"Astronomy is about as pure and as clean as you can get, so what’s the big deal?”

That's the question an astronomer asked about why, after 13 astronomy experiments on Mauna Kea, 13,000 feet in the air and a pristine location due to lacking 40% of the earth's atmosphere, activists from the mainland have mobilized native Hawaiians into believing the air up there was some sacred space.

It wasn't sacred. Commoners were not allowed to visit on penalty of death. And even elites didn't visit often.

Yet Slate had a physicist beset by virtue signaling and liberal guilt over...something...draft an apology of sorts and tell archaeologists they need to dance to the tune of modern native Americans who only became concerned about telescopes 50 years after they were built, in a place they had never wanted to go because of that air sickness a lot of people get at high altitude.

"And so transcendence can take the form of blindness to differences between people and to our own biases. We assume scientists all think and believe the same things, even beyond the unequivocal data. We are all equal as scientists if we all value the same principles. And what we value comes almost entirely from Enlightenment-era Europe."

You know the ideological fix is in when the Enlightenment is invoked as a bad thing. It's become cliché at this point among the people who want to write dirges about the modern world.

Yet he debunks his belief that science is not for all in his next paragraph when he talks about being in the cafeteria of a particle collider and seeing people from across the world who all spoke the same language: science. It did not matter their gender or their sexuality or their race or their height, the laws of nature was common ground. He then dismissed it all and delves into postmodern belief that natives should get to overrule all of that when environmentalists show up to do to Hawaii what they did to Mt. Graham on the mainland. It's like saying people motivated by the supplement industry to be terrified of vaccines need to be given special treatment when it comes to discussions about spreading infectious preventable diseases.

No, they don't. That creates tyranny of the minority, and catering to so many conflicting cultural constituencies is what got science into the mess it is in. We allowed people to contend it is just another world view.