Cranks come, and cranks go. If you’re around online long enough, you’re bound to see a few.
The turnover is probably for the best, in a way. The nutters with online longevity seem to get nastier and nastier over time. It’s probably the brooding, I imagine: however stupid other people are, sitting and concentrating on the defects of others is liable to distort your point of view! There will never be any shortage of folly in the world, that’s for sure.
Months ago, I was looking on my hard disk and found a directory “/piso”. How that brought back memories! There was a strange chap posting back in the day in usenet about how Jesus was really some member of the Roman family which used the cognomen “Piso”. I found a thread from 1999 here, for instance, and by name here in 2002, and talking to me in the same year. There was some association with a booklet by a Jewish polemicist calling himself Abelard Reuchlin, which I never got to the bottom of.
The details of his theory were rather incoherent, and the reasoning as shaky as is normal. But I remembered the gentleman in question — who used to post as “Roman Piso” — because he seemed a harmless soul, and posted about his obsession without malice. He vanished from the web years ago, and I always wondered where he went.
Well today I know — for on the David Icke website, he has reappeared! On Boxing Day he spake thusly:
Here is Proof, that Josephus’ Plutarchus Created Christianity.
Titus Flavius Josephus and Lucius Plutarchus are the same person, thus i nickname “Josephus Plutarchus”, in reality, his real name is “Arrius Piso”. …
Mmm. He joined the site on Christmas Day, and managed a sterling 66 posts in the last 3 days.
I don’t know if anyone else remembers him, but if so, well, it’s nice to see him back again.