And the thing that surprised me (that shouldn't at this point) was how desperately people cling to the idea of using psuedoscientific concentration camp studies steeped in racial typology that can't possibly be validated via re-testing. They'll argue for using the "data" until the point of anger. Talk about not "wasting" it so that people wouldn't "die for nothing."
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They absolutely died for nothing anyway. Stop trying to find a silver lining or justification for systematically slaughtering people.
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Just because the fascists were meticulous fascists doesn't mean the study wasn't garbage.
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If you study the subject via other means today, then what value is a study from the 1940s on emaciated, dying people? There are a lot of variables that make the concentration camp studies garbage and pointless to use.
Obviously, beyond the thought experiment is more complicated if we expand to include data from experiments on soldiers, overall research conducted by the Nazis, Operation Paperclip, etc. Yes, some researchers still have to question using Nazi era research itself, such as their research on tobacco use, but what gets to me is running into people who think that fascists were somehow behind all of modern medical and industrial technology. The concentration camp experiments were generally useless on a global scale, much like how the Japanese vivisection experiments were ultimately pointless.
I am just damn tired of this "classic ethical dilemma" surrounding concentration camps coming up. It's a toxic myth.
Edit: Thanks for letting me rant. It wears down on me sometimes to keep running into reactionary bullshit when talking about the sciences, and I have very few outlets.
An_Old_Big_Tree wrote
I hadn't thought about this stuff before; thanks for taking the time to write it up!