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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15640 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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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.

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