Gillian Burke is a biologist, black and originally from Kenya, but now indigenous to BBC Television Centre in London, within whose back office burrows she currently writes op-eds for BBC Wildlife magazine with titles like ‘What We Call Living Things Matters’.
In this particular piece, Burke recalled being harangued by a “wonderfully neurodivergent” 11-year-old girl who was annoyed that, in a 2016 episode of the BBC wildlife series Springwatch, which Burke helps co-present, a newly-hatched golden eagle had been given the nickname ‘Freya’. “Why do you have to give them names?” demanded to know the delightful infant. “Why can’t you just allow them to be wild animals?” (The girl’s name was ‘Flora’, by the way, making her objection towards the naming of fauna after humans somewhat hypocritical in my opinion.)
Being a modern-day BBC presenter, Burke didn’t just tell the kid to shut up then slap her, but took her wholly unreasonable complaint seriously, using it as a platform to approvingly cite the work of Danish academic Sune Borkfelt, namely his “paradigm-shifting” view that “whether what is named is land, people or animals, the process of naming reflects the worldview of the one who names, rather than the view of what is named”. According to Burke, “this makes naming a powerful tool of control”, as “we are unwittingly wielding some form of control by naming wild animals such as Freya the golden eagle”.
Inevitably, all this ends up gaining some kind of racial aspect to it, as the common English-language names for various species of African wildlife were purportedly derived from old-time white imperialists, with their dreaded colonial mindset, not from native black Africans themselves:
The English names for East Africa’s iconic wildlife – so heavily featured in natural history films and in this magazine – jar, at least to my ear. In my own writing I prefer re-introducing these familiar animals by their Swahili names: ndovu (elephant), twiga (giraffe), fisi (hyena) and my personal favourite, because I used to love how my dad said it, kongoni (hartebeest).
Burke doesn’t specifically call for the animals in question to be renamed, but that seems the increasing trend in zoology these days. There are several animal species out there whose nomenclature has now been deemed irredeemably racist/sexist/homophobic/colonialist by today’s new woke Western scientific establishment, and therefore deemed fit candidates for immediate forcible relabelling. I have recently exposed elsewhere the attempts of some palaeontologists to pretentiously christen various sub-species of extinct trilobites after a range of prominent drag-queens.
Yet the desire to rename animals is not an entirely new phenomenon when totalitarian-style New Orders come to power, and begin trying to systematically reset everything around them back to a desired political Year Zero. In 1942, the German Society for Mammalogy passed a resolution to replace the common German name for a bat, Fledermaus, as the word literally meant ‘flying mouse’, and bats are not actually winged mice at all, they just look a bit like them, cosplaying. This thoroughly unnecessary decision drew the ire of no less a figure than Adolf Hitler, who issued the following warning via his secretary: “Should members of the Society for Mammalogy have nothing more essential to the war effort or smarter to do, perhaps an extended stint in the construction battalion on the Russian front could be arranged.”
If even Hitler could see that scientists spending ages pointlessly debating the renaming of random creatures in the name of ‘modernity’ was a complete waste of the time and resources of everyone involved, why can’t today’s ideologically blinkered biologists see likewise?
Birds of Ill Omen
That today’s bat-blind scientists cannot see this fact is conclusively shown by the saga of Scott’s oriole, a breed of American desert-bird which a U.S. Army officer spotted in 1854 and named after his commanding officer, Winfield Scott – a man today notorious for having engaged in the brutal ethnic cleansing of Native American Indians in the 1830s by forcibly shipping them all out into designated Reservations away from their original homelands on the so-called ‘Trail of Tears’. In 2020, when George Floyd died in Minneapolis, pressure was placed on the American Ornithological Society (AOS) to, as one petition of concerned bird-fanciers put it, erase all bird names containing “significant isolating and demeaning reminders of oppression, slavery and genocide” – prime amongst them Scott’s oriole, which will indeed now be compliantly renamed, possibly as the yucca oriole.
Such demands from obsessive activists were clearly politically motivated in nature, and intended not simply to make the ornithological world more ‘inclusive’, but to contribute to the transform Western society along race-Marxist lines more completely – to kill two birds with one stone, as it were. The most prominent pressure group involved in the campaign was ‘Bird Names for Birds’, whose website explicitly makes reference to the iconoclastic toppling of statues of old Confederate generals and suchlike which was then ongoing during summer 2020’s BLM riot-fest:
Eponyms (a person after whom a discovery, invention, place, etc., is named or thought to be named)… are problematic because they perpetuate colonialism and the racism associated with it. The names that these birds currently have… represent and remember people (mainly white men) who often have objectively horrible pasts and do not uphold the morals and standards the bird community should memorialise. … Eponymous common names are essentially verbal statues. They were made to honour the benefactor in perpetuity, and as such reflect the accomplishments and values that the creator esteemed… we [modern, right-thinking people] should make decisions about who and what we honour based on our own values, values that create a more equitable world for all. By continuing to use eponymous common bird names, we continue to reference and honour our distressful colonial heritage and the racism that was a direct consequence of this malicious exploitation. This is unacceptable, and we must do better.
In October 2023 the AOS further issued a new ruling that, besides Indian-killers and other such reprobates, to avoid future similar controversies arising, eponyms of any kind would henceforth be banned from the world of American birds entirely, even retrospectively: the AOS will now have to begin rechristening 263 relevant U.S. bird species, 5.5% of the entire total, even ones with eponyms as wholly inoffensive as ‘Anna’s hummingbird’.
As AOS President Colleen Handel put it in a statement (which sounds distinctly similar in phrasing and sentiment to that of Gillian Burke in BBC Wildlife magazine): “There is power in a name, and some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today.” Furthermore, “it is a questionable premise that species should be named after specific humans at all, as if bird species were possessions or trophies,” added the AOS.
Turds of a Feather
Examining the AOS’s incredibly lengthy and tedious report into this matter – the result of “nine months of bi-weekly deliberations”, enough to gestate an actual human baby – is to reveal a world strangely similar to that of science in the old Soviet Union, where needless debates over ideology and politically-correct terminology frequently ate into time that could have been spent doing something far more scientifically useful.
The AOS’s report determined that the flesh-footed shearwater, for example, with its pinkish-coloured feet, now had to be banished from dictionaries forever on the grounds that its “name implies a default skin tone” of roseate whiteness, not dusky blackness or brownness. Such absolutely essential administrative measures, it was proclaimed, would “pave the way for the biodiverse, equitable and healthy futures toward which we all strive”.
The whole document is steeped in classic Critical Race Theory dogma. The idea all eponymous bird names should be replaced, not just those of Hiawatha-displacing mass murderers, was justified by the ‘fact’ that
individual and structural acts of oppression are intertwined. Trying to identify the people who committed harmful acts broadened into identifying people who did not individually commit harmful acts but whose work produced, or was used to support, state-sanctioned acts of violence, or to identifying people who did not individually commit harmful acts but who were supported and enfranchised by a system of inequity and exploitation.
White American society as a whole is inherently racist, oppressive and worthless, then, so even the most blameless bird-watcher who might have had a species named after them was ‘guilty’ of helping maintain black slavery and Indian-genocide nonetheless, even though he personally may have had nothing to do with either. The fact that most eponymous bird species were named after straight white males further reflected dominant power structures of the sinful, irredeemable Western past, and all traces of such “legacies of colonialism” must be removed, even in terms of bird names. Somehow, this would all lead to a process of utopian world-transformation, as Marxism always does:
We believe that changing the naming process can be a powerful signal of systematic change. Enacting that change will provide an important space for learning new processes of engagement and ultimately catalyse the kinds of organisational and field-wide changes that will realise AOS’s DEIBJ [i.e., Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] vision and, thus, strengthen ornithology in the long term.
Will it really? Or will it just burn through the AOS’s limited financial resources for no good reason?
Altered Beast
By one estimate, if the AOS’s measures were adopted worldwide, and all eponymous animals relabelled along PC lines, not just American birds, it would require some 200,000 reclassifications to take place. To what meaningful end? Purely to make woke liberals feel good about themselves.
Around 2020, the aptly-named Washington Department of Agriculture employee Dr. Chris Looney made calls for an invasive species of hornet in his home state to be renamed. The new alien insect was being popularly referred to in the media as an ‘Asian giant hornet’ and a ‘murder hornet’. As 2020 was also the year the ‘Chinese virus’ of COVID-19 broke out, leading to an alleged epidemic of anti-Asian hate-crimes across America, Looney worried these popular monikers might help fuel further violence against Asians – or, even worse, “stoke entomophobia” against the innocent insects themselves – so lobbied to get it called the ‘northern giant hornet’ instead.
Pathetically, in 2022, the Entomological Society of America caved in to Looney’s demands: the entomologists had been forced to become etymologists instead. But was the whole process really worth it? Well, no subsequent U.S.-wide genocide of Chinese or Korean people took place, so I suppose in the end it must have been, right? This entire very public procedure can’t just have been one gigantic stupid moral vanity project, surely?
Moral vanity is now all that matters in many of our institutions, sadly, not mere trivia like practical reality or affordability. Extraordinarily, if you read through its report, the American Ornithological Society basically admits the whole exercise of bowdlerising birds will be so costly as to be unaffordable to them:
Throughout the process, the AOS will need dedicated personnel to be in charge of communications. Administrative support for this step will not be trivial. For the public comment period [on what each censored species should henceforth be renamed as], interactive platform(s) will need to be set up in order to moderate and accept the desired input. For broadcasting new names and general publicity, substantial investment will likely need to be made for setting up workflows to track and manage web and social media communications, publish press releases, and handle media relations… We recognise this process is potentially costly. If the cost is prohibitive, then partnerships with other bird-focused organisations may be a step to consider.
What, precisely, is the point of spending ages renaming the endangered General Robert E. Lee Bird if by the time you’ve done so, you’ve got no cash left to spend on any habitat conservation, and so the damn thing has gone extinct?
Hitler knew best how to deal with navel-gazing time-wasters like this: off to the Eastern Front with them all!
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2023/05/23/vegan-bubble-burst/
Talking about food, Lidl Ireland is launching insect burgers made with mealworm larvae
https://plantbasednews.org/news/alternative-protein/lidl-insect-burgers/
So far here in the NL the only bug-based food I’ve come across is dry cat food in the pet shop. This line at least went out of its way to advertise itself as insect food but I’m still incredibly suspicious that they might be sneaking it in human foods, in the flours and thickening agents, for instance, so I do keep my eyes peeled anyway but, considering about 5 insects have been approved for human consumption in the EU ( with about 8 in the pipeline ) now I do find it a bit suss that I haven’t come across any. I wouldn’t even feed my cat that crud. No wonder it was way cheaper than the regular stuff. I just really hope I’m not unwittingly eating said crud also.
I check and double check ingredients lists on most foodstuffs, more so since the approval of insect derivatives. I have come across a couple of strange instances recently in the ingredients of some biscuits. Some text stating ‘may contain fish’. No actual warnings in the ingredient list, written in bold, of potential allergic ingredients and no ‘made in an environment etc…’. Just may contain fish. Why would plain biscuits potentially contain fish? I recall reading that eating foodstuffs containing insect flours etc may cause a reaction for those allergic to seafood etc. Surely the insect crud wouldn’t be added without proper labelling, would it?
I wouldn’t put it passed them. It pays to be vigilant but if they’re covertly adding the stuff we’d never know. Well, not until some independent person with the tools can analyse some foodstuff and find evidence or if somebody has a severe allergic reaction to something they’d ordinarily be safe consuming. If they were doing it covertly I’ve no idea of the quantities they’d use because they couldn’t sub too much milled insect for regular flour, for instance, because it’d affect the taste presumably. I just avoid processed foods as best I can tbh.
There was a time not so long ago that weevils in ships biscuits was considered a bad thing!
I have posted this before, but this was the reply to exactly that question from local Trading Standards:
‘The FSA [Food Standards Authority] has undertaken specific work to assess potential food safety risks arising from edible insect products. In May 2022, a generalised risk assessment was conducted by the FSA and Food Standards Scotland (FSS) and found that the safety risks associated with edible insect products are likely to be low, provided the appropriate measures are in place (i.e., labelling on potential allergy risks).
It is a statutory requirement that all relevant edible insects need to undergo a robust safety assessment stage as part of the novel food’s authorisation process. If we find credible evidence to say that edible insects could be unsafe, we will not authorise them; and local authorities, who are responsible for enforcing food law, have the power to remove them from sale.
Under food law all ingredients must be clearly labelled including edible insects. The FSA encourages food businesses to follow relevant industry guidance and good practice to appropriately label their products. Food law requires that any labelling provided must be accurate and not be misleading to consumers. However, it is possible to add specific labelling requirements, over and above food law, as part of the authorisation process if required. We will continue to consider these as the individual assessment of each application progresses.
Be that as it may, note that the newly approved ‘precision engineered’ foods approved in April by our Organic Majesty for the proles, will NOT need to be labelled. And as there has been absolutely no research done on the effects of these foods on the gut biome/allergenic potential, etc, the best bet will be to avoid any form of processed food entirely. Difficult I know, but not entirely impossible.
I honestly think that the insect food makers plans in thinking that people will start changing their diets has a fly in the ointment.
Thank goodness WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted, eh?
“but the Cabinet Office warns that disclosure would be a “serious intrusion of privacy”
But intrusions of privacy are irrelevant where its the little people:
How many people were in our homes during lockdowns, how far we walked, what we put in our shopping bags, was / is a scotch egg a meal, what we said on twitter ten years ago etc
Suck it up Bozo you Next Tuesday.
And adding to my post above look what I found:
“The Australian branch of the Censorship Industrial Complex is well and truly active. As Taibbi notes: ‘Through a freedom of information request, a conservative Australian senator named Alex Antic revealed that the country’s Department of Home Affairs between 2017 and 2022 made 13,636 referrals to digital platforms to review content against their own terms of service. Of those, 9,000 were terrorism-related, but a full 4,213 were listed as “Covid-19 related” referrals.’”
From a TCW article. Link to follow.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/are-the-covid-chickens-coming-home-to-roost/
“intrusions of privacy indeed.”
Anyone would think that trawling through someone’s messages and stumbling across something incriminating should be normal police
stateprocedure (think of the children!)It also shows that just because a conversation is end-to-end encrypted does not mean the authorities can’t discover stuff.
Those same end to end encrypted messages that the Online Safety Bill is looking to abolish? Hoist by one’s own petard…. This is what happens when you dance to another’s tune. You get told to dance where you don’t wish to.
A fine comment BB.
Thank you Hux
Is this his work phone or his private phone? If it’s his work phone then everything on it should be in the public domain. If it’s his private phone then he shouldn’t be using it to discuss government business. He was working for us, paid by us.
I’m very disappointed that the DS team have not shared anything whatsoever to do with the Prof Bhakdi sham accusations and trial. So once again it is down to us lot below the line to do the honours. We know that he was found not guilty but the prosecution want to appeal the decision. It’s blatantly all politics and is pathetically transparent. I wouldn’t blame him if he wanted to leave Germany as a result of this charade.
”During the nearly nine hours which observers spent within the courtroom during the hearing (those who vacated their seats during one of a number of adjournments lost them to one of several hundred people waiting outside, so hardly anyone did) it became quite clear that Professor Bhakdi was indeed a pawn in a game with much higher stakes. “Bhakdi, Defense Counsel Martin Schwab explained, had not incited, not even insulted anyone or harmed Human dignity. “He has explained what the shots are doing! This is not about anti-Semitism”, said Schwab in his final plea, “it is about the fear of those who are responsible for the crimes committed during that false pandemic. They fear that Professor Bhakdi might be called as witness for the prosecution in the tribunal against them once all of this is over.”
Sven Lausen, the second of Bhakdi’s attorneys, elaborated: “This was a vicious charge. Very vicious! Obviously something very different was on the State Prosecutor’s mind than an assessment of arguments in criminal law.”
https://neveragainisnowglobal.substack.com/p/sucharit-bhakdi-how-a-humble-man
Yes, why hasn’t Prof Bhadki’s situation been featured on the DS website, nor on TCW? Good question.
Well I spy about 7 Telegraph articles linked above, as well as other MSM rags, so as usual there’s a heavy reliance on covering issues from that realm. But as you say, DS do often feature the odd TCW article so it’s perplexing really. Fortunately we BTL hopefully provide a balance with all of our contributions, to even things out, as it were.
Yes indeed. Nice response by the WHC:
https://worldcouncilforhealth.substack.com/p/why-prof-bhakdis-court-ruling-will
There’s a full campaign to censor, ban, intimidate, even jail or kill, people who go against big pharma and they will certainly not have finished with the persecution of Professor Bhakdi. In Australia, a few years back, the renowned herbalist Barbara O’Neill was hounded out of her profession, barred from practicing for life, and eventually had to leave the country at the risk of being imprisoned. She did nothing wrong apart from get the attention of the Australian Health (haha) Authority who made unsubstantiated claims against her. She advocates that the power of healing is in the hands of the individual rather than the health services and big pharma, that everyone has a choice and Barbara provides expert information about the human body and the power of herbs to assist healing. She makes no claims that they can cure cancer or any similar disease or condition. Anyway, she is a survivor and has a very good way of dealing with all the stress of losing her lifetime’s work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsbK5TLdAPo
You may be aware of this but you can email them on thedailysceptic@gmail.com
They do respond, sometimes
If, during my meandering searches through the Sceptic sites I find something I believe my fellow “Far right neo Fascists” (
) might be interested in I post it. If DS Editorial subsequently run the same piece it is win win.
Some sites are not even acknowledged such as Patrick Wood ‘s excellent Technocracy News, Off Guardian, Natural News, UK Column News and others. No idea why but if i think an article is valid I post it.
Quite right. Sometimes though I think it would be good if the articles were linked to in the NR or had their own article dedicated to them, as it gives them more prominence.
The gulf between trans athletes and women in sports
I saw this table on Twitter yesterday – for track and field athletics events, it shows the age at which a boy has exceeded the women’s world record. It looks like the average age across all events is round about 15.
There is a bit of a – no sh*t Sherlock – about this, isn’t there? Even the ancient effing Greeks recognised the difference and it’s been a subject of sports medicine research for years!
When women competed in the Heraea Games at Olympia, they ran 5/6 (83%) as far as men, which was the female/male performance ratio of 1928 Olympic champions when women resumed athletics competition. Regarding the Modern Olympics, for running, swimming and rowing, using physics and kinesiology, equations for the velocity ratios of female/male elite athletes were derived and then populated with parameters from studies of over 2000 athletes. Assuming equal training and efficiency, the female/male ratio for running velocity simplifies to the relative female/male lean-to- weight ratio; while for swimming and rowing, the velocity ratio becomes the 8/9th power of the relative lean-to-weight ratio, a remarkable similarity.
Raymond Stefani, Kinesiology Analysis of Athletics at the Ancient Olympics and of Performance Differences Between Male and Female Olympic Champions at the Modern Games in Running, Swimming and Rowing, Athens Journal of Sport, June 2017
You real could not make this up! De frosting wind turbines!
https://youtu.be/FHUCzSJ7Dzs
Can we just share a DS moment to mark the passing of Tina Turner, a true vocal legend. RIP Tina.
https://rumble.com/v2puyz7-legendary-singer-tina-turner-dead-at-83.html
With you, WW. She triumphed over a lot of adversity in her life and developed a strong spiritual core. An incredible singer. RIP.
Hear, Hear…
Bonus point for first correct answer – name the TT song containing the following lyrics:
“A church house, gin house
A school house, out house”
RIP, Tina Turner
No takers? It’s Nutbush City Limits
“A church house, gin house
A school house, out house
On highway number nineteen
The people keep the city clean
They call it Nutbush, oh, Nutbush
They call it Nutbush city limits”
If you don’t know it, take a listen. If you do, take a listen.
I thought your question was a bit of a wind up as the answer was so obvious.
I suppose you are right, HP, given the age demographic on this site…
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/phasing-out-petrol-and-diesel-cars-is-just-pie-in-the-sky/
Some more interesting figures behind the UK’s net zero campaign. Given that the replacement of ICE vehicles is a non-runner (
) it looks like some severe measures will be required to take us off the roads and lock us in the 15 minute ghettos.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/blood-sacrifice/
The post injection menstrual issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zoso8Um9P2M “Astonishing rise in atrial fibrillation says BHF”, by JC. Nothing in particular mentioned as a potential cause by him, but no shortage of it by those who commented on it.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/are-the-covid-chickens-coming-home-to-roost/
An update on Dan Andrews’s prison kingdom.
Morning all!
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/africa-starkly-unvaccinated-and-starkly-unvanquished-covid
Africa Is Starkly Unvaccinated, And Starkly Unvanquished By COVID
Presumably the pro-jabbers will have an ‘excuse’??
https://www.technocracy.news/the-club-of-rome-climate-hysteria-and-global-governance/
Seriously fellow Sceptics this is a must read. Embedded within this article is a ten minute vid. from The Club of Rome detailing exactly what is happening now across the world. The video was recorded in 1973.
Interesting to see Neil Ferguson’s computer at work!
Indeed it is Chris as that computer must be over fifty years old now.