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Notes -
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.
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