Flammie A Pirinen on github pages
As I often tell, I do not participate in politics and such much. As such, this is just a short note on things I need to argue about on Twitter and social media every now and then. Number one topic within academic twitter is travelling and conferences, I can say for myself that there are a lot of times when meeting personally leads to better results and is necessary, I am happy if someone can effectively do things on zoop / skyme / gathertown, I personally am much less efficient with it than being able to work in the same room and tell people what to do and vice versa. Also, I live in a place that has no rail road and is inaccessible by any other means than aeroplane, you can keep suggesting me better options when you come with a travel plan and funding (patreon accepted).
First and foremost I oppose flight shaming and other forms of shaming, when it comes to researchers and scientists, or just other lower and middle class academic immigrants earning peanuts trying to visit their family, this is one end of the argument that I need to have an opinion of. We have had a multi-year pandemic now, we know that behaviour of poor people who travel once or twice a year is not the key to fix things, we all gave up air travel for two years+ and it didn’t magically fix everything. Even more disturbingly, the airlines flew thousands of empty planes around and around to fulfill rules they invented themselves. It is clear to me that the solution here must be from the companies and not single people’s giving up visiting their families and meeting colleagues. It’s all fair and well to strongly prefer travelling on land where it is practical and affordable (even if you are spending someone else’s money as in work trips, it’s still someone who has to stress with the budget, if you are on academic career, your future is to become the one who gets stressed about the budgets). Not only flying empty planes, but also absurdly pricing longer and more complicated flights cheaper is solely a problem with the airlines, not something consumer can effect on. For most of these points, extinction rebellion has pointed out in their agenda that it will not attack single consumers but the companies and structures, how well it generally happens changes from protest to protest, but since XR doesn’t take monthly donations, it is quite reasonable to donate the protests that are on point.