Re:Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appear...
by moate on Friday April 12, 2019 @09:34AM
(#19644625)
My point, which I'll just keep remaking here, is that pointing out the "super tiny" population of Israel is disingenuous since the intent is to show Israeli exceptionalism. If I was claiming "NASA is the best, way better than Israel whom NASA helped" then your whataboutism would be a valid critique. But I'm not saying that.
Pointing out the population relative to the US/China is the "Tony Stark built this in a cave from spare parts" argument, but that's not really what happened here. It's more "Tony Stark built this from a schematic given to him by Reed Richards and using parts gifted from Hank Pym" (to stretch my Marvel analogy as far as possible). It's still impressive, but that statement doesn't provide clarification to the accomplishment's significance.
TL;dr- "Israel did a cool thing, and they had lots of international help doing it" is the accurate statement on what happened.
Re:Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appear...
by SEJeff on Friday April 12, 2019 @12:44AM
(#19642044)
If someone puts a gun to your head and says "Do this thing or you and your family will be executed" it doesn't make you the same as them. Coming from Nazi Germany does not make them necessarily Nazis.
What's your point? NASA got a bunch of help from Nazi scientists.