April may be the cruelest month overall, but March has been deadly on some of my favorite weblog carnivals.
Fortunately, the Bad History Carnival is back, over at Old is the New Way.
Good! Bad History Carnival is back
March 5, 2007
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Bogus history, History, History blogs, Voodoo history | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Nixon’s dead, but dirty tricks live on
January 31, 2007Do I correctly recall that President Bush suggested Republicans and Democrats can work together?
How long ago was that?
Already the right-wing hoax machine is out in force (Swift Boat Veterans again?). A couple of people sent me the latest hoax against Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, claiming she was advocating a 100% tax on incomes of the rich. To be really fair and accurate, we need to note the hoax has been circulating since at least October.
Pelosi didn’t say she favors a 100% tax. The e-mail circulating is a hoax.
Snopes.com, that grand internet ally for getting the story straight, has a debunking post up.
Here are a few of the victims of the hoax:
- Hang Right Politics (note the odd juxtaposition of the Ben Franklin quote)
- Real Texas Cowgirl
- Illinois Review
- Red Hot Pawn
- The Conservative Army
- Readers at STLtoday.com (a readers’ forum for the St. Louis Post)
- Fort Liberty
It’s almost painful to watch how quickly some people succumb to hoaxes like these. One hopes the perpetrators of the hoaxes get the same twinge of regret that Mencken got from the Fillmore bathtub hoax — but one may be hoping against experience.
So far as I can tell, no one who posted the hoax has yet corrected the post, or noted the error (in a few places, others have written in to note the hoax).
5 Comments | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Bogus history, Current History, H. L. Mencken, Hoaxes, Politics, Quotes, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Why we need to study history
January 27, 2007Do we want to prevent future genocides?
Then we need to study history.
I came across this article from the Azeri Press Agency, noting the death of historian Eric Feigl, who “disproved” the story of the Armenian genocide.
Amazing. Is there an official association of voodoo and bogus historians?
(Here’s a collection of Los Angeles Times pieces about the Armenian genocide and current events around it, including the murder of a reporter who argued for Turkey’s recognizing the events.)
1 Comment | Accuracy, Armenian genocide, Bogus history, History, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Russian creationists miss Stalin’s views in biology
January 3, 2007The good news is that Russian high school biology textbooks talk about Darwin, at long last, after the 74-year rule of the Communists decimated the corps of teachers who taught Darwinian evolution, partly because Darwin was ‘too bourgeois.’
The bad news is that Russian creationists, with what appears to be the support of the Russian Orthodox Church, are suing to bring back the old Stalinist views that Darwin was wrong. The case is loaded with irony, not the least that Theodosius Dobzhansky, the famous biologist who noted that biology is only clear under the light of evolution theory, was devoutly Russian Orthodox.
This case appears to have gone on for some time, but details are only now coming to these shores. The Baltimore Sun had a story on the case today. And, as if one would not guess, it appears the case is brought by a public relations company — perhaps the Moscow branch of the Swift Boat Veterans?
Tip of the scrub brush to Panda’s Thumb, where there is guaranteed to be more discussion of the issue.
Leave a Comment » | Bogus history, Cold War, Creationism, Darwin, Evolution, History, Religious Freedom, Science and faith, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
D. James Kennedy suffers heart attack
January 2, 2007Browsing at Positive Liberty today I first saw the news that the Rev. D. James Kennedy suffered a heart attack, and is hospitalized. Kennedy is the head of Coral Ridge Ministries in Florida, and a leader of the history revisionist movement to rewrite especially textbooks to argue that the U.S. should have a religiously-based government.
It appears the news didn’t get out quickly. The Miami Herald had a story just today, though Kennedy’s heart attack was last Thursday. Jonathan Rowe urges a speedy recovery, so Kennedy can continue to provide material for that blog. I think there’s enough material for this blog without Kennedy, but I wish him a complete recovery anyway.
2 Comments | America's founding, Bad Quotes, Creationism, History, History Revisionism, Hoaxes, Intelligent Design, Science and faith, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Kearny, NJ, supports voodoo history
January 1, 2007A brave kid in Kearny, New Jersey, recorded his high school history teacher doing what can be fairly described as preaching religion instead of teaching history. That should be good enough warning to good and careful history teachers to keep doing their jobs right.
Some citizens of Kearny, however, take a different view: On a city-run internet bulletin board the student gets little support, and his father gets threatened. Jim Lippard at the Lippard Blog has a summary of key details.
And you thought your class a tough room to work?
And a tip of the old scrub brush for tracking the story to Pharyngula.
Postscript: Does anyone know how to pronounce the name of that town? Like Kearns, Utah, or is it like Kearny, Nebraska?
5 Comments | Accuracy, Bogus history, Civil Rights, Curricula, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
‘First, Roy Moore came for Keith Ellison . . .’
December 26, 2006While denying that they have any racist or other xenophobic intent, critics of Minnesota’s U.S. Representative-elect Keith Ellison, like the abominable Dennis Prager, continue to try to gin up reasons why he cannot carry his own scriptures to Congress, why he cannot have the rights that every school child in America has, because the scriptures Ellison carries are Islamic.
Except for Roy Moore, the Xian Nationalist, unreconstructed Christian Reconstructionist, and Christian Dominionist who probably got the memorandum about how they aren’t supposed to talk about it in public, but who lets it fly anyway.
Representing the Great Booboisie, Roy Moore says Ellison should not be seated in Congress at all.
Alabama’s voters were wise to reject Roy Moore as governor, after Moore burned the people so badly when they trusted him to be chief justice of the state’s supreme court, and he instead turned the court into a circus of religious pomposity and disregard for the laws of religious freedom. Another History Blog Fisks the manifold, manifest errors Moore makes.
I cannot escape the feeling that Moore is speaking for most Reconstructionists and Dominionists, Read the rest of this entry »
9 Comments | Accuracy, America's founding, Bad Quotes, Bill of Rights, Bogus history, Civil Rights, First Amendment, Freedom - Political, Good Quotes, History Revisionism, Patriotism, Religious Freedom, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Carl Sagan
December 22, 2006I’m a day behind — but, that just makes it more like real history, no?
Carl Sagan and the Mars “Viking” Lander, NASA/JPL photo
Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan’s death. Several bloggers are blogging to commemorate his memory.
I’ll borrow wholesale; John Pieret at Thoughts in a Haystack pulled out a passage from Sagan’s book, Demon-Haunted World, that has rung true for me. Here it is:
Pieret wrote: For this passage (pp. 414-15), Sagan begins by discussing George Orwell’s 1984 and its roots in Stalinism:
Soon after Stalin took power, pictures of his rival Leon Trotsky — a monumental figure in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions–began to disappear. Heroic and wholly anhistoric paintings of Stalin and Lenin together directing the Bolshevik Revolution took their place, with Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army, nowhere in evidence. These images became icons of the state. You could see them in every office building, on outdoor advertising signs sometimes ten stories high, in museums, on postage stamps.
New generations grew up believing that was their history. Older generations began to feel that they remembered something of the sort, a kind of political false-memory syndrome. Those who made the accommodation between their real memories and what the leadership wished them to believe exercised what Orwell described as “doublethink.” Those who did,not, those old Bolsheviks who could recall the peripheral role of Stalin in the Revolution and the central role of Trotsky, were denounced as traitors or unreconstructed bourgeoisie or “Trotskyites” or “Trotsky-fascists,” and were imprisoned, tortured, made to confess their treason in public, and then executed. …
In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion pictures, and videotapes technologically within reach, with television in every home, and with critical thinking in decline, restructuring societal memories even without much attention from the secret police seems possible. What I’m imagining here is not that each of us has a budget of memories implanted in special therapeutic sessions by state-appointed psychiatrists, but rather that small numbers of people will have so much control over news stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work major changes in collective attitudes.
We saw a pale echo of what is now possible in 1990-1991, when Saddam Hussein, the autocrat of Iraq, made a sudden transition in the American consciousness from an obscure near-ally — granted commodities, high technology, weaponry, and even satellite intelligence data — to a slavering monster menacing the world. I am not myself an admirer of Mr. Hussein, but it was striking how quickly he could be brought from someone almost no American had heard of into the incarnation of evil. These days the apparatus for generating indignation is busy elsewhere. How confident are we that the power to drive and determine public opinion will always reside in responsible hands?
Good things for historians to ponder.
3 Comments | Bogus history, History, Science, Science and faith, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Another test for bogus science and bogus history
December 21, 2006In a post I missed back then, science writer Chet Raymo sets a standard for how science can leave the “bogus” category: He says intelligent design can start to be called “science” when the first paper is published retracting another, previous paper, that was since found to be in error. Raymo wrote:
Here is my litmus test for science.
In the October 7 issue of Science, the weekly journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Robin Allshire, of the prestigious Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh, offers a retraction for a paper previously published in the journal, titled “Hairpin RNAs and retrotransponson LTRs effect RNAi and chromatin-based gene silencing.” He admits that his laboratory and others have been unable to reproduce the results reported in the paper.
When we see the first peer-reviewed experimental data supporting intelligent design or astrology that is reproducible in other laboratories by skeptics and believers alike, then these hypotheses can make a legitimate claim to being sciences.
When we see the first published retraction, we will know that intelligent design or astrology has reached maturity as a science.
Of course, the same is true for bogus history. Corrections made when error is found suggest that there is care for accuracy, and that the author has no great stake in the story other than getting the facts right to get the correct understanding.
I’ll have to revise the list, here, and here.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Catholic Sensibility.
Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Bogus history, History, Hoaxes, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Intelligent design advocates bank on ignorance
December 13, 2006In the later years of his life, after he was elected a Member of Congress from Florida in 1963, Claude Pepper’s appearances on Capitol Hill always generated memories from politicos attending, of the 1950 campaign that took away his U.S. Senate seat a decade earlier. It was a nasty campaign. Because he had actually met Joseph Stalin, Pepper, a Democrat, was called “Red Pepper” by his opponent George Smathers, a moniker designed to produce a particular reaction in Florida’s conservative but uneducated voters. Smathers never hesitated to point out that Harvard-educated Pepper had learned “under the Harvard Crimson.” But that was just the start.
There are a few recordings of the breathless claims against Pepper by campaign stumpers, and they are fantastic. Pepper’s family morality was impugned — the speaker notes that Pepper’s sister was a “well-known thespian” as if it were some sort of a sin to be an actor. Pepper himself was accused of “matriculating in public” all through his college career. It would seem normal that a college student would enroll for classes, no?
Of course, the speaker was hoping the audience wouldn’t know the meaning of those large words, and might confuse them for something else less savory. Pepper’s opponent banked on the ignorance of a large portion of voters — and won.
Do campaigns on ignorance work today?
The Discovery Institute comes now with a press release that announces, in rather breathless fashion, that Judge John Jones used the plaintiff’s suggested findings of fact in his decision against intelligent design in schools, in Pennsylvania a year ago. Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Bogus history, Evolution, History Revisionism, Intelligent Design, Law, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Holocaust denial conference in Tehran
December 12, 2006Some subjects do not lend themselves well to parody. Either the subject is itself so repulsive that parody is unsavory, or it is impossible to tell parody from reality because the reality is so bizarre. As Mark Twain noted, fiction writing is more difficult because it must stick to possibilities, while non-fiction doesn’t. As Dave Barry noted, “I can’t make this stuff up.”
Tehran, Iran, is hosting a Holocaust denial conference.
“Revisionist fringe,” says the headline in the online Independent. Analysis from The Jerusalem Post says it’s mainly the same old stuff, including the denials that the denial of the Holocaust is anti-Semitic. Iranian students protested the stuff — so often it is the students who seriously read history, now, who see what is going on and what is wrong with it — but the story from the online Times of London also carries the photo of the fringe ultra-orthodox Jewish group who showed up at the conference just to voice their opposition to the creation of Israel. A sub-headline in the Times is “‘Nazis and racists’ gather in Tehran.”
One would be much more comfortable were there a floating picture of MAD Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman coming across these stories on-line. But it’s not humor, it’s not parody. It’s really happening.
The ghost of Santayana rests uneasily today.
4 Comments | Bogus history, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Voodoo history, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
The rise of David Barton and bogus history
November 28, 2006Some people were relieved when voodoo history maven Davin Barton’s term as vice chair of the Texas Republican Party expired.
Dallas Morning News editorial writer and occasional columnist William McKenzie warns that we have not seen the last of Barton’s involvement in politics — and textbooks are in Barton’s gunsights.
McKenzie wrote about Barton in the November 28 paper:
Pay attention to his work, because, as Newsweek reported after the election, the religious right is at a crossroads. With big-name leaders declining, lesser-knowns like Mr. Barton will fill the gap. And they will come with their own approach.
The most interesting thing I learned from him was that the next wave will revolve around networks of activists, not the big names who lobby Washington. Look for e-mail blasts that start with a small group upset about a comment or decision about abortion, homosexuality or textbooks. In the decentralized technological world, a David Barton doesn’t need the podium of a Jerry Falwell or a Ralph Reed to trigger a prairie fire.
In other words, watch him.
2 Comments | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Bogus history, Education, Freedom - Political, History, History Revisionism, Politics, Textbook Selection, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
. . . and a little more rope for creationists
November 27, 2006A fellow named Daniel J. Lewis asked for a debate with P. Z. Myers on . . . well, it’s difficult to say, really. Lewis is a creationist, affiliated with the group “Answers in Genesis” — Ken Ham’s group that has a museum in Kentucky ready to open, touting the hypothesis that Hanna-Barbera was not far off of reality with “The Flintstones” humans and dinosaurs coexisted (go to the link, click on exhibit #19). Anyway, PZ asked the regulars to lie low for a while at let Lewis expound. Not likely to happen on a blog that has tens of thousands of readers daily, right?
The premise that Lewis wants to start from is problematical, so I invited him to come by here someday and have a more leisurely chat, where there are far fewer people waiting to pounce on every error. If Lewis ever drops by, this is the thread. This is what Lewis said at Pharyngula:
Then if the blog administrator allows it, I’m available to publicly discuss creation vs. evolution if we can do so on level, intelligent grounds without childish attacks. You can start with your belief system (naturalism), and I can start with mine (the Bible).
I find that a problem because it assumes that science requires a specific belief system contrary to Christianity, and it assumes the Bible establishes a complete philosophical foundation for Christians, which seems awfully narrow to me. Plus, I don’t trust a creationist to define what “naturalism” means as a philosophy, or that science must be bound by that definition. So, in the discussion thread, I said:
Nothing in the Bible contradicts anything Darwin proposed, unless and except we insist on a Darbyist interpretation of scripture only. Is there any tenet of Christianity, especially one based in the Bible, which suggests God couldn’t have created an evolutionary system to make life diverse? Is there any tenet which requires any opposition to evolution or any other finding of science?
When you’re done here, Mr. Lewis, if you’re ever done, c’mon over to my blog and start in again.
Meanwhile, there is some rational discussion on the issue over at a fellow Texan’s blog, A Nerd’s Country Journal (tip of the old scrub brush to Carnival of the Godless #54). That’s a neat summary of my view, consistent with the error debunking goal of this blog: Creationism is bad religion not keeping with the tenets of Christianity, in addition to being really, really bad science.
6 Comments | Accuracy, Bogus history, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Religious Freedom, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
National Humanities Medal to Bernard Lewis . . .
November 26, 2006Generally there is just too much going on to follow all of it in the news, let alone understand it.
PanArmenian.net complains that historian Bernard Lewis’ being honored with the National Humanities Medal is a problem, labeling him a denier of the Armenian genocide. He was found to be so by a French court (does that increase his appeal to Bush?).
Lewis’ work is influential — here is a 2004 Washington Monthly piece by Newsweek correspondent Michael Hirsch, pointing out that Lewis is the guy who probably first coined the phrase “clash of civilizations” with regard to international relations with modern Islamic nations. Is he just one more Princeton University faculty member, like Ben Bernanke, who happens to have the ear of the President?
Teachers of history certainly should be familiar with the controversy over the Armenian genocide, its relation to post-World War I history, its salience in European politics today, and its effects on U.S. history (and especially U.S. literature — think William Saroyan, George Deukmejian, etc.). I admit I know very little about Lewis. I don’t know enough about him to make a judgment on whether the charges of the Armenian partisans are fair.
In my previous post I noted the rise of a superstar natural history prof, in England. Here in the U.S. the National Humanities Medal was awarded to nine people and one institution — one of the people is a Nobel Prize winner — and the news sank like a small, round stone in a small pond, without making much of a ripple.
If we can’t name some of the stars among historians and others in the humanities, are we doing our jobs? Are our newspapers and broadcasters doing their jobs if we don’t get this news?
Did President Bush honor a denier of the Armenian genocide? Our future relations with Islamic nations and peoples may depend on the answer. I don’t know. Do you?
Here is Lewis’ biography from the awards press release:
Bernard Lewis is considered by many to be the greatest living historian of the Muslim world. He has pursued his primary interest, the history of the Ottoman Empire, producing groundbreaking works including The Emergence of Modern Turkey, The Political Language of Islam, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, The Jews of Islam, and Islam and the West. His most recent publication is From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East. Other titles by Lewis: The Crisis of Islam: Holy War & Unholy Terror; What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East; Western Impact and the Middle Eastern Response; A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters and History; The Multiple Identities of the Middle East; and The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. Born in London, England, in 1916, Lewis became attracted to languages and history at an early age. Lewis’s interest in history was stirred thanks to his bar mitzvah ceremony, during which he received as a gift a book on Jewish history. He graduated in 1936 from the then School of Oriental Studies (SOAS, now School of Oriental and African Studies) at the University of London with a B.A. in history with special reference to the Near and Middle East, and obtaining his Ph.D. three years later, also from SOAS, specializing in the history of Islam. During the Second World War, Lewis served in the British Army in the Royal Armoured Corps and Intelligence Corps in 1940-41, and was then attached to a department of the Foreign Office. After the war he returned to SOAS, and in 1949 he was appointed to the new chair in Near and Middle Eastern history at the age of 33. In 1974 Lewis accepted a joint position at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, marking the beginning of the most prolific period in his research career. In addition, it was in the United States that Lewis became a public intellectual. After his retirement from Princeton in 1986 as the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Lewis held many visiting appointments. Lewis has been a naturalized citizen of the United States since 1982.
3 Comments | Armenian genocide, Bogus history, History, History Revisionism, Holocaust denial, Politics, Voodoo history | Tagged: Armenian genocide, History, History Revisionism, Holocaust denial, Politics, Turkey, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Voodoo historian: Harun Yahya and anti-evolution in Turkey
November 22, 2006Voodoo historian and crank scientist “Harun Yahya” (it’s a pseudonym) has done the Rev. D. James Kennedy one better — he’s sending books to school libraries in Turkey claiming that Darwin is responsible for terrorism.
For years U.S. creationists have bragged about their reach into Turkey and Islam. Whether Moslems regard it as a toe-hold for Christianity, or whether American creationists have any compunction about working to stir up religious strife in Moslem nations, sane people who work for peace, justice and knowledge should be concerned.
In a chutzpa-filled claim that would take away the breath of Baron Munchausen, Yahya claims that Darwin is reponsible for fascism, communism and terrorism — never mind that fascists, communists and terrorists generally denounce Darwin and espouse the views of Yahya on evolution.
19 Comments | Accuracy, Bogus history, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Darwin, History Revisionism, Science and faith, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 