Hundreds of plant names are offensive: botanists voted to change them. Really!

This reeks of cancel culture and inquisition! This renaming should be boycotted! This is abhorrent!!!

This reminds e.g. of the renaming of one of the major ML & AI conferences NIPS into NeurIPS or the renaming of monkey pox into mpox and so forth!

Such attempts to rewrite history motivated by some ideology is dangerous! Only 63% of botanists voted for this change in a secret ballot! The infamous tyranny of the majority!

"Botanists today [7/18/2024] voted to change the name of hundreds of plants to remove a racial slur in their scientific names. They also voted to allow a committee to evaluate new species names that could be offensive or derogatory, starting in 2026. ...
This is the first time that botanists have voted on changing names that could be offensive. Their decision will eliminate a “c” in more than 300 scientific names of plants, algae, and fungi that include caf[e]r- and caff[e]r- . The one-letter change would mean removing references to caffra, an Apartheid-era slur used to discriminate against Black people in South Africa, in favor of affra and related derivatives, implying simply that the species has its origins in Africa. ...
In a secret ballot among 556 botanists physically at the Madrid meeting, 63% voted to accept the change. ..."

In a first, botanists vote to remove offensive plant names from hundreds of species

Many plant names are offensive: botanists will vote on whether to change them Researchers at an international meeting will also consider how to monitor names that have problematic roots.

George Hibbert, an eighteenth-century English merchant who profited from the slave trade and fought abolition, lends his name to a genus of flowering shrubs.