With genuine reluctance, I find myself obliged to ban Larry from St Louis from commenting on this blog.
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.
But Larry has a different agenda. His technique is continually to accuse me of holding opinions which I do not in fact hold, and which he thinks will call my judgement into doubt.
Take this comment posted by Larry at 9.35 am today:
I’ve re-read your post on the Russian spies, and once again you’ve proven to be a complete dumbass.
I predicted Russia claiming (in some minor way) those idiots. You didn’t. You thought it was a conspiracy.
You’ve once again self-indicted.
In fact my view on the Russian spies was the exact opposite of what Larry claims it was. As I posted:
I don’t have any difficulty in believing that the FBI really have discovered a colony of Russian sleeper spies in the United States.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/06/those_russian_s.html#comments
This is not Larry being mistaken – remember he claimed he had just re-read my posting. 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.
He most often – indeed daily – does this with reference to 9/11. He tries to divert almost every thread on to the topic of 9/11 and to insinuate that I am among those who believe that 9/11 was “an inside job”. In fact, I am not of that opinion and never have been.
I have put up with this now for months, but Larry’s activities have become so frenetic and are so counter-productive to informed debate, I am not prepared to put up with it any more. I am also deeply sucpicious of the fact that he is able to spend more time on this blog than me, and to post right around the clock (often as with this one at 9.35am – think about it – what time is that in the US?).
Anyway, sorry Larry, your derailing days are over.
.
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?