Discoveries of advanced pre-flood civiliztions

I feel like I should be reading between the lines here, but there aren't enough lines. What do you mean?

 

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Unfortunately, this discussion would get into topics of ontology that some might perceive as having a "religious" dimension, so it is best not to continue on the boards (I'd be happy to chat via PM). But by a false anthropology I mean that they do not have a sound understanding of what "man" is in the most fundamental sense.

 

I am professionally interested in the question of the "nature of money". Some economists and anthropologists argue that money is credit and always has been credit, even in primitive societies. Others - me included - argue that money is an asset, i.e. the exact opposite of credit. Hence, money is what extinguishes credit.

In the first view commodity money has no real role to play. It is, if anything, a barbarous relic, that needs to be overcome. In the second view, commodity money is real money and the precursor of all money in existence today. In this view, it is the fact that the dollar once was equivalent to gold, which bestows value even today, although the dollar stopped being as good as gold nearly 50 years ago. In my view, gold or any other commodity that creates a natural limit on the expansion of money is per se a good thing.

Somebody wrote that humankind has made all sorts of technical advances, despite leaving the gold standard behind. This is undeniably true. With no real constrains on the money supply all sorts of things can be financed, at least for a while. Good things, like the internet and smart/phones and bad things like world wars and the destruction of the environment. Gold is a decelerator and evaluator. A project financed in gold needs to meet the highest standards. If gold is money and nothing else, you can only wage a war until you run out of gold, which is usually very very quickly.

Indeed, the American Civil War was to a large extent not won on the battle field, but on the financial markets. Salmon P. Chase's scheme to suck all the gold out of the banking system, by replacing it with paper legal tender bills in 1862, gave the North the means to buy weapons and other essentials on the international markets where only gold was an acceptable means of payment.

 

In that case, it sounds like the "false" in "false anthropology" is a statement of personal religious or philosophical belief...?

 

Ontology (so a branch of philosophy), but not "personal" as in "detached from underlying objective truth." But like I said, I'd be happy to discuss off list.

 

Yeah - David Graeber most recently seen doing this. Even on the BBC.

Anyone else notice that alongside telling us all how we should reform the world economy, he also tried to start a very small academic society (HAU) but rapidly quit as at fell apart in inter-tribal warfare. Maybe anthropology is itself becoming a primitive society?

Or dogma

Rob T

 

I like Ancient Aliens because the guys there are all funny and quirky.

 

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth#Historicity

 

Nevermind that many new discoveries (may or may not) await, what are the very recent discoveries you allude to?

 

I was waiting for that one!

 

That guy was always such a poser, such a Bozo... he never could get the Londo Mollari look down pat...

 

What always has bothered me about the ancient aliens BS is the inherit post colonial racism. The very idea that 'those people' could not have possibly built anything without outside guidance is offensive.

 

AGREED!
We.did.it...

 

Yes, ancient man was ingenious in many ways. Let's take 10,000 average folks of today, plop them in the desert and tell them to build a pyramid. I'd bet they couldn't. Intelligence was the same, just without industrial age machines. Or ask them to build the dome of the Hagia Sophia without construction equipment.

 

Agreed. This is the same issue that faced those trying to figure out the Rosetta stone. Some of those seeking to translate the hieroglyphs believed that ancient Egyptians would never be smart or sophisticated enough to have an actual functioning language where letters corresponded to sounds. Instead they believed that the function was symbolic or representational. However, a very talented linguist named Champollion came along and disagreed. He tracked down speakers of Coptic and realized that the hieroglyphs represented a true language and not a mere symbolic system. The prejudice shown by some would be translators allowed Champollion the time to finally crack the puzzle. He was a linguistic prodigy and had knowledge of several dead languages as a teenager.

 

Can you cite for this? My recollection is that (eg) von Danikan got ideas from Leithbridge and when I studied Leithbridge I concluded he was a deluded fantasist rather than a racist.

There does seem to be evidence that during the cold war a strategy might have been considered to manipulate the population into the false belief there were aliens, in order to direct attention away from international tensions. I do not know if this is true, but it seems inherently plausible to me. Of course deluded fantasists would wish to believe that there are aliens watching. That was the point of the (suggested) exercise. But the fact that the human race contains some very manipulative people and also some very deluded ones seems not exactly news to me.

Regarding the hot topic here of “colonialism” – my own studies indicate many of the popular ideas on that matter track back to efforts to build a Pax Americana in the early post war period, in particular with attacks upon earlier British and French colonial attitudes. Anthropologists like Levi-Strauss led the charge, so its interesting to note that L-S spent WWII in New York, and thereafter rose on the back of the UN, in association with a lot of Ford Foundation money.

Perhaps most pertinent here is that Rockefeller paid a guy called Lazarsfeld to study the sociological impact of that famous 1938 radio phenomenon concerning Aliens - the H G Wells “War of Words” broadcast and panic. Then later when Braudel (side kick of Levi-Strauss) got a lot of cash from Ford Foundation - part of the deal was that the very same Lazarsfeld got to oversee the syllabus.

But the cash was supposedly to fund a historical institute – so why put an expert on propaganda about aliens in charge of the syllabus? Weird or what?

But these are just facts. Afraid in my experience they tend to have little impact on what people want to believe

Rob T

 

https://hyperallergic.com/470795/pseudoarchaeology-and-the-racism-behind-ancient-aliens/

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/01/02/close-encounters-racist-kind

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/201...hese-archaeologists-want-win-you-back-science

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristi...es-and-fingerprints-of-the-gods/#504f39557ab0

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/how-to-fake-an-alien-mummy/535251/

I would quote some relevant passages from von Däniken’s books concerning non-white races, but they would violate the Forum rules.

 

Thanks - but this seems merely:

"Never mind the quality - feel the width"

What hard fact do you wish to dredge out of this word soup which you claim strongly supports your position?

Rob T

 

You asked for citations, I provided them. Whether or not you choose to read them is entirely up to you. BTW, the first article will answer all your questions. I hope you take a few minutes to read it.