w0de0

Oppenheimer, as well as many other Manhattan Project researchers (eg Rabi & Weisskopf), were first or second generation German-Jewish immigrants/refugees. Max Bonn, Oppenheimer’s mentor, was also a refugee in the end; Oppenheimer was born to immigrants in the US but studied under Bonn in Germany prewar.

Moreover, the physical foundation for atomic power was largely the work of German, often German-Jewish, scientists.

So it’s plausible to suppose a counter-factual in which Germany, one less crippled by bigotry (and it is a disability…), develops the bomb.

And it’s not just the bigotry: it’s the anti-intellectualism. Einstein could write a letter to a well-educated patrician of the New York Dutch aristocracy (FDR), and so help change the world. The pig farmer and the corporal would never have read such a letter (even if were they not already trying to murder the writer and all his cousins for nonsense reasons).

Presumably all of them, as this is the simple definition of “better.”

Ah, literate humanity, I’ll miss you in my dotage.

Just so. I don’t mean optimal locally or globally - the species is practically extinct! - only unique.

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

Humans are extremely special! They have a unique trait no other extant and few antecedant species have/had…

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).

The mediocre may livestream, but I suppose the worst and the best, in seeking escape from the middle voice, now gifted to large language models, now not our own, that is, I say, the best and the worst will become esoterically poetic, will run on in agramatical authenticity, in voluminous polyglot, tiresomely peripatetic through the thesaurus. Loose change, slang, new coinage, words lazarized, older and rarer englishes, scattered everywhere.

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.

She’s not a lit critic, rather a classicist and the author of the most popular recent translations of Homer.

It was so in the trailer’s opening shot. One assumes this to be intentional.

In actual fact I did move to a boat far from American shores. Ha.

I think your observation is valid, but - perhaps from very understandable frustration - overwrought, and unfairly characterized as a specifically American foible.

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?)

That tone you detect is deliberately over-the-top: it’s breathless as a satirical technique. The author entirely agrees with your concerns; they’re mocking the corps and the researchers, or rather, letting them mock themselves by pretending complete credulity.

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.

Fine, it’s all my fault. Neither me nor my state voted that way, I’ve protested like hell, but nonetheless at your insistence I accept personal responsibility for the policy choices of the federal government.

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.

I would have let it be were it not for the “play” part! That’s what roused the pedant.

- It’s not a play, it’s a poem.

- 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).

> all you need to do to become stronger and more "manly" is to exercise, sleep well, and maintain a nutritious diet.

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 not to be exposed to advertisements for this service.

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.

Thinking, thesis and synthesis, syllogism, poesy or prose: in all these things I am far better than an LLM.

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.

In which specifics does “low social trust” differ from “high xenophobia”?

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?

Ah, friend, America was importing people from Africa. Indeed “import” is rather more apt in this case than the several other you’ve ignored (e.g. the mass immigration from Vietnam at the finish of that war).

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).

I can do it all, but I have my own boat. We choose how we live.

As neither side has year-round road access, it’s to be the rare road both to and from nowhere. The only commodity worth infrastructure would be oil.

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

> we never were really communicating that well to begin with?

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.

The bicameral hypothesis seems impossible to me. Consciousness must precede language, no? The invention and use of the latter is impossible without some theory of mind, which requires first a theory of self. Therefore language cannot be integral to the advent of consciousness.

You’ve forgotten the scenario in which senility remixes all of the above daily.

were*

Unlikely. Adaptability of the language to new concepts as well as ease of adoption for second language learners matters. English - indeed every other candidate global language (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic) - excel Chinese in these respects. I’d wager that even we’re American hegemony to go the way of the UK, English will persist. It may become more Indian or Singlish, but this demonstrates its strength.

And I suppose this world-historically rich Afrikaner is prepared to pay the high personal taxes required for such a scheme, no? Words speak loud than actions, no? He will not be troubled by the skin color of recipients (“universal”), yes?

Also superior.

Genuinely regrettable. The appointed life peers system is worse than the traditional ‘hereditary sortition’ (if you will).

The former creates a class of semi-sinecures of equally questionable quality yet beholden to the political system of the moment. Life peerages become awards for donors and loyalists, a legitimized corruption. The house’s composition becomes an ever-growing competition based on unlimited partisan appointment. The house becomes less thoughtful, more unwieldy, more pointless, more expensive. It will inevitably be abolished on this path.

In contrast aristocrats are at least less likely to owe anything to a special interest, and more likely to hold firm to unpopular but perhaps higher ideals: they owe their position to no other power center, neither voters nor parties. They are also inherently invested in the nation’s long term success. It’s hardly democratic but at least it’s not a wasteful partisan circus.

My pitch would be to keep a small number of intra-peerage elected hereditary peers, keep the bishops, add various ex officio academics - but fill the majority of seats by true sortition. Every British subject is liable to be drafted, and paid, into a year or two of part-time lordship. (Though I’d grant the whole house a right to easily expel such members, should they fail to meet basic expectations.)

And they’d be right to, fella. It is unjust to need to pay more to achieve similar safety.

Sounds like you should take away a necessity to learn more about Zoroastrianism! Not all writing must be generally accessible.