Sunday, December 14, 2008

Davids

David Thompson on The Vestergaard Odyssey.

David T on McCarthyism.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

McCarthy was a disgusting, drunken bully who invented fake "evidence" to support his case. But the conspicuous feature of McCarthyism was that, in broad terms, he was right; that is, he was right that the Roosevelt administration was heavily penetrated by Soviet agents. I suggest we ought to preserve the noun Mccarthyism for the arguments of reckless sonofabitches who, despite absent or faked evidence, happen to be right. The first time I came across a case of scientific McCarthyism, a crook had published a paper with an honest (or middling honest) man, who had finally realised that there were "data" in the paper that had been invented but said of his crooked co-author that "his intuition was so good that the faked data were probably pretty near the truth". There are, or were, people who reckon that Millikan's celebrated oil-drop data were, in my sense, McCarthyite. Hey ho.