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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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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...