Robert Graves and Archaeolmythology

[Ewan]

I feel sorry for the guy tbh, I'd tentatively suggest there is more askew than just ego unfettered. Much like a lack of empathy can be categorised in several ways depending on degree, there seems to be a distinct lack of social awareness to the point that perhaps it never formed in the first place.

I can be like a bull in a china shop sometimes in my directness, it was kind of refreshing to see a whole herd of bison obliterate the premises. :D

[ulli]

Posted by Ewan (here)
I feel sorry for the guy tbh, I'd tentatively suggest there is more askew than just ego unfettered. Much like a lack of empathy can be categorised in several ways depending on degree, there seems to be a distinct lack of social awareness to the point that perhaps it never formed in the first place.

I can be like a bull in a china shop sometimes in my directness, it was kind of refreshing to see a whole herd of bison obliterate the premises. :D

I feel sorry for him too.
And I know people who have Sagittarius sun, ( I'm doing it my way, my sloppy way, and if you don't let me I'll be out of here)
Aries Moon (if you don't let me be number one there will be a temper tantrum),
Capricorn Mercury, (long cynical and negative strings of thought, where "logic" insists that all other type of thought is irrational)
Capricorn Venus (nobody loves me)
Aquarius Mars (tactless, arrogant genius)
And so without knowing his birth time or birthplace, and whether that data would modify or enhance the planetary influences above, I can still see that he has painted himself into a corner of a castle dungeon.

He mentioned Gurdjieff in one of his posts, and since Gurdjieff would regularly toast the "idiots" he was surrounded by, as a challenge to their egos, and to test reactions, I had a hunch that he saw himself obliged to play a similar role.
Needless to say, his error was in the fact that this gathering here was not assembled in order to pay him nor his field of study homage.
Also, the fact that he is researching the outer periphery of human history, without doing any inner work to accompany this, he is missing out on the power and relevance which can be found in the here and now.

[AriG]

edit to add (in response to JChombre's post - coffee.. need coffee)

I do not disagree with the spirit of your post. I agree. Two (or more) parties in constant affirmation render one party redundant. No question. But there is a universally accepted way to disagree between gentle people. Blatant insults debase the spirit of debate (corny I know). That being said, Bill has made it abundantly clear that there are certain protocols to be followed on this forum. He was much more patient with Baird than he has been with others who have said and done far less. Based upon Bill's comments above, I am guessing that he believed that Baird had more to bring to table than the typical detractor. We could debate the fairness in that approach as well, but should not. This inconsistency seems to be a one off and Bill has much more information about the situation that we.

I am a little surprised and somewhat disappointed in my primal reaction to this scenario. Normally, I don't involve myself in petty squabbles. But in this case, I can only liken it to observing someone physically attacking another person. You wouldn't just turn a blind eye and allow that to happen, would you? Attacking another's spirit is perhaps even more harmful than attacking their body.

I also wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that Baird is incarcerated in a mental health facility somewhere. I feel sorry for him.

Just realized that every paragraph in this post begins with "I". Me should change that, but will not. It stands as evidence that ego is a contagion. LOL. Off to bathe in the cleansing waters of humility now. Thank you to Bill and the Mods for doing the difficult work.

[ulli]

Posted by AriG (here)
Just realized that every paragraph in this post begins with "I". Me should change that, but will not.

Nothing wrong with I. It means that you are sharing your point of view.
What can be more honest than that?

Imagine starting every sentence with "you", which could mean either confrontation or stroking.

Or "he/she", which could be interpreted as criticism, identification, or gossip.
(I know I'm guilty right there, looking again at my post above.)

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)

His very interesting threads will of course stay open. Over the next few days, I'll try to mend all the broken links in his articles... I think I can do that. It's worth it.

I think (but wouldn't yet bet my life on it! ) that all the links in Robert's posts now work. About to double check... if anyone finds a link that's broken, please PM me and I'd be confident I can find the proper full link and fix it.

[Shannon]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)

His very interesting threads will of course stay open. Over the next few days, I'll try to mend all the broken links in his articles... I think I can do that. It's worth it.

I think (but wouldn't yet bet my life on it! ) that all the links in Robert's posts now work. About to double check... if anyone finds a link that's broken, please PM me and I'd be confident I can find the proper full link and fix it.

Since Mr. Personality is no longer here to say thank you, ( I doubt he would have the manners to do so anyway), I will say it for him, and for me ( us )....

Thank you, Bill .... You have the patience of a saint....A real one, not some druggie imposter.

*giggle
;P

[Citizen No2]

You know what,

I just have this feeling that we've failed somehow, that in some way we've played into his hands....

I've just read the whole thread and pretty much to a man & woman, we've behaved exactly as Robert states groups such as this do. I did not find him offensive as such, as Bill said, it was kinda enjoyable and I looked forward to what he would contribute next, but then again I wasn't on the end of some of the more barbed of Robert's comments.

I'll tell you what I did laugh out loud about.............. Some members' calling him rude, and then being equally as rude back. I don't mind rude people who have the intelligence and knowledge to back it up, even if I'm the one being insulted, I always have done. It's people who are rude for the sake of being rude that I find offensive..... but that's just me and I'm not judging anyone here.

Regardless, for those that can leave ego to one side for a little time, some of the information he imparted is very interesting.


He certainly made an impression here.



Regards.

[Sierra]

Posted by Citizen No2 (here)
You know what,

I just have this feeling that we've failed somehow, that in some way we've played into his hands....

I've just read the whole thread and pretty much to a man & woman, we've behaved exactly as Robert states groups such as this do. I did not find him offensive as such, as Bill said, it was kinda enjoyable and I looked forward to what he would contribute next, but then again I wasn't on the end of some of the more barbed of Robert's comments.

I'll tell you what I did laugh out loud about.............. Some members' calling him rude, and then being equally as rude back. I don't mind rude people who have the intelligence and knowledge to back it up, even if I'm the one being insulted, I always have done. It's people who are rude for the sake of being rude that I find offensive..... but that's just me and I'm not judging anyone here.

I read some of the other forums that banned Baird, and we were actually pretty honest, direct, and helpful in our comments in comparison. For awhile anyway, lol.

If Baird is getting kicked off where ever he goes, well, I can see why. He really does have a problem with forums. He did well as a lone blogger where virtually no one else posted, maybe one other poster I heard, but I didn't see anyone else but Baird. We're talking a lot of material, which is available for those who want to read more of his writings.

Baird may blame us, but if every forum reacted in a similar fashion, I tend to think it is Baird who has the problem. He could accurately predict he would be banned, but he could not alter the behaviors that led him to being banned.

The mod team researched/discussed Baird in depth, but it became clear we could not (as a team) bear the weight of Baird on the forum, the work needed would have been beyond our capacity. I (personally) also think we would have gotten nowhere, and people were getting genuinely upset, so there was a time frame issue as well.

I had another problem with Baird though. I did not trust his scholarship, and given the lack of sources, was never going to be able to confirm the rightness or wrongness of his statements. If there is anything the alternative community does not need, it's more disinfo, whether by design or sloppy scholarship or a desire to be the eminent guru (trust me completely, accept all I say) of history.

[avid]

Sorry, haven't followed every post for the last few hours, but as a person who had to live with an aspergers genius, and some of these folk are so focussed to the detriment of themselves in society, this is atypical. If I am wrong, I apologise, but in the last load of threads I immediately recognised traits. However, the research is fascinating, if disjointed, and I am very grateful for the insight.
Some of these talented individuals have no educational veracity, in fact, they can run rings around those from the mainstream educational system. The everyday discussion in a home with a person so 'driven' is totally immersed in data, nothing mundane, and usually OCD behaviour in routines. No patience for the weaknesses of others, and little empathy in a crisis, (until our cat died - that broke the hard front and there were genuine emotions). Thank goodness for cats....
I wish the best for Robert, and his amazingly proliferate researches.

[Citizen No2]

Sierra wrote:

I read some of the other forums that banned Baird, and we were actually pretty honest, direct, and helpful in our comments in comparison. For awhile anyway, lol.

If Baird is getting kicked off where ever he goes, well, I can see why. He really does have a problem with forums. He did well as a lone blogger where virtually no one else posted, maybe one other poster I heard, but I didn't see anyone else but Baird. We're talking a lot of material, which is available for those who want to read more of his writings.

Baird may blame us, but if every forum reacted in a similar fashion, I tend to think it is Baird who has the problem. He could accurately predict he would be banned, but he could not alter the behaviors that led him to being banned.

The mod team researched/discussed Baird in depth, but it became clear we could not (as a team) bear the weight of Baird on the forum, the work needed would have been beyond our capacity. I (personally) also think we would have gotten nowhere, and people were getting genuinely upset, so there was a time frame issue as well.

I had another problem with Baird though. I did not trust his scholarship, and given the lack of sources, was never going to be able to confirm the rightness or wrongness of his statements. If there is anything the alternative community does not need, it's more disinfo, whether by design or sloppy scholarship or a desire to be the eminent guru (trust me completely, accept all I say) of history.

Absolutely fair point, I can agree with most of what you wrote...... I can understand other's points of view. I did read a couple of other forums where exactly the same outcome was achieved........ That's a wee bit of maybe why I feel the way I do about all this. We reacted just as every other alt media forum did.

Regards.

[Sierra]

Posted by Citizen No2 (here)
Sierra wrote:

I read some of the other forums that banned Baird, and we were actually pretty honest, direct, and helpful in our comments in comparison. For awhile anyway, lol.

If Baird is getting kicked off where ever he goes, well, I can see why. He really does have a problem with forums. He did well as a lone blogger where virtually no one else posted, maybe one other poster I heard, but I didn't see anyone else but Baird. We're talking a lot of material, which is available for those who want to read more of his writings.

Baird may blame us, but if every forum reacted in a similar fashion, I tend to think it is Baird who has the problem. He could accurately predict he would be banned, but he could not alter the behaviors that led him to being banned.

The mod team researched/discussed Baird in depth, but it became clear we could not (as a team) bear the weight of Baird on the forum, the work needed would have been beyond our capacity. I (personally) also think we would have gotten nowhere, and people were getting genuinely upset, so there was a time frame issue as well.

I had another problem with Baird though. I did not trust his scholarship, and given the lack of sources, was never going to be able to confirm the rightness or wrongness of his statements. If there is anything the alternative community does not need, it's more disinfo, whether by design or sloppy scholarship or a desire to be the eminent guru (trust me completely, accept all I say) of history.

Absolutely fair point, I can agree with most of what you wrote...... I can understand other's points of view. I did read a couple of other forums where exactly the same outcome was achieved........ That's a wee bit of maybe why I feel the way I do about all this. We reacted just as every other alt media forum did.

Regards.

Yes. We did.

Could you see a way out of this cattle chute? I couldn't. The only thing I could think of, was to put Baird in his own lane, similar to the solution we worked out for Jimini, who was upsetting people with somewhat sloppy COS material.

But then, Baird's area would have become a duplicate of his forum, and what would be the point of that?

[araucaria]

Posted by Sierra (here)
I had another problem with Baird though. I did not trust his scholarship, and given the lack of sources, was never going to be able to confirm the rightness or wrongness of his statements. If there is anything the alternative community does not need, it's more disinfo, whether by design or sloppy scholarship or a desire to be the eminent guru (trust me completely, accept all I say) of history.

Thank you Sierra: that is precisely what I was trying to say. And since disinfo and gurus are a persistent threat, I want to take this discussion a little further, and illustrate it with a very ‘concrete’ example

The notion of misreading in my previous post applied both to other people’s writing and one’s own has been conceptualized by Jean Ricardou (in ‘Ecrire en classe’, Metz, journal ‘Pratiques’ n° 20, 1978, pp. 23-70.), where he calls it ‘retrouvaille’. The word means rediscovery, but is rarely used except as the plural form meaning meeting up again with someone after losing touch. It is cognate with ‘retrieval’, the translation I would probably use. The idea is of this circular process of coming back to something familiar to oneself which has nothing to do with the subject at hand; it is your own mind loop that seems to you more real than what is actually going on. We all know how often such a ‘blast from the past’ simply will not fit in with the current context. Former friends are now strangers, alien just like other people’s conversation and writing – but our own is no different, and no time lapse is needed. The solution is therefore to learn the distancing mechanism of reading your own writing as if it was someone else’s – this is the meaning of Arthur Rimbaud’s famous quote, ‘Je est un autre’ (I is an other; I is someone else; I is not a monolith; I am not what I write (say); this is not about me). So yes, we are talking about an ego issue.

This is something we are doing all the time in massive ways. To take a really huge example, we can all talk endlessly of a God in church services, political rallies etc., and it’s all lovey-dovey until we realize that other people’s retrieval mechanism is operating with a very different notion of God than we are, and instead of exchanging views, we go to war over it.

It gets even more complicated when the principle is applied to such things as theories as the building blocks of one’s thinking. It is like building on sand instead of rock. This is an appropriate analogy in the following instance taken from another Baird thread. He has apparently ‘proved’ that the pyramids were made with a kind of mortar cast on the spot. This may or may not be the case, I have no idea either way, I would need to think about it; but that is not my point. This is how he responds to Greybeard’s objection that at Baalbek some large unused stones lie cut in a quarry:

Posted by Robert Baird (here)
Yes, they did "one of"s by quarrying such things as porticos and obelisks, The chipped rock and malachite plus Natron made the geopolymerized pyramid rock. Then they also had laser light measurement (see Archimedes) and possibly ultrasound per Chris Dunn.

All explainable with common sense - no need for BS.

The Ba'albek huge rocks left in quarries or the ones on mountains in the Andes and how they made them earthquake proof require more techniques and methods which also are explainable.

When you have your theory carved in stone and you treat an exception as an also explainable one-off, you are entering ‘forbidden archaeology’ territory, i.e. simply brushing stuff under the carpet when it doesn’t fit your paradigm (if ‘common sense’ can be called a paradigm). But there is no point explaining the pyramids with ‘common sense’ when the issue comes back to bite you in the rear at Baalbek. Normally speaking the mortar solution calls for sand quarries. We have clear evidence at Baalbek that stone quarries were used, and indeed Baird talks of blocks made from ‘chipped rock’. The problem is that the larger the blocks you make, the fewer the chippings: where would you get 6 million tons of them for just one pyramid? At stone quarries, the method always used in human memory has been to carve out manageable chunks and cart them as so many building blocks off to your site. The mystery of how huge stones were moved (the pyramids being just one example of a wider phenomenon) is as deep as ever, and the answers more inadequate than before; this is because Baird’s common sense is saying that not only was someone doing seemingly impossible things, but they had several ways of achieving them. Maybe they did, but what I see is that Baird has an answer for everything. But we need more links, preferably working links, explaining the ‘explainable’. Symptomatically however, weak links are Baird’s... weak link.

Meanwhile, the evidence of our eyes suggests that someone may well have had a very different notion of ‘manageable’ to our own. We know of one recent (late 19th century) example of someone who had just that, one Zana: ‘She could recognize her own name though, and would do simple chores…like carrying with one hand heavy 110 pound sacks of ground corn flour that she had ground from the water-mill by the river’ – see Bill’s thread: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1052096

We also have recent experience of changing levels of manageability. Thirty years ago, a bag of cement weighed 50 kgs. Nowadays cement comes in 35 kg bags: not because we can no longer carry 50 kgs, but because we prefer not to. We have a health regulation to cover our backs, and it may indeed happen that we get so out of practice with the bigger-sized bags that they will eventually become too heavy for us, even though we know we can do it. Although I am no Zana – small and not very strong – I myself have shifted quite a few in my time. Hence bigger is not always better, and manageability is tempered by convenience. Hence when we have a choice, such as in choosing a size for fired bricks, since Roman times if not earlier, we have opted for tiny hand-held bricks, on the basis that a skilled bricklayer, working at high revs in low gear, is competitive with a stone mason in terms of output, and without breaking his back.

Applying this hard evidence of recent experience to the pyramids, we reach some conclusions inconsistent with Baird’s theory. There is no ‘conveniently manageable’ constraint on pouring concrete in situ. On the contrary, the pyramid builders could have cast blocks even bigger than those at Baalbek; they could have cast blocks all the way from one corner to the next. The question then becomes: why did they use this relatively small breeze-block-type technology for in situ work? It makes no sense. Well actually it does make sense, but only if we imagine for example a civilization of giants building pyramids like we would build a wall with convenient bricks or breeze-blocks, and also capable of building Baalbek in manageable chunks of stone. They may have decided for instance that at Giza, tectonic movement would have snapped larger blocks and that built-in gaps would be more resistant than unscheduled ones. But all these things are the subject of open discussion, which is only possible if I can step back and see that I am not what I say, I am not a monolith. Things can be broken down into manageable and smaller parts, provided we have a full set of gears. Even so, it would appear from the above that the stones in the pyramids while seemingly huge to us, appeared much smaller to the builders for reasons of relative size rather than technology; so we are almost back we started.

The above analysis itself only looks at a tiny chip off Baird’s huge monolith of work, but I suspect a glutton for punishment would be in for more of the same. My issue here is with a lack of structured thinking, also suggested by the overly impressive number of books, and the missing links; no amount of one-off explanations will have the efficiency of a truly theoretical basis. Newton’s single theory of gravity works for everything from apples and smaller to galaxies and larger, as well as explaining why garbage goes into landfill – unless of course it is produced by NASA Similarly, Talbott’s theory of a Saturn-Venus-Mars-Earth system explains a whole range of seemingly unconnected phenomena, including, but not limited to, exploding planets, the shape of scallop shells, sacred and upside-down satanic symbols, celestial nomenclature, ancient cave glyphs, kingship and religion, the worship of bulls, and the workings of the human mind based on fear of catastrophe. And it also explains the likely origins of giants capable of building Baalbek and the pyramids...

I suspect therefore that Robert Baird’s disagreement with myself, had he taken the trouble to examine it – which you have to do in order to avoid being simply dismissive – lies in his inductive approach, often adopted by mainstream science, and my deductive approach, often adopted by alternative science. See this section of the below-referenced post:

Van Flandern’s methodology is deductive, going from cause to effect, rather than inductive reasoning, proceeding from effect to cause. In this way, he can start out with a one-particle universe and work his way up. You can dismiss him as a theorist, but does not the scientific method involve forming theories and testing them? That is what he does. The process is one of building upon solid ground, whereas scientists often fail to see the falsity of their basic assumptions (such as redshift being exclusively a velocity effect, which it is not). https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?71360-What-is-REAL-SCIENCE&p=833516&viewfull=1#post833516

When you start out from causes, you are comfortable with noting a wide range of effects such as the list I started above. When you are starting from effects, you are quickly overwhelmed as you trace them back to too many causes. 83 books, I suggest, rather than any deep understanding is a sign of being overwhelmed. Calling the multifarious effects of a single cause ‘garbage’ or ‘nonsense’ is equivalent to talking about ‘junk DNA’: hence when Robert Baird talks among other things of ‘so-called junk DNA’ here, I reckon we are dealing with writing more akin to brain-storming or speculation than to serious research; for he is salvaging junk while producing more junk: not a very coherent approach. It lacks the grounding of pragmatism, in other words it is an abstraction that cannot be made to do any useful work, whereas pragmatism is a process leading to positive results. Unsurprisingly, then, Baird’s work has difficulty gaining any traction in terms of (critically alert) readers: it has no place for them.

Hence it has no place for us. We and other forums have done our best and have no reason to feel guilty because of this seemingly incoherent desire to join others and keep to oneself; but the guilty feeling is understandable because we all experience a similar process to a smaller degree. The perennity of a forum relies on the same criteria as a pyramid: its elements may be deceptively large and actually quite small; the key is how they hold together, strong links between one another; how the space between them gets smaller rather than bigger. In other words, the cement holding the structure together is paradoxically not in all that stone, but in the almost non-existent empty space between the blocks. The ultimate example of ‘je est un autre’: the mystery of the pyramids is in the cement: there is none. L’autre est moi. The forum experience, when it works, lies in the oxymoronic process of being oneself by joining others. While welding welds, cement actually holds apart. But cementless cement does both.