Answering Ekpunobi (Red Head vs Founding Fathers)

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Answering Ekpunobi (Red Head vs Founding Fathers) · New blog on the kid: All Borders Aren't Equal and Other Considerations

she, her = the redhead that Amala Ekpunobi is talking about (also "the redhead")
you = Amala Ekpunobi, I'm commenting under her video.
everyone else = named

The Founding Fathers Were Dumber Than A Modern 12-Year Old?
Amala Ekpunobi | recent?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XJXYjq89Xg

0:30 You are talking apples and oranges.

She was not saying "smarter" but "more access to information" ... two different things.

1:45 Correcting her, lobotomy was NOT a thing of the Founding Fathers era.

It only came with further progress in the 20th C. There is a reason why "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" is not a 19th or 18th C work of theatre.

3:45 Thank you very much for noting some things that some try to put down with police force are first amendment rights.

Nearly dito for shaming, though the shaming would also be a first amendment right.

4:15 We do not have IQ 100, because we have sunk from 160 to 100. He had (if so) 160 because he was an exceptional man (and that's why he was chosen to do his job or was able to take it on himself).

Medium IQ is defined as 100. It's an inherent feature of the system.

Btw, Plato, Shakespear, Greek, Latin, it's not a question of IQ, it's a question of cultural outlook.

For the record, it's also not a question of information as the redhead understands it, it's still a question of cultural outlook. Not of individuals, but of the whole society.

The redhead (I missed her name) belongs to another cultural outlook. Where knowing "we descend from Tiktaalik" or "Earth circles the Sun each year and itself each day" and "the universe is 13 + billion years old" is supposed to be not just true (I disagree on all points mentioned) but also more important as an outlook than Shakespear or Plato. Or Thomas Aquinas. I heartily disagree with her cultural outlook, but information as she understands it (the sum of verified factual statements about the world we live in, according to her standards of verification, those of Dawkins, basically) is more readily available now than in the day of the Founding Fathers.

She might have to ponder that the disagreements about what to do are not always disagreements about fact, but disagreements about which of the facts are more relevant to act on, and on what principles. I'm afraid that was not part and parcel of the informations she accessed as a twelve year old.

4:15 bis Auron McIntyre has a point about chronological snobbery, except in her case it's not just that. In her case, it's first and foremost a preference for Scientific Civilisation over Classic Civilisation, as C. P. Snow understood the words.

For the record, of the authors he enumerates, Cicero and to a lesser degree Locke were not CSL's favourites, though he relished what Locke had to say on society, and Plutarch is not really harder to read than Reader's Digest. He basically invented Reader's Digest.

4:52 They were professionally active in their teen years, fine, so was Justin Bieber and so was Brett Cooper. "Agonising" is overdoing the pity over professionally active teens.

5:28 Schools back then were not mooching on the idea that teens are immature and need to get LOTS of education before they can do anything.

Btw, Greta Thunberg was 17 going on 18 when, for one day, 6 Dec. 2020, she was editor in chief of Dagens Nyheter.

Weren't you chiming in with Jordan Peterson about teens not needing anything except EDUCATION that other day?

5:33 I started learning Latin as a teenager. Because lessons were not available in prepuberty childhood. To Jefferson they were, fortunately.

C. S. Lewis started learning Homer at age 16, he already had a founding in Ancient Greek before that.

Kirkpatrick: here is Iliad Alpha, read!

C. S. L: Menin aeide thea, Peleiadeos Achileos ...

5:47 St. Thomas Aquinas had a training in Trivium AND in Quadrivium.

The latter part being sth closer to the "information" (of scientific type) that the readhead was going on about.

Education was not just dumbed down from Founding Fathers to our day in the Trivium area, it was also dumbed down from Scholastics to Founding Fathers in the Quadrivium area. Meanwhile, Quadrivial things have actually got a boost since the Founding Fathers and were indispensable for the surveyor's licence as well.

6:26 The right to carry arms, second amendment, she had a point about what kind of arms it referred to.

Swords, yes. Pistols, but not revolvers. Rifles, but frontloaders, which had to be reloaded between each two single bullets shot.

By the way, ICE and the marines are lucky in LA that the leftists they are facing are no fans of the Second Amendment. If they were, perhaps the Boston Teaparty vibes would not just be cosplaying by now.

6:58 Burning at the stake was more of a hasard a century before the founding fathers. Lobotomy was not yet so.

Hope lobotomy remains a bad memory.

7:22 Their obsession was partly due to a Whig bias.

And it was partly selective. It was Tories, less concerned with Constitutional Freedoms, who were more concerned with individual freedom as against slavery.

George III = moderately anti-slavery (and that may have been part of the reason for Founding Fathers to oppose him). Yes, even in practise.
George Washington = theoretically anti-slavery, but really not just for now, directly ...

8:47 I'm also one who was at age ten not an eager letter writer.

However, he had learned more rhetoric than I and could elaborate more on the point.

9:21 Ah, they believed in homeschooling. Good.

9:43 At age 25 I could definitely not imagine myself writing letters for his advice on studies, I was doing mine.

My sentences are long, as his are, but part of the thing about the letter, which makes it seem advanced, is, word choices and phrases were different back then, what was a perfectly everyday word to John Quincy Adams (like "vexd" = "vexed") would be very "recherché" to most US readers today. In French "vexé" is still everyday, and this reminds me of one reason why English was NOT made the official language by the Founding Fathers, they are mixed with French culture, having just defeated France in the Seven Years War and therefore ruling some territories where French was not yet dead. Plus, more pertinently, they were Gentlement with French culture.