United Nations: Pot meets kettle
A little over a year ago, the mainstream media fell all over itself to breathlessly report the story of a meaningless committee at the United Nations questioning the Vatican over abuse committed decades ago by Catholic priests. The whole episode at the U.N. was little more than a publicity stunt by aging left-wing cranks.
Yet now the media is notably silent over the rich irony of a new report detailing rampant child sex abuse and cover-ups by U.N. employees and "peacekeepers" today!
Amazingly, 175 new allegations of sex abuse were reported among United Nations programs just in 2013 and 2014 alone, even though the U.N.'s operations take place in just a handful of small areas around the globe.
So the next time that the United Nations wants to lecture some other institution about sex abuse, it should look in the mirror first.
"There is none who is rightous. Not even one."
‘Mark’ (the 9th, 443AM) brings up a major point: in the ultimate state of things among humans, nobody is purely righteous.
This complex and dynamic reality about humans has resulted in a profound and core tensive balance struck by historic Christianity’s and especially Catholicism’s anthropological vision: nobody is purely or perfectly or totally good or evil; rather, within each human being there remains the active mix of potentials for good or for evil, and thus possibility of either a good act or an evil act.
And thus the ultimate ‘drama’ or ‘agon’ (‘struggle’ in Greek) for each and all human beings is the ever-present struggle to choose the good and reject the evil, and – if at all possible – to always refine and strengthen and habitualize one’s ability to choose the good and reject the evil.
But there is a natural tendency in humans to want the simplistic or the cartoon-ish – thus in this matter that a person or group is simplistically ‘good’ or ‘evil’. And no human beings are free of the susceptibility to this seductive conceptual short-cut to ‘knowledge’ about people.
But – of course – you can’t run a Stampede based on conceptually complex formulations. Cartoons and caricatures work best for conducting any effort to manipulate people as individuals or in mass groups.
Thus what is often called ‘demonization’ is precisely this effort to lock one’s chosen targets or one’s adversaries into a cartoon (or ‘narrative’) where they are totally ‘evil’ (while, correspondingly, one’s own side is totally ‘good’).
It is upon this volatile and dangerous tendency in humans that manipulative agitprop strategies and tactics are squarely based: make ‘them’ look evil and make ‘us’ look good.
In the Catholic Abuse Stampede this demonization agritprop gambit is evident in the effort to get large masses of people to presume a) that there has been (perhaps for centuries or millennia) a huge amount of genuine abuse perpetrated by Catholic clerics; b) that therefore all or very nearly all Catholic clerics are presumably abusers (whether the fact has been discovered or not); c) that therefore the Church itself is nothing more than an abuser-enabling organization and perhaps always has been nothing more than that.
And yet – in a very sinister twist in the Catholic Abuse Matter – this agitprop has not been fomented by ‘advertising’ in the commercial sense but rather by a media that masked this agitprop as ‘reporting’ (the media, of course, getting their money made in the number of sales of their ‘reporting’ about the consequent horror-stories and soap-operas constructed precisely for the media venue – as we most recently saw in the Rolling Stone/University of Virginia ‘report’ of a horrendous gang-rape story that – when examined more closely – collapsed.
And in the Victimist twist the primary human ‘drama’ is not that of the individual human torn between choosing good and evil. Rather there is a primary human soap-opera in which a purely good ‘victim’ (individual or collective) is bethumped by a purely evil ‘perp’ (individual or collective).
And, of course, there must be a ‘hero’ who will rescue the victim and bethump the perp.
And there is a whole pandemonium of aspirants for that exalted ‘heroic’ status: pols, media, professors, and assorted aspiring or established ‘elite’ types.
Indeed, the National Nanny State (itself the current incarnation of the American Progressive ‘totalitarian’ impulse – about which I have written very recently on recent threads) is precisely built on this presumption that an elite and benevolent and all-powerful and all-competent and all-knowing government will rescue all ‘victims’ and vanquish all who are designated as ‘perps’ … and no Constitutional or historical quibbles about principles and fundamentals of law will be allowed to stand in the way.
The Nanny State is always rolling in emergency-response mode, with lights and sirens, and it must always be given the right of way, and you had better not get in the way or stay in the way because if you do you are going to get rammed to the curb. That sort of thing.
Today government totalitarianism drives around not in a tank but – as it were – in an ambulance. But a very big and hefty ambulance, on a very hefty truck body, with a very powerful engine, and a cow-catcher to clear those who dare to get in the way.
Nanny state my ass. Could you salvate over reaction any more than you already do? Is there no low to which you will not stoop?
You lick the richies booties because you are under the delusion that you and they are superior to everyone else. Wrong again sunshine. You just think you're different than the rest of us. You're just a Bozo on the bus exactly like everyone else.
And any system that ignores and at the same time abuses and robs and yes, kills the majority and our kids for the benefit of a spoiled and deluded minority; should die as quickly as Possible.
What the hell is wrong with government meeting the majority of the population's needs?. Why do we spend more for death in this country; than we do to help all the living; and not just a lucky few?
In France they get free child care; free health care; free 5 weeks paid vacation every year (from the first year you work even). Oh the horrors of socialism!
Nobody wants to invade America we're too fuckin' crazy; we say if you aren't rich you're nothing and that's pretty self defeating. Well good luck with that. All the money we spend for wars,should be spent on all of us to make our lives better, more supportive, richer . Remember we are the ones who keep starting these wars.
Now if we could possibly take a break from the endless wars of this country; we could cater to the majority of the people.
We the majority are the economy. Should'nt we control it for our benefit first?
Or does helping the majority of the population interfer with your freedom? Well may I suggest you take that freedom and don't stop at the next red traffic light? See where that get's you.
I don't want the freedom to starve or kill. That freedom ain't. Freedom in America usually has much more to do with obedience than it does fullfillment. Personally I'd rather be fullfilled.
And now for the 10th at 109AM:
In the first paragraph: a string of mere epithets laced with the usual juvenile scatology. Punctuated by a nonsensical bit to the effect that I “salivate” (correction supplied) “over reaction”. Over what “reaction” am I salivating?
In the second paragraph: more epithet. But now the Wig of Diagnosis doth declaim that I am “under the delusion” that I and the “richies” are “superior to everyone else”. (Because I take the time to spell properly and think-through my material?) And can JR produce one accurate quote of mine that indicates that I am somehow in cahoots with the “richies”? But this cartoon framing (i.e. the old rich-vs-poor) is the only one in the 3×5 file so he has to try to shoehorn any objections into that framing narrative – whether it works accurately or not.
Anyhoo, it is precisely the Progressive elites who consider themselves and have always considered themselves “superior” (and thus they should have the power to do what is best for all those who don’t know what’s best for themselves). As I have said, all of the sibling ‘-ism’s of the 1880s-1920s require a dedicated elite that must be accorded all power in the government in order to drag everybody to their particular ‘-ism’s vision/version of paradise: Communist, Nazi or Fascist Party members, or – in America – ‘progressives’ (although in the beginning they too were formally a Party).
And “drag” here is meant to include – for all but the Americans – the physical imposition of terror and state coercion in order to make the unenlightened “masses” accept what (in the vision of the elites) is best for them.
Although in the American instance we see such grossly failed initiatives as Prohibition (which created organized crime in this country) and such deranging assaults on traditions and founding-principles as has been seen in the US over the past 50 years (despite whatever ‘good intentions’ were piously and righteously proclaimed by the New Left or liberal or radical or progressive or revolutionary elites of the day).
Then an effort in that same paragraph to claim that everybody is a “Bozo on the bus” – thus, perhaps, conveniently and (to him) congenially that JR’s cartoons are just as worthwhile and accurate as anybody else’s thinking. Readers are welcome to assess that possibility.
In the third paragraph: as every one of the ‘-ism’s has ever done, JR will simply focus on a) the particular problems that the ‘good intentions’ of the enlightened elites sought to eradicate without b) any consideration of the (increasingly clear) evidence as to the serious negative consequences of this elitism in the putative service of solving the problems of (fill in the blank: the people, the masses, the ‘Volk’, the Victim).
And he tosses in – but of course – the “kids” as being ‘abused’, ‘robbed’, and (have you been waitttting forrr ittttttt?) even ‘killed’. But for the past 50 years all this has taken place under the Liberal/Radical/Progressive/revolutionary ascendancy embraced by the Democrats in the early 1960s and later acceded-to by the Republicans as well.
The difficulty is not that government “ignores” such problems as (perhaps burnished by agitprop manipulation) it selects to focus-on, but rather the difficulty is the Method by which government seeks to address whatever it has chosen to go-after (and that selection of target ‘problems’ is itself open to much question and debate).
In the fourth paragraph: JR then – incoherently – defends the very same government that he has just accused of ‘abusing’, ‘robbing’, and ‘killing’ “kids”: “what” (scatology omitted)”is wrong with government meeting the majority of the population’s needs?”.
As I said, the problem is the Method used to i) identify those “needs” (however defined) and then ii) the Method(s) used to address or resolve those “needs”.
And when, as has been the case in the past half century in the US, the government embraces revolutionary and secularist and even Marxist and totalitarian ideas in order to create and impose its solutions, then we are in a great deal of very profound and fundamental trouble. As is evidenced by the increasing abandonment of Founding principles and the (completely predictable) departure from the rule of law and the overall kicking-to-the-curb of essential traditions and history (they were all oppressive back then so they generated no history worth learning).
With the result that a) the essential unitive culture of the country is actively undermined and torn apart even as b) the government must increasingly intensify its intrusions in order to fix the problems created by its earlier policies and laws and intrusions. This is an ever-intensifying downward spiral that cannot end well. And didn’t end well for the Marxist-Leninists, the Nazis, and the Fascists.
And – so as not to turn this into simply a political science discussion – it was John Paul II’s core insight about the utter necessity and value of ‘Culture’ that impelled his many efforts to prevent the dissolution and (not the ‘changing’ or ‘reforming’ but rather) the active disassembly of Western Culture and its societies, to the great and lasting detriment of the people within them.
Thus the effort to frame it all as merely a Marxist, 1930s rich-vs-poor framing narrative is grossly inaccurate and insufficient: when Culture is wrecked or deranged, it is all the people who will suffer.
Yet, marvelously though darkly, after half a century of the combined ‘revolutions’ in the US we see precisely now the plaint that society is becoming (‘reverting-to’ or ‘regressing-to’ would be more accurate terms) a two-tier rich/poor society. Even as the government embraced the old Marxist-Leninist idea of ‘equality of income’ (distributed or re-distributed – have you been waittttting for itttttt?) by the government), we see the hardly-unpredictable slide into a two-tier rich/poor society – which, of course, means that ‘the next logical step’ is for the government to become even more intrusive and impositional and on and on.
Thus the whole exercise has resulted in the (government-abetted) reversion to pandering to the benefit of “the lucky few” (while keeping “the masses” happy with various culture-war soap-operas, in which the agitprop script-dynamics of Victimism figure largely).
In the fifth paragraph we get JR’s take on comparative foreign examples, using France – the same France whose decades-long multicultural impositions and machinations have resulted in a deeply fractured and increasingly violent social disaster that admits at this point of almost no workable resolution or repair.
In the sixth paragraph: we can pass over the “nobody wants to invade America” whackery while also recalling that if there were not a strong military defending the country we might well see a reversion to the era when ‘the New World’ became a handy ‘solution’ to the problems of many world powers of the day.
Then in the seventh paragraph we are informed that if we simply stopped with the “wars” then we could make everybody’s “lives better, more supportive [of ‘victims’, no doubt, genuine or otherwise], and richer”. Nice thoughts and so (uncharacteristically) nicely put. But the Great Society itself was created half a century ago by a government (and a Democratic-controlled government) delusion that the US could have guns and butter, war and social re-distribution and ‘revolutionary’ change. And it would all work out and there would be great strides toward the broad sunlit uplands of … what we have now.
And in the eighth paragraph the smarmy and hardly-accurate assertion that “we the majority” (whoever that may be and however that term is defined) “are the economy” – which is a cutesy sound-bite but hardly accurate as an economic insight.
And then in the ninth paragraph we get (again) a repetition of the idea that all government is trying to do is to be “helping” and if you oppose the government then you oppose “helping” – which is a cartoon mimicry of actual logic. All the Bolsheviks were trying to do was to ‘help’ history along to its inevitable purposes and ditto the Italian Fascists and the Nazis and ditto the original Progressives and ditto the radical/revolutionary/ transgressive/transformative progressive of today.
And this “helping” meme gives us a nice and clear example of what I had been talking about in my prior comment on this thread: totalitarianism in this country no longer travels in a military tank, but in a (“helping”) ambulance. But if you get in the way you are going to wind up getting rammed to the curb, either way.
And then in the tenth paragraph a charmingly adolescent definition of “freedom” as merely being “obedience” (something I doubt JR has ever really been very good at it in any way, shape, or form).
And this takes us right back to ideas I put forward quite a while ago here and which form the nub of the Catholic (and, for example, John Paul II’s) anthropological view of genuine freedom): genuine freedom is the habituated ability to realize the limitations and possibilities open to humans and to work toward ideals and goals within those parameters (so as to avoid doing more damage with your solutions and your “helping” than originally existed in the problems to begin-with).
Thus to repeat my imagery of aircraft and ships: an aircraft pilot – in complete command of the operation of the aircraft – is still not ‘totally free’ at all: there are company rules as to the uniform to be worn (you can’t show up in Bermuda shorts with a drink in your hand); there are FAA rules (you can only fly westbound or eastbound at certain altitudes; you have to fly to the destination you said you were going to fly-to); and there are fundamental principles of aerodynamics (you cannot fly in reverse; you cannot decide to land on a highway and drive the aircraft along as if it were a motor vehicle).
And as a warship commander, although in complete command, you cannot make the ship fly and you cannot simply fire off your weapons whenever you feel like some pick-me-up excitement on a boring day.
That sort of thing.
So constructively taking-into-account the many parameters hedging-in human activity is far far more than merely truckling to ‘authority’ in that way that is anathema to the adolescent mind.
And while the (uncharacteristically charming in its rhetoric) declaration that he doesn’t “want the freedom to starve or kill” is cute and very nice, yet the reality of all human activity is that humans do indeed have the capacity to starve or kill (as many claim the US government is doing or abetting in various places around the world even now) and thus humans must ‘obey’ certain fundamental principles of genuine and authentic freedom and through that ‘discipline of obedience’ to those principles maintain – as best might be achieved – “a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations” (to use Lincoln’s conclusion of his Second Inaugural).
The kicker is in a) what is possible and workable and b) by what means a government chooses to achieve that fine and noble ideal and goal.
The Catholic position is that if you don’t sustain a culture or Culture that supports people in disciplining themselves to the conception and practice of authentic and genuine freedom then you will wind up (by either a Cabaret culture or a War Culture or a Totalitarian Culture, for example) with inauthentically-formed people soused with anti-authentic principles creating a web of unprincipled acts and policies. Such as we are seeing even now.
And the great irony in the West today is that in an era of ‘revolutionary’ and ‘transgressive’ and ‘transformative’ freedoms, we are yet seeing a descent into inauthentic and non-genuine (one might even say anti-genuine) culture and society and government.
Those would be my ideas in regard to JR’s oddly uncharacteristically constructed and styled comment.
Benedict personally met with many of the victims out of the limelight to apologize for the failures in stopping the perpetrators and those covering up for them; one co-worker had been been victimized held no animus toward either the popes or the Church but recognized that opportunists with a different agenda than repressing the wrongs and healing their wounds were making their anguish greater. Both Benedict and St. John Paul II had seen how totalitarian parties used this technique to try to dissolve the Church – ‘see, we’re protecting you against the eeeevil Catholic Church!’ – and the people continuing to press the story now are no different than those who excused their assistance given to the genocidal torturers of the USSR by a perpetual distortions of the conditions of the West. They at least had more justification for doing so; these new anti-Catholic are just eager to emulate ISIS
Your hierarchy allows the transfer and protection of perpetrator priests to rape innocent catholic children; and you're suprised when those behaviors taint the whole priesthood? Awwwww!
What could be a bigger cartoon than the catholic church? There's Superman/ Jesus. There are all the Marvel Super Heroes, performing their "miracles": the saints. There are the people of god: a cross between Peanuts and the Katzenjammer Kids. I wouldn't be throwing any stones at cartoons if I were you.
You live in a Disney inspired wet dream: dreaming of a cartoon heaven and terrified by a cartoon hell. People in glass houses etc.
Your knowledge on the subject is very shallow indeed, and so it is not possible to converse with you in a meaningful way. I will pray for you, that your pride falls away so you can realize you don't know as much as you think you do, and then perhaps expand your knowledge before passing judgment. You are mocking something you clearly do not understand.
You are simply not in the same league as Publion.
Given the date-time stamps, then JR’s of the 10th at 1036AM went up before mine of the 10th at 732PM. Thus he hadn’t read my comment when he put up his own.
And yet I think we will see that what he has put up – precisely by not having been calibrated to my own comments at 732PM – demonstrates much of what I have been saying.
If you – as I – read his comment without first reading the date-time stamp, yet his comment might seem precisely the type of response we would expect from him if he had indeed read the 732PM comment before putting together his own of 1036AM.
In the first paragraph, we are simply given an old distraction: the bit about the “transfer and protection of perpetrator priests to rape innocent catholic children”. This is a bit we had the opportunity to examine at some length here back when the LA document-cache and all its ensuing comments went up.
We found then that there were few if any instances of any such transferring in that cache, though the documents were specifically selected and presented as ‘proof’ of that very thing. Rather, in the LA cases we were given cases where priests were sent for therapy and then returned to ministry and if they failed again then they were taken from ministry.
Although I do note here that in some cases – I can think of the Geoghan case in Boston – that cleric was indeed given far too many ‘chances’, no doubt connected to the fact that he was the nephew of a high-ranking cleric in that Archdiocese. One might well imagine that that man should never have been allowed to complete seminary training let alone be admitted to the priesthood.
And we note as well that the trusty “rape” term has been dragged in again, although so very few of the actual allegations claimed “rape”.
Nor did I ever express any ‘surprise’ as to the tainting of the entire priesthood: that was the objective of the Stampede as it was of many prior attempts to discredit the Church with sexual accusations against priests (the Soviets and the Nazis made use of that gambit). Thus JR’s snark stems from a statement – have you been waittttting forrrr itttttt? – that I never made. No surprises there.
In the second paragraph we simply get a riff on some of my material, attempting a version of the juvenile I’m Not/You Are gambit to which JR so often resorts: it’s the Church that is a cartoon, and so on. And then the riff takes off on its own weak wings with a bit about Jesus being Superman, leading us into that comic-book realm with which JR is – admittedly – so very familiar.
Apparently the Abusenik mind figures that if its come-backs are vivid enough and good for a few yuks then they are sufficient responses. And back to the cafeteria we go.
Then in the third and final paragraph: the comic book riff continues, while trying to work itself up into a concluding epithet (once again along the lines of I’m Not/You Are: heaven and hell are just cartoons.
But this rather unimpressive gambit then reveals itself to have been intended to platform the actual concluding snark: that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
In other words: while much of JR’s material is reducible to a cartoonish core, yet the core of Christianity and of Catholicism (and thus of the Church) is – to JR’s mind – a cartoon, and so nobody should be looking askance at his cartoons since the core of Christianity and of Catholicism (and thus of the Church) is – to JR’s mind – a cartoon and so no Catholics have the right to criticize JR’s cartoons. You see the neat circularity to the gambit.
And again then: if you hadn’t first paid attention to the date-time stamps of the comments, then is it not clear that his comment might easily have been a response to what he had read in my 732PM comment? His come-back material is so generic that it could be a come-back to any comment.
Who historically has supported a war culture more than the catholic church up till vatican 2?
Knock 50 years off, roughly, 2000 and you have 1950 YEARS worth of catholic war culture.
Completely ignoring the church's support of the Vietnam war for 20 of those years.
Just because you pretend you are for peace verbally; doesn't explain the church's behavior actually.
Can you name
Can you name any wars in which the church wasn't a participant since it's inception?
Wanting to be free of the freedom to kill or starve is "cute"?
What a total humbug you are.
We are to believe that you represent the Prince of Peace?
Hey, Mr. Freedom, were you for the draft?
You know you sound like a navy brat, whose daddy was a "Praise the Lord and pass the Amunition (but whatever you do don't redistribute the wealth)" kind of a guy. A family who gets everything from the government but they are special "doncha know"..
Who pays your pension P? Or is the cheque you get from the church keeping you away from bagging burgers at the local McDonalds in your dotage?
You and the other American sociopaths would have us all back to Bill Sykes' and Nancy's brand of Twistian poverty.
Let's see France has free health care and 5 week vacations etc. because they make the rich and the corporations pay for it. And you want for America more weapons and no redistribution of wealth? Is there any subject you take a truely moral postion on…. oh never mind I forgot you have no conscience.
A "morality" than is only a euphemisum for repressed sexuality; fear and obedience, is no morality at all.
"Please sir, can I have some more?".
When the vast majority are the have nots; then I say: "Screw the haves"!
I'm not stepping back into the dark ages so that the Koch family can have another billion.
Social Security and Medi-Care are not Prohibition. Do you think they need ending, Lady Catherine De Bourghs (a snob elitist created by Jane Austin)?
Do you think Denmark; France; Sweden; Canada; England; Ireland all have less freedom than we do? Ever lived in any of those places?
Let's look who really supresses our freedom, starting with "The Homeland Security Act' and the monopoly, Federal Reserve. It ain't Islam.
J.R. is also so "familiar with" Camus; Genet; Sartre; and Brecht and Chekov as well as American comics and the teachings of Jesus.
Are you saying it's the Nazis and the Socialists who are "inventing" my rape as a child by your clergy? And that every victim who's come forward is part of an international plot to degrade your church? I'll bet the Nazis and Communists didn't have to scratch too deep to find priest sex abuse.
Oh that's right It's all been made up to fuck with god.
And now for some history:
On the 11th at 849AM JR asks – in a mimicry of informed inquiry – “Who has historically supported a war culture more than the Catholic Church up till Vatican 2?” (corrections supplied)
Naturally, since the question involves a comparison (that “more than”), then we must first a) establish who else did such a thing.
And before we can do (a) we have to b) establish what is meant by “historically supported a war culture”.
And having accomplished steps (a) and (b), we then have to review the historical record.
Thus we can see that arriving at ‘truth’ requires some complex and informed logical steps; JR’s recent effort to spin his “simple truth” against my “complicated lies” is demonstrated to be itself nothing but a cartoon.
But let’s see, then, what we can do.
Let us first stipulate that we are not talking about all the wars waged by the world’s many historical kingdoms and empires and tribes, but only wars on the Eurasian scene since the Church’s “inception”.
Up until the fall of the Roman Empire the Church had little say in the Empire’s wars (let alone in the various struggles among the non-Roman tribes and other Eurasian kingdoms and empires).
By the Middle Ages the Church had instituted a complex and extensive list of feast days and seasons of various types on which days and during which seasons wars and armed clashes among then-evolving Europe’s statelets and feudal powers could not be fought.
Since the Papacy had increasingly come to take over the political order-keeping role of the now-fallen Roman Empire the Papacy as a temporal power (by default) had to become involved in military operations of various kinds to protect Italy and the Papal territories.
Which Papal territories, the Church had come to see, were necessary to prevent then-evolving monarchical powers and even the Holy Roman Empire from simply invading Italy and the City of Rome itself, taking the Pope hostage, and forcing him to do the capturing-monarch’s bidding. As we saw in, among other examples, the so-called Avignon captivity, the invasion of Rome itself by the Holy Roman Emperor in 1527, and even Napoleon’s capture of Pius VII – which Pope was then forced to attend (but not to effect ) the self-coronation of Napoleon as Emperor.
And with the unification of anti-clerical and secular ‘Italy’ in 1860 the Popes of the era realized that the Papacy was now completely a tenant (if not a hostage) of a secular State.
It should become clear then, by the way, why 60 years later, in the dawning of the Soviet-Fascist era in Europe or Eurasia, the Church pressed Mussolini for the Vatican to be erected as an independent sovereignty in the 1929 Concordat – Mussolini agreed for his own purposes and the League of Nations accepted the Vatican as an independent sovereignty. It was that sovereignty, as it ultimately turned out, that not even the Nazis, let alone Mussolini, dared to violate, especially as the course of WW2 began to go against the Axis Powers. Even though Mussolini and the Nazis realized the Vatican was harboring Jewish people and was using various methods to get them out of harm’s way.
During WW1, it was Benedict XV who sought to prevent it and then to stop it, making various proposals. It was precisely because of his stature as an independent ‘sovereign’ that he could do so, free of any fear (conceptually, at least) that the warring powers would merely invade the Vatican State. This status also enabled the Pope to rise above the pressures (and perhaps personal individual feelings) of various hierarchs in the several warring nations who – not surprisingly – empathized with their nation’s and their particular national people’s cause in the war.
But the behavior of the Germans (desperate to win quickly in the West in order to avoid an extended two-front war, then frustrated when it was clear they would not be able to do so) against civilians and clerics and nuns in Belgium and other occupied areas drew the Church toward realizing that the leader of the Central Powers, Germany, had pursued a path of war-against-civilians that in that era was utterly unacceptable.
And when the fear of the utter collapse of the autocratic European monarchies (Russia, Germany, Austria- Hungary) threatened i) a general European civilizational collapse, ii) a vast outbreak of violent European societal disorder, and iii) the creation of a political and cultural vacuum into which the nascent Bolshevik power might flow (with European Socialists if not also Anarchists now enraptured with the Soviet ascendancy in Russia), then the Popes made the political and moral decision to accept the lesser of two evils, hoping that an Allied victory would somehow blunt the growing Soviet threat (which was very real at the time since the early Soviets planned on using Russia as a spring-board for the international diffusion of Communism and of Marxist-Leninist political and cultural ideology and praxis).
In the interwar years Pius XI had to face the waxing power of the Soviets in the East of Eurasia and the Fascists in Italy itself and then by 1933 the Nazis in the ever-vital and centrally-sited Germany, to which Reich the Italian Fascists then indentured themselves.
Given the totalitarians’ (Soviet and Nazi especially) demonstrated refusal to honor international agreements or the League of Nations, the Vatican was also faced with the distinct possibility that either Mussolini (at the bidding of the Nazis) or Hitler himself would simply walk in and occupy the Vatican State. And this was a fear that was not finally laid to rest until the Allies re-took Rome in June, 1944 (Mussolini’s fall in late 1943 simply opened the door for direct German occupation of Italy.)
Anyhoo, the idea that the Church supported all the wars waged in Europe since the Church’s “inception” can be compared with a list of Europe’s wars since the time of the Roman Empire which is available here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe
JR is welcome to demonstrate the Church’s “support” in each and every one of them. But I advise nobody to postpone their next meal until that might happen.
As for the Vietnam war, the Church herself was divided over that war, with the American Church taking a very divided stand on the issue (Cardinal Spellman, for example, as chief of Catholic chaplains of the US military on the one side, and such protesters as the Berrigans on the other).
And in regard to the Vietnam war I would also point out the American Catholic Church’s loyalty (on Spellman’s side) to the Democratic Party – whose leadership of the day, LBJ, was the author of the extension of American military involvement in Vietnam but who was also strong-arming the nation into his vision of the Great Society, with its few solid achievements, such as the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, and a host of other Progressive/liberal visions which would soon turn ‘revolutionary’ in all the ways I have indicated in prior recent comments.
Thus before we judge “the Church’s behavior actually” we have to determine i) what is meant by the phrase “the Church’s behavior”, ii) what is meant by “the Church” here, with a so demonstrably significant a division of political judgments as to “war” and especially this or that particular war, and iii) whether that “behavior” was indeed ‘actual’ and historical.
Such are the profound and complex challenges of historical assessment, for which cafeteria-level, one-liner cartoon-thinking about “simple truth” is utterly and abyssally incompetent.
Ditto then the one-liner comment on the 11th at 851AM, in which – on top of everything else – the Church is now claimed to have been a “participant” in all the wars that have taken place “since its inception”.
And then on the 11th at 853AM JR will give us a familiar dodge: he mis-reads (intentionally or through incompetence) my reference to his “I don't want the freedom to starve or kill” statement (the 10th at 109AM). I characterized that comment (in mine of the 10th at 732PM) as being “cute and very nice”.
He has here quickly and typically donned the Wig of Outrage, insinuating that I think “wanting to be free of the freedom to kill or starve is ‘cute’”.
What I said was that his high-ground declamation was rhetorically “cute” but utterly insufficient since “the reality of all human activity is that humans do indeed have the capacity to starve or kill” and we (and the Church) must deal with that utterly intractable human reality.
Thus if all one wants to do is to piously claim that one is “wanting to be free of the freedom to kill or starve” then one has for all practical purposes no plan of proceeding whatsoever; one only has a (self-servingly histrionic) pipedream and cartoon.
So in regard to the intractability of that awful “freedom”: I realize it, the Church has realized it, Lincoln realized it, and I imagine most readers would realize it as well.
And the Problem thus remains: what to do in regard to a so stubborn and intractable a capacity or “freedom”?
And the Church’s answer is: personally embrace and habituate the principles of the Gospel and of the Christian anthropology that requires a) each human being to aim oneself like an arrow at the ideal of (let us say) “a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations” while b) ensuring a culture or Culture that supports that overall goal, all the while c) recognizing that to do so and conform oneself as best and fully as one can manage requires profound self-discipline, individually and as a community of believers.
But then but then but then: such a profound self-discipline is precisely what the liberal/progressive/radical New Order since the 1960s doth completely reject as being ‘oppressive’ and ‘authoritarian’ and as getting in the way of one’s various polymorphous jollies.
So we see revealed clearly that this entire vision propounded by JR and so very many others nowadays is fundamentally incoherent, working against itself precisely because it is grounded in an abyssally incoherent anthropological conception of human beings and of human nature.
Why is pleasure so wrong?
If our nerve endings, developed over millenia by evolution, can offer our bodies such pleasure; why can't we enjoy, literally, ourselves?
Why would god create such pleasure "zones" in us if they were not to be used enjoyed explored? Why would "he" do that?
Why, if "he" loves us so much, would he create a hell where, if we don't "love him" correctly we burn forever? A god ,who creates a hell is, like yourself , a sociopath, and is not worthy of worship.
What if we could send god to the hell of his own making. "He" certainly deserves it for his punishments; plagues; and oppressions "he's" put upon humankind.
He made hell. So let "him" go there for such a crime against humanity.
Let god burn forever for his sins.
It would be more moral for humans to pick hell as THE destination post mortem; as a protest against such a jerk of a god.
You feign yours is a god of love; but really your religion is all about fear(of hell) and obedience to priests and what they say this unprovable god (who will always remain silent cuz he aint there) "wants" humanity to do. Your god is much more about power and fear than love. Your power and the people's fear.
You've built your house on sand. No proof of god = no god.
5 week vacations; health care; and child care in, still catholic, France is wrong? Why?
You are a reactionary people hater and jack booted coward who won't even say who you are.
I notice you never mention government speding as being wrong when it's for the military but social services are decadent?
"Death good. Life bad." you are the Frankenstein monster.
How many kids did your "Western Civilization" kill today at home and abroad?
Is that where you get your pension CHEQUES from, the military?
You are a death whore.
I had overlooked two of JR’s comments.
On the 12th at 1149AM we are once again back to high-school with the question about “why is pleasure so wrong?”.
As I had said, pleasure is not in itself “wrong”; it all depends on how it is deployed. The water cannons on fire pumping engines are not ‘wrong’; they can serve a vital purpose if deployed in the proper setting. But if you as the company commander decide to simply hook up to hydrant and blast passers-by with the powerful stream to relieve the boredom of an afternoon … then that is most certainly wrong.
That is to say: it all depends on how you use it.
Is this news?
Beyond that, and as I (simply echoing Church teaching for a very very long time) said: the great danger in the visceral and primal pleasure of the sexual act is that its undisciplined deployment will not only harm others but also derange oneself from developing higher capacities; one literally regresses back to, or remains in, “the trees” (to use JR’s pithy image).
Sex, as the feminists are so fond of pointing out, can be used as a weapon if not properly deployed, and – further, I would say – results in the derangement of the individual if not properly deployed and mastered through self-discipline (which self-discipline thus works to keep the track clear for further maturation and development into one’s higher capacities, establishing – to use the term – a “positive feedback loop” in the process of maturation and self-development).
Thus to build a life or – through the embrace of a Cabaret culture – many lives on the primary grounding principle of the undisciplined deployment of the sexual-power and capacity merely for the gratification of pleasure … cannot end well.
And again: we recall Freud’s invention of the so-called “Pleasure Principle” as a core driving force in the human being, which spawned a pandemonium of subsequent theoretical claims and assertions.
Prescinding from the fact that Freud – utterly Monoplanar in his theoretical starting-point – swept off his conceptual desk all human capacities for higher and Metaplanar-based human potentials (as, for example, that human beings are created in the Image of God and all that flows from that starting-point), we are still left with the working definition and conceptualization of that key idea of “Pleasure”: what is “Pleasure” and what constitutes it and from whence in the human make-up does it originate?
Freud’s Monoplanar presumptions, and his apparently fixed fascination with the power of the sexual capability, resulted in his defining “Pleasure” as being purely visceral and based in merely the bodily appetites and urges, the sexual being primary. The concept of a spiritual or philosophical Pleasure is inconceivable to him; at the very very best (in his theorization) such a sense of Pleasure would merely be the ‘sublimation’ of the core and fundamental and essential and all-defining animal sexual urge.
(Feminism – in many of its variants – has run with this, while applying it only to ‘men’, in the on-going effort to limn ‘men’ as brutish and fundamentally dangerous sexual louts. An image, alas, which is not well-countered by the examples of males besotted with Cabaret culture.)
Thus one cannot simply “explore” one’s capabilities, any more than the fire officer can “explore” what will happen if he charges up the water-cannon and sees what happens when he blasts away at the passers-by and for the same reason that a warship or warplane commander cannot simply “explore” his weaponry by firing off the main armament just to see what the explosions will do or what pretty patterns the fireball will create.
The Church’s position is and always has been that the deployment of the sexual capability is as serious a business as that of the warship commander firing off the weapons under his command. This position is, of course, gall and wormwood to the user-friendly, do-what-you-like, pleasure-besotted and frankly libertine approach embraced by many elite elements of Western culture and civilization nowadays.
There is, they hold, nothing “serious” about “pleasure” and to deny such harmless and groovy excitements to people is merely to “oppress” them and boss them around.
Imagine, if you will, getting onto a passenger plane, taking off, and then have the pilot announce to you that he has utterly no intention of being ‘bossed’ around by the company, the FAA, or the laws of aerodynamics because he is totally free and liberated from such oppression and intends to lead everyone on the plane into the same exciting uplands.
As to the conception of “hell”: the core idea is that one can conduct one’s life and (not-)develop oneself in such a way that one becomes incapable of responding to the best promptings of one’s best potentials and of the Holy Spirit, to so fundamental and profound an extent that even one’s soul cannot tolerate the direct presence of God in the afterlife. (There is also the possibility that one can commit acts of sufficiently deranging consequence that, as well, God’s Justice cannot permit the presence of such a soul in the fullness of the afterlife.)
Thus neither God nor myself (in that slyly-inserted epithet) qualify as a “sociopath” (again with the Wig of Diagnosis – that itself, of course, must be held immune from diagnosis).
Then the comment descends – not surprisingly – into assorted riffing on God and hell.
Which then seeks to ground itself – yet again – in the claim that there is no “proof” of God. And we are back to my response that if you look for aircraft with nothing but your sonar set you are very likely not going to be accurately informed as to the presence of aircraft in your vicinity.
And the comment concludes with the characteristic effort to focus only on the positive aspects and good intentions of assorted French socio-political policies. Whereas my focus has been on the cultural policies and the sequelae that are not at all so positive.
Thus, in the examples mentioned by JR, the cultural dangers of creating a non-productive and government dependent ‘people’ who yet are (fatuously) supposed to ground and conduct a robust democracy that can at the same time productively support itself by creating and producing items of value for use and trade.
And the whole bit concludes with more epithets, as usual.
Oh, and the bit – dragged up yet again from the 3×5 file – about my not revealing my “identity”. Again: I am Publion and my ideas are the focus of the discussion here. And – as well – all the material I put up here as Publion is my own. Nor – again – have I ever seen any demonstration here whatsoever in any way that supports the presumption that by using one’s own name one’s material is somehow rendered more coherent, accurate, informed, veracious, or reliable.
On the 12th at 1217PM:
I have never said I support excessive military spending, nor – for that matter – have I ever said that “social services are decadent”. We see here again JR’s and the Playbook’s signature scam of trying to create statements never made in order to create more useful and congenial targets for plop-tossing. Which gambit therefore is itself a form of plop-tossing.
Then – building on the utterly inaccurate foundations of his own creation – JR will riff on further with the cartoon one-liner that my position is “Death good. Life bad”. Which leads him to Frankenstein and his monster and yadda-yadda.
Then – have you been waitttttttttttting forrrrrrrrrrrr itttttttttttttttt? – JR will deploy against me here a modified version of the old 1960s chant ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?’.
This bit is quite capable of twisting in the wind all on its own.
But – marvelously – JR (no doubt unintentionally and out of ignorance) reveals the profound historical incoherence at the core of the Nanny State: from its modern-day inception in the days of LBJ, the National Nanny State has relied on the same impositional and omnivorous government that grounds the National Security State. The two States are, fundamentally, “sisters under the skin”, to use Kipling’s phrase (“The Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under the skin”).
Thus then a repeat of the riff about where I get my (supposed) pension check from. JR, we of course recall, got his check another way.
And the whole thing – wobbling vertiginously on a skein of inaccurate and conveniently created self-serving presumptions – ends with a ‘logical’ epithet.
While I was composing my immediately prior comment, two more of JR’s went up.
What have we here?
On the 11th at 1202PM:
In the first paragraph, an epithet, supported – as almost always – by utterly nothing.
In the second paragraph: we get the creation of something I never said (that we are to somehow “believe that [i] represent the Prince of Peace”), serving merely but nicely to demonstrate how to deploy insinuation in the service of epithet by creating non-existent statements.
Then in the third paragraph – apropos of nothing or perhaps working to undermine his own peacefulness – JR asks me where I was “for the draft”. We recall here, although it is so touchy a subject with him – as are so many other similar issues – his slippery claims about his own military service, and let’s not go down that road again. But I would wonder why he didn’t simply “sit on the tracks” or take some other action to demonstrate his own principled commitment to peacefulness.
Then in the fourth paragraph he will avoid issues entirely and try – yet again – his signature distraction of wondering about my background. Which simply serves – on top of that – to platform more of his epithetical musings. And let them stay up there where they were tossed.
Ditto the fifth paragraph, this time in regard to my “pension”. That seems to be coming from beyond the left-field flagpole, but then we see that it is tossed up here in order to platform another epithetical insinuation – have you been waitttttting forrrr ittttttt? – to the effect that I might be getting a “cheque” (his mommy was English, dahlings, doncha know?) “from the church” in my “dotage”.
The only person to have gotten a “cheque” from the Church here seems to be JR – and on grounds that have demonstrated their dodginess all along and at every juncture where we have examined them.
Then in the sixth paragraph, the Wig of Diagnosis delivers one of the favorite whacks from the 3×5 file: I and others are “American sociopaths”. This bit is not “un christian” – doncha see? – because JR is a truthy truth-teller and also a victim (genuine or otherwise) and Jesus would not question such a type.
And he draws his own conclusion as if it were my recommendation and somehow connects me with Bill Sykes and Nancy, characters from – oh my – ‘Oliver Twist’. Because – if you hadn’t already noticed – JR is also well-versed in things literary as well as in things logical, philosophical, theological, political, economical, sociological, cultural and – see my immediately preceding comment, among others – historical.
In which regard, by the by, we are still awaiting his solutions to the profoundly problematic Atwill claims (discussed on the immediately prior thread here) that the Flavian Emperors used Josephus to create Christianity (Jesus, Paul, the Pauline Corpus and the Gospels) for their own political purposes.
In the seventh paragraph he simply gives us the contents of his 3×5 on contemporary France: it has “free health care and 5 week vacations”. And avoids the far more immediate and threatening problems I noted, to the effect that that country is now facing existential-level problems thanks to its whole-hog embrace of Multicultural dogma and praxis as imposed by the central government.
As to whether one wants to consider Obamacare (the American effort to imitate the French) as a successful and effective policy, readers may consider as they will. But it is certainly clear that to an adolescent mentality the prospect of “5 week vacations” has its indubitable charms and allure.
And it has apparently slipped beneath his oh-so-knowledgeable radar that France is a major weapons-producer and supplier, going back to the Mirage fighter and the building of warships for sale.
But the whole hash here merely serves to platform – to his own satisfaction at least, such as it is – the epithet about my not taking “a truly moral position” (correction supplied) which then serves to platform the epithetical bit about my having “no conscience”. Had I no conscience, I would have let so very much Abusenik plop be tossed onto this site and left it unchallenged and unexamined.
And then and then and then – have you been waitttttting forrrrr ittttttt? – the Wig of Diagnosis doth hereby declaim and declare and denounce that my “morality” is “only a euphemism for repressed sexuality”.
And in that regard: we recall JR’s assorted pronunciamentos, revelations, and hoot-hoots about his own sexual jollies, which – it would certainly appear – are hardly “repressed” (I would use the term ‘disciplined’).
And if the Wig of Diagnosis could explain just how his diagnosis is derived, then wouldn’t that be nice?
And the assertion also serves to indicate that JR does not actually know the meaning of the term “euphemism”.
And lastly on this point: I would say that a “morality” based on undisciplined sexuality and grounded in no fear of sexuality’s volatile powers nor any obedience to any principle except personal and immediate whoopies and jollies … “is no morality at all”.
On then to the 11th at 1233PM:
In the first paragraph – and its content apropos of nothing here – JR delivers another quote from a Dickens character. This is apparently nothing more than part of a ploy to ‘demonstrate’ his literary chops.
In the second paragraph we are treated to nothing more than a declaration of his ‘to the barricades’ chops as a genuine revolutionary Wig of the People. Which, of course, must also demonstrate his ‘moral’ chops.
In the third paragraph we get a similar bit, this time premised on the insinuation that “the Koch family” will somehow be connected to leading us all “back into the dark ages”. Intended, apparently, to demonstrate his many chops as ‘moral’, historically-informed, and socio-politically and economically informed as well. Whew.
Nor have I ever mentioned the Koch family nor discussed anything that would indicate my support for whatever it is that JR feels about that family. The Koch reference was introduced by JR, clearly for the purposes of trying to increase the size of the target at which he might toss-plop (apparently after all this time his aim still isn’t too precise).
In the fourth paragraph he notes – and accurately enough for the factoid – that “Social Security and Medicare are not Prohibition” (correction supplied). But this is a typical dodge by all
liberal/progressive/radicals at this point: they will point to the very first and successful elements of the Great Society as envisioned by LBJ. But it is the many subsequent elements over the past five decades – waging unremitting assault on the Western and American culture or Culture and tradition and history and even Constitutional presumptions and principles (about which I have written a great deal here) – that are the problems.
And Prohibition as a public policy (and law) demonstrated in its time precisely the same problematic aspects and dynamics that subsequent late-1960s impositions have demonstrated (the consequences of which are becoming increasingly clear today, requiring even further government impositions).
In regard to JR’s question in the fifth paragraph as to whether I think that the named European countries have “more freedom than we do?”: I do not think so. And I think that the only reason that the US still retains more freedom is that that fuddy-duddy old Constitution created by the Framers still functions (although in an increasingly weakened condition) as a firewall or watertight-bulkhead against the flood of (fill in the blank: revolutionary, transformative, transgressive, liberating) changes on the Nanny State’s agenda.
Do Americans have more freedom than they did in, say, 1965? Now that is an interesting topic for debate. In that regard I recall attorney Harvey Silverglate’s 2009 book” Three Felonies A Day”, that clearly indicates how – given the vastly engorged body of federal criminal and regulatory laws – the average American commits three actionable (if technical) felonies each and every day (and the number may have risen in the ensuing half-decade since the book was published).
Which book also demonstrates the accuracy of Jonah Goldberg’s theory in his 2007 book “Liberal Fascism” to the effect that Progressivism is indeed a cradle-sibling of all the other Totalitarianisms born in the 1880-1920 period in Europe (i.e. Communism, Fascism, Nazism).
And also demonstrates my theory that the American National Nanny State had to forego conducting its agenda by traveling in the military tanks of the other three and has resorted instead to ramming itself through the ‘traffic’ of American tradition, culture and law in the (equally lethal) ‘ambulance’ of Victimism.
And then in the sixth paragraph – incoherently, if you look at it closely for a moment – JR will turn on this very same National Nanny State government and rail (hardly inaccurately) against “The Homeland Security Act” (also known as The Patriot Act) and – a large leap, and grammatically incoherent – “the monopoly, Federal Reserve”.
And without getting into trying to suss out the meaning of the “monopoly” bit, I would point out that the Federal Reserve was created by Congress in the Federal Reserve Act of December, 1913, with just about every Democrat for it and just about every Republican against it and the thing signed into law by – have you been waittttting forrrrr ittttttt? – the great Progressive Democratic President, Woodrow Wilson.
Once again, we see clearly demonstrated that plop-tossers only seek factoids, have no real knowledge of actual historical facts (let alone any capacity or desire to coherently understand those facts), and are governed – as fundamentalist mind-sets always are – merely by their own plop-tossy agendas and cartoon visions.
And the relevance of this to the Stampede – itself a creature of a secular National Nanny State seeking to undermine if not also destroy its greatest rival (the Catholic Church) – is, I would say, clear.
In the seventh paragraph “J.R.” (referring to himself in the third person) dons the Wig of Knowing to declaim and declare (if he does say so himself) that he is “also … familiar with” a list of literary and philosophical luminaries as well as with “American comics and the teachings of Jesus”.
Readers may consult the record on this site to consider the validity of that assertion. But I would say that a Cliff-Notes or internet familiarity with factoids and one-liner quotes from those individuals hardly constitutes a working knowledge of them in the context of their times and long cultural and civilizational and societal discourse about the perennial and particular issues they joined.
And the record of JR’s various bits on this site will bear that out. It takes more than a shoebox full of 3×5 factoids and quotable bits to constitute a working familiarity-with and knowledge-of most large matters and the Great Conversations of Western and world history and cultures.
And – of course – we must recall that when JR says “the teachings of Jesus” he means a fictional personage created by the Flavian Emperors for their own political purposes.
And in the eighth paragraph JR asks me if I am “saying the Nazis and Socialists” ‘invented’ “[his] rape as a child by your clergy”. I said no such thing and if he thinks he has accurately read my material to arrive at the formulation of that question he’ll have to demonstrate his ‘thinking’ before anything further can be said.
Actually, I am under the very strong impression that it wasn’t the Nazis or the Socialists or anybody else who “invented” his “rape”. I think the inventor is much much closer to home.
And so on in the rest of that paragraph as JR tries to wave his version of the Victimist ‘Bloody Shirt’ to manipulate a distraction from the issues under discussion.
However I can certainly see some very very useful avenues opened up by his statement that “Oh, that’s right”: the Stampede has “all been made up to [typical distracting juvenile scatology omitted] with God” (corrections supplied and omissions as noted).
But – as I demonstrated with links on the prior thread – the Stampede was “all … made up” by a congeries of synergistic elements (the allegants, the torties, their political enablers, the various elements outside-of and within the Church) to weaken and undermine the public stature and credibility of the Church for the purposes of those various afore-noted interests and groups.
And thanks for prompting that summary.
Public stature is over for you; and justly so.
Your wealth will keep politicians tugging their forelocks to you for centuries; but real "stature' is for the stature-esque.
You are cowering simps.
I spoke to a born again cousin yesterday who lives in Texas, she dropped the phrase "freedom of religion" which is a euphemism for the "freedom" for religion to say what's what for everybody just like they are used to doing.
"I refuse to marry gay people civilly because it's against my religion", says the born again civil servant. While she/he's salary is being paid mostly by gays and people who support gay marriage. Fire them!
I believe in freedom from religion. I won't get married in your church and will continue, crudgingly, to let your religions not pay taxes; IF, you keep your nose out of my civil rights. That's the deal.
How many weeks vacation does the church militant and/or "religious" military give you Capt. Mc Hale? How much do you/ did you get payed for being a paid killer?
At least I had a mother, who's yours, Satan? Eva Braun? Rosemary?
There was no laying you in a manger. The straw would burn.
Again you say my rape was "invented" by me.
That, you living piece of shit, is LIBEL!
I will sue TMR; and Dave Pierre for publishing such lies. Keep it up. You're filling my bank account.
Should we pretend blacks aren't and were never victimized in this country?
Only Adolph Hitler,himself, could think up the nonsense you spew.
I don't think you'll win anyone over to your side by pretending you're the bigger "victim", who's "really" being "victimized" here.
I wait for Frank to hit Philly where your preplanted "bomb",the "wrongfully" incarcerated priests, will be detonated.
As of now, you have no victims to prove your self created victimization.
The pope's Philly visit is there for a reason. It's supposed to be the start of your "reversal" of victimization campaign. Isn't it?
Unless, of course, the Philly "revelations of injustice" fails to go off as planned.
Mark my words; that's what's coming.
I, happily, wear the Wig of a Cassandra. (Read your Homer).
I go to my 3×5 cards? You pull out the same sad rhetoric, the same tired metaphors over and over again.
Posing as being cultured (i.e. mis-naming Nancy for Schultz's Lucy Van Pelt) is so obviously not the same thing as being cultured.
So, let's pretend: You are culture, itself; and I'm only 3×5 cards?
Oh! O.K. You sure are a smart guy, Yep! Duh Ya! I'm just Mortimer Snerd, Yeah, yeah! Happy?
As far as my bad spelling goes
Why doesn't my spell check (not CHEQUE) work on this site? It works in my e-mails.
Does TMR have the ability to stop certain posters spell check?
I'm asking because I don't know if that's possible..
The idea that 5 weeks paid vacation a year is somehow a juvenille issue is insane.
Healthcare; childcare; vacations; and sick leave benefit the majority of people. Why are the poor the "nanny state" for the rich? Why must our children die for lack of care (we rank 37 just above Cuba in health care)?
All the while, the rich store and hide $Billions for the well being of their great great great great great great etc. grandchildren?
So you haven't lived in any other country than the U.S..
How do you know then the U.S. is "more free" than anyone else? Did Jesus tell you?
Even if I don't believe Jesus or the gospel writers or Paul existed. It doesn't mean I'm incapable of quoting from the so called "teachings" written in their names.
I did suffer through catholic schools you know.
I can also quote Jiminy Cricket, i.e." A dream is a wish your heart makes"; and he's an imaginary talking bug.
God is the dream your heart wishes were real.
Sorry! You simply have no real evidence for "it's" existence.
Isn't the Federal Reserve a monopoly?
Are there other federal reserves we can shop from in this country?
I can choose amonst multitudes of toothpastes, hair products and breakfast cereals, but for my federal reserves, which are neither federal nor reserve holding, I only get one?
Where's that market competition; I've heard about in legend and song?
There should be a National bank of the people with branches in every U.S. post office.
All banks should be nationalized to prevent their criminal behaviors. Banks that are owned by the people would work better for the people. You only want a few people owning everything.
Let's take the profit making out of banking and healthcare.
All groups who rate bonds etc. like Standard and Poors should be nationalized. They rated the C and D investments: triple A and caused the crash.
The government should establish a peoples' certified public accountantcy dept.
There is no particular rhyme nor reason to the most recent crop from JR so I won’t need to take them in chronological order.
On the 12th at 1202PM:
In the first paragraph, we are merely given the results of JR’s looking into his personal collection of tea leaves. Readers may consider it all as they will.
In the second paragraph, we are given a cutesy play on words involving “stature” and “stature-esque”. Ditto.
In the third paragraph, some plural “you” are told they are “cowering simps”, an epithet and apropos of nothing.
In the fourth paragraph, we are given yet another just-so story that – as they all seem to do, by the most amazing coincidence – just happens to fall in with his take on “freedom of religion”. Beyond that, the sentence/paragraph tails off into grammatical incoherence and I cannot make heads or tails of the point this little story was (presumably) trying to make.
The rest of the comment consists of his eructations on various matters and need not detain us here.
Then on the 12th at 1222PM:
Merely an effort at insinuation. And – if his claim to military service is to be believed – then he too might be asked – since he has raised the point here – how much he was “payed” for being “a paid killer”.
And readers may also contemplate the fact that in the space of a six short words he has both improperly and properly spelled the same word.
And then and then and then: on the 12th at 144PM we are back to the high-school cafeteria again with – have you been waittttting for itttttttttttttttttttt? – a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool, old-fashioned juvenile ‘mother cut’. Does that not take one back to the queasy greasy precincts at the back of the old high-school cafeteria? And the rest of the comment trails off into the epithetical.
On, then, to the 12th at 1239PM:
In the first paragraph: Once again, JR adopts the afore-mentioned lefty gambit of manipulating readers to simply focus on the long-ago (50 years or more since the Civil and Voting Rights Acts) rather than on the Methods that have evolved to address such problems as the government wished to address.
And simultaneously, he creates a suggestion I certainly never made in order to give himself a larger target (and one more congenial to his cartoon). In response to which I would say that we should not “pretend” anything at all about the matter, but rather (as I have said previously on this thread and elsewhere that we examine the Methods used to address the identified problems. For which the Civil and Voting Rights Acts constitute only a starting-point for an assessment of those Methods and not a trump end-point.
What we should certainly not do is to “pretend” that the ‘victimization’ justifies the adoption of policies that create more difficulties than they solve. This Victimist ‘emergency’ approach – whereby a) the ‘victimization’ is asserted to constitute an ‘emergency’ so great that it has to be met ‘by any means necessary’ and b) any hesitation or doubt or disagreement as to Methods is instantly to be tarred as ‘victimizing’ or ‘re-victimizing’ or bitter-clinging or some such – is simply a contemporary version of the old Nazi ‘Emergency Laws’ that greased the skids for totalitarian and anti-democratic praxis.
But – amazingly – in the second paragraph JR does indeed seem on some inchoate level to have realized that such an approach is indeed the very gambit deployed by Hitler with such temporary success and such lethal long-term consequences.
In the third paragraph he tries to set up a comparison of victimization. Given i) what we know of standard tortie praxis and strategy and what we know of prior efforts by Progressivism’s sibling ‘-isms’ to undermine the credibility of the Church; and ii) what we have seen of the various bits of ‘evidence’ proffered here in support of the Stampede vision of ‘victimization’; and iii) the many vivid examples of the Stampede Playbook to manipulate or distract-from serious and close assessment of the assorted claims and assertions … then there is more than enough of substance here to justify continuing along the path of close analysis and assessment.
Also, I am not trying to “win anyone over to [my] side”. Rather, as I have often said, I am content to do the analysis – against which substantive rebuttals are always welcome – and let readers draw their own conclusions after conducting their own assessment of everything put forward.
And I would also note that there is very large difference between a) trying to assess material and b) trying to ‘win over’ or manipulate anybody else’s opinion.
I have always worked toward (a); the Abuseniks are notable candidates for having espoused (b).
In the fourth paragraph, I have no idea to what the “preplanted ‘bomb’” image refers and how it is supposed to work.
In the fifth paragraph – beyond the incoherently expressed idea itself – I have no clear concept of just what this point it that JR thinks he has made.
In the sixth paragraph: ditto. Although the results of JR’s tea-leaves as to the “reason” for the Pope’s visit to Philadelphia are his own. Readers can assess as they will.
I would note, however, that this conflation underlying “your” is simplistic: it reveals merely JR’s tendency to personalize and lump-together all elements against which he rails: in this case, that all Catholics are somehow privy to whatever the Vatican (and the American pols who welcome the Pope) are thinking.
Ditto, then, as the riff continues in the seventh paragraph.
But then in the eighth paragraph – and with a phrasing right out of central-casting – we are to “mark [his] words” that he knows what is going to happen. We may consider the weight of that prophecy as we will.
And in the ninth paragraph, we get a quickie bit from “Homer” about Cassandra, whose Wig, we are informed, JR doth wear.
Charming. Cassandra – cursed with never being believed (a curse resulting from her having refused sex to Apollo) – slyly provides here a rather histrionic but nicely self-serving bit of justification for JR: he is never believed – doncha see? – but he is right and someday everybody’s gonna see that.
Whether JR is rightly seen as Cassandra in that regard shall be demonstrated in the fullness of time when the Pope actually gets to Philadelphia and his other destinations here. In the meantime all we really have to go on is that Cassandra was female and she had taken a vow of chastity, and readers may apply those aspects as they will.
And the whole bit concludes with the Wig of Instruction instructing us to “read your Homer”. I would add: understand Homer.
On then to the 12th at 118PM:
In regard to the first paragraph, my “metaphors” are, I would say (nor has JR ever demonstrated coherently otherwise), accurate and quite topical and so they keep appearing in various contexts and discussion. As for “the same sad rhetoric”, he’d need to give some accurately-quoted examples.
And as I have said many times before, they keep appearing because the same old Abusenik dodges and 3x5s keep appearing, which indicates nothing so much as the old agitprop tactic of sticking to merely repeating your talking-points (such as they are) and avoid trying to explain the problems with them that arise from others’ assessment of them. In the Stampede, of course, the ‘talking-points’ are given a further twist: the stories, claims, assertions and allegations.
In the second paragraph he somehow seeks to demonstrate my “posing as being cultured” by using the example of my mistaken reference to Lucy Van Pelt as ‘Nancy’ in the Peanuts strip. If anyone can suss out the logic of his gambit here, they are welcome to share it.
And I would say that through the wonders of projection, he describes not me but himself.
In the third paragraph he will continue his epithetical riff on whether or not I am “cultured”. The cultured thing to do here is to politely ignore the gambit, and that is precisely what I shall do.
Ditto the fourth paragraph.
But then starting in the fifth paragraph, JR will attempt to wish-away the dubious “spelling problem” (connected to the utterly dubious presumption that he has a word-processing system that does not have a spell-check function) by asking (insinuation, rather than coherent explanation will be the gambit here) why his spell-check “doesn’t … work on this site”.
In other words: he is now trying to float the idea that he does indeed have a spell-check, but while it works elsewhere yet it doesn’t “work on this site”. But what can this possibly mean?
First, it is not the “site” that has a spell-check function, but rather the word-processing system that creates the text of the comment going up on the site.
Second, as we saw even on this thread, he manages to both properly spell and misspell the same word within the space of six words. This clearly cannot be a malfunction of any system but only his own act, for whatever reason.
Third, we are told that his spell-check system “works in [his] emails”. In other words: this is indeed a wondrously insoluble mystery.
But not so insoluble and not such a mystery, I would have to say: a) there remains the hardly improbable possibility that we are not getting a veracious claim here in regard to the emails; b) there is the possibility that his email system is separate from his word-processor system; c) his comments here are typed directly onto the site’s comment-box.
Continuing this sly gambit to avoid explaining by proffering insinuation, he ‘asks’ if TMR has disabled or can disable spell-check for his own comments. But the site, as I said, does not have a spell-check function. Was that not clear to him when absolutely no spell-check symbols and indicators ever appear at any time in the post-comment box?
He then lards on some smarmy bits with his Goody-Two-Shoes assurance that he is only ‘asking’ because he doesn’t know if that’s possible.
It is of interest that he would even imagine – or at least proffer to readers – such a suggestion. But – doncha see? – if he can plant the idea that Dave Pierre could and would do so, then that would indicate that he is (have you been waittttting forrrr ittttttt?) a victim of DP’s deliberate effort to make JR’s material “look bad” (to use a favorite phrase and excuse from the JR collection).
That bit takes us through to the ninth paragraph where the Wig of Diagnosis doth declare and proclaim that one of my statements is “insane”. All that can be said here is that for someone who doesn’t like anybody speculating about ‘sanity’ in regard to himself, JR certainly does like to lard on the psychiatric bits in regard to others.
In the tenth paragraph I can make no sense whatsoever of the idea that “the poor are the ‘nanny state’ for the rich”. I don’t know what he means here, but my own discussion posits the government as the National Nanny State, not “the poor”. And – to repeat my thought – the problem is that the government has used “the poor” as a pretext for creating the Nanny State (along with ‘the Victim’ as a pretext, which stratagem developed with increasing intensity and scope as the 1970s progressed).
If JR’s statistical claim is accurate, then this country now ranks surprisingly low in quality of health-care (and just above one of the last remaining Communist regimes) and indeed it is last among the developed nations.
Is this point to be taken as a demonstration of the success of the National Nanny State that has developed in the past 50 years?
Be that as it may, it is – to repeat – not the point that I have been making. My point has been that the Methods deployed i) to identify the problems as ‘emergencies’ and then ii) to address the problems while side-stepping the possibility or probability of serious and perhaps lethal negative consequences … has been the enabling stratagem of the National Nanny State (as it was for the Third Reich and for the Soviets before that).
Thus although then in the eleventh paragraph JR seeks to head for the high-ground in his new role as Wig of the People, here extending his sway over umpty future generations, the whole bit relies on the above-noted rickety foundation.
Then in the twelfth paragraph he concludes – through his tea-leaves? – that I “haven’t lived in any other country than the U.S.”. He ‘knows’ that, just like he ‘knows’ so much else.
Ditto then the thirteenth paragraph, where he tries to bolster the whackery of the twelfth with some snark.
Then in the fourteenth paragraph he says that he is still familiar with the teaching claimed to be from Jesus, even if – as he here now admits – he doth not “believe that Jesus or the gospel writers or Paul existed”. All that can be said here is that if he chooses such a belief in light of the abyssal problems with that belief as we have seen on this and other threads here recently, then we are beyond the realm of the rational.
In the fifteenth paragraph he assures us that he “did suffer through catholic schools, you know” (correction supplied). With what success, however, is another question altogether.
In the sixteenth he proffers proof that he can also quote from a noted cartoon character. That’s modestly impressive and even noteworthy, although not, perhaps, for the reasons he intends.
But the seventeenth paragraph demonstrates that there is a method to the madness of the sixteenth: Just as Jiminy Cricket (who, he admits, is “an imaginary talking bug”) burbled that “A dream is a wish your heart makes”, so too “God is the dream your heart wishes were real”.
This is a rather uncharacteristically acute connection (perhaps the product of various “email” collaborations with this or that muse) but it reveals simply that JR has no working-familiarity with the faith experience of so many human beings.
This gambit was first given wide amplification by the various thinkers of the early psychological and sociological era in the 19th and early-20th centuries: rather than accept the Reality of God as a given, experienced first as relationship in the lives of believers, those thinkers shifted the starting-point: they would examine God as a product of humans, rather than humans as the creation of God. And things went on (and downhill, many would say) from there.
Meanwhile – and with a delicious irony – JR here takes toward God the position Scrooge took toward Marley’s ghost: merely “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato … there’s more of gravy than the grave about you”. And readers may consider this as they will.
And the eighteenth paragraph simply repeats the scientismic and atheistical gooey bit to the effect that God’s existence cannot be ‘proven’ and we “have no real evidence for ‘its’ existence” (correction supplied). This point has been addressed before several times recently, and at some length: looking for proof of the Metaplanar God with Monoplanar science is like looking for aircraft with a sonar set. Be ye not surprised if the set gives you no indication of the presence of aircraft.
On then to the 12th at 136PM:
The entire comment is JR’s (or his muse’s or muses’) extended riff on things-economic, demonstrating nothing so much as the riff’s ignorance of the difference between a) the products available in an economy and b) the mechanisms that underlie and enable that economy.
Beyond that the riff simply keeps driving itself further off the rails. He can take the matter up on a site dedicated to the discussion of such matters and good luck with that.
Hey! You call your delusions "reality". I think your day room's calling.
Listen to the tone of what P writes?
Does he say what countries other than the U.S. he's lived in? No it doesn't matter.
He believes it relates to nothing important here. He does however think it's important to correct me on a coma!!!!
If P's such an authority on why socialism's wrong; why won't he say where he got these incredable insights? What socialist societies has he lived in? !, 2, maybe; or is it none?
Knowing one's experience of the world is important if you think you know what system will best govern it.
I know nothing about computers and have said it again and again. But if you'll notice P must question my veracity in everything. He never accepts anything I say as fact. Why? to accept my truth as such would mean he must relate to me as a person. And anyone who calls the church out for the fraud that it is, must never be seen to be honest about anything or even be seen to be a person. I'll survive, no problem; but that's a very odd christian position.
So obvious. So dull.
The "Federal Reserve" is a product who authority is being sold as a product to the American people; and even the brain dead right wing don't like the Fed.
This is how damaged this person, P, is. There is no better word for what he says, intones. it's "damaged".
Is this the behavior of the loving christian or a base snob? Sans gifts or talents he spews his discounting venom again and again and always so dully. The fool is screamingly dull.
O.K. The personal means nothing and the unproven means all? Is that the catholic message or just asshole's?
Hey pathetic one, It's the rest of us and the poor than "Nanny State" the rich.
You are a fucking moron and an evil one to boot.
Fuck off and don't talk to me or about me. You won't. You can't. I'm your obsession. Without me you'd be talking to no one here. You talk more about me than you do about god or justice.
I write here to give conservative religionists a different POV.. A reasonable one rather than fantasies about the unprovable.
5 week vacations and child care matter to the majority of people right here and right now.
Your" planes" have all crashed.
That not "than" Nanny state the rich. Apologies.
On the 14th at 157AM:
The first paragraph (a one-liner) is merely an epithet.
The second paragraph asks readers to consider “the tone” of what I write. No further explication and no examples.
The third paragraph is correct: “it doesn’t matter” what countries I have “lived in”, nor for that matter what my name is nor whether I am a military retiree nor how old I am nor anything else except my ideas (which are open to rebuttals to which I will happily respond).
But my position here deprives the Playbook of one of its marquis distractive and squelching gambits: focusing on the person making the ideas rather than engaging the ideas themselves. Because, as I have often written here, the Playbook is precisely designed to manipulate and you can’t manipulate if a) you engage ideas properly and especially if b) you have put forth ideas or assertions that cannot withstand scrutiny or assessment. This is how the Stampede got as far as it did.
In the fourth paragraph JR will seek to insinuate that it is indeed “important” whether he has all manner of bits about me personally – and on that score he is accurate because it has to be “important” to him and the Playbook to have such bits because otherwise my ideas would have to be engaged.
Nor am I aware that he was ever or now is in a “coma” and I certainly never made any reference to that new bit of information.
But if we were supposed to realize that he meant ‘comma’, then I will say yet again that a) grammar and punctuation are important so that people can accurately understand your ideas (not a Playbook priority at all; you only need to grasp the vivid images and be manipulatively moved to the Playbook’s desired ‘outrage’ and ‘empathy’); and b) correct grammar and punctuation and spelling are important since they require disciplining oneself to focus on them, which discipline thus trains the brain to accurately conceive and process, as well as express, ideas.
But again: the Stampede – itself so deeply based in agitprop techniques – is not at all concerned for i) the accurate conception and expression of ideas. Rather it is concerned completely for ii) creating vividly manipulative assertions and claims and stories that will precisely preclude people’s assessment of those manipulative assertions and claims and stories and instead quickly ignite their emotions, sidestepping their abilities to rationally assess those manipulative assertions and claims and stories.
In the fifth paragraph he simply demonstrates his natural or deliberate lack of reading comprehension by asking (the Wig of Insinuation) why I won’t say where I got the “incredible insights” (correction supplied) as to “why socialism’s wrong”.
First, I didn’t say socialism was “wrong”; I have pointed out numerous problems with the quartet of essentially totalitarian ‘-ism’s that were all born in the period 1880-1920: Communism, Fascism (Nazi or Italian variants), Socialism, and Progressivism.
And second, I specifically recommended to readers Jonah Goldberg’s 2007 book ‘Liberal Fascism’, whose ideas – I had said – were ones that I drew on for my thoughts expressed on this site.
And third – and yet again – whether I have “lived” in various “socialist societies” is no more relevant than might be a question to him as to whether he had lived in the era of the Flavians when Atwill claims that dynasty commissioned the creation of Jesus, Paul, the Gospels, and the Pauline Corpus out of whole cloth by Josephus.
The question he poses here is reminiscent of nothing so much as a problematic grade-school student trying to get out of a history class by insisting that since the teacher didn’t “live” in any of those historical times then the class is groundless (and, perhaps, instead the whole class should go outside and “explore” their capacities for “pleasure” – which, come to think of it, sounds like a lot of college students back in the day).
Thus the attempt at Wiggy declamation and instruction in the sixth paragraph also fails.
In the seventh paragraph we are merely informed once again that JR doth “know nothing about computers” and – the Wig of Exasperation – he hath “said it again and again”. But yet he has managed to keep composing (or cutting and pasting) and putting his stuff here, including putting up at one time an email from one of his off-site muses and interlocutors as if it were his own.
And then – when the problem was pointed out – engaging in a host of excuses and diversions that indicated that he certainly knows enough about computers to be pulling such tricks. Nor does his excuse of lack-of-knowledge answer the many questions that it raises. And all of this has been dealt with before, and no sufficient and non-problematic answer has been forthcoming.
But JR reveals far far more than he intends when he then says that I “never accept[s] anything [he says] as fact”. Because that is precisely what Abuseniks hope to happen: people will simply accept anything and everything they toss up as if it were “fact” (not only excuses, but claims, stories, and assertions).
I don’t often accept anything and everything as “fact”. Instead I assess it by comparing it to what I know and what alternative theories might explain it and perhaps consult what far more capable thinkers have said about the alleged “fact” and then, of course, cross-check the asserted “fact” with various other sources of relevant information. And, of course, I judge the “facts” by the internal coherence of their claim and also by their external coherence to other relevant and established facts.
This, of course, is utterly and precisely what the Abuseniks and the Playbook seek to avoid or to distract-from or to squelch.
But he goes on in that paragraph even more revealingly: I avoid ‘accepting’ his ‘truth’ because to do so “would mean he must relate to me as a person”.
Not so at all. I do not “accept [his] truth” because there is a factual truth that is not at all necessarily the same as anybody’s so-called ‘personal truth’ – which concept is itself a recent creation of Victimism and its assorted pandemonium to try to endow with some authority what in essence remains ‘spectral evidence’ that regresses the matter back to the era of medieval and Reformation witchcraft ‘science’ and jurispraxis.
And we also see in his bit here precisely a key Stampede (and Victimist) gambit: hey, you’re a person and I’m a person so … why would I lie to you and what sort of a ‘sociopath’ are you to think that I would lie to you?
In other words, we see here the Victimist gambit that tries to reduce profound questions of factuality and actuality and reality and truth merely to the level of the ‘personal’ (i.e. if you reject my assertion than you attack and reject me personally). ‘Rolling Stone ‘magazine’s recent University of Virginia debacle is simply the latest in a long line of such results that occur when media and others take for granted that a ‘person’ (and a victim – allegedly – of course) would be truthful. And the Stampede has largely been built on this sort of thing.
It’s not good intellectual practice to accept asserted “facts” without examination and this is not only true for the Stampede but for just about any encounter with assertions claimed to be “facts”.
The eighth paragraph gives us merely a one-liner stab at juvenile epithet.
Then in the ninth paragraph we get the slippery effort to spin the Federal Reserve as a “product”, bouncing off my prior recent comment that there is a difference between a) products created for commerce and use in economic exchange or in the ‘economy’ and b) the mechanisms (e.g. the Federal Reserve) that are supposed to ground and manage or govern that ‘economy’.
Here, JR will try to somehow spin the Federal Reserve as a “product”: but not a “product” for use in the economy (which is what the point was all about) but rather the Federal Reserve as a “product of authority” that is being “sold as a product to the American people”.
But this is a slippery play on words: the Federal Reserve was only figuratively “sold” to the American people, and it was presented not as a “product” of the economy but rather figuratively as the “product” of the government’s authority, not of the economy.
Nor was the point at all about whether left-wing or “right wing” elements “like the Federal Reserve”. This bit merely demonstrates JR’s cartoonish us-vs-them way of constructing issues or spinning them.
And I never said I ‘liked’ the Federal Reserve (I have some deep reservations).
But what I did say – and JR has avoided the point all along in the exchange here – is that the Federal Reserve was created by the Democratic and Progressive President Woodrow Wilson (with all Democratic congressmen for it and few Republicans) and thus reveals its provenance as yet another highly-dubious Progressive imposition (thinking of Jonah Goldberg’s theories here) that has been fraught with both unintended and intended consequences and that demonstrated the problems of too greatly centralizing in a government of humans the vast powers over society and culture that the Progressives presumed their elites would administer benevolently and without serious error.
The Soviets, of course, like all the other ‘-ism’s, also demonstrated this problem with centralization of government, as evidenced in Lenin’s and Stalin’s assorted and hugely lethal early initiatives, buttressed inevitably by state terror, and resulting in later Soviet centralizing institutions such as ‘Gosplan’.
Thus in regard to the tenth paragraph: I would say that “this is how damaged” and insufficient JR’s assessment-of and processing-of information “really is”.
And then in the eleventh paragraph, we get the queasy effort to connect that with my being (by insinuation here) not a “loving Christian” (correction supplied) … since, but of course, a “loving Christian” would not question JR’s material and his “facts”.
And instead, if you question his material and his “facts” then you are a “base snob”. I imagine he didn’t like kids who did better on tests than he did, either.
And then the bit that I have committed the (cardinal Abusenik and Victimist) sin of “discounting”, specifically that I have ‘discounted’ his assertions and “facts”. I have expressed a low opinion of much of his material, but have gone to great lengths to explain the problems with the material and the questions raised by the material. With results that are now in the record on this site.
And the paragraph seeks to buttress its bits with an epithet as to my being a “fool” who is “screamingly dull” – as I have said, words and concepts and ideas and careful processing will often appear “dull” to certain mentalities. Not my problem.
And then in the twelfth paragraph an effort to further buttress the prior paragraphs’ queasy bits by claiming that I think “the personal means nothing and the unproven means all”. I would say that his characterization of my position is almost completely correct: when it comes to making assertions and claims and charges and allegations or proposing theories and explanations – which is true in legal matters but also in intellectual matters generally – that is precisely how things must be (the Third Party Observer Problem, to use my term for it).
JR here reveals nicely a fundamental Vicitmist and agitprop gambit: the ‘personal’ must take precedence over the ‘proven’. This constitutes an abyssal and lethally consequential departure from the realm of reason and rationality. And as I have often recommended before, this entire gambit is given an extended and informative ‘philosophical’ justification in feminist law-professor Catharine MacKinnon’s 1989 book ‘Towards a Feminist Theory of the State’, which I can heartily recommend to anybody who wants to understand how we got to where we are today.
But again, in a queasy effort to avoid the conceptual and go for the plop-tossy, JR will then try to shift the basis of his plaint to religion: my focus on the rational and the conceptual is not only not “Christian” but is also not (by insinuation) “the catholic message” (correction not supplied).
But what can “the Catholic message” possibly mean here? It is supposed to mean here that true Catholics don’t question Abuseniks.
And the bit ends with an epithet as usual.
The thirteenth paragraph opens with an epithet in order to merely assert (with no explication or corroboration, and lodged in a grammatically nonsensical passage) that “it’s the rest of us and the poor than the ‘Nanny State’ rich”.
Which, if one can presume to suss out the intended meaning here, merely goes to show that JR hasn’t comprehended my concept of the National Nanny State. Specifically, that the Nanny State has done as much as any other regime to use its engorged power to pander to the rich (while amusing “the poor” with short-term bennies and culture-war soap-operas whose consequences, finally after decades, demonstrate their results with a seriously deficient economy and a society and culture hollowed-out to a regressive and flattened core).
But – nicely – JR does distinguish between himself and “the poor”, and for good reason.
Then a double epithet in the fourteenth paragraph.
Then in the fifteenth paragraph we merely get a repetition of his insistence that I not talk to him or about him. But – as I have said in prior responses when this bit has been put up – JR chooses to put up material – and highly assertive material – on a site with a comment function. If he wants to take his marbles and go home, that’s his choice to make, but as long as he chooses to comment here then he has entered the kitchen and he must stand the heat (to use Harry Truman’s pithy image). And it’s not my problem.
Nor – again – is it my “obsession” (the Wig of Diagnosis again). I respond to material that is willingly put up on the site and that’s all and that’s that. Welcome to Harry’s “kitchen”.
And the juvenile scatology can stay up right where it was deliberately put.
Then in the sixteenth paragraph JR tries to buttress and burnish the whackery of the preceding paragraphs by plainting that he simply writes “here to give conservative religionists a different POV”. But since he does not so much offer “a different POV” but rather uses unsupported assertions and claims and a panoply of distracting gambits to undermine serious consideration of relevant material, then this self-serving self-characterization of his efforts here fails.
As does his equally jaw-dropping self-serving assertion that his material is “reasonable”.
But he slyly then seeks to establish it as “reasonable” by contrasting it only with “fantasies” (i.e. material must either be “reasonable” or it is “fantasies”).
But material can fail to be “reasonable” not merely by being “fantasies” (not such a bad characterization of some of JR’s unsupported theories and assertions) but also by failing to be coherent, by failing to be supported by evidence or competent explication, and/or by being irrelevant and fundamentally distracting to the matter under consideration.
And religion and Christianity and Catholicism are only “fantasies” if one is looking for the aircraft with nothing but a sonar set.
And – as I have said – if he considers and wishes us to accept that Atwill’s claims in regard to the Flavians and the invention of Jesus, Paul, the Gospels and the Pauline Corpus, then we are surely beyond the realm of the historically “reasonable” or rational, especially in light of the insufficiency of his defense of Atwill against the many problems with Atwill’s material.
So to paraphrase Harry Truman’s advice to Molotov: don’t put up such stuff and you won’t find your stuff so uncongenially assessed.
And in the seventeenth paragraph he once again simply puts up his material about “5 week vacations and child care” as if those ‘good intentions’ and only those programs were the gravamen and substance of France’s experience with ‘progressive’ or ‘socialist’ governing policies … which they most certainly are not.
And thus my “planes” have not “all crashed” – and certainly not by any material JR has proffered here.
But it’s a zingy one-liner that lubricates his slide to the curtains as his late-night show concludes.
But then there is a comeback appearance at 205AM on the 14th: he appears to think that I was taking issue with his claim about the ranking of US healthcare. I did no such thing. As far as I know, the US healthcare system has fallen that low (in the past 50 years), and is 11th (and almost last) among the recognized developed nations. Although his consultation of Michael Moore as a source is not one that I would have chosen.
JR says to Publion on the 14th at 1.57 a.m. "you talk more about me that you do about God and justice".
Well… let's focus on the justice…., which should be paramount in this. If my memory serves JR was sexually abused, by a Catholic teaching brother, at his school.
I understand he was one of the victim/claimants in a "bundled lawsuit" against the Church.This matter resulted in a mediated settlement.. and each claimant got a considerable payout. But this did not conclude the campaign for JR,…. he has continued to harass the Church on this site, and probably other blogs as well. Clearly he appears to want passionately to protect children from sexual predators.
To my simple way of thinking the best way to do that would be to put real (and proven) predators in prison. They can't continue to cause harm if they are in prison? Can they? Prison might be the best place for a recidivist pedaphile.
This prompts my question to JR. When did he report his attacker to the police? Or how old was he when he walked into the police station… to report his attacker? Don't give me the excuse that he was only a teenage schoolboy and didn't know what to do? We don't remain children, we grow into adulthood. Ten years after the alleged attack he was an adult .and must have known then that it was an illegal act. So when did he seek justice in the manner most of us would… by going to the police.? How else can the wheels of justice be put in motion?.
If he surprises me by saying he did just that …..then would ask him to quote the police reference number for his particular case and the date.
Because I am astonished by the number of alleged victims who have never gone to the police. They seem quite content to let their lawyers threaten the Church with damning media publicity… in order to extract a big mediated settlement. Just one small problem to concern me… the alleged sexual predator just walks……he escapes justice.
So how on earth does that protect children from sexual predators?. If he really is a pedaphile (doubtful) then he goes completely free to continue his deviant inclinations. Of course the truth is, it's just a false accusation, and they know he didn't do it, so what the he ickf he walks free. As long as there's a big payout for the accusers and their greedy lawyers.
The number, 37th in healthcare, came from Michael Moore's brilliant film: SICKO. I believe he got that figure from the U.N..
I don't care what you "think" about anything.
Everything you've "thought" about me has been 100% WRONG.
So you and "thinking" are at best distant strangers.
I'm sure sociopaths "think".
But when you've choosen a religion based on "love of your fellow" humans as it's base; and then continiously choose to ignore and/or debase that premise. You are thereby no example for anything but evil; stupidity, and sociopathy and immorality.
You have no "heat" and this is no kitchen.
Fuck you and the mass murderer you choose to quote!
Truman, the "christian man" who dropped two nuclear bombs killing 200,000 people. Where was Jesus in that?
You are all about fear and obedience to murderers and child rapists.
I charge you with abetting crimes against children. Child rape as it has been used as a modus operendi of the Roman catholic church.
It is called that you know? ROMAN. It was named after it's real masters, the Roman Empire not Jesus.
I know why you dread your personal information being revealed. If you revealed who you are; your judgements against others would fall back on you ten fold.
You are what I've always said you are. A sniper in god's army. A murderer "blessed" by a god of love.
And I'm the stupid person with the dumb beliefs?
JR's Quote - I charge you with abetting crimes against children. Child rape as it has been used as a modus operendi of the Roman catholic church.
When you throw around an accusation like this it makes your claims that you were abused less credible.
In Hoc Signus says it all. Kill a Commie for Christ. Onward Christian Soldiers.
At my high school reunion ilast year. One of the former bullies at the school, who in 1964 was awarded the title "Mr. Cavalier Spirit", got up to speak on how he knew there was a god.
He found out this, not from 12 years of catholic indoctrination in the FAITH; but because he'd survived a fire fight at the DMZ in Korea during his first night patrol when he was only 3 days" in country".
He never mentioned why god would have him flown at tax payer expense 7000 miles to "defend" the U.S. by occupying another country; or why god spared him but not one of the others who died that night. Oh no but he knew god existed allright! A school honored bully becomes a killing man of faith. Catholicism in a nut shell.
So you've never lived outside the U.S.; or the American Empire better known as the U.S. " zone of influence"?
And we are to believe you know more about places you've never lived than those who've lived there?
Just like you know heaven exists?
Wonderful!
I'm begining to think English may not be your first language. You are so limited in it's possibilities and actualities. (Save of course for your Spell Check, machine granted "erudition".)
My personal truth, as said by me, refers to the truth about me, personally, which is fact based. I'm not saying it was only personally true for me (like your faith is personally "true" for you).
I was raped. That's the fact you refuse to acknowledge. I don't imagine I was raped.
I don't need you to repeat yourself about my "lack of proof" for my rape. You don't matter.
Mahony and the marianists didn't apologize to me for nothing. It cost them and their insurors a million to apologize to me.
Why don't you list the socialist countries you haven't lived in?
Did you attend college on the socialistic G.I. Bill? Do you get Social Security and or Medicare?
As I have said a number of times, the value in responding to some of the material that goes up here lies primarily in using it as an example that illustrates this or that aspect and element of the Stampede.
That being said, we proceed.
On the 15th at 1127AM:
In the first paragraph: JR informs that he doesn’t care what I “’think’ about anything”. Fine and dandy. I wasn’t really commenting for his benefit in the first place.
In the second paragraph, we get merely an unsupported assertion about what I’ve “’thought’” about JR. But the burden of my comments has been about his material and not him; so what we see here is simply another demonstration of the Abusenik/Victimist tendency to personalize matters in order to distract from their conceptual consideration.
In the third paragraph, an epithet riffing on ‘thinking’.
In the fourth paragraph, an epithet repeating the “sociopaths” bit.
In the fifth paragraph, we see yet again the effort to insinuate that nice Christians don’t question or doubt what ‘victims’ (genuine or otherwise) tell them. Apparently we are to believe that ”love of your fellow humans” means believing everything you are told; which suggests nothing so much as a gospel according to used-car salesmen.
But on the basis of that most rickety gambit, then the Wig of Declamation will declaim and declare that I am thus “no example for anything but evil, stupidity, and sociopathy and immorality”. Oh my. The only question of relevance being: would that statement count as one epithet or four?
In the sixth paragraph a variation on the old I’m Not/You Are dodge: it is declaimed and declared that I “have no ‘heat’ and this is no kitchen”. I never suggested that I had any “heat”; and I very much think that this site is indeed a “kitchen” in Truman’s sense and it would appear that some can’t take much heat.
In the seventh paragraph: an epithet buttressed by scatology. And since the only thing on the 3×5 under ‘Truman’ is that he was (if you buy the cartoon) a “mass murderer” then that’s all we get.
In the eighth paragraph, a further riff on the 3×5 from the seventh paragraph.
Buttressed by the childish question as to where Jesus was when Truman ordered the atomic bombs to be dropped (so as to end the war before an invasion of Japan would have killed far more than two hundred thousand, and on both sides). Christ was there, and if JR wants to presume that Christ disagreed with Truman’s decision, JR can make the case for it, rationally and coherently.
In the ninth paragraph, more epithet in the assertion about what some “you” are “all about”. And neatly trying to combine “murderers” and “child rapists” (and again with the ‘rape’ trope, although so very few formal Stampede allegations made such claims).
But then but then but then: in the tenth paragraph, the Wig of Denunciation is plopped on top of the Wig of Declamation as JR (striking a histrionic note reminiscent of another former commenter) delivers a J’accuse! : JR – by virtue of the authority vested in him by … him, not to put too fine a point on it – doth accuse me of “abetting crimes against children” and further, that “child rape … has been used as a modus operendi of the Roman catholic church”.
Readers may consider that performance as they will. I note only that the Latin phrase is incorrect; perhaps improperly transcribed.
In the eleventh paragraph, a demonstration of JR’s logical and historical chops: we are informed that the Roman Catholic Church is called “Roman” because – have you been waittttting for itttttttt? – the Roman Empire and not Jesus was its (correction supplied) “real master[s]”. This, readers may notice, is an assertion flowing from the Atwill material, for the abyssal problems of which JR has yet to proffer solution or defense.
The “Roman” (an informal designation) came from the fact that this was the Church centered in the city of Rome (and of Peter and of Paul), as distinct from that Church centered in the Byzantine realm of the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople, which called itself ‘Orthodox’ while the Church centered in Rome called itself “Catholic” (from the Greek word for ‘universal’).
Which also leads to this interesting point: the key distinction – as readers may see – is between Roman Catholic ‘universality’ and Orthodox ‘orthodoxy’. In other words: there was at the time a significant tension between the effort to reach out to the world by the Roman Catholics and the effort to preserve the uniformity of doctrine by the Orthodox.
In the twelfth paragraph we are informed by the Wig of Knowing that JR doth “know why you dread your personal information being revealed”. Readers may mark that down on the list of the many other things JR has assured us he ‘knows’. Nor do I “dread” anything; I have explained even on this thread why I keep the focus of discussion on conceptual issues and not on personal issues – and JR’s performance in this recent crop of comments here reveals precisely how irritating and confounding this focus is to Abuseniks and their Playbook.
Nor should the Wig of Denunciation be so robust in the claim about making “judgments against others”, in light of the hefty passel of epithets provided here even in this batch of Abusenik material.
But the “ten fold” bit is a snippet of scripturally-based rhetorical flourish and again – with other histrionic bits here – more reminiscent of some other former commenter on this site.
In the thirteenth paragraph the riff of the twelfth is continued with the assertion (“judgement”, perhaps?) that I am “a sniper in god’s army” and a “murderer ‘blessed’ by a god of love”.
If JR could provide an accurate quote of where I wrote that I was such a “sniper in god’s army” then that would be nice. And his characterization of me as a “murderer” holds as much water as his prior characterizations of several recent Popes as “murderers”, indicating merely that a) he doesn’t quite grasp the meaning of the term and b) he doesn’t really seem to care whether he deploys the word accurately or not – which is a revealing characteristic all on its own .
And in the fourteenth paragraph, building on the mushy foundations of all that has gone before it in this comment of his, we get the conclusion that (have you been waittttttting for ittttttttttttttt?) absolves JR of being a “stupid person with the dumb beliefs”. Which readers may consider as they will.
Then on the 15th at 1142AM:
“In Hoc Signus” says – not to put too fine a point on it – nothing. And JR may consult with his muses as to the problems with his deployment of the Latin phrase here. I am reminded of that scene in Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ where John Cleese’s centurion says to Brian: “’Romanes eunt domus’? ‘People called Romanes they go the ‘ouse?’” And when Brian insists that the phrase means “Romans go home”, Cleese’s centurion puts him through a quiz on Latin grammar that Brian had apparently thought he knew.
But when plop must be tossed, then plop must be tossed.
In the second paragraph we get – by the most amazing coincidence – another story about JR’s high school reunion (and readers may recall other stories from that reunion that were proffered here). And – by the most amazing coincidence – there was “one of the former bullies” who “got up to speak on” (waitttttt forrrr itttttttttt!) “how he knew there was a god”. Only such lumps as “bullies” – doncha see? – know “there is a god”. That’s convenient.
In the third paragraph, the story then goes on to include some military bits and readers may consider the whole thing as they will.
Although there is – when you look at it – a curious incoherence: are we to focus on the ‘bully’ bit or on the fact that a soldier in combat came to a sense of God’s presence?
Nor do things become any more clear (or credible) in the fourth paragraph, where the story apparently confuses “Korea” and Vietnam: US troops did not occupy South Korea; they only manned the DMZ in support of ROK troops; and the DMZ – he apparently has to be reminded – was the result of North Korea’s invasion of South Korea.
But the whole ploppy hash serves – to JR’s satisfaction at least – the purpose of providing the lead-in for JR’s overall objective of linking a “bully” (and “a school honored bully”) with “a killing man of faith”, all of which – have you been waitttting forrrr ittttt? – conveniently then constitutes – to JR’s satisfaction at least – an illustration of “Catholicism in a nut shell”.
And so we see the quality of JR’s material “in a nut shell”.
Then on the 15th at 1152AM:
In the first paragraph, lacking any solid information (irrelevant though any such information would be to matters here), JR will simply smooth his path by drawing his own conclusion as to where I have “lived”. He can wander along his oft-travelled imaginative path as much as likes.
In the second paragraph – demonstrating the Abusenik mistaking of a) the mere mimicry of language with b) the actual substance of thought underlying language – JR will build upon his own created conclusion by asking “are we to believe” that I know more about places I’ve never lived in “than those who have lived there?”.
First, no mention has ever been made on this discussion thread of anyone who “lived there” (wherever “there” might be) and who disagreed with the ideas I put forward. So this is a non-issue from the get-go, here.
Second, there is thus nobody involved in the site discussion here in regard to whom I would “know more about places” (and what places?).
Third, we are back to the same problem I discussed in regard to the student who didn’t see any use in the history class since the teacher had never been alive in that prior era. And who is to say who knows more about a place – a person who lives in it or a person who studies it? DeTocqueville didn’t live in the US and yet left us with a remarkably acute perception and analysis of the place.
Fourth, as we know from the experience of soldiers in combat: the individual soldier in his own little patch of front knows very little of the battle overall, and may know nothing of the strategic or even tactical forces and plans and objectives that have created his little patch of combat.
So the question has to be further refined: just what is it that – getting back to the topic at hand – i) a resident of a place might better know as distinct from ii) what a student of the place might better know?
And fifth: have we seen here any material from any demonstrated resident of some such “place” that takes issue-with or contradicts such ideas as I have put forward? We have not. And we thus back to the non-issue from the get-go.
But this whole pile simply serves, as we find out in the third paragraph, to serve as a lead-in (such as it is) to JR’s substance-less snark about how one might “know heaven exists”. And we have been all around that garden before.
Then on the 15th at 150PM:
In the first paragraph, the Wig of Insight confides to us all that he is “beginning to think that English may not be [my] first language”.
And why doth the Wig think thus? Because – doncha see? – I am “so limited in it’s possibilities and actualities” (correction not supplied).
Let us move quickly past the nonsensical phrasing of that bit (and any consequent misgivings as to whether English is JR’s first language, either to think-in or to express himself in).
Just what might – in JR’s mentation – such “possibilities” be? And what might such “actualities” be? (Since he clearly has demonstrated no command of the “actualities” of the English language himself.)
But the Abuseniks – enabled by the no-rules-so-everything-goes approach of the past few decades – may very well know a great deal about those “possibilities” of the English language: if you don’t allow yourself to be bothered or boundaried by definitions or grammar or rationality or coherence and if you put your imagination to work … why there are so very many “possibilities” which can be put in the service of your plans and objectives.
And in that paragraph we also see the abyssal limitations demonstrated by the presumption that “erudition” can come from a spell-check function. But again: for Abuseniks, mimicry and putting-on-a-show are conflated with the substance of whatever you want to imitate; you can mimic just about anything, and for an Abusenik, apparently, that’s usually been good enough.
And in the second paragraph, JR demonstrates the failure to understand that i) “personal truth” and ii) truth that is “fact based” are not the same thing at all, and further that in this grossly imperfect world (i) and (ii) may actually be incompatible or even opposed to each other.
Because – to repeat yet again – it was precisely the gambit of Victimism (and explained at great length by MacKinnon in her 1989 book I mentioned in a prior comment on this thread) that ‘objective’ or ‘fact-based’ truth had to be abandoned in the service of “personal truth” (which may have no rationality, no coherence, no corroboration in facts, and no evidence supporting it).
Nor – although it is a very uncharacteristically nuanced bit here – is it demonstrable that all faith is only “personally ‘true’” for the believer. In, for example, the Catholic instance, one cannot at all rule out that the belief and faith of the individual has indeed perceived a reality (or Reality) this actually exists (although not on the Monoplane but on the Metaplane), even if not in a way accessible to Monoplanar science.
But – to repeat yet again – assertions of fact on the Monoplane must be demonstrable by evidence from the Monoplane. And this is where one’s ‘personal truth’ differs from one’s ‘personal belief’: belief about matters on the Metaplane involve a Plane of Existence beyond material science, whereas if one refers to ‘truth’ about events on the Monoplane, then one’s ‘personal truth’ must correspond to demonstrable actualities existing on the Monoplane.
And this is why the Abusenik effort to somehow conflate a) ‘personal truth’ about some purported experience and b) ‘personal belief/faith about God’ ultimately and fundamentally fails.
Thus the third paragraph fails as well: an assertion that is made to Third Parties on the basis of which actual (and serious) responsive action is demanded from those Third Parties, is no longer a merely ‘personal truth’ but rather constitutes a claim to be – so to speak – ‘public truth’, and such ‘public truth’ must be demonstrable by Monoplanar evidence.
And if such evidence is not forthcoming or non-existent, then the assertion not only ‘is’ personal truth, but ‘must remain’ personal truth – meaning that the individual may believe it, but cannot expect others to believe it.
Contrary to the position exemplified by MacKinnon, one cannot use one’s ‘personal truth’ as an unquestionable instance of ‘public truth’. But this was and remains precisely the gambit that Victimism and MacKinnon insist can and must be done.
And thus one cannot legitimately rail against those who would doubt or debate such ‘personal truth’ that is trying simultaneously to masquerade-as or pass-for ‘public truth’.
If ‘personal truth’ can be demonstrated by evidence on the Monoplane, then it can rightly be considered ‘public truth’ and has a legitimate claim to be accepted as such by that ‘public’, who are all Third Parties to the event.
And this was precisely what the modern Western system of jurisprudence and court/trial process was designed to determine – until the Victimists, under MacKinnon’s conceptual guidance, began ‘reforming’ it.
And thus the fourth paragraph’s assertion “you don’t matter” also fails: to the extent that any ‘personal truth’ is proferred with the insistence that it be accepted as ‘public truth’ with no corroboration, then any and all Third Parties “matter” very much indeed because a claim/demand is being made upon each and all of them.
If this were not the case, then we would, for example, have legions of actual Napoleons, existing in those legions of persons each of whose firm ‘personal truth’ is that he is indeed and in fact Napoleon.
As for the fifth paragraph, we have examined this bit before and all of that material is in the record here.
The sixth paragraph then goes back to the living-in-foreign-countries bit, and it remains as irrelevant and juvenile here as it did in prior paragraphs.
And the seventh paragraph again repeats the contemporary gambit of trying to avoid the problematic elements of assorted general policy approaches and focus on other things.
Nor can JR provide any quotation from me that to the effect that the G.I Bill or Social Security (as originally conceived) or Medicare (as originally conceived) were “socialistic”. Once again we see JR creating positions I do not hold in order to have something more congenial to shoot-at.
Yawn!
Mr. Harris, when I reported my abuse to the adult authorities at my school, the dean of students and the only priest at the school. I presumed they would do what ever was necessary to insure the protection of other children. It turns out I find out 50 years later the exact opposite happened. My perpetrator was in fact promoted to head a high school in Hawaii.
I don't know why you would expect victims who are children, most of whom don't tell their parents about their rapes, would have the support needed to face this horror like an adult when they are in fact: children. Why would I or any other child call the police if we want no one to know what happened to us and if we don't think anyone would take our word over the very people who were already in positions of trust? Child victims are panicked. I wanted the abuse to end and left the rest to the grown ups. They failed. I didn't.
I had always asked about what had happened to McGloin. I was told he'd left the order. I'd done the best I knew how to do. Just over three years after my abuse I was a 19 year old draftee expecting to go to Vietnam. I had a lot on my plate.
It amazes me that you don't ask your prelates why they transfered, again and again, (in every country) abusers to rape again. No you'd rather yell at children for not behaving like adults and then blame them for not bringing up their most shameful moments and walking into a cop shop.
We were kids. Surviving the abuse was a majorly heroic effort; in and of itself.
"Harass the Church"?
I don't think the "Church" gives a shit about some 68 year old lefty from L.A. giving them the truth. Try to remember who the victims are. It's not you. It's us, your raped children.
I'm here to bust SNAP VOTF and Doyle. Your church has created a false flagged fron to control victims still not to help victims but to protect the church's main objective: the maintenence of wealth. No matter the human cost. That is not what Jesus would do, if he existed, I know that for certain.
Mr. Harris, you can stop playing the questioning innocent. You already know the truth. You, like the church, care only about protecting the money as well.
So all Catholics are responsible for "your" alleged rapes? Once again, when you throw around accusations and lump anyone and everyone as an abuser, your claims become less credible. Publions Abusnik theory appears to hold more water than what you are throwing around. I'm not syaing you were not raped, I have no idea if you were are were not, but the point P has been making is that a claim made to a 3rd party with no supporting eveidence other than the claim that is being levied is just that, a claim. Nothing you put out there is proof and when you accuse P to be a child rapist and accuse all Catholics with being responsible for the rapes then your claims appear to be bogus. It sounds like you will make as many accusations as you can until something sticks.
Dave Pierre. I want to say thank you for allowing me to write exactly what I want to say.
Curse words and all.
I'm guessing my use of such language, which is exactly how I speak, is allowed to make me appear even more 'outre" here. but I don't care. It's so wonderful to say what I think without edit.
I do apologize to the readership if my word choices are not pleasant for you to read. I just talk this way. This is me, as is.
Again though you may not be doing it for the right reasons. i.e. free speech; the free exchange of ideas. I am grateful, Dave.
Now if only the the Catholic Reporter would do the same for progressive catholics, your church might have a chance at morallity. imo
It is outrageous that I'm banned by the Catholic Reporter. If I was able to be read there. I wouldn't be posting here.
So if you want to be rid of me; write the Reporter and demand my bannishment be overturned.
However I think it suits Tom Doyle O.P. and SNAP perfectly that I post here. SNAP was created to lull progressive catholics into a false sense of justice being done or at the very least justice being attempted.
When I call out SNAP here on the Publion web site, TMR.
Doyle and SNAP can say," Oh look what a traitor JR is to "survivors" he's always being posted on the right winged catholics web site". Never saying how much I condemn the church's failure to compensate all it's victims.
I post here, Dave; because I can post nowhere else in "catholicville". I hope it's as refreshing for you all to read the the truth as it is for me to write it.
Onward and upward!
On the 16th at 1240 JR replies to ‘Malcolm Harris’.
Let the ever-mutable mutate as it may and will, and let the merely repeated points be repeated as they will be.
I would like to focus only on the very last paragraph of that comment to ‘Malcolm Harris’.
This paragraph gives a crystal-clear example of my point about ‘personal truth’ as contrasted to ‘public truth’.
Because here, addressing “Mr. Harris” as if in direct, person-to-person, face-to-face exchange, JR tries to set up a scene in which he fixes MH with a stony glare (think of the third act of a TV detective show where the detective confronts the suspect with the undeniable evidence of the suspect’s guilt) and … precisely tries to conflate the ‘personal truth’ with the ‘pubic truth’.
Specifically, JR insists to MH that MH “already know[s] the truth”. But how might MH conceivably be said to “know” that “truth”? Because JR has just told him in the prior paragraphs (or other versions from prior tellings).
But the “truth” in the prior paragraphs is JR’s “personal truth”, not any demonstrated ‘public truth’. And there is no legitimate way that anyone A can demand of somebody else B (who was not present at Event X) that ‘B’ must accept and acknowledge the ‘public truth’ of Event X simply because A says so. (Nor, to save time here, can the Gospels or Jesus or “the Catholic message” be coherently characterized as establishing any moral obligation for B to accept A’s assertions out of some version of Christian charity or similar phrasing.)
The other point about the paragraph is that JR not only tries to run the personal truth/public truth conflation, but also turns the valence of the exchange negative by then accusing MH of “playing the questioning innocent” when – to JR’s mind – MH most surely and clearly only “care[s] about protecting the money as well”, just “like the church”.
And, of course, we see the curiously consistent prioritizing of “the money”.
Also: in regard to this entire question about ‘truth’ – personal or public – and the agitprop appeal to emotions in order to manipulate people away from their rational assessments and into merely visceral and emotional responses, there is a most interesting comment made in a recent review of the film ‘Selma’.
That review can be read here
http://bostonreview.net/arts-culture/alan-stone-ava-duvernay-david-oyelowo-selma
The comment made about the film by the (very friendly) reviewer is: “Even if the facts are wrong, the feelings are right”.
And this statement gives us yet another opportunity to examine the matter of ‘truth’ in its various (nowadays) forms. (And for any readers for whom the term might evoke collegiate philosophy course memories, we are about to enter the ancient realm of Epistemology.)
First, we see the eye-catching (although nowadays far too common) dismissal of the significance of “facts” – recalling as well the mantra of assorted agitprop advocacies that “facts don’t matter”.
Thus what I would call ‘public truth’ – an assertion demonstrably credible or at least highly-probable to Third Parties – which is itself dependent on established facts or the high-probability of some Event X as being truly and genuinely a “fact”, is shunted aside.
And it is shunted aside in favor of what ‘feels right’.
Instantly we and the entire matter are transported from the relatively solid ground of factuality to the far softer and mushier (one might even say ‘swampier’) ground of “feelings” and what ‘feels right’.
And instantly certain serious questions are generated by this gambit: What establishes that “the feelings” are themselves “right”? By what principles of assessment and on what presumptions are “the feelings” to be considered “right”? On whose authority are “the feelings” declared to be “right”?
And has a new and very volatile and slippery category of ‘public feelings’ been introduced into the matter of what is and is not ‘public truth’? That is to say, it can be characterized as ‘Lots of people feel this way so it has to be (accepted as) true’.
But this gambit veers inevitably into propagandistic and agitprop manipulation: If you can get enough people among the public to ‘feel’ a certain way, then their ‘feelings’ can be asserted to be true for all practical purposes. (Which also brings us to Pragmatism as propounded especially by William James, and Gustav LeBon’s late 19th century study of crowds and how they can be manipulated, and on into the 20th-century governments’ taking over the principles of then-nascent advertising for the purposes of government propaganda – which was given its first major field-testing in World War 1, and was thus ready to hand for the various ‘ism’s and regimes of the post-war and interwar period and on then from there.)
And all that, of course, will seem very operative to persons familiar with the dynamics of the Stampede in our time.
Mr Mitchell,
Rape is usually committed one on one. No witnesses. Yet it's still a crime and rapists still go to jail for a very long time.
I received compensation and an admission of guilt and responsibility from the church.
So you can take what you call my "bogus claims" and place that libel where the sun don't shine.
Have you attempted to remove any of your prelates who enabled child rape?
If you haven't YOU and every other catholic, are an accessory, after the fact, to their crimes.
Have I made myself clear?
Since JR tries to take “Mr. Mitchell” out to the woodshed in the comment of the 17th at 1108AM, I will simply recap the general and conceptual issues I have mentioned that are applicable to material in the 1108AM comment.
In the first paragraph: by the very nature of ‘rape’ events, a) there are few witnesses yet b) it is still a crime.
But crimes require evidence or witnesses if persons are to be convicted of them. This was precisely the obstruction posed by Western law and jurispraxis that Victimism had to undermine; which it did by insisting that ‘personal truth’ (i.e. the allegation story itself) was sufficient in and of itself to substitute for any lack of witnesses or of corroborating evidence.
Nor – as a matter of logical principle – does the absence of witnesses and evidence for any Event X in and of itself provide clear and indubitable proof of the actuality and factuality of said Event X.
In the second paragraph: The settlement cases brought in the Stampede – through long established tortie stratagems discussed and linked-to on this thread – were specifically designed to prompt settlement-payouts from a defendant corporate entity and its insurers, rather than seek trial of each individual allegation (there were, in the LA case, 500-plus plaintiffs and at least as many specific allegations).
Any letters of apology (and there remains at this point no specimen of an actual text and precisely how it may have been worded: e.g. sorrow for the pain or trouble coupled with a clear admission of guilt or responsibility; sorrow for the pain or trouble but with no actual clear admission of guilt or responsibility) would have been elements formally included in the settlement and thus would – with the monies – lie under the same cloud of coercion that the tortie stratagems generated in regard to settlement vs. trial. This is simply a consequence of the working-out of the tortie stratagems explained at great length in the linked-to article in prior recent comments.
In the fourth and fifth paragraphs: in light of the above-mentioned serious and profound conceptual issues and problems, and in regard to any moral obligation for Catholics in regard to their hierarchy and Church: there remains wide latitude not only a) in regard to what action to take but also b) what assessment to make as to the actuality of the claims made (upon which any such action in (a) would be based.
And i) the problems of truth (personal or public) that have been discussed in prior comments, when coupled with the ii) problem of coercion built into the tortie stratagems as also discussed and explicated in prior comments must also be factored into any general assessment, since their combined weight, when added to the issues in my prior paragraphs in this comment, creates more than a modest probability that they had an impact on the entire process.
Nor can any legitimate assessment simply take a short-cut for itself by making unwarranted presumptions and trying thus to ‘presume away’ the above-noted problems.
Actually, very few people who are charged with rape go to jail at all. It’s very hard to get a conviction. I would imagine that there would have to be compelling evidence for a rapist to be sent to jail for a long time. I’m thinking physical evidence would be that compelling evidence although this kind of evidence is difficult to obtain for a variety of reasons
I didn’t say your claims were bogus, go back and read it again.
Here is my exact quote:
“Nothing you put out there is proof and when you accuse P to be a child rapist and accuse all Catholics with being responsible for the rapes then your claims appear to be bogus.”
Key word is “appear”. No Libel there so no need for me to place it where the sun don’t shine. Thank goodness for that. : )
I have not attempted to remove any prelates because I don’t know any prelates who enabled child rape. I also haven’t gone around trying to remove principles, police chiefs, fire chiefs etc. etc. because I don’t know anyone who is allowing child rape to go on. We do have authorities that handle these types of things. They get paid for it too. Now, if you wish to accuse me of being an enabler, right back at ya. When did you go to the police to have your rapist arrested? If you didn’t then you too would be an accessory after the fact if your rapist committed future rapes. This is based on your standards, not mine. See how that works? Alas, after researching who claim to be your abuser, I can see why there was no report to the Police.
You put his name out there so it was easy to dig up information on him in today’s information world. He doesn’t appear to be what you claim him to be. There’s much to be said in what I was able to find and what I was not able to find. I guess that is why you did not go to the police with your accusation. Also, after 1970, he was no longer a Brother and would no longer be under the “watch” of the Catholic Church. As early as 1967, he was out from under the eyes of the Church. There is nothing I could find about him that would lead me to believe he is a child rapist. He was in the public teaching industry for 20+ years with no allegations of impropriety against him. This is not to say that what you claim against him didn’t happen, I wasn’t there. As has been posted here, we can only take the information we have and exam it and see where this leads us.
Mr.Mitchell, The sentence "make your claims less credible" says what about me? One is either raped or not.
"Less credible" leaves me where exactly? It either happened or not.
I woud love to know how you got more information about my perpetrator than I have? Did you Google it? I would really like to know.
Do you think cardinals Law, who transferred Geoghan again and again; or cardinal Mahony, who enabled a perp to escape to Mexico by warning him that the police were after him, do you think those prelates should still be in power? Law was promoted to Rome.
You can "exam" what ever you want. Where you'd get the evidence to "exam", I don't know?
P trys to push that it's the victims who don't want the stories out. But it was always, ALWAYS the church before 2002 who demanded silence.
You aren't here to do anyrthing but cast doubt on ALL victims and or minimize the facts of your prelates failures.
We now have a couple more from JR (and associates). The formatting is more conventionally (or – if you wish – normally) organized and some of the stylistic and content elements are so different that if one didn’t see JR’s name at the head of the comment one might not imagine it to be his.
Be that all as it may.
In regard to the 18th at 957AM:
While JR is quite accurate in asserting that “one is either raped or not”, that bit is not the point at issue in assessing the corpus of allegations in the Abuse Matter (and in Victimist abuse allegations generally).
Since no other persons were present at the alleged or claimed ‘rape’ (we are back to that term again) then it falls into the category of ‘personal truth’ rather than ‘public truth’ – and JR’s easy one-liner either/or set-up here fails precisely because it seeks to conflate and then to hide the conflation-of the two very different concepts of i) ‘personal truth’ and ii) ‘public truth’. This is a classic Victimist gambit and has been essential in ramming through various Victimist-driven legal ‘reforms’.
Rather – as ever – the question here (certainly in my material) has always been: do we have enough information (either in the form of a) corroboration or b) rationally and coherently explicated recounting of the story) to accept at least the high probability of the credibility of the claim … ? That’s about as good as one can do in the internet modality with this sort of thing.
And – to repeat – I do not find that we have gotten any material satisfying either (a) or (b) and consequently the Probability Quotient is rather low.
And – to repeat – we have actually been proffered material that is not only insufficient to ground a high-probability of credibility but also works precisely to increase the probability of non-credibility.
And – to repeat – we have also seen information that increases the probability of the various allegations being highly dubious, meaning that while each allegation must be assessed on the merits of the information we have, yet we must give the allegations as a general group a form of ‘strict scrutiny’ since so many elements (discussed in prior comments) work against any simplistic and easy acceptance of those allegations as a general group.
If the above paragraphs sound a tad repetitive, that is simply the result of the effort to be as clear as possible as to my meaning and intent here. And to do so step-by-step for any who might need each step carefully illustrated.
Thus too the second paragraph fails since it simply repeats the gravamen of the first.
And – to repeat – what is “less credible” is not x) the actuality of the alleged ‘rape’ but rather y) the claim of the actuality of the alleged rape. There is a vital and absolutely essential distinction between (x) and (y) and no effective and competent assessment of any such claim can be conducted unless and until that vital distinction between (x) and (y) is made. But – again – this is precisely the conflation that the Victimist Playbook tries to (and so far, successfully) to run by the general public, with great assistance from far too much of the media.
Thus too then in regard to the third paragraph:
In the first place, we as Third Parties actually have no “information” about the claimed Event except what JR (who is hardly a disinterested Party) has proffered; there is i) no independent corroboration and ii) no notable coherence to the variant re-tellings of the claim about the Event. As Third Parties we are in this complicated position by the very nature of the internet, but this would also be the case in any trial-process if we were, say, jurors.
And this would be true for almost all such allegation-cases in this Victimist era.
And we have seen here on prior threads how the Victimist Playbook develops a stratagem and tactic for avoiding this abyssal problem with its operations: ‘victim’ stories are supposed to be irrational and incoherent and to vary in their details through the various re-tellings g) because victims can’t be expected to remember correctly (unless, but of course, they have one of those pristine ‘recovered/repressed memories’) and/or h) because rational assessment is just a bitter-clingy old hold-over from patriarchally oppressive rationality (about which MacKinnon in her 1989 book goes on at great length and in great detail).
With the objective and result of making all of us Third Parties into First Parties: i.e. that since Victimist stories are to be presumed veracious and accurate, then we can presume that when we have been given a Victimist story about some Event, then we know exactly as much and that we know exactly in the same manner as if we had been present at the Event ourselves and witnessed the whole thing.
But this is a parlor-trick and nothing more. (Time-saver: I am not, as readers can see, saying that the Event itself is a parlor-trick; rather, I am saying that the attempt to turn Third Parties to the Event into First Party witnesses to the Event … is a parlor-trick.)
Thus too the slyly manipulative effort to transform himself into the victim here (rather than the perpetrator of the Victimist stratagem just-described above) reveals itself for what it is. JR might wish to spend less energy on what he’d really like to know and put more time and effort into what readers need to know.
In regard to the fourth paragraph (may we assume that were not a couple-three ‘cardinals Law’?):
In the first place, the Geoghan transfers have been discussed as being failures, probably having much to do with that man’s being the junior relative of a high-ranking former prelate in that Archdiocese; nobody here that I can recall has defended that situation.
Nor was Law “promoted to Rome” since he wound up with what is effectively a (significant) demotion to a post that for all practical purposes is titular pastor of a church there.
And in regard to the LA cases, in light of the competence and scope of police networking and cross-border protocols, then this particular instance (we not given the name of the priest and I am not familiar with the demonstrated specifics of the case) to which JR refers can hardly have been imagined as being a definitive solution to the problem by putting the priest irretrievably beyond the reach of American law enforcement (if indeed at that point the priest was the subject of a police investigation).
In most of the cases we had a chance to examine here (through the release of the LA Times document cache), priests were sent to various facilities in other States for treatment or assessment and thus were most surely not beyond the reach of any police agency that would want to retrieve the priest.
In regard to the fifth paragraph: the fact that we have so little evidence to “exam” is precisely the problem here. But since JR brought his material to the readership then he automatically conferred upon the readership the authority (and, it could very well be said, the responsibility) to “exam” it all.
In regard to the sixth paragraph: JR spins me as trying “to push that it’s the victims who don’t want the stories out”, continuing on then to insist (with a giveaway effort to bolster his otherwise undemonstrated assertion with scare-caps) that “it was always, ALWAYS the church before 2002 who demanded silence”. But as Federal judge Schiltz said – as has been noted here in prior comments on this site – to his knowledge more than half of the settlement cases involved allegant-tortie demands that the cases be kept under a seal of confidentiality.
The reasons for this allegant-tortie demand is hardly irrational: having forced the Church and Insurers to settle (through dynamics and tactics discussed and linked-to here on this site very recently), the allegants/torties most surely would not want the weakness of the allegations to be publicized, since that would both cast into doubt the veracity of the claims and also possibly expose the entire tortie stratagem of bringing cases with many plaintiffs/allegations merely to force a settlement (as revealed by the Wall Street Journal and referenced in prior comments on this thread and others ).
And in regard to that curiously careful qualifying phrase “before 2002”, JR is welcome to put up some evidence for that otherwise unsupported though insistent assertion.
And the comment concludes with yet another effort to spin what this site is trying to do as being merely to “cast doubt on ALL victims and/or minimize the facts of your prelates’ failures” (corrections supplied and scare-caps retained).
In the first place: this is nothing more than an assertion in the service of spin.
In the second place: in light of what I have said even in this comment, then it should be clear that while nobody here is insisting that all hierarchs acted as assertively as might be wished, yet there remains the fact that few cases were as clear-cut as the Victimist Playbook would like us to assume.
In the third place: we cannot legitimately judge anybody from a prior era (i.e. before the ‘raising of consciousness’ as to sex-abuse generally) by the standards of this era (i.e. of the valorization of the Victim) – clearly, no institution or organization, the government itself included, could pass such a test.
In the fourth place: the effort to emphasize “ALL victims” (scare-caps retained) simply reveals the scope of this Victimist-strategy problem, which even JR appears to comprehend on some level. But he is somewhat right: there is indeed an effort to reject the Victimist Playbook’s conflation of the Third and First Party roles, and instead to retain an objectivity that must include some initial doubt (until such time as sufficient evidence or rational explication is provided – which, as the Playbook itself says, may never come).
Your unwarranted and unprovable presumption that the majority of victims and the majority of our lawyers, who happen to be officers of the court as a part of their duties, that we are all criminal fraudsters is delusional.
But then your church thrives on delusion doesn't it. No surprise there.
I wouldn't be talking about coersion if I were you. Your entire purpose here is to coerce the ignorant into believing us rape victims are lying about our rapes. And with out an ounce of proof to back you up.
Screw off scumbag! Crawl back into your holy hole.
On the 17th at 812PM – and in an uncharacteristically well-formatted comment with some rather too-good phrasing – JR will go after ‘Jimmy Mitchell’ and (the “coercion” point) myself.
In the first paragraph we get the phrase “your unwarranted and un-provable presumption”, rather nicely (correction supplied).
But the “presumption” – as JR then describes it – is not “delusional” (and nobody said that ‘all’ allegants “are criminal fraudsters” – we see here another example of creating more convenient quotes and references).
The presumption is – given the highly constrained task of examining evidence in the internet modality – not a matter of ‘proof’ at this site’s level of examination (as I have often explained). Rather, it is a matter of “probability” and I would say that the “probability” of various bits of chicanery – especially in light of the many dynamics I have noted, and recently, here – is very high.
And in addition to all the prior references I have put up in regard to that point, I would add this from an editorial entitled “Surf, Cry, Sue” in the ‘Wall Street Journal’ edition of Friday, April 17, 2015, p. A-18: “Trial lawyers [i.e. torties] have built an empire chasing the potentially injured and convincing them to sue”. And further: “The trial lawyer agenda is not to litigate but to confront the companies with such mammoth [amounts of allegant-plaintiffs] and astronomical legal fees that they will settle regardless of the merit of the claim”.
And when you take this aspect, and add it to the other aspects that created a Stampede-friendly milieu (Victimist legal ‘reforms’, Victimist agitprop, friendly media presentation and treatment, and the hostility of the secular-progressive-radical project towards the Church, the prospect of very tidy sums of ‘compensation’ for allegations that would almost surely not be subjected to any extended analysis or questioning), then this constitutes indeed a “coercion” or coercive situation where defendant organizations would have little if any choice but to settle.
Tortie stratagems have been surfing this milieu for quite some time in a number of areas, and it is hardly “delusional” to consider the (very high) probability that such a strategic approach was not part of the Stampede.
But the psychological “delusional” is then seen in the second paragraph to have another use: not only commenters here but also – have you been waitttttttting forrrrrrrr itttttttttttt? – the Church are “delusional” since “your church thrives on delusion”.
So there’s a tidy little rhetorical connection and thus a method to the madness here.
Then in the third paragraph (whether aimed at myself or ‘Jimmy Mitchell’ or both) we are warned not to “be talking about coercion if I were you” (correction supplied).
And why might that threat be made? Because – doncha see? – “your” (mine, I imagine, more than ‘Jimmy Mitchell’s) “entire purpose here is to coerce the ignorant into believing us rape victims are lying about our rapes” and “without an ounce of proof to back you up”.
In the first place, the “proof” bit has been dealt with many times before and even immediately above in my comment here: it is and must be a matter of Probability, and I again say that certain Probabilities are hardly insignificant.
And while allegations as to any Event X that took place on the Monoplane need to be proven or at least demonstrated as highly-probable by some form of corroborative evidence or reasoning that accounts for all the (few) known facts and elements of the allegation-stories, yet even the Abuseniks – even as recently as a recent comment on this thread – admit that such evidence is hard to come-by.
And there it is: there can be no ‘public truth’ or ‘public knowledge’ accessible to Third Parties and thus we are regressed back to the old ‘spectral evidence’ of the Reformation-era witchcraft trials.
In the second place, readers may consider as they will whether it is I (and others) or whether it is the Abuseniks who are trying to “coerce” and manipulate and distract-from and squelch in the matter of considering this Abuse and Stampede material. This is another nice example of JR’s (and his muse’s) signature I’m Not/You Are gambit. And also – through the wonders of projection – a nifty revelation by the Abuseniks about themselves here.
And the comment then concludes – have you been waittttting forrrr itttttt? – with a nasty epithet or two. Which we are to take, apparently, as merely a stylistic tic and not indicative of deeper issues.
Double Yawn!
Does anyone actually think that the church and more importantly it's insurors are just handing out money to any and all?
That our claims couldn't be accepted by a jury in a civil case?
Or are we to pretend that thanks to false bad PR and a gullible public that juries; insurors judges; shrinks; our lawyers, your lawyers and the police are all wrong in settlements with us?
Well that's just the existing system. You'd rather compensate no one rather than have one or 2 false claims get through that system?
Well I'm very glad the system doesn't abett you in that criminally immoral behavior (pleasant change!). Your prelates are thrilled they haven't been jailed for their crimes and your insurors are thrilled not to go to juries where they'd really lose really big bucks.
This is all about you defending, not the truth but, money. And since your prelates rise (career wise) on the amount they bring in juxtaposed on money going out. The church's whole modus operandi balks. What money going out??? NO NO, says the church No money only comes in. It doesn't go out.
So to protect money you've created your own little world of lies that you might pretend we are the liars. Good luck selling that line of bullshit.
And on to the 19th at 616PM.
In the first paragraph: merely a grade-school effort at implied epithet, but ideas and concepts will do that to some minds, and especially if they are precisely trying not to deal with ideas and concepts.
As to second paragraph and its question as to whether it is to be thought that “the church and more importantly its insurors are just handing out money to any and all?”: Yes, I would say that especially in light of what we know of tortie stratagems and the milieu neatly created by the Anderson Strategies and its assorted abettors in the media, then having “the church and more importantly its insurers” (correction supplied) wind up “handing out money to any and all” rather fairly describes precisely the objective.
Surely, on the basis of the material we have seen on this site, that is just how the overall and time-honored tortie game is played, and that is just what the stratagems called for and that is just what happened.
And as I have said before, many a Bishop or hierarch was put in a hugely difficult position: confronted with a dubious claim / in a Victimist milieu / where to pay informally and immediately merely on the basis of the claim would be simply to invite more such claims / and probably create its own legal problems as to the hierarch doling out Church funds without demonstrated justification / and to call upon Insurers would result in settlements that would both i) be substantial and ii) would most likely result in Insurers demanding the settlement route, thus providing to some mentalities ‘evidence’ that the claims were veracious / and to litigate would result in numerous individual trials of claims that would consume vast amounts of money and resources with very modest possibility of success in a time of media-abetted Stampede (precisely as the torties expected).
The challenge presented to any hierarch by this carefully-calibrated congeries of pressures would be formidably complicated.
Thus as to the third paragraph: in a time of Victimist Stampede and in an era (begun in the 1970s) when ‘corporations’ were presumed to have committed all sorts of Evil and any person claiming victimization therefrom was presumed to be veracious (and even truthy and heroic), then I would say that anything is possible from jurors already soused before-the-fact with Stampede-friendly ‘reporting’.
But there is also the possibility – and given the material proffered on this site not a small one – that juries might indeed realize that there was no basis to this or that allegation/claim or even that such a finding would open the allegant (and the tortie) to charges of Frivolous Lawsuit or even to charges of Perpetrating Fraud Upon The Court or Perjury or to professional charges (against the tortie) for unprofessional (and possibly illegal) conduct.
As to the question posed in the fourth paragraph: Yes, there is indeed something “wrong” with all these settlements as a general tortie strategy (as clearly explicated in various materials I have put up here) and further that there is a high probability of there being something “wrong” with many of the specific settlement cases.
As to the fifth paragraph: we get a classic Playbook coyness: it’s “just the existing system”.
To which I would add: a) this is the “system” that now exists after decades of Victimist law ‘reforms’ that have actually only been regressions in the practice and principles of Law; and b) the prior system (patriarchally and oppressively ‘rational’, as MacKinnon explains in her 1989 book) would indeed have had problems in accepting many of the stories and claims and allegations (which is precisely why Victimists had to get the classical and traditional principles and practice of Law regressed back to the era of ‘spectral evidence’).
And there is a very strong probability that there have been many more than only “one or 2 false claims”, which is another classic Playbook ploy of minimization.
As to the sixth paragraph: JR merely reveals himself with his being “very glad” about the whole thing.
And we see also the “criminally immoral behavior” charge, which i) takes us beyond civil law into criminal law without any demonstrable justification and ii) conflates the criminal and the moral forums, although there is more than enough probability that neither characterization is accurately applied to various actions of the Church (unless, but of course, one first accepts that all or even most of the claims and allegations were veracious – and this simply demonstrates the circular hall of mirrors at the heart of the Stampede).
And the bit about “juries” most likely going along with the torties has been discussed above here.
As to the seventh paragraph: once again we are back to the effort to spin the Matter as being merely one where it is “not the truth” but rather “money” that is at issue. Which, marvelously, is a fine description of the Stampede, brought to us yet again by the workings of projection.
But it is nice to see that JR has finally learned how to spell a Latin phrase he deploys.
The rest of the paragraph merely riffs on its theme.
Ditto the eighth paragraph.
Although once again we get a marvelous bit of self-revelation (unintentional no doubt): the Stampede is indeed built on a whole lot of ‘pretend’ that focused on “money” from Day One.
And that’s no BS.
Here's a present, Bertrand Russell's, Why I'm not a Christian
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F6J8o7AAe8
It's not perfect i.e. "millions of witches burned". But it's good.
On the 20th at 733PM – despite everything that is on the table for discussion – JR will change the subject by proffering an online video of Bertrand Russell going on about why he is not a Christian (he originally gave this lecture on March 26, 1927, to the UK’s ‘National Secular Society’).
Readers so inclined my read his address here
http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html
The reference to “millions of witches burned” comes at the end of the second paragraph in the sub-section headed “The Emotional Factor”.
In the first place, there is utterly no corroboration for this number.
In the second place, Russell is speaking about “Christianity” here and thus includes the post-Reformation era, when the Protestant polities burned far more people as witches than the Church ever did.
Interested readers may consult Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) and Norman Cohn’s Europe’s Inner Demons (1975).
It seems unsurprising that Protestants would be more susceptible to the fear of witchcraft since they had largely done away with both the sacramental power of the priest and sacraments and also with the power of the Church to wield God’s power against the devil. Indeed, early Protestantism refused its ministers any authority to conduct exorcisms; which proscription had to be modified when Protestant layfolk demanded some sort of ministerial relief from satanic afflictions and assaults.
Which also recalls the fact that the Roman Inquisition (i.e. run under the rules of canon law, as opposed to national Inquisitions (such as in Spain) run by the cognizant monarchy) was originally set up to deal with heretics, and only later came to include ‘witchcraft’ after such practices became popular (in the formal sense of the term); one purpose of including witchcraft in the Inquisition was to extend the canon-law jurisprudential principles to persons accused of ‘witchcraft’ – rather than, say, allowing them to be subjected to the type of ‘trial’ that Monty Python so vividly portrayed in their film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
And – interestingly – the very conception of a ‘witch’ (or ‘warlock’) came to be viewed as a form of treason as the nascent national monarchies developed: where in the Middle Ages there were various gradations such as i) persons who harnessed minor supernatural powers to do good or to harm (the latter being considered worse than the former) and ii) persons who were possessed by the Devil in such a way that their free will was compromised.
But then there developed the idea of persons who actually allied themselves to the Devil and willingly and fully made themselves the Devil’s instruments and agents.
This definition enabled the nascent monarchical powers to exert their legal system’s authority; it also, of course, theoretically meant that a ‘witch’ so defined was even more a threat to the Church than a heretic. But this development came about only in the 15th century, only shortly before the Reformation and as the temporal power of national monarchies was beginning to wax.
Which is not to hold the Church of that era completely blameless. In the remainder of the 15th century, various regional Councils and a papal Bull accepted the new concept of witchcraft as both a) an overt and willing alliance with the Devil and b) a treason to the Church at least as heinous as heresy (by this time, ‘heresy’ as a charge didn’t have the clout it used to, and ‘witchcraft’ might have seemed a more useful rationale upon which to proceed).
Naturally, as the various Protestant Reformers allied themselves with local temporal authority (since they could not by themselves reliably fend off the power of the Church), and since the Reformation had opened itself to Satanic concerns by abolishing the sacramental power of its clergy and polities (as noted above here), then the Protestant Ascendancy in Europe resulted in what is now known as ‘The Great Witch Craze’, wherein the new definition of ‘witch’ was considered treason to both (Protestant) Christianity and to the secular monarchs (who still claimed their own authority from God, though not necessarily through the mediating authority of the Church).
But the peak of such trials was post-Reformation (and Protestant), from about 1580 to 1630 and then things trailed off from thence to the mid-1700s.
But overall formal records of the era indicate the number of executed being somewhere between forty and sixty thousand, spread over a period of several centuries and ending in the 17th century.
Russell’s number of “millions” is unsupportable by any known facts or records, and given the population of Europe in those days then the number of “millions” becomes even more phantasmagorical.
However, his penchant for exaggeration in this matter helped fuel subsequent mid-20th century claims by various anti-theist, anti-clerical, secularist, and atheist types for whom, in the service of whatever agendas they were pushing, the wild exaggeration in numbers worked nicely as a way to incite, inflame, and manipulate public opinion and feeling.
Yes Jim, you are correct, you were either raped or you were not. I could not possibly know for certain. I cannot even be sure if you are who you say you are. How could I possibly know for sure? I can only go by what you put up here on this website comment page and do whatever research I can to make my own assessments. As far as what evidence I have, none as far as physical evidence. I have your name and claim and the name of the accused. That’s what I am going on.
What kind of power do Cardinal Law and Cardinal Mahony have that is objectionable to you? Law is retired and even if in the US, would not spend a second in prison. That is a fact. Concerning Cardinal Mahoney , he certainly is in no position of power unless you consider him being a priest In good standing as power.
In regards to why I am here, unless you were directing this comment at P, I am not here to cast doubt on All victims or minimize the failures of the Church or even their culpability. I saw your posts and decided to engage you and examine your claim and see where it leads me. With that said, I doubt I will find a smoking gun one way or the other.
Jimmy, That last bit was for P not you.
You ARE here to throw shade on all victims. IMHO.
The smoking gun in my case is me and my life's wreckage, due in a huge part to my rape.
(The reason Law wouldn't spend time in prison is because the statute of limitation has run out, 7 years in the U.S., His removal to the vatican allowed that time to elapse.)
I went into high school with a full scholarship and great grades, which allowed me to gain that scholarship. All that vanished thanks to the abuse. That's just the truth of it.
On the 21st at 1137AM, “Mr. Mitchell” has now morphed into “Jimmy”. Hi there, ‘Jimmy’, you little dickens, you.
The point is made in the third paragraph that the “smoking gun” is JR’s case is “me and my life’s wreckage” which – we as well as ‘Jimmy’ are informed – was “due in huge part to my rape”.
This third paragraph’s assertion nicely exemplifies a familiar and long-standing Playbook gambit that also, by amazing coincidence, exemplifies a standard trope in any lawsuit, which goes something along the lines of this: at the end of the recitation of the points of the Complaint and the listing of the alleged ‘torts’ perpetrated by the Defendant, there is almost always a variant of the phrase “all to the great damage and detriment of the Plaintiff”.
But now we come thus to the Causality Problem.
As I have noted before several times in comments here, there is the problem of establishing a direct causal connection between the alleged damage and the alleged tort.
In the Billy Doe case in Philadelphia, for example, we have to establish that the alleged abuse somehow resulted in the drug-addled, multiple-story-telling and otherwise ‘challenged’ or ‘afflicted’ (and somewhat queasily un-appetizing) person that Doe as an adult has been revealed to be.
As so often, we are expected to accept in the Doe case that an otherwise high-performing and large-futured waif was almost utterly and rather suddenly derailed from that marvelous life-track, to become what he is today.
His intellectual capacities, his mentation, his very character … all were globally and even permanently deranged by the alleged instance of abuse.
In other cases, we have seen persons on the very cusp of legal adulthood (say, the age of 17), otherwise purportedly high-performing and large-futured, ostensibly deranged almost utterly by an act(s) that did not achieve penetration (although since the individual was – by a matter of months – still eligible to be classified as a ‘minor’, then the act(s) might legally be classified as ‘statutory rape’).
Were one to be a civil attorney taking this case to a jury, one would have one’s work cut out for oneself, to make a rationally and scientifically supportable case for such a chain of causation.
I don’t think it would have much prospect of success in a rational and genuinely scientifically based evidentiary milieu. And perhaps not even in the Victimist-deranged evidentiary milieu of the Stampede.
One would be better advised – as Doe’s upcoming civil case did not do – to follow the Anderson Strategies’ established path of agglomerating a whole bunch of allegants/plaintiffs, and then hope to cow the Defendant corporation (the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, I expect, in the Doe case) into settling the matter in a general settlement, without risking having to put anybody on the stand under adversarial examination under the eyes and ears of a jury that might come to its own (unwelcome) conclusions as to the credibility of the allegation as put forth in the Complaint.
One would not want to risk going forward with an actual trial where one would have to demonstrate rationally and convincingly to a jury that the allegant you see before you would most surely have been a high-performing and quite mature and engaging and accomplished fellow … if only he hadn’t been so totally derailed and deranged by the long-ago act alleged in the Complaint.
And as I have also said about the Doe case and about the Causality Problem in general: there is always the conceptual possibility – and this possibility would also exist in the jurors’ minds after hearing and watching the allegant/plaintiff perform on the stand, and under adversarial examination – that rather than a) the alleged tortious act(s) having caused the obvious problems that the allegant/plaintiff displays, instead the actual sequence is more likely b) that this rather unsavory or unpleasant or dubious character’s problems were the cause of the abuse claim being lodged in the first place.
This is the problem facing any tort attorney in this type of case, and it is a problem that the Anderson Strategies so shrewdly side-stepped by agglomerating so large a number of allegant/plaintiffs that the targeted defendant corporation had no choice but to settle (as the Wall Street Journal and the legal article to which I linked in prior comments have revealed the tortie stratagem for us).
I would also like to make a point in regard to the charge often seen here as to the Church extracting from Mussolini the independence and sovereignty of the Vatican in the 1929 Concordat.
As I noted in recent comments here, the Popes became guardians of the remnants of the City of Rome and then of the (Western) Empire after the fall of the Empire in the 5th century.
Thenceforth and until the 1929 Concordat, the Papacy was always at the mercy of foreign invaders (of whom there were many), who might, and literally did, take the Pope hostage and thus make both Pope and Church an arm of the capturing monarchy or temporal power (one of the last being Napoleon).
Which also meant that the Papacy had to keep as many troops under arms as possible, which required territories whose products could support the forces, and which also meant that the Popes had to constantly be concerned for maintaining alliances with at least some temporal powers. All of this, as is generally realized, distracted from the Church’s primary mission. But as best I can see, in those days there was nothing for it.
Nor was the situation much improved with the Unification of Italy in the period 1860-1870, since Risorgimento Italy was anticlerical and there were grounds for the Papal fears that the new government would institute persecution of Church and Catholics (thus heading down the path taken by the French Revolutionary governments less than a century before).
And with the new government taking over Rome itself at the end of that decade, the Papacy found itself (and the Church) theoretically a tenant-at-will of the Italian government.
Thus it was long-standing goal of the Church to achieve some sort of reliable independence from temporal powers so that it could continue a more purely spiritual mission in the world.
That was impossible until after World War 1 since the Papacy did not have the resources to field an army even modestly capable of protecting it from even the least capable of modern European industrial-state armies.
But then came the League of Nations as a result of World War 1.
Vatican diplomats realized that instead of relying on bare-knuckle military power for protection, they could rely on the combined forces of the League instead.
Provided that the Vatican could claim status as an independent sovereign state (whose existence would then be guaranteed by the League).
Thus in approaching the Concordat of 1929, the Vatican (on behalf of the Church) saw that there was finally the possibility of resolving a problem that had bethumped it and distracted it for 14 centuries.
Mussolini, for his part, was equally ardent for the Church’s support (for his own reasons; Hitler at this point was not a political force on the international scene). And there was – up in the Northeast of Eurasia – Bolshevik Russia, trumpeting loud threats of fanning out from its homeland and taking over Europe itself.
Considering the Concordat, then, we have to bear all of this in mind.
In regard to the numbers of false claims in sex-abuse cases (not simply in the Catholic Abuse Matter but generally), two articles appear today that are of relevance.
First, the ‘Wall Street Journal’ reviews (“The Plague of Campus Rape”, print edition of Tuesday, April 21st, page A17) the book ‘Missoula’, by John Krakauer.
In the process, the reviewer notes the flawed study by David Lisak ‘et al’ from December 2010 (appearing in the’ Journal of Violence Against Women’) that claims only a 2-10 percent rate of false allegations in “sexual-assault reports”.
The reviewer notes that “this statistic is misleading” since that study “treats as presumptively true all sexual-assault complaints that authorities have not formally labeled either true or false (the vast majority), including most of those dropped for insufficient evidence”. Whereas “older studies suggest the possibility that up to 40%-50% of accused men may be innocent”.
The reviewer – himself a Brookings Institution nonresident Fellow who has co-authored the book ‘Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case’s – notes the clear influence of the Obama administration’s own agenda.
I proffer this to be taken in connection with all the other material I have put up in regard to the question of the possible (or, I would say) probable rate of false allegations. And I would especially note the added effect in the Catholic Abuse Matter of the Anderson Strategies, the general tortie template for going after deep-pockets corporate defendants, and the complex synergy of interests marshaled in the service of promoting the Stampede against the Church for their various agendas and purposes.
I would also note this article from the online magazine Slate, which further explores the matter:
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/12/college_rape_campus_sexual_assault_is_a_serious_problem_but_the_efforts.html
The second article appearing today is from the ‘New York Post’ (“Harvard’s Wacky Campus-Sex Survey”, print edition of Tuesday, April 21st, page 19).
Harvard has sent, under the authority of the University President, a 67-part anonymous email survey to each of its degree-seeking students.
It has, the article’s author notes, numerous problems.
The first is the formulation of the questions.
One example: Since you got to Harvard has anyone in any way associated with the University “continued to ask you to go out, get dinner, have drinks or have sex even though you said ‘No’?” Because, the survey says, if so then “you may be a victim of sexual misconduct or sexual assault or sexual harassment”.
That’s a pretty broad net and that’s a pretty broad menu of possible victimizations.
And – I would add – if you are simply given the option of a Yes or No reply, then a reply of ‘Yes’ could be (mis-)construed by tabulators as being a Yes to ‘sexual assault’ as easily as a Yes to something far less (if anything at all).
The article notes that nowhere is there a clear definition of ‘rape’ or “forceful sexual assault” or “misconduct” or “harassment”. And we have seen this vital problem of ‘definitions’ in regard to our own consideration of the Stampede.
Although, the survey advises, “these behaviors could include remarks about physical appearance or persistent sexual advances” and could also “include threats of force” aimed at getting somebody to “engage in sexual behavior” ranging from “nonconsensual or unwanted touching, sexual penetration, oral sex, anal sex, or attempts to engage in those behaviors” or “tweeting sexual remarks”. Which, again, is a very broad net.
And, as the article itself notes, there is precious little daylight between something that is merely an “obnoxious” behavior and something that is materially connected to an actual victimization (unless, of course, you subscribe to the theory that even “obnoxious” behaviors are ‘victimizing’ without any larger motive and that so-called ‘micro-aggressions’ – which can even be un-noticed by the recipient/’victim’ – are within the scope of the survey and of the University’s concerns).
And – as noted – this is an anonymous survey so nobody is going to be corroborating your answers.
In fact, in the entire survey, the actual term ‘rape’ does not appear. Which may reflect current PC concerns over upsetting persons by using the very term ‘rape’ and thus ‘triggering’ unpleasant memories or simply unpleasant thoughts. Or it may reflect the awareness on the part of the University (and ‘advocates’) that there most likely aren’t enough actual rapes, and the net must be made broader and cast wider in order to Keep The Ball Rolling.
And the same problems appear in the section that seems to indicate that the University is leaning toward the new ‘affirmative consent’ standard by which any sexual encounter must advance to each level of engagement only with the “active, ongoing, voluntary agreement” of both parties – with, of course, no definition of what each of those adjectives actually is supposed to mean in practice.
The survey – the article concludes – is “badly written”. And yet it is from the highest levels of the Harvard administration.
The article’s author sees this survey as an effort by the University to placate and “cover its behind” in light of sustained and ever-increasing government regulatory pressures to – I would say – not only Keep The Ball Rolling, but also to Keep The Ball Rolling Ever Faster.
One must also wonder, then, if this is simply i) an example of a stunning lack of competence on the part of those authorities in the University who composed it and those authorities in the University who approved its text or ii) a deliberately vague and generalized instrument the purpose of which is only to garner as many ‘Yes’ responses as possible for the purposes of inflating numbers and providing a lead-in to many many more ‘stories’ and claims.
Again, the Stampede in the Catholic Abuse Matter has always been synergistic with the larger sex-abuse ‘advocacy’ agenda, which is supported, and has been for quite a while, by the government itself.
I would make the following addendum to my comment about the Church and the 1929 Concordat with Mussolini’s Italy.
By 1929 the Church and the Vatican also had fresh in their minds the fate of the Russian Orthodox Church and its people, clergy and hierarchs at the hands of the Soviets in the period immediately following the accession of the Bolsheviks to power.
As early as 1905 Lenin, echoing Marx (who was echoing de Sade and Novalis from the 18th century), had referred to religion as “the opium of the people” and the New Soviet Order – expected at that time to be extended throughout Europe if not also the world – would have no truck with religion; the new Soviet state was the first in history to be ideologically opposed to religion in any form. Which made the Russian Orthodox Church (people, clergy and hierarchs) prime targets of that regime.
In addition to various ways in which Orthodox believers were increasingly stripped of status and even the most basic opportunities in the Soviet New Order, Orthodox Church property was expropriated and nationalized, churches closed or wrecked and demolished or re-purposed, and there followed all the rest of the panoply of anti-religious strictures totalitarian governments can impose upon their targets.
And just in its first five years, the Bolshevik regime executed 28 Bishops and 1,200 priests. Under the particular attention of the OGPU (granddaddy of the KGB and daddy of the NKVD) – which had a special Section completely dedicated to the obliteration of religion – almost all of the clergy were eventually sent to camps and/or executed, including Metropolitan Veniamin, who was executed for refusing to hand over sacred vessels; Metropolitan Peter was imprisoned. Patriarch Tikhon spoke out against Bolshevik atheism, denounced the killing of the Tsar’s family, and for his trouble he was blamed by the Bolsheviks for sabotaging their massively lethal and failed collectivization plan in 1921. He was put under house arrest in the Donskoy Monastery where he died in 1925 (ironically, he was buried in the monastery’s chapel, while the remains of Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD who oversaw the most prolific period of killings in Stalin’s Terror-Purge of the mid-1930s, were dumped into a mass common state grave on the monastery grounds – by then converted to a government penal institute for children – after he himself was ‘purged’ once he had done Stalin’s dirty-work … such were the ups and downs of life at the top in the Soviet state).
At any rate, the Vatican would have had the example of the fate of the Russian Orthodox Church clear in its mind as the possibility of a Concordat (and Vatican independence) began to take shape.
Hitler, as we recall, was not at that time a political power and indeed when the Concordat was signed in February, 1929, Hitler’s Nazi Party was declining in influence due to Germany’s remarkable economic recovery in the mid-1920s. But then in October of 1929 the Wall Street crash gave Hitler a new opening as Germany’s prosperity turned into pervasive ruin, an opportunity which he seized artfully with the results we all know.
On the 21st at 11.57 a.m. JR says… "the smoking gun in my case is me and my life's wreckage, due in a big part to my rape"
He had earlier said that he was forced to masterbate, or was it being forced to engage in oral sex. Anyway am pretty sure he never said it was sodomy, which to my mind is what the word "rape" implies. He alleges the perp was a teaching brother at his school. Given the locality and time that this happened, at the school, it all sounds rather improbable. The crazy man would have had to have been almost suicidal, given the risk he was taking. Because it would have been a suicidal risk to his reputation and future career. What if somebody had walked in?. What if his hapless victim had ran out screaming for somebody to help? How could he be sure that the victim would not tell his parents? The perp didn't know how his victim was going to react? Did he?
All very incredible. That is why real pedaphiles groom their victims, so that the risk of being caught is mimimized. But let me, for the sake of argument, accept JR's story as factual.
So what have we got?. I know that at that time a teenage boy would masterbate under the blankets with a copy of Playboy. By itself, it didn't ruin his life. I also recall, at that time, being surprised to see two teenage boys kissing and surmised they might also be doing oral sex on each other. But each of them grew out of it, later married girls, and had heaps of kids. Research has since confirmed that same-sex attraction is not uncommon… and most do grow out of it. So oral sex would not, by itself, ruin somebody's life.
Yet according to JR the consequences of this sexual abuse did have a profound impact on his future life. Left him a virtual "wreckage". It is common for alleged victims to claim their lives "were totally ruined". But with any claim for personal injury the claimant must maximize the harm done to them…. in order to get a big compensation payout. Publion raises a good point when he says that cause and effect are frequently not proven. The causal link is not really established. It is all just presumed? Wow!
And JR says he got a million dollars in compensation. Lucky the perp was a Catholic teacher… and not his next-door neighbour.
Statuatory RAPE is what it's called when a child is touched sexually by an adult, period.
So RAPE is what it is.
I was doing the lead in the school play in '63.: Christy in " The Playboy of the Western World".
We got out of school around 2:30 in the afternoon and had to wait an hour for the young women in the cast to arrive from their catholic schools for rehersal.
I was failing chemistry: McGloin's class; and he ordered me to report for "coaching" to his small private locked office between his class room and chem lab.
He punished me for not getting the symbols for chemical names correct by twisting my arm behind my back and rubbing it down the front of his pants. First on the outside then on the inside between his jockey shorts and his pants then escalating again to inside his underwear….. Am I making myself clear?
I was a very naive 16 year old who was like a deer in the headlights.
OVERWHELMED!
Having no idea what to do. Who would believe me if I told? His word against mine. He was a religious. I was a kid. Adults always "won" in my mind. And religious definitely always won. Would I be in more trouble if I told? I was 16!
My life's wreakage was: NO relationships. Lots of promiscuity. Fired from all but 2 of the jobs I ever had.
I was a straight "A" student with a full scholarship when I entered my high school.
I received the second, if not the first, most awards in my grade school graduating class out of 40 kids.
And then a life time of chronic unemployment and no emotional relationships.
And if you think $1,000,000 covers that? You are an idiot.
In regard to the 22nd at 1047AM:
First (and we have been over all of this before), “statutory rape” is not the same as “rape” unless one is merely playing word-games. “Rape” is the forcible penetration of person A by person B against the will of Person A; “Statutory Rape” – as JR himself acknowledges – is merely “when a child is touched sexually by an adult”.
The determining factor in “statutory rape” is the age of the recipient: if a child or minor (and the defining age limits vary among States), then it is only the age of the recipient that creates the charge, and not the act. Thus, in the matter of, say, “sexually touching”: what is merely a low-grade of sexual assault if the recipient is an adult or non-child or non-minor (defined variously among the States) becomes “statutory rape” if committed against a non-adult (‘child’ or ‘minor’, variously) simply and merely on the basis of age.
In other words, ‘statutory rape’ may actually involve an act no more invasive than – if you wish – “sexual touching”.
Thus the best that could be said with any accuracy is that JR was ‘statutorily raped’. But merely to select the more vivid ‘rape’ out of the term ‘statutory rape’ is, as I said, nothing more than word-play, albeit a very inflammatory and manipulative type of word-play.
Thus too we see the characteristic give-away “period” which he so often deploys when attempting to ram home an assertion that is of itself weak or dubious.
We also note yet another discrepancy in the age: this time it is sixteen, rather than (as very recently given) seventeen.
We also note – as was noted in documents proffered by JR from the released LA case’s document cache– that he was failing in at least one class, and that class just happened to be the one taught by the teacher he later accused of molestation/abuse/rape.
What actually happened in the private office remains, for Third Parties, as – at best – ‘personal truth’ rather than ‘public truth’ and readers may consider it as they will. As it is related here, this time, there is nothing more than a “rubbing” of the student’s arm against the phallic area of the teacher.
And thus any tort attorney would have difficulty in building a case for grievous, comprehensive and permanent damage on an instance of “rubbing” of an arm against a groin. (A very real difficulty which was so shrewdly side-stepped by the Anderson strategy of multiple plaintiffs – and in this case, 500 or more plaintiffs.)
Thus, if it is accepted that JR here has indeed given us a “clear” (thus accurate and veracious) account, then it is hardly surprising that the matter was ultimately dealt-with by a classic Anderson and tortie stratagem of including it in a massive multiple-plaintiff case where ‘settlement’ rather than examination on the merits was the almost-guaranteed route to pay-out.
Thus then, we are back to the Causality Problem: could any reasonable Third Party (especially a juror) be rationally expected to accept the Complaint’s proposition that an instance of “rubbing” would create the grievous, comprehensive , permanent, catastrophic and life-wrecking damage alleged? Readers, as Third Parties, may consider this as they will.
It will be noted that in my presentation here I am operating on the acceptance of the description of the tortious event as accurate.
The “straight ‘A’” status was – as implied in the material proffered – an alleged description of the student’s successful grammar school record, before he entered high school. Another problem for a tort attorney might then have been: explaining a less-successful high-school achievement preceding the “rubbing” event in such a way as would preclude a juror’s coming to the conclusion that a less-than-successful student, in danger of losing a scholarship, lashed out at a teacher in whose class he was failing by making the allegation. This would have been a difficult task for any tort attorney.
But clearly, from the documents released in the cache mentioned above, this was the conclusion reached by school administrators at the time. It cannot be legitimately characterized as irrational.
As for the various afflictions throughout the subsequent life, we are yet again faced with the difficulties I discussed in regard to the Doe case in Philadelphia and in regard to such allegation-cases generally: did the alleged tort cause the damage, or did the damage drive the lodging of the allegation? For Third Parties as defined in commentary here – readers or hypothetical jurors – this problem remains a core element.
Nor can anyone taking cognizance of these vital and core problems legitimately and accurately characterizable as “an idiot”.
"MERELY"!
Neither my family; nor the nuns; nor any of the other teachers I had, EVER rubbed my or anyother child's laps during class or any place else. I'm talking about the GROIN, the GENITALS, you piece of dung.
How many teachers ever did that to you or in front of you?
What P fails to tell you about the Bolsheviks is that the church in Russia OWNED 60% plus of all the arrable land in Russia.
28 Bishops killed? What were these "impoverished" bishops up to that someone thought they deserved killing?
Feeding the poor were they? Educating the uneducated? Or was it protecting "sacred vessels" while famine reigned for the impoverished? How like Jesus!
Or maybe siding with/ spying for/ financing/ blessing the white armies and the land "expeditionary" forces from the U.S. and Britain who had invaded Russia? Armies beaten out of Russia by Trotsky and the Red army.
A well loved religion doesn't easilly engender the hatred that would cause 28 bishops' murders.
I agree the vatican was scared of the Russian revolution. They held even more wealth than the orthodox church. And they had engendered an equal amount of hatred of their pompous arrogance. Remember the fights in vatican 2 over the lengths of cardinals' vestments' trains? That was the real catholic church before and after st. John XXIII. Closet queens fighting about their embroidered "drag" while children starved.
People don't kill good bishops easily. Good bishops are defended by good people.
In regard to the 22nd at 1111AM:
As to the first paragraph:
What JR has failed to tell us is where he got the figure of “60%”. A corroborating reference would be nice, especially in light of the fact that on prior occasions he has told us that the Church owns or constructively controls a significant chunk of the land under the City of Chicago.
Does this figure reflect the fact that in the Tsarist era there was no legal distinction made between the government and the Church, such that the figure (if indeed it is accurate in the first place) would reflect the amount of arable land owned by the (Tsarist) government?
Or does this figure actually correspond to the amount of land owned by the nobility rather than the Tsar/Church?
We have no information as to any of these hardly irrelevant questions. Surely, since he has made the assertion, JR has this information handy and could quickly resolve the problems arising from his uncorroborated assertion.
As to the second paragraph:
Are we to infer that even if the Church owned all that land, the killing of the Bishops (and the clergy, numbering in the many tens of thousands by the time Stalin had gotten through) was somehow OK because “someone thought they deserved killing”? (That “someone”, of course, being the Bolshevik/Soviet regime.)
As to the third paragraph:
Merely a further riff on the second paragraph’s bit, although we are then given the added zingy bit that perhaps those killed by the regime were not “like Jesus” anyway. And could JR rationally and coherently demonstrate how Jesus would have justified the regime’s extermination of so many on that basis?
As to the fourth paragraph:
Are we to infer that the Orthodox Church’s support of the White Cause (against the violent usurper Red regime) was somehow evil or irrational or – why not? – un-Jesus-like? Did any subsequent historical developments demonstrate that the Orthodox Church’s fears and doubts about the value or dangers of the Bolshevik/Soviet revolution and its policies were misplaced or inaccurate?
Is the dispatch of Allied forces to assist a formal Allied government against an illegitimate revolution (in fact, doubly so, since the Bolsheviks did not overthrow the Tsar, who had already abdicated and effectively ended the monarchy, but rather overthrew Kerensky’s government which had replaced the Tsar after his abdication) to be considered an ‘invasion’?
Is JR’s considered opinion of the failure of those efforts to reverse the Bolshevik undermining of the actual Russian Revolution (resulting in Kerensky’s government) to be in any way and ultimately a good thing?
More to the point, were the Orthodox Church’s concerns groundless?
As to the fifth paragraph:
The Orthodox Church was almost obliterated by the Bolshevik/Soviet regime, not by some general uprising of the people against the Church. So “well-loved” doesn’t enter into it; the regime was ideologically opposed to religion from the days of Marx and Marx’s view was re-affirmed by Lenin. And what then to make of the fact that Stalin had to re-establish the Orthodox Church in order to motivate the Russian people in the Great Patriotic War?
And – to repeat – the Orthodox hierarchs and clergy were murdered by the regime, not the people.
As to the sixth paragraph:
On what basis can JR corroborate his assertion that the Vatican “held even more wealth than the Orthodox Church” (correction supplied)?
And are we to believe that the Vatican had no concern for anything but its own survival? Was the Church’s fear for the survival of European and Western culture misplaced? From the beginning of the regime until its end in the reign of John Paul II there was an abiding concern for the wreck of that culture and all the damage that would be caused to human beings by its destruction (to be replaced, by some, with a Cabaret culture).
And from such profoundly serious issues JR then slides down into eructating about vestments at Vatican 2.
But there’s a reason for that: in his mind, the vestment matter was “the real Catholic Church before and after John XXIII” and the rest of it. Readers may judge this bit as they will.
And then a trope we’ve seen before from him: good people like good bishops, and good people kill bad bishops. And reads can take this bit of logic or declamation as they will. The logic – as best can be figured out here – is that if good people kill a bishop, then it must have been because he was a bad bishop. Such logic.
And – as noted above – the Orthodox hierarchs and clergy were killed by the regime, and not the people.
But wasn’t it a zingy concluding bit?
The violent Reds? Millions of Russians had died in WWI violence; that horror is what started the revolution that ousted the tsar. No Reds controlling those pre revolution bloodbaths.
If the orthodox church (correction supplied) were truely loved by the people. The hierarchs would have been protected by the people. They weren't.
The fight over cardinals' train lengths happened in vatican 2. I didn't invent that.
The CNN special "Holy Money" referenced the church's major ownership of downtown Chicago.
The vatican as you refer to the ROMAN catholic church has always only cared about it's own power and survival. Remember how much it cared for the Jews, Commies Gypsies Jehovah's Witnesses and Gays during WW2? Why it cared for them so much it let them die en mass without a word at mass.
Oh yea the church keeps it's money top secret; but it's so called "morality" it never shuts up about.
Where does that hit on your hypocricy meter?
the ROMAN catholic church has more wealth to protect than the orthodox church's; because it was connected to at least 6 empires world wide; and had "inherited" the wealth of the pagan empires religions that had preceeded the rise of christianity. That's a big pile of gelt.
When your leadership worried more about what it's wearing than what it's most destitute children are eating and that it had no shame in debating dress in vat2 over the necessities of the poor. That's the real ROMAN catholic church.
I will proceed down the latest cache of comments as they appear chronologically on the site. I may have to do it over the space of several comments, since in order to do this job properly, it will take some space. Plop is easily tossed, but if it is to be countered then it takes some time and space to do the job properly.
In regard to the 23rd at 1028AM:
As to the first paragraph: Russian military casualties in WW1 are estimated variously between 1.7 and 2.35 million; another 410,000 are estimated to be civilian casualties.
Contrasted to this the Soviet State (those “violent Reds”) was responsible – through direct execution or as a consequence of policies such as collectivization and policies targeted against specific sub-nationalities within the USSR – for tens of thousands of kulaks executed and somewhere between 6 and 8 million who died as a result of the famines created in 1932-1933. And then there was the Great Purge of the later 1930s
And while the military casualties were a result of military action – where casualties are somewhat unavoidable (although I am no fan of Tsarist military strategists) – yet the millions of other deaths were a direct consequence of official State policy (which usually is not supposed to create the deaths of millions of its own citizens).
And the Soviets – like all revolutionary groups and movements – subscribed to the necessity and legitimacy of State terror as a way of jump-starting the march to the glorious revolutionary future and to jump-start various social-engineering schemes. Thus the French Revolution, Mao’s regime which killed so many millions in the famines of the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s regime which is estimated to have killed one and half to two million out of a population of seven million (if you owned a pair of eyeglasses then you could read and that meant you were de facto a ‘bourgeois’ and you were executed).
There were no “bloodbaths” under the Tsarist monarchy that even approached those numbers of deaths and certainly no Tsarist monarch embraced a formal policy of State Terror and conceptually aimed at so many types and classes of Russians and sub-nationalities as did the Bolshevik/Soviet regime.
This is borne out by the numbers. After the 1991 fall of the USSR regime, its own documents revealed that 681,692 were shot (merely) during 1937 and 1938, an average of about 1000 per week. The Tsarist monarchy executed 3,932 on charges of ‘political crimes’ during the period 1825-1910, an average of less than one per week.
So then: there were no “pre-revolution bloodbaths” and merely on the basis of the 1937-1938 figures, the Reds were a thousand times more “violent” (which, of course, doesn’t take into account the millions of Soviet citizens and sub-nationalities who were killed or died as a result of Soviet policies before the Great Purge of 1937-1938).
As to the second paragraph: we get again yet another variant of JR’s logic, which is not only flawed but based on an abyssally inapt historical presumption. If the Russian Orthodox clergy had been ‘good’ – we are informed – then the Russian people would have risen up to defend them and since the Russian people – it is asserted – did not, then obviously the Russian Orthodox clergy were not ‘good’.
If JR could provide historical evidence that the Russian people i) deliberately chose not to defend their clergy because ii) they thought the clergy were not ‘good’, he can share it with us.
And if JR’s assertion were even remotely to be presumed credible and accurate, then why did Stalin find himself obliged to reinstate the Orthodox Church in order to motivate the citizenry to wage the Great Patriotic War? (And why, thinking of a bit further on down in this comment of his, did Putin see himself obliged to do the same much more recently?)
As to the abyssal historical presumption: it is anachronistic to assume that one could ‘protest’ or ‘oppose’ the Soviet regime the way modern Westerners are used to the relatively cushy practices of today or even the way Gandhi fared against the Brits in India.
If, for example, somebody either unhinged or selflessly truthy or both were to have handcuffed himself to the dais at a Party Congress or Politburo meeting (presuming he survived long enough to get that far), then what do we imagine would have happened to that person? If Gandhi had tried his famous tactics against the Soviet regime on behalf of its bloodily murdered sub-nationalities, what do you suppose would have happened to Gandhi and how long would he have lasted as a living being?
(This echoes an earlier JR bit about the Poles being complicit in the Holocaust because they did not even ‘sit down on the tracks’ to block the extermination-bound trains. How long, do you think, any such persons would have lasted in the face of the Nazis, trying to pull a tactic that actually does not surface in Western history until various groups in the US tried to block trains with Vietnam-bound troops or supplies and, a few years before that, various groups in the UK tried to block British government trains or convoys bringing atomic weapons or supplies to various UK secure sites? And this entire gambit recalls the Stampede gambit of judging the Church of an earlier era by the standards and practices of a subsequent era.)
As to the third paragraph: nobody denied (although I have no knowledge or information about it) the hierarchs’-vestment controversy at Vatican 2. My point was that such a bit, proffered as further proof in an already dodgy effort to address the serious and profound problems then under discussion, merely serves to indicate the consequences of a basically plop-tossy approach trying to deal with major and serious and complicated historical issues.
As to the fourth paragraph: the best I could find was an October 2nd, 1909 (page 502) reference in Vol. 42 of the Economist journal (not to be confused with the modern UK magazine of the same name) to the effect that the Church had purchased a half-block plot of ground in Chicago from Washington Blvd. between 51st Ave. and 51st Court for the purposes of building a parish school/church complex connected to a newly-erected parish in that area of the city.
The link is six lines long and I think it will trigger this site’s rejection mechanism so readers may simply enter something like ‘the Catholic Church owns the ground under the city of Chicago’ where they will find a Google-books link. If JR has any better information that more accurately supports his assertion, then he can share it with us here. Otherwise my surmise is that any more modern ‘news report’ is simply a hashed-up version of this 1909 plot purchase as then amplified and deranged for their own purposes by various interests.
And wouldn’t one imagine that if the Church did indeed exercise “major ownership of downtown Chicago” today, then it would have received more play and come up more often in contemporary media discourse?
As to the fifth paragraph: we get merely an assertion of JR’s own devising (or his muses’) that the Church “has always only cared about its own power and survival” (corrections supplied). He then attempts to ‘corroborate’ his stupefying claim by pointing-to the Church’s history of “how much it cared for the Jews, Commies Gypsies Jehovah’s Witnesses and Gays” (corrections not supplied).
This constitutes so hefty a pile of historical problems that its proffer here as if it were all clearly demonstrated and historically established (he could at least have rehearsed his take on all of these historical phenomena) qualifies as mere plop-tossing. And as such readers may consider it as they will.
And we get once again more of the Atwill material, which – as readers may recall – insists that the Church is known [though only informally] as the “Roman” Catholic Church (scare-caps omitted) because the Roman Imperial government invented it out of whole cloth (along with Jesus, Paul, the Pauline Corpus, the Gospels and who knows how much else). Readers may continue to consider that claim as they may.
And once again (we apparently have gotten the contents of the same 3×5 we got before from the plop-toss file) the assertion that the Church did nothing for any of those groups, even deploying the rhetorically cutesy but historically ridiculous bit about letting them “die en masse without a word at Mass” (corrections supplied). How on earth can this assertion be supported? Was JR at every Mass relevant to this assertion?
And if JR imagines there were simple and easy ways to deal with totalitarian governments or societies indulging in their own particular preferences or prejudices, then he can explicate all that further.
Then – rather than provide any documentation for his claim – JR will try his hand at ‘historical analysis’. And the manner of it is on this wise: since the Church “was connected to at least 6 empires world-wide” and since it had “inherited the wealth of the pagan empires
The sixth and seventh paragraphs merely riff on what JR – itself a revelation – apparently considers his competent historical revelations in the prior paragraphs.
As to the eighth paragraph: JR will attempt to demonstrate more of his historical chops not by providing documentation but simply by indulging in the following bit of historical ‘logic’: since the Church “was connected to at least 6 empires world wide” and since it had “’inherited’ the wealth of the pagan empires religions that had preceded the rise of Christianity” (which is itself a far too complex and nuanced sentence for JR’s demonstrated capacities) then the Church “has more wealth to protect than the orthodox church’s” (corrections not supplied).
What can be said about this hash? That “connected to” is far far too vague, and slyly so: it neglects the fact that the Church did not control any of those “empires” and indeed it was the European monarchs or the original Roman Empire that actually went out and made whatever contact was made with those “world wide … empires”. Nor were any of those temporal powers inclined to share wealth to any great degree (the Spanish, for example, needed every cent they could get out of the New World for their various dynastic and imperial ventures closer to home).
And we don’t even now to which “world wide … empires” JR is trying to refer since he doesn’t list them.
And the Roman temple religion did not have a great deal of ‘inheritable’ wealth, since it was an arm of the Roman State and the “wealth” went to the State.
So JR’s bit here is “a big pile”, surely, but the only conclusion to be drawn is that he either needs to read and study a lot more, or else make fewer assertions, or else get himself some better-informed and more competent muses.
Jesus, wouldn't kill anybody but how many millions have been butchered in his name over he eons? The Nazi Armies belt buckles announced "God is on our side" in case anyone missed the connection between Jesus and slaughter. Last time I heard you say Jesus is "God" isn't he?
You're like the last druid priests must have been. Howling out damnations on the new religion calling it: what ever that time's version of "cabaret culture" might have been.
Too bad they didn't obliterate the orothdox church.
Now it's back on top. Fooling the ignorant alcoholic Russian mystics. They'll be finding Jesus' face in potato latkas in Russia again. Miraculous!
orthodox.
Your undeservedly "beloved" JP2 wasn't very "concerned " about Maciel's victims now was he?
Oh no! Raped seminarians were a dime a dozen in the ROMAN catholic church.
But a fascist money maker like Maciel was far more important and "valuable" than raped future priests.
Where's the hypocricy needle now?
Jesus, if he existed, wouldn't kill anyone. He said "Turn the other cheek" but that sure didn't apply once ROME made christianity THE state religion. Over night it used the cross as a symbol to kill: In Hoc Signus (conquer). Conquer, quite the word for a Prince of Peace. The sword became the cross's best buddy, (talk about hypocricy). That immoral love affair still goes on.
Moving on then to the 23rd at 1025AM:
We are informed that “Jesus wouldn’t kill anybody” (correction supplied). This may well be true of his strictures and exhortations for individuals, but the key problem is: what is to be the path followed by groups and institutions that developed to take His message through history? Which is a problem that He never faced in His earthly life and which is precisely the type of issue that required not only an ongoing body of believers but also some form of authoritative sussing-out of the meaning of His statements as that body of believers faced an earthly history that extended far beyond His own earthly life and circumstances. That’s precisely how the Church developed (nor have the Protestants or any other world religions had great success with simply allowing various sub-groups or individuals to interpret His message as they saw (or felt) fit).
And while the Nazis retained the Wilhelmine “Gott Mit Uns” saying on military belt-buckles, the Church certainly did not approve of the Nazis and this indicates again precisely what I said in the immediately preceding paragraph: if there is no authoritative central instrument for deciding what is an authentic and what is an inauthentic interpretation or adaptation of Jesus’ sayings, then just about any individual (the Reformation) or government (the Nazis, among others) can claim that they are genuinely and indubitably doing what Jesus would do.
And the Nazi retention was merely a sop to people’s sensibilities: Hitler conceptually had no use for religion (any more than did Mussolini, who said so pithily: Nothing against the State, nothing outside the State; nothing above the State). Hitler tried to set up his own version of the Church in Germany when he realized that he couldn’t control the Catholic Church or even the dissenting elements in the Protestant churches in Germany.
And the comment trails off with (as best can be determined) some sort of attempted snark about the Trinity.
In regard to the 23rd at 1035AM:
As to the first paragraph: JR opines that it’s too bad “they didn’t obliterate the orthodox church”. “They” pretty much did – but then “they” had to revive it for the Great Patriotic War as did also Putin, who had to re-connect his government with the Orthodox Church in order to enhance the government’s legitimacy among the people.
And then – apparently realizing on some inchoate level that the Orthodox Church’s return meant somehow that it was considered vital to ‘the people’ and by ‘the people’ – he tries to tamp down the fire he inadvertently started by an epithet: those ‘people’ are merely “ignorant alcoholic Russian mystics” and are being ‘fooled’. Yah. He’s a real Wig of the People, no?
As to the “potato latkas”: it’s “latkes”.
In regard to the 23rd at 1040: Back to Maciel in regard to JP2, although we have discussed at length the failures of JP2 to be sufficiently skeptical of some of his priestly associates and why that might have been.
Then in the second paragraph, the bit about “raped seminarians” being “a dime a dozen” and (have you been waitttting forrrr ittttttttt?) again with “the ROMAN catholic church” (scare-caps retained). Readers may judge it as they will.
And the comment trails off with further riffing on the theme.
In regard to the 23rd at 1050AM: Once more around the block with Jesus. Once again we see here – beyond the usual demonstration of such theological, historical, and logical chops as JR might (or might not) have – the old saw, beloved of anti-religious and anti-clerical and atheist types: that since Jesus didn’t mention anything about a ‘church’ then His material must be taken a) not only as referring only to individuals but also b) that no institution built upon His message could/should be built.
But humans don’t work like that (as the Protestants quickly discovered in the early Reformation period and subsequently). Humans who believe they have a good thing seek to continue it and that means – willy or nilly – institutionalizing it in some form. Lenin took Marx’s original statements but did not simply apply them to individual Bolshevik believers; instead he erected the believers into an institution (the Party) and then went further and assigned the institution the job of imposing the Marxist beliefs on everybody they could, by whatever means they could – terror included (and necessarily so, in Lenin’s view as also in the view of the French Revolutionaries). And as the Progressives did in the USA (under the constrictions imposed by the Constitution and Western political culture): they claimed the existence of a benevolent and omni-competent set of ‘elites’ whose technological chops would have to be accepted by everybody else (i.e. ‘the people’) as the best way for the country to go and they didn’t think much of anybody who disagreed with them.
In that sense, then, Lenin’s vision was to set up an alternative religion (albeit a thoroughly this-worldly and Monoplanar one) to Christianity and Catholicism (Christianity’s most organized representative).
And thus it has been with secularist Leninists and Progressives and totalitarians generally ever since.
And we get a repetition of the nonsensical effort at Latin with “in hoc signus” – which does not translate as “conquer”. But the plop-tossing requires “conquer” so – to JR’s mind – “conquer” it must be.
And then he concludes with a bit on “immoral love affair[s]”, which I thought particularly delicious.
So the church didn't approve of the "Nazi's" did they.
Could you explain then why the vatican chose to be the very first to enter into a treaty with them? The church certainly supported the Spanish fascists and the Italian ones.
Dude, if you are one, you are such a queen. I mean could you butch it up a little? Your effeminacy is embarrassing.
Hey scumbag, my scholarship was lost after my first year at high school not my 3rd.
The first abuser had done that with his public rubbing of my and other boy's laps in class. My grades crashed from that initial abuse on, save in, "waitttt forrr itttt", RELIGION! History; and English.
It was strange the failing of my freshman year at Serra was at the same time I recieved a certificate of merit in a national test. I forget the name National Academic Standard test or something? I really don't remember it's name. But my name was in the local papers with about 10 others from my freshman class. Just the facts, Jack!
And finally to the 23rd at 1105AM:
It opens with the usual epithet, bringing us all right back to those old high-school or grammar-school days.
I had not said when his scholarship was lost and if indeed he “lost” it after the very first year, then that certainly does nothing but intensify the points I had been making.
As to the second paragraph: now there was apparently a second “abuser” as well. Beyond that, we remain right where we were: the “rubbing” is to be accepted as the cause of the global failure.
And yet we also informed that his “grades crashed from that initial abuse on” – which again raises the seriously improbable if not also incredible claim that one single “rubbing” so globally deranged his capacities.
Except (that “save” is an archaic usage more reminiscent of some other prior commenter no longer with us, who may be one of the muses) for “Religion, History, and English” (various punctuation usages omitted). Well then: readers may consider as they will a) how that instance of “rubbing” could so specifically target some subjects (what were left? – Math and Chemistry?) but not others; and b) to what extent the material from JR in the record here indicates any working competence with Religion and History and English.
Apparently we are to infer that i) the “rubbing” first wiped out the Math and Chemistry (and perhaps related Sciences) skills, and then ii) that same “rubbing” or another one then later (at age 16 or 17, take your pick) clearly did the same for Religion, History, and English. Or else that JR completed high school with all flags flying in Religion and History and English but then – somehow – those skills too were reduced at some subsequent point in life to the levels we have seen here.
As to the claim that he “received a certificate of merit in a national test” (before or after the “rubbing” is not given to us): readers may consider the claim as they will. As what must be imagined to be one of his last successes in life (by his own declaration), it is odd that he can’t recall the name of the national test. But the mind does play tricks as one gets on in years.
But I do most certainly and assuredly agree with him: the whole thing is indeed “strange”. Perhaps it might help if we had the name of the “local papers” wherein his name appeared and even the edition and so on. That would be nice.
But at any rate and in any case, we are left with quite a confounding skein of causality and consequence in all of this.
And I do must certainly and assuredly agree with him: “Just the facts, Jack!”. Oh yes indeed.
Onward, if not upward.
On the 23rd at 1028AM we merely get an epithet masked in a historical speculation about “the last Druid priests” (correction supplied).
And apparently my term “Cabaret culture” – explained at length in prior as to how it is derived from the eponymous film of 1972 – is characterized as a “damnation”. Which is revealing since I only pointed out some of the problems with it, while JR (and/or the muse squad) providing the unwitting presumption that such problems are sufficient to merit that culture being considered in primarily a negative light in regard to its various consequences.
Thus on to the 23rd at 1153AM:
In regard to the second paragraph: we are informed (I do not recall seeing a 2005 letter to the “investigators of [JR’s] case” (most likely meaning the attorneys in the 500-plaintiff lawsuit and not the police) that the Brother who was apparently an administrator in JR’s era states – as quoted by JR – rather clearly and concisely that he (the Brother) was not informed of the ‘molestation’ “in the presence of another member of the class” (scare-caps omitted).
Well, that’s pretty clear. But JR handles that by flatly asserting in the third paragraph that the Brother “lied” and that JR had indeed “told him”. We are thus left with he said/he said and readers may judge as they will.
In the fourth paragraph we are informed that at the 50th class reunion JR spoke with “a classmate” who also (and somewhat oddly) “told” JR that JR had also mentioned all this at the 20th reunion. Who knows? Billy Doe also has a long-time friend who, until examined in some depth, corroborated the Doe story (or stories). Readers may judge as they will.
This friend – we are also now informed – was a “police detective” by the time of the 20th reunion. Yet at the 50th this officer also “denied [JR had] said anything” at the 20th reunion about the alleged abuse.
At that point JR – in a somewhat uncharacteristic moment of self-reflection – wondered if he were indeed “losing it” (correction supplied). An insight that might indeed have borne some very useful fruit if further pursued.
But JR – by remarkable coincidence – had a “new best friend”, who – by further remarkable coincidence – is a “parole officer”, and a person who as a student seemed – to JR anyway – a student of “integrity” and the “coolest guy in school” while – we are also informed – JR was “the biggest very religious nerd”.
And in the sixth paragraph – by yet another remarkable coincidence – this gentleman put it all together with just “two words: ‘Mandatory Reporters’”.
This revelation is further developed thus: the Brother and the “cop” (meaning, I imagine, that police detective) “were both mandated to report what I’d told them in 1984”.
I don’t see that assertion as being accurate. The first CA mandatory reporting law went into effect in 1963, and thus would have governed any legal assessment during JR’s high-school years. That law only applied to physicians.
Readers may read this handbook prepared for mandated-reporters here
http://mandatedreporterca.com/images/pub132.pdf
The law was amended in 1980 to include clergy and others, but three problems arise immediately:
First, by 1980 JR was not a “child” (defined in the CA mandatory statute, called the California Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Act, or CANRA, as being under the age of 18). (One also quickly sees that the way these laws are written, in order to extend the widest possible net, one could be a “child” one day and – after one’s birthday the next day – be a member of the armed forces; indeed, one might still be a “child” (for the purposes of the law) and still have pre-enlisted in the armed forces during one’s 17th year.)
Second, the Act (incorporated into the California Penal Code as PC Sections 11164-11173.3) requires mandatory reporting (only) when the “legally mandated reporter” has “knowledge of or observes a child in his or her professional capacity, or within the scope of his or her employment whom he or she knows or reasonably suspects has been the victim of child abuse or neglect” (Sec. 11161[a]).
This requirement would clearly not have applied to JR in 1984, and we have seen that it could not be retroactively applied to the era of JR’s actual high-school years.
Third, the law requires mandatory reporting only if there is “reasonable suspicion” on the part of the mandated-reporter.
And that term is further defined in the law thus: “it is objectively reasonable for a person to entertain such a suspicion based upon facts that could cause a reasonable person in a like position, drawing when appropriate on his or her training and experience, to suspect child abuse” (PC 11166[a][1]).
But we saw in the document cache that the administrators did indeed consider JR’s allegation (however it was made or delivered) during his high-school years and decided that it was most likely a case of JR getting-back at a teacher who was giving him poor grades (that might have endangered his scholarship, perhaps).
Which assessment and conclusion seems rather clearly to fall within the scope of the 1980 amended CANRA (although even so, the 1980 amended CANRA could never be applicable to any events preceding the date of its legislative and legal enactment).
So this “parole officer”, whatever his virtues, didn’t seem to have a grasp of the applicable statutory law, if JR’s story here is to be presumed as accurate.
But then in the 7th paragraph, JR abandons his claim of having told the administrative Brother in the presence of another student, and simply asserts that he did tell the administrative Brother (back in the high-school era or at some later reunion – the timeline is not clear from the text of the comment, although in any case the CANRA is not efficacious as a legal support or element here).
Thus too the concluding characterization and assertion in the eighth paragraph fail: there is no evidence of “mendacity” (unless JR’s ‘personal truth’ story is taken for granted to be veracious and accurate) and certainly there is no demonstrated “mendacity” that “never ends with ‘the faithful’” or with “TMR’s posts and posters prove” (correction supplied).
Indeed, there only appears clearly to be ‘no end’ to the incoherences and problems with JR’s various stories, claims, characterizations, allegations, assertions, legal knowledge, and – as it were – logic.
As his material here proves.
You would know, Gramps.
Let's pretend we are both younger than springtime shall we?
Why are you so stupid? Genetics? Brain Injury? Catholic guilt?
I never much cared for math or science. Killing an animal to see how it worked. (the poor frog) repelled me.
I've had many successes in life, thanks. Relationships were with my employability my biggest failures. When I worked for myself I was a swell employee. Thanks for caring so.
Screw you and punctuation!
I'm very e. e. cummings.
I,of course, save 50+ year old papers.
It's so important to prove to a sociopath that I'm telling the truth.
Just take my word for it, o.k.?
I'm always amazed how a sociopath like P, who lies every opportunity he gets, is always pretending others are the "real" liars.
Pope GregX is most likely not my grand pa. FYI.
Darn! He had the same name as a grandpa though. I'm just telling the truth as I find it out. Keeping it real!
Why don't you try it?
In today’s episode:
On the24th at 434PM:
In regard to the second paragraph, I repeat what I said and explained at great length in prior comments on this site when the matter came up before: The Vatican did not enter into a “treaty” (such as a mutual defense treaty or a treaty of alliance); the Vatican entered into a Concordat with the legal government of Germany at the time, very early on (in mid-1933).
A Concordat is an agreement between the Vatican and a national government, setting forth rights and responsibilities of each Party in regard to the Church’s religious freedoms and activities.
In this case, it was signed by then-Cardinal Pacelli (for Pius XI) and President von Hindenburg and Vice-Chancellor von Papen (for Germany). Hitler (though he was Chancellor) did not sign the document; nor does the document make any reference to him or to the Nazi Party. (Did Hitler for whatever reasons not want to sign what should have been his to sign? Did the Church insist that the Concordat be made with the German government and not with Hitler and the Nazis? I have not come across any historical discussion that deals substantively with these questions.)
After World War 1, when the empires of Europe had largely been abolished, and numerous new countries had come into being, it was necessary for Pius XI to negotiate a number of such Concordats with the new countries and governments that had replaced the old imperial governments. In none of them did the Vatican enter into an ‘alliance’ with those governments.
As to the Church supporting the Spanish fascists, that “certainly” would need to be explained and demonstrated with some specificity. Although it must be borne in mind that as the Spanish Republic embraced the Communist Popular Front in the early/mid-1930s, then the options were rather vivid and also limited (the Church had seen how Communist governments usually rolled when it came to religion and religious freedoms, as I discussed in a prior comment on this thread).
The Concordat with Germany, by the by, remains in force today. Demonstrating that its provisions were applicable to Germany without Hitler or the Nazis.
And the Concordat of February, 1929 with Mussolini, has also been discussed in a prior comment on this thread.
And thus to the third paragraph, where – apropos of absolutely nothing at all – we get not only an epithet but an epithet about my being a “queen” and so on and so forth. As I have often said, when plop must be tossed, then for a plop-tosser almost anything will do.
On then, to the 24th at 425PM:
With all the material on the table, what do we get?
In the first two paragraphs, and apropos of absolutely nothing, some epithetical bits about my age (as JR might imagine it).
In the third paragraph an epithet about my intelligence (or my “stupidity”), although he gives no examples of my stupidity, and certainly nothing that matches his own sustained performance here.
In the fourth paragraph – had you been waittttting forrrr ittttttt? – he makes an excuse for himself: he “never much cared for math or science”, and ditto biology, since he – the Wig of Pure Humanity – couldn’t bring himself to kill an animal “to see how it worked”. The relevance of which to the issues on the table is anybody’s guess. But it’s a stab for the high-ground and that’s probably the only move he has here.
And the whole bit ends with – had you been waittttting forrrr ittttt? – another epithetical bit about my not “caring” (since people who ‘care’ aren’t supposed to question Abusenik stories and claims and allegations).
And thus and once again: we see the essential Abusenik game-plan: they could make any allegations they wished, and they had to be believed because they were truthy and they were (presumptively) victims. Meanwhile, nobody could question their material because that would be (fill in the blank: sociopathic, un-Christian, un-caring).
On then to the 24th at 449PM:
In the first paragraph: he doesn’t like punctuation. Which is not so surprising, since punctuation (and spelling and grammar) are necessary for the accurate expression of coherent ideas and truthful assertions, and that’s not at all what the Playbook wants to deal-with.
Grammar and spelling are not (as pomo and PC theorists like to imagine) instruments of ‘oppression’ and rigidity of mind. Rather, they are essential for accurate and effective human communication and discourse and the expression of important ideas. But again, that’s not how the Playbook rolls.
In the second paragraph, JR will attempt to cover himself in the robe of e.e. cummings. But while that poet played with language and expression, he did so masterfully and in such a way that his ideas were still clear and conceivable. As opposed to material, say, that is simply incoherent and distracting and so chaotically expressed that one winds up with little but the vivid distractions from the actual issues at hand.
In the third paragraph, he tries to dodge my question as to whether he might remember even the name of the “local papers” that – he says – mentioned him among a group of award-winners or high-achievers of some sort: he doesn’t – doncha see? – “save 50+ year-old papers” (correction supplied).
Yet he recalls – we have been informed – that he did get onto the list, and at a significant juncture in his high-school years (so otherwise unhappy in their result). Might he at least recall the name of the newspaper(s) and the year of this memorable success? Apparently not.
In the fourth paragraph – apparently realizing that he has to fluff up his dodge here – he will run a familiar Playbook distraction: I am – doncha see? – a “sociopath” since I question his material.
And thus – have you been waittttting forrrrr ittttttttttttttttttttttt? – since I am a “sociopath” then he doesn’t have to stoop to answering anything or proving anything. Neat.
In the fifth paragraph – and it is hard to tell if this is self-parody or whether he actually means it – he instructs me to “just take [his] word for it”. Seriously? In light of everything we have seen that is in the record here?
The sixth paragraph then riffs further on that theme: in the accents of the Wig of Honest Exasperation he confesses that he is “always amazed”. He is “always amazed how a sociopath like P, who lies every opportunity he gets, is always pretending others are the ‘real’ liars”.
Nothing new here. Nor has he ever offered any (accurate) quotation of mine demonstrating a “lie”. Unless – that is – you presume that anything he doesn’t like or can’t answer is and must be a “lie”.
Such ‘logic’. Such very neat ‘logic’. Such very neat self-serving ‘logic’. Such very neat self-serving and distracting ‘logic’.
As to who may be – since JR raised the question – a “real liar” here, the readership may consider his question as they will.
Thus to the seventh paragraph: does he now admit that Pope Gregory X is “most likely” not his ancestor? (He prefers the term “grand pa”; the fact that the term is inaccurately deployed here does not, as usual, cause him any concern; that seems to be a habitual mental tic of his.)
It would appear that he does make such an admission, since we then get the ‘definitive’ – for JR anyway – “FYI” deployment to back it up.
That takes us to the eighth paragraph, where things seem to depart the sane plane rather overtly: Pope Gregory X “had the same name as a grandpa though”. Does he mean “X”? Does he mean “Visconti”, that Pope’s family name?
In any case, we still have nothing to corroborate this bit.
And the whole confection is then topped off – in lieu of substantive or relevant material – with the self-serving assertion from the Wig of Truthiness that he is “just telling the truth as I find it out”. Which, he further asserts and assures us, means that he is “keeping it real!”.
Readers may judge each of those two claims as they will.
And for the exit line on the way to the curtains, delivered over his shoulder on the way to the exit, the juvenile bit suggesting that I “try it” (meaning try ‘truth’ and ‘keeping it real’). While JR does indeed – I completely agree – demonstrate something that is “real” (and all too “real”), I think we would differ on just what that “something” is.
And I’ll just keep on as I have been, since the alternative (i.e. imitating him) does not seem to me a useful path at all.
I had not noticed the comment of the 23rd at 1119AM.
It offers further insight into the Playbook, and on that basis I will say this:
The comment tries to distract from the gravamen of its accusation and claims by emphasizing the outlandishness and outrageousness of the (single, apparently) act of “rubbing” (upon which, we recall, JR bases his characterization of “rape”).
We see here then the results of a tortie and Playbook gambit wherein the allegant is advised to always focus on the outrage-producing elements of the accusation and claim – and not, ever, to allow the focus of attention to shift to the actual substance of accusation and claim themselves.
This, as readers may have already realized, is tactically shrewd advice, since the accusation and claims of damage consequent thereupon may very well appear rather less than credible upon even modest examination.
And in a tort-case generally, the tortie merely wants to focus on the puffing-up of the ‘damages’ caused by the alleged tortious act, in order to drive up the size of the award for damages that will be negotiated with the defendant’s attorneys.
And that is tactically shrewd – certainly in this case – because what we are confronted with is a proffered (and sworn-to) accusation of tortious act and damage-caused that reminds one of nothing so much as that ‘magic bullet’ from Dallas in November of 1963: here is a teen-aged boy, allegedly high-performing and presumably large-futured, for whom – somehow – a single act of groin-rubbing is supposed to have a) rather quickly and utterly deranged math and science abilities and then b) at some later point somehow circled back to derange other (word, rather than number-based) cognitive capabilities, and to have achieved all this on what for all practical purposes must be considered a permanent basis (and let us simply note c) the characterological damage also supposed to have been caused by this magic-bullet of an event).
Readers will also note the similarity of this template to the Doe story (in its variant forms), strongly indicative of the presence of a guiding ‘script’ and strategy that governs the presentation (and construction) of the story.
Alternative possible explanations for the cognitive and characterological damage that are doubtlessly present may be considered by any reader so inclined.
Why don't you die? Jesus is calling.
Rock yourself in the bosom of Abraham; you nasty turd.
Only an invented god could love you. Any decent god would kick you to the curb.
You need a god of Hell fire because you are a cheap ass brute.
You are the devil you believe in.
If I find out that I wasn't raped at school. I'd write that here and send my share of the 1.1 million back. My lawyer took 40%.
Why? Because honesty matters to me.
I'm still waiting for your, so obviously, planned event to "go off in Philly" when Franky shows up there.
Why else would he be going there?
The cheese steak?
American Bandstand's long gone.
Maybe he wants to run the art museum's steps like Rocky.( Stallone's Rocky not Bullmoose's) :^)
JR says on the 25th at 11.51 a.m.
"if he ever finds out that he wasn't raped he will write in down here and send his share of the 1.1 million dollars back. But his lawyer took 40%."
His own telling of the 'rape' describes what was really low level sexual abuse, (groin rubbing), by the alleged perp. But no penetration or masturbation were involved.
This reminds me of something that happened in a elevator during the late sixties. An intoxicated colleague groped a teenage office girl, lifted her skirt and 'felt her up'. She ran out of the lift, and went straight to her supervisor, in tears.
Her compensation?…a box of tissues to dry her eyes.The perp's punishment?….a severe reprimand from his boss. She had four witnessess in that elevator. So attitudes really have changed…. it's a different world now.
Incidentally if JR's lawyer took 40%…. then JR was 'screwed'…. by an expert.
In regard to the 25th at 1151AM:
As to paragraph 1: epithet.
As to paragraph 2: epithet.
As to paragraph 3: epithet.
As to paragraph 4: epithet.
As to paragraph 5: epithet.
As to paragraph 6: At this point it has been explained in no little detail why JR has already “found out” that he was not “raped” but rather was ‘statutorily raped’, and there is great and real difference between the two claims.
His lawyer took what JR had agreed-to when he signed on to the tortie’s representation.
As to paragraph 7: Readers may consider as they will the piously self-serving declamation that “truth matters to [JR]”. While also considering how very many problematic aspects of his material he has ignored.
As to paragraph 8: In an effort to regain some sort of Victimy high-ground for himself in light of the significant amounts of problems with his material, JR – the Wig of Exasperated Competence – will declare himself “still waiting” for the Pope’s Philadelphia visit. No doubt many people are, but it’s a matter of time at this point, and “waiting” is what he shall have to do.
Just how the Pope’s visit is “so obviously, [a] planned event” says far too little and far too much. It says far too much since the visits of any prestigious guest are usually “planned”. It says too little since – apparently in his own mind – JR imagines some sort of plot having to do with the Abuse Matter.
It seems to me that, first, if the Pope wanted to visit a major Stampede site, he would visit Boston, whose Cardinal-Archbishop is head of the Vatican Abuse of Minors Commission and that city’s progressive paper, the Globe, was the media launch-pad for the 2002 phase of the Abuse Matter.
And second, as with all visits of important personages, just about everybody who is anybody has an angle to play and want to surf the possibilities provided by the visit. If JR thinks he has an inside line on the key ‘planning’ or objectives for this or that element in Philadelphia, then he is welcome to share those ideas.
Or, as is more usual, just leave his little insinuations up and leave it at that.
As to paragraph 9: If JR thinks he has isolated the reason for the Pope’s choice of Philadelphia, then he can put it up here.
Otherwise this bit leaves us with nothing.
As to paragraph 10: Juvenile riffing on paragraph 9’s weak question.
As to paragraph 11: ditto.
As to paragraph 12: ditto.
And that’s all there is.
Harris, you too are a scumbag.
My major abusor, McGloin, shoved my hand down the front of his pants inside the underwear, trying to get me to masturbate him. He whiped his dick out after manhandeling me into a closet where the chemicals were kept for his lab. There he was hoping for oral, a blow job from me. Get the picture, Shit head? He got neither masturbation, I kept my hand in his pants in a fist; nor did he get a blow job. Am I clear?
My lawyer and every other lawyer repping L.A. victims, save one, got 40% of our settlements. I begining to think, that given Jeffy Anderson and SNAP picked our lead attornies (the ones with the most cases) that time delays in our negotiations for settlements which allowed "our" lawyers to take 40% was planned by the church..
The one lawyer that only took 25% was Art Goldberg, the only Jewish lawyer, in our lawyers groups. He was a mensch.
The rest turned out to be catholics. My lawyer was Kathy Goldburg, I hoped she was Jewish when I hired her. Nope she was a catholic.
How you demean the written word!
Boredom is your gift. Truth not so much.
"Ditto" wow wee wow wow! Your so Prussian! It must be hard to be you. It's difficult being around you. There's so little play in you. No play and no truth, how awful for you. You definitely should drop LSD you need to see where you fit in the now. If there is a god and he's everywhere he's in us all of us believers or no. Listen to the god you believe is in me.
We're trying to tell you something. Wrong path pal. You're on it. Do you really think your lies will get you to heaven? Do you even believe in what you say you believe in?
Find some good acid P. You need to get experienced. Go and sin some more.
You count real good:^)
Must come with counting money. :^)
On the 28th at 206AM:
In the first paragraph, by the wonders of projection, we are treated – as so very very often – to a Wiggy huffing about how I “demean the written word!”.
Readers may consider just who doth “demean the written word!” around here.
And I note yet again that this quoted phrase is not characteristic of JR’s diction but rather recalls the slightly antique style and diction of another Abusenik who once commented here in a tag-team with JR, right down to the histrionic exclamation point.
In the second paragraph: epithet. This time repeating the fact that JR finds nothing but “boredom” in the material – but what other move has he got in light of the analysis of his oh-so problematic material?
And the paragraph concludes with yet another mere assertion: that my material is not ‘gifted’ with “truth”. Readers may consider this as they will, even if more for entertainment than enlightenment.
In the third paragraph: epithet. This time in the form of further plop-tossy riffing on my use of “Ditto”, which phrase I use to demonstrate the now-familiar (and ‘boring’?) sameness of his bits.
How my deployment of that phrase is “Prussian” is anybody’s guess.
And we are given the vague effort (it would look too ridiculous to try to sustain the bit) to imply that his material is just “play” and I – with “Prussian” humorlessness? – am taking seriously so much of JR’s material that is actually just “play”. As perhaps was so much of his asserting and allegating all along.
Thus then: the take-away JR intends for us here is that he is just ‘playing’ and I am screwing up his comedic-stylings by taking his comedy as if it were supposed to be taken seriously. But as I have said: without denying the lack of seriousness in much of his material (although the ‘comedy’ and ‘play’ is rather thin, when you think about it), yet the material has to be dealt with because a) there are those in the webverse who will presume that an unanswered assertion is an accurate assertion and because b) JR – acting in his most useful way – is a magpie bringing to us assorted bits that are popular in the relevant lower precincts of the webverse, which gives us a chance to examine those bits.
Then the paragraph continues by trying to imply a link between “play” and “truth”. This ludicrous bit of ‘logic’ is designed to try to salvage the seriousness of his material which he had just thrown under the bus in an effort to avoid having to make response to my points by claiming he was just ‘playing’.
Then the paragraph continues with another epithet, to the effect that I should try using LSD. I cannot and will not rule out the possibility that JR is speaking from experience here (it might explain a few things characteristic of his presentations and proffers here). Be that as it may, I don’t and won’t do drugs. Nor would I consider the use of drugs either a form of ‘play’ (as in the Cabaret culture) nor as a short-cut to intellectual competence (which perhaps JR had imagined could be done).
Then the paragraph continues with an effort to go for this: since God may be everywhere and in everyone, then God (or at least “the god” or whatever “god”) is in JR and therefore speaks through JR and therefore JR should be listened-to as one who channels that “god”. Thus then: forget the frakkery and whackery of his stuff and just accept it as the word of (pick one: God, a god, the god, some god, any god).
Then in the fourth paragraph: A further effort to distract-from and avoid the frakkery and whackery by appealing to the intention rather than the quality of content of the material JR puts up: JR and the Abuseniks are “trying to tell [us] something”.
But a) that may be an intention, but it is not at all well or credibly carried out.
And b) they have already told us a great deal (about themselves and their intentions) with all the frakky and whacky material they have tossed up here. So this bit merely serves as a late-in-the-game effort to try to ignore and avoid all their prior problematic material by now wrapping themselves in the Wig of Good Intentions (which ‘good’ is itself somewhat dubious and remains to be demonstrated).
Then the paragraph continues with another shifty slipping-in of the bit about my “lies” (none of which JR has ever actually demonstrated with an accurate quotation and explication). So this – again – is mere epithet.
And the paragraph concludes with further epithetical insinuation as to whether I think my (undemonstrated) “lies” will “get [me] to heaven”. I’d say JR and the rest of the Abusenik band have more than enough on their plate in that regard and don’t need to be worrying-about or thinking-about or referring-to me.
And this (curiously and uncharacteristically packed) paragraph then inquires (the Wig of Insinuation) whether I “believe in what [I] say [I] believe in?”. The mechanics of projection nicely offer us yet another insight into the Abusenik mind and I have often wondered whether this was true of them.
And I have actually made few statements of belief, limiting myself to factual assessment. So the whole bit here is based on yet another Abusenik phantasm to begin-with.
And the comment concludes with further riffing (from the Wig of Experienced Instruction) as to the use of drugs, since – it is to be inferred – for JR drugs constitute useful ‘experience’ and both are then mooshed together with “sin” and are worthwhile pursuits for an adult. Or for anybody. I wouldn’t start down that road for any reason whatsoever. One can clearly see where that road leads.
Thus to the 18th at 210AM: Merely a one-liner epithetical riff on my numbering of the paragraphs of his oh-so problematic material (so that readers can keep track of the numerous problems as they are examined).
The bit then burnished – to JR’s mind – with an emoticon.
Ditto then the 28th at 212AM, where – the revelatory dynamics of projection again – JR’s bit about “counting money” recoils rather nicely on him.
And ditto the emoticon.
"Emoticon" is that like Neo-Cons or Comic Con?
"I second that 'emoticon'." to misquote Smokey Robinson.
You're so smart-lite. LMFAO!
One man's "lower" is another man's root.
One man's "lower" is another man's higher up.
One man's higher up is another man's "lower" down.
How are we to know you to be higher than others who don't have the same life view as you?
You could be a janitor on a religious toot.
What did Jesus say? Wasn't it: " The first shall be last; and the last first"?
Who will be higher and who will be lower then? You fake believer you.
In your case, god is not everywhere. In your case, god has left the building. (Corrections supplied) :^)