APPENDIX: Why I call Mary Beard a bullshitter. If you can’t trust a historian for something you eyewitnessed (below caught redhanded), how can you trust her for something you did not?

Post Scriptum: This position caused me to get 000s of harrassing posts from U.K. journos, with names I recognize such as the BS vendor Simon Singh and others I don’t recognize, but all seem to have the same profile (usually verified). (Some are far more insidious: Massimo Pigliucci for instance misrepresented my argument above in a long account that loses you in niceties.) The smearing mob can’t get that 1) They can’t get me to lose a “job” or affect my income (even if I loved them they don’t have $$ to give, anyway), 2) They can’t sue me over here (recall, America), though I enjoy lawsuits & confrontation, 3) They can’t stop people from reading my books (IYIs are a tiny minority of book buyers), 4) Their random pop-psych labels such as “childish”, “rude”, “narcissistic”, “toxic masculinity” “lacking in self confidence”, or some newly diagnosed psychological disorder by the BBC just to repress dissent fail to convince, 5) They have increased my twitter following (in spite of ~1000 blocks), 6) They can’t reach my mother because someone is instructed to pick up the phone and confuse them in Levantine, 7) What people think of me has never been my concern (truth & integrity come before reputation).

Lesson: Studying courage doesn’t make you couragous, no more than eating cow meat turns you into a cow. All these intellectuals know is to either shut up or be part of a lynch mob. This explains why all these “classicists” (who know in intimite details what people of courage such as Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, Julian, Leonidas, Zenobia, etc. ate for breakfast) can’t have a shade of intellectual valor. Is it that academia (& journalism) is fundamentally the refuge of the stochastophobe tawker? That is, the voyeur who wants to watch but not take risks? It appears so.