Where I am, it's been Christmasing since Halloween. Welcome to the jungle!

Exactly. It's a bad sign when you need to add notes to explain the joke. Who am I, T.S. Eliot? But you do what you gotta.

Headless bodies found in topless farm. [I'm still workshopping it.]

But, more basically, just making up stuff about Theseus as a way to know things about how actual institutions work won’t work. Why would it?

This argument is most generously regarded as no argument at all because, were one to take the terms of it seriously, it would be an argument for the view you want to be wrong. If the Ship of Theseus were, by hypothesis, structurally racist, and one swapped out all the bits it would still be racist.

"Where is this hand of the past?"

Again, I can't make you read a book about it. I can only point out books have been written. Should you ever develop an interest in these topics we've been discussing for months, you can commence pursuit of that interest.

If you REALLY don't want to read a book, you don't have to read a book. But then: you haven't read the book.

Such is the eternal debate between head-in-the-clouds conservative Machiavellians, like yourself, and feet on the ground leftist bleeding-heart lib would-be reformers, like me, who see - as you do not - how hard reform would be to effect on the rough ground of Realpolitik!

You are a conservative, I, a progressive, so I am more of a Burkean. First, I think it's important to look and see. The heavy hand of the past may lie upon the present and we cannot shrug it off. You are more Utopian, by temperament, inclined to trust to ideal blueprints. Human nature - unfixed!

I'm not even on social media - except once an hour to say something funny. I'm reading good books!