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THE POET AS SCIENTIST

THE POET AS SCIENTIST, THE POET AS SCIENTIST

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The Geek's Raven
[An excerpt, with thanks to Marcus Bales]

Once upon a midnight dreary,
fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line,
I took a floppy from the drawer.
Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command
But got instead a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

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Form input - by Günter Born

Friday, August 11, 2023

What if there had been no "Night of the long knives", in Germany, in 1934?

One of the defining moments of the Nazi regime in Germany was The Night of the Long Knives, in 1934. In this "internal purge", Hitler and the SS executed Ernst Rohm, a close friend of Hitler's and one of the founding members of the Nazi party. The primary reasons for this internal purge were the disruptive nature of Rohm's Storm Troopers, a kind of paramilitary force with a huge number of members, and Rohm's revolutionary, socialist leanings towards massive wealth redistribution. The official explanation for the purge was that Rohm was plotting a coup, but, there appears to be very little evidence for this. By 1943 or so, even the closest members of Hitler's inner circle who encouraged Hitler to kill Rohm -- Goering, Goebbels, etc. -- were openly saying that they'd made a mistake in killing Rohm, as Germany plunged towards a final apocalypse. Essentially, with the death of Rohm, Hitler abandoned any further pretense of social revolution, adopting an essentially nationalist agenda in which wealth was acquired first by massive deficit spending, and then by war and exploitation of conquered territories. So, suppose, instead, a compromise with Rohm had been adopted, and wealth had been redistributed along a somewhat socialist model, in order to raise the living standards of the majority of the German people. Do we still have a second world war? What does the future of Germany look like under these circumstances, and how does it differ from what happened OTL?

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