Hello all,

This community will be removed from the instance in the near future because it is unmoderated, does not align with the instance’s focus, and frequently introduces political content into the local feed, which is contrary to the instance’s goal of minimizing political content.

Alternative versions of aboringdystopia are available on other instances:

!aboringdystopia@lemmy.world

!aboringdystopia@lemmy.ml

!aboringdystopia@lemm.ee

I would prefer locking the community to avoid losing visibility of the posts, but unfortunately locking a community is not an available feature.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    10 hours ago

    The scope is explicitly anti-politics because I do not want to moderate a politically charged or polarizing environment

    We aren’t the ones that made science politically charged or polarizing, the coordinated global movement of rightwing extremists did.

    What are you going to do when conservatives force science further into the realm of politics? Stay silent about it here until all the science funding is cut and climate change discussion is barred from public discourse?

    Peter, let’s jump right in. The usual stance of scientists is to remain publicly neutral, especially when it comes to political issues. In light of the rising tide of anti-science, do you believe this must now change?

    I think it will have to because the attacks are so partisan. No one in science wants to talk about politics, liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, red and blue states. Our training says we should be politically neutral, and I support that. But what do you do when the 200,000 needless deaths due to refusing Covid vaccinations overwhelmingly occur in red states? In addition, as the data show: the redder the county, the lower the immunization rate, and the higher the death rate.

    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11229655/

    Wake up and get with the times, it is 2026, we have to actively defend science explicitly and in political contexts not just talk about it abstractly on the internet in a positive way and hope that makes a difference.

    • Salamander@mander.xyzOP
      0·
      10 hours ago

      You can have a look at some communities that often have content where science intersects politics:

      https://mander.xyz/c/academia https://mander.xyz/c/earthscience https://mander.xyz/c/publichealth

      Minimizing politics does not strictly mean being extreme about enforcing the no-politics rule. Posts that are about the interaction between politics and science generally contain enough overlap with science that it is acceptable. But that is not the case in this community, it is mostly general topics and politics.

      • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
        1·
        9 hours ago

        This is an unsustainable moderation policy and philosophy for a community ostensibly about promoting science and scientific discussion.

        If anything a hazy acceptance of sommeeeee political content is worse than an attempt at not allowing any at all, which is also not a sustainable moderation policy for a community centered on science.

        I don’t think you understand, you either fight this head on or you accept that you have lost and science will continue to be dismantled globally and you seem to be stuck in the middle thinking there is another option.

        • tristynalxander@mander.xyzEnglish
          1·
          8 hours ago

          Sal is quite lenient, but you – and I have noticed you’re the main submitter to this community – flaunt your violation of the rules. We talk science politics all across this instance (academia, public health, even labrats has more politics than I’d like and I’m the only poster). The posts on this community are pure chest-beating tribal politics though.

          I bet I could even get away with making a community on voting theory and explaining how the math of different voting systems and statistics all play together. I wouldn’t personally want to put the work into moderating such a community, but the scope of science stuff is extremely broad. Not even a token effort was made to fit the scope, so the community got removed. That’s perfectly fair.

          • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
            1·
            8 hours ago

            The posts on this community are pure chest-beating tribal politics though.

            What do you mean exactly by that?

            What do you mean by “tribal”? Why are you using “tribal” in a derogatory fashion?

            Do you think I am passionate about politics because I see this like sports teams and I am just really passionate about my team winning?

            • tristynalxander@mander.xyz
              0·
              8 hours ago

              Do you think I talk about politics because I see this like sports teams or something and I am really passionate about my team winning?

              Pretty much, yeah.

              • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
                1·
                7 hours ago

                It is difficult for me to comprehend loving science and betraying it by artificially blinding yourself to the reality that science is political and is under existential threat from coordinated, intentional actions by rightwing movements all over the world, but then again people betray the people and things they love all the time I guess.

                • tristynalxander@mander.xyzEnglish
                  1·
                  7 hours ago

                  My loyalty to science first is why I’m on this instance. It’s not hard to understand that social drama distracts from and often undermines science. Calling a politician stupid gets us no closer doing more science. It doesn’t help get us funding or logistics. It doesn’t have anything to do with the science itself. It might well be true, but it amounts to useless whining. It’s increased noise for people who are looking for technically interesting things.

                  Additionally, science being politicized is not a justification to further politicize science. When people push and pull science to one side or another it makes it harder to build the broad coalitions and broad consensus required to fund things and solve problems. The moment people start thinking in ists and isms they stop thinking about how to solve problems. At the end of the day, Ideologies are social constructs. They sorta exists, but they’ll always be less important the physical reality and practical mechanisms.

                  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
                    1·
                    4 hours ago

                    Additionally, science being politicized is not a justification to further politicize science.

                    This mindset is exactly the kind of toothless reaction that the people politicizing science in the first place are counting on, congratulations.

                    When people push and pull science to one side or another it makes it harder to build the broad coalitions and broad consensus required to fund things and solve problems.

                    You are equating why I am passionate about politics and science as essentially the same motivations as people who are explicitly bigoted and anti–intellectual which even if you were right, which you are not, misses a very important difference between me and those people you are intepreting I am having mud slinging fights with because it is fun.

                    I am not bigoted and hostile at a fundamental level to science like the people I am trying to point out are who are actively lighting everything on fire.

                    You don’t seem to comprehend you are playing an essential part in the ratchet mechanism here.

                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_effect

                    Yet the erosion of public trust in science has significance that goes well beyond any particular policy decision or agency budget. The functioning of modern societies depends on what the English sociologist Anthony Giddens termed “abstract systems”: networks of institutions that use technical expertise to “organise large areas of the material and social environments in which we live.” From this point of view, the stark polarization of American politics around trust in science not only threatens the legitimacy of particular expert institutions, but also has potentially destabilizing consequences for society as a whole.

                    …

                    The idea that distrust in science is due simply to ignorance—or a “deficit” of information—has been especially alluring to many members of scientific, educational, and media institutions because it presupposes that what needs fixing lies not with those institutions but rather with ignorant others. Although this framing has long been discredited by scholars, it persists in part because these same institutions are uniquely well-positioned to supply more information. Yet distrust is a relational concept—it calls for repair, not more information. Efforts to fill the void left by distrust with more information are therefore unlikely to succeed; they also run the risk of aggravating the underlying cause of distrust.

                    Another explanation for distrust of science, highly influential in the scholarly literature, rejects the deficit model but instead blames conservatives’ hostility to government. As historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway put it, “contemporary conservative distrust of science is not really about science. It is collateral damage, a spillover effect of distrust in government,” traceable to the anti-government, “neoliberal” ideology of the Reagan era.

                    https://issues.org/new-politics-science-mills-st-clair/