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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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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!