Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

They won’t be doing physics. They will be doing (in the broadest sense) empirical social research with a focus on gender and physics, i.e. why are people with certain genders deciding to go into physics or not.

Are you really surprised that universities are looking for researchers researching all kinds of things? Someone I know just got a (post-doc) job researching social comparison theory and she can pretty much do whatever she wants in that field. That’s not even socially relevant, it’s merely interesting (nothing wrong with that).

Given how socially relevant this topic is (i.e. why do women decide against going into physics or even leave physics? How can we attract more women?) I’m really quite confused why you turn your nose at some poorly paid social research job looking into this for two days a week …

Social research is not luxurious. It’s badly paid, the methods at our disposal suck, the topic and subject (human brains and how they interact with each other) is fucking complex as hell, we don’t even know how to deal with it … it ain’t easy. Just so you know.

It's weird how this mirrors what you see with terrorists. Terrorists are middle-class or upper-middle-class with very, very few poor among them.

I don't think that the "daily struggle for survival" is it. Rather I think that the fact that poor are constantly forced to confront themselves with reality and living with others that makes them less likely to join movements like this.

Also, as a worker you'd have direct contact with members of this party (because you don't get to choose the people you hang out with). It is much, much harder to tell yourself a fictional story about what drives them. About what they'd do if given power. By contrast you regularly find insane positions among the upper classes. How hard is it to find an upper-middle-class or higher Marxist on a university campus ? Not very hard, despite the fact that he wouldn't be there in the system they advocate. Hell, there's Malthusians among them too, whereas I've yet to meet the first poor worker defending the virtues of killing of "enough" of the human race for a "sustainable population of Earth" to me.

Having illusions about "grandeur" of race, of inherent virtues of one group versus another, about the "good of the human race", ... is far easier when you're not confronted with the underbelly of any city on a daily basis ... when you're only confronted with who you choose to be confronted with.

I actually think Angela and the CDU have never won an election (especially if you exclude the CSU) - she just managed to get more votes than the SPD. If she led a coalition before an election that then won then I would consider her the winner, but just putting together a coalition after the election rather undermines any majority support.

Having said all this Hitler did manage to work the Weimar system so he was able to grab total power - he always seemed to be proud that his rule was "legal".

It doesn't seem like it at all. Things she apparently wrote in 1946:

The West experienced moments of doubt, Thompson wrote, in which the outcome of communist belief and behavior was questioned: "Can communist cultism, organized like a medieval secret order, with a priesthood, a police and an inquisition, reform itself into a modem, liberal, democratic movement?" Why, during the war, did communist propagandists throughout the world demand an immediate "second front", an attack on heavily fortified Western Europe by the United States and Great Britain? "Did these obedient claques care nothing for the lives of American boys? Were they listening to any voices but the voice of Stalin?" "Yet, we said: No", Thompson continued. "We shall prove our confidence, trust and trustworthiness. We shall hold faith that it will not be betrayed. Loyalty, we said, begets loyalty." But as Germany collapsed, the Soviet Union began "reversing every wartime pledge and policy. And not only was the quarter of a century of communist despotism to be fastened again upon the necks of the long suffering, heroically,enduring, eternally,hoping, eternally,serving Russian people -but naked and unashamed it was seeking new people to subject. "

I recommend Malcolm Muggeridge's autobiography for a compelling look at the circle of Western journalists in Moscow in the '20s and '30s, of which Muggeridge was a part. Scott Alexander has a good review:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-...

You either stayed in that circle or dropped out; there was no in-between. Of the reporters listed in the link, W.H. Chamberlin is the only other one who defected. Duranty (whose Pulitzer the NYT still refuses to return) was the norm, not the exception.

Also note that Thompson was part of the most bloodthirsty wing of New Dealists (eg, Rex Stout, also seen in the link) who supported prewar and postwar anti-German atrocities. It was certainly Nazi policy from 1941-45 to kill as many Jews as physically possible, but it was also Allied policy from 1941-45 to kill as many Germans as physically possible -- and that policy by no means stopped on a dime in May 1945:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_occupied_Germany

A real and complete moral reckoning for the period has yet to come, and will be more interested in our crimes than those of our defeated enemies.