Abide with me, fast falls the eventide

“The hardest thing is re-learning to make split decisions again, like when you’re driving you can’t just stop and think, it’s much better and safer to just make the wrong decision quickly then it is to slow down and not be able to decide, and it’s taking a while to relearn that mindset”

I mean, I genuinely don’t know, are there a lot of right-wing fascists in Italy who think the unification was a mistake and want to return to the time before Italian nationalism?

One of the earliest and most intellectually interesting Fascists, the futurist leader Marinetti, lionized the automobile as a way of inculcating fascism on basically exactly the same grounds Adorno is doing here, the only real difference is that Marinetti thought that fascism was a good thing.

I had to restrain myself from rushing out into the street to help him on the grounds that I might well get run over by one of the oncoming cars; there are two shrines to people who were run over crossing the street within walking distance of where we were.

Traffic simply maneuvered around him; drivers were probably feeling that if they stopped for him, they’d get rear-ended so people in the lane he was standing in just swerved into the other lane a little bit.

Once there was a break in traffic I ran over and helped him get his stuff to the sidewalk.

How else to describe this process but as one of pure functionality, which does not tolerate freedom of conduct? The car will move down the street; to interrupt that motion is to put your life at risk, so the people surrounding this old man find themselves at least unwilling, and quite likely actually unable to stop and help him reach a safer island.

And the notes above about cars are a really good example of how this thinking can go further! And if you understand the point after reading the car examples, well then try to apply that same logic to the other examples! Does that tell you anything?

Speaking of Vʔ in closed syllables, the word being translated as Unicorne in Job 39:9-10 in this 1611 KJV is רֵים rêm, and six of the nine times it shows up in the Hebrew Bible it's actually spelled רְאֵם rəʔēm instead—that is to say, it was originally *riʔm.

'Unicorn' is an interesting choice of translation, particularly given that three of the times the word shows up the text is talking about its horns, plural. E.g. Deuteronomy 33:17:

בְּכוֹר שׁוֹרוֹ הָדָר לוֹ וְקַרְנֵי רְאֵם קַרְנָיו בָּהֶם עַמִּים יְנַגַּח יַחְדָּו אַפְסֵי־אָ֑רֶץ וְהֵם רִבְבוֹת אֶפְרַיִם וְהֵם אַלְפֵי מְנַשֶּׁה׃ bəkôr šôrô hādār lô wəqarnê rəʔēm qarnāw bāhem ʕammîm yənaggaḥ yaḥdāw ʔapsê-ʔāreṣ, wəhēm ribəbôt ʔeprayim wəhēm ʔaləpê mənašše. The firstborn of his bull—majesty is his!     His horns are the horns of a rəʔēm; with them he gores the peoples     all together to the ends of the earth; such are the myriads of Ephraim,     such the thousands of Manasseh.”

The KJV (or actually the Coverdale Bible, which these parts go back to) isn't the first to use 'unicorn' to translate rəʔēm: the Septuagint mostly uses μονόκερως 'one-horned' (once, it uses ἁδροὶ 'stout ones'), which the Vulgate calques as unicornis in four cases. E.g. Psalms 22:21 (21:22 in the Vulgate's numbering):

σῶσόν με ἐκ στόματος λέοντος καὶ ἀπὸ κεράτων μονοκερώτων τὴν ταπείνωσίν μου Salva me ex ore leonis, et a cornibus unicornium humilitatem meam.

In the remaining instances, the Vulgate uses rhinoceros (borrowed from Greek ῥινόκερως 'nose-horned'):

πρωτότοκος ταύρου τὸ κάλλος αὐτοῦ κέρατα μονοκέρωτος τὰ κέρατα αὐτοῦ ἐν αὐτοῖς ἔθνη κερατιεῖ ἅμα ἕως ἐπ᾽ ἄκρου γῆς αὗται μυριάδες Εφραιμ καὶ αὗται χιλιάδες Μανασση Quasi primogeniti tauri pulchritudo eius, cornua rhinocerotis cornua illius in ipsis ventilabit gentes usque ad terminos terrae. Hae sunt multitudines Ephraim et haec millia Manasse.

Obviously people were confused about what kind of animal this was supposed to be. Akkadian has an obvious cognate rīmu, and the Babylonians were kind enough to depict one on the Ishtar Gate:

Rīmu is generally translated as 'wild bull' because your average Assyriologist doesn't know what an aurochs is, but it's an aurochs. They went extinct in the ANE and the eastern Mediterranean somewhere during the first millennium BCE, and it's very likely the Septuagint translators, in Egypt and the southern Levant, never saw one. Knowing only what was in the text—the rəʔēm is an animal whose defining features are (1) strength and (2) horns, both greater than a bull's—they took a punt.

It's actually not clear what they had in mind with μονόκερως; Aristotle, in his History of Animals and Parts of Animals, twice calls both "the Indian ass" and "the oryx" μονόκερως, and it's not particularly clear what he meant by that either. Probably they did know about rhinoceroses, and Jerome certainly will have—his rhinoceros all but certainly refers to an actual rhinoceros and not a mythical animal.