Bismillah we will get you an iron

I have an example of this in Chile. In Tierra Amarilla, a huge ass hole happened "out of nowhere", which made the news. A lot of people, myself included, learned that the local mining company has been made to do a bunch of long, never-ending studies to "prove" that it is safe to continue their mining operations without affecting the town. It's a classic move by mining companies to basically delay any closure or investigation into their safety measures. "Ah, see, MAYBE we're contaminating the local water supply, but there's no proof yet because we haven't finished the studies! Oh, we would NEVER destroy people's lands ON PURPOSE, we just don't know if we're doing it or not yet! No choice but, in the meantime, to keep drilling!"

One of my professors lost funding because she was researching the effects of parasitoid wasps on an invasive species of cricket vs native crickets, because this research contained key words including 'diversity' 'feminine' and 'intersex'.

The cancellation of research is even broader than what you might expect because they are trying to remove these words from scientific use entirely.

I've been calling it the "politics of postponement" where we utilize any potential gaps in our knowledge to justify doing nothing about the problem.

Discussion prompt: "No data no problem" is a big reason people oppose/support women's studies in history. Another paper on Caesar? We can never get enough. No data on his last wife Calpurnia? No problem. Some clergy actively ignore Junia, whom Paul seems to have regarded as an apostle without any issue, while others try to write her away as only a woman among apostles, not an apostle herself, or maybe even not a woman. Because if they had to reckon with a female apostle in the early church, they might have to challenge patriarchal systems espoused by their current theology.

I swear, you'd think men were 90% of the human population in history. And yet, trying to uncover and better understand overshadowed women is regarded as an inherently political choice, while researching men is natural.

The "no data, no problem" thing is awful because they find ways to dismiss actual data. A lot of anti-trans studies dismiss 99% of the data and twist the remainder so much its unrecognizable.

22:16 this reminded me of a discussion I saw about how med students don't dissect fat cadavers because it takes too much time and skill that could otherwise be spent on "the important stuff" - which has resulted in surgeons who don't know how to operate on fat people, or aren't willing to do so. There are always justifications, but the damage is consistent.

Another recent example of the no data no problem problem is Covid. As someone with long covid, the obfuscation of info around this disease is so frustrating and isolating. And the fight to have any clean air standards or meaningful public health infrastructure is exhausting.

Reagan also cut alternative energy research forcing it into the private sector where it could be bought up, controlled, and destroyed. That set battery EV cars back 20 plus years.

4:44 Another example of Agnotology: it's almost impossible to find out how many US workers spend the bulk of their working life on minimum wage. Not only do the data not exist but as far as I can tell no one is even trying to find out. They found out that about 37% of minimum wage workers are still in that same job 5 years later. And then they stopped looking. Because the US minimum wage goes down every year due to inflation, and they're worried about what they might find down there. Plus, it disproportionately affects the poor, women, and people of colour. So why should the hegemony care.

Hirschfelt had apparently been dubbed by Hitler as the most dangerous Jew in Germany, and honestly? You couldn't get a better character reference. If Hitler fears you the most, you must be doing something right.

I wrote about Hirschfeld's scientific & political work for my dissertation! The one comfort after the sacking of the Institute is that Hirschfeld was so prolific in the world of sexology that his books were translated and published all around the world, and therefore his work couldn't be entirely destroyed like the Nazis wanted. So now bisexual they/thems can still use them for primary source material✌

she’s back with another haircut i can show my stylist

Discussion prompt: on that “no data, no problem” problem, I feel like that shows up in a modified form in economics with regard to communist/socialist states, with Cuba being a great example. The modification being that people intentionally obscure or downplay the factor of sanctions and other forms of US imperialism when evaluating the success of these states. The classic “look they drive all these super old cars” while pretending it has nothing to do with export controls and sanctions.

I'd love to see a video about the way climate ignorance was constructed. I worked in climate science extension until the government of the day decided we would no longer be talking about climate. Example of the impact was that a talk I'd been scheduled to give on my research was abruptly shifted from a standard presentation to a short overview in a minor concurrent session, where what I said was monitored to make sure I didn't mention climate change. Even now, a decade later and with a government not censoring us, our research is very much directed toward certain outputs that, in many cases, are not what we should be focused on.  But the most annoying part isn't the people who "banned climate change" for a few years, it's the people who just nodded (and continue to nod) along in agreement with this deliberate manipulation of science.

It's such a breath of fresh air when even one cis person chooses to defend trans people. Online, it's just so easy to dismiss trans people's opinions on absolutely everything, that it kind of just feels like screaming into the void when trans people have to act as their own advocates all the time. It's shocking to see how quickly everyone got on board with this moral panic and project of ostracization

Not in the same scale as what you've said but in France, statistics on ethnicity/race are forbidden, and it has prevented scientifics from gaining data on racial discrimination and when said scientists use indirect indicators of race/ethnicity (like names, neighborhoods, etc...) to prove those discriminations, racism deniers will always easily contradict those studies because "statistics on ethnicity are forbidden" so to them there's no actual proof of the structural racism in France.

For queer people, the sacking of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft is our "burning of the Library of Alexandria." Every time I'm reminded of this tragedy and travesty, it genuinely makes me cry. 😢

Philosophy of science is a most important field of study that no one else cares enough about!!

9:20 I know a professor who had a grant proposal for studying the behaviour of self-driving cars at intersections - a pretty normal machine learning/robotics proposal. The word "intersection" got flagged as being related to intersectionality and the project was scrapped. Just goes to show just how dumb the DOGE process was.