Do you think that Western science is inherently oppressive?

While I don't like freedom being infringed, I suppose that drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes having an age restriction makes sense. Unlike "moral" mental panics like videogame violence, anime affection, and so on, booze and cigs have straight up physical effects that can be quantified.

I have been hanging around a pair of human smokestacks for extra money, and very much appreciate how nasty the ciggies are: At least one of the geezers have lacerated lungs, and both of the fellows go through a fair number of the death sticks. Sometimes a literal pack within an eight-hour span. That is pretty expensive, health effects and stench aside.

I won't stop anybody from engaging in that stuff, but...well, I really don't want to partake. That is why I wear a balaclava around smokers, and very much prefer public institutions not permitting smoking on the premises.

Uh. No. But I probably don't understand the question at all.
Or its terms. ("Western science" = scientific knowledge? scientific institutions? scientism? "western" technology?...)

There's (op)pressions within science, technology can be oppressive, scientism or bad science can fuel oppressive philosophical systems, real knowledge isn't very democratic (there's a reality, reachable or not, beyond the societies' or the individual's choices of beliefs), science often contradicts our notions of freedoms and of constraints, science denial has complicated pros and cons, and it takes a lot to overturn a faulty scientific model that had been satisfactory up to a point. I don't think any of that makes "western science inherently oppressive" unless you have one very specific aspect in vety specific circumstances in mind.

OK, let's say scientific methodology as articulated by Aristotle, since modern science is to a considerable degree corrupt, given that it serves the interests of those who fund it.

It's very clear to me that social justice philosophy is completely at odds with traditional Western thinking, hence the efforts to mandate enforced diversity, equality, and now, equity. But something else is also very clear: there is no mention of the globalist financial order that controls most of the wealth in this world.

Most people don't think too deeply about these things, for obvious reasons, but if you do you see very quickly that the only possible outcome is what I'll call an equality of poverty. So I ask you, do you really think that is something worth fighting for?

Uh, nope. Science and philosophy have evolved and progressed a lot since Aristotle. And nope, science doesn't simply serve the interests of those who fund it (depends on which one, where, when). Your views are way too superficial, reductive, and ignorant of modern philosophy and of the history and sociology of science.

And there is no "traditional western thinking" (which one !?), and there is no odds between some western thinking as a whole and the respect of diversity (some ambiguities with several contradictory aspects of enlightenment, but which ones would be "tradition" ?), and it is distinct from political theories of equality and equity (themselves stemming from conflictual western "traditions"), and I'm not sure "where" in particular there is no mention of "what" globalist "order" (the only "globalist financial order" that I know is just a spontaneous common trend amongst wealthy elites to push for global laws and ideologies that benefit them, but western history is made of tensions between such local or global trends and attempts at regulating or curbing them), and I don't know of "what", here, the "only possible outcome" would be global poverty (of ? western science ?). And this is all a mess, and I wonder if there is any point to it apart from "wargh sjw sjw my games", or what it's doing here at all.

So, yeah, I'd love to see the whiteboard with all the arrows. :-/

Ah, well please tell me who it is that is funding science with no expectations pertaining to findings, so that I can be better informed. And while you're at it, tell me why it is that you think the "sociology" of science is grounded in scientific methodology, and is therefore a valid perspective.

Oh really? Well how about the Western thinking that preceded what has taken it's place, back when replacement populations weren't in vogue, and people weren't considered Nazis for the terrible crime of wanting to preserve their cultural heritage?

"Spontaneous common trend", as opposed to conspiracy, because conspiracies are something that can only be attributed to groups that are officially designated as enemies of the state, like Islamic evil-doers -- depending on time, place, and expedience?

And I'm the one whose views are "way too superficial, reductive, and ignorant..."? ;p

Fighting for an equality of poverty? That's not a very catchy slogan. ;)

[1] Aristotle was intelligent. Many others have contributed, a non-exhaustive list of (natural) scientists (in no particular order) would include Leonardo, Euler, Descartes, Darwin, the Bacons (Francis and — no relation — Roger, though no one knew what he wrote to the Pope for half a millennium and by then Francis had pretty much re-discovered it), but also consider the important contributions of the decidedly non-scientific, like Shakespeare's improvements to Modern English.

Then of course more recently the rent-seeking naked fraud of junk science has polluted the scientific method. And politics. (Think arch-villain Lysenko.)

Human haecceity is based on symbolic cognition, which is based on a not-gate logic (the "self" is "not-other").

The worst politics gives people a reason to hate "the other", whoever they deem it to be. Jewish scapegoating is a species of this, but so is a mahram: the Saudi gender Apartheid that infantilizes women by insisting they have a male guardian at all times. An exploitable underclass is an effective way to provide a better life for the others.

It was the French Revolution where this category became a (socioeconomic) group (all aristocrats are scum), but not until Lenin (a twentieth century Trump with simplistic answers to complex and intractable human dilemmata) built a totalitarian system based on "fairness", coöpted by Stalin, who fomented antipathy to enormous conclusion of extermination (individualists / whomever-I-don't-like-today are the enemy of the people; kill all enemies).

As the Soviet system demonstrated, if money is no longer the means to differentiate people in society, then power and its hierarchy is the inevitable consequence. Trotsky thought communism would only work if the entire world was yoked under the one system. Until that Marxist utopia, where everyone is equal, the system instead creates a stratified society of power emminating from the Politburo outwards and downwards.

It's easy to whip up class envy and avarice; much harder to construct useful policy; difficult to sell slow, plodding progress to the young and impatient who want results now.

Obviously equality of outcome is ludicrous (as Pol Pot demonstrated with Kampuchea) but equality of opportunity might be obtainable.

Capitalism (you keep what you make) and Socialism (to each what they need) are poles on the modern economic axis.
Historically, socialists have been slowly undermining the liberal democratic structure with sophism. In 1962, a group meeting in Britain decided that the definition of poverty was wrong (statistics clearly showed that more people owned washing machines and televisions, and outside lavatories were disappearing fast), and so decided to redefine poverty as a percentage of the community (those earning less than 60% of median wages). Poverty, which had been decreasing steadily since the end of WW2 was recreated as an eternal and relative part of society. The OECD, and others, swallowed the new definition. (James Bartholomew, who coined the phrase "virtue signalling", writing in The Weekend Australian, 8 Dec., 2018, p.21.)

Currently, socialists target the very rich, mesmerized by big numbers. The Economist, just last week, noted that, over the last 40 years "… In [the United States of] America the average income of the top 1% has risen 242%, about six times the rise for middle earners. …", but then also noting: [Millennial socialists chip away at the virtues of liberalism, published in The Weekend Australian, 16 Feb., 2019, pp.17&24.]

The ethical question is: as offensive to everyone else as it may be that some people have more money than they can ever spend, is this an acceptable price for lifting EVERYONE out of poverty? Socialism always undervalues risk-taking. What is the incentive to risk hard currency, if not to make more? Why should anyone expend discretionary effort, especially when everyone can be given what they need? (Even those "unwilling to work", as Ocasio-Cortez's suddenly-removed New Green Deal manifesto wished.)

Another statistic (from a television interview I saw a few weeks ago) confirmed the socioeconomic mobility of the Australian liberal democracy, where 93% of the poorest 50% earn more than their parents.**

Capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than any other system. Socialists always fixate on big numbers.
Ocasio-Cortez has posited a 70% tax on the wealthiest in order to fund her massive centrally-planned public spending Green New Deal. Unfortunately, even if people didn't actively minimize tax* this probably would result in about $12bn, or less than ½% increased revenue for the fed.
As the article concludes: The late Dr Karl Popper, who said about social engineering: "The piecemeal engineer will, accordingly, adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good." (Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1971)

[2] Popper explained why socialism is doomed: "It is the difference between a reasonable method of improving the lot of man, and a method which, if really tried, may easily lead to an intolerable increase in human suffering. It is the difference between a method which can be applied at any moment, and a method whose advocacy may easily become a means of continually postponing action until a later date, when conditions are more favorable. And it is also the difference between the only method of improving matters which has so far been really successful, at any time, and in any place, and a method which, wherever it has been tried, has led only to the use of violence in place of reason, and if not to its own abandonment, at any rate to that of its original blueprint." (loc.cit.)

Pretty much the only consistent attribute of people taken as a whole is the desire to NOT do what they are told. (Wachowski red-pill truculence :)

So the more an oligopoly tries to control everyone else, the more difficult it becomes. (The tighter you grip, the more who slip through your fingers, to paraphrase George Lucas spouting philosophy through Princess Leia.)

=
* Strategies might include substituting company benefits instead of wages, or even flight from high-taxing jurisdictions, like the tax exile Rolling Stones before 1979, when Thatcher reduced the top tier of taxation from 83% to 60%, whilst increasing consumption tax to 15%.
** "Not only is income inequality not rising, our best guess is that it is actually falling," economist Roger Wilkins (University of Melbourne) Australian Social & Economic Outlook Conference, 12 Oct., 2018.

References
The concept of not-other as self discussed discursively in Dr Terrence Deacon, Symbolic Species (1997).
Douglas Hofstadter wrote some mind-bending stuff on genetics and not-not logic (protein production increased by not-stopping it, or rather reduction by RNA coded not-stopping the not-stopping of it) in Goedel, Escher, Bach (1979).

Edit: hypertext links and extended characters don't mix. :|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bacon
Popper quote from wiki:
en.wikipedia . org/wiki/Social_engineering_(political_science)

Yeah, but the truthiness! lol

I see people like Soros and the Rothschilds as criminals because of their behavior, not because of their ethnicity. There was a time -- not so long ago -- when usury and the extraction of land rent were not considered honest and productive work, and rightly so. To refer to such practices as "capitalism" is to degrade economics to it's standing prior to the publishing of Adam Smith's The Wealth Of Nations.

Extreme economic disparity is very detrimental to human society, and *should* be corrected, but the way to do it is to attack the corruption that has made it possible and allows it to worsen. Socialism makes no mention of corruption, and is in fact funded by those who leverage it for their personal gain.

Thank you for your insightful contribution!


Oh yeah, forgot to mention, the sexualization of children is definitely not a good thing, but I don't think the behavior referenced by the OP is going to help. So STOP IT!

:)
You are forgetting Bezos, probably the biggest villain of the age. Not only has accumulated an offensive amount of money, he's also contributed much to disruptors like Uber and AirBnB, which have seriously impoverished thousands (millions?) of working class taxi-drivers and hoteliers, to name two. And his investment in Amazon is slowly suffocating the retail sector of most countries. Much like Rockerfeller's Standard Oil, this should be broken up in some meaningful way (I'll elide that … someone else can crack that nut) to create more competition, the antidote to oligopolies.
/land of lollipops.

Following up on your reference to "junk science": like everything else in this world, science is thoroughly corrupt and in the process of breaking down. Reproducibility of results is well under 50%, and publication in prestigious journals is no guarantee of scientific rigor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfHEuWaPh9Q

So yes, vaccine "science" is junk science, and this calls into question *everything* that is presented as unquestionable truth by governments and corporations.

Antitrust legislation is fool's gold, because corruption is no less prevalent in government than it is in business and industry. Public relations at it's "best". : (

Truth be told, there is no ideological or political solution. The only thing that can fix the mess we have gotten ourselves into is ethics, and it starts with the individual -- you and me.