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The purge of German science in 1933

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Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#131

Post by bitwize »

bergen wrote: post #122
cedilla wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verbally smacked down? Yes. But it's absurd to even compare this to the purges in China, Germany and Russia, were people were literally killed to death. Also, while everyone has the right to argue anything, no one has the right to have the merits of their effort evaluated. When you go on and tell everyone here that ROT13 is as secure as RSA-2048, everyone will rightly laugh at you without considering your reasoning.

Not arguing with your point but “killed to death” sounds like an awesome metal band name

"Kohga, the stupendous chief of the Yiga Clan, is gonna kill you all... to death!"

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#132

Post by usrusr »

neffy wrote: post #38
xyzelement wrote: post #6

It occurs to me that anti-semitism is a disease that ultimately destroys its host. If Germany "simply" wanted to win WW2, it should have cultivated its Jewish scientists (and by the way, 100K Jewish soldiers served their country in WW1) instead of eradicating them as per this article. Not to mention, diverting scarce wartime resources towards the program of concentration camps and ethnic extermination is not just pur…

It's an interesting question, and on the face of it, yes, the Nazi's probably would have won with the Jewish people on board. Similar arguments can be made about their invasion of Russia, given the support they would have received against Stalin without their accompanying genocide. The big but in this, is whether they would have gotten there to begin with. Picking on the Jews was a huge cash/property grab, which was…

It was so much more than just a cash/property grab. It was also an accidental ideology hack to plaster over the unsolvable conflict between working class and capitalism.

Short reminder that by name, it was a socialist workers' party. But a socialist workers' party fooling themselves into believing that all strife of the working class could somehow be blamed on the subset of capitalists who happened to be Jews. And by doing so, they offered capitalists who were not a lifeboat to survive the upcoming revolution, survive with all their status and wealth, or more even. A revolution was coming, and they would rather have it brown than red. Many of the moneyed class despised Nazis as the uneducated roughlings that they were, but begrudgingly accepted them as lesser evil compared to red socialists. Before, in almost all cases I guess, eventually getting pulled in by all the cheering. It may sound absurd to us, but Nazism ran on positivity. "Be part of it, it will be awesome" (unless of course you happen to be one of those we need as common enemies to unite against, please be a good victim and just shut up while we remove you from existence. Don't worry, we'll find a substitute for you to push out next when you're gone)

Without antisemitism to distract the working class, nazism would have never grown beyond a group of sad drinking buddies with bad pick-up lines. The cash/property grab happened much later, about a decade after antisemitism enabled the unlikely alliance of (some) capitalists and (some) workers that carried them into power.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#133

Post by mgoetzke »

perihelions wrote: post #8

One aspect of this that fascinated me is Nazi Germany's "physics denialism" (?) — the reactionary response to the modern physics revolutions of the early 20th century. (I.e. the twin revolutions of quantum physics and of relativity). It was a much weirder response than simply an attack on physicists who happened to be Jewish humans. Fields of physics were conspiratorially labelled as having a "Jewish" character, and…

Similar to some tendencies today with Right Wing from German AfD or American MAGA to dismiss complete fields of science. Whether it is climate change or vaccinations. They do not have a discussion, they dismiss it outright.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#134

Post by pdonis »

graycat wrote: post #77

Common estimates are that WWII killed 50 million to 100 million people. So, wanted to get some understanding of how it happened, how to avoid such, and looked at many descriptions of that history. I'm just a US citizen, not a professional historian, and here have only rough explanations, maybe not 100% wrong. A really short description: Hitler became a dictator and then went nuts. For a little more: (1) Foundation. T…

> By then Hitler had done lots of ugly things and got away with them, e.g., the Holocaust.

No, actually the Holocaust, meaning the actual mass killing of Jews, didn't start until 1941, about the time Hitler attacked Russia.

Not to say Hitler hadn't already gotten away with plenty of ugly things by the time he attacked Poland. But the Holocaust wasn't one of them at that time.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#135

Post by eastbound »

blululu wrote: post #105
actionfromafar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny I was thinking of how so many otherwise intelligent and educated people believe climate change is just a liberal hoax.

Ask any of your friends how much sea level will rise by 2050 and you will get some pretty wild answers. It's a technical subject that does not immediately affect most of us on a day to day basis. It is not surprising that people would have poorly informed opinions on a topic they don’t really care about very much. For what it’s worth, the average college educated liberal has a comparably abysmal understanding of clim…

I’m an ex-climate militant, so the fun part is that I have a very large corpus of knowledge on this topic. It’s an incredible experience to have read papers deeper than people who try to defend climate, and to know the weakness of each paper. Militants and even professionals really generally don’t know what they’re talking about, which is across the board in climate change. They are right, but often by mistake or pure luck, and I abhor that.

The sad part is any scientific topic that becomes politicized, becomes abyssal in terms of science. It is true of climate change, feminism before that, all the way back to 1500 and planets.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#136

Post by graycat »

Tainnor wrote: post #114
graycat wrote: post #77

Common estimates are that WWII killed 50 million to 100 million people. So, wanted to get some understanding of how it happened, how to avoid such, and looked at many descriptions of that history. I'm just a US citizen, not a professional historian, and here have only rough explanations, maybe not 100% wrong. A really short description: Hitler became a dictator and then went nuts. For a little more: (1) Foundation. T…

> Hitler and Germany could'a stopped there and likely been okay. If Hitler had been Franco or Mussolini, then maybe. But racism and especially anti-semitism were integral parts of Nazi ideology. It wasn't principally about wealth or strategic objectives as we might recognise them. They really believed that the races of the earth were in a big struggle for resources and that if the "Aryan race" didn't exterminate or s…

> but he was "nuts" way before he ever came into power.

I agree, sure, but strictly, literally that doesn't conflict with what I wrote -- i.e., I didn't claim he was not nuts before 1933 or before he became a dictator! I considered being clear and explicit on this point but omitted such to make the main points shorter and simpler. And I part way addressed this issue by noting that with constraints a nut might not look like one but look nuts if the constraints are off.

> was some brilliant politician

Well, it seems accepted that on his way to being a dictator he was an effective speaker. Maybe he had some industrial backers who were brilliant.

On the Nazi ideology, Aryan, master race stuff, you know more than I do and might be right, but I omitted mention of those out of not being sure they were more than just a party line, a way to get political support, etc.

"Master Race"? Let's see: Math, science, music. Hmm .... Germany, yes, but also Poland, France, Russia, Austria, Hungary, England, the US, ....

Ah, poor Hitler and his "master race": About then, the 1936 Olympics in Germany, Dad was at Ohio State and knew Jesse Owens -- 4 Gold Medals!!!! Hitler's athletes just needed better running shoes -- that was the problem????

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#137

Post by [deleted] »

EnigmaFlare wrote: post #80
wongarsu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a "climate alarmist". There is a band of climate science you can freely publish without reputational damage, but don't go over or under it. But that's probably nothing compared to the narrow band of tolerable science when it comes to questions of race or ethnicity. Anything that could be construed as people of some descent being "inferior" in any aspect is pretty risky to publish.

There's a dirty fashion in climate science to include political activism or call to action in their papers. Especially if they've found something that shows good news about climate change. They qualify it with "... but we must all make an effort to reduce fossil fuel use". I used to teach science and would tell students not to give life advice to the reader, because that's what we were supposed to teach them. But the…

[deleted]

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#138

Post by pasabagi »

EnigmaFlare wrote: post #128
dmbche wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the conclusion everyone is missing? I'm sure you know how unscientific IQ tests are, I'm surprised that's what you're bringing up here as being "good science" being shut down politically. Just trying to correlatw the two tests they used is absolutely subjective, I would take a step back and reexamine the parts of those studies that convinced you of whatever beliefs you have - it seems like a shoddy foundation.

IQ test have genuine predictive power when applied to large groups. So no, they're not unscientific. In fact, the idea of IQ tests being useless or culturally biased is a now-outdated excuse that people used to use to justify the different results between ethic groups. It's now well accepted that different ethnic groups have different average IQs, and that IQ is a useful predictor of various life outcomes. What the p…

In general the thing people find obnoxious about this kind of argument is that both 'race' and 'IQ' have their origin in eugenics, but are meaningless in genetics. The genetic variation across one race (say black) is much greater than the variation between races. There are no well-established genetic predictors of IQ. So, even if you do find evidence that there is a statistical correlation between these two unscientific and essentially meaningless concepts, your correlation is equally unscientific and meaningless.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#139

Post by usrusr »

arp242 wrote: post #30
jandrese wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counterpoint is that Hitler wouldn't have been able to seize power so easily were it not for the clear "other" to demonize. That's just human nature. Fascists always need some identifiable enemy to rally against and there was no shortage of antisemitism already in the country to work with. This is why they also picked up on hating Gypsys and homosexuals. Fear mongering is one of the most efficient ways to gain po…

Hitler didn't exactly seize power "easily"; it took an attack on the German parliament (possibly orchestrated by the Nazis themselves), a paramilitary force intimidating opposition parties (and at times directly preventing them from voting in parliament), and an assassination campaign. In the end it's a "what if?" type question, but I think a decent case can be made that anti-Semitism was not key to the Nazi success,…

Without the "your enemy is not capitalism, it's the Jew!" ploy that entire "working class brownshirts beat up communists on behalf of industrialists" thing would not have happened at all. Antisemitism was the keystone that kept their self-contradicting ideological mess from collapsing before they even got a foot on the ground.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#140

Post by bryanrasmussen »

kergonath wrote: post #60
xyzelement wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect. EG - a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated.

> a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated. Interestingly, I have more examples of the opposite: scientists being branded “climate alarmists” (even as their models consistently under-estimate global warming) or totalitarian control freaks (or some enlightened nonsense about being…

>scientists being branded “climate alarmists” (even as their models consistently under-estimate global warming)

the attacks come from different directions - climate alarmists attack comes from without the scientific community (political, corporate)

climate denialist or antivaxer attacks generally come from within the scientific community, generally from experts in the field from which results are being denied.

The people who then want to support climate denialism can then say the scientists are non-scientific because they are taking sides, providing another useful tool of attack.

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