most fearsome killer

Where I come from there are a dozen or so charities that will take used books off your hands to sell in their shops, but I know these don't exist everywhere. That's where mine go when I run out of shelf space. I'm sure they throw out what they can't sell, but at least you tried, and it goes to a good cause.

It's a version of the passenger pigeon problem - there are millions out there, so who will miss a few more?

I have a problem with this. It's one of boundaries. There are millions of copies of the Twilight saga and 50 Shades out there and they are, and we can agree on this, shite.

Short answer, yes.

Sob.

Yes, it is. It's down there with book burning. I'm with Littlellhall on this one. I don't care what book it is, ye dinnae nae dae that!

Burn flags, not books. Seriously, it could be a copy of Mein Kampf*, but I won't sink to their level, however shit the book.

So far, the foundations of capitalism and game theory and the notion of self-interest in balance with communal interest

It's not just me. Hey, I'd probably get on with someone like that.

You seem to be missing the point, and I'm not sure why. Yes, I do wonder if it's because you believe the current systems are "natural" and therefore "good" (and both parts of this argument are faulty). You seem to be concluding that our choices are the current system, something like Bhutan (which seems to be working…

My own personal favourite (sometimes the amateur study of natural history is just an excuse to be a big kid) is the aptly named dog-vomit slime mould (Fuligo septica), which is typically a sulphurous yellow and looks (literally) either like dog puke, the spawn (forgive the term) of Hell, or both.

Actually, no, they aren't. They're metastasizing tumours on our cultures that we've been taught to believe are natural growths (the naturalistic fallacy and the appeal to nature are fallacies inherent in economic thinking from (at least) Smith onwards). There are, as I've already pointed out, other ways of doing…

That's because you were still trying to think in the box the school (and much of the rest of western-influenced societies) put you in.

I doubt it's a coincidence it's set in 1857, the year of India's First War of Independence (usually known to colonialists as the Indian Mutiny).

Yes, in most countries under some variant of neoliberalism they try to keep unemployment above about 6 or 7 per cent, in order to keep inflation down. They don't seem to give a **** that this means real people destitute - until the time comes to look for a scapegoat, when they are quite happy to blame the poor for not…

I'm sick of this ridiculous seasonal global warming scares that happen right in the middle of summer heatwaves and are focused on the heat traps that metropolies are.

It's not what you said - it's the way you twisted it to make it sound like human contributions to greenhouse gases are insignificant - a common denier trope.

Yet again, you are twisting the data, which is exactly why I want the likes of you blocked.

It's not a defect, it's a neurological atypicality which in some cases can result in intrinsic disabilities and, in others, culturally delineated disabilities or both. There's an important difference.