"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

Dumb, predictable flamewars are, to say the least, uninteresting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we've had to ask you not to do this more than once before. Continuing to do it will eventually get your account banned here, so please don't.

The military-industrial complex you refer to would be the war efforts of allied nations. Those war efforts didn’t start in earnest until the Munich Agreement in the case of the UK and quite a bit later in the case of the US. Your writing seems to paint this in a negative light and this is an extreme position. One may view current military spending in the U.S. negatively but to view the WW 2 efforts thusly is bizarre.

As to them being men and white it is a historical fact that at that time white men dominated in science and economics. That is not the fault of the referenced men and it’s not as if in hindsight we are glorifying the male scientists while diminishing the contribution of their female counterparts. There were very few of them. Marie Curie is still the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two separate fields so it’s not as if female contributions were always ignored or downplayed.

I don’t think your take is cynical but rather somewhat pointless. I can’t see what point you are trying to make or highlight.

Cherry picking some facts to build up your narrative is indeed cynical, yes. You could similarily point out that none are wearing shorts or sandals.

I understand about shorts, but it's not offensive to compare ethnicity with sandals.

Einstein had some very radical political views. That's why he wasn't permitted to work on the manhattan project, which he probably would have thought immoral anyway.

> I know this is a cynic take,

It’s worse than that. This take is a trivial restatement of history, namely that whites and men had most of the power, while amplifying outrage with people already agreeing with you, not contributing to lessening the divide, and causing people like myself to self censor by replying using throwaway accounts.

I think what people are having trouble understanding about these kind of statements is what do you want to do about it? What kind of idolizing are you actually against? I have never seen these people being used as examples of morally virtuous people. Even in this thread/article nobody is calling them morally virtuous. Are you against saying anything positive about them?

> started "idolising" past scientists [..] whose primary purpose on life had become, basically, how to best kill other people

We all should be careful to judge people in history with our current set of morals. The scientists in the photo all experienced the horrors of WWII. I don’t think it requires to much mental gymnastics to have the position that the deterrence of nuclear weapons would lead to a safer world, especially in the post WWII context. Note that this is not a blanket statement against judging people in history. I just don’t think this applies to the scientists here.

There’s a recent article in Scientific American loosely related to your concerns that I suspect you will find insightful.

Surely you're trolling, user paganel.

And?

The Jews freed from Hitler's concentration camp would beg to differ.