toyotathon posted:

scientific training teaches you how to do highly political work, as an intellectual laborer, and either compartmentalize it, justify it, or just not realize it.

for the compartmentalizers, i loved this section on how physics researchers pretend that they're free intellects, rather than weapons researchers

roseweird posted:

le_nelson_mandela_face posted:

thank god. does anyone know which of those online pharmacies sell real cialis?

this is another rude and unwanted phallic goatstein post but the answer is yes of course i do

i dont see how a selfown is rude

roseweird posted:

tears posted:

thats my education/science story

this is kind of what i am afraid of... i want to be free to satisfy my curiosity and to learn the skills to satisfy my creativity. there is almost no useful thing that can be created that capitalists cannot use to enhance their exploitation of the people and natural resources. so then what if you love technology? i'm afraid it is a selfish love but not an easy one to get rid of. we can resist being exploited by capitalism by being above or beneath exploitatin, but then we waste our lives and become vulnerable to the most petty and destructive predation. messed up...

edit: this post is now gone! if you saw it, congratulations on getting a look into my head, hope you liked what you saw in there!

Edited by tears (April 23, 2017 18:26:15)

toyotathon posted:

so i'm not a physicist, but the book, Disciplined Minds, had me breaking my neck, nodding along. scientific training teaches you how to do highly political work, as an intellectual laborer, and either compartmentalize it, justify it, or just not realize it.

for the compartmentalizers, i loved this section on how physics researchers pretend that they're free intellects, rather than weapons researchers

I knew most funding for physics came from the DoD, etc., but the pretensions of independence are interesting--and very different from my field. In economics, you generally aren't expected to bring in grant money, but there are absolutely no pretensions when you are working on a grant--you explicitly frame everything around pleasing your sponsor. Even when your work has no external funding (most of the time) you generally frame your research in terms of its utility to "policy makers", a useful rhetorical sleight-of-hand to get around putatively positive nature of economic research. You can't make normative claims on your own behalf--or even study explicitly normative issues--but so long as you latch on to respectable elites you can take their neoliberal values as given without drawing censure.

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . .