https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/177rsze/a_mural_in_the_science_faculty_of_my_countrys/

https://radiolab.org/podcast/library-alexandra

  • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.