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The purge of German science in 1933

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Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#201

Post by defrost »

EnigmaFlare wrote: post #123
defrost wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turned out to be a big conspiracy and false. Did it now? Lableak truther loses $100,000 in his own debate https://www.protagonist-science.com/p/lableak-truther-loses-... Even with money on the line and an arsenal of medical expertise and documents that's not a case that can be conclusively made.

I agree it's not conclusive, so I shouldn't have said "false", but the FBI says it was most likely a lab leak [1]. Your article starts by calling it a "false myth" so they're clearly still in the political partisanship trap whatever the outcome of some bet. Anybody who's certain it was of natural origin is just being fooled by the news and some prominent scientists who made some intentionally misleading statements. […

From your link:

     underscoring a divide in the US government as the majority of the intelligence community still believes that Covid either emerged naturally in the wild, or that there is still too little evidence to make a judgment one way or another.
"My article" isn't mine, it's an article discussing a lengthy technical debate recently held on the merits of zoonotic origin Vs Lab leak origin cases with a great many qualified onlookers, experienced judges, and $100K USD at stake on the outcome.

You may feel the article is biased as the (qualified) author clearly thinks lab leak is an improbable origin, you can go to the actual debate record being discussed and judge whether that was a fair pitting of one viewpoint against another - great lengths were taken to ensure a fair playing field in a debate for a cash prize.

Nobody is certain .. that's your ongoing strawman in in all your comments here so far, but the probabilities with all things considered very heavily fall on the natural origin side.

The best arguments put forward for a lab leak being more likely failed to carry the day.

It's still possible just very unlikely and certainly not certain.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#202

Post by carlosjobim »

drekk wrote: post #194
carlosjobim wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant exactly what I wrote, almost everybody who took the vaccines contracted covid.

Protecting people from COVID involves more than preventing them from contracting the illness. It reduced mortality and hospitalizations. Compare the mortality rate in a country like Brazil to the US and tell me again how the vaccines didn't protect people from COVID. I seriously don't get this antivax nonsense. People get the flu after a flu vaccine sometimes too. The point is to not have a naive immune system if all…

> I seriously don't get this antivax nonsense.

Maybe you have been conditioned to react with extreme suspicion when somebody even dares to mention the word "vaccine", so you don't even read what people write and start imagining what they "must be meaning"? We live in an age of paranoia and hostility, even after the pandemic.

I'm incredibly happy that the people saying that the vaccines were dangerous were wrong. It's a shame they didn't protect people better, but in the end the pandemic ended just as expected, ie a super-contagious and much less lethal strain infected everybody. This is how the black plague probably ended, reading accounts from the time. Even if they didn't know anything about viruses then.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#203

Post by nahuel0x »

usrusr wrote: post #132
neffy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are right on the point. Also note that antisemitism was the ideological way to unify the image of a nebulous jewish german finance class with bolshevism, painting them as both sides of the same jewish conspiracy coin. This way the hatred to the capitalist class was diverted to hatred against bolshevism. Antisemitism was what made that ideological manoeuvre possible.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#204

Post by neffy »

greedo wrote: post #89
neffy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The only way the Nazis would have "won" is if they developed the atomic bomb before the US. Even with many of the emigres that helped with the Manhattan project, that might not have been possible. The Soviets were never going to surrender, same with the British, and once the Americans started supplying Britain with arms, they were safe. And then when Hitler declared war on the US, it was game over. The industrial mig…

I think the cash/property grab aspect was there from the beginning, and even in the 20´s you see it manifesting itself on a local level with intimidation etc. Klemperer's, I will bear witness, diaries from Dresden in that period are a fascinating read on the day to day impacts. Then as you say, it escalates culminating in Kristallnacht.

But I think they would never have succeeded if it hadn´t been for the 1929 US crash, and the subsequent withdrawal of loans from Germany by the New York banks in response, which pushed Germany over the edge for the second time.

As to how Germany wins WW2, or at least fights into a Cold War like stalemate. Germany continues the Battle of Britain for another month, rather than switching to bombing London, the RAF runs out of operational pilots (rather than newly trained pilots with 8 hours flying experience who have yet to fire their guns, they had plenty of those.). Or just that the men who made up the Polish and Czech squadrons that had the most kills in the Battle of Britain don´t make it across Europe to fight on for the RAF.

Britain falls, the London government retreats to Canada, Hitler can now turn his attention to Russia, without having to fight a two front war. They might still have lost that one, Russia is big, and would presumably have been backed up by the USA and the remains of the British Empire, but the atom program in Germany isn´t that far behind, and they do have the V3 by 1944, so it hopefully? ends up in some kind of Cold War by the 1950´s. (Essentially the storyline of several alternate histories out there. and the SS-GB series.)

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#205

Post by greedo »

neffy wrote: post #204
greedo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way the Nazis would have "won" is if they developed the atomic bomb before the US. Even with many of the emigres that helped with the Manhattan project, that might not have been possible. The Soviets were never going to surrender, same with the British, and once the Americans started supplying Britain with arms, they were safe. And then when Hitler declared war on the US, it was game over. The industrial mig…

I think the cash/property grab aspect was there from the beginning, and even in the 20´s you see it manifesting itself on a local level with intimidation etc. Klemperer's, I will bear witness, diaries from Dresden in that period are a fascinating read on the day to day impacts. Then as you say, it escalates culminating in Kristallnacht. But I think they would never have succeeded if it hadn´t been for the 1929 US cra…

It's possible that had the Germans forced a surrender or armistice upon Britain, that the US never gets involved. Domestic sentiment against US involvement was pretty strong and took all of FDR's political skills to overcome for Lend Lease etc.

I'm not sure that Britain could fall though, especially with Lend Lease. The Luftwaffe, while able to initiate the BoB, had surprising losses in the invasion of France, Poland and the Low Countries. Given how the Luftwaffe rarely rotated pilots out of combat squadrons to train new pilots, these losses were difficult to replace, and probably were one of the reasons for the success of the RAF. Also, none of the German fighters really had enough range to escort their bombers over the UK. And the RN was a huge impediment to any invasion of Britain that I doubt could be overcome.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#206

Post by woooooo »

greedo wrote: post #26
arp242 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a Nazi perspective, what you're saying makes little sense. It would be similar to "we should enlist Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh in the army, because they've shown to be excellent at bombing stuff". That would be silly because these people and the organisations they associate with are considered a corrupting influence. In the Nazi view, Jews consisted a corrupting influence. "Hitler and his friends hated th…

Anti-Semitism as a 19th century development doesn't seem historically accurate. While anti-Semites in the 19th century glommed on to racial theories as backing for their hate, the origins of anti-Semitism are millennia old.

As a modern, industrial phenomenon about specifically jews as an ethnicity its unique.

People generically hated every religion that wasn't theirs for millenia. The idea of hating a Semitic race after God was pronounced dead is different.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#207

Post by rightbyte »

radu_floricica wrote: post #181
Tainnor wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the same thing in mathematics. For example, when Edmund Landau defined pi as "twice the value of the unique zero of cos in the interval [0, 2]" (a very common definition) instead of geometrically, this was attacked as being "un-German" (even though you can obviously go from the geometric to the analytic definition and vice versa). https://institucional.us.es/blogimus/en/2017/03/pi-and-the-n...

The disease is independent of context. It's about taking a political club and using it to hit anybody you don't like. And we're far from being immune to it even now. The correct reaction is to identify people using this particular pattern and penalize them regardless of political or cultural affiliation. Especially if they're in your own tribe - you're the one in the best position to censure them.

> The correct reaction is to identify people using this particular pattern and penalize them regardless of political or cultural affiliation.

Ohh no. The correct reaction is to do nothing if censorship is on the table. It is trivial to push BS by blaming fighting BS.

I believe the correct action is to pretend they are sane and calmly explain why I think they are wrong in combination with ignoring them.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#208

Post by Thorrez »

devjab wrote: post #57
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.

There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though. You can certainly have egotistical reasons but the herd immunity created through general vaccination isn’t just a theory anymore. I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. With a lot of these things like climate change, there are clear economic forces which will pour “tobacco is healthy” amounts of money into pushing whatever…

>There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though.

Read pages 4,5,6 of this vaccine insert[1]. It seemingly says a large percent of infants have adverse reactions to vaccines (up to 85% for some vaccines and symptoms). An anti-vaxxer can say "I won't give my kid a shot that has a chance of causing an adverse reaction."

[1] https://www.fda.gov/media/74035/download

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#209

Post by wongarsu »

csomar wrote: post #169
wongarsu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lingua franca in many sciences might still be German instead of English. But for the most part the technology level of Germany is coupled to that of the rest of the world. It's hard to tell how that would have evolved. Maybe keeping the existing research clusters in Western Europe intact would have lead to faster advances in chemistry and particle physics. On the other hand we probably wouldn't have a space stati…

You are assuming that without wars, all these achievements wouldn't have happened. Sure, that's one possibility. The other possibility is that people do them regardless. We have the iPhone today. A quite advanced device. We didn't need a war for that; but only the people willingness to connect with other people. In fact, most things we have from war are meaningless for everyday life. Man to the space has a certain gr…

There are plenty of business use cases for computers. Before the invention of electronic computers companies employed rooms full of people to do math by hand, so there was obvious economic incentive to automate this. Every step after that, including smartphones, had obvious economic incentives. Sometimes war helped it along, like demand for better weather simulation or the Apollo program kickstarting demand for silicon chips, but the advances would have come either way.

The same isn't true for rocketry. Communication satellites are nice, but took decades of massive investment, no private enterprise would bankroll this. Space stations still haven't really paid off, they will see (private sector) return of investment once we have figured out some kind of resource extraction (mining of asteroids, the moon, mars, or wherever). With advances in computer technology, metallurgy, etc these technologies got cheaper, so we might have rocketry by now, but I believe space stations would have happened at least a century later than in our timeline without the world wars and the cold war.

Similarly, the incentive for nuclear power is pretty weak. Civilian nuclear reactors aren't a great technology, half a century later we still struggle to make them make economic sense. Without the massive military backing kickstarted by WWII they wouldn't have happened. And that military backing might have eventually happened, but not at nearly the same pace without the threat of nazi nukes and soviet/us nukes.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#210

Post by tdba »

pasabagi wrote: post #138
EnigmaFlare wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unscienti…

> There are no well-established genetic predictors of IQ

Common misconception, sadly untrue. There are known genetic predictors of intelligence, they're just not simple genes that the layman can wrap his head around.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104

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