The science I grew up learning was a boring, reliable, opinion-free, globally constant entity. Pi was 3.14 whether you lived in Beruit or London or Bulawayo.
Now we have celebrity scientists eho hold contradictory positions and people who say things like "Trust the science."🤷🏿♂️
I grew up learning that science existed to be constantly challenged, and scientific fact could only be established using the "scientific method" as against consensus and "because I said so."
Maybe the rules have changed since then, I don't know.
Apparently, there is no longer any such thing as universal scientific fact in this COVID era. Now there are just widely varying opinions which are all supposed to have value because the holders wear white lab coats.
Nothing is true anymore. Nothing is a lie.
"COVID-19 is harmless." "COVID-19 can liquefy your organs and melt your brain."
"Masks reduce transmission by 80%." "Masks are useless placebos."
All are apparently statements of fact supported by white lab coats with many alphabets after their names.
All I see is nonsense.
Science is now acting like a religion with a white-coated clergy class and a terrified laity class jumping through whatever hoops the clergy comes up with every week.
Two directly contradictory positions cannot be true at the same time. At least one of them must be false.
When all this is eventually over, the entire global entity called 'science' will need to fundamentally reexamine how it moved from universal consistency to a series of personality cults in our lifetime.
Because humanity desperately needs actual science, not yet another religion.
This is an example of what I mean. Scientifically, this is absolute nonsense, akin to saying that God put dinosaur fossils on earth to test your faith.
But this is an atheist saying this, and this is becoming a "scientific" consensus.
I have a lot of questions about this. First of all, why has @SecBlinken removed Nigeria from this list of religious freedom violators? That placement was one of @SecPompeo's last actions in office.
Second, why is the public link to this press release on the @StateDept website broken? Why did I have to go hunting through the newsroom section to find it, and why does the URL show that the press release has been deleted?
I have just received a message from Cote d'Ivoire about Itunu Babalola. She is still in prison in Abidjan where she has contracted a serious infection and apparently she is dying.
All those promises by NIDCOM, Abike Dabiri, OYSG etc - audio.
She's so far gone that the guy who reached out was only asking for her parents' contact details, presumably to inform them about their soon-to-be-dead daughter's condition.
Before slipping into unconsciousness, she showed him my name and he found me on Facebook.
One of the most profitable internet grifts I've observed since 2011 is when an African living in Africa starts courting diaspora African audiences who have read some Walter Rodney and imagine they've figured out why Africa is underdeveloped.
It's so predictable and so funny.
The diaspora people (usu. 1st & 2nd gens in Europe and North America) make the fundamental mistake of extrapolating the petty racisms they face daily, to global geopolitics and economics.
Tim in Accounts making a racist joke = The White Man oppressing Africans globally🌚
They need someone on the ground in Africa (which they are hopelessly disconnected from) to confirm this for them by telling them that there are French soldiers in Yaoundé oppressing Cameroon and that American corporations dump used electronics at a landfill site in Agbogbloshie.
I strongly believe that many of the weird societal values and low quality cultural behaviour present on the African continent, stem from Africa's historical lack of difficulty.
If Africa had European/American climate or Australian wildlife, our behaviour would be VERY different.
Our equatorial climate allowed for subsistence agriculture all year round, plus vast biodiversity and huge savannas made feeding yourself a slam dunk.
Unlike places where the ground freezes solid for 6 months a year, there was no need to plan ahead significantly or innovate.
Due to this relative ease of survival, behaviour that is detrimental to the group wasnt punished to the same extent as elsewhere.
Elsewhere, natural selection would rapidly delete you if your group couldn't work together. Here, you'd stroll a few km away and start a new village.
Just Femi Osibona, rich, educated, UK-resident, high end Nigerian developer who lived in Ikoyi, proudly admitting on national TV that he does not listen to architects and structural engineers when doing projects in Nigeria.
Same dude admitting proudly that he gamed the system to flout planning regulations and build an extra storey on a house he redeveloped in Stoke-Newington, London🌚
Well, after a career of stacking unapproved extra storeys on buildings and ignoring advice from structural engineers, here is where he died.
Under his own stack of concrete Lego.
The quintessential rich and educated Nigerian illiterate pauper.