Science is racist because....

[Swindle1984]

When native ideas consist of things like raping infants to cure AIDS, casting spells to make your neighbor's penis disappear, 'corrective rape' of lesbians, and eating someone's heart to gain his strength, their ideas don't deserve to be taken seriously or given consideration.

So, yeah. I can understand why they might feel ignored, but there's a reason for that.

And that's the exact attitude that is encouraging the people in question to reject science. Which doesn't lead to 'native ideas' (which include a whole bunch of other things) being ignored; it leads to science being ignored. South Africa does not have an SD.net moderator to swoop in and tell everyone who takes an anti-science position to shut up and then back it up with bans and mockery. If you want to change those practices you need to do the hard work of actually convincing people (not just proving) that you're right. Otherwise they're going tell you and people like you to go to hell and continue to go with non-science alternatives, which in practice means whatever feels right.

Scientists tend to come from places of wealth and power enough to piss off natives. That doesn't mean they're rich and powerful enough to force their will on those natives.

So... you're saying we should take a witch doctor who sprinkles chalk on you and slaps your head to cure a migraine seriously, rather than dismiss him as quackery?

Look, I get that they feel like nobody gives them their due, but these are primitive peoples who haven't assimilated the scientific method or anything; the only exposure to the modern world they've had is some white guys who showed up, blew holes in them with some magic thunder sticks, then put them to work paving roads, building hospitals, universities, factories, farms, etc. And then when the white man pulled out, it all went to shit because most of the natives had no idea what was involved in maintaining a modern society and all its attendant infrastructure. Of course they're going to revert to the level that they understand, which is living in huts and practicing voodoo and animistic religions, just like they did before whitey showed up and forced them to wear blue jeans and speak a different language. Hell, many tribes don't even have concepts (or at least, lack words in their native languages to describe abstract concepts) like zero. In Zhosa, there's no way to tell someone how far up a tree a bunch of bananas is; you can't say 'at the top', 'halfway', or anything, just "up". You can't force people like that into a totally different culture and mindset overnight, it has to be a gradual thing. Clearly they're capable of doing it or we wouldn't have black scientists, doctors, politicians, etc., but the culture is deficient and our methods of passing ours along has done more harm than good. Hell, instead of assimilating them into our society, we were chopping off hands because they didn't harvest enough rubber; pretty sure that didn't do anyone any favors and might've made it a little difficult for Akimbode to become a rocket scientist.

If some guy walks up to you and says Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing in a movie studio and the Earth is really flat, and you start telling him about the curvature of the horizon, the orbit of the moon, the fact that we have satellites in orbit taking pictures as we speak, etc. and he gets angry and starts telling you that not taking his ideas seriously is an insult... do you treat his ideas as legitimate, or tell him he's wrong and try to correct him?

Again, I can understand where they're coming from, I'd be pretty pissed too if people told me my ideas were stupid, but that doesn't change the fact that their ideas are, in fact, wrong. For fuck's sake, the woman in the video claimed people were using witchcraft to make other people get struck by lightning and science couldn't explain it; how do you take someone that wrong and give their ideas/beliefs equal treatment?

There's also the fact that they're explicitly anti-science not just because they don't even understand what science is (though you would think seeing the results of science would convince them it worked), but because science is a white thing. When your entire underlying motivation is racism, it's pretty hard to ascribe your ideas with legitimacy.

[mr friendly guy]

You do realise that the science class her group was giving the lecture to burst out laughing. The science class full of these same primitive people.

[Terralthra]

It wasn't even a science class, as far as I could tell.

[mr friendly guy]

In the opening seconds the title had the words "UCT science faculty meets with "fallists" so I am going at least say they were science students or teachers.

[Flagg]

The problem is the idea of "safe space" is being abused because it allows people to spout whatever they want to believe in without being questioned themselves.

I envision safe spaces being a place set up so if someone's past trauma is "wigging them out" (For lack of a better description as I consider "trigger" to be fucking stupid in an educational institute. For one, because it has a negative connotation. Like someone who was in prison for a long time (guilty or not, I'm not the judge, the Judge is the judge) or a soldier during wartime and had such a traumatic experience that it causes them to lash out very distractively or violent) since it's not The Manchurian Candidate, even the one with Denzel) due to the course or a lecture they can go there to talk, or just sit in a beanbag chair and cry while listening to The Sex Pistols on whatever soul sucking digital device they own, rather than some kind of ultra-sanitized class with no controversy being brought up about anything.

Except that time in Sanitized Math 102 when Jimmy took an extra 1/5 of a slice slice of cake on Kim's' Birthday. Yes, I know there were plenty of slices left after the party but it's the principal!

[ray245]

The problem is the idea of "safe space" is being abused because it allows people to spout whatever they want to believe in without being questioned themselves.

I envision safe spaces being a place set up so if someone's past trauma is "wigging them out" (For lack of a better description as I consider "trigger" to be fucking stupid in an educational institute. For one, because it has a negative connotation. Like someone who was in prison for a long time (guilty or not, I'm not the judge, the Judge is the judge) or a soldier during wartime and had such a traumatic experience that it causes them to lash out very distractively or violent) since it's not The Manchurian Candidate, even the one with Denzel) due to the course or a lecture they can go there to talk, or just sit in a beanbag chair and cry while listening to The Sex Pistols on whatever soul sucking digital device they own, rather than some kind of ultra-sanitized class with no controversy being brought up about anything.

Except that time in Sanitized Math 102 when Jimmy took an extra 1/5 of a slice slice of cake on Kim's' Birthday. Yes, I know there were plenty of slices left after the party but it's the principal!

Like I said, the idea of safe space and identity politics has been abused by a number of people. It basically acts as a "moral defence" not to engage in any sort of intellectual debate. A debate about evolution? Oh no, my safe space as a fundie has been violated!