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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24900 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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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.

Trying to do this bird by bird would mean engaging in divisive debates about individual people and the merits of whether or not they should have the honor of having a bird named after them, he realized.

"That just seemed like it would lead to endless arguments," he says, adding that he didn't think the birding community should become the morality police for people who lived two centuries ago.

Some of the quotes read like they were convinced or "convinced" to make the right mouth sounds and fall in line.

Referencing Catholics is still A-OK.

For the moment! I'm sure "cardinals" is terribly discriminatory as it privileges Christianity and is non-inclusive of indigenous ways of knowing.

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.

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.

This is a disturbingly precise description of one of the bird watching hobbyists I know. Makes you wonder.

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.

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.

Surely there would be far more obvious birds to start with in that case!

But renaming a bird that may be called, say, "Smith's Wren"? Why?

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.

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?

This isn’t about attracting minorities at all, this is a repentance ritual for black-obsessed white people making up the ornithological PMC community.

Except I don't think "that bird has a Western, Anglo name" is what is keeping black, Asian, Latino etc. people out of birdwatching.

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--

Nol says she recently was visiting some salt marshes this summer and saw a common bird there that's called Wilson's Snipe, which has a long bill and engages in dramatic displays such as flying in high circles, which produces a whistling sound as air flows over specialized feathers. "And I thought, what a terrible name," she says. "I mean, Wilson was the father of modern ornithology in North America, but this bird has so many other evocative characteristics."

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:

My father might have reminded people of Mr. Pickwick, except that he was always bearded and never bald; he wore spectacles and had all the Pickwickian evenness of temper and pleasure in the humours of travel. He was rather quiet than otherwise, but his quietude covered a great fertility of notions; and he certainly liked taking a rise out of people. I remember, to give one example of a hundred such inventions, how he gravely instructed some grave ladies in the names of flowers; dwelling especially on the rustic names given in certain localities. "The country people call them Sailors' Pen-knives," he would say in an offhand manner, after affecting to provide them with the full scientific name, or, "They call them Bakers' Bootlaces down in Lincolnshire, I believe"; and it is a fine example of human simplicity to note how far he found he could safely go in such instructive discourse. They followed him without revulsion when he said lightly, "Merely a sprig of wild bigamy." It was only when he added that there was a local variety known as Bishop's Bigamy, that the full depravity of his character began to dawn on their minds.

Except I don't think "that bird has a Western, Anglo name" is what is keeping black, Asian, Latino etc. people out of birdwatching.

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.

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.

nobody studies biology without learning Latin names, nobody studies math without learning Greek letters

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.

I use that flavor of stats in my work and I still can't draw the damn symbol right.

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