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Next week I am gonna join a big and important global event regarding innovation, AI, tech and sustainability, with thousands of participants, investors, startups etc.
The prime attention on both social media is given to left-wing NGO, that are arriving in full force to do political propaganda on stage. It is always fun to check the background on LinkedIn of all these, always female, speakers, and see that it is completely unrelated to the issue they are talking about.
For example, of the 5 women speakers from @WomenInAI, only two are graduated, with bachelor, in Engineering, and then they moved to managerial roles, HR or NGOism. One is an "Afrofuturist feminist" who has done nothing in life apart launching her shitty art with the NASA.
In my opinion, the greatest fault of Capitalism, and the real problem that is behind it, is that it is so productive that can share money to unproductive people, creating a new caste of Priestly Propagandist, that exists only because they receive money from society. A parasitical relationships between the producers of wealth, the managers and the oppressed/activist class, who can rearrange the chairs to receive more money, prestige and wealth.
The only way in which a productive capitalist society can work is to introduce a huge shame against this kind of behavior. Sadly, if introduced, it would be,correctly, interpreted as anti-women discrimination.
This logic seems incomplete, but there’s obviously some merit to it. It’s easy to be an advocate when one is completely removed from the negative consequences of their advocacy. Commies eventually got so triggered by repeatedly being called out on their revealed preferences that they made a webcomic just to snark at it (without actually refuting the original criticism, naturally).
The utopian socialist Star Trek narrative of cornucopia technology making war obsolete is itself born from the luxury of living in a hyper secular capitalist paradise bereft of any real ideology. Every great story of central planning returning man to the Garden of Eden begins by skipping the part where capitalism made a technologically advanced civilization possible. The endless irony of 1984 is the unchallenged assertion that a fascist shithole like Oceania could actually foster and cultivate a scientifically rich inner circle, when Hitler’s relatively kind and gentle Third Reich couldn’t even figure out the atom bomb.
So capitalism continues to pave the way for its enemies to live comfortable lives attacking its excesses in as many novel and uncharitable ways as possible. Easier to try to build civilization in the skeleton remains of a better one than to have to figure out how shit works on your own. And when everyone’s starving and hauling hay as a peasant, they’re too miserable to listen to your screed on inclusion and diversity.
Just as a real specific issue, Nazi Germany did not get the nuclear bomb due to a lack of scientific innovation. They simply were bombed too often in too many places, didn't have a lot of access to the right resources, and more. The US basically threw a ridiculous amount of money at the problem and the program never got bombed once and it still took years and years to build just two bombs and even by the time they did, they had air superiority anyways. So I think that's worthless as evidence. In fact, I think there's plenty of evidence that a lot of scientists are perfectly happy "doing their thing" without much regard for what society is doing outside their research bubble.
Yes, being a fascist society makes being technologically advanced hard, for all the reasons you stated. A society that requires constant war to flourish eventually runs out of reasons to research and develop a bigger gun.
But does fascism actually require war to flourish? Spain and Portugal, Pinochet's Chile, etc. seem like strong counterexamples for this.
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