There’s this guy whose selling tee-shirts with a picture of curious George on them, and the caption:  Obama in ‘08.

Some people are objecting to that based on the idea that it is racist.  Seems to me, that, given the vocabulary of racist speech, it sure looks like the intent of the tee-shirt is racist.

I mean, it is not uncommon in history to refer to non-whites as “monkeys”, or to imply that they are of various “kinds” that are just above monkeys on a hierarchy of beings with Aryans at the top.

If you look at Hitler’s assertion in Mein Kampf, and other examples of the idea that each species only produces its own “kind”*, and read racist literature about the “unnatural” nature of “hybridization” (mating two different species to create a hybrid…like crossing horses and donkeys to produce mules), you can see how comparing Obama to a chimp could be called hate speech.  It could easily be seen as tapping into those old "heirarchy of creation" ideas and implying that Obama is part of some hierarchy of creation  where being a black man puts him just above chimp, but far below a white man.

Then again, I got much amusement from that one website that compared pictures of president Bush to pictures of chimps…and while there’s not a lot of historical precedent for comparing whites to being just above chimps on the pre-natural selection  hierarchical scale of creation…it was certainly mean-spirited and tasteless.  The fact that it’s not part of a long-standing hate tradition doesn’t really help a lot.

The guy producing the tee-shirt says it wasn’t intended to be part of the “each kind produces its own kind” top-down structure of racial bigotry tradition, but was instead merely of the “say something randomly insulting about your political opposition” school like what they did when they compared Bush to a chimp.

So, what do you think?  Hateful?  Or merely rude and tasteless? 

*the current incarnation is called “microevolution”.  Like Hitler, the Intelligent Design people assert that there is no common descent relationship between species, only improvability within species.  Most of the IDiots currently seem to reject the idea that the different human “races” are different species…and they also seem to reject the idea of artificial improvability…so it’s nice to know they agree with Darwinian theory on those two points anyway.

Oh yeah, and can someone go over here and tell me if Michael Medved's take on genetics is as warped as PZ Myers says it is?  PZ has some quotes and it seems as though Medved is making a case for the genetic superiority of white Americans because our ancestors came here due to their capacity for risk-takeing (not desperation, not deportation, not the economic incentives offered by some governments), and blacks were brought here by force.

It's unbelieveable to me that a fellow at the Discovery Institute would have such a poor understanding of genetics and history..wait...no it isn't.

It is also not unbelievable to me that an IDiots would blame the Holocaust on ideas that have nothing to do with the theory of natural Selection, but attribute them to the theory anyway, and then go on to spout those same ideas to prove how we are superior to other human beings.

How many different ways can one group of men be wrong about the same thing if they are allowed to contradict themselves?  Eventually, they will find the limit.