This is the work we have to do as individuals, to struggle with our understandings against the real world we live in and challenge our own positions and understanding to more thoroughly champion those values we hold dear. Keep going, you’re on the right path. Keep struggling, it only gets harder for a while. If it starts getting easier, you’re going the wrong way.

Keep going! I think you still need more precision. Your racialized students are all victims of racism at nearly all times. What you’re talking about is when racialized students are victims of harm (which comes in many forms) where that harm is the intimate form of structural racism.

So when someone uses a racial slur, racialized people experience harm if they are exposed to it. A) what is that harm if the slur was used at them versus if that slur was used near them but not at them? B) is there harm if no racialized people are exposed to that event?

Being able to articulate these sorts of nuances in a way that is internally consistent will be the result of struggling with these concepts and coming to deeper understandings and the path forward will be clearer.

To put a finer point on it, if a white child, in a room of 5 white children and a white teacher, uses a racial slur, how would you describe that, how would you understand the consequences of that, how would you make the decision on whether and how to intervene, and how would you communicate your decision in context?

I will challenge for the sake of you refining your argument: bigotry is equivalent with rude behavior and aggressive confrontation. Bigotry is not limited to the structures of racism. You can be a bigot against people without hair, bigot against people based on height, a bigot against people based on body fat, a bigot against people based on body shape and proportions, etc.

Racism, on the other hand, is a structure that exists even without bigotry. Bigotry is a symptom or an outgrowth of structural racism. The earliest racists didn’t spend their time being rude and getting into fights with people, they spent their timing writing academic essays, giving lectures, and generally being perfectly calm, reasonable high society people who just believed things like race is inherent in the person and values are inherent in the race.

I challenge you to get more precise about why you think bigotry is different than other forms of conflict, connect it to the structural so that you’re not only dealing with the individual, and proceed from there with a refined analysis and set of proposals.

It’s a social democratic country run by an early stage neofascist party. Social democracy is the form of a state adjacent to fascism - fascism emerges from social democracy and fascism returns to social democracy.

So Italy is in an early stage of fascist potential.

It can be fully end to end encrypted and still drop keyword-based metadata into the envelope. But also, I am pretty sure that the feds can access the keys if they need to. It’s e2e encrypted, but that doesn’t mean the key stays on your device.

This is why hexbear disabled downvotes, because it requires the would-be downvoter to engage

Uh, the US has vetoed multiple attempts by the UN to condemn the glorification of Nazis. I hate to break it to you, but Nazis and racists are not illegal.

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://slavery.virginia.edu/

https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/nzo1tx4elaerg13akjwxuve3pv9sb03a

https://news.emory.edu/features/2021/09/emory-unpacks-history-of-slavery-and-dispossession/index.html

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.

Race science is the science that emerged to rationalize and justify the structure of racism. It is the science that emerged to justify political race structures. Race science is what allowed black and indigenous children to be ripped away from their parents while other parents watched and participated and said “This is good”.

That race science was funded by the elite or society. They extracted wealth through settler colonialism and racialized capitalism and then donated it to the universities as “philanthropy” and used their influence to direct more research into race science and other endeavors to maximize their profits.

Making research freely available is not removing all barriers to science. It is removing but one barrier to science. There are many other barriers that exist, have existed, or could exist.

In this way, saying that all barriers to science must be removed ignores the historical facts that the origins of academic science in the US are rooted almost entirely in race science. Even medical schools were locations of mass racialized atrocities where black and brown bodies were bought, imported, experimented on, killed, and desecrated in order to meet the demands of donors and chasing more endowment money. That science was used to further establish the schools’ reputation and revenue streams.

Fixing this will be seen as a barrier to science, as fixing it required dismantling major portions of the socio-politico-economic structures that maintain academies of science. Reparations alone would make many scientific institutions disappear overnight.

Racial hatred and bigotry are individualistic barriers to science.

Racialized capitalism is the foundation of the modern university. Harvard resisted getting rid of its slaves and when they did they bought and sold people in the Caribbean outside of the reach of US law. Disgustingly high numbers of medical schools were built on the basis of dissecting and experimenting on black and indigenous people.

Most ivy league schools still have the remains of scores of black and indigenous people in their museums, their libraries, and even their classrooms. Entire skeletons of enslaved people were prepared for classroom demonstrations and used in contemporary memory!

The money for these universities came from the slave trade and from slave labor. The schools themselves were often built with slave labor. The patrons of the university funded race science to justify the structures of racism.

It has nothing to do with racial hatred and bigotry.

The structural racism funded the creation and expansion of universities. MIT would not exist if it weren’t for the need for textile producers to build machines to make more money so the money that got poured into MIT was the money that was extracted from slave labor picking cotton.

Undoing this harm and bringing about justice through reparations is going to really undermine university endowments. It’s going to require removing names of buildings, dishonoring scientific “heroes”, and preventing it from happening again is going to be seen as barriers to science.

Uhhhh, the dominant historical source of academy science is race science. We require many barriers to science because science has historically been completely entrenched in oppression and it hasn’t really ever stopped