Friday, March 08, 2013

Gish and Chavez: I Won't Miss Them

Duane Gish is dead. I won't miss him.

I first heard Gish speak when I was a graduate student at Berkeley; it must have been around 1980. He gave his usual Gish gallop. Although I'd heard Walter Bradley speak in Princeton a few years earlier, this was the first time I had been exposed to really hard-core creationism. It angered me that such a transparent fraud would speak in the name of science. Hearing Gish lie over and over again was what got me involved in fighting pseudoscience.

Hugo Chávez is also dead. It's always mystified me why the Left elevates people like Chávez and Che Guevara to the status of heroes. Although he did improve social conditions in the country, he also was essentially an authoritarian who first tried to gain power through a coup d'état, and later, after being elected, kept power by a cult of personality. Chávez was intolerant of the political opposition and routinely had opponents arrested. I won't miss him, either.

8 comments:

Steve Watson said...

But Stompin' Tom and Max Ferguson OTOH....

Jeffrey Shallit said...

Won't miss Stompin' Tom either - a 5-year-old would be ashamed to write lyrics like "The good old hockey game is the best game you can name, and the best game you can name is the good old hockey game".

Unknown said...

If I had to choose among all the songs written about Sudbury, I'd go with Stompin' Tom:

The girls are out to Bingo and the boys are gettin' stinko,
And we think no more of Inco on a Sudbury Saturday night.
The glasses they will tinkle when our eyes begin to twinkle,
And we'll think no more of Inco on a Sudbury Saturday night.

Anonymous said...

To weave the two topics of this post into one fiber, a hypothetical question. If you (Jeffrey O Shallit) had the level of power which Chavez had, would you feel justified using that power to strip Gish or other creationists of their credentials? Why or why not?

Diogenes said...

Sure college students have Che posters. But who on the left makes a hero out of Chavez?

Jeffrey Shallit said...

Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, the UN, ... How many do you want?

Jeffrey Shallit said...

If you (Jeffrey O Shallit) had the level of power which Chavez had, would you feel justified using that power to strip Gish or other creationists of their credentials?

I'm not sure what you mean by "credentials" here. Do you mean his Ph. D.? Then no, on what basis would a president of a country have power to tell universities how to award degrees?

Takis Konstantopoulos said...

What anonymous probably means is this. If you were (a rational) president of the country, and realized there was a bigot creationist out there, would you try, using your presidential influence, to get rid of him?

(If I was asked this question I would reply, no, but I would try to point out his stupidity and inform people about the dangers of creationism; and I would certainly oppose the teaching of it in schools.)