One take on this - those rare few who did the "long and hard way" were not as lazy / stupid / warlike / etc. as us mere humans. And maybe they took 750k years, or some other really longhttps://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HardWorkMontage stuff.
But a related take - if you just move the "seems inexplicable" stuff further away in space and time, then most people magically see it as being less inexplicable.
Even if that were true, it wouldn't disprove the link to racism: Eratosthenes was Hellene, not native Egyptian. He "counts as white"; ancient Egyptians may or may not.
Feels to me that the current popularity of "What if...?"-scenarios of Alternative History may be a substitute. Though those are at least explicitly acknowledged as speculation, not some "Hidden Truth". (In contrast to "Flat Earth", "QAnon", and other recent conspiracy theories.)
"People in his time"?!? He only died the other day. Until last week was "his time"! And new weird religions / cults / sects like the "Ancient Aliens" one he founded are being born all the time. The world hasn't changed fundamentally since last week, so it's still "his time".
The only place he has earned is as a successful nutjob / scam artist (about on a par with L. Ron Hubbard or Eric Dubay?), as opposed to all the less successful ones.
> The Holocaust was carried out by people who had to invent their own religions (their variant of neo-paganism and "positive Christianity") to have religions that could be reconciled with their ideology. Their ideas were more rooted in "racial science" than anything else.
Some of them thought they had to invent or resurrect such religions to sell their movement to the masses, yes. That movement's actual religion was that ideology and racial "science"; it kind of was its own religion. (Not that this is exclusive to nazism / fascism; the same goes for communism.)
Yup. Which was why some (probably Nietzsche, but AFAICR several people before him too) called Christianity "a religion for slaves": It's very very useful for elites throughout the ages, from Roman patricians to current techbroligarks, to fob the plebs off with "Your reward will come in the afterlife!"... So they don't make a ruckus about getting any reward for their toil in the present. Or, as Marx (no, not Groucho) put it: "Religion is an opium for the masses"; means the same thing.
Seems to me, from the bit you quoted, that their answer would be something along the lines of: "I would restate the point of the post as talking about how SQL is bad at hierarchical data, while using bad SQL to defend this argument." What they actually wrote is so close to this that your claim not to be able to see that feels a tad disingenious.
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