The idea that any of our presidents ever actually “ran the country” should actually be completely unacceptable. You think farmers can run an entire country? How about actors? Failsons? Sex pests? None of these people should be “running the country”. The country has a massive bureaucracy running it and the president is filling a specific role of making judgement calls and tweaking the roster of bureaucrats
Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, The Philippines, Nicaragua, Chile, Guam, Hawaii, Marianas, Cuba, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, economic shock therapy in Russia
And that’s just the basics. Millions dead, nukes on civilians, chemical weapons on civilians, mass deforestation, poisoning land and water, generations of cancer and birth defects, some individual US targets had more bombs dropped on them than all countries combined dropped in WW2, napalm and white phosphorous to bind chemical fire to human flesh, land mines fucking everywhere, depleted uranium dropped in population centers, coups, death squads, resource extraction and annexation, torture, kidnapping, direct terror and training and arming thousands of terror cells.
Not to mention the USA was built on land where 80% of the indigenous population was killed and the USA maintained and continues to maintain the policies of genocide, enslavement, mass murder, lynch mobs, systematic rape, eugenics, child torture and trafficking, etc.
Sooooo, no. The USA is not on its third invasion of a sovereign nation, it’s 200 years into it’s prosecution of the genocidal annexation campaign that it deliberately took control over from Western Europe.
Internet is absolutely unusable without ad blockers. And when ads get forced through a service, I stop consuming that service.
As Marxists, I think we need to be very careful about how we talk about taxes.
It’s a ridiculous system of exploitation. Owners should be paying all of the taxes, but they control the tax law.
And Britain isn’t even under sanctions!
She’s a teacher, in a school setting, where kids are literally there to learn, during their formative years.
She’s not talking to you.
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Social cohesion in Canada is a threat to people who are black, brown, and indigenous; a threat to people who are women, queer, and neurodiverse; a threat to the ecosystem that we all rely on; I’m OK with communism being accurately seen as “anti-social” because it literally means against the society of context (in this context white European settler society) and that’s exactly what it means to be for universal liberation - it means being against settler society.
But I think it’s disingenuous to say “science” is at fault for these
I think it’s disingenuous to say that this is what I said. Science participates in the dominant social structure and is interpermeates the processes and structures of violent oppression.
Shitty people doing shitty things for their own shitty reasons seems to be at play.
That is an incredibly farcical representation of how liberals conceive of society. It’s just not true. These are systemic and structural outcomes, not simply morally reprehensible individual choices.
we just have different descriptions of who we think the bad guy is
Yup.
My view is that humans have the capacity for great evil
I don’t believe in good and evil at all. Morality is a socially constructed technology for influencing humans. It’s not real.
science itself isn’t the root cause of this evil
No one said it was.
is instead a catalyst enabling people to become famous as a result of it
The desecration of Mauna Kea has not made anyone famous. I dare you to name anyone involved in it without looking it up.
It’s the fame, in my opinion, that drives people to do these terrible things
What an incredibly unscientific perspective.
Science itself doesn’t really benefit, and is arguably hurt, by these actions, since there are likely other less harmful ways to research these topics.
Now you’re moving way into the abstract by saying that science can be hurt. What you mean is that the process of “science” exhibits suboptimal outcomes, in part, because of things like oppression and colonization. I agree. That doesn’t mean science doesn’t participate in it all the same. You’re crafting your worldview entirely from ideals and not actually engaging with reality.
Of course, I am biased. I have a career in science, after all
When you say you’re biased, it’s really important to understand what that means. I don’t think you actually mean it in the literal sense. You actually mean to say that you are “prejudiced” - meaning that you have a tendency to make judgments prematurely and stick to those judgments even in the face of evidence.
Bias is a statistical concept about outcomes. When I attempt to throw a dart at a bullseye, if my darts end up to right of the bullseye more often than not, then we can say I have a bias in my throwing behavior towards the right hand side of the dart board. What bias does your behavior exhibit, statistically? Is it that your prejudice biases your cognitive behaviors towards denying the harms of science, to fallaciously attribute harm to anything except science, to abstract science to its ideals more often than actually examine how it functions in society?
This is important, because if you think of your prejudice as bias, then you can’t ever examine what your actual bias is. Own that you’re prejudiced. It’s fine. We all have prejudices. I am prejudiced towards believing people who self-identify as communists have a better grasp of history and of dialectics. I am often wrong, but I still judge prematurely. My biases are fundamentally different than my prejudices. My network is biased towards white suburban men. My work is biased towards tech work. My friend-set is biased towards people who are often late to social events.
So, what is your prejudice, and what bias does it cause in your behavior?
Be scientific about this.
it does not have anything to do with the output of most scientific endeavors
Don’t try to equivocate your way out of this. The practice of science does harm. Setting “remove all barriers to science” as your slogan is problematic. If you want to equivocate, advocate for a slogan change to “Remove all barriers to distributing the outputs of scientific research to any and all people free of charge”.
The colonialist history of the building of those telescopes doesn’t make the astronomical data collected with them somehow racist
Don’t strawman. No one claimed the data was racist. The 30M is not history, it’s the future. The US occupation of Hawaii is still illegal under US and UN law. It’s not historical colonialism, it’s present day colonialism. The indigenous people who were disenfranchised are still there, still occupied, still dying from water pollution, land pollution, and destruction of their food sources and ways of living. And the way we conduct science is actively playing a part in that occupation.
But saying somehow that SciHub is wrong and wet shouldn’t promote open sharing of scientific output isn’t going to change those institutions.
I have been very clear that the slogan is problematic. Scihub’s missing of free information flow is not.
In fact, I will point out that you’re sharing data from academic sources who are criticizing academic history which is how it always has been done.
Brown University was the first, and it happened because the president they chose was both the first black person and the first woman to ever be president at any Ivy League institution. Harvard University didn’t do - its undergrads did all the work and went public with it. The process of dismantling is ongoing, it’s very slow, and all the while the white supremacist structure that undergirds the academy remains and continues to dominate decision making.
In one big voice all of the university trustees have linked arms and established that any students and professors speaking and acting tor Palestinian liberation are to be condemned. The academy may do incremental reforms, but their power is not subject to incremental reforms because it is structural. As a communist, you should understand this. If you don’t understand, I’m happy to help you work through it. But don’t give me this incremental ethical reform bullshit. It comes nowhere near addressing the white supremacist structure that the academy participates in.
Mauna Kea is a sacred mountain in Hawaii that is colonized by astronomers and the proposed site of the very large 30M telescope. Indigenous Hawaiians who are illegally occupied are resisting it. Scientists are saying that they’re being anti-science.
In Guam, environmental impact studies are used to justify the continued destruction of habit because the study doesn’t reveal sufficient impact. This is because the definition of impact is politically motivated and informed by white supremacy.
I will try to find right-wing geneticists who go out and try to justify racism with genetics. It happens all the time. Richard Dawkins was someone who attempted to use science and neo-atheism to justify bombing brown people.
Forced hysterectomies come from the academy. They aren’t merely just bad behavior, they are the legacy of eugenics and white supremacist social policies informed and crafted by the academy. You can’t just stay science doesn’t do anything wrong - that’s a “no true Scotsman”.
Just because you aren’t informed of the prevailing critique of science as a continuous tool of oppression doesn’t mean it’s not. It just means you likely have a vested interest in not believing it. If you’re not making oodles of profit from science, then your vested interest is likely your self-concept.
But doesn’t do anything to prevent, for example, military science to oppress or genocide.
I’ve described numerous ways we currently combat racism in science.
No you didn’t. You described how we currently combat bigotry in the academy and somewhat in sampling for research. If you think the 1800s isn’t recent enough, then you’ve got a real problem. Imperialism and racism weren’t built in a couple of decades, they’re not going to be dismantled by asking people to identify as a goddamned racialized group. Every single time someone does a report on crime and breaks down data by race you’re seeing racist social science in action. The way we do clinical trials. Decisions about what to study, like the impacts of lead, or education, or pharmaceuticals, all of it lies on top of and interpermeates racist superstructure. Recent? Forced hysterectomies. Public statements from researchers that genetics are not politically correct. Mauna Kea. Environmental impact studies in Guam. I mean, it’s never ending.
Do you understand that the primary barriers being referred to here are intellectual property?
I understand that anyone who knows what SciHub is about would infer that. It’s not what the slogan says. It says remove all barriers in the way of science. The slogan is problem.
Intentional racism is no longer an issue due to nearly every (reputable) publication’s requirement of a institutional review board. This is to prevent exactly what you describe.
This is LAUGHABLE
Unintentional racism, yes I agree that’s a problem.
You really gotta study what’s been written about racism. It’s not what you think it is, apparently.
But come on. We’ve made huge strides in this over the past few decades.
Nah, we really haven’t. Representation is better. White supremacy is still killing millions.
Nearly every grant I apply to has a secondary version that prioritizes racially and ethnically diverse applicants
That’s diversity at best and tokenism at worst and has no impact on what science has inherited. Black people working on chemical warfare doesn’t make it less structurally racist.
Half of articles I see published are now acknowledging the racial divide in science and striving to recruit more minority populations.
Doesn’t reduce the billions of dollars current institutions have extracted by consuming black and brown bodies.
We definitely have more work to do, but it’s not like we’re pretending the racial divide doesn’t exist.
It’s not a racial divide. It’s a racist structure. We ARE pretending like racism doesn’t exist in the way that it does but instead exists as not enough representation. Racism isn’t a lack of representation. It’s much much much bigger than that, and fixing it doesn’t require more representation to happen first.
Lysenkoism
The man was operating at the same time as other scientists who were just starting to create hypotheses that DNA was the physical manifestation of their theorized concept of a “gene”. He denied the existence of the gene because he, correctly, established that his data contradicted the oversimplified view of genetic inheritance. His data showed that somatic changes were part of what an offspring inherited. Lo and behold, he was talking about the current field of study we call “epigenetics”. His “eugenics” theories were nothing like those of race scientists. Instead, his theory was that the state must produce a healthy society in order to produce healthy people. Lo and behold, we find that trauma transmits to offspring and that the traumas of slavery (for example) are passed down from generation to generation. This position cannot be accounted for in the genetic theories of the time, and as such he rejected those theories. In essence, Lysenkoism is actually an attempt at thinking of biology dialectically, and that does indeed make it Marxist-Leninst.
And, like anything else in science, the dominant power structure must do everything it can to dismiss and denigrate anyone that correctly pointed out critiques of their work. For almost 200 years we taught doctors in training that the human body had 78 organs. We finally updated that to 79 in 2012, despite the overwhelming evidence from 3 separate researchers and papers. The doctor who made the claim that stood the test of 100+ years was an English knight. The researchers who contradicted him were Italian and American. The Italian contradicted him 5 years before his own book was published. But, the dominant culture must be correct. The British empire is also the structure that maintained the incorrect science that the brain and lymph system were not connected, despite detailed anatomical sketches from non-English doctors showing otherwise. That position was held for centuries until it was finally overturned in 2015, but not before much controversy that it couldn’t be possible and those other doctors were probably just obsessed with something irrational.
The claim of Lysenkoism being eugenics “just like what the imperialists did” is just completely ahistorical and requires a desire to absolve one’s own national project through the use of projection. Lysenko’s theories, and the policies that were built on them, failed in many ways and caused a lot of harm, none of which holds a candle to child separation, centuries of mass rape, and centuries of forced sterilization (which, we must acknowledge, continued well into the 1960s in the USA).
Lysenko was wrong about a lot of things, and was right about very little. But the idea that his contrarian position to the dominant theories of genetics is to be mocked or even vilified is a completely ideological position firmly seated in the imperialist camp.
You’re ignoring the history of academic science.
https://legacyofslavery.harvard.edu/report
https://slaveryandjustice.brown.edu/
https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/nzo1tx4elaerg13akjwxuve3pv9sb03a
And on and on.
And that’s just the university system. Then you have actual laboratories. Los Alamos is notorious for being a massive “consumer” of indigenous women and girls of the slave trade. Current astronomy observatories on Mauna Kea are there against the will of the colonized Hawaiians and for years have destroyed their environment, their sovereignty, their health, and have contributed massively to the sex trade in Hawaii. The indigenous are a barrier to the planned 30m telescope there. Are you arguing that this barrier should be removed? Are you saying astronomy cannot possibly intersect with the structures of racism, settler colonialism, and genocide?
We do not need to be anti-intellectual to erect barriers to settler violence that impinge on science. Those barriers are important, and we need more of them. If we are to undo the harm of centuries of European imperialism, it will be a massive project that will hinder scientific inquiry in many ways. Establishing a “no barriers to science stance” creates an ideological commitment to the already existing conflict between justice and science that has been raging for centuries upon centuries.
And CAPITALISM blames WOMEN for lots of things like this so this is just par for the course