Our old friend Tim Daw continues his one-man defence of the bluestone quarrymen, mostly on his blog, which I ignore for most of the time. He clearly likes to follow my utterances and writings, and posts rather frequent and very aggressive ripostes, while in some cases being very reluctant indeed to mention me by name. Weird, that. Maybe he is afraid I might sue him.......... he need have no concerns on that score, since (unlike some of his cronies) I actually believe in the merits of open academic debate.
But the one-man hit squad is now behaving in a way which can only be described as bizarre. First, back in March he hired an anonymous "referee" to review my two papers on the Limeslade erratic, and published it on his blog, here:
https://www.sarsen.org/2025/03/peer-reviewing-john-2025.html
Anonymous peer reviews in circumstances such as these are of course completely worthless, and I refuse to engage with this one. If a reviewer does not wish to publish his / her name alongside disparaging and insulting comments, why should anybody take them seriously? Shame on him / her for taking part in this grubby little stunt. Maybe Tim wrote the review himself in spite of denying that he had anything to do with it? Maybe it was written by a committee of aggrieved academics (Ixer, Bevins and Parker Pearson come to mind) and then put in the public domain with the pretence that it represented the opinion of somebody who is an "independent expert" in the field? Who knows what goes on in the shadows..........
Then in April 2025 Tim published an anonymous rant entitled: "A Critical Review of "Carn Goedog on Mynydd Preseli Was Not the Site of a Bluestone Megalith Quarry": Another Glacial Fantasy Masquerading as Scholarship."
https://www.sarsen.org/2025/04/a-critical-review-of-carn-goedog-on.html
Again there was no mention as to the name of the author, who spat out a great deal of bile beneath a cloak of anonymity.
Then Tim wrote a riposte on the matter of far-travelled Bristol Channel coastal erratics, referring to my Limeslade erratic paper published in QN 162 (June 2024). Tim's piece was clearly designed to show that the "high level erratics" cannot have been carried by glacier ice but must have been transported on ice floes and carried uphill by human beings. (The ice floe transport idea is of course also promoted by James Scourse and others in previous publications.) The latest blog post is here:
and it refers to an "important article" -- written modestly by himself -- on the Researchgate web site:
This is referred to as a "preprint", which means of course that it has not been reviewed or assessed for quality. Suffice to say that it is a very strange piece of work, filled with misunderstandings and unwarranted assumptions and obsessed with the 100m contour. Boulders and erratic fragments found over that altitude are deemed to be worthy of consideration, and erratics beneath it are discounted as irrelevant. The important work of Madgett, Inglis and others is cited but effectively discounted, as is my article in QN 164 (February 2025). The reference list is strongly biased and selective. There is no mention of the work of Bennett et al (2024), who are in no doubt that the ice of the Irish Sea Ice Stream did affect the coasts on the southern shore of the Bristol Channel.
I just cannot understand what Tim is on about here; why is he so obsessed with demonstrating that flowing glacier ice did not affect the Bristol Channel coasts, when everybody knows that the evidence demonstrates otherwise?
Then, also in April, Tim published three further reviews of my papers on Rhosyfelin, Carn Goedog and Waun Mawn:
https://www.sarsen.org/2025/04/a-review-of-brian-johns-2015-paper.html
https://www.sarsen.org/2025/04/a-review-of-brian-johns-2024-paper.html
https://www.sarsen.org/2025/04/a-review-of-carn-goedog-on-mynydd.html
No authorship is revealed for any of these weird critiques, and so they can be dismissed without further ado. They might of course have beern generated through some AI programme, but that does mot make them any more meaningful, since we do not have any idea what prompts and editing adjustments there might have been, and we have no sight of any of the reviews that might have been commissioned from the same AI source for articles written by MPP and his team. Now THAT would be an interesting exercise...........
The AI question comes up again in a very strange article published in Researchgate with the joint authors shown as Tim Daw and "Groc":
It turns out that Groc is an AI bot, and that his (???) contribution was prompted and edited by Tim. In other words, it is a meaningless exercise which has no value as a piece of independent and unbiased research.
What on earth is this article doing on the Researchgate web site? I am contacting the moderators to check out what their policy on AI might be, and to ask for the removal of something that makes no pretence at all to represent original scientific thought or process.
So there we are then. Tim's mission of character assassination continues at an accelerating pace, but at least he has the good grace to use his own name. But it's sad to see that he now has to resort to AI to do his thinking for him. As for those who use Tim's blog site to publish abusive rants directed at me personally while sheltering beneath a cloak of anonymity, they are beneath contempt. And shame on Tim for allowing it to happen.
.
9 comments:
Very un - called for and unnecessary. I like association football, and if Tim was a coach/manager on the touchline and I was the referee, he'd be shown a red card with an indefinite ban. It's hubris but not as we know it, Jim. Why on earth he chooses to act like this is beyond me.....I recently shook his hand when he attended a Wiltshire Museum talk given by Richard Osgood on his involvement in 21st century excavations at the enigmatic Neolithic long barrow, Boles Barrow. He was sitting next to astronomer Simon Banton - what on earth does Simon think? You talk about "bile" in Tim Dad's personal remarks.It's very weird. Both he and Brian possess Oxford University qualifications. I have my suspicions that a certain geologist is fanning these completely unnecessary flames......
The bile comes from a certain anonymous writer whose name we all know. Tim simply chooses to publish it -- and thereby encourages further nonsense.
My last comment somehow mentioned Tim's Dad.......I meant Tim Daw of course.
looked at Tim's piece and find it difficult to accept the current wisdom of publishers that they can allow others to pump stuff out on their platforms without taking any editorial responsibility. However, in my reading, Tim is concluding positively by asserting, from an editorial chair, that Brian's case is plausible and people like Mr anonymous should deal with the plausibility. He also states that more work should be done on the glaciation studies and wouldn't we all like that.
I would encourage Brian not to engage with all the line items and to spend the precious summer time saving hanging art works, enjoying the company of his wife, and walking our much loved hills. The case is out there now for many years and if Mr Anonymous wants to engage seriously he can clear his mind of preconceptions and behave more like a proper doctor of science rather than a certain professor of structural linguistics (Girard). Girard apparently inspires several of the muddled maga intellects - see this weekend's ft.
Tim might better act like an editor and take a position. Encouraging two old people to fight is hardly dignified.
Chris J here - the system won't allow me to comment as normal with my Google account.
Well said Chris, good points. As a former information worker I check plenty of online Posts mentioning the Stonehenge Bluestones, and find there is a regular percentage of comments advocating as worthy of consideration the glaciation theory. Very recently I have linked up with Richard Osgood in his role as Senior Archaeologist for the Defence Infrastructure Organisation - part of the Ministry of Defence. He is very open -minded as regards the possibility of glaciated bluestones having been deposited as part of an erratic train on Salisbury Plain.
Well put Chris. By way of balance, not everyone is as dismissive of the glaciation theory as Tim Daw insists. As a former information worker, I use this training in checking out loads of online Posts mentioning Stonehenge and the issue of its bluestones, and find that there is a regular percentage of comments remarking that the glaciation theory is these days very worthy of consideration.
The other day I transferred this Post on the subject of Tim Daw's bizarre negative publications, first to my own Facebook and then to that of Tim Daw. So far Tim has not removed it, although he initially asked me not to bother him again.
"Imagine all the people/bloggers
Living life in peace"
Tim's given a swift response to this Post. I find its content baffling.
Post a Comment