Ready for another stupid adventure in wokeism, my friends?
Let's start with some nice photos. If ever you've been in a very dark outdoor spot where the night sky viewing is particularly fine, you may have noticed two large smudge-like appearances close together in the sky, pictured here:
ENHANCE:
Those are the Magellanic Clouds, two nearby dwarf galaxies that have been observed by humanity since ancient times; they were eventually named after the great Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan.
But of course that's a big no-no these days:
...Magellan's name is not fitting, astronomer Mia de los Reyes and colleagues argue. The leader of the first expedition to successfully circle the globe, Magellan enslaved and killed Indigenous people encountered on the voyage, which set out from Spain in 1519
Uh huh.
I mean, it's possible that they were named that way because Magellan's crew observed them on their voyage and it was just an interesting thing they saw and talked about and so people just decided to start associating them with Magellan and the clouds don't have anything to do with enslavement or indigenous people or anything at all. I mean that's possible, right?
But since this is the woke timeline, nobody can just let a thing be. White explorers were evil monsters who thought about imperial colonialism and enslavement every moment of the day (unlike woke people), so everything has to be relentlessly scrutinized, analyzed, subject to prevailing political theory, and re-shaped in the image of the current zeitgeist:
"It doesn't make sense to have them named after any one person, let alone a person who never actually studied them," says astronomer Gurtina Besla of the University of Arizona in Tucson.
At this point it's hardly even the case that they're "named after" Magellan, at least in the popular consciousness. They're just the Magellanic Clouds. That's it. Heck, we literally have one world superpower and two continents named after the first name of an Italian explorer who somehow ousted Columbus to become associated with an entire hemisphere.
A German mapmaker literally said in 1507 that he didn't see why "Amerige, meaning Land of Amerigo, or America" wouldn't be a good name "since Europe and Asia have received women's names."
But nah, we can't have fun and wacky stories about naming things anymore that remind us of history. Everything has to be sanitized so we can live out a "1984" fever dream.
The astronomers are now trying out new names. One popular suggestion is to call them the "Milky Clouds."
SO MUCH BETTER, RIGHT??
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
