WE FORGIVE HIM MS MALKIN:

Vale Denis Dutton (Hal G.P. Colebatch on 12.30.10, American Spectator)

"It's a grave mistake in publishing, whether you're talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests," Denis said in a 2000 interview. "A few years ago, Bill Gates was boasting that we'll soon have sensors which will turn on the music that we like or show on the walls the paintings we like when we walk into a room. How boring! The hell with our preexisting likes; let's expand ourselves intellectually."

Certainly not everything re-published or made available at ALD was of the highest standard, but a great deal of it was. Denis told me he tried to avoid giving ALD a narrow image, but conservatives in particular have reason to be grateful for the forum he created – it opened magazines like TAS, Quadrant, City Journal and the Weekly Standard to the world, along with the sites of such as Michelle Malkin, Thomas Sowell, Keith Windshuttle and Mark Steyn. The list goes on…

I know of no one who has done more for the international distribution of conservative ideas. For a professor of philosophy his contribution to the world would have been eminently practical even if her had done nothing else. And he did it from a provincial university at the bottom of the world.