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The Terrifying Future Threat of Nuclear Waste According to the Government

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Ozymandias:
I am legitimately interested in what the "feminist" approach to science is, besides what this silly document has already defined as basically "fuck the last 2000 years of science, because men controlled it".

This is now an extreme curiosity.

Alex C:
Yeah, I mean, I take feminism pretty seriously, but I'm really unsure what the feminist perspective would have to say on the use of diatoms as an environmental monitor other than "stop doing that."

Bah. I'm being unnecessarily glib and dismissive here. Apologies. I just rarely hear much on the subject of ecofeminism that isn't tied up in primitivist ideology, which I pretty soundly reject.

pwhodges:

--- Quote from: onewheelwizzard on 21 Apr 2009, 17:33 ---the majority of 20th-Century Western science IS, in fact, "inferior, inadequate, and muddled masculine thinking."  I mean, 19th-Century science and 18th-Century science and 17th-Century science were all accurately described this way too.
--- End quote ---

So an eco-feminist view of gravity, evolution, Ohm's law, DNA, X-rays would differ how?  I like to have knowledge to base a view on - is this somehow bad?

Ozymandias:
I can see how there can be differing methodologies used in some fields, like medicine, based on feminist viewpoints but the process would, on a basic level, be the same.

I can also see how there could be disagreements on the advancement of science in academia, via journals and such, but honestly I'm not sure what a better alternative is besides just saying "the idealized version of this philosophy is way better than the reality of it."

But really, I just want OWW's thoughts, so people stop piling on him when he hasn't said any dang thing but that he agrees with a certain viewpoint.

onewheelwizzard:
People are just getting confused about the ideas, which is fine, because there are very few resources in society espousing this viewpoint with any degree of detail.

There are a lot of angles I could take to approaching the subject here and I'm pretty sure that none of them would really "present an argument" that people could weigh favorably against the "argument" presented by Western scientific thought.  But if I explain things right, people will hopefully see why that's part of the problem.

First of all, it's important to explain where Western science comes from.  Western science was started by religious men who were reforming a masculine and Judeo-Christian society by espousing the idea that the most perfect way to serve and appreciate the Lord was to study and understand His creation, rather than offer tithes to the church and such.  The fact that the goals of science outpaced their origins does not change the fact that science, at its heart of hearts, is based on a fundamental cosmology that assumes separation between individual humans and a vast, unfeeling, unconscious, impersonal universe.  This is the model of the universe that ancient Middle Eastern politics left in its wake in the form of religion, and science has relied upon it entirely.  The ideas that the universe might be alive or conscious, or that humanity might have some form of consciousness on the collective level, or that the planet Earth might be a living organism itself, *which are all ideas that are central to pre-Judeo-Christian pagan thought* (implication: we have alternatives and they are hardly new), have been considered more or less scientific heresy, not because they challenge DATA that scientists have collected, but because they challenge the traditional model with which scientists analyze their data ... the ancient, anti-pagan, Judeo-Christian model that started with "God created the universe and we are but souls within it" and then, over time, deleted "God" and "soul" from the equation without really adding much.

Science has done next to nothing so far to directly address our basic cosmological understanding of who we are in the universe.  Now, that's fine, I suppose, because it has never purported to intend to do such a thing, but the problem is that we, as a society, NEED to directly address our basic understanding of who we are in the universe, because the one we've been using in Western society is just not working well enough.  Our society is profoundly sick in a lot of ways, and this is due in large part to the sterile, rigid, impersonal way that we've conditioned our society into viewing the universe for the last 5000 years ... and our insistence that everyone else see things the same way.

Science is a many-times-refined holdover from the days of true patriarchy (back when you could sell your daughter, etc.) but it is a holdover nonetheless.  Here's the crux of the matter ... the thread that connects science to its roots in Judeo-Christian religious thought is concurrent with and intimately connected to the oppression of women within the same time frame.  That thread, by which I mean the shared worldview of a nonliving planet, a nonliving universe, and a disconnected human individual, has been the prime weapon used by men against women for as long as it has existed as a cosmology.  Science is on one end of its spectrum and fundamentalist religion is on the other, but the fact is that they are both on the same spectrum, and we need to get off it if we're going to become a truly feminist (read: egalitarian) society.

This doesn't mean we need to do away with science.  But it does mean we need to get off this silly kick we're on in which we think science is actually an arbiter of legitimacy when it comes to ideas about "reality," rather than just one of several equally valid frameworks we can use to examine reality.

There's a lot more to be said on this, maybe it should move to DISCUSS! ... I certainly haven't yet touched on most of the important points I could be making in this discussion.

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