Back in my liberal days, I actually really liked Kurzgesagt, The guy who created it wrote a book about the immune system, but from like a normal person’s perspective so you don’t have to know anything about biology to understand it, it’s actually pretty good.
The only problem is that the overlap between pro-science and hyper-liberalism is fucking scary.
One of their videos a while back was about the unhealthy addicted internet that we have. Their solution was basically just to self-opt out of it and go for small online societies. Like, that’s not how systemic problems are solved, guys. But if they had mentioned censorship on any level, they would have been torn apart by their funders.
People, including the highly scientifically minded ones, just can’t see past their own privilege. To the privileged, equality looks like oppression.
Kurzgesagt is a capitalist ideologue because the channel receives funding from Bill Gates and other bourgeois demons, not because it’s run by someone who is pro-science. He didn’t stumble into a dogshit ideology, the channel is basically a propaganda outlet.
Yeah, I’ve come to realize that. I guess I appreciated the science back in the day, but now I’m more aware about how ridiculous it all is.
The only problem is that the overlap between pro-science and hyper-liberalism is fucking scary.
Very understandable phenomenon. We live in an age where science is depicted as objective knowledge that carries society to greatness, and not as a method of always trying to prove yourself wrong so that you map a practical understanding of a topic.
So of course any “sciEnCe, Bi**Ch!” genius out there whose understanding of science is solely based on sensationalist vulgarisation and pseudo-brainy TV shows is going to have this absolute trust in imperialists countries since they have “the most science” so they must be right about everything
And the worst is of course actual scientists who treat politics as a math problem because they think social science is just too easy for them and they can just figure it all out, like the german physicist lady on YouTube
And the worst is of course actual scientists who treat politics as a math problem because they think social science is just too easy for them and they can just figure it all out, like the german physicist lady on YouTube
This is it right here. Scientists are usually the most uninformed politically nowadays (because 100 years ago, it used to be scientists were overwhelmingly political with many being Marxists). There’s various reasons for it besides what you mentioned I think:
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The zeitgeist around every person in Western societies is that liberal democracy is the best, since it supposingly provides maximum freedom to everybody. As a result, scientists think that this is obviously the most logical choice to support. In addition, they think its promises of free expression are required for scientific progress to manifest.
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Capitalism has seeped deep into science, and currently careers are made and broken on the ability to gather funds for projects. Capitalists control science essentially. Therefore, the scientists who are promoted to acclaim, are the ones who are most aligned with the capitalists ideologically.
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University science departments everywhere in the West have consciously made efforts to ban serious political thought from their campuses, usually in round-about ways. As a result, they’ve removed a lot of the professors who would be political enough to influence their students. I’ve seen this happen during my studies and my short time working for a university a few years ago
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actual scientists who treat politics as a math problem because they think social science is just too easy for them and they can just figure it all out, like the german physicist lady on YouTube
Germans have a word for people like her: fachididot. Someone who is highly educated in one field, and applies only this narrow field of expertise to problems outside of that field, therefore missing critical parts of the problem and potential solution which do not stem from their own expertise.
So cool, I need to remember this one. If there’s one thing I like about Germany its the language. It’s no wonder why German philosophy is so important for Western philosophy, their language allow them to naturally form cool concepts. English is also nice but not as elegant imo. I’m pretty jealous because French, my native tongue, is lame as f for new words. We even have a state sponsored institution full of monarchists who try to police our language to prevent us from copying English words since trying to translate them produces absolutely ridiculous results
German isn’t particularly special for being able to form natural compound words like that. Every Germanic language can do it as well as Greenlandic, just off the top of my head, but Germany has a longer history of schools of philosophy
Every Germanic language can do it as well as Greenlandic
That’s cool, didn’t know that!
Yeah, it’s called linguistic compounding. English is the odd one out here in the Germanic family since all of the others let you jam nouns together to create more specific nouns. You can do it in a lot of Asian languages too, and north American indigenous languages. Finnish and Russian.
like the german physicist lady on YouTube
Sabine Hossenfelder: Capitalism is good. Let me explain.
Incredible. Ten seconds in and she commits the cardinal sin of the barter society myth.
Edit: oh lol, the shortcuts she takes to go from minted coinage to fiat money too
Edit: guise remember when marx said capitalism is about grabbing the means of production?
I remember when she started talking about philosophy I ditched so fast. You know what you call a channel that starts doing one thing to get popular and then SUDDELY jumps into random unrelated topic that’s always political? A fascist propagandist. It’s always the same playbook, and I wasn’t going to wait for them to start openly endorsing something evil in the however-many months it took them to release that video.
Exactly what I was referring to lmao
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
And the worst is of course actual scientists who treat politics as a math problem because they think social science is just too easy for them and they can just figure it all out, like the german physicist lady on YouTube
A friend of mine works as in-house legal for a Fintech company. She tells me that every 6 months or so she’ll be asked to review one of the tech guys’ “revolutionary streamlined process” and tell him “congratulations, you’ve invented tax evasion.”
Very understandable phenomenon. We live in an age where science is depicted as objective knowledge that carries society to greatness, and not as a method of always trying to prove yourself wrong so that you map a practical understanding of a topic.
Lack of materialism scream from those types. They might stopped believing in deity figures, but they just found themselves a new idol.
And the worst is of course actual scientists who treat politics as a math problem because they think social science is just too easy for them and they can just figure it all out, like the german physicist lady on YouTube
For some reason this reminded me of Asimov’s Foundation and the Seldon plan: let’s translate social sciences to a math and predict a future with hard science. Best of all, it was nothing of sorts, even regardless of how that’s impossible, in universe they straight up relied on magic and the actual plan was “mind control neobarbarians for 1000 years and prepare them for the enlightened rule of psychic ubermensch aristocracy”.
If you don’t have a specifically leftist dictionary to pull from you can get completely lost in the channel’s propaganda. None of that they say is offensive to your average American knowledge of the world, and it’s not like they’re overtly fascist about it either. If you aren’t going in knowing ahead of time what neoliberalism is you might even consider their ideas and solutions to be worth trying out. It’s not like you know better. But then you come back at it with a more complete understanding of the world and then you can see how fucked up what they’re saying is. They cloak their poison behind such masterful manipulation tactics that even those who know better can get caught up in it.
This isn’t a channel going around denying genocide or siding with nazis, they’re throwing platitudes and manipulating your emotions. It’s all equally dangerous but when you’re in the deep of it you won’t notice any of that. This is why all of the most effective propagandists are all science channels; they don’t have to risk revealing themselves as monsters by taking a political stance, they can just defer to the data and then sneak in ideology when interpreting it to the audience. After all, everything they say is backed up by science, and the rest is just their opinion.
The problem with the ideology these creators have, is they essentially make science a new religion and elevate it to god status. They have replaced the role that monotheistic gods once had in the human experience with an abstract idea of “science”. Not only is this idealist thinking, it bastardises science itself.
We’ve seen this ideology manifest itself time and time again. From thinking the invention of the internal combustion engine and massive steam versions of it would advance humanity (then WW1 happened), to the neo futuristic atomic hope of the early 1950s after WW2 before the cold war kicked off heavily, to the end of history 1990s before the “war on terror” started. To finally the modern day worship of “green energy” in capitalist societies, that is not actually green.
It needs to be remembered that the scientific method is simply the best way we currently have of understanding the world around us, and not the understanding itself. Objectifying science to the point that people consider it analogous to the understanding itself leads to all kinds of problems.
In short, listen to the song DLZ
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Kurzgesagt is like if the World Economic Forum had a department of explainer videos. They get funding from Bill Gates and effective altruism cultists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurzgesagt#Sources_of_funding
Gates-funded eco-porky.
There are also Hungarian, German and South African flags, and I doubt it has much to do with them either.
This is just how liberals virtue signal these days, no different from having a load of flags in your twitter name. Mostly surprised that there aren’t any Ukraine flags.
Let all virtue signal with Palestine flag reactions xD
“You are being oppressed” - Yeah right, I don’t buy into propaganda that easily
“Kurzgesagt: You aren’t responsible for climate change” - WAAOOWW-!!!
Hardcore Liberal “I fucking love science” youtube channel has exactly the sort of discord one would expect. More at 11.
I’d wager the part that while international, it is, at it’s core, german, has a lot to do with it
Kurzgesagt have a few problematic videos, the scaremongering one about CRISPR comes to mind, but most are actually good scientific explanations with lovely animations for less technically minded people.
