w0de0

Hardly true. Have you never tried to be the lone dissenter in a crowd? Make that crowd a nation.

One program or the other is better - and that’s the end of it, no? As always.

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).