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"Science is bad and must be destroyed"

First up, thanks to Resume for posting an unedited cut of that discussion. Second up, I launched a thread in the education part of the forum which covers one 'white, middle class' persons perspective on science ('Women/minorities should not do science because objectivity is racist/sexist')

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=312691

Last up for this post is a video by an African-American, who pours a whole heap of scorn on the original (edited) version of the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwZ651i5vls
 
Donn said:
Well, naturally. That's trivially true. All the pro-science points are correct, as I've said. The problem lies with how to communicate that to students like her who are not listening. I suppose I am over-reacting to the thread. It's been a rough few months down here.
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I understand everything you are saying, and I know your heart's in the right place, and certainly your personal position is a wise result of your personal story, and I respect your decision to stay out of it. (I am in a reclusive stage myself, again, currently, and fully appreciate the wisdom of silence…)

But I would say that her disastrous misplacing of her ire is a political problem, as are all the other effects of poverty etc that the political corruption of the ANC (and probably others) has wrought. That needs to be pointed out.

It's ridiculous to waste time harking back to some imagined autonomy of culture, returning authority to the con men that are witch doctors, when the actual problem is the political hijacking of the country by a corrupt political class. Hopefully there are some politically aware young people in your country who will turn their attention and efforts in that direction. A simple and quick mention of that is appropriate in any discussion where the false analysis she is falling into is getting aired.

Stay well, Donn. Your thoughtful and humane posts enrich this forum no end.
 
maximara said:
:eek: :hb:

Ugh. I really hate people who have no concept of what science really is.
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Nor any concept of what witch doctors are, either, it would seem.

Kidnapping and killing albino children in order to use their body parts for magic.

Pushing the idea that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS.

Stirring up mobs to attack random people and kill them, because of an imagined fear of some black magic influence the stranger has supposedly brought with them to market (cases where people believe their genitals have been stolen! All it takes is a hysterical accusation, and the mob murders in minutes!)

Etc. :mad:
 
A skeptic on YouTube (King Crocoduck) who normally posts about Creationists has weighed in on this video with one entitled "The New Lysenkoists". It's about 20 minutes long, has words by Richard Dawkins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k-kEhVBdnY

His follow-up entitled "Specious" opens with Noam Chomsky saying something that he (and I) fully agree with and then follows up with a long list of papers from the somewhat Orwellian named "New Real Peer Review"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE-Hbd5FHzw

That twitter page is also worth looking at...

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview
 
asydhouse said:
I understand everything you are saying, and I know your heart's in the right place, and certainly your personal position is a wise result of your personal story, and I respect your decision to stay out of it. (I am in a reclusive stage myself, again, currently, and fully appreciate the wisdom of silence…)

But I would say that her disastrous misplacing of her ire is a political problem, as are all the other effects of poverty etc that the political corruption of the ANC (and probably others) has wrought. That needs to be pointed out.

It's ridiculous to waste time harking back to some imagined autonomy of culture, returning authority to the con men that are witch doctors, when the actual problem is the political hijacking of the country by a corrupt political class. Hopefully there are some politically aware young people in your country who will turn their attention and efforts in that direction. A simple and quick mention of that is appropriate in any discussion where the false analysis she is falling into is getting aired.

Stay well, Donn. Your thoughtful and humane posts enrich this forum no end.
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Thanks Syd, you're a mensch.
 
My instinct is to leap to the defense of science, but that makes me suspicious. It makes me think there is a cultural aspect to it, that I value science, not qua science, but because it's strongly attached to my way of life. This actually supports her point a little.

On the opposite pole of things we have at least one tribe I've heard of that remains "untouched" by modernity. It's considered moral to leave them alone because they generally attack outsiders. I feel no particular compulsion to "save" them. So I can't believe that science is some universal boon. There are modes of living which don't include modern scientific ideas.
 
Graham2001 said:
A skeptic on YouTube (King Crocoduck) who normally posts about Creationists has weighed in on this video with one entitled "The New Lysenkoists". It's about 20 minutes long, has words by Richard Dawkins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k-kEhVBdnY

His follow-up entitled "Specious" opens with Noam Chomsky saying something that he (and I) fully agree with and then follows up with a long list of papers from the somewhat Orwellian named "New Real Peer Review"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE-Hbd5FHzw

That twitter page is also worth looking at...

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview
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I quite enjoyed the King Crocoduck video, but I have a minor quibble. He thinks the panel members and students are laughing at the young lady's assertions but I think they're laughing in agreement.
 
Resume said:
I quite enjoyed the King Crocoduck video, but I have a minor quibble. He thinks the panel members and students are laughing at the young lady's assertions but I think they're laughing in agreement.
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I am going to say, that you cannot see their faces, so I am going to judge them. The speaker and the moderator(?) on the other hand deserve all the criticism they are getting, it's just said that they will dismiss all of it as being motivated by 'racism'.

Tracked down one of the papers that King Crocoduck puts up on the screen during the 'Specious' video, sadly only the abstract is freely available, but it's of the 'new agey' kind that argues that reality should bow to the collective will of the people:

Drawing on Berger and Luckmann’s discussion of reification, this paper examines the five aspects of essentialism that make the social construction of a seemingly objective reality possible. The five aspects are religion (as typically manifested in the idea of ‘God’), science (as typically manifested in the idea of ‘Nature’), reason (as typically manifested in the notion of ‘Logic’), universalism (as typically manifested in the notion of ‘Everybody’), and eternalism (as typically manifested in the notion of ‘Always’). They constitute the foundations of the process of making the merely intersubjective and conventional seem objective and inevitable.
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cus.sagepub.com/content/10/1/69.abstract

And some commentary from a self-avowed right-wing blogger, the emphasis in the quote is his:

To the decolonizers, science is a “social construction” because it is but one of a myriad ways of examining and ordering the natural world. In other words, just one of many ways of doing so. Magical lightning bolt throwing Mchawi are just as valid as rocket scientists, if not more so due to the formers elevated states of not being a colonizing oppressor. The colonizers, then use their particular method to oppress the apparently magical indigenes...

...


There is a clear conflation of science with political ideologies. This type of conflation leads to the Thule Society and Lysenkoism. Replacing “androcentric” science with a decolonized one, then, isn’t just about changing methods and views, but a political necessity to conquer and overthrow the unbearable Whiteness. By so conflating science with social studies and political ideologies, science can, when in conflict, we deemed to be wrong and be made to adhere to some broader pseudo-spiritual truth.
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http://politicalhat.com/2016/10/19/...-throwing-magical-lightning-bolts-dont-exist/

I find it pretty disturbing that I find myself agreeing with this blogger on the dangers of this issue with regards to science.
 
Graham2001 said:
I am going to say, that you cannot see their faces, so I am going to judge them. The speaker and the moderator(?) on the other hand deserve all the criticism they are getting, it's just said that they will dismiss all of it as being motivated by 'racism'.
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I'm talking about the faces you can see on the audience and "panel" to the left of the young lady speaking. Notice at the 23:57 mark that she, and the young man to her immediate right gesticulate and laugh at the person who had the audacity to challenge the idea of black magic directed lightning.
 
Dani said:
Wolrab said:
Lightning fatalities in SA:
8.8 per million people in rural regions
1.5 per million in urban areas

Most Witch Doctors are in rural areas. Case closed.
http://www.vaisala.com/Vaisala Docu..._rates_of_lightning_fatalities_by_country.pdf
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But, but... this is science! This link must be destroyed.
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Repeat after me.

Correlation does not imply causation.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Om mani padme hum.
Om mani padme hum.
Om mani padme hum...
 
EHocking said:
Repeat after me.

Correlation does not imply causation.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Om mani padme hum.
Om mani padme hum.
Om mani padme hum...
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Looky there, King Arthur! 'Tis the Holy Grail of the Buddhists, composed entirely of ommanipadmium!






I'll show myself out… :boxedin:
 
After watching the video, it sounded like to me just another college SJW rant...full of made up buzzwords that sound important, but really mean nothing. Her preferred buzzword seems to be "decolonization". Not sure what that means, but I'm guessing it's code for "get rid of white people and their influence". She apparently thinks that "science" was created by white people, and therefore must be bad, and needs to be "torn down and rebuilt". I'm sure that sounded really good to her in her head, but it's totally meaningless.

How do you "tear down science and rebuild it"? Science isn't a dilapidated building that you can bulldoze and reconstruct. It's a methodology of discovering how things work. What are we exactly supposed to do? Just burn all the science books and forget everything we've learned about science in the last 1000 years, and start over from scratch? She's clueless as to what science is, and how it has greatly improved our lives, and is not a construct of a single race, but a combined effort of every culture to improve the way humans know how nature works.
 
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casebro said:
My arguement re: the OP is that No, colonials didn't steal anything, there wasn't anything worth stealing. Rhodes' opinion of a lost city is not pertinant, though the existance of the city could be.
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How about stealing the persons of millions of slaves? That was an immensely profitable enterprise.

Then there were colonies called the "Gold Coast", the "Ivory Coast" and so on. They seem in fact to be named after things worth stealing; and stolen they were.

ETA But I'm forgetting Leopold II of BelgiumWP, about whose general criminality, of which mass stealing was but a minor part, I find it too unpleasant to write.

The German mass murder of the Herero people of SW Africa around 1906. Was that stealing, or merely genocide? I can never remember.

ETA2 I just looked it up in Herero PeopleWP
Between 1893 and 1903, the Herero and Nama people's land as well as their cattle were progressively making their way into the hands of the German colonists.​
So theft of land and cattle, leading to an insurrection, the response to which by the imperial ruling government was genocide.
 
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Hercules56 said:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14&feature=youtu.be

Truly fascinating discussion.

Turns out science is all just colonialism, and is fake.

We should listen to the witchdoctors instead.

They know how the world works, not scientists.
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Having to deal a lot in the last few years on the internet forums, including this one, with the nonsense of postmodernist, cultural relativist and 'post colonial' studies which already conquered the Western Academia in Humanities (Islamic studies more exactly but the disease is much more widespread) I can easily recognize here the next step in the agenda: the all out assault on physical sciences. Even via this nonsense that the hard sciences, largely the product of Western civilization, are a way to continue the imperialist domination of 'the poors' (& their cultures) of the world.

Happily the Sokal Affair dealt a heavy blow on this movement (at least the assault on the hard sciences was stopped at the moment) but if we are not careful enough then pure political ideology can gain a strong foot even in hard sciences. Now (hard) Science may not have an algorithmic rationality (important detours from the path toward the Truth are possible indeed) but this does not mean that it ceases to be rational and the best 'tool' we have at the moment to make sense of the observed facts (we can talk at least of a non algorithmic rationality of Science*). In reality Relativism has Zero justification, at least at this moment in time.


* with the observation that parts of Humanities, unfortunately, have long ago now been 'infected' with pure ideology. Try to criticize islam, the ideology, for example (in important ways, yet fair, based entirely on rational argument) and see what happens...being labelled an 'Orientalist' is the best one can hope ('Orientalist' in the pejorative - Edward Said sense)
 
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