A Medieval Classroom

I've always liked this painting. To a 21st-century academic, it will seem quite authentic because it seems so startling familiar: the students who are paying close attention. The students who may or may not be paying attention. The student in the first row, with a somewhat sarcastic expression on his face, who looks as if either he is speaking or he urgently wants to speak -- a class clown? A young scholar with a mind of his own? Perhaps both at once?

The student in the third row, nearest to us, who appears to be hung over and possibly asleep. The student in the back row, farthest from us, in conversation with someone who doesn't appear to belong in the classroom at all -- why is the teacher putting up with this? Perhaps this student is from a powerful family and the teacher has been made to understand that this student can do as he pleases.

One rule in medieval universities which was violated extremely rarely was that women were not allowed to participate. I've heard of exactly one exception to this rule: a woman known as Nawojka disguised herself as a boy and studied at the university of Krakov for two years before being discovered to be a woman. She was put on trial, but no-one from the university could be found who would say a bad word about her. Her record as a student was excellent. The authorities didn't know what to do with her, until she asked to be sent to a convent; they agreed. She taught at the convent and eventually became its abbess.

Or perhaps not: there seems to be some disagreement about whether the story of Nawojka is an historical account or a legend.

Some people have said that there are women in the picture above, which was painted on a wall in a German university in the 14th century. (I'm sorry, I don't know which university it was in, or who painted it. It's in a museum in Berlin now. Sorry, I don't know which museum. Not much help. am I?) Maybe they got this impression because some men's and boys' clothing and hats and hairstyles of 14th-century central Europe may seem feminine to us today. Also, some of the boys studying at universities in the 14th century were very young, by today's standards. Perhaps even pre-pubescent in some cases.

I'm Okay. Really

Yesterday, after writing a blog post about medicine balls, I ordered a 45-pound slam ball from Amazon. This particular brand of ball does not seem to have the best reputation for quality and endurance (nor the worst), but the 45-pound model was ridiculously cheap. So cheap, I have to wonder whether the price was a mistake. So cheap, I honestly wonder whether what I paid would even cover the cost of free 2-day shipping of an item that weighs 45 pounds.

I'm not on steroids. (I know: that's exactly what most steroid users say. But I'm not.) Just in case any of you were worried about that, or worried about me in general and my new enthusiasm for medicine balls. I'm aware that many or most or all of the people (besides me) who are genuinely interested in 300-lb medicine balls

are on steroids. I'm not interested in becoming even bigger than I already am. I'm not interested in competing in strongman competitions. What I want to do is become thinner. I want to use the medicine balls to burn off fat, more than I want to use them to pack on muscle. If some of my muscles get bigger in the process of burning off fat, that's okay with me, but it's not the main focus.

If I were seriously interesting in developing huge muscles, I would be starting an exercise program centered primarily around lifting barbells and dumbbells -- and around taking steroids and HGH and things like that. But I don't want the huge muscles. I want to get smaller. I want MORE of a neck, not less of one. I don't even know very much about steroids and HGH and other things used by -- well, apparently by top athletes in every single sport where it's not specifically banned and rigourously tested, as well as a lot of the top athletes in sports where it is specifically banned and rigourously tested. I don't know very much about the banned substances, but I get the distinct impression that they're dangerous in various ways. Some people insist they're not, but those people seem to me to be either using steroids (etc), and in denial -- or selling steroids (etc).

I hear that steroids (etc) are expensive, too, so even if I were convinced that they were safe as milk, even if I wanted to take them, I couldn't afford to. (I don't even drink milk, because of health concerns. I don't pour milk on my cereal or oatmeal. If I'm in the mood for a beverage which resembles milk, it's almond milk for me.)

I'm not planning a lot of barbell and dumbbell lifting. Just calisthenics and and cardio and medicine balls. And the medicine balls are mainly intended to intensify the effects of the calisthenics and cardio: burning fat, strengthening my heart and lungs, lowering my blood pressure and resting pulse rate.

HEALTHY stuff. Before my surgery back in August, I said to myself that if I survived, I would make a stronger commitment to my physical health. And that's exactly what I'm doing. And my blood pressure and pulse rate have been coming down -- not dramatically yet, but that's okay. I'm taking small steps in the right direction.

You know, some day I will meet a beautiful woman who is into heavy slam balls and mechanical watches and the Latin language and languages in general and healthy, steroid-free living and quantum theory and Moleskine notebooks and almond milk and kitties, and sparks will fly.

I'm Still Pure Mental About Medicine Balls

More specifically: about slam balls, because, as far as I can see, medicines balls over 20 pounds are all or almost all slam balls.

I'm getting very good results from working out at home with my 8 pound medicine ball and my 5 kilogram ball and my 20 pound ball. But I want to go heavier.

The guy behind the gun counter at the big sporting-goods store said they could get medicine balls as big as 12 or even 15 pounds. The fact that they sell guns and do not sell big medicine balls (big from my point of view) are only two of the things that make me uncomfortable about the place. Going there again after several years reminded me that I had already told myself I probably wouldn't need to go there again. Ever. In my life.

Of course, I can buy slam balls as big as 300 lbs from Amazon. I have actually been having wildly irresponsible thoughts about doing exactly that. Once a 300-lb ball was delivered, would I be able to get it as far as from the sidewalk up onto the front porch? Interesting question. Then again, I don't see what would be so bad about leaving it outside -- who would steal it? Very likely no-one who wasn't using a forklift. It might stay right there on the ground outside for a very long time, looking like a spherical yellow lawn ornament.

I have actually been more seriously thinking about buying a slam ball which weighs 45 lbs or more.

A more responsible thought is joining a gym which has huge heavy slam balls. Which gyms have what size balls? I don't know. After looking in at the above-mentioned sporting goods store today, I spotted a nearby gym. But it's still under construction.

The first gym I telephoned about this told me that their slam balls are usually locked up. They're only taken out for classes. No lone-wolf slam-balling at any old time for them! Which is disappointing, but I guess I can see their point, which -- I'm guessing -- is safety. And far be it from me to denigrate safety. Seriously.

Seems like a LOT of local gyms don't even answer their phones on Saturday afternoons. What, are they all CLOSED on weekends? Sigh. Most of them would probably be out of my budget range, too, unless I can arrange to get a free gym membership because I'm poor, which some people actually seem to think I can do.

It may be that I am kind of crazy to to build my fitness plans around slam balls to such an extent, but you know what? I don't particularly care if it is crazy, it could still work. I know somebody who lost an amazing amount of weight on a cabbage-soup diet, and who very enthusiastically preaches the Gospel of Health through Cabbage Soup. Which is crazy, but, much more importantly, it actually worked for him, so who's crazy now, huh? I think that a huge variety of approaches to diet and exercise would each work well for some people. Would, and do. It may very well be that focusing to such an extent on heavy slam balls would be crazy for most people but brilliant for me, because I'm just built that way. (And there's also the possibility that I've stumbled across fitness gold here and am far, far ahead of my time.)

There's an Australian company called Iron Edge which makes fitness equipment, including slam balls as heavy as 85 kilograms. That's over 187 pounds.

They have some YouTube videos featuring a young man who is very thin, but wiry, who actually picks up the 85kg balls and carries them around and throws them and such, and also makes comments about the balls which I find humorous. I don't know how much he's cracking up his Australian target audience, and how many of things which crack me are just things Australians say. Like when he describes some amazing feat which Derek Boyer, Fijian-Australian strongman legend and Iron Edge spokesman, has performed with the heavy slam balls in training, and then dryly adds something like "[...] which, in my opinion, is pure mental."

Besides being funny, the fact that this fellow is so thin and can still carry and toss an 85-kg slam ball makes me confident that I can carry a 300-pound ball. Eventually. If I work very, very hard. Probably not today.

And it may actually be very tricky to even find a slam ball as heavy as 85 kilograms, let alone 300 pounds. (And I've said in this blog, and I stand by it: they should make them even bigger than 300 lbs.) I don't know yet how common they are in gyms. Maybe they're all over the place, and it's just a matter of hooking up with a gym.

Or maybe, to most fitness enthusiasts, the very thought of slam balls as heavy as 85 kilograms, never mind 300 pounds, let alone even bigger, is still pure mental -- either because it really is pure mental, or because I am from the future.

How This Postmodern Thing is Going So Far

For over 57 years, I managed to avoid learning enough about postmodernism to have any idea what it was. (Would it have been possible for me to remain ignorant about it for so long if I had lived in Paris? That's a non-rhetorical question. I have no idea to what extent postmodernism precepts might be a "part of the air" in Paris. I don't know whether it would be as difficult to live in Paris and not know what postmodernism is as it is to live in the US and not know the rules of baseball.) I heard mostly negative remarks about it and mostly accepted those remarks. Then, just a few months ago, I heard about Jordan Peterson for the first time, because Peterson was annoying some of my friends. Some negative remarks he made about postmodernism caught my attention because they sounded so absurd. So, for the very first time ever, I looked for postmodernists and what they themselves said about what postmodernism was. Very soon, I had my hands on a copy of Derrida's Of Grammatology. I devoured that magnificent book, and exclaimed,

"I'm a postmodernist!"

Unfortunately, however, the remarks I heard about postmodernism, apart from those made by actual postmodernists, continued to be the sort of negative remarks I had heard all my life, and had little or nothing to do with what postmodernists actually said. Although I'd started to call myself a postmodernist, I am not against technology, or against reality, or against authorship. Neither are Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard...

I am against patriarchy, colonialism, over-simplification, racism, sexism. Far from being opposed to technology or science or reality, since this cataclysm which has resulted in my identifying as postmodern, I have greatly intensified my study of advanced mathematics, electromagnetism, industrial manufacture, quantum theory and other STEM subjects.

As far as being "against authorship" -- what could that possibly mean, for an author, such as myself, to be "against authorship"? I suppose that this particular misunderstanding of postmodernism comes from the incomprehension of the very basic postmodern insight that the effect of any piece of writing depends just as much upon its readers as upon that which was actually written.

Perhaps this last insight can help me somewhat when I see people claiming all sports of nonsense about an entire group of people, the postmodernists: just as any author cannot control how his readers will understand or misunderstand what he or she writes, so postmodernists cannot control what people will say or write about us. All we can do is persevere in our own efforts. Perhaps if, now and then, we notice that someone actually understands something we've said, we can recognize that recognition. That might be better than trying to chase down the endless nonsensical things said about us, like a man trying to chase down a swarm of bees because one of them has bitten him.

Perhaps I should be hesitant to apply the label of postmodernist to myself so soon after having begun to study postmodernist literature.

Perhaps it would be good for me to keep in mind how seldom those who are considered the major figures of postmodernist literature actually referred to themselves as postmodernists. Perhaps it would be better for me to say that I've read some Derrida and found him to be profoundly delightful and not at all incomprehensible (perhaps because I share many of his interests). I haven't really had a comparable experience yet with any of the other postmodernists (as they are known by others, and much more rarely to themselves).

I think it makes sense to keep the postmodernist label for now, a couple of months after having so hastily adopted it. Although I have so far only read one postmodernist with great enthusiasm, I have a great deal in common with most of those in the group: a lack of recognition of anything I can call absolute truth; as I mentioned above, an opposition to patriarchy, colonialism, over-simplification, racism, sexism; the realization that relativity occurs not only in physics but also in ethics; a suspicion of claims of having found "the answer," whether those claims have been made in the name of Buddhism, Christianity, Marxism or what have you; a particular concern for the environment -- those sorts of things.

And if eventually the nonsensical definitions of postmodernism by people claiming to be its adherents, its opponents or its more or less sympathetic observers -- all three can be quite annoying -- prove to be to much, then I can reject the postmodernist label -- and I will have that, too, in common with many of the great postmodernists.

Fake Albert Einstein Quotes

Albert Einstein never said any of this shit:

"Success is a lousy teacher."

“Don't let yesterday take up too much of today.”

“Change your thoughts and you change your world.”

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

“In the end, you’re measured not by how much you undertake but by what you finally accomplish.”

"Hard work never brings fatigue. It brings satisfaction."

“Talent is what God gives us, Skill is what we give back to Him.”

"Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see further."

"The more I want to get something done the less I call it work."

“All growth depends upon activity. There is no development physically or intellectually without effort, and effort means work.”

"Success only comes to those who dare to attempt."

“I hope the millions of people I’ve touched have the optimism and desire to share their goals and hard work and persevere with a positive attitude.”

“A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain.”

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.”

In conclusion: read a book!

Looking For a Prehistory of the Presocratics

I recently published a post on this blog in which I stated that I didn't believe that philosophy began with the Pre-Socratics -- not because I actually knew anything about cultures previous to the Pre-Socratics, but because the notion that the pre-Socratics could've invented philosophy on their own struck me as prima facie absurd. A century or two after the Pre-Socratics, the author of Ecclesiastes stated that there was nothing new under the sun, and this matched the impression I had that cultures borrowed things from other cultures which had borrowed them other cultures, with many modifications, to be sure, but rarely with anything completely new. There was certainly nothing new, or unique to the ancient Greeks, in a reluctance for one culture to acknowledge its debts to another.

The wrong way around, after publishing the blog post instead of before, I attempted to track down some confirmation of its thesis.

And I'm still looking. Martin L West, in his book The East Face of Helicon, Oxford, 2003 edition, says on p vii: "I am not concerned with Oriental contributions to science and philosophy," and I also could not deduce any from among the huge number of Mesopotamian literary, mythical and other cultural influences upon Greece demonstrated in West's book (which is superb and which I highly recommend).

Marc Van de Mieroop's book Philosophy Before the Greeks, Princeton, 2017 edition, did not show me that which its title describes, nor, apart from an assertion that Pythagorean triples were in use in Mesopotamia 1000 years before Pythagoras -- an assertion which did not come with a footnote which would aid someone hoping to confirm it -- did Walter Burkert's contribution, "Prehistory of Presocratic Philosophy in an Orientalizing Context," to The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, Oxford, 2011, p 55. Perhaps I should read them again, more slowly.

Or perhaps I should show more respect to an academic consensus, even when it contradicts my sense of what is prima facie obvious. Perhaps, when there is widespread astonishment among the experts at some achievement, as there is in the case of the achievement of Pre-Socratic philosophy, I should be more open to the possibility that the astonishment is justified. Astonishment is what I'm feeling more and more as I search for philosophical predecessors of the Pre-Socratics and -- sorry, Dr Van de Mieroop, sorry, Dr Burkert -- keep finding none.

The Jordan Peterson -- Matt Dillahunty Debate

Master charlatan and YouTube super-duperstar Jordan Peterson recently debated New Atheist and YouTube star Matt Dillahunty:



Dillahunty posted his reflections on the debate:



So, would I rather hang out with Peterson, or with Dillahunty? The answer is, no.

As you can see, Dillahunty got really hung up on one point during and after the debate, and since he's a New Atheist, it shouldn't be too hard to guess what that point was, because the New Atheists, all of them amongst themselves, only have one point: God doesn't exist.

I agree with the New Atheists on this point: I don't happen to believe that God exists, nor that gods exist. I don't agree with them about the importance of this point. For them, it's central to their existence: People believe in God, AND THEY ARE WRONG, AND THEY MUST SEE THAT THEY ARE WRONG! For me, the topic is exhausted after a few seconds' worth of discussion, and then there are ever so many other things to think about. But the New Atheists, they just can't let it go, they can't move on. Religious belief is the central fact in human life, the source of all trouble, and must be stamped out. Now.

Peterson, referring to myths and religion, points out that they are very important to people. I have to agree with him. It may actually be the one thing about which I agree with him. I can almost actually imagine Peterson and I having a pleasant conversation, if we stuck to this one topic: the importance of myths and religion in people's lives.

Dillahunty was not available for that conversation, because he immediately, and unendingly, hammered on that one single New Atheist point: "But it's not TRUE! God doesn't EXIST!" Geepers, thanks for mentioning that, Matt, because it may actually have been as long as five minutes since you last said it. Peterson points out that myth and religion are very important in people's lives. This is true. And it offers vast possible room for discussion. But first, Dillahunty has to establish that God doesn't exist.

It's a fact! he, along with every other New Atheist, insists. It's a fact that there is no God!

And I agree with Dillahunty that this is a fact. But there's another fact which Dillahunty, and Dawkins, and Harris, and Myers, and all the other New Atheists don't seem to grasp, or at least not in all of its dimensions and implications: the fact that there are billions of people who believe in God and who are just going to be -- at best -- annoyed by someone who won't shut up about their firm belief that He doesn't exist.

New Atheists: your refusal to just agree to disagree and talk about sumpin' else -- like, for example, the great meaning which religion holds in many people's lives, maybe in most people's lives -- or it could be another topic, like incredibly-heavy medicine balls, or cats, or food, or economics or anything else except your one point -- this refusal is not converting people en masse to atheism, have ya noticed that yet?

Time for Plan B.

Okay, Okay, I Admit It --

I'm COMPLETELY obsessed with 300-lb medicine balls!

Furthermore, it ANGERS me that so far I have only found one company, D-Ball, which makes medicines balls that big. This is a 300-pounder from D-Ball:

It's 15 inches, which is a lot bigger than, say, a basketball, but also a lot smaller than some other medicine balls which are much lighter.

(A d-ball, or dead ball, also known as a slam ball, is different from a traditional medicine ball in that it does not bounce, so that you can slam it straight down into the floor or ground or point-blank against a wall without having to worry about it bouncing all over the place and injuring people.)

And more recently it has begun to anger me that there are -- as far as I know -- no medicine balls which are larger than 300lbs. The next-biggest I've found so far are 85-kilogram slam balls from an Australian company called Iron Edge:

85 kilograms equals about 187 pounds.

There are people running around loose out there, purporting to be experts on such things, who say that slam balls only go up to 150 pounds.

The 300-pounders are used, among other uses, to train for strong-man competitions in which one has to pick up a stone or a keg which may weigh as much as 450 lbs, and then either set it down on a shelf around shoulder or eye-height, depending upon the strong man, or carry it for a distance before putting it down on such a shelf. How, I recently asked, are you going to train for that if there are no medicine balls bigger than 300 pounds?

Turns out they have an answer for that: they just train with stones or kegs, with the same objects which are used in the competitions. Here are some people training with the stones:

And I have an answer for THAT: they should use medicine balls in the competitions. The heavier ones may be sand or steel shot or other things on the inside, but they're rubber on the outside, and that's the way to go. No discussion, I'm right, everyone else is wrong. Rubber, AND SPHERICAL, is the way to go. Yes, the Atlas stones are spherical, but there are also kegs used in competitions, and sandbags used for training, which are not.

Spherical is the way to go because it's most difficult shape to lift and to keep steady. Barbells and dumbbells have handles specifically shaped to fit your hands, to make lifting easier, and to make it easier to keep them steady once they've been lifted. Nautilus-type machines make it even easier, because zero energy is required to stabilize the load: you just go straight up and come straight back down.

Well, what are you there to do: lift the maximum amount of weight off of the ground, or get the maximum effort into your workout? A sphere, a ball, requires the maximum effort to be lifted by a human, and the maximum effort to stabilize it, to keep from dropping it. And in return for that maximum effort, it returns the maximum reward in building strength. Right now, having used medicine balls which weigh much less than 300 pounds, I can feel muscles all over my body which have been woken up and stimulated. (In a good way.) Including some muscles which I can't recall ever having felt before at all.

There are some medicine balls which have indentations in them, sort of looking like the Death Star, and in those indentations are handles. Talk about completely missing the point of what you're making.

Okay, I admit, I don't know all of the biological science, and maybe there are plenty of good reasons to use barbells and dumbbells and Nautilus-type machines, and maybe I'm totally wrong to say that medicine balls are always the way to go. Maybe saying that only proved that I'm a total noob at the entire subject of lifting and throwing weighted objects. I suppose it's even possible that I'm completely wrong about the Death Star-medicine balls. But that's not my point right now. My point is that medicine balls are way cool and that I love them almost as much as kitties.

Rubber is the way to go because stone can scuff up your skin really badly and you don't need that. Also because you don't want to go around throwing either stone balls or barbells or dumbbells, generally speaking. Generally speaking, I think it's safe to say, throwing stone balls and dumbbells and barbells is a bad idea. And throwing Nautilus-type machines, of course, would just be much worse.

But you can throw the medicine balls and slam balls. They're designed to be thrown. You can throw them in more ways than the shot from the shot put. The shot is also way cool, but that's for another post.

Yes, We Can Impeach Trump Any Time We Like Now

Yes, we can impeach Trump anytime we like after January 3, because impeachment only requires a majority in the House, and we'll have that. But to CONVICT him and remove him from office requires 2/3 of the Senate.

I think a large portion of the general public doesn't realize that to impeach means only to charge someone with a crime. That it's only the first step in removing a President from office.

In 1998, Bill Clinton was impeached by the majority-Republican House, but the Senate, with a larger Republican majority in the Senate than they have now or will have after January 3, failed to convict him. In fact, what they mainly succeeded in doing was making themselves look silly. In the mid-term elections, held a few months after the impeachment debacle was over, the Republicans lost a few seats in the House and gained none in the Senate.

We don't even have a simple majority in the Senate, and we won't after January 3, and which 20 or so Republican Senators do you see crossing the aisle to join us? I see possibly 1 or 2. Possibly.

There's no point in impeachment if the trial in the Senate is just going to be a Republican farce. And things would have to change in HUGE ways before it would be anything else.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but it looks like we won't solve this little problem until November 2020.

The Inevitable Victory of the Proletariat

"Die wesentliche Bedingung für die Existenz und für die Herrschaft der Bourgeoisklasse ist die Anhäufung des Reichtums in den Händen von Privaten, die Bildung und Vermehrung des Kapitals; die Bedingung des Kapitals ist die Lohnarbeit. Die Lohnarbeit beruht ausschließlich auf der Konkurrenz der Arbeiter unter sich. Der Fortschritt der Industrie, dessen willenloser und widerstandsloser Träger die Bourgeoisie ist, setzt an die Stelle der Isolierung der Arbeiter durch die Konkurrenz ihre revolutionäre Vereinigung durch die Assoziation. Mit der Entwicklung der großen Industrie wird also unter den Füßen der Bourgeoisie die Grundlage selbst hinweggezogen, worauf sie produziert und die Produkte sich aneignet. Sie produziert vor allem ihren eigenen Totengräber. Ihr Untergang und der Sieg des Proletariats sind gleich unvermeidlich."

("The essential condition for the existence and for the dominance of the capitalist class is the accumulation of wealth in private hands, the creation of ever-more captial, and capital relies upon wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on the competition of workers with each other. The progress of industry, whose involuntary and unresisting promoters the capitalists are, puts, in place of the isolation of the workers through their competition, their revolutionary unification through association. With the development of large-scale industry, therefore, the ground upon which the capitalists produce and take the profits of production will pulled out from beneath their feet. What they are producing, above all, are their own gravediggers. Their fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.")

That's the last paragraph of the first chapter, "Bourgeois und Proletarier" ("Capitalists and Proletariats") of the Communist Manifesto by Marx & Engels. That is some stirring prose, no doubt. And if you're wondering who wrote that excellent English translation -- it was me. You're welcome.

Marx was one of the followers of Hegel known as the Young Hegelians. Hegel stated that the development of the mind toward its ever-greater fulfillment was inevitable. The Young Hegelian Marx modified Hegel's prophecy inasmuch as he declared that what was inevitable was the victory of the working class.

I like much of what Marx says, but I would modify this remark of his inasmuch as I believe that what is inevitable is: -- cue Michael Corleone staring down the phony Senator from Nevada -- nothing. The Communist Manifesto was first published 170 years ago. Perhaps it's time to become more critical of Marxist predictions and less confident that any sort of economic justice is inevitable, without our working hard, first to achieve it, and then to hold on to it. The Marxist glass can be seen as half-empty or half-full in its startling relevancy to today' economic conditions. Is it half-full because Marxist works are still so relevant? Or are they still so relevant because this stirring but half-empty prose has changed the world so little in such a long time?

Marxists, don't get angry with me, I don't want to throw away the works of the Prophet. I want to improve upon them. There is much to work with here.

I Didn't Work Out With a 300-Pound Medicine Ball Today

I went into the sporting-goods store, went right for the 20-lb medicine ball lying on the floor and lifted it up. The young lady working the cash register asked if I needed any help. I told her the truth: that I had just come in there to do a set with the 20-pounder.

I asked whether she was aware that medicine balls as big as 300 lbs were made and offered to the public. She said no, seemed genuinely surprised and asked what medicine balls so big could possibly be used for.

I told her that I saw two possibilities: 1) Frontin'.

Somebody might buy a 300-lb medicine ball just so they could pay 3 or 4 strong people to carry it into their home, and keep it on their floor and try to convince other people that they actually exercised with it; and 2) I asked if she'd seen those World's Strongest Man contests on TV. She said she had. I pointed out that in those competitions, sometimes kegs and stones and other unwieldy objects were lifted which weighed 300 lbs or more. I asked rhetorically: How would someone train for such a competition, if not with a 300-lb medicine ball?

We chatted a little bit more about medicine balls. Just in case it's not already completely obvious: I'm fascinated by medicine balls these days. I happen to have owned an 8-pounder and a 5-kilogram ball for years. I googled looking for exercises in which I wouldn't actually have to throw the balls. One thing I found is called the Russian Twist.

I am really feelin' the Russian Twist right now, which I've been doing with the 8-pound ball. I'm feeling it in a really good way. I guess, technically, a Russian Twist is not done with a weight, and if you do it with a medicine ball or some other weight in your hands, it's a Weighted Russian Twist.

After my stop at the sporting-goods store, I walked around the strip mall. Literally: I walked all 360 degrees around it. I saw one bird in the trees behind the strip mall; it was flying too fast and close for me to tell what kind of bird it was. I walked for about 40 minutes altogether. Got a little endorphine thing going on right now. Hope I don't feel 300 years old and like all my bones have been crushed when I wake up tomorrow morning. I think I'll be okay. I think I may finally be doing that thing I've been telling myself to do for years and failing to do: starting an exercise routine and building it up gradually, in a sustainable way, without injuring myself. Those 5-mile walks I was doing a couple of months ago, soon after my surgery: that was overdoing it. That was unsustainable. But I should be able eventually to do 5 miles and more at a stretch, by gradually working up to it, and carrying drinking water with me. I don't have to get there today. I don't have to be a beautiful super-athlete today -- and it's a good thing that I don't have to do it today, cause I can't do it today. 40 minutes walking and a little bit of light, careful medicine-ball work was good for today. Plus plenty of stretching.

Did I mention how much I love the medicine balls? I can picture myself carrying a medicine ball on a long walk as if it were a pampered dog. And by the way, I have found a way to throw a medicine ball in my house: I just lie flat on my back and push the ball with both hands straight up, hard as I can. So far, I don't seem to be in danger of putting a hole in the ceiling.

Wish List of New Discoveries of Ancient Texts

There's nothing at all realistic about this post. It's pure wishful thinking.

Trogus was highly regarded as an historian by his Augustan contemporaries, and yet, except for an epitome and a table of contacts, his work has disappeared. Why did the work of an esteemed historian vanish? Some say that's the wrong question, and perhaps they're right. They say the real question is,how did any ancient literature survive at all, all the way down to our own time?

As regular readers of my blog know, and as others can see by clicking here, I wish the missing books of Livy would be discovered. He wrote his history of Rome in 142 books, 35 survive, plus a few additional odds and ends. Livy's reputation as an historian has often risen and sunk. I believe it's risen recently, as some archaeological finds support his versions of various events. But Livy is still avidly read even by those who put no stock in him as an historian, because he's a good writer, who tells stories in a very engaging manner.

Texts by Livy as well as by many other ancient Latin authors disappeared in the late 6th century. It would be great if we found out that some people of that time had hidden collections of ancient Latin, just as, a fewer centuries earlier, some Gnostics and other Christian heretics had hidden their favorites texts, and if we were to stumble across some of those collections of the ancient Latins, as we've recently stumbled across some of those collections of early Christian writings. Other than stumbling across them, how can we find such collections of Latin texts mentioned and quoted until the late sixth century, and then no more? (How long was Petronius' Satyricon, all together?) You might as well ask me how exactly to go into a forest and find a unicorn.

Time has not been kind to ancient Phoenician manuscripts. We possess very little Phoenician literature today. On p 588 of The East Face of Helicon, Martin L. West fantasizes about coming across a corpus of ancient Phoenician the size of the Old Testament. Why stop there? Imagine a mighty chest, longer than a small canoe and fat as a keg, so well-built by the best and proudest of Phoenician Carthage's craftsmen that it preserved almost immaculately the hoard of the choicest Phoenician literature on papyrus and parchment with which it was stuffed to the brim, then to be hidden from the Roman fires, hidden until our own time... I mean, it'd be nice to get the other side of the story of that conflict, wouldn't it? Round things out a bit, it might. Not to mention the many centuries' worth of an entire civilization's poetry, history, science...

I don't wish so intensely for more and more and still more finds of ancient papyri of the Bible and other Early Christian texts, but that's okay, there are many others fervently wishing that in my stead. It would be nice to have the entire collected works of the Classical Greek tragedians, and more than just fragments of the pre-Socratics, and every lecture Aristotle ever delivered.

I don't know enough yet about the Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians or ancient Persions to even know what more to wish for from them. And as far as the rest of the world, let me put it this way: my first introduction to Lao Tzu and the Tao is about a week old. I'm reeling from that. (In a good way. A very good way.) I'd never, ever before seriously asked myself: can I learn to read Chinese? Anyway, to return to the theme of this post: I don't know enough about any ancient literature other than Latin and Greek to know of any lost writings to specifically long for. The Vedas? I don't know much more than the name. When did the Japanese begin writing? Beats me.

Please feel free to mention your own wishes.

Upcoming Books From Steven Bollinger

First of all, I've got to surf the Jordan B Peterson wave:

I will do this with my book 0 Rules for Life: Welcome to the Existentialist Void, the first honest self-help book. The first one that tells you that all self-help books are crap, and that you've got to figure out some stuff for yourself. It will be an introduction to existentialism (which is also known as common sense), thinly disguised as self-help crap: "The good news is also the bad news: there are no rules for life, except those you make for yourself. You make your own rules whether you want to or not, whether you realize it or not. Embrace the terror and embrace the freedom: they are one and the same." And so on. Motivational crap like that.

In fiction, there's my already long-awaited novel. I've mentioned this one before: Because it's There. It's the story of an unmotivated young man who suddenly, in one instant, is struck by a powerful motivation: to cross the entire world with no vehicles, motorized or non-. This includes no boats, rafts or even life jackets. Yeah, you can bet that the swimming will be the hard part!

And then there will be the dozens if not hundreds of books consisting of essays from this very blog. Did you realize that I've posted on The Wrong Monkey nearly 1700 times? As John Cleese said in that cheese shop which was utterly uncontaminated by chesse: "What a senseless waste of human life!"

All I need is a genius agent or a Kickstarter campaign or generous patrons or something. Anything. As always, all I need is all the help I can get. SPREAD THE HYPE! Spread it thick like decadent jelly. Spread it high, spread it low. Go spread it on the mountain. Go Spread Me. Spread me like the nice monkey I am. Spread me before I spread again!

Almost forgot: there are also the 2 novels I've already finished and nearly forgotten: Salvation, my version of the story of Jesus in which Jesus is an atheist, Jesus and Pilate are good friends, and Christianity spreads as the result of a series of misunderstandings. For example, in my version, Jesus says, DON'T turn the other cheek. If you're not going to fight back, then at least cover up or run away. Misunderstandings like that.

Then there's my second novel, The Independents, which is about 300 or 400 pages long.

Then there are the two novels I've begun on this blog: the one with angels, with no title yet; and Because of Mistakes!, a novel about some people in London in 1900, at least two of whom are autistic. (It's not a mistake to refer to autism in 1900: it's an anachronism of which the author is aware. A piece of poetic license.)

The World's Greatest Bookstore

Is it possible that it would be worth traveling all the way across the world -- even if you don't like traveling -- just to see a bookstore?

Ah, but this is not just any bookstore, my friend. I'm talking about El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Some guys named it "second most beautiful bookshop in the world." Who named it so? Who cares! What is the number one most beautiful bookshop? I don't know! You don't seem to get my point -- this one is in Buenos Aires! Have I ever been in Buenos Aires? Well, to be completely honest -- no! But I was in Bonn once, and a girl I was seeing and I went all dressed up a movie theatre because we mistakenly thought they were going to show Stop Making Sense and clear out some of the seats to make a dance floor, and we thought that, all dressed up, we might look quite nifty among all the punks. (Who knows, maybe the Bonn scene would've been way ahead ahead of us, and we would've been just one among many quite unsurprising couples playing dress-up.) But we were there on the wrong night, and Apartment Zero was playing, set in Buenos Aires, starring Hart Bochner and Colin Firth, dubbed into German.

I loved the movie. She didn't. We didn't have much in common except physical attraction. That was almost 30 years ago, and physical attraction is still extremely important to me, but that might've been the relationship which finally convinced me that physical attraction, all by itself, is not enough to make a relationship rewarding. I'm heterosexual, and God knows she was gorgeous, but I found myself glancing around the theatre as the heavily homoerotic Apartment Zero played, wondering whether I might spot some guy who was bored with his guy with whom I could escape.

As it turned out, I didn't escape from her until a couple of months later.

So no, I've never ever been to Buenos Aires. And no, I don't know if El Ateneo Grand Splendid is really even all that splendid. The potential splendour of bookstores is not even the point. Well then, you demand, what on Earth IS my point? And I stare at you in horror as you ask me that, because I have never stopped trying to make my point. If you were playing footsie with me under the table right now instead of interrogating me about bookstores then we wouldn't even be having this unpleasant little tiff! Go ahead! Run away! You're so gorgeous and so unhappy and it's not my fault at all!

I don't know what she wanted from me. If she had just come right and told me, as specifically as she possibly could, what she really wanted, maybe I could've given it to her just like that, and maybe then she would've stopped being unhappy, just like that, and maybe even today, almost thirty years later, we'd still be married, and we'd have three stunningly gorgeous kids, maybe even an unbelievably beautiful grandchild or two. If she'd just told me what she wanted. Yes, if she'd been completely honest, maybe I would've turned and run in horror and never looked back. Or maybe I would have had exactly no problem giving it to her. And then suddenly she would've been happy. And that would've been so great. I never saw her happy, but I can easily picture it. I hope, somehow, that she's happy now. I can see her face lighting up with a smile as beautiful as Rachel McAdams'.

Medicine Balls

I have some medicine balls. Not this many:

One of mine is slightly larger than a basketball and weighs 5 kilograms. That's right: kilograms, not pounds. I wonder where it's from, originally. Probly not Murrka.

Another one is slightly larger than a shot which is thrown in the shot put. And there's got to be simpler way of mentioning such a shot. Then again, maybe not. It's just barely small enough that I could put it like a shot. I'm very curious about how far I could put it. I'm not going to find out today because it's icy outside. Okay, I could go outside right now and put it. I probably won't. We'll see.

I know that exercise with medicine balls generally involves throwing them. But I can't throw them inside my house, which has limited space and fragile walls and floors. I watched a video yesterday in which a trainer had his clients throw medicine balls as hard as they could against cinder block walls. At one point the trainer said approvingly of his client, a UFC fighter, "Yeah, he's trying to throw that ball right through that wall." I sometimes hold a medicine ball and move around with it, or shift it from hand to hand, or throw it up, but not high enough to hit the low ceiling, and catch it before it hits the floor, and repeat. I don't know whether I'm getting good exercise when I do such things, or injuring myself, or neither. Hey, maybe I'm doing both!

Yesterday I was holding the 5 kilogram ball, and I actually wondered whether it was about as heavy as medicine balls get! Yeah, it seems kind of silly in retrospect that I wondered that, because I googled it and found medicine balls weighing as much as 300 pounds.

The 300-pounders are not any bigger than regular medicine balls. I don't know what they're made of, whether they're rubber all the way through -- extra-heavy rubber -- or basically just iron or brass with a very thin coating of rubber, or what. I don't know -- if you can play catch with one of those, you may be overdoing it, and maybe you just need a really good hug. But who am I to judge? Go ahead and get your freaky strong on if you want to.

I'm pretty sure that I could lift a 300 lb medicine off of the ground or floor all by myself. I'm also pretty sure that if I did it right now, I'd injure myself. But it doesn't have to stay that way. I could transform myself from a Great Big Fat Guy to a Great Big Freakishly Strong Guy Who is Not Fat At All. It's possible. Or I could go thin. I've been thin before, it wasn't bad at all. It was much easier to jump around like a cat when I was thin. Or I could just forget about everything except enjoying lots and lots of great food, and go for 500 lbs. (Weighing 500 lbs, that is. Not working out with a 500-lb ball. Although that too would be possible...)

I think that tossing the medicine balls as described above, repeating for dozens of reps, is good for me. I think I can feel myself getting stronger and less fat. Tossing a medicine ball just a little ways into the air, because of the low ceiling, I can feel it in muscles all over me, from my calves to my neck.

I think it's possible that I won't write any more Great Big Fat Guy posts. Maybe instead, the next Great Big Fat Guy post will just be a Great Big Guy post. That'd be sweet. And I think it's more likely than me weighing 500 lbs. Yeah, I really feel it all over. Feels good. There is no doubt, I'm getting some good exercise from these medicine balls.

(But, of course, a well-rounded exercise program includes many kinds of exercise. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that medicine balls can do it for you all by themselves.)

(Although...)

Biblical Scholars Be Trippin'

The meme above is one of those things that's hysterically funny if you understand it, and if you don't, explaining it to you would probably just exhaust me and bore you. So I'll just say that one reason Biblical scholars be trippin' is that they continue to discover huge amounts of extremely-old Biblical manuscripts.

For example, James Snapp Jr wrote last June about some palimpsests. When the ink is scraped off of a piece of parchment to make room to write something new, the indentations left by the old writing are a palimpsest. For over a century, people have been getting steadily better at using technology to recover palimpsests: that is, to make them readable again. Snapp wrote:

For at least the past five years, reports have circulated about the contents of palimpsests (recycled manuscripts) that were discovered in 1975 at Saint Catherine’s monastery. National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, The Atlantic, ScienceBlog, Ancient-Origins, and the BBC have all told readers that major research is underway that involves ancient manuscripts and expensive manuscript-reading equipment.

Now the Sinai Palimpsests Project has a website, and visitors can easily get some sense of the scale of the work that is being done with the (relatively) newly discovered manuscripts. The manuscripts at Saint Catherine’s include all kinds of compositions: ancient medicine-recipes, patristic sermons, poems, liturgical instruction-books, Old Testament books, and much more.

Fifteen continuous-text Greek manuscripts are among the newly discovered palimpsests. All but one of these New Testament manuscripts have been given production-dates in the 500s or earlier.

Another thing they be trippin' about is claims that the Codex Sinaiticus, famous for being the oldest complete Bible known to exist -- and named Sinaiticus because it was found in the very same St Catherine's monastery in Sinai where they have found the above-mentioned palimpsests -- is actually not nearly as old as had been thought. It was dated to the 4th century, now here come these guys saying it was made in the 7th century. But apparently that brouhaha has come and gone and the 4th-century dating has survived. But don't take my word for any of this: let Steven Avery tell you all about it.

MB&F L’Epée 1839 Grant

This is Grant.

Grant can be moved into 3 different positions, and is about 7 inches wide and 8 inches long.

And, as you can see by this photo --

-- Grant is a clock, a joint venture between the companies MB&F, who make mostly somewhat out-there watches, and L’Epée 1839, who make mostly weird and playful clocks. Grant is named after a WWII tank which was named after Ulysses S Grant, was made in a limited edition of 150 pieces, and retails for a little over $20,000, which is a real bargain when you look at all of the high-quality craftsmanship and fine materials which have gone into this piece.

Can we talk about socialism? There are some socialists who hate wealth and money and want to do away with it. Then there are socialists such as myself and George Bernard Shaw. Shaw wrote, in the Preface to Major Barbara,

"To teach children that it is sinful to desire money, is to strain towards the extreme possible limit of impudence in lying, and corruption in hypocrisy. The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization, the one sound spot in our social conscience. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty as conspicuously and undeniably as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people. It is only when it is cheapened to worthlessness for some, and made impossibly dear to others, that it becomes a curse. In short, it is a curse only in such foolish social conditions that life itself is a curse. For the two things are inseparable: money is the counter that enables life to be distributed socially: it is life as truly as sovereigns and bank notes are money. The first duty of every citizen is to insist on having money on reasonable terms; and this demand is not complied with by giving four men three shillings each for ten or twelve hours’ drudgery and one man a thousand pounds for nothing. The crying need of the nation is not for better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money."

(My emphasis, lest some careless reader think that I or Shaw were telling the lazy poor to complain less and work harder.)

The other sort of socialist -- the Puritan sort, even though they often are atheists -- will point to things like Grant and say that they represent all that is wrong with the world. They may bite their tongues, if they were raised as Christians, to keep from saying "all that is wicked," but that's what they mean. Shaw and I favor universal basic incomes, that is: giving money to everyone, because everyone should have it. We see nothing wicked about Grant. What is wicked to us is that the world is arranged so that so very few people can afford to buy themselves something like a Grant, if they so choose. (Not everyone could buy a Grant even if everyone were rich, because there are only 150 of him, but there are many extravagant things like Grant.) And that other sort of socialist, the Puritan kind, ought to brush up on their Marx, especially Marx on the subject of leisure, if they think Marx is on their side, and not not mine and Shaw's.

It strikes me how many of these socialists who say they're against wealth are a lot wealthier than I've ever been. They have varying definitions about how wealthy is too wealthy, but, conveniently, it tends to be much wealthier than they are. Bernie Sanders may well be a millionaire, but billionaires really grind his gears. For them not to be much more focused on poverty requires, I think, both a lack of experience of it, and a lack of empathy. It happens now and then that a rich Puritan socialist will actually give away everything they have, to the point where they actually become poor on purpose, but it doesn't happen often. Shaw, as far as I know, was never close to being poor, but he was gifted with enormous empathy. He was able to spot suffering without having experienced something similar to it himself. And he was clever enough to see that one doesn't reduce the amount of misery in the world by becoming miserable.

Anyway, I just came here to say: lookit Grant, he's wicked cool!

Martha Nussbaum, Non-Insider

In 1947 Martha Nussbaum was born. Her name at birth was Martha Craven. She claims to have repudiated her own "aristocratic" upbringing and to dislike elites and in-groups, whether it's the Bloombury group or Derrida. She has taught at Harvard, Brown and the University of Chicago, received more than 60 honorary degrees, and a few days ago she won the Berggruen Prize, which comes with a $1 million cash award.

In the mid-1980's, when Nussbaum was a professor in both the Classics and Philosophy Departments at Brown, she published The Fragility of Goodness, a book which added considerably to her already considerable prestige in academia. In the late 1980's, I was a Collage Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. We College Scholars were given The Fragility of Goodness to read. Prof Nussbaum came to the University of Tennessee to speak. There was a Q&A after her lecture. I asked several questions.

I have never been particularly drawn to nor particularly repelled by Nussbaum's writing. I think I went to the trouble of coming up with questions for her because I was drawn to the aura of power around her. Double full professor in the Ivy League at around age 40, that's sumpin. Many camerapeople followed her around, including at least one video camera crew. I don't remember what my questions were. I'm quite certain they were uninteresting.

By this time, 1988 or early 1989, I had heard the name Derrida, but not with connotations which tempted me to read him.

Bill Moyers interviewed Prof Nussbaum on TV about The Fragility of Goodness. In his introduction, there are several shots of Nussbaum's visit to the University of Tennessee. In one shot, from behind the speaker's lecturn, in the upper-left corner of the screen, is a small smudge which may or may not be me.

In 2007, Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher whom I still liked somewhat at the time, despite numerous German-speaking friends having assured me that he was an asshole, published a book about Derrida. That was the first time I was strongly tempted to read a text either by or about Derrida. However, my competence in the German language never ceases to grow, and the more precisely I'm able to understand Sloterdijk, the less I like him. I didn't get a copy of Sloterdijk's book about Derrida, nor, at the time, did I get any books by Derrida.

Less than 2 months ago I finally began to read Derrida. I've taken an immediate and immense like to him. I'm a postmodernist! Who knew?!

Present-Day Epicureans and Stoics in Academia

At around 6:45 in this podcast of The Majority Report with Sam Seder,



Nathan J Robinson, editor-in-chief of Current Affairs (a wonderful magazine, by the way) says:

"There is a kind of sense among many academics that engaging with the public is something that is at best optional, and at worst, actually, almost anti-intellectual."

Sam and Nathan are discussing how it is that pseudo-intellectuals such as Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris are able to pass themselves off as geniuses and have great success engaging with the public. Nathan points to the disconnect between academic journals and more popular media, and the resulting lack of push-back against frauds and/or fools (it isn't always easy to see which is which) like Peterson and Harris. Many academics, Nathan is saying, see their task as involving academic journals and book publishers in their specialty, and their lives as being located in somewhat closed communities of their peers, and are quite simply not particularly interested in, or are even disdainful of, the wider public. Their ivory towers can be quite comfortable, quite blissfully calm compared to the strife of public life and politics, and they can see little reason to venture outside.

In short, many of them are Epicureans.

There are other academics who actively fight against the sort of nonsense being spread by people like Peterson and Harris, and like Stephen Greenblatt, at least when Greenblatt ventures outside of his specialty of English Renaissance literature, and spreads sheer hair-raising nonsense about ancient Latin literature and its transmission, as he does in his huge bestseller The Swerve. The ones who try to stand up for academia in public, who denounce the charlatans and half-wits posing as intellectuals, are thoroughly Stoic in their outlook: the work of their disciplines is important, they feel, and it is important that the public not be grossly misinformed about it.

Nathan J Robinson, somewhat plugged into the academic world, has spoken to neuroscientists and asked them what they think of Sam Harris, and found that often they have never heard of Harris. This is somewhat surprising in that Harris is the most famous living neuroscientist in the world, and somewhat distressing in that he has sold millions of copies of books full of positions on neuroscience which have little to no credibility among those neuroscientists who have bothered to look into Harris' work. (Harris, with a BA in philosophy from Stanford in 2000 and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA in 2009, has published a total of 2 peer-reviewed papers as well as his 7 "popular" books.) Similarly, Jordan Peterson has sold millions of books in which he pretends to be expert not only in his academic specialty of psychology, but also in philosophy and evolutionary biology and other fields as well, and, similar to Harris when it comes to philosophy or neuroscience, and similar to Greenblatt on the subject of ancient Latin literature and its transmission, Peterson rarely says or writes anything with which a scholar competent in those fields would agree.

Some academics seem, at least at first blush, to be Epicureans and Stoics at the same time. For example, Bart Ehrman is a respected specialist in the history of early Christianity who has published well-received scholarly papers and books, and has also published "popular" books aimed at the general public, which offer a sort of watered-down version of his "academic" books: no footnotes, less detail.

Such a split of one and the same scholar into "academic" and "popular" publishing, gives short shrift to the Stoic side. It implies that the public can't really handle the good stuff, unadulterated. It contains a bit of the contemptuousness of the Epicurean.

I have often been greatly tempted to follow the Epicurean path, and leave the big dumb ugly world to blow itself up. And perhaps I'm a fool not to have followed that path. Who can truly say how much we change the world, how much of the grim effort to change the world is a waste? Be that as it may: as a Stoically-minded person outside of academia, but with great interest in academia, I wish more academics would attempt to shine more of the full light of their learning into the public arena, both to expose pseudo-intellectuals to whom many of them have until now abandoned the stoa, the public marketplace of ideas, and also to be more sharing with the full delight of truly learned discourse.

The Origins of Philosophy

From the Hellenistic age down to our own, Aristotle and Plato have been very widely studied in "the West." Aristotle studied under Plato; Plato and others sat adoringly at the feet of Socrates; Socrates learned among the last of the pre-Socratics; and the first pre-Socratics, as we all know, sprang, fully-formed and philosophizing away, from the brow of Zeus.

What?! There was no philosophy before the pre-Socratics? Yes, that's exactly what it says here, on p 10 of Wisdom of the West by Bertrand Russell, London, 1959:

"Philosophy and science, as we now know them, are Greek inventions[...]Philosophy and science begin with Thales of Miletus in the early sixth century BC."

Okay then. That's all cleared up. And what exactly is philosophy? Russell covers that too, same book, same page:

"Philosophy begins when someone asks a general question."

Got it!

Seriously, though: although I find Russell to be eminently sensible almost all of the time, what he is saying here is absurd. Even though, as far as I have been able to determine -- I don't know how far that is -- very few "Western" scholars seem to be saying anything different about how philosophy, or at least "Western" philosophy, began.

One of the few exceptions is Arthur Schopenhauer. In his Parerga und Paralipomena, part I, in the chapter "Fragmente zur Geschichte der Philosophie," in the section on the Pre-Socratics (Saemtliche Werke, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt aM, 4th printing, 1996, vol 4, pp 45-56), Schopenhauer points out how some of the positions of the pre-Socratics are anticipated in Egypt and in the Brahmanic philosophy of the Vedas. He even mentions (p 56) Apuleius' assertion that Pythagoras had traveled as far as India, and been personally schooled by Brahmans.

You might say that it's absurd to accept Apuleius' account, written well over half a millennium after Pythagoras' death, as anything more than an amusing anecdote. And you might be right about that. But is it more absurd than assuming that no Brahmanic, or Egyptian, or Phoenician, or Babylonian, or other philosophy found its way to Greece before the career of Thales was over?

I submit that what began with the Greek pre-Socratics is that the individual tidbits of wisdom began to be preserved in connection with the names of individual wise people. A very significant development, and even more so to authors concerned about receiving the proper credit for their work than it may be to the public at large.

But to arbitrarily advance several thousand large steps past that and flatly assert that before Thlaes, no-one, anywhere, had ever stopped and asked what it all means, is, I must say so in all directness, thoroughly absurd.

And I say so even though I have only found one Western philosopher, Schopenhauer, who also says so. I have found many "Eastern" scholars, and laypeople from all parts of the Earth, who agree with me on this point. It's not the only point in which I feel that Schopenhauer and I are a bit lonely. There's also the matter of Hegel. There are so very many perfectly intelligent scholars who admire Hegel so very much. And yet, when I read Hegel, I see what Schopenhauer describes: an empty-headed charlatan, a pseudo-intellectual par excellence, a sheer horse's ass who is shamelessly wasting everybody's time. A Sam Harris of the early 19th century.

There is yet another point where I find myself and many, many other laypeople on one side, and almost every single Western scholar on the other: the scholars almost all state quite flatly that it is quite certain that Jesus existed, and is not merely a fictional character in a myth, a character perhaps cobbled together from the biographies of John the Baptist and some other real people.

I do not take it at all lightly when the academic consensus is so overwhelmingly against me. It troubles me, it truly does. But no academic consensus will persuade me to stop thinking for myself.

Who is Jordan Peterson and Why Have 7 of My Previous 8 Posts Been About Him?

(8 out of 9 if you count this one.) I'm so glad you asked!

Jordan Peterson

is a Canadian professor of psychology who is one year younger than I am and specializes in myths and their Jungian interpretation. For example, he points out that in some myths males represent order and females represent chaos. So far so good, that is an accurate description of those myths.

But then, instead of pointing out that such myths (developed and propounded mostly by males, of course, with very little consultation of female viewpoints) are descriptive of the psychology of the myth-tellers, he actually claims that they are literally accurate. He insists that males are ordered and that females are chaotic. All 4 billion or so human males, Peterson says, are ordered, and all 4 billion or so human females are chaotic.

And furthermore, he insists that male and female are the only 2 human genders which exist. (Any real experts in myth who never heard of Peterson before this blog post are already beginning to sense how much myth Peterson has to ignore in order to keep his worldview intact.) And this leads to the way in which Peterson became famous: by objecting, in 2016, to the the 2nd clause of Bill C-16, which reads:

This enactment amends the Canadian Human Rights Act to add gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination.

The enactment also amends the Criminal Code to extend the protection against hate propaganda set out in that Act to any section of the public that is distinguished by gender identity or expression and to clearly set out that evidence that an offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on gender identity or expression constitutes an aggravating circumstance that a court must take into consideration when it imposes a sentence.

Peterson objects to this because, he claims, it will infringe upon his freedom of speech by forcing him to use pronouns other than "he" and "she" when referring to persons.

As far as I know, Peterson has not yet faced any criminal or civil prosecution because of his use of pronouns. Still, in tried-and-true right-wing fashion, he is claiming to have been victimized when no-one has done anything to him.

That's what made him famous. That, and some very popular YouTube videos in which he spews his right-wing viewpoints which, in tried-and-true right-wing fashion, he claims are not right-wing, but Classical-Liberal (or, as we would say in the United States, libertarian.) And also his book which followed very quickly upon his sudden fame as a martyr against pronoun abuse, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. (Remember: as mentioned above, Peterson says that males are orderly, females are chaotic, and that no further human genders exist.)

Peterson is a far-right-wing nut. He checks all the boxes: He claims that women need (and secretly want) to be dominated and controlled by men. He says that postmodern neo-Marxists have (again, secretly, as the postmodernists deny that they are Marxists and the Marxists deny that they are postmodern) swarmed into the faculties of our universities, where they are trying their best to enslave the minds of our young people in preparation for marching all of us off to the gulag. He is a climate-change skeptic. He says that white privilege doesn't exist. He's against women's right to choose with no if's and's or but's. He's against casual sex and gay marriage.

And he's passing himself off in many -- by no means all -- mainstream media outlets as not being right-wing at all. And he has a huge following among incels and other groups of misogynistic young men. And, annoying to me personally as a real intellectual, very many people, even including some generally-sensible Leftists, keep referring to this doofus as an intellectual. Does this help answer your question about why I've been posting about him?