Amarna Forum

A year, 9 months and 17 days ago a substack was launched of considerable Merit. This thread is to talk about the works published on it. As there was not one before, and the shoutbox I find not fit for purpose for discussing the pieces written by the authors of J'accuse. First a brief overview J'accuse is the creation of one Mikka(Who has gone under many pseudonyms but is known chiefly by that title), avid English death note fan and anti communitarian eugenicist  along with his partner in crime Hooghly and a few pseudo anonymous other figures from fringe British twitter circles that discuss creating rewild tropic jungles on those isles and the need to smash the civil service as patriots. This post acting as a anniversary celebration is a good intro to their style of biting satire and deep writing on current British society wider western civilization and various online trifles.
https://www.jaccusepaper.co.uk/p/jaccuse-at-one

J'Accuse Wrote:This is a story about a newspaper which was not like other newspapers.

In the past, newspapers were printed on sheets of paper; they were sold by small children and old men who rode bicycles and read by people on the way to work.

*shot of Harold Macmillan getting out of a car*

Then, a strange and dark figure came up with an idea.

To sell newspapers you could read on a computer.

*shot of Canary Wharf at night*

In 2021, Substack was invented.

*cuttings from a 1960s Open University Science Programme*

They started with An Idea.

*shot of stock exchange numbers going up and down*

What if all the energy that had previously gone into the productive and enlightening world of Blogs.

*shot of scientists working on the Manhatten project*

Was actually about Power.

Tim Chapman, who I believe is a third man who is not Mikka or Hooghly has made this a fine art. 
https://www.jaccusepaper.co.uk/p/how-to-...um=reader2

Tim Chapman Wrote:Some of life’s setbacks are small wounds. Like bruises, and cuts, they will heal with the passage of time. A missed train, a broken plate or dead grandparent. It may be acute for a moment.

But the skin knits itself together again, and the pain is lost in the grey, shapeless ocean of our pleasantly finite memory.

But other wounds are deeper. Limbs are lost, or are amputated. Skin is burned. Eyes are gouged.

And for all the pain we feel in the moment, the very worst of it comes with the realisation that this scar shall never fade. The crushing prospect of misery; existing, not living, with this disfigurement.

The stain of failure is now on you, concerned parent, as it is on me. And you cannot wash it away. No matter how hard you scrub. Not for all of the perfumes of Arabia.

It starts with a light thud at the door.

As soon as you see the letter, you feel a black pit opening in your stomach.

Why is it so small?

Not even the clever men at Cambridge could fit a proper ‘welcome pack’ in such a tiny slip.

You tear it open with shaking hands, tearful eyes.

‘I regret to tell you…we must inform you that your application has been unsuccessful’

You check the name again. Then a second time. It’s there in plain print.

Xavier Chapman.

Your legs give way. You cover your eyes with your sleeve. You cannot bring yourself to look at the wretched waste of life in front of you.

Some  brilliant literature, this one in particular might be my favorite piece of his. Really under discussed. But J'accuse is more known for the think piece side such as this recent one on IQ (Chapman stories, are the free sample's it seems), many things to discuss here and in their archives which I'll leave to you as I've spoken enough. 
https://www.jaccusepaper.co.uk/p/beware

Mikka Wrote:Richard Hannania and Existential Comics and those like them are not 'IQ fetishists' or 'nerd supremacists'; they barely even pretend to be this. Richard Hannania's silliness was documented here last week; anyone who fanatically duped themselves over COVID clearly has other normative concerns beyond IQ. Steve Sailer and Charles Murray are both proponents of American civic libertarianism; their point is that assortive mating at the top is producing an unequal society and that blacks are betrayed by white liberals who ignore their genetic propensity to crime and low likelihood of reward from social programs. Posts about how, y'know, IQ isn't VIRTUE are very common in the Rationalist and post-Rationalist sphere: the actual message of Yudkowsky's 'Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality' being that Voldemort is an Ayn Rand inspired IQ supremacist while Harry bends the knee to utilitarianism. In Unqualified Reservations, Moldbug also explicitly distances himself from Eugenics and Ayn Rand "nerd supremacism" in the section about V.R prisons. This rejection of pure IQ-maxing is usually justified through a belief that "the libs" are High IQ, so obviously, IQ isn't everything but as even defenders of the idea elites are smart (they aren't) point out; the elites are not necessarily *more* smart than "dissidents", they do not have a monopoly of all the smart people in society and include a great many very stupid people among their ranks.

The main use of IQ for Rationalists is to provide a broad justification for inequalities produced by the free market, which Rationalists believe is the best way to maximise global utility. Hence, Existential Comics ties 'weird little nerds' to inventing things which raise the standard of living and not the mere fact they are weird little nerds. The polemic goal of IQ-bashing is to distance oneself from the banal vision of life proposed by these people but I suggest, from examining their beliefs, it is a poor way of doing so when there already exists a Nietzschean critique of their core value: utilitarianism. Attacking IQ only lets them pretend they are the only people who talk about IQ and to pose as 'dangerous thinkers'.

All hail lord Mikka! Soon the sun will never set on the Meritocracy, but first, before that can happen, we must manifest this glorious reality through our collective action. What collection action am I alluding towards? What small thing done now could send vibrations through the heavenly threads of providence? A simply thing really, but its effect can not be denied. The world is made of money— money is power— and thus by diverting some of your money into Mikka’s wallet will his power grow. What are grand ideals and an abnormally high IQ without the power to assert one’s will upon the world. Without the death note would Light Yagami have become Kira?—no, sadly not. Seeing how the death note isn’t real— or any magic for that matter— Mikka will just have to make do with the power of capital in his ambition towards changing reality. So then that just leaves one last thing to say: subscribe to the J’accuse NOW! 

I enjoyed the deep Chapman family lore.



Declassified: On the “workability” of creating explosive devices using Uranium-235

Quote:By 1931, aged 35, he had risen to the position of Permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies within the Committee of Imperial Defence, where he pushed for the immediate independence of Iraq on the grounds of ‘Value For Money’. His Treasury experience found expression in other aspects of interwar foreign policy, with Rudolf cautioning against the procurement of ‘experimental and untested’ technologies such as Radar and Aircraft Carriers, in favour of ‘tried and true’ machines of war such as the Hawker Hart light bomber.

Quote:2.1 In 1932, scientists at the University of Cambridge (my Alma Mater) discovered that lithium ions could be split with protons. Since then, there has been some speculation by fringe theorists that these innovation could have some military application.
2.2 One of the most prominent advocates for Nuclear Fission is an Italian man named Enrico Fermi. It is worth remembering, of course, that Italy has recently engaged in an illegal war in Abbysinia. The Italian army has used mustard gas on civilians and fired upon red cross ambulances during this campaign.
2.3 Intelligence reports which suggest that Germany is researching the military application of Nuclear Fission also indicate that the concept may be fascistic in origin. We must consider the possible diplomatic repercussions of being seen by in the international community to engage in ‘alternative science’.

Beware is now paywalled. Even so, I offer a very light and friendly critique that I hope can spur discussion. I read the article a single time the day it was posted, so I can't give it another look or go back and reference specifics. However, I see the growing obsession with the term "IQ" -- much like that of "eugenics" and "degeneration" -- as having done less in advancing a real, tangible Meritocracy than it has in diluting an actual conversation about what a Meritocracy itself is and how it can be achieved. 

"High IQ" no longer means being a uniquely intelligent person. Sure, it's just that typical sort of semantic drift that's all too common in the Online Age. But is that all it is? 

"You can't have an honest discussion of elites or IQ because everyone wants to believe they're a genius" said the user capgras in the shoutbox. So true. 

Conceptually, you wouldn't expect "High IQ" to become something that was susceptible to this kind of fate. Eugenics, degeneration, maybe those are different. But "High IQ" ... that's something you either are or are not. You should be able to tell pretty quickly whether you are or are not. Right? Unfortunately, if you have to think about it all that much, odds are... 

There's a section, if I'm remembering correctly, about how the great powers during the Age of Exploration would have definitely administered IQ tests, if they had them. But they didn't have them, so [most of the time] they would just have to resort to the proven capabilities of a seafarer as a sort of IQ supplement. Thankfully, we do have them. There's just that one small problem in that we're not really allowed to use them for anything that would be meaningful and Meritocratic.



IQ tests are not, in any way, related to job performance... go figure. 

To give just one example of what I think a more proper representation of Meritocracy is, without the oriental obsessiveness, see some of the selected Marshals of Napoleon's Empire:

Jean Lannes, Duke of Montebello, Prince of Siewierz (son of a farmer)
François Lefebvre, Duke of Danzig (orphan)
André Masséna, Duke of Rivoli, Prince of Essling (son of a tanner)
Édouard Mortier, Duke of Treviso (son of a farmer/merchant)
Joachim Murat, Grand Duke of Berg, King of Naples (son of an innkeeper)
Michel Ney, Duke of Elchingen, Prince of the Moskva (son of a craftsman)
Nicolas Oudinot, Count of France, Duke of Reggio (son of a farmer/brewer)

None of them had any idea what a quotient intellectuel was. Their honours came as rewards for their personal displays of skill that proved useful. In fact, if you know a little bit about some of them, you quickly come to realise that some may not have been all that 'smart' at all. But something was needed, and they knew how to do it better than everyone else. 

There's two main points here. The first is that the rules of the game are so perverted and skewed out of certain peoples' favour that you could be as "High IQ" as your heart desires and it still ends up meaning far less than it should, for now. Have you seen the video of the White kid who was first in his class with a "5.1 GPA" reading his rejection letters from each of the Ivy Leagues? I don't know if that was real or not, but the important thing is that it doesn't even have to be real at this point because (1) school is no longer real, and (2) even some of you reading this probably are that White kid in a lot of ways. The second point is that aside from the obsession with "High IQ" lessening what it really means to be a 'smart' person, it really amounts to nil if all you're ever going to be in life is some faggot in an office that has to make kind chat with your female coworkers because your state has a gun to your head waiting for the second you step out of line. Having said all that, maybe I just don't understand it yet (I am certainly not "High IQ"), but I yield to anyone else who would like to share their thoughts of the subject.

IQ is simply a good approximation of potential, but without a proper personality test, can give you autists (of the bad kind) and teacher's pets types - this is because there is "Normal High IQ" and "Anomalous High IQ" - the difference being that the former is consistent and heritable, and the latter happens due to one-off mutation and, for all intents and purposes, luck. It's also the sort of genius associated with one-trick pony savants. Generally you want to filter those out when selecting for top-level management and governance positions, but they excel at being faceless bureaucrats.

Currently, if you are reasonably intelligent, you are screwed by default, though if you are this latter type, you might have more success as you will be more pliable, and gay nigger communists need reasonably competent jannies.

Btw, I think "Tim Chapman" is just Mikka's satirical alt, a "character" he plays.

Erik Hoel is an up and down kind of guy for me but I check in occasionally. I thought that this was a solid position on the IQ thing, and I agree with him more broadly that cultivation OF THE ALREADY INTELLIGENT is what education is for and what makes the difference. 

https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/...no-ones-is

Here's your link to that. I've linked his other pieces on education and the "genius drought" before in other threads.

The entire first world is still smart enough to probably get extraordinarily good results if heavy investment were made in the top 20% or so of promising minds over a broad classical education which serves as a pathway into higher education and qualifications for good work and status.

That's not a model I came up with now, I'm talking about British Grammar Schooling. The system their Socialists destroyed in the 60s. British grammar school graduates (18 years old) used to be recognised as being equal to or better than American college graduates in knowledge and practical value to employers. This wasn't accomplished with eugenics. It was accomplished through what every sane society should be doing as a matter of course.

Back to the subject of the thread. I've read most of Peter Htichens book on Grammar Schooling, 'A Revolution Betrayed'. And it's quite good. The history of British Schooling is quite chaotic and disordered, so it would be hard to piece together without this. I think this book is very valuable. Mikka has also shared his thoughts on it, but he paywalled it.

https://www.jaccusepaper.co.uk/p/peter-h...n-betrayed

I wonder what's going on here...

So this J'accuse shit is, what?  The international pod jew wrestling with reality, complaining and spinning, spinning and complaining?  It's not me!!!! 

The amount of effort put towards insular fairytales while humanity looks on asking, "What the fuck is wrong with these people?" is something I'll never get.  But I am a good sport.  As Wittgensteinbergblattstein said, as long as you understand what the jew says is for himself, then there is no problem.


Not feeling the IQ piece, tbh.  For starters it's way too jewy. 

And then there's this: "It is not white to reject or accept an idea according to where it came from."

Totally ignoring bergblattstein above. Pure folly.


It is a far more stereotypically 'Chinese' or 'oriental' mindset to believe that we are bound to imitate what our ancestors did as the highest form of the good.


Another Strauss kike struggling with the ineluctable desire to don the white skin suit. Sidenote- Any white guys that wander onto the board: understand that "imitating what our ancestors did as (the highest form of the good)" is an issue that strikes at the heart of kike being. More so because they are NOT doing that. Because their ancestors, when spoken of honestly, are shit. The modern kike is psychologically tied in knots. The strauss kike is appealling to gentile philosophy - white mans philosophy - to wrestle with the issue; we put "the highest form of the good" in parentheses because it's not their syntax. But their neediness on the question deforms philosophy. And they don't even pursue the question honestly - they kike it up in the end, simply search for a new way to re-arrive at their ethnic particularism from which they're theoretically departing, and that which originally places "the highest good" beyond their reach or even conception. So what does this mean for a proper white man? First, don't listen to jew horseshit. Secondly, what should be a lesson to them (which they ignore) is not a lesson to you (though they kick and scream and insist it is). Imitating the forms of YOUR ancestors is close to the highest good, especially in absense of certainty or times of otherwise limited information. This is true for you, white man. And by extension, the world. It is not true for them. Hence, their obsession on the point. Extirpating your ethnic forms is another route to resolving kike resentment - he no longer feels ashamed aping your ineluctable beauty if you or that beauty no longer exists. And this path might be less mentally taxing for him, rather than seeing his shtetl being against the light of "the highest good". Do you understand?


It is literally white to be like, "oh, that's jewish?"
No thanks.

Oh that's negroid? Hm. It is jazzy.
Maybe if you enter and leave through the service entrance, ok. And not after 8pm. And not on sundays.
And if you don't like those terms, we'll get a white boy to do it.  Matter of fact, let's get on that.

And so it's white.

I literally can't hear anything else you're saying, subhumans.


Another few general points, for the benefit of any properly white men that wander onto the board-

What's this obsession with elitism?? That's often asked. Understand the shtetl bug is sublimating his own ridiculous but customary ethnic discourse through alternative expressions, wherever he can find it.  Now comes European right wing thought.

We got guys looking in from the outside, saying what is with the "amarna" extremism? how is that supposed to work actually? It must be intentional poison pill, subversion of what we're trying to do.

Innocent and logical questions at the top, but over-complicated conclusion. Shtetl bugs aren't trying to solve the same problem. Or any problem. The pseudo elitism or claims to elitism are situation normal. There is no mandate to bring the whole together.

That's putting the overriding sentiment in proper context. Moving onto the content- The IQ thing is muddy.

The piece handles IQ from the perspective that it permits access to ..... whatever's out there. Something out there.
You see the assumed realism?

To say it another way, what if there is nothing out there sufficiently stable to "know"? Of what value is "IQ"?

We're just saying this to understand there is an assumed and unexamined realism within the posters perspective.

This gets muddy when he tries to dump on the Rationalists - an affectation of "against utilitarianism" isn't the definitive rebuttal. Rationalism is not possible if there is nothing stable. 
But the poster is already committed to the realism Rationalism must begin with in his handling of IQ.

He gets stuck in the same mud when he tries to dump on burke.

Burke's assertion of "universal natural laws" is the consequence of conceptualizing the world along realist terms, centuries in the making.

It's a small point to say ah, but he put it to use for pajeets.
Simplistic appeal that obscures the more substantial point.

The j'accuse crew should be intimately aware of the peculiarity in the development of white man's thought because it stands in stark contrast to kike thought that persisted well into modernity.

White man is the premiere realist on the globe through all of history. But we don't see this because it's simply normative to us.

If you want to waste time someday reading into kike thought, the shit they insist on writing over and over again, you should note how frequently you run into myth or made up shit, that sits easily into the surrounding text and author's handling.  Seems out of place in a work that assumes some authority. But this is our peculiar perspective, a consequence of our peculiar way of conceptualizing the world in realist terms.

IQ is real. But its value in discerning the "truth of the external world" is only a modern thing. And modernity is what, 500 years?

But IQ has always been around. What it is is the capacity to derive order for man from out of a reality of flux. The necessity of what man has always done.

It was there, possessed and exploited, before we became so relentlessly realist.

https://www.jaccusepaper.co.uk/p/the-loc...medium=web
Fresh off the presses, best thing I've read on the matter focusing on the twists and turns within the UK of course as usual. Some choice quotes from the opening:

J'accuse Wrote:We are watching the construction of a historical narrative 100x more important than The Windrush. Everyone knows that lockdowns were a mistake. The average person still dimly remembers being imprisoned by government diktat to stop a virus; they all got jabbed but the virus didn't go away and everyone decided to pretend it never happened. They also, very vaguely, feel that this was all very wrong because ever since lockdown the world has seemed to get worse and worse.

The economy is and remains a mystery to the average person so unless you understand its central tenet, the government can create money ex nihilo that you pay for over the span of decades, you will never truly understand why Cofvid was bad. Only the vague and incoherent feeling of rage exists. As a result, the media are trying to project those feelings onto something simple which the public can understand. The emotion is: the ruling class have screwed us over. The story is: Blimmin Bonkin Boris was eating cake. The emotion is: lockdown was fucking stupid. The story is: well, the NHS didn't have masks for women! If you can associate the emotion with a set of images and words which appear to resemble their real cause but are in fact different, people will eventually confuse correlation for causation and accept the new memory.

J'accuse Wrote:So many people were radicalised during lockdown. In 2020, every normal person was suddenly forced to live the life of a NEET, the sort of life I had already been living intermittently for a few years then; and in the Land of the Blind the one-eyed man is king. I massively enjoyed lockdown and my powers have only grown stronger as society becomes more fucked up. What changed? You have no idea how much *spiritual* damage it has done for people to see that, if it wants to, the government can simply dispense with the laws of economics. In 2019, despite the shocks of the previous decade, it was still possible to argue, persuasively, that the World is as it is because of powerful impersonal structures which had arisen inevitably and rationally; 2019 was still a world coeval to The Financial Times, to 'Spengler' and Gideon Rachman; and also, therefore, to Nick Land, Ted Kaczynski and Logo_Daedalus. As a heterosexual male who had been redpilled by Paradox Interactive, you were still offered a highly persuasive defence of the status quo in these terms. I never held this worldview but I'd say most of my friends did. In 2020, these people watched in horror as every iron law of necessity, every Copybook heading and all wisdom of the wise was broken, torn up and transgressed purely to advance the interests of old people. It was as if an entire generation suddenly saw the skull beneath the skin. This was what society was really about. These were the real 'material conditions' behind the superstructure. Not "Capital", not "the Markets" not "the CIA": life sustained for the sake of mere life. Nobody is going to put the genie back in the bottle for those who were young during the first lockdown. It is now clear there is no limit to what politics can achieve, only your interests vs. everyone else's.

Quote:Nobody has the courage to openly adopt the Pension Tax. Instead, what seems to be happening is a sneaky, underhand attempt to loosen the rules around which Pension Funds can invest. The logic is, having been bailed out by the government, the pension funds can now help the productive economy using the money of old people. I don't buy it. I want acknowledgement Lockdown was stupid, I don't want a secret revenge and this will do nothing to actually pay off the Youth Tax. Pensioners are being made victims of spivs and speculators to avoid the simply way of remunerating the youth for lockdown.

The popularity of such a measure is probably about the same in the usa. But lots of people know that Rachel Levine (now biden's tranny health czar) took his own parents out of Pennsylvania nursing homes before he forced them to accept covid patients, boosting the death rate. Lots of people saw with their own eyes that New York hospitals were completely empty, despite being officially at capacity. Is this stuff just too out there to be outrageous? Too cloaked in bureaucracy? I don't know what to make of the motives behind all this. My best guess is that it is convenient to kill some boomers and use the resulting inheritance wealth to keep the economy from completely failing. Some people have speculated that covid19 economic issues were cover to delay realization of deeper economic issues.

Quote:Cofvid is, justifiably called the worst policy failure in History. WW1 does not come close, the British Empire gained Mesopotamia and brought down its Russian rival. Literally nothing has been gained from Cofvid; nothing was built, nothing was gained and no lives were saved. On the other column in the balance sheet, underneath a big red (-) sign, the future happiness of millions has been irrevocably diminished. There is much I could perhaps say about how all the children born to people I know between 2020-21 have speech issues, how public space has become impossible to police as all restrictions are seen as illegitimate, how nobody trusts the police anymore, how a small number of children have simply vanished from the census and 3 years later nobody knows where they are, how alcoholism is now basically socially accepted, how everyone who graduated 2020-21 is behind in their careers - but I think the one thing which would scare Neill O'Brien more than any of these ills is how many people are starting to agree with my political views.

This is very melodramatic: alcoholism, crime, education, employment have all been worsening for longer than a few years with more directly obvious causes. Not sure how the author arrived at these conclusions if the plandemic barely affected him personally. Certainly a lot of money was lost and I regardless agree with the main point of the article.

It really was quite surprising in retrospect that normies were convinced that they all needed to come together to provide ineffective marginal support to the elderly, when the rest of society had been divided and at war with one another while being failed in fundamental and profound ways. A lot of this can probably be ascribed to the rhetorical power of a scary killer virus (fake) as a common external threat. The masses have a huge appetite for new political causes.

(11-07-2023, 06:25 PM)Mason Hall-McCullough Wrote: [ -> ]This is very melodramatic: alcoholism, crime, education, employment have all been worsening for longer than a few years with more directly obvious causes. 

Are you really claiming that these societal-ills weren’t radically exacerbated by COVID, which is hands down the most all-encompassing, impactful, global-social phenomena in recent history? It’s simply a statistical fact that these metrics jumped during COVID. Correlation isn’t  guaranteed  to be causation, but the prevailing fact that public mental health took a nose-dive due to the propaganda and restrictions of the state/state-media, and that lower mental health is a direct cause to the rise of these societal-ills, would point to the substantial theory that COVID(and everything encompassing it) played a directed cause in this rise. To argue against this would mean you’d  have to disprove COVID’s effect on the population on the social/mental health level, which you didn’t do. All you did instead of offering an argument to this salient point was whine.

(11-07-2023, 07:06 PM)Nigel Carlsbad Wrote: [ -> ]Are you really claiming that these societal-ills weren’t radically exacerbated by COVID, which is hands down the most all-encompassing, impactful, global-social phenomena in recent history? It’s simply a statistical fact that these metrics jumped during COVID. Correlation isn’t  guaranteed  to be causation, but the prevailing fact that public mental health took a nose-dive due to the propaganda and restrictions of the state/state-media, and that lower mental health is a direct cause to the rise of these societal-ills, would point to the substantial theory that COVID(and everything encompassing it) played a directed cause in this rise. To argue against this would mean you’d  have to disprove COVID’s effect on the population on the social/mental health level, which you didn’t do. All you did instead of offering an argument to this salient point was whine.

"Mental health" in general and especially of a population is a dumb concept that has no need to be medicalized, but note that suicide rates decreased during fakerona. The impression I got was that a lot of normies found playing along with the doomsday LARP to be exciting and fun. You could sense an eagerness in the way they talked about death tolls and their stockpile of masks. Crime increased, the economy took a hit, people bought alcohol, that's all true, but the claim that the event did lasting damage to generations of people is almost as hysterical as libs were about the virus itself. The government already wastes vast amounts of tax money on useless or outright harmful shit as a matter of course.

The economic effects were not so significant because the entire world was held back at the same time, and China may have been worst affected due to the extreme measures they resorted to. The real problems facing the West, the problems that are actually ruining the lives of generations, are the same ideological, political, demographic issues that were crippling society before COVID, and continue to do so afterwards.

(11-07-2023, 08:11 PM)Mason Hall-McCullough Wrote: [ -> ]"Mental health" in general and especially of a population is a dumb concept that has no need to be medicalized, but note that suicide rates decreased during fakerona. 

What about public moral or any of the other number of names for this concept that at its heart is concern with the spirits of a population? Just because the therapy religion has become the new bugbear doesn’t mean you need to discard fundamental concepts that might seem associated with it.

(11-07-2023, 08:11 PM)Manson Hall-McCullough Wrote: [ -> ]Crime increased, the economy took a hit, people bought alcohol, that's all true, but the claim that the event did lasting damage to generations of people is almost as hysterical as libs were about the virus itself. 

Thank you for admitting that much. Good that you recognize a lot of that mental illness or lowering of public moral originated from hysteria, that was, for the record, instigated by propaganda. I don’t think I claimed lasting damage, as in I need to substantiate that current mental illness is being caused by the aftereffects of the COVID debacle. My claim was related to whatever spirit damping effects(or, if you’re going to be pedantic, mental illness causing effects) COVID caused through its many manifestations that in turn caused the spike of certain societal-ills during that time interval. I think what you’re doing is called moving the goal post.

New short piece. Nodding towards potential paths as usual.
https://www.jaccusepaper.co.uk/p/forcing...in-to-work

J'accuse Wrote:Artificial intelligence fantasists love to posit that models like ‘ChatGPT’, which has now given up on giving sources and references for historical and scientific statements because it is incapable of writing out names of Authors correctly; will lead to sunlit uplands of leisured mass unemployment because AI will do the jobs that ordinary people are already doing. The transformative technology that thinking people should put their faith in to instead is Gene editing, specifically Germline engineering (changing what is inherited).

It is quite possible that advances in this field will eventually solve the problem of which troubles Western Welfare States. It is currently being kneecapped by totally arbitrary Global conventions on ‘ethics’ that are much more binding than those proposed by ‘AI safety’ grifters and Effective Altruists. With Crispr Cas-9 we can probably engineer out most of the inherited disabilities which afflict humanity. Millions of unborn children will suffer unnecessarily because of legacy Christian ethical norms enforced by global treatise.

It is still, mind bogglingly, illegal for men of science to edit the genes of babies to improve their condition. Currently the best hope for humanity is wrapped up the supposition that the Chinese Government is secretly allowing He Jiankui to continue his groundbreaking work under the cover of his new laboratory in Beijing. Anybody with the agency to recognise the inegalitarian principle, who cares for those left behind by genetic endowments, should put their shoulders to the wheel of liberalisation and progress for Gene editing technologies.

Disabilities, both real and imagined, can be resolved through scientifically informed charity. The properly Liberal approach involves dealing with these problems at the root, not punishing the poor for their circumstances – which in truth, are mostly inherited. Like the millions of Horses who pulled artillery for His Majesties Armed Forces during the World Wars, low IQ people had their utility in an age of low skilled mass manufacturing, coal mining and farming. These Beasts of Burden. But now that these tasks can be performed by machines, the onus is on us to rescue these people from the condescension of reality.

May I direct your attention to Britain's latest cultural magazine, the Pimlico Journal?

https://pimlicojournal.substack.com/

'Right-wing thought from the London scene' - and every article free.

I will leave the origins and τέλος of this organ unstated, given that Amarna is open to prying eyes; but I'm sure you can deduce them on your own.

anthony Wrote:Back to the subject of the thread. I've read most of Peter Htichens book on Grammar Schooling, 'A Revolution Betrayed'. And it's quite good. The history of British Schooling is quite chaotic and disordered, so it would be hard to piece together without this. I think this book is very valuable. Mikka has also shared his thoughts on it, but he paywalled it.

A writer for Pimlico Journal has also put an article on Hitchens' book, intelligently criticising his egalitarian ideology and leftish framing of the issue; you can find it here.

(11-25-2023, 12:57 PM)Matthew Jim Elliott Groyper Wrote: [ -> ]

anthony Wrote:Back to the subject of the thread. I've read most of Peter Htichens book on Grammar Schooling, 'A Revolution Betrayed'. And it's quite good. The history of British Schooling is quite chaotic and disordered, so it would be hard to piece together without this. I think this book is very valuable. Mikka has also shared his thoughts on it, but he paywalled it.

A writer for Pimlico Journal has also put an article on Hitchens' book, intelligently criticising his egalitarian ideology and leftish framing of the issue; you can find it here.

The statistics on the grades and sources of grammar school students could be right either way for all I know, I didn't pay too much mind to that in either case. More interested in the broad case for the value of superior education (for superior people). Whether or not grammar schooling was actually capable of turning the genelocked goblins of the working class into high IQ professionals or was actually almost exclusively just giving a better deal to the children of what were already professional stock strikes me as an interesting intellectual diversion, but not really an issue of importance. Since anybody with integrity would want the same education program set up regardless of what actually turns out to be the case.

Hitchens' framing is rather leftist. That grammar schools were a great opportunity for the downtrodden of the Earth. But as is said in the article, he's leftist as a fabian, not a nigger communist. He wants to rationally make everything nice for everyone as far as is possible. A truly meritocratic schooling system would be an opportunity for the poor and otherwise disadvantaged, just many might be disappointed at how rare exceptional promise from below actually is. But again, I don't believe this matters. We practically want just about the exact same things as Hitchens as far as education goes. Academic segregation, transmission of high culture and national values. 

I'm glad that the author of these piece had the restraint to not fall into a myopic sperghole over HBD stuff. Let's say we acknowledge the case that the british working class average 8 IQ points lower or whatever the hell. What do we do different from there? It just never strikes me as relevant to anything. But really that's a whole other thread.

Thank you for sharing this. I've liked everything I've read from Pimlico Journal so far.

anthony Wrote:We practically want just about the exact same things as Hitchens as far as education goes. Academic segregation, transmission of high culture and national values.

It would be interesting to consider the right balance between formal education, real work and free time for people of differing class and intelligence. I think we agree that the traditional British grammar school or public school is the closest thing (so far) to ideal formal education, the public school (upper-class) placing more emphasis on leadership and the grammar school (middle-class) placing more on scholarship. But until the later nineteenth century schools of that sort catered for a tiny minority; second sons of the rural gentry and the nascent bourgeoisie were still educated at home or in a local day school before going out into the world in their teens. Everyone here is familiar with thirteen-year-old midshipmen and so on. Which would be better for a moderately intelligent (say 120IQ) child - Maths and Greek in a boarding grammar until 18, or a commission in the Nuclear Energy Office at 15? And which for a Meritocratic superman?

Unlike most people in this sphere I enjoyed my time in school. Looking back, however, it's clear that I failed (or school failed me) in several ways. Mikka once wrote that disorders like autism and dyspraxia are the consequence of missed developmental milestones; I think that education can be judged on how well it gets people past those milestones. It did not do so for me.

Tao Lin described how he fell behind in middle school:

Quote:At birth, I probably received antibiotic eye drops, as most kids born in U.S. hospitals do. At home, I was weaned on soy milk formula. I cried in the late afternoons and at night. In restaurants, my mom would carry me outside so that my crying didn’t disturb others. My parents—Taiwanese immigrants—and older brother were my only relatives in the country. When I was three, I had diarrhea for a week and was given antibiotics.

In elementary school, I was social and had friends, but was shy and often unwell, with stomach aches, headaches, nosebleeds, nausea, rhinitis (runny nose), ear infections, and more diarrhea. When not sick, I was hyperactive, running around, climbing things. According to my mom, I was good at entertaining myself. I was placed in the ESL (English as a Second Language) program, but after a while the teacher said my English was acceptable, and later, after an IQ test, I entered the “gifted” program.

In middle school, I addictively played an online text-based multiplayer role-playing game that was a faceless form of social interaction. For around eight hours a day for two years, I stared at a screen, clicking, typing, chatting, watching numbers go up as my character gained experience and better equipment. At school, when asked, “What’s up?” I felt thwarted and a bit confused. “Nothing,” I’d mumble. I had to learn to process “What’s up?” non-literally, as “Hi” and/or “What are you [doing/up to]?”

I liked collecting things (Magic cards, sports cards, pogs, coins), and I was taciturn both in person and in writing. At the end of 8th grade, the 46 students in my class wrote about our “favorites,” “memorable people,” “memorable events,” and other memories in a yearbook. My classmates wrote an average of around 100 words. My response, 28 words, was the briefest, with no memorable people or events.

My health issues compounded my introversion. Nosebleeds, swollen lymph nodes, and mouth sores limited my desire and ability to speak, move my mouth, or use facial expressions. I had eight teeth pulled so that my remaining 24 could fit in my underdeveloped jaw. I experienced my face as a locus of self-conscious discomfort, instead of as a tool for self-expression; in the computer game, socializing with small finger movements, I lacked this obstacle, and exacerbated it.

By high school, I’d become much more autistic. I rarely spoke, sometimes committing to just not speaking all day. When I did say something, people often couldn’t hear or understand me. I spoke without moving my mouth, one classmate noticed. I grew distant from my friends. My right lung spontaneously collapsed three times. My face looked gloomy and tense. I had low self-esteem. I closely and inconspicuously observed my peers, wanting to identify kids who were more awkward and withdrawn and socially anxious than I was. I identified fewer than 1 in 100 people. I felt doomed.

A list of those milestones might include things like physical development, socialisation, sexual relations and overcoming one's parents. The first two are obvious and relatively simple. The third and fourth are areas where traditional (British) methods clearly work and modern methods clearly do not. I get the impression that the end of boarding might have contributed to this.

And then there's also the question of free time - how does it compare to formal education and real work when it comes to building men? I don't have much of it so won't develop this point, but I would like to hear your thoughts.

As for universities, I think that their true purpose (scholarship for self-improvement - there's an excellent C. S. Lewis essay on this, which I will paste with your permission) makes perfect sense but is probably not affordable for a modern society under intense competitive pressure. Certainly at present they tend to act as either state-sponsored party hubs or places for people to be taught what they should have learned in a selective school.

(11-28-2023, 09:30 AM)Matthew Jim Elliott Groyper Wrote: [ -> ]It would be interesting to consider the right balance between formal education, real work and free time for people of differing class and intelligence. I think we agree that the traditional British grammar school or public school is the closest thing (so far) to ideal formal education, the public school (upper-class) placing more emphasis on leadership and the grammar school (middle-class) placing more on scholarship. But until the later nineteenth century schools of that sort catered for a tiny minority; second sons of the rural gentry and the nascent bourgeoisie were still educated at home or in a local day school before going out into the world in their teens. Everyone here is familiar with thirteen-year-old midshipmen and so on. Which would be better for a moderately intelligent (say 120IQ) child - Maths and Greek in a boarding grammar until 18, or a commission in the Nuclear Energy Office at 15? And which for a Meritocratic superman?

Any kind of serious treatment would be an improvement I believe. We're at the point where virtually everyone has given up on any kind of real positive results which are to be expected of education.

[quote pid="11690" dateline="1701181809"]
Unlike most people in this sphere I enjoyed my time in school. Looking back, however, it's clear that I failed (or school failed me) in several ways. Mikka once wrote that disorders like autism and dyspraxia are the consequence of missed developmental milestones; I think that education can be judged on how well it gets people past those milestones. It did not do so for me.
[/quote]


Well my development got all screwed up and I didn't enjoy myself.

[quote pid="11690" dateline="1701181809"]
A list of those milestones might include things like physical development, socialisation, sexual relations and overcoming one's parents. The first two are obvious and relatively simple. The third and fourth are areas where traditional (British) methods clearly work and modern methods clearly do not. I get the impression that the end of boarding might have contributed to this.

And then there's also the question of free time - how does it compare to formal education and real work when it comes to building men? I don't have much of it so won't develop this point, but I would like to hear your thoughts.
[/quote]

As I wrote on Amarna1, I think all of this kind of starts to fall into place one way or another once society actually sets some real goals and starts acting like it wants to achieve them. We aren't hitting milestones in human development because we can afford not to because we don't need or want anything collectively. We did have better schools that did the job, but those schools were doing a specific job. I think it was Hitchens who said that by the end they were training boys to run an empire that was gone. The future doesn't need to be an empire, but there should be something. As for free time, I might answer later. Sorry, it's very late and I wanted to give this thread an answer tonight.

Quote:As for universities, I think that their true purpose (scholarship for self-improvement - there's an excellent C. S. Lewis essay on this, which I will paste with your permission) makes perfect sense but is probably not affordable for a modern society under intense competitive pressure. Certainly at present they tend to act as either state-sponsored party hubs or places for people to be taught what they should have learned in a selective school.

Please do share if you'd like to.

This is the most relevant part:

Quote:Schoolmasters in our time are fighting hard in defence of education against vocational training; universities, on the other hand, are fighting against education on behalf of learning.

Let me explain. The purpose of education has been described by Milton as that of fitting a man ‘to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all t’e offices both private and public, of peace and war’. Provided we do not overstress ‘skilfully’ Aristotle would substantially agree with this, but would add the conception that it should also be a preparation for leisure, which according to him is the end of all human activity. ‘We wage war in order to have peace; we work in order to have leisure.’ Neither of them would dispute that the purpose of education is to produce the good man and the good citizen, though it must be remembered that we are not here using the word ‘good’ in any narrowly ethical sense. The ‘good man’ here means the man of good taste and good feeling, the interesting and interested man, and almost the happy man. With such an end in view education in most civilized communities has taken much the same path; it has taught civil behaviour by direct and indirect discipline, has awakened the logical faculty by mathematics or dialectic, and has endeavoured to produce right sentiments—which are to the passions what right habits are to the body—by steeping the pupil in the literature both sacred and profane on which the culture of the community is based. Vocational training, on the other hand, prepares the pupil not for leisure, but for work; it aims at making not a good man but a good banker, a good electrician, a good scavenger, or a good surgeon. You see at once that education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves. That is how they were distributed in the old unequal societies; the poor man’s son was apprenticed to a trade, the rich man’s son went to Eton and Oxford and then made the grand tour. When societies become, in effort if not in achievement, egalitarian, we are presented with a difficulty. To give every one education and to give no one vocational training is impossible, for electricians and surgeons we must have and they must be trained. Our ideal must be to find time for both education and training: our danger is that equality may mean training for all and education for none—that every one will learn commercial French instead of Latin, book-keeping instead of geometry, and ‘knowledge of the world we live in’ instead of great literature. It is against this danger that schoolmasters have to fight, for if education is beaten by training, civilization dies. That is a thing very likely to happen. One of the most dangerous errors instilled into us by nineteenth-century progressive optimism is the idea that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of our planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination of the planet and civilization in our history books, only because sea and savagery are, to us, less interesting. And if you press to know what I mean by civilization, I reply ‘Humanity’, by which I do not mean kindness so much as the realization of the human idea. Human life means to me the life of beings for whom the leisured activities of thought, art, literature, conversation are the end,[sup][1][/sup] and the preservation and propagation of life merely the means. That is why education seems to me so important: it actualizes that potentiality for leisure, if you like for amateurishness, which is man’s prerogative. You have noticed, I hope, that man is the only amateur animal; all the others are professionals. They have no leisure and do not desire it. When the cow has finished eating she chews the cud; when she has finished chewing she sleeps; when she has finished sleeping she eats again. She is a machine for turning grass into calves and milk—in other words, for producing more cows. The lion cannot stop hunting, nor the beaver building dams, nor the bee making honey. When God made the beasts dumb He saved the world from infinite boredom, for if they could speak they would all of them, all day, talk nothing but shop.

That is my idea of education. You see at once that it implies an immense superiority on the part of the teacher. He is trying to make the pupil a good man, in the sense I have described. The assumption is that the master is already human, the pupil a mere candidate for humanity—an unregenerate little bundle of appetites which is to be kneaded and moulded into human shape by one who knows better. In education the master is the agent, the pupil, the patient.

Now learning, considered in itself, has, on my view, no connexion at all with education. It is an activity for men—that is for beings who have already been humanized by this kneading and moulding process. Among these men—these biologically simian animals who have been made into men—there are some who desire to know. Or rather, all desire to know, but some desire it more fervently than the majority and are ready to make greater sacrifices for it. The things they want to know may be quite different. One may want to know what happened a million years ago, another, what happens a million light-years away, a third, what is happening in his own table on the microscopic level. What is common to them all is the thirst for knowledge. Now it might have happened that such people were left in civil societies to gratify their taste as best they could without assistance or interference from their fellows. It has not happened. Such societies have usually held a belief—and it is a belief of a quite transcendental nature—that knowledge is the natural food of the human mind: that those who specially pursue it are being specially human; and that their activity is good in itself besides being always honourable and sometimes useful to the whole society. Hence we come to have such associations as universities—institutions for the support and encouragement of men devoted to learning.

You have doubtless been told—but it can hardly be repeated too often—that our colleges at Oxford were founded not in order to teach the young but in order to support masters of arts. In their original institution they are homes not for teaching but for the pursuit of knowledge; and their original nature is witnessed by the brute fact that hardly any college in Oxford is financially dependent on the undergraduates’ fees, and that most colleges are content if they do not lose over the undergraduate. A school without pupils would cease to be school; a college without undergraduates would be as much a college as ever, would perhaps be more a college.
It follows that the university student is essentially a different person from the school pupil. He is not a candidate for humanity, he is, in theory, already human. He is not a patient; nor is his tutor an operator who is doing something to him. The student is, or ought to be, a young man who is already beginning to follow learning for its own sake, and who attaches himself to an older student, not precisely to be taught, but to pick up what he can. From the very beginning the two ought to be fellow students. And that means they ought not to be thinking about each other but about the subject. The schoolmaster must think about the pupil: everything he says is said to improve the boy’s character or open his mind—the schoolmaster is there to make the pupil a ‘good’ man. And the pupil must think about the master. Obedience is one of the virtues he has come to him to learn; his motive for reading one book and neglecting another must constantly be that he was told to. But the elder student has no such duties ex officio to the younger. His business is to pursue knowledge. If his pursuit happens to be helpful to the junior partner, he is welcome to be present; if not, he is welcome to stay at home. No doubt the elder, of his charity, may go a little out of his course to help the younger; but he is then acting as a man, not as a student.
Such is the ideal. In fact, of course, Oxford has become in modern times very largely a place of teaching. I spend most of the term teaching and my tutorial stipend is a part of my income no less important than my fellowship. Most of you, perhaps, have come here with the idea of completing your education rather than with the idea of entering a society devoted to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. What do these changes mean? They mean, I think, that a temporary immersion in the life of learning has been found to have an educational value. Learning is not education; but it can be used educationally by those who do not propose to pursue learning all their lives. There is nothing odd in the existence of such a by-product. Games are essentially for pleasure, but they happen to produce health. They are not likely, however, to produce health if they are played for the sake of it. Play to win and you will find yourself taking violent exercise; play because it is good for you and you will not. In the same way, though you may have come here only to be educated, you will never receive that precise educational gift which a university has to give you unless you can at least pretend, so long as you are with us, that you are concerned not with education but with knowledge for its own sake. And we, on our part, can do very little for you if we aim directly at your education. We assume that you are already human, already good men; that you have the specifically human virtues and above all the great virtue of curiosity. We are not going to try to improve you; we have fulfilled our whole function if we help you to see some given tract of reality...