SJWs IN SPAAAAACE!!!!

"When Discussing Humanity's Move To Space, The Language We Use Matters."

   Yeah...no it doesn't.
   First of all: Jebus, this nonsense is just everywhere. I'd have thought SciAm might be immune...
   Second: these people are massively obsessed with language. Probably because they are more-or-less ideologically committed to the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis (or Sapir-Whorf as it's become known...dunno why the inverted order...). The lefty-left wants to control our thoughts, and it's also largely committed to the claim that basically everything is (warning: nonsense term afoot) "socially constructed"...and they tend to cash that out in terms of some kind of nominalist antirealism that makes reality (magically) dependent on language...so...yeah...they're obsessed with language...
   It does, of course, matter how we think about these things...because if we think false and/or confused things, then we'll be wrong. Or worse, as Pauli put it, not even wrong... And language does matter a bit, as it can help to structure and guide our thinking. But it does not create the world. And it does not determine thought (that is: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is false.)
   Well, the real story here is probably more genetic/historical: the bad theories that spawned the quasi-philosophy of the contemporary left was largely spawned out of literature departments and other disciplines that think about language rather than things...rather, even, than actual thoughts or properties. The chattering class--and that's where neo-PC has metastasized--is largely made up of people who, well, talk...and think about talking. And people tend to think that what they tend to think about is more important than it actually is...
   Anyway...  What really matters is that we get our thinking straight about space exploration--like, well, everything else... For example, one thing we'd want to do is not mindlessly apply the mindless lefty political orthodoxy of the moment to space exploration...especially when it obviously fails to apply. The left and the left fringe of liberalism have been obsessed with colonialism for twenty or thirty years or so. They don't do a lot of clear nor original thinking over there, so what they basically do is apply their pet political categories willy-nilly. You'd think that the fact that there are no people on Mars to oppress might make even them realize that they're being dumb. But...apparently not... Next I expect articles on exporting "rape culture" to Mars or some such nonsense...
   Bad theories and bad categories make even smart people stupid. Believing a bad theory is like running a stupidity emulator. No matter how fast your processor, you're turning yourself into a Commodore 64 by buying into this idiocy.