Friday, February 11, 2005

"What You Ought Not To Do, But You Do Anyway"

Powerline has an intersting story on an anti-Catholic libel disseminated recently by the Washington Post: Not Even Voltaire Believed This One

The moral of the story is that news sources that are considered reliable by many people, like the Washington Post, in fact make a great many errors--some innocent, others not. If an assertion sounds outlandish, like the claim that roving bands of 18th century Catholic priests went about hanging people, realize that it may very well be a fabrication. (Or, to take another example, the claim that a Secretary of the Interior expressed the view that environmental preservation is unnecessary in view of the imminent end of the world.) And bear in mind that false statements seem to be made more frequently about some people--Catholics, say, or Republicans--than about others.

Leaving aside Powerline's martyr bit for the moment, I will say this for them; They can pull off dramatic understatement when they want to. Take their comment on this part of the WaPo article:

Still, talk of religion's role in the disaster irks Marty. Following the devastation in Lisbon in 1755, priests roamed the streets, hanging those they believed had incurred God's wrath. That event "shook the modern world," he notes, changing people's idea of a benevolent, all-caring God.

Powerline responds with:

A casual reader of the paragraphs quoted above might attribute the "hanging" reference to Professor Marty.

A casual reader might? Any reader would attribute the reference to Marty. That is only way to uderstand that paragraph, at least the only English understanding.

I guess inventing historical incidents out of whole cloth isn't just for Ward Churchill anymore.

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