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fooker 2 days ago

You missed some important points that explain why he's not celebrated.

His efforts received enormous amounts of funding from the Nazis.

Much of his specialized 'computers' were explicitly for the war effort, including planes.

He was a big fan of utilizing computing for racial and genealogy research. The Nazis had plans drawn out to murder orders of magnitude more people based on this sort of research had they won (Generalplan Ost).

It was not like he was forced at gunpoint to participate, he was all in for the funding. Much like Von Braun, but did not have the luck to be paperclipped.

ds_opseeker 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Initially received funding, later in the war they turned it off as "not war worthy"

You might be surprised how many UK and US scientists of that time supported eugenics, see for example https://nautil.us/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics-238014

and as for computers and atrocities, see IBM's history from the time or perhaps some more recent tech companies.

Few of us are saints.

fooker 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

You'll find that the computing pioneers we celebrate by name are largely detached from the examples you mentioned.

throw234259 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

wormius 2 days ago | parent [-]

I don't know how much I can trust you on Zuse if you can't get basic facts about de Beauvoir right:

Simone de Beauvoir did not have a "future is female" plan, as the modern slogan "The Future is Female" originated decades after her major works and stems from lesbian-separatist contexts in the 1970s.

"She is globally famous for writing in The Second Sex (1949) that "[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," which established that gender is a social construct rather than a fixed biological destiny." (I hazard this is really what you're butthurt about).

"Rather than advocating for female supremacy or a matriarchal "female future," Beauvoir's existentialist framework sought human liberation and radical reciprocity between sexes, arguing that both men and women need to transcend oppressive societal myths of the "Other".

The phrase "The Future is Female" was coined by Liza Cowan in 1975 at a feminist bookstore (A Woman's Place) in Washington, D.C., and later popularized as a modern pop-culture T-shirt slogan in the 2010s, completely separate from Beauvoir's 20th-century existentialism."

------ Trying to find info on a "90% male reduction plan" it looks like what you are referring to is:

The idea of reducing the male population by 90% (leaving a ratio of 10% men to 90% women) comes from the radical American feminist author and activist Sally Miller Gearhart. In her 1982 essay titled "The Future – If There Is One – Is Female,"

Gearhart argued that to achieve global peace and end patriarchal violence, the human sex ratio should be shifted over time. She explicitly clarified that this should not be achieved via violence or culling, but rather through future reproductive technologies and selective breeding ------- Please don't conflate Simone's pluralistic, humanistic, liberating form of feminism with 1970s style "Lesgbian" RadFem ideology.

Please at least get your actors straight when you make claims like this, it almost sounds like I'd be making claims like: (bot) throw234259 wants to genocide every human and especially men.

It's not even remotely true. And it stains your name, because it's easier to just take what you heard without reflecting or retaining (even if google is a search away).

Eugenics is alive in the US Government right now. "Don't get injections, only the strong survive! Drink raw milk, don't you dare have government test it... Swim in Sludge (literal things RFK Jr advises/does)" The Kennedy's were literally eugenicist and threw his aunt in an institution and lobotomized/sterilized her.

If you want a "widely supported today" why didn't you take one of the chief proponents of such ideology as your example? One who hasn't been dead in ages? One who holds power, and is joined in a union with SecDef Pete Hegseth who pushes some "ubermensch" (I'm stwong!) Might-Makes-Right/Fittest-Survives ideology that closely ties in with this ideology.

I would leave it there, too, but you didn't.

throw234259 2 days ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

orbifold 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Same can also be said of IBMs computers at the time and the US efforts to build computers.

fooker 2 days ago | parent [-]

Sure, winners writing the history is a tale as old as time.

2 days ago | parent [-]
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froh 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

to my understandung this strong "fascist" hypothesis is hypebole. he was member of a conservative student association, however those were prohibited by the Nazis.

correct is that he was a conservative engineer who happened to be intelligent and live in that era, and who was lucky enough to work in his domain instead of dying a cannon fodder somewhere. did they build weapons? sure thing. does that make him a convinced fascist? certainly not.

he wasn't even member of the NSDAP party.

here is a short biography based off complete archive material:

Deutsche Biographie - Zuse, Konrad https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd118637436.html

fooker 2 days ago | parent [-]

Where did I mention he was a fascist or a nazi?

There's a huge difference between "a conservative engineer who happened to be intelligent and live in that era" and leading a weapons lab attracting enormous amounts of funding, and fantasizing about how computing could be used to advance race science research.

froh a day ago | parent [-]

> fantasizing about how computing could be used to advance race science research.

mind to share sources to that part? that's saying "Nazi" btw.

fooker 11 hours ago | parent [-]

https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/a-701465.html

https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/article/der-erste-computer-d...

> that's saying "Nazi" btw.

No more than allowing chips on drones makes Nvidia/Intel VPs terrorists, but there's certainly culpability.

1718627440 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What do you think Alan Turing was working on?