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I wanted to post this over at /r/slatestarcodex but it's obviously CW material and surely someone should bring it to Scott's attention, as it wins him quite a large number of prophet points I suspect...
NPR reports that these American birds and dozens more will be renamed, to remove human monikers.
The story is... well, pretty much exactly what you think it is, I bet.
I don't really care? Except that I do care, to just this extent, as I've written before:
I am not an ornithologist. I'm not even a bird-watcher. The closest I've ever come is snapping an occasional photo of a bird that catches my attention. These changes have nothing to do with me... except, of course insofar as they represent the continued burning-down of the contributions of "my" culture to humanity's broader understanding of the world. The active removal--dare I say "erasure?"--of the past, so as not to offend the sensibilities of the present.
(But mostly, I'm once more astonished by Scott's peculiar prescience...)
I worry that the name of the superb starling will make other starlings feel inadequate.
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White Supremacy strikes again. Anything ever associated with a white person makes others feel bad.
The shocking thing is we are always looking for cases of white supremacy but we have actual anti-semitism all over the place the only people who notice are Jews feeling pain and right wingers like me. The Ivies are literally justifying their students physically assaulting Jews.
https://twitter.com/billackman/status/1719878415325528357?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1719819193145573619?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
And of course there are deans writing letters in support of this behavior (can’t find it now but Columbia’s dean put out a letter in support of the students being mean to Jews).
I had asked here before where do Jews sit on the grievance social heriarchy. It’s apparently a bit of both sides. For official government stuff very highly. For the next generation of elite wokes they might be beneath rural whites.
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Two questions that immediately occur to me:
Why should we care that this non-governmental organization is going to change what it calls some birds, what authority does it have to change what anyone else calls them and will it actually have any effect, and
Given standard linguistic drift, how long does the average bird name tend to last, anyway?
Regarding 1, it's about the power of being the default. They can't literally force you to not call the long-tailed duck by its older name, but they're generating an incentive for everyone to not understand what you mean anymore. If they can change everyone and everything around you, then you either get branded a crank (and see the following social status drop) or have to spend your time clarifying what you're referring to.
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"Too many birds are named after white people and we have to take action about it, says the American Ornithological Society" is ... not one I had on the bingo card for this year.
There are of course many, many hundreds of thousands of people in the US who aren't white who have these same first or last names, so it really is just plainly about whoever is agitating for this not wanting these specific white people and people like them to have birds (or anything? medical terms? physics theories?) named after them.
I sincerely hope that the traction the news about this decision is getting online is mostly thanks to it all sounding like a ClickHole bit.
(Points if you can guess roughly how far into the linked NPR article you can get until the author writes the sentence "That really started to change in 2020, when police officers killed George Floyd in Minneapolis.")
Goddamnit I thought you were kidding. That really is in the article. So zero points for me, I guess.
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My first instinct was to check Wikipedia to see if the blue-footed booby is in danger. No sign on the article that a rename is afoot.
The penduline tit also appears to be safe, for now.
Though given that donglegate actually happened, I would think names such as these would scare off more people than names of human beings, especially innocuous names with no negative connotations of their own like Anna or Lewis.
”Things all started to change in 2028 when JaQuarius Washington was smothered to death by the massive mommy milkers of officer Laura Campbell during a routine traffic stop gone horribly wrong…”
This gives me some ideas for a final solution for the incel problem by combining BLM with MAID.
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Or right! You don't know the man, and it might well be that the only reason he didn't protest is because he was too busy enjoying it.
Either way, body cam footage is inconclusive, because anything below the neck is covered by a hemispherical object that stretches from horizon to horizon.
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If they're getting rid of genuinely offensive or hurtful names, okay fine. But renaming a bird that may be called, say, "Smith's Wren"? Why? The only reason I can see there is "Smith is an Old Dead White Guy".
This reminds me of what a lot of the liberal Protestant churches did in regards to LGBT+ matters. Think of all the LGBT+ people who would love to come to church, except they've been turned off Christianity by the bad old, mean old, regressive, 'that's a sin' teachings of the past! So they junk the 'offensive' doctrines, kick out the traditionalists/have a public, messy, divisive split, and then sit back and wait for the flood of new LGBT+ and allies congregants to fill the churches.
Which... doesn't really happen. They get a lot more out gay, lesbian and trans clergy and bishops (if they're a denomination that has bishops) but congregants? Ordinary people in the pews? Not so much. What tends to happen is that the split means a small, LGBT+ majority church here, and a somewhat larger (but still smallish) traditional church made up of those who were kicked out/left over there, which tends to maybe be a bit more vibrant and growing.
So they torpedo everything they used to have, but don't get the wished-for replacement numbers of the new people to fill in for the traditionalists who left, or to replace their aging/dying liberal remaining congregations.
And that's what I think will happen here. "Let's get rid of all these Euro-centric names, and the masses of BIPOC people who would love to become birdwatchers will turn up!" Except I don't think "that bird has a Western, Anglo name" is what is keeping black, Asian, Latino etc. people out of birdwatching. People who are inclined to "I've been calling it Bewick's Wren for thirty years, I'm resigning from this club" will leave or give up the hobby or form their own, separate group. People who never even heard of "Bewick's Wren" are not going to suddenly turn up because now it's called "Long-tailed Wren" or the likes.
Five bucks says “prothonotary warbler” remains unchanged! Referencing Catholics is still A-OK.
Oh, right. Per the article, it sounds like the AOS was bullied into doing the first one or two, then decided to blanket remove human names.
Some of the quotes read like they were convinced or "convinced" to make the right mouth sounds and fall in line.
For the moment! I'm sure "cardinals" is terribly discriminatory as it privileges Christianity and is non-inclusive of indigenous ways of knowing.
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How do you get bullied into changing a name for a bird. It's bloody bird watching. What kind of pansies run this org? Just tell the miscreants to pound sand. Is this just a case of ideological capture?
I mean, it’s bird watching. I associate this hobby with innoffensive old people who stayed Episcopalian after it started using gay pride vestments, read the New York Times, and retired from their teaching job a few years ago thinking they should move to be with their grandkids but just don’t think it’s the right time.
I’m surprised it took them this long to give in to even the most ridiculous demand from work activists.
This is a disturbingly precise description of one of the bird watching hobbyists I know. Makes you wonder.
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The Venn diagram overlap of the sort of people who administrate hobby groups and the sort of people who bird watch is not your most testosterone-fueled set.
Is this a claim that prominent birders are mostly women, or mostly low-T men? In the UK, obscure geeky hobbies like birding are generally assumed to be light on both actual XX women and ManlyMenTM.
I would guess there are plenty of manly men who bird watch, but they are mostly not the ones who sit on the committees and run for president.
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If it was that easy, the ideological capture would not have gone through literally everywhere and we would not have had the great awokening. Agreeing to say no, together, is a hard collective action problem, since saying no alone is a fast path to cancellation.
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Surely there would be far more obvious birds to start with in that case!
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As far as I can tell, it's that instead of saying 'these specific names are offensive for these specific reasons' and getting into a fight over each one, they're just implementing a rule of 'no naming birds after specific people' and calling it a day.
In a sense, this is good: it means that even if the rule was invented for partisan reasons, it can't be enforced in a partisan manner in the future.
Let us hope, but I'm not going to hold my breath. Sure, if it means that in future all birds must have names like "green-throated beetlebrush" then it won't be partisan, but I would expect some other activist group to start pushing for "let's use an Indigenous name and if there isn't one, let's make one up" or "let's call this after a heroic member of a marginalised minority" names. Because why should bird-watching remain unsullied?
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This isn’t about attracting minorities at all, this is a repentance ritual for black-obsessed white people making up the ornithological PMC community.
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Yeah, this sort of thinking has always been puzzling to me--nobody studies biology without learning Latin names, nobody studies math without learning Greek letters. "Black people won't go birdwatching because all the birds are named Smith" is an utterly baffling take. That said--
If "evocative" is the real goal, I suppose if they decide to start naming birds stuff like "Talonflame" or "Spearow" maybe I could get on board...?
I dunno, "Long-billed, high-circle flying, special feathers to produce whistling sound Snipe" sounds longer and more cumbersome than "Wilson's Snipe". What's the local name for it? I'm sure local people have a local name instead of Ms. Nol needing to make up an "evocative" one.
You might need to be careful about asking for local names, or making up your own, though. Chesterton from his autobiography:
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I think you're thinking about it backwards. The people who make this kind of criticism tend to be very open about their belief that any disparity* within any group is automatically and inevitably evidence of oppression, and it's just a matter of finding out what that oppression is. They also tend to be very open about their belief in the ability of terminology to oppress. And so when their search encounters this sort of terminology, i.e. disproportionately Western and Anglo names among birds, they conclude that that's the oppression that's responsible for the disparity. They're not trying to reason empirically about what kind of effects having so many Western and Anglo names among birds would have on birdwatchers in general and concluding that it would cause POCs to stay away from birdwatching.
* of certain kinds.
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Give it time.
To be fair, when I started learning math + stats, I found the use of greek letters intimidating and confusing, especially rarely-used ones like ξ. Of course there's nothing wrong with them besides their unfamiliarity, but I try to start with English letters in my own math writing and only reach for greek letters when I'm running out of those.
Having to take notes and understand the lesson was enough work. I hated having to figure out how to draw a xi in the middle of a lesson.
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I use that flavor of stats in my work and I still can't draw the damn symbol right.
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How long before they come for Thomson's Gazelle?
They've aimed brickbats at Przewalski so I guess there's going to be a call to take his name off the horse too.
And of course the bloody article has a trigger warning for the exceptionally faint-hearted.
I read this (bolding mine) and immediately went "I bet the founders are all White":
No photos, but going by the names I'm going to take a guess that yep, white white whitey white. Which makes the irony of them determining what is or isn't harmful even more ironic:
They even recognise this themselves, which must make the irony at least three layers deep?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerutter
BA from Oberlin, then a conservation biology MS from University of Minnesota. Entire professional experience has been as a twitter manager for non-profits: "digital communications for other bird organizations (American Ornithological Society, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, Great Lakes Piping Plover Recovery Effort) and international events (NAOC 2016, Earth Optimism 2018) has aided in her science communications skills and outreach ability to non-technical audiences."
She eventually worked her way up to "director of communications" at the American Bird Conservancy. Here's their 990 disclosure for anyone who wants to see the grant slush fund in action.
It's like a portrait study.
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This is like the third or fourth "culture war in bird-watching" story I heard about since Scott wrote his post.
At this point I'm beginning to think they like culture war topics more than Leica vs Zeiss vs Swarovski.
Never watched a bird in my life, but the Zeiss Victory SF 10x42 are a in a class of their own. I highly recommend at least viewing something far away through them at some point. They took my breath away with how clearly I could read text on an advertising billboard more than 3km away.
Wish I could justify owning a pair personally but unfortunately I'd use them like once a year or less and the price is just too high for it to be worth it.
They'd be a deductible expense for me, so I chuckled and smugly looked them up to-
Yeah, no, not a chance.
You know you're getting reamed when you're buying Zeiss
Especially if you are ASML, who are as dependent on Zeiss for the lenses and mirrors that go into EUV photolithography tools as TSMC and Intel are on ASML for the photolithography tools. ASML offered Zeiss more money than you could shake a stick at for their semiconductor business, but Zeiss is owned by a non-profit with no interest in giving up control.
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Maybe it's just because I'm an enthusiast in photography and sport shooting, with their extremely pricey optics, that I expected these to be more than $3k.
That's pretty high for binoculars. Compare Vortex cheap 10x42 at under $200 or their nice line at $1700. Camera lenses are just crazy expensive.
That's just the typical glass price/quality tier list though. China->Philippines->Japan->Alpine space magic
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For that price, I'd want to be able to see Armstrong's footprints on the moon!
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