You may or may not be aware of this, but many active slavers, among them John Taylor of Caroline, described slavery as an “evil” while simultaneously opposing, both in their words and their deeds, all immediate efforts to end it. “Evil” is a word which has many shades of meaning, and in the 18th and 19th centuries it was far more commonly used than it is today to refer not only to deliberate acts of wickedness, but also to more generally bad conditions such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or general ignorance and folly. Many anti-abolitionists and slavers viewed slavery as an “evil” in the latter sense (in that they would rather be rid of it, but did not believe that white slavers had any immediate moral obligation to stop enslaving the black people that they held captive). Robert E. Lee, for example, was of this school of thought (the letter in which he famously described slavery as a “moral and political evil” was actually a letter primarily devoted to denouncing abolitionism as a doctrine and Northern abolitionists as a group). So was John Taylor of Caroline. So was Jefferson, at times, although at other times he made hypocritical gestures towards a more anti-slavery position. It is either pure ignorance, pure folly, or pure chicanery to try to represent this position (which recognizes no moral obligation to stop enslaving actually existing slaves, and which explicitly prefers the indefinite continuation of slavery unless and until all black people could be ethnically cleansed from their life-long homes in the American South and forced to foreign colonies in Africa) as an anti-slavery position. Real abolitionists in the 19th century were quite familiar with this position (since it was the official position of the American Colonization Society, an organization of which John Taylor of Caroline was an early supporter and officer), and they denounced it furiously. (See, for example, William Lloyd Garrison’s Thoughts on African Colonization.) As well they should have, since the position is, first, racist rubbish, and, second, quite clearly calculated to ease the consciences of squeamish slavers rather than to free those held in bondage. Those who sentimentally wished for slavery to end, somehow or another, in some far-off day which they perpetually deferred in the name of some other goal that justified their keeping slaves in the meantime — as, for example, with John Taylor of Caroline and his dreams of a Negerrein Virginia — no more count as anti-slavery for those idle remarks than George W. Bush counts as anti-war for having said (in his speech announcing the Iraq war) that war is terrible and he longs to live in peace.

This is the necessary context — that is, the context of John Taylor of Caroline’s actual thoughts about the nature of the “evil” in question and what if anything ought to be done to “alleviate it” (short of “wholly cur[ing]” it), and what all that actually meant in practice for the many black people whose slave-labor he himself was living off of while he wrote those lines — that your isolated use of that single quotation, and your frankly outrageous attempt to paint this active slaver as being anti-slavery, omits.

As for your accusations of plagiarism, I thank you for quoting the passages that you claim to have “caught” me plagiarizing. I’ll be happy to let the reader judge whether what I wrote could fairly be described as “plagiarizing” either of the other passages that you mention here.

You may or may not be aware of this, but many active slavers, among them John Taylor of Caroline, described slavery as an “evil” while simultaneously opposing, both in their words and their deeds, all immediate efforts to end it. “Evil” is a word which has many shades of meaning, and in the 18th and 19th centuries it was far more commonly used than it is today to refer not only to deliberate acts of wickedness, but also to more generally bad conditions such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or general ignorance and folly. Many anti-abolitionists and slavers viewed slavery as an “evil” in the latter sense (in that they would rather be rid of it, but did not believe that white slavers had any immediate moral obligation to stop enslaving the black people that they held captive). Robert E. Lee, for example, was of this school of thought (the letter in which he famously described slavery as a “moral and political evil” was actually a letter primarily devoted to denouncing abolitionism as a doctrine and Northern abolitionists as a group). So was John Taylor of Caroline. So was Jefferson, at times, although at other times he made hypocritical gestures towards a more anti-slavery position. It is either pure ignorance, pure folly, or pure chicanery to try to represent this position (which recognizes no moral obligation to stop enslaving actually existing slaves, and which explicitly prefers the indefinite continuation of slavery unless and until all black people could be ethnically cleansed from their life-long homes in the American South and forced to foreign colonies in Africa) as an anti-slavery position. Real abolitionists in the 19th century were quite familiar with this position (since it was the official position of the American Colonization Society, an organization of which John Taylor of Caroline was an early supporter and officer), and they denounced it furiously. (See, for example, William Lloyd Garrison’s Thoughts on African Colonization.) As well they should have, since the position is, first, racist rubbish, and, second, quite clearly calculated to ease the consciences of squeamish slavers rather than to free those held in bondage. Those who sentimentally wished for slavery to end, somehow or another, in some far-off day which they perpetually deferred in the name of some other goal that justified their keeping slaves in the meantime — as, for example, with John Taylor of Caroline and his dreams of a Negerrein Virginia — no more count as anti-slavery for those idle remarks than George W. Bush counts as anti-war for having said (in his speech announcing the Iraq war) that war is terrible and he longs to live in peace.

This is the necessary context — that is, the context of John Taylor of Caroline’s actual thoughts about the nature of the “evil” in question and what if anything ought to be done to “alleviate it” (short of “wholly cur[ing]” it), and what all that actually meant in practice for the many black people whose slave-labor he himself was living off of while he wrote those lines — that your isolated use of that single quotation, and your frankly outrageous attempt to paint this active slaver as being anti-slavery, omits.

As for your accusations of plagiarism, I thank you for quoting the passages that you claim to have “caught” me plagiarizing. I’ll be happy to let the reader judge whether what I wrote could fairly be described as “plagiarizing” either of the other passages that you mention here.

Consider RadGeek:

he was rather more explicit and consistent about his belief that the “evils” he condemned were to be remedied by ethnic cleansing, not by emancipation, and, if that wasn’t available, the lesser-evil alternative in his view was for “well managed” slaves who were “docile, useful, and happy,” and a slave-lord “restrained by his property in the slave, and
susceptible of humanity.” Taylor is widely considered to have been an important step in the ideological transition from the older Jeffersonian “necessary evil” defenses of slavery to the later Calhounian “positive good” arguments.

The juxtaposition of these two excerpted phrases and its accompanying paraphrase is illustrative in its prior familiarity…

“In Taylor’s opinion ‘slaves are docile, useful and happy, if they are well managed’ and that ‘the individual is restrained by his property in
the slave, and susceptible of humanity’. The blandishments as well as the terrors of religion indissolubly bind together the happiness and misery of
both master and slave. In this he anticipated the later arguments that slavery was a positive good.” — RW Fenn and JD Ellis. (2007) “The History of Hayfield in Caroline County in the Commonwealth of Virginia.” Copyright, Bardon Hall Publishers

Of course there is also the Wikipedia rendition of this same piece of copyrighted material, itself plagiarized with a couple of words rearranged to make it look original:

Taylor agreed with Jefferson that the institution was an evil, but argued that it was “incapable of removal, and only within reach of palliation,” and took issue with Jefferson’s repeated references to the specific cruelties of slavery, arguing that “slaves are docile, useful and happy, if they are well managed,” and that “the individual is restrained by his property in the slave, and susceptible of humanity . . . . Religion assails him both with her blandishments and terrours. It indissolubly binds his, and his slaves happiness or misery together.” His approach, defending the preservation of slavery as it was and claiming that proper management could benefit the slave as well as the master, anticipated the more emphatic defenses of slavery as a “positive good” by later writers such as John C. Calhoun, Edmund Ruffin, and George Fitzhugh.

It’s a seditiously simplistic art really. Take somebody else’s paragraph and excerpted phrases, re-arrange a couple words, substitute a couple harsher-sounding synonyms like “slave-lord” for the dispassionate neutrality of the plagiarized original, truncate a couple of unnecessary names here and there, then post it as your own work and credit yourself endlessly for providing important “context” to the argument of others.

The only problem is when you get caught.

Consider RadGeek:

he was rather more explicit and consistent about his belief that the “evils” he condemned were to be remedied by ethnic cleansing, not by emancipation, and, if that wasn’t available, the lesser-evil alternative in his view was for “well managed” slaves who were “docile, useful, and happy,” and a slave-lord “restrained by his property in the slave, and
susceptible of humanity.” Taylor is widely considered to have been an important step in the ideological transition from the older Jeffersonian “necessary evil” defenses of slavery to the later Calhounian “positive good” arguments.

The juxtaposition of these two excerpted phrases and its accompanying paraphrase is illustrative in its prior familiarity…

“In Taylor’s opinion ‘slaves are docile, useful and happy, if they are well managed’ and that ‘the individual is restrained by his property in
the slave, and susceptible of humanity’. The blandishments as well as the terrors of religion indissolubly bind together the happiness and misery of
both master and slave. In this he anticipated the later arguments that slavery was a positive good.” — RW Fenn and JD Ellis. (2007) “The History of Hayfield in Caroline County in the Commonwealth of Virginia.” Copyright, Bardon Hall Publishers

Of course there is also the Wikipedia rendition of this same piece of copyrighted material, itself plagiarized with a couple of words rearranged to make it look original:

Taylor agreed with Jefferson that the institution was an evil, but argued that it was “incapable of removal, and only within reach of palliation,” and took issue with Jefferson’s repeated references to the specific cruelties of slavery, arguing that “slaves are docile, useful and happy, if they are well managed,” and that “the individual is restrained by his property in the slave, and susceptible of humanity . . . . Religion assails him both with her blandishments and terrours. It indissolubly binds his, and his slaves happiness or misery together.” His approach, defending the preservation of slavery as it was and claiming that proper management could benefit the slave as well as the master, anticipated the more emphatic defenses of slavery as a “positive good” by later writers such as John C. Calhoun, Edmund Ruffin, and George Fitzhugh.

It’s a seditiously simplistic art really. Take somebody else’s paragraph and excerpted phrases, re-arrange a couple words, substitute a couple harsher-sounding synonyms like “slave-lord” for the dispassionate neutrality of the plagiarized original, truncate a couple of unnecessary names here and there, then post it as your own work and credit yourself endlessly for providing important “context” to the argument of others.

The only problem is when you get caught.

As for your comments on John Taylor of Caroline, again, you are taking the passage out of its context and directly ignoring the many other things that Taylor said about slavery. I quoted several of these.

What a curious claim. For comparative purposes it is sufficient to note that I provided a lengthy multi-sentence excerpt of Taylor’s writings on slavery with the belief that an intelligent non-zealot could reasonably ascertain their context from the simple fact that such context is implicit to the length and completeness of the quote itself.

By contrast, Mr. “RadGeek” claims to have supplied the “context” of additional quotations from Taylor yet not one of them amounts to anything more than a brief mid-sentence phrase, allegedly excerpted from Taylor and described within the sentences of others.

Even more curious is the apparent supply of RadGeek’s quotations, revealed by a moment’s activity on any simple search engine: more mid-sentence phrase excerpts of Taylor described in the words of others from two sources: a 1995 essay compendium by David Thomas Konig (http://books.google.com/books?id=6p9IOsu3xXIC) and that ever-reputable repository of trivialized idiocy for stupid people who wish to pretend they are smart: Wikipedia. If you desired to add substantive “context” to Taylor and discuss it through the lens of measured historical analysis, RadGeek, it would be welcome. But don’t post a litany of second-hand cherrypicked mid-sentence phrases in its place while simultaneously accusing another of the same for posting something far more extensive and substantive.

If nothing else has emerged from this exchange it is the validation of my earlier point about the tendency of zealotry to render any further rational discussion impossible. I’m content to leave it at that, as all honest attempts to reign in displays of zealotry, be they the effort of myself or others, have only elicited responses that illustrate the severity of the impediment it imposes upon conversation.

As for your comments on John Taylor of Caroline, again, you are taking the passage out of its context and directly ignoring the many other things that Taylor said about slavery. I quoted several of these.

What a curious claim. For comparative purposes it is sufficient to note that I provided a lengthy multi-sentence excerpt of Taylor’s writings on slavery with the belief that an intelligent non-zealot could reasonably ascertain their context from the simple fact that such context is implicit to the length and completeness of the quote itself.

By contrast, Mr. “RadGeek” claims to have supplied the “context” of additional quotations from Taylor yet not one of them amounts to anything more than a brief mid-sentence phrase, allegedly excerpted from Taylor and described within the sentences of others.

Even more curious is the apparent supply of RadGeek’s quotations, revealed by a moment’s activity on any simple search engine: more mid-sentence phrase excerpts of Taylor described in the words of others from two sources: a 1995 essay compendium by David Thomas Konig (http://books.google.com/books?id=6p9IOsu3xXIC) and that ever-reputable repository of trivialized idiocy for stupid people who wish to pretend they are smart: Wikipedia. If you desired to add substantive “context” to Taylor and discuss it through the lens of measured historical analysis, RadGeek, it would be welcome. But don’t post a litany of second-hand cherrypicked mid-sentence phrases in its place while simultaneously accusing another of the same for posting something far more extensive and substantive.

If nothing else has emerged from this exchange it is the validation of my earlier point about the tendency of zealotry to render any further rational discussion impossible. I’m content to leave it at that, as all honest attempts to reign in displays of zealotry, be they the effort of myself or others, have only elicited responses that illustrate the severity of the impediment it imposes upon conversation.

Far more difficult is to consider the status of slavery in its own time …

The “status of slavery” where and for whom?

For black people in Virginia, or for that matter for white slavers in Virginia, it was a pretty important issue.

William:

… and ask the question that all persons of moral character asked at the time: what can we do to get rid of this wretched institutional inheritance? If American history shows nothing else, it is that there was no easy answer to that question.

What do you mean by the question “What can we do?”

If it’s intended to be a moral question about what those who were in positions of legal power, or who perpetrated slavery as individuals should have done to get rid of it, the answer is easy: immediate, complete, and unconditional emancipation. This is something that Garrison, Spooner, and Gerrit Smith all believed in, advocated, and acted (in different ways) to bring about. It’s something that Jefferson and Taylor explicitly rejected in favor of continuing slavery, and gradual emancipation conditional on forced exile from America.

If it’s intended to be a strategic question about what abolitionists ought to have done in order to get around the efforts of obdurate or unrepentant slavers to prevent or halt emancipation, then that’s a more difficult question, but it’s a question that is only difficult because of the difficulties inserted by slavers like Jefferson and Taylor. It’s certainly not a “difficulty” that offers any reason to mitigate the judgment on Jefferson’s character, or his libertarian credentials.

William:

The same may be said with equal relevance to Jefferson’s concept of decentralized republicanism. And I’ll leave it at that.

I’m going to repeat this one last time, to make sure that we are clear. Nothing that I have said concerning Jefferson’s political views is a denunciation of “decentralized republicanism.” I’m an anarchist, so I don’t believe in any form of government, no matter how decentralized or how republican. But as it happens, I think that political decentralization is better than political centralization, and republican and democratic governments are better than monarchical governments.

The issue here is not that I’m using slavery in order to stop discussions of decentralized republicanism. This is either a careless or a deliberate distortion of what I’ve explicitly and repeatedly said. What I’m doing is denying that the political system actually advocated by Thomas Jefferson counts as a form of decentralized republicanism, any more than the Roman Catholic Church counts as a “democracy” on account of the cardinals voting for the Pope.

You may want to talk about decentralized republicanism more than you want to talk about Thomas Jefferson and slavery. That’s fine; it’s an interesting subject. But this post is, again, about Thomas Jefferson and slavery. You are the one changing the subject in order to try to redirect conversation to something other than the original topic. Not me.

As for your comments on John Taylor of Caroline, again, you are taking the passage out of its context and directly ignoring the many other things that Taylor said about slavery. I quoted several of these. Taylor was a colonizationist, not an abolitionist, and he explicitly stated that while slavery was an “evil” that continuing to enslave black people was preferable to freeing them without the condition of forced deportation to Africa. He specifically criticized Jefferson’s own writing on slavery because he felt that Jefferson was too negative about it, and that “well managed” slaves were better off than free blacks in America. I gave you several direct quotations in order to contextualize your own quotation and to explain the ways in which his views were a point of transition between the older anti-abolition views of Jefferson and the later positively pro-slavery views of Calhoun, Ruffin, Fitzhugh, et al. You have simply ignored these quotations rather than engaging with them and repeated the original quotation, apparently unaffected by direct evidence to the contrary of your interpretation of it. I don’t know whether or not you have any actual knowledge of John Taylor of Caroline’s political writings on slavery other than the quotation you’ve misused here, but I do know that so far you haven’t engaged with his full views in anything resembling a comprehensive or accurate way, even when the full content of those views has been directly pointed out to you.

Gil:

And I agree that it’s easy to imagine that we would have applied our modern sensibilities …

Abolitionism is not a “modern sensibility.” It already existed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Jefferson in particular was familiar with the abolitionist arguments; at times he even made some of them himself, while consistently refusing to act on the conclusions that he drew.

Far more difficult is to consider the status of slavery in its own time …

The “status of slavery” where and for whom?

For black people in Virginia, or for that matter for white slavers in Virginia, it was a pretty important issue.

William:

… and ask the question that all persons of moral character asked at the time: what can we do to get rid of this wretched institutional inheritance? If American history shows nothing else, it is that there was no easy answer to that question.

What do you mean by the question “What can we do?”

If it’s intended to be a moral question about what those who were in positions of legal power, or who perpetrated slavery as individuals should have done to get rid of it, the answer is easy: immediate, complete, and unconditional emancipation. This is something that Garrison, Spooner, and Gerrit Smith all believed in, advocated, and acted (in different ways) to bring about. It’s something that Jefferson and Taylor explicitly rejected in favor of continuing slavery, and gradual emancipation conditional on forced exile from America.

If it’s intended to be a strategic question about what abolitionists ought to have done in order to get around the efforts of obdurate or unrepentant slavers to prevent or halt emancipation, then that’s a more difficult question, but it’s a question that is only difficult because of the difficulties inserted by slavers like Jefferson and Taylor. It’s certainly not a “difficulty” that offers any reason to mitigate the judgment on Jefferson’s character, or his libertarian credentials.

William:

The same may be said with equal relevance to Jefferson’s concept of decentralized republicanism. And I’ll leave it at that.

I’m going to repeat this one last time, to make sure that we are clear. Nothing that I have said concerning Jefferson’s political views is a denunciation of “decentralized republicanism.” I’m an anarchist, so I don’t believe in any form of government, no matter how decentralized or how republican. But as it happens, I think that political decentralization is better than political centralization, and republican and democratic governments are better than monarchical governments.

The issue here is not that I’m using slavery in order to stop discussions of decentralized republicanism. This is either a careless or a deliberate distortion of what I’ve explicitly and repeatedly said. What I’m doing is denying that the political system actually advocated by Thomas Jefferson counts as a form of decentralized republicanism, any more than the Roman Catholic Church counts as a “democracy” on account of the cardinals voting for the Pope.

You may want to talk about decentralized republicanism more than you want to talk about Thomas Jefferson and slavery. That’s fine; it’s an interesting subject. But this post is, again, about Thomas Jefferson and slavery. You are the one changing the subject in order to try to redirect conversation to something other than the original topic. Not me.

As for your comments on John Taylor of Caroline, again, you are taking the passage out of its context and directly ignoring the many other things that Taylor said about slavery. I quoted several of these. Taylor was a colonizationist, not an abolitionist, and he explicitly stated that while slavery was an “evil” that continuing to enslave black people was preferable to freeing them without the condition of forced deportation to Africa. He specifically criticized Jefferson’s own writing on slavery because he felt that Jefferson was too negative about it, and that “well managed” slaves were better off than free blacks in America. I gave you several direct quotations in order to contextualize your own quotation and to explain the ways in which his views were a point of transition between the older anti-abolition views of Jefferson and the later positively pro-slavery views of Calhoun, Ruffin, Fitzhugh, et al. You have simply ignored these quotations rather than engaging with them and repeated the original quotation, apparently unaffected by direct evidence to the contrary of your interpretation of it. I don’t know whether or not you have any actual knowledge of John Taylor of Caroline’s political writings on slavery other than the quotation you’ve misused here, but I do know that so far you haven’t engaged with his full views in anything resembling a comprehensive or accurate way, even when the full content of those views has been directly pointed out to you.

Gil:

And I agree that it’s easy to imagine that we would have applied our modern sensibilities …

Abolitionism is not a “modern sensibility.” It already existed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Jefferson in particular was familiar with the abolitionist arguments; at times he even made some of them himself, while consistently refusing to act on the conclusions that he drew.

Zealotry in defense of liberty and against slavery is no vice, moderation no virtue…

You’ve mistaken zealotry for extremism, Micha. Extremism is a conclusion that may be reached by rational means and qualifies itself only by distance between that conclusion and the status quo. Zealotry, by contrast, is no more than stubborn irrational advocacy. It is not reached by rational mechanisms and it qualifies itself not by relation to an existing condition but rather by the intensity with it is voiced.

It’s “slavery, was evil, period“, full stop, no qualification with times-were-different-back-then bullshit.

Except that would be an untruthful removal of necessary context from the discussion or, as I termed it previously, a conversation stopper.

Since we have characterized slavery in terms of good and evil, it necessarily follows that this determination is a moral one. Therefore the logic of morality applies. And what does that logic tell us? It tells us that a moral wrong is determined by the act itself, but the culpability of the individual for that wrong is determined by the circumstances of its occurrence.

To put it another way, this is why the act of “killing” (a wrong in the strictest sense) renders a wide range of accompanying levels of guilt – that from a justified use of deadly force to preserve one’s own person to manslaughter to premeditated homicide.

To end at the period and exclude the “but” of slavery’s circumstance thus necessarily deprives you of the logical means of extending culpability from an abstract moral wrong to the particulars of the individual actor. So if you want to cut out any qualifications and state your platitudes, that’s fine by me and we’ll leave it at that. Just don’t pretend to apply it to those you condemn, to wit: Jefferson, as you have just deprived yourself of the means to rationally do so.

Zealotry in defense of liberty and against slavery is no vice, moderation no virtue…

You’ve mistaken zealotry for extremism, Micha. Extremism is a conclusion that may be reached by rational means and qualifies itself only by distance between that conclusion and the status quo. Zealotry, by contrast, is no more than stubborn irrational advocacy. It is not reached by rational mechanisms and it qualifies itself not by relation to an existing condition but rather by the intensity with it is voiced.

It’s “slavery, was evil, period“, full stop, no qualification with times-were-different-back-then bullshit.

Except that would be an untruthful removal of necessary context from the discussion or, as I termed it previously, a conversation stopper.

Since we have characterized slavery in terms of good and evil, it necessarily follows that this determination is a moral one. Therefore the logic of morality applies. And what does that logic tell us? It tells us that a moral wrong is determined by the act itself, but the culpability of the individual for that wrong is determined by the circumstances of its occurrence.

To put it another way, this is why the act of “killing” (a wrong in the strictest sense) renders a wide range of accompanying levels of guilt – that from a justified use of deadly force to preserve one’s own person to manslaughter to premeditated homicide.

To end at the period and exclude the “but” of slavery’s circumstance thus necessarily deprives you of the logical means of extending culpability from an abstract moral wrong to the particulars of the individual actor. So if you want to cut out any qualifications and state your platitudes, that’s fine by me and we’ll leave it at that. Just don’t pretend to apply it to those you condemn, to wit: Jefferson, as you have just deprived yourself of the means to rationally do so.

However, I can see William’s point that it isn’t helpful to react to its mention so strongly as to make further discussion impossible.

And I agree that it’s easy to imagine that we would have applied our modern sensibilities to major institutions if we had been alive hundreds of years ago, but I think that most people would be mistaken about that.

Sometimes “But” isn’t so much a qualification as a segue into a suggestion that there might be more to say. Usually there is.

I’d much rather hear bad theories than have people too intimidated to suggest anything taboo.

However, I can see William’s point that it isn’t helpful to react to its mention so strongly as to make further discussion impossible.

And I agree that it’s easy to imagine that we would have applied our modern sensibilities to major institutions if we had been alive hundreds of years ago, but I think that most people would be mistaken about that.

Sometimes “But” isn’t so much a qualification as a segue into a suggestion that there might be more to say. Usually there is.

I’d much rather hear bad theories than have people too intimidated to suggest anything taboo.

Yes, slavery existed, and yes, slavery was evil. But it’s always easy to sit here from your modern perch and condemn its long-dead practitioners in paragraph upon paragraph of haughty self-righteous Jacobin indignation.

See, it’s statements like these that are highly problematic. There should be no “but” following the first sentence. It’s “slavery, was evil, period“, full stop, no qualification with times-were-different-back-then bullshit.

Yes, slavery existed, and yes, slavery was evil. But it’s always easy to sit here from your modern perch and condemn its long-dead practitioners in paragraph upon paragraph of haughty self-righteous Jacobin indignation.

See, it’s statements like these that are highly problematic. There should be no “but” following the first sentence. It’s “slavery, was evil, period“, full stop, no qualification with times-were-different-back-then bullshit.

Owning slaves is _in and of itself_ an inherently anti-libertarian thing. Nobody with the tiniest shred of decency or humanity could possibly think otherwise.

All this long, long thread has demonstrated is that John V and William are exactly the sort of people Rad Geek was addressing in his original post.