[floatrock]

Remember when the Oppenheimer movie taught us how we got The Bomb even though the nazis had a significant head start because ze germans got rid of the smart people studying "jew physics" and what was left of their science took them to dead ends?

Replace "jew physics" with "woke physics" and you see the idiocy of this.

Foot, meet gun.

[conception]

Fascism always trends to incompetency because loyalty is more important than skill and knowledge.

[Aeolun]

So it’s just a matter of time before the US crashes?

[snowpid]

I wouldn't say crash, but more decline. But many Americans including on HN and in SV don't like to see it.

[foogazi]

They didn’t say that

[fifilura]

It is simpler than that.

Fascism always trends to incompetency because it is stupid.

[olelele]

The nazi regime destroyed a lot of what today would be classified as "woke research" by the reactionary right. Sexuality studies, social studies and so on. The book burnings were not only about rooting out fiction, they destroyed research.

[spwa4]

History isn't quite so simple. Half the academic establishment, especially the human sciences, chose to side with the Nazis before they actually came to power. A lot of institutions in Europe, inside and outside of Germany, removed Jewish scientists before anyone asked them to. Ironically that mostly turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to both the Jewish scientists themselves and a number of people that chose to leave with them (there are entire cities in Europe that were founded by Jewish scientists forced to leave and the people who left with them). For example, after the UN (technically then "League of nations") fired Einstein for not being sufficiently Swiss (it's more complicated than just racism though) in 1932, he was shown why not to return to Germany and was offered a job in the US, at Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. He returned to Germany anyway and was shown why accepting the Princeton offer was a good idea, after experiencing "the degree of their brutality and cowardice". Note: he was talking about German academics and institutions, not the Nazis directly. This was before the first time the Nazis forbade Jews from teaching, which was in April 1933.

Of course, the Nazis turned out to be anti-intellectuals to an extreme degree too and whether it was by concentration camp mistreatment or using them as cannon fodder (or just sending them to the Russian front and leaving them to freeze to death), the Nazis eventually killed most of those scientists, including outside of Germany, who chose to remove Jewish scientists before being asked.

[xhkkffbf]

It's more complicated. At many of these top universities, woke means don't hire whites. And Jews are often lumped in with whites. The Jewish percentage at top schools has dropped dramatically as wokeism appeared. At Princeton, one top professor campaigns to "eliminate whiteness" and he's very open about it.

[pyuser583]

That was not my takeaway from the Oppenheimer movie.

Or from … history.

The Germans chose to extremely underinvest in their nuclear program to maintain financial and political support for their rocket program.

The rocket program was so fundamentally different from the Manhattan Project it’s hard to see the Germans doing anything like it.

[maplethorpe]

I mean, they definitely expelled Jewish scientists, people like Einstein and Bohr and other prominent physicists, who would have ultimately been very useful to them. Maybe their funding choices would have been different if they hadn't ousted so many researchers.

[pyuser583]

I read the Oppenheimer biography, so maybe that’s distorting things.

Oppenheimer was Jewish, but very Americanized.

Bohr was working on radar for the Nazis. Einstein had surprisingly little knowledge of nuclear physics, and famously rejected key parts of quantum physics.

The Germans had great nuclear scientists. They simply weren’t willing to spend the money it took to cold the bomb.

[maplethorpe]

I mentioned two as an example, but they expelled significantly more. In 1933 they brought in laws that immediately ousted many Jews from public positions, which caused a mass exodus of intellectuals from the country. James Franck was another prominent physicist who left in protest, and he went on to work directly for the Manhattan Project.

The Nazis drawing a distinction between "Jewish mathematics" and "German mathematics" was also very real.

It's hard to imagine these policies had no effect on their ability to do research, and that it was purely a matter of funding.

"Boris Stoicheff, wrote how the mathematician Edmund Landau was 'physically prevented from entering his classroom by about seventy of his students, some wearing SS uniforms.' They demanded 'German mathematics' instead of 'Jewish mathematics.' One estimate is that the 15% of scientists in Germany who had been fired accounted for about 60% of the country’s physics-based publications."

https://research.usask.ca/herzberg/resources/the-person/phys...