St. Paul and Minneapolis Archbishop John C. Nienstedt fights off the lynch mob:
Ramsey County Attorney John Choi (l) and St. Paul Police Chief Tom Smith (r)
Back in December, police began a surreal criminal investigation into whether St. Paul and Minneapolis Archbishop John C. Nienstedt somehow "inappropriately touched" a boy four years ago in broad daylight in front of crowds of people outside a church following a public Confirmation ceremony.
If anyone needed another example of the wildly disparate treatment of Catholic clergy by the media and by law enforcement, one needs to look no further than this batty episode.
Common Sense on Vacation
Police finally concluded just last week what any clear-thinking individual would have known from the beginning: that nothing even remotely inappropriate ever took place.
But their conclusion was not reached until after a mob of investigators conducted an intensive three-month investigation with over a dozen interviews with "witnesses" and pored over photographs of the day in question like the F.B.I. examining photos of Dealey Plaza on the day that JFK was assassinated.
Think about that. All those public resources and tax dollars were expended to examine the nutty claim that a Catholic clergyman had in some way molested a boy while having his picture taken at a public event in front of hundreds of people.
Not only did the wild-eyed zealots at the anti-Catholic group SNAP admit that the kooky claim against Nienstedt was "pretty implausible," but even the boy who was at the center of the episode said that he "did not feel violated," that he was "concerned about the attention the incident was receiving," and that he "did not believe the incident was significant."
So the obvious question about the whole episode is: Why did such a bogus and inconceivable case receive so much public attention and waste so many tax dollars?
Public officials now ceding to the media lynch mob
As we have relayed a number of times before, the media in Minnesota has been on a nasty crusade against Archbishop Nienstedt and the Catholic Church. And now it seems that local officials charged with impartially enforcing the law have ceded to the media pressure.
Ramsey County Attorney John J. Choi and St. Paul Police Chief Tom Smith have not only bowed to the media's lynch mob mentality but also wasted limited public resources with the goal of garnering media attention and free publicity. (Choi just-so-happens to be running for re-election this year.)
And so it goes: the media's hysterical coverage of sex abuse in the Catholic Church has led not only to the Church being unfairly maligned in the public square but has also led to witch hunts by opportunistic public officials for good free press.
Can Choi be impeached for this?
What a despicable farce. Names of the aiders and abetters duly noted. Let's make sure the personal details of the false accuser/liar are published and propagated – as a warning to those who may live and work nearby to be on the look-out for a scumbag liar.
Interesting record Choi has: from leftist union and media involvement (a rich laboratory in which to grow the lefty germ), to reparative justice initiatives. Noteworthy that there is no mention of his 'politics' at the link provided, such as his party affiliation. No doubt he's running as far away his Democrap Czar-in-Chief, Obama.
How many of these misfits persecuting the Church are lefties? I would guess most, but, has anyone done this research, yet?
Have any priests been categorized as "credible pedophiles' for brushing (or, almost) past any minors on crowded streets, mass transit, or on the way into/out of a concert or theatre, yet?
If it wasn't actually ruining lives, this lefty witch hunt, and it's collection of persecuting and accusing Dick Tracy characters, could actually be comical.
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/double-trouble-the-leftist-threat-and-the-islamist-threat
Not the first time I introduced this leftist-Islamist connection; here it is again from another source.
It is no stretch of the imagination to see the void being forced upon our culture with the ongoing offense against the Catholic Church, which will make it very ease for the Islamists to occupy. It's physics.
This remarkably odd groping-in-public bit did not occur in a vacuum. Since the resignation of the Archdiocesan staffer last Spring we have seen a stream of remarkably odd bits here on Jeff Anderson’s home turf.
Readers may recall: With that State’s legislature poised to pass extensions to the Statute of Limitations, there was the resignation of the Archdiocesan staffer, who then went to MPR with her ‘story’.
Then there was the deeply-dubious and contorted burst about a priest’s alleged stash of child-porn on a long-sold computer, including the sudden claim by a long-ago purchaser of the computer that he had made a complete copy of the alleged child-porn and then forgotten about it until ‘just now’, and then the entire issue disappeared without any resolution or official or media explanation whatsoever after the police said they just wanted to talk to the Archbishop and the Archbishop agreed to talk to them.
Then this utterly extraordinary bit about the Archbishop – in the middle of all this brouhaha – allegedly groping a child while they were standing for a formal group photograph (as a result of some sacramental event, if I recall). And now this too suddenly goes away, although it has taken the police quite a while to determine that there was no basis to the allegation (raising the unhappy thought that the police simply didn’t want to overload the news with yet another story of a strangely-disappearing non-event and waited a while before finally acknowledging their conclusions).
As I have said before, the behavior of neither the police nor the media does anything to inspire confidence in all of this, and it is – disturbingly – perfectly plausible that a great deal of the recent goings-on have been collusively ‘manufactured’ by the police and media, for purposes as yet unknown but which certainly seem to work to the detriment of the Archdiocese and the Archbishop and to work toward the purposes of local heavy-hitter and ‘connected’ torties (who, given the SOL-extension, might need some publicity to prime the Stampede’s pump and drum-up a fresh crop of those-who-finally-come-forward).
There are many possibilities and they beg for further examination and information. But I would say that one explanatory scenario that is certainly beyond any probability whatsoever is that in all of this, a) the police have simply been minding their normal duties and business until possible-criminal events have been brought to their attention and then conducting perfectly standard and appropriate and full investigations and b) the local media have simply been dutifully and fully reporting on same.
And given the geography of the whole thing, I would also wonder about the gravitational pull of any heavy-hitting Stampede attorneys whose orbit passes through this whole neighborhood.
Too bad this Archdioscesian trick, along with all the others, has backfired. Nobody was distracted. And people still want answers, not more lies, stonewalling, and coverups.
The despicable farce is this article and Mark's comments above. A child reported the touching to other adults who then, out of an obligation to report, did just that. The system worked as it should, the allegation was investigated and the bishop cleared. The child never sought to make this a big deal, the adults did, as well as the Media Report who relished the idea of screaming foul yet again.
But wait, the Media Report's David would have you believe the police should have just dismissed this allegation without anykind of investigation, after all, what would make anyone believe a priest, let alone a bishop would grope a child? Could it be that since thousands of child victims have come forward making credible allegations of sexual abuse by clergy, that this just might have happened? Unlike church official, civil authorities won't dismiss such charges WITHOUT A REAL investigation. Not just based on a priests claim "I didn't do it".
How would you feel if you were investigated for crazy stuff like this and your reputation ruined?
Nothing further.
So long as the very same rules apply to Another Mark and every other non-priest, and it is the will of the people and not a political witch-hunt, go for it.
Things are going to get awfully touchy out there and awfully crowded in the precincts and courtrooms. You must have plenty of tax dollars to waste on your grudge.
In this insane atmosphere, the character "Fr. O.Malley" (played by Bing Crosby) would be investigated even for saying to "dial O for O'Malley".
What "insane atmosphere"? The one you've invented? The "persecution" that wasn't there?
FYI, Bing Crosby used to beat his first family's sons brutally. One or two of them committed suicide. And one of his identical twin sons, Phillip, was also molested by a priest if I remember correctly. He didn't "carry moonbeams home in a jar". (Lyrics of Crosby's hit song as fr. O'Malley in Going My Way)
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/16/dutch-based-international-pedophile-ring-busted/
Choi and Smith were simply doing thier jobs, now only if our bishops would only lead like the servants they were called to be? Just imagine how many catholics would have never shaken the dust from thier feet and walked away if we had pastoral shepards and NOT princes of this church? Constantly pointing out others shortcomings hardly resolves the real issue, countless children, yes children and families have been greviously harmed by clergy who abused thier trust and molested children. There is certainly no arguing those facts, thankfully in this case, perhaps no child was harmed. Just because someone is not tried or convicted does mean he or she didn't commit a crime.
Is that true for you, too, Another Mark? What crimes have you committed (or, were you actually convicted)?
Presumed guilty applies to you, too- right, so, if Choi or Smith want to run you through the legal mill with their unlimited public resources (you got plenty of cash for attorneys, I hope) because some kid you passed on a street said you touched her/his bottom, you're OK with that, right?
Now that the clergyman is cleared of any wrong doing, do the perpetrators of false accusations and character assassinations face some responsibilities for their shameless and vigorous attempt to tarnish the image of an inocent citizen or is it business as usual because it's attack of Religion and Catholic Church in particular?
Good question.
"Good question" ! Really? Was the bishop arrested? No. Was the bishop put on trial? No. Was the bishop falsely accused for personal benefit of the accusor? No. Was an investigation made and nothing relevent was found? Yes. There were no charges. End of story.
It isn't as if your clergy has no history regarding touching children. Oh! I forgot. According to you the vast majority of our claims against you are lies. All of us "morally trained" catholic children just became liars and thieves to screw with you an god.
The catholic church cries poor mouth and bankruptcy at the same time it declares itself to be the largest charitable giver in the world. How do you justify those paradoxical positions?
Plenty of 'morally-trained' ex/former and dissident Catholics became liars and thieves, beginning with Judas and through to the current generation- including mostly yours.
They became adulterers, fornicators, murderers, and homosexuals and heretics and addicts and all sorts of un-Catholic sinners/persons- are you serious?
Your priestly generation "became" many of the same things you just mentioned.
So everyone who's not a catholic is hellbound? What a splendid example of love you are.
Yep- you will note that I did mention Judas – one of the Apostles, as straying from God's plan? Jesus warned us about wolves in sheeps clothing- didn't you ever get to that gospel/scripture during your stint Catholic school? Were you otherwise 'engaged'?
Anyone who isn't aligned with Jesus' gospel/preaching/teaching (for Catholics, we follow the Catholic Church's Magisterium teachings) is potentially bound for hell, including offending priests- no one on earth has the authority to exclude them from the final judgement of God.
Your not-so-hidden 'baiting' to draw Catholics into debate about who does or doesn't go to heaven or is/isn't saved isn't working – you are a theological amatuer ('midget') among pros ('giants'), so, do yourself a favor and stay in your lane (which, according to you is pink and sparkly and lined by marshmallow guardrails)-
"There is certainly no arguing those facts, thankfully in this case, perhaps no child was harmed. Just because someone is not tried or convicted does mean he or she didn't commit a crime."
"Certainly ….perhaps …..Just because…. " What on earth is that supposed to mean?
After 44 years of living with an adult who has never been permitted closure for his atrocotities by clergy as a child, I would suggest that any investigation is acceptable as long as the truth is finally established.
Re the suggestion by Constance Taylor, on the 20th March, that "any investigation is acceptable as long as the truth is finally established". This makes sense as far as it goes, but wouldn't such an investigation be just as effective if done quietly, without all the publicity that surrounded the allegations?. We know that if you throw enough mud then some will always stick. Surely the universal human right… of being presumed innocent until proven guilty.. is being trampelled on here, in this dreadful witch hunt against the clergy. So investigate all you want… but only identify the alleged perpetrator after he has been ordered to stand trial. This would protect many individuals who are falsely accused for money and/or malice.
Having read more details about this case, the accuser said the bishop touched his behind while they were standing in a group photo shoot.
Now the point of this article is to say that for someone to think a bishop, or any other public person, or any person at all, would try to 'cop-a-feel' in broad daylight during a photo-op at a religious celebration is just too ridiculous.
I tend to agree because it is only our modern world's prejudice against priesty celibacy and their baseless assumption that it leads to perversion, that is driving any suspicion in this case.
Years ago celibacy was praised as 'the better way' and sexual liscence they thought led to mental problems…. what a far way we have descended.
Rod or Furlong, you just don't measure up.
How interesting discussing people who weren't abused but never discussing or compensating, on the whole, those who were abused. Avoid and distract.
A priest friend was accused because when he put his arm around the shoulder of a girl she moved and his hand just brushed against her breast. He was removed from his high school ministry, waited for a year before his case was filed. When he was cleared and the judge said it was a ridiculous action the local bishop moved him to a parish, what this priest did not want, and two years latter he died of pancreatic cancer. These stories of falsley accused priests need to be told more and more.
Cardinal Joseph Bernadin died of pancreatic cancer not too long after he was accused. His denial was very public being such an important figure. His suffering and death was mourned by the world.
The accuser allegedly discovered in hypnosis that he was abused by Bernadin. He later recanted and Bernadin met with him and forgave him. The man then died of AIDS. No doubt that the ordeal did not help Bernadin's fight against cancer.
And on the 20th at 843PM we are given a pitch-perfect example of the Playbook gambit of I’m Not/You Are: by examining the oddness of this entire series of events, it is the questioners who are trying to “avoid and distract”.
While simultaneously – and as always – trying to get the play to begin at first base rather than an at-bat at home plate by seeking to manipulate us to presume that a) none of the questioners were ever “abused” which then clears the path for b) the implication that we may rely on the genuineness of any who claim that they were “abused”.
Distracting again aren't you? You distract by discussing ad nauseum an incedent that was deemed a non incedent. Meanwhile back at the ranch you have all the truely raped you never discuss. Hence "Avoid and distract".( i knew you'd jump on this. You have so little else.)
So per usual no discussion of the really raped. Only talk about those who weren't hurt at all. Subject avoided. distraction enacted.
Let it be noticed, just stop and let it detonate in your brain for a moment that Frank Vitus just implied (March 21, 2014 at 8:55 am) that a 'false' accusation against a priest precipitated the priest's death by pancreatic cancer. Frank Vitus' anecdote may not even be based on a true story but the implcation is clearly made. Too bad the priest was not able to get to Lourdes in time to be cured.
March 21, 2014 at 8:55 am
Amen LDB!
Let it be noticed, that the March 21, 2014 at 8:55am post was nothing more than a friend lamenting the persecution of (directly related to the TMR subject article) and subsequent penalty and finally loss of his friend.
Too bad there is no cure, in heaven or on earth, for the evil that ails you.
What is the point of your 'contribution', other than to troll?
"Subsequent penalty"? Pancreatic cancer isn't a " subsequent penalty". it's a disease.
Delphin-I don't see where you called the disease that killed this priest friend that Frank Vitus speaks of a "subsequent penalty". Could you be kind enough to explain to Jim what you meant so the spinning can stop right now, He doesn't understand and is making a deceitful point again. P.S. JR there are many people who have benefited by visiting Lourdes. You should try it sometime. What you now do is not helping you one bit.
Josie- my first response to the intentional misreading and distortion of my statement by the resident whiner was not posted by TMR. I will try to clear the moderators sword here: the transfer to a parish is clearly meant to be the 'subsequent penalty' target referenced in Frank's post, and not the disease, which is clearly referenced to the loss.
Only a diseased mind could distort such a straighforward statement.
Imagine what these same diseased, twisted minds do regarding accusations against priests and any attempts at their defense. Pitiful.
There is a direct correlation (not causation) between psychological stress and pancreatitis. There is also a direct correlation between pancreatitis, especially the chronic form (as opposed to acute) and pancreatic cancer. Since this requires math at a level of 1+1=2, it will likely have to be explained to some commenters here.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15286435
Sorry JR, the P.S.was meant for LDB who was making fun of Lourdes cures.
So you didn't mean his pancreatic cancer was the accussed priest"s "subsequent penalty"? But then both you and Josie blame "false accusations" for causing or in cardinal Bernadin's case exaserbating his pancreatic cancer? ( Bernadin by the way paid his accusor. If the charges were false, why the payment? )
[edited by moderator]
Another claimants lie- I didn't blame Bernadin's cancer on anything. Good grief man, the simple law of probability, if nothing else, would have you stumble into the truth more than you have on the abuse matter and every other item your feeble brain attempts to tackle.
Tell us again how beneficial your lifestyle of endless drugs and sex has been for your community-
My "lifestyle" of "Endless drugs and sex"? If I had been on "endless drugs" I wouldn't be 67. Endless sex sounds like heaven to me. Wake me up when that starts. I wouldn't want to miss it.
Keith Richards is over 70, he (and hordes of others like him) did endless drugs – your retort is hooey.
Remember, dear, for you heaven does not exist (which is probably akin to your 'love' life)-
It’s hard to keep things tidy but it has to be done. JR has found some new toy and he is going to drag it around the place no-matter-what.
What “incident” [correction supplied] am I “discussing ad nauseam” [ditto] which was “deemed a non-incident” [ditto]? To be accurate: I pointed out a series of non-incidents that a) at the time were blared to the public as incidents and that b) disappeared without any explanation of how they suddenly had become non-incidents. And recognizing the complications flowing from (b) is as important as recognizing the complications flowing from (a).
And in focusing attention on that series of curious and dubious non-incidents, from what then am I “distracting” readers?
And the answer to that question is – waitttt for itttttttt – that I am not discussing the “truly raped” [ditto[. Which, of course, brings us back as always to first-base but not to any actual at-bat at home plate. Hence the inapplicability of the following “Hence”.
Thus we proceed to the lament about “no discussion of the really raped” – although on this thread we are discussing the dynamics of how the media and police handle material in the Twin Cities and thus on this thread the “really raped” (meaning, apparently, the genuinely-raped, of whom there appear to be so very few) are not the topic of discussion. But if it weren’t for bringing-up this (profoundly problematic) red-herring, what else would JR have?
But there is a method to the madness in this whole bit from the 21st at 1203PM: all of the possible problems arising from this series of events in the Twin Cities area are sidetracked by an effort – however irrelevant to the thread – to simply distract attention by waving the ‘raped’ flag – as if readers were nothing but bulls to be be distracted by waving the red-cape (or, if you wish, ‘rape-cape’) in front of them. (Readers might recall that hardy Republican political stratagem that lasted from 1865 to the outset of World War 1: ‘waving the bloody shirt’.)
And we have already dealt extensively in comments on this site with the ‘rape’ trope and the numerous definitional and credibility and probability issues attached to it.
But what else does the Stampede have? It is the stories – not their accuracy or veracity – that form the only fuel for the Stampede.
Some readers may have been watching this week’s replays of the TV series “DaVinci’s Demons” (as the new season prepares to debut this weekend). In one episode, a judge is lectured thus: ‘The more scandalous the accusation, the greater the people’s appetite for it’ and ‘Lies or truth are irrelevant – the best story wins’. These statements rather acutely sum up the guiding maxims as to how a Stampede is initiated and sustained.
Thus, in the Playbook, the solution to any un-congenial turn of attention toward the problems with the Stampede is to simply hop up and down waving the ‘story’ and hope that attention will once again be diverted and distracted away from any analysis or assessment.
I only wish the catholic church was being "attacked". It most seriously deserves to be. Why? Because it gives away millions through it's charities but refuses to pay the people it raped. You're still punishing your victims for mentioning the crimes committed against us. When will you compensate your raped?
JR makes the comment on March 22nd…. "when will you compensate your raped?". Sometimes I think that whoever wrote the Playbook studied at the 'Joseph Goebells College of Public Propaganda' because the Playbook frequently resorts to Goebell's basic manipulative strategy….'the bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed'.
JR's words follow the Playbook, claiming that the 'raped' actually exist… and are waiting for 'justice' in the form of money. After having swallowed the 'big lie', the general public will sympathise with the 'raped' and despise the 'guilty' Church. The Nazi Minister for Public Information had the great advantage of absolute control over the mass media, therefore any opposing views were silenced. Today the mass media are, generally speaking, perpetuating 'big lies' for their own hidden agenda. Those of us who can still think for themselves will continue to question. To begin with the sexual abuse of children would be one of the worst crimes that could be levelled at any man. It follows that nobody should be assumed to be guilty of such a shocking crime unless he has been reported to the police, investigated, charged, and convicted in a real court of law. Remember that 'the court of public opinion' is no better than a 'lynch mob'. Because their attitudes and prejudices can easily be manipulated by the mass media. Hopefully they cannot fool all of the people, all of the time.
Thank you for comparing me to a murdering Nazi. Given your church was one of the Nazi party's biggest supporters. Fascism came from catholic Italy, (the vatican "state" owes it's literal existence to Mussolini) It's Germanic version was born in catholic Austria and Bavaria. Let's not forget Franco's catholic Spain and the dear relationship between the church and the generalissimo.
If you base your arguements here on "false claims" could you give us some actual examples?
Mr. Harris you are from Australia. The archdiocese of Sydney is worth well over 1 billion dollars. It has a PROFIT!!! of 43 million a year. It spent 1.5 million dollars fighting a $100,000 victim's law suit. Will Sydney's arch diocese be declaring bankruptsy soon?
Mr Harris can you afford a libel suit? Call me a liar again and we will see if you can.
Dont be silly, you'd have to pay a lawyer to sue Malcolm since he isn't your most cherished target, the well-insured Catholic Church (no contingency option there, genius) – which means you'd have to part with some of that that blood money you 'claimed' from the Church (aside from the fact that his home country would rightfully laugh you out of their jurisdiction). No lawyer in the US would take on your ridiculous defamatory claim, either (you and your silly claims) against the factual historical statement contributed by Malcolm.
This one's tight as a clam, Malcolm, you have nothing to worry about - a typical liberal-leftist that is uber generous only with everyone else's money.
His revisionist history about the Catholic Church is a lie, that's a fact, that makes him a…what? Truth-teller? But, doesn't his typical go-to place 'sue, sue, sue' say everything we need to know about him and other 'claimants? The Church needs to take that page from his sordid life-book and sue the claimant frauds for defamation.
He'll need to defer back to his usual na-na boo-boo antics to try to shut down opposition and debate here.
O.K. I won't be silly. "Blood money" huh? My Blood My money and your problem, oh dear oh dear.! If i'd been hit by a priests car would you call my compensation "blood money"? Well would you? Answer me.
And what exactly are we debating here? You never answer my questions. I answer yours.
How do you justify the fact that on one hand your church declares bankruptsy and cries poor mouth and "blood money" when it comes to victims and at the same time patting itself on the back for being the largest charity in the world. You might want to pay your bills before you start giving money away. Fiscally it would be sound. Morally too. Why can't you get that?
Since we are on the topic of media coverage of the Abuse Matter on this thread:
Readers may be aware of the Vatican announcement late last week that the Pope has put together an Vatican-level abuse-committee that includes a number of assorted experts from many nations. (It strikes me that the group’s brief is far more expansive than any American Abusenik would prefer: the focus seems to be on child-abuse generally (i.e. not just sexual) and on its many instances occurring around the world in many venues (i.e. not just the Church.))
The American member is Cardinal O’Malley of Boston.
By the most amazingest of coincidences (as so often happens in the Catholic Abuse Matter, no?), Barbara Blaine of SNAP just happened to be (suddenly?) invited to Boston to speak to a local abuse-group over the weekend. This is reported in the Boston Globe today on page B-1 of their local or ‘Metro’ section, replete with two photos. (The article itself is, as best I can determine, behind a pay-wall.)
The local group is apparently organized around child-abuse generally, and one of its leaders is quoted as saying that the Church abuse instances represent only “a fraction” of the abuse-instances about which the group is concerned but – for some reason – the group yet went and invited Blaine on what was either remarkably short-notice or by an amazing coincidence indeed. (Perhaps there weren’t enough folks in the local SNAP chapter to do the inviting themselves.)
There are two photos included. One is of Blaine standing all nice and gussied up behind a podium in what appears a rather small conference room. The second photo, taken from the podium area, and rather curiously close-up in focus, shows about ten people sitting in two rows of chairs, and the wall and windows behind them indicate that the room is so small that there would not be room for a third row (nor were there any standees squeezed in along that back wall).
Blaine delivered the usual SNAP bits (the Church is not doing enough; this is just window-dressing; etc etc) and then went over to the local Cathedral (i.e. Cardinal O’Malley’s) where she mentioned the on-going SNAP ‘vigil’ at Sunday Masses there, which has been going on for a dozen years or so. No photograph of the squad on duty at the Cathedral; we recall that the gaggle that showed-up for the 10th anniversary world-conference 2 years ago had to be trick-photographed by the Globe to make it appear more numerous that it really was.
And this disproves my false flag accusations against SNAP how? Everything Blaine did was geared to show exactly what you've written about: Stupid press conferences. Ill focused public attacks on the church by very few people. Everything done with the final outcome arranged to make victims look arbitrary and meally mouthed. (Blaine's entire Modus Operendi imho) What you see from SNAP is exactly what you were meant to see. It's exactly how the church wants victims to be seen. How after 30 years of "leadership" do those behaviors of SNAP aid victims? Where's SNAP's never heard demand for just compensation for the people it pretends and purports to represent? Never heard, again per usual. Where's the growth and sophistication that comes with time? Where are the Stokley Carmichaels and Hewey P. Newtons of the victims movement to Blaine's "MLK"? Oh that's right, they are not there. The anomolies are fantastic.
Would you wait 30-40-50 years to file your lawsuit against anybody that hit you with their car?
What would be your evidence (upon which your case would be based) all those decades later?
Are you seeing the reality of your ridiculousness, yet?
Answer me, answer me.
Was interested in Publion's comment of 24th March, re Barbara Blaine addressing a meeting in Boston. The published pictures of the event showed about 10 people in attendance, apparently all belonging to some victim's support group. Am surprised that it was so poorly attended, given JR's oft repeated claims that there are thousands of victims out there, all waiting for compensation.
In Australia we have a politically inspired Royal Commission going on at the moment. Recently saw (30 second) T.V. footage showing about 5 persons outside a building in which the hearings are taking place. All brandishing placards and some shouting the usual mantras from the Playbook. Was surprised that they were all of my generation… middle aged. Or to put it more politely….no longer young. So I have to wonder if this description also fits the victims/claimants in the U.S. If it does then shall make this prediction. That 15 years from now Barbara Blaine will not need to hire a hall for her meetings. Because any public phone box will provide ample space for those in attendance.
D,
I agree about the timing of a car accident claim.
However,with child hood sex abuse particularly those enacted by one's religious leaders, it takes decades for the victims to get the nerve; and the distance from the act for the victim to come to terms with it. Particularly when it's such a shamefull act, as is clerical rape. Our own shame betrayed us victims. You and your church betray us victims still.
Ever hear of scar tissue? It tells you a lot. If a person is shot or stabbed their wound shows you their injury. We have that scar tissue. Our lives are that scar tissue, our evidence.
When a victim comes forward and tells what happened to us. You can tell by what we say and how we say it as to the truth of our rapes.
Again, The church's insurors are paying nearly half of all settlements. they're not doing that out of the goodness of their hearts. They're paying victims because we are telling the truth.
If you have examples of mass fraudulent claims could you trot them out please. Otherwise you are saying something exists for which you have no proof. That may work for you pushing religious illusions but not for this situation.
You can't even offer any proof that the church is being "victimized" because the press mentions when another priest has been caught didling a kid or that his superiors' knowledge of his child abuse did not stop them from posting him to fresh groups of catholic children.
It is the victim-claimants task to prove their charges/claims against priests or any other defendants, with evidence, in a court of law – not leak their claims to their cronies (SNAP and others) in a media circus atmosphere that taints the Innocent Until Proven Guilty person and process.
It is not anyone's job to trot out frauds or any other victim-claimants; that is irrational and illogical in any civilized society or in any fair legal setting. That isn't how mathematics works and it isnt how nature works, it is thoroughly unnatural to demand to prove a negative.
Shall we construct third-world kangaroo courtrooms to screen every victim-claimants charge solely based upon his word that 'something' almost exclusively 'unprovable' happened decades ago? And you say that is sane?
The Catholic Church is being persecuted because it is the only religious institution out of many being prosecuted in court and in the media, therefore, it is a victim of persecution. That is a fact, it is documented, as so much of the victim-claimants charges are Not.
You are saying evidence exists for which there is no proof (ex. hordes of abuse victims of priests) and you are saying there is no proof of persecution for which there is ample proof (ex. years of bigoted and biased prosecution of the Catholic Church, only).
Who has the problem with reality here?
You claim that victims have no proof of our rapes because of time passing etc. So you say that because our claims never get to a court room, usually due to settling before hand, they are not "proven" therefore they are not true. Right? So since the vast majority of our claims don't go to trial therefore our claims are not "proven" true and being not proven true are therefore lies, correct?
Well why don't you have examples to show of our lies? Or are we to assume all victims claims, who don't go to trial but that are settled before hand, are lies? Why would the church and it's insurors settle for lies? They usually do that to avoid much higher jury awards.
So my question is this: Where are your examples of the fraud you claim to not only exist but one that you claim is rampant? Put up; or shut up, dear.
I am asked (the 25th, 1053AM) how my comment material on SNAP “disproves [JR’s] false flag accusations against SNAP”. First, I was noting the SNAP material in regard to how the media so often manipulate ‘reporting’ in regard to various aspects of the Catholic Abuse Matter. Thus I was not particularly working on the ‘false-flag’ bit (which by this time has been dealt-with extensively, in response to which we have gotten nothing more than the rote repetition of the same 3×5 card).
The point about “stupid press conferences” is accurate – as far as it goes. But it does not at all go far enough. My points were a) the ‘constructed’ nature of this particular press conference (actually, it was an address to that local general-abuse group that the “press” covered); and b) the “press” covered that (already suspiciously-timed) address in such a way as to make it seem that Blaine/SNAP were far more numerous and influential than they were/are.
Thus while it is also true that SNAP constitutes “very few people”, yet the “press” here were clearly trying – as the Globe and other media elements have long tried – to make these “very few people” seem far more numerous and influential than they were/are. And that may well be a constitutive element of the entire Stampede since Day One.
The “press” here did everything it could to make the address look valuable and important; if JR has drawn the conclusion that the whole event actually worked to “make victims look arbitrary and mealy-mouthed” [correction supplied] then that is clearly not the result of the “press” coverage but rather the result of the obvious consequences of what Blaine/SNAP actually did and said. And any reading of the entire article would demonstrate even more clearly just how hard the Globe was working to puff Blaine/SNAP and to puff them up (the photos certainly were working toward that manipulative objective).
Then it is proffered that Blaine’s “entire Modus Operandi” [correction supplied] is to make victims (however defined) look like that. But again: if Blaine/SNAP makes ‘victims’ look like that, I would say that it is not because Blaine/SNAP are trying to make them look like that, but rather because once you start listening-to what is being said, then their material simply reveals itself in such a way as to give that strong impression. And this goes to my general thought that once most Abusenik material is actually looked-at carefully, it reveals its own short-comings and improbabilities quite quickly and clearly.
But how all of this somehow ‘proves’ that the Church is behind the Blaine/SNAP result that ‘victims’ look bad remains in desperate need of some rational and coherent explanation. Because to me it seems rather clear that they look bad not because the Church has “arranged” that “final outcome” but rather because their material itself reveals its weaknesses. To say that since X works to the advantage of the Church (or at least to the disadvantage of the ‘victims’) then that in and of itself proves that the Church must have “arranged” that outcome … does not work logically. Rather than demonstrating conclusively that the Church was/is “arranging” it or controlling such an impression or revelation, the only conclusion that logically proceeds from what we see is that Blaine/SNAP – in expressing more clearly than usual any ‘victim’ material – is simply revealing the actual and fundamental and original weakness that has always been present in the ‘victim’ material.
To demonstrate that the Church is the cause of these revelatory impressions will require far more coherent explanation than we have ever seen here. Nor is this the first time I have pointed this problem out.
And yet again: the fact that Blaine/SNAP may well not be working fully or even largely in the service of ‘victims’, does not prove that Blaine/SNAP are tools of the Church rather than of the torties. Nor is this the first time I have pointed this problem out.
And while it most certainly is an interesting question as to “where are the Stokely Carmichaels and Huey P. Newtons of the victim’s movement” [corrections supplied], yet this question does nothing except raise even more questions as to the existence of any larger ‘victim’ demographic at all, and certainly a demographic that is at all concerned for bringing itself together and working toward some agenda or goals.
So, yes, “the anomalies are fantastic” [correction supplied] indeed, but they are not of themselves indicative of any Church involvement and instead such anomalies actually work rather vividly to raise even more questions about the probable credibility of so much of the ‘victim’ material and of the ‘victim’ demographic itself.
Then, responding to the ‘Malcolm Harris’ comment of the 15th at 1230AM, we get a comment (the 25th at 1201PM) that once again misreads in order to claim for itself some form of victimization: JR claims he is personally being ‘compared’ to “a murdering Nazi” – when clearly the Harris material is noting the similarity in dynamics here, and is not comparing anybody to Goebbels himself. But at this point the only thing to say is that ‘if the shoe fits …’ and leave it at that, since this gambit of trying to maneuver oneself onto the high-ground of being-victimized has been tried-before and noted-before.
But for the purposes of historical accuracy: Fascism did not come from “catholic Italy” but from anticlerical post-1860 Unification Italy, the government of which was then in the early 1920s suborned by Mussolini’s Fascism. And the Concordat of 1929 – which established the independence of the Vatican State – was a goal Rome had been hoping to achieve since at least 1870 when the Papal States were taken over by that Unification government. The fact that in the 1920s Mussolini – for his own political purposes – still needed to look like he was not anticlerical and thus he was willing to accede to establishing Vatican independence from the Italian State in no way establishes that the Vatican was an ‘ally’ of Fascism, especially since a ‘Concordat’ is only a diplomatic agreement and does not constitute any sort of diplomatic treaty of alliance.
And the assertion that the Church “was one of the Nazi party’s biggest supporters” is one that has been dealt-with rather definitively in extensive prior comments on this site.
(In fact, further adding to what I had said on previous occasions, I will point this out as well: Pius XII and the future Paul VI (Montini – then an official in the Vatican Secretariat of State) authorized the wholesale printing of pre-approved and signed Vatican documents that would enable Jewish folk to move more freely in their efforts to escape Nazi and later Fascist Italian dragnets; it is my thought that left-over supplies of these documents, after the war, were then used by some clerics so-inclined to enable various Nazi operatives to escape from the Allies. Such wholesale printing of official authorizing documents is hardly a wise idea under normal circumstances, but it does demonstrate just how committed the Vatican was – under its own unusual circumstances during the war – to helping mitigate the plight of Jewish folk, especially in Italy.)
Hitler – and again this is material I have pointed out before – did not proffer himself as a Christian let alone a Catholic, but instead sought to create himself in the German mind as another incarnation of Christ, the Messianic savior of the German people, sent by God. And various prelates pointed out this genuinely pagan – as well as heretical – aspect of the Nazi propaganda message, especially in the early years of the Reich. Nor did Nazi ideology have any use at all for the Sermon on the Mount or the virtues that the Sermon valorized; the new Nazi human-being would be brutal, ruthless and assertively violent – and very little of Christ’s message was acceptable to Nazi ideology for its New Order. Hitler only tried – parasitically – to capture the éclat and status of Christ, but he was no Christian, let alone a genuinely Catholic human being in any but the most basic sense that in his infancy he had been baptized.
And again: Franco’s Spain was a relief for the Church there from the tremendously violent and lethal anticlericalism of the Republic, which – following Lenin’s example – killed hundreds of priests and sisters, and even dug up their remains and put them on display (to ‘prove’ that since their bodies had decayed then there was no ‘saintliness’ in them and that ‘therefore’ the Church was a fraud). The Spanish Civil War was truly awful, in that it posed an impossible choice between the Republic’s virulently Leninist government and Franco’s Fascist (and Fascist/Nazi-abetted) government. Although it is also to be recalled that Franco did not allow himself to ally with Mussolini and Hitler (recall the amazing meeting at Hendaye, about which Hitler, having failed to woo the Generalissimo, said afterwards that rather than go through that meeting again, he would rather have all his teeth pulled out).
So before anybody ‘forgets’ history, they had better educate themselves into history first.
And as for – yet again – the “false claims” bit, I say again that all of the material that would enable us to examine Abusenik claims has been placed under secrecy, at the behest (as Federal Judge Schiltz has revealed) of the torties on behalf of the ‘victims’. And thus it is at the very least disingenuous for any ‘victim’ to now claim that there is no ‘proof’ about the invalidity of their claims; their own attorneys have ensured that such proof as may exist has now been placed under secrecy. Thus this gambit is a mirror-image of the old saw about a person who has murdered his parents then throwing himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.
Duh! gee o.k. teacher the catholic church was such a strong virtueous force for good that all the little cathloic nazis and Spanish fascists and italian fascist who all were baptised communicants, confessed and confirmed, had such a firm moral highway given them by the church that they became fascists? Their matrix was 2000 years of catholicism and we get Auschwitz? hmmmmmmm maybe you smart believer guys aint?
The church wasn't so into the sermon on the mount in those days , the 1930's, they were more into god; country; home all those lovely, fluffy, imaginary things. They were more into Lourdes, (where the cure rates a joke), and Fatima and bread watching Very much like todays church. There was Father Coughlin in America railing against the Jews. And where were the priests and nuns supporters in Spain who could attest to their goodness and charity and connection to the best interests of the majority of the people. Where were they to connect and defend these helpers of the poor. Sounds like there's a pretty big disconnect with the people to me. Or just maybe the church you project now onto the past, never existed then. Maybe the arrogance of clericalism won no friends with the people. You believers can be insufferably arrogant. That's where i learned all my tricks. The same place you learned yours. Chickens meet roost; and welcome home. We are what we've seen. We are what our examples were. So going by both you and I we didn't have such a swell examples regarding kindness from our religion. Not what the religion pretended to be but what it actually was. Manipulative comes to mind. Dictatorial Sexist all those words pop up when I think of the real church I knew and lived with daily. That was just the reality..
So you don't want to pay any victims compensation because they aren't really there in the first place? Well then you have no problem. Don't pay the people that aren't there. Just pay the victims that are.
Now the Catholic Church is going to held responsible for every cradle catholic (small c) that ever lived and sinned and/or committed atrocities per the resident cry-baby's latest irrational tirade? Whoever will hold the non-Catholics and never-Catholics responsible for their atrocities?
And, this is a perfect exampe of how the leftist brain-mush distorts reality when indulged and given voice by faithful Catholics and your typical normal (traditional, conservative)partiotic American.
Let us learn our lessons well.
Am I "whining" really? Am I a "cry baby"?
So far according to Delfink, I'm those things and an "endless drug and sex user" to boot!
I did not know that about myself. I sure sound busy what with coming down from all my drugs, resting from all my orgies; and crying like a baby all day; I don't see how i have the time and energy to post what I do here.
Perhaps if you could just learn this lesson it might help you: You are not the rich. You are not the 1%; and the rich don't give a s#@t about you and yours at all.
The fact that you've missed that little "lesson" after living in America your entire life says plenty. Would you put up with the horrors of capitalism in your own life if you didn't believe you'd be rewarded for all your suffering in an afterlife? If you saw life as a one shot with no magic land that appears after you die, would you suffer bad bosses; bad pay; crap jobs; no retirement quite as readily as you do? I don't think you would. The rage you feel towards the left comes out of the anger you have because of the literal situation economically; spiritually; emotionally; sexually; psycologically that you are in.
You are not a happy camper and you have to blame somebody for that. So instead of being angry at your oppresors you get fired up against the people who tell you you shouldn't be putting up with that crap in the first place: the left.
Oh, the "horrors of capitalism"! This must be why our borders are breached every second of every day by those fleeing oppression and poverty in those so-much-better despot, communist and socialist systems. It must be why you also chose to leave this horrible system, too. Just because you failed at figuring out (how hard is it for a 'privelaged white guy' to screw up so badly in America?) how to power your own choo-choo here doesn't mean the world that is forever pushing through our borders sees your imaginary bugaboo's in the free market system.
You've bragged about your drug use and sexploits here many times, not so 'proud' anymore?
I am not jealous or envious about whatever others have, as are you. My only concern is to make sure those that want or need within my sphere of influence do not want or need for long. Many of our 1% Americans are some of the most generous philanthropists in the world – they spend billions in poor nations throughout the world – what is it your OWSers and Rainbowers and other useless 'dreamers' are doing to feed, clothe and heal the poor?
Lies and Liars whose sole purpose is to defame, distort and mislead (spread evil and hate) must be challenged. That isn't 'unhappy' you poor, demoralized lost soul – that is being faithful to the Truth. That is the Church Militant.
In regard to the recent crop:
The causes of the rise of Fascism (in its Italian or Spanish variants) or Nazism – it apparently has to be pointed out – had a great deal to do with the profound disruptions to European society created by the Great War and its consequences, as well as the Great Depression and its consequences for European societies and governments. That the Church – along with any and all other religious groups in Europe – was not able to largely prevent those consequences is true as far as it goes, but also implies the possibility that any religious polity’s formation and education could have proved strong enough to withstand such powerful dynamics as were rampant in Europe at that time.
Nor does such an assertion cover the Leninist-Stalinist phenomenon in the USSR, which was proportionately more bloody (to its own citizenry) even before factoring in the Great Patriotic War and didn’t involve the religious polities of Western Europe.
The necessity of being able to master historical facts and realities (and not just factoids that might be plopped one on top of the other like kiddie-blocks) is, I would say, rendered vividly clear here.
Thus for the comment of the 26th at 156AM and now ditto for the even more extended demonstration proffered at 222AM.
The “priests and nuns” in Spain were in great numbers dead or being hunted and tortured and killed by Republican forces, as I said. And as for the Spanish people, a very significant number opposed the Republic and to this day Spanish society and the Spanish people are still techy and divided over the Civil War that took place almost 80 years ago. So the bit about “the poor” doesn’t cover the ground here at all.
And so readers may take “what it sounds like” to JR for whatever they think it’s worth.
We are then informed that JR learned his “insufferable arrogance” from “you believers” – and readers may savor the various implications of that statement about where he claims to have learned all his “tricks”. I for one could happily tolerate some “insufferable arrogance” if it were accurately informed and could present a coherent and well-demonstrated historical argument, but so far nothing on that score has been proffered in this crop of comments.
And readers may thus also consider just how much of “the reality” we have been proffered here.
And at 1021AM we get another clear example of the Playbook in action: that we “don’t want to pay any victims compensation because they aren’t really there in the first place”. Once again and to repeat: we haven’t been able to prove that allegants were in a victimized-position in the first place, which is not quite the same thing at all. Again, the gambit here is to start the play already-on-first rather than with an at-bat at home plate.
And if there are any proposals as to how establish just which ‘victims’ were genuinely “there” then we have yet to see them put forward here.
Yes, you would appreciate from me what you so deeply admire in yourself "insufferable arrogance" I agree with you on that.
Ask your insurors how they determine the accuracy of our claims? Ask the people who write the checks to tell you how and why and for what reason they write them (when they do). You pay those people. Ask them about what you pay them for. What does one victim know? Your church and your insurors should be telling you what they know. They have the over view not one victim.
It seems that I missed a comment that was further back up the scroll on this thread. On the 26th at 145AM we are treated to the assertion that while his questions are never answered, JR does “answer yours”. Readers are welcome to compare that comment to any tally they might be keeping.
But we are also then given a lecture as to the morality and fiscal wisdom of finishing to “pay your bills” before “giving money away” in charitable activities. First, we haven’t established at all that there were bonafide “bills” that had to be paid to the many allegants. Second, one might wish to consider the immorality of taking money under false pretenses which might have gone to charitable causes that genuinely deserved such monies and help – just as a conceptual exercise, of course.
Also, then, going back for a moment to the 222AM comment on the 26th: readers may have noticed the remarkable differences in style, tone, and spelling between that comment and the one of 156AM on the 26th. Readers may even have marveled at the difference. And understandably so.
But I would also point out another conceptual point from that 222AM comment: we are proffered the thought that “we are what we’ve seen” and “we are what our examples were”. This is a very deterministic view of human-beings, that whatever we “see” is what we become – as if there were no choice or individual free-will involved at all in the process of a person choosing what “examples” s/he would follow (or reject) in shaping the self.
Additionally, of course, such assertions open up the possibility that since one inevitably and ineluctably becomes what one has ‘seen’ in this or that ‘example’, then if one has been abused one will thus inevitably and ineluctably become so oneself. Which theory, of course, raises some rather disturbing possibilities in regard to persons allegating abuse, specifically that each allegant is willy-nilly declaring him/herself a (later) abuse-perpetrator. Which would certainly provide yet another reason why torties sought to ensure ‘secrecy’ for their allegants once the checks were cashed.
What "false pretenses"? If you can prove them to be "false pretenses", then why don't you? You give us no examples of things that you say not only exist but are rampant. If fraud is so rampant, why can't you produce any examples?
Jim, I think that you are mistakenly seeing the "Catholic Church" as all one connected entity. There are churches, charitable organizations, religious orders, etc., that are separate, not connected, really, but under one umbrella. I think there has to be a divine oversight, helped by the papacy, to keep it all together, even though separate. Otherwise we WOULD be all divided, like the protestants are. BTW, working in the media, I have witnessed SNAP, such as it is, being sought out by anti-Catholic editors, because they WANT to what SNAP sells, anti-Catholic comments that say all the same thing always, not matter what the situation is. They WANT that anti-Catholic voice in stories. "Call SNAP," I heard an editor say once, when a story came up. That is how SNAP has been able to appear influential. It sends out ugly press releases, and there are certainly anti-Catholic editors out there who are buying the snake oil SNAP is selling. Conversely, I've seen similar stories about protestant pastors deliberately kept to a smaller length and buried, and no direction from the editor to "call SNAP." I"VE SEEN IT WITH MY OWN EYES AND HEARD IT WITH MY OWN EARS.
Julie, I believe you absolutely. I do.
Editors take the easy road: they need a statement they call SNAP, job done. There are no more investigative reporters. May i tell you why the press buys SNAP? It's because SNAP is all they see.
Your editor isn't writing or calling SNAP about editorials or opinion pieces but about real breaking news. SNAP responds to that breaking new for them and then the whole machine waits to be activated again by the next real breaking news story regarding abusive priests or lying cardinals; or church transferring wealth to protect it from claiments or apologies to victims or sentencing of perpetrators, settlements. All real news stories. When the protestant churchs and bishops do what the catholic church does; hide their wealth; transfer their abusers to abuse again etcetra etcetra. They are treated exactly the same way as your church is by the media. Orthodox jews; Baptists; Jehova's witnesses, the Boy Scouts all have been in the press for their bad behaviors.
The thing is, you can't show me one time SNAP has made an anti catholic, as a religion, statement. They never talk about your faith. They talk about your corporation. Now i know that pisses you off. That's just what SNAP was meant to do; what it was built for. Rubbing salt in your wounds, which SNAP does do, is meant to piss good catholics off against victims. (And so far for 30 years that seems to be working)
When, as I have told you here, we victims have absolutely no control over SNAP what so ever. We can't vote them out. they've never been voted in, by victims. No victims know who and how SNAP's political choices are decided. So how does that "represent" victims when we have no input? But SNAP's made you and the media believe that they represent victims. Victims don't believe they do but the public and you believe they do. Battle won by false flagged SNAP.
These "independent" entities in your church that you describe, Julie, aren't.
Why do i say this? Because one man, the pope, can end their existence with a word, a stroke of a pen. That's not "independent" that's being subserviant to a monarchy.
Commenting on Julie's post of the 27th March. Re what she saw and heard whilst working in a newspaper office. If I were still young and idealistic would be skeptical, because would have believed that journalistic ethics would not allow it. But we all live and learn, don't we?. Less than twenty years ago I read a book written by Reverend Fred Nile, an outspoken Baptist Preacher, here in Australia. He recounted how he chanced to meet a retired journalist who had interviewed him years earlier for a city daily. The guy sincerely volunteered an apology because of the negative article he had written. His editor had called him into his office and literally told him to do a 'hatchet job'. It was the only time in his long career that he had been given specific intructions for a 'hatchet job'. It should be understood that, at the time. Fred was loudly critical of the gay saunas that existed in Sydney. He maintained they were hotbeds for the spreading of diseases like HIV/AIDS. Other media outlets were also against him, but more by making him look like a figure of fun…. someone to be mocked.
So I am inclined to believe Julie's story. If some sections of the media can do a 'hatchet job' on one man, then they can do it to my Church, namely the Catholic Church. They have done this and still continue to wield the hatchet.
Actually, it is bigoted commenters antiCatholic statements, not SNAPs, that have done more to undermine true victims than any other entity or outlet. We all know exactly what SNAP is, and isnt. SNAP is a rip-off artist organization. They found a way to keep their golden goose laying, and with the complicit medias help, everyone involved is banking the ill-gotten Church's 18k eggs.
But those of you who repeatedly make disparaging, sarcastic and hateful remarks about religion in general, belief in God and the Catholic religion in particular- you have done more to derail your objectives to convince the world of the "clergy problem', according to your definition, than just about any other entity.
Congratulations! How's that errant GSW to your own foot faring these days?
On the 27th at 1007AM we are simply given more from the (clearly finite) 3×5 shoebox and the Playbook.
The usual Abusenik ‘science’ that “with childhood sex abuse particularly those enacted by one’s religious leaders” [corrections partially supplied] “it takes decades for victims to get the nerve”. And yet Mr. Horne told his father that very night and then the bishop was told shortly thereafter. So clearly JR’s unqualified assertion isn’t accurate. And indeed JR soon told somebody (even though only a peer, so that that somebody might tell somebody else). So much for (self-serving) Abusenik science.
And apparently in addition to being totally determined by the ‘examples’ that he ‘saw’ as a child, JR was also betrayed by his “shame” – and, again, the unqualified universalized statement is made in regard to all of that class of ‘we victims’: “our own shame betrayed us as victims.” In this collection of tellings, ‘victims’ have no will-power whatsoever and were cast into life like twigs on a flooded stream, to be taken wherever what ‘examples’ they ‘saw’ took them.
Then the kewt rhetorical bit about “You and your church betray us victims still”. But we’ve been through all this posturing before.
Then the Doctor lectures us on “scar tissue” – which we might not have heard of, he seems to think. The only interesting bit in it here is that he slyly tries to equate a) the un-deniability of the scar-tissue resulting from a gunshot or knife-wound with b) the utterly invisible (‘spectral’, if you wish) ‘scar-tissue’ from a (purported) sexual ‘injury’. But (a) does not equate with (b), nor vice-versa.
Ditto the “When a victim comes forward” bit in the following paragraph.
Again, we are seeing here nothing more than a rhetorically manipulative collections of ploys designed to tug the heart-strings but not to actually demonstrate or prove anything (which, in the Abusenik arena, cannot be done anyway – so playing for emotions is all they’ve got; thus the ever-ready waving of the ‘rape-cape’ at us and the insistence that the story is true because (regardless of its hugely dubious bits) the story-teller can (and must) be totally trusted and believed).
And then – again pulling up issues already dealt-with, but the 3×5 shoebox is clearly finite here – the utterly ungrounded and illogical but self-serving assertion that the only reason the insurers are paying half the settlements is because “the victims” or rather “we victims are telling the truth”. We’d need to see some official statements from “the church’s insurers” [correction supplied] to justify that assertion. A far more probable explanation – one that does not require the pipedream that insurance companies assess payouts on the basis of pure justice or truth – is that paying-off the allegants was going to be less expensive than litigating each of a bundled-lawsuit’s allegations (at least 500 of them in the case that paid off JR). The insurance business is about the money – as the torties and the Anderson Strategies so well realized.
And – again from the limited 3×5 Shoebox, whose cards must now be getting rather worn – JR wants us to ‘prove’ examples of “mass fraudulent claims” even though we have already discussed, on this very thread, the fact (which JR apparently shrewdly has chosen to ignore) that all of the evidentiary material is now hidden behind a secrecy wall imposed at the behest of the torties in the interests of their allegants.
But it is truly marvelous to then be lectured that “otherwise you are saying something exists for which you have no proof” … to be lectured on this by an Abusenik can only prompt a call for Dr. Freud to Examining One with his projection kit.
But as JR has found out to his abiding irritation, “that may work for” Abusenik circles, “but not for this situation”.
And – coming across another bit that has already been dealt with – to the effect that the major Nazi death-camps were located in ‘catholic’ Poland. Apparently we are meant to infer that somehow the ‘Catholics’ of Poland would be more hospitable (than the majority-Protestant Germans, although Bishop Galen of Munster had almost single-handedly forced Hitler to stop the euthanizing of those whom Nazi eugenicists had proclaimed ‘lives unworthy of life’ in the 1930s). But readers here will notice that such an inferred conclusion is not actually forthrightly put forward; just the innuendo – in fine Playbook style.
Yet a) a glance at a map would indicate that the death-camps were placed rather strategically and efficiently (such as the term may apply here) as close to the geographic center of the European Jewish populations (Germany, Poland, and the USSR territories captured in Barbarossa and subsequently).
And b) at the time of the death-camps ‘Poland’ no longer formally existed. It had been divided between the Nazis and the Soviets according to the Pact of August 1939. The Nazi-held territory was re-named the Government General and was under direct Nazi control. Are we to imagine that the Polish people – Catholic and otherwise – were in any position to stop the erection and operation of the camps? Both the Jewish rising and the later Warsaw rising (1944) were crushed; are we supposed to imagine that mere Polish civilians were going to have any success conducting a sequence of military operations against the various camps? Or that Nazi government political praxis gave them any say in what went on in the Government General?
Sorry for the repetition of material that has been dealt with before, but the same 3x5s keep showing up and there may be new readers who haven’t caught up on the general discourse of comments on the site here.
Now I'm responsibile for all your nasty attacks against all victims simply because I tell you why I don't believe in what you believe in? Say what? This is a dialog. I speak for myself, on my beliefs. You don't want to hear my point of view? Swell! Don't read what I write. You smear with such a broad blood filled brush.( Using our blood of course never your own, so typical). Where were you stationed in the military during your 20 + years of service Delphin? Germany Guam, Viet Nam or Panama like me? Oh that's right your claim to a career in the military was just something you made up. (I wouldn't dare call you a liar. lol!) Church militant? More like Delphin chicken hawk.
P, Ever hear of blowing up rail way tracks? The U.S. didn't do it and they knew about the death camps. the Polish catholics didn't do it and they ran the trains. so the slaughter continued. And Pius said diddily.
Was Poland no longer catholic during it's occupation? There were no death camps for Jews; Gypsies ; Gays and Communists (obviously) in atheistic Soviet occuped Poland.
But our scars are not "invisable". Our scar tissue is very easily seen. You dismiss it; but you see things that aren't there more than you see what is. The blessings of faith no doubt. Studies on the effects childhood sex abuse are numerous. But they exist and therefor are not as relevent to you as your imaginings .
A "chicken hawk' is a deviant homosexual that sexually preys on young boys. I am sure at least 50% of your closest rainbow coalition colleagues were strict 'hawk' adherents, as the statistics will bear out.
Isn't it interesting that the left and their homosexual lackeys are trying to redefine this term, along with the miscreants redefinition of marriage, racism (all of a sudden this word applies only to caucasians), bigotry (currently trying to be reserved for only religious people, except Muslims – they're still way too afraid of them) for the moral majority?
Won't work.
A chicken hawk is also a person who hollers for bloodshed, invasions, wars and rumors of war, and then manages to never go to these blood baths themselves. Think Dick Cheney; Rumsfeld; George W. Bush, William Kristol etc. etc. Chicken hawks all. You are a chicken hawk.
You might want to read the sermon on the mount again, if you've ever read it at all. Jesus said: "Blessed are the peacemakers"
Speaking of NAZI propoganda, policies and practices comparable to the lefts persecution of the Catholic Church….
http://thesestonewalls.com/gordon-macrae/united-nations-assault-catholic-church/
Oh, we know how the left wishes to redfine words, revise history and rewrite social and cultural norms, we're simply pointing out your failed efforts at such.
We all know what the original term 'chicken-hawk' meant (and still means) - we're just enjoying the pretzel-logic and other contortions required as the left tries (and fails) to redefine these terms, as well as defy logic, science, reason and the natural world, in general.
As to the recent crop:
On the 27th at 1142AM we are asked “what false pretenses?”. Well, I had proposed it as a “conceptual exercise” – so readers could come up with their own answers to that in various ways. JR is certainly welcome to work through that conceptual exercise if he wishes. There has certainly been enough treatment of the possibilities and probabilities on this site by now so that we don’t have to treat this de novo here.
Once again, we see the repetition of the “prove” trope – which simply goes to highlight the Anderson Strategy tactic of ensuring that all the allegation-material would be hidden behind a secrecy wall once the checks were cashed.
But – as I have often said – we may consider the probabilities, and in toting up the probabilities we come up with a hardly inconsiderable quantum of material that weighs heavily against credibility. And on the side of credibility we have, essentially, nothing but the insistence of the (hardly dis-interested) allegating Parties that they are telling the truth, bolstered – such as it may be – by the type of ‘scientific’ theorizing we have seen in the Michigan Manual, which might be said to boil down to this: a) just because a story doesn’t conform to any known traditional criteria of truth is no reason to not-believe it and b) the less a story conforms to any known traditional criteria of truth then the more truthful it should be considered to be – all of which takes us well down the rabbit-hole.
Whereas lemmings are famously envisioned as stampeding off a cliff, we might envision ourselves as being inveigled to stampede down a rabbit-hole.
Thus, to answer the question at the end of the 1142AM question yet again: we can’t “produce … any examples” because all of the allegation-material was hidden behind a secrecy wall by the torties and allegants as soon as the checks were cashed. But – to repeat – we have the probabilities, as discussed at great length immediately above and in prior comments. And readers may consider all of that and judge as they will.
At 1106 on the 27th, in a response to ‘Julie’, it is asserted that “the press buys SNAP … because SNAP is all they see”. That may be true. But it doesn’t go far enough at all. Is it that a) there is nothing else out in victim-land for the press to see? Or – alternatively – it is equally possible that b) the press spends time with SNAP’s stuff because that is all the press wants to see.
If (a) then we are supposed to presume that myriads of allegants and victims (genuine and otherwise) have for decades been prevented from getting themselves together because of the mere existence of SNAP. This doesn’t say much for victims (genuine or otherwise), especially on top of other assertions made to the effect that they have throughout their lives been merely twigs on a stream, at the mercy of whatever “example” they “see”.
If (b) then we must ask why the press has so doggedly focused on SNAP. And here I would say that the press has indeed done so because SNAP has been deliberately positioned by the Anderson Strategies precisely to provide for the press the seductive element so near and dear to its corporate heart: an anti-pole, a totally opposing point of view that is consistently capable of providing sound-bites and photo-ops so as to fuel and fulfill an endlessly repetitive picture of that old script of Pure Innocent Good Beset By Pure Malicious Evil.
Thus in (b) the very phrase “real breaking news” is undermined by the ‘constructed’ or ‘fabricated’ or even ‘pre-fabricated’ nature of the coverage, precisely along the so very tort-friendly lines sketched by the Anderson Strategies.
It goes without saying that we see here as well the continued effort to slide us to first-base without any inconvenient at-bat at home plate: the terms “claimants” [correction supplied] and “victims” are deployed as if they instantly and completely covered all the conceptual ground here, i.e. that all of the aforesaid “claimants” and “victims” were/are genuine.
A simple internet search will demonstrate that no other organization has been covered on the topic of sex-abuse the way the Catholic Church has. And thus is fatally undermined the assertion that such organizations “are treated exactly the same way as your church is by the media”. While they have all “been in the press”, yet they have not received the decades-long, sustained, and selectively-shaped attentions that the mainstream media have by and large aimed at the Church.
But now a torturous – though novel – bit of explanatory imagining is proffered: SNAP is a tool of the Church, and the manner of it is on this wise: “what SNAP was meant to do” and “what is was built for” was to irritate and annoy Catholics with all the SNAP-py bits against the Church (as a “corporation”) and thus – waitttt for itttttt – to “piss good catholics off against victims”.
That the Anderson Strategies called for some organization that could front for the torties with the media; that the media always like a Good-Evil dynamic in order to simplify and spiff-up their ‘reporting’ – none of this is dealt-with by such a convoluted explanatory hypothesis.
That “good catholics” (and anybody else) might be turned-off by i) the credibility problems with the stories and allegations or ii) the suspiciously tempting pay-off possibilities for any allegant or iii) the give-away hiding of those stories and allegations as soon as the checks were cashed … these are also not dealt-with by such a convoluted explanatory hypothesis.
Readers may consider all this as they will.
It may well be true that “victims have absolutely no control over SNAP whatsoever” [correction supplied] but that does nothing to establish the governing forces behind the front-organization that is SNAP.
And the rest of the objections to SNAP are valid but have been seen before here and yet they do nothing – as I said – to establish the identity of the governing forces behind the front-organization that is SNAP. My theory is that it is the Anderson Strategies and a further congeries of political and cultural interests whose objectives are congruent with the Anderson Strategies. And the media – so long as they can cast this in their preferred Pure Innocence/Pure Evil script – happily amplify as required.
Lastly, for this 1106AM comment, I note that the ball keeps bouncing in the discussion about SNAP: sometimes it’s about a) SNAP being some sort of tool of the Church and sometimes it’s about b) SNAP not “representing victims”. I can certainly agree with (b) but (a) fails on a number of counts as noted above and in prior comments, and is more rationally accounted-for if SNAP is seen as a tool of the Anderson Strategies and those other interests.
Thus SNAP is indeed “false-flagged” in the sense of (b) immediately above, but it is a front organization for Anderson Strategies and so forth in the sense of (a) immediately above.
As for the assertion of 1114AM on the 27th, we see here yet again that anything except total and utter kow-towing to the Abuseniks is to be construed as “insufferable arrogance”. Readers may judge as they will.
At 1127AM on the 27th, we see here a long-established Abusenik (and SNAP) trope: that the Church is a “monarchy”. If the Church is a “monarchy”, it is more accurately imaginable as a constitutional monarchy than an absolute monarchy. There is a reason bishops are canonically and technically referred-to as “Ordinaries”: because the power they have over their sees is “ordinary” and thus not “delegated” by the Papacy. It is for this reason that the Church is not accurately imagined as either a modern military power-structure or a conventional Western corporate power-structure (although anybody familiar with the complexities of modern corporate power-structures would also quickly realize how modulated such structures are, and how constricted CEO authority can be).
And thus the substantial inaccuracy of the assertion that “one man, the pope, can end their existence with a word, a stroke of a pen”. The Pope can indeed dis-establish a Diocese – but it is rarely done and mostly for demographic reasons (for which reasons new Dioceses can also be established, and an Ordinary appointed for them). But the idea of a Pope getting up in a bad mood of a morning and at a whim simply issuing a ukase that this or that Diocese be dis-established is certainly beyond the parameters of the applicable realities here.
And, in light of various recent World War 2 commentary here, the Vatican had more than its share of problems with some Ordinaries (and even lower clergy) who individually and for whatever reason(s) could not bring themselves to be as outspoken as the Pope could wish. One thinks here of Pius XI’s experiences with Bishop Galen of Munster (who could be remarkably forthright in his objections to the Reich) and Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna (who was initially inclined to try to make the best of the Anschluss until Pius XI called him to Rome for consultations, after which the Cardinal took a more oppositional stance, and was quickly and violently abused by the Nazis as a result). And then there was Father Tiso who headed up the First Slovak Republic as a Hitler stooge. The stereotypical absolute monarch would have had no difficulty at all disposing of an Innitzer or a Tiso, but the Papacy is not the site of a stereotypical absolute monarchy.
But it suits both the Abuseniks and the torties to imagine the Papacy as a stereotypical absolute monarchy: Abuseniks – especially if of anti-Catholic bent – can rail against the ‘anti-democratic’ aspects of that fantasy, while the torties can thus claim that such an absolute monarchy (bottom-line: all that fabled Vatican wealth) lies open to abuse lawsuits under the doctrine of respondeat superior. Neat all around.
And on the 27th at 1153AM we simply get a sly repetition of the 3×5 card for this topic: it is up to us to ask the insurers “how they determine the accuracy of our claims”. Whereas my point was that – as per the shrewdly constructed Anderson Strategies – it wasn’t a matter of “accuracy” for the insurers in the first place. Rather it was the brute economics of calculating how much it would cost to defend at trial against 500-plus allegants as opposed to simply settling out-of-court for an agreed sum.
Readers, of course, are welcome to consider the possibility that the insurers simply sat around spending very great amounts of expensive actuarial and legal time and money carefully assessing the credibility or veracity of each of the hundreds of allegations because they envisioned that to be their role – rather than simply toting up the projected costs of at least 500 separate trial and coming up with an alternative settlement figure that would save them some serious money in legal fees and expenses.
And then – after all of the assertions and claims that we have seen from this commenter – we are suddenly faced with the ‘umble plaint about “what does one victim know?”. I have often wondered that myself, prescinding from wondering about the genuine-or-otherwise classification problem as well. But in any case, it is a question that does cry out for an answer.
You still never explain why the insurors pay their part of the settlements.
So you claim the vast majority of claims against your church are false but you have no examples to show us? So empirically how are you reaching that conclusion with zero evidence?
And what I'm telling you is Anderson is a tool of the church as well. He needs SNAP to get clients SNAP doesn't need Anderson at all. SNAP could and did pick who they would reccomend to represent victims. They could have picked any lawyer but Anderson became the go to guy why? Why wasn't The first lawyer in Boston the go to guy? Why when the population zones for numbers of catholics is both coasts in America, do Jeffy Anderson and SNAP pop out of the mid west? Statisticly likely? Never.
But you don't really want to know any of the truth about what we claiments have gone through.
According to you it all never happened but Lourdes did. Great. Why don't you sprinkle us with holy water and we'll just go away? Get that magic mojo working! Make us disappear.
Anderson doesn't have the smarts to do what you say he did regarding SNAP. Have you ever seen the man speak? He's a pompass little shmuck. He couldn't create an original thought let alone the false flag SNAP. [edited by moderator]
There isn't a case brought against the church for sex abuse,that can't be looked up in a court house. It's public record.
And a fresh crop.
The 28th at 1129AM: JR is “responsible” [correction supplied] for the fact that I have to keep going back over points already dealt-with, because he keeps putting up the same material in repetition and does nothing to advance the discussion, even for his own side of it. (A prime example will soon be seen below.)
And once again we see that pointing out the problems with Abusenik material and assessing probabilities as to credibility is defined as “attacks against all victims” (as if I am not constantly distinguishing between genuine victims and allegants otherwise-classifiable).
The point would not be merely to express one’s belief or disbelief – which anybody can do. It would be to explain coherently and rationally the reasons for one’s beliefs or disbeliefs, and for one’s assertions and conclusions. What we do here isn’t a ‘belief-bout’, it’s an assessment operation. But then again: the Stampede precisely has been a ‘belief bout’ from the get-go because from the get-go it was obvious that there was very little actual evidence. Thus the need for Abuseniks to become skilled in the waving of the rape-cape and the demand to simply be believed regardless of anything else.
Nor did I ever say (an accurate quotation of mine to the contrary could be put up if it existed) that I didn’t “want to hear” whatever JR has to say. But he clearly isn’t clear on the concept of “dialog” – which does not reduce to “I speak for myself”.
Then the nice examples of Playbook hyperbole: “smear”, “our blood” and so on.
But then: “where were you stationed in the military during your 20+ years of service?”. It appears that various bits of this comment are made to ‘Delphin’ and other bits to me, so who knows what is what here? JR spent 2 years in the Canal Zone processing passports, if memory serves, and was “counting” the time until he could get out. But of what relevance is a record of military service – such as it might have been – to anything under consideration here?
I am then informed (the 28th, 1129AM) that there is such a thing as “blowing up rail tracks”. My, my. The Germans were some of the best track-repairers in the business; it took weeks of intensive working-over by US heavy bombers just to get ahead of the Germans’ capabilities in this regard in the run-up to D-Day (in 1944). Just what chance Polish civilians would have had in 1942 and 1943 – and where they would have gotten not only the skills but the explosives and equipment – to blow up enough track enough times to significantly hinder the death-trains is a basic operational question that perhaps passport-clerking had not prepared JR to assess.
The US “didn’t do it” because the targets were both a) too distant and b) too tightly-patterned on the ground for high-level heavy-bombardment from the air (and, but of course, lighter bombers did not have the range); nor until the arrival of the P-51 could heavy-bombers get capable fighter-escort platforms; and the Luftwaffe was still in business. So if the US couldn’t pull off this military operation, what precisely were the Polish civilians – Catholic or otherwise – going to do? And what but what but what was “Pius” supposed to ‘say’ by mid-1942 or 1943 (Wannsee was January 1942) that would have affected anything the Germans had already set in motion? The Western Allies were not going to take military action (because such action was impossible, especially since the Soviets had proven themselves inhospitable to allowing Western-Allied military forces to refuel or stage on Soviet-held territory); and are we seriously to imagine that the Nazis would have been open to moral exhortation or denunciation by the Pope at that point?
We are then given the stunning bit that the Soviets didn’t run death-camps in WW2. First, neither did the Poles – the Nazis did in the Government-General. Second – it apparently has to be pointed out here – Stalin ran the Gulag on Soviet territory. And if JR could possibly explain the significance of the civilians in the Government-General being Catholics … well, wouldn’t that be nice?
I think we are seriously being proffered here the idea that the Nazis ran death-camps in ‘Catholic Poland’ while the Soviets did not run death-camps in atheist Poland (were there then no Catholics in Soviet-occupied Poland?) – and thus, apparently, that the atheists were (and are?) somehow morally better than the Catholics. And this is apparently supposed to pass for serious and capable historical questioning or thinking. Readers may make of it what they will.
The core problem certainly wasn’t whether “Poland was no longer catholic during its occupation” – the problem was that no Poles were allowed any say in what went on in the Nazi running of the Government-General. Does JR care to assert that the Poles did have political control or input into what the Nazis did in the Government-General?
Then – as a prime example of the fact that I have to keep repeating material – we get (the 28th at 1134AM) the claim that I “still never explain why the insurers pay their part of the settlements” . For the reading-challenged I quote from my comment of the 27th at 1156PM: “Readers, of course, are welcome to consider the possibility that the insurers simply sat around spending very great amounts of expensive actuarial and legal time and money carefully assessing the credibility or veracity of each of the hundreds of allegations because they envisioned that to be their role – rather than simply toting up the projected costs of at least 500 separate trial and coming up with an alternative settlement figure that would save them some serious money in legal fees and expenses.”
Then let me paraphrase that quote: The insurers chose the settlement route because their task is to minimize the financial outlay, and a settlement was cheaper than trying to conduct and prevail-in 500-plus separate trials. They are not in the business of judging the veracity of claims – they would have to shell out their own funds to conduct such assessments (which is what courts are for) and the insurers’ role is simply to figure out how to minimize financial outlay, as I said.
On the 28th at 1137AM: I have pointed out the very strong and high probability that claims may be false; JR is welcome to put up any accurate quotes to back-up his assertion that I “claim the vast majority of claims against your church are false”.
And there are no “examples” because the material was put behind a secrecy wall by the very people who might have made the false claims – which itself simply intensifies the probability that that material needs to be looked at very carefully and in the meantime treated with some hefty doses of skepticism.
But all of this is material we have gone over before even on this thread. And we see again the rote application of the same 3×5 cards. And most curiously, this gambit very closely resembles the M.O. of SNAP – which does not at all engage in discussion of matters but simply holds a press conference to dole out its usual dreck-points and then scoots before anybody can raise any serious questions (not that the mainstream media often do).
But then (the 28th, 1152AM) we are advised that “Anderson is a tool of the church as well”. And with this assertion I don’t think readers will take it amiss if I just leave this comment up where it was put and let any who wish savor its implications in regard to the theorizer even more than to the theory.
In his book D’Antonio discusses in detail how SNAP was a nothing organization until Anderson chose to seek out Blaine and had that talk. And are we to imagine that “the first lawyer in Boston” – whose name seems to escape JR – wouldn’t also have been tarred as a tool of the church in this theorizing of the matter? A tortie’s interests would be the same no matter who the tortie was, and SNAP would have been the front-organization.
As to the statistical bit, its point is incomprehensible as stated. And the conclusory assertion of “Never” is thus skylined as utterly unsupportable.
Ditto then the connection to the following paragraph, i.e. that I “don’t really want to know any of the truth of what we claimants have gone through” [correction supplied]. I haven’t seen too much in any story proffered here that encourages the conclusion that it is truthful – unless one were to apply the Michigan Manual standards, but the problems with that Manual’s approach have been extensively gone-over in prior comments.
As for the tenuous connection to Lourdes: we have – as the links were provided here in comments during the relevant discussions – at Lourdes the published conclusions and case-assessments of reputable medical doctors and specialists. From the Abuseniks we have nothing but claims and stories and assertions that are not only a) unsupported by any evidence but also b) such explanations as have been proffered here have raised far more questions than they have answered and also c) such material as might be introduced to substantiate the stories and claims has been hidden deliberately behind a secrecy wall at the behest of the torties and allegants themselves.
And the rest of the comment is too ketchup-stained to handle further.
Then the 28th at 1202PM: It is claimed that “our scars are not invisible” [correction supplied]. Alas, an actual “scar” in diagnostic terms is visible pretty much by definition; the usage of “scar” as applied to the Abuseniks claims as put-forward here is merely metaphorical. And even if any form of advanced scanning were to be conducted, and lesions or scars were discovered on the brain or elsewhere, it would still have to be established that such lesions or scarring did not pre-exist whatever claimed experience the allegant was making. And – I suppose it has to be pointed out – ‘emotions’ can’t be scanned for “scars” so we are once again back in the realm of metaphor on that score.
Ditto the bit about “our scar tissue if very easily seen”. No it is not; it is merely metaphorical. Actual dysfunction of many sorts, along one or several axes of assessment, may clearly be noted and observed, but one would then have to establish that the dysfunction did not pre-date the allegated experience.
And once again with the “studies on the effects of childhood sex abuse” – a point the problems of which have been pointed out here before: one would have to find studies that i) did not take as their starting point the mere presumption of a ‘report’ of such abuse by a study-subject but rather instead established independently and beyond doubt the accuracy of that ‘report’; ii) studies that carefully explained every step of their carefully-designed and carefully-followed research protocol and how they derived their information and calibrated their research question and calculated their results; and iii) studies that did not hedge their final conclusions with the subjunctive ‘may cause ’ or ‘can cause’ or ‘might cause’ rather than the firmly indicative ‘does’ and perhaps ‘frequently does ’ or ‘inevitably does’. Very few of these ‘advocacy science’ studies qualify according to those fundamental scientific research parameters. (Examples claimed to demonstrate the contrary of my points here may of course be proffered here, with accurate links.)
So much for my “imaginings”. The majority of such ‘studies’ exist, indeed – but they are not actually proper scientific studies according to the parameters I have generally described above. (Examples claimed to demonstrate the contrary of my points here may of course be proffered here, with accurate links.)
Then on the 28th at 1208PM: Apparently JR is not familiar with the cataloging and public retrieval of legal cases and case material. First, you have to know at least some of the identifying information (names of Parties, docket number, name of the particular court or such) – one can’t just go trawling, especially under so vague and general a search-parameter as “case brought against church for sex abuse”. Second, such cases as are identified will yield documentary legal filings – perhaps even their texts – but not the specifics of evidence submitted in support of the Complaint. And if the case were settled out of court, and if the settlement included a secrecy clause (at, say, the insistence of the Plaintiffs through Counsel) then one is not going to find much useful at all. Back then to square-one.
P, Since your church is the last divine right monarchy, convincing you of anything is meaningless because you are only an apologist. You have no power in your church. How do I know that? All you have to do is disagree with the "princes" on one thing and see how far you'll get? You'll get the great catholic rulers, silence. Just silence, no prayers no bon voyage just silence. Les tyrany des majesties. You love that s#&t. But they'll never let you in. And since there's no heaven; you won't be "rewarded" there either. You are not on the side of virtue. Write your lengthy obfuscations till you croak. You still haven't explained how the church can be declaring bankruptsy at the same time it's the largest charity giver on earth.
Judas was a Jew. Jesus was a Jew. Jesus never heard the word Catholic. So who's lying here my generation or you?
Really my generation liars huh? Sister or Father Cunagunda your generation is which? Before or after mine. You sound like the generation before mine. You sound like an old John Bircher. You write like before mine but ever since Ronny Raygun there been a real rebirth of idiocy amongst the young. My point is, that from whatever generation you come, you care nothing for truth; intelligence; and reality. You will have "pie in the sky when you die, bye and bye," (Woody Gutherie). But those of us who've had to deal with your unsunny disposition while you are still with us will always remember you for your anger, hostility and complete inability to relate compassionately to the majority of humanity, as we are.
Any god that would create or allow a hell, is no god worth believing in.
Anyone who can imagine a "lane" that is "pink and sparkly and "lined by marshmallow guardrails" isn't as "straight" as they like to pretend they are, princess.
Why don't you tell us what your 'liberation theology' god has done for you, or the poor, or anyone?
You promote this religion, when you're not promoting your other religions, atheism and homosexualism, maybe you can get yourself a few converts here…give us your very best sales pitch, and also make sure to back up any claims that your religions are void of the sins of man, as you expect the other (monotheistic, Abrahamic) religions of the world to be.
God who? Athiests don't have a god remember?
Nor have I ever said your church stands alone in having abusers. The issue is: other religions didn't have an entire order devoted to helping those abusers to rest and recuperate; then returned them to the parishes that they might abuse again. And they did abuse again. Children were harmed who could have been spared, SPARED! but thanks to your monarchy, weren't.
Other religions haven't systemically attacked the people they helped rape that they might hold on to money.. Other religions haven't created a black flag operation that castrates victims like SNAP does. And other religions don't have members who pat themselves on the back for being the world's great giver of charity while at the very same moment howling bankruptsy and poor mouth..
You've got a lot to answer for but instead you whine and cry, baby like, at imagined monsters under the bed or in the media, who are "persecuting" you. Here's a kleenex, blow your nose and sober up..
On the 29th at 1108AM it is asserted that “Anderson doesn’t have the smarts to do what you say he did regarding SNAP”.
Let’s review what Anderson – judging his chops as a tort attorney – has accomplished in the Catholic Abuse Matter: i) he initially realized that numerous currents and waves of cultural developments were beginning to work in sync, creating a synergy towards ‘victims’ (who needn’t be too carefully examined) and against not only institutions generally but – as a result of the current of secularization abetted by government – against religion; ii) he realized that among those religions the Church provided the fattest target: it had “deep pockets” – which is a key criterion for any tort-attorney; it kept more records than less organized religious polities; it was sufficiently hierarchical so as to be imagined and spun as a corporation, which opened up the possibility that one could not only sue individual accused priests but could also take a stab at higher-ups in the organization and at the entire corporate entity (and thus, of course, its assets and insurance resources); he realized that the mainstream media were easily lured by simplistic Good-Evil scripting and that the media were eager to increase declining circulation and viewer ‘numbers’; he realized that in matters of sexual assault claims legislators were eagerly passing laws that profoundly weakened the traditional evidentiary and procedural principles and maxims that had heretofore impeded significant possibilities of wide success in that type of case; he realized that the law enforcement agencies and DA’s would also be receptive to any reliably sustained and usefully-presented ‘cases’; and he realized that in order to really ensure a sufficiently numerous supply of clients he would need a front-organization or two that could groom prospective clients and steer them toward tort-attorneys (because of professional principles and legal regulations such activity could not be initiated by the tort-attorneys themselves).
And all of this led to the program I have called “the Anderson Strategies”. Which became a template that any enterprising tort-attorney could deploy in his/her own patch of turf (thus he was not only willing to ‘share the wealth’ by erecting a reproducible legal strategic template, but was willing to explain exactly how one would go about setting-up for business when using the template).
As a result of which tort attorneys have garnered somewhere between two and three billion in settlements and fees, spread over a field of eleven or twelve thousand formally recorded allegants, on the basis of allegations and claims which were largely unexamined and which are – a crowning brilliance – now hidden from subsequent analysis and examination behind secrecy walls demanded by the tort-attorney as part of the case settlements.
And we would also have to add the ‘bundled lawsuit’ tactic, where so many Plaintiffs were bundled together in one lawsuit and one huge Complaint that almost all major insurers could almost inevitably be relied upon to choose ‘settlement’ to ‘trial’.
And then – rather than dirtying his hands by actually creating a front-organization from scratch – he sought out the then-small-potatoes SNAP and made Blaine an offer that she clearly couldn’t and didn’t refuse.
That record strikes me as indicative of some pretty serious professional chops; whether he himself is an inspirational speaker is a minimally relevant concern in light of his strategic achievements.
And, finally, we have seen recently the probable influence he has exercised in his own base-State, in the form of all the Twin-Cities Minnesota developments and oddities I recently recounted in a comment here.
"God's plan" ? Maybe god's getting senile his "plans" seem a bit wonky. They've included us victims coming out and your church being shamed publicly for it's truely shameful behavior reguarding us. Maybe god's really on the side of all the poor people in this world and against the rich including the very rich catholic church? Long live Liberation Theology!
In regard to the 30th at 1227PM: we are given the characterization of the Church as “the last divine right monarchy”. This assertion contradicts my ‘constitutional monarchy’ metaphor, which I had put forward as being more accurate than the divine-right absolutist model – but the assertion does so without any explanation of itself whatsoever. And, strictly speaking, the Church is not a “divine right monarchy”: in the divine-right-monarchy model, the crown received authority directly from God to control all matters temporal in that crown’s territory.
But the Papacy’s authority is rather different: the Pope is not a royal sovereign over all things temporal within a given geographical realm; rather, the Pope is God’s Vicar on Earth, and in that role the Papacy’s writ is not over the temporal but over the spiritual, and this authority extends beyond all earthly kingdoms and realms. So while the “divine right monarchy” characterization makes for a nice snappy sound-bite, it remains just that and nothing more. In matters temporal the Sun King, Louis XIV, exercised more temporal authority and deployed more power than any Pope.
The epithet about my being “only an apologist” can stay up where it was put – hanging, like all the other assertions, unsupported by any reasoning or explanation whatsoever.
The level of thinking and cognitive process behind so much Abusenik material is clearly in evidence: one might not go too far in any corporation by disagreeing with the organization’s “princes” – but are we thus to believe that all corporations and militaries are thus accurately characterizable as ‘divine right monarchies’?
Where the bit about “silence” comes from I do not know. And the phrase “Les tyranny des majesties” is not recognizable as any language with which I am familiar (although it seems to be trying to pass itself off as French).
The rest of the comment trails off further into the fog.
But then the effort to regain the high-ground of victimization by hook or by crook: the plaint that I “still haven’t explained how the church can be declaring bankruptcy [correction supplied] at the same time it’s the largest charity giver on earth”. To the best of my knowledge the entity formally known as the Roman Catholic Church has not declared bankruptcy – if JR has information to the contrary, he can put up his supporting material and links here. This or that Diocese may have done so, but none of them are known as “the largest charity giver on earth”. Thus once again we see the sloppy quality of Abusenik thought, which mirrors so much material encountered in certain precincts of the Web.
And on the 30th at 1210PM we are treated to the type of sophomoric theologizing that takes its place alongside the profoundly under-informed historical and military theorizing and asserting. The role of Hell, flowing from the role of indispensable human free will, is available for any reader who wishes to inform him/herself, starting with the Catholic Encyclopedia. For those with a particular interest, I could recommend Andrew Michael Flescher’s 2013 book Moral Evil as a very informative overview for general-interest readers.
Oh,the popes not a divine right monarch he's just "God's (Only) Vicar on Earth". That's nice. How humble! Prove it.
I could say I'm "God's pumpernickle here on earth" and I'd be deemed "nuts" or at best "excentric". But your magic man is credited by your myths to be gods rep. Why sure he is…… cough, cough…. sure he is.
[edited by moderator]
No one notices that P winds up defending more than criticizing SNAP and Jeff Anderson?
He defends them by rationalizing their very odd behaviors as if not being " o.k." then at least understandable; because after all they only represent liars and thieves. Why defend them at all? Only to make us wrong? Possibly or is it to make them right? As in, they are who the say they are. When I and other victims who've posted here tell you that they are not right. They are not who they claim themselves to be. So sure believe someone who's never met any of the usual suspects versus people, victims who have worked and met with these "people" literally dozens of times.
For you working class "types" Compare this behavior to how a bad boss acts like he knows everything about your job but couldn't do it for an hour. The truth is the workers , the activist victims who've posted here, know just what's going on. We've had to deal with these people, daily for years. But if you don't believe we were raped in the first place , why would you believe us about SNAP?
Let's talk about Holy Money, a program on the church's wealth, on Al Jazeera tonight Sunday and at various times all this week.
I need to watch it twice but how can you talk about the church's wealth and not mention the debris of wealth from the past two THOUSAND + years. The show didn't. I think they underestimate the wealth of the church. In South America alone the church was second and sometimes first in command in the continents christianization and it's colonization. And they absorbed (stole) the wealth of the conquered and transfered it to where? Why to Spain and Rome where the Church was so close at hand, as it were. I don't think the real wealth on earth here and now of the church's assets is merely stupendous I think it is wealth itself. "If the church were just a corporation in America it would be in the top 20 companies right up there with General Motors and Apple".
The church leaves every year a 170 billion dollar foot print on the economy of the U.S. They have beaucoup power. They can sit where ever they want to in whore house earth.
Money = Power = Church. vs. Victims = ants, (something easily stepped on) = easily destroyed = easily ignored= easily forgotton = easily manipulated by SNAP. That's the truth of it in my opinion.
Tsk, tsk, tsk, so interested in everyone else's bling; why don't you mind your own business and stop coveting thy neighbors goods (and husband).
One would think that since this same one absconded with his own portion of that same bling he criticizes he'd be less critical. How could he have ever benefitted from his 'victimization' were it not for the Church's assets? Assets that should have gone to the poor and sick, instead of lining the pockets of "actors".
Envy is the most evil of all the deadly sins.
Al Jazeera, now, there's your go-to source for all the news thats fit to print.
And, not a bias in sight, anywhere!
I wonder, does Al Jazeera support the leftist agenda when it comes to female, "gay", ethnic minority or animal and mother-earth rights and protections? I did hear a terrible story one time about how they napalmed a black lesbian donkey in Afghanistan - just for the fun of it….
You are such a simp.
I once asked Marianne Williamson (A Course in Miracles) what she meant by "God's will' she quickly answered "the way things are".
So if god's will is the way things are. My being here; my refuting your nonsense is the will of your almighty. I guess I've been sent by god to wake you up; but you keep rolling over and going back to sleep. Awake you sinners the lord approaches by sending you moi. LOL!
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The church's wealth is everybodies business. You get it all tax free. You rape people and refuse to compensate them. The state ( which also consists of, buddhists,protestants; muslims; athiests; and gays etc.) has to pick up the tab for your crimes. There are real life consequences for your religious fantasies and irresponsibilities.
You call me an "actor". Wasn't your divine Ronny, an "actor"? So some actors are better than others but only if they agree with your ignorant "take" on life? ( I recieved a scholarship for acting from the Globe theatre in San Diego, I never took it. I was scouted by Universal studios as an actor in college. I'm a very good actor. That does not mean i'm a very good liar. I'm not. I had no need to lie about my rape. It was all too real.)
"Art is a lie that tells the truth". That's according to another communist artist, Picasso. [You might have heard of him?]
Shouldn't you be somewhere praying away the sins of the world? Or is saving god's money your self "ordained" goal?
Future "saint" John Paul 2 was also an actor FYI.
[edited by moderator] Napalm was invented in America (Dow chemical) and was used mostly by Americans in illegal wars against innocent human beings viciously attacked in their own countries by foriegn invaders, us, the good old U.S. of A.
But what with your imaginary 20+ year military career? You should know that.
Oh Dear- appears as though I touched a nerve, again. Oops.
I will put a extra C-note in the old basket for the second collection this Sunday to make it up to you. That collection go to Courage.
An "extra C-note", huh! How did you earn that "extra C-note"? Lift it from the collection plate, did you father?
In regard to the comment of the 31st at 0118AM:
First, I would make the point that what we are trying to do is not just “talk about” the Catholic Abuse Matter and the Stampede here; what we are trying to do is to examine and assess and get some clearer grasp of the subject. Anybody can “talk about”, and toss around whatever comes to mind or whatever is prompted by one’s mood or inclinations – who hasn’t heard this type of thing in bars or coffee-shops or innumerable other venues? And the internet – for all its advantages – has simply added one more venue, although hugely more amplified, where such ‘talking about’ can go on.
We might even wish to add this fact to that long list of elements that the Anderson Strategies realized would be useful for the erection and maintenance of a Stampede.
Second, we are directed toward a TV show on the Al Jazeera network as a basis for discussion. The network has a rightful claim to some stature in news-reporting, especially when compared to much of American mainstream media sources (Minnesota Public Radio – and the larger umbrella organization National Public Radio – has demonstrated its dubious ‘reporting’ recently in the various Twin Cities developments and the Abuse Matter generally, as we have seen and discussed here).
But whether Al Jazeera’s show “Holy Money” is accurately informative is another question. Does its examination define “wealth” (cash-holding, cash-flow, financial assets, real estate (including or excluding historic architecture), art and cultural treasures that might well be characterized as ‘priceless’) clearly and accurately?
Nor can I understand the effective meaning of the phrase “the debris of wealth from the past two-thousand-plus years” [formatting changed]. Does it simply mean the accumulated material footprint of an organization that has operated for two millennia? Is “debris” supposed to imply something more on the lines of ‘wreckage’, as the word would seem to imply if its primary meaning is actually operative here?
It is most likely to the show’s credit that it actually “didn’t” refer to all that asserted “debris”.
And in regard to the Church’s fiscal worth, the TV show apparently did not – to the satisfaction of some – engage in the type of hyperbolic speculation or fantasizing that has been the prime-matter of anti-Catholic fever-dreams for centuries.
If one wishes to ‘opine’, then that is one thing, and anybody can do it. If one wishes to “think” – then one can reasonably be expected to discuss or explain not only one’s conclusory assertion but also the ‘thinking’ that led the speaker to reach that assertion. Thus, whether the show does or does not “underestimate the wealth of the Church” remains open to further question and examination.
In the matter of the 15th and 16th century Spanish colonization of South America (reaching all the way up to present-day Central America and Mexico and the American Southwest), the Church’s difficult relations with the strong-willed Spanish monarchy of that era work to undermine that military term “in command”; the Church was the only European religious organization to be allowed to come over in any numbers with the various Spanish expeditions and so characterizing it as being “in command” is misleading.
JR then confuses the depredations of the official Spanish colonial governments with the Church. In the early period, those officials were simply the conquistadors and warrior-entrepreneurs who were named by the Crown to lead the expeditions. And Spain’s interests were first and always ‘colonial’, and the discovery of vast troves of precious metals did nothing to soften those aims as the Spanish Crown realized that it now had sole access to treasure vitally necessary to fund its large and various ambitions in Europe.
Given both the development of national monarchies by the 16th century in Europe, and the necessity for open-ocean travel on a scale never undertaken by Europeans before, the Church was forced to hitch a ride – as it were – with the Spanish government expeditions in a way that was not necessary in the first great age of Catholic missionary work on the Eurasian landmass starting in the fourth or fifth century.
And it is certainly reasonable to see the Church’s role in the New World as quickly evolving from one of merely ‘missionary’ work to actually settling-in to build a society and a culture, something not primary to the government’s expeditionary leaders.
And when the Church objected to the treatment of the natives, the Spanish Crown – torn between the desire to further the work of God and its increasingly-desperate need for precious metals, and relying for its ‘military’ leadership on the afore-mentioned conquistadors, tried to have it both ways … which is rarely a strategy that delivers optimum results.
Nor could the Popes of that era simply ‘command’ the Spanish monarchy, which was strictly Catholic until well after the Reformation, although in that peculiarly Visigothic Spanish way: intense, single-minded, robust to the point of violence. (The Spanish Inquisition, we recall, was set up independently by the Spanish monarchy since it didn’t trust the Roman Inquisition – with its canonical principles – to be tough enough.)
We have seen the same cartoonish presumption of Church ‘command’ as recently as the plaints about the Church not stopping the Fasicsts and Nazis (and – it has to be added – the Communists and Soviets) in World War 2; and today – for more pecuniary purposes – we see the Church cast as a monolithic ‘command structure’ in order to i) establish legal pretexts for pot-of-gold lawsuits and ii) assure allegants that they are actually heroic ‘Robin Hood’ types who will rob the illicitly rich to compensate the variously poor and ‘victimized’.
Thus the cartoon vision of the Church as leading or co-commanding the Spanish conquest of the New World is grossly insufficient for understanding what actually was going on back then. But such cartoons have served various masters and agendas over the centuries since then: the Church as rapacious, the Church as anti-democratic, the Church as (take your pick).
While it sounds catchy and even pretends to some sort of philosophical conclusion, the idea that “the real wealth on earth here and now of the church’s assets is [not] merely stupendous I think it is wealth itself” [sic] actually conveys nothing substantive; what is the entity termed “wealth itself”? But stuff like this does impress, in certain circles, especially in the internet age.
Where the Church might stand in any ranking of American corporations is also an issue that would require some prior clear definition of “the church” and of the definitional content of assets and wealth and so on.
And then one would have to explain the significance of the fact that the Church (distinct from this or that Diocese? The Church in the United States or the entire world-wide Church?), having been around for two millennia and having played so great a role in European civilization since before the fall of the Roman Empire, has a large organizational footprint. What precisely is the core problem with that? Size?
Numerous religious groups have far less size. One might think of the Campbellites or the group that styled itself the Hard-Shell Baptists (as distinct from the larger Baptist polity or polities). But their charmingly small size, one quickly realizes, had a seriously deleterious effect on their effect on the wider culture and society and civilization around them.
But then, such groups were content being ‘sects’. The Church – from the Fall of the Roman Empire and even before – sought not to be a ‘sect’ but rather to be a universal Church, representing as best as might be achieved in this or that era the realm of the spiritual while simultaneously having to therefore become involved with ‘the world’, the realm of the temporal. And that was guaranteed to be a fraught process in many ways – temporality being what it is.
And in regard to the comment of the 31st at 138AM: How is this 170 billion dollar figure arrived-at?
The “beaucoup power” bit (cafeteria-style French again, it seems) cannot coexist coherently with the course and consequence of the Stampede over the past 30 or so years.
The simplistic ‘equation’ that then follows can stay up there right where it was put. As an “opinion”.
Your own pope Frank said and I quote " Money is the dung of the devil". Well then the church must be rolling in it. Because they have a lot of it.
Look at the documentary and see for yourself.
On the 31st at 1036 we are informed that JR has it on the best authority (let’s leave the rest of that story just where it was put) that “God’s will” is to be defined as “the way things are”. And that to think otherwise is to be a “simp”.
All would depend on whether “God’s will” is accurately defined as being “the way things are”. There seems no distinction here between the way things “are” and the way things might be or indeed should be. If this definition were to be taken as accurate, then there is little room to justify going to any effort to change anything at all; we are back to the fatalism, determinism, and passivity of those belief-systems that see either a) no room for human intelligence and activity to operate in history or life or b) no justification for it or c) no need for it because there is no possibility of human intelligence and activity as having any effect.
And what happens then to the use of the human mind and will in this life and world? If everything is what “God’s Will” wants and always-wanted it to be, “God” can either be very good or very incompetent (or even evil) – it would all depend on how any particular individual felt about the state of things in this world.
And then in any case, things need not be – indeed cannot be – justifiably improved.
Or one might decide that one didn’t like things “the way things are”, decide that God must be the sole source of all evils (natural and/or moral) and thus set oneself up to define ‘change’ simply as whatever one’s private illuminations or whims directed.
This is not a theory that conceptually holds together.
And it regresses us back to the early centuries after Christ when the Manichees held that there were two more or less equal gods – one good and one evil and neither able to get control from the other. But adds the stupefying complexity that it is up to each individual as to a) whether one judges what is good and what is evil and b) what one might wish to do with the results of one’s imaginings about (a).
The theory also omits any space for human-caused evil, and fails to deal with the stupendous complexities created by that abiding human phenomenon.
It simplistically reduces the problem to “God” and then cuts everybody loose to follow their own imagination.
And with no formal conceptual handling of such major phenomena, and by leaving things so precipitously up in the air, this Williamson bit basically opens the door to there being no way of judging or dealing-with evil (natural or human-caused) except for everybody to do what everybody else does because that lemming-like conformity is all that is now available to claim any justification for taking any action at all.
And this is what happens when you use catchy sound-bites as a substitute for serious thinking.
I would also point out this crystal-clear example of the cafeteria method of approaching such profound complexity: i) find somebody who wrote a book and – if one likes what the author says – then simply avoid doing any further critical or evaluative thinking (or any thinking at all) and presume that what the author says is accurate and then ii) put together a pile of blocks built on the foundation of the simplistic step one took in (i) and thus create the simulacrum of accurate-thinking for oneself.
And in this case one can also deploy the contemporary ‘argument from celebrity’: this book has sold lots of copies and all sorts of ‘in’ people have talked about it so – but of course – it must be right. And – but of course – that one is so ‘in’ as to be ‘in’ with the celebrity and running with the herd. A stampeding herd does move and does raise a lot of dust, but that’s about all that you get from it.
Thus a classic example of what might accurately be described as a program entitled ‘Thinking for Simps’.
Ms. Williamson (and I) never said you couldn't or shouldn't do something about the "way things are". Changing things would also be the "will of god". The whole shebang is god's will. Oppression; revolution; murder, punishment; justice; injustice; hatred and love: all of it, the illogical will of god. Yay god!
On the 30th at 1000PM we are now informed that the problem isn’t that “your church stands alone in having abusers” but rather “The issue is: other religions didn’t have an entire order devoted to helping those abusers to rest and recuperate; then returned them to the parishes that they might abuse again”.
In regard to this bit: To the extent that the behavior of sexually-abusing (however defined) as distinct from the actual clinical diagnosis of pedophilia, was (and still is) considered a dysfunction that can be addressed by psychological therapy of some sort, then the Church had set up a special Order and facilities specifically devoted to the work of providing the best therapeutic intervention that was considered professionally available at the time. In that sense the Church was ahead of just about every other organization – religious or otherwise – on the planet it addressing this particular type of dysfunction.
Additionally, the Church had set up such facilities for clergy to address other dysfunctions such as alcoholism and drug abuse, as well as more overtly psychiatric problems. And again, in having done this so many decades ago, the Church was well ahead of every other organization – religious or otherwise – on the planet in addressing the psychological and behavioral difficulties among its clergy (or, solely for the purposes of this discussion here, its ‘employees’). While ‘human resources’ and various types of corporate programs are now well-established in government and industry, the Church was well ahead of all of them in going this route.
The fact that the abuse issue is now primarily guided by other priorities does nothing to lessen the achievement of the Church in addressing the psychological bases of the dysfunctions. Indeed, there is now a type of (somewhat legally dubious) ‘civil confinement’ law of recent vintage that enables prisons to keep ‘sex offenders’ who have completed their sentences beyond that release-date in order to require therapy. So the government itself realizes the value of psychological intervention (although the legal dynamics claimed to justify this particular type of ‘civil confinement’ law create problems of their own).
And of course one must then factor in the famously mutable and malleable play-dough definition of ‘abuse’ and ‘abusive’ and ‘abuser’, as well.
We then get the bit that “other religions haven’t created a black flag operation that castrates victims like SNAP does”. We have not in any way established – and I think it remains a hugely and even grossly dubious theory – that the Church “created” SNAP as we know it. I have discussed this at very great length and will not detain regular readers with a rehearsal of all the problems with this theory here today.
And I would further point out that “castrates” bit, which is utterly metaphorical and hyperbolic (but this is exactly what is required by the Playbook: when the idea isn’t strong, make the expression of the idea as vivid as you can, no matter how much exaggeration is required).
The rest of the paragraph is a moosh of all sorts of plaints about the Church, reflecting not so much a focused concern on abuse but instead a scattershot compendium of the usual garden-variety anti-Catholic eructations one can encounter on numerous sites and comments on the lower end of the internet spectrum.
The problem calls for “sober” thinking but instead we get the “imagined monsters” of the Church, which images are simply plop-tossed at the screen with no effort to engage or address the problems pointed-out with them. But this too is standard Playbook praxis: when you haven’t got any material to counter the problems pointed out with the Stampede, just keep tossing the same stuff up and avoid any discussion at all.
Then, on the 31st at 951AM I am asked to “prove” that “the popes not a divine right monarch” [sic] but only “God’s (Only) Vicar on Earth”.
We are either facing a reading-comprehension problem here or else what I wrote a few days ago on that point is simply being ignored (and avoided).
I am putting up here the relevant two-paragraph sequence from my comment of the 27th at 1156PM:
“At 1127AM on the 27th, we see here a long-established Abusenik (and SNAP) trope: that the Church is a “monarchy”. If the Church is a “monarchy”, it is more accurately imaginable as a constitutional monarchy than an absolute monarchy. There is a reason bishops are canonically and technically referred-to as “Ordinaries”: because the power they have over their sees is “ordinary” and thus not “delegated” by the Papacy. It is for this reason that the Church is not accurately imagined as either a modern military power-structure or a conventional Western corporate power-structure (although anybody familiar with the complexities of modern corporate power-structures would also quickly realize how modulated such structures are, and how constricted CEO authority can be).
And thus the substantial inaccuracy of the assertion that “one man, the pope, can end their existence with a word, a stroke of a pen”. The Pope can indeed dis-establish a Diocese – but it is rarely done and mostly for demographic reasons (for which reasons new Dioceses can also be established, and an Ordinary appointed for them). But the idea of a Pope getting up in a bad mood of a morning and at a whim simply issuing a ukase that this or that Diocese be dis-established is certainly beyond the parameters of the applicable realities here.”
And two paragraphs from my comment of the 30th at 809PM:
“In regard to the 30th at 1227PM: we are given the characterization of the Church as “the last divine right monarchy”. This assertion contradicts my ‘constitutional monarchy’ metaphor, which I had put forward as being more accurate than the divine-right absolutist model – but the assertion does so without any explanation of itself whatsoever. And, strictly speaking, the Church is not a “divine right monarchy”: in the divine-right-monarchy model, the crown received authority directly from God to control all matters temporal in that crown’s territory.
But the Papacy’s authority is rather different: the Pope is not a royal sovereign over all things temporal within a given geographical realm; rather, the Pope is God’s Vicar on Earth, and in that role the Papacy’s writ is not over the temporal but over the spiritual, and this authority extends beyond all earthly kingdoms and realms. So while the “divine right monarchy” characterization makes for a nice snappy sound-bite, it remains just that and nothing more. In matters temporal the Sun King, Louis XIV, exercised more temporal authority and deployed more power than any Pope.”
So however the Papacy might be theoretically described, ‘divine right monarchy’ isn’t among the options. But it does conform to the Playbook requirements: if you can’t be accurate (because the facts won’t support your assertion), then just be vivid.
It might have occurred to some readers that there is a lot of material in the Playbook that actually seems merely to enshrine some deficient-thinking habits that one might see in the cafeteria or the back-end-of-the-parking-lot at any high school. I believe such an observation to be correct: the Stampede shrewdly capitalized on weak and problematic thinking deficiencies that are observable among the lower spectrum of any high-school student body and – realizing the value of the internet in this regard – has enabled such types to deploy their ‘thinking’ on the Web.
And the bits about “God’s pumpernickel” and speculations by JR as to whether he is “’nuts’ or at best ‘excentric’” (‘eccentric’, actually) can remain up there for any reader who wishes to pursue the thought further.
Then on the 31st at 1016 we are given a nice little innuendo question (in best Playbook style) that tries to get a play going on-base rather than with an at-bat at home plate: Presuming what is yet to be demonstrated, readers are slyly informed (as if it were a fact they had missed) that “P winds up defending more than criticizing SNAP and Jeff Anderson”.
In regard to Jeff Anderson, I have pointed out on this thread that he has accomplished quite a bit and therefore has to be given credit for his combined Anderson Strategies. Only to a cafeteria-thought process could that equate to “defending” him. I simply countered the inaccurate assertion that he isn’t really such a competent attorney (because he isn’t an impressive public speaker).
To the Abusenik mentality, anything negative against a target is ‘good’ regardless of its inaccuracy, and anything positive about an Abusenik target is ‘bad’ regardless of its accuracy. And it is to Anderson’s credit that he knew enough how to harness this type of wackness out there in the Webverse without ever having to sully his hands and reputation by actually interacting with these types.
However, with all that already said, I would say that ultimately Anderson’s is a brilliance in a very dubious enterprise. And I have expended much time and many pixels on explaining why.
Then the coherence-train seems to derail in the second paragraph of the comment: suffice it to say that the phrase “liars and thieves” is not mine, and once again – for lack of anything better – the Abusenik mind has simply created its own quotations with which to take issue.
Anderson and other torties who have deployed his Strategies have raked in between two and three billion dollars for somewhere between twelve and thirteen thousand allegants. I think one would have to say he has done them all quite a service (even after fees and expenses are deducted). Am I “defending” him? Not any more than I defend Hitler simply by acknowledging the brilliance of employing the Sichelschnitt strategy that knocked France out of the war in six weeks in 1940.
The rest of that paragraph is a specimen that individual readers may wish to plumb. I can’t follow the thought-process at all.
Then we get the concluding trope trying to a) make commenting a proof of being “activist” and b) connecting such types to “working-class” heroes (as in late-19th century and early-20th century struggles between labor and workers vs. management and bosses). Readers may consider it as they will.
And yet the last question – apparently an attempt at a snappy rhetorical conclusion – actually hits a nail on the head: since we have great probable cause not to accept many Abusenik stories at face-value (for the many many many reasons discussed over time in comments on this site), then why would we believe the ‘victims’ about SNAP (which question actually presumes that many many ‘victims’ share this theory that SNAP and Anderson are and always have been merely tools of the Church)?
Although once again, it is not really merely a matter of ‘belief’ because we are not here conducting that hoary Playbook exercise I call a ‘belief-bout’. Whether SNAP and Anderson (and all other torties perhaps) are and always have been tools of the Church is a question that can be rationally examined (and therefore need not be reduced to the classic and fundamental Abusenik whine to be ‘believed’ with no further questions asked, please). And I have spent much time and many pixels raising questions as to the probability of this theory’s being accurate and sufficient as an explanation. And no responses – such few as there have been – have done much more than create more problems for this theory’s probability.
When do you intend to compensate your own raped catholics?
That's really not the best activist/anarchist chant you can muster up, now, is it ("when do you intend to compensate your raped catholics"?)
Try this: "Hi-Ho, CatLicks Must GO!" Or, "Hell No, We won't Go… to Church!"
How about: " Eeenie, meenie, minee, moe- catch a Bishop by his toe!"
Come on, there, SeanPenn Robertson, you can do better-
We know you chicken hawks never go to the wars you shill for.
"Let the other guy do it", should be your motto. (I only wish i knew how to say that in Latin).
Why do you bother to go to church if when push comes to shove on a moral issue, like compensating your victims, you refuse to do anything about it?…..Positively.
Let me say this: 1 and a quarter billion catholics can do what ever they like. they have the numbers. the question is, what do they like and who do they like; and even after JP2's long conservative reign, how much they believe in the church's rather odd standards of morality.? Where a priestly class is not subject to the laws of man but only subject to the machinations of their bosses. And their own children might be protected but they might not; And those truely injured are ignored.
This is a moral issue. So if you want to pretend you are on the moral high ground about anything. You should fix yourself first. If you fixed this for your already raped; catholics could begin to hold their heads high again.
Francis is no Ronny Raygun unlike Ron he won't be able to fool the faithful to act against their own best interests there's been to much made known.
If you don't fix it. You'll be closing a lot more churches and have even less new priests to replace the old. Remember what happened to the Shakers.
On the 1st at 1114AM we get an enlightening bit: JR asserts that he and Williamson “never said you couldn’t or shouldn’t do something about ‘the way things are’”.
That’s probably true: I doubt that either JR or Williamson actually thought-through the consequences inherent in that “the way things are” assertion. But that’s precisely the point: they toss out snappy sound-bites without actually having thought them through in terms of ramifications, implications, and conceptual consequences and sequelae.
This is the equivalent of claiming that when you mixed this and that and the other chemical in the lab you didn’t intend for there to be an explosion. As if to say that since your intention wasn’t to cause an explosion, then any consequent explosion isn’t your fault.
But the points I raised in my comment about the implications and consequences of her assertion logically flow from the assertion and are in there, whether she or JR want to notice or acknowledge them or not.
And then on the 1st at 1217PM we simply get – no doubt for lack of anything better – the umpty-teenth repetition of the 3×5 mantra “when do you intend to compensate your own raped catholics?”. To which I would respond: when we can definitively establish who is genuinely a “raped” Catholic. And that hasn’t happened yet. And if the material we have had a chance to examine and consider on this site is any indicator, that isn’t going to be happening any time soon.
Meanwhile, those twelve or thirteen thousand actual allegants have split somewhere between two and three billion dollars for their stories (minus – say – 40 percent for combined tortie contingency fees and expenses). One can, if one wishes, do the math.
Hey, I'm so sorry your priests raped so many children and that you have to pay for it. But don't kill the mesenger.
Continuing with some attention to the Vatican’s appointment of that Vatican-level abuse panel, today’s Boston Globe prints two ‘letters to the editor’, both of which, by amazing coincidence, are from Abusenik sources. (The letters appear on page A12 of the print edition if your public or university library has a subscription; the online Globe is behind a pay-wall.)
The first letter is headed (by the editorial staff, I imagine) “Church must take action, not hold more meetings”, which is their effort to sum up the key point in the letter. But of course, this is right from the Stampede Playbook: don’t allow readers to think about whether what you assert is true; instead, just manipulate them to presume that what you claim is true and then get them to join the herd braying for “action”.
Thus to the text of the first letter: “We” (identity revealed here below) do wish well to anyone who “is willing to try to convince Pope Francis that decisive action against perpetrators and enablers of perpetrators is what it will take to end the sex-abuse crisis and protect children”. As if the Pope hasn’t already evinced a serious concern.
But then the Abusenik kicker: “Only strong action will count, not a ton of commission meetings, speeches, and reports”. Of course, it is in the details of such convocations and reports that responsible officials can get a clear and accurate picture of the genuine shape and size of the “crisis” (especially now, when the allegations are dropping off precipitously).
Condescendingly, the letter then lectures that “This is not a difficult subject to grasp. The rape and sodomy of children is a crime”. Yes, truly so. But then such crimes constitute only a small fraction of the official allegations formally lodged (which are the only ones we have to go on without simply entertaining this, that, and another fever-dream assertion about how many and how many more horrific allegations remain – after a full quarter century of the “crisis” – un-reported).
Then a nifty rhetorical bit: “You can get it, as the Vatican now says it does, but getting it is not an accomplishment getting rid of it is”. But of course, a) the Church – if the numbers of allegations be any criterion – has indeed been “getting rid of it”; and b) we still don’t know how genuinely large – and therefore how much more – “getting rid of” needs to be done. And the letter doesn’t seem to want too much examination (by meetings and study and reports) to be done on that particular question.
The letter then compares the abuse bits to the fact that “it didn’t take a commission for the pope to oust a German bishop over his ostentatious personal residence”. No it did not. Because the clear and actual physical and visible evidence of that Bishop’s spending habits were there for any and all to see. Whereas in the Stampede “crisis” all we have is stories and allegations and claims (we recall here not only the Philadelphia stories but also the ‘Horne’ comment here about the UK in the 1950s). So the letter here tries to compare apples and cactus-blossoms.
Then the letter also notes the Bishop Finn case where that Ordinary – although found guilty of a misdemeanor (if I recall correctly) – is still in office in his Diocese on the Kansas-Missouri frontier. Whether conviction for a misdemeanor requires removal of an Ordinary is an open question. But when we consider how much the Church has achieved in the past decades, this newish insistence that now Bishops must be fired (or even ‘defrocked’) reminds me of nothing so much as Hitler’s smarmy and pious 1938 declaration that after the Sudeten land, he would make no more territorial demands. Yah. And after a Bishop or ten have been thus dealt-with, what next, d’ye suppose? That the Pope be defrocked – just ‘to send a message’?
And in its conclusion, the letter says that “the commission should be weighted in favor of survivors and whistle-blowers”. Which is code for: we don’t want “experts” (who might try to assess the actual size and scope of the problem – and maybe find that it’s been overblown) and instead we want “survivor”’ and “whistle-blowers” (whose genuine-ness, but of course, must be presumed and not in any way whatsoever at all doubted or questioned or examined). You see how the Game is played.
This letter is from one ‘Kristine Ward’ who identifies as “Chair” of the “National Survivor Advocates Coalition” in Dayton, OH. (And yet one wonders: have we not so often been bethumped here by certain “activist” comment-makers that ‘victims’ have not been allowed to form any alternative groups to SNAP?)
On to the second ‘letter’ then: its header is “Survivors network brings sense of urgency to protecting children”. Decent enough indeed.
The piece opens up with a blurby “congratulations” to SNAP for “25 years of hard work to protect children”; the writer (identity indicated below) had recently attended “the group’s recent meeting” and found “an inspiring review of its accomplishments”. We are even told that SNAP’s “leaders” receive “6,350 phone calls from survivors each year”. But a) “survivors” of what – precisely – since SNAP has now extended its brief to anybody and everybody anywhere in the world who was ever abused by anybody in any sort of authority of any kind whatsoever; and b) how did those SNAP “leaders” go about confirming the veracity of the stories and claims – or is that simply presumed?
Then we are told that “many fail to appreciate the sense of urgency” of SNAP’s “need to identify perpetrators and see them removed from ministry” (so much for anybody anywhere in authority who wasn’t in the clergy). But again we see clearly here the Playbook scam in action: start the action on first-base and not with an at-bat at home-plate: how do we – or even SNAP – know who is and isn’t telling a genuine and accurate and true story? We don’t and SNAP doesn’t. Nor – no doubt – would SNAP consider it good form to inquire. You see how the Game is played.
Thus, but of course, “SNAP is understandably impatient” about “another study commission with unspecified authority and with no indication that bishop accountability [not to be confused with the Bishop-Accountability site] is germane to its purpose.” Thus the same thoughts I put forward about the first letter apply here to the second.
The letter is signed simply with a name: Carolyn Disco, of Merrimack, NH. However that simple individual name seemed to ring a bell: and by amazing coincidence she is an official of the Voice of the Faithful group (again, one wonders about claims that ‘victims’ have not had any alternative groups to SNAP).
You are a silly silly man. Christine Ward is a catholic believer just like Barbra Blaine is. Again a women led "survivors" not victims' group. Who elected Ms. Ward? What is the matrix Mz Ward's group comes from? Activist catholics "survivor" groups have been as usless as teats on a boar, so far; but after all it's only been 30 years. Perhaps they need more time and prayer.
father Tom Doyle in his paper to the American bishops said they should create secret committees to control victim and our families. He even titled those committees as "The Project" SNAP; VOTF; and Ms.Wards are those black opp, false flag "committees. How do I know these groups are what I claim. Look at what they produce for victims. NOTHING! No demand for compensation. No demand for a governmental inquery. NOTHING. Just more talk about "The Church". Victims don't care about what you do with your church. We, the few I've met anyway, aren't church centric. We'd like to know when your church will compensate your victims. The rest is all fluff.
All of what you complain about in those letters is phony but not as you see it. It's phony because each group authenticates the other as being representative of victims and our needs and wishes, when they aren't.
Here's a simple guide to false flag efforts: If they have no elections and are headed by active catholics and or women, they aren't what they say they are.
I mention women because 80% of victims are men yet SNAP and Ms. Wards group and VOTF are headed by active catholic ladies, all.
I believe in women's leadership but these groups aren't pro victim as they pose as being; but pro church. Votf even changed it's mission statement from promoting the needs of victims to reforming the church. Niether the injured's job or need, thank you.
Your majesty, I told you committees were formed in the name of survivors with no oversight by survivors, no input, no election just pose. Everything SNAP does only makes sense when you see them as working for the church. Not letting victims control SNAP means that victims have no representation at all and worse those posing as our representatives are in fact working for the church not victims. They are there to make sure the church controls our image to the world and most importantly have us appear to active catholics as not so bright, hostile to the faith, by demoing in front of churches during religious ceremonies, and whiney.
And the beat goes on.
On the 2nd at 1029AM I am “silly” – standard Playbook epithetical – because (JR assures us) “Christine Ward is a catholic believer just like Barbara Blaine is”[sic]. And we are to take this as a fact because … why? Will we soon be informed that in addition to conversing with an Oprah-famous author and being scouted by a major motion-picture studio and getting a second scholarship (this one from the Globe theater in San Diego – which is actually the Old Globe) which, alas, he turned down (thus neutralizing the need to produce any record), JR, on top of his high-school achievements, is now also an expert on who is and isn’t a “catholic believer”?
And of what relevance here is the point about being a “catholic believer” in the first place? Are we to infer that if one is a ‘catholic believer’ then one by definition cannot run a victims’ group?
But we are then informed that “a women led ‘survivors’ not victims’ group” [sic] is apparently not an actual victims’ group in JR’s personal schematic, and anyway such groups “have been as useless as teats on a boar” [correction supplied] for the past 30 years. Thus apparently there are few if any ‘victim groups’ out there, in JR’s schematic. And a) just what would constitute an actual victims’ group in JR’s schematic and b) why hasn’t he started it up?
We dealt at length with the Doyle-“control” point way back when we discussed the matter and it turned out that the “control” bit is not actually in the documents. Perhaps JR could provide a quote and link to the documentation this time around. Ditto the “secret committees” bit. And again with no supporting link to the actual documentation necessary to back up the assertion(s).
Instead, JR merely offers his own reading by which we are to infer they are “false flag” by what – in JR’s schematic – they do not provide. Specifically, they do not “demand compensation” [exaggerated formatting omitted] and a “governmental inquiry” [correction supplied]. On what legal basis would “the government” run an inquiry? (Or – perhaps – the government realized quite a while ago that to do so would only expose to public view the weakness of the entire Stampede as having any sufficient basis in fact and also realized that the Anderson Strategies could do the dirty work for them.)
Then – marvelously – JR lets a rather big cat out of the bag: referring to victims (genuine or otherwise classifiable) he says “We, the few I’ve met anyway” … and thus we see that JR has based his entire bit on a rather slender actual basis indeed. Perhaps he could take a bit of Shakespeare from the Old Globe Theater (whose scholarship he rejected) and start saying “We few, we happy few” in reference to such “few” ‘victims’ as he actually knows.
Then the umpty-teenth-plus-one 3×5 bit about compensating victims – which point was dealt with in prior comments even on this thread. And for which we are still awaiting an answer: how distinguish genuine victims from those otherwise-classifiable? But – marvelously – this question of ‘victims’ is apparently what Karl Popper would call a ‘non-falsifiable’ claim, i.e. there is no way to disprove it (unless you examine the claims for probable credibility, which is something nobody is – in the Abusenik Playbook – supposed to do).
Genuine victims, therefore, would appear to constitute a category of beings not really very much removed from the various Choirs of Angels: it’s all a matter of belief and nobody can really prove or disprove their existence.
How silly is that?
Meanwhile, in its role as front-organization for the Anderson Strategies SNAP has helped move along that 2.7 billion or so to those relatively few actual allegants. And in that regard, the just-released Annual Report (mentioned in the latest TMR article) counts 6581credible allegants since 2004. It seems possible that the number I have been using for allegants (twelve to thirteen thousand, derived from the John Jay Reports with some extra thrown in for the past two years since the last Report) might be high. If we then do the math using 6581 rather than 12 or 13 thousand as a base, then the actual and formally-declared victims have cleared even more than had been previously thought. Or perhaps what we are seeing here is that only half of those allegants had credible allegations (which still almost completely remain unproven) and the other half got compensated for non-credible (perhaps incredible, if you wish) allegations.
At any rate, JR contents himself with merely asking the increasingly dubious 3×5 question about compensation, while claiming that any further thought, analysis, or examination is nothing but “fluff” (thus neatly excusing himself from any need to deal with the increasingly acute problems with his vision of things here). Readers may consider his assertions as they will.
Then on the 2nd at 1044AM we merely get the assertion that everything I “complain about in those letters is phony”. And the reason for that – he says – is that each group “authenticates the others as being representative of victims” whereas actually (meaning ‘actually in JR’s vision of actuality’) none of these other groups actually represents “our needs and wishes”. But if nobody else can see these myriad ‘victims’ – about whose “needs and wishes” even JR has admitted on this site he does not know – and if he himself only knows a “few”, as he has just said on this thread, then are we dealing here with anything more than phantasmagorical imaginings?
Then more criteria are now revealed from JR’s version of things: if a group a) has no elections and b) is “headed by active catholics or women” … “then they aren’t what they say they are”. Readers are welcome to contemplate those criteria as they will.
The reason proffered to us for this new set of criteria – especially (b) above – is that most of the victims are male and (apparently) women cannot thus ‘represent’ men in this thing. Just why that might be is a question that requires some serious ‘splainin’. At this point I am going to go out on a limb and say that it certainly appears that any group not headed by JR is simply going to be a “false flag” group. But then … he hasn’t actually started up any group.
And then we proffered the assertion that such groups as exist are only ‘posing’ as being “pro victim” but are actually – waitttttttt for ittttttttttttt – “pro church”. Readers may contemplate that as they will.
And we still wind up circling yet again the empty bowl supposedly containing myriads of invisible and un-reported ‘victims’ (genuine or otherwise, on top of that). How many such individuals, do you suppose, can stand on the head of a pin?
Why haven't I started a victims group? I don't know how.
You can't do it without activist victims. Most of the victims I've met are not political i.e. activist. It has been impossible to form a coalition. when the only victims groups to be seen are all pretty much SNAP- like, catholic, false flag operations.
Why would people bother to form a group when SNAP is there? SNAP seems to be saying the right things to qualify as repping victims. But when you get up close and personal, they are phonies from Phonyville. And the media tells us SNAP is speaking for victims again and again and again.
Your average victim never has access to a SNAP "meeting". And too, the forming of groups; particularly when SNAP has all the names, has been nigh on impossible.
I'm not condemming victims being catholic or women. But ALL OF THEM? ALL the leaders still active catholics? All the leadership women at a percentile rate that given 80% of all your victims are male, is anti statistical; anti-mathmatical; anti-instinctual; and just plain old, anti-common sense.
Do you actually think that I'm wrong because I don't spell well? That's the only dig you race back to.
Are there any of the readership who've ever spelt something wrong but still were right about what they were saying?
Grow up quit insulting adults. Stick to fooling children that's what you're good at.
[edited by moderator] I live in Los Angeles, a world class city. not some backwater monastary or ivory tower. I've met a lot of people. Including 4 Pulitzer prize winners I had said 3 before but I forgot one. He won the Pulitzer for photography. The picture of the naked Vietnamese girl who had just been napalmed. (U.S, christian love in all it's bloody action.) Her skin peeling off. I met him fighting this fight. How many have you met? [edited by moderator]
In regard to the comment of the 3rd at 1210AM:
I have been promoted in the space of less than a day from “a silly silly man” to “your majesty” … things can happen so fast in the Abusenik universe, and even change 180 degrees. Nor does it seem particularly unusual to them when such large swings in their story and position occur.
We note that JR seems to be under the impression that since “I told you” then that’s all the evidence we need to assess the assertion; that is to say: for him, the assertion is its own evidence and proof of veracity. Meanwhile, the fact remains that the text of the documents – examined on this site in comments – did not support either the “control” bit or the “secret committees” bit. And the document that was supposed to demonstrate all that also did not indicate that whatever administrative groups were formed were formed “in the name of survivors”. They may have been formed by Bishops to assess the issues, but the committees were formed “in the name of” the Bishops – to the extent that the phrase is applicable here at all.
A great deal makes no sense at all if one assumes SNAP is working for the Church: i) SNAP has participated in a campaign that has cost the Church almost 3 billion dollars; ii) there is absolutely no documentary indication that SNAP works for the Church, and yet D’Antonio’s book relates – with documentation – how Anderson enlisted SNAP to work with him (as a front-organization, as I have said); iii) the fact that ‘the victims’ (however classified) are not SNAP’s primary priority fits in perfectly with Anderson’s need for a front-organization for the torties and for his Strategies.
And so far, the only response to all that has been that Anderson and perhaps all torties are themselves tools of the Church, joining SNAP and all organized victim-groups not run by JR and instead run by ‘active Catholics’ and ‘women’.
And now, in light of the admission that he knows only a “few” victims (however classifiable), then I think readers would need to take any universal assertions as to what ‘we victims’ think or feel or want or demand with the appropriate amount of caution.
And, to repeat a point, I think that when they are examined, Abusenik stories and claims and assertions are more than capable of damaging the PR “image” of victims (however classifiable) without any help from any exterior interests such as the Church. The stories around which the Philadelphia trials revolve, and the Horne material recently seen here, demonstrate that clearly.
Ditto for the whine that the “demoing” has made them look a bit whacky or some such: that is a natural consequence of the actions taken by the ‘demo-ers’; how can any negative PR consequences of the actions they chose to take be rationally blamed on the Church?
Then the 3rd at 501PM:
JR now reports that he doesn’t know how to start a victim group. I could suggest starting up a website and getting some networking going and building from there.
“You can’t do it without activist victims.” I was under the rather clear impression that JR considers himself to be exactly that. And if he actually meant that one needs victims (however classifiable) who are willing to get involved, then if there aren’t many out there … perhaps one has to re-think one’s basic assumptions. Specifically, one might want to consider whether there is actually an existing demographic comprised of actual individuals for whom such a service would seem useful and worthwhile.
But how one gets from the (very curious) passivity of most victims (at least the ones JR knows) to the conclusion that SNAP is a tool of the Church and a ‘false flag’ … the logic here is not at all clear.
If “people” - presumably victims (however classifiable) who have used its services and gotten “up close and personal” with it – haven’t felt SNAP to be a ‘false flag’ then perhaps the theory that SNAP is a ‘false flag’ is itself in need of some examination and revision. Or perhaps many or even most of the individuals who went to SNAP did so with the primary intention of getting some help finding a tortie to get a lawsuit going (which is precisely what, in the Anderson Strategies, SNAP as a front-organization and funneling and grooming organization would do).
But as always: the fact that SNAP does not prioritize victims (however classifiable) does not in any way whatsoever indicate that SNAP is a tool of the Church rather than of the torties.
In regard to the 3rd at 508PM:
Is Mr. Clohessy not the CEO of SNAP? He certainly was at the time of that Deposition brouhaha a while back. And had been CEO, at that time, for quite a while. For that matter, how many victim groups or survivor groups or what-have-you are there and who heads up each one? Does such a listing exist or has it been compiled? How do we even know we have a problem here – if indeed having females heading up such groups is a problem in the first place?
And who really knows what ‘active catholics’ means and whether any of the group bosses are indeed ‘active catholics’?
As for a) “anti-statistical” and b) “anti-matmatical” [sic] and c) “anti-instinctual” and d) “just plain old common sense”: In the matter of (a), just what particular statistical principle is contravened? In the matter of (b), just what mathematical principle is being contravened? In the matter of (c), just what “instinctual” bit is being contravened? And in the matter of (d), just what principle of “plain old common sense” is being contravened?
And just what precisely are the problems with women heading up victim (however classified) organizations where there are more male than female victims? Are women incapable here? In what way and how does it manifest and what are the negative consequences of their presence as leaders? And if no males have come forward (although there is Mr. Clohessy, and perhaps other males in whatever various such groups are out there somewhere) then why would that be?
In regard to the 3rd at 517PM:
I think much of JR’s material is off-base simply by virtue of its content. The spelling issue goes to credibility in the various ways I have discussed before in comments on this site. But I have never said that since the spelling is poor then the idea itself is wrong. I judge ideas by their content, not their style; the style, however, does bear some relevance in evaluating the quality of the commenter’s mentation. Apparently document analysis was not part of the passport-clerk job.
And this would especially be so when we are confronted not with the occasional and even inevitable typos that anybody can commit, but rather with a sustained and indeed counter-intuitively purposeful sustained pattern of wrong-spelling that even spells wrongly material that it is simply copying or quoting. That type of thing legitimately raises questions – or is that principle not evident?
I have insulted no adults on the basis of their spelling. I make corrections or indicate misspellings when quoting so that it will not appear that I myself cannot spell properly. That’s my prerogative as a commenter and I’m sticking to it. Proper spelling, in my view, is an important part of clear communication and a necessary sign of respect for persons who will be reading the material.
As for “fooling children” – that can stay up just where it was put. And readers can consider it as they will, since they are involved in that characterization.
In regard to the 3rd at 741PM:
Of what conceivable relevance is it where anybody lives? And does ‘living’ in a particular place in any way indicate a person’s competence? For all JR knows, I live in LA too. Or NYC or Dallas or some other urban setting. As for further revelations and claims as to whom JR has met and such, what have we got to work with, really? And of what conceivable relevance are such claims anyway? ‘Meeting’ this or that person is no more indicative of anything than ‘living’ in this or that place. If one managed to shake Ike’s hand at a campaign whistle-stop, does that make one in any way more acute and informed as a political commentator? If one managed to get close enough to stroke Seabiscuit’s or Secretariat’s neck, does that make one somehow an expert on race-horses?
But the Playbook requires that just about any old thing be stuffed into the blunderbuss, when one has no real conceptual responses to make. It’s what Abuseniks do.
If you live in any of those places why don't you say where? Why the need to hide? Your ideas don't speak for themselves because you hide to say them. You pretend to not believe when I say i've met and spent lots of time with 4 Pulitzer prize winners? I tell you It's because I'm smart; connected to other smart people and live in a major metropolis. Then you act like you don't understand why my living in L.A. where I've had the opportunity to meet these people, has anything to do with my meeting these people or has any relevence at all.
P, you are not the only judge of relevence here. Your denial of my rape and the majority of other victims' rapes makes you irrellevent around this subject. Mocking my spelling is rude. Mocking victims is unforgiveable. You and D gain what for your cause with that behavior?
In regard to the 5th at 1044AM:
Of what conceivable relevance is it where I live? There is no conceivable relevance at all. Nor am I therefore ‘hiding’, because whatever I could putatively be ‘hiding’ is of utterly no relevance to the present discussion in the first place. Content it all. The rest is manipulative distraction.
Thus, if my “ideas don’t speak for themselves” then I would submit that we are confronted here with either i) a substantial reading-comprehension problem or we are faced with ii) the Playbook’s inevitable irritation and frustration at not having enough irrelevant stuff in which a distracting red-herring might be found in order to avoid having to deal with the ideas.
I don’t pretend anything. Nor do I credit prima facie any claims to substantive connection to various celebrity figures since I don’t credit the argument-from-celebrity. Once again, JR fails to realize that a) what he doth “tell” is not b) the equivalent of demonstrable supportive evidence of what he doth “tell”.
And if JR wishes to assert that the is “smart”, then I would simply leave it to readers to consider that claim as they will, in light of everything they have read.
Nor do I “pretend” when I say that simply being in the physical presence-of, or sharing the same general space-with, this or that achievement or achiever does not in any way of itself indicate that a person so geographically and physically situated is therefore substantively connected to the achievement or the achiever. I am stating it as a clear and logical fact. ‘Meeting’ – even if it is true – established precisely nothing. ‘Meeting’ Ike or Seabiscuit – as I have said – does utterly nothing to establish anybody’s reliable creds and chops as to politics or horse-racing. Thus it is of no relevance, especially in the matters under discussion here.
[edited by moderator]
I have explained why I correct or note spelling in quotations I take from comments: perhaps it is “rude” to inflict such oddly-patterned and sustained misspelling on other with whom one is trying to communicate. And if JR can produce a quote where I am “mocking victims” he could put it up, if it were to exist in the first place.