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Comedy Central

Comedy Central

Any show that can get the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue to defend the Inquisition is OK in my book: “COSMOS” SMEARS CATHOLICISM - Catholic League.

At first I thought he was just going to deny the Catholic Church had anything to do with the Inquisition, but no — he actually defends it as a force for “order and justice.”

The propagandists involved in this show, represented most conspicuously by Seth MacFarlane, told viewers last night that “the Roman Catholic Church maintained a system of courts known as the Inquisition and its sole purpose was to investigate and torment anyone who dared voice views that differed from theirs. And it wasn’t long before [Giordano] Bruno fell into the clutches of the thought police.”

The ignorance is appalling. “The Catholic Church as an institution had almost nothing to do with [the Inquisition],” writes Dayton historian Thomas Madden. “One of the most enduring myths of the Inquisition,” he says, “is that it was a tool of oppression imposed on unwilling Europeans by a power-hungry Church. Nothing could be more wrong.” Because the Inquisition brought order and justice where there was none, it actually “saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.” (His emphasis.)

As for Bruno, he was a renegade monk who dabbled in astronomy; he was not a scientist. There is much dispute about what really happened to him. As sociologist Rodney Strong puts it, he got into trouble not for his “scientific” views, but because of his “heretical theology involving the existence of an infinite number of worlds—a work based entirely on imagination and speculation.”

In short, MacFarlane, who is no stranger to the Catholic League, has once again shown his true colors.

Funny Or Die

Also see:
Right-Wing Media Indignant Over President Obama’s Funny or Die Interview

The Mighty Glenn Greenwald gave a presentation at Austin’s SXSW gathering of dudebros today, and since I know LGF readers are busy adults who don’t like to waste time with inconsequentialities, here’s the condensed infographic version of his speech about the perils of being the most honest and moral journalist in the world, courtesy of the very creative and talented folks at imagethink.net.

@ggreenwald @Mlsif the #graphicrecording of your talk is now posted!! Thanks for the insight at #SXSW14 #ggreenwald pic.twitter.com/WQuzsrN6YV

— ImageThink (@ImageThink) March 10, 2014

Here’s the full-sized version (click to enlarge):

I absolutely love how “RUSSIA” is sort of stuck in, way over in the bottom right corner with some squiggly lines and a generic silhouette and no other text, like they had an afterthought as they were running out of room. “Oh yeah, Russia. I guess we ought to at least mention that.”

Sums it up very well.

SoundCloud

The latest Republican crackpot to come out in defense of the Koch brothers and their big, big far right money: the always fully-deranged Michele Bachmann.

Bachmann advocates using the RICO Act against people who criticize the Koch brothers.

I just thank God that there’s a billionaire or two on our side. All the billionaires seem to be on the radical left, so I’m glad that we have a couple on ours. I hope we get a few more that are willing that come out but realize also this is an intimidation movement, I’m sure that the donors on our side don’t like to have their names vilified and that’s what this is about, intimidating people from giving money to our cause, that’s it. There’s something called the RICO statute, the racketeering law, that should be applied against them for doing this.

Some conservatives have started laying into the Oscar-winning movie 12 Years a Slave for creating an unfairly negative portrayal of slavery. You see, the movie portrays slaves being made unhappy by slavery. But that negativity is merely anti-slavery “propaganda,” according to James Bowman in conservative magazine The American Spectator:

If ever in slavery’s 250-year history in North America there were a kind master or a contented slave, as in the nature of things there must have been, here and there, we may be sure that Mr McQueen does not want us to hear about it. This, in turn, surely means that his view of the history of the American South is as partial and one-sided as that of the hated Gone With the Wind.

…Yes, there was much cruelty and hardship in the slave-owning South, as there has been in most of the rest of the world most of the time, and Mr. McQueen’s camera is all over that. But it strains ordinary credulity to suppose that there was nothing else.

We are wondering, was Bowman equally aggrieved by the lack of happy Jews in Schindler’s List?

More: Conservative Mag Slams ‘12 Years a Slave’ for Failing to Portray Happy Slaves