Orac gets fan mail

Here's a comment that popped up in my moderation queue for an article I wrote on the old blog several months ago:

The Holocaust is a huge money maker for Jews; one they do not wish to lose. Irving's and Zundel's struggle in our time is analogous to Galileo's struggle with discovery that threatened the TPTB's power structure.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Now the Holocaust deniers are pulling the Galileo gambit. This guy needs to get a clue. As much as I find the law that sent him to prison for three years to be an offense against free speech, Irving is no Galileo.

More like this

I can see how it might go...

Galileo Imprisoned For Heavenly Sphere Denial

The controversial scientist Galileo Galilei has recieved a larger than expected jail sentence for 'Denying the Heavens'.

A fierce critic of geocentrism - and what he calls "The Geoish Conspiracy" - the author is a hero to many who believe that Heliocentrism should be publicly debated.

Galilei is on papal record as saying, "The crystal spheres are a myth. They could not hold the millions of stars required of them according to Geos. The catholics make a lot of money from this lie."

Someone should do a bit of research -- it's probably not a big enough subject for a dissertation, but it would probably support a good undergraduate thesis or maybe a master's -- into the history of the Galileo Gambit. Seems to me that it's a great deal more prevalent than it was even 10 years ago, or in the preceding few decades.

This is just anecdotal, but I'm more attuned to Galileo references than average, and it seems this way to me.

I suppose it's due to much more serious attempts to make various pseudosecience activities respectable. The obvious example is ID, and there's global non-warming and the rest. It's funny to see the "I'm being persecuted like Galileo" gain popularity in parallel with "Galileo wasn't really persecuted", another popular subject at present.