Great Piece on the Politicization of Science

The statistician William Briggs posted the following piece today, which I encourage you all to read. The relevance to the HIV AIDS scam will be very clear.

What Postmodernists Got Right About Science

I’ll keep my commentary minimal; Dr. Briggs’ piece speaks for itself. Emphasis is mine throughout. Here we go:

Maybe you can remember way back to the mid to late 1990s. Ancient history. This was the time of the original Science Wars, the assault by rapid postmodernists (i.e, the pre-woke) on the staid and solid walls of Science. I was in grad school at the time, and paid close attention, because I had planned on making science my career.

Postmodernists claimed that there were different ways of knowing, and that science occupied a place no more important in its claims to truths about the world as did, say, Aboriginal origin myths. That argument would later become a woke one when it was said that Aboriginal origin myths are ackshually superior to claims of science because the Aborigines were Victims.

That story you know. But it lay twenty years in the future.

It’s true; I was also in graduate school between 1997 and 2002, and I noticed that the prevailing attitude toward scientific discovery was changing subtly from how it was when my father entered academia. Even in mathematics, graduate students were being encouraged to enter “trendy” areas of study, and I was certainly not immune to that pressure. Furthermore, it became a necessity to publish in scientific journals prior to the awarding of the doctoral degree. One might assume that this is a good thing and will only encourage further scientific discovery, but it often has the opposite effect of valuing quantity over quality, among other potential pitfalls. This is certainly the case among all but the most famous scientists (and even some of them)—number of publications and citations has become a kind of surrogate marker for the relevance and significance of the research published. There can be dangerous, and it becomes more of a problem when science becomes political, as it most certainly has.

Postmodernists charged that science had become a vote, just another system of power-in-action, no more or less noble than any other. Scientists rebutted that postmodernists were ninnies.

The peak was, as you may recall, the so-called Sokal hoak, in which physicist Alan Sokal slipped a goofy jargon-filled incoherent science paper into Social Text, a big name po-mo journal. Sokal’s paper had statements like “quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct.”

The idea behind the hoax was that Social Text was going to blush, postmodernists would be exposed, admit their sins, and science would again reign triumphant.

Alas, this did not happen. Because the postmodernists were more or less right. Science in practice was becoming, in a large and increasing degree, the machinations of people who did not always, and sometimes not at all, have Truth as their goal, but who were interested in power.

The article goes on to discuss the phenomenon in science of the creation of entire subfields of science, entirely because they are popular among scientists themselves. His examples include climate change and “gender theory”. The following example about “gender theory” is quite reminiscent of the ad hominem attacks that are automatic whenever one dares to question the basic tenets of the HIV AIDS story.

A more mundane, but even more revealing, example was provided in a recent tweet announcing that the American College of Pediatricians had put out a statement condemning the satanic lunacy of butchering and drugging children in slave to gender theory.

One of the first comments to this tweet was that the ACP is “a fringe group”. That was the entirety of the tweet. The implication, plain to all, was that therefore it was right and proper to ignore anything the ACP says.

The commenter was right. The ACP is a fringe group, and is so because it calls to Reality, whereas mainstream scientists are lunatics in love with twisted Fantasies. But the mainstream has a bigger vote. The mainstream won; they have the power. The key is that ordinary people recognize who is in power and who is out.

He concludes with discussion of the mask madness of 2020/2021, which, as we all know, was nothing but propaganda based on the vaporous wishes of the public health community and the frightened public.

The following quote—not from the end of the piece, but perfectly correct—seems a good way to conclude: “Science is becoming power politics, where might makes right. Not everywhere, no, but in bulk, and certainly in its main funding methods.” No wonder the deadly, and dead wrong, HIV AIDS story continues to chug along its perilous course.

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