Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/22/no-plan-b.html
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Got my sign ready. Hooking up with a contingent from the county Democratic party on Portland’s waterfront for Science March PDX.
(Actually my old anti-static robe, used when entering my employer’s manufacturing floor, where custom motherboards and streaming boards and such were assembled into video servers. March . . . AGAINST STATIC!)
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Marching in Atlanta shortly. I’ll be the guy looking like he wishes he was holding the “Artist for Science” sign he comped out in his mind, but didn’t have time to make.
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Looks like you’re ready to join Devo, actually!
Post pics later![quote=“xkot, post:4, topic:99609”]
Marching in Atlanta shortly.
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You too! Post pics!
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After listening to my NPR’s localized coverage of the upcoming march, I’m torn. At the very least, these marches need to stay on-topic and not splinter into a march for a hundred causes.
If you haven’t read or listened to scientists’ dissent on this march, it’s worth absorbing if only to refocus your own support for it:
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/02/12/513873493/why-id-rather-not-march
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I agree with him that denialism has already politicized science as a method of understanding the world. Same with women’s rights. Much of what women want shouldn’t be political questions (control of our own bodies, equality in the workplace, etc), but it is.
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I still don’t understand how the issue of clean air and water has become politicized in the U.S., let alone other obvious (to me) issues like ‘should women be forced to carry their pregnancies?’. Any culture in which that remains an actual controversy needs to do some serious soul-searching.
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Someone on NPR talking about this issue noted that the EPA has been rather successful in both of these areas (clean air and water). Because people don’t see environmental degradation on as large a scale as in the 1970s, they don’t think it’s a problem we need to address anymore, the argument went.
As for women - plain and simple, some people don’t see us as fully autonomous beings. They just don’t. Also, many men are afraid of us, what our bodies can do in sustaining humanity, and feel the need to control that. Or they just hate us.
Entirely true.
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Earth version
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I’m annoyed, because this is just another data point in the Great Dumbening. Like “terrorism”, science is a technique, not a viewpoint or political agenda or something to be for or against. Science is a tool in our service, it doesn’t dictate an agenda any more than a hammer draws up the blueprints of a house. It might set boundaries as to what’s possible, but within that it’s all up to us.
A March for Science makes about as much sense as when someone with a religious pov says “where is your god of science now!?” when something bad happens. It’s fundamentally basing one’s whole argument on an incorrect premise.
But science has already been politicized by people wishing to deny that science has any objective foundation. That has led to less funding for science and science education (even as there has been a huge push for STEM education, but this is because corporations have picked up the economic slack and been in part responsible for the STEM push). When scientific methodology itself is what is being rejected, what precisely should be done? If not a march, then what would you suggest?
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A clever President would take this opportunity to say “I salute and support the March for Science, because Science and Free Speech are both things that Make America Great!” Bam—he’d undercut his opponents and make himself look more reasonable in one short statement. It’s even under the 140-character limit.
We do not have a clever President.
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Portland!
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It was next on the hit list for the right and corporate America maybe 30 or so years back.
You know, because Freedom™.
That lead in the water and smog in the sky is there because we can’t let the government control our lives! Only the free market can do it right! Freedom™!
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That seems to happen frequently, doesn’t it?? When the platforms of OWS and BLM and MFS all start to look alike, you need a scorecard to tell one TLA from another.
Why is the National Rifle Organization the most successful citizen lobbying group in American history? Because they focus on one issue. Doesn’t matter what a politician says about abortion, or taxes, or war, or vaccination, if the position on guns is right, the NRA is supportive.
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Having your position affirmatively written into the federal constitution from Day One seems like a significant leg-up on other causes whose positions are, as a matter of legislative procedure, far more precariously coded (if at all).
I mean yeah, point taken, they stick to their message but man there’s gotta be a better example of that than the NRA.
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The NRA also has been bankrolled by corporate interest for a century. It’s not even a little alike - especially with the NRA leaping from “industry propagandist” to a shell game of various lobbyists groups, lawyers, and PACs in the 90s.
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