it is alright to write about non-current politics here, right? i hope so.
thesis: gandhian non-violence satyagraha is nice and all, but only applicable when your tormenter is benevolent, and stronger than you. if your tormenter is benevolent and stronger than you, then they can do more for you than you can. therefore, some colonialism, such as the british control of india are good and should be encouraged.
satyagraha has worked a few times in human history. gandhi, mlk jr., and the velvet revolution of vaclav havel off the top of my head. but these enemies, the british, the americans, and the post-perestroika russians, were humane and/or media conscious (i'm not sure one could say the wwii era british were media conscious. did any brits really give a damn about india in the 1940s?).
my favorite gandhi quote is this letter he wrote to the jews of germany after kristallnacht:
"if i were a jew and were born in germany and earned my livelihood there, i would claim germany as my home even as the tallest gentile german may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me into the dungeon... if one jew or all the jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. and suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy can. the calculated violence of hitler may even result in a general massacre of the jews, but if the jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre i have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant."
>also, i'm too lazy for the shift key.
Are you bullshitting me?
Then I'm too lazy to read your posts, much less take them seriously.
are you bullshitting me?
you really take posts with proper capitalization more seriously than posts without? someone once said something about books and their covers that you should remember. be more like bubu, damn me for substance, not style.
>>14: If I bought a book and began reading it only to see the author didn't bother to capitalize, I'd take it back to the bookstore for a refund rather than try to decipher it. (Having to read "Ulysses" in college was torture.) And if you are too "lazy" to do it, that speaks volumes about your substance.
Wish to have an intelligent discussion? Write with intelligence. Then we can talk.
>>9
It's not a stretch at all. The British abolished thuggee and suttee (just as they abolished the slave trade in all their African colonies), and dragged India kicking and screaming out of the Bronze Age. The British were the best thing that ever happened to India, and I only hope that the Indian government can keep it all from regressing back to it was before the British came.
we simply disagree on the definition of intelligence then, because i think that capitalization spellling and punctuation are simply aesthetic. language is about communication, not entertainment; if you get your message across you succeeded, if you didn't, you failed. besides, half the languages i know don't even have capitalization, and i can't imagine denigrating them for it. and the "lazy" comment was an attempt at humor. i just choose not to capitalize.
please, if it bothers you so tremendously, stop reading my posts. i'm the only one here who posts under the name of "anonymous" so it ought to be easy to weed them out.
>>15 has a good point by the way. i'm done talking about capitalization until they make an orthography board. ;)