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.
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As a follow-up to my last post on threats to free speech from the left, it may be instructive to look at some very disturbing trends going on in our neighbor to the north. Canada has increasingly squashed free speech in the name of protecting minorities from offense. For instance, it is now…
In the recent hubbub concerning the use of the Nazi analogy, there are two seemingly unrelated statements that have struck me. The first was from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, while giving a talk at the oldest Jewish synagogue in the United States. The AP reported on November 22, 2004:
In…
Ancient Brit left a comment on a thread below, and the answer became so long and involved - and important, in my view - that I decided to move it up here to its own post. He wrote:
I find it interesting that while Europe has exercised moderate control over hate groups, America has not, and is fast…
As I've mentioned before, I am on the ReligionLaw mailing list run by Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy. It's a valuable resource for many reasons, but especially because I get to interact with and hear the views of some of the preeminent legal scholars on church/state issues, including Doug…
I notice that Wikipedia and SkepticWiki don't have entries for "Galileo Gambit". Someone should make one.
I can see how it might go...
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.