.... .. Egyptian Electrification .. ....

July 8, 2002

Note : Updated with slight revision. I've had to recreate the commentary on the posts I replied to on this thread from memory, because Stephanie Cass deleted them before I got around to saving them. Don't worry, though. You'll get to see something equally strange out of their friends, shortly.

By chance, I did hold onto copies of most of the posts that I made on this thread, which you'll see reprinted below, in context.

Is it unfair that you are only seeing my side of the argument? Yes, it's very unfair - to me. I'd be delighted to show you the original text of the posts on the other side of the discussion and let my opposition on it be heard in its own words, if only I had access to those words. This situation is unfair to me because while I can relay the absurdity of what I was reading, I can't give you a very good sense of just how abusive JamStone, "Bob" and their friends became. Dry sarcasm is more my style when I get angry online, and these folks took a crawl through the sewer.

Think about how it is that you remember a discussion. The whole thing is not going to be sitting on the tip of your tounge. You'll remember a sentence here, a phrase there, and you'll try to fill in the blanks. In your head, you'll start to carry out the discussion as you remember it, replacing the parts you forget with something that sounds natural to you. One of those tries will jog your memory and another blank spot will be filled in. Eventually, you will remember the discussion to a greater or lesser degree. The more natural that the words would feel coming out of your mouth, the easier you will find the effort to repeat the discussion in its original phrasing. This is why we can't remember a lecture just by repeating the words we heard this morning to ourselves, and yet we can recite our roommate's tales by heart. This is why, as a teacher, I make an effort to re-express the material in terms of my student's own experiences. A finance major who struggles with the notions of exponential growth, suddenly finds the material easy when it is illustrated with the example of compound interest, to take a case that often arises.

Content-free diatribes do not roll naturally off my tounge. The end result : trying to fill in the blanks in the scraps of invective that I briefly remembered was difficult for me, and within a few weeks, I had forgotten even the scraps, which I suppose is just as well, for the most part. Certainly, it's good for my blood pressure and general productivity. However, this may leave the reader with the illusion that the only thing provoking my sarcasm was the mind-bending stupidity that I was encountering. No, far from it.

Let us note that Ms. Stephanie Cass, the less-than-impartial board monitor, moved very quickly. By the time I got up, after a very late night on the boards, the thread was gone. The intent on her part to thwart efforts to document what happened here, couldn't be clearer. (Note the legally unenforcable (1) demand that one not reprint posts from the board elsewhere, backed up with veiled threats of legal action based on what could only be termed a "creative" reading of copyright law). In fact, Ms. Cass would later, in a letter you will see printed here on our Netjer page, come out and openly announce that as a matter of policy, she wouldn't allow us to "discredit" people on the board and that she had and would continue to engage in censorship in support of that policy.

Imagine that! A guaranteed right to never lose an argument. It's a fool's fondest dream, come true. The long term consequences of that policy should be obvious. When one sets out the honey, one should expect to see a few flies.

The silliness began when "JamStone" made a post entitled "Egypt is not really dead". Nothing terribly original, the post gave us the standard politically correct (and historically inaccurate) claims that the ancient Egyptians invented everything, more or less, with the Greeks apparently stealing the credit. JamStone even went so far as to claim that the Egyptians invented Greek architecture and created the precursor to most of the modern Western languages. To the lengthy list of alleged accomplishments, he added the astonishing possibility that the ancient Egyptians had harnessed electricity! Even by Internet standards, this was outrageous. I had to respond.

JamStone immediately went on the attack. Pardon me if I take the personal abuse out of his commentary, as it didn't seem to be worth memorizing at the time. His counter-argument was that "good scientists" were in the business of proving things true, not proving them false. This is pure nonsense, as the latter is what constitutes "peer review", one of the cornerstones of all legitimate scholarship. Adding that "the absence of proof is not the proof of absence", he tried to then argue that his claims regarding Ancient Egypt's "harnessing" of electricity were beyond debate, because he merely said that it was "possible" that this had occured. Besides which, he said, a key hanging at the end of a kite string (as in Franklin's experiment) would count as a "harnessing of electricity".

Yes, he really argued that he had no need of the facts, because his theory couldn't be disproved. It was time to set him straight.

At this point, "John" decided to bless us with his presence. Mainly, he just ranted abusively, as mentioned in "Dealing with John". (The details immediately follow a copy of the message he sent at about the same time, in a feeble attempt to pressure me into silence. The "behavior" referred to is nothing more than the making of the counterarguments you are now seeing).

"John" decided to speak in support of JamStone's remarkable claim, regarding the harnessing of electricity in Pharoanic times. He started by citing a list of the accomplishments of the ancient Egyptians, such as the pyramids, which he claimed that we would be unable to build today. (This, of course, is utter nonsense. The only things standing in the way of such a project are the increased cost of labor and the lack of desire to undertake such a project, and its costs. The increase in pay (and resulting prosperity) that the common man has come to expect can hardly be sensibly viewed as being a step backward).

Having run off this list of accomplishments, he then concluded that since the ancient Egyptians were so bright, obviously they could have harnessed electricity. My response to this was to point out that one could cite an even longer list of accomplishments for the Renaissance Italians. Certainly, one would agree, Leonardo da Vinci was far more intelligent than most (if not all) of the aircraft designers at Boeing. Therefore, by this logic, one would conclude that there were (or might have been) supersonic aircraft during the Renaissance! Absolutely absurd.

This lead me to a very serious question. Just how serious were the people posting here? As I pointed out, even my six year old cousin could understand (without adult prompting) that each generation of scientists builds on what the previous generations did before it. Aside from the gains in theoretical understanding, there is also what is known as "technological maturity". That is, the gradual improvement in the quality of tools available to the workman and in his resulting capability to construct the things that engineers design, using the knowledge of natural law and other theory that scientists and mathematicians provide them with. For example, the concept of solid state circuitry was around in the 1920s, but nevertheless, analog computing was still going strong in the 1940s, because those designs could not be practically implemented using the technology of the time.

Again, as mentioned in the file regarding "John", there was much ranting and raving about my use of "polysyllabic, pseudo-intellectual (expletitive deleted)", and the Greeks destroying Egyptian culture by referring to the cities and gods of Egypt by different names than those used by the Egyptians, leading me to point out that this hideous practice was one known as "having a different language", leading to the aforementioned question of how the Egyptians had survived "the horrors of translation" for so long. No reasonable man could think that to offer gentle teasing in response to coarse personal abuse would be objectionable, but Craig Schaefer, the Nisut's second-in-command, took exactly that position, warning me that "mockery" wasn't allowed on the boards. Yes, Craig actually tried to forbid the use of wit on the House boards, even in small doses. Some would say that he succeeded.

Note : The weaknesses of Johns's metaphysical theories regarding the significance of language are discussed in another article on this page, entitled "Formal vs. Magical Usage".

Continuing the childishness, "Djed" protested my decision to bring up something as unimportant as the facts, on the basis that "one shouldn't have to be an egghead in order to have fun speculating about something interesting". In other words, knowing what one was talking about, as one spoke, was intolerable, because one would ruining the fun of those who didn't. (2) With some dismay, I started to notice that a theme was developing here: a belief that one was obliged to lower oneself to the level of the lowest common denominator, so that others would not feel inadequate. If another can't think, one must not make sense. If another can't write, one must not be too articulate. Such a creed brings out the worst that is in man, rather than the best.

Disappointing if true, I thought to myself, but irrelevant at that point. I proceeded as if the House would be motivated by concerns nobler than the desire to appease those moved by petty spite and gave it the chance to live up to the respect it was shown by this action. Summing up the craziness already seen, I wrote:

JamStone was back. His next stroke of genius was to try to argue that the mythology surrounding Asclepius, the Hellenic god of medicine, was derived from the real life story of Imhotep. His methodology, as usual, was suspect, glossing over the differences in approach between modern scholarship and ancient theology.

"Khen", who had behaved so curiously during the "Religion and Empowerment" thread, once again went out of her way to appease the belligerent (JamStone, in this case). She tried to rationalize JamStone's latest claims, by pointing out that the historical Imhotep was the high priest of Ra, the sun god, arguing that this validated JamStone's analogy. This, however, was incorrect :

JamStone wasn't about to give up. Given his postmodernist stance, I'm not surprised. The other guests on the list, and at least one of the shemsu ("Bob"), were supporting him. From the standpoint of somebody who understands the value of serious scholarship, this is an indictment of the intellectual atmosphere the House had fostered on its boards. However, from the point of view of a postmodernist, somebody who believes that all reality is subjective, this collective lunacy became a source of vindication. "The facts be (deleted), because there are no facts, only politics", as some would put it.

Politics, indeed. JamStone's next move was one straight out of the Usenet playbook - character assassination via the use of an inflammatory accusation. JamStone said that I was "censoring" him. How could I be doing that, given that I wasn't a member of the House and had no editorial control over the board? Simple. By discrediting his arguments, I was "censoring" them. "Bob", the shemsu I mentioned, concurred. Ironically enough, this would be the same "Bob" who would soon ask Stephanie Cass to delete the entire thread on the basis that by winning the argument, I had "degraded" his side. The only remedy, "Bob" argued, was to destroy all evidence that the argument had ever happened. To her everlasting shame, Ms. Cass would soon choose to go along with that argument and engage in some real censorship, by deleting the entire thread.

Continuing the persecution theme, an intriguing one out of a member of a philosophical camp notorious for its eagerness to harass those who disagreed with it into silence, JamStone spoke of the great effort that I was putting into painting him as a "closeted pseudoscientist". "The desert is a big place", he said. "Who cares if no evidence of such equipment has surfaced yet? Who know what might be out there? And what does Occam's razor have to do with any of this, anyway?" or words to that effect. Not only was this nonsense, but it wasn't even original nonsense. The demand that one begin any discussion by acknowledging that one can't really know anything about the subject discussed, is a postmodernist cliche.

I already was quite tired of this discussion, but responded anyway. The issue here wasn't possibility, but plausibility, and a failure to grasp the concept of relative certitude.

Naively hoping that it was all over, now, I wrote :

JamStone had one last trick up his sleeve. During the course of debate, when he would find that he was pinned down and his position was no longer tenable, he would simply change it and act as if the new position was one that he had been arguing all along. As he probably expected, the others on the thread were happy to let him get away with being this evasive.

The downside to this strategy, for those unconcerned with honesty, is that it leaves one contradicting oneself on a regular basis. JamStone tried to turn this drawback into a tactical advantage. You've already seen me confront JamStone about some of the backpedalling he had done already. In a moment of pure, classic, memorable chutzpah, JamStone responded by saying that I was the one who was backpedalling, because first I said that he had said one thing and then I said he had said another. As usual, he was trying to bluff the reader into not noticing the blindlingly obvious, and I called him on it :

Somewhere along the way, during all of this silliness, a miracle occured, and JamStone actually made a thesis statement which he could be pinned down on. Responding to it was a great way of summing up the whole thread. I didn't feel good that I had come. A great deal of my time was wasted by it and I wasn't sure why I had even bothered. Maybe I was writing for the lurkers. But now, at least I could leave this nonsense behind me in the archives, and feel good about the fact that I had left. My rebuttal was an easy one to write:

By now, no matter how much he might try to posture to the contrary, "Bob", the shemsu who had tried to support JamStone's side of this insane debate, couldn't hide the fact that his side had lost the argument and lost it badly. Worse still, from a troll's point of view, I was walking away in a moderately good mood, and nobody else seemed likely to be sucked into the craziness. His response, as I've mentioned, was to take one last parting shot by asking the moderators to destroy all evidence that the discussion had ever occurred and erase my posts. That, and resort to endless backbiting in another forum by way of retaliation, but why obsess?

What was the basis for this absurd request? Willfully turning a blind eye to the fact that a rational, if blunt, series of arguments on my part had been responded to with an endless stream of personal abuse and occasional profanity from him and his friends in the forums, and threatening private messages from one of his friends ("John") warning me of unspecified nasty consequences if I continued talking back, "Bob" actually had the nerve to complain that I had been too mean to his side. (Translation : I stood up for myself). Harsh language didn't belong in an educational forum, he said. Obviously, somebody had never been to grad school. As an educator and an academic, though, and still having a far higher opinion of the House than it actually deserved, I posted a rebuttal, and commentary about his theory of education.

I had over-estimated the House. Like the posts above, this article was censored within the day. Most of the posts that I had made elsewhere soon followed it into oblivion, even where no flammage had occured. I had never witnessed such utter cowardice. My only regret as I left the House of Netjer webboards behind, was that I had ever wasted a moment on them to begin with.

Side note : JamStone has since popped up elsewhere to boast of his intellectual triumphs on this thread, now that his friends have succeeded in getting the evidence to the contrary destroyed. (This came in response to a post by somebody who had reacted to what he saw here with incredulity. To say that he took liberties with the truth would be akin to saying that O.J. Simpson was not the perfect husband. (So, what else is new?)

Profanity cut by me, in keeping with my provider's Terms of Service agreement, but the rest of this is pure, unadulterated JamStone, misspellings and all.

Seperating truth from nonsense should be easy for the reader at this point. Quoth JamStone : "well i clowned him with facts, established theories and logic ..." Yes, JamStone, you sound like a real intellectual. Realistically, does this person sound capable of establishing either theories or logic? Having carelessly acknowledged that the posts you see above were, indeed, the ones I placed on the board, JamStone continues : "and instead of trying to debate in a serious manner he chose to post angry tirades with personal attacks", which, as you can see merely by looking at what I wrote, is a bald faced lie. JamStone asserts that I "thusly got booted from the board", but, as you will see in "Groupthink in Action", by the testimony of none other than the Nisut, the leader of the House of Netjer, months after this flamewar, I had still never been banned from the Netjer boards. If, as is so often the case online, the reader is left wondering "how do I know who to trust", he need only look at the facts.

And that is exactly what Ms. Cass is trying to keep the reader from being able to do, much to the delight of kooks like JamStone, who can then lie to their heart's content about what went on, now that the evidence is being suppressed. Or, should we say, most of it, because being too cocky to realise it, JamStone was kind enough to expose himself in the post quoted above. In response to JamStone's statement "but he left ONE thing out -- MY (deleted) posts and rebuttles to his posts (he claims that they got deleted but his somehow miraculously survived...how (deleted) convient!)", we offer an invitation and a challenge: repost those lost articles in a public place. We would be personally delighted to place the original text on our page and if JamStone could find the articles posted by the others, we'd love to have those too. Or, even better, could he persuade the House to stop blocking access to that thread? Because unlike he and "Bob", we have nothing to hide.

As for JamStone's blustering about the alleged strangeness of my still having copies of my own posts, I would invite the reader to do what is best when somebody attempts to substitute attitude for argument. Go out, get a nice cup of coffee or hit a museum, and when you get back, having shaken off the emotions dropped on you, ask yourself just how much sense the argument really seems to make. You've been online for a while? You've known other people who've been online as well? Then, in your own experience, exactly how unusual is it, really, for somebody to hold onto backup copies of his own work? Anybody who isn't throwing the bull in order to "make a point" will have to concede that it isn't very unusual at all, and that JamStone is clutching at straws.

The policy statement on the board at the House of Netjer says all. Posts on the board may not be copied without the permission of the House of Netjer or the authors according to House policy, the House claiming a copyright on the posts made on its boards. Such a claim, as we explain elsewhere, is without legal merit under the laws of both the United States and United Kingdom, where our webpages reside, as it runs contrary to the Fair Use doctrine. But, in real life, more than a few system operators "shoot first and ask questions later", taking action in response to groundless complaints, stubbornly refusing to listen when their users explain why the complaints are ludicrous.

We've found that our providers and our sysops seem to have a lot more class than that. But, until that much became clear, we were left dealing with a group of would-be "copyright terrorists" (people who attempt to abuse the legal system with frivolous copyright-related suits, or the threat of such, in order to muzzle their critics). We weren't about to endanger the existence of our own homepage just to include a few old posts. This being the case, copying down the posts not due to Shrine members became a very low priority. What we were seeing is exactly what one would expect from the writer of the quote above: garbage. There was nothing there which we would have any reason to wish to read ourselves, and we were still unclear as to whether or not we'd be able to show it to anybody else.

There is nothing more than a writer, even an amateur writer, hates more than having some of his writing be lost, and some of my work had already been capriciously deleted. Just to be safe, I stayed up, downloaded copies of a number of my posts and then, since it was an ungodly hour and the sky was starting to light up, I decided to go to bed. JamStone seems to feel that this is evidence of something, and he is right. It is evidence of the fact that I have a life outside of the Internet.

And that, dear reader, is one thing for which I shall never apologise. Click here to return to the main page of the review of the House of Netjer, here on the homepage of the Shrine of the Sleeping Gods.

(1) The reprinting of posts used to document an account of events on the board clearly falls under the protection of the "fair use exemption" recognized by the Berne convention, and all copyright law written in accordance with it (such as in the United States and the United Kingdom of Great Britain), as it is a non-commercial use of material of no commercial value, necessary for the purposes of critical commentary.

Did I mention that my family includes a line of attorneys going back into the early middle ages, to say nothing of my friends ? Being from a Jewish background has its advantages.

(2) This note was to be repeated by a swarm of people who entered the thread, most of them after I had downloaded the last copy of one of my posts, still in my possession. (This thread ballooned to a great length in its last day or two of existence). JamStone's insistence that he was being persecuted was parroted, and calls were made for the House to step in, and 'take action'. So much for free and open discussion.

(3) Neppy was the afrocentrist who started the thread about Cleopatra's alleged blackness.