It’s absolutely true that the Holocaust hit several groups with the same brutality as the Jews (Slavs, Romani, Gays, etc.). However when the Holocaust is taught about, it’s usually with a strong focus on Jews and antisemitism. Additionally, Russia has been built up as an adversary throughout the past 50-70 years. With that in mind, I don’t see it as strange that the “Holocaust guilt” is centred around Jews, and that Germany finds it easier to oppose Russia than Isreal.

Don’t you see that if you want to effect change, it helps to understand why Germany is doing what they’re doing now?

I have no idea what brings the ICC into this, I’m not aware of cases against any other country than Isreal here.

By the way, how does trying to understand why people are doing what they do make me an asshole? I’m trying to be civil here, and I think you’re being very impolite.

You’re wilfully ignoring the historical context that makes it hard for Germany to oppose Israel. By doing so, you’re not helping anyone.

It’s laudable of you to bring attention to these other atrocities. Without creating a “race to the bottom” regarding what was worse, I still want to point out that the horror of the Holocaust was not only in the number of killed.

I’m aware of a couple of the atrocities you mentioned, but as far as I’m aware, they don’t carry the clinical state-sponsored efficiency that is a hallmark of the Holocaust. When I compare Gaza today to the holocaust, that’s what I’m comparing, rather than the number of killed. It’s about the way Isreal has decided to wipe out the population of Gaza, and systematically does so completely unhindered.

This is a classic problem of going into one ditch, then oversteering and hitting the opposite ditch.

Germany has worked so hard on “The Holocaust was terrible, we will forever support the Jews to make up for it” that they’re now supporting a genocidal Jewish state.

My point is that I understand why this is hard for them. For them to oppose Israel invokes some associations that they really want to keep far away. However, now, supporting Israel invokes the same associations. This puts them in a kind of catch-22 situation, where no matter what they do, they’re invoking associations to the Nazis.

To be clear: I think the only right thing to do now is to oppose Israel. I just understand why that is exceptionally hard for Germany.

To be fair to the Germans, I can understand how the Holocaust is integrated into them as a kind of “original sin”. What was done to the Jews under the Nazis was so unspeakable terrible, and German society as a whole has done an enormous job at ingraining in themselves that nothing of the sort should ever repeat itself.

The problem is that “nothing of the sort” has translated into “opposing Jews in any way”. It seems to me like Germany sees itself as bound to support Jews (and thereby the Jewish state Israel) no matter what in order to “atone for their sins”, and I can understand that. However, right now, Israel is suddenly the state committing the closest thing we’ve seen to the Holocaust since the actual Holocaust. It’s very hard for Germany to oppose Israel without tickling a part of their history that they’ve done a laudable job at condemning.

What Germany needs now, is to separate their history from their current politics. I understand that it’s difficult, and I don’t have an answer to how it should be done, but it needs to happen, lest the same crimes are committed again.

Hard disagree. I work a lot with numbers, both hand-written and typed. I’ve yet to come across a situation where spaces are not sufficiently clear for readability. Using spaces for separation has never been an issue with letters, why would it be an issue with numbers?

As if an organised military of any kind has any hope of winning a guerrilla war in one of the largest, most populous, and most heavily armed countries on earth.

The ability of the American people to defeat the American army in a revolution is solely dependent on their willingness to take casualties. It’s been shown time and again that a massively superior army like the US really isn’t able to deal with a war where enemy combatants are also the civilian population. An exception is Israel in Gaza, where they’ve decided to just level everything to the ground, and massacre the civilians.

I’ll be honest: It’s complete insanity to use commas within a number. If you need laughably high precision, use spaces for readability. If you need a lot of zeros, use power notation.

There is no excuse for putting commas in a number. I rest my case.

Thanks for this! I want kids myself, and constantly see people online being so negative to the idea, it’s nice to see someone here being positive to it.

To me, it’s quite simple: I really want kids. Have wanted for years. It’s probably a biological urge more than anything else, but I find myself daydreaming about playing with my kids, taking them camping, and showing them how to build a treehouse.

We’ve accepted that there will never be an “optimal” time to have kids, so at this point we’re kind of just “waiting for it to happen” (i.e. not actively preventing kids from showing up).

There are people out there moralising about how it’s irresponsible to bring kids into this world, and I honestly couldn’t care less what they think. I’m confident that I can give my kids a good life, that they’ll be glad they were born, and that they will bring a lot of joy to the world.

You summed it up perfectly. What you’re saying is exactly the point I’m trying to get across. We’re just using different words.

You’re using “physics” in the sense it was used 2000 years ago when you say “from their perspective all our fields fit under physics”. I’m saying the exact same thing, only replacing “physics” with “natural science/natural philosophy”, which are the umbrella terms used today.

You even point out that “all our fields fit under physics (natural science/philosophy), except for applied science (engineering)”, which is exactly the point I’m making when saying they saw no distinction between the different natural sciences, but did distinguish between “pure science” and “engineering”.

The word physics comes from Latin physica (“study of nature”)

This is essentially my point. You don’t have to go more than a couple hundred years back before “natural science” or “natural philosophy” was considered a single field, without a distinction between e.g. physics and chemistry. Engineering (as we call it today) or “crafting”, has been considered separate from the study of nature itself (or “natural philosophy”) all the way back to before Ancient Greece.

I’m not saying they knew nothing about physics. I’m saying that they didn’t regard it as a distinct discipline the way we do today. No Greek philosopher would have called themselves a “chemist” or “physicist” or “biologist”, but they would separate between “natural philosopher” and “craftsman”, just as we today separate between “scientist” and “engineer”.

Economists set option prices. That is literally trying to predict the future.

Edit: To be fair, I shouldn’t say “economists” in general. There are plenty of good economists out there that understand that economics is not a predictive science, I know a couple personally. But there are definitely some economists out there that think their degree lets them predict the unpredictable.

You’ve successfully turned the discussion from being about “can a field which does not produce reproducible results be a scientific field?” to “what are the requirements to judge whether a field is scientific?”

I have a PhD in chemistry, and a good bunch of published scientific articles. Besides that I’ve studied philosophy of science for half a year. I assume that should make me qualified (in your eyes) to reiterate the questions and points made by !plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works: “Can a field that is largely incapable of producing reproducible results be regarded as scientific?”, “Why do so many fields that are incapable of producing reproducible results insist on being called scientific?”.

This is missing a lot of historical intrigues and “mistakes” in mathematics. Firstly, the way modern mathematical theorems and proofs are built up from axioms is relatively new (a couple hundred years or so). If you go back to Euclid, there are in fact contradictions that can be drawn from his work because he was defining his axioms inappropriately.

In more modern times we have discussions around the “axiom of choice”, and whole fields such as set theory and Fourier analysis faced some major hurdles in just being established.

My point is that math is constantly changing, also on a fundamental level, because new systems and axioms are being introduced. These rarely invalidate old systems, but sometimes they reveal a contradiction in terms that puts limitations on when some system is valid.

This is very similar to when Einstein developed a new framework for describing gravity: It didn’t “disprove” Newton in the sense that Newton’s laws still apply for all practical purposes in a huge range of situations, it just put clearer limits to when they apply and gave a more general explanation to why they apply.

It’s not revisionist to say that and engineering texts are engineering texts rather than physics texts, it’s just properly classifying them.

I’m not sure whether the ancient Greeks really had a concept of “physics” as a dedicated discipline like we do today- they would probably put a lot of what we do under the umbrella of “natural philosophy”. The separation of pure natural science into distinct branches is a relatively recent phenomenon. The separation between pure science and engineering on the other hand is quite old.

The US literally beat the Nazis to developing fission technology, i.e. nukes (admittedly with a very international research community). It’s quite clear just from that, that the US had plenty of strong scientists before they brought in Nazis/Nazi collaborators from overseas.

As a complete side note: I believe it’s been speculated (by people who know much more about this than me) that Nazi research on nukes, among other things, was hampered by researchers like Heisenberg deliberately dragging their feet because they were forced to work on the projects but didn’t believe in the cause. I’m not meaning to clear the name of any Nazi collaborators, but pointing out that not all scientists working under the Nazi regime were necessarily nazis.

I actually experienced breaking a toilet lid by sitting on it once (I’m like 70 kg). It wasn’t even one of those crappy ones. The problem was that it was designed with a slight upward arch and far too few points of contact with the seat, so if you sat down in just the right way (and happened to have your wallet in your back pocket) all the force was concentrated in the perfect way to make it crack.

I used to sit down on toilet lids without batting an eye, but now I am scarred.

Another comment here gives an example of how a 6th grade reading comprehension test could be formulated. Essentially, it’s about how complex sentences you can parse, and how large your “context window” is while reading.

Imagine a small child just learning to read. They struggle with every word, so if a sentence grows more complex than “The dog is brown.”, they simply can’t get to the end of the sentence while still remembering what the start was about. This also applies at a higher level: Keeping track of a complex “scene” which describes a setting while also describing dialogue between characters and inner dialogue in parallel requires more cognitive effort than the simpler “scenes” in children’s books. A higher reading level means you spend less cognitive effort reading and understanding the words and sentences, so you have more cognitive capacity in reserve to actually understand the full picture.

Censoring shit that doesn’t need to be censored (i.e. swear words, and more recently any word like “kill”, “died”, “murdered”, “raped”, etc.) is likely the cheapest form of ragebait. You automatically trigger a bunch of engagement through responses of “you’re allowed to say X on the internet”. Engagement = More views, so throwing asterisks or blurring random words is proliferating.