"Sure it does.  You're ignoring their cultural and spiritual motivations for building them in the first place.  So you're either quite culturally ignorant, or possibly the worst troll in the history of the internets.  Bets?"

I'm not ignoring their motivations. I'm saying that the effort would be better spent somewhere else. I think the churches and cathedrals of the middle ages are magnificent buildings. I still think the efforts would have been better spent on other things.

The fact that Egypt now has a lot of lovely ruins may be nice for the tourists, but saying they might have preferred better roads or canals being built 4000 years ago instead makes me neither culturally ignorant nor a troll, and I'm curious as to why you would think it does.

••

Okay, one more time:

Flying Saucer mythology began in the late 1940s, when a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw some unusual flying objects over the mountains near Portland, Oregon. He filed a report, and described the objects as looking like this:

Unfortunately (from a historical viewpoint) he described the objects as moving erratically, "like a saucer being skipped across a lake", and a local reporter picked up on this, applied it to the SHAPE of the objects, and coined the term "flying saucers". For some reason, this pair of words fired the public's imaginations, and people started seeing "flying saucers" all over the country, and eventually the world.

It was all bad timing, really, since a while after Arnold's "sighting", the US government declassified the YB-49.

Too long after "flying saucer" had completely written over Arnold's report, alas, for many people to make the obvious connection.

So, to this day, when people see "alien spaceships" they see saucer shaped objects -- and as Carl Sagan pointed out, wasn't it nice of the aliens to completely redesign their technology in order to match the story filed by that reporter back in 1947?

"Yes, because clearly I was taking a shot at the Romans and making a stealthy pissing contest between the two cultures.  Way to suss that out."

What are you on about? I'm using the Romans as an example of how building can be both impressive and actually useful. No matter how much spritual fulfilment the aristocrats attained from the pyramids (We don't even know enough about the poor slobs who died building the things to tell if they had any spiritual ideas related to it at all), functionally it's just a big pile of rocks in the desert.

There is a lot of impressive art and architecture in Ancient Egypt but the pyramids are really just impressive for the bloody-mindedness of the work that went into them.

You're making value judgments based solely on what you would have preferred ("imagine if they had done something useful").  That's your own subjective angst. The pyramids were of great use to the ruling class that commissioned them.  Not mention a marvel of human invention and artistry through time (which is my own subjective angst).

For example: "I'm saying that the effort would be better spent somewhere else. I think the churches and cathedrals of the middle ages are magnificent buildings. I still think the efforts would have been better spent on other things. The fact that Egypt now has a lot of lovely ruins may be nice for the tourists, but saying they might have preferred better roads or canals"

It's this confounding of "I think" with some sort of factual declartives which drive me bonkers.

---

and I'm curious as to why you would think it does.

***

In the interest of full disclosure, you are so unnecessarily disagreeable here on many occasions with people just trying to have interesting conversation, I like to needle you a bit.

"The pyramids were of great use to the ruling class that commissioned them. "

So? There were US politicians who found it very useful to them personally to waste millions on a bridge to nowhere. If I say that's a stupid waste of time, money and effort, does that make me culturally ignorant? Am I expressing my subjective angst? Being insensitive to the needs of politicians by pointing out that it was of little use to ordinary people?

"In the interest of full disclosure, you are so unnecessarily disagreeable here on many occasions with people just trying to have interesting conversation, I like to needle you a bit."

Oh. Okay. My mistake. I thought that was the definition of a troll.

 If I say that's a stupid waste of time, money and effort, does that make me culturally ignorant?

***

Yes.

Ok, Craig. Obviously our views of reality are wildly divergent. I prefer mine.

••

Human memory is an amazing thing, isn't it?

RE: This thread. 

I have no words.