I used to love Popular Mechanics. I’ve always been a science junkie and technology junkie and I grew up reading Popular Mechanics the way so many other aspiring engineers did.
I gave up on Popular Mechanics a few years ago, now the only time I really pick it up is when I’m waiting at the barbershop or doctor’s office and my other option is Reader’s Digest.
It was that every other article was about climate change. I liked the stuff they used to publish like the engineering behind the F-104 or some obscure cool facts about the lunar lander. That’s no more.
Two days ago Popular Mechanics went full-tilt into the culture wars in the most disgusting way possible.
How to Topple a Statue Using Science
Bring that sucker down without anyone getting hurt.
It hasn’t been a great past few weeks for statues.
From Bristol, England to Birmingham, Alabama, people all over the world have been grappling with the legacy of racism by tossing their grappling hooks around the heads of problematic monuments.
Should you happen to find yourself near a statue that you decide you no longer like, we asked scientists for the best, safest ways to bring it to the ground without anyone getting hurt—except, of course, for the inanimate racist who’s been dead for a century anyway.
Yup, that’s a real article. Popular Mechanics is now embracing the Two Minute Hate and Memory Hole.
The activist group March For Science promoted that article in a Tweet.
March for Science is a group that states its goals are “To mobilize advocates around the world in support of evidence-based, science-informed public policies.”
I guess those policies now include iconoclasm.
The pinned Tweet for March for Science is the beginning of a thread about how science is racist.
What’s police brutality and racism got to do with science?
Everything.
A #BlackAndSTEM/#ShutDownSTEM/#ShutDownAcademia/#BlackLivesMatter multidisciplinary science megathread. pic.twitter.com/ZcJakmI3xS
— March For Science (@MarchForScience) June 11, 2020
#ShutDownSTEM is one of their hashtags.
#ShutDownSTEM and #ShutDownAcademia was apparently last Wednesday.
There is an entire website dedicated to this.
In the wake of the most recent murders of Black people in the US, it is clear that white and other non-Black people have to step up and do the work to eradicate anti-Black racism. As members of the global academic and STEM communities, we have an enormous ethical obligation to stop doing “business as usual.” No matter where we physically live, we impact and are impacted by this moment in history.
Our responsibility starts with our role in society. In academia, our thoughts and words turn into new ways of knowing. Our research papers turn into media releases, books and legislation that reinforce anti-Black narratives. In STEM, we create technologies that affect every part of our society and are routinely weaponized against Black people.
Black academic and Black STEM professionals are hurting because they exist in and are attacked by institutional and systemic racism. Black people have been tirelessly working for change, alongside their Indigenous and People of Color allies. For Black academics and STEM professionals, #ShutDownAcademia and #ShutDownSTEM is a time to prioritize their needs— whether that is to rest, reflect, or to act— without incurring additional cumulative disadvantage.
Hu?
I spent last Wednesday writing a proposal to do research for NASA for lunar exploration. I don’t understand how that is part of systemic racism?
It’s not enough for science just to be science anymore, it has to be social science and Progressive social science at that.
Black Lives Matter: Oxford will ‘decolonise’ degrees
Oxford University has revealed plans to “decolonise” its maths and science degrees and will allow students of any subject who have been affected by the Black Lives Matter furore to seek lenient marking.
In a letter to the student union, Louise Richardson, vice-chancellor, said that the mathematical, physical and life sciences division had been awarded a grant to develop teaching resources that supported the diversification of its curriculums, describing it as “an area that is frequently overlooked”.
She added: “Many departments in social sciences have begun work on making their curriculum more inclusive and adding diverse voices to it. This includes steps such as integrating race and gender questions into topics, embedding teaching on colonialism and empire into courses, changing reading lists to ensure substantial diversity.
I want to know how “integrating race and gender questions into topics, embedding teaching on colonialism and empire into courses” will improve things like Design of Experiments and Statistical Analysis? I suspect it won’t.
The other idea in this is that black students and academics need special consideration because they need time to be activists as well as scientists and events that have nothing to do with them directly affect them uniquely.
This is something March for Science pushed as well.
This trauma is passed down through the generations–culturally and behaviorally, but a new area of research is suggesting that it may be getting passed on epigenetically as well. There is much that’s still unknown about the biological legacy of slavery.https://t.co/NlM25qBf0g
— March For Science (@MarchForScience) June 11, 2020
This feels less like science than the soft bigotry of low expectations, but it is the new front in academia.
A professor at UCLA was put on leave after he decided not to give black students extra time on their exams so they could be part of the George Floyd protests.
Popular Mechanics is not the only once-respected science publication that has fallen to Progressivism. Nature News had to engage in suicidal naval gazing as well.
We recognize that Nature is one of the white institutions that is responsible for bias in research and scholarship. We commit to working to end anti-Black practices in research. #ShutdownStem https://t.co/hLJnXenlRS
— nature (@Nature) June 10, 2020
They wrote about things like stellar formation.
Everything is political. Nothing can exist for the Left without politics.
In my world as a metallurgist “transition” is what happens between phases in atomic packing factors. For me, the only thing “anti-black” about my work is trying to control “black body radiation,” but I suspect that people who have no idea what that is and why it is important in the vacuum of space now want me canceled.
Science is dying and the Progressives are killing it.
This makes me sad because my son loves science and us currently enjoying his science summer camp.
Unfortunately, by the time he gets to college – unless something substantial changes – he’s not going to be taught the rocket equation because Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert H. Goddard are white men and attempting the lunar landing was imperialist colonialism.
I don’t know what to do but I weep for the future of the West when the Progressives are done killing science.
Remember that video of the classroom where grades were based on ‘privilege points’? or that old after school special ‘The Test’ iirc? Education is racist. Parody is becoming reality.
I gave up on Popular Mechanics the they went antinuclear while I was studying nuclear engineering. It now appears that they’ve gone full Lysenko. Of course that worked well for the USSR. How long before they make Jüdische Physik illegal?
Yes, I was remembering Lysenko just the other day. The history is repeating itself with a vengeance.
‘I don’t know what to do but I weep for the future of the West when the Progressives are done killing science’
I feel perpetually nauseated just thinking about this.
Hard core STEM was the last bastion of sanity. May be because the possibility of having a blown up nuclear reactor or a slightly mistimed neutron bomb explosion due to incompetence somewhat deterred the political mob.
Not anymore.
If you want your son to learn science, teach him yourself. Everything is available online for free.
Higher education ain’t anymore. Leave em in the dust of their own fire.
This is all fun and games until aircraft start crashing and bridges & buildings start falling down. As an aerospace engineer/operations analyst at a large defense contractor (starts with an “L”), I saw the inexorable creep of SJW policies into many areas. How long until “lenient marking” causes a catastrophe?
See the collapse of the pedestrian bridge at Florida International University two years ago. Link here
The problem is that I’ve worked with some great black and women engineers, but this sort of nonsense is going to destroy any job seekers. No one gets hired without personal recommendations from deeply trusted friends.
Years ago, I swore I’d never hire anyone from an Ivy League school. Sorry, but their SJW mindsets are legendary. Back in 2011, I got a document called “A Guide for Integrating Social and Economic Justice Into Mathematics Curriculum” but even that recognized the answers come out the same no matter who does the math, and was an attempt to get problems that interest future SJWs.
These people seem determined to show that numbers mean nothing. Which is handy because they can refute any statistics or data you cite saying it’s just white science and therefore meaningless. White cops are less likely to use force on black suspects than black or latino cops? Sorry, that violates the narrative, so it must be white science.
If you politicize science to the point of uselessness, then it is easier to impose Year Zero and eliminate those with critical thinking as enemies of the state..
You go to school to get two things: an education and a diploma. The diploma is a piece of paper that the issuing institution uses to say “We promise that the bearer of this instrument has met the standards of learning that we require to earn this piece of paper. We are staking our reputation on that fact.”
This is so future employers know that the person with the diploma possesses certain knowledge and skills.
As the reputation of those institutions becomes worse, the standards are lowered, and more students get the paper without actually obtaining the knowledge, the paper becomes as irrelevant as it is meaningless.
Actually, at some point the piece of paper isn’t irrelevant, it’s a red flag warning. If you see a “university” adopt the sort of thing described here, the necessary conclusion is that people wielding diplomas from that university should not be hired — at least not absent strong evidence that they learned in spite of attending that university.
To the left, science is just another weapon in their quest to get power. They also use it as a tribal signal — but their understanding of it rarely goes deeper than cartoon level.
When the deck of cards you use to play cards with is all race cards, you have 5 of a kind. Problem is, so does everyone else. Who wins? In a socialist utopia, it’s anyone that still has superior power. Whether its’ by guns or muscle.
This has been inevitable from the moment the left embraced atheism. Atheism’s professed religion has always been a domestic version of“science”. The left seemed to jump on science as a religion as a way to justify their version of global warming and scientist caved to the demands of the “science religion” to get funding and authority. The main problem with the “religion of science” was its base tenants such as catastrophic global warming tended to not agree with the math and other hard sciences so they needed a way to delegitimize them.
There is a trend I’ve been noticing for quite a while; Label something as “science” and all of a sudden you’re a bad person for so much as questioning it.
Indeed.
It’s one thing for “social science” to do this PC crap, since it’s not a science (it’s what Heinlein so aptly called a “fuzzy subject”). But in real science, talking about “diversification” simply exposes the speaker as a mentally defective moron. Unfortunately, it sounds like Oxford has hired such people and even put them in positions of power.
Mouse, there is a simple rule: a discipline whose name contains the word “science” isn’t. (The same, only more so, goes for disciplines containing the word “studies”).
Remember Heinlein’s Crazy Years?
Marx was the pioneer with that, along with hordes of other snake-oil salesmen. He was followed by the eugenicists.
It’s like we are on the cusp of entering another dark age or have taken the first steps. Incredible.
I had a subscription to popular mechanics and popular science for 18 years by 2010 neither publication was worth reading any more as they were both politicized and heavily dumbed down. How to articles turned into show and tell and detailed descriptions turned into light overviews while ads increased to seemingly every other page. Don’t even get me started on the acceptance of junk science as established fact and their politics. When my subscriptions ended in 2016 i didn’t miss it.
Wouldn’t give up my old popular mechanics encyclopedias for the life of me though, those alone made ebay worth it’s existence.
You know where you went wrong? First you needed to include $25 million for “muslim outreach”, $50 million for “anti-discrimination training”, then guarantee a “diverse workforce” with a “racial quota”. But since you forgot, the bureaucrats will accuse you of wrongthink and throw out your application. But you should reapply, include these things and tell them you now feelz like a blonde woman and they can’t deny you based on your supposed sex. I’ll be glad to teach a few gender study courses for pre-2016 HRH Hillary rates of about $250,000 per class.