Re: <nettime> Why I won't support the March for Science

["Lunenfeld, Peter B." <lunenfeld@arts.ucla.edu>]

Dear Eric, Florian et al. --

I marched on Saturday, and I supported marching on Saturday. I see the
complaints about the the M4S as driven by a quest for ideological
purity. That's what I've been reading on <nettime>, The Root and
elsewhere about the march and its intentional separation from other
forms of social and economic justice work, and its reliance on what one
might call a technocratic political solutionism. We can argue about
techno-social intersectionality and inadvertent Popperian neoliberalism
until our fingers wear down our keyboards, but the reality is that in
the US at least, whatever you want to call the left/liberal alternative
to right-wing revanchism has lost almost all of its political power. The
Presidency, the House, and the Senate are all in Republican hands, and
that's just the national government, at the state level the Republican
Party now control the governor's house or the state legislative chamber
in 44 states, with full control in 25 states. If you feel like there is
no difference at all between a US with a strong Democratic party
composed of multiple, occasionally opposed coalitions, and the
abortion-hating, climate-change denying, racist nationalists we have
running the whole government right now, boycotting the M4S makes as much
or as little sense as anything else. If you feel there remains a
difference, then writing off the M4S comes off as pointlessly fractious
at best, and ally-denigrating, wheel-churning self-destruction at worst. 
   
Impurely yours --

Peter Lunenfeld

________________________________________
From: nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org [nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org] on behalf of Eric Kluitenberg [epk@xs4all.nl]
Sent: Monday, April 24, 2017 12:33 AM
To: Nettime
Subject: Re: <nettime> Why I won't support the March for Science

Similar sentiment - in fact I am all for ‘alternative facts’, just
different alternatives than the ones the Trump posse is proposing…
-e.

> On 23 Apr 2017, at 18:54, Florian Cramer <flrncrmr@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Why I won't support the 'March for Science':*
>
>
> 1) The central demand of the 'March for Science', "evidence-based
> policies and regulations", is toxic and dangerous.
 <...>

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