Fallism - "Science Is Racist and Should Be Abolished"

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Link: http://reason.com/blog/2016/10/14/watch ... ence-is-ra

"Students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa brought some interesting concerns before the science faculty this week: namely, they think science as it is currently understood must be abolished.

"The whole thing should scratched off, especially in Africa," said one of the students.

The students are apparently known as "fallists." Their hashtag is #ScienceMustFall."



Skip to around the 1 minute mark to see someone being singled out and antagonised for speaking out of turn, before being told "this is not an antagonising space".

Doesn't make any sense. They shouldn't pick science as a subject then.

Wonder what Neil DeGrasse Tyson would make of this?

As an actual skeptic, this seems fine to me. How is it not racist when animals don't exist until a white guy in a lab coat ticks them off on his clipboard? Science has earned a lot of this criticism, and has absolutely been used as a tool of colonialism.

Do I agree with what they believe? I'll have to experience it myself to have an opinion, and since any attitudes I bring to that experience will change the nature of the experience, I'll try to keep an open mind. Too often, scientists fail to recognize all the cognitive biases that they bring to their experiences. An experience isn't an experiment, but if you never appreciate the experience, you'll never consider it possible to do the experiment.

I'm curious what African magic can bring to the table.

Naturally the Zulus and other tribes had names for the indigenous animals they encountered (lions, crocs, rhino etc) way before Europeans came on the scene and gave them English and Latin names.

But I fail to see how the subjects of science or mathematics can be viewed as racist. They are based on actual experience. Certain individual scientists have certainly made controversial claims, true - but science (biology, physics etc) are generally "neutral" and always attempt to align with facts.

History as a subject is a different matter.

http://www.animalplanet.com/tv-shows/mo ... o-be-real/

It was only innumerable black people insisting that the animals were actually real, so you can understand their outright refusal to consider the existence of such unusual animals. No, wait, you can't excuse it because it isn't skepticism, it's racism from scientists.

http://www.npr.org/2015/06/22/415194765 ... xperiments

Also scientists

There's much more, and you could find it for yourself if you bothered to look. Scientists are people, and are too often sexist, racist people at that.

Someone please crowd fund a spaceship to send me back to RightPlanet.

Animals of other nations get named by the scientists there. Just because they have western names in our countries doesn't mean Westerners get dibs on naming every animal and single science related thing. Whoever discovers something in this day and age gets to name it.

Example: Just because we call Japan "Japan" doesn't mean a certain demographic of people you dislike "claimed" it. That's just our name for Japan. Japan has it's own name for "Japan" and they decided what it was first. Us having our own name for it isn't us "stealing" that privilege of discovering or naming something from someone else.

Man. My head hurts.

EDIT: And if we are to abolish science or math based on who came up with facts rather than the validity of them, we might as well go back to living in mud huts. It is not "racist" to discover things before other people, or to present facts based on scientific evidence or mathematical equation. What people do with the facts however, is what can be prejudiced. We shouldn't confuse the two notions though.

Way not to read the links

I was meant to quote the first post you made not that one. Whoops
But I'll have a read of the links as well.

EDIT: jrjones, those were horrific experiments. Unthinkable even. But if we were to abolish every academia on the grounds of racists using it for racist things, we'd all be stupid. The past cannot be excused, but we also can't be stuck there.

You lost me as soon as you said Africa, they still believe in voodoo and witchcraft and sacrificing people and their own children, and a lot of radicals want to keep people uneducated, esp the females. its in the news quite often, even their court system is plagued with it and that of misinformation.

Simply fabulous. The moment someone declares themself against science, you know you can't reason with them, because reason is what science is about.

They're acting pretty much like the Nazis did with "Jewish science", and you know how it ended up for them. Throw science away at your own peril.

All this pearl clutching. They can't abolish science. They can reject the scientific establishment. Let them try.

I'm in favor of sending them to the middle of nowhere with nothing to start from the Stone Age. More science for the rest of us.

I agree, and can think of many examples of science being used as a tool of oppression and prejudice.

To many scientists, black Africans were considered as a separate species. They weren't human, according to some. Charles Darwin was extremely racist; he considered the black African to be a separate genus from white man. The Australian aborigines were almost completely wiped out by colonialism, simply because they didn't register as human to racist white anthropologists. Even in modern times, white supremecists will use arguments like "Australian aborigines don't have such-and-such gene, that means they're not human!"

When you look at historical oppression of gay people, most of the time it was justified by the scientific literature of the day. People use evolutionary psychology to rationalize sexist views about women; the transgendered face discrimination due to biology. I can't think of a single form of bigotry that isn't rooted in the ideas of scientists, other than religious intolerance (which, by its very nature, falls outside the scope of science).

Oppression of women, and gays, is "rooted in science"?

"Rooted"?

That particular sentence is objectively 100 percent false.

Woman and gays were oppressed around the world for thousands of years in many cultures (western and nonwestern alike) before the rise of modern science in Renaisance Europe in the last five centuries, and before European imperial expansion started in the same era.

Further-the oppression of women and gays was certainly codified and enforced (if not actually "rooted") not in the "science" of any culture, but largely in the religions, especially by the Abrahamic relgions (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity) that spread around western Eurasia in the last 20 centuries.

And pagan cultures oppressed women for centuries prior to the rise the modern monotheistic religions. So you could argue that oppression of women is not "rooted" even in living religions either, but religion certainly played the enforcing and justifying role a lot longer than did early modern science.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 17 Oct 2016, 3:07 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I know right. It's rich coming from a woman who has supported the stoning of women and Sharia law in another PPR topic.

Besides,true scientists are always prepared to admit they were wrong when faced with new evidence. How often do the religious zealots admit to possibly being wrong?

Selected stuff from ancient scriptures taken out of context were used to justify various evils such as apartheid.

Science is at the forefront of progressive thinking.

Some of the posters here have strayed off topic a little. It was a tragic link which jrjones posted, but (a) the experimenters were not true scientists and (b) both the links wander a bit from the OP's point.