300

This is my 300^th posting since I started this blog in 2005. I can’t say that I’ve kept up a steady rate of postings since then. After all some years I’ve only made two postings a year and in 2009 I managed to do 97. In 2012 I was down to 25 over the course of the year. Still I am finding it an educational experience. So here I would like to talk about the whys about my postings.

The reason is I do these postings more to educate myself than I do to inform others. Also I intend these pieces to be more than mere opinion but also to be able to stand up has informed.

Thus a fair number of the postings are not “opinion” pieces of any kind but simply as posts that give information about something(s) that I have found of interest and feel that would be of interest to others.

The standard by which I decide whether or not to write and post something is entirely arbitrary it is simply something that I find interesting, with the emphasis on the “I”. I do not expect that anyone else would necessarily find a particular point to be of interest.

What interests one person may not interest anyone else. I do not expect that many people would find that long post I did on the Peace of Kalias1 to be of interest it is in fact a piece mainly of interest to Classicalists. However I suspect that very few of them will find it or read this blog.

Since I do this blog mainly to further educate myself, I find that I have to research and read a fair bit of information etc., in order to cover the topic or frankly avoid making a fool of myself in regards to certain topics.

Some postings are of course opinion pieces and others mix the two. My piece on the 10^th anniversary of 9/11 was just such a piece and was not intended to be a in depth impartial analysis of the event.2 Hence I did not give a “impartial” evaluation of 9/11 “truthers”, who are in my opinion woo meisters and pseudo “scholars” of the worst kind joining Kennedy Conspiracy theorists, Satanic ritual abuse nut bars as sociological cancers on the body politic.

I have also for example done pieces on predestination and Plato’s theories of forms, in neither of them do I pretend that the piece in question is “unbiased” or “impartial”.3 What I wanted to convey in pieces like those two that after much reading I considered the ideas in question to be both wrong and illogical.

Pseudoscience and pseudo history have been the subject of a great many of my posts. From the nearly forgotten Velikovsky affair which serves as a perfect example of shoddy pseudoscience and an outstanding example of double standards and is thus absolutely germane to discussing what pseudoscience is and how it is treated in the media and by the public in general, to the recent Alien abductions nonsense pseudoscience rears its ugly empty head. I suppose those postings can be characterized as public services.

Pseudo history is another area of interest and it comes in many forms. Perhaps the most insidious form of pseudo history is the long accepted “conventional” myth that through sheer repetition becomes “truth”. In one of my postings I discussed a small example of one such myth. This was the repeated incredulity about why the Duke of Medina Sidonia was made the commander of the Armada in 1588. To so many historians, (Almost all English), Philip II’s appointment made no sense and so we got reams of utter nonsense about how inexplicable the decision was. A visit to the Spanish archives would have revealed that the decision was actually very explicable and understandable. Instead historians (Generally English.), kept repeating the same old mantra.4

Sometimes the pseudo history is popular mythology, like the notion that Hitler’s father was half Jewish. A notion that is to put it mildly totally bogus.5

If that is one aspect of pseudo-history the other is out and out pseudo history has illustrated by such writer has the Russian Fomenko. In the case of Fomenko with his conspiracy theory of missing history and massive large scale fabrication of texts, sites and coins, we have what can only be described has out and out fraud.6 Fomenko is arguing in bad faith and as such is the worst sort of pseudo.

If pseudoscience and pseudo history are areas of interest to me I have some interest in popular culture so in my postings I have occasionally reviewed current films. Such films have included The Artist and Agora.7

There have been also a couple of book reviews of such books as Strange Victory, about Hitler’s conquest of France in1940 and Europe’s Tragedy about the Thirty Years War in Europe. Books that shed light on some of the more obscure aspects of history.8

Archaeology comes into my postings with a fair degree of frequency with posts on the development of civilization and my interest in the pre-columbian civilizations of the new world. In this case this is combined with my interest in the highly dubious notion of pre-coloumbian diffusionism which is highly pseudo scientific.9

I include footnotes in most of my postings for various reasons. It is an indication of seriousness; that I am not just spouting off. I do indeed take what I am doing seriously. Also I like to show where I am getting my facts etc., from so that interested readers can go check for themselves and don’t have to just take my word for it.

Also quite frankly I want to show my work. Footnotes give a pretty good idea about how the work in creating what are in effect mini essays was done.  And that is one of the points many of my postings are in effect essays and by footnoting them I believe I am giving the gravitas that is necessary to the what I am posting.

Also to be blunt it is a lot of fun much of the time to post this sort of stuff. It educates me and I end up learning stuff I never knew before.

After all one of the most exciting thing that I have found in my life is learning new stuff, finding out stuff I didn’t know before, learning about the world, the past and society, experiencing the new and old not known before.

As it is I started this blog for the purpose of learning for myself and I hope that some people have found it of interest.

1. Here.

2. Here.

3. Here and Here.

4. Here.

5. Here.

6. Here.

7. Here and Here.

8. Here and Here.

9. For example see Here,

Pierre Cloutier