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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   24875 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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YOU KNOW WHAT NOBODY HATES EACH OTHER ABOUT YET? BIRD-WATCHING.

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.

And the next day half the world’s newspaper headlines are “Has The Political Correctness Police Taken Over Bird-Watching?” and the other half are “Is Bird-Watching Racist?”. And then bird-watchers and non-bird-watchers and different sub-groups of bird-watchers hold vitriolic attacks on each other that feed back on each other in a vicious cycle for the next six months, and the whole thing ends in mutual death threats and another previously innocent activity turning into World War I style trench warfare.

The story is... well, pretty much exactly what you think it is, I bet.

Get ready to say goodbye to a lot of familiar bird names, like Anna's Hummingbird, Gambel's Quail, Lewis's Woodpecker, Bewick's Wren, Bullock's Oriole, and more.

That's because the American Ornithological Society has vowed to change the English names of all bird species currently named after people, along with any other bird names deemed offensive or exclusionary.

I don't really care? Except that I do care, to just this extent, as I've written before:

When stuff like this happens, one of my first reactions is to reflect on the fact that everyone gets forgotten eventually. Some of us get statues or scholarship funds or university chairs carrying our name or likeness a little farther into the future than might otherwise have occurred, but the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" was always destined to go away someday. Roads and schools and landmarks get renamed, statues are left to crumble.

And yet I concur with you--this sort of thing makes me uncomfortable. But it can't be because they are ending the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" that I had never heard of and could have predicted would eventually vanish anyway. I have wondered in the past whether similar cases bothered me because I didn't approve of the deliberate social engineering that tossing things down the memory hole reveals, but I find even that objection does not quite do it for me. I find that I'm not in principle opposed to people making the world over in their own preferred image, provided they do so within certain rational constraints. So I wondered if I should simply chalk my discomfort up to personal political bias, but this felt wrong, too--for example, I found myself bothered by the tearing down of Confederate statues even though I am not from the American South and had no other discernible reason to favor their preservation by reason of political bias.

At present the best I've managed to come up with is that I am bothered by the publicity of destruction. That is--what would have happened if the ALSC had, beginning last year, simply not mentioned the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" to anyone ever again? Simply conduct business as usual, and if asked by anyone about the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" respond only that the Award was "undergoing some conceptual reorganization in hopes of better-serving our community, but while we workshop it we'd love your participation in some of our alternative programs" or something.

Of course, they don't do this, because someone decided that they would get more attention (=dollars) with a press release on their "core values of diversity and inclusion" coupled with a prima facie sacrificial offering to signal sincerity. If you look very hard at what's happening, it's the memetic equivalent of sacrificing sick animals and weeds instead of the firstling of the flock--there's no real sacrifice taking place here--but the gods of social justice are so far pleased. This is probably because it establishes a precedent, so when they come calling for greater sacrifices--how long before the residents of Seattle demand to live in a state that isn't named for a slave owner?--the practice of signaling your allegiance by tossing things down the memory hole in a way that also alienates you from the Other Tribe has already become so ingrained that no resistance to such demands remains.

Both ideas and people fade, but it is one thing to lose your struggle against time, and something else entirely to be thrown into a volcano by someone trying to prove their loyalty to Moloch.

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...)

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

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.

Zeiss Victory SF 10x42

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

For that price, I'd want to be able to see Armstrong's footprints on the moon!

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