(A platypus is special too, while also rather the worst at everything it does.)

No other carbon terrestrial species can run for such long distances - a healthy young human can jog for 50 km or more on water and sugar: this is a (not too) breathtaking efficiency!

Can you imagine being a gazelle who has been sprinting away from a human for six hours but they just keep coming? Terrifying.

The ability to do so truly defines the species, to the extent they’re taxonomied as ‘homo marathoniensis‘ (fun fact: during the atomic age most human philosophers used ‘homo sapiens sapiens’ - more like ‘homo vanus vanus’ amirite).

Nonsense and beauty ascendant! Poesy freed from several centuries’ fuligin tyranny of the novel and horrid mass literacy; windmills again a just and proper enemy!

This new muse will mate with the corpse of epistemology to produce a second coming of baroque obscurant gnosticism. A fine time to be a scholar or a priest, the 2100s.

Success always has many fathers, failure is always an orphan, anywhere. At least I am recognizing failure, if only to disown it!

(And if I rightly feel shame now, even without personal responsibility, can I not be allowed some sober pride in equal measure in other circumstances?)

The article even concludes with advice on how best to shoplift, given what’s been learned!

For me I would have preferred a slower, more thoughtful and researched approach - but make no mistake, this writer ain’t “corpo-friendly” in the least.

What do you propose I do?

Or did you just want my permission to be personally angry at me? Not sure you needed it, but you’ve now got it.

- Greeks of which time? Those of mythical setting, rooted in the Bronze Age? Those of the several centuries when it was an oral history? Or those of the many centuries of it being a written work (during which a myriad of interpretations were put to pottery for our perusal)?

- What about non-Greek interpretations? The long Hellenistic and Roman epochs gave us a vast number of syncretisms…

- Famously (among classicists) the works themselves (more the Illiad here) are a historical muddle, including both surprising Bronze Age accuracies (Ajax’s shield; digamma implied in the meter) and clear Iron Age anachronisms (how chariots are used).

One also needs to be handy, humble, kind to and protective of the weak, trustworthy and able to keep your word, and not a coward, moral or otherwise. You know, have character.

I have “TDS” specifically because these all are lacking, so lacking it is as if by deliberate abdication, among those leading the new masculinity cult in America.

I’d pay a premium for the works of authors who despise it, if it existed; I reckon this would be a signal of their quality.

But even were I not, I would still insist on doing them myself. An abnegation, an abdication of yourself, to do otherwise. A little suicide. If I speak to you yet you act a mere frontend for Claude, what’s the point of you?

But for coding? Sure, if the tool works. But I expect its ideas will never be new.

Is fear of the other a morally neutral emotion?

Do you suppose your response to an ethnically or culturally different neighbor differs from some your ancestors’?

If it does, would you say your response is morally superior? If so, why? If so, how did you acquire your more enlightened approach?

What a horridly dull country it would be were your understanding nearer the truth; what a betrayal of its dream to wish it as you see it; how silly you would seem to your know-nothing antecedents so lumping “Europeans” as one (it is an irony that in their comparatively more nuanced racialism they at least understood a little more of that continent’s ethnic and cultural diversity).

Conclude this is to be in reality either pipedrem or pipeline.

We were not. A majority of humanity has been merely semiliterate since at least the advent of radio. As this came before secondary (high school) education became ubiquitous, I suspect that sublime, true literacy has only ever belonged to a minority.

And, of course, language is wholly imperfect to its purposes, a perpetual kludgery, even when commanded by the purest poet.