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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   17305 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.

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.".

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