Friday, April 23, 2010

Anything Hugo Can Do, Evo Can Do Better

. Friday, April 23, 2010



The president of Bolivia brings the crazy again:

Evo Morales has claimed that both homosexuality and baldness can be caused by the humble chicken.

Speaking at an environmental conference on Tuesday, Morales said chicken producers injected fowl with female hormones and insisted that "when men eat those chickens they experience deviances in being men". ...

Morales's theories do not appear to have been immediately accepted by the scientific community, to put it mildly, and have been criticised by Spain's National Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Transsexuals and Bisexuals, which sent a letter of protest to the Bolivian embassy in Madrid describing the president's remarks as homophobic.


Seriously, what's with these guys? Is there some competition for best crazy talk by quasi-authoritarian that I'm not aware of? Chavez thinks the Haiti earthquake was purposefully caused by a U.S. military experiment and likens Twitter users to terrorists. Ahmadinejad thinks there are no homosexuals in Iran (what... they don't eat chicken there?), which of course inspired the classic video above.

Come on, guys. At least try to act sane.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i think these statements might indicate a greater degree of intelligence/rationality than what you suggest. if their comments are for domestic political consumption, i can see how these comments make sense and are rational for these leaders. since the electoral bases of both men might like these comments (which is plausible, since most are conservative and/or poor and middle class groups who hate MNCs). So, even those these comments seem ridiculous to foreigners and a relatively small number of people within these countries, these people affect less the political survival of these leaders and thus the effects of these comments on these people are less important. these actions suggest that these leaders are normal politicians, behaving like politicians in advanced democracies.

Kindred Winecoff said...

That would be my take as well. This post was intended to be taken sarcastically, but it is probably true that blaming foreigners for everything plays very well at home. We've argued that point on this blog before.

But even if that's true, the locus of crazy just shifts from the leader to the populace.

Anything Hugo Can Do, Evo Can Do Better
 

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