"Rioting students determined to defy gravity"

[CWatters]

Was surprised to read this news story from South Africa. I guess this is what happens if your science education isn't poor.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/l...ents-add-african-science-to-demands-wncgpq5fm

South African students who have been in violent clashes with the police while campaigning for free tuition say they want to scrap the “Eurocentric” science curriculum in favour of traditional African theories.

Sir Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation has come in for particular criticism from the movement known as #Sciencemustfall. In a meeting with the science faculty at the University of Cape Town, Kealeboga Ramaru, a student leader, questioned the cause of lightning and dismissed Sir Isaac’s work as colonial.

Continues..

 

[DrClaude]

Didn't Sokal demonstrate that in Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity?

 

[Choppy]

I was expecting a link to the Onion.

 

[fresh_42]

It always shivers me, if I read things like that. We have done such in our history: it has literally been hell.
To connect science to social attributes is probably one of the worst ideas mankind has ever come up with.
I seriously recommend these students to read the vita of Felix Hausdorff.

 

[Vanadium 50]

It's not just South Africa. Google Hunter Havelin Adams and the Portland Baseline Essays.

 

[D4rk]

As a South African student, I'm somewhat surprised that this made international headlines. What's more saddening is that the students who made the comment are students of one of the most well respected academic institutions in the country.

There is this whole historical reasoning to their argument, which frankly speaking is just plain idiotic. The sheep don't understand that it's all a political agenda and most of us students want to continue with our studies. Our academic year is at risk of being scraped because of these rioters.

 

[Mark44]

It's not just South Africa. Google Hunter Havelin Adams and the Portland Baseline Essays.

I remember the Portland Baseline Essays, but I didn't know anything about the individual contributors. Adams is listed in the Encyclopedia of American Loons.

From the piece cited above

According to Adams, the ancient Egyptians were black and their culture ancestral to African-Americans. They also flew around in gliders and were the inventors of most of modern science, in particular the use of the zodiac and “astropsychological treatises,” which Adams implies is science. Furthermore, the ancient Egyptians were “famous as masters of psi, precognition, psychokinesis, remote viewing and other undeveloped human capabilities.”

 

[zoobyshoe]

I can't read the link and can't find any confirmation that the riots are about anything but the cost of education.

 

[fresh_42]

I can't read the link and can't find any confirmation that the riots are about anything but the cost of education.

I admit it sounds a bit less stupid on the Guardian, than on the South African Times

https://www.theguardian.com/news/20...dents-have-turned-on-their-parents-generation

but the allegation of eurocentricity is part of the report.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I admit it sounds a bit less stupid on the Guardian, than on the South African Times

https://www.theguardian.com/news/20...dents-have-turned-on-their-parents-generation

but the allegation of eurocentricity is part of the report.

That guardian article not only makes it (the anti-euro movement) sound a lot less stupid, it makes it sound like it makes some sense.

I found this YouTube of a white South African criticizing what appears to be only one black South African student who seems to be purveying the anti-western science idea:



In other words, the article in the OP seems to be using one very fringe person to taint the larger movement which (based on the guardian article) is really about something else: rejection of a euro-centric culture where the best blacks get is to work at Walmart waiting on white customers.

We can easily find plenty of Americans who reject evolution and believe in intelligent design, etc. etc. who would be happy to demonstrate for a more bible-based approach to science if prompted. Can't use them to characterize all US students.

 

[dipole]

South Africa is also the country with one of the highest populations of AIDS victims, because it was widely believed that raping a virgin would cure one of AIDS... so a generation of young girls contracted the disease.

That fact might help put this in perspective.

 

[zoobyshoe]

South Africa is also the country with one of the highest populations of AIDS victims, because it was widely believed that raping a virgin would cure one of AIDS... so a generation of young girls contracted the disease.

That fact might help put this in perspective.

Seems to be a myth. Although the percentage is the highest in the world, actual distribution of people who get aids is more or less what you'd expect:
https://www.avert.org/professionals/hiv-around-world/sub-saharan-africa/south-africa

Orphaned children are at risk, but not because they're virgins:

Children and orphans and HIV in South Africa

In 2012, an estimated 410,000 children aged 0 to 14 were living with HIV in South Africa. From 2002 to 2012, HIV prevalence declined among children, due mainly to programmes to prevent the mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT). The scaling up of antiretroviral treatment has reduced child mortality by 20%.27

There are also 2.3 million children in South Africa who have been orphaned by HIV and AIDS.28 Orphans are particularly vulnerable to HIV transmission; they are often at risk of being forced into sex, have sex in exchange for support, and typically become sexually active earlier than other children.29

 

[OCR]

I found this YouTube of...

I mean really, really...[COLOR=#black]..[/COLOR]

 

[DrClaude]

He doesn't look bored, he looks concentrated.

 

[OCR]

He doesn't look bored, he looks concentrated.

Well...

 

[Fervent Freyja]

Seems to be a myth.

Of course, the belief that having "sex with a baby'" can cure HIV and AIDS is a myth with no scientific basis. However, many babies and young children have been raped since the myth arose decades ago. It could be that the number of victims (on account of the myth) have been overestimated in publications for the last decade, I'll give it that. But it is undeniable that at least a few thousand children have been raped by men infected with HIV or AIDS, in attempts to cure themselves. There is no question there. There has been much media coverage and publications on the topic. This was actually prescribed by healers and even a decade ago it was a common belief that it was a cure!

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.482.5349&rep=rep1&type=pdf

 

[aquitaine]

That guardian article not only makes it (the anti-euro movement) sound a lot less stupid, it makes it sound like it makes some sense.

I found this YouTube of a white South African criticizing what appears to be only one black South African student who seems to be purveying the anti-western science idea:



In other words, the article in the OP seems to be using one very fringe person to taint the larger movement which (based on the guardian article) is really about something else: rejection of a euro-centric culture where the best blacks get is to work at Walmart waiting on white customers.

We can easily find plenty of Americans who reject evolution and believe in intelligent design, etc. etc. who would be happy to demonstrate for a more bible-based approach to science if prompted. Can't use them to characterize all US students.

I watched a video about this which showed the event in question and that's not what I saw. First of all the forum was basically a safe space, there was one guy in the audience that challenged the speaker and he was quickly silenced by the panel leader. Secondly there were several people there on the panel who did demonstrably agree. Thirdly the language she used about "deconstructing" is EXACTLY the same that "social science" and other nests of post modernism use to insert their own agendas into whatever they're trying to look at, and yes many of them in western countries have said similar things about science being a "western construct". This isn't a unique idea and it's far more pervasive at universities than you think. http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/science-is-not-entirely-a-social-construct/

I'll also point out that South Africa used to have an AIDS denier as a Minister of Health who tried to promote "traditional African medicine" to treat AIDS, of course like all "traditional medicines" from everywhere it doesn't work. When asked about subjecting them to clinical trials to see if they work, like real medicine, she said "We cannot use Western models of protocols for research and development".

I also reject the notion that this is going against a "euro-centric culture where the best blacks get is to work at Walmart waiting on white customers." since we see this attitude by more than a few white people at western universities and in the new age movement in the general populace, and in the context of a country where the Prime Minister is black and most of the government is black I find that all the more absurd. Apartheid ended more than 20 years ago.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I also reject the notion that this is going against a "euro-centric culture where the best blacks get is to work at Walmart waiting on white customers." since we see this attitude by more than a few white people at western universities and in the new age movement in the general populace, and in the context of a country where the Prime Minister is black and most of the government is black I find that all the more absurd. Apartheid ended more than 20 years ago.

It looks like you didn't read the Guardian article. Postmodernist ideas about social constructs have nothing to do with why this guy started all this.

The apartheid past, Maxwele realized, was still shaping his life. The realisation made him feel more and more angry, because it had not been what he had been taught growing up. His generation had been told they were the “born frees”: an exceptional generation in South African history, the first one raised with almost no direct memory of apartheid’s terrors. “They’re like nothing that’s ever been!” bleated a promo segment for Bornfrees, a reality TV show that began airing in South Africa in 2004. In school and at home, their elders often reminded them how different life was for them and how much they had to be grateful for.

On the morning of 9 March, Maxwele traveled by minibus taxi out to Khayelitsha, picked up one of the buckets of dang that sat reeking on the kerbside, and brought it back to the campus of the University of Cape Town (UCT), where, in 2011, he had gained a scholarship to study political science. He took it to a bronze statue of the 19th-century British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes that held pride of place on campus, just downhill from the convocation hall. Rhodes had been one of the main architects of South Africa’s segregation. “Where are ourheroes and ancestors?” Maxwele shouted to a gathering, curious crowd.

Then he opened the bucket and hurled its contents into Rhodes’s face...

https://www.theguardian.com/news/20...dents-have-turned-on-their-parents-generation

 

[zoobyshoe]

South Africa is also the country with one of the highest populations of AIDS victims, because it was widely believed that raping a virgin would cure one of AIDS... so a generation of young girls contracted the disease.

That fact might help put this in perspective.

Seems to be a myth.

Of course, the belief that having "sex with a baby'" can cure HIV and AIDS is a myth with no scientific basis.

Obviously the "myth" I'm debunking is the myth that raping virgins to cure aids caused South Africa to have the highest incidence of aids in the world.

 

[Carrock]

... of course like all "traditional medicines" from everywhere it doesn't work.

Many "traditional medicines" practitioners and much of their knowledge has been suppressed or incorporated (mostly unacknowledged) into standard medical practise by doctors. It's common to select obviously rubbish "traditional medicines" and state all of them are useless or harmful.

from Wikipedia

The Microbiology Society (previously the Society for General Microbiology) is a learned society based in the United Kingdom with a worldwide membership based in universities, industry, hospitals, research institutes and schools. It is the largest learned microbiological society in Europe.

Researchers from Nottingham rediscover Anglo-Saxon antimicrobial

...Microbiologist Dr Freya Harrison, working with Dr Steve Diggle and Dr Aled Roberts, collaborated with Dr Christina Lee, an Anglo-Saxon expert from the School of English, to recreate a 10th century potion for eye infections from Bald’s Leechbook...

...The team has shown that Bald’s eye salve kills up to 90% of meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria in in vivo wound biopsies from mouse models...

...Dr Steve Diggle added: “When we built this recipe in the lab I didn't really expect it to actually do anything. When we found that it could actually disrupt and kill cells in S. aureus biofilms, I was genuinely amazed. Biofilms are naturally antibiotic resistant and difficult to treat so this was a great result. The fact that it works on an organism that it was apparently designed to treat (an infection of a stye in the eye) suggests that people were doing carefully planned experiments long before the scientific method was developed.”

Of course most such recipes haven't survived and it's a matter of opinion whether any of them worked.

Scientific imperialism, anyone?