Tom Lehrer - Wernher von Braun - with intro

What Hacker News said

Strong rec sriram_malhar · 2022-12 · on “Tom Lehrer has released all of his songs into the public domain”

My favourite is Wernher Von Braun. [this video] Thank you Tom Lehrer for all the memories and the laughs, and a biting satire that's still fresh.

Cites gjm11 · 2014-10 · on “The strange contagion of a dream”

> The best you can say about his stance during the war is that he was not an ideologue, but an opportunist. The best expression known to me of this is Tom Lehrer's song "Wernher von Braun" (e.g., [this video] ).

Cites PhasmaFelis · 2016-04 · on “Cisco’s Attempt to Dodge Responsibility for Facilitating Human Rights Abuses”

I didn't intend to imply that he did, apologies. I realize my original post was poorly phrased, so I edited out that part. It's the people saying either that Cisco couldn't have possibly known what China would do with tech designed specifically to track a suppressed religious group, or else doing the Werner von Braun defense[1], that I'm referring to. [1] "'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,' says Werner von Braun." [this video]

Cites otras · 2018-12 · on “Project A119”

Along these lines, I've always been fascinated by Operation Paperclip [0], the US effort to collect Nazi scientists that including Wernher von Braun (of V2 infamy and Saturn V fame). As Tom Lehrer sang [1], " 'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun. " [0]: [LINK] [1]: [this video]

Cites cjslep · 2020-03 · on “Pleroma 2.0: a free, federated social networking server built on open protocols”

And we've come full circle: your argument here is exactly the same as here: [LINK] I am happy to let you keep showing off your circular reasoning to the world, and will happily repeat myself pointing out all my counterpoints you did not engage with and ignored. For example: - I claimed a technology's existence is enough to cause real world consequences. You ignored this point. - I mentioned you are not including safeties to building a tool to protect its user[0] (the "first party" user of your tool) and its targets ("second party" people the tool-users are subjecting to your tool). That makes it legally/morally unappealing to use as a tool (puts self in danger), and morally unappealing to be

Cites fer · 2021-12 · on “The Last Soviet Generation”

Hard to tell, but it was consistently losing to the Soviet Union by most space-dick measurement metrics. Please don't see me as defending the USSR in any way, it's a widely accepted fact that the USSR was 0.5-2 years ahead in most milestones. My comment was more in line to contradict the statement of "this country invented everything!" when obviously the Soviets had a strong know how that certainly didn't come from the US [0]. The man on the moon is what it is: an incredibly impressive feat with an objectively terrible risk/benefit ratio, but pulling it off makes it great for propaganda purposes. Once the US did that, the crewed moon landing programs in the USSR, which already had problems,