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>I have a book from Scientific American from the 1960s that has a whole section removed for the british audience because it contained instructions on how to run
by jhbadger 2y ago
>I have a book from Scientific American from the 1960s that has a whole section removed for the british audience because it contained instructions on how to run experiments on bears. That is a political act.
I think you'd need a bit more evidence for that being "political". A far more plausible reason for the removal is that Britain doesn't have bears to any degree (there have been isolated sightings but most think they've been extinct there for over 1000 years).
- tomgp 2y agoIt's true! Britain has no bears so we like any refrence to them to be removed from our books ensuring we never have to think about them.
- partomniscient 2y agoStrangely enough, I read about a bear that was lurking around at Paddington Station.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoBut that's a Peruvian bear.
- tim333 2y agoThere were also rumours of a pooh bear in East Sussex.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y agoLet me guess, he claims he's just a tourist, but had two 400lb suitcases.
- coolhand2120 2y agoThe swallow may fly south with the sun, or the house martin or the plover seek warmer hot lands in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land.
- shrubble 2y agoThere’s a version of a book on birds that doesn’t have the gannet in it. (Monty Python reference)
- suzzer99 2y agoAnd a book on trees that doesn't have the larch in it.
- KaiserPro 2y agoI need to find it again but it said something along the lines of: "this chapter has been removed as it describes experimentation on live bears." it then goes on to apologise and has a lovely passive aggressive: "we would hope that British readers would not like to carry out such experiments on live animals"
- DiogenesKynikos 2y agoGalileo. Oppenheimer. I think those two examples are already enough to show that science has been political for 400 years.
- jbstjohn 2y agoIn all seriousness, no, it shows that there were at least two cases of political science in the last 400 years, not that all science is. I think there have been more, and it plays a role, but I don't buy that you can just dismiss the criticism of political science with the claim that it always is. There are matters of degrees, and it's almost universally acknowledged to be bad, because it usually means results and emphasis have been distorted because of the politics.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y agoI just chose one example from the early years of science, and one modern case. Anyone can fill in countless cases of science being highly politicized in the intervening centuries. > There are matters of degrees, and it's almost universally acknowledged to be bad, because it usually means results and emphasis have been distorted because of the politics. No, science is generally objective, but its results have political implications. To take the pandemic as an example. Virology and epidemiology came to a clear, objective, true conclusion: social distancing and vaccination would drastically reduce the death toll of the pandemic. However, because there are people who reject social distancing (e.g., people who run businesses) and vaccination (anti-vaxxers and opportunistic politicians who see that as an issue they can push), virology and epidemiology have become politically controversial. It's also politically convenient in the United States to distract from the government's own failure to effectively respond to the pandemic by pushing conspiracy theories about the virus coming from a lab in a scary foreign country (and if you don't accept that this is a conspiracy theory, I'm sorry, but you've fallen victim to the widespread propaganda on this issue in American media over the last few years, which is 100% at odds with the conclusions that the scientific community has reached). The problem isn't with virology or epidemiology themselves. The problem is with how the society and political system respond to science.