04 March 2007

Home Education

Record numbers of parents are choosing to teach their children at home amid mounting disillusion with state schools, the Government’s own research revealed yesterday. ...The study, commissioned by the Department for Education, suggests the numbers of home-schooled children have almost tripled since 1999 despite the boasts of ministers that state schools have improved. ...

By law, parents who shun the school system must ensure their child receives a ‘suitable’ education according to ‘age, aptitude and ability’. ... Local education authorities are legally required to check on home-educated children who have been taken out of school. Their inspectors can force youngsters back to school if they are not being properly taught.

However, the law also gives parents the right to refuse to ‘present’ their children for monitoring. As a result, they do not have to submit to any checks by the authorities throughout their child’s home schooling.

Most children who do go to school are starting at the age of four — a year earlier than the official beginning of formal education. ... The survey by the Times Educational Supplement prompted warning that increasing numbers of children are starting formal schooling before they are ready — in the rest of Europe it does not happen until the age of six or seven. (From ’150,000 children educated at home’ Daily Mail 24 February 2007.)

My comments

Difficult, if not impossible, to believe that a child can really be got off the hook just by its parents de-registering it with the source of all power and oppression.

What happens about the exam-taking? Can you really get your child accepted at some exam-taking centre without it falling back into the power of the ‘authority’? And practicals, as ever, are a stumbling block. Can you arrange for your child to do the work at a place that can suitably certify it for exam purposes without it becoming the business of the local ‘authority’?

Afterthought

A very good thing that parents educating children at home could do, if they had any sense, would be to come and live nearby and offer voluntary work to my beleaguered academic institution in administrative and other useful capacities. If we were receiving enough such help, it might enable us to provide learning materials for various subjects, including, possibly, classes on investment and other forms of business enterprise.

But the snag is that such parents, like everyone else in modern Britain, have learnt that no help should ever be given to individuals with high IQs, even if it might turn out advantageous to themselves to do so.

No benefits from the Oppressive State

I really do think I should point out that I have not been able to get any benefit at all out of the Welfare (Oppressive) State. The terms on which the medical ‘profession’ operates are too immoral for me to have anything to do with it. I can only proceed with trying to become as rich as possible so that I can go abroad to some country where the restrictions are less prohibitive if I ever have anything so seriously wrong with me that I need something that can only be obtained via the medical Mafia.

Nor have I ever been able to draw ‘Social Security’ even though deprived of any means of earning a living. Since I was thrown out unqualified for the only sort of career I could have, I never drew any benefit. I was not prepared to pretend that I was seeking work and go through the motions of applying for jobs, such as the schoolteaching that everyone wanted to force me into so as to enjoy my suffering and humiliation. I went to the SPR in the first instance, purely for money, because my parents, at the behest of society at large, were trying to force me to ‘earn a living’. I thought, in view of their oppressive attitude, that I would need to collect any pittance that I could get for my return to Oxford in the autumn. At the SPR, I found there was a potential field of research with which I might be able to regain access to an academic career.

But I have never been able to draw benefits, however hard up I was, because I was thrown out at 21 with no usable qualification for the only sort of career I could have and I could not earn money in any other way. I had no income after my brief and intolerable period of employment at the SPR, which was as intolerable as I had known it would be. I had to put an end to it as soon as I could, before the damage being done to me became even harder to reverse.

Although I had no income, the fact that my supervised ‘education’ had left me with no usable qualification at all meant that I could not draw anything from the ‘social security’. If you can do that, when you are unemployed, you get your National Insurance contributions paid for you, so that you still get a basic state pension at the end. I had to pay voluntary contributions myself out of any money that I could make or obtain for myself in any legal way, to reduce the disadvantage at which I would be when I reached retirement age in comparison with someone who had been able to have a salary.

01 March 2007

"The over-60s are not worth treating"

Recently the Daily Mail reported that 1 in every 2 GPs said that patients (victims) over the age of 60 were not worth diagnosing or treating. Well, of course, what they say has no necessary relationship to what they actually do. Telling the truth is not, even nominally, part of their remit. But in fact we can be pretty sure that what goes on, and has been going on for a long time, is worse than they admit openly.

Some years ago there was a similar article revealing that, in the case of women, 55 was the age at which doctors thought them past bothering with. Taking a short break at Boscombe in a seaside hotel, I was discussing this with someone at the breakfast table, sitting opposite a lady in her fifties. She twice protested at so painful a topic being discussed, so I stopped talking about it. But that clearly illustrates, both how demoralising the immoral power of the medical Mafia is, and why there is no sympathy with those who complain of it.

When this lady went to her doctor she liked, no doubt, to maintain an uneasy fiction that she could trust him, rely on him to exercise his powers in her best interests (as understood by herself) , and believe what he said. She would wish to do this in order to relieve her anxieties about any symptoms she might have, but it would take quite a lot of emotional energy to do so, in view of the available evidence. Taking up emotional energy in this way is essentially decentralising. Recognising that one is alone in a hostile world is, or may be, eventually liberating (although, no doubt, there are plenty of ways of doing it wrong).

This lady, like everyone else, believed in society. On higher level terms, and in view of the basic moral principle, one considers it highly immoral to force people into decentralised positions, and tries to avoid offering people the usual provocations to reactiveness. The psychological social contract is what happens when the individual gives up his own drives to self-fulfilment and becomes the willing slave of social oppression, in return for the possibility of oppressing others, or enjoying the spectacle of their being oppressed by the social forces with which he has thrown in his lot.

Once a society has instigated an oppressive regime, such as the modern Welfare (Oppressive) State, there is no real possibility of reversing it, as an increasing number of people wish to believe in the ‘benefits’ they are deriving from it, including in many cases the opportunity to oppress other people, rather than face up to the terrifying nature of the threats to which they are exposed.

It may also be pointed out that discrimination against persons over a certain age is discrimination against aristocratic genes and high IQs (as certainly as is a chronological-age related exam system) since high IQ is positively correlated with longevity. My parents, with aristocratic genes and high IQs, remained functional with little recourse to medication or hospital treatment until they had reached an age at which they were, in the eyes of the medical Mafia, past their sell-by date. People with worse genes and lower IQs cost the taxpayers (via the NHS) much more over their lifetime than my parents did, even if in a shorter lifetime.

27 February 2007

Compulsory screening

Terrifying legislation is constantly proposed and my philosophy department remains unfinanced and hamstrung. Appallingly, it is proposed that, since a high proportion of the population is assured (whether they work or not) of an income at other people’s expense sufficient to enable them to eat and drink themselves into a state of ill-health, which prevents them from making any contribution by way of taxation towards the upkeep of themselves or towards interference with the lives of others, there should therefore be compulsory screening of all for high cholesterol at 5-year intervals and, presumably, enforced ‘treatment’ (torture) by the iniquitous socially appointed ‘medical’ sadists.

Now it is bad enough that access to pharmaceuticals and information is blocked to the extent it is by the totally immoral terms on which the medical Mafia operates, in complete violation of the basic moral principle, but at least a conscientious objector such as myself is able to avoid being forced into an abusive relationship with any doctor by forgoing whatever could only be obtained with its permission. This is bad enough, and one regrets also that one continues to be taxed (have one’s freedom confiscated) so that others who are too unintelligent to object can be subjected to torture and abuse.

But to be forced into an abusive contact with the medical Mafia against one’s will is horrific beyond measure. I have already said that this is no longer a country where it is possible to live except under protest. The protests which should be being expressed by the philosophy department of my crushed and downtrodden independent university are ignored and suppressed, and that should not be so.

22 February 2007

Suppressed drive turns into aggression

As I said recently, children are brought up in such a way that compliance with social demands, and identification with the rewards to be derived from membership of social groups, are seen as good, and any individual drive is bad, since it is likely to lead to social disapproval and punishment.

So the individual represses his individualistic drives and cravings, but this leads to anger and resentment, which is also regarded as bad, and he has to try to pretend he does not have such feelings. But he can sublimate or redirect them into a socially approvable form, by joining with society in its disapproval of those who express their drives in ways considered morally wrong.

E.g. people with high IQs who emerge from their state-funded education as demoralised criminals, and with no way of using their drives to succeed in life, are not angry at the oppressive education which has got them into this position, although they quarrelled with their teachers and committed acts of vandalism on school buildings. Instead they are angry at bank managers and property owners and their minds run on ways of asserting themselves by doing something really painful and damaging to such people, such as putting lighted papers through the letterboxes of those who annoy them in any way, in the hope of burning down their house.

Or they may become agents of the collective, such as teachers, doctors or social workers, and interfere in the lives of other people against their will.

Boys are more likely to suffer from repressed anger and resentment than are girls, who usually cotton on sooner to the possibility of using social position as an aid to oppressing other people, and reconcile themselves from an early age to seeing the restriction of the liberty of other people as the only form of self-assertion to be aimed at.

A form of genocide

Communist/socialist revolutions are always aimed at reducing the presence in the population of ‘upper class’ or high IQ genes. The genocide that is going on in this country now is relatively concealed and results from the inception of the Welfare State, better called the Oppressive State, which at the time was hailed by many as ‘the bloodless revolution’. So considering more open forms of genocide enables one to see more clearly what is really going on here and now.

A high IQ or aristocratic ancestry is correlated with both cultural and intellectual interests and with financial and managerial success; populations that achieved too much freedom of action for themselves were persecuted on both counts. Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China killed landlords and intellectuals. In Cambodia, similarly, the communists killed the ‘middle class’. The French Revolution sent aristocrats to the guillotine. The Nazis (National Socialists) killed Jews, who were commercially successful, had strong family solidarity and, statistically, above-average IQs. That means that although the IQ bell curve for German Jews and German non-Jews overlapped to a large extent in the middle regions, the population of people with remarkably high IQs, say over 160, was likely to contain a considerably higher proportion of Jews than of non-Jews. This corresponded to the social observation that the Jewish representation was conspicuous among such people as successful bankers, leading intellectuals, and scientific inventors.

The Holocaust must have had a significant effect on the IQ bell curve for Germany, shifting it downwards. A similar effect is being produced more gradually in this country by covert long-term policies. It is made more difficult for those at the upper end of the IQ range to achieve tolerable living conditions, so they reproduce more slowly. The ‘highly educated’, as they are euphemistically called, have smaller than average families. At the same time, the dysfunctional are given every inducement to reproduce freely, and every generation increases the population of handicapped people, requiring to be supported and subjected to medical treatment throughout their lives at the expense of functional taxpayers.

How many generations will it take, or has it already taken, for this to produce a downward shift in the IQ bell curve as perceptible as that created by the mass murder of millions of Jews in Nazi Germany? Do not overlook the power of geometric compounding.

20 February 2007

"Curing" the homeless

Herbert Spencer was a prestigious Victorian philosopher, now out of fashion. According to the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ‘Spencer enjoyed immense popularity in his own time, especially in America. ... Sinking in esteem by the century’s end to hitherto unimagined depths, Spencer is today remembered primarily as the enthusiast for extreme laissez-faire or Social Dawinism...’ (from article about Herbert Spencer by Michael Ruse).

Herbert Spencer was opposed to state interventionism and also to female suffrage, on the grounds that women would be too likely to support paternalistic (or interventionist) policies.

Personally, I regard the basic moral principle as being that one should refrain from imposing one’s own evaluations and interpretations on other people, but leave them as free as possible to make their own best guess in view of the existential uncertainty. The modern, and totally different, principle, appears to be that the individual should be willing to sacrifice his own interests in order to contribute to the greatest good of the greatest number of people. I find this horrifying.

An article by John Bird in the Mail on Sunday of 18 February, under the headline ‘Lock up the homeless’, is headed, in large letters, ‘No one knows more about the homeless than the founder of The Big Issue. In a tough and provocative article, he argues that the present policy is useless and the only "cure" for most is compulsory treatment in mental hospitals’.

In the article, the author declares: ‘The way the Government ... "treats" this problem is just plain wrong. The system isn’t curing anything. ... the illness that caused the crisis in the first place is still there, untouched and untreated. What nobody wants to acknowledge is that 90 per cent of people in and around homelessness have drink and drug problems. ... It is addictive behaviour and the only way to tackle it and stand any chance of "curing" the homeless is to treat it as the mental problem it is. Addiction doesn’t fall under the remit of the 1983 Mental Health Act. [An oppressive and intrinsically immoral Act, by the way.] But it should.’

John Bird refers to the cases of two individuals.

Jim was somebody I knew well. He died last year from alcohol abuse, having been slowly rotted by the system that, nominally at least, kept him out of homelessness for 25 years. He teetered on the edge of society, there to be a pain to the hard-working people he lived among. ... The taxpayers paid for Jim to drink himself to death because nobody would accept that his addiction was a state of mental illness.

Bill is in a similar situation. He is a walking disaster. Mentally unstable, a nuisance to himself and others. He has been housed for five years but still lives the life of a homeless person. He simply no longer sleeps rough. His flat is full of last week’s takeaway wrappings. Sometimes he remembers to charge up his electric key. Most times he is in the dark. He lived in a hostel for a while and had to behave. But he was never 'cured'. And so, when he was rehoused, his existence was always going to be that of a sustained victim. He never eats properly or sleeps through the night, is jobless and unemployable. But, as far as some homeless agencies are concerned, he’s been ‘successfully rehoused’. It just shows how much the system masks the problem — to the tune of an estimated £60,000 a year in Bill’s case.

He who pays the piper calls the tune, but the piper is paid with freedom confiscated from taxpayers, thus reducing their ability to build up enough capital to do what they would find most rewarding, which might include having children and educating them. If it costs £60,000 a year to keep a homeless person physically alive, that is about as much as it costs to send six boys to Eton. So the freedom of the taxpaying population is being reduced by that amount for every homeless person it ‘successfully rehouses’.

If the Government had not wished to keep Jim, and others like him, alive at the taxpayers’ expense, these homeless people would have drunk themselves to death more quickly, and the population of drifting homeless would not have become so offensive to the non-homeless population as to justify incarcerating them in the power of the iniquitous medical Mafia, which will not hesitate to deprive them of their mental, as well as physical, liberty by the enforced administration of mind-altering drugs.

‘Colonialism’, the imposition of your own standards on a subject population, is in other contexts disapproved of. You could say that John Bird’s article is expressing 'lifestyle colonialism'. If your subjects do not bring themselves into conformity with your ideas of an approvable lifestyle — however much at variance with their own culture it may be — you consider yourself justified in bringing them into line, by whatever sanctions you see fit.

19 February 2007

Pussyfooting about compulsory education

Exceedingly pussyfooting criticism of compulsory education, from an article by Professor Dennis O’Keefe, published by the Libertarian Alliance:
As elementary education got going in the late nineteenth century, before and after compulsion, and up to the Second World War, the curve of British crime fell. With the huge growth of secondary, tertiary and further education since then, it has all rocketed back to square one. One flinches from drawing mechanistic associations, but the contingent growth of anti-social activity side by side with the parallel expansion of mass schooling raise questions too obvious to be ducked. (from ‘Compulsory Education: An Oxymoron of Modernity’)
Why should one ‘flinch from drawing mechanistic associations’? It is clear enough that compulsory education, in this day and age, is aimed at producing demoralised criminals. Nor is it the case that only secondary and tertiary education produce them. As the concepts of compulsory and state education have developed, so also has the ideology that is applied at all levels.

When, recently, I and my associates were resident in East London, we found that waiting for a train at a railway station exposed one to being the target of rocks thrown by children of primary school age, something that was unheard of when I lived in East London soon after the inception of the Welfare (or Oppressive) State. Although even then the ideology was far enough advanced to be severely damaging to the education of a person of exceptional drive and ability.

If I gave a seminar in Oxford on this topic, nobody would come, because I have no academic position or social status. This results from the damage inflicted on my life by the post-war educational and academic systems.

Middle class students

Middle-class students [euphemism for: those with above-average IQs] emerged as the hardest-hit by rising tuition fees as universities warned of further increases. Official figures showed demand for college places hitting record levels despite the introduction of £3,000 a year ‘top up’ fees last September. But the increase was lowest among youngsters from better-off families — the students who miss out on grants and most of the bursaries designed to cancel out the fee increase for the poorest students.

Leading universities are already pressing for the limit on fees to be raised still further within two years — it is due for a review in 2009. They say tuition fees would have to double or even triple to cover the cost of degree courses. (Daily Mail 15 February 2007)
My comments

It is a long-standing policy of modern society to favour the poorest students (poorest in both senses, since high IQ and autonomous drive are correlated with having successful or ‘middle-class’ parents). This follows from the fact that the primary objective of modern society is to destroy exceptional individuals, who would be likely to be the most successful were they not discriminated against.

This is really a form of genocide, more concealed than that of the Nazi holocaust, since its objective is to reduce the presence in the population of representatives of ‘superior’ gene pools.

But making entry to ‘higher education’ difficult for those with above-average IQs could be a blessing in disguise for those who can overcome their social conditioning sufficiently to realise this. Going to university no longer has any point, and I would not recommend it to anyone without consideration of the special factors that may be present in their case.

This place (Oxford Forum) is a Noah’s Ark, and those who perceive the hopelessness of a normal career, taxed from cradle to grave, followed by living on a pension that is ‘withering on the vine’ as well as being means-tested, should think about coming to join my incipient independent university cum business consortium.

15 February 2007

The quality of life of British children


"Devastating UNICEF report blames family breakdown for giving British children the worst quality of life in the affluent West."

(Front page headline from Daily Mail 14 February 2007.)

My comments

I blame the Welfare State, and the interventionist socialist ideology behind it, for giving British children (and many adults, including me) a terrible quality of life. And what is ‘affluent’ supposed to mean, when the vast majority of the population is sending their children to state schools, and exposing their children and themselves to the tender mercies of the NHS?