I went looking for a source for your list, as it definitely has a "polarized social media fever swamp" vibe. It appears that list was written by a little-known novelist who is often misrepresented as an academic, and gets things wrong: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5r5dai/are_t....
No need for warning signs: I think the problem about the facism diagnosis is only that comparison to historical figures like the infamous austrian painter is misleading. Just call it palingenetic ultranationalism and we probably really quickly get agreement.
I think that was the single most horrific thing I've seen from him.
Since we're already discussing a novelist, I'll add some (spoken) lyrics[1], from "Sophia" by The Crüxshadows[2]:
"The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature,
capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty.
If you wish to find that which becomes the dividing line between
mankind and other biological classifications, it rests not in
brain size, dominance, or even emotional capability. It lies within
the innate capacity for human beings to reflect on their actions
and show regret. It is most certainly the ability to empathize that gives
them their position. All mammals understand love and affection, but
only man shows a propensity to place himself in the shoes of
another life-form. Losing this capability, among individuals of the species
reduces them below their much heralded position
and readies the climate for the likely fall of man.
A fall from grace."
A large part of that is that there aren't a lot of astronauts, and those who were selected for a substantial part of the space program had external forces selecting for men.
A big requirement was someone who was an experienced pilot, likely from the military, with a proven track record of unusual planes. Women were explicitly prevented from that on-ramp. It wasn't until the 80s, 20+ years into the program, that the first truly civilian (no military experience) astronaut was selected.
Maybe women are predisposed to qualities that make them less likely to be selected as astronauts? I don't think that's true, but even if it was... the selection size of astronauts to inspect from is simply too small to come to any good conclusion.
Sure, there may well be various structural factors which may explain some or all of the disparity - but it's worth noting that whenever there's an attempt to fix this, we hear endless complaints along the lines of "it's wrong to change selection procedures, there just aren't enough women or minority candidates applying, it's a pipeline problem".
Well, these comic books are an attempt to fix the pipeline problem.
In reality, there are likely multiple factors in play. But if you believe that, after removing "anything specifically targetting women" from their communications, NASA are going to alter downstream selection criteria in order to compensate then I suspect you are going to be disappointed.
You mean like: women are smaller and therefore require less life-support reservoirs? An all-female astronaut corps was investigated in the Mercury days for just that reason.
Oh wait, no, that's the opposite of what you are looking for.
> Social Justice has yet to put a man on the moon.
Here's another way to look at it: For most of history a significant portion -- probably the vast majority -- of the human population has been relegated to economically low-level labor for numerous reasons. Unfortunately, this has disproportionately affected specific groups of people, often through some form of social oppression, and has continued even as social norms have changed and global productivity and wealth have exploded.
One upshot is that this has kept those people from contributing to global economic and scientific progress unless they could break out of the social strata they were born into. Hence, beyond fairness, "social justice" is also a way to increase the pool of people who can contribute.
Im the opposite, I think things like this are the most important things they can be doing. Empowering the next generation of innovators, empowering people. People are who do those experiments...
> If NASA makes cool rockets then they will attract people that naturally align with their mission of making cool rockets
This reminds me of founders with a legitimately cool product being floored by their lack of sales and marketing efforts translating into a lack of sales.
Nothing sells itself. If we want astronauts, we need to keep the astronaut brand in schools. Art is a proven way to do this.
Comics and books inspire people to get traits and achieve things like the characters from the stories. As an example: Elon, because of reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation and other sci-fi books, got inspired to do space stuff. Not to become a sci-fi writer (although that could have happened as well)
Many scientists and engineers have been inspired this way when they were kids.
This is deeply flawed thinking. It also doesn't really make sense in the real world.
How does anyone hear about the thing you're doing or making? How do people figure out how to get involved? How do you attract different people(women, POC, etc) to your thing if they aren't already represented?
People don't just magically know about something that's interesting to them. They have to discover it.
Tons of very influential or popular figures only took their path because of things like comic books(art) from NASA. I wouldn't be an engineer today if it weren't for stuff like How It's Made or Bill Nye. Representation matters.
One of my introductions to engineering was watching MacGyver as a kid.
Now watching it, knowing what I do, it's comical. But it had a big part in getting me interested and in the door.
It's the with any media or entertainment. You can't take kids to space, but you can make a book, movie or comic book where they can dream about doing it when they grow up.
Put another way, it's better that kids read this comic book and not one that does nothing to develop their futures, right?
By your argument, my GI Joe and Lone Ranger toys were patronising toys that prevented me from getting into the military or horsemanship purely on merit.
Proactively courting interest in children is completely orthogonal to "getting into" anything by merit. Millions of boys that didn't grow up to meet the requirements of military pilot positions, still yearned to be astronauts. Including, probably, 100% of those that did qualify.
Encouraging children to aspire to greatness in their adult life is not patronizing in any way.
POWERFUL AND CONTINUING NATIONALISM
DISDAIN FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
IDENTIFICATION OF ENEMIES AS A UNIFYING CAUSE SUPREMACY OF THE MILITARY
RAMPANT SEXISM
CONTROLLED MASS MEDIA
OBSESSION WITH NATIONAL SECURITY
RELIGION AND GOVERNMENT INTERTWINED
CORPORATE POWER PROTECTED
LABOR POWER SUPPRESSED
DISDAIN FOR INTELLECTUALS & THE ARTS
OBSESSION WITH CRIME & PUNISHMENT
RAMPANT CRONYISM & CORRUPTION
FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS