The Ethics of Banning Trolls 754


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.

.


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754 thoughts on “The Ethics of Banning Trolls

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  • glenn

    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.

  • glenn

    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.

  • Stephen Jones

    ——“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.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    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’!

  • Suhayl Saadi

    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.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    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

  • Suhayl Saadi

    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

  • Clark

    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.

  • Richard Robinson

    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.

  • Alfred

    “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.

  • Alfred

    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.

  • Stephen Jones

    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.

  • Richard Robinson

    “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.

  • crab

    “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

  • crab

    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.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    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?

  • Alfred

    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.

  • Stephen Jones

    It is England’s population density that is twice Pakistan’s. And it’s lower than that of the Pakistan Punjab. Your point?

  • crab

    “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.

  • Alfred Burdett

    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.

  • avatar singh

    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. ”

  • avatar singh

    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.”

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

  • crab

    “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?

  • avatar singh

    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€

  • Richard Robinson

    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.

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