Numismatic Hate-blogging

How haters spread their
bile in the Golden Days of
American Numismatics

"Cultural property issues only lead to frustration and ill will" says the coin dealer who runs an "Ancient Coin Collecting" blog. He reckons that "those issues can tend to take over one's thought process and overpower the intent of a blog itself", so he has decided (for the second time) to make a fresh start... He deleted the post ('Funding Terrorism', January 28th 2016) which declared that 'The great American Dream is in serious jeopardy' because of the passing of a bill “to protect and preserve international cultural property at risk due to political instability, armed conflict, or natural and other disasters, and for other purposes”. One just wonders what the juxtaposition of those facts tell us about that writer's concept of "The Great American Dream".  Perhaps that is something he's done well to keep off the Net.

Another example of the genre who really should consider just what kind of an ambassador for the coin trade he is being is Dealer Dave's "Ancient Coins, Musings by a dealer in Ancient coins". The ill-will and frustrations revealed by its contents would lead anyone else to be more upfront about its purpose and name it the "I Hate Paul Barford blog" because for the past six years the bulk of the posts there are not about ancient coins and hardly merit the label 'musings'. Such a title would well suit the contents in exhibiting the puerility and pettiness of this "professional numismatist". One attack after another.

This blog, to its author's shame, show how a US ancient artefact dealer copes with comments concerning good and bad practice in the collection of, and commerce in, dugup ancient artefacts and how unlikely it is that we can ever expect such dealers to have a hand in getting their own house in order. Here too the difficulty of defending an inborn opposition to best practice leads to the sort of irrational discourse and personal attacks which is apparently mostly what one may expect from the artefact collecting community. According to the world view of Dealer Dave the, imagined "opposition to coin collecting" of the enemies is obviously in some way "Marxist-based" and in the words of one of the comments this rather unerudite blog contains:

Marxism, quite apart from genuine hard Leftists, also attracts those with obvious psychological defects like flies to a turd. Marxism empowers them and in their demented, bitter and sometimes tormented minds enables them to compete with those they see as being superior; both mentally, and professionally. These mental cripples should be sidelined and not given the exposure they crave, one cannot argue or debate with lunatics.

I suppose that is one way to avoid the issues. But then, opposition to bad practices in collecting of and commerce in dugup antiquities has less to do with political bent, religious affiliations or skin colour and all about expecting a bit of decency from dealers and collectors. We, however, see from the blogs of Mr Sayles and Mr Welsh how 'decent' some of these people may be expected to be.

One of these writers claims he's intending to write of "numismatic topics of personal interest", and the other "Musings by a dealer in ancient coins concerning his unusual profession". I think that is precisely what we'd like to see from them. Ancient coin collecting is represented by both of them as a separate discipline which can be done on a kitchen table. Let us see from them some kind of discussion of the methods and recent results of this heap-of-loose-coins-on-a-table 'study' of coins.

Two months ago, I issued a challenge for one of them to demonstrate the use of coins as an historical source ('Self-Absorbed Dealers and the place of coin collecting in Historiography' PACHI Monday, 7th December 2015, originally 'Berks, Profits and Trashed History' PACHI Thursday, 3rd December 2015). I think we can see that nobody was up to it. The dealer milieu prefer to express their ill-will and frustrations by attacking commentators and moaning rather than show that taking steps to exclude looted and smuggled coins from the market will cause the loss of a resource for responsuiible collectors, and what effects that will have, for example, on our 'knowledge of the past'. Mr Berk, Mr Sayles, Mr Welsh - a pile of California state quarters as an independent historical source. Tell us what you can do with them.