Wednesday 12 June 2013

"Pablito the Undistinguished", "Warsaw Wally", "Butthead", "Heritage Harry" and assorted epithets

.
It seems to me that artefact collectors both sides of the Atlantic have one fundamental characteristic which they share. When their glib arguments are challenged, when somebody asks them to specify exactly why they think what they write, if they cannot twist and turn to avoid the question by changing the subject, they invariably fall back on name-calling. I propose calling that the Houghton-Howland Principle, and readers can check out for themselves to what degree I am right suggesting it is a pretty general rule.

TAKE A GOOD LOOK at this behaviour, for these are precisely the sort of people the PAS wants to grab more and more millions of public quid to make into the "partners" of the British Museum, archaeological heritage professionals and to whom they want us all to entrust the exploitation of the archaeological record. Take a good look and decide what you think about that as a "policy".  

5 comments:

kyri said...

to be fair to mr tompa he didnt call you any names paull,now the metal detectors,well true idiots resort to abuse as soon as they run out of argument as it saves their grey cells from being over worked,but enough of that,as a uk tax payer i must agree with you that the pas should take a good look at its awards policy not to mention bumping up the value of any find once they have issued a nice pas number and a find spot.how much would the crosby garrette helmet have sold for ,without the help and publicity they got free of charge from the pas,not even £20k.than they stuck two fingers up, but i bet they wont.
kyri.

Paul Barford said...

Tompa publishes insulting posts on his blog, ON BEHALF of another contributor. He is able therefore to choose what goes on the blog and what not to a greater extent than myself on mine. I cannot believe that if he said "Arthur old chum, tone it down please" that Mr Houghton would sever ties of friendship or slash his tyres whatever.

In reality there was absolutely nothing wrong with the points I was making about the stolen diary pages, why SHOULD they staay in the US?

Tompa is throwing out random snide remarks left right and centre, I was asking him to make his meaning more precise and he got narked (because it would seem, one would be forgiven for thinking, he had not really thought through not know himself what he was getting at). There certainly was no call for the remarks he published.

I therefore have no hesitation in drawing attention to the shortcomings of the clownish arguments offered by these spokesmen for collectors. Because these ARE the sort of people the PAS wants to get more and more money to "partner".

To my mind, the more the Houghton-Howlands howl instead of addressing the real issues, and the more publicity we give this, the better.

And yes, it would be good, would it not, to hear something from the PAS about all this. Past experience however shows we will not.

Paul Barford said...

Oh, and is Tompa being "fair" after throwing out yet one more barbed comment - on an unrelated topic - to say he's going to discontinue comments in that thread?

kyri said...

hi paul,i did make a comment on his blog about the not so pleasant posts towards you and i agree that they are uncalled for.arthur,is an intelligent man but however we dress it he did shine a light on the gettys scandalous behaviour.i bet he was your heroe when he did.i really cant understand why he persists with the snide remarks.
kyri.

Paul Barford said...

Well, let's leave it up to the readers of Tompa's blog to decide if they think Houghton's taunting, and that is all it is, reveal him to be "intelligent", or something else. Seen his latest?

 
Creative Commons License
Ten utwór jest dostępny na licencji Creative Commons Uznanie autorstwa-Bez utworów zależnych 3.0 Unported.