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It's a bit like reading Julie Bindel, this. The terminology and language clearly resemble someone with much the same source material as I, but at some point it's taken a turn for the strange.
So, let's try to sort this one out. I think, Supersister, your brain chemistry might be getting tangled between the metaphorical and the literal - hence the dinosaurs. Burrowing down, and temporarily leaving out the ill-informed rambling about AIDS, which is nto doing you any favours, I believe that what you are trying to say is something like:
Currently, the scientific establishment's membership is mainly made up of white, university-educated Western men. As a result of that, it is canted disproportionately towards fields of inquiry of interest to this group, and also towards conclusions which serve the interests of this group and this group's paymasters. This is not actually a reflection on science or the scientific method per se, but rather the scientific establishment. I believe, personally, that the fields of study reflect white men's fears of extinction, and so focus on AIDS, endangered species and dinosaurs (this bit is a bit mad, FYI - palaeontology is a very photogenic branch of science, but not one of the most heavily funded by corporate interests). Also as a result of that, the credibility of one's research, and access to tools with which to research, is often conditioned by one's ability to gain qualifications which are further gatekept in such a way that many of those who receive them will be well-off, white and male.
Because the interests of the wealthy, white and male are often represented as the interests of society, this has meant that scientific inquiry, which is largely performed by university-educated white men, is frequently given value over other forms of inquiry or ways of reaching conclusions which are less identifiably rational, which are often associated, consciously, or unconsciously, with the subaltern, not least because the subaltern is prevented by reasons of wealth and connections from getting access to the training or the opportunities that would allow them to join the scientific establishment.
This is not in itself hugely controversial, and is not a bad basis for proceeding - unfortunately, the utterly batshit stuff about how we have legends of fire-breathing dragons is because at the time of the Roman Empire people were using fire to cook and eat dinosaurs, and that at some point the white man has suppressed this fact for whatever reason, is getting in the way of that, as is the ill-informed conspiracy theorising about AIDS, which does I think often annoy people because it assumes that Africans are basically less important than a really good conspiracy theory (see also "but what if the Holocaust didn't happen" - the point is, this is not a profitable "what if").
However, we come up here against a basic issue, which is that the scientific establishment != science. The scientific establishment = people, and people who often have reasons outside pure science to identify, perform and present their research - so you get controversialist science (The Bell Curve), populist science, corporate science (pet corporate scientists fighting holding actions on global warming) - in short, Bad Science. |
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