Tim O'Neill - History for Atheists

Consummatum est! Ten years in the planning and after over twenty years of reading and at least one year of writing, Galileo - History and Myth is complete. historyforatheists.com/2026/10/gali...

It seems I've annoyed @profaliceroberts.bsky.social. And apparently I'm a terrible person and a "misogynist", no less! 🤔 Some context. Last year Roberts, a biologist, paleopathologist and sometime TV presenter, went well outside her areas of

... a fascist because I post on Twitter. I actually hate what Twitter (I refuse to call it X) has became under that vile turd Elon Musk. But I debunk bad history and there is vastly more bad history there than over here. This place is nicer, but a bit dull. I supppose the Alice Robert fan club ...

It seems I've annoyed @profaliceroberts.bsky.social. And apparently I'm a terrible person and a "misogynist", no less! 🤔 Some context. Last year Roberts, a biologist, paleopathologist and sometime TV presenter, went well outside her areas of

... gets in a snide jab at Tom Holland @holland-tom.bsky.social at the end. Of course she does. 🙄 She had the chance to actually engage with my arguments. Instead she behaved with her usual combination of cowardice, lying and intellectually dishonest avoidance. So, typical. She's pathetic.

It seems I've annoyed @profaliceroberts.bsky.social. And apparently I'm a terrible person and a "misogynist", no less! 🤔 Some context. Last year Roberts, a biologist, paleopathologist and sometime TV presenter, went well outside her areas of

... else made at the bottom of my review "calling me out" for alleged "misogyny". Though I can see no such comment. I must say there is something particularly repugnant about those who take the real problem of genuine sexism and actual misogyny - something we see far too much ...

It seems I've annoyed @profaliceroberts.bsky.social. And apparently I'm a terrible person and a "misogynist", no less! 🤔 Some context. Last year Roberts, a biologist, paleopathologist and sometime TV presenter, went well outside her areas of

... the grand total of those is ... zero. I would have thought a medical scientist would be better at counting than that. The I'm accused of "slinging mud" at her. Where? We aren't told. Perhaps she thinks none of her fan club will bother checking my review for themselves. ...

It seems I've annoyed @profaliceroberts.bsky.social. And apparently I'm a terrible person and a "misogynist", no less! 🤔 Some context. Last year Roberts, a biologist, paleopathologist and sometime TV presenter, went well outside her areas of

... this in my reivew of *Domination*, which she had supposedly just read. This makes me wonder if she actually bothered to read the review at all. She then claims I didn't engage with her arguments and just proceeded to "rubbish" her. Anyone who reads my review can see very ...

It seems I've annoyed @profaliceroberts.bsky.social. And apparently I'm a terrible person and a "misogynist", no less! 🤔 Some context. Last year Roberts, a biologist, paleopathologist and sometime TV presenter, went well outside her areas of

... A more honest and serious person would do the obvious: address my actual arguments. But Roberts is not honest or serious. Instead, we get the patent misrepresentation below:

It seems I've annoyed @profaliceroberts.bsky.social. And apparently I'm a terrible person and a "misogynist", no less! 🤔 Some context. Last year Roberts, a biologist, paleopathologist and sometime TV presenter, went well outside her areas of

... Roberts' attention, she waved it away dimissively with some nonsense about how I had decided I wasn't going to like the book before I read it. Even if this was true, my review wasn't 10,000 words of me repeating "I don't *like* this book". It's a careful and systematic ...

It seems I've annoyed @profaliceroberts.bsky.social. And apparently I'm a terrible person and a "misogynist", no less! 🤔 Some context. Last year Roberts, a biologist, paleopathologist and sometime TV presenter, went well outside her areas of

... was pretty poor stuff, with a lot of strained arguments, selective evidence, slanted language, unuanced analysis and a dubious and biased thesis. So I detailed exactly why I found this, in a long, careful and fully referenced critical review - 10k words:- historyforatheists.com/2025/10/revi...

It seems I've annoyed @profaliceroberts.bsky.social. And apparently I'm a terrible person and a "misogynist", no less! 🤔 Some context. Last year Roberts, a biologist, paleopathologist and sometime TV presenter, went well outside her areas of

... expertise and wrote a book on the rise of Western Christendom in the Late Roman and Early Medieval periods. I was not encouraged by some early publicity for this book, or by some previous encounters with Roberts, who has some odd ideas about history, heavily coloured by ...

"Concering Hobbits" - So last week actor/director Andy Serkis kicked off yet another tedious culture war via an interview with the BBC. He's filming an unasked-for bit of IP squeezing by Warner Brothers, who need to get cash from their purchase of rights to *The Lord of the

... country gentlefolk. These class distinctions and signifiers are so foreign and archaic to the Zoomers that they don't seem to even see them. So, once again, a boring culture war about racial politics erupts around a book that current readers don't seem capable of even ...

"Concering Hobbits" - So last week actor/director Andy Serkis kicked off yet another tedious culture war via an interview with the BBC. He's filming an unasked-for bit of IP squeezing by Warner Brothers, who need to get cash from their purchase of rights to *The Lord of the

... not racial differences. JRRT's Fallohides and their descendants are the "fairer of skin". They also become the Shire's gentry. So Frodo and Bilbo live rather comfortably in a large hobbit hole, writing books and enjoying visitors for tea. Whereas Sam and his Gaffer - clearly from ...

"Concering Hobbits" - So last week actor/director Andy Serkis kicked off yet another tedious culture war via an interview with the BBC. He's filming an unasked-for bit of IP squeezing by Warner Brothers, who need to get cash from their purchase of rights to *The Lord of the

... this non-white population was. So the young Ronald Tolkien may well have seen the odd black or sub-continental person in busy Birmingham, but back in rural Sarehole they were essentially unknown. Yet our earnest Zoomers and Americans imagine Tolkien's ...

"Concering Hobbits" - So last week actor/director Andy Serkis kicked off yet another tedious culture war via an interview with the BBC. He's filming an unasked-for bit of IP squeezing by Warner Brothers, who need to get cash from their purchase of rights to *The Lord of the

... Birmingham in 1897 were even more so. The idea he was thinking of "the villagers and their children" of this specific time and place as racially diverse is absurd. Some of the sermonisers have assured us that the England of this period was not universally homogenous and ...

"Concering Hobbits" - So last week actor/director Andy Serkis kicked off yet another tedious culture war via an interview with the BBC. He's filming an unasked-for bit of IP squeezing by Warner Brothers, who need to get cash from their purchase of rights to *The Lord of the

... writing in a cultue (1940s England) that was not wholly, but still *overwhelmingly* racially white European. Further, his Shire was self-conciously and explicitly recalling a very specific and even more homogenously *white* time and place: the rural Worcestershire and ...

"Concering Hobbits" - So last week actor/director Andy Serkis kicked off yet another tedious culture war via an interview with the BBC. He's filming an unasked-for bit of IP squeezing by Warner Brothers, who need to get cash from their purchase of rights to *The Lord of the

... waved them away. They had found a form of the word "brown" applied to skin and that was all that mattered. And since it seems everything these says needs to be parsed via race politics, this finding was final: this was a RACIAL designator. Case closed! But this is a very ...

"Concering Hobbits" - So last week actor/director Andy Serkis kicked off yet another tedious culture war via an interview with the BBC. He's filming an unasked-for bit of IP squeezing by Warner Brothers, who need to get cash from their purchase of rights to *The Lord of the

... other two ancestral groups: the Stoors and the Fallohides; with the latter described comparitively as "fairer of skin" than the other two. By the time the book is set most hobbits had a mix of these groups in their ancestry and JRRT describes their general attributes in ...

"Concering Hobbits" - So last week actor/director Andy Serkis kicked off yet another tedious culture war via an interview with the BBC. He's filming an unasked-for bit of IP squeezing by Warner Brothers, who need to get cash from their purchase of rights to *The Lord of the

... few of these semons gave a supposed quote, which was usually that hobbits were "brown of skin". Except what JRRT wrote was that *some* hobbits were "*browner* of skin", which is subtly but significantly different. Firstly, *which* hobbits? He's talking at this point about...

"Concering Hobbits" - So last week actor/director Andy Serkis kicked off yet another tedious culture war via an interview with the BBC. He's filming an unasked-for bit of IP squeezing by Warner Brothers, who need to get cash from their purchase of rights to *The Lord of the

... a very, a very white [place]". This could not stand! Within hours I saw short-form videos with outraged Zoomers asserting that the Shire was racially diverse, that JRRT "said the hobbits were brown" and even that he detailed "black hobbits". Some raised themselves to the ...

"Concering Hobbits" - So last week actor/director Andy Serkis kicked off yet another tedious culture war via an interview with the BBC. He's filming an unasked-for bit of IP squeezing by Warner Brothers, who need to get cash from their purchase of rights to *The Lord of the

... There was once a day when noting that Tolkien was insprired by what he called "Northerness" and that the Shire was "very white" and highly insular would not have raised any eyebrows. But this is not that day. While anti-wokesters on certain platforms rejoiced at Serkis' ...

"Concering Hobbits" - So last week actor/director Andy Serkis kicked off yet another tedious culture war via an interview with the BBC. He's filming an unasked-for bit of IP squeezing by Warner Brothers, who need to get cash from their purchase of rights to *The Lord of the

... Rings* by taking a bit of backstory told in summary in part of one LOTR chapter and stretching it into *The Hunt for Gollum* - "like butter scraped over too much bread", as Bilbo would say. Serkis plays Gollum and is directing. Asked about the film's (so far) "almost ...