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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15615 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Fascinating article on the apparent controversy of naming a telescope after James Webb, former head of NASA throughout the 60s (content warning: NYT).

Broadly speaking, Webb is accused of anti-gay bigotry. There does not appear to be any dispute that the US government, as part of investigating federal employees who were suspected of being Communists during the red scare, also fired employees accused of being gay (estimated to be around 5k-10k total over 20 years). The origin of tying the accusation directly to Webb appears to have been borne out of a misreading:

But as the telescope neared completion, criticism flared. In 2015, Matthew Francis, a science journalist, wrote an article for Forbes titled “The Problem With Naming Observatories for Bigots.” He wrote that Mr. Webb led the anti-gay purge at the State Department and that he had testified of his contempt for gay people. He credited Dr. Prescod-Weinstein with tipping him off, and she in turn tweeted his article and attacked Mr. Webb as a “homophobe.” Those claims rested on misidentification and that portion of Mr. Francis’ article has been deleted without notice to the reader. Mr. Francis declined an interview. As Dr. Oluseyi discovered and NASA’s report confirmed, it was not Mr. Webb but a different State Department official who oversaw the purge and spoke disparagingly of gay Americans.

So someone made a claim and someone else looked into that claim and conclusively found the evidence lacking. Research isn't easy and it's reasonable to expect some mistakes, and I find nothing embarrassing or humiliating about just admitting error. But instead of just conceding their belief rested on a faulty premise, the Webb-is-a-bigot crew refused to let go of their favored conclusion and went searching for other reasons why they were right all along.

In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order that essentially barred gay Americans from federal employment. It applied to all federal agencies and remained in effect throughout the 1960s, when Mr. Webb led NASA. In 1963, police arrested a NASA budget analyst, Clifford Norton, in an anti-gay sting in Washington. He was forced out of his job. Critics say Mr. Webb stood silent. Mr. Odom’s report for NASA, however, found no evidence Mr. Webb knew of this case in an agency of many thousands. In any event, he would have had no good option, said James Kirchick, author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. “It is unimaginable that a high-level functionary would have stepped in and blocked a broad federal law that applied to every agency,” he said.

And of course, people tried to come up with other reasons why a telescope should not be named after Webb:

Sarah Tuttle, an astrophysicist at the University of Washington, characterizes the question of whether Mr. Webb was a homophobe as unanswerable and a distraction. The point, she said, is that the bar should be set higher. Previous telescopes were named after physicists and astronomers — Edwin Hubble and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Why not name in that tradition? “This controversy should restart the discussion about why on earth this telescope is named after him,” said Jason Wright, a Penn State astrophysicist who signed the critics’ petition.

Things got especially dark for Oluseyi, the guy who fact-checked the original claim. First they claimed his fact-check was an ill-disguised attempt to justify historical homophobia, then rumors spread around academia of some sexual harassment and mishandling federal funds. And so on.

So that story is entertaining on its own right, but it's also an interesting examination of the best ways to respond when someone points out an error of yours. Speaking for myself as someone who jumps at the opportunity to self-label as an egotistical narcissist, it seems like adopting a regular habit of admitting mistakes is plainly self-serving. It's almost a cheat code for how well it can bolster one's credibility, and I don't understand why it's not more common.

The basic contours of being motivated to save face are obvious enough, sure, but the part that continues to be absolutely bewildering to me is that dogged stubbornness only makes you look worse! I'm guessing there must be some other benefit here (assuming, of course, people who refuse to admit error are behaving remotely rationally) but I can't understand it.

Sean Carroll addressed this controversy on his podcast and I think that the best argument was that Webb name should never have been the proposed one. James Webb was just a bureaucrat, a pencil pusher leading NASA. He did not have any significant discoveries or scientific work under his belt. He was just a politician - an important one, but pencil pusher nevertheless. I think that having scientific projects named after political appointees is much more damning, it shows some level of hubris and quite frankly only shows how out of touch these people are. So yeah, fuck Webb - this controversy is well deserved even if for bad reasons.

I thought Sean Carrol was fully infested with the woke mindworms, and being a very smart man would be fully able to use a plausible justification like you describe to achieve the woke desired outcome?

That is a valid question and of course the answer is "yes", but that doesn't mean that that is necessarily what is actually going on in this case, or that the "plausible justification" isn't a good enough argument to deserve to win on its own merits.

I was dimly aware that there was controversy about the naming, but everything I'd heard was about the ignominy of naming the telescope after a mere bureaucrat instead of an actual astronomer; this is actually the first time I've heard a "woke" objection to Webb, and so from my perspective it looks like the astronomers realised that they weren't going to win the day arguing tradition and merit and decided to try using progressive politics instead.

Given the current climate I'd have expected that approach to be much more successful (regardless of whether truth was on their side or not); alas it seems not.

Perhaps that's unsurprising: changing the nameplate on a spacecraft at L2 is not currently within NASA's capability...

Yeah, he is very woke but I find him one of the sources that I like listening to, if for nothing else then for more "diverse" information diet. He does have some good takes even on woke topics.

A diverse information diet might be a good thing.

I’m not sure it’s more complicated than all-too-human pride, combined with a dollop of anti-white male sentiment.

deleted

Astrophysics bah humbug.

Truth only matters for the use of hard power against external enemies. Everything else is politics.

This seems to me more a case in which a verdict (of sorts) was reached prematurely, and the very human partisan bias to hold on to opinions despite contrary evidence has taken hold: these folks have already decided that James Webb was "problematic", and if not in this particular way, then surely some other mortal sin exists. I don't at all agree with their mindset, but I don't think it's clear that they set out with the goal of making the rest of us believe a falsehood.

What I mean is that there is almost no way for the renaming of a telescope based on bigotry or not to ever come back and bite due to it introducing a physical and real error or weakness for an enemy to exploit on the battlefield, or to leverage in trade/economic actions. Webb is dead, etc.

The only plausible way is that someone argues agianst it and gets cancleled.or their carwer hindered by oplosing the dominant culture, and in the counterfactual world their contribution would have menaingfully shifted the margin such that a war, battle, company contest for non trivial market share, etc is changed.

it seem very much like an internal zero sum status game where one side is already dead, and announcing loyalties for that side, even if the face value arguemnts used are true and logically beat the other side, is a losing move. There is no House of Webb, no dynasty, no long term faction that coalesces around the name, just using arguments to seek the truth fighting agianst those using them as soldiers fighting for status in an arena where truth has no power over status.

So that story is entertaining on its own right, but it's also an interesting examination of the best ways to respond when someone points out an error of yours. Speaking for myself as someone who jumps at the opportunity to self-label as an egotistical narcissist, it seems like adopting a regular habit of admitting mistakes is plainly self-serving. It's almost a cheat code for how well it can bolster one's credibility, and I don't understand why it's not more common.

The basic contours of being motivated to save face are obvious enough, sure, but the part that continues to be absolutely bewildering to me is that dogged stubbornness only makes you look worse! I'm guessing there must be some other benefit here (assuming, of course, people who refuse to admit error are behaving remotely rationally) but I can't understand it.

I'm reminded of a quotation by Elena Gorokhova in her memoir about living in the Soviet Union, A Mountain of Crumbs, a version of which is commonly (mis-?)attributed to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.

The idea seems to be that, if you have absolute power over your audience, then you don't need to bother with all that "credibility" nonsense. You just tell them whatever you want to tell them, and you don't particularly care if they believe you or not, because they have to pretend to believe you, lest they face the consequences.

The "Webb is a bigot" people don't care about anything except having all PR everywhere pay tribute to their gods.

This may very well be true, but if you're going to say it, you need to buttress it with some evidence or argumentation. Remember that this is the thread for discussing the culture wars, not waging them. That doesn't mean you can't criticize your outgroup, but if you do criticize your outgroup, you're going to have to do it with more effort than this.

And I'd normally leave it at that, but you've accrued a lot of warnings in the last two months. So I'm going to ban you for a week and see whether maybe that makes something stick.

The basic contours of being motivated to save face are obvious enough, sure, but the part that continues to be absolutely bewildering to me is that dogged stubbornness only makes you look worse! I'm guessing there must be some other benefit here (assuming, of course, people who refuse to admit error are behaving remotely rationally) but I can't understand it.

I don't understand how you can claim to understand "the basic contours of being motivated to save face" but then claim to not understand why someone would do it twice, three times, four times, and infinitum?

Admitting you were wrong (either in a Maoist self-criticism context or in a sagely academia context) is rarely a winning move, because it doesn't bolster your credibility, it destroys it. Being known as "The guy who insists he's right when others say he isn't" is a hell of a lot more credible to the median observer than is being known as "The guy who was unequivocally wrong even by his own admission". The first one has only a P=0.5 probability that you spout garbage, the second has a P=1.0 probability that you spout garbage. Who'd rely on the P=1.0 guy? No-one!

I guess a dogged refusal to admit error could make you less credible to people who absolutely certainly KNOW that you REALLY WERE wrong, but very few people (even in academia) have the time or inclination to actually check these things, so while it might make you look worse to a small handful of very motivated people... that's only a small handful of very motivated people.

That's not really a realistic representation of the results of saying you were wrong.

Xi's family was hounded during the Revolution for various errors, and his father "admitted" them; that allowed his family to live to fight another day and eventually dominate the country.

Even in the more forgiving context of US politics, people love a good conversion story. It's everywhere: David Horowitz on the right, David Brock on the left. The best revival tent evangelical stories are always about a wayward sinner who finds God and admits his sins. It allows the person to embody the argument, which is far more compelling than mere logic.

The first one has only a P=0.5 probability that you spout garbage, the second has a P=1.0 probability that you spout garbage. Who'd rely on the P=1.0 guy? No-one!

This model only makes sense if every participant only makes exactly one claim, which has a binary truth value, ever. The public discourse, in which people's reputation matters, is nothing like that, instead being an iterated game in which moreover participants model each other as having to arrived at their claims as the result of some internal process, which public communication such as admitting fault or not also grants insight into.

Of course, the culture war affect-loading game comes with a tendency of actually reducing everyone's participation to a single claim ("Tribe A is right about everything"), in which case the model may apply, but that particular game is one that you should just not participate in (and certainly not update on the "plays" of the participants in).

This model only makes sense if every participant only makes exactly one claim, which has a binary truth value, ever.

Even then, in the general case there's no reason to assume the probability it's right is exactly 50% if not known definitively. That's at best a default position for cases where you have literally no background knowledge, but that's almost never the case.

I think Weinstein put it best. “We can’t just exonerate a dead white guy who […]”. But it doesn’t matter what he did. These people hate straight white men, especially any from the past. They wouldn’t mind naming it after the Hidden Figures black women, despite their probability of being as or more homophobic (the majority back then, especially in the black community). And it wouldn’t matter to them that the Hidden Figures women were lower level employees doing college-level math to double check the actual mathematicians. They would be totally fine with it, Chandra-Weinstein would love it, because it means someone from their tribe is named. I don’t think there’s any reason to elaborate motives

From a 2014 article

On June 25th, Prescod-Weinstein tweeted that she wants “to burn the tent of whiteness down.”

A few days later, Prescod-Weinstein sent out a tweet declaring that all America has ever stood for is white power.

In a July 6th tweet, Prescod-Weinstein denounced Thomas Jefferson as a “ rapist.”

“To address white power,” Prescod-Weinstein said, “is to look evil in the eye and to challenge everything this country has stood for in the last 250 years.”

(I vaguely recall going through her ancestry and finding, like, three generations of Marxists on her father’s side. It’s like a family business. Wasn’t there also controversy over her wife not being real or something?)

https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=6681

Everything cited here. Additionally:

Many white people, according to Prescod-Weinstein, celebrated the gay marriage decision more enthusiastically than they should have, something she chalks up to “white tears.”

It’s especially funny that a black woman is lecturing white people on homosexuality. The acceptance of homosexuality is a purely “white people countries” phenomenon, at less comparing major powers. Without white people, it’s unlikely any black nation would have gained tolerance of homosexuality. Without non-Jewish white people it’s also unlikely, because the secularization of Jews required the effects of the renaissance and an accepting European host to protect them from being slain by their rabbinical leader.

For what it's worth, many cultures more or less accepted homosexuality within the appropriate context (European example: the Greeks). European imperialism extended a broad disapproval of it to the extent state policing of same sex sex was considered right.

A man who was known to fuck other men would do better in a hunter gatherer culture (so long as he hunted productively, produced heirs, and fought in wars) than he would in a colonial society.

What?

Yeah, it took achieving superpower status to bother extending charity to homosexuals. That’s the story of liberalism: you’ve got to be secure before people are willing to give everyone the same rights.

Coincidentally, all those major powers involved a lot of white people. I don’t see any reason black people wouldn’t have done the same conditional on having gotten that far.

I have no idea what you mean by getting slain by the rabbi.

superpower status

If Netherlands was ever a superpower, it wasn't in 2001 when it made marriage sex-agnostic. In fact presently no European country can claim to be a superpower, but many followed in the clog shapped footsteps.

An improved argument would be taking instead the prosperity of the countries people, and not the influence it wield on the international stage. Here you would have a better case: countries that say a man can marry a man are more similair in their GDP per capita, than in the number of aircraft carriers with nuclear bombers their navy posses.

But on the other hand, this logical implication of rich countries recognizing such unions and poor countries refusing, only applies if the rich countries are restricted to European states. Qatar and Singapore have higher GDP/capita than the US, but their stance on this issue is contrary to Obergefell. The latter is shared with Israel, Japan, and South Korea.

I don’t see any reason black people wouldn’t have done the same

If one believes in Whig history and interprets the past as inevitably marching towards the present, yes. But one equally well say that the ultimate and universal moral framework hasn't yet been discovered, and that groups today considered fully human, whose proclivities are to be enabled by society acting directly, or through the state, are historically contigent.

Consent framework once championed by LGBTQI+ activists as providing a justifiction for their goals, had epicycles added upon it to stigmatize may-december romances between, what is considered by law, to be two adults. Or the "power imbalance" cudgel, deployed to attack workplace amorous activity, claiming "Not trully consensual.".

Probably because it is back in the news now that we are getting results from it that are likely to push forward our understanding of cosmology.

The basic contours of being motivated to save face are obvious enough, sure, but the part that continues to be absolutely bewildering to me is that dogged stubbornness only makes you look worse!

To people who care about the truth, maybe. But surely you've also heard the advice, sometimes given to celebrities caught up in PR nightmares, to "never apologize?" Sure, if you discover your own mistake or your own agenda requires that you change course, "I was wrong" looks like a cheat code for credibility. But if someone demands an apology, or catches your mistake, owning up looks like an act of submission rather than contrition.

These people are, in other words, treating arguments as soldiers. They're waging a culture war. The original goal of the bad research was never truth to begin with; definitively establishing the falsehood of the initial claim has no bearing whatsoever on the project.

In short: there will be no apology because no one is sorry--or so it seems to me!

Never apologize works well when the issue is one of morality (eg you said x which is y). I don’t think it applies to facts.

Never apologize works well when the issue is one of morality (eg you said x which is y). I don’t think it applies to facts.

Setting aside the complicated fact that I do think there are moral facts, I mean... Jussie Smollett? Or on a weirder scale, there is Rebecca Jones, Forbes Technology Awards 2020 Person of the Year for generating what Ron DeSantis (as far as I can determine, accurately) called "defamatory conspiracy theories." She went on to run for Congress and... well, long story short, this is a woman who definitely never apologizes for the many, many factual distortions for which she is clearly responsible. Or on a smaller scale, but recently in professional philosophy, Carol Hay lied about a presentation she was attending and has steadfastly declined to recant despite attempts by Brian Leiter to shame her into it.

Even setting aside peculiar cases like Shaun King (who appears, to the best of my understanding, to factually just be a white man pretending to be black), there are loads of people who steadfastly maintain expressions of belief in total contravention of obvious facts. And yes, some people do call them out on it, but eventually the people calling for apologies have to move on with their lives.

But has it worked for people like Rebecca Jones? She lost her congressional

Bid, has faced criminal issues, and just generally appears unhinged.

I also get the impression that most people find Shaun King gauche. He had cachet at one time. But now seems like a fake.

Also what makes Jussie S situation a moral fact? The facts are the incident never happened and it was a set up to try to prop up Jussie’s career. The moral implication is that Jussie should be in jail for a very long time (mores the pity that he won’t be).

But has it worked for people like Rebecca Jones? She lost her congressional [b]id, has faced criminal issues, and just generally appears unhinged.

I guess that depends on what you mean by "worked." She lost her bid, but she still got the Democrat nod well after her dismal character was widely and publicly grasped. She successfully raised money for that bid. She's not in jail, somehow.

I also get the impression that most people find Shaun King gauche. He had cachet at one time. But now seems like a fake.

Having a net worth of probably a couple million dollars seems like a decent definition of "worked" to me. YMMV! Besides, it doesn't matter what "most" people think, as long as a couple tens of thousands of them are still buying your books, subscribing to your newsletter, paying you to give speeches, etc.

I take it from the absence of objection that you also admit that the Smollett and Hay cases are also obviously examples of refusing to apologize on factual errors leading to "success," so I regard this point as made.

Regarding moral facts: all I meant there is that you separated "issues of morality" from "facts" in a way that I don't buy. For example, I regard it as a fact that Jussie Smollett's perfidy is a moral failing--he is a blameworthy person, and "the sky is blue" and "Jussie Smollett is blameworthy" are both statements with truth values of "true." This is a meta-ethical position, and not a simple one, so I won't develop it further here, but I did just want to note that you were drawing a distinction that I don't regard as sensible.

Hasn’t it backfired for Smollet? Haven’t followed him closely but I thought he was done as an actor?

Hasn’t it backfired for Smollet? Haven’t followed him closely but I thought he was done as an actor?

Last I heard, he was out on bail while appealing a jail sentence of 150 days. Pretty tough to sign on to film deals with that hanging over your head. He may or may not be "done as an actor" in the long term, but if he is, it's not because he failed to apologize--it's because he perpetrated a criminal hoax. His failure to apologize may well be a part of his appeal strategy. Actually, the extent to which he has demanded, and continues to demand, his day in court seems almost as unhinged as the hoax itself, but I'm not a criminal defense lawyer so maybe there's something I'm missing.

Might the prosecution have gone easier on him if he'd owned up in the first place? Sure, I agree that it's possible. Prosecutors have been known to show their appreciation for honesty (and simplicity) by making sweetheart plea deals. But my limited experience with prosecutors suggests to me that you would not want to bet any large sums of money on such inclinations.

To be fair to Jones, her charges under Florida code 815.06 would probably fall under Florida's 775.082(10):

If a defendant is sentenced for an offense committed on or after July 1, 2009, which is a third degree felony but not a forcible felony as defined in s. 776.08, and excluding any third degree felony violation under chapter 810, and if the total sentence points pursuant to s. 921.0024 are 22 points or fewer, the court must sentence the offender to a nonstate prison sanction.

While it's not impossible to argue her actions exceeded that scope (eg the mass-texting considered part of an attempt at fraud), it's possible even had she gone to trial that a prison sentence would have been prohibited, and likely that it would have been disfavoured.

There's an argument for her fundraising since being fraudulent, but given the broader class of internet grifters...

In October (2022!), the Royal Astronomical Society in Britain waded in, declaring that Mr. Webb engaged in “entirely unacceptable” behavior. The society instructed that no astronomer who submits a paper to its journals should type the words “James Webb.” They must use the abbreviation JWST.

Why ever tell the truth when you can just keep lying and punish anyone who calls out the lie? The dogged stubbornness in imposing lies doesn't make them look worse, it makes them look powerful. It's just:

A black woman invented the telescope. You might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over?

A black woman invented the telescope.

They are already counter-attacking and gloating that dissenters will be punished, along with threats against anyone who might be thinking of speaking up:

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: We are potentially going to be seeing a lot of things like this today, so let’s talk about this (reported) op-ed by Michael Powell, which is masquerading as an article. The claim that my tweets are about someone who has not been named in them without evidence? That’s literally conjecture being reported as fact. Opinion. The bad news: multiple scientists who have appeared in the press have Title IX stories following them around

There was no reason to involve Peter except to try and make me look bad. I don’t. I look principled, tenacious, and focused on upholding values that are important.

Couldn’t find a woman to agree with you, eh, Michael? That’s interesting.

It was anonymously pointed out to me that Powell has a history of writing articles that are transphobic and this piece should be seen in context of those prior pieces.

She's started calling Jim Gates a race traitor for "helping a white man attack my integrity"

She is being boosted in this by a who's who list of powerful science bureaucrats, like the UC system astronomy chief and a Science magazine editor, the chief editor, and the chief editor of Scientific American. Plus a horde of ass-licking sycophants with pronouns and shibboleths in their bios. "Thinly veiled anti-communist misogynoir by the New York Times" is a new one, I have to say. The American Astronomical Society is also tripling-down in response.

What chance does the truth have against that?

I looked at the twitter account for Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, and…wow. That woman is so unhinged. I have never been more happy I chose not to go further into academia, it has completely turned into a mad house.

The JWST naming discussion serves to highlight how much more work is needed, and we are striving to make progress. In 2022, the AAS hired the first AAS DEI Committee Support Specialist to help support this work, and we are planning a DEI summit in 2023. We are implementing pronouns as part of the AAS membership and meeting registration processes. We will continue to advocate and urge NASA to create a transparent and community-based process for naming missions and buildings.

The sheer number of woke rhetorical cliches here…it’s almost artistic. Reminds me of the furor in Canada when they “found” all those dead children from residential schools, all the while not admitting not a single corpse had ever been exhumed and nothing new was actually being uncovered, but a mass hysterical performance of grievance was called for regardless.

"Thinly veiled anti-communist misogynoir by the New York Times" is a new one, I have to say.

The part that's absolutely wild to me is that there would be any reason to veil anti-communist sentiments in the first place, or that someone would think calling someone an "anti-communist" is a good attack avenue. Being anti-communist should carry a strongly positive valence, only slightly brought down by the worst excesses of McCarthyism. Were I standing accused of being an anti-communist, I could think of no situation where the Yes Chad meme is more applicable.

It seems like there’s been a push on the left recently to define anti-communism as an ideology of its own which is viewed as a flavor of white supremacist authoritarianism or whatever.

The article he's criticizing has nothing to do with communism. But the guy's a dyed-in-the-wool communist who thinks that everything he disagrees with is inherently anti-communist, and that that's a bad thing. Since it would be bizarre for the NYT to publish an article about naming a telescope that devolves into questioning the labor theory of value, there's nothing obviously anti-communist about it. So it's veiled anti-communism. But only thinly-veiled; the rhetorical device here is to flatter the audience by pointing out something hidden but making it seem like it's not hidden very well so the audience doesn't feel stupid about it. Plus saying that something is heavily veiled implies that you need some special knowledge or ability to decipher the hidden clues and you can come off as a schizophrenic or a conspiracy theorist.

“I am sorry for Hakeem,” Dr. Rassoul said. “These rumors never die out, and they damage his reputation. These accusations were shamefully promoted.”

quite relevant quote from the article

It was anonymously pointed out to me that Powell has a history of writing articles that are transphobic and this piece should be seen in context of those prior pieces.

curious tweet considering nothing in this debacle involves trans people

nothing in this debacle involves trans people

The exclusion of trans identities from this debacle is transphobic. There should be an assortment doing youth outreach.

I read these sorts of complaints as tribal signaling. It usually improves my opinion of the accused.

There was some contemporaneous discussion in the old BLR here. Good to see the denouement, to what extent anything like this ever ends.

In 2015, Matthew Francis, a science journalist, wrote an article for Forbes titled “The Problem With Naming Observatories for Bigots.” He wrote that Mr. Webb led the anti-gay purge at the State Department and that he had testified of his contempt for gay people. He credited Dr. Prescod-Weinstein with tipping him off, and she in turn tweeted his article and attacked Mr. Webb as a “homophobe.” Those claims rested on misidentification and that portion of Mr. Francis’ article has been deleted without notice to the reader.

This part's pretty funny: the current page for that article gives a blank editor's note, but comparing the original 2015 version to the one from from 2016: removing the troublesome paragraph leaves the story referencing "the party line" it doesn't actually establish or define.

("misidentification" is a bit euphemistic: the original allegations depend on a mess of wikipedia citogenesis.)

The basic contours of being motivated to save face are obvious enough, sure, but the part that continues to be absolutely bewildering to me is that dogged stubbornness only makes you look worse! I'm guessing there must be some other benefit here (assuming, of course, people who refuse to admit error are behaving remotely rationally) but I can't understand it.

The steelman is that a lot of the anti-Webb position never cared specifically on the alleged memo Senate testimony. And that seems pretty well backed up by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, one of the people Francis was using as a source and who later joined the campaign at length on twitter, on her substack, which doesn't seem to even be trying to argue the facts on the ground for the specific acts there. The point is the system, and it's hard to pretend Webb bucked the trends; even where he took the moral route, it's no coincidence it happened to overlap with LBJ's political goals.

The... less overtly charitable analysis's that many of these people get the same or better career boost from papers like this mess) than from her 'classical' work (which, tbf, she does do!); there's a reason they've gotten lots of coverage in the culture war threads, whether for those papers or for the EO Wilson kerfluffle. So I'm not sure that her framework for 'face' is the same as yours or mine.

At a deeper level, from seeing lesser versions of this sort of drama in other environments, my impression's that it's a social thing, somewhat related to how social animals evaluate trust. The point of someone taking this role isn't to evaluate any specific claim's accuracy, or even whether a person's act was right or wrong, but to evaluate whether the person is Good or Bad. Retreating from claims about memos or congressional testimony aren't retreating from central claims, it's just different evidence for the actual matter on trial, that Webb Shouldn't Be Celebrated. That's not specific to 'woke' witch-hunts (or to, for another 'easy' Blue Tribe parallel, harassment allegations that start at rape and reduce down to someone 'being sketchy' before they get booted); I'm sure you've seen it from prosecutors that want to push the horns-and-halos effect as far as a judge will let them go before excluding testimony as 'character', and the Red Tribe equivalents in religion or sexual misbehavior are not exactly far off.

but the part that continues to be absolutely bewildering to me is that dogged stubbornness only makes you look worse

Genuine question because of the paywall: are the people dishonestly pushing the debunked homophobia claim suffering any sort of consequences?

Absolutely none. Here's an archive link to the article. https://archive.vn/RpOby

Yea, reading this ymeskhout’s reaction seems bizarre. Like he is coming from some alternate universe where baseless woke smear campaigns are actually punished as opposed to rewarded. Like, what does he imagine the consequences will be? Does he foresee Chanda Prescod-Weinstein being fired? Does he think her next campaign will just be roundly ignored and dismissed with derision?

My apologies, I did not articulate my observation very well. I can acknowledge that Prescod's career seems fine, but that appears to be primarily due to just how much of a bully she is. With regards to her ability to persuade others, her refusal to admit wrong seems like an obvious liability on that front. Yes, she has a platform but to me that just lets her repeat catechisms to an audience already in deliberate pursuit of confirmation bias. So I concede that never admitting wrong can have specific benefits in certain facets of life that rely upon a brash persona. It's still overall a bewildering decision to make.

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