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.
.
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”.