The courage to tell the truth: Dr. Joaquín Navarro-Valls
Some say the most distinguishing feature of our modern media landscape is its inherent herd mentality. A narrative or story line is developed by one or a few media sources, and then suddenly, like bison, every journalist in the land is penning an endless series of similar stories with little regard for truth or accuracy.
And so it is that even Church spokespersons are intimidated by the herd mentality from telling the simple truth: that while the Church, like every other institution at the time, made many mistakes in the past in how it handled sex abuse claims, it has been a model now for the last number of years in how to handle sex abuse claims.
So kudos to Dr. Joaquín Navarro-Valls, former head of the Vatican Press Office, for bravely declaring recently that the Catholic Church has been the world's leader in the fight against child sex abuse and the Church is the "only communitarian and institutional body that is effectively acting to eradicate pedophilia."
Navarro-Valls' comments were made in a recent interview in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica and republished by Catholic News Agency.
The media blackout of the truth
As would be expected, not a single major media outlet reported Navarro-Valls' remarks. Thus the media blackout of the truth continues unabated.
But there can be no doubt as to the truth of Navarro-Valls' remarks. Indeed, because of the unprecedented measures the Church has implemented in the past two decades, contemporaneous accusations of abuse against a Catholic priest are extremely rare, recently averaging only 8 allegations deemed "credible" by review boards each year.
And as we have reported numerous times before, the story of sex abuse in the Catholic Church is more of a history lesson than a current news story. The facts are simple:
- 78% of all identified priests who were accused last year were either already deceased, already removed from ministry, already laicized, or simply missing;
- 90% of all abuse accusations last year allege incidents from at least 25 years ago; and
- 80% of cases last year in which an investigation had been completed fell into the categories of either "unable to be proven" or "unsubstantiated." Only a mere 14.6% of all 2013 cases were even deemed "substantiated" by the very liberal standards of review boards.
And while the cranks and haters claim otherwise, no other organization has stepped up to produce the results that the Catholic Church has in protecting children. In recent years, the Church in the United States:
- has trained over 5 million children in giving them skills to protect them from abuse;
- has trained over 2 million adults, including 99 percent of all priests, in recognizing signs of abuse; and
- has spent well over $70 million just on therapy for victims over the past decade.
Meanwhile, the media continues to turn its collective back on the massive abuse and cover-ups happening today in our local public schools and in Hollywood, instead focusing its ire only on one target: old claims of abuse in the Catholic Church.
Bias? What bias?
They are biased because liberals hate religion generally.
The RCC "has trained over 2 million adults, including 99 percent of all priests, in recognizing signs of abuse." How can that be? What are the 'signs' of abuse?
The RCC makes this claim and TMR echoes it. Publion? Can you help? What could anyone reasonably look for as a sign of sexual abuse?
What is 'sexual abuse' anyway? The definition is so fluid. Wait. That's it, fluid. Look for fluid.
Well, sorry for being a 'hater', TMR. The RCC is doing a great job as it continues to 'eradicate' the 'pedophilia' problem it was only falsely accused of having . . . way in the past.
Catholics "hate the truth In general".
A generalization on my part that is as true as "liberals hate religions generally".
Does Dr. Shmuck above have proof for his "80% of investigated claims last year being either " unable to be proven" or "unsubstantiated"?
Who are the "review boards" he mentions? Who appoints them? How are they chosen and who says the review boards are so "liberal"? Give some proof please.
If Dr Shmuck tells the truth, why the need for programs to protect children when, according to you, the cases are 80% fake anyway?
LDB there are readable signs of abuse. Mood swings, grade failures where there were none before, acting out in anger. Personality changes. Signs of depression; sadness. Good kids who suddenly behave badly.
Both you and SNAP always talk about how "brave" people are. SNAP says we victims are brave for speaking out. You say Dr Navarro is brave for speaking out. What do you live with nothing but moral cowards who fear the truth so much that when they speak it they should be nominated for the Congressional Medal?
It only takes bravery to be truthful when telling the truth expects punishment as a response to truth telling. Psychologically, that's very interesting.
Perhaps I'm delusional (Here comes Snarky) but I thought telling the truth is what was expected of good people. No bravery medal needed.
Well, it's all about the money anyway so, this news is bad news for the stampede.
In his eagerness to toss his plop (an eagerness which even incites the correction of – waittt for ittttt! – JR (more on this below) LDB returns (the 7th, 671PM) as lawyer-with-no-interest-in-law to instead pick some fights in the psychological mode. Apparently he does have a bit more than “no interest” in the psychological forum, so let’s see what we get.
His first question seems to result in nothing more than innuendo: how is it possible that the Church has trained more than 2 million adults “in recognizing the signs of abuse”? The answer that would occur to me is: through the mandated training programs, programs similar to thosein the military and in universities and other venues.
But he does then stumble onto an lulu: “what are the signs of abuse?”, he asks. I have pointed out a number of aspects of this problem recently in regard to those 1970s self-help diagnostics and so forth. As currently practiced, are there any reliable signs of abuse?
And by “reliable” I mean that they have been verified by competent research and experiment to be direct and clear results that have abuse as their cause. There are very few.
Instead, we get claims like ‘if you as an adult hate hot coffee then you were abused because daddies like hot coffee’ or – as we see JR trying to deploy here (the 8th, 1106AM) – we simply get a laundry-bag of any (self-proclaimed) ‘victim’s perhaps extensive list of psychological, behavioral, emotional and/or characterological problems … which are then simply puffed away as nothing more than the clear and direct and inevitable results of abuse (upon, of course, a previously high-functioning and large-futured innocent).
But LDB’s stumble takes him – alas – even further: if there are indeed no – or at least very very few – reliably demonstrated sequelae of ‘abuse’, then how determine a ‘genuine’ victim? And upon what psychological foundations has the Stampede (and its parent Victimism’s other stampedes) been based?
Perhaps LDB might have some “interest” in giving some response to that issue.
But then suddenly – disturbingly, from a coherence and rationality point of view – LDB apparently takes almost the opposite tack by going for (apparently) snark and sarcasm: “the definition [of ‘sexual abuse’] is so fluid”.
So it appears rather clearly that LDB’s response here is governed not by rationality and coherence but by taking potshots wherever his little emotional machine-gun happens to be pointing at the moment.
Or else he seriously and rationally and coherently meant the first question and is only deploying his subsequent snark at the actual fluidity of definitions. But if that’s true, then he has raised an very good point which does much to undermine any Abusenik, pro-Stampede position and what – then – is his further response to that problem that he created for himself here?
(And we note that the surface of his self-proclaimed legal mind displays not even the merest ruffle at the lethal problem of fluid-definitions.)
Then a bunch of “Dr. Schmuck” comments by one of the more vivid practioners of that sub-specialty, JR himself, who comes here demanding “proof” (which he can do in regard to anybody but which nobody can do to him because – doncha see? – he has already declared himself not only a ‘victim’ but a ‘truth-teller’ so Period and Case Closed.
I also do one little thing that you don't. I tell the truth; the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Where have I lied to you? I don't say there's a god and he's/ they are catholic.You do.
I say from working around the issue and having had therapy that the signs of abuse always appear. That's why juries give us the big bucks. They see the damage done.
You religious folks don't see it or deny it's existence. How christian of you. Like telling Jews to convert or die in the Crusades. I would never suggest I accept all cases at face value. I haven't seen all the cases; but then again neither have you.
You claim a media stampede with no proof. Sorry but conjecture doesn't equate to telling the truth.
It seems what the gist of your complainings about is: that victims are and the crimes against us are mentioned at all in the media.
Well let me give you a helpful hint. Don't have abusors transfered from parish to parish and you won't have victims period.
Publion, What's up with your strange use of 'an' in 'an lulu' and 'an very good point'? I don't remember you doing that before this last post of Oct. 9 at 1:41pm. Is that a style thing that you have adopted or just a couple of mistakes?
Also, you seem completely incurious in that last post about what 'signs of abuse' your church employees could be 'teaching' adults to recognize. That is strange because you have denied that there are valid signs of abuse that can be discerned. I cite your chicken-and-egg/proximate-cause problem that you have gone over many times. 'How do/can you know that the alleged acts caused the behavior (or whatever else) in/by the alleged victim?' summarizes your thoughts on this point.
I won't take issue with that here but I do take issue with your support/credit, implied or express, given for your so-called church's employees 'teaching' about 'signs' that you claim are the stuff of worthless '1970s self-help diagnostics'. What sort of crap then are they 'teaching'? And why if it is crap that they 'teach', should they be given any sort of credit for doing this? TMR (and you agree) lists this 'teaching' as one of three major church accomplishments of the last decade on sex abuse.
The church looks no better on this than the drinker who, at the advice of his lawyer, enrolls in a rehab program after having been arrested for drunk driving. Not to condemn the drinker, just to say that this sort of ‘queasy’ ‘gambit’ is common for people/institutions that get in trouble.
On the 9th at 857PM JR merely asserts (he’s correct – that’s one thing he does that I don’t) that he doth “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.
Readers who have attempted to follow the bouncing ball of his own story over the long haul here, to say nothing of just about all of his other assertions and claims to truth and knowledge, can consider the credibility of this assertion he makes here now.
Further, his phrasing actually recalls the court-trial examination to which he never had to submit himself or his material.
Then – pitch perfectly – we are informed that “from …having had therapy” – whatever that may mean – he doth know that “the signs of abuse always appear”. I doubt that merely “having therapy” makes one reliably informed about psychology, but since he has put it out there I will repeat what I have written on this site before: there is almost no extant research that demonstrably proves in a valid scientific manner that this or that alleged symptom is uniquely and unequivocally a consequence of “sex abuse” (which term itself has to be defined).
If he has any research in mind that contradicts my point here, he is welcome to inform us. Otherwise he may simply be parroting the usual conventional bits to be found wherever Victimism is well-thought-of and where assertions pass-for demonstrated facts and reliable information and is simply giving us a practical demonstration of those 1970s dynamics I have recently discussed.
I would also point out that “juries” did not give JR the big bucks; the sly Anderson Strategies did. In fact, very very few “juries” have ever had the chance to give “us” (i.e. allegants) those “big bucks” since the Anderson Strategies – in my assessment of them – went right for the Insurer attorneys.
And as for all that obvious “damage” (and who could deny that we have seen a whole lot of it on this site?): there are numerous possibilities as to the source and cause of all that behavioral, cognitive, and characterological frakkery, and “sex abuse’ is not at all the first candidate, especially in the cases we have seen on this site.
Then a blathery excursus addressed to “you religious” and let it remain where it was put.
Then he continues to try to deploy his “proof” bit, again demonstrating his signature move: I Am/You’re Not (i.e. JR is proofy, I am not). That is to say: having been unable to come up with proof of his own claims, he will fashion a Wig from what he has seen others write here (sort of monkey-see, monkey-do) and figures that he can mimic and fake competence the same way, one might imagine, he has pulled it off in other venues and matters over the years. But as I have said before: the Wig can just barely provide an appearance or mimicry of something; but it cannot substitute for the substance of that something. But for this type of character, all you need to do is fake-it, there is no substance to anything. Perhaps he was of that philosophical inclination back in his own youth as well as subsequently.
And, of course, we are into Probability and not Proof – but he has no 3x5s that can cover that problem and doesn’t want to go near it, so we will continue to get the Proofy Wig instead.
Then – displaying a bit more mentation than is his wont – he tries for the idea that the only thing that really irks in all of this is that “victims … and the crimes against us are mentioned at all in the media”. How he can imagine that after everything I’ve written here is anybody’s guess, but perhaps his source here hasn’t actually read back in the record on this site. As we have seen: it’s not the media coverage quantitatively; it’s the quality of the media coverage (selective and credulous, and apparently deliberately so) that is the problem.
And then an effort at a snappy exit line with the old bit about transferring. Another Playbook dodge: be the first on your block to collect all of them!
And if readers didn’t already have enough indicators, he then – pitch perfectly – ends with the ever-revealing “period”. As if he had delivered the ultimate and utterly truthy statement on the whole matter.
Oh I "doth" "doth" I! Since when do I talk in fakey psuedo biblical? You keep saying I'm "pitch perfect" in everything I write. Have you mistaken me for god? Or do you only make that mistake when it comes to your self?
LDB has – waittt for itttttt! – returned (the 10th, 1115AM), after the swooning declaration (delivered as he got to the curtains) that he would not be dealing with my material in the future. But that was in some yesterday, and who could be so sociopathic or un-empathetic or un-Christian as to bear in mind what an Abusenik said in some yesterday?
He has picked up a couple of typos (there were more). I broke my own rule about not doing two things at the same time and I made several typos. But you wouldn’t need a Harvard or a law-school education to pick those up, so let’s see what his alleged Harvard and law-school education has for us this time around.
As is typical of Abuseniks here, he will try on a Wig designed to mimic what he sees others doing in comments: I seem “incurious”. And “incurious” about “what ‘signs of abuse’ your church employees could be ‘teaching’ adults to recognize”. So we are going to be working in the psychological forum here in this comment, rather than the legal (in the discussion of which he has “no interest”, as we recall).
OK then.
There are, as I have discussed at length in prior comments on this thread and others before this, “a number of aspects of this problem recently in regard to those 1970s self-help diagnostics and so forth. As currently practiced, are there any reliable signs of abuse? And by ‘reliable’ I mean that they have been verified by competent research and experiment to be direct and clear results that have abuse as their cause. There are very few.”
What the courses teach to teachers, parents, and persons-in-authority in schools or other such venues are signs of upset in the child (although even here the ‘signs’ are not at all unambiguously indicative of ‘abuse’; they simply indicate that something might be going wrong in the child’s life).
What such courses cannot teach is actual diagnostic and clinical skills for further exploring and investigating those ambiguous indicators.
Thus there is a difference between i) a course in recognizing possible signs of abuse and ii) a clinical professional education in handling and treating whatever difficulties those ambiguous signs might be indicating.
The abuse-recognition courses are of some use, although not specifically in determining abuse because there are no signs that are utterly unambiguous indicators of abuse except for obvious physical injuries which would of themselves clearly require referral to a competent professional clinician.
Thus the courses that the Church has implemented – similar to the ones in other venues as I mentioned in my previous comment – are for improving responsible-adults’ capacity for recognition and the courses are not for providing such responsible-adults a capacity to provide full treatment. (And this presumes that the clinician’s investigation determines that sexual-abuse is the cause of the signs that the child is exhibiting.)
The mistake LDB has made, quite similar to the one JR made in his comment, is that a psychological layperson can be trained quickly but effectively in treating deeper symptoms rather than simply recognizing that there is some upset going on in the child that requires referral for further determination and – if and as required – treatment and resolution and intervention.
But this is a problem that echoes the larger problem with the quickie diagnostics which I have discussed at great length here: the fallacious implication (nurtured by Victimism and by the Stampede and imbibed and amplified by the media and the Abuseniks) that there are indeed a) clear and definite behavioral, emotional, psychological or characterological symptoms that b) uniquely and reliably indicate the specific cause of sexual abuse to the exclusion of any other possible cause.
So LDB’s point is based on that failure to realize the difference between recognition and treatment.
That being said, however, it remains unclear what LDB means by “chicken-and-egg/proximate problem” that I “have gone over many times”. The meaning of his phrasing here is not immediately clear and so requires explanation. What dynamic does he characterize as “chicken-and-egg” here and what is the meaning in this context of the term “proximate problem”?
Or has he simply picked out a couple of bits here that seem rhetorically useful regardless of whether they actually support or convey any actual and specific meaning or not?
Also, what he says is my material that “summarizes [my] thoughts on this point” is not accurate. The distinction between recognition and treatment is also a necessary element. As is the fact that ‘sexual abuse’ – with the exception of certain physical signs of upset visible upon gross (using the term in the clinical sense here) assessment – does not offer indubitable and clear ‘signs’; persons will exhibit signs of upset, and it is the recognition of those signs that should trigger prompt referral for professional clinical examination in order to determine and deal-with the cause.
‘Sexual abuse’ is not a clinical entity like bipolarity or psychosis, which exhibit with clearly recognizable symptoms specific to themselves that manifest with some predictable and recognizable uniformity across the entire spectrum of patients suffering from those afflictions.
Also the programs work on prevention of sexual abuse, and that prevention would be implemented by inculcating in a potential victim population an awareness of the types of behaviors that might be displayed by an abuser.
Although – again – we still face the fact that some rather innocent and common behaviors are included in this listing of possible abuser-behaviors. Thus, to use an example I have used recently, relatives or known-persons who hug children at holiday seasons (or simply as a form of greeting outside of holidays and such) can be mistaken for displaying abusive behaviors. And thus careful discernment is required here as well, since – with the exception of an outright assault or express invitation – behaviors clearly and reliably portending potential abuse are not at all easy to determine.
Also, therefore: it is very difficult, in a forensic setting or a clinical setting, to establish the direct causal chain between a behavior and sexual abuse, absent further corroborating indicators and – not to put too fine a point on it – evidence. The only way to resolve this problem, as I have said in prior comments on this site, is to presume the connection. Which is what some clinicians and legal types have often done to smooth their path for whatever purposes they might have.
Nor am I being “agnostic” about this, to use LDB’s recent characterization. I am not denying the possibility of sexual abuse; I am, rather, questioning the validity of the process by which one gets from a) an indicator of upset to b) determining the definite perpetration of sexual-abuse. This is a fundamental and abyssal problem facing all clinical and legal efforts to create a clear and simple causation-chain.
And for both clinicians and legal professionals, there are major ethical and integrity-of-service issues involved in seeking to merely paper-over the abyss by making convenient presumptions.
Thus the “issue’ that LDB does “take issue with here” is not the actual core issue.
The Church, therefore, looks no better or no worse than all the other major institutions that have instituted some sort of sex-abuse recognition and prevention programs: such programs have their place, as long as their capabilities are not exaggerated (as they so often are, for whatever purposes, by various interests).
And thus the institution of such programs on so wide a basis and so quickly within the Church do indeed qualify for characterization as “one of the three major church accomplishments of the last decade on sex abuse”. As they do in the other venues I mentioned.
As for the example of the alcoholic “drinker”: it is inapt here. It has only recently been recognized that every institution should have some sort of awareness and recognition program and few have ever had them before. Now some very significant institutions have them, the Church included.
And LDB’s sudden indictment to the effect that it is “common for people/institutions that get in trouble” serves only to highlight the fact that the Church is, in the human organizational aspect, part of the imperfect world of human affairs, along with all the other institutions. Does LDB have an issue with the imperfection of all earthly institutions? That’s as may be, but such an issue does not reflect on the Church and the other institutions so much as it reflects on LDB’s personal issue here in regard to the imperfection (and non-perfectibility) of human affairs.
Who the hell do you think you are; that we are supposed to read your lengthy obfuscations?
If you don't have the balls to say who you are; why should we believe you ato be honest and upfront in anything you do?( LDB has his own reasons for remaining LDB and not giving his real name. If he is who I think he is, JS. He doesn't like what i write about the SNAP monster anyway. and I control no one but me.)
I would care less about your remaining in the shadows if you didn't play the part of the religious wig maker and church apologist. However, that's what you are. So man up missy.
Probability = Conjecture. Why should we take your ruminations, your fantasies, as fact?
I have letters of apology from the head of the order of Marianists and one from Cardinal Mahoney apologizing for my abuse; plus a very real bank account. Those tip my veracity into the reality portion of this conversation. Reality, ever visit that plain?
Keep your snarky, sharkey, lying nonsense for the angels and demons you follow so obediently. Imaginary spirits are the perfect audience for your imaginary reasoning. The rest of us don't give a damn what you "think" about anything.
If you want respect, try giving respect.
If you want to blow smoke and cover up the truth keep doing what you do.
On the 11th at 1051AM we see a nice example of JR positing as advice to somebody else, something that he should actually tape up on his own mirror. We also note that with the distraction of his creating my apparent desire for “respect” he avoids substantively addressing here any of the substantial amount of material I had put up.
But there’s a reason for that – so to speak – as we proceed to the comment of 1152AM: all that material is nothing but “lengthy obfuscations”. Because – doncha see? – anything that confuses an Abusenik, anything that had not occurred to an Abusenik, anything that complicates the standard Abusenik Cartoon as to what is “the truth”, anything for which the Abuseniks don’t have an answer and/or to which they cannot respond … is and must be merely “lengthy obfuscations”. And you can take their word for it … if you wish. And you can take that to the bank … they did.
Then – with the usual juvenile and histrionic cafeteria machismo scatology – we are brought back yet again for the umpteenth time to my screen-name, as if a) the use of one’s actual name is any guarantee of credibility, rationality, coherence, or veracity (viz. any of JR’s submissions here) or as if b) such a many-monnikered Abusenik as LDB (formerly Learned Counsel, formerly Boston Survivor) doesn’t do it.
But it’s my material which is to be assessed by the readers, not me. And this – but of course – is precisely what irritates Abuseniks, who so often have demonstrated themselves to be the type of mentalities, lured to the surface by Victimism and the Anderson Strategies in the internet era, that are most at home in cafeteria-style foodfights and name-calling, rather than the full exchange of opinions and ideas.
It was the brilliance of Victimism and the Anderson Strategies to realize that since there really wouldn’t be much evidence in these cases, and thus they couldn’t really afford to have anything seriously examined and discussed, then they would lure into their service those mentalities that are most adept at simply tossing-plop at – to use one of JR’s favorite bits – “the messenger”.
And if LDB (and/or whoever that “JS” is) “has his own reasons” which take him off the plop targeting list, then how does that not apply also to me? (Time-saver here: because JR likes most of what LDB says and he doesn’t like having his Cartoons exposed as they are in my material.)
Then the ever-revealing deployment of queasy gender-bendy epithet (“missy”) and the instruction that I “man up” – which, no doubt, is to be accomplished by drawing deeply upon the examples provided here by JR and the rest of the Abuseniks whose rather histrionic performances have so very often graced the boards here.
Then the assertion that “Probability = Conjecture”, which merely demonstrates vividly that JR is not familiar with dictionaries and that the actual meaning of words means little to him (which characteristic no doubt stood him in good stead when he was burnishing his own story back in the day).
Then we are taken back to what he claims to possess: a letter of apology from the Marianist Order. As I said several times previously when this bit came up, i) such letters are standard fare in Victimist usage and ii) may well have been a requirement inserted by the torties in their demands to the Insurers’ attorneys, to which those counsel agreed without much objection (their primary concern, as I have said, being only to minimize the fiscal outlays to their employers).
It can reasonably be expected that the letter was simply a standard and general type of thing, apologizing for pain and so forth generally, but I seriously doubt that each letter was specifically tailored so as to constitute a specific admission of absolute guilt, let alone for such specific bits of each allegant’s story. But – as I have said several times before – such a demanded letter could also serve, after the checks had been cashed, as a proof (as it were) of each receiver’s claims and stories and allegations.
I have never expressed any doubt as to the resulting swag being deposited into bank accounts. But JR’s comment here once again nicely reminds us of the role that money has played in the Stampede. That is a “reality” that I have often “visited” here, which irritates the Abuseniks no end.
Then a concluding exercise in additional epithet.
But as I have said several times before, the only core “imaginary” pandemonium here is the class of genuine victims.
And then the final bit in which JR confuses his own imaginings as being those of “the rest of us” (whoever that “us” might be). Revealing in the process a Wig not often given the recognition it deserves: the Wig of Us.
And given the querulous tone of his two comments here, may we not imagine that it is he who “can dish it out, but can’t take it”?
Did anyone read about the landmark settlement between the clergy abuse victims and the Archdiocese of Minneapolis-St. Paul where they agreed to a list of 17 protocols to be implemented to protect the children?
Landmark my tookus. Dolan removed tens of millions of dollars to cemetery funds to protect money from the people harmed. Leaving the victims with next to nothing. Next to nothing. Shame on the church and Dolan. Doesn't the sleazoid factor in your church's behavior make you ill? Or has every decent possibility for doing right been eliminated in you catholics?
On the 14th at 930AM there comes commenter ‘Michael Skiendzielewski’. The name rings a bell, and comments of a pro-Stampede, Abusenik nature have appeared here and elsewhere on the web under that name.
Should he be taken – as the format of his comment might suggest – as merely an honest questioner seeking enlightenment about something of which he is not presently well-informed? Or should this question-comment be taken as something with a more ulterior motive?
I am going to go with the latter option.
In best Playbook fashion, this ostensibly concerned commenter offers us nothing. Instead we get the familiar resort to innuendo: he merely asks a question. Sort of an internet drive-by on the cheap.
It concerns a recent court case in the now oh-so-dubiously-familiar Twin Cities area which is home, we recall, to Jeff Anderson and is the site – in the past year – of the weirdly insubstantial chicanery on the part of a former Archdiocesan staffer / who quickly went to Minnesota Public Radio with here ‘whistleblowing’ claims and story / involving the police re-opening of an investigation / about a former priest’s computer hard-drive collection of alleged child porn / and a later anonymous purchaser’s (of that hard drive) sudden recollection that he had made a complete copy of all the porn which he just recalled where he stashed it / (which thus technically implicated both the staffer and the purchaser in the crime of possessing internet porn) / which investigation suddenly disappeared without resolution or explanation by the police / to be followed by a claim that the Archbishop had within the past few years sexually-abused a Confirmation candidate (thus a minor, and a male) / which abuse was perpetrated while standing for the formal photograph commemorating the event / which claim also suddenly disappeared without much explanation / after the police boss said she just wanted to ‘talk to the Archbishop’.
By the most amazing coincidence, Jeff Anderson’s law firm was also squiring a curious lawsuit case through the local court system, which it had filed in May of 2013, just after – by another most amazing coincidence – that staffer had left the Archdiocese.
Using the novel claim of ‘creating a public nuisance’ (by not somehow publicizing the names of alleged abusive priests) Anderson created a legal pretext for Discovery, i.e. for a court-sanctioned process of fishing through the general files rather than being legally limited to simply seeking information on any one particular specific accused. Neat.
As a result, a settlement ensued. This is hardly surprising, considering the venue of the Twin Cities, which has demonstrated itself (in keeping, perhaps, with the Upper Midwest’s historical reputation as an island of ‘progressive’ – if not indeed socialist – social thinking in an otherwise conservative and traditional Midwest) to be quite taken with the Stampede.
As so very very often, the details of this settlement were not released (even by Jeff Anderson, who quickly went to the media with a press release).
But the settlement included the Archdiocese’s acceptance of “seventeen child protection protocols” which – it seems, at least – are mostly and merely repetitions of the Dallas Charter protocols.
But there are a couple of other requirements. For one thing, the Archdiocese has agreed not to conduct its own investigations of any alleged abusers after the Archdiocese makes its “mandated” report of any abuser to the local public authorities. This pretty much leaves the local public authorities (whose dubious official performance has already been amply demonstrated) to play with their blocks however they might wish.
Additionally, this entire gambit of Anderson’s was filed during a three-year window in the Statute of Limitations that had been opened up around the same time (mid-2013) by the state. In response to which, as best can be determined, there had not been an avalanche of new claims and clients for the Anderson tortie operation. Whether this present bit of publicity will prime the old Stampede pump is an open question, the answer to which remains to be seen. But I would say that – given the way the Stampede works, in its ‘good cause’ – there may somehow be ways that individuals whose names were found in this fishing-expedition in the files might by amazing coincidence be somehow reached and invited to have another go.
The original allegation that was the pretext for this just-settled Anderson lawsuit dated back to the mid-1970s, making the former altar-boy allegant now in his 50s. That accused priest was taken from ministry in 1985 and formally laicized in 2009 and no criminal charges were ever brought.
So in response to Mr. Sken: Yes, I did read about it. Was there something he had read that he wished to say here?
The Pope has once again made a revealing comment: in regard to sexual orientation, he simply says Who am I to judge?
The most disturbing aspect of this comment is the misconception of his role as Pope. Not to put too fine a point on it: it’s not all about him. When he speaks as Pope – even if only informally – he is not simply speaking as just any Catholic, nor even as just any hierarch. He is speaking not in his role as an individual private person but rather as the highest representative of Catholicism. And he is in that sense ‘bound’ by his office and his role, the responsibilities of which stretch beyond his personal opinions and feelings (however laudable or strongly-felt they may be).
The Catholic conceptual system (which, in its comprehensive reach includes a place for same-sex orientation) is the core of the matter here. And this profound reality is not sufficiently characterized as ‘tradition’ (or ‘mere tradition’) as if it were simply the accumulated weight of past approaches and habits and customs and various opinions in the Church.
Rather, the Catholic conceptual system is highly-developed – indeed it is perhaps the world’s most highly developed and refined and comprehensive and logically coherent moral-religious system. Which means that you – as anybody who has ever tried to tinker with a complex operating system knows – can’t tinker-with or tweak just one part of it, no matter how small, without creating a ripple effect throughout the system, with whatever effects and consequences may thereby be engendered by your tinkering and tweaking. There are consequences and effects to any such tinkering and tweaking and those must be taken into account.
And when this Pope wants to conduct such tweaking under the rubric of simply ‘being pastoral’, such good-intentions do not neutralize the iron law of consequences and effects that governs every complex system.
I am not here taking a position on the Church’s teaching on same-sex orientation. I am pointing out that even when a Pope would like to do the tinkering and tweaking, there are vital and inescapable systemic realities which he must take into account.
And simply tossing-off his thoughts (or feelings) is not going to be enough to achieve any actual progress (rather than mere ‘change’).
Perhaps the Pope is responding to the cultural pressures exerted by the fading but still pulsating star of an America riven and fractalized by its half-century of culture wars (tinted so strongly by Victimism and Identity Politics and ‘revolutionary’ change that is so easily assumed to be progress). If so he is well-advised to consider the fate of Liberal theology generally and the religious polities in the West that have embraced it whole-hog.
From its beginnings in the late 18th century – especially in what we now call Germany (but then were a congeries of smallish principalities and statelets, many strongly Protestant as a result of the Reformation) – Liberal Theology sought to somehow take advantage of the Enlightenment’s powerful energies, to the point where Liberal Theology (following the general post-Reformation tendency in Protestantism to ally with the state) actually sought to conform Christian belief to the culture and state rather than to continue a robust witnessing-to and judgment-of the state and the culture from the strong standpoint of Christian belief.
As we saw with Thomas Jefferson (who famously sought to reconcile Christianity to the Enlightenment by going through the Gospels and excising all the ‘miracles’ and Meta talk and retaining only Christ’s ethical pronouncements), this Liberal-Theology effort required a substantial de-emphasizing of the Multiplanar nature and Source of Christianity, reflecting instead the Enlightenment’s fascination with the Monoplanar excitements (however well-intentioned) of the this-worldly.
And that resulted in an abyssal conceptual fissure being opened up in Christianity: the effort during the European Enlightenment (shared by newly-founded America) to conform Christianity to the Monoplane rather than to retain Christianity’s vital grounding and source in the Multiplane, i.e. in the reality and existence of God.
This dynamic has continued to the present day.
Along the way, in World War 1, it led the mostly Liberal-Theological German Protestant professoriate and clergy to declare full theological (as well as religious) support for the Kaiser’s war effort, exemplifying vividly the dangers of Christianity’s too-close and too-easy accommodation to the culture and the state-regime of any particular country in which it finds itself situated. (Which over-accommodation was also demonstrated on the Allied side, although without the weighty back-up of Teutonic theological scholarship.) And in the Nazi era, this dynamic again revealed itself in Germany, to the point where Bonhoeffer, drawing in part on the powerful (if also problematic) theological position of Karl Barth to the effect that Christianity must recover its ultimate Source and bear witness-against the Monoplane, participated in the Confessing Church in opposition to the Reich-sponsored official German Christian church.
In the United States, the 1960s saw the powerful cultural and political and religious and theological vortices created by the volatile interplay of i) the black civil-rights movement (initially led by Martin Luther King’s highly refined combining of the Monoplanar-political and the Multiplanar-theological), ii) the Second Vatican Council (more misinterpreted and appropriated for various purposes than genuinely understood), and iii) the Democrats’ desperate effort to create fresh client-demographics for their Party after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 shattered the electoral coalitions that FDR had constructed – which political efforts were soon sheathed in the attractively burnished lineaments of pragmatic Progressivism’s urge to refine American society and culture through the services of a disinterested and benevolent technological elite in alliance with government, and 1960s’ radicalism that drew its Methods and Content more from the Leninist agitprop and ruthlessly Monoplanar presumptions of Communism and its 1960s mini-me spawn, Euro-Communism.
The Church in the United States was hardly prepared to handle all of this dynamic and problem-fraught activity well. Having recently seen itself shift from a suspect-alien organization to a proudly patriotic vital element in American culture and society through the social-theorizing of Catholic thinkers such as Monsignor Ryan in the 1930s and the solid performance of Catholic laity and hierarchy in the exertions of American’s efforts in World War 2, the American hierarchy was not up-to-speed with the pace of further fundamental change (not to presume ‘progress’) in the 1960s.
And in typical American fashion, too much of the hierarchy (whose most visible and ‘successful’ practitioners far too closely resembled old big-city machine-politics bosses) was not overly exercised by the seemingly abstract and non-pragmatic concerns about tinkering and tweaking complex conceptual systems. Readers may recall my recent comments on an earlier thread here about the seemingly very-American folksy Cardinal Cushing of Boston, who was minimally concerned about abstractions and happy to go-along-to-get-along.
And readers may also recall the fact that under the Cardinal’s very nose (and perhaps with his awareness) the local Jesuits were quietly meeting in Hyannisport in July of 1964 in order to counsel the still-regnant Kennedy interests in how to manage the Democratic Party’s embrace of abortion while making it seem congruent-with, if not fundamentally consistent-with, Catholic doctrine and teaching.
It may not be a coincidence that Pope Francis is also a Jesuit. The Order is known for its abiding interest in trying to enter into a society and culture in order to transform it from within – as it were – which, alas, drives that Jesuit strategic approach dangerously close to the old Liberal Protestant theological approach of allying with a culture and government rather than bearing Gospel witness-to (and, when necessary, judgment-upon) a given culture and state-policy. It’s not easy to avoid being co-opted and seduced by the gravitational pull exerted by governments and cultures if you get too close to them – no matter how good your intentions originally might have been.
My thought is that when the Church is faced with a lethal amalgam of a government-shaped culture that is deeply enmeshed with a) the old Liberal Theology of mainstream Protestantism, b) the elitist and state-dependent dreams of American Progressivism, and c) the anti-democratic social and cultural and political manipulations of Leninist state-socialism or Communism … then somehow going-along-to-get-along is not the way forward if one is to maintain the integrity of the Church’s mission and message, even if one tries to sheath such an ill-advised strategy in the homey, folksy, and ‘sensitive’ lineaments of ‘pastoral concern’.
Because if your ‘pastoral concern’ results – intended or not – in the undermining of the conceptual system which is the indispensable element in your foundational identity, then the you the Church will wind up in the same position as the many mainstream Protestant polities, whose long-standing approach of Liberal Theology has led them into institutional irrelevance and a theological invertebracy that is utterly insufficient to actually minister to the most pressing and abiding human need of all: fundamental and ultimate Meaning.
(It is also no coincidence that – if I am rightly informed – that same once-strong and numerous New England region or province of Jesuits that rode the back of the 1960s culture-wars tiger starting back in July of 1964 is now so comprehensively desiccated that it is going to be simply dissolved next year, to be absorbed into the Jesuit region of New York, from which – illustratively – the New England region was erected as a free-standing entity in the 1920s.)
And the relevance of all this to the Stampede? I would say that the Church in the United States, having maintained more of its integrity and consistency in witnessing-against the general American cultural tendencies of the past fifty years than any other religious polity, made herself a necessary target of the various interests and elements driving the culture-wars that began in the 1960s.
And – it should have come as a surprise to nobody even modestly familiar with the efforts of prior anti-democratic regimes in the West during the past century or so – the sexual-abuse crisis was almost inevitable. It is one of the most common weapons against the Church deployed by governments seeking to supplant her or force her to conform.
If there have been some few but very real and repellent cases of overt sexual assault by clerics – which should have been addressed by the hierarchy more definitively decades ago – yet I find the Stampede’s vision (hordes of abusive priests / conducting a violent ‘culture of rape’ / abetted by a hierarchy whose primary objective was to enable all of that rapine) to be utterly dubious and suspect as a government-supported form of the old Kulturkampf, designed to remove the Church as an obstruction to the government’s agenda, while sheathing that fundamental purpose behind the now-predictably scripted soap-opera of claims and allegations and stories with which readers here are all too familiar.
If Francis, as pope, is the "highest repfesentative of catholicism"; publion has to be it's nadir.
"lured to the surface" says it all. The trash calling itself publion, calling his fellow man trash.
The morally bankrupt calling others morally bankrupt.
And why are we supposed to see christianity superior? It's love for it's neighbor? As demonstrated by P?
All the nazi death camps were in catholic countries while Hitler's birthday was celebrated by the church. millions died. Sieg Heil,Baby!
Your grasp of history is furtive at best.
The church never removed itself of the "obstruction"of facism. Untill facism lost.
And even when facism lost, the church still backed Franco in Spain; Salazar, Portugal; Peron in Argentina. Diem in Viet Nam. ad nauseum.
On the 15th at 1142 … what have we got?
An epithet. Nothing new there.
The invention of something I didn’t say in order to have something to go on about (“calling his fellow man trash”) while at the same time reaching for the high-ground with the “fellow man” card.
Then another epithet.
I said that Christianity has the most comprehensive and coherently worked-out meaning-system on the planet. Whether anybody cares to think of “Christianity as superior” is their own business, but it certainly has a – and perhaps the – superior meaning/ethics system.
Then a bunch of all the old stuff about World War 2 from long-ago comments of his, to the problems of which JR at that time (and this time) did not choose to substantively respond: The Nazi death camps were located in the Government General, so as to be near to their victims. The inhabitants of the Government General had no say in the matter. And the whole bit concludes with a bit of Nazi-themed juvenilia.
And then – oh my – JR doth declare and pronounce that my “grasp of history is furtive at best”. Aside from the fact that the phrasing doesn’t sound anything like him, I’ll be sure to give his judgment every iota of the consideration it merits.
And then a concluding zinger that makes no sense as written (“the church never removed itself of …”).
And that’s all, folks.
As readers may have already realized, with the old WW2 stuff that JR has put up, we are at the bottom of the 3×5 file-cards designed to support the larger Cartoon, and from now on we will be seeing a lot of re-cycling, unless – of course – we get material in substantially different tones and styles and authorial voices tossed up under JR’s screen-name.
And while “furtive” doesn’t work at all as a description of my grasp of history, we might want to look at JR’s most recent howler (the 15th, 825PM).
JR’s “grasp of history” fails to include or consider one of the most active elements of the situation facing the Church in those years: the Church did not only face rising Fascism; it also faced – simultaneously – rising Communism.
And both of these developments came into play on top of the rising anticlericalism seen not only in Bismarck’s late-19th century new German empire (and his Kulturkampf) but also in the early-20th century regimes of France, Italy, and Mexico – which engendered a bloody civil war in that country. All of these were active problems just before WW1 and then Portugal and Spain became enmeshed in the interwar years.
To which profoundly difficult issues one might want to add the incredibly complex and various instances of ethnic violence in the Balkans and the southwestern borderlands of Russia as the Ottoman Empire and then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Czarist regime in Russia weakened and dissolved, and their sovereignty over those lands and peoples crumbled.
It’s no wonder that Pius X died in that August of 1914 after trying to deal with everything that had been going on since his Pontificate began in 1903. His successor, Benedict XV, worked to mitigate the effects of WW1 and to bring about a cessation of hostilities – to no avail since neither the Central nor Allied Powers would consider anything less than military victory as an outcome. And after remarkable exertions on behalf of both peace and social-justice, Pius XI died in 1939.
One might also note that many of the later Popes of the 20th century had either military chaplain experience (John XXIII, in the horrific Italian campaigns against the Austro-Hungarian forces) or early-adult experience of these diplomatic catastrophes, including work in the Vatican diplomatic service ( Pius XII and Paul VI) and – of course – John Paul II’s extensive experience as a Pole during WW2 and then the subsequent Communist take-over of his country before the smoke of the Nazi occupation had even cleared away.
And in all of this, Catholics – hierarchical and lay – would always be aware of the utterly astounding bloody government attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church perpetrated by the Soviets in the 1920s.
Readers further interested in these matters might use as a very good and readable introduction Philip Jenkins’s 2014 history of the religious aspects of the WW1 era The Great and Holy War.
Thus in order to get an accurate historical grasp of the situation in those years, one must retain a clear view of the core diplomatic and political bipolarity of the problem: the Church had to deal with either Fascist (and then Nazi) governments or Communist governments, and even the so-called Allied and ‘democratic’ governments such as France and (for a while constitutional-monarch) Italy were solidly anticlerical (which would make all of this in some sense a tri-polar complexity).
With that in mind, JR’s “grasp of history” hardly even rises to the level of “furtive”, and the same goes for whatever sources he may have – to put it no doubt too generously – consulted.
Also, in the interests of accuracy, the correct Latin would be ad nauseam.
So the church never did anything wrong. The church never made hugely profitable deals for themselves with facists. The vatican is not a state. The church saved all the Jews; Gypsies; Jehovah's Witnesses; gays and Communists from the nazis.There were no death camps in catholic countries. Not one. No one was killed. The so called sexual abuse victims don't exist. The media, who raves in support of Francis, is out to destroy the church through lies with the help of Jeffy Anderson. And P knows all about this and is the most profound and accurate teacher of history available to humanity.
And my not spelling words correctly is a crime against mankind and , somehow, helps reveal me to be a liar and a thief and a fraudster and a felonious criminal.
And once again we see (the 18th, 1258PM) the creation of something that nobody said in order to somehow distract from what actually was said.
How JR derives that “So” and all the material that follows is anybody’s guess. I didn’t assert any such thing and it cannot be derived from what I did write. Nor, for that matter, can it be derived from anything JR wrote.
Once again, we are in Cartoon country.
And since JR brought it up: No, I am not “the most profound and accurate teacher of history available to humanity” and this entire bit is simply his own creation. But what is clear is that JR is no perceptive student of history and knows very little about matters he goes-on-about.
And then the same gambit appears on the 17th at 102PM: his misspelling of a Latin term is not evidence of his being “a liar and a thief and a fraudster and a felonious criminal” (which is his self-characterization) and nobody ever suggested it was evidence of any of that. But – since he brought it up – his misspelling of a Latin phrase he chose to deploy does indicate that he doesn’t know Latin either and is in over his head in using it.
Once again, he has to create material to make himself out to be a victim of something, for lack of anything better to proffer.
F.U.! Did I spell that right? Could you die soon? Just asking. You deserve to see whats waiting for you. I want you to find the bosom of Abraham as soon as possible. If there was a god , he'd kick your ass. Consider that Gospel.
Publion, FYI, we are still reading and appreciating your clarity, charity and thoroughness. Keep the truth coming.
Julie your imagination has taken flight; If you confuse total bull with clarity and charity. and thoughtfulness But I think you, personally need P to be "right" even if he isn't.
We Celts come from the oral tradition. I think P would have a hard time with me on any subject even if I spelled well. Christ! Spare us your lying nonsense.
If you'd just shut up P I promise to worship your gods.
What an insult and disservice this man does to non Catholic organizations. The Catholic Church is hardly a leader in this. I worked at both a summer camp and an Americorps organization, and they made child safety a HUGE priority. Not to mention of course the various non profits who work to help sexually victimized people and track down exploited children (many of whom have made protecting children from perverts a priority about 20 years before the Catholic Church publicly did so.
Concerning the comment by ‘PeppyHare’ (the 20th, 228PM):
It’s always a give-away when one opens with a manipulative effort to spin a conclusion about one’s material at the outset, before one has even presented one’s material. And this problem is only amplified when one seeks to make oneself or one’s cause ‘the victim’ of something (and, thus, some other entity as the perpetrator of one’s victimization); playing the Victim card – especially at the outset – amps up the emotional before readers can consider the conceptual.
Thus in this ‘PeppyHare’ comment, we are given a double-barreled dose of manipulation at the outset: a) the writer (and “non Catholic organizations”) are insulted and disserved b) by the statements that “this man” (presumably, Dr. Navarro-Valls) has made.
First, the statement that Dr. Navarro-Valls made (as described and quoted in this TMR article) does not have the record or efforts of those organizations as its subject. So it’s more than a little tendentious to somehow twist things around to arrive at (or construct) the conclusion that he was trying to do any such thing as insult and disserve any non-Catholic organizations.
Second, this commenter is apparently trying to make the point that other (and non-Catholic) organizations had been working on child safety as a “huge priority” (familiar screamy-y caps omitted) “about 20 years before the Catholic Church publicly did so”. Which, since the Dallas Charter was formulated 12 years ago, would put us back about 32 years ago, or the early 1980s, although I am under the rather clear impression that AmeriCorps was formed only in the mid-1990s in Bill Clinton’s first administration.
And the assertion about this claimed “huge priority” would require some corroboration. And for corroboration all we get is i) this commenter’s claim about working “at … a summer camp” and ii) the claim that this commenter worked “at … an Americorps organization” (whatever actual specific historical entity that rather vague and vaguely-worded assertion is intended to describe).
What “summer camp” was this? And while we have the text of the Dallas Charter text available, we don’t have the text of any similar protocols from whatever this “Americorps organization” might be (nor, clearly, do we even have the name of this apparent sub-set organization within the Americorps umbrella).
Which leads to the next problem: “a summer camp” and even a sub-set organization within the AmeriCorps umbrella are not equivalent to a world-wide organization such as the Church. So even if these two examples (such as they are) proffered by ‘PeppyHare’ actually did have substantive and specific protocols formally in place, they do not represent an achievement on the same scale as the protocols put in place by a supranational organization such as the Church.
And, for that matter, they do not represent achievements on the scale of other very large national organizations such as the American military.
“Not to mention of course the various non-profits”, as ‘PeppyHare’ also proffers. What organizations does ‘PeppyHare’ have in mind here? Do they actually a) conduct other primary missions, to which the protection of children is ancillary? Or are they simply b) single-purpose organizations specifically designed to “help sexually victimized people” (and doesn’t that descriptor create familiar genuine-ness problems of its own?) and “track down exploited children” (however “exploited” is defined).
Such organizations as are in this (b) category are hardly equivalent to the Church (or the military) since they are simply single-focused operations specifically designed for their single purpose. This is like saying that the local fire department is more into fire prevention than the local university; while one can expect the fire department by its very nature to be rather heavily-focused on fire-prevention, it is an achievement to have the local university to become more fire-prevention focused since the university does not have fire-prevention as its primary mission.
And as I said, these victim-helping organizations quickly give rise to questions as to issues such as genuineness (as to the claims of their clients; one thinks of SNAP here, among others) and these child-exploitation organizations give rise to questions as to the nature of the exploitation upon which they focus (much of that exploitation is not sexual, just as much ‘child abuse’ is not sexual).
So I would say that ‘PeppyHare’ here is trying to build a case by confusing apples with oranges, and that flawed case is not helped by being so histrionically presented with so little evidence and with only such dubious bits as appear in the comment.
And the fact that the bottom-line of the comment appears to be an effort to minimize the achievement of the Church as described by Dr. Navarro-Valls rather nicely puts the frosting on the cake here.
And thanks to ‘Julie’ for her comment.
For readers so inclined, the current issue of The New Republic magazine has a cover story entitled “The mistreatment of accused college rapists” by Judith Shulevitz (TNR, October 27 issue, pages 8-9). As I had mentioned in a recent comment, in the university setting the Stampede dynamics we have been seeing on this site for so long are even more clearly demonstrated.
I would also say that it has become crystal clear with the Ralph Cipriano work in regard to the Billy-Doe Philadelphia cases just how vitally helpful a fact-based and skeptical media analysis can be. And this is precisely what we have rarely seen in the Stampede (the Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz is another fine and vivid example of such clear media analysis – but there are few others).
One can only imagine how the Twin-Cities cases (in Jeff Anderson’s home town) would be handled by such clear-eyed media analysis, but instead all we get in the Twin-Cities cases is only the usual Anderson-Strategies media complicity from Minnesota Public Radio such as we have also seen in The New York Times.)
That being said, let us allow ourselves a brief diversion to consider JR’s most recent comments.
On the 20th at 931PM we get … what?
We begin with the almost-obligatory epithet against ‘Julie’, buttressed by the epithetical assertion that my material is “total bull” that is – it is asserted – not to be confused with “clarity and charity”. And anyone who wishes may review JR’s record of comments here, apparently, as vivid examples of his working definition of “clarity and charity”. (Nice stylistic rhyming though, and not really JR’s style.)
Also, that bit includes (although grammatically not so as the text of the comment is written) “thoughtfulness” – and readers may wonder just what the working definition of “thoughtfulness” is here. Something along the lines of buying everything that is tossed-up on the screen with a polite and empathetic clucking.
Then the diagnostic pronunciamento from the Wiggy throne that Julie doth “personally need P to be ‘right’ even if he isn’t” – although JR has proffered very little to support that characterization except for his own Playbook and Cartoon bits.
Then the Wig of We is again deployed, albeit in a fresh form: “We Celts” … as if whatever JR’s material may be, it is swathed in the identity-authority of all “Celts” (and, perhaps, if you aren’t a Celt then you just don’t and can’t get it.) This assertion of his presumes some sort of literary something (tone, voice, style, vocabulary, or fill-in-the-blank) unique and native to “Celts”, and anybody with a literary or linguistic education can consider that possibility as they may.
JR then goes for the idea that “We Celts come from the oral tradition”. Meaning, apparently, that the Celts have left us no or very little literary heritage since – apparently – they are used to talking rather than writing. That seems a bit harsh on the Celts (with whom JR is supposed to share some heritage here) but it cannot be surprising: when it comes to making excuses for himself, JR will throw anybody under the bus.
Thus then this bit serves as a lead-in for his primary point: JR is from Oral tradition and I am from the Written tradition and thus I would no doubt “have a hard time with [JR] on any subject even if [JR] spelled well”.
Oh my.
First, even if one were to come from an oral tradition, one could still speak coherently and rationally and with some degree of competence that matched the level of assertions and claims one wished to make, whether verbally or in writing. I would say that it’s all about the thought-process (its quality and competence and integrity) and not really about the expression-of-the-thought-method (speaking or writing). A good idea can be well-put orally or verbally, but i) such a good idea ii) must first be cognitively and mentally processed competently.
And as for JR’s spelling issue: we still don’t know if he actually has a spelling defect or if – for whatever reason that seems significant to his purposes – he chooses deliberately to misspell. After all, a) his claim as to his military experience has him being rapidly promoted (thus, for good performance) in a job that required the processing of vital and important information and documents. And b) there are no word-processing programs currently available that do not automatically spell-check – and you have to override their misspelling-warnings if you are going to be making comments on the Web. And c) there does not seem to be any logic or rhythm to his misspellings that would indicate a basis in some particular neurological tic or defect.
Then another epithetical bit about my “lying nonsense”.
And then in conclusion the utter non-sequitur about his worship of my “gods”.
But then – with more of his usual marvelous pitch-perfection – the comment of 935PM on the 20th: a scatological bit of obscenity. This is indeed the genuine JR, whether oral or written.
Then – harking back to the implicit and queasy underlying violence that I had noted in the case of another commenter on this site a while back – the bit asking if I “could … die soon?”. Charming and far more revelatory than I think he intends here.
And that sundae is then lathered with the whipped cream about some possible “god” who would “kick [my] ass”. And back to the cafeteria we go (as if we ever leave it with any of JR’s commenting).
And the whole thing is then topped off with the strawberry of JR’s assertive and directive theological assessment of his own material. Readers may consider how reliable such an assertion might be.
In regard to the Shulevitz article in The New Republic I would especially like to note two points she makes toward the end of the article since they are greatly relevant to the Stampede:
First, she says that all of this current difficulty “represents an often necessary effort to recategorize once-acceptable behaviors as unacceptable”. I would not be so sanguine in terms of that “necessary”, since the costs and consequences (rarely if ever considered when a ‘new’ ‘reform’ is being pushed) are actually proving to be far more dangerous and damaging than had been considered (although these costs and consequences were right there from the get-go if any media had cared to notice).
But what Shulevitz says here dovetails nicely with the current issue of Reason magazine (October, 2014). On page 10 of the print edition, in the ‘15 years ago in reason’ section, a 1999 article by the writer Helen Searls – entitled “Trial by fury” – is quoted: she is concerned about the “fashionable” tendency “to use the law to ‘send messages’ and to ‘correct’ people’s attitudes”.
And I think that the Anderson Strategies harnessed this tendency, effectively using ‘law’ (and thus prosecution) not primarily for the purpose of actually determining innocence or guilt but rather for the primary purpose of “sending a message” and ‘correcting’ attitudes. I certainly see this tendency at work in the Philadelphia trials (covered by Ralph Cipriano): the DA is clearly not concerned for the integrity of legal process, but rather for the mere symbolic effect of bringing charges against some element of the Church hierarchy.
Second, splendidly, Shulevitz observes that in pushing this approach, the government “is effectively acting on the notion popularized in the 1970s and ‘80s by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon that male domination is so pervasive that women need special protection from the rigors of the law” (italics mine).
Consider that italicized preposition carefully: not ‘through’, not ‘by’, but “from”. In other words, those two feminist legal lights demanded that women be excused from all the usual and traditional rigors that the law required of accusers.
Their legal theory (MacKinnon actually criticized Marxism … because it did not go far enough and include the oppression of women as one of its standard indictments of bourgeois civilization) developed in synchrony and synergy with the developing rape-counselor maxims with which we are familiar today because they have been erected into some of the standard tropes of Victimism: you can’t expect victims to be coherent and rational; you can’t ignore their claims and stories simply because they don’t make sense or change from telling to telling; you must approach any such story or claim with a presumption of belief and you must not further victimize a victim on the basis of a patriarchal and oppressive insistence on rationality; you must be flexible enough so as to not allow yourself to be blinded by traditional legal principles since they are all infected with patriarchal and oppressive rationality. (And the list goes on; readers so inclined may want to look at MacKinnon’s 1989 book Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.)
Dworkin, some readers may recall, insisted that all heterosexual penetrative intercourse was – for all practical purposes – coercive and essentially rape because society was so pervasively and fundamentally male-supremacist. Readers so inclined may want to read her 1976 book Our Blood, among others.
Shulevitz then observes that such ideas actually run in contradiction to “American liberalism” since American law is built on the foundational principle that “individuals have rights even when accused of doing bad things” and that such liberalism “reject[s] the notion that those rights may be curtailed even for a noble cause”.
But the government – for its own reasons – chose to support such theories and their more practical legal and jurisprudential sequelae, creating what I call Victimist legal theory which – as I have often said – represents not progress but rather a regression in law and jurispraxis, contrary to the hard-won integrity and achievements of Western law as it had evolved up to the later 20th century.
So then we see here how the Stampede is and always has been – to a profound degree – a spawn of larger dynamics and forces exerting pressure on American culture, which then synergized with torties’ (and allegants’) unsleeping eye for a chance to score some big settlement pay-outs with a minimum of legal fuss and bother.
And along came Anderson to pound all this snow into a great big Ball. And toss it at the Church.
You just can't shut up.
So again it's the women and the gays who are wrong and…that ..leaves us..who?
Oh yes!. Men, Only straight men. They are right again. Men, Man, Men ,men men,…men. I feel like Nelson Eddy,.
Men are the answer; they will lead the world out of hunger; poverty; warfare……. Wait a minute it was Straight male leadership that has the world where it is. …..
Stop Jim! That's such a wrong idea.
Forgive me, please. I've just not been obeying my straight masters the way I was taught I should. I must repent to the straight master and obey him in all things, He only imitates God after all.
Maybe it's because all 3 persons of God are men or male.. That's why only straight men can lead us. It's all; so clear to me now. They are the true reflection of God,
Welcome back to the middle ages.
What a reactionary you are. You may be homophobic, P but you sure do like your straight men. You sure like your straight man……… Oh oh! .
Gay people are intrinsically wrong for us just being who we are and having sex.
Women are intrinsically wrong. for wanting to be treated equally.
I think I've got it now. I know where this is going "straight" up to that all male locker room in the sky. The penultimate man cave: heaven.
You maybe homophobic P but you sure do like straight men.
Publion, church as victim of metaphorical snowball tossing (sniff) Who can protect the catholic church from the law?
If only the sex abuse scandal were as easily brushed off as a bit of spherical snow. Right? 'Avalanche' would work better for you than big ball of snow. But then you do have to keep with your rolling 'Ball' for the sake of continuity in your image and analogy-filled prose. Great fiction! You are my favorite author/theorist in the conspiracy-against-the-catholic-church genre.
And what a nice little crop of comments to which to respond.
On the 22nd at 1012AM we have the alleged Harvard Philosophy major, law school graduate, and non-trial attorney LDB.
Which is not surprising since the material I quoted from the Shulevitz article raises some very substantial and cogent philosophical and legal issues.
But – alas – what is also not surprising is that LDB apparently has “no interest” in those issues (or perhaps didn’t even have the necessary chops to notice them).
And instead:
He goes after the ancillary metaphor of the snowball. And then some wordplay to try to turn the thing against the Church.
And in regard to that last bit I would respond: when the law has become as deranged as it has, not only in praxis but in its very fundamental conceptions, then who at all is safe from such law?
And after a bit more playing in the snow, LDB will try to bring the act home with an epithetical riff on “great fiction”. Apparently the philosophical and legal issues appear on his mental radar screen as nothing but “fiction”. Which perhaps is very apropos, since his self-claimed creds appear to be rather fictional themselves.
But as for this “conspiracy” bit: I have never used the term in regard to the Stampede. Readers may recall I used the term “synergy” (the substantial difference between “conspiracy” and “synergy” – as was discussed here a while ago – being one that has also escaped his notice and his competence).
And did I conspire with Shulevitz or with the writer from 1999 whom I also quoted?
Bottom line here: LDB has demonstrated only the skills of a juvenile plop-tosser who is yet either shrewd and sly enough to avoid the substantive issues or who is sufficiently insufficient in his claimed competence to have missed the major points here completely.
Thus then to JR (the 22nd at 658PM):
He begins – yet again – by proffering as an observation about somebody else a point that should be taped up on his own mirror.
And then the entire comment derails into a trough of his own creation, creating yet again a pillow-fight with himself (and avoiding the actual substantive issues raised in the material I put up).
Shulevitz’s and Searles’s points (and they are both women, I suppose it has to be pointed out) are solidly grounded in the material of Dworkin and MacKinnon, as I discussed with references.
Nor did “gays” come into it at all. So JR here is having-at entities perhaps hovering somewhere around his computer, but they are not in my comments or their material.
And he does go on in that vein for quite a bit of the remainder of his comment, even to the point of arguing with himself or with some entities hovering somewhere around his computer.
And having himself created the issue of gays – which is not in my comment or their material – he then ‘concludes’ from an issue that he himself raised but I didn’t that I am a “reactionary” and “homophobic”. Such logic. And again we see the brilliance of the Anderson Strategies in figuring that such mentalities would arise on their own to help lubricate and – why not? – enable the Stampede.
And then – marvelously – he compliments himself that he has now ‘gotten it’ – although he has (intentionally or through incomprehension) completely missed the core points of the material I put up. A pitch-perfect performance.
He then goes for the distracting gambit of framing the substantial and profoundly serious feminist-law issues raised by Shulevitz and Searles as merely being the issue of women “wanting to be treated equally”.
To which I would respond: While that may be the desire of feminist law, and while that may constitute a ‘good intention’, yet the costs and consequences of the approach taken (limned by Shulevitz and Searles) in order to try and achieve that desire are and always have been seriously dangerous to the fundaments and the integrity of Western law and jurispraxis as it was painfully developed over the course of centuries (with much help from the development of canon law in those “middle ages”).
And for his exit-line he has selected – revealingly – his vision of heaven as being a “male locker room in the sky”. But – in as nice an example of the psychic economy of projection as one is likely to see – he has somehow convinced himself that I was the one who brought the gay issue up and that the male-locker-room vision is mine and not his. If by any chance his “therapy” is not merely in the past-tense, this would be a fine bit to bring up at the next session.
And we note the nicely-constructed phrase “penultimate man cave” – which is so very nicely done as a piece of literary construction that I don’t see it coming from him at all (especially since he is - as he has declared – from that Celtic oral tradition).
And as he gets to the curtains, he delivers his ultimate zinger: an epithet (but of course). But one that is based on his own gay points that he raised here and not based on any material in my comment.
At the end of which performance, we then realize that none of the actual points raised in my material and comment have been addressed at all. As usual.
I bet the church dosn't even pay you for the job you do here. They are so rich yet so cheap.
I bet it's all done on the hope of future payment in the sky, bye and bye, when you die.
Are you Opus Dei, oh hidden one?
I've been posting on Crux and their version of P though at a much lower intellectual level is a guy called Bob. He's playing the part of the Angry Catholic with the same anti evolutionary rhetoric that the person (whose fake name i have forgotten now) did here.
Bob at Crux talks about Gay "posses" using basically the same Marlboro country language and imagery that P with his "Stampede " uses here.
The P.R. companies, hired by the church, have their talking points and imagery all batened down it seems.
It's a shoot out between good: the church and it's elite; and the bad guys: gays; victims; women's leadership. Pick an enemy. and if you can't find a real one make one up. But it has to be a shoot out, a conflict, none the less. Conflict drives most readers away. They've got enough conflict to deal with in their own lives. So if you station folks at catholic sites and have them ready to spring the moment any real dialog starts to happen; and have them hammer the outsider with insults disaproval and revision. You can end the conversation and repel the readership with an ongoing bitchfest between the plant and the opposition. Repelling one and all. Obfuscating the issues and leaving any decent dialog in the dust. Yee Ha!
No happy trails for anyone but the owners and the cowboys. The poor cattle are still headed for the slaughter house.
And more of the same from JR.
On the 23rd at 221PM: the insinuation that I am paid or should be paid by the Church “for the job [I] do here”. This is not the first time he has tried this toss; as I said the last time he tried it, it serves only to reveal that he apparently cannot imagine being concerned for an issue without being paid for it. Charming.
Everything that he doth “bet” can be left up for everyone to consider.
If I am supposed to be the person who has – he seems to assert – put up “the same anti-evolutionary rhetoric” (whose fake name here JR doth protest he doth “forget”), then I would say this: neither JR nor any other Abusenik was able to make any response to the major issues I raised as to the problems with the evolutionary theory as it is generally held today.
Specifically: first, the theory – even as Darwin acknowledged in his own time – is not capable of explaining the origin of matter itself, but rather only claims to deal with the dynamics of the origin of species. But this claim as to the origin of species thus is insufficient to ground any conclusions as to the origin of matter and thus insufficient to ground any conclusions as to the existence or non-existence of a Creator.
And second, the dynamics posited by evolution are themselves unable to account for the fact that we have no indication of all of the hypothetical intermediate-evolutionary forms of each living thing that would have had to exist while other more ‘evolved’ versions of each living thing were developing.
And third, the very coherence of the evolutionary principles is flawed because it cannot explain how such lesser-evolved versions of each life form survived successfully if its various vital life-sustaining or life-supporting organs were only partially evolved over the eons it would have taken to evolve to the full forms we know today.
And fourth, with the construction of far more advanced computing capabilities and the math that they enable, it becomes hugely questionable whether a mere few billion years are even minimally sufficient time for the amount of complex evolving that would have had to have taken place.
And fifth, the fourth point is supported by the advances in our scientific awareness of just how complex even the most minute living organisms actually are, let alone then the development of organic entities so incredibly complex as the human body and the human brain.
And sixth, the theory of evolution cannot account for what we now know to be the information that actually directs the development of matter: where does the information come from which directs the most minute aspects of material organisms to form themselves into more complex and ‘evolved’ forms? And here the time problem of the fourth point comes into play. Advanced computer scientists have observed that it is the problem of the origin of directive-information (very much resembling the code that governs computer programs) that drives the formation of bio-matter that is even more fundamental an issue than the hypothetical evolution of the bio-matter itself.
And seventh, the evolutionary theory cannot even begin to address the problem of how even evolved bio-material organisms (such as the human brain) can be the source of non-material capability (such as the human mind).
And once JR has successfully addressed those problems, there remains the question of the origin of the human spirit or soul. (Although from his material it would appear that his ‘solution’ to this problem of the soul is resolved by the simple expedient of a brute (and brutish) materialist reductionism: i.e., humans are simply meat-bags and there is no soul and no non-material reality. (But, of course, if his philosophical anthropology is correct here, then he undermines the very significance of the Victim who is in his philosophical schema merely a meat-bag in the first place and the last.)
All of which I discussed at great length on prior threads when this topic came up. I also recommended the two books by Stephen C. Meyer: Signature in the Cell (2009) and Darwin’s Doubt (2013). Therein can be found the scientific issues – across many scientific disciplines – and mathematical problems (replete with equations and explanations) that I have pointed out in this comment.
Since I pointed all of this out quite some time ago, if for no other reason, it may be presumed that JR has not bothered to read them or has not been able to comprehend their material. There’s a surprise.
Then JR goes on about some other commenter on some other site (where he is still permitted to post, for now anyway) which is nothing but a distracting dodge of the issues confronting him on this site.
Which he then uses to form the un-grounded conclusion that everything he either disagrees with or can’t deal-with is just the effluvium of “the P.R. companies … hired by the Church”. Although, then, I doubt he would take without irritation any characterization of his own effluvia that we deal with here.
He then opines that the whole thing is – waitttt for itttttttt! – just a Good vs. Bad cartoon, and it’s simply a matter (in his view) of whom one wishes to categorize as ‘good’ and whom as ‘bad’. Thus to the profound complexities of the issues under consideration JR brings and demonstrates merely a cartoon-capable mentality. With predictable results.
But his description of the dynamics of ‘stationing’ people at various sites pretty much describes SNAP (which he claims, we recall, is merely a tool of the Church, along with Anderson and anybody else who doesn’t think he knows what he’s talking about) and also points toward the legion of plop-tossers who are also attracted to their keyboards to dish out their confections (although we have seen how poorly they ‘can take it’ when the problems with their plop are pointed-out).
And we also see the truly phantasmagorical presumption that JR and his ilk are merely trying to conduct “real dialog” – which phrase, however, must be understood to include a rather total leap of faith as to the utter credibility and sense of whatever plop they insist on tossing.
And he then – in a marvelous example of a profound lack of self-awareness – raises the problem of “bitchfest” without any apparent realization of his own material, voluminously in the record here, so repellently replete with its juvenilia of scatology and epithets and so on.
And then tosses in “obfuscation” in the same way, as if the distracting gambits of the Playbook might be unfamiliar to the readership here.
The “cattle” in all of this are the persons – the general public – so carefully and relentlessly manipulated by the Stampede and all its proponent interests.
And as if by afterthought, at 238PM, he will try to pre-empt any further comments with the presumptive epithet that my imagery is merely designed to “fool readers with”. If I have ever put up an image that confused rather than clarified material that I was discussing, he has never pointed out any such image. Does he have any actual imagery of mine in mind?
He does say “sports-connected” – but, again, the key issue with a sports or a historical analogy is whether it does or does not accurately clarify and exemplify the material it is used to support.
And by “fool”, of course, we must understand its definition in JR’s cartoon dictionary: anything that doesn’t work to make his plop sound good is merely something to “fool readers with”. As if his own efforts at fooling people over the long course of years aren’t now rather clear.
Readers so inclined may wish to visit whatever website it is where JR is – he claims – going mano-a-mano with some other commenter. I seriously doubt they will find there a different JR with far more impressive capabilities than those we have seen so often and so vividly displayed here.
What a joker! Evolution doesn't work because it doesn't explain the nonexisistant? A soul?
Well it can't. the process of evolution is all based on fact; reality; the proveable; the extant; not the imagined. That's how it adapts. We adapt or die from ants to idiots; all are welcome to adapt or die by nature and it's evolutinary process..
If by my outing them they have to find new imagery to try to fool readers with; I'll just bet that new imagery will be sports connected.
Opus Dei? Is you or ain't you a devotee? Answer up.
You always lose when you pit mythology against science.
Clarity and brevity of discourse is considered by you cartoon thinking?
I see it as making my points and not asking people to waste their time getting lost in the maze of your mirage of feigned rationality.
What an easy way to avoid the contradictions in your own mythology. Dismiss sombody else as less than; not as smart as yourself; child like as compared to your aged seer self. Poses; postures; false advertising. You are nothing but a big fat lying fake.
Following up on my immediately prior comment:
Today 28 members of the Harvard Law School faculty published an open letter objecting to the sex-assault protocols that the Department of Education is attempting to foist on all universities that receive any sort of federal funding.
Readers may access an article (with hyperlinks) about it here
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/oct/22/tyrrell-the-harvard-28-to-the-rescue/#!
This is, I would say, an example of a counter-synergy that is finally developing, but one that is based on issues that we have been dealing with in regard to the Stampede for quite some time.
Or perhaps LDB would care to further burnish what is clearly his own “conspiracy” theory: that I am somehow in cahoots (and perhaps manipulating or controlling) not only a writer from 1999 but also a well-known contemporary journalistic writer and – waitttt for ittttttt! – a number of members of the Harvard Law School faculty.
What other possible explanation could there be for these articles and that open letter that we have seen? That some of the key driving forces behind Victimism and the Stampede have finally over-reached and revealed the true lineaments and costs and consequences of their agenda for what they are and always have been?
Wasn't the Washington Times once owned by the Reverend Moon? Given the wealth of the catholic church; maybe they took it on when the other religious dictator left this vale of tears.
How hard is it to buy university professors? The drug companies did it.The tobacco industry did it. The military industrial complex does it all the time. Endow a chair and pick the tone of your choosing.
Plus Harvard's got a lot of endowment to lose, the most $32 billion. That's $32 billion folks mere chicken feed to the catholic church, I know. I'm not saying it's wrong to have money as long as the public knows who's ox is being gored and for what reason?. Actors enter.
I also have had female and male friends who were deeply injured by college date rape. The shadow that destruction of trust leaves overshadows generations. The mother doesn't trust the children don't trust. hard to build an emotional life without trust.
On the 23rd at 917PM we see displayed precisely the type of mentality that is the foundational bottom-layer of the Abusenik pandemonium: in regard to a widely-reported and link-supported Washington Times report of the Harvard Law School faculty open-letter, JR simply points out – irrelevantly – that at some point in the past the paper was owned by the (admittedly loopy) Reverend Moon.
Were the article merely an op-ed or editorial or opinion piece, and/or were Moon still to own the paper, then JR’s point here might have some possible relevance. But otherwise – and as the matter actually stands now – JR’s effort here yields nothing but a demonstration of his (and the Playbook’s) signature innuendo and plop-tossing.
In addition to the fact that readers are welcome to calculate the possibility that JR actually came up with this newspaper point himself.
JR then intensifies the depth of his self-revelation here by insinuating or suggesting that the Church somehow took over the paper. And did the Church – in this hypothesis – then force or manipulate 28 members of the Harvard Law faculty to compose and publish their letter?
But if you think that JR will simply leave it at that, figuratively shooting himself in both legs, he then proceeds to continue shooting in that same general direction: perhaps the Church bought the professors, since they aren’t that hard to buy.
And then he reloads and does it again: He notes that Harvard has a 32 billion dollar endowment, “which is mere chicken feed to the catholic church”. The problem with the logic in that paragraph of his comment is that the profs are endangering federal funding by their monitory open-letter, not by a silent acceptance of the DOE ‘standards’ (so to speak). So if Harvard has a lot to lose, then why would the profs write the letter? And would the profs then risk so much and endanger their standing by shilling for the Church (in JR’s theory) in direct defiance of their employer’s (i.e. Harvard’s) interests?
And – for that matter – of what relevance to this torturously-illogical point of his about the size of Harvard’s endowment relative to the Church? (Answer: JR has a 3×5 with ‘church wealth’ on it in that little box of file cards and figured that he’d toss it up here, for lack of anything more cogent to proffer.)
And then – but of course – JR takes this no doubt seductive opportunity to insert himself into history by claiming that he “too … ha[s] had female and male friends who were deeply injured by college date rape”. Ovvvvvv coursssssse. And we can take his word for it.
But notice the usual Playbook dynamic here: rather than rationally and directly address the problems of costs and consequences he simply goes for the emotionally vivid and manipulative limning of the asserted problem.
Thus the dynamic follows this path: the problem is so utterly huge and awful (and presumed real) that anything is better than just doing-nothing. And it is precisely this causal chain of unstated presumptions that has resulted not only in the Stampede but in the problems noted by Searles in 1999 and Shulevitz this month and the Harvard Law faculty professors two days ago.
Then on the 24th at 1119AM, in the matter of Darwinian evolution and with six or seven rather substantial problems his position has to resolve, JR goes – waitttt for itttttt! – for the cartoon solution: he attempts to characterize and wish-away all those problems by claiming that my position reduces to “evolution doesn’t work because it doesn’t explain the nonexistant” (sic).
In the first place, that was the seventh of the problems, leaving JR’s position still saddled with the first six.
In the second place, JR’s own statement requires the prior assumption that the non-material does not exist. Which is itself a rather profound and foundational presumption.
And in the third place, JR’s position (i.e. the Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian position) cannot even sufficiently handle the material and scientific difficulties with its assertions and presumptions (i.e. points one through six) let alone the metaphysical issue of point seven.
For that matter, the Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian position cannot really handle the brain-mind (i.e. material-immaterial) problem of point six either. (If he disagrees and can explain his disagreement rationally and coherently, JR is welcome to do so.)
And in the concluding paragraph JR simply asserts a panoply of points that are precisely the ones at issue: Evolution as a hypothesis is not proveable on its own terms (and there are increasing numbers of difficulties with it as science has developed further) and thus is precisely not “based on fact; reality; the proveable; the extant; not the imagined”.
If it were, JR (or – let’s face it – whoever is the source of the material in this comment under his name) would have been able to search-engine some quick and complete refutational responses to all of my points. That hasn’t happened and won’t happen because there exist no such responses.
And if we “adapt or die” then what to make of – say – somebody almost seventy with the mentality of a teenager? Would such a person be an “ant” or an “idiot”? Darwinism in any form is a hard taskmaster indeed.
And that’s all we’ve got, folks.
When two groups have the same interests; one holds the door for the other. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If institutions dislike the fact that they can be held responsibile for what they should be held responsibile for finiancially. They will link with those like themselves. If the rats are squeaking the same tune there's a reason.
Let's pretend you are the Roman Catholic church as a financial body. You have all this wealth rolling in. Thousands of years of wealth. What do you do with it? Why you invest it to make more wealth. That's why the church is the largest hotelier in Rome and god knows where else. In down town Chicago the Catholic church is the largest land owner period. If you've got the money why not buy newpapers, radio and television stations; news services. Fronts can always be bought. Like hotels and Chicago skyscrapers can be bought. Foundations can spring up over night. Look at the Koch brothers roadshows: The Cato Institute; Heritage Foundation etc. etc.
These are real controls on our real political system. Why would you be surprised that your religion would behave in the same underhanded way the Koch Brothers do in attempting to control the way things operate to their advantage?. They represent the same interests.
It's not improbable; nor impossible.
While you wish to swing us back to the trees in your anti evolutionary fantasies.
Ruminating on who controls what and how they do it. Seems a much saner speculation than believing in the complete lack of evidence that the faithful build their oppression of others and themselves on.
The bottom line is that it would take tremendous courage for an "individual" to stand up
to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Franco & Diem, wouldn't it? How many people have you met in your life in everyday situations (let alone dealing with these monsters) to take a stand for justice?
And, when one does get the opportunity to witness this unselfishness, what is the average person's response? How grateful and appreciative are individuals and/or groups when someone takes the risk (while he/she may be scared, too)?
Thank God for our unselfish troops, and Thank God some of our privacy rights are kept intact!
And for those keeping that Notebook on the Playbook, more fodder from JR on the 24th at 108PM.
Of what conceivable relevance to anything would be my membership in any organization? The material is up there, questions and all. JR can answer them – especially if the “science” is so clear and the rest is “mythology”.
“Clarity and brevity” without substance or accuracy is a cartoon. One-liners and Playbook distractions do not count as “clarity and brevity” but simply as reductionist juvenilia.
JR has indeed made his “points” – and they are in the record for anyone to peruse. Those “points”, however, do not qualify as “responses” to any of the problems with the material (Darwinian evolution, in this instance) that he himself brought to the table.
The dynamics of projection are once again paraded before us as JR characterizes the list of problems with his material as “feigned rationality”.
I have ‘dismissed’ nothing; I have pointed out problems with material proffered and am awaiting some responses – which, given the assurance with which JR has tried to dismiss my points, should be easy for him to provide. But he has given us nothing here but distractions and avoided addressing the substantive scientific objections.
And to top it all off, a whole bunch of characterizations that should actually be taped up on his own mirror.
Nor does “child-like” (connoting apparently to his mind ‘innocence’ and ‘truth-telling’) actually equate to ‘juvenile’ and ‘adolescent’ – especially when describing material from somebody just south of age 70.
For the record, as of this writing, a search-engine entry for that Harvard Law faculty open-letter returns half a million hits (its title in the Boston Globe article is ‘Rethink Harvard’s Sexual Harassment Policy’). The list of faculty members signing it consist of both males and females, white and black.
As I have previously said, the core Victimist sex-law agenda is revealed in the objections that the faculty members lodge in their letter and many of the points they make in their letter are points with which readers here would be familiar:
The procedures for deciding the cases “lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process, [and] are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused”.
There is “an absence of any adequate opportunity to discover the facts charged” (they also object to the absence of any opportunity “to confront witnesses and present a defense at an adversary hearing” – which problems in the actual legal system were avoided through the Anderson Strategies’ by a) the shrewd creation of an alliance with the media in order to uniformly spin the matter of clerical abuse; b) the enlistment of various victim organizations to front for the torties and serve as a conduit for drumming up fresh allegants; c) the targeting of the Insurer attorneys whose core concern would be only to minimize the financial outlays by their employers; and d) where possible, to bring criminal cases through friendly DA’s, such as we are seeing in Philadelphia).
They object to “adopting a definition of ‘sexual harassment’” that has greatly “expanded the scope” of conduct liable for treatment in this flawed and one-sided process.
They object to the adoption of procedural rules “which are starkly one-sided as between complainants and respondents” (i.e. accusers and accused), which rules are also “entirely inadequate to address the complex issues” in the cases that are brought.
All of which demonstrates that the Harvard Law faculty open-letter is not a creation of a single reportorial source but is rather an actual existing event and that the open-letter deals with issues that this site has been concerned-with for quite some time.
Oh there's plenty of substance in my substanciations.
Are you or are you not a member of Opus Dei? If I was a member of Opus Dei I wouldn't hide it. What's to be ashamed of if you are? L.A.'s new cardinal is a proud member. Speak up. Let us see your matrix.
You want your opposition to cross every t and dot every I. Everybody knows my politic here. What's to hide?
And you don't believe in evolution. Well well well that puts you in a rather rarefied ,if limited, group.
Do you believe dinosaurs and cave people lived at the same time?
If anybody can make sense of JR’s comment of the 25th at 1209AM they are welcome to share their illumination. Aside from the misspelling, it seems to be not only a style not yet seen from JR, but a style that has lost any connection with the content it is apparently supposed to express.
Then (the 25th at 1241AM) we are invited to play a game of “Let’s pretend” with JR (which, arguably, is what we have had to do with him for quite some time now).
First, his pretend-scenario has to do with all of this “wealth” that the Church has – “thousands of years of it”. The imagined wealth of the Church seems to be one of the really great turn-ons for Abuseniks (as it no doubt is for their torties). Who says it hasn’t all been about the money? And perhaps JR’s true fantasy of heaven must be re-defined as “a male locker room full of really wealthy males”. I’d add this: his scenario is a combination of the afore-mentioned stuffed locker room and the enormous pile of the dwarves’ treasure in The Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug: mountains of gold pieces, golden vessels, and – but of course – shiny jewels (or – as Tolkien somewhere has one of his characters put it) – “jools”).
Second, he presumes that all this “wealth” is liquid and can be invested. That art treasures and architectural treasures cannot be ‘invested’ does not seem to have occurred to him and thus undermines this cartoon.
On this basis we are then treated to some internet fantasies that he has not pulled out of the 3×5 box for quite some time here, regarding Rome and “down town Chicago” (sic) and “god knows where else”. And all the rest of it as he doth go on.
The upshot and purpose of this particular bit being that the Church can ‘buy’ a ‘front’ any time it wants. Except that we have D’Antonio’s detailed description of the very meeting that took place between Anderson and the head of an obscure victim-organization (SNAP’s Barbara Blaine) wherein Anderson proposed they create an alliance and Blaine said Yes. All of which was discussed at great length here quite some time ago. Which pretty much rules-out the Church ‘buying a front’ theory … unless you also want to theorize that Anderson and Blaine and the rest of the tortie pandemonium are all themselves bought-and-paid-for tools of the Church (and toss in the 28 Harvard Law professors as well).
We are then taken from that bit of JR’s ‘logic’ and ‘factual actual’ to his assertions about “our real political system” and readers so inclined can make of it what they will.
And then and then and then: the commenter who just recently on this thread reduced humanity to “ants” and “idiots” and whose philosophical anthropology essentially consists in not only a Monoplanar but also a meat-bag materialistic reductionism, accuses me of ‘wishing’ “to swing us back to the trees with [my] anti evolutionary fantasies” (sic).
Readers will quickly observe that of the seven objections I noted (the 23rd at 926PM) in regard to evolution the first five are purely scientific or mathematical objections to the ‘science’ in the evolutionary position; the sixth is an objection inherent in the mind-brain problem; and only the seventh raises the hardly less relevant question of ‘soul’ – which is not a ‘scientific’ problem precisely because science is incapable of dealing with it but most certainly is relevant here since evolutionary ‘science’ claims that there is no Multiplane and thus no soul either.
Which means that it is evolutionary Darwinist and neo-Darwinist theory that indeed seeks to “return us to the trees” with its Monoplanar materialistic reductionism.
And readers will have also noticed that JR in all of his verbiage here has said absolutely nothing responsive to those seven objection-points, for which the clear and simple ‘science’ (as he imagines it) should be instantly available to refute those objection-points.
And indeed, one could propose – to use JR’s words – that there is a “complete lack of evidence” not only for the actual material science of Darwinist and neo-Darwinist evolutionary theory, but also for the metaphysical (thus meta-material and meta-scienitific) assertions also made about the non-existence of a Creator or a Metaplane. And so far we haven’t seen anything from any Abusenik here to disprove that proposal – which shouldn’t be surprising because they haven’t got anything that can do the job.
And a concluding bit seeks (with the highly uncharacteristic style and tone of that “ruminating”) to impose instead the old Marxist-Leninist dreck that the only possible hermeneutics is one of suspicion of earthly power because essentially all there is to existence is that earthly power (primarily an economic power) and human beings are merely Monoplanar meat-bags caught up in its “oppression”. (It was precisely this type of dreck that so exercised Solzhenitsyn in his many diatribes against the Soviet system and also – marvelously – in his June 1978 address at Harvard in which he applied the same criticism to the materialism and Monplanar-ism evident to him in the United States.)
And then (the 25th at 724PM) JR attempts to further his “pretend” that he is actually making comments responsive to the issues at hand by – waitttt for ittttttt – merely asserting with no explication whatsoever that “there’s plenty of substance in [his] substanciations” (sic). If anybody can detect that “substance” in his “substanciations” they are welcome to put up the quoted material of JR’s here that may support that assertion.
But then – in a signature Playbook move, and precisely the type of gambit that the Playbook would advise for this type of situation he’s gotten himself into here – he tries to distract about his utter lack of responsiveness to the issues at hand by asking about my membership in some organization. (For the record, I am not a member nor even familiar with its positions or ideas.)
And does he seriously imagine I would be guided by his thoughts as to what he would or wouldn’t do about anything?
He then seeks to minimize his utter failure to support his assertions by claiming that I want my “opposition to cross every t and dot every I” (sic). He has to resort to caricature here, in order to avoid the actuality in play here: he and other Abuseniks have proffered almost nothing to rationally and coherently explain how they ground their assertions and claims and positions.
But that blithe waving-away of the need to ground claims and assertions and stories is precisely what we so often have seen in the Stampede, is it not?
And then he further compounds his distraction by referring to his “politics” – when it is his essential incoherence and non-rationality and lack of substantive content that is the actual problem here.
But he reveals something here: for Abuseniks (as for their elder relations in Victimism and other movements) it is not at all a matter of the rationality and coherence and credibility and accuracy and consequences of your ideas; it is merely about your politics. As long as you have chosen the right political stance, then the content and consequences of your ideas don’t matter. This is Leninist and revolutionary dreck in the original package.
My “matrix” is the rational assessment of ideas and of validated facts, leading to an assessment of credibility and evidentiary demonstration.
Nor is it a matter, therefore, of whether one believes in evolution. It is a matter of whether that particular scientific theory can adequately and sufficiently handle the claims it makes and the scientific objections to those claims and to that theory.
Evolution – and JR has given the game away again here – is a scientific theory; one does not approach it as a matter of belief but rather as a matter of science. And thus we are back to the objection-points I made.
So if anything is being ‘hidden’ here, it’s all that scientific substantial and substantiated evidence that JR insists can make mincemeat of the objection-points.
Then – continuing with his self-derailment – JR tries to reduce the profound and essentially scientific issue to merely a popularity contest: it is a “rather rareified, if limited group” (sic) that doesn’t “believe in evolution”. Thus: it’s not about the quality or integrity of the substance of the argument – rather, it’s only about how many other people will high-five you for holding the position. And we are back in the cafeteria again, playing to the peanut gallery for yuks and yippies.
And in regard to his concluding effort at a get-off-the-stage and leave’em-laffin’ zinger: it looks like JR has enough trouble with the seven points already on the table; so let’s wait until those are satisfactorily resolved before letting him go even further afield.
But we see here, I would say, precisely the derangement of discourse that has enabled so much of the Stampede: under no circumstances are the difficult issues to be discussed or allowed to be discussed. Instead ,distract and disparage and create other stuff to Keep The Ball Rolling.
Shut up! You run on sentence on steroids.
Before one "redoes" their apartment in the vatican to the tune of 3 million dollars or more or decorates their gilded palaces with art; any dictator makes sure there's money in the bank. Your church is no exception.
The only reason I'm concerned with the church's wealth is the simple fact they refuse (unless forced) to pay their injured victims.
And where the church has paid up, in Ireland for example, (where the church and the government, both libel, have co-conspired agreements. Abetted with SNAP's ever aquiesing help) victims have gotten little.
Meanwhile the majority of victims world wide have gotten nothing but hostility and lies. The Media Report is one example of such a charitable love filled institution .
To pretend your church is not one of the most wealthy enterprises on this planet, is (no surprise here) evidence of your complete lack of knowledge of your church's economic history. Or what's more truthful, your personal ability to lie about anything and everything.
What fries me is the fact, you claim your church to be the biggest charity giver in the world . Yet cry bankruptcy when victims seek compensation for our rapes as children.
My guestion is : How can you give money away you don't have?
Yet to feign a perfection, you also don't have, regarding sexual abusing priests; you deny your victims compensation.
Charity begins at home. Doing right begins at home. At your house the lights are on but nobody's home. Jesus has left the building; the money changers won.
O.K. even I don't get my " Yet to feign a perfection" line above. I wish you had an edit button. And, my "guestion" above? That am what it be: an error on my part. Mea Culpa! Mea Culpa! Oh! you know the rest.
JR says on the 26th…."Jesus has left the building, the money changers won". Well the money changers are certainly to the forefront in this secular world. Even the deep pockets of types like a Jeff Anderson are extremely influential. But have to wonder how he and his fellow travellers will cope when the male college students wake up. That they too are now being caught up in a Stampede, in which their Constitutional rights are being trampelled on.
Can't you even be gentleman enough to deny or admit you are a member of Opus Dei?
Thank you for answering my question.
It takes such a long time to get through your posts and they are so denegrating of me. That I approach them as if walking through a mine field. I step very carefully in reading them. I read them a bit at a time. I think I've been hurt enough by catholics. No pity party for me. I just don't enjoy being insulted.
So I just saw your answer about Opus Dei. thank you.
Jeff Anderson is as dependent on the church through SNAP's control of victims, as anyone.
If he doesn't know SNAP's the church by now he's a moron.
He doesn't care that SNAP's the church. SNAP get's the calls from the victims.
Jeff's there to catch them when they call. It's he who tells victims if they can sue or not in their state. He's a gate keeper as well as SNAP. Who know's where his initial impetus came from. The church always wins when it plays the game by the church's rules. And since the church controls all the players but the insurors. The church usually wins.
You keep acting like the absolute little SNAP does: Echoing arrests of perpetrators and calling prelates on their obvious failures, is some kind of a big deal. It's nothing; just a repetition of what the press publishes. SNAP's job publicly is to look like victims are organizing and helping other victims get their due. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Anderson didn't create SNAP. he may give it some money and he certainly gets his money from the church through our settlements. but have you ever seen his offices!!!!
Like a movie set for a 1890's Cardinal's home. It gives victims the creeps. He's so insensitive he decorates his offices like a Cardinal's palace. Creepy Mc Creep!
Can you imagine a victim walking into a place with choir stalls; maybe even confessionals? When they are trying to find a lawyer who will fight for them. They want help and they walk into a replica of the very homes of the people who've harmed them. Yuck!
On the 26th at 1212PM JR takes his signature route of telling me to “Shut up!”. Because – apparently to him – my sentences run on steroids (the actual text would make no sense if quoted). Compound complex sentences will do that to certain types of minds. Not my problem.
Then some bits about Vatican redecoration, apropos of nothing presently under discussion and tying in the Church and dictators. We are assured by JR (and must take his word for it) that in whatever matter he is working-on here, “your church is no exception”.
So far so usual.
Then an old bit: JR is only concerned because of “the simple fact” that the Church refused to fork over cash to the “injured victims”. As I have said so often when this bit was tossed-up: there is no “simple fact” involved here, due to the actual reality that since the Church could not determine the genuineness of the “injured victims”, and since the Insurers would be paying and would require some court action in order to justify the outlay to their shareholders, then court authority and court action of some sort (such as the Anderson Strategies deranged it) would be necessary. Clearly JR is not familiar at all with the necessities of transferring (or forking-over) cash; which is curious since money looms so large in his thoughts. But we see here again the essentially Cartoon nature that drives the Abuseniks: there are pots of gold in there somewhere, and all that has to be done is to fork a whole bunch of it over and how hard could that be?
Then he attempts to reduce the matter in Ireland to some sort of Church-government conspiracy. At what point in time would that conspiracy be? In the present? In the past? If the past, when in the past? And is “conspiracy” supposed to cover that period in Irish history when the government could not afford to provide services and asked the Church to provide them? And for that matter, was the Church not providing all manner of social services before there even was an Irish government?
At what point (accurate quotation required) did I “pretend” that the Church “is not one of the mostwealthy enterprises on the planet”? And in what – once again – does that “wealth” consist? And – to repeat – on what justification is that “wealth” to be forked-over to any allegants who want to have a go at the piñata?
And then and then JR tries another monkey-see/monkey-do bit with the Wig of Professional Competence: I am indicted for my “complete lack of knowledge of [my] church’s economic history”. And of what parts of that history a) do I demonstrate a “complete lack of knowledge” and b) does JR demonstrate any actual knowledge at all?
JR then proclaims himself victimized by being “fried” that I “claim your church to be the biggest charity giver in the world”. Where (accurate quote required) have I ever claimed that? Or is he once again creating a pillow-fight with entities visible only to himself hovering around his keyboard?
As he will later admit, the single-sentence paragraph that includes “to feign a perfection” makes no sense as written.
And then he offers clear and certain evidence of his own abyssal ignorance of the economic actualities involved here: the Church has not declared bankruptcy; individual Dioceses have. There is a difference (or is this rather substantive difference unknown to him?).
And, but of course, there remains the real fact that there has yet to be proffered any reliable way of determining who is and who isn’t a genuine victim deserving of money that – additionally – might be legitimately classified as “compensation for our rapes as children” (with all of the so-often discussed problems with that characterization, especially when made by JR).
Then, once again, the reach for the moral high-ground (and Wig): it is not possible to discuss the appropriateness of the “Charity” and of “doing right” until the genuineness of the victims has been established. Which it appears the Abuseniks cannot provide.
Which leaves us, then, with the Abuseniks and the allegants and the torties quite possibly being the real “money-changers” in all this. But if so, “they have won”.
And on the 26th at 1215PM he tries for the Wig of Gentlemanliness: why can’t I be gentleman enough to answer his (utterly irrelevant and distracting) question as to whether I am or am not a member of Opus Dei? And while he will later admit that he had missed my answer, the point to be noted here is the Wig gambit.
Then on the 26th at 708PM he indulges in another of his signature moves: making excuses for himself. It’s my comments – doncha see? – that are responsible for his failure to note my answer: they take so long for him to “get through” and they are “so denegrating of” him. Pointing out the vital problems with logic and coherence and accuracy in his material – doncha see? – are to him a form of denigration. He is thus yet again – waitttt for ittttt! – a victim.
If my comments seem to him “a mine field”, that’s only because his own material – to which I am merely responding – is itself a mine-field of the aforementioned problems. And to belabor what should be obvious: there are two solutions to the problem. One, I simply “shut up”; two, he improves the quality of his material along the axes of the aforementioned problems – which, I would say, is not so “simple” but is the only way (since I am not going to “shut up”).
Ah, and my material merely takes its place as one more demonstration of his having “been hurt enough by catholics”. Readers may consider that bit as they will. And Catholic readers may consider to what extent they have been hurt by his material here, which evidence is far more evident than any evidence of his stories and claims and so forth.
Whether he is being “insulted” or whether his material is insulting; whether having his material forthrightly assessed constitutes being “insulted” … these are questions that might also be considered.
And thus to the 26th at 741PM:
His initial assertion contains a logical howler: he hasn’t at all established that the Church has a controlling role in SNAP.
Then thus the assertion about Anderson’s being “a moron” if he hasn’t come to JR’s way of envisioning SNAP also fails since it is equally possible that Anderson hasn’t embraced JR’s theory because JR’s theory doesn’t really hold together and can’t be proven and perhaps also does not conform to a reality about which Anderson very probably knows a lot more than JR.
Thus too JR’s effort to plaster over the abyssal gaps in his theory (i.e. “who knows where [Anderson’s] initial impetus came from”) fails as well: D’Antonio’s book reveals what was hardly the improbable answer: Anderson is a tortie and saw a huge opportunity to do what torties do and make a whole lot of money in fees and expenses. (Whether he personally holds an abiding animus against the Church or religion generally is an interesting, but secondary, question.)
And in what way – yet again – has the Church ‘won’, if it – in JR’s theorizing of it – “controls all the players”? That interesting new reservation – “except the insurers” is not just a little thingie: the Insurers and their attorneys were the key target all along because they held the key to the major money that the torties really wanted and had wanted all along (for themselves and for their allegants, whose payouts, when widely publicized, would encourage fresh allegations and seed fresh allegants – a very neat self-sustaining game for as long as it could be made to last).
Then some eructations about what I “keep acting like” for which some accurate quotes from my material are required in support. SNAP is a front organization for the torties and it has done its job and played its role well enough.
As for the mere assertion that “nothing could be further than the truth”, all readers can do with it is consider whether the source is credible, since no support for the assertion is proffered.
Anderson obviously didn’t “create SNAP”; but, as I have said several times, he did create the current version of SNAP through that meeting with Blaine that resulted in SNAP’s alliance with him in his plans and Strategies.
What relevance the sight of his “offices” might hold here is anybody’s guess.
And the rest of the comment trails off in some bits best assessed by a grade-school English teacher.
You have any proof; any evidence that the victims can't provide evidence?
Cut to the chase. Where is your proof that we victims have no proof?
Put up or shut up!
Matrixes, including office decor and home decor are very important. They are a Rorscharch test of a kind. The sub concious comes out in what we choose to have about us. One of the reasons you really refuse to reveal anything about yourself, is that even you know, people are read by what they are surrounded by. You don't want to be seen as a person only believed as some kind of fake authority. You are your church. The right wing edition.
And what have we here?
A pre-note: we have submissions from JR here that differ rather significantly from his wonted style and structure and substance and tone and authorial voice. Once again, we are either dealing with a JR whom JR usually hides or else we are dealing with some out-sourced comments here.
On the 28th at 1204PM JR slyly tries to shift the responsibility: What proof do we have that victims have no proof. In fact, I’ll quote the bits directly just so readers can roll them around in their mind: Do I “have any evidence that the victims can’t provide evidence?” and “Where is [my] proof that we victims have no proof?”.
To which I would respond: a) the responsibility is on the accuser to provide the evidence and b) we have seen no evidence of any convincing evidence here. So if the Abuseniks have some evidence then let them put it up. “Or shut up!” – as JR so neatly advises. (Time-saver: stories and claims and allegations don’t count as evidence; they only qualify – unless substantively corroborated – as stories and claims and allegations.)
We are then informed that “Matrixes, including office décor and home décor are very important” (sic). And why would matrices be important (presuming that one’s décor is a ‘matrix’ in the first place)?
They are important – we are informed from the precincts of the psychological forum – because “they are a Rorscharch test of a kind”(sic). That would be ‘Rorschach’ test and – can it be? – we are treated here to JR actually qualifying an assertion (viz., “of a kind”).
That test and the theory underlying it have been subjected to serious doubt over recent decades and readers need to keep that point in mind as – for purposes of the discussion here – I will look at JR’s material that is based on the test and the theory underlying it.
Thus – doncha know? – “the sub conscious comes out in what we choose to have about us” (sic). Let us for the purposes of the present discussion accept then JR’s prior descriptions of Anderson’s office furnishings and décor. Are we then to accept a line of logic that essentially goes: a) Bishops and hierarchs have certain types of office furnishings / b) Jeff Anderson has the same type of furnishings in his office / c) therefore Jeff Anderson is a tool of the Church … ?
In (a) we have to presume that all hierarchs have a generally standard and similar type of office décor. In (b) we have to take JR’s word for it that Jeff Anderson’s office décor is what JR says it is. And (c) doesn’t follow as the logical conclusion of (a) and (b) at all. At the very best, a conclusory (c) that might be drawn from the (a) and (b) that we (presume we) have would be: Jeff Anderson seems to think that in some way he is a hierarch.
More probably though: Jeff Anderson has chosen a traditional décor (presuming that JR’s description is accurate) for the same reasons banks and government buildings used to go for the Classical massifs of Greek and Roman architecture: to imply that they too are as solid and reliable as those ancient civilizations. His décor is an advertisement to potential and actual clients for his solidity and reliability as a counsel.
And if Jeff Anderson thinks in some way that he is in some way a hierarch, then that’s an oddity about Jeff Anderson to be sure, but hardly relevant to the matters under consideration here.
Thus JR has given us a couple of psychological factoids that are rather grossly mis-applied here.
JR then tries to take his already grossly-flawed two-step a step further here and tries to connect my use of a screen-name to the whole concoction: I don’t “want to be seen as a person only believed as some kind of fake authority” (and if you have trouble following that logic, the problem – as they say – is not with your set).
In the first place, I am not seeking to be seen as an “authority” at all. Which puts my purposes here hell and gone from JR’s, who most certainly insists on being taken – with no evidence in his claims or his reasoning or any of his other material – as an “authority” here. Indeed, as I have pointed out through my assessments and questions, his material constitutes a telling an amount of evidence as to his unreliability as an “authority”.
And in the second place, JR can add to the lengthy list of quotes from my material (that he has yet to produce in support of any of his assertions) such material of mine that supports the assertion that I am a “right wing edition” … and of the Church to boot.
Then an hour later – at 110PM – we get a genuine disquisition from this commenter.
What’s in it?
I don’t explain SNAP’s continuous tactical errors (notice the adolescent use of scatology in his text, here omitted) because it isn’t the point of my assessment and position: which is that SNAP is an ally of and operates as a front organization for Jeff Anderson and all the other torties pursuing his Strategies to further the Stampede.
And I would further repeat that in doing so SNAP is also acting in synergy with various elements within the Church that want to see the same types of change imposed upon the Church that have been imposed on other institutions of Western culture and civilization in the past 50 years.
Then the text goes off on a tangent about the slowness of change in the Church, snarkily trying to manipulate us into the Correct presumption that if one is against ‘change’ then one is “uncaring and unmotivated” – which doesn’t follow at all (one might, for example, simply have grave reservations about the wisdom and costs and consequences of such a ‘change’).
And then – the Wig of Direction – we are informed that we may take the following bits “about this scandal” as sure and certain truth:
First, that since change depends on the prelates, then there will be no change since “they obviously can not change” (sic). But I say again: they may have some rather serious and well-grounded reservations about this or that change – and they do not presume that ‘change’ and ‘progress’ are synonymous – which thus does not mean that they ‘cannot change’ but rather that they are not going to embrace a change that may well create more problems than it solves. The dust-up over the recent Synod is an excellent example of this possibility.
Second: trapped by his own (or his source’s here) presumption that SNAP is a tool of the Church, he derails by pointing out the illogical (if we accept his presumptions) position into which SNAP has (according to his theory) now placed itself. This is a pillow-fight between JR and the difficulties with his own (or his source’s) material and we can watch this train-wreck from a safe distance with no need to get involved.
Third, we are informed (with the signature JR use of adolescent scatology as if that would improve the coherence and reliability of his proffered material here) what the victims do and do not give an ‘F’ about. Again: This is a pillow-fight between JR and the difficulties with his own (or his source’s) presumptions and assertions and we can watch this train-wreck from a safe distance with no need to get involved.
Fourth, the signature and repeated deployment of “raped children” and of JR speaking of himself as a member of that set are noted but I won’t waste anybody’s time pointing out the same problems with this gambit of his that I have pointed out umpteen times before.
Ditto fifth, what JR or anybody whose mind he claims to know and speak-for thinks about the Church.
Ditto sixth, that the Church “will not accept responsibility”. But we have not ever established how many genuine instances actually exist in which the Church should or must legitimately ‘accept responsibility’.
But then seventh, JR (or whoever came up with this thing) then tries to conclude with this bit of ‘logic’: since i) SNAP is primarily concerned with changing the Church, and yet ii) the Church cannot be changed because the hierarchs cannot be changed nor will themselves change, then iii) SNAP must be more than “merely a mouthpiece for Anderson” since “changing the church” is “more important to Jeff than underlining the injuries to his clients”.
This, JR declaims, “makes absolutely no kind of sense”.
To which the response is: The conclusion (iii) most certainly and “absolutely” does “make … no kind of sense” … because the logical premises upon which this conclusion (iii) is built make utterly and absolutely no logical sense.
In other words, JR has identified a genuinely nonsensical and illogical conclusion, but that conclusion is precisely and directly the result of his nonsensically-selected and strung-together premises.
And the manner of it is on this wise:
First, he confuses or conflates Jeff Anderson and SNAP.
Second, he does not establish that SNAP has as its primary mission ‘changing the Church’. I would posit a perfectly rational and coherent explanation: SNAP’s primary mission is to be a front for the Anderson Strategies and its torties (as it has been since Blaine had that meeting with Anderson), and yet since SNAP also seeks to draw some creds from its synergy with those elements in the Church seeking ‘change’, then it also tries as best it can manage to surf that wave as well. It could also be added: these days, with the Ball No Longer Rolling So Well, SNAP has to try to justify its organizational existence and its creds by whatever means seem available to it.
Then a few minutes later, at 119PM, we get another 3×5 tossed up at us, since no doubt it was lying around in the ‘SNAP’ subsection of the card-file box: JR is welcome to eructate on the points he makes here as much as he wishes. I am certainly not going to be defending Blaine or Clohessy.
But but but: JR’s further gambit here – to claim that it is those two (and only those two?) who “make victims look insipid; criminal and stupid; hypocritical” (sic) – is another bit of manipulation. While the machinations of those two might indeed reveal something along the lines of JR’s characterizations here, it has in no way been demonstrated and established that beyond ‘looking’ like that, allegants are not also actually (if not also essentially) that.
So – yes: various of SNAP’s gambits may indeed work to the detriment of the appearance that Abuseniks would like to present of themselves to the public. But that doesn’t reach the question of the actuality and essence of the Abuseniks’ gambit itself. Which remains highly open to question.
This was built into the Stampede gambit from Day One: there was always the possibility that this entire phenomenon, so hugely dependent not on evidence but on (highly and carefully manipulated) appearances, would someday twist and turn in such ways as to reveal rather unsavory aspects of the perpetration of the entire scheme and of its perpetrators as well. And so it comes to pass now, even to the point where JR (or whoever his source here may be) brings it up.
And in conclusion, the comment seeks to manipulate readers once more by deploying the inflammatory phrase “the raped children”, a characterization – to repeat for the umpteenth time – that has not at all been credibly established as to accuracy and scope.
You notice how you never explain SNAP's continuous f'up's over the years regarding: A) demanding records from the church for 25 years but then SNAP wilfully refuses to hand over limited records to a judge under court order; and they use the same excuse the church makes for not doing so. Hypocritical and publically so. B) The policy of "protecting the unraped while ignoring the raped who they say they represent. C) Continually badgering a church already shamed by the actions of a few of it's priests and a (majority of it's prelates) demanding that the chuch change.
What is slower than the changing of the catholic church? Pouring molasses? Watching grass grow? Both are speeding bullets compared to an uncaring unmotivated church.
If you get nothing else about this scandal get this:
If the catholic church changes it's up to the same people who brought you this mess in the first place: the prelates; the bosses; the controllers of the church system to change it ; and they obviously can not change. They will not change but SNAP keeps on acting like they should change. Of course they should change but it's clear by now they won't. So does SNAP reconoiter? Re evaluate it's political line? Never in 25 years. SOS new day. New Year; New millenium; and SNAP just like it's owner never changes.
Look the victims don't give a fuck about what the church does now. We don't care if your church changes because we know it won't. It's had every opportunity to do right by it's raped children and it hasn't done anything good. Any real victim gets that but not SNAP.
We victims care about what the church did to us then and what they continue to do to us since: Degrade or ignore; attack and dehumanize; and deny or discount our injuries.
While SNAP only mentions victims' injuries briefly and only to validate themselves as our representatives. Then on to the next demand from SNAP to change the church.
I'm not a catholic anymore. The majority of the victims I've met are no longer catholic. I don't give a damn about the catholic church.
Why should I? The church refuses to accept responsibility for it's criminal acts. That is crystal clear by now. Screw the church!
Why are our "representatives" more concerned about saving the church than they are about saving us?
If SNAP was merely a mouthpiece for Anderson; why would changing the church be more important to Jeff than underlining the injuries of his clients? That makes absolutely no kind of sense.
Also Barbra Blaine's letter in support of a child shrink imprisoned for kiddie porn. and Dabid Clohessy never seeking out his perpetrator brother and warning children and their families about him. These aren't mistakes. They are purpose filled choices. The purpose to make victims look insipid; criminal and stupid; hypocritical. All done in the public eye to make the church out the victim; not the raped children.
Have you ever said anything nice about me or anyone else who claim that we were victimized by your church?
You might be considered more "believable" had you. But your position was hostile from the get go.
I know Ive been attacked by you; not victimized. I'm a grown up now. I can handle myself thanks.
Everything you've ever written about me has been an attack. Can you pretend it wasn't?
And of course It's my fault that you are such a nasty piece of work. I drove you to it. I see now you and your church are the real victims. well you may blow that out your ass! You're a bunk meister.
Listen you low IQ'ed fantasist, Claiming all allegents against your church to be: "Criminal; insipid; stupid and hypocritical" only proves my point. Just as every degredation you offer illuminates more of you and your sad little mind than it reveals any truth about victims. Your finger pointing. Your sweeping generalizations reveal who you are,more than anything else. You are one sad little dude.
Two more from JR, on the 28th at 715PM and at 938PM.
With all the questions on the table about his material one might wonder how he will go about making some response?
Simple. He doesn’t.
And instead we get the signature moves of the victim-card and the epithetical, laced with adolescent scatology.
In addition to which – in the 738PM comment – he is unable to distinguish i) his own material that I was quoting from ii) my own material (i.e. that bit about “criminal; insipid” and so on).
And the remarkable display of the dynamics of projection in his claim of my “sweeping generalizations”, capped – as noted – by the concluding epithet as he heads for the curtains.
And – as always – not a whit of a substantive response to any of the points and questions I raised.
But to repeat again: I spend the time and energy on Abusenik material so that we can get a better grasp of a) the type of mentalities drawn up into the Stampede and b) the type of twisty turns one is most likely to encounter when trying to engage rationally and coherently the material proffered by Abuseniks upon which the Stampede has always been based.
Not believing in the fact of evolution. Doesn't exactly place you on the side of the intellectuals?
Acting dismissively; rudely; and arrogantly towards victims on this site doesn't place you on the side of the angels either.
Of course you are right wing. There maybe a few issues you are progressive on but your overall lack of courtesy in your defense of a corrupt power structure places you squarely on the side of reaction i.e. the right wing of your church.
You don't have to believe us or what we say about our rapes. We never demanded that you, personally believe us. You are wrong but that's your choice. You have the right to be wrong.
But when you paint us all liars with your generalizations; you are more than just wrong you are libelous.
No one, but myself, has posted particulars about their abuses. So I don't understand how you can be so sure we are lying if you haven't heard what happened to us. I know I've told you the truth.
Attacking us as criminals, however,when you know nothing about us, other than our telling of our abuses, is neither normal nor christian; nor sane.
The Media Report has offered no proof for any of it's claims. It inflates innuendo and then is outraged by the innuendo it's magicly transaubstantiated into "fact".
If The Media Report has any proof of criminal acts by fake victims; it should go directly to the police and report the crimes they have discovered and hand over the proof they "possess".
The problem for you P and them is you have no proof for what you claim true. None.
Innuendo isn't truth. it's speculation.