Damnatio Memoriae Watch: Ornithology Goes Woke

The plague of stupid spreads.

At least in this case there is some advantage to be gained by adopting more descriptive names. Though probably not enough to warrant such extensive change. Not to mention: making it all flatter and more boring.

But it's really the reasoning that's stupid.

The main type of inference--used by my own august institution as well--goes like so:

George Floyd

Therefore:

Anything the left wants

Quoting:

One notable exception came in 2000, however, when the society renamed a bird that's now called the Long-tailed Duck because of concerns that its previous name was derogatory to Native Americans.   

   "That was the first that I'd ever really recognized or heard of a name that was offensive," says Handel, who says at that point in time, concerns about injustice wasn't a traditionally accepted reason for changing bird names.
   That really started to change in 2020, when police officers killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. On that same day, a white woman in Central Park called the police on black birder Christian Cooper, claiming he was threatening her.

   The George Floyd incident has nothing to do with this. It cannot be a justification. At best, it's a nonrational explanation for an unjustified change. 

   The Christian Cooper incident is just as irrelevant. It just happens to have something to do with bird-watching. If women were ever at the top (bottom?) of the Totem Pole of Oppression, that interaction would have had exactly the opposite polarity on the left. 

   I don't have a dog in this fight. Just gesturing at another case of unjustified revolutionary change. All part of the project of remaking history, as Orwell warned:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.

But, then, as many conservatives have noted: the left thinks 1984 is an instruction manual...

[Incidentally: I can't even find a page now that will say what the "long-tailed duck" is normally (or used to be) called. There is only one oblique reference to it in Wikipedia. Apparently it included the word 'squaw'...which, actually, isn't a slur at all. It apparently just means young girl. We are told that some American Indians now find the word "offensive"...]