Pardon me for tardiness; was storming the Bastille of the inner man ce matin.

A more than 1,500-year-old Armenian musical commemoration of the Exodus.

youtube.com/watch?v=SkOhBmptMeg

Juryless trials are being pushed again. But they are not a solution; they are a step toward centralised control that erodes democratic accountability. We must resist their introduction with the same vigour as we oppose digital IDs and central bank digital currencies, recognising them all as part of a broader effort to diminish individual freedoms and entrench state power

My new article on the perils of juryless trials

https://clarewillsharrison.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-abolishing-jury-trials?r=18q3db

spiv
/spĭv/
noun
- a smartly dressed person who trades in illicit, black-market or stolen goods
- a flashy con artist, often homeless, who lives by his wits
- in Scotland Yard usage, a low and common thief

“Everywhere schoolmarms gain the upper hand, we see the same symptoms—an obsession with vocabulary over ideas, a pervasive insistence that everybody be nice, constant catastrophising and a tendency to divide every concept and ultimately every person into opposing camps of good and evil. In their small-minded obsession with shallow propriety, schoolmarms impose a cultural rigidity and a profoundly formulaic and unreflective discourse that induces a kind of political arthritis. They make your nation stiff, senile and dumb.

Through early modernity, schoolmarmery was unknown to human government. The sensitive historical observer can find early manifestations in certain religious movements, but politically, the schoolmarms did not become a force until the emergence of mass politics in the nineteenth century. They have been with us ever since […]

In political systems dependent upon mass political participation, millions and millions of ordinary people have to be politically socialised, and the schoolmarms are recruit to handle their ideological education and enforcement. They take the nuanced, sophisticated thought hammered out by chain-smoking IQ 140 intellectuals and reduce it to canned pabulum suitable for schoolchildren. This process is why all establishment ideologies everywhere lie somewhere on a spectrum from childishly naive to prohibitively retarded.”

open.substack.com/pub/eugyppius/p/schoolmarmocracy