#penguin gate

[al-gorythym]

I try to avoid politics, here. Sometimes, just can’t help it though.

[lacunametata]

Found this in the comments to Yaacob Ibraham's statement to the ST (posted on his FB). If there is one truly alarming antithesis to democracy and politics today I believe it is the modern psycho-medico discourse, one that has in some ways been the logical conclusion of the Enlightenment and the history of Western progress. This discourse, layered with all sorts of delusions about post-ideological neutrality, seeks to abstract and totalize the world, claiming special license over deeply public, political, and by extension ideological matters with its supposedly scientific knowledge. It seeks to co-opt and reify the status quo within its asphyxiating jargonistic discourse. It's vision, which is no doubt political (just look at how Big Oil tries to shape climate change studies) despite its disavowals, is of a depoliticized life structured around the specialized knowledge of a select few, ones whose identities are superfluous insofar as they espouse the same things - the ultimate reduction of social and political life to "scientific" study. I haven't read enough about this to take this critique further but I don't think I'm opposed to science per se. I just fear the ramifications of ideology posturing as post-ideological behind the sleek impermeability of modern science.