Race, Sex, and Space Telescopes: Hot Button Issues?

David Sims gets censored — again.

by David Sims

RACE IS not a social construct. It is a real, biological phenomenon. The idea that race was a social construct began in 1973 with a Jewish geneticist at Harvard, Richard Lewontin (who recently died). He said that nobody working with genetic information alone could sort people into racial categories. About 25 years later, forensic anthropologists proved him wrong.

But by that time the belief that race is a “social construct” had become unalterable dogma among political leftists, and no matter how thoroughly the evidence proved that race was a real feature of our species [and all species], they just kept on chanting their slogans to the contrary; e.g. “There’s only one race, the human race” and other such misinformation. If race weren’t real, then companies such as “23 and Me” wouldn’t have a product to sell, police couldn’t identify suspects by race, and courts couldn’t use DNA matching in paternity cases. But they can, and thus race is a real phenomenon. It isn’t merely a social construct.

[One might also add that, ironically, genetic information alone is enough to identify Jews like Lewontin at nearly 100 per cent. accuracy.]

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Sex itself came about as a means of promoting genetic diversity in species without depending on mutations to provide variant alleles. The pleasure that people get from sex is an evolved inducement for men and women to have sex and thereby engender children. Homosexuality is a perversion of sexuality. Biologically, homosexuality is a waste of time [and precious energy]. Additionally, homosexual acts spread diseases more efficiently than normal (heterosexual) sex does, and anal “sexual” penetration leads to the loss of the body’s ability to hold fecal waste, which requires the use of adult diapers. Homosexuality is, frankly, nasty.

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[Mr. Sims recently ran afoul of the political censors on an astronomy forum when he stated his opinion that the James Webb Space Telescope should not be renamed just because Webb (a NASA administrator who served until 1968 and died in 1992) held views that today would be considered Politically Incorrect, and had participated (as did thousands of Washington managers and administrators) in a dismissal of homosexuals from sensitive government posts as security risks and Communist sympathizers. Here are Mr. Sim’s words, followed by the response he received after his post was removed.]

I oppose changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to anything else. This is a “woke” political move, and if it is successful it will only feed a Marxist beast that is best left to starve. It’s an outgrowth of cancel culture. Giving this beast what it wanted is what ruined Star Wars. It can’t do anything positive for the JWST, either.

How often are we led to assume that our best thinkers of yesteryear, contemplating the same social controversies that we do, somehow got it all wrong, and that the present views are more correct? Maybe they were right and we are wrong. Maybe the American Psychiatric Association was infiltrated, corrupted, and taken over in 1973, and that the changes made to their diagnostic manual [normalizing homosexuality] were wrongly done, and all the other cultural dominoes since have simply fallen from that initial woke push.

Hi David:

We removed a post you made to the thread Science: James Webb telescope might get renamed, because you went well-overboard into hot-button political territory in that post, into territory unacceptable under provision 1© in Cloudy Night’s Terms of Service: “c. Topics about politics, religion, or ‘hot-topic’ issues (global warming, taxes, lifestyles, etc.) that can easily become incendiary are not welcome here. Moderators have the discretion to determine if a topic or post is within these boundaries.”

True, the entire general issue of what the proper threshold or criteria are to justify renaming something because some of the honoree’s activities in a past era are sharply disapproved in the current one — is inherently difficult to meaningfully discuss without getting into contentious political territory. It might have been inevitable that in the context of potential renaming of James Webb Telescope, the thread would eventually run afoul of getting into “hot-button” politics of the sort that undermine the core purpose of this CN site: to promote a community of shared interest and useful information about astronomy.

Nevertheless, your post goes way past complaining about excessive political correctness, and past calling others by pejorative political labels like “Marxist beast.”

You comment that: “How often are we led to assume that our best thinkers of yesteryear, contemplating the same social controversies that we do, somehow got it all wrong, and that the present views are more correct? Maybe they were right and we are wrong. Maybe the American Psychiatric Association was infiltrated, corrupted, and taken over in 1973, and that the changes made to their diagnostic manual were wrongly done, and all the other cultural dominoes since have simply fallen from that initial woke push.”

This is rather open-ended about the scope of which “best thinkers of yesteryear” were perhaps right about a broad potential reach of social issues where past discriminations against various classes of people were defended by such thinkers.

You indulge in disrespectfully pejorative speculations about the alleged corruption of the American Psychiatric Association in 1973, which is not only an overtly hot-button political assertion, but completely aside from having any substantive relevance to astronomy.

We welcome the many substantive posts you have made in the Science forum about orbital mechanics. But we are not going to gladly indulge your explosively provocative social and political viewpoint posts here.

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