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The purge of German science in 1933

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Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#61

Post by dotnet00 »

mxkopy wrote: post #43
aftbit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or did the wars actually lead to progress? A challenging question. Strife breeds strength, but stability breeds prosperity.

Industrial or technological progress, sure, but at the expense of cultural and societal progress. Tech trees are straightforward to visualize but I challenge you to think of a law tree or social norm tree as well.

Isn't a lot of the initial progress of women being treated as equals in the workplace in the US related to their work in factories during WW2?

IIRC the end of colonialism and thus the end of the associated oppression, is also associated with the world wars, as they left the colonial powers too exhausted to retain their overseas empires.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#62

Post by carlosjobim »

kromem wrote: post #45
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…

You mean things like thinking that the vaccine harms of something nearly the entire world has received which was being said would kill people in two years time is more dangerous than the thing that actually killed millions of people during the last few years? It would be pretty weird if there were major political parties denying the science like that, or even picking who they would vote for as a leader based on the p…

In the end it seems both "sides" were wrong on this. The vaccines didn't protect people from getting covid, but they also didn't kill them.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#63

Post by dotnet00 »

grujicd wrote: post #50
Terr_ wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean like jetpacks and robots, it would probably look the same as our current timeline, given that "nowadays" is 70 years later plus the global diffusion of technological progress. Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars.

You can also wonder what would happen if Gavrilo Princip missed Franc Ferdinand in 1914? Single bullet could completely change world history. Would Austro-Hungary declare war to Serbia over some other cause? Or would some other incident start war between other two countries, leading to the same worldwide havoc? Some say that history is inevitable since it's result of massive forces which are similar to laws of nature…

IIRC all of humanity outside of Africa has gone through a tight population bottleneck at some point, such that a massive portion of human history can probably trace its root to a group of early humans managing to survive a certain encounter, none of which would've existed if they hadn't survived.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#64

Post by seabass-labrax »

paganel wrote: post #36
greedo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anti-semitism wasn't a major factor in European history until the (second-ish part) of the 19th century, for the simple reason that the European Jewish population wasn't that big of a presence for hundreds of years. Once the Enlightenment and French Revolution happened and once the Jewish population started to get some rights (which gets us into the 19th century) then things changed. Yes, I do know about the very unf…

I wouldn't agree with the assertion that it wasn't a major factor. The repeated violence against Jews and their expulsion from various areas is not a singular event, but forms a significant common thread across European history. It has happened so many times that the idea of persecuting Jews became a part of European culture, and thus gave the Nazis their inspiration for the Holocaust.

The massacre at York in 1190 took the lives of about a hundred Jews, whilst the population of York at that time was somewhere around 7000. As a proportion of the population, that makes it as bloody, possibly considerably more so, than the Holocaust within their respective scopes. I would posit therefore that antisemitism was a very major factor, but the decentralised, often pastoral political geography of pre-industrial Europe makes it harder to see the extent of that antisemitism.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#65

Post by mmorriso »

tptacek wrote: post #55
arp242 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not; anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th century. Before that it was an anti-religious thing: anti-Judaism, which was a markedly different and similar to Anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, and things like that. Especially in the context of the Nazi ideology, this really matters. Recall that the Nazis killed more Slavs than Jews, who were also cons…

There's a lot of weird things in this comment, but the weirdest is the claim that antisemitism is a 19th century innovation; Google "expulsion of the Jews from" and see where it autocompletes for you. Similarly: pogroms in the Pale of Settlement were not motivated by (and predate) 19th century race science.

While the impact on Jewish individuals was the same, it's true that Nazi style antisemitism focused on them as a racial group (Their ancestry), whereas previously they were targeted as a faith group (What they believed).

Your example of the Pale actually makes the point; Converting to Russian Orthodox actually released you from the rules imposed on Jews within the Pale. Conversion wouldn't save you from Nazis.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#66

Post by hollerith »

dotnet00 wrote: post #63
grujicd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also wonder what would happen if Gavrilo Princip missed Franc Ferdinand in 1914? Single bullet could completely change world history. Would Austro-Hungary declare war to Serbia over some other cause? Or would some other incident start war between other two countries, leading to the same worldwide havoc? Some say that history is inevitable since it's result of massive forces which are similar to laws of nature…

IIRC all of humanity outside of Africa has gone through a tight population bottleneck at some point, such that a massive portion of human history can probably trace its root to a group of early humans managing to survive a certain encounter, none of which would've existed if they hadn't survived.

The severe bottleneck 800,000 years ago includes the ancestors of all modern Africans.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#67

Post by selimthegrim »

actionfromafar wrote: post #35
arp242 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Ah the fine line between fascist: “if you died you were weak and deserved to die” vs nazi: “you are weak, you deserve to die”

In the end, Hitler basically stated the first axiom about Germany, so it really wasn’t a difference

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#68

Post by dotnet00 »

hollerith wrote: post #66
dotnet00 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC all of humanity outside of Africa has gone through a tight population bottleneck at some point, such that a massive portion of human history can probably trace its root to a group of early humans managing to survive a certain encounter, none of which would've existed if they hadn't survived.

The severe bottleneck 800,000 years ago includes the ancestors of all modern Africans.

Yeah was just coming back to edit after reading up on it. A bottleneck from 100k to 1000 human ancestors ~800,000 years ago for ~100,000 years.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487

"Population size history is essential for studying human evolution. However, ancient population size history during the Pleistocene is notoriously difficult to unravel. In this study, we developed a fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to circumvent this difficulty and calculated the composite likelihood for present-day human genomic sequences of 3154 individuals. Results showed that human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction. This bottleneck is congruent with a substantial chronological gap in the available African and Eurasian fossil record. Our results provide new insights into our ancestry and suggest a coincident speciation event."

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#69

Post by ScoobleDoodle »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #17
Terr_ wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean like jetpacks and robots, it would probably look the same as our current timeline, given that "nowadays" is 70 years later plus the global diffusion of technological progress. Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars.

> Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars. Agreed. How many years does each war set us back? And are there hurdles in our future that we will be unable to clear if we too often let war impede our progress.

There's an alternative as unfortunate as it may be of: how many years does each war move us forward. Or how many years behind would we be without the war having occurred.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#70

Post by Kranar »

tptacek wrote: post #55
arp242 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not; anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th century. Before that it was an anti-religious thing: anti-Judaism, which was a markedly different and similar to Anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, and things like that. Especially in the context of the Nazi ideology, this really matters. Recall that the Nazis killed more Slavs than Jews, who were also cons…

There's a lot of weird things in this comment, but the weirdest is the claim that antisemitism is a 19th century innovation; Google "expulsion of the Jews from" and see where it autocompletes for you. Similarly: pogroms in the Pale of Settlement were not motivated by (and predate) 19th century race science.

No one would dispute that hatred towards Jews existed for 1000s of years, but I think you're mincing words here and being somewhat uncharitable. The kind of anti-Semitism that was based on an innate racial inferiority rather than based on religion and culture was very much a 19th century development and it was that specific form of hatred towards Jews that was widespread across Europe and America rather than an opposition towards Jewish customs and beliefs.

Indeed the term "anti-Semitism" was coined to reflect the shift in hatred towards Jews from one rooted in culture and religion to one root in race. The very fact that you acknowledge that pogroms prior to the 19th century were not based on race suggests that if you had just taken the time to actually understand what was being said you could have avoided your confusion.

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