I’m pretty sure that Demian Maia is also a leftist and supported Lula.

The scientists working in Nazi Germany didn't believe they would even be able to produce a bomb given what they thought it required, and thus they settled for a small nuclear reactor. When they were captured by Western forces they had their room bugged and most of their private conversations were transcribed at Farm Hall. They sincerely believed they were at the forefront of nuclear physics and that Churchill, Stalin, and FDR were just dying to meet them. It is true that when the bomb was dropped most were incredulous, and there were some who were "completely shattered by the news" with respect to the deaths caused such as Otto Hahn, who was an opponent of the regime. Others were incredulous merely to the fact that such a bomb was even possible. Heisenberg responded, "I don't believe a word of the whole thing. I don't believe it has anything to do with uranium" while Hahn jeered at him stating that, "If the Americans have a uranium bomb then you're all second raters. Poor old Heisenberg."

Essentially, one thing Adam Becker argues in his book "What is Real: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics", is that Heisenberg and his student, Carl von Weizsacker, purposefully constructed a revisionist narrative of their wartime activities. The narrative is that "while the Americans had built a weapon of death and destruction on unprecedented scales, they, the Germans, had deliberately pursued only a nuclear reactor, being unwilling to build a massive new weapon for Hitler's Reich - thereby placing the responsibility for their failure on their supposed moral clarity, rather than their sheer incompetence."

While the Nazi project to build the bomb was a disorganized mess almost from the start, the Manhattan project accomplished exactly what Bohr thought was required, but was initially pessimistic about realizing. After he was flown to the US he was given a tour around the new facilities that had been built for the project and said, "I told you it couldn't be done without turning the whole country into a factory. You have done just that."

So yeah, there were scientists who did silent resistance such as Hahn, and even a few scientists who were open in their opposition to the Nazi's such as Hahn's buddy Max von Laue, but we should be weary of the sort of narratives constructed by "apolitical" scientists after the fact to excuse their participation with the Nazis. It's kind of analogous to other Nazi revisionist narratives. Of course the Soviets aren't superior in warfare, it's due to their being willing to send hordes of peasants to their deaths! Of course we Germans have the most sophisticated nuclear physics program unlike the US which is a scientific backwater. Thus you see it's not that we couldn't build a bomb, it's that we were unwilling to build such a destructive weapon! If only the Nazi's weren't so gosh darn virtuous maybe they could've won the war!

You probably will want to avoid his opinions concerning transgender people competing in sports.

Potatoes are genuinely the greatest vegetable known to mankind.

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How are you enjoying the game? Would you consider it worth picking up? I've gotten used to playing some other paradox games, but I've never delved into the EU or Victoria series.

I think those questions about the design process fall within the domain of the philosophy of technology. Maybe check out the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy page on the Phil of technology.

Tsar to Lenin is solid. Also “Seeing Red” by Julia Reichert is the best doc I’ve seen about the US Communist Party that interviews a bunch of former members.

Edit: also recommend Thomas Sankara The Upright Man, and also while I haven’t seen it yet the Wobblies doc that just got restored looks pretty great.

Pants were invented to carry pockets.

Whenever someone questions my leftward trajectory.

Isn't her focus on vulgar Marxism exactly what your critique of her is? She argues that the cultural theorists don't focus nearly enough on the development of the forces of production (which IIRC according to her argument can't be understand theoretically sans collaborative effort), and how the rapid development of the forces of production have led not further the rationalization of the economic process, but only a furthered its abstraction to new levels, which basically seems to be what you just said.

I'd prefer the green face. It's got the cool black dots to red dots on the rim, a red star, the color green, and I kinda dislike the way that the bottom-left watch has a big border to frame the circular part of the watch unlike the other 3.

I think they are riding Vespas because they mod themselves, so then they can make a nostalgic reference to the mods from Quadrophenia and must drive colorful scooters as well.

While I myself can’t speak German, you might dig the podcast 99 Zu Eins. They’ve done some crossovers with leftist podcasts in english which is how I found them, but for the most part their episodes are in German. It kinda reminded me a bit of TMBS.

There was a skylight in the apartment I used to live, and birds would land and walk on it in the morning. The sound of their claws on the window panel was somewhere between hail and nails on a chalkboard. Truly terrifying.

I guess since this is an internet forum your taking my legitimate question as being a "gotcha", but whatever it's all love on my side. If you reduce punishment to just inflicting harm for emotional retribution then yea of course it's going to be unjustifiable, but if your going to be as charitable as possible to the crowd who supports punishment, then you should consider the advocates who support things like comparatively "painless" executions in which the suffering is minimized. However, the advocates of punishment are to my knowledge not specifically defending capital punishment, but punishment in general, which would seem to include something like imprisonment which I'd assume you'd support over the execution of war criminals.

Overall, I think I tend to agree with what your saying as I don't think its right to cause unnecessary suffering out of some sense of justice, nor am I supportive of executions when one can be rendered powerless by other less harmful means. However, that doesn't stop me from thinking that your notion of punishment seems narrow, and while the critique your making may be applicable to certain forms of punishment, that it fails when considering less extreme forms of punishment which don't aim to bring about unnecessary harm unto the offender, but to merely render them harmless.

Was punishing Nazis for the Holocaust justifiable?

I think technological change is something good to focus on. Namely, changing the socio-economic system which has the most significant determinative effect on our environment. Libs like technological change except when you challenge the socio-economic organization of society, which they presume to follow "human nature" and to be something entirely natural rather than as something technological. They conceive of technology only in terms of gadgets and toys, but why should technology be limited to mere instrumental tools? Why shouldn't we consider the way in which we organize our society as technological? Perhaps part of the problem is the manner in which people take shit coming out of the economics department as naturalized facts, rather than as technological constructions which their own limitations. The capitalistic organization of society has been able to accomplish more than the feudalistic formation, however the very means which enabled it to do so, also functionally results in it being fundamentally unable to deal with poverty and climate change.

Spongebob was pretty great when I watched it growing up. Haven't really seen many episodes past the first film release though, so I can only assume its grown stale since the original creator passed away. Mr. Krabs is probably the best representation of a greedy, parasitic, small-business owner you could ask for. Along with this it's fairly obvious to even kids that Spongebob is incredibly naive and how he gets taken advantage of, such as when he tells Patrick how lucky he is for only having to pay Mr.Krabs $50/hr to work for him, as when he started he had to pay Mr.Krabs $100/hr. Or how ridiculous it is for Spongebob to be forced to take a vacation by Mr. Krabs, ironically due to the Fry Cook Union threatening to fine the Krusty Krab a nickel due to Spongebob accumulating too much vacation time. Then of course there are simpler episodes like the reef-blower episode in which Squidward builds up existential dread having gone to live in the suburbs with people who live just like him, only to find the ceaseless monotony and conformity as even worse than dealing with the chaos induced by Spongebob and Patrick.

I think it means "to be clear"