Dispatches from the Creation Wars

Samuel Chen Joins the Smear Campaign

Posted by Ed Brayton on May 5, 2006
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Just when you thought all of the clowns had exited the ID car to compare Judge Jones to Hitler and Stalin, Samual Chen of Baylor jumps out of the trunk to add his 2 cents to the fun. Only he’s even more blunt about it. He cites the exact same four bad guys from Time’s previous lists – ignoring, of course, all the good guys they’ve honored like Ghandi, Churchill and Martin Luther King – and says:

Either way, congratulations to Judge Jones on joining a long line of famous, or infamous, leaders. Hopefully the dictatorship he aims to set up in education falls like the dicatorships set up in governments by Hitler and Stalin.

Well yes, because demanding that science classes teach actual science and not PR-driven nonsense is virtually identical to murdering millions of Jews and Ukrainians. They’re so comparable, one can scarcely tell the difference. How does someone capable of making such a ridiculous comparison manage to get into any college other than Liberty U or Bob Jones?

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Comments

  1. #1 Raging Bee
    May 5, 2006

    I’ll remember this next time someone gets all pissy about lefties comparing Bush to Hitler.

  2. #2 BigDumbChimp
    May 5, 2006

    Like I said in another post Chen is a complete clown. His blog shows how hard it is for him to keep a cognitive line of thought going without heaping in self praise and sucking at the tit of Demsbki et al.

  3. #3 bourgeois_rage
    May 5, 2006

    What a shill!

    Well, I guess it was either this, or they’d be touting this as support from Time for ID. The could be saying that by acknowledging Jones they were saying how important ID is. Oops, that’s next week.

  4. #4 mw66
    May 5, 2006

    The hypocrisy is so thick you couldn’t even cut it with a knife; you’d need a blowtorch. If Jones had decided for them they’d be hailing him as a Christian hero. It’s funny how judges are only “activist” judges when they don’t decide the way the theocratic wingnuts want them to.

  5. #5 Ed Darrell
    May 5, 2006

    Mountain/Molehill disease: How is it that they conflate a cover listing 100 people who influenced the last year with Time’s “Person of the Year” award, which comes out in December, and this past year went to “Good Samaritans,” featuring a cover photo of Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates?

    Are the wackos at DI and Chen actually saying that the Good Samaritan is equal to Hitler in all things?

    It’s not just that the ravings of self-proclaimed unheathen are generally somewhat vapid, they are so venal, and ill-thought, too.

    The Dover case really, really unhinged the ID advocates. They’ve become like Capt. FitzRoy at the Huxley/Wilberforce debate, little more than raving, Bible-thumping lunatics in the back of the room.

  6. #6 boojieboy
    May 5, 2006

    IDers are desparate for something, anything, that will give them some traction in the public arena, and Chen’s post is further evidence for that desparation.

    Unfortunately, what they are NOT desperate for is public mindshare. Falling back on emotional attacks is one way of preserving that mindshare. When people aren’t motivated to reject their arguments, they’ll be willing to accept cheap attacks like this without much thought. One way to increase their motivation would be to try to create some serious cognitive dissonance.

    Seems to me like it might be the right time to push forward with a tactic that IDers have used a lot: point out the serious rifts within their own community, between YECists and IDers. The people with the gleam of credibility that comes from association to higher ed institutions (e.g. Behe) generally don’t accept the young earth idea, and they also accept that evolution has happened, and even accept the idea that we share our ancestry with apes.

    Then hit ‘em with the Vatican’s insistence that creationism is neo-paganism. Finally, finish with the moral terpitude of their stars like Dembski and anyone else you can think of.

    We could call it our Wedge Strategy.

  7. #7 Cody Cobb
    May 6, 2006

    boojieboy,

    I rather prefer the sound of “Pointy Stabby Thing Strategy”: the needle that plunges into the heart and various extremities of the non-methodological supernaturalism movement.