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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I meant more stuff like this, but generally wasn't the zeitgeist of the post war period one of science / rationality / industrialization / technology?

Oh technology generally was more fashionable back then. Scientific prestige was higher. Tom Swift was the hero in 'Tom Swift and his Atomic Earth Blaster'!

I really think lobotomies come under the aegis of medicine. Eugenics too, for that matter. Medicine just doesn't feel like tech, it feels like something else. The pharma-industrial complex has a different essence to the military-industrial complex or the big tech that we know today IMO. They tend to hold less of the limelight, the profile of Pfizer and Johnson&Johnson was very low compared to tech. Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos... these are mighty names! Who has heard of Alex Gorsky, former CEO of J & J? But on the other hand, they are called biotech companies.

With tech, I think it's a case of the more physics are involved, the techier it gets. Aerospace, ballistics, Silicon Valley, Massachusetts. Computer science is sort of like physics, it's all precise rules and mathematics. I reckon the bombards that were used to break the walls of Constantinople would be classified as tech, that's physics/engineering.