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Ruairi's avatar

Stanley Bowles apparently used to clsim.he had 3 A-Levrls because he knew it annoyed Cough

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Anthony's avatar

PPS: English is an excellent degree to do

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James's avatar

Great stuff Ed, but some really depressing things in there.

Re. the Government and industry thing, one thing very striking about UK discourse is the almost total absence of discussion or recognition of the UK's massive and seminal historical role as the home of the Industrial Revolution, and the explosion of innovations and transformations which underpinned it and flowed from it. Its bizarrely treated as some kind of footnote between discussions of royalty and wars and colonialism, by both sides of politics. Nearly everything in our daily lives is downstream of the Industrial Revolution, and many of us would be dead without it and the technologies which came after (I know my kids would not have survived childbirth otherwise).

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Ed West's avatar

my daughter's school had one of those celebration of cultures day the other day where everyone was encouraged to wear something that represented their ancestral homeland. I only thought afterwards that she have gone in representing the Industrial Revolution.

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Aidan Barrett's avatar

"I’ve said, many times, that America in the mid-20th century was the peak of western civilisation, and some of its early skyscrapers reflect that. Personally, I’d love to see some more gothic high rises in London (here, as imagined by Grok)."

The "High" to use Strauss-Howe Generational Theory.

Did you know that in 1946, many leading economists actually believed the US was on the verge of a return to Depression and a collapse of the birthrate?:

"Looking forward to the future, people did then what they still do today: They assumed it would resemble the recent past. Their most recent frames of reference—the hardbitten thirties and the cynical twenties—were not remembered favorably. Fortune feared a resumption of “ rude pushing ways” and “ill temper.” Republishing an old 1932 photo of police routing World War I veterans petitioning for their benefits, the editors warned that “a slice of blueberry pie” would not satisfy “ the veteran’s gripe.” Many economists saw a new depression ahead. Harvard economist Sumner Slichter warned of “the greatest and swiftest disappearance of markets in all history.” The Research Institute of America’s Leo Cherne predicted “insecurity, instability, and maladjustment” for “middle-class families… susceptible to the infections of a postwar disillusionment.” A month after VJ Day, Life magazine forecast a sharp further decline in the U.S. birthrate. Fearing depopulation and economic collapse, the federal government planned a massive campaign, involving some two hundred organizations, to provide work relief on the scale of the original New Deal."

Page 416 of The Fourth Turning is Here by Neil Howe.

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Ed West's avatar

Wow, economists getting thing wrong.

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Anthony's avatar

Economics is in the same category as alchemy and soothsaying

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Aidan Barrett's avatar

This wrong prediction was all the more amazing as this was the time when the US was on top of the world and produced 50% of the words goods. Outside of North America and the Antipodes, practically all industrial rivals in Europe and Asia had been decimated in the war. Read Keith Lowe's "Savage Continent" for a good description of Europe in this period.

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Aidan Barrett's avatar

Eric Hoffer, the "Longshoreman Philosopher" quite symbolized this "Golden Age" for the working man. Yet as far back as the early 1960s, he was starting to express an shift to cynicism that thanks to "automation" and accompanying socio-economic shifts, the days of the "common man" like himself were over.

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John's avatar

Ironically, when judges imprison people in cases such as Wootons they are apt to refer to the thing being expressed as having “no place in a civilised society".

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Sjk's avatar
Sep 30Edited

If you ever want proof of the great man theory of history - or in the case of this sorry King the important man theory anyway - then your first name's popularity and continued existence is almost entirely the result of Henry III's devotion to the cult of Edward the Confessor and therefrom his eccentric decision to give his son a strange archaic Anglo-Saxon name.

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Ed West's avatar

true. And if his son's heir Alfonso had survived https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonso,_Earl_of_Chester we might have had a long list of Alfonsos.

I'm going to do a post on all the kings England might have had were it not for deaths: Alfonso, Ralph, Arthur, Frederick and Louis (although Louis sort of was king for a while)

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Sjk's avatar

I suspect the name would have been Anglicised as Alphonse had he become king. The use of an 'o' at the end of the name is a little too Latinate for English tastes, I think. Indeed many of the sources after his death did that already when referring to him.

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Matthew's avatar

I’m part way through Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning but I’ve bought a copy of your book on my Kindle and look forward to giving it a read. I think we both share a fascination with the roots and origins of the English, its inflection points, and the surprising ways it continues to shape us without us fully understanding it.

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Ruairi's avatar

Yes- Ed. My daughter is wandering about Peru with an Irish moniker and no one has ever misspelled it. In fact they have ended up Hispanicizing it

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Okulpe's avatar

What the FP calls "face blindness" is also known as aphantasia ("no imagery"). I am a cognitive psychologist and I have it myself. People with it, as one researcher has said, "know about their past but they don't remember it." The phenomenon was discovered by Francis Galton in the 1880s. He was studying high-level thinking and one question he wondered about was the role of mental imagery. He collected memories from friends via letters (e.g., describe your breakfast table this morning), and found huge variations from no imagery to imagery virtually indistinguishable from perception. His findings languished when psychology became dominated by behaviorism. About 2.8 % of people have aphantasia, and about 3.2% have hyperphantasia. One early investigator has a substack: https://futuremindlabs.substack.com

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Ed West's avatar

Fascinating

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Paul Cassidy's avatar

“Please buy it, so that the book can temporarily feature as an Amazon bestseller in a history sub-category for a few hours - it’s hugely important for my ego.”

Well, since you ask so nicely! And Mr Amazon also suggested the Saxons v Vikings book which would have been rude to refuse.

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Ed West's avatar

Why thank you!

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Anthony's avatar

I've read the original hardback. Can I just have the extra bits :-)

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Ed West's avatar

it's basically the same

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Aidan Barrett's avatar

I think about Rome in Late Antiquity in particular a lot.

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Ed West's avatar

me too!

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Aidan Barrett's avatar

It's such an overlooked period, all the more fascinating for its role as a transition period between Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages. One wonders throughout what contemporaries were thinking. Here is one channel I would especially recommend: https://m.youtube.com/@Maiorianus_Sebastian/videos

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JonF311's avatar

In the US at least we more closely resemble the late Republic (as great wealth corrupted its politics and gross inequality began to fuel social discord) than the late Empire.

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JonF311's avatar

It's not clear to me how we can determine the intelligence of humans in the distant past (I mean members of homo sapiens, not earlier hominids). That's a complex trait requiring considerable observation and testing to determine. Unlike, say, skin or hair color, it's not something arising from a single (or some very few) genes we can find by DNA analysis.

It may be a good theory that in the past intelligence was lower if due to nothing else than to widespread malnutrition and disease in childhood. (Also a factor in the shorter stature of people in the past)

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Ed West's avatar

the thesis is that urbanisation both leads to selection for intelligence, because being a boffin is way more of an advantage in civilisation than it is a hunter-gatherer society, and also that urbanisation speeds up evolution, because there are just way more mutations being produced each generation and those that have major advantages (for example, lactose tolerance) will spread through the population in quite a short space of time.

AFAIK there are at least 500 or so mutations associated with higher intelligence/education. presumably many more.

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JonF311's avatar

This is a valid thesis, but not one that is easily testable. And if there is such selection it's likely to be sexually based, not survival based: intelligence leads to social and economic success which makes men (and occasionally women too) more attractive as mates.

The point about more mutations simply because there are more people and in close remove to each other is probably correct, though that can also favor negative mutations and those may not always be filtered out if they do not impact survivability early in life (a propensity to cancer and heart disease later in life wouldn't be). Also, some hunter-gatherer cultures in very fecund areas did achieve considerable population density: the Jomon era population of Japan, or Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest.

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