it was only ever yourself that suggested a gaussian distribution for wealth. And it was only you that thought that I was asking you to consider thirty different samples. It was only you that thought that “genocide” applied to Leicester. I’m going to proceed on the assumption that you WILL misunderstand everything everyone says, and post nonsense that starts arguments that never reach a conclusion. Sorry.

Sandcrab said:

“Actualy the figures we found did not show it [India's GDP] is ‘substantially’ greater [than Britain's]. Not according to the CIA Factbook.

Oh, I thought it was agreed that the CIA figures were the most reliable:

India GDP World rank 5: $3.69 trillion

UK GDP World rank 7: $2.149 trillion

http://tiny.cc/bnvro

But take what numbers you want and believe what you want.

Alfred,

our posts crossed, but my decision remains; I’m not going to argue with you until I see your posts making more sense, more quickly. I scanned the BNP and genocide arguments (trying to help you out on the latter), but now that I’ve been on the receiving end personally I’ve discovered just how frustrating and pointless it is. I really am sorry about this, because you are polite and seem like a decent person. No more arguments means no more “scurrilous and dishonest” attacks.

Sandcrab,

Alfred,

I’m off to bed. Goodnight.

“India GDP World rank 5: $3.69 trillion

UK GDP World rank 7: $2.149 trillion”

-I dont even regard these figures as substantialy different between two entities of such massively different size. They are remarkably similar.

“will you still deny that there has been no replacement, ethnic cleansing, genocide — I don’t give a damn what you call it”

To make sense you have to give a dam what you call it, and what it is. Its simply not genocide, because that means lots of people were killed -explicitly. I dont think it was ethnic cleansing because that means people were deliberately squeezed out. You would need to substantiate that, but its a bit too late for now as youve used up precious attention credits defending nonsensical language and ‘artifacts in the analysis method’ (good term that)

- theres plenty of other people wanting to air their opinions in the cybergardens of the distinguished.

Much of what you have written here Alfred has come across as muddled and unreasonable im afraid, thats no one elses fault, maybe the worlds fault, its a crazy place, im a victim too. Its not fair. I dont give a dam then. Listen to me, i know im right inside its just not clear here. Were not really alone in our folly. crazy troll threads…

night world’

http://www.stallman.org/images/cartoon-economists.png

lol

Goodnight Sandcrab.

Stephen Jones said:

“Except the figures show that Britain has more wealth than everybody in India combined.”

Depends which figures doesn’t it. You don’t like PPP, but if you can get a meal for a buck in Jaipur but it costs 20 bucks in Boston, does it really make sense to say that someone earning 10 bucks a day in Jaipur is not better off than someone earning the same amount in Boston?

and you ask:

—–”Another reason, perhaps, to judge wealth on physiocratic principle: i.e., by population,”——

What on earth do you mean?

The physiocrats dominated economic thought in Europe before Adam Smith. They considered land and what it could produce, i.e., how many people it could support, to be the basis and principle measure of wealth.

You may not think a nation of a billion is richer than one of 60 million but there are many ways in which it can be so considered. The late Julian Simon was one economist who thought human brains had real value, hence on population he supported the principle of the more the merrier.

Winston Churchill’s determination to hang on to the Indian Empire was surely motivated by similar thoughts — the Indian Army, larger than the present US army; the massive pool of industrial labor, etc.

Perverse creature starts talking sense as soon as the other conversationalists announce their intention to go to bed.

“sense” ? That’d be nice.

I’d like to know why he chooses here to post his stuff to so persistently and egregiously, as opposed to any other blog in the world. It’s not like he’s finding anybody that wants to hear it. Is it supposed to have some particular relevance to Mr. Craig Murray ?

——–”i guess there might have been an exchange rate economic whoopsadaisies which millions of people got screwed by the cash counters.”——–

PPP is supposed to compensate for exchange rate fluctuations.

The short answer is the site’s software is crap. GDP PPP continued to rise although nominal GDP dropped because of Exchange Rate Fluctuations.

http://www.indexmundi.com/india/gdp_per_capita_%28ppp%29.html

—–”Depends which figures doesn’t it. You don’t like PPP, but if you can get a meal for a buck in Jaipur but it costs 20 bucks in Boston, does it really make sense to say that someone earning 10 bucks a day in Jaipur is not better off than someone earning the same amount in Boston?”——-

If all they spend their money on is eating out that would be correct. However the restaurant meal is cheaper in Jaipur because the cost of services are cheaper. The cost of a kilo of rice in Jaipur is the same as the cost of a kilo of rice in Boston, and a television set, hardly a luxury, will cost you 70% more in Jaipur.

And you are comparing the very rich. Whist the cost of haircuts remains fairly stable as a proportion of income throughout the world (it was noticing that the poor well as well-groomed as the rich that let to the development of the concept of PPP)the rich are not going to have three haircuts a day, and the fact you can hire 45 dalit sweepers in Hyderabad for the cost of a part-time Hispanic nanny in Manhattan isn’t going to be that useful.

—–”Oh, I thought it was agreed that the CIA figures were the most reliable:”—-

No, we agreed the CIA was giving PPP figures and they are not the best figures for comparing the incomes or wealth of the richest percentiles.

—–”The point you raise may be fascinating but it does not alter the by now generally agreed fact that, as I originally asserted, the aggregate wealth of India measured on a PPP basis is substantially greater than Britain’s.”——-

Except we have no figures whatsoever for comparative wealth of the two countries after the year 2000, which shows the UK ahead. And why on earth should we use PPP to judge wealth? What sense does it mean to say that if you have $50,000 in US government bonds in India you are five times richer than a guy who has $50,0000 government bonds in the US? If it were true the guy in the US could simply catch a plane and increase his wealth five-fold.

Here come the spambots!

Sorry to be ridiculously pedantic, but ‘Scotch’ is a drink, Alfred. It’s ‘Scottish’ nationalism.

And along with the spambots, here comes the BNP, the bampots. Of course, most people regard them as anathema, they’re a bunch of racist opportunists (they’re against imperial war but seem also pathologically obsessed with, and opposed to, all-things-Muslim; that’s new, it used to be ‘blacks-yellows-and-browns’ before but they know that’s a loser nowadays) with links to Nazis, fascists, etc.

However, as with most parties/ political groupings (trade unions, etc.), I do think that some degree of state infiltration of the BNP is likely. If you look at the career of someone like Fascist Italian politician, Roberto Fiore, a very good friend of Griffin, one can only be uplifted by the relative lack of support for the BNP in the UK compared to the massive support for Fascists in Italy. So, such policies – ‘International Third Position’ (which sounds like something out of either the Kama Sutra or the Approved Manual for Honeytrap Spies)- don’t seem to have done any harm to Italian Fascism, quite the opposite. Of course, there is very strong and ongoing tradition of Fascism in Continental Europe.

However, when Searchlight magazine assert that Fiore is an Italian state intelligence asset – which of course he may well be – one has to point out that the same accusation has been leveled at Searchlight itself!

Perhaps they both/ all are state assets. In which case, perhaps elements of the state raise such political entities in order to provide cover and leverage for its own nefarious activities and simultaneously to make the mainstream parties look good by comparison as well as to keep the pressure on mainstream parties, who tend to end-up feeling that they have to pander to some extent to the agendas of the Far Right. There is usually more foregrounded Far Right activity in the UK during Labour Governments.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6798146.ece

——-”The thing about the BNP is that I questioned the consistency of those such as Craig Murray who advocate Scotch or Welsh nationalism while deriding British Nationalism”——-

Your argument would only have the semblance of coherence if you said deriding ‘English’ nationalism. British nationalism is by definition inimical to Irish, Welsh and Scottish nationalism.

And even then your argument would only be true if the Scottish or Welsh Nationalists were demanding the forcible repatriation of the English.

Sandcrab said:

“”India GDP World rank 5: $3.69 trillion

UK GDP World rank 7: $2.149 trillion”

-I dont even regard these figures as substantialy different between two entities of such massively different size.”

What’s that supposed to mean?

Anyhow, Britain just added a trillion quid to the national debt. At that rate India’s wealth relative to Britain will be infinite.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1293940/Real-debt-Britain-78-000-family–twice-official-figure.html

Will the Avatar and Craig Murray’s anglophobic Irregulars be happy then. Probably not.

Suhayl said:

“Sorry to be ridiculously pedantic, but ‘Scotch’ is a drink, Alfred. It’s ‘Scottish’ nationalism.”

It’s not necessarily a drink according to my dictionary:

Scotch: 1. the people of Scotland 2. Inclined to frugality — LOL

Ach! You must have hoochie-coochie, bootleg dictionary!

“”Sorry to be ridiculously pedantic, but ‘Scotch’ is a drink, Alfred. It’s ‘Scottish’ nationalism.”

It’s not necessarily a drink according to my dictionary:”

That may not be the most highly regarded of sources around here, following your last use of it.

My dictionary, the Concise Oxford, says that ‘genocide’ means “the mass slaughter of human beings”, by the way.

Stephen said:

“The short answer is the site’s software is crap.”

Och man, it’s no crap, it’s scotch: frugal in features — not vanilla-flavored, but oatmeal.

“What sense does it mean to say that if you have $50,000 in US government bonds in India you are five times richer than a guy who has $50,0000 government bonds in the US? If it were true the guy in the US could simply catch a plane and increase his wealth five-fold.”

That’s precisely what the multinationals are doing. Want to invest in software development: $60,000 to $120,000 per man year in the US, $5,000 to $10,000 in Chennai, India.

But the relative wealth of India and Britain will certainly have changed between 2000 and 2010, and substantially I would bet. Furthermore, estimating wealth from GDP does not seem an entirely hopeless proposition. If neither the proportion of wealth represented by productive capital nor the rate of return on capital changes radically, then there must be a strong relationship between wealth and GDP (plus 7% in India in 2009, minus 4.4% in Britain in 2009).

Is britain richer than india?

http://www.funqa.com/economics/275-1-Economics.html

Indian economy ‘to overtake UK’

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6294409.stm

India could overtake Britain and have the world’s fifth largest economy within a decade as the country’s growth accelerates, a new report says.

If trends continue, India’s economy may then surpass the US and be second only to China’s by mid-century, the report by investment bank Goldman Sachs says.

Hey, Is Britain Richer than India,

Interesting link. This BBC story from 2007 says “India could overtake Britain and have the world’s fifth largest economy within a decade…”

Actually, according to the CIA World Fact Book, India overtook Britain to become the world’s fifth largest economy not “within a decade” but in just two years, i.e., by 2009 (http://tiny.cc/bnvro).

The BBC article also states:

“Within 15 years Indians should, on average, be four times richer than today, buying five times as many cars, and the country will burn three times as much crude oil …”

which indicates wealth doubling in an incredibly short 7.5 years. This is even faster than I estimated for the period 2000-2010 based on growth in GDP.

Ach! You must have hoochie-coochie, bootleg dictionary!

Suhayl, It’s the Humpty Dumpty “words-mean-whatever-I want-them-to mean” dictionary.

Actually, its the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary, which I prefer to the SOED. For one thing, you don’t need both hands to pick it up.

But Richard, I already gave you a definition of “genocide” that makes my use of the term defensible. I also indicated that the intention of the Blair/Brown governments may not have been the extirpation of the indigenous people from entire cities, but just a dirty racket to boost their ethnic vote, with consequences for the rest of the population of no concern. If that is shown to be the case, genocidal intent cannot be proved: merely treason.

But try to grip this: I am not a racist, I am a democrat. I believe governments should serve the interests of the people, and on immigration the people have been quite clear. (And David Cameron claimed before the election to recognize the will of the people on immigration and his determination “to grip it.”)

You are puzzled by the fact that I enjoy living in a multi-racial society. But that only puzzles you because you have assumed all along that I am a racist, which I am not. My views on immigration to Canada are very similar to my views on immigration to Britain, except insofar as the circumstances are different. Canada needs more people, in my view, to occupy the space and give us a chance of holding on to it, maintaining our traditions and form of goverment. Britain is different, vastly crowded and short of resources. A decline in Britain’s population would, in my view, be a good thing. Furthermore it would be happening now without mass immigration.

Unfortunately, in Canada, since the Liberals brought in no fault devorce (my wife’s getting a little dowdy, I think it’s time to take up with a teenage floozie — actually my wife is as lovely as the day we married) and abolished restrictions on abortion, Canadians have been unable to reproduce themselves. Thus we need immigrants just to keep the system running, let alone grow the population. I think this is sad, and I say this out of respect and affection for my Asian, African and other non-British friends and acquaitances as much as for what remains of the British nation here.

Yeah, on immigration the people of Britain were quite clear: that’s why the BNP lost council seats everywhere and all 12 council seats in Barking.

I have come up with a thought why dosnt Craig start a conpsiracy blog and any conspiracy fanatics can blog away all day. If they continue to disrupt the other blogs then we know it is a diliberate tactic to disrupt the site.

“But try to grip this: I am not a racist, I am a democrat. I believe governments should serve the interests of the people”

I don’t believe you, and I don’t care how many clever arguments you use to “prove” it. You retreat into talking about ‘culture’ when challenged, but still only the culture of different races, as though they were synonyms. And I do not like the uses to which you are putting the belief you claim.

I am one of the people of the country you talk about, I don’t need your second-hand information on what we want.

You persistently evade mention of “assimilation”. People bring their foreign mitochondria into the country, their children grow up here, they become the “us” whose wishes you talk of. Your obsession with describing this as genocide may be justifiable by the rules you wish to play by, you may have managed to dig up a dictionary that doesn’t rule it out (though most do), but to me it looks like troublemaking. There are enough people preaching fear and divisiveness already, thank you very much.

Given that none of this has any connection with the stated purposes of the blog, I really wonder why you would choose someone in Mr. Murray’s family situation to dump your shitstirring ideology onto. It’s unbelievably crass, to put it as politely as I can. I wish you would stop it.

Technicolor said:

“Yeah, on immigration the people of Britain were quite clear: that’s why the BNP lost council seats everywhere and all 12 council seats in Barking.”

Techie:

Try to be sensible.

Here’s what opinion surveys about immigration to Britian show (http://tiny.cc/wb8y4):

“Sixty-nine per cent of voters felt the huge influx of newcomers into the UK over recent years has had a “negative” impact on society, putting a strain on housing, hospitals, schools and social cohesion.

Only 12 per cent of voters agreed with the Government’s claim that migrant workers should be encouraged here to boost the economy….”

As for the BNP, why would anyone concerned about immigration vote for a no-hope party of knuckle-dragging, nose-pullers carrying jars of marmite and threatening to assassinate one another when they could vote for David Cameron, an election winner who promised a sane and restrictive immigration policy?

What you say about the BNP being wiped in Barking is interesting, though. I did not know of this, but it supports my thesis that the BNP is intelligently designed to fail. Barking was a stronghold. The Party leader runs for Parliament in Barking and creates enough of a stink to wipe out the party’s representation on the council. Wow, Griffin is good.

Richard,

You say: “I don’t believe you, and I don’t care how many clever arguments you use to “prove” it.

Well that ends it then doesn’t it. You call me a liar, I call you a horse’s arse. But you really should try to improve your reading comprehension. You would not then fall into the Larry sin of attributing to others what they have not said and do not believe.

plonker

Steve – ‘I have come up with a thought why dosnt Craig start a conpsiracy blog and any conspiracy fanatics can blog away all day. If they continue to disrupt the other blogs then we know it is a diliberate tactic to disrupt the site.’

This is a conspiracy blog. Craig says there was complicity by elements of the U.K. government and security services in the use of torture, which they deny. That’s a conspiracy theory until officially admitted or proven in court. :-0

—–”That’s precisely what the multinationals are doing. Want to invest in software development: $60,000 to $120,000 per man year in the US, $5,000 to $10,000 in Chennai, India.”——

Your figures are way out as usual, but that’s irrelevant.

If your claim about using PPP for the richest percentiles’ wealth was correct then why doesn’t Mittal quintuple his wealth by moving from London to Delhi. According to you he’d immediately be five times richer.

—-”Sixty-nine per cent of voters felt the huge influx of newcomers into the UK over recent years has had a “negative” impact on society, putting a strain on housing, hospitals, schools and social cohesion.”——-

Did ‘the huge influx of newcomers’ form part of the question they were asked. Nothing like influencing your answers.

Alf; not interested.

——”when they could vote for David Cameron, an election winner who promised a sane and restrictive immigration policy”——-

The only problem is that he is talking bull.

The only immigration he can control are spousal visas and visas for highly skilled workers. Neither of these categories have ever got anywhere close to 10% of immigration. All he can do with limits on spousal visas is split up families through absurd bureaucratic requirements, and the proposed cap on highly skilled workers is farcical. Demand for highly skilled workers doesn’t remain static because it will decline in a recession and pick up quickly in a recovery. One of the effects of the cap will be that in a recovery companies will consider outsourcing the whole enterprise to India instead of importing a couple of Indians.

“Well that ends it then doesn’t it. You call me a liar, I call you a horse’s arse. But you really should try to improve your reading comprehension. You would not then fall into the Larry sin of attributing to others what they have not said and do not believe.”

You should be pleased and relieved to see our indigenous culture defending itself vigorously against alien intrusions.

Richard:

“I am extremely happy for people to comment on this blog who disagree with my views. It makes it much more interesting for everybody. I wish more people who disagree would comment” — Craig Murray

LOL

Sandcrap

Plonker yerself.

Stephen,

Thanks for the informed comment on what “gripping” the immigration issue actually means.

no need to plonk me alf, if you dont like me i’m usually measured and easy to skip. You’re letting your tackle hang out and pretending you’ve no shame. This isn’t a chat forum old boy it’s a human rights activist’s comment board pestered by noisy, selfish plonkers -like yourself. Your thing that is it?

He who talks too much

,says nothing.

-nobody

I wish more people who disagree would comment”

Is that an answer to my “why post it here” ?

Sandcrab,

seconded.

Alfred,

as usual, it looks like you’re stirring for the sake of it.

Alfred,

for ages you wrote as if you supported the BNP. Eventually you came out with your “They look like a front set up to fail” argument. All along, you could have just stated your final point, but no. Either you spent ages stringing people along and wasting their time, or you changed your unpopular tune.

Richard, good point about Craig’s family.

Alfred, you then did the same with ‘genocide’. “Oh, I’m using ‘genocide’ in some unusual manner that I can justify with a dictionary”. You are devaluing the word ‘genocide’.

And I expect that your misinterpretation of my maths was deliberate too.

Stirrer.

Alfred – “I am extremely happy for people to comment on this blog who disagree with my views. It makes it much more interesting for everybody. I wish more people who disagree would comment” — Craig Murray.

Such ‘disagreers’ should not be conflated with nasty, little weasels that cynically post on here with hidden agendas. Weasels that only wish to cause disruption and spread disinformation.

hello, ‘jaded friend of apostate’. How strange that you should how lowered the tone to insults again. Not. Go away, please.

sandcrab: thirded & lovely.

Maybe different branches of the BNP? There are at least two splitter movements after the Barking debacle.

Technicolour – ‘hello, ‘jaded friend of apostate’. How strange that you should how lowered the tone to insults again. Not. Go away, please.’

Well, I don’t know apostate. Maybe you are trying to hide personal links you have with him by throwing accusations at others? Anyhow, I think the weasels I speak of are worthy of insults. If you wish to welcome them and give them the time of day good luck to you… Go away, please. Thank you.

Well, maybe I am in league with ‘apostate’, ‘jaded’, though I shouldn’t think anyone here would agree with you.

But apologies, of course, if you’re not the ‘jaded’ who joined in a stream of random insults and specific anti-semitism at the beginning of this year. What a coincidence that you should choose the same name and resort to the same style of personal attacks. You must have a twin!

Clark – “Richard, good point”

It’s a nasty point. Intrusive, creepy, way out of bounds. I mind having had to think of it. Hence my, er, faint air of lacking a certain sweetness and light.

The common cormant or shag

Lays eggs inside a paper bag

The reason, you will see, no doubt

It is to keep the lightning out

But what those unobservant birds

Have never noticed is that herds

Of wandering bears may come, with buns

And steal the bags to hold the crumbs

Christopher ‘I am Camera/Cabaret’ Isherwood, would you believe it.

argh. cormorant!

‘Well, maybe I am in league with ‘apostate’, ‘jaded’, though I shouldn’t think anyone here would agree with you.

But apologies, of course, if you’re not the ‘jaded’ who joined in a stream of random insults and specific anti-semitism at the beginning of this year. What a coincidence that you should choose the same name and resort to the same style of personal attacks. You must have a twin!’

Technicolour, for starters I would warn against second guessing what the 110,000 unique visitors to this blog do or don’t think about those who comment. You may find yourslef coming seriously unstuck. However, if you really want to engage in such speculation don’t let me stop you.

So, you think that little weasels who ‘cynically post on here with hidden agendas. Weasels that only wish to cause disruption and spread disinformation’ shouldn’t be insulted then? They should be made welcome right? Craig himself banned Larry for being such a specimen and you are defending them? This is all very suspicious I must say. Maybe you have do have some siblings on this site?! As for text I ***may or may not*** have written, please post any quotes you have in mind and I will be happy to assist you further. Thank you.

No please, do stop me. Are you not the ‘jaded’ who was posting random insults and specific anti-semitism on this blog at the start of the year?

“argh. cormorant!”

Mmm, cormorant !

Technicolour – ‘No please, do stop me. Are you not the ‘jaded’ who was posting random insults and specific anti-semitism on this blog at the start of the year?’

As I said:

‘please post any quotes you have in mind and I will be happy to assist you further. Thank you. ’

Quite how, even after being providing with quotes and assisting you, that would stop you speculating about what the 110,000 unique visitors to this blog think about those who comment is completely beyond me… Maybe you need to ‘stop yourself’ and take stock of exactly what you are trying to say for a while? Moreover, you haven’t answered questions I have posed based on direct quotes you have written; yet you seem to be wildly hypothesising without providing any quotes whatsoever. Do you actually think that is grounds for sensible and constructive debate technicolour? Thank you.

Are you not the ‘jaded’ who was posting random insults and specific anti-semitism on this blog at the start of the year?

“Alfred,

as usual, it looks like you’re stirring for the sake of it.”

Bugger off Clark. You owe me an apology.

Actually, yes, no, whatever. I guess you can answer how you like.

Some things in life are bad

They can really make you mad

Other things just make you swear and curse.

When you’re chewing on life’s gristle

Don’t grumble, give a whistle

And this’ll help things turn out for the best…

And…always look on the bright side of life…

Always look on the light side of life…

If life seems jolly rotten

There’s something you’ve forgotten

And that’s to laugh and smile and dance and sing.

When you’re feeling in the dumps

Don’t be silly chumps

Just purse your lips and whistle – that’s the thing.

And…always look on the bright side of life…

Always look on the light side of life…

For life is quite absurd

And death’s the final word

You must always face the curtain with a bow.

Forget about your sin – give the audience a grin

Enjoy it – it’s your last chance anyhow.

and -

Technicolour – ‘Are you not the ‘jaded’ who was posting random insults and specific anti-semitism on this blog at the start of the year?’

For every further time you ask that consider this my response:

‘As I said:

‘please post any quotes you have in mind and I will be happy to assist you further. Thank you. ’

I’m sure your 110,000 fans will be further impressed by your abundant intelligence. Ha ha ha. If you have anything new to add I will be happy to assist you. However, I think that will indeed be the sum of it and i’m not often wrong about such siblings. Thank you.

P.S. Hmm, thinking about it, aren’t you that BNP technicolour who was lurking on this blog some months back? I’ll mull it over…

No, I’m not that BNP technicolour. See? Easy.

So you’re another BNP technicolour? One of your siblings then? How many of you are there?

Anyway, good night.

I hope you and apostate get a good kip. It must be a really hard grind in the BNP…

fwiw i think that if this Jaded is not the same Jaded of the banned jew and gay bashing bunch, its her(?) job to distinguish herself or choose an distinct nick.

-

Ive been reading Suhayl’s novella, ‘The Spanish House’ ,slowly, the language and imagery is nutritious, its having a stimulating effect on my sourcefile addled mind and im just getting to juicy bits…

nighto’ Techni and all.

Sandcrab – ‘fwiw i think that if this Jaded is not the same Jaded of the banned jew and gay bashing bunch, its her(?) job to distinguish herself or choose an distinct nick.’

Well, for what it’s worth, I must say that there seems to be a serious shortage of quotes from this notorious user you both speak of. One would have thought that it would be a very simple task to highlight what you deemed to be the worst of them, even if just a few. However, there hasn’t even been one quote presented yet. Very strange indeed. Could it, could it really be that you are both deluded, crazy persons? Hmm… The 110,000 can judge for themselves and send round the men in white coats if needs be. I will not second guess them. Thank you.

Jaded,

Technicolour (when you return),

please don’t fight. I vaguely remember that argument; I don’t think I can remember which thread it was on now. Things got pretty heated and there were other people involved. I think there may be some confusion here.

Anyone remember which thread?

This ~maybe,

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/

archives/2009/04/holocaust_denia.html

Sorry Jaded, i tried to dig some dirt on you but just skimmed through a dozen or so perfectly fine posts. I think you may have taken a difficult position in that thread and perhaps others, but you seem to have been quite misaligned.

Many apologies.

‘Jaded,

Technicolour (when you return),

please don’t fight. I vaguely remember that argument; I don’t think I can remember which thread it was on now. Things got pretty heated and there were other people involved. I think there may be some confusion here.

Anyone remember which thread?’

No, I don’t think this notorious user they speak of would have only been active on one thread. Technicolour seems to be referring to a dedicated user active over a period of time. Scroll up a few inches and read his comments. As for ‘fighting’, well, I think you solely need to talk to Technicolour about that. He made accusations and I asked for quotes. If he wasn’t prepared to get quotes he could have dropped it. However, he didn’t drop it and persisted. That’s more akin to a wannabe bully picking on someone and that someone standing up to them. After being made to look a fool and getting a taste of his own medicine he obviously thought it best to skulk off. He needs to present quotes, which I will civilly address, or just shut up. It’s as simple as that in my view Clark. Or do you disagree with my general assessment?

Sandcrab – ‘Sorry Jaded, i tried to dig some dirt on you but just skimmed through a dozen or so perfectly fine posts. I think you may have taken a difficult position in that thread and perhaps others, but you seem to have been quite misaligned.

Many apologies.’

Like I said, if you wish to present a quote I will address it. If you don’t, then fine. No problem.

did not want to comment but seeing so much about India getting rich and what not-I could nto resist this commnet.

well itidoes nto matter if India is getting rich -what matters is what proportioan of indioans are reaping the beenfit odf that richness.

Bharat, from the worlds richest and most literate, to the most poor and illiterate in 200 years.

Gross Domestic Product in Millions of Dollars

Year 1000 1500 1600 1700

India 33.8 60.5 74.3 90.8

China 26.6 61.8 96.0 82.8

WEurope 10.2 44.3 66.0 83.4

World 116.8 247.1 329.4 371.4

here is why and how it happend-due to pirate english bastards.

=————————————————————————————————————————

“I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar or who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values & people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and therefore I propose that we replace her Old and ancient education system, Her culture , for if the Indians think that all that if foreing and english is goodand greater than their own, they will lose thier self esteem, their native culture and and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”

- (Lord McCauley in his speech of

Feb 2, 1835, British Parliament)

India has always been amosnt the top 3 richest countries in the world in histoical time until 1870 when after about 100 yrs looting by the en,glish apirates andf destruction of her iundustry-deliberatley doen bu7y the enlgish pirates- India became the topmost poor country int he world at time of indepdence in 1947. since then we tried self sufficennecy in industry and in scince the fruit odf wy 1980s but then by 19091 we had imposed on us an unlelcted harami manmohn singh who is a british and american agent and jsut like many stooges the world over he works for angloamericna interests and has run americnapolicy of buying th elite class to the detriment of the masses.

in todays india despite so many consymer goods and shottping mall the farmers are commiting sucie for last 15 years and india is an agragrain society with 65 % living ion vilalges depdnet on farming and its associted industry. so you can see th eplioght of average indians who have bene robbed t=by the anglophile corrupt elite class.

ans goldman sachs is a parasite bank which is trying to make india a colony by first flattering the elite class there and then underminign the defence capability of india.

as for someone having 50000 dolallrs in india or usa-yes the person having that much in idna is atleast 6 times richer than in usa because the cost of living is much less.(railway fare, food, clotheing, restaurnt, entertainment, education etc).

and indian middle class cost is one of house . good food, clothes , car or motorcycle, entertainment and most important of all private schooling (though govt shcooling and university is free middle class prefer private)- all combined they can live happily with this standard of living on say 30000 Rupees equivalent to about 700 doallrs a month or about.(many earn about 300000 Rs per month aswell) and the middle class is or bank officer or beaurocrat or MBA. middle class in idnia means bascially unicvversity educated-itihas nothing to do with your income a shopkkppeer who is ilelterate is nota middle clas in India

then think how many of americans can live on 7000 doallar a month on standard of a middle class life style?

and the reason mittal(not that he is not honest) and his rich like people from thrid world like donto go to India is becaus london has the highest concnetration of stolen money in the world and all theives want to stay there because british govt. takes good care of them-where else criminals woudl get so much govt. and media patronage??

India can always get a real govt which might confiscate the a-unaccounted money from the rich -hence the danger.and thier ayslum in london and cayman islands.

=========================================7th october, 2008

even after the obvious faliure of free markeeters in america this americna gen manmonan singh ( a person who is not only unlelected but unelectable-he sttod for lower house of parliament but was throughly defeated by the elctorate-then he entered parliament through uppwer house-like house of lords from where he is not supposed to become prime minsiter at all-but law was circumvented for him) such is the democracy we are talking about) not been killed frhh treason but also not chastised

this manmhan singh is a charlaton whose theory fits with fit with Milton Friedman’s “greed is good” Chicago School mumbo jumbo. Both Friedman and Kemp believe that what is good for the stock market is good for America, ignoring the shocking economic polarization that has divided the nation. Now, more and more people are beginning to see that Friedman was a charlatan who provided ideological cover for obscenely rich financiers and their dodgy investment scams.

may 9th , 2007.

This ( rejected thrice by the public in general election) prime minister(installed at american behest) manmaohan singh is trying to enter parliament again through vack door-he filled nomination through assam with help of sonai gandhi congress(of whoioch he is not a leader or person of any singificance).

such is the democracy we live in.

i thought democracy meansd people electing the party and primeminister to be elected through that elelctable persons.

but as for american definigitn of democracy like in stooge s in afggansitana nd iraq we have an americana tooge who doe snot need to boyther wabout indian opinion because he has not been s-chosen by the indian people for the post but isntalled by a foreing country to make idnia run for foreing.es nbenefit.

and we are celebrating 150 yrs of what?

return of the company and corporate again?(not called ast or west india company this time but same nevertheless)..

the media now decries that the polling rate in india is rapdly going down that in india where the people have always been enthusiatic to

vote. doe sit not occur to media that pepel are now refusing to rubber stamp the primeminsiter sna his cabinet when the people have already

rejected such lots and still unelectable person gets chosen as prime minister of foren minister(jaswant singh) with no popular support

anbut only because angloamerican agents in india want that to be. For several general elections the people have rejected the so called

loiberalization and wasnhington consensus policy of govet. of india but each time new govt is elected the media astrats telling that

economic and foreing policy msut not change even though people have overwhelmingly voted against that.

media brings erronaeous cause for defeat of incumbent govt. like secratarianism and all russbih but never mentions that people have thrown

that american dictated policy being pursued by both parties.

Such is the genesis of indian electorate’s disilluionment with voting -all due to corruption of media and jourtnalists along with the

busisness class of india(these days traitor FICI is organising more conferences than the govt. of India for inter-ministerial meetings!.

How India is being treacherously enslaved by angloamerican agents likes of (unelectable and defeated in democratic election ) this Pm

manmohan singh and the english media inside india.

a great misconception is that so caled liberalization and globalization was brought to india by this manmohan singh. In fact soon after

victory in iraq war in febraury 1991 the bush no. first declared a new world order in which he explicitly said that he will open up the

world for american business. In fact his trade seccratary immeditealy annomnuced that she will make sure that america open up the thighs

of thrid world countries (Like as with a vice ) as a slwoly and surely to american business(true analogy to a rape)-that was given the name

Liberalization and globalization for which the british and americans had been working since 1986. What was left for america to do was

install maleable stooges inside the thrirld world countries. escpeally those types who are unelctable and have no mass base of their own–

in other words who are not elelctable democratically but installed from above through media and other manipulations.

this manmohan singh in india fulffiled that criteria of being unliked and unelctable insignificant person who was willing to act on arder

of his american masters -if they had asked him to turn communist he would have done that.It is this traitor manmohan singh who informed

america of impending Indian nuclear test in 1993 and also who openly said that iran pakistan inida pipe line would be difficlt to finance

-just because his americans masters did not want that!

It isa sad refletion on india that since 1986 we

have has only weaklings as our prime minsiters and fincnace minsiters not to speak of non mentionable defence misnters who made sure that

Indians nuclear and missle programme got stuck at 1986.

Jaded,

my guess is that Technicolour had you confused with someone else. You got accused (mistakenly, I think) all those months ago, and feel cross – please remember I’m just guessing.

Other people were deliberately stirring in that argument, and the damage was done. Now I’m just trying to re-establish peace. It did used to be peaceful here most of the time, I seem to remember, before the trolling began.

I respect Technicolour, who has a fine humanitarian outlook, makes good points and has a good sense of humour. I think there’s been a mix up.

Jaded,

I think Sandcrab meant “maligned” rather than “misaligned”.

But Technicolour wouldn’t deliberately malign someone. It’s a snafu.

Yes Clark, I think all the actual trolling in recent seasons has caused a bit too much hostility and suspicion.

Jaded, i concur with the position you took on that issue and respect you for putting it. It may have been confused as the ‘rear guard’ to steelborns problematic links and prejudices. But the body of your posts i scanned dont bare that out at all. I look forward to reading you again.

avatar singh – great post for India!

be well’ night folks’

ta Clark – mishtoocken %}

Clark – ‘Jaded,

my guess is that Technicolour had you confused with someone else. You got accused (mistakenly, I think) all those months ago, and feel cross – please remember I’m just guessing.

Other people were deliberately stirring in that argument, and the damage was done. Now I’m just trying to re-establish peace. It did used to be peaceful here most of the time, I seem to remember, before the trolling began.

I respect Technicolour, who has a fine humanitarian outlook, makes good points and has a good sense of humour. I think there’s been a mix up.’

Well, my position remains the same. If someone wishes to present a quote I will address it. If they don’t, then fine. No problem. It will soon become apparent if anyone wishes to continue this without presenting a quote. I will always stand up for myself. We shall see…

For the record, I will always insult trolls. I have been online and engaged in controversial debate for many years and it isn’t just ‘disagreers’ I am talking about. After a while it becomes totally obvious who these people are. They fully deserve to be insulted and booted off. For example, idiots who believe in the official narrative of 9/11 are just docile sheep. They wouldn’t cyber fight tooth and nail, 24 hours a day, ad infinitum in defence of the official narrative! It’s ‘beyond obvious’ who these people work for.

This is a personal blog; not a forum or chat room. If Craig didn’t want me here he wouldn’t need to ban me. He need only ask me to leave and I would respect his decision and go. Shame the same can’t be said of Larry the Lamb…

@jaded: Yes, it’s interesting that you seize the right to ‘insult people’ on this board and ‘boot them off’. I think the latter decision is down to Craig, and I object to both your assumption of power and your insults. Even if, you note, they are directed at someone with whom I have disagreed.

In the meantime, are you this ‘jaded’: yes or no?:

Jaded to eddie (who Craig had not banned) 26 Jan 2010:

“You are a vile, disgusting, little weasel. Get a life. MI5/MI6 are completely corporate now. They have no interest in ‘Defence Of The Realm’. Any agents that think otherwise are grossly deluded. They just represent psychopathic crooks. Do you really not see that or are you accepting of it? Or are you even gladly one of them? Which is it you pile of stinking trash???”

And, ‘jaded’. Do you have any connection to this poster, ‘Apostate’, posting to Craig on the same thread shortly after:

“Your “bollocks” comment re-tungsten’s references to B’nai B’rith show a deep ignorance of history.May I suggest you start by doing some of your own research re-the history of the Lobby.Had you been more aware of the extent of its reach and influence I dare say you might still be in Samarkand or even the Lords today!

The generally vaccuous and ahistorical comments on your message board seem to be a reflection of a generalized knee-jerk phobia re-what elites progamme you to think of as “conspiracy theory. Unfortunately it seems you share this willed blindness to facts and reality.”

And for stylistic comparison, ‘Jaded’, just now:

“For example, idiots who believe in the official narrative of 9/11 are just docile sheep. They wouldn’t cyber fight tooth and nail, 24 hours a day, ad infinitum in defence of the official narrative! It’s ‘beyond obvious’ who these people work for.”

Really, goodnight.

Jaded – “After a while it becomes totally obvious who these people are”

I think that’s it. (I vaguely remember your name from a while back, but can’t remember who said what, why, or about what. but …) Misunderstandings happen, people can make mistakes, sometimes just kind of hang loose and give people rope ? Some people right themselves, others just keep on digging until the drop’s big enough.

As you see from all the above, you’re coming in at the end of a carnival of the trolls. Food fight, custard pie all over the walls, a bit fractious all round …

*shrug* Good night, all.

Technicolour – ‘@jaded: Yes, it’s interesting that you seize the right to ‘insult people’ on this board and ‘boot them off’. I think the latter decision is down to Craig, and I object to both your assumption of power and your insults. Even if, you note, they are directed at someone with whom I have disagreed.

In the meantime, are you this ‘jaded’: yes or no?:

Jaded to eddie (who Craig had not banned) 26 Jan 2010:

“You are a vile, disgusting, little weasel. Get a life. MI5/MI6 are completely corporate now. They have no interest in ‘Defence Of The Realm’. Any agents that think otherwise are grossly deluded. They just represent psychopathic crooks. Do you really not see that or are you accepting of it? Or are you even gladly one of them? Which is it you pile of stinking trash???”

And, ‘jaded’. Do you have any connection to this poster, ‘Apostate’, posting to Craig on the same thread shortly after:

“Your “bollocks” comment re-tungsten’s references to B’nai B’rith show a deep ignorance of history.May I suggest you start by doing some of your own research re-the history of the Lobby.Had you been more aware of the extent of its reach and influence I dare say you might still be in Samarkand or even the Lords today!

The generally vaccuous and ahistorical comments on your message board seem to be a reflection of a generalized knee-jerk phobia re-what elites progamme you to think of as “conspiracy theory. Unfortunately it seems you share this willed blindness to facts and reality.”

And for stylistic comparison, ‘Jaded’, just now:

“For example, idiots who believe in the official narrative of 9/11 are just docile sheep. They wouldn’t cyber fight tooth and nail, 24 hours a day, ad infinitum in defence of the official narrative! It’s ‘beyond obvious’ who these people work for.”

Really, goodnight.’

Strange, I thought you had gone to bed like 3 hour ago? And that’s all you can come up with? That’s very weak technicolour I must say. I will gladly address your post *****in full***** one point at a time for the sake of coherence. We shall see if you really want answers or are just sniping. We really shall.

Firstly, would you care to post a quote where I have ‘seized a right to insult people and boot them off’? I don’t recall saying any such thing. I think you are just wildly speculating again. In my view, I have only stated that this is my ‘personal position’ and I fully stand by it. Like I said before, you feel free to make the trolls welcome. Where have I said I have the ‘power to do boot people off and it’s my decision’? I am completely mythed. Let’s just iron that out and i’ll move on to the next bit of your post. Otherwise, I fear you’ll try to sit behind a mishmash off wild, unsubstantiated accusations. This would be an attempt to descend this debate to a chaotic level in the hope it’s curtailed. To try and save face no doubt. Well, not with me i’m afraid.

I think you need to cool off, eat a dose of humble pie and come back tomorrow with a calm head. You have dug a hole for yourself and don’t like it. Just admit it. You don’t even need to apologise.

Richard, you make some good points. However, you only need to scroll up a few inches to read some of his vile accusations. I’ll happily quote them for you if you want me to? I will not let these vile accusations go unanswered and i’m sure you would be of the same opinion if they were levelled at you. Well, I would be seriously worried if you, or anyone else, were not!

Av,

Why don’t you drop the “pirate English” talk. It does nothing for your case. England is not an independent country and the United Kingdom has been as often dominated by the Scots and the Welsh as by the English. Also remember that India is not the only country burdened by corrupt government subservient to corporate or foreign interests. Tony Blair was probably the most corrupt British Prime Minister in 100 years and is now loathed and despised by the great majority of the British public.

As for India being exploited by Britain, you give no specific examples, and therefore, your charges sound like nothing more than Anglophobia. Globalization has provided India and other Asian nations the opportunity to win the majority of the world’s manufacturing, engineering and IT work. In the future, Asia will become the global center for most R and D. As in England during the industrial revolution, the transition may bring many unpleasant side effects. But the reality is that India will likely be many times wealthier than Britain within a generation. For India, this is surely something to celebrate, not a cause for anger. For Britain it looks increasingly certain that the transformation of the world economy now in progress will create enormous difficulties leading to political instability and possible disaster.

Technicolour,

I’ve found that thread:

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/a_politician_sh.html

With respect, Technicolour, I don’t see any anti-Jewish stuff from Jaded there. Jaded was extremely offensive to Eddie, which started basically in defence of Ruth. I note that Jaded accused Eddie of being anti-semitic a number of times, too.

Shortly afterwards there follows a lot of ranting from Apostate / Steelback / Tungsten, ostensibly anti-Israeli, but with the usual Apostate anti-Jewish undertones.

Jaded,

I don’t believe that you are Apostate, but this should be a lesson to you; by being offensive you came to be mistaken for another of Apostate’s sock-puppets.

All,

looking back at the threads is revealing. My feeling is that it was predominantly Larry that incited lots of aggression, and this blog has really taken a bashing from it. The general level of insult and offence greatly increased.

But we should have challenged the Apostate Puppet Show long before that. I wonder if anyone else felt like me. I felt this character’s aggression and did not wish to engage with it, so I let it lurk like an unexploded bomb, and when the temperature rose it went off.

Back when those arguments started I did a lot of calling for civility, just because that was my feeling. Now I feel that my instinct had practical application. You really can’t fight for peace. Rising to provocation always feeds the flames. You just need to keep coming calmly back to the truth, over and over again.

Clark – ‘Technicolour,

I’ve found that thread:

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/a_politician_sh.html

With respect, Technicolour, I don’t see any anti-Jewish stuff from Jaded there. Jaded was extremely offensive to Eddie, which started basically in defence of Ruth. I note that Jaded accused Eddie of being anti-semitic a number of times, too.

Shortly afterwards there follows a lot of ranting from Apostate / Steelback / Tungsten, ostensibly anti-Israeli, but with the usual Apostate anti-Jewish undertones.

Jaded,

I don’t believe that you are Apostate, but this should be a lesson to you; by being offensive you came to be mistaken for another of Apostate’s sock-puppets.’

I reiterate, trolls on this blog deserve insults. That is my honest view. You are surely not of the opinion that government agents appearing here from nasty regimes, such as the U.S., U.K. and Israel, aren’t worthy of insults? Or do you actually believe that a government agent has never posted on Craig’s blog? Anyhow, I believe the moral of the story is read carefully; not don’t insult trolls. If people are careless enough to make mistaken assumptions is is their fault. I am a decent person that doesn’t wander around randomly insulting people. I respect all human beings on this planet, unless they have given me cause to disrespect them. I am looking forward to swiftly concluding a ‘factual, civil debate’ with Technicolour later. Hopefully he will realise that he did indeed throw wild, vile, baseless accusations at me.

jaded, it’s called ‘working the night shift’. no accusations of ‘skulking’ or attempts to make it seem mysterious can detract from the fact that people do it.

Instead of answering my original question, you keep asking for a quote. So, please, dear jaded, do keep your promise and answer at least this:

Are you the ‘Jaded’ questioning whether any Jewish people were directly murdered in what is described as the ‘Holocaust’ (their inverted commas) on this board in January, as follows:

“The Jews, other groups too, suffered dreadful persecution in the years leading up to the war and during the war. It was all terrible and shocking. The question of planned total extermination is a pertinent one though. They were certainly used as a source of labour in some camps. Why would the Nazis brand with numbers, absolutely disgusting I know, people they were going to kill? Admittedly, every Jew that died from malnutrition, illness etc. may as well have been murdered. Furthermore, the Nazis may well have tested gas on the Jews. If the Nazis had won maybe their fate would have been genocidal, I don’t know.”

Is this you? If you don’t want to answer, which I can understand, that’s fine; just say so.

No fight, here, on my side, by the way. Happy to apologise if I’ve got you confused with another ‘Jaded’, as I said originally.

Technicolour – ‘jaded, it’s called ‘working the night shift’. no accusations of ‘skulking’ or attempts to make it seem mysterious can detract from the fact that people do it.

Instead of answering my original question, you keep asking for a quote. So, please, dear jaded, do keep your promise and answer at least this:

Are you the ‘Jaded’ questioning whether any Jewish people were directly murdered in what is described as the ‘Holocaust’ (their inverted commas) on this board in January, as follows:

“The Jews, other groups too, suffered dreadful persecution in the years leading up to the war and during the war. It was all terrible and shocking. The question of planned total extermination is a pertinent one though. They were certainly used as a source of labour in some camps. Why would the Nazis brand with numbers, absolutely disgusting I know, people they were going to kill? Admittedly, every Jew that died from malnutrition, illness etc. may as well have been murdered. Furthermore, the Nazis may well have tested gas on the Jews. If the Nazis had won maybe their fate would have been genocidal, I don’t know.”

Is this you? If you don’t want to answer, which I can understand, that’s fine; just say so.

No fight, here, on my side, by the way. Happy to apologise if I’ve got you confused with another ‘Jaded’, as I said originally.’

So, you were wishing people good night when going to work the night shift and have repeatedly come back? That’s bizarre. For starters, I can’t answer if I am ‘the Jaded’ in relation to anything without seeing specific quotes. You have blatantly tried to avoid my previous question, and all previous questions, I have posed to you. Still, you will end up just looking worse and worse to your 110,000 fans. Never mind eh.

In relation to this ‘specific post’ you have made, I can categorically state that I am not the ”Jaded’ questioning whether any Jewish people were directly murdered in what is described as the ‘Holocaust’ (their inverted commas) on this board in January’. Do you have any quotes that this Jaded made for my perusal?

You oddly seem to then attach a quote that has absolutely nothing to do with ‘questioning whether any Jewish people were directly murdered in what is described as the ‘Holocaust’ (their inverted commas) on this board in January’. Again, bizarre. The quote you have highlighted clearly questioned whether ‘all’, not ‘any’, Jewish people were directly murdered in the ‘Holocaust’. For the record, that text was indeed mine. I was taught in school that 6 million Jews were directly murdered, predominantly through gassing, and it just doesn’t seem to be true. I think it has been cynically exaggerated and used for political capital by the Isreali governemnt. I think that’s a sick slur on the poor, innocent Jews that did die, whether through direct murder or not.

You are increasingly coming across as being ill in the head. You seem incapable of reading posts properly and make one mistake after another, as has already been pointed out by others. Are you one of those crazy people who really thinks that ‘all Jewish people’ who died in the ‘Holocaust’ were directly murdered? Are you one of those that blindly repeats the mantra of 6 million? You are simply beyond belief. Unless you don’t think that pray tell?

Seriously, keep your mind on work and don’t give up the day job. Actually, truth be told, you are ‘beginning to sound like’, not saying you definitely are, one of the thousands of Zionist bloggers that the Israeli government even admits troll the internet on their behalf. I still await your response to my previous measured post, probably too measured for you…

P.S. Right, i’m off to scour Craig’s blog for 5 hours to see if I can find any posts of yours that I blatantly can misquote. That’s while sleeping, working and having sex too I might add.

Clark, I think you’re right (0411am – God’s sake, talk about owls and larks; I’m definitely the latter!) re. ‘trolls’ raising the aggression level. What happens then is that people who have genuine disagreements with one another about things begin to assume that one another are also trolls and so the aggression gets directed internally.

I think sometimes – usually (though I’ve certainly not adhered to this, myself, partly because I was being personally attacked) – it is best to ignore trolls and their attempts to stir. But sometimes, I do think that one has to confront them – not address their ‘points’, but attack them head-on and deconstruct their methods, for everyone to share that deconstruction. It’s a balance, I guess; they keep changing tactic and so must we, to not be caught off-balance!

I’m not sure why the two topics which seem to pop up with stoic and tedious regularity specifically in such circumstances seem to relate to the terrorist attacks on US cities in late 2001 and The Holocaust. Why don’t, say, the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, or Indonesia/ East Timor, or Diego Garcia or Kashmir or Tibet or US/UK militarism or Venezuela or Iraq or Afghanistan or Haiti or… arise as points of argumentation when either trollery, or the subject of trollery, comes up?

It’s an observation.

Sandcrab, I’m really glad you’re enjoying ‘The Spanish House’ and thanks for writing that. The tale goes well with some Andalusian sherry!

Anyway, get some rest, guys.

—–”As for India being exploited by Britain, you give no specific examples, and therefore, your charges sound like nothing more than Anglophobia. “—–

Jeez, has this guy never read anything? I’ll tell you what, Alfred, let’s do this bit by bit. Google “salt, Raj” then when you’ve read up on that for a week come back and we’ll give you another clue.

‘jaded’: you complain of being ‘attacked’ and yet the only thing I’ve remotely accused you of is being a ‘friend of apostate’. The rest were questions. You can, of course, to chose to call me ‘ill in the head’ and accuse me of being a Zionist agent as a result, but then earlier you were accusing me of being BNP.

So you are the Jaded who wrote this: (my emphasis)

The *question* of planned total extermination is a pertinent one though. They were certainly used as a source of labour in *some* camps.

Admittedly, every Jew that died from malnutrition, illness etc. may as well have been murdered. Furthermore, the Nazis *may well have tested gas* on the Jews. If the Nazis had won *maybe their fate would have been genocidal*, I don’t know”.

You are not questioning whether precisely 6 million Jewish people were murdered. You are questioning whether there was a ‘Final Solution’ at all. You are suggesting that Jewish people were merely used as labour in *some* camps. You insinuate that instead of gassing Jewish people the Nazis *may have tested gas* on Jewish people. Finally you suggest that there was no genocide.

So I think you’ve answered my questions, thanks. Otherwise, if you know of any Zionist agents, or, for that matter, BNP stooges, who had friends on the convoy to Gaza and who defend the Palestinian people at any opportunity, do let me know. In the meantime, I guess we can wait for the IP addresses when Craig gets back, can’t we.

In the meantime zillions of apologies if you’re just a really nice bloke whose history is utterly confused and whose random insults are just the product of an over enthusiastic defence of Craig, rather than a concerted attempt to scare people off the board. Of course.

that was me (above). oh, and i know you did not directly accuse me of being a Zionist agent. ‘jaded’; that’s not your style. Insinuate, I should have said. Strange, because I thought you read this board.

where did i misquote you, by the way?

Clark, thanks, it’s interesting looking back at the threads. I ignored the apostate thing because, at the time, I was just dabbling in the board, and frankly, their posts were too long, dense and dull to read. It was only when angrysoba started screaming that I started reading them, and realised he was right.

Of course civility’s the way to go, you’re quite right. Was on a tight deadline (which got done) so may have slipped a bit. Now to catch up with some sleep.

Jaded, you cant demand to be directed to a contentious post and then complain youve been ‘blatantly misquoted’ when you are :p

Jaded – “Richard, you make some good points. However, you only need to scroll up a few inches to read some of his vile accusations”

Yes, I do see what you mean. My points would, perhaps have been better made if I’d remarked that they cut both ways. Food fight, tears before bedtime. At least there could be worse threads for it.

Challenging trolls … yes, but. Much righteous fun to be had, but there’s an infinite supply of them, thus a potentially infinite amount of distracting noise to be generated by anybody that isn’t actually bothered about the subjects in question. This can make the whole thing into like a frustrating dead loss to anybody that is – who would, after all, be the people Craig actually intends this blog for.

To look back afterwards, sometimes we see that our guts did lead us right, sometimes we see that our egos weren’t the most important thing; difficult is, to do that in real time.

Jaded,

please try to chill out. If you read enough posts you will see that Technicolour makes some cutting criticism of the Israeli regime. Technicolour does not support Israeli attrocity, quite the opposite, and certainly seems sane enough to me.

And incidentally, ‘Holister’ is a spambot, not human. It just qoutes bits from previous comments and links to a website.

Technicolour,

Jaded seems to me to be suggesting exaggeration in the mainstream account of the Jewish Holocaust under the Nazis, rather than promoting Holocaust denial. I think it would be more constructive to link to reputable sources of data rather than to classify Jaded as a denialist. It is a principle of mine that nothing should be beyond being questioned, because if it is, it becomes merely dogma.

Both,

I think you two have more in common than you realise. Beware ‘Divide and Conquer’! Your major difference seems to be that Technicolour is always civil whereas Jaded regards insults as sometimes appropriate.

Suhayl Saadi,

it is no coincidence that the two subjects you mention are favourites for trolling. They carry great emotional charge, and thus can be used to start arguments and fragment a community such as ours. This is a prime example. This argument started months ago, and here it is still, poisoning the threads.

Richard Robinson,

yes, I’m reminded of “Please ensure that brain is properly engaged before attempting to move off with mouth (read ‘keyboard’).

Jaded,

I’m re-posting Ruth’s link (July 10, 2010 10:00 PM)

http://thecurrentaffairs.com/disinformation-tactics-the-methods-used-to-keep-you-in-the-dark.html

THIS is why insults and abuse need to be avoided. Derailing rational conversation is one of the objectives of the trolls. We really have to be careful not to manufacture ammunition that can be fired from troll weapons. If we descend to launching insults, the trolls have scored a point.

“Please ensure that brain is properly engaged before attempting to move off with mouth (read ‘keyboard’).

grin. My parents used to quote that to me when I was younger. … worth reminding myself, I am aware I do it too. Ingo said it nicely in a thread somewhere up above.

As to why some troublesome subjects keep recurring – it doesn’t take very much reading here to see that, simply, they work. If somebody feels like winding people up, and sees that people get wound up on subject X … no-brainer.

Jaded,

sorry, I looked back and saw that I hadn’t answered some direct questions of yours.

My position is that we cannot tell whether some commenter is a ‘government agent’ or not. Someone like Eddie seems to me to be blinded by his tribal support of New Labour. We know that Larry has worked for a company that does Karimov’s PR, rather than a government.

Etc, I’ve got to go. More later.

Stephen said:

“Jeez, has this guy never read anything? I’ll tell you what, Alfred, let’s do this bit by bit. Google “salt, Raj” then when you’ve read up on that for a week come back and we’ll give you another clue.”

Stephen I would wager I have read a great deal more of the history of the Raj and many other topics than you. And one thing I know that you seem not to is that the Raj died more than 60 years ago.

My point was and is that the Avatar has not cited any evidence of of English pirates exploiting India today, or if he has the evidence is not clearly and specifically presented.

And why be so thoroughly ill-mannered in making what you consider to be a point?

It seems to me that banning Larry is not an ethical issue but a purely practical matter: how to maintain a civilized discourse, which means excluding so far as possible comments that are intemperate, ill-mannered, irrelevant or mendacious.

I don’t see that permanently excluding one or two individuals assuming that that can be done, however annoying or insincere those particular persons may be, is going to solve the problem.

One must either moderate comments, which may require user registration, or continue to rollick along as now. Moderation is not a simple matter. Will it be done 24/7? If so there is a huge cost. If comments are queued for moderation, the cost in time of volunteer or hired help will be less, but the flow of discussion will be more or less disrupted. If moderation is delegated to volunteers, its effectiveness will depend on what might prove to be the difficult task of finding individuals with the necessary experience and soundness of judgment.

If discussion on the blog continues unmoderated then it will continue to have a high noise to information content, and may as on this thread, sometimes generate some very ill-natured comments that can leave any participant, however sincere or qualified, well and truly smeared. For example, the absurd allegation that Technicolor is a BNPer. This is not an environment to attract the best contributors but rather one that will repel most sensible people.

I know, Alfred, but of course this thread is about trollery and all things trolleresque, so perhaps it’s inevitable that the ‘mood music’ is not so unlike that of ‘modulated troll’ (or ‘homeopathic troll’, perhaps – though that’s another debate entirely!).

You’re right, though, that sometimes this happens on other threads as well. I guess we all – me included – need to remember to keep our heads, as Clark/Richard/ingo suggested.

And Alfred, you and Clark are right, Technicolour is a lucid, humane and completely genuine contributor who clearly has expressed their critical views on, for example, Israeli state policy many times. Clark, thanks again for your cool-headed even-handedness (or even-handed cool-headedness). I am in awe. Technicolour, really glad you met your nail-biting deadline! Good luck with it, whatever it was…

Suhayl,

You raise the question, why do 9/11 and the Holocaust come up with such regularity and generate such heat.

In part, as you suggest, they may be raised merely to provoke discord. However, there is a more fundamental reason why these topics are so often raised: they are both pivotal events in recent history, and the way they are interpreted is thus bound to be polarizing.

Nine-eleven was either the opening assault in a Muslim war against the West, or it was a false flag attack to justify an American-led war for oil, and global hegemony.

The Holocaust was either a crime against humanity without compare in the history of the world and for which all the World is in part to blame — a view with many political consequences, or it was merely one of a many twentieth century state-sponsored mass murders in which Jews have been involved not only as victims but also as perpetrators.

Since so much hinges on the view you take, the debate is inevitably subject to every kind of distortion and misrepresentation, which makes discussion of such subjects on an unmoderated blog highly inflammatory. But does that mean that the subjects should never be raised?

Of course, Alfred, they are important subjects. And you’re right that the reason for raising them so often out-of-context is that they’re bound to provoke emotive responses/ distortions/misrepresentations. Indeed, my point was simply that all-too-often they seem to be used as levers to disrupt discussions about other subjects entirely, rather than to stimulate discussion in and of themselves.

Of course, they need to be discussed. But there is so much discussion about them on the web, much of which seems to me to proceed backwards from predetermined fixed end-points and/or in pursuance of vested political interests of one sort or another. They come with immense emotional and historical baggage and that’s unavoidable. In some ways, for some people (in perhaps I should say, in the cultural discourse of our times) they’ve become almost like ciphers – or hinges, as you say. Please note, though, I do not wish to provoke discussion of them right now! It was merely an observation. Thanks.

Alfred,

I agree that those two events are pivotal. However, I do not see them in an either / or fashion. We take events, and try to fit them into a mental model. But the events consist of the actions of many people, each with their own outlook, motivations, prejudices, misapprehensions, and personal motivations etc, more than would ever fit into a human brain.

Essentially, I think that it is vanishingly unlikely that we could ever discover all the circumstances behind any ‘event’. Hell, quantum physics has taught us that we can’t even do that for the interaction of a pair of fundamental particles. These things we call ‘events’ are massive conglomerates of many people’s actions, plus a load of circumstances and a mass of coincidences.

In one very important respect it does not matter. Done is done. We need to concentrate upon how the present will affect the future. I’m undecided on some aspects of 9/11, but even if evidence does emerge to make up my mind, I’m not going to start believing that drone attacks in Afghanistan are justified, nor that war should be declared upon Iran.

Precisely, Clark.

I sense the spambots will arrive soon… They seem to pick up phrases from here and there and fuse them together in ways which would give Edward Lear apoplexy.

Dr Vandana Shiva has been fighting big corporate exploitations of agriculture and ‘biopiracy’ in India and the third world.

http://www.navdanya.org/news

Suhayl,

I have no desire to discuss the details of 9/11 or the Holocaust here. The latter has lost much interest since the Industry, if not bust, looks in even worse shape than BP. It may not be too long, it seems to me, before it is acceptable to discuss the Holocaust in the same way that it has long been discussed by Jewish scholars such as Raoul Hilberg, i.e., as a historical event or process.

An interesting point about the discussion of 9/11 is this: if it was an inside job (note I say “if,” though I have an opinion which I will not mention), can it nevertheless by morally justified? That seems to me to be a horrific question. Yet in the context of a technological society, hurtling from one humanitarian outrage or catastrophe to another, it must be possible to make a strong case (not that I say I would agree with it) for killing a few thousand of your own citizens in order to bring about a global transformation that will bring the world under a unifying and thus more stable system of government.

But this argument cannot be made publicly by those who accept it since it would negate the effectiveness of 9/11 as a catalyzing event! But in due course, perhaps, the victims of 9/11 will be honoured for their part, albeit involuntary, in the salvation of civilization.

Clark,

Even though I’m not talking to you, you …, I seem to have responded to your point in my comment to Suhayl!

Sandcrab,

biopiracy in particular and patents on software are very worrying issues that we should all be campaigning against.

http://www.stallman.org/articles/biopiracy.html

Clark said:

“I think that it is vanishingly unlikely that we could ever discover all the circumstances behind any ‘event’.”

Well, yes, “all the circumstances” would mean going back to the Big Bang.

But in politics many things follow from other things in as deterministic a way as flipping a switch (usually) turns on a light. When it no longer matters, historians with university tenure will most likely have a pretty clear idea of who made the decisions resulting in 9/11.

As it is, scholars without tenure have already reached conclusions about 9/11 that I believe will be generally accepted when such conclusions no longer have any political significance.

“We need to concentrate upon how the present will affect the future.”

It is true, we can only proceed from where we are. However, the direction in which we chose to proceed depends on our belief as to how we got to be where we are now. So you really cannot ignore the interpretation of events such as 9/11 if you want to participate in a realistic debate about the future.

There are fundamental issues at stake here. Do we have a democracy? Do we want a democracy? My answer to the first question, is no. My answer to the second question is, God, I don’t know — but I’m not worrying about it too much because it ain’t an option.

” I’m undecided on some aspects of 9/11, but even if evidence does emerge to make up my mind, I’m not going to start believing that drone attacks in Afghanistan are justified, nor that war should be declared upon Iran.”

But if the survival of humanity depends on the NWO, then not only is a 9/11 inside job but also the slaughter of innocents by drones morally justified.

If you find these comments morally outrageous, so do I, although I am driven to them by the logic of the situation.

Whether individual quantum events, subsequent to the Big Bang, ever influenced the course of history seems hard to decide. However, it does not seem impossible to envisage a kind of Schroedinger’s cat event that would total transform the course of history. Perhaps most wars, where both parties believe they have a chance, are such events. That’s why the NWO seems to imply such a dreary future. No more exciting history, just an endlessly corrupt, decaying feudal empire, with no outside forces to shake it up or knock it down.

Alfred,

if by New World Order you mean an authoritarian conspiracy to control all humanity, I do not believe that such a thing could possibly succeed; all the lessons of evolution (organic and cosmic) teach against it. However, it could do a great deal of damage in the attempt, and it should be exposed and resisted.

If you mean that the entire World needs to achieve a New type of Order to address the challenges of the future then, yes, I agree.

You wrote “But if the survival of humanity depends on the NWO, then not only is a 9/11 inside job but also the slaughter of innocents by drones morally justified”. This looks suspiciously like one of your extreme argument traps, (eg Leicester genocide etc) and you can expect no further comment about it from me.

Clark,

“This looks suspiciously like one of your extreme argument traps”

You are paranoid!

Can you not conceive that those who advocate the NWO actually believe in it — that its the best hope for mankind? And do you not realize that they believe in it, at least in part, because it would achieve stability. Better to be frozen in some feudal system, they would say, than dead in a nuclear winter, or whatever.

But if you don’t like that future scenario, what are you going to do about it? It seems to me you are burying your head in the sand, and saying no to the war for global empire but nobody to question the enabling events.

Some people question the official conspiracy theory of 9/11 because they are simple minded people like me. It’s a scientific or historical question and they want to get to the bottom of it. But for anyone opposed to the NWO, proving 9/11 is an inside job would provide an enormously powerful tool with which to attempt to derail the project.

So yes, who did 9/11 matters enormously, and those who say why talk about it are really saying “lets not really worry about what’s going on, we’ll just work around the edges of things, try to stop Britain using evidence obtained under torture, etc.” That’s good, I’m not deriding it, but it’s missing the question fo what’s happening, why it’s happening and what’d have to change it it’s not to continue happening.

Sorry to spoil you day, but I’m not trolling. I simply pursuing the questions that folks here seem to think are important.

Cheers, I off for the day.

“But if the survival of humanity depends on the NWO, then not only is a 9/11 inside job but also the slaughter of innocents by drones morally justified”

There are two conditions involved in the clause,

1 survival of humanity depends on a specific kind of NWO.

2 the required kind of NWO can only be achieved through slaughter of innocents.

I find it absurd and a very casual treatment of morality to submit here.

sandcrab – notice that Alfred isn’t taking responsibility for very much of what he says. He puts it into other peoples’ mouths and “what if ?”s.

Well Ive just been skimming Richard.

He’s been all leaps and no bounds… meh

“all leaps and no bounds”

Neat.

hey folk let me tell you one thing-I would never weant british to go poor because Indians are getting richer-no i would want all to be richer in life and material goods too.. and i am not talking about 100 million and so of richer Indians -i am talking about 1300 millions of indians -and all of the chinese, and russian and british and so all the people .

what i donto want is for one group of people to exploit others to get rich-that is is all.-is it too much to ask? let us not interfere in others affairs .

By the way Craig the produce from africa-ghana -looks very tempting especailly those green chilli-well done for your good deeds.

—-”My point was and is that the Avatar has not cited any evidence of of English pirates exploiting India today, “——-

He wasn’t talking about today, Alfred, he was talking about MacCauley’s time.

avatar singh – thank you. Those are good wishes,and I share them, for us all.

On another note, I guess people will have noticed the recent invasion of the spambots on most of these threads.

Perhaps one might postulate a different kind of spambot, which doesn’t lift lines from other people, but which invents almost nonsensical, bizarrely syntactical, lines of its own, drawn from the emerging collective unconscious of the internet. Either that, or let’s say, the hypothetical spambot is smoking some weird De Quincey!

Perhaps one might envisage a situation in a fantastical cyberspace (though is that not a tautology?) where the spambots, now animated and enlarged to the size of behemoths, do battle with the trolls whose single most distinguishing feature is that they are possessed of nightmarishly elongated tongues.

Here, then, in the spirit of all things trolleronery balloronery and straw spamboatery, is a ‘spambot’ of my own:

‘Tongues, I wear tongues night-time, you walk around best-cut cloth, good this blog, eat me.’

Isn’t it nice and comparatively quiet, without Larry and the ApoBackMetal thing ?

“the spambots, now animated and enlarged to the size of behemoths, do battle with the trolls”

A thought I have from time to time is about the arms race between the junkmail bots and the spamfilters; one side tries to generate mails that look human enough to actually come to a readers’ attention, the other side looks for ways of telling that that’s what it is. Automating the Turing test. So, a ‘survival of the fittest’ environment, selecting for artifical intelligence …

The spambots don’t seem too bad here, so far, really. But, yes, there are more than there were, and it can only get worse. (I think Craig’s probably going to have to do something systematic sooner or later; or ‘wibbler’, perhaps. whoever actually does the tech. I try to resist the temptation to know what he ‘should’ do, it’s his time and work.)

de Quincy. He was an Old Boy of the school I went to. I think they must have had a range of ‘successful’ people to pick from, but he’s the only one I remember hearing about, they seemed very proud of him. *grin*. and good for them, I say.

Facsinating, Richard. Yes, the ‘Mancunian dope-fiend’ moved to Edinburgh where he wrote most of his work and more than once ended-up in the debtors’ prison in Glasgow. He and fellow-dope-fiend, Coleridge apparently had a big bust-up at one point – now that would’ve been something to have seen!

Unlike most of his poet contemporaries, Politically, De Quincey was a High Tory, though of course, often the others went from being fervent revolutionaries to being curmudgeonly reactionaries, so at least he was consistent.

Did you meet his ghost when you were at school?

hey donot worry be happy! the Al; queda has moved or is moving to my country now and you will be relived to know.! shame on feeble respnose from my country India!1

“http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LG13Df02.html ”

“outh Asia

Jul 13, 2010

Al-Qaeda aims to cash in on Kashmir

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD – Pakistan-sponsored proxy operations that were largely abandoned several years ago have been revived at both the political level and on the armed insurgency front in Indian-administered Kashmir.

For al-Qaeda, watching from Pakistan’s

North Waziristan tribal area, this provides an opportunity for which it has waited a long time – to hijack Pakistan’s “bleed India” operations for its own cause, that is, to pull India into the region’s war theater.

The struggle for the right of self-determination in Indian-administered Kashmir, which died down following Pakistan’s crackdown on Kashmiri militant groups under American pressure

m 2002 onwards, has flared again.

Over the past four weeks, more than 15 people have died in clashes between the local Muslim Kashmiri population and police and paramilitary soldiers, mostly in Srinagar, the summer capital of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. Last week, for the first time ever, the army was sent into Srinagar.

Sources who spoke to Asia Times Online say that two militant organizations – al-Badr led by Bakht Zameen Khan and the Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose resources were largely depleted up until 2008 – are involved in the unrest. They have sent people across the Line of Control that separates the Pakistan-administered and Indian-administered Kashmirs.

This marks the second Kashmiri intifada – the first began in 1989 and resulted in more than a decade of some of the worst violence South Asia has seen and on several occasions brought India and Pakistan to the point of war – fighting did break out briefly at Kargil in 1999.

Speaking to Asia Times Online, a senior Western diplomat commented, “A water dispute is the main bone of contention between the two countries. Although we have found that Pakistan’s water problem is the result of internal mismanagement and has nothing to do with Indian intrigues as projected by Pakistan, jihadis are now exploiting the issue for recruitment and wrongfully projecting that if India is not controlled, the whole of Pakistan will be turned into a desert.”

The dispute centers on the Neelum River that flows from Indian-administered Kashmir into Pakistan. Under pressure from the US to reduce tensions because their rivalry spills over into Afghanistan and complicates efforts to bring peace there, India and Pakistan are scheduled this week to discuss the appointment of a panel of neutral experts. They will consider India’s plans to dam the river for a 330-megawatt hydro-electric power project.

Al-Qaeda watches on

By the standards of the long-running conflict in Kashmir, the latest flare-up is relatively low key, involving mostly street protests, in contrast to the bloody militant attacks of previous years.

For al-Qaeda, though, this is a big moment in terms of its Ghazwai-e-Hind, the Prophet Mohammad’s promised end-of-time battle for the conquest of India. “

Stephen said:

—”My point was and is that the Avatar has not cited any evidence of of English pirates exploiting India today, “—

He wasn’t talking about today, Alfred, he was talking about MacCauley’s time.

Hmmm, but in any case what he said was a load of Anglophobic twaddle.

First, the English in India were not in any reasonable acceptation of the term, “pirates.” In 1615 the East India Company was granted by the Mughal Emperor Nuruddin Salim Jahangir the right to live “in what place soever they choose” and to have “freedom answerable to their own desires; to sell, buy, and to transport into their country at their pleasure.”

Second, by the time that Thomas Macaulay went to India the “pirate,” i.e., free enterprise, phase of British imperialism in India was nearing its end, with passage of the Government of India Act in 1833 ?” leading to the Appointment of a Governor General of India and a Governor’s Council, of which Macaulay was a member, and the nationalization of the East India Company under the Government of India Act of 1858.

Third, the quotation provided by Avatar Singh from Macaulay’s alleged Parliamentary speech in February 1835 including words:

“I do not think we would ever conquer this country [India], unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and therefore I propose that we replace her Old and ancient education system, Her culture, for if the Indians think that all that if foreing and english is goodand greater than their own, they will lose thier self esteem, their native culture and and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”

is a forgery designed to delight Anglophobes, Indian and British alike.

Evidence?

Macaulay was in India in 1835 and made not speeches in Parliament that year:

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/people/mr-thomas-macaulay

Not only is that alleged quotation a forgery, it utterly and grotesquely inverts Macaulay’s actual position on Indian education and government as expressed in Parliament. On the refusal to grant the Indians admission to high office on the grounds “we should endanger our own power” he said “this is a doctrine of which I cannot think without indignation.” And then:

“Governments, like men, may buy existence too dear. “Propter vitam vivendi perdere causas,” ["To lose the reason for living, for the sake of staying alive"] is a despicable policy both in individuals and in states. In the present case, such a policy would be not only despicable, but absurd. The mere extent of empire is not necessarily an advantage. To many governments it has been cumbersome; to some it has been fatal. It will be allowed by every statesman of our time that the prosperity of a community is made up of the prosperity of those who compose the community, and that it is the most childish ambition to covet dominion which adds to no man’s comfort or security. To the great trading nation, to the great manufacturing nation, no progress which any portion of the human race can make in knowledge, in taste for the conveniences of life, or in the wealth by which those conveniences are produced, can be matter of indifference. It is scarcely possible to calculate the benefits which we might derive from the diffusion of European civilisation among the vast population of the East. It would be, on the most selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India were well governed and independent of us, than ill governed and subject to us; that they were ruled by their own kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working with our cutlery, than that they were performing their salams to English collectors and English magistrates, but were too ignorant to value, or too poor to buy, English manufactures. To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages. That would, indeed, be a doting wisdom, which, in order that India might remain a dependency, would make it an useless and costly dependency, which would keep a hundred millions of men from being our customers in order that they might continue to be our slaves. …

Wow, those were the days to be a Liberal.

Remarkably, those Liberal ideals were put into practice. The Indian Councils Act of 1892, put through the House of Commons by George Curzon, empowered the Governor-General and Provincial Governors to seek nominations to seats in their councils from Indian communities, including Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, thereby introducing a representative principle in the Indian Government. The Indian Councils Act of 1909 legalized the principle of election (instead of nomination) to Indian Councils, and empowered councils to discuss affairs (as opposed to merely advising) and pass resolutions.

The drive, on the British side, for Indian self-government was spearheaded by the Rhodes-Milner group and culminated in the Government of India Act 1919, which served as the basis for the central government until Independence in 1946. With this legislation, the British Government sought, in the words of Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, to achieve “… increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-government institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India… ”

Avatar’s Singh’s hope for solidarity among the ordinary people of the world is one we no doubt all share, although the realization remains as sadly remote as it always has been and likely always will be. “They attacked us on 9/11″ as Stephen Harper and David Cameron insist. Thus we must bomb them.

I was trying, yesterday, to look at the implications of that hideous reality and what a realist might make of it. But it was deemed to be setting “traps.” So now it seems, it is time for me to slink away, Gollum-like, shamed and exposed, a plonker, an unbelievable, racialist four-footed creature, to plot trollery against more vulnerable targets.

That’s a tempting thought, if I ever feel like trying a new identity. Like, WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, man ! So far out I’m never coming back. Gravy, booby !

And what about Alexander Trocchi? His ghost stalks a street near me, I’m sure. His mother ran the Trocchi Boarding House in the West End of Glasgow. Now, If I could locate it – no-one I know seems to know exatly which house it is, though I’m sure if I researched it, I could locate it. And then, one might take an Ouija Board in… but beware the Wrath of Cain.

Alfred: “They attacked us on 9/11″ as Stephen Harper and David Cameron insist. Thus we must bomb them.

I was trying, yesterday, to look at the implications of that hideous reality and what a realist might make of it.”

Well. Good questioning. A realist might say ‘it’s empirically proven that causing violent deaths by human means leads to more violent deaths by human means’.

An economist might point out (as Nordhaus does) the law of diminishing returns. Each recent ‘war’ has cost the aggressor far more than it has recouped (unless you’re a multinational corporation).

A Jesuit might point out that ‘the end justifies the means’ and that the sacrifice of human lives is necessary, for an end (said end in fantasy realms unspecified: delivery date unspecified).

And so on. All I see is nonsensical & pointless & boring suffering. What do you see?

Tabitha,

I’m not supposed to be here. So to be brief, let me suggest that you go back to the posts I did yesterday at 9:19 PM and 9:50 PM. That way I don’t need to repeat myself.

What I said there may not be very clear and that is because I was trying to reach a conclusion other than the usual platitudes that pass for sound judgement.

In particular, I was raising the question of whether it is ever morally justified to sacrifice the innocent for the greater good: the “greater good” in question being the New World Order, which means a World Empire in which war as we have known it, i.e., among nations will be ended.

Believe me, I was not advocating the NWO, what I was saying is that advocates of the NWO probably sincerely believe that there’s is a worthy goal. And I am suggesting that this may indeed be the only hope for the continued existence of mankind, although it would likely be an existence that would appeal to few: a feudal system, corrupt and basically beyond reform because there would be no outside forces to challenge it.

Alfred we were talking about British exploitation of India. I asked you to Google ‘salt’. Can you post back and tell us what you found?

Tabitha,

One other thing, there is nothing boring about suffering. I it would be hard to conceive of anything crueler or less trivial than mere boredom than napalming a child or burning someone to death with white phosporus.

As for Salt, Stephen, Jeeze, I just sorted out the rubbish you referred me to which was based on a misquote of Macauley (not MacCauley). If you want to tell me something else tell me. I’m not going on a goose chase.

agree of course about individual tragedies: something boring (reductive, stifling) about the general pointlessness of man-made suffering though, I think.

Alfred – “So now it seems, it is time for me to slink away…”

i slink under rocks. You can be a right good read, and me a crab. Its the boundaries drive me nips, too much pushin and shovin to here to wander lots. ymmv.

“Alfred we were talking about British exploitation of India.”

Stephen,

And the primary evidence presented was fraudulent. Avatar Singh made inflammatory Anglophobic statements justified by a fabricated racist statement attributed to Thomas Macaulay.

In any case the topic is trolling not exploitation and evidence of trolling by Avatar Singh seems clear. The only ground I can see on which he could claim extenuation is ignorance. The fake Macaulay quote has been widely disseminated on the Web. If ignorance is his plea, he should take care to check his sources much more carefully in the future. He should also avoid making inflammatory and racist statements such as he has made here and as have been made either by him or a namesake elsewhere on the Web.

As for salt, sorry, I don’t do quizzes or treasure hunts.

But if you want to talk about exploitation, of course the English went to India to get rich, and they lucked out in finding there a decadent and decayed Emperor insane enough to invite them in. Being better armed than the natives, the English did what those of superior military power have done throughout the history of civilization: they robbed and pilled and subjugated the people within their power. And in doing so they sometimes acted with great brutality. To the descendants of the victims, I would express regret. However, responsibility in fact lay with the Emperor and the rulers of the various states who failed in their primary responsibility to protect their people. Mostly, they failed even to try.

But what is truly remarkable about the British Empire, is not that it exploited people, but that (a) it became a democracy at home, something that had never happened to an empire in the history of the world; and (b) that the ruling elite then decided to extend democratic self-government to the colonies. As a result, no empire, surely, has been dismantled with such amity between the formerly ruled and those who formerly ruled than in the case of the British Indian Empire. Such good will has lasted for 65 years and will, one hopes, always be maintained.

Slanging the English for a racism in India that did not widely exist is pernicious. Of course, there were English crooks, swindlers, bullies and racist morons who went to India. But I believe that the English — the more intelligent ones anyway, recognized the Indians as fully their equals. This was not something that was so difficult to perceive. The British and the Indians are, after all, closely related peoples: hairy, and big-nosed. The Indians are in part of Persian stock and the Persians are closely linked with the Europeans. Look at a crowd photo from Tehran and see whether you could really distinguish the faces from those in an English football crowd.

And the well educated English — and the Raj was generally very well educated, recognized that not only did India have a civilization of wonderful elaboration, but that many Indians were people of the highest cultivation. The Indians, after all were composing philosophical scripts before the English knew how to write, including the Gitas, which contain the chief elements of the Jewish and Christian religious texts that were not compiled until many centuries later.

Tabitha,

Re: agree of course about individual tragedies: something boring (reductive, stifling) about the general pointlessness of man-made suffering though, I think.

I suppose one could say the entire universe is pointless so far as we can tell. Not surprisingly, therefore, much in it seems pointless too, including, to many people, man’s inhumanity to man.

And in a sense much violence does seem pointless unless you are a sadist, depend for your income on the military-industrial complex or you come from a Klingon-type culture that especially values the martial virtues and an opportunity to display them.

However, human conflict is not without practical consequences. Except as the result of unending conflict — war, murder, rape and pillage, none of us would be here today. The real pacifists, those who would always turn the other cheek, were wiped out before we passed the level of the amoeba.

Fortunately, within society, it is possible and even necessary to apply the universal moral code with which we are all familiar and which to most people seems natural and reasonable. Yet as long as the world is divided into competing groups, another moral code, the code of real politic, will always be applied

Crab,

Thanks for your note.

I have to find out about biopiracy. In 1967, at the age of 23, I completed a Ph.D. in molecular biology. At the time, we didn’t know much, and immediately afterwards I turned to other things, so I have little grasp of what it means for corporations to patent organism and genes, create sterile seed, etc. But it is disquieting. And it is one of the too many too complex issues that cannot effectively be covered in the popular debate about public policy. Blogs such as yours that focus on such issues must therefore have a valuable role in keeping at least a portion of the public informed.

IN GOD WE TRUST

Despite the strenuous efforts of the hegemonic system against the Islamic Revolution in the past thirty years, the Islamic nature of the revolution and Iran’s ruling system, as well as the devotion and selflessness of the Iranian nation are main factors that lead to impenetrability of Islamic Iran, and growth of the Islamic Revolution. The Iranian nation has put behind the upheavals of the past three decades victoriously and has gained a deep-rooted awareness of the global realities and Iran’s domestic topics of importance. As the Leader of Islamic Revolution pointed out, on Wednesday, in his meeting with IRGC commanders and members, the Iranian nation act based on its high understanding and experience. This fact manifested itself during the post-election unrests in Iran. The US and the Zionist regime entered the scene during last year’s incidents in Iran and supported the sedition’s ringleaders. They imagined that the sacred Islamic system has faced a domestic threat. However, the vigilance and steadfastness of the Iranian nation disappointed and unnerved the hegemonic system. The US and its allies have issued a new resolution under the pretext of Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities and even speak of a military attack against Iran. But, based on divine tradition, the Iranian nation will also be victorious in this scene.

Pilger puts it well:

“The corporatising, or appropriation, of news and facts and truth, and the dereliction of public memory, are probably the most critical issues today ?” for one thing, they lead us to unnecessary war as a permanent state removed in distance and culture from our everyday lives.

This is barbaric, of course, as is its corollary: unnecessary poverty. We are not automatons; we have no choice but to deal with these challenges as human beings and to support those who struggle on our behalf.”

Good quote Tech.

During WW1, Prime Minister Lloyd George said that if the people knew what was going on, this war would end immediately. He then added, but of course they could never know.

So how are we doing in the information war now?

What an incredibly long and wide-ranging thread! Been away and tied up too much for more than the briefest comment for the past couple of weeks, apart from replying on the 9-eleven thread. Someone else should take part on that, it’s only me and AngrySoba (plus all AS’s mates borrowed from other forums, actually).

I’m a bit pushed to see what this thread is actually about – but the tone is remarkably improved with the troll cull. Everyone’s learned to ignore trolls who have the impudence to still show up too, so hats off all round.

Btw, I do remember one of Apostate’s mates who called himself Jaded, but it’s not the same one who was posting here, iirc.

“Blogs such as yours..”

oops sorry Alfred, thats not my blog i just put the link in there to make it clickable. Sorry again for being so nippy earlier, as often with confrontation it was more about my problems than anything.

-

Ah Glenn respect for slaving away in the 911 thread! That thread is a phenomenon now Good to hear your comment as always.

” The Iranian nation has put behind the upheavals of the past three decades victoriously and has gained a deep-rooted awareness of the global realities and Iran’s domestic topics of importance. As the Leader of Islamic Revolution pointed out, on Wednesday, in his meeting with IRGC commanders and members, the Iranian nation act based on its high understanding and experience. This fact manifested itself during the post-election unrests in Iran. The US and the Zionist regime entered the scene during last year’s incidents in Iran and supported the sedition’s ringleaders.”

Mark, I see you’re cutting and pasting chunks of propaganda straight from Uncle Napoleon himself.

Tell us about the children of Iran from the days of the Iran-Iraq War and the little plastic keys to Heaven that they wore round their necks. What were they forced to do again?

Maybe you could tell us about the Tudeh Party and what became of it. Or the fate of modern dissidents in Iran now.

Well, whatever problems there are in Iran I expect it is all the fault of the Zionists and the Anglos. etc… etc…

Angrysoba,

on the 9/11 thread I asked you to “include fewer cynical remarks”. Your comments above are the sort of thing I mean. *You* know who you mean by “Uncle Napoleon”, but I do not. Something like “I see you’ve pasted from : (link)” would be more helpful.

Also, I do not know of these “little plastic keys to Heaven”. Again, information would be more useful than insinuations.

I believe that the “West” has repeatedly interfered with the development of Iran, and other Middle Eastern countries. Iran was democratic before Operation Ajax:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran#Recent_history_.281921.E2.80.93present.29

alfred: “The real pacifists, those who would always turn the other cheek, were wiped out before we passed the level of the amoeba.”

I suppose Ghandi doesn’t count. Or the Quakers who worked as ambulance men during the wars. Or Sweden.

“Except as the result of unending conflict — war, murder, rape and pillage, none of us would be here today”

Is it not conceivable that more people would be here today if “unending conflict” had not killed so many people before they had children ?

Mark, sorry to say so, but all I can see are the images of protestors being beaten and tortured. Fisk covered it very well. Naturally this does not mean I think the Iranian should further be bombed, invaded or crippled by crazy sanctions, nor am I unaware of its tragic history and the US crimes in the region. I am also aware that the regime is more moderate than previous regimes, despite its appalling treatment of its own people, if one can describe such behaviour as ‘moderate’.

btw meant to say thanks to Clark and Suhayl for previous testimonies. Thanks fellows.

Tech:

“I suppose Ghandi doesn’t count. Or the Quakers who worked as ambulance men during the wars. Or Sweden.”

Gandhi wasn’t a pacifist. He urged Indians to volunteer for service with Great Britain in WW1. He wanted to prove that Hindus weren’t wimps, and millions of them did serve with the British, thus proving his point.

Gandhi applied the method of non-violent resistance where he thought it would work — against the British. He knew that against the Germans and, during WWII, the Japanese it would be a dead loss! Ghandi realized that the British at some level actually believed the message of the Sermon on the Mount. Hitler, of course, did not and advised the British Ambassador, Arthur Henderson (or maybe someone else), during some nationalist disturbance that Britain should shoot Gandhi and then shoot 50 members of the Indian National Congress every month until the trouble ceased.

The Quakers are fine people. I knew some who served in the Friends Ambulance Unit — one was a three-time British National Glider champion who turned down a commission in the RAF as a wing commander, but their ideals were never really tested, because they lived in a country that fought the war on behalf of all citizens, including the pacifists. My own father was in two minds, but finished up as a volunteer in the RAF.

Oh, and the Swedes, they were just smart. They are well-armed neutrals. They build their own fighter jets and have very cool subs driven by near silent Sterling cycle engines producing a nitrogen-free stream of exhaust gas (carbon dioxide) which dissolves silently and invisibly in the ocean.

In the prelude to WW11 the Swedes refused to allow British military assistance to Finland (100,000 troops promised by Neville Chamberlain) to cross their territory during Russia’s invasion, which was astute, since the Russians were the eventual winners.

Ghost:

“Is it not conceivable that more people would be here today if “unending conflict” had not killed so many people before they had children ?”

Nah. Population is largely dependent on the carrying capacity of the land, which in turn reflects technological capability. Without a few hundred million years of natural selection to sort the smart from the dumb, our ancestors would have been too dumb to have invented the wheel barrow. In fact, they’d have been too dumb to have descended from the trees, if they’d ever been smart enough to climb them in the first place.

alfred: “He knew that against the Germans and, during WWII, the Japanese it would be a dead loss!”

Can you provide a source, please. Btw non-violence is pacifism.

Otherwise, interesting tho the history is, I’m not convinced by your attempts to show that Quakers aren’t pacifists; nor, I suspect, would they be.

The Swedes were ‘just smart’. I agree, it’s smart to pursue a non-violent policy, even if you need deterrents to ensure that you can.

Jains? Buddhists? Ba’hai? Still alive, I think you’ll find

Alfred – actually, rather than the carrying capacity of the land, population growth is far more influenced by how empowered women happen to be in a given society.

We would expect to see the same population density everywhere in Europe, just about, given locally grown crops are not exactly the staple for most people anymore, should carrying capacity be the significant factor. In fact, it varies hugely.

Why would the indigenous population of Europe, and Japan for that matter, be going down in many areas, has the carrying capacity diminished? But when women get the ability to choose not to pump out as many babies as their bodies can stand, the population reduces.

*

Incidentally, talking about natural selection sorting ‘the smart from the dumb’, you would probably enjoy the film Idiocracy. It’s rather amusing and has just that germ of truth about it. It’s not giving anything away to say your form of natural selection has actually began to act in reverse.

Far from the ‘smart’ being more successful and having more children, they will tend to have them later if at all – waiting until the time is right and all that. The ‘dumb’ are vastly more predisposed to have children on the other hand, with nary a thought about how they’re going to manage them all. The cumulative effect across many generations is depicted in the film.

Since when was war ‘natural selection’? Btw a contemporary of Darwin’s (forget the name, but you must surely know it, Alfred) was working on a smiliar Theory of Evolution at the time; but he concluded that species evolved by mutual cooperation, not competition. Darwin published first and that, Alfred, could be why you think the way you do?

Glenn, would love to see Idiocracy, as it sounds funny, but it also sounds as tho it could be worryingly equating ‘dumb’ with poor’. Isn’t it clear that intelligence is innate and universal, not inherited? Anyway, will have to watch it!

Thanks, technicolour, my pleasure! Sorry, I’ve been rushing around the last few days!

I agree entirely about Jains, Quakers, etc. and with your general point.

I also agree to some extent with Alfred specifically on Gandhi. He was a very wily lawyer – basically a good man, no question – but the non-violent struggle was a tactic adopted because of the massive population of India as opposed to the relatively small number of Brits in India and because, unlike the Dutch, French, Japanese or almost every other empire, he knew the British of the mid-C20th would not (with occasional shameful exceptions, such as Jallianwala Bagh, 1919; this event made Indian independence inevitable) machine-gun peaceful demonstrators. Yes, I know about the 1942 Bengal famine and there was other violence of course. But Gandhi – originally a dapper legal gentleman in suits and hats – knew the publicity value of all those long marches in sandals, etc.

He also had the implicit threat of, “You’d better deal with me, or you’ll have to deal with… them and there are millions of them” (‘them’ being of course the guys who were not peaceful).

Gandhi also to some extent bears some responsibility – along with a number of other people and factors – for the Partition of India. There was also much criticism of him at the time because by raising ideas from the Hindu religion – until then, the struggle had been very secular – as a focal tool against the British, it was thought that he might be unleashing irrational demons. Indeed, tragically, this proved to be the case and contributed to his own death. The ‘Attenborough’ version of Gandhi is largely inaccurate.

Nonetheless, whatever the contingencies of the time, the imagery of Gandhi as a peacenik retains appropriately powerful symbolism for the world. Truthfully, despite divide-and-rule, I don’t think any of the mainstream Indian leaders around at that time (Jinnah, Nehru, Azad, etc.) – or indeed ordinary people – imagined for a moment that there would be bloodletting on all sides on such an enormous scale; I think they were all shocked and knocked off-balance by it. They lost control for a time, and millions died and were permanently displaced. Madness.

Lord Louis Mountbatten, of course, bears much responsibility for that immediate debacle, partly because it was he who accelerated the timing and thus accentuated the lack of planning and sense of panic – and he did it for his own glory; he was a vainglorious man. His wife and Nehru, of course, were having an affair but it was a cosy menage a trois. That’s another taboo subject – and another topic for another time!

“Without a few hundred million years of natural selection to sort the smart from the dumb, our ancestors would have been too dumb to have invented the wheel barrow. In fact, they’d have been too dumb to have descended from the trees, if they’d ever been smart enough to climb them in the first place”

That doesn’t seem a very worthwhile answer to the question I asked, there are too many other variables.

Also, a strategy that produces workable results for an amoeba, or a band of monkeys in the pre-technological environment of a few million years ago, should not be assumed to be optimal for their distant descendants in a massively different environment. These over-simplifications are very dangerous, in the world we have to deal with now.

[Richard Robinson will be resumed when he's ready to dig the reincarnation groove. Rattles chains halfheartedly, thinks about going 'Woo' again but gets distracted ...]

I’m rushing off back to work right now, a 17-hour day! – so can’t post links re. Gandhi et al, but will try to find some soon.

technicolour: actually, it wasn’t a poor = ‘dumb’ relationship that was being drawn in the film. It was more an attack on the dumbing-down of society (America’s in particular, of course), to the point that they cared for nothing except rather mindless entertainment. Massive screen TVs, porn, all-in wrestling, people getting whacked in the crotch by a football, et cetera. In fact, a lot of the _really_ dumb people were rather well off. It was a statement on dumbing-down, spoon-fed entertainment, and corporate slogans as conventional wisdom.

technicolour – re: contemporaries of Darwin, other theories of evolution – are you familiar with the writings of Gregory Bateson ? Busybusy academic, there was a collection of his essays and papers published in the mid-80s as “Steps toward an Ecology of Mind” (a startling title, and the contents justify it), ranging from ’30s anthropology, through ’50s cybernetics, ’60s psychiatry, and out into some very abstract stuff; in the course of which, he comes back frequently to some very interesting discussion of Alfred Russell Wallace, Lamarck, Samuel Butler, and more. Chewy stuff, if you have a taste for that sort of thing.

Tech,

“He knew that against the Germans and, during WWII, the Japanese it would be a dead loss!

Can you provide a source, please.”

What I said is only an inference, certainly. But it follows logically from the facts of Gandhi’s career: for example, his urging fellow Indians to serve in the armed forces with the British in the War with Germany. Arthur Herman’s “Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age” provides a highly readable account of Gandhi’s career.

“alfred: Btw non-violence is pacifism.”

But for Ghandi, non-violence was to be applied where it was likely to work, although he recognized that it might not, which is why he said that those who participated in non-violent protest must be willing to lose their lives for the cause. He had no time for whimps! But the fact that he urged participation by Hindus in the Great War confirms that he believed non-violence to be a tactic, not a universal principle.

“I’m not convinced by your attempts to show that Quakers aren’t pacifists; nor, I suspect, would they be”

I have sat through enough Quaker meetings to be able to assure you that Quakers are very uncertain about almost everything including pacifism. As a child, I recall one of the kindliest of those attending the local Quaker meeting was an elderly engineer who did OK in the war making shells for the Navy. He once expressed the view that war was a necessity to control the population! To be quite truthful, he may not in fact have been a Quaker. He probably attended meeting to accompany his wife, who was an Elder of the Society of Friends.

“The Swedes were ‘just smart’. I agree, it’s smart to pursue a non-violent policy, even if you need deterrents to ensure that you can.”

No the Swedes do not believe in non-violence if, as you insist, non-violence equals pacifism. The Swedes will definitely give you a bloody nose if you invade their territory. But they are neutrals, which means they will not participate in other peoples wars. Which is, I believe, very sensible, and which is why I favor British neutralism and why I have advocated a new political party: DNTDFBNP, or Definitely Not The Damn Fool BNP. The party would adopt most of the BNP platform (out of the EU, out of NATO, massive devolution, trade protection to maintain Britain’s engineering and high tech skills base), but without the nose-pulling, knuckle-dragging idiot bodyguards and all the other ridiculous or offensive crap. And it would absolutely explicit in its recognition of the equality of all British Citizens of whatever origin, but it would share with the BNP a commitment to terminating mass immigration (something which, as Stephen pointed out to me the other day, the British Government cannot do under its present EU commitments) for all the economic and other reason I have stated elsewhere. (Oh, dear, this will surely send you, my dear friend, into orbit!)

“Jains? Buddhists? Ba’hai? Still alive, I think you’ll find ”

Show me an unarmed state without the protection of an armed state and I will show you a country about to lose its independence.

Glenn,

“Alfred – actually, rather than the carrying capacity of the land, population growth is far more influenced by how empowered women happen to be in a given society.”

No, in the long-run, the space is filled by those who will fill it. In Europe, the indigenous populations have a low fertility, but the population is nevertheless growing through immigration and reproduction by immigrants who tend to be much more fertile than the indigenous population. Muslims in particular are demonstrating that their social policies are more intelligent than those of the post-Christian West.

“We would expect to see the same population density everywhere in Europe, just about, given locally grown crops are not exactly the staple for most people anymore, should carrying capacity be the significant factor. In fact, it varies hugely.”

Actually, you do see approximately the same population density throughout Europe and it is generally very high. Britain for example has twice the population density of Pakistan. And the reason that the population density of Europe is high is that Europe was the first region of the World to undergo a technological revolution in agriculture.

Of course, in the short run, many things impact population, including insane social policy. But in matters of survival, numbers always count. Only numbers count. If the indigenous European women prefer fornication and shopping to raising kids, so be it. They will become extinct. But it takes a while.

“Far from the ‘smart’ being more successful and having more children, they will tend to have them later if at all – waiting until the time is right and all that. The ‘dumb’ are vastly more predisposed to have children on the other hand, with nary a thought about how they’re going to manage them all.”

The state of affairs you describe is only a temporary anomaly resulting from the transient triumph of liberal thought. Before that, the children of those unable to support children generally died young. Adam Smith explains all this. Smith was the first social Dawinist. Well maybe not the first, but he was certainly before Darwin. And in the future, we will go back to something similar.

Incidentally, at the beginning of the 20th century, even Liberals worried about the bizarre biological consequences of their own social policies, and were enthusiastic advocates of eugenics. Unfortunately, Hitler’s obscene and loony perversion of these ideas, put the whole question on hold for a century. If we don’t deal with it soon, we won’t be smart enough to do it ever!

Tech,

Your understanding of the evolutionary ideas of Alfred Russel Wallace are somewhat confused.

In fact Wallace and Darwin co-published their shared but independently formulated theory of evolution:

“Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection” is the title of a joint presentation of their two scientific papers read to the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858.

Suhayl,

Re: Gandhi,

A good summation. I’d question only one point:

“Jallianwala Bagh, 1919 … made Indian independence inevitable.”

I would argue, on the grounds stated previously, that Indian independence was inevitable well before 1919 because some of the most powerful forces within the British elite, in particular the Rhodes-Milner group, were committed to it.

But there’s no question that Jallianwala Bagh, better know to the British as the Amritsar massacre, was a shameful occurrence, described by Winston Churchill in Parliament as an act of “atrociousness.”

But perhaps this colossal blunder, not to say brutality, by General Dwyer (he was booted from the Army on his return to Britain) was influential in bringing Churchill and other imperialists to the realization that they were on the losing side of the argument.

Ghost said:

” a strategy that produces workable results for an amoeba, or a band of monkeys in the pre-technological environment of a few million years ago, should not be assumed to be optimal for their distant descendants in a massively different environment. These over-simplifications are very dangerous, in the world we have to deal with now.”

Here we go: the put down with no rational argument to back it.

If what I said is a massive and dangerous simplification, tell us what is the correct understanding of our predicament before we all go and kill ourselves living by the old book of rules.

You may be confusing Dyer and Dwyer.

Yes, that’s right, Alfred, it was a catalyst.

Re. Iran, I agree that the regime there is committing human rights absues on a large scale, esp. against young people. people in gerenal are very scared. It’s like after Revolution, one hears. However, the UK and USA have a very poor record in their dealings with Iran and I think it best if they keep a distance – the people there do not want US/UK interference/ intervention again and it would be completely counterproductive.

The Tudeh Party and liberals/ leftists/ secularists were crushed by the regime in the 1980s; the theocrats were enormously strengthened by Saddam Hussein’s Western-sponsored invasion – see, counterproductive.

Who is backing the terrorists who blow up mosques in Iran? Any interesting question. is it the Pakistani ISI, those rent-an-assassins, or Saudi Arabia, or the USA? or a combination of the above? I don’t know the answer to this particular question. Perhaps someone else does.

“Britain for example has twice the population density of Pakistan”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density

Great Britain, 255/km2.

Pakistan, 211/km2

France, 114/km2.

“Europe”, a suprisingly low 70. “South east Asia” 117.

Sorry, my typing is fraught and barely intelligible, a silly computer system here where I am, not my usual one, blame it on that! Yes, the atmosphere without the trolls is much less tense, much more normal. I’m sure there will be spirited discussion but it won’t be nasty and vicious. I’m sure the trolls will return – with their long tongues – but we shall be ready to continue, regardless!

Yes, well, Pakistan is a very big country with much empty space, mountains, deserts, fields, etc. But it’s population continues to grow rapidly – a product of chronic underdevelopment and wealth mal-distribution. I think it’s about half the size of Iran, which means it’s like France and the UK, combined (in size). France is twice the size of the UK with the same population as the UK. Apart from the north and south of Scotland, much of the middle and south of England seem very congested and suburban (when I drive down, once you hit Leeds). We’re lucky in Scotland, that way. Atrocious weather though! Most of the Pakistani population now lives in towns and cities. This is new.

“Here we go: the put down with no rational argument to back it”

Why is that fair ? Those were the examples you gave, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to question your assumption that they’re applicable.

“If what I said is a massive and dangerous simplification, tell us what is the correct understanding of our predicament before we all go and kill ourselves living by the old book of rules.”

I do not know, I am not preaching a One True Answer, fits all sizes, efficacious in every case. But I agree that this is the risk.

Ghost:

:Great Britain, 255/km2.

Pakistan, 211/km2

France, 114/km2.”

Oh, good shot. I must have muddled miles and kilometers. From the CIA Fact Book I now get numbers close to yours:

UK 252 per km2

Pakistan 222 per km2

And yes France and Spain are less crowed than Britain, Italy, Holland Germany have about the same population density.

I don’t know where you get the figure of 70 per km2 for Europe. I should think this must include the wastelands of Scandinavia up to and beyond the Arctic circle.

According to the reference you give, the density for the 25 member nations of the EU is 112 people per km2.

Anyhow, Europe like Asia is crowded. And it got crowded before Asia because Europe is where the agricultural revolution occurred first.

Anon,

“You may be confusing Dyer and Dwyer.”

yes, thanks.

For absolute certainty and with apolgies to General Dyer, I meant Brigadier-General Reginald Edward Harry Dyer.

I think some years later was assassinated by Udam Singh, who had been a boy at the massacre in which his father was killed. The Asian Dub Foundation (ADF) did a song about Udam Singh, who was hanged after being found guilty at trial; he didn’t deny it, quite the opposite.

Ghost,

“Ghost said:

“Here we go: the put down with no rational argument to back it”

Why is that fair ? Those were the examples you gave, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to question your assumption that they’re applicable.”

OK, I’m sorry.

What was causing me frustration was the seeming suggestion that humans are somehow not bound by the same natural laws as other creatures and that one can therefore reasonably ignore those laws when formulating a course of conduct.

True, we often do ignore those laws when formulating a course of conduct. However, when we are thinking about social policies that bear on the survival of the species or of groups within the species, e.g., individual nations, we should surely take those laws into account.

Suhayl – “France is twice the size of the UK with the same population as the UK”. Yes, that was the observation that rang alarm bells for me with Alfred’s figures. I lived in the southwest corner of it once – about the same north to south, but twice as wide. While I was living there, I went off and played a series of gigs round the northern Highlands; the journey led me to conclude that the built-up (“best avoided”) area stretched from Newcastle to Limoges. But that may not be true any longer, I had a quick bop back there a few years ago, and the southern Massif Centrale seemed a lot busier and more built-up than it was 25 years ago. Can’t blame them, really – if you have some sun, might as well enjoy it …

“I think some years later was assassinated by Udam Singh”

That is Sir Michael Francis O’Dwyer , KCIE (April 1864 ?” 13 March 1940) was assassinated.

He was Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab and supported General Reginald Dyer’s action regarding the Jallianwala Bagh. massacre and termed it a “correct action”.[1][2]

Christopher Lee acted as Jinnah in the biopic of that name and he was excellent in the role, so much so, people in Lahore (where it was filmed in the late 1990s) thought it was Jinnah’s ghost. I’m not sure about some aspects of the script, relating to the fantasised ‘Purgatory’ which Jinnah, Gandhi and Nehru were meant to be inhabiting and the implication of blame placed on all three – in spite of what I said earlier – but it is a good film nonetheless and relates a version of history about which we in the UK seldom hear. It was directed by Jamil Dehlvi and the script was by him and Akbar Ahmed (I seem to remember). Christopher Lee is an amazingly powerful actor, an immense sense of presence and of inhabiting a role completely.

Oh yes, that’s right – God, why did these guys all have such similar names! Didn’t they realise that 90 years on, we – or at least I – would be mixing themn all up? Why didn’t one call himself, ‘Fred’ and the other ‘John’?

Thanks, De Quincy’s ghost. Sounds like a good trip. Amazing how the ghosts of old C19th poetic opiate hounds can drive nowadays. Ah, the wonders of modern techonology! Give my regards to Samuel T., won’t you, there’s a good man. Ghost, I mean.

But De Quincy’s Ghost, you’re a musician… now I’m intrigued. Quite a few musicians tend to blog hereabouts, ones I know are musicians. You’re not Richard Robinson, or Vronsky or Jives by another name, are you?

Yes, I think that Mr De Qunicy’s spirit has come to inhabit the consciousness of Mr Robinson, whose tunes will now be definitely psychedelic in nature. The Incredible String Band? Dr Strangely Strange? Trader Horne? Spirogyra?

Suhayl – the Grateful Dead !

pleased smirk, I’m a sucker for a bad pun. It’s true, anyway, I loved ‘em, in their early days. And the early ISB, before Robin Williamson started to go to his own head. And so on …

Yes, was I not clear enough ? It could have been someone else, I suppose. But it was you who invoked me.

RR, too lazy to reincarnate just now.

—–”was influential in bringing Churchill and other imperialists to the realization that they were on the losing side of the argument. “———

Quite the contrary. Churchill viciously opposed any attempt at self-government throughout the thirties and refused to join the government because of this alone.

His contempt for Indians can be seen by the fact he was quite relaxed about the millions starving as a result of the Bengal famine.

—–”Anyhow, Europe like Asia is crowded. And it got crowded before Asia because Europe is where the agricultural revolution occurred first. “——

Since when was Mesopotamia in Europe?

——”trade protection to maintain Britain’s engineering and high tech skills base”——

Unfortunately, old boy, trade protection isn’t unilateral. If the UK stops imports other countries will stop imports from the UK. The US and the EU and India and China are all big enough to be self-sufficient. I very much doubt that is true of the UK.

Stephen, I think Alfred probably meant the Agrarian Revolution which occurred first during the early C18th in England, with enclosures, etc. and which was a precursor of the Industrial Revolution; threw lots of peasants off the land so that cities grew, working class formed, etc.

—–”Lord Louis Mountbatten, of course, bears much responsibility for that immediate debacle, partly because it was he who accelerated the timing and thus accentuated the lack of planning and sense of panic – and he did it for his own glory; he was a vainglorious man. “—–

Mountbatten had set up a provisional Indian government in 1946 and Jinnah retaliated by calling for armed resistance. You basically were looking at a situation of civil war. It was calculated that half a million British soldiers would be required to maintain order and Attlee, and probably Mountbatten as well, realized the British would have a mass mutiny on their hands if they attempted to conscript that many.

This was the result independence was advanced.

Now, with hindsight, partition didn’t prevent the civil war with millions of deaths and brought problems the peninsular is still suffering from, but to blame it on British bad faith or vanity is simply not on.

—–”I think Alfred probably meant the Agrarian Revolution which occurred first during the early C18th in England, with enclosures, etc. and which was a precursor of the Industrial Revolution; threw lots of peasants off the land so that cities grew, working class formed, etc. “——

And how did something that increased malnutrition and starvation lead to a population increase. The truth is the Indian peasant had a better standard of living than his British counterpart until the middle of the 19th century.

“What was causing me frustration was the seeming suggestion that humans are somehow not bound by the same natural laws as other creatures and that one can therefore reasonably ignore those laws when formulating a course of conduct.”

But I was asking you to justify your assumption, not restate it. How does an explanation of what worked for our remote simian ancestors (I’ll accept the assumption that this explanation is okay, for the sake of argument) become a ‘natural law’ that should determine our behaviour in this very different set of situations ?

I think the UK pop. increased with industrialisation, no? Of which the Agrarian Rev. was the prequel. People moved en masse to the cities, driven off the land, so a pool of labour for the new factories, etc. factories needed more and more people, very labour-intensive. So was landless labouring – as opposed to common land working. You’re right, Stephen, about the peasants of India and those of the UK.

Mountbatten and Co didn’t want the civil war to happen while they were in chrage. Blaming Jinnah for everything bad that happened is convenient but not accurate. Jinnah has become the stock villain. Ziegler, Mountabatten official biographer, recognises the role which Mountbatten’s vanity played in the debacle. John Galbraith and many others in the UK, India, pakistan and the USA have acknowledged very firmly Mountbatten’s key responsbility. As I said, though, it wasn’t one thing, nor was it simply British bad faith, I never said that, Stephen, but a complex of factors, but Mountbatten was the wrong man at the wrong time for the job.

What an interesting thread. Thank you, all. Will consider. In meantime will resort to quoting, again Voltaire, “doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is absurd”.

Why was Voltaire so cool? Candide is amazing! Discuss…

Stephen Jones said

“Quite the contrary. Churchill viciously opposed any attempt at self-government throughout the thirties and refused to join the government because of this alone.”

I didn’t say Churchill changed sides I said he may have come to the realization that he was on the losing side. Slight difference there.

“If the UK stops imports other countries will stop imports from the UK.”

What imports from the UK are you talking about! Oh, whiskey and marmalade. Frankly, I’d be happy to keep the whiskey and marmalade for home consumption in order to preserve healthy British engineering and textile industries with their associated skilled workforces.

Re: agricultural revolution

Wikipedia says:

Agricultural revolution (sometimes Agrarian Revolution) can refer to (in chronological order):

Neolithic Revolution or “First Agricultural Revolution” (about 10,000 years ago), which formed the basis for human civilization to develop

Muslim Agricultural Revolution (10th century), which led to increased urbanization and major changes in agriculture and economy during the Islamic Golden Age

British Agricultural Revolution (18th century), which spurred urbanization and consequently helped launch the Industrial Revolution

Scottish Agricultural Revolution (18th century), which led to the Lowland Clearances

Green Revolution (mid 20th century after World War II), the use of industrial fertilizers and new crops greatly increases the world’s agricultural output

As might have been fairly obvious from the context, I was referring to the British agricultural revolution which eventually spread to more backward places such as Scotland and France.

Ghost aka Richard Robinson (thought I noticed a smell of horse) said:

“But I was asking you to justify your assumption, not restate it.”

Assumption. What assumption? That humans are subject to natural selection? It’d be a total waste of time. The argument about evolution has been on for 150 years. Nothing I say is going change anyone’s mind.

Off the top of my head, this is nonsense:

“Green Revolution (mid 20th century after World War II), the use of industrial fertilizers and new crops greatly increases the world’s agricultural output”

Because you only have to read the book ‘Hungry Corporations’ for meticulous research which proves the devastation behind the so-called ‘Green Revolution’.

Try it, Alfred:

http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/book.asp?bookdetail=3919

Anon, writing remarkably like Stephen Jones says:

“Off the top of my head, this is nonsense…

Because you only have to read the book ‘Hungry Corporations’ for meticulous research which proves the devastation behind the so-called ‘Green Revolution’.

Try it, Alfred…”

I cut and pasted from Wikipedia merely to illuminate the question of nomenclature. I didn’t write the article and I’m not interested right now in reading about the “Green revolution,” which I considered a bad idea at its outset. More food meant more people, which meant more people starving at a higher equilibrium population.

“Nothing I say is going change anyone’s mind.”

Not mine, certainly, the way you go about it. I have, after all, shown all kinds of reasons why I’m not convinced, and you’ve evaded most of them. Those you have acknowledged, you’ve very seldom done anything except rephrase. Showing why they make sense might have been more effective.

Given the evidence that humans can breed, I can see nothing natural, or resembling a ‘law’, in the insistence that we should do anything else in order to maximise some theoretical construct, however important it may be to you.

“smell of horse”, my rosy whatnot. 6:08 might have been a Clue, to one so quick to dismiss others for not being intelligent enough to have paid the desirable amount of attention to his every clever nuance.

Yep, Voltaire is the man. His critiques stand up even today; you merely need to substitute the names in his stories with contemporary ones. Swift, too, of course. Voltaire was fascinated by Britain and of course lived in exile here for some time.

And my view on manufacturing, etc. in the UK is that yes, I think it ought to have been invested-in and not sold to the most powerful bidder to be outsourced. Protectionism is necessary in certain circumstances. I also think that mining and shipbuilding could have kept going in the UK; it was not necessary for these highly profitable industries to go to the wall. They were deliberately destroyed. It was an ideological ‘crusade’ by Thatcher. Social engineering of the worst kind by regimes who, at root, are not interested in the lives of ordinary British people.

——”British Agricultural Revolution (18th century), which spurred urbanization and consequently helped launch the Industrial Revolution”—–

I’m not at all sure that the ravages of 18th century enclosures spurred the Industrial Revolution. Canals were probably more important.

Textile production was decentralized until the beginning of the 20th century. That is to say most workers were self-employed working from their houses.

India had masses of skilled workers in the cities (Dhaka produced some of the best steel in the world until the end of the 18th century).

Sorry that should say “decentralized until the beginning of the 19th century”.

I am a tosser with too much free time. Sorry about that!

Interesting thread on the partition of India at independence. The fault for the disaster (and the hundred’s of thousands of deaths) was Britain’s, because Britain was in charge. It is as simple as this ?” Power and responsibility go hand in hand. It was Attlee who appointed Mountbatten, and it is Attlee who must bear the ultimate responsibility for what happened. He would have done better to have stayed with Wavell.

Re: Indian partition

“The fault for the disaster (and the hundred’s of thousands of deaths) was Britain’s, because Britain was in charge. It is as simple as this ?” Power and responsibility go hand in hand.”

Most of the violence occurred after August 15, so what you must mean is that India was mainly responsible.

But would it be hopelessly old-fashioned to suggest that responsibility for the violence rested at least in some slight way with those who actually committed acts of wanton violence or engaged the ethnic/religious cleansing of communities?

Re: Indian partition

Responsibility for protecting the innocent lay with the Imperial power; just as we would rightly expect responsibility for enforcing Rule of Law in the UK and Canada today to lie with our own governments. The RAJ had responsibility for planning security not just before independence but for its immediate aftermath as well.

Is it a bit old fashioned of me to expect that governments should take responsibility for putting a stop to mob violence, ethnic/religious cleansing and other known breaches of Rule of law that occur in their jurisdictions? Did not Stanley Baldwin say that ?” power without responsibility is the prerogative of the harlot? Do governments not have some responsibility for enforcing rule of law, or is it just about hiring civil servants and paying indexed pensions?

The Mountbatten’s and Attlee’s may not have accepted that Power and responsibility go hand in hand, but most former members of the ICS would never have doubted it for a minute. The RAJ had many fine moments during its long history, but handling the Partition of India was not one of them.

Alfred: You’re right, and I only made my distinction about the indigenous population further on in that post.

But we were talking about population densities, and I still maintain that it varies wildly across Europe, even when the capacity of the land is more or less equal. France cannot to be said to have a hugely different load capacity, yet has half the population density just about. As it’s our nearest comparison, I think my point actually stands. Divergence of 100% between us and our closest neighbour make the whole thing look rather not approximate at all.

*

I’m not at all sure that it’s “liberal thought” which has got our society in the state it is in. It wouldn’t do to have peasants starving in the street, that would lead to too much uprising.

Rather than too many children being the result of an over-generous welfare system, as you seem to suggest, too many children have always been the product of an impoverished society, and/or one in which women had little say in their reproductive capacity.

No welfare? Then you need loads of kids so that (a) some might survive the hardships of war/hard labour that the poor are almost exclusively predisposed for; (b) some might survive the diminished health services left for them, and (c) welfare in old age by handouts from grand-children.

Too much welfare? Then you’ll have loads of kids to get more money for them.

Just enough welfare? You’ll have the same number of kids as anyone else, possibly more if you don’t understand contraception, even more if you don’t care about a career, and cared nothing for an education.

So unfortunately, Alfred, the poor, uneducated and stupid – who are not the same set of people by any means despite Conservative conventional wisdom – will always tend towards larger and more successful reproduction. Nothing temporary about it, it’s been happening since children were understood to be pension schemes, thousands of years ago.

Technicolour – ”jaded’: you complain of being ‘attacked’ and yet the only thing I’ve remotely accused you of is being a ‘friend of apostate’. The rest were questions. You can, of course, to chose to call me ‘ill in the head’ and accuse me of being a Zionist agent as a result, but then earlier you were accusing me of being BNP.

So you are the Jaded who wrote this: (my emphasis)

The *question* of planned total extermination is a pertinent one though. They were certainly used as a source of labour in *some* camps.

Admittedly, every Jew that died from malnutrition, illness etc. may as well have been murdered. Furthermore, the Nazis *may well have tested gas* on the Jews. If the Nazis had won *maybe their fate would have been genocidal*, I don’t know”.

You are not questioning whether precisely 6 million Jewish people were murdered. You are questioning whether there was a ‘Final Solution’ at all. You are suggesting that Jewish people were merely used as labour in *some* camps. You insinuate that instead of gassing Jewish people the Nazis *may have tested gas* on Jewish people. Finally you suggest that there was no genocide.

So I think you’ve answered my questions, thanks. Otherwise, if you know of any Zionist agents, or, for that matter, BNP stooges, who had friends on the convoy to Gaza and who defend the Palestinian people at any opportunity, do let me know. In the meantime, I guess we can wait for the IP addresses when Craig gets back, can’t we.

In the meantime zillions of apologies if you’re just a really nice bloke whose history is utterly confused and whose random insults are just the product of an over enthusiastic defence of Craig, rather than a concerted attempt to scare people off the board. Of course.’

Technicolour – ‘that was me (above). oh, and i know you did not directly accuse me of being a Zionist agent. ‘jaded’; that’s not your style. Insinuate, I should have said. Strange, because I thought you read this board.

where did i misquote you, by the way?’

Well, I gave you a few days to cool off and stop being a prat, but more of the same bile is spewing from your mouth it seems. You accused me of being anti-semitic for starters. Then you state ‘I only accused you of being a friend of’ etc.. You are certainly ill in the head. Now you just carry on with your deluded misinterpretation, as the one thing you can’t do is eat humble pie.

I *am* questioning whether 6 million Jews were directly murdered, executed to be clear. I *am not* questioning whether elements of the Nazi regime wanted all the Jews dead. I *fully acknowledge* that they did. I *certainly am* suggesting that Jews were used as a source of labour in some camps. You then make a deranged comment about ‘gassing instead of gassing’? What the hell. I *am questioning* how many Jews were gassed. I *don’t suggest* that *substantial numbers of Jews* weren’t directly murdered, executed, and elements of the Nazi regime wanted them all dead. I *am accusing* the Zionists of exaggerating what happened. Yet again you try to twist everything into a black and white debate. That is a very common and feeble trick that the Zionists employ.

You have answered all your own questions and answered them *incorrectly* because you are a buffoon. As it goes, i’m sure there are many Zionist agents that pretend to be what they are not. That’s the way the game works. Are you really so stupid? For God’s sake, even Tony Blair pretends to be a Palestinian friend!!! As for IP addresses, that proves absolutely nothing whatsoever. You think that Zionist agents, if in Israel, work with Israeli IP addresses showing? Ha ha ha. I am a nice bloke and my history isn’t confused at all. My insults are certainly not random and not designed to ‘scare off’. Are you some sort of baby? Anyhow, I hope that there are enough well placed asterisks to help your challenged brain comprehend some simple text. It seems very disorientated to me. Moreover, you definitely don’t strike me as a nice chap.

As for questions, you mysteriously didn’t answer all my questions. Combined with your previous posts I do find your behaviour suspicious. Let me ask you one simple question Mr. Technicolour and we shall see. I was taught in school that 6 million Jews (human beings) were deported and executed in an industrial fashion. I disagree with that narrative. Disagreeing with that narrative *doesn’t mean* you think that *substantial numbers* of Jews were deported and executed. Moreover, as I have said before, the intimidation of any human being is unacceptable in my view, let alone deportation and execution! Do you agree or disagree with the 6 million deportation and execution narrative or not Mr. Technicolour?

That’s ‘weren’t deported and executed’ 3 lines up from the bottom in case you try and play the fool.

The posting at 12:56am on 17th July 2010 was not me. Someone posted using my name but it was not me. Just so everyone knows.

Jaded,

once a conflict is begun, how does one go about ending it? It seems a shame that in the few days that you gave Technicolour to cool off, you did not do so yourself, and have reopened the dialogue with insults.

Please look at Technicolour’s previous comments on many threads. If you can find any that look like the work of a Zionist shill (apart from the argument with yourself, of course) please point them out for my benefit; I think you will find many that contradict that theory. If your accusations are correct, then I have formed completely the wrong impression of this contributor.

Jaded, a person can believe the mainstream account of the Holocaust without being a Zionist shill; do you agree? I think Technicolour was mistaken in associating you with Apostate (please correct me if I’m wrong about this), and I think that you have misjudged Technicolour. Now, we need an ‘exit strategy’ for this argument that started months ago. Refraining from name-calling and sticking to the facts could help.

—–”The Mountbatten’s and Attlee’s may not have accepted that Power and responsibility go hand in hand,”——

The problem was that the government was only a few hours old. Thus it had the power but didn’t know what to do. Remember most of the new Indian leaders didn’t have a great deal of governing experience because they’d spent a large number of the preceding years in jail.

On the other hand the old regime had no power; it had just handed it over.

——-”Nothing temporary about it, it’s been happening since children were understood to be pension schemes, thousands of years ago.”——–

Quite the opposite. It’s an entirely new phenomenon. Until the beginnning of the 20th century the richest tended to have the largest families. This is still true in most parts of the world.

—–”I was taught in school that 6 million Jews (human beings) were deported and executed in an industrial fashion.”——–

‘In an industrial fashion’ is somewhat of a bizarre phrase but you were taught quite correctly at school. That you now choose to ignore it for no other reason than that you feel like it is your business.

The reasons we can be fairly sure of the numbers is that the Germans kept very meticulous records.

Suhayl – “Just so everyone knows”

Annybody who reads you knew it already, of course, you’d be a difficult voice to forge convincingly. (There’s a bit more of it upstream, too).

Regarding intercommunal bloodshed, whether it’s in the Balkans, Rwanda or India, it has to be faced that (some) ordinary people pick the machetes off the walls and kill other ordinary people – this is a part of the human condition that isn’t nice or pretty, but has to be faced, as Alfred suggests, I think. Same with the Germans, French, Eastern Europeans in relation to the Jews, over many centuries and esp. in the mid-C20th. Of course, many ordinary people do not do these things and help protect neighbours, etc. and there are countless stories of those acts of heroism. There were even people in the SS who protected Jews – there’s a famous story of one man who acted like Schindler and helped spirit away Jewish children.

However, Roderick also has made a good point – that governments have responsibility.

I think, in the case of India 1947, the leaders of the UK and the leaders of India lost control of events – this happens, as Tolstoy well knew – they got embroiled in constitutional arguments, etc. and failed to take account of the effects of their actions and of other, more sinister bodies, extremists on all sides who wanted a sectarian bloodbath for their own purposes.

So in fact, Stephen, too is correct.

My point is that these points are all valid and are not mutually exclusive. We can argue about relative weight, but it remains a complex event, or series of events and no one narrative can fully delineate it.

Jaded, please do be mellow. You’re entitled to put your point-of-view, as are we all, but there’s no reason to attack technicolour; you can agree to disagree. How about that?

Thanks, Richard, good to know I can’t be forged! But where are the other comments of similar ilk? As far as I can tell, all the rest are genuinely mine! The one yesterday evening about the typing being bad was mine. Anyway, thanks again. Glad you have emerged from the voluminous cloak of Mr De Q.

Suhayl – “where are the other comments of similar ilk?”

Bottom of the very-white-shirt-photo ‘Quick Post’, 11:29 AM

Thomas de Q seems to have caused more confusion than I intended, I thought the transition was clear … never mind. I’m tempted to feign an opium hangover, but there are things I should be doing (also, I don’t actually know what one would be like, it’s something I’ve kept away from). I just had a fit of curiosity & looked him up in Wikipedia, it seems that however much the school – or the subset of teachers I met there – might have liked to claim him, he really wasn’t there very long. Curiouser and curiouser.

But. Must get some shopping in, hoover the floor, debug some code … see you later.

Thanks, Richard. Yes, I think this is them changing tactic again – see Ruth’s link. They’ve realise we’re onto them and will ignore them, so now they’ve decided to try and undermine our discourses in other ways. It won’t work, it’s puerile and just very silly. A reflection, I think, partly of envy. Anyway, if we have to, we have Thomas De Quincey up our sleeves – and of course, the Dalek, who has been undergoing a service recently but who, I feel confident, would be willing to return on request (for a price) in order to to exterminate trolls.

The problems of misrepresentation, irritation, confusion and defamation due to people posting under other people’s names or in multiple names can be largely eliminated by requiring user registration.

Registration would have prevented the multiple Larry phenomenon, unless the Larry’s shared pass words, in which case they might reasonably have been banned for misrepresentation.

Against registration, it might said that some people will not bother to comment at all. I tend to forget passwords, think “oh heck” and go on to do something more useful. However, I seem to manage to access sites that I think really matter, so I don’t see this as a real problem.

Glenn,

Re: “But we were talking about population densities, and I still maintain that it varies wildly across Europe, even when the capacity of the land is more or less equal. France cannot to be said to have a hugely different load capacity, yet has half the population density just about.”

The paradox is resolved if you take into account what land relates to what population. Globally, food production equals food consumption.

The discrepancy in population density between France and Britain is probably explained by differences in agricultural policy. Britain imports 42% of its food, according to this source, for which I cannot vouch:

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090118103316AABwS6o

In France, however, activist farmers, of whom there are many, are prone to drive flocks of sheep down the Champs Elysees, or dump manure on the doorstep of the Presidential Palace if their demands for protection are not met. As a consequence, I should think that France is much more self-sufficient in food than Britain.

” … Rather than too many children being the result of an over-generous welfare system, as you seem to suggest, too many children have always been the product of an impoverished society, and/or one in which women had little say in their reproductive capacity.”

But the thing is, Glenn, if you’re really impoverished your children don’t have the best prospects of living to reproductive age, assuming that you have lived long enough to have any children. At the end of the 19th century, British cities consumed people. Country folk went to London to seek their fortune and generally lived very poorly, became sick and died young. Their reproductive rate was well below the replacement rate. I don’t have the stats to hand, but Jack London describes the process vividly in “The People of the Abyss”.

Today, whole nations consume people in the same way, although without reducing them to apparent poverty. The poverty today, some would say, is spiritual. Thus the irrevocable commitment to immigration. We live in a culture so toxic that we are unable to reproduce ourselves (I’m talking generally here, not about individuals. There have always been people who for whatever reason did not have children though they led valuable lives and contributed to the welfare and the perpetuation of their society.). The fertility rate in Italy is now 1.1 per female. Germany manages 1.4 and Britain 1.6, all well below the replacement rate of 2.1.

So yes, if the culture of the West were adopted worldwide, then your contention that female choice dictates reproductive rates would be correct. However, at present global population growth or replacement is overwhelmingly determined by people outside the Western cultural system.

“So unfortunately, Alfred, the poor, uneducated and stupid – who are not the same set of people by any means despite Conservative conventional wisdom – will always tend towards larger and more successful reproduction.”

Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the Earth! The Bell Curve and all that depends on the social system. If you have a relatively rigid class structure, then all social class will likely be similar in human potential. If you have a meritocracy, then those at the bottom of the heap will by definition be dumb or in some way handicapped. I think that is the way society has tended over the last half century. Therefore, the high reproductive rate of welfare mothers is a cause for concern, especially if as has been asserted, many girls with few prospects become pregnant because that assures welfare, a place of their own to live, etc.

“The reasons we can be fairly sure of the numbers is that the Germans kept very meticulous records.”

Are there German records showing the number of concentration camp inmates gassed? If not, what are we to conclude? That the records were not meticulous, that the records have been destroyed or that there were no concentration camp gassings?

But if these questions are illegal under EU law, then naturally I withdraw them.

The Zionists will not prevail. There is clear evidence of high level backing for their tactics in trying to subvert Craig’s blog. I wouldn’t put it past some of these people to sabotage the mango crop, but that’s another story and one which I can say little about at the moment.

“I think, in the case of India 1947, the leaders of the UK and the leaders of India lost control of events – this happens, as Tolstoy well knew – they got embroiled in constitutional arguments, etc. and failed to take account of the effects of their actions and of other, more sinister bodies, extremists on all sides who wanted a sectarian bloodbath for their own purposes.”

Well put, Suhayl. Situations can arise that are beyond the wit of man to control. It has been argued that the violence of partition stemmed from the Indian Councils Act of 1892, which introduced the principle of representation by community in the government of India: the effect being to polarize and divide according to religion or ethnicity, etc. If this was the effect, it was certainly not the intent. But it may just have lit a fuse that caused the explosion 54 years later.

—–”Are there German records showing the number of concentration camp inmates gassed? “——–

Gassing as a method of execution came about quite late on. They started by using trucks, locking people in the back and then feeding the exhaust pipe in.

There are vast amounts of documentation on the number of people in the camps. Dozens of books written on it. Remember the camp authorities had to claim food supplies based on the number in the camps.

To give you an idea of how meticulous the documentation was when Montserrat Roig wrote ‘Catalans in the Nazi Concentration Camps’ she was able to list every single Catalan who died in the camp with their names (2,002 of them I believe; the names are in an Appendix to the book).

“There are vast amounts of documentation on the number of people in the camps. Dozens of books written on it. ”

Yes and those records showed cause of death. So how many in the camps died of gassing — according to “meticulous” records?

Having posted on the need to be honest about our identities, I should add that the recent post about the Indian Councils Act was mine, which for some reason came out as anonymous.

The post at 0726pm on July 17th 2010 was not me.

If any posts supposedly from ‘me’ appear during the UK’s night tonight, please disregard them. Thanks.

“If any posts supposedly from ‘me’ appear during the UK’s night”

Sleep well.

—-”Yes and those records showed cause of death. So how many in the camps died of gassing — according to “meticulous” records?”——

The death certificates for Auschwitz apparently were only for a small subsection of the prisoners, and according to Hoess’s testimony at Nuremberg doctors were told to put any cause of death they wanted on the death certificates.

I’m sure you have a conspiracy theory to explain why the Allies arranged for the witnesses at Nuremberg to exaggerate the number of deaths in their testimony, but I’m not interested in hearing it.

Stephen said:

“The death certificates for Auschwitz apparently were only for a small subsection of the prisoners, and according to Hoess’s testimony at Nuremberg doctors were told to put any cause of death they wanted on the death certificates.”

So much for those meticulous German records you were talking of.

Alfred: You said,

—start quote

“The paradox is resolved if you take into account what land relates to what population. Globally, food production equals food consumption.

The discrepancy in population density between France and Britain is probably explained by differences in agricultural policy. Britain imports 42% of its food, according to this source, for which I cannot vouch: [...]”

—end quote

Are you seriously suggesting that people’s decision to reproduce is based upon the food available, in a western first-world democracy that has not known war in two generations, and even more particularly on whether that food happened to be imported?

I would suggest that, actually, most people do not know or care where their food comes from, or how it was prepared. An awful lot of them do not even have a clue how their food was produced, let alone where, and less still (if possible) about the precariousness of that import.

*

You mention about children not reaching reproductive age – yes, exactly – that is why they had so damned many of them. And Stephen Jones, earlier, pointed out rich families were often the largest. Well obviously, since they were going to have the most favourable opportunites. Rich infants/children and adolescents would not have to mingle and catch disease from the riff-raff, had the best nutrition and doctors.

In my grandmother’s mother’s day, she told me, they loved them all but simply had to have as many children as possible. Because they knew at least half of them would not survive infancy. Among those that did, polio had a fair chance of crippling those that some accident did not befall. Particularly when work down the mines was just about the only show in town.

So if there were any hope of maintaining the village that was necessary for all within it, let alone the family line, as many children as possible were hoped for.

Old habits die hard, particularly in those not particularly educated, and whose traditions are largely passed down unmodified regardless of changed times.

*

Interesting points you raise about cities, and the way you argue that they actually were a drain on national population (immigration aside). Have you got any recommendations on reading for a more thorough examination of this through the ages?

*

You suggest the culture is toxic, preventing free breeding among indigenous populations, and that is an interesting line. Unable to reproduce ourselves? Surely you mean unwilling? Maybe it’s not just hedonism that prevents partners with such ideas from having children (you focus overmuch on the female), rather than a rational decision not to do so.

*

Your last point about a pregnancy becoming a meal-ticket for very young and relatively non-achieving females is a sad reality. Particularly because being pregnant, giving birth and having an infant is often the only time such females have felt even a semblance of societal and official approval and concern. The poverty trap is a terrible thing.

Hmm. Suhayl, there’s an obvious give-away with the posts pretending to be from you. Why are you being targeted so much, I wonder? I had that honour a little while back. Tea-baggers at work, no doubt about it. What was it someone was saying earlier… something about trying to discredit any potential voice to the masses, at the very earliest opportunity, so that there would be a _long_ history to call upon when his or her integrity could be shown to be called into question.

Nobody said that? Huh! Well, someone should have.

——”Rich infants/children and adolescents would not have to mingle and catch disease from the riff-raff, had the best nutrition and doctors.”——

I’m not so sure doctors were a great idea. Modern medicine really started when researchers in Vienna discovered that a lot more rich people died in childbirth than poor people. The reason being that rich people had their babies in hospital and thus caught diseases.

Rven after the germ theory became clear in the UK there were still many more deaths amongst those who had babies in hospital than amongst those who didn’t. The reason was the poor had midwifes but the rich had gynecologists, who had a much higher fatality rate.

Glenn, Richard, thanks, much appreciated and very good points. It’s good to know that the good sentinels of the night were out floating their multi-coloured animated helium balloons… btw that image reminds me a little of ‘The Prisoner’!

Yes, Stephen, hospitals used to be extremely dangerous places because of the concentrating effect of multiple pathogens and lack of hygiene. The rise of MRSA, etc. has brought back a reprise of that, albeit less ubiquitous, but it’s a big concern today. Joseph Lister played a big role in bringing this to light.

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/b.gardner/Lister.html

I’ll post an interesting article on midwifery/ obstetrics etc. in the next post – the post won’t post if one tries to post two links! It’s a complex subject – another! – but you have made an accurate point.

Glenn, also that is an excellent point about the early C20th. Up until the advent of sulpha drugs, anti-TB drugs, mass vaccinations and antibiotics, primary school children used to have a sore throat one day and be dead the next; that was routine.

I had a very good friend who worked as a teacher from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s in northern England. Before WW2, teachers had look out for the throat membrane of diphtheria; they had to get the kid of-of-class immediately. They knew they would be dead in a day.

In Glasgow, according to a colleague (J. David Simon, in a novel about the Jewish community in that time, ‘The Credit Draper’), the teacher would tie a black ribbon to the child’s desk for a week and no-one would use the desk for a week. Then someone would be moved to fill the place.

William Carlos Williams, American poet and paediatrician, wrote some incredibly moving accounts of attending children with diphtheria, polio, etc. in the 1920s.

The word, “scarlet fever” still strikes fear into many (even young) people today. If one says, “tonsillitis”, everyone fine; if you say, “Scarlet Fever”, there’s a look of shock. This is a folk memory from the time of grandmothers, when it (the bacterium streptococcus pyogenes) used to scythe through school populations, effecting mass death.

It was a different world. It’s the same world, in some countries, among poorer people today.

Here you go:

http://www.faqs.org/childhood/Me-Pa/Obstetrics-and-Midwifery.html

Oh yes, before I forget, here’s a link to the excellent novel, ‘The Credit Draper’, which I mentioned earlier it’s intensely evocative of the Jewish community on the South Side of Glasgow in early C20th Glasgow, told through the eyes of a boy/ young man. I’d thoroughly recommend it, it’s a captivating read!

http://www.jdsimons.demon.co.uk/index.html

Finally, William Carlos Williams, ‘The Use of Force’:

http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/force.html

Lynne Stewart, the US human rights lawyer, has just had her jail sentence quadrupled. This is a shocking disgrace to American justice, a totally unjustifiable and vindictive judgment (as was the original conviction). As her husband said, for a 70 year-old woman, it is indeed a “death sentence”. Lynne Stewart is a political prisoner. If this isn’t McCarthyism, I don’t know what is. Shame, shame, shame!

http://www.rense.com/general91/stew.htm

Quintupled, I mean: 2 years to 10 years.

At the risk of sounding like a spambot, thanks to all for this excellent discussion, to which I have had nothing to add, but from which I have learned a lot.

Apropos of nothing in particular, except that this is the tail end of a long thread that lost any idea of ‘topic’ a while back, I’ve just bumped into a very fine post on something I’d known nothing about.

http://www.ranyontheroyals.com/2010/07/abd-el-kader-and-massacre-of-damascus.html

It’s what it says on the tin. A piece on Abd el-Kader, who he was and how and why he tried to avert a massacre in Damascus. It’s long (but not unnecessarily so) and it’s worth a read. Or so I thought, anyway. Specific incidents and real people are, perhaps, a good antidote to over-generalisations.

“this is the tail end of a long thread that lost any idea of ‘topic’ a while back”

Not altogether. As noted not too far back, user registration would eliminate the possibility of people and their ghosts commenting under separate identities or people impersonating other folks or even someone pretending to impersonate themselves. I would recommend this, plus a software upgrade to allow more links, application of styles to text, and some other features.

WordPress has a spam autodetect system, which allows review of suspect posts while posting the rest immediately. And for a few bucks you can use your own domain name.

Actually, I am not sure if you can enable user registration on a WordPress.com blog, but you can come up with a nice vanilla, sorry Scotch, format if that is what one wants, e.g.,

Stephen McIntyre’s blog:

http://climateaudit.org/2010/07/14/report-from-the-climategate-guardian-debate/

There are some attractive blog formats on the Squarespace.com system and they provide customization at what is probably a reasonable cost.

But the best blog software I have seen is at the Oil Drum: http://www.theoildrum.com, although I do not know if it is a custom design or a readily available generic package.

Craig used to hold up postings from unknown users until he was satisfied they were legit. In a time of free emails registration is simply a pain in the ‘arse.

“In a time of free emails registration is simply a pain in the ‘arse.”

If the site were to adopt a policy of ‘pick a name and stick to it’, registration would at least make that the easiest way to behave, you’d have to take extra action to get round it.

Nothing’s going to give perfect results (for any definition) except a perfect (ditto) team of moderators.

“But the best blog software I have seen is at the Oil Drum: http://www.theoildrum.com”

It’s built from standard Drupal modules. Cost anything from a few hundred quid to get that put together, but more to ‘migrate’ all the old articles and comments into it. A thousand pounds wouldn’t be an outrageous price. It would take several hours for the best web-developer to do, days for a good one and a couple of weeks for most that are available.

I would suggest Craig sticks with this old board until he has a bit of money to throw at it. Its mainly a collection of his articles after all, and he can prune the comments whenever it suites. The result of the no registration is an interesting sample of anonymous internet signals and noise too.

This thread has put out too many trails for me to follow.

I dont think Ive heard of Lyne Stewart before. Good one for Craig to comment on if he gets the time to digest.

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/07/

darkness-in-america-lynne-stewarts.html

Sorry, a 70 year old locked up in an American jail for 10 years, for defending human rights too well, i should at least spell here name right. Lynne Stewart.

Crab, yes, that’s the piece, there’s a lot more on the story as well. Btw, just out of interest, are you a different person from sandcrab? I presume there a various species of cyber-crustacean… (!) Or is it like Ambrose Slade and Slade?

Glenn,

The regulation of animal numbers is a complex issue, particularly so in the case of humans, where you have to deal not only with basic biology, but also culture, psychology, technology and economics. The subject is more suitable for a long boring review article for presentation at a meeting of a learned society of sociologists or anthropologists than for a blog post.

Maybe we could do a joint paper: “Food, Culture and Population.” With Syhayl to refine the argument and polish the prose it might be a worthwhile effort. However, I suspect that negotiating the central thesis might take so long we’d never get past Chapter 1.

Re: some points

You ask: “Are you seriously suggesting that people’s decision to reproduce is based upon the food available, in a western first-world democracy that has not known war in two generations, and even more particularly on whether that food happened to be imported?”

I have already acknowledged that culture determines fertility for indigenous people of the West European nations, and in such a way as to result in a population implosion. However, the shortfall is made up through immigration, leading to the rapid (in a historical time scale) elimination of the bulk of the indigenous populations.

Population is and must always be governed by food supply, but the effect is complex because few people are now totally dependent on local agriculture. Thus if there are food shortages in one country their effect may be felt thousands of miles away due to the international food trade. For example, rice from Vietnam is consumed in California, and American wheat is sold in Somalia. Thus, locally, the effect of food on population depends on the availability of money. An Indian economist recently one a Nobel prize for the seemingly obvious finding that people with money do not starve (the work had the useful result of persuading the Indian Government to alleviate famine by providing those in danger of starvation with money: the food then materialized through spontaneous market processes).

In a country such as Britain, global food availability affects population in a way that can only be understood through an awareness of the culture. For example, if the cost of food rises from, say, 10% of net income to 20% or 30%, no one in England should starve. However, when many young people are convinced that they are not living unless they have a 100 m2 apartment, high speed Internet access, Mediterranean holidays, a late model car and free cash to eat out several times a week, then you have a major impact of rising food prices on people’s inclination to have children. Plus there are many other cultural factors. Girls’ education for example, means that many women do not enter the workforce until they are in their late twenties or early thirties when they may be loaded with student debt, which must be paid off before any thought can be given to a family. Then with a mortgage to pay, a women may be reluctant to quit a job. In fact, it may be financial suicide for a couple if one or other quits their job to care for children.

So yes, food supply does impact fertility everywhere. And remember, food prices may not rise by a mere 5, 10, 20% of net income. A major climate change event, due to a new explosion of Krakatoa for example, could drive food prices up ten- twenty-fold, leading to very direct effects not only on reproduction in Britain, but mere survival.

You say: “In my grandmother’s mother’s day, she told me, they… had to have as many children as possible.”

In my grandmother’s case they had no option, except sexual abstention, something to which few humans seem inclined. My grandmother was the oldest of ten, all of whom survived and had many children. One reason they did well was that the West was in a phase of rapid expansion ?” new land coming into cultivation in America, Canada, Australia, NZ, so an era of cheap food and high labor demand and hence decent and increasing wages.

But as you indicate, large numbers of children make good sense, by which I mean represent an adaptive pattern of behaviour, whether times are good or bad. In bad times, it means, as you indicate, that there is a chance at least some will survive. It also means there is material for natural selection to work on. As it is now, we have very small families, keep everyone alive by, if necessary, massive medical intervention and thus create a population that is increasingly unfit (in a technical, or evolutionary, sense).

(Interesting question: what to do about this. Go back to large families, drive the standard of living back to the subsistence level everywhere and let natural selection take its course, with many dieing in childhood of deficiency diseases, infectious diseases, etc.? Or can we use genetic screening, gene technology, interfamily exchange of reproductive rights so that mainly the fittest reproduce? Or will today’s Liberals cry, “Fascist eugenics”?)

An interesting facet of the food population relationship is that in an age of advance technology and with an abundance of capital to invest, we can increase food production almost without limit. Taking the average flux of solar radiation world wide to be 0.25 kw per m, one would need about 50 m2 of intensively managed crops (in a an airconditioned greenhouse) to feed one person. The Earth’s surface is 500 million km2. So we could potentially feed a trillion people.

However, we may be closer to the upper limit than that suggests. First, we’d need energy for things other than food production, so cut the population limit in half. Then assume mainly outdoor crops not greenhouse crops and efficiency of solar energy use falls by factor of 5 or 10, lowering the upper limit to population to, say 50 billion. Then you begin to realize, we will soon be hitting insuperable limits.

Incidentally, when I erroneously (see a few yards above) stated that Britain’s population density is twice Pakistan’s, I was confusing Britain with England. It is England’s population density that is twice Pakistan’s. And that is a significant figure since, (a) Scotland is most wasteland anyhow, and (b) the Scots and Welsh and Irish are all intent on going their own way. So population density and food supply should be an issue for English politicians. The English have a mere 2000 m2 each, and that’s including urban land, roads, swamps and uplands.

It is England’s population density that is twice Pakistan’s. And it’s lower than that of the Pakistan Punjab. Your point?

I’ve written about this on my own blog and would welcome a response from Craig Murray.

http://sydwalker.info/blog/2010/07/19/dear-craig-murray-please-explain-wtc-7/

“Population is and must always be governed by food supply”

I would see food supply -and resultant prices, as an influencing factor of population growth but not the governor of it, at least not until much of the population struggle to afford it. I have noticed the cost of my food shopping almost double in price in the past 5 years, all my favourite things like rice and fish and stuff, not so much meat.

It is very simple modelling to think of population growth as just a function of food supply, the kind of simple modelling that always put me off economics which i took for two years at uni but have forgotten most of.

-

Sorry Suhayl it would be pretty easy to fake a crab post cause im so moody. You’re impossible to fake, like an extreme sort of turing test i think.

Im going to stick with ‘crab’ for a while, sandcrab i googles has some other distasteful meanings.

Crab,

You say: “I would see food supply -and resultant prices, as an influencing factor of population growth but not the governor of it”

But how do you maintain a population beyond what can be supported by the current food supply? You cannot.

I donto want to reply to this despicable characther called alfred but here is my repky to those who think that british empire has bene for good of the victims .

and yes macauley did say that sentence-it is on record. besides he did many more harmful things.

first enlgihs economy is based on ysery and it can do no good to anyone except thse english parasites. that is why such parasites need to be eliminated through military conquest and not by talkin uselss to low lifes .

so how is your afgan war going alfred?not paid enough to taliban not to shoot at your troops? bribing enemies -because you have no guts and hide like women in capms?

“us, that shift has begun.

The King Is Dead

The British Empire’s fate was sealed in mid-2007, with the simultaneous deaths of its monetary system, and the financial system that monetary system had created. The distinction is important. The power of the empire rests in its ability to control the supply and price of money. It does this through a network of central banks, such as the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, and the European Central Bank. These so-called “independent” central banks are creatures of the empire, which views itself as sitting above mere nation-states.

The claim has been made that, in the bailout frenzy of the past two years, the central banks have become tools of the state. The Fed, it has been said repeatedly, has become virtually an arm of the U.S. Treasury, carrying out government policy. In fact, the opposite is true. The Treasury, and the White House, are captives of the imperial system which controls the Fed.

The bailout, underneath all the empty promises, was never intended to bring the dead system back to life. Instead, it was intended to support the imperial monetary system during the transition from the dead financial system to what the empire planned as its replacement: a global financial dictatorship. At the same time, it served to bankrupt the nation-states, the biggest obstacle to this global fascist plan.

The real goal of the British Empire is to turn back the clock to when it ruled the world in its own name, before the American Revolution changed the balance of power. Its scheme to do so revolves around sharp reductions in global population. That is, genocide. The bailout, the phony “man-made global warming” scare around which the Copenhagen conference was organized, and the accelerating, born-in-Britain, police-state measures, are all elements of a plan to impose crushing austerity.

This evil scheme, ironically, is what dooms the Brutish Empire. By destroying the physical-economic basis for life, the empire is destroying the basis for its own existence, and the basis for the existence of civilization itself. If they kill us all, they kill themselves, too.

Defeat the British Empire

If mankind is to survive, we must finally defeat the oligarchic pestilence and its imperial monetary system. Not reach an agreement with it; not put it at a disadvantage; but end its power over the human race. We must, as sovereign nations, once again take control over our own money, and direct our spending into areas that promote the general welfare. That means infrastructure projects, economic development, rebuilding and expanding our productive base. It means putting our people back to work in productive jobs which benefit society as a whole. It means returning to science and technology, setting new goals and exceeding them. It means putting human settlements on Mars, as a jumping-off point for exploring the universe in which we live.

The biggest single obstacle to all of this is that medieval monstrosity known as the British Empire. It is the empire which is the beneficiary of the bailout program, at the expense of the people. It is the empire that pushes the superstition known as “man-made global warming,” as a way of shutting down human progress and killing off two-thirds of the world’s population. It is the empire that relentlessly pushes the police state, by staging phony incidents and using those incidents to justify ever more intrusive and un-Constitutional measures. It is the empire that plays on our impulses to keep us dumb, blind, and passive, while it destroys all we hold dear.

But the British Empire is also irrational, a wild beast acting on instinct as it tries to protect a world view that should long ago have passed into history. Its effort to use the Copenhagen Climate Change summit to set up what amounts to a world government under the guise of environmental concerns, was a failure, as many nations chose survival over submission. Though it is still powerful, and far from defeated, for the first time in a long time, the smell of its own blood is in the water.

It is, after all, the British Empire’s derivatives-fuelled financial system which collapsed. They failed, and then demanded that we commit suicide to rescue them. In the U.S., the Federal government quickly complied, but the population rebelled,

============================

another article–

“?” it is time to take back South Asia from foreign invaders

Preetam Sohani

Feb. 6, 2007

South Asia is today what was known in ancient days as India.. —

Then came the tricky British and other Europeans. They came as traders. They dealt with local kings promising them piece of England. They stole India’ minerals, wealth and dignity. They also took advantage of the caste system, the low tribe population’s economic distress. They converted the Hindus and Buddhists into Christianity by force and with lure of money. dignity. These invaders treated Indians as slaves in their own country. Mothers and daughters were raped. Men were tortured till they agreed to convert their religion into something they never believed.

Today India is under attack again. They are coming back as traders, manufacturers, and financial institutions from the West. They are dealing with new generation Indian kings ?” the oligarchs of India. These industrialists and rich classes of India (close to 100 families) who control Indian politicians, economy and even the communists. The new trading invaders from the West call themselves agents of globalization. They want to outsource every piece of junk they do want to perform or manufacture. They pay pennies on the dollar to Indian workers. They have joined hands with the Indian oligarchs like they did two hundred fifty years back with Indian kings. History is repeating in India after two hundred fifty years.

These foreign invaders and the cooperating Indian politicians and rich oligarchs are raping Mother India again.

India not to get tortured any further by these ruthless invaders. or the British East India Company or the modern day Western Multinationals ?” they are all the same ?” invaders ready to strip India of its dignity and independence.

It is time to retake the country and the region back from the invaders. “

more commnet==”

not mine ofcourse.

“India is on the move. And nobody can stop it. The British tried their level best. Prior to 1857, according to Dialogue (July-September 2006) the British colonial emphasis was on the consolidation of the empire, the denigration of the Indians and running down of Indian culture. India was only a “geographic entity”, “an imaginary state”, Brahmins were “an ants’ nest of lies and impostures”, Hindus were ‘liars’ and Macaulay who introduced English as the administrative language of India (would now surely be regretting it) proposed to pay over one lakh rupees to a 32-year-old German scholar, Max Mueller for translating Rig Veda in such a manner that it would destroy the belief of the Hindus in the Vedic religion.

Monier Williams, another Sanskrit scholar, was to remark that “Brahmanism must die out and Christianity, in the end inevitably sap its foundations”. Indian science was laughed at.

According to Michel Danino, convenor of the International Forum for India’s Heritage, of a list of 3,473 science texts from 12,244 science manuscripts found in 400 repositories in Kerala, no more than seven per cent are in print even today. And yet there were times when Indian science was laughed at, Indian entrepreneurship berated. Tatas have shown that they too can fight?”and fight effectively. The question is asked: “Why must a home-grown company like Tata Steel seek to acquire?”at a fairly high price?”concern like Corus which has four times its own capacity?” ”

from

=================================

“In a letter to his wife Max Muller wrote: “I hope 1 shall finish that work and 1 feel convinced, though 1 shall not live to see it, yet, this edition of mine and the translation of the Veda, will hereafter tellto a great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of sou= ls in that country. It is the root of their religion and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that sprung from it during the last 3000 years.”

==================================

“

“But how do you maintain a population beyond what can be supported by the current food supply? You cannot”

But the current food supply reacts to the demands of the population also. Food supply can be dynamicaly altered, population much less so. As food gets more and less scarce its production can react. Its production can also react to cultural fads and commercial persuations. Food supply to humans is not like petrol supply to cars. We can all live off rice and peas and water if we have too, or 1/100th as many people can live off livestock that eat the rice and peas. Human cultures, also dynamic, can affect population growth. What are people being encouraged to aspire to? What is glamourous, sexy, successful? What worlds are people penned into by the effects of social policies?

from–Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Speech in Parliament on the Government of India Bill, 10 July 1833,” Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, selected by G.M. Young (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 716-18

“I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic.-But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the Oriental plan of education.”

====================================

“We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellecta€

If we’re doing “wishlists for what this blog should be like”, I’d suggest to allow links. Point to things instead of copying them verbatim, far easier on the thread and very little more trouble to read (what the Web’s about, no ?). Without comment on their content because I need to go to bed, good night.

AVATAR SINGH IS A TROLL

Avatar Singh said:

“I donto want to reply to this despicable characther called alfred”

Why do so then?

“but here is my repky to those who think that british empire has bene for good of the victims.

No one here said that.

“and yes macauley did say that sentence-it is on record.”

You claimed he said it in a speech to the British Parliament in February 1835. But, as you now acknowledge, that was impossible because he was in India at the time and spoke in Parliament at no time in 1835.

So if he made the statement that you allege that he made, and which is quite contrary in sentiment to statements he did make on the subject of Indian education and government, where did he make it and when? Obviously, you don’t know because you copied and pasted the lie from someone else.

“besides he did many more harmful things.”

Come on, this is bullshit. State what you mean or shut up.

“first enlgihs economy is based on ysery and it can do no good to anyone except thse english parasites. that is why such parasites need to be eliminated through military conquest and not by talkin uselss to low lifes .”

This is inflammatory, and quite possibly criminal under the law of the United Kingdom. I would urge the moderator of this site to consider deleting the post just made by Avatar Singh.

Further, your advocacy of war against Britain is consistent with what you have advocated elsewhere on the Web, including incitement to the murder of Glaxo exectives.

http://engforum.pravda.ru/showthread.php?274280-british-bastard-glaxo-is-at-loot-again-kill-glaxo-executives.&p=3041012&viewfull=1

“so how is your afgan war going alfred?”

If you bothered to check any of your facts, you would see that on my Web page I have consistently opposed the war against Afghanistan. But shoot first, ask questions later is evidently your approach.

“The British Empire’s fate was sealed in mid-2007″

There is no British Empire and has been none for over fifty years.

“The power of the empire rests in its ability to control the supply and price of money. It does this through a network of central banks, such as the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, and the European Central Bank. These so-called “independent” central banks are creatures of the empire, which views itself as sitting above mere nation-states.”

Oh yeah, sure. England rules the waves and Obama takes his orders from David Cameron — suuuuuure.

As for the rest, well who cares, it’s just cut and paste as anyone can confirm for themselves with a google search for the first few words.

Crab,

Re: “But the current food supply reacts to the demands of the population also. Food supply can be dynamicaly altered, population much less so.”

That’s true, but there are limits, and adequate adjustment is possible only as long as times are reasonably good. A major drought in China, India, or America and we could be in trouble. Dynamic downward adjustment in population is distressing in the extreme — as during the collapse of the Soviet Union when millions died prematurely as the result of economic dislocation causing malnutrition, stress, hypothermia, etc.

In fact, what will happen in the event of a global food shortage is that stress will be transmitted to the poor via market mechanisms while the rich continue to eat steak. An ugly prospect that might lead to a 1930′s type political upheaval and war — as already being advocated by Avatar Singh.

Re: moods

Do you know about trace lithium? Quite possible not relevant, but interesting. Some decades ago there was research indicating that lithium may be an essential element. There was also some interesting but less than totally compelling research indicating an inverse relationship between suicide, violent crime and lithium in drinking water. Some info is to be found through a google search for “Schrauzer” and “lithium”. Schrauzer was at the University of California and specialized in effects of trace minerals on health.

Here, lithium containing products are rare, although in Europe some mineral waters, e.g., Vichy water, are rich in lithium. I wonder if that is why the French Government was located in Vichy during WW2, they just kept glugging the water so the occupation didn’t seem so bad.

San Pelligrino water also contains lithium (200 micrograms per litre, which could be a useful daily dose) according to Wikipedia article, even though nothing about lithium appears on the label.

Interestingly enough, Cuban soil apparently contains fairly high levels of lithium. It’s possible that Cuban cigars have a more uplifting effect than cigars from elsewhere because of this. Then again, if one is enjoying the Caribbean sun, drinking some very agreeable Cuban rum while smoking a fine Montecristo (for pennies on the pound), that in itself might well contribute to the uplifting effect.

(More on the population discussion later, short of time right now.)

“adequate adjustment is possible only as long as times are reasonably good.”

Thats an indistinct phrase. To say food “governs” population, and the gist i take from your descriptions of the relationship, is saying that food supply quite exclusively drives population numbers. It could be the fundamental relationship you describe, but for the extra complexety involved in the world, food production buffers, land use, transformation (plants to meat), distribution (subsidy, taxation > pricing, and waste)

In crisis we *could* currently, reduce bloated meat consumption which would free dozens of times as much grains for human consumption, if we arranged to, we could also build up much better stores of non perishables, but it seems like we/(profit maximising market traders) currently pass on fluctations to the poorest countries in the world instead.

For most Europeans food supply has no direct effect on their lives, food pricing is how we contact with the logistics of supply. iirc The cost of eating is around 15% of the overall cost of living in a modern society.

Food supply only acutely pressures reproduction and survival during crisis, where production technology, conditions and economic reponses combine to result in unaffordable prices, starvation, ill health, worried aspirations.

There is,

human instinct,

combined with local and cultural norm.

And,

cost of living/reproducing

rents and taxes, theraputics/ medicines, education/ arts, advertising and other mind numbing media, clothes, tools, toys, … food)

It is a very complex matter to me.

–

Avatar Singh, sorry i havent time to say much about your perspective. Take care to mind history but perhaps as well the differences in the present. All the best to you and your kin.

Avatar has stated where the speech was made. It is well attested, as it is well attested that the British government did the best it could to weaken the Indian education system for the racist reasons given in Macauley’s abominable claptrap.

Why the fuck can’t you all use real names? Suhaaayl? Avatar?

What a bunch of wankers This blog needs to be moderated, badly.

You are all islamist anti Zionist lowlifes

In the cavorting spirit of this thread, here is a really funny piece. There’s another one, actually, which someone e-mailed to me – I don’t know who wrote it, but it’s not long. I’ll copy and paste it soon. Meanwhile, here’s the first piece, via link. Enjoy!

http://www.dailyshame.co.uk/2010/07/satire/william-hague-appoints-himself-as-lord-viceroy-of-india-upsets-locals/

And for some more light relief, here’s a ‘Borat’-like piece, pasted. I don’t know who the author is; as I said, someone e-mailed it to me. It’s hilarious and is totally un-PC, thank goodness:

‘Muslim suicide bombers in Britain are set to begin a three-day strike on Monday in a dispute over the number of virgins they are entitled to in the afterlife. Emergency talks with Al Qaeda have so far failed to produce an agreement.

The unrest began last Tuesday when Al Qaeda announced that the number of virgins a suicide bomber would receive after his death will be cut by 25% this February from 72 to only 60. The rationale for the cut was the increase in recent years of the number of suicide bombings and a subsequent shortage of virgins in the afterlife.

The suicide bombers’ union, the British Organization of Occupational Martyrs or B.O.O.M., responded with a statement that this was unacceptable to its members and immediately balloted for strike action. B.O.O.M.’s General Secretary Abdullah Amir told the press, “Our members are literally working themselves to death in the cause of Jihad. We don’t ask for much in return, but to be treated like this, is like a kick in the teeth”.

Speaking from his garden shed in the West Midlands in which he currently resides, Al Qaeda chief executive Osama bin Laden explained, “We sympathize with our workers concerns but Al Qaeda is simply not in a position to meet their demands. They are simply not accepting the realities of modern-day Jihad in a competitive marketplace. We realize that young people are our future, and today’s youth blow up so quickly. “And thanks to Western depravity, there is now a chronic shortage of virgins in the afterlife. It’s a straight choice between reducing expenditure and laying people off. I don’t like cutting benefits but I’d hate to have to tell 3,000 of my staff that they won’t be able to blow themselves up this year.”

Spokesmen for the union in the North East of England, Liverpool, Ireland, Wales, New Zealand and Australia stated that the strike would not affect their operations as “… there are no virgins in these areas anyway”.

The Scottish Al Qaeda spokesman said they had not had any suicide volunteers since the emergence of Scottish singing star, Susan Boyle. Now that Scottish Muslims know what a virgin looks like they are not at all keen on going to paradise.’

Stephen said:

“Avatar has stated where the speech was made. It is well attested, as it is well attested that the British government did the best it could to weaken the Indian education system for the racist reasons given in Macauley’s abominable claptrap.”

Stephen, you are a hopeless gul.

When Avatar Singh offers, without a word of apology for his previous false attribution, a new source for the fake Macaulay quote, you suck it up without a moment’s hesitation.

But the Avatar is just spinning another lie.

Here is the full text of the minute referred to:

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html

Benthinck, who approved the minute, was Governor General at the time.

So where’s the quote? It ain’t there.

But the minutes are well worth reading because the make it clear why Macaulay was considered one of the three most important English Liberals of the 19th century and why it is inconceivable that he made the statement that the lying “Professor” Avatar Singh alleges.

Glenn,

Re: Cuban soil apparently contains fairly high levels of lithium.”

Ha, the perfect sedative. Dr. please renew my prescription for Cohibas — to be smoked as required.

Apparently, not only do Cuban soils have a high lithium content, but tobacco plants accumulate higher concentrations of lithium than most crop plants, lithium enhances the nicotine content of tobacco and some cigarette producers use a solution of lithium salts as a humectant in the processing of tobacco (my grandpa used molasses, which seemed to work).

But yeah, I got stuff to do too. See ya later.

A ‘gul’ in Persian means ‘a flower’. ‘Gulistan’ is a classic of Persian literature (‘The Rose Garden’), by Saadi of Shiraz. So, Alfred, were you calling Stephen a flower? How nice. Or was ‘gul’ webspeak shorthand for ‘gullible’, or ‘seagull’? Or was it just a misprint?

Cuban cigars wake one up and are CIA-explosion-proof.

Suhayl,

Let’s hear it from you. Are you a gul or a gull? Do you accept the legitimacy of the outrageous statements made by Avatar Singh. No bullshit now. Do you agree:

“enlgihs economy is based on ysery and it can do no good to anyone except thse english parasites. that is why such parasites need to be eliminated through military conquest and not by talkin uselss to low lifes .”

You think the English are parasites should be eliminated through military conquest or not. yes or no?

Alfred, I’ve already dealt with this on several threads, including this one and an older thread on which you seemed to misunderstand my intentions (re. the distribution of wealth in C19th Britain and the Victorian working class, etc.) and the points I was making – please look several hundred posts ago on this thread – and then and now my criticisms of the manner in which ‘The English’ were being essentialised were made very clearly.

No, of course, I don’t agree with such statements. I also have no difficulty with answering direct questions.

It is possible – indeed, it is necessary – to take a consistently anti-imperialist position and not to essentialise people by either ethnicity or nationality (or religion).

But what does a ‘gul’ mean in this context? I’m genuinely puzzled.

But what does a ‘gul’ mean in this context? I’m genuinely puzzled.

Really? With your grasp of the English language so wickedly forced on the inhabitants of the Indian sub-continent, it is surely not that difficult for you to infer. Spell it with two els, of you prefer.

“All the nice gulls love a sailor” – Gerald Durrell.

Suhayl,

You said:

“I’ve already dealt with this on several threads, including this one and an older thread on which you seemed to misunderstand my intentions”

Oh, and “please look several hundred posts ago on this thread… ”

Yeah, sure, I’ll just screw off.

But first let me ask you three more direct questions.

Do you accept Avatar Singh’s assertion that Thomas Macaulay said:

“I do not think we would ever conquer this country [India], unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and therefore I propose that we replace her Old and ancient education system, Her culture, for if the Indians think that all that if foreing and english is goodand greater than their own, they will lose thier self esteem, their native culture and and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”

You haven’t already dealt with that.

And further, did Singh give a false source for that statement not once, but twice?

And last, is it not clear that Singh is either a person of buffoonish incompetence in dealing with historical evidence, or someone who persistently engages in Anglophobic hate speech?

Alfred, why are you being aggressive towards me? I didn’t tell you to “screw off”, nor did I insinuate it. I answered your direct question very directly. I have no idea what Macaulay said; I cannot comment it because I don’t know.

And, Alfred your comment on the English language is just unwarranted in relation to me. You’re in a mood, Alfred. Please just go for a stroll of something and cool off. Smoke a Cuban cigar or something. “Walkin on the beaches, looking at the peaches…”

Ahem.

To answer the question yet again, I quote from myself, two to three posts ago:

“No, of course, I don’t agree with such statements…

It is possible – indeed, it is necessary – to take a consistently anti-imperialist position and not to essentialise people by either ethnicity or nationality (or religion).”

That applies not just to avatar singh, of course, but in general.

” I have no idea what Macaulay said; I cannot comment it because I don’t know.”

Well you should know that he did not say what Avatar Singh alleges he said on February 2, 1835 either in Parliament or in a minute for the Governor General because I have provided links establishing that he did not.

Rather than engaging in diversions, distractions and irrelevances, it seems to me you might have provide some support for my contention that Singh’s defamation of Macaulay based on false references should be unacceptable here, or for that matter, anywhere.

“Well you should know that he did not say XYZ because I have provided links establishing that he did not”

You should make a public confession of faith in Alfred when he quarrels with someone else (chorus: nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition !) Is it only Suhayl, or is everybody going to be badgered like this ? is it because he asked if you were calling Stephen a flower ? Or do exploding Cuban cigars touch a nerve ? Well, they would, I suppose. Got to hurt, that.

There are two separate speeches regarding Macauley (and one spurious one).

There is the Parliamentary speech of 1833 and the education minutes of 1835. Both show an ignorance of Indian and Arabic civilization and a racist plan to create a group of Indians with British tastes and interests who would then use the inferior vernacular to pass the wisdom on to the masses.

Stephen said:

“There are two separate speeches regarding Macauley (and one spurious one).”

Yeah, and I’m talking about the spurious one, which no one here seems to have the wit or integrity to acknowledge is a piece of hateful Anglophobic propaganda.

Macaulay’s rationale for recommending a European education for the Indian elite was in no way racist. It made certain sincerely held assumptions about the superiority of western science and philosophy and the benefit to the Indian elite of becoming familiar with that wealth of knowledge.

But perhaps you think that without westernization India would be transforming the world with software written in Sanskrit.

“Well you should know that he did not say XYZ because I have provided links establishing that he did not”

Richard, we’ve already established your handicap with a rational argument. Go back to your rubber duckies and helium balloons.

About Richards’ performance your comment must be making use of the royal “we”

Computing power is ultimately limited by energy supply. But its more complex than that in practice.

“I’m talking about the spurious one, which no one here seems to have the wit or integrity to acknowledge is a piece of hateful Anglophobic propaganda. ”

At first i thought it might be real, then put it down to satire, and that Avatar had slipped up. But one mistake is no big deal to me. Colonisation has historicaly involved domination and destruction of culture, even outlawing languages. It is no news that agents of the process were horribly demeaning and ignorant towards their partners/subjects/victims.

I dont think Avatar is quite fluent in our language and some posts i read as a splooshing stream of frustrated conciousness. Frustration at disparity and callousness of civilisation i empathise with.

“But perhaps you think that without westernization India would be transforming the world with software written in Sanskrit.”

Why not, in a parallel universe. Things could sure be better.

…you weren’t really being serious about the genetic superiority of the english earlier were you?

heh only kidding – im sure that is a misreading of your views.

“your comment must be making use of the royal “we”"

grin. Ta, crab.

Personally, I wish the Chinese had invented computers. The time that’s been wasted by 8bit character tables …

Oh dear, I can’t resist … “What do you mean ‘we’, paleface ?”

—–”Macaulay’s rationale for recommending a European education for the Indian elite was in no way racist. It made certain sincerely held assumptions about the superiority of western science and philosophy “——-

Which assumptions were both grotesquely ignorant and racist.

“Which assumptions were both grotesquely ignorant and racist.”

Oh, but he isn’t taking any responsibility for saying it himself, is he ? Just passing it on, like, you can’t touch him for it.

Attacked by irrelevance, again – has anybody read Christopher Brookmyre’s “Invasion of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks” ? Good title, I feel.

In Lincolnshire, people use the term, ‘duck’ (pron. ‘dook’) as a term of affection. A little like “hen” in certain parts of Scotland. What is it about ornithological referents?

Perhaps, in Antarctica, physisists, geologists, climatologists and molecular biologists who fall in love with each other call each other, “penguin”. Could this represent a linguistic infantilisation of the dinosaurs? What would a bird-hipped Tyrannosaurus Rex think about that, one wonders?

“Eh, bud. Who are you callin’ a budgie? Are you talkin’ ta me? You lookin’ at me…??”

Amidst the inane babble, Stephen Jones’ comment achieves intelligibility:

“—–”Macaulay’s rationale for recommending a European education for the Indian elite was in no way racist. It made certain sincerely held assumptions about the superiority of western science and philosophy “——-

Which assumptions were both grotesquely ignorant and racist”

But not perspicacity.

Normally it would delight me to see Liberal opinion trashed here or anywhere else, but for once I find myself in the Liberal camp. But whether Newtonian physics or David Hume’s epistemology are inferior in some general sense to the ideas dominating the thought of the Indian elite almost 200 years ago seems a question impossible to resolve. If, however, one judges on the basis of practical validity it is Stephen, surely, who is grossly ignorant and, in wishing that Indians had been denied the fruits of Western science, racist too.

But the whole argument about the rights and wrongs of Indian education under the British seems pointless since India would have been westernized whether the British had done it or not. India, at the time of the creation of the British Indian Empire was a feebly and corruptly governed collection of petty states that would have fallen under the domination of, if not by Britain, then one of the other Western or westernized powers, including had others not acted before them, Japan, America or China.

What could be discussed is (a) Macaulay’s sincerity which is grotesquely impugned by the Avatar Singh’s fraudulent quotation; and (b) whether westernization of India has redounded to the benefit of the British now that India has nukes and intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying those nukes as far as London.

But there is important point to be understood about Avatar Singh’s comments, which has not I believe thus far been taken sufficiently seriously. Though they may be considered no more than imbecile rantings, Singh has here urged the military conquest of Britain. For Craig Murray to tolerate such comments ?” not that I suggest he does, even if they may be dismissed as insane, seems tantamount to treason. For this reason, it seem necessasry for Craig Murray to delete calls for the armed conquest of Britain from his website as soon as their presence comes to his attention.

For others here, if they are British subjects, to support such raving as sensible commentary on imperialism (mostly cut and pasted from loony websites) seems somewhat treasonable too. I believe the penalty of beheading for treason was abolished in the UK in 1973. Nevertheless, a life sentence would not be fun.

So on the one hand it would be ignorant and racist to deny the fruits of Western Whatnot to India, and on the other, now they have them we must be terrified that they’re going to use them to nuke us.

I think we in the UK have more urgent concerns. I was startled to hear the reporting of Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller’s comments to the war enquiry just now. Is the whole of the Establishment queueing up to let us know they always thought it was a rubbish idea, now it’s too late ?

“Are you calling my pint’s girlfriend a chough ?”

I remember ‘ducks’ as an endearment, I’ve been trying to place it. N. Staffs, I think, when I was a kid there.

Small, fluffy, unthreatening, edible; hmm. And then there are the Gooses Who Say Boo. Penguins … well, who can say what that much winter might do ?

“…the armed conquest of Britain”.

Does anyone take this seriously, Alfred? It fits in with your “genocide’ / “ethnic cleansing” narrative, which is why I criticised avatar singh for being the other side of your coin.

Amidst all this humourless inanity, it is Britain, must one remind one, who has troops in various war-zones in faraway countries and in these past few years it is Britain (on the coat-tails of Big Brother USA) who has launched aggressive wars against nations far away. ‘The Reds are coming!’ was the old incantation. So now, is it ‘The Desis are coming!’? Or even, ‘The Budgies are coming!’

Richard,

To a Penguin, a penguin is beautiful.

Famous (and very cold) Zen master

Of course, the difference b/w ‘duck’ and ‘hen’ is that in demotic the former is applied to both sexes, which makes sense given the gender of hens (assuming chickens have only two genders; please note that this itself is a moot and possibly controversial point).

In fact, tonight I feel like invading England. It’s only 95 miles away, due south, by road. Less as the crow flies (but since I’m neither crow, duck nor hen…) Beware, Carlisle! Be very ware! Any takers?

“Beware, Carlisle! Be very ware! Any takers?”

The camels are coming, hurrah, hurrah !

(I nicked that from a technical manual on programming, if it helps).

I’ll have a word with my old mate Euan Huzami.

Here in Lancaster, there are still peole who will tell you how there are no old buildings because bloody-stupid Charlie’s army burnt them all down when he besieged the castle. The museum will tell you that’s a rubbish story, it never happened, but when did that stop anyone ? (they’ll go on to tell you it did actually happen about 20 years earlier, in the course of some other foolishness).

But if you bring enough poultry, of course, it could all be different. A slow and confusing journey, but there’ll be a drove road not too far off into the hills. People did that, too, walked their beasts right down from the Highlands into the south of England.

Speak softly and carry a big duck.

Oh, but I forgot to say – watch out on your way down. On your right hand, a quiet town called Whitehaven, on your left you see quaint peaceful Rothbury … Beg to report, Sah, the natives are turning ugly. What on _earth_ is going on ? Someone runs amok shooting people, and now they’ve got *twenty* people arrested on suspicion of helping him ?

Alfred: You write some fascinating thoughts about self regulation of humans, particularly of the variety native to their country for some generations.

ok, I’m willing to grant for the moment that any gap left in a land’s carrying capacity left vacant by the indigenous population will be filled, if government allows, by immigrants. We must then assume that France has not increased its population by a full 100% with immigrants, only by dint of the fact that the UK is more accommodating to such immigrants.

The office for National Statistics (ONS) puts the figure for those born overseas as about 8.3% at the start of the decade, twice what it was 50 years ago. You must be suggesting that the load bearing potential of this UK island has never been reached, and is only being fulfilled with immigration, while that of a lot of the rest of Europe is not.

Whether a genuinely imploding indigenous population really is keeping the fairly steady growth that has been seen since WW-II, because vast immigration (and the subsequent offspring thereof) has been keeping the trend afloat, I’m not so sure… I’ll have to look at some more statistics to be convinced. I’ll grant it’s possible.

*

All the same, and despite reading what you argue about food supply and its subtle effects on decision making, I have to admit to hesitancy in concluding that food prices determine proliferation in a human brood to the extent you imply. (I’m not sure ‘fertility’ is the right term, because it’s a choice now, not the level of fertility, that is the determining factor.)

The cost of housing, the amount of work a couple will jointly have to put in in order to make a reasonable living, the cost of health care, the average wage, the economy, the strength of unions to protect jobs – all these things play much greater in the consideration of the stability of a prospective family, than a 20% swing in the price of rice and various other staples. It’s not an unknown phenomenon by any means for the rate of pregnancy to rocket up in times of war and crises, when one might anticipate food supplies to be particularly precarious. The survival of one’s line appears to assume more importance in times of stress.

I’ll agree that another Krakatoa might mean a substantial cost in the price of food – which, in real terms, has substantially _decreased_ in the past few decades. If a deep concern about the perceived cost of eating was at the bottom of decisions about getting pregnant, we should have seen the precise opposite in reproductive patterns in that same time. But concerns about another Krakatoa is far from uppermost in the considerations of your typical very small family while pondering an expansion – or indeed any food-cost boosting event as a point of concern at all. Even the general cost of living doesn’t get much of a look in.

*

You didn’t remark on my reference to the film Idiocracy – it was only partly in jest that I suggested you consider the reasons it offers for demographic shifts. What do you think of Clinton’s reform of welfare, so that only the first two children of welfare recipients would be eligible? (I don’t think this was directly related to his “three strikes and you’re out!”, but the principle might be the same.)

You mention massive medical intervention, but while those totally incapacitated are kept alive, it’s not as if they reproduce that often. And even in rare cases when they do, it’s not that they had a congenital problem which necessitated the medical intervention. Exceptions include those with Down’s Syndrome, and I do worry about that. Such individuals are as predisposed to reproduction as anyone else, but the offspring are guaranteed to carry the same characteristics. Should they be allowed to, and create a dependent group in the population? This is related to your ‘interesting question’ section. Personally, I don’t think so.

Screening, gene technology and so on can certainly prevent any undesirable characteristic from taking hold, and this is an old argument. Where would it end, if everyone wanted their child engineered to be above average in all respects, and will indeed be so, depending on what one could afford? Sheesh… as if the class divide were not already wide enough!

*

Your thoughts on carrying capacity with regards to technology and the limits achievable are sound, but how are such considerations ever to be given even a nod, while religious zealots must apparently be given as serious a hearing for public consideration as evolutionary biologists?

*

Been all over the shop here, hope I didn’t miss anything I was really supposed to address.

I suppose someone ought to warn France of the 100% increase in population they should look out for, and the locals get busy unless they want outsiders to fill the space. But in all seriousness, I don’t think the world capacity for humans is more than 1/10th what it is right now, particularly if all aspire to the lifestyle even of the most eco-conscious westerner. Requiring perpetual growth in an economy as a long term plan, and indefinite global growth in humans, is currently heading us down a path to total extinction in the blink of an evolutionary eye. Worrying about the genetic makeup of any particular country is, to coin a phrase, rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic. Have you read Leakey’s “The Sixth Extinction”, btw? Picked that up well over a decade ago, I’m surprised people are only just talking about it.

To have a population limited directly by access to food is a seriously undesirable situation. After the ensuing die-off, the over-exploitation of the land will have reduced its future “carrying capacity”.

It’s a weird old world that Alfred seems to inhabit; scary too. Maybe he should revise the mathematical aspects of his education in science, to help him get things more in proportion.

“Maybe he should revise the mathematical aspects of his education in science”

I think it’s about belief, rather than science. He’s insisting that he’s right, rather than considering the possibility that he might not be.

The “population of France” thing was revealing – he backs his argument up with figures that 30 seconds digging can show to be very badly wrong. Someone who’s trying to get scientific – earn a Ph.D, for example (he does know this, you see ?) – would have to revise their thought if the numbers turn out to be v. dodgy. Someone who’s preaching a belief would come up with different stuff to continue to insist it’s the true belief. I leave it up anyone who’s interested to make their own decision as to which he did, if there’s anyone that still hasn’t lost the will to live.

It is a scary world. Even the Indian nukes thing – it’s good to “give them” the tech (they should have copyrighted the number zero, eh ?), then it follows that You Have To Get Them Before They Get You – makes sense if you’ve got some weird fascination with that there’s got to be Unending Conflict and won’t entertain any thought of anything else.

I also think that – to a true missionary, someone who shows why they’re not acepting the arguments given is an opportunity; they’re showing what has to be done to resolve those doubts. So you show them the reasoning, and if it’s any good then, bingo ! they see why they have to agree with you. You don’t just get rude at them, or you’ve blown the chance. So he’s not trying to convince other people. So perhaps he’s trying to convince himself ? It’s always the same – he says things that look completely horrible, but he’s always ready to prove that he’s allowed, it doesn’t make him a Bad Person. Perhaps he’s worried about it, really ?

It reminds me of eddie re: the Iraq Body Count thing, where he finally explained his reasons for identifying with New Labour and how that made him want to do whatever he could to make them look good and swamp anything that made them look bad, so that seemed a good enough reason for him to repeat one and gloss over the other. (In his opinion, anyway, I never followed his reasoning about why he thought the cases in point did that, but never mind that now, the point is that he did).

Which is not to suggest that “faith” necessarily has to be like that – Oliver Cromwell, ladies and gentlemen :- “I beseech you in the Bowels of Christ, pray consider it possible that you may be mistaken”. (I could get Buddhist on the perils of “attachment” here ?) I’ve never seen anything that could make up my mind one way or the other as to whether he could take his own advice, btw.

But of course, I have my biasses, too. That is, firstly, a thing that’s important to remind myself of, and secondly, an invitation to dig the hole deeper by quoting it with no reference to my other points.

yes, one wonders whether silence is rightly taken for monumental lack of interest in, say, the relentlessly tedious whispers of holocaust revisionism (i’m not sssaying, you know, anything sspecific, jusst asking, that’s allowed, issssn’t it?). Or whether silence is taken for aquiescence. No more arguments? Yes! I must have persuaded them with my devastating combination of random insults, family anecdotes, lengthy digressions and suggestive non-sequiteurs! What? They’re still muttering about facts?

I think Richard’s right; it has to be about belief. And I suppose if you have a freaky world view you do tend to want other people to share it. I myself, for example, have often tried to persuade people that fishfinger sandwiches are best with ketchup *and* mayonnaise, but it’s strange how few of them will even contemplate the idea, insisting instead on the supremacy of melted cheese (I ask you), ketchup alone or, in one case, thinly sliced cucumber.

And now I know that at least one person, somewhere, will use that fishfinger sandwich to prove that there’s genocide in Leicester. It obviously does take all sorts, as my mother often says.

—–”Yeah, and I’m talking about the spurious one, which no one here seems to have the wit or integrity to acknowledge is a piece of hateful Anglophobic propaganda. “——–

Actually, it’s a fairly accurate description of the effect of his reforms. It is ironic that the Hindu and Buddhist revival was the result of Westerners, particularly Olcott and Blavatsky though the influence of Muller was immense, telling the Indians that in fact there culture was quite capable of standing up to the much vaunted western variety, and as the Panadura debate proved in 1879 was also quite capable of demolishing the Christian spokesmen through force of logic.

—-”And now I know that at least one person, somewhere, will use that fishfinger sandwich to prove that there’s genocide in Leicester. It obviously does take all sorts, as my mother often says”——-

I would have thought encouraging people to eat fish fingers was a crime against humanity comparable with genocide.

To a duck, a duck is a duck.

Zen master (very wet)

Stephen, you have completely overlooked the sandwich element of the process which makes all the difference. Ketchup *and* mayonnaise…try it..you know it makes sense…and according to a book I once read the fish don’t need fingers anyway…

to a duck, a duck is?

trying to find content of Panadura debate, no luck but read some interesting history so far when I should be (cough) working.

Actually I made some chronological errors in my post. The Panadura debate was held in 1873 and not 1879, and it was the debate that influenced Olcott, who arrived in Ceylon in 1880, not the other way round.

The bit I found most amusing was the Christian priest conducted the debate in fluent Pali and Sanskrit. The only problem was scarcely anybody in the audience could understand him, and when his Buddhist opponent spoke in colloquial Sinhala he wiped the floor.

of course I have my biases too, and I find I seem to quite like them, so certainly it is worth examining them and trying not to get attached to them. Thanks Richard.

There was a beautiful Indian man at my bus stop yesterday, talking loudly of love in an accent like a Yardie while looking like a Sufi, by the way.

“to a duck, a duck is?” technicolour

Now that is Descartes.

Ah yes, the (fish)oil paintings of the cold masters. Something to think about during those long cold months, while you stand there with an egg balanced on your toes …

I spin, am I therefore a mouse ?

Fishfinger sandwiches, that’s /truly/ freaky; if you start proclaiming that I’m too stupid to eat them, I may very well have to consider nuking you before you contaminate my precious bodily fluids. Which there is my bias, of course, he tweaks a prideful streak. But now – I think I praised “Making Light” before now for its discussions ? I’ve just bumped into a reference to an old thread there, on Bullying, which is very long and full of chewiness. I might be gone for a while …

Which came first, descartes or the horse ?

Glenn,

On the relationship between food and population in Britain, history provides a useful perspective. Until the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1849-52, the population of the British Isles was essentially limited by the quantity of food produced within the Isles. Until that time, there would have been few who doubted Thomas Malthus’s contention that population tends always to grow faster than the supply of food, with the consequence that population is continually checked by malnutrition or outright starvation. The only way, Malthus believed, that this sad state of affairs could be avoided would be through the widespread indulgence in what he, and at that time the World, called vice, i.e., contraception, abortion, and sexual practises incapable of leading to conception.

Since the repeal of the Corn Laws, three things affecting the British population and its means of existence changed:

first, Britain became heavily dependent on imported food. By the 1880′s 45% of the grain consumed in Britain was from abroad. This dependence on imported food explains the significance of the war in the Atlantic during both World Wars. Had Germany managed to sink enough ships carrying food from the New World to Britain, there would have been either mass starvation in Britain, or an early British capitulation;

second, vice in Britain, as Malthus defined it, became hugely popular, so much so that not only does every right-minded liberal consider it vicious to condemn it, but it has become a prominent component of the school curriculum;

third, since the Second World War, Britain began to import people to combat labour shortages and union power.

The process began on a significant scale in the early 1960′s when Enoch Powell, as Minister of Health was responsible for recruiting large numbers of immigrants from the West Indies and elsewhere to fill approximately one-third of all National Health Service positions. The rate of immigration has continually increased since then, particularly during the last ten years when the Blair-Brown governments deliberately sought to change the ethnic and cultural composition of the British population through mass immmigration.

Thus, it is evident that whereas until the middle of the nineteenth century the limit to the British population was essentially determined by the domestic food supply, it has since depended on the availability of food only insofar as access to foreign sources has been physically constrained (as during German war-time blockades) or subject to financial limitation (as when dependent on America’s post-war Lend-Lease program). At the lower end of the wealth spectrum, inadequate nutrition probably has continued to exert a negative effect on reproductive rate, although the effect is modified with sometimes perverse consequences by welfare programs.

But so long as Britain has physical access to foreign markets and the means to pay, there is essentially no upper limit to population. It would be possible for example to accomodate the entire world, except the farmers, in England, without necessarily creating a food shortage. The population density would be high, approximately 50% higher than in Hong Kong (here’s something for ballon boy and stat’s wizz, Richard Robinson, to check), but I’ve never met anyone from Hong Kong who complained about overcrowding there.

So I don’t disagree with your contention that fertility of the British population is, today, largely a matter of choice. However, Britain’s dependence on foreign supplies has several important implications of which I will mention two:

first, Britain’s capacity to divert food from throughout the world to satisfy her needs, means restricting the availability of food to those without the financial means to compete with British consumers. So as long as starvation or malnutrition exists anywhere in the World, Britain eats at a cost to the poorest of the Earth. The relation between population and food supply continues to exist, but it is now a global relationship. Where wealth exists the relationship is no longer apparent, where poverty exists the relationship is exacerbated;

second, Britain is vulnerable to a global food shortage, and much more so than nations that remain self-sufficient in food. Today, China, Africa and India, where several billion people still must survive on a dollar or two a day, export large quantities of food to the rich countries including Britain. It seems unlikely, however, that governments of most of these countries would allow food exports to continue during a major famine. Thus populations that exist above the carrying capacity of their territory may be particularly hard hit during a world food shortage.

Re: “The office for National Statistics (ONS) puts the figure for those born overseas as about 8.3% at the start of the decade, twice what it was 50 years ago.”

This number has changed greatly during the last decade with huge impact on particular urban populations.

Re: “The cost of housing, … the cost of health care, the average wage, the economy, the strength of unions to protect jobs – all these things play much greater in the consideration of the stability of a prospective family, than a 20% swing in the price of rice and various other staples.”

Thing is, though, people don’t eat rationally even in times of scarcity, and they very rarely buy unprocessed staples such as rice. Thus it is not the price of staples that counts but the price of things people actually eat. The poorer you are the more likely it is that you live on potato chips and candy bars, which is not only unhealthy but extremely expensive relative to the price of rice and flour. The family of my great grandmother, refugees from the Highland Clearances, are said to have survived during the Crimean war largely on bread, jam and tea. It would have been more sensible to forego the jam and tea and supplement the bread with milk and cabbage. But, being human, they were not entirely sensible.

Re: “It’s not an unknown phenomenon by any means for the rate of pregnancy to rocket up in times of war and crises, when one might anticipate food supplies to be particularly precarious.”

Yes, a good instinctual response. It overloads the carrying capacity of the habitat and causes a population crash. But those who did most to cause the boom and bust are most likely to be represented in the succeeding though much reduced generation (cf. David Lack, the Natural Regulation of Animal Numbers).

“You didn’t remark on my reference to the film Idiocracy”

I missed it, the movie I mean. I haven’t been to the cinema since “Amadeus” and I don’t own a television set.

Re: “You mention massive medical intervention, but while those totally incapacitated are kept alive, it’s not as if they reproduce that often.”

I don’t think this is necessarily the case. The occasional shot of penicillin can compensate for a severely defective immune system, and thus allow unimpaired reproduction resulting in an increase in the genetic load of succeeding generations. It is not difficult to think of many other examples.

Re: “Screening, gene technology and so on can certainly prevent any undesirable characteristic from taking hold, and this is an old argument. Where would it end, if everyone wanted their child engineered to be above average in all respects …”

I thought among the middle class all children were above average anyway!

Re: “as if the class divide were not already wide enough!”

An unfortunate result of meritocracy. With a decent class system, the human potential of all classes will be comparable.

Re: “Your thoughts on carrying capacity with regards to technology and the limits achievable are sound, but how are such considerations ever to be given even a nod, while religious zealots must apparently be given as serious a hearing for public consideration as evolutionary biologists?”

Religious doctrine seems to be another good adaptive strategy, although it can backfire, as with Catholics in Italy, Ireland and Quebec who, contrary to Church teaching, have taken to vice with enthusiasm and now have fewer children than godless disbelievers.

Re: “I suppose someone ought to warn France of the 100% increase in population they should look out for, and the locals get busy unless they want outsiders to fill the space.”

Sarkozy has already warned the French people to intermarry with the immigrants or face extinction.

Re: “I don’t think the world capacity for humans is more than 1/10th what it is right now”

The world’s current carrying capacity must be at least equal to the current world population, although the carrying capacity may be declining, perhaps precipitously, in which case we’ll have a population crash. Nothing to worry about there – its just how life works, how the adapted get sorted from the maladapted!

Re: “Worrying about the genetic makeup of any particular country is, to coin a phrase, rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic.”

That’s where I think you are very seriously wrong. If you want to transform humanity into a tame animal that lives peacefully according to the dictates of the International Panel on Climate Change, the UN, etc., then one thing you need do is provide everyone with a sense of security. The last thing you should do is say, oh screw the Brits, they had their time in the sun, now its time for them to move over and make way other folk, because if you do that you may well instigate a war driven by the instinct for survival, the most powerful incentive to human action that exists.

Virtually all wars, are motivated by clan, tribal or national fears and rivalries. Therefore, the best way to ensure global stability is to guarantee the survival of all people in their traditional homelands. And when I say survival, I mean survival as they are: Brits with British faces, Vietnamese girls with beautiful Vietnamese noses, and all the rest.

To a biologist, incidentally, the variety of humanity is a source of unending delight and fascination. To make us all the same color and shape and emotional and intellectual composition would be a catastrophe.

And yes I read Leakey’s “The Sixth Extinction” when first published in paperback – full of interesting facts.

“the best way to ensure global stability is to guarantee the survival of all people in their traditional homelands. And when I say survival, I mean survival as they are: Brits with British faces, Vietnamese girls with beautiful Vietnamese noses, and all the rest.” Alfred

Aint never happened, aint never gonna happen. So, Indians, Pakistanis etc would have to split themselves into at least sixty pieces and return one piece to Persia, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Mongolia, Greece… Hmn. That’s a good idea.

And the Roma would have to go back to Sindh/ Rajasthan and al the countries in between there and Spain/ Scotland/ Bulgaria.

And the Greeks would have to go back to Central Asia.

And the Syrians, to France and Persia and Italy.

And you, Alfred, to the Highlands of Scotland and Leicester and Devon.

And me to Beverley, home-town of Philip Larkin. Now that IS a good idea.

“Brits with British faces”.

What, like Linford Christie? Or Julie Walters? Or David Baddiel? Or Benny Hill?

Please, don’t worry about war, Alfred, unless you want to make up to Iraq and Afghanistan somehow. Or about the beautiful noses of Vietnamese girls, they will always exist in your dreams. And that’s the way it should be, don’t you think?

Suhayl said,

“…the armed conquest of Britain”.

Does anyone take this seriously, Alfred?”

From someone who, it appears, has called for the murder of British citizens (see link I provided above), why would you not take it seriously?

“it is Britain, must one remind one, who has troops in various war-zones in faraway countries and in these past few years it is Britain (on the coat-tails of Big Brother USA) who has launched aggressive wars against nations far away.”

I need no reminding by Suhayl. I have been an opponent Britain’s wars against Iraq and Afghanistan from the outset, but I am not a traitor and I don’t advocate anti-British terrorism.

By attempting to trivialize the racists statements made by Avatar Singh about the English, Suhayl provides cover for those who call anti-racism racism. His position might be clearer if one were to rework Avatar Singh’s libellous statements about the English and call residents of the Indian sub-continent parasitic bastards using their sweatshops, their call centres, their hives of IT workers — all employing the precious English language and the fruits of the European renaissance, which they have stolen from us — to rob the English people of their jobs, etc.

The perverse habit of calling anti-racism racism is well exemplified by Stephen Jones’s comment which asserts that Thomas Macaulay’s minute on Indian education and government (which held that Indians needed a westernized education if they were to hold their own as a self-governing people in a westernized world) displays “ignorance and racism.” Curious, really, to characterize someone recognized as being among the most learned Englishmen of his time, as ignorant. But that is to digress.

Quite contrary to Stephen Jones, Avatar Singh’s defamatory lies are designed to show Macaulay a racist who wished to hold Indians in permanent servitude to Britain.

So which is it? Was Macaulay a racist, as Stephen Jones asserts, because he wanted to westernize Indian education as a necessary preliminary to self-government or would he have been a racist if, as Avatar Singh falsely asserts, he opposed Westernization of Indian education in order that Indians remained in permanent servitude? Or was he a racist simply because he was a “paleface,” to use a term employed by one of Suhayl’s co-apologists for Singh.

One other thing, am I the only person here to be struck by the extraordinary humbug displayed by those who enthusiastically encourage the defamatory liar Avatar Singh to hold forth on a thread devoted to the ethical justification for denying access to the defamatory liar Larry?

But then humbug is always a mark of the ruling group, and lib-lefties have unquestionably gained the ascendant in Britain today, with consequences likely to be to the everlasting detriment of the British people.

If you look closely – very closely – at Tony Blair’s nose, you will see that while at first glance it appears average, on closer inspection, in fact it resembles the proboscis of Pinocchio.

I feel Alfred might be putting forward some sane sides of the dreaded subject. People are worried to debate what kind and amount of immigration would be best and what could be undesireable for their homelands. The commercial pressure is to not give it a thought, let labour move and reap profits. I dont have a firm position on the issues, i feel these modern times are different to any in history, and ideally every human should be equal and free to move across the world. I do sympathise with people wishing to protect their own tribal characters, especially when they wish no ill on others, the promiscuous world perhaps, other than some boundaries for their kin to persist within.

Yes, crab, I agree, but the problem is, Alfred often provides an excellent and measured historical anaylsis of the problems but then draws completely inappropriate conclusions/ solutions. That’s the rub with much of Alfred’s argumentation. One cannot but agree with a whole lot of what he says but not with his conclusions. Well, I speak for myself, of course.

Hey, Suhayl, if people ever had stayed put they wouldn’t even have got to those alleged homelands, we’d all be overcrowding East Africa. (Heh. Did you ever read Stand on Zanzibar ?)

Come to that, did you ever read Steve Bell on cartooning Mr. TB ? An interview long time back, I can’t remember where (the aGuinard, I guess). He said that the trick to making it work was to focus on his Evil Left Eye. Once you’ve heard that, it even works for photos (though the distinction seems to be fading these days, he’s becoming a goblin).

“because he was a “paleface,” to use a term employed by one of Suhayl’s co-apologists”

That’s *funny*.

“I do sympathise with people wishing to protect their own tribal characters, especially when they wish no ill on others, the promiscuous world perhaps, other than some boundaries for their kin to persist within”

That brings into focus for me a vague idea that’s been nagging at me for awhile. A lot of what Alfred says, perhaps (I Am Not An Anthroplogist) is more feasible when applied to, for example, the few remaining “uncontacted” people hiding behind the quieter trees of the Amazon Basin (if there are any left by now), defending their patch against the neighbours, keeping their population under control by sending the young males out to cull each other, not expanding out of their ‘homeland’, and unpopulated bits in between the patches where they can agree to have their battles without trampling anyone’s gardens, all very nice and tidy and stable.

“Alfred often provides an excellent and measured historical anaylsis of the problems but then draws completely inappropriate conclusions/ solutions.”

Suhayl,

Come on, Suhayl, be specific. what is so inappropriate in concluding that if the British are threatened with being swamped out of their small and crowded homeland it is only reasonable that they should want to restrict the rate of immigration.

Or are you trying to insinuate that I have a swastika tatooed on my forehead?

That reminds me a little of Mrs Thatcher’s “swamping” phrase back in 1979. But a swastika? No. Unless it be the original Hindu symbol, of course, whcih has a quite different connotation.

Well, it’s actually quite difficult now to get into the UK (legally) to live ‘forever’ unless you’re an EU national or unless you’re really quite rich – but of course Brits can go to France or Spain or Portugal to live, so one can’t really have it both ways, as it were. Brits also work all over the Middle East and Far East. It’s a labour market issue, an issue of capitalism. I’ve already discussed this before. We are all at the mercy of the corporations and the banks.

Hey – this thread is catching-up with the 9/11 one! Does that mean something? I don’t know.

People ‘wishing to protect their own tribal characters’; bless. It’s nice, I think, that the ‘tribal character’ of the Brits largely consists of:

gardening

football/rugby/cricket

barbecues

children

cookery

music

DIY/home improvements

and possibly a vague desire to live by the sea.

I do think it’s a tribute to our fine media, and their tenacious pursuit of the vulnerable, that people use this word ‘immigration’ as though it meant something. Like the Daily Express use of the word ‘ethnics’; just simple, unfocussed, meaningless stuff.

Crab, I agree, commercial pressure to move to work to live is one thing; appalling. But a Polish worker, say, who’s had to come to the UK to work is not an immigrant; and the Polish workers are also going home again. Having tried to generate fear and resentment of Polish people, the media are now trying to generate fear and resentment of immigrants, or ‘ethnics’ ie, anyone who looks like an immigrant. The fact that they may have been born in Leicester is irrelevant.

Alfred’s conclusions and language encourage such an outlook; hence his insistence on appearances (the ‘British face’) rather than on facts. And now he’s warning of a Brit ‘war’.

Anyway. Suhayl, are you insinuating that Alfred has a swastika tattooed on his forehead? Because I find it unlikely myself: I mean, it would surely make shopping etc quite difficult?

Alfred, I think care and attention toward an economically, environmentally and culturally beneficial immigration rate for all places, balanced against the ideal of free movement, would be one thing provided by a proper state, one which was not dominated by the military, industrial, commercial and financial persuasions which combine to create such a mess out of life.

Our problems are immense, Environmental catastrophy, Computerised Warfare, Sick social planning, souless employments and economic schemes, all to maintain some ravenously wealthly and manipulative companies and organisations, which in turn maintain the masses in follysome struggles. The stress which surplus immigration could put on culture at these times seems diminutive to me compared to the wars and terror nightmares and stupid adverts and dreamless kids and ruthless adults.

Write well about how to deal with the big problems, not why to make bigger problems out of little ones.

Parts of the media, I should have said. And even then, this talk of ‘war’ and ‘genocide’ is really reaching the skirts-over the-windmill extreme end of the extreme. Alfred, I said it before and I say it again, you should come and visit.

Otherwise, time for bed, and I think my appetite for this circular Alfred is generally sated. Liked that website, Richard! Goodnight.

‘night technicolour

such good advice

Write well about how to deal with the big problems, not why to make bigger problems out of little ones.