Rev. Joseph Jiang (c) punches back against the bullies at SNAP:
SNAP Outreach Director Barbara Dorris (l) and National Director David Clohessy (r)
Finally! A falsely accused priest has had enough and is not going to take it any more.
After being twice accused and cleared on wild charges of sex abuse, Rev. Xiu Hui "Joseph" Jiang has filed a federal lawsuit against his accusers, the lawyer-funded, anti-Catholic group SNAP, and members of the St. Louis police department for publicly accusing him of being a child molester.
Something rotten in Denmark
[**CLICK to read Rev. Jiang's federal lawsuit**]
In both 2012 and 2014, Rev. Jiang was publicly accused of abuse charges which received wide media attention with SNAP breathlessly claiming that Jiang was a dangerous child molester on the prowl. Yet even at a glance the accusations against Jiang were clearly bogus.
In his lawsuit, Fr. Jiang sets forth a litany of facts which demonstrate just how crazy one accuser's claims were from the start:
- The accuser's fourth-grade teacher has stated that it was "virtually impossible" that Fr. Jiang pulled the accuser "out of line" at school and abused him as claimed;
- "The alleged victim had made previous unfounded allegations of sexual abuse";
- "[The accuser's] fourth-grade teacher indicated that [the accuser] was a serial exaggerator to the point of being 'delusional'";
- "[The accuser's] parents had a history of making unfounded claims against the Catholic Church for monetary gain";
- "[The accuser] has never had any personal acquaintance with Fr. Joseph, and he could not identify Fr. Joseph's name when he made the allegation";
- "[A parent of the accuser once] physically assaulted the principal of [a Catholic school] by choking him or her";
- "The accusations were brought by a deeply troubled and unreliable 12-year-old boy at the suggestion of his abusive father."
As for his suit against SNAP, Jiang argues that the trial lawyer-funded group "conducted a defamatory smear campaign against Fr. Joseph throughout the case." SNAP published media statements which were "false and malicious" and "were extremely damaging to Fr. Joseph's reputation. They were calculated to inflame public opinion against Fr. Joseph, without any regard for the truth or the facts of the case."
The priest's suit also asserts that SNAP was involved with both the accusers and St. Louis police in a "conspiracy" against Fr. Jiang.
Indeed, one of Jiang's accusers who has filed a civil lawsuit against Fr. Jiang and the Church is represented by St. Louis trial lawyer Ken Chackes, who has previously admitted to donating money to SNAP and receiving client referrals from the group. (Not that this should be a surprise to anyone.)
Pot meets kettle
The irony in all of this is that while SNAP has for years claimed in the media that Church officials have never been held "accountable" for their handling of abusive priests in the past, it has been SNAP itself which has never been held accountable for its reckless statements against innocent priests, destroying lives and reputations without consequence.
We congratulate Fr. Jiang on his lawsuit, and we hope that a successful outcome will spur other falsely accused priests to fight back as well.
If you don't push back, you get more of something.
Ergo the church is in the positiin that she is with these crooks
Goodspeed Father!
Lauren, on the 30th, is absolutley right.
Because Father Joseph Jiang is doing something that should have been done years ago. Pushing back.
Often think that we Christians should have a more balanced view of forgiveness. Yes, Jesus said on the cross "Father forgive them…they know not what they do". But he also showed anger when he drove the merchants out of the temple, brandishing a cord made into a whip.. Also he said very damning things about some scribes and lawyers. So Jesus sometimes had to draw a line in regard to entrenched evils.
So I congratulate this priest and all those who will support him.
How many "accusers", does this priest have ?
There were two separate accusers. Prior to the story involving the fourth grader, a teenage girl in Lincoln County also made an accusation. After dragging out for two years, that case was also dismissed. It is suspected that the parents in the second case latched onto Rev Jiang as an easy target because of the publicity surrounding the first case and his race.
I've been observing the self righteous, self serving, corrosive behavior of SNAP for years. Talk about a pit of vipers. I am very grateful that Fr. Jiang has the guts of go after this corrupt institution and the hateful people behind it. Bless him! He'll be fighting uphill against a multitude who have joined the "lets get the molesters" bandwagon. I sure hope he's got a good lawyer.
Excellent! Kudos to Fr. Jiang. Please keep us updated.
The Church has been on the back foot for way too long with this campaign of lies. Other priests and bishops need to follow Fr. Jiang's lead.
For the moment, I'd just like to make the following points:
First: thanks to TMR for actually giving us the link to the actual Complaint so that we can read it for ourselves. You don't often see this in the Stampede, especially in most 'victim-friendly reporting' where readers are precisely not given the text of the document, but simply the spin that they – the readers – are supposed to take away from the 'report'.
Second: having read the Complaint I think it becomes clear just how far a stampede can take things when accusations as whacky (but still vile) as those against Fr. Jiang can be lodged with some expectation that they will be well-received by the media and the public.
Third: having serious and almost lethal first-hand experience of how matters are handled in an overtly totalitarian regime, Fr. Jiang at least is blessed with familiarity with this type of 'stampede' game, where everything is rigged in favor of one side. I have often noted that the Stampede draws from the same manipulative and comprehensive agitprop Playbook that was deployed by totalitarian regimes in the USSR, Nazi Germany, and in this still-functioning revenant of Mao's China that went after Fr. Jiang when he was a seminarian over there.
While those regimes claimed to do whatever was 'necessary' to protect 'the People' and our current American version does it to 'protect children and bring justice to 'victims'', it's the same old lethal game and it's played for keeps. Secularist regimes are Monoplanar versions of religion, they sense the Church as a rival, and they do whatever they can to reduce the stature of the Church by any means necessary.
While Bismarck tried unsuccessfully to reduce the power of the Church and of religion in his Kulturkampt of the 1870s, and Stalin simply exiled or killed priests and nuns and hierarchs, Hitler sought to criminally prosecute them (so often on sex charges) – and it is his strategy that appears to have appeared most useful to secularizing elements in the U.S. over the past 30 years.
Maybe P could give us a link to his "stampede" and the evidence that there is one?
Publion: the great American jokester.
The Nazi's ,who were, at the first, supported by the church (before any other government on the planet); and who were helped out of Europe by the church after the war were somehow out to get the church through a false accusation of priests program? Why the church was on their side?
Where's your proof these priest were falsly accused?
Were the falsely accused priests, Leftist and the child abuse rap was the excuse made for an attack on Lefty priests? Many questions to be answered here.
Let's see, SNAP the false flaged catholic church fraud, goes after a priest because a lawsuit was filed against the priest? And now the priest is going after SNAP in federal courts? Right as Francis' visit to Philly (another case where a "falsely accused" but yet still convicted by a jury priest awaits his holinesses sacred appearance to magically turn the "stampede" around) draws neigh.
Wonderful! Miracles happening everyday (Sounds like Flower Drum Song!)
What a coinky dinse!
Your church isn't being persecuted. None of your hierarchs, save for one lowly monsignor, have ever seen the inside of a jail in the U.S.. Where's the persection?
SNAP may need to disappear. Only to be replaced by some other church created fraud that keeps forgetting to include victims in any decision making regarding victims?
Maybe things are too hot for SNAP; too many trails leading back to the church from SNAP?
If Anderson's the money behind SNAP why hasn't the priest filed suit against him?
Is the priest suing for civil damages in his federal case?
Obviously Stalin didn't kill enough priests and nuns to do any good. Look who reigns in Russia now, the "persecuted" church. Miracle again! Can't be. God doesn't do tricks for the orthodox church just the Roman one. Doncha know?
Barbra Blaine has always said that she owns SNAP and that she'd, "kill it "if needs be. What those needs might be are highly debateable. Contrary to Cowboy P and his thundering herd theory.
I always found that" I'll will kill SNAP" line of Barbra's really strange. Why would the owner of "oldest and largest survivors' group in the world ever even think there would be a need to "kill" such a group????? It could die naturally if there are fewer victims being made but to "kill" it?????
What is the catholic church a rival to, secularism? I don't see people filling the churches. I see them emptying the churches in the West. Your church's power now lies with it's money and it's new ignorant membership under the age of adulthood; and those people will walk away just as we catholic's who came to adulthood in the '60's and '70's did. So you have your money; and that's all you have.
SNAP may need to go by it's owners hand. It's real owner the church. Why? Because somebody else besides me and my friends might have figured out the church's scam in creating SNAP. SNAP makes TOO many "mistakes" easily questioned easily incomprehensable unless you know who SNAP actually works for: the church..
As I had previously noted, when things get around to SNAP we are into JR’s favorite cartoon – for which there are many 3x5s in the shoebox. And that is certainly demonstrated in the most recent crop here.
Nor should the hopeful be reader be falsely encouraged that since some of JR’s following comments are far more lengthy than is his wont, then they are sustained treatments of a subject. They are not. Rather, there is simply such a ready pile of 3x5s that he can just keep going on with this one and that one.
On the 1st at 203PM he affects to not be familiar with the many discussions of the Stampede. Readers can consider which is less embarrassing for him: that he hasn’t read the material, hasn’t rebutted it, or has read it and proceeds here with his ‘question’ nonetheless.
On then to the 1st at 118PM:
In the first paragraph, an epithet.
In the second paragraph – had you been waitttttttting forrrrrrr itttttttttttt? – we get a regurgitation of all his Church-Nazi 3x5s from the long-ago (in regard to the abyssal problems of which material he has never made any coherent reply).
Thus the now-familiar cartoon bits as to i) “the Nazis, who were, at the first, supported by the Church (before any other government on the planet)” – which makes no sense as written but perhaps is based in JR’s continuing failure to grasp the difference between a Concordat and a treaty of alliance; and ii) the ‘rat line’ bit that was dealt with on a recent thread (with no rebuttal or counter-argument from JR).
In the third paragraph, a question nonsensical by context since a) we are given no idea as to who “these priests” refers to and since b) the burden of proof is on the accuser (a bit of basic Constitutional doctrine with which JR remains utterly unfamiliar, or at least pretends to).
In the fourth paragraph, the fundamentally flawed ‘point’ of the third paragraph is continued with further riffing, bolstered by the effort to mimic serious assessment (“Many questions to be answered here.”). We cannot begin to address the questions until JR a) clarifies who these priests are or are supposed to be or supposed to have been and b) gives us some explication as to what questions he sees arising from these priests. But of course, the Abusenik Playbook prefers to avoid the heavy conceptual lifting and seeks to just leave the whole thing to innuendo and insinuation, which is further undermined by the abiding Abusenik problem of not being able to even formulate the innuendo properly.
In the fifth paragraph, we simply get a regurgitation of all the SNAP 3x5s and all of that material has been discussed (and not rebutted) in recent comments on this and immediately prior threads.
And it is anybody’s guess how a horse (“neigh”) got into this.
And in the sixth paragraph, merely an effort to deliver some comic or snarky relief (from the stuff JR is larding on with a zestful if zany éclat).
Ditto the seventh paragraph.
Then in the eighth paragraph, merely – had you been waittttting forrrr itttttttttttt? – the regurgitation of his usual unsupported assertion to the effect that there is no Stampede and the Church is not being “persecuted”. On that last point, I will simply say that I have never used the term ‘persecution’ in regard to the Stampede since in the American variant there is none of the lethal physical violence that usually accompanies actual instances of “persecution” and the use of the term in connection with the Stampede would not be historically accurate for that reason.
In the ninth paragraph a further unsupported bit, as to whether SNAP “may need to disappear”. When it no longer fulfills the tasks assigned to it as a tortie front-organization and media go-to resource for sound-bitey bits, then I have no doubt that SNAP will indeed go away or at least revert to its pre-Anderson status.
And we see again a clear echo of JR’s abiding irritation that he is not considered by anybody as the national go-to guy for ‘victims’.
If – as he proffers in another unsupported bit in the tenth paragraph – there are “too many trails leading back to the church from SNAP” (sic), just what might those “trails” be? JR has no idea but hopes that innuendo and insinuation will do his heavy-lifting for him here.
In a vivid demonstration of his ignorance of the law, JR in the eleventh paragraph asks why Anderson has not been named a defendant in the lawsuit. On what legal basis – we ask the Wig of Law – would Anderson be included as a Party-Defendant in the lawsuit under discussion?
Continuing with my comment on the 1st at 118PM:
In the twelfth paragraph JR demonstrates – no doubt unintentionally – that he hasn’t read the Complaint, wherein the answer to this paragraph’s question is clearly contained.
In the thirteenth paragraph, we are merely given a regurgitation of JR’s repellent (one might almost say ‘sociopathic’) opinion that “obviously Stalin didn’t kill enough priests and nuns to do any good”. Lucky for “the good Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet” that they weren’t in the USSR at the time.
And – in an equally unintentional but vivid demonstration of his abyssal ignorance of foreign affairs – JR informs us that it is the (Orthodox, presumably) Church that “reigns in Russia now” … and Mr. Putin is … what? Just a tool of the (Orthodox) Church? And might Mr. Putin then be added to JR’s list of all those who are in cahoots to make him and ‘victims’ look bad?
The fourteenth paragraph makes no sense as written, nor is there any explication that might shed any light on whatever sense it was supposed to have made. It would appear that JR simply had a factoid about Blaine and tried in some way, or any way, to turn it into an epithet against me and – whatever the phrase means in this context – my “thundering herd theory”.
More riffing in the fifteenth paragraph, for whatever it is worth.
But now to the sixteenth paragraph, where JR tries to make a run at the point I made about the Church as a rival to secularism. But his grammar and conceptual ability isn’t up to expressing anything coherently so all we get is an irrelevant bit about “people filling the churches”. Which simply goes to demonstrate the level on which JR’s mind works: a popularity contest (sort of like those 1980s TV shows discussed earlier on this thread, or like the old ‘Queen For A Day’ show with its applause-meter).
But it is the Church’s message and the principles and ideals which it proclaims that constitute the gravamen of the rivalry. Especially since the Church and Christianity have played so fundamental a role in the development of the civilization and culture of the West, which is precisely what the secularists wish to reverse, in favor – of course – of their own version of a this-worldly utopia presided over by an engorged government of Correct secular elites.
And while Europe and the U.S. continue to sink themselves into secularism, large segments of the populations on other continents and in other parts of the world are going in just the opposite direction from Western secularism. JR might perhaps want to read Philip Jenkins’s “The Next Christendom” and its discussion of the robust expansion of Church membership in the Global South.
And the seventeenth and final paragraph merely seeks to insinuate a self-serving commercial about the marvelous insight of JR and his friends who have “figured out” – have you been waittttting forrrr ittttt? – that the Church created and runs SNAP. Napoleon hats all around then! And possibly not so much Kool-Aid.
And that paragraph then trails off into incoherence, although working as always to assert as a fact what JR has never demonstrated as either fact or even credible probability. So hold the hats for the moment.
As far as SNAP's behavior towards fr. Jaing. I always thought it made sense to never comment about the guilt or innocence of a person till the verdict was in.
In my own case I knew I was molested and what ever I said about my abuse ,i knew, would hold up in court because it was the truth; but SNAP in L.A. never went out on a limb like David Clohessy did in this case. This might be SNAP's swan song. Death by self inflicted and wilful commitment to end SNAP; to go out in a blaze of bullshit by SNAP. To die due to it's own fuck ups. Can you show me one success won for victims by SNAP? I can't think of any. I just remember their well planned public fuck ups. Take your pick!
And then on the 1st at 143PM – in what would be a marvelous demonstration of self-parody (if JR did self-parody) – the Wig of Patient and Informed Judgment doth inform us that the Wig “always thought it made sense never to comment about the guilt or innocence of a person till the verdict was in”. Readers may consider the veracity of that assertion when measured against the voluminous records of allegations, assertions, claims and stories about the Church and clergy now in the record here.
Also, reflecting the complexities of legal process, it might be more accurate to say ‘until the verdict has been finalized’, i.e. after the complete available legal process has been finished).
But then this platforms an opportunity – in a seemingly innocent and nonchalant by-the-by – to toss in a commercial for himself and his own Stampede participation (where, we see, his experience has been downgraded to having been “molested” – however whichever ‘dictionary’ may define that term as applied here).
And JR – doncha know? – just absitively and posolutely “knew” that his allegation “would hold up in court because” – had you been waittttttttting forrrrrrrrrr ittttttttttttttttt? – “it was the truth”. Ovvvvv coursssssssssssse.
And whether SNAP did or did not “go out on a limb” in the L.A. 500-plus Plaintiff case is something readers may wish to explore for themselves. But it is surely relevant here that in the L.A. case there were at least 500 stories (I don’t know how many actual individual priests were targeted) and SNAP would have been suffering from what might be called a “target over-rich environment”; whereas in this St. Louis case there is only one priest accused, it’s a relatively fresh venue, the Ball Must Be Kept Rolling, St. Louis is close to home for SNAP and Clohessy, and – it would appear from reading the Complaint – there is some danger for the Parties-Defendant here on the basis of their actions.
And the whole bit trails off in more of the usual SNAP stuff, although nobody here is in the business of defending SNAP.
The church tried suing it's accussors before; and the U.S. Supreme court told the church they couldn't bring suit in order to hinder a suit against them. fr.Jiang's case maybe different.
On the 1st at 153PM the Wig of Legal Knowledge informs us that “the U.S. Supreme Court told the church they couldn’t bring suit in order to hinder a suit against them”. And might we have the case and paragraph citation for that? Or is this bit just another example of JR’s tireless Web bottom-feeding, tossed-up here without the benefit of any filtration whatsoever by a competent assessment of its reliability?
But then – in a sly effort to prevent himself from getting into a discussion where his signature plop-tossing won’t suffice and any wider or deeper knowledge on his part is non-existent – JR then opines that “Fr. Jiang’s case may be different”. Ya think? That should have occurred to him simply on the basis of the fact that Fr. Jiang is not “the Church”, either in actuality or for the purposes of this Complaint.
If Fr Jiang's Case, police investigators, appeared to have enough, to bring charges. Something tells me, they had a reason. And if we appear to have at least, two possible victims, independent, of each other. This speaks volumes, to me, about Fr Jiang.
Perhaps Fr Jiang, might consent to a deposition, and polygraph ?To be Conducted by a Independent Private Investigator. Agreed upon by both parties. For public review ? He would be able to came out clean, on the deposition, and subsequent lie detector. Arrive at the truth. And erase all doubt. And clear his good name.
Fr. Jiang did voluntarily and of his own accord submit to a polygraph in each case and passed both. No deception on his part was ever detected.
The police brought charges based on the single unsubstantiated complaint and nothing else. That is why they are named in the lawsuit.
There was no first "victim". That case was dismissed for good reasons. The only reason there was a second "victim" was because this troubled family got Fr. Jiang's name out of the news.
It is easy to make an accusation in the hopes of manipulating the system and getting a settlement.
On the 1st at 603PM JR merely notes that the next SNAP convention takes place in Washington, D.C. in August – when (the Wig of Detection triumphantly reports) “Congress isn’t even there” (correction supplied).
The Wig of Bemused Veracity and Competence then shares the plaint that he only wishes he “was making this up”. But this is one of the few actual facts about which readers might well not suspect that he was.
On the 1st at 307PM – running true to form – ‘True Catholic’ simply presumes (“something tells me”) that where there’s smoke there’s fire (conveniently avoiding the hardly improbable possibility of police and prosecutorial misfeasance or malfeasance).
And in such a highly Church-unfriendly public and jurisprudential atmosphere, would any attorney take Fr. J’s case, compile this extensive Complaint, and n-o-t expect to have to prove every element of it with credible evidence?
This case, after all, is precisely oppositely-situated from the Stampede type of case where torties could put together a broad range of allegations, relatively secure in the knowledge that the allegations would never be carefully and adversarially examined.
And, as always, TC joins the ranks of Abuseniks who don’t read the material about which they purport to authoritatively declaim: Fr. Jiang had indeed taken a polygraph test as envisioned by TC. And passed it.
Also is this just a game to "victimize" SNAP to ever again make SNAP the issue instead of real victims. That's been the game so far. SNAP fucks up; and makes it look like victims are fucking up.
SNAP that represents all the church's victims with no approval by the church's victims.
No method allowed (the democratic process) by which one can control an organization saying it reps your interests TO THE WORLD. When no victim has ever asked them too.
SNAP was handed us through our own lawyers who were picked by us victims cuz they got the headlines but who picked them that they would get the headlines?
What if they were connected to the church? Like insider trading. Why else they would pick SNAP to rep us?
Oh yea! that's right! SNAP was handed to us full blown. There was more money and influence behind SNAP than Barbra Blaine could muster or that Jeffy Anderson could afford.
I remember the first SNAP conference in St. Louie at an expensive hotel. It was just too bourgie an event for a bottom of the barrel out fit that SNAP was supposed to be.
Where'd the money come from to pay for this road show? (and, per usual, at a cost more than the average working person could spend to attend. Leaving out working class victims, so conveniently).
It was an expensive hotel and travel expenses. Who could afford to go?
Then magically there were flight scholarships. I got one. First convention must have victims, after all , we"re the validators for SNAP. Victims are It's red seal of approval . We victims who could barely speak to each other thanks to SNAP's barrage of events program.
I can only compare their conventions to a ride at Disneyland. They took over and we went where the rails took us.
But that takes real MONEY honey (that's what that takes to have a hotel and airfares happen) Not 2 people working at a kitchen table or working out of church property, a former convent in Chicago SNAP's home Address then.
And not Jeffy Anderson's dough back then. He didn't have enough, then, to throw that luau including plane fare.
Scam ! Scam! Scam! All scam all SNAP from the get go.
It's a closed circuit scam. Each fraud validates the other ;and therefore, they all appear to be what they say they are; because the other fraudster, they validated.Validates them. The closed circuit . Scam.
Do you know that victims distrust authority intently?
And then there was SNAP which was ALL about controlng victims intently and nothing else!!!
But we thought they must be good for us; our lawyers said they were.
Who told our lawyers that? Why Jeffy Anderson. And after all he's the go to lawyer for church victims world wide now. Who made him that? He was validated as that by someone .
Oh yes wasn't it fr Greel,y the Chicago Jesuit novelis,t who helped validate Jeff and SNAP and Jason Berry all in the same afternoon on the Phil Donahe show from Chicago?
The closed circuit of authentication again.
I was just thinking, SNAP's legal fee's alone in a lengthy case would conveniently bankrupt SNAP.
Oh Lawdy! there goes the last "help" for the victims.
Why would our lawyers price a SNAP event so high that only the 2 upper classes in America could afford to attend? Given the majority of victims are working class. Why wouldn't "torties" want more rather than less possible clients?
You should also know. SNAP's conventions in August in Washington D.C. are to have all the look of political action around the victims' issue. Done, again and again, the very month when congress isn't even there.
I only wish I was making this up. No group could be this consistantly dumb by accident. There's a method to their madness.
Father Jiang could very well be innocent. However, this was handled in an atrocious manner by the archdiocese. Archbishop Carlson gave him a check for 20K which Jiang put under the windshield of the car of a family which had accused him of inappropriate interction with their daughter. In addition, Jiang is from Communist China. From someone who has interacted with others from Communist China, they always have "handles". Relatives left behind are sources of blackmail to get the individual to follow orders. While an archbishop in Poland, JPII had at least 2 bishops who were assigned by the KGB to pass on information in his regard. I believe that this guy's background should be checked strigently. He may be here just to cause turmoil. Just look to the Polish turmoil involved with the priest from Poland at St. Stanislaus. JPII visited that same church.
Archbishop Carlson did NOT give Fr. Jiang the $20,000 check.
D Paul, on the 1st, seems to want to add a new smear against the brave Father Joseph.
I guess to some minds the slander of child molestation is not enough. So in case that falls over… there is a back-up slander ready to go. This time the manipulative suggestion is that he is a cunning agent of Communist China.
Ouch!… I'll bet my bottom dollar that at some point the Chinese authorities accused him of being a "running dog collaborator of the West"
I suggest we all say a prayer for Father Joseph. Because the back-stabbers will be working overtime to discredit anybody who dares to stand against them.
And on the 1st at 734PM ‘D Paul’ comes at it from a fresh direction: while avoiding the question of Fr. J’s guilt or innocence, D-P will create an apparently fictitious (certainly unverified and unsupported) scenario in which the local Archbishop is supposed to have given Fr. J a check for $20,000 which – and this is really taking things to the realm of Disney – Fr. J then “put under the windshield of the car” belonging to the family whose daughter was allegedly molested by him. Has the family produced the check? Or if they cashed it, have they got a bank statement showing a deposit of that amount? Is there any evidence to corroborate this truly jaw-dropping proffer at all?
And this bit is then buttressed by a riff on how the Chinese Communists (or any totalitarian government – who can forget the old WW2-era Nazi official asking someone: Do you haff relatiffs in Chermany?) blackmail persons with the threat of harm to their relatives back home. So what has this to do with the case here? Is the Chinese Communist government blackmailing Fr. Jiang … to make victims look bad? To somehow support the Church?
What “turmoil” is “this guy” “here to cause”? And since – it is clear from the Complaint’s exhaustive recitation – that in order to ‘cause the turmoil’ of the Complaint being filed, Fr. J first had to undergo the alleged mis/malfeasances perpetrated upon him by the local police and prosecution, then would not the local police and prosecution also have to be in on the plan to “cause turmoil”?
And in regard to JP2’s well-known experiences with being shadowed not only by the KGB and East-bloc security services, but also by clerics and even hierarchs who had been won into their service: are we to imagine – as D-P would apparently have us imagine – that Fr. J is somehow a plant or agent of the Communist Chinese security organs?
J Paul, on July 1st, appears to be the one who first raised the dubious suggestion of a $20,000 cheque being paid over,,, to satisfy the alleged victim's claim. My first question is this….what is "inapppropriate intertion"? Because it must be something very serious, in terms of personal injury, to warrant $20,000 in compensation. Frankly I've never heard of it…, but I must know what it is… in order to avoid doing it myself, Cos… it would break me financially.
My second question is this. The only things that I have found under my windsreen wipers were advertising material and parking tickets. The latter were protected by plastic sleeves to protect them from the rain. Was the cheque similarly protected.. or just soggy with rain.?
Finally.. did the family keep the cheque?. Cos if they did.. they have a virtual admission of guilt. Well to my mind the fact that this lawsuit has been brought tells me that there is no such cheque. It is just another cunning fabrication… like the "inappropriate intertion".
If the Archdiocese gave him a $20,000 check. Then how can the Archbishop not be behind it ? You can also bet there will be no paper trail, nor any employee testimony, confirming the archbishop knew anything, about it. And you can also bet, the Archbishop will "play dumb", and not know anything. Just like he did in his YOUTUBE deposition. Archbishop Carlson lied several times, during his deposition. He is a lying, son of a bitch.
But yes. Technically speaking. The Archbishop, probably did not hand it to him. And; therefore, most-likely, " did not give it to him".
Any proiest, who rats, knows his goose will be cooked.
Ah!!!! Feel the love!
How do you know fr. Joseph is so f'ing brave, Malcolm?
I swear between you guys and SNAP your picked heroes are all so "BRAVE".
Did he leave a cheque for $20,000 or didn't he?
(This sounds so much like Michael Jackson giving his victim $20,000,000 just to "get it over with".)
On the 2nd at 1246PM ‘True Catholic’ – again running true to form – will start the play on base rather than at home-plate by presuming the veracity of the frankly incredible and phantasmagoric claim about the $20,000 check. But it is precisely the plausibility or credibility of this bit that is at issue. Seeking to presume its accuracy and then (conveniently) go on riffing negatively about the Church from there is hardly justified by the known facts.
But such innuendo-saturated riffing is TC’s favorite (and perhaps only) form of processing material and so on s/he goes.
But then but then but then, TC utterly undermines the entire first paragraph by then coming to the conclusion in the second paragraph that “technically speaking” (whatever on earth that can mean in this context) “the Archbishop probably did not hand it to him” and “therefore, most likely, did not give it to him”.
And TC seems on some level to be aware of what s/he is doing and has just done here in the second paragraph, with the torturously pedantic fiddling with “technically speaking” and the faux-logical and objective formulations about “the Archbishop probably did not hand it to him … and therefore most likely did not give it to him”.
But TC – again running true to form – will try to salvage this impossible situation thus created in the story-line with – apropos of nothing that has gone before – the pronouncement that “any priest, who rats, knows his goose will be cooked” … which bit serves only to add geese and rats to the horses that have joined the distracting menagerie of creatures introduced in recent proffers on this thread.
If he was given a $20,000 check. To put on the 4th grade girl's, parent's car. Maybe he should also sue the 4th grader, and her family.
At the very least, get your facts straight. There is no fourth grade girl.
The key point is – again – whether Fr. J was given the check at all in the first place.
But this is precisely the point TC doesn't deal with and instead – running true to form – simply goes with the undemonstrated (and frankly phantasmagoric) presumption, conveniently negatitve to Fr, J, and riffs on with it.
Ever say any prayers for the well being of the children raped by your church and it's leadership? No I bet you haven't.
Why is it "BRAVE" if you're an innocent priest or an innocent victim of priests to stand up and say that wrong is wrong? Who keeps pushing this "Brave" bullshit?
One needs be "BRAVE" in wars. I'm not at war with your church. I don't believe in your church. I don't care about your stupid religion and I don't care about it; but I'm not at war with it.
You're church has made war on victims from the get go from the day we were raped. I fight the fraud called SNAP and VOTF etc. ceated to manipulate into victims into obedient animals that trust and obey these church created frauds.
But no one can afford to be at war with one and one quarter BILLION people ( I wonder if I'm still counted in that figure? The church has a history of lying about things remember)
Your church has always, even pre 2002, considered any report of sex abuse by a catholic child and their families an act of war against the church. Look how they've behaved around the issue universally. Call victims: liars with out ever knowing individual victims experiences.
Look at TMR this is much a self created war journal as was Stars and Stripes in WW2 for the U.S. war machine.
TMR is an act of war in itself. It and Publion have declared themselves at war with victims (who according to P aren't victims because we haven't individually passed his "fact" check policy) and a press who have put little to no pressure on the American catholic church at all. Not one molesting bishop in jail proves that.
So we have TMR (The Warrior's Journal) and SNAP who are the only "victims" to pretend victims are at war with the church and that they (SNAP) are leading the victims side in this war they have all agreed to have amongst themselves.
Victims want help not war. Victims want compensation not devastation and hostility; but instead we have WAR!, No conversation. No debates. Just immediate and constant war from the church and from SNAP? For the church thanks to SNAP it must be like shooting fish in a barrel.
Us victims are the fish in SNAP's barrel.
If you are considered BRAVE by both sides in this "war" for doing nothing. Real bravery no longer matters. It's been redefined as obedience.
Real bravery doesn't even need to make a showing. Belief and obedience suffice as being the new " brave".
So lets see SNAP and Church at constant "WAR" since the '80's and where are the winning victims? See any? Nope. All you see is SNAP and the church wrapped in WAR and victims ignored. I couldn't dream up a reality like this. I'm not that much of a liar.
Just an observation on my part: For someone who who does not "believe in my church and does not care about my stupid religion", you are awfully emotional and angry in your postings. Angry and emotional is not the face of "I don't care." You obviously care otherwise there would not be so much emotional energy behind what you post. It is incongruent. In other words, there is a huge disconnect between what you are saying and what you are feeling.
I think you're right in part Joanne.
My question is: Why wouldn't I be angry?
First I'm raped. Then I'm lied to and about, at SNAP.( I played their dummy for years. I don't know about you but I'd rather not be used and made a fool of. That tends to piss me off.)
I've been used so many times by your church. Including by my own self loathing; self censorship. Created by the inner oppressive facist state the church sets up in every catholic childs mind. I'm talking mostly about sex here, not like: Darn! the church doesn't want me to murder today, DARN! ,( unless of course it's in some patriotic war the church blesses,i.e. WW I and WWII where the church was on all sides of the conflict and happily took money from all sides.)
Angry? Yes I am. Angry at the corporate church; that one portion of which (the tip top portion) decided to create a fake victims' group that cheats and misleads all ready deeply injured people. People injured by the very same hierarchs who wanted our obedience and faith but didn't care so much about our being raped as children. Angry? Who wouldn't be? Put your self in my/our place Joanne.
As far as the "stupid religion" goes? Am I crude and heavy handed with that crack? Yes I am.
I am sorry for offending you.
I guess after all these years I'm tired of having people tell me they don't believe me about SNAP or my rape. Yet a life after death sans proof ;THAT they leap to believe!!!
Angry? If you were me wouldn't you be more than a tad miffed?
again Joanne. I'm sorry for my crack (It's how i feel but you didn't need to be insulted)
Not too much in the recent crop, especially considering all the significant material that was on the table.
But JR continues to provide a remarkable example of the Playbook as deployed by the Abusenik mentality, so let’s get on with it.
The comment by ‘Joanne’ (the 3rd, 1218AM) is quickly turned to JR’s purposes: he adroitly selects only her acute observation of his anger (which I would say is accurate, as far as it goes) and slyly turns it into a commercial and an excuse: Why, he quickly asks, wouldn’t he be angry?
This instantly provides a platform for a recitation of a story that I, for one, have not found convincing and have explained the difficulties in the story at great length. This includes his ‘experience(s)’ at his high school (which nets the Church) and then his victimization experience (he was “lied to” and – verrrry interestingly – “lied … about”) by SNAP.
This bit is then burnished by the curious (and new) assertion that he “played their dummy for years”, which does nothing so much as raise the question as to why it took “years” for him to break away (which, if we are accurately informed by JR, had something to do with his effort to get himself ‘elected’ to the leadership of SNAP by some group among the 500-plus allegants in the 2006 L.A. case).
Followed by the sly effort to cast himself as one ‘victimized’ by “being made a fool of”. But this brings us right back to the abiding question: was he “made a fool of” gratuitously and out of purely evil and oppressive vitriol despite the acuity and veracity of his assertions and claims and insights, or did his material and assertions invite or even push persons toward making such a judgment about him (i.e. such that he was “made a fool of”)?
There is a significant key element in this issue here that reveals itself by the apparent fact that JR automatically ruled-out or rejected the latter possibility from the get-go. Which, I would say, was both a) very premature and b) rather conveniently self-serving – as such predeterminations so often are in this type of situation.
All of which then platforms the plaint that he has “been used so many times” by the Church (which bit also deploys the equally familiar Victimist tropes of “self-loathing” and “self-censorship”).
And there’s more: we are then informed of the “inner oppressive fascist state” that “the church sets up in every catholic childs mind” (sic), which ropes in the familiar Victimist trope of ‘oppression’ as well, on top of – what the hey? – “fascist” and blends them with many familiar (and queasily adolescent) anti-religious and anti-Church tropes.
And while any effort to paint the Church’s educational efforts as “fascist” simply indicates a merely rhetorical and manipulative bit of over-painting, does not his preferred Communist ideology do somewhat the very same thing as the “fascist”? “Communist” and “fascist” methods, being totalitarian siblings, are pretty much the same, if one ignores the differently-colored flags.)
Continuing about the response to ‘Joanne’:
And he then reveals that the gravamen of his complaints revolve “mostly” around “sex”, and not the Church’s other moral teachings, as for example, the proscription against “murder” (although he can’t help tossing in the old epithetical 3×5 from the ‘60s that all “war” is “murder”).
So it’s all about “sex”, and i) the abiding adolescent complaint that the Church interferes with a pleasure that is ii) nothing but pure and innocent and fun and nobody else’s business and iii) why would the Church be so mean for no reason whatsoever … ?
And – as I mentioned when the topic came up quite some time ago – while local hierarchs in World War 1 bent to the pressures of their particular national flocks, the Pope of the era, Benedict XV, following the path of his immediate predecessor Pius X, worked strenuously although fruitlessly to end the war. And this was in an era before the Vatican enjoyed the relative security of independent sovereignty; and for his troubles the Pope was not invited to the Versailles Conference and the nations pursued the path that led to World War 2 within 20 years. And Cardinal Innitzer’s unhappy experiences connected to his initial support for the Anschluss, and his subsequent dressing-down by the Pope, and the beating he received at the hands of Nazi goons as a result of his changed position, are all in the historical record.
Thus we then get in the fifth paragraph the Wig of Declamation using all of the previous bits to platform his usual menu of complaints and irritations, including his ever-incredible assertion that it was the Church that created and runs SNAP (and the torties and all the rest).
JR is well-advised not to ask people to put themselves in his “place”, since the bubble of his cartoon may well not look any more credible from the inside than from the outside, with the added danger that persons who try to put themselves into a state of mind that could construct such a cartoon-bubble may glean some acute insight and even palpable sense of the inner workings of such a mind.
He then apologizes in the seventh paragraph while instantly excusing himself in the eighth.
And the basis of his excuse is – yet again – that he is rather put-off by the fact that people will believe in life-after-death but won’t believe Abusenik stories, claims, assertions and allegations. And we have been all over that before, including the Apples-Oranges problem: matters involving the Beyond or the Metaplane are dealt with by belief; matters of the Monoplane and of (purported) actual historical fact are dealt with by proof and evidence, demonstrating conclusively or at least as high-probability that the claim is historically veracious.
And the comment winds down with a few more self-dramatizing rhetorical riffs on “angry” for good measure.
And finally concludes with another pitch-perfect ‘apology’: JR is sorry for his sharp words but – had you been waitttttting forrrr itttttt? – ‘Joanne’ had no call to go and feel “insulted”. Some apology.
Think about various gangs in prison. If they were as one instead of being at constant WAR with each other they could amilorate their prison circumstances. The same goes for gangs at war on the ouyside of prison.; but prison gaurds and police exaserbate gang differences that they might continue to fight themselves rather than the cops.
SNAP and TMR are the equivalent of two cop controlled prison gangs fighting each other instead of solving their mutual problems peacefully; quietly; intelligently..
Why? Because solving this particular problem would require changing the church or at least it's criminal hierarchs. Ending their obedience as bravery myth. And THAT can never be allowed to happen. Cardinals and bishops might go to jail for their crimes, (heaven fore fend!) So in order to avoid that possibility we have this phony "WAR!". between two church maintained and church controlled frauds.
"guards" sorry I'm just a hair dyslexic, I think.
Belief and obedience regarding SNAP.
You want to believe and obey the church that's your right and up to you.
But your belief and unconcious obedience to take a "side" in a manufactured made up war between church and it's victims; that winds up giving credability to frauds like SNAP (the All- American Fraudulent Fuck Up Machine) as being anything but a fuck up machine?.Well, sad to say it leaves such "believers" like yourselves buying the bull shit. ……Again.
WHAT GOOD HAS SNAP DONE VICTIMS? I shout because factually regarding SNAP's actions, you're asleep. Make a list yourselves. What good SNAP's actions have done victims vs. What Bad SNAP has done victims then you tell me what you get. Take the blinders from your eyes!
Where ever SNAP testifies nothing good happens for victims: gauranteed. If settlements even happen they are at fire sale prices. The exact prices the church and SNAP think "fair".
in Australia SNAP agreed with the church the very first day the unoffered offer was'nt offered, as it were. Un fucking believable! Yet completely true.
SNAP keeps praising itself but all it does is call echoey press conferences and then fucks up something else for victims, publicly. SNAP's fuck ups are always so big so costly to victims. SNAP's actions in a ,nutshell, are nuts. Not in how it addresses the media but what it addresses the media about.
All SNAP ever says is change the church. Do you see that little miracle happening ? No neither do I.( It needs too but it can't. The heirarchy is unecessarily decadent, decayed. It just can't change).
Accordingly thanks to SNAP. It's one selected theme over; they offer no other plank in their platform. victims issues closed. Dead ended and driven to the cul de sac and dropped off and left by SNAP. SNAP defining what's important for victims. Again.
Do you really think helping the church fix it self (which it obviously can not do) is more important to victims than dealing with their own wreaked lives? Really?
On then to the 1st at 539PM:
In the first paragraph – once again and as so very often – we merely get an innuendo type of question: “is this just a game to ‘victimize’ SNAP” and thus “ever again” to “make SNAP the issue instead of real victims” … ? No explication as to how the dynamics of that insinuated gambit might actually work out in actuality.
Followed instantly by the equally unsupported assertion that “That’s been the game so far”. (So much, then, for the bit about everything being about ‘making victims look bad’; now it’s about making SNAP look bad … and the sleazy bouncing ball bounces on.)
And – in yet another demonstration of one of JR’s signature distractions – we get scatology to try to float his content-less bits over the rocks of any conceivable reality.
The third paragraph simply gives us more from the dog-eared 3×5 about SNAP not being “democratic” and so forth – but why would a front-organization (for the torties in SNAP’s case) want to risk losing control of its message-discipline and thereby endanger the whole scam? A point with which almost all of the check-cashers apparently agree, since almost nobody but JR has tried to crawl back into the spotlight once they left the bank parking lot.
And the 3×5 regurgitation continues on through several more paragraphs, with claims and stories and allegations for which we have no source except JR and all of which have been seen and discussed here before.
That takes us up through paragraph thirteen, and the only thing that is apparently clear is that SNAP (post-Anderson) had a lot more money at its disposal than one might reasonably have imagined. But this would be a perfectly rational and expectable and predictable result of SNAP indenturing itself to the torties.
An inconvenient problem which JR will then slyly try to wish-away by merely asserting (in the thirteenth paragraph) that “Jeffy Anderson” didn’t have that kind of “dough” (the Wig of the Hard-Bitten Macho Noir Detective, didja notice?). And what tea-leaves have informed JR of this (highly dubious) bit?
The fourteenth paragraph nicely emphasizes the “scam!” aspect of the whole thing, and who can disagree? Although JR should respect his own maxim about people in glass-houses.
And that applies even more robustly to the fifteenth paragraph.
Then in the sixteenth paragraph we are informed by the Wig of the Victims’ Tribune that “victims distrust authority intently”. Let us politely pass over that clearly inapt “intently” and indulgently presume that the Wig actually was going for something like “intuitively” or “inherently”.
And proceed to the substance of the bit: if ‘victims’ did indeed “distrust authority” then why did they turn to such “authority” (i.e. SNAP and this or that tortie) in order to sign on to the piñata-whacking game? And why have so very very many of them n-o-t subsequently made the types of claims JR is now making?
And in the seventeenth paragraph merely another unsupported assertion, punctuated as if for reliable emphasis by three exclamation points.
And in the eighteenth paragraph – tah dahhhhhhhhhhhh! – in order to bolster the bit about ‘victims’ being so weak, crippled and gullible, JR – apparently without realizing the incoherence – has to gainsay the assertion he had just made two paragraphs earlier about “victims distrust[ing] authority”.
And the sleazy whacky ball bounces on into the nineteenth paragraph where the torties themselves are apparently made ‘victims’ of “Jeffy Anderson”.
And – tossing some fresh chum into the water – in the twentieth paragraph JR will then introduce (the late) Chicago Jesuit Andrew Greeley (who was a noted and widely-published national commentator and sociological writer, and not merely a “novelist”). Greeley exemplified the phenomenon of the Stampede finding robust support from the ‘liberal’ wing inside the Church, especially in the U.S. and was quick to support what turned out to be the Stampede.
But aside from the geographical factoid that he too was from the Chicago area this bit simply serves to add yet another name to the ever-expanding list (now to include Vladimir Putin, as I noted in a prior comment on this thread) of JR’s suspects who are in cahoots with the Church to make ‘victims’ – and JR – look bad.
Thus the “closed circuit” of this scam is distractingly moved from the highly-probable SNAP-tortie axis to the increasingly and phantasmagorically implausible Church-SNAP-Jason Berry-D’Antonio-Putin-Greeley axis.
As to the twenty-first paragraph, I would agree that if the Jiang lawsuit succeeds then SNAP is indeed going to have a problem, and that will create a problem for its financial backers, the torties – whose abiding objective was to keep their SNAP-supporting role in the deep background.
But JR appears excitedly pleased about that prospect. After all, if SNAP goes, then ‘victims’ may have to turn to – have you been waitttttttttting forrrrrrrrrrrr ittttttttttttttt? – JR. (Now where did that Napoleon hat go?)
On to the 2nd at 237PM:
In the first paragraph, JR will try to platform an epithet against MH by shoehorning it into his usual “children raped by your church and it’s leadership” (sic) bit. Readers can consider the worth of his “bet” as they may.
In the second paragraph he continues on against MH’s use of “brave” to characterize Fr. J’s lawsuit. But this bit is slyly premised on the presumption that Abusenik allegations and claims were also “brave” – because – we are expected to presume – they were all simply instances of ‘standing up and saying’ “that wrong is wrong”, thus then that they were all accurate and veracious. We have seen here how few elements of Abusenik stories and claims and allegations conform to such presumption.
But then – given the way his mind works – he instantly abandons the ‘equivalence’ approach in the very next sentence and simply ruminates against “brave”. How “brave” was it, in a time of Stampede, for all practical purposes guaranteed that any cash-generating story one came up with would be immune from analysis and for all practical purposes guaranteed to garner for oneself ‘heroic victim’ status on top of the check … how “brave”, really, would anyone so predisposed have to be?
This riff on “brave” then platforms, in the third paragraph, the introduction of “wars” – where JR will declaim that he is “not at war with your church” but rather he merely ‘doesn’t “believe in your church”. As the youthy types say: whatevvvvvvvverrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
But as we see in the rest of the comment, this “wars” trope is continued to serve as the basis of an extended riff.
In the fourth paragraph – had you been waitttttttting forrrrrrrr ittttttttttt? – that “you’re church has made war on victims from the get-go”, demonstrating only a) that JR is not clear on the concept of “war” and b) that to a certain (and perhaps sociopathic) mentality, if your target defends itself then it is making war on you.
And he then goes on in the next sentence to repeat his whacky theory that “SNAP and VOTF etc” were/are ‘created’ by the Church – rather than the torties – to “manipulate victims into obedient animals that trust and obey”.
And in this we see yet again this odd and queasy effort to spin ‘victims’ as mere ignorant and spineless and helpless pawns, who were – had you been waittttttting forrrrrrrrrr itttttttttttttt? – re-victimized by these groups.
This ‘re-victimization’ included getting hefty checks for their stories and claims and allegations, a result which few, if any, of the ‘re-victimized’ have seen fit to now decry and repudiate.
And it would be more accurate to say that in creating a convenient conflation of his favorite bugbears by insisting that the Church, rather than the torties, is behind these front-organizations then JR has himself ‘created a war’ for himself, and one specifically tailored to be convenient and congenial to his predispositions. Neat.
The fifth paragraph gives us – as usual – a runaway riff where the Church is now “at war with one and one quarter billion people” (scare-caps omitted), which figure, apropos of nothing he has explained, then prompts him merely to wonder – had you been waittttttttting forrrrrrrrrrr itttttttttttt? – about his own status as included in that number and in this ‘thought’ that he has created for himself here.
And he concludes the paragraph by reminding everyone that the Church has a history of “lying about things”, a pronouncement delivered without a whiff of irony or self-parody or embarrassment in light of his own performances about so many “things”.
The sixth paragraph gives us further demonstration of the little cookie-cutter bit process by which JR assembles his toy-blocks to create for himself a convenient and congenial ‘reality’: since the Church defended itself against all these stories and claims and allegations then the Church considered such runs at the piñata to be an “act of war”.
And this bit is then bolstered by the old conflation of ‘personal truth’ and ‘objective truth’ as JR whines that the Church has called ‘victims’ “liars … with out ever knowing individual victims experiences” (sic).
Thus far yet another regurgitation of all the old familiar bits from the shoebox.
But wait: there’s more.
In the seventh paragraph JR will now drag TMR into the scenario, functioning as a “self-created war journal as was Stars and Stripes in WW2 for the U.S. war machine” (sic). (Here, WW2 is cast – as required by the convenience of JR’s little toy-block constructions here – as merely the product of “the U.S. war machine”.)
Which bit then platforms a further expansion of the riff in the eighth paragraph, where the Wig doth pronounce that “TMR is an act of war in itself”. Because – doncha see? – to question Abuseniks’ stories and claims and allegations and the Stampede is – waitttttt for ittttttttttttttttt! – “an act of war in itself”.
And thus, the riff hoovers on neatly, TMR (and now myself included) “have declared themselves at war with victims”. Have we? Simply by examining and assessing the stories and claims and allegations (that they had been assured would never be examined and assessed) … ?
And why would this be? Because – waittttttt forrrrrrrrrrrr itttttttttttttt – of the mere quibbly fact that “we [‘victims’] haven’t individually passed his ‘fact’ check policy”. Which excuse, with a marvelous lucidity, reveals the scam at the heart of the whole Thing: you aren’t supposed to check the facts in these stories and assertions and claims and allegations. Such ‘checking’ is – doncha see? – an act of “war”.
And note this sly deployment of “individually”: it is far too nuanced and careful for JR’s mentation and I would say constitutes clear indication that we are dealing with muses here). And it just happens to sidestep the massive credibility problems with the stories of ‘individual’ allegants – such, by amazing coincidence, as JR – and tries to keep things on the general and abstract level of ‘all stories and claims and allegations’, where things can be kept safely beyond ‘fact-checking’. Thus we are expected to conclude that while individual stories and claims and allegations may well have ‘fact-checky’ problems, yet everyone can still be assured that the whole conglomeration of them remains truthy and accurate and veracious. It’s all true – doncha see? – if you just don’t check the facts.
And if you do, then it’s an act of “war”.
The riff continues in the ninth paragraph: TMR (now epithetically dubbed “The Warrior’s Journal” (so who are the warriors here – TMR and myself or the allegants?) and, as always, conjoined and conflated with SNAP (JR does like to keep all his little toys in a tidy pile).
And this bit then leads to his further riffing in the paragraph as to how TMR and myself and SNAP and so forth “have all agreed to [this] among themselves”. One cannot but think of the core dynamics of paranoia: since the individual cannot possibly be wrong or at fault, then any indicators to the contrary can only mean that the sources of those indicators must all be in cahoots against the individual, thus ‘to make him look bad’. (Although in this case, the list of individuals and entities that must be listed as being in-cahoots has now expanded even to Putin and the Chinese Communist government, as well as the Church, the torties, most of the media, and various authors, and on and on.)
The tenth paragraph then reverts to declamations by the Wig of Decent Whining: “Victims want help not war” (too pithy; there are muses at work here). Actually, the facts – as opposed to this so-convenient assertion – indicate that ‘victims’ seemed quite satisfied merely getting their checks and haven’t been heard from since.
And the Wig continues: they only want “conversation” and “debates” (which slyly avoids mentioning that such “conversation” and such “debates” requires that i) their stories and claims and allegations be accepted as true ‘ipso facto’ and ‘prima facie’ and that ii) no questions be asked or uncongenial conclusions be drawn. That’s quite a bit that ‘victims’ “want”, indeed. And they cawn’t think why they are opposed in this menu of ‘wants’ (which opposition, of course, is an act of “war”).
The eleventh paragraph merely theatrically repeats – as if we hadn’t seen it the first time at the end of the tenth paragraph – the bit about ‘victims’ being “fish in a barrel”. But by putting forward the material we have seen and examined here, what did they expect? (Short-answer: they expected to be utterly believed and not-questioned … and since that is not the case here, then it is “war”.)
The twelfth paragraph descends into incomprehensibility as the riff meanders further into the swampy bits of “real bravery” and – somehow – “obedience”.
But then the thirteenth tries to bolster that by slyly trying to eliminate fact-checking and veracity by claiming that “real bravery doesn’t even need to make a showing” (of – had you been waittting forrr itttttttt? – any facts). Which merely goes to demonstrate that JR (and the muse squad) aren’t really familiar with “real bravery” at all.
And the fourteenth paragraph then tries to wrap the whole mushy hash into a neat package with a bow: there are, we are now informed, no “winning victims” in this – waitttttt for ittttttttttttt – “constant ‘war’” (scare-caps omitted) which SNAP and the Church have been waging since the 1980s.
No “winning victims”? Except for all those new millionaires and check-cashers.
And then, in a splendidly pitch-perfect self-advertisement, JR – the Wig of Outraged Purity and Decency – doth declare and declaim that he “couldn’t dream up a reality like this” because – have you been waitttttttting for itttttttttttt? – he’s “not that much of a liar”. And readers may consider this bit as they will.
On the 2nd at 303PM the whole riff is further expanded into prison gangs. And this time, suddenly, there is a lot of misspelling.
And we are presented with the “reality” of “cop controlled prison gangs” (sic).
And these gangs are fighting each other instead of “solving their mutual problems peacefully; quietly; intelligently” (another muse indicator with the rhetorical style here). But the allegants have indeed solved their problems, if their behavior is any indicator: they got their checks and got out of town. Except for JR, who, for whatever abyssal purposes, continues to try to dine off the Thing.
And on the 2nd at 320PM we get a sly if incredible excuse: the misspellings happened because – he doth “think” (after 68 years and an Army hitch he hasn’t looked into the matter further) that he’s “just a hair dyslexic”. But alas, like the misspellings, dyslexia doesn’t just turn on and off from time to time.
But the excuse makes for a nice – not to put too fine a point on it – excuse, and who would be so sociopathic, un-Christian, un-charitable, and un-loving as to doubt a dyslexic?
On then to the 3rd at 213AM:
Here JR will try to conflate “belief and obedience” in regard to the Church and some sort of “belief and obedience” in regard to SNAP. Readers may consider it as they will, but the fact that both the Church and SNAP might be the objects of “belief and obedience” does not in any way demonstrate that the Church created and runs SNAP.
Which bit he then tries to blend with his recent “war” bit: that there is a “manufactured made up war between the church and it’s victims” (sic). But who has “manufactured” and “made up” this “war”? The Church, merely by defending itself when all these un-demonstrable allegations came flooding along? Or by seeking – as it legally had to and as its Insurers would initially have required – to assess the credibility and veracity of such claims? (At least until the Anderson Strategies, building upon a tried-and-true tortie stratagem, forced the abandonment of that rational objective.)
We are supposed to accept that refusing to fork over the cash forthwith was an “act of war” (which, so very very neatly, ‘justified’ the allegants in heading for the torties and the piñata).
And nobody here whom I can think of denies the fraudulence of SNAP and its sibling organizations.
And whether the settlement amounts were “fire sale prices” is hugely open to question. One allegant upped his take from 12,000 to one million dollars – if memory serves.
And then several paragraphs of JR’s abiding fulminations about SNAP and he is welcome to them; few if any here have ever disagreed with that point.
Although there are some notably outré bits: in the sixth paragraph, JR tries to make it out as if SNAP was doing the bidding of the Church in agreeing to a standard settlement-figure in Australia, although it is Australian law itself that has capped the settlement figures (precisely, I have proposed, in order to prevent the type of allegating-for-cash Stampede that developed in the U.S.).
And in the eighth paragraph JR will rhetorically try to manipulate readers into concluding that SNAP’s calls to “change the church” (sic) have had no result (at least none that JR wants to see). SNAP’s calls, I would say, haven’t changed the Church (at least not in the ways SNAP would really like to see) but the Church has surely changed, becoming the largest organization of any sort on the planet with so comprehensive a child-protection protocol in place.
And JR’s tea-leaves in regard to the nature and un-changeablity of the hierarchy can be considered by readers as they will. (Although the phrase “unnecessarily decadent” is marvelously whacky; is there such a thing as ‘necessarily decadent’?)
But the final paragraph is revealing: apparently we are to accept that a) since the Church is undeniably un-reformable, then b) “victims” need not concern themselves with such a project (and may consider themselves justified thereby in simply enjoying their banked gains). Such a convenient bit of ‘logic’. Really.
What a world class fool you are. We been waiiiiittttting for itttttttt and waitinggggg forrrrrr ittttttt and we still are waiting for it: You to say something nice.
Poor sociopaths they can't be nice everrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Howwwwwwwwwww saddddddddd!
Look up the word "intently". It's exactly the word I wanted.
On then to the 3rd at 549PM:
JR opens with a familiar epithet. He affects not to understand what we have been “waitttting forrrrr” and implies that whatever we have been “waitttting forrr” has never materialized. But in my usage, what readers are “waitttting for” are demonstrations of JR’s typical whackeries. And most surely such elements have been copiously forthcoming.
JR will try to get some epithetical mileage out of this bit by then affecting to presume that what everyone has been “waitttting forrrrr” all this time is for me “to say something nice”. But that is demonstrably only JR’s particular irritation, and it cannot be forgotten that in JR’s universe one cannot be “nice” until and unless one buys his stuff hook, line, and sinker.
And he concludes with a familiar epithet, the one about my being a “sociopath”, a diagnosis with which he appears to have had a rather unpleasant experience at some point, and one that clearly made a lasting impression on him – not that it moved him to further study the possibility.
Leader shmeader! why don't you lead us to the stampede that doesn't exist? And then after that you can lead us to the love and kindness your god commanded of you. In other words. we're going nowhere.
On then to the 3rd at 747PM:
We get some sort of a riff on “leader”, but no indication of the context, so I have no idea what he is on about here. Except that he is trying to work up an epithet out of it.
"Putin"? Do I think Putin's part of my conspiracy analysis? Of course I do. I'm a paranoid. Doncha Know?
How nicely you ridicule me. Asssholes ridicule. I know. I'm an asshole about religion.
You ridicule people. I consider people sacred.
You're so funny. You so can't ever be nice; or agree to disagree. You are one damaged piece of work. You are a sociopath. You are ill.
On then to the 3rd at 758PM:
He attempts to sidestep the whackery of his Putin thoughts and where they lead. But they’re already in the record for readers to consider as they will.
He then feigns insight by his mocking claim that he is “paranoid … doncha know?”. But I rather think he’s on to something there and can only encourage him to change what are most likely the habits of a lifetime and confront that issue squarely.
Instead, though, he will try to shift the subject from himself to his being ‘ridiculed’ (indicating, nicely, that in his universe adverse possibilities or the mention of them can be nothing except ‘ridicule’ and ‘acts of war’ by any persons who note such adverse possibilities). And it enables him to don, as so very often, the Wig of Victimization.
And the scatological bits.
And then – pitch-perfectly and right on cue – the Wig of Righteousness: I “ridicule people” while JR – had you been waitttttttttting forrrrrrrrr itttttttttttttt? – doth “consider people sacred”. That term is rather overtly a religious one, and beyond that readers may judge this performance as they will.
And the final paragraph is a stitched-together bit of old but ever-manipulative epithets: I “can’t ever be nice” – although we must remember that in JR’s dictionary being “nice” means buying all his stuff hook, line and sinker or at least shutting-up if we don’t buy it.
And “agree to disagree” is precisely not what is called for here, as if there can be an equivalence or mere ‘disagreement’ about such profound and abyssal problems as we have so often seen, and examined at length, in regard to Abusenik material and method and the Stampede itself.
And the whole thing concludes with more mere epithet around that ever-interesting “sociopath” bit of his.
And as always, one is moved to admire again the wonders of clinical projection.
If there was a attempted $20.000 payoff. There was obviously, a big problem. And a very bad situation.
'TrueCatholic', on the 4th, is still going on about some alleged payout to the alleged victim. This comes under the category… "if you throw enough mud then some will always stick". It's utter rubbish.
How do I know that? Well… would anybody in their right mind bring such a lawsuit against a crowd like SNAP?… if they had just shot themselves in the foot? Because paying out any money to the claimant would immediately be seized upon as an admission of guilt, and the lawsuit would collapse.
Gimme a break?. Am beginning to doubt that 'TrueCatholic' is really a Catholic….let alone 'True'.
True to form, 'True Catholic' prefers to imagine the worst and harrumph on from there, rather than finding out whether the windshield-payoff bit is even true.
If there was no attempted payoff … then what?
This whole thing would have been so much easier. If the girl, and her family would have taken a $20,000 check. And we can get back to business. Like we always do.
550 more less victims in California get just settlements and we are to ignore the fact the rest of the world have gotten next to or literally nothing?
Settle with victims in THE media capital of the world and the rest can get nothing?Or settle after much hassel for what the church and or the state decides.?
And the world will think, thanks to CA settlement, that victims are getting a square deal. Poppycock! Bunk! Bullshit! Victims and the public at large are being had.
This how I know P's the church he mocks injured people for getting not only just compensation but for getting ANY compensation for our damages. I bet he's mad at the street person the Bishop in New Mexico killed while driving drunk. How terrible (I think he died). Following P"s "type"of logic (fraud) to compensate that victim, or his family, for his injuries is immoral because the criminal was a bishop and there for above the law. Oh he'll deny it but that's what P's saying. It the same thing.
By P's logic the man killed by the bishop isn't really dead; he's just not moving on purpose.
And if his body rots and decays (as those pesky dead people are want to do). It's his own fault for not taking enough exercise.
Was it the bishop of Phoenix not New Mexico? I've forgotten. That's not my point anyway.
On the 5th at 915PM JR and the team apparently circle back to try to hammer in a few more nails: according to them, my “logic” would dictate that “the man killed by the bishop isn’t really dead” (and a further snarky bit – as if it could help him out of the hole he has dug for himself here).
But as I demonstrated in my immediately prior comment here, I have no doubt about the death of the pedestrian because it was demonstrated (i.e. there was a corpse) and that the Bishop was at fault (i.e. the nature of the injuries, the admission – if memory serves – of the Bishop, and further evidence from the damage to the auto involved).
The key point, rather, is that my “logic” would dictate that since there is precious little evidence demonstrated in the allegants’ material in the Stampede, then we precisely do n-o-t have the same type of demonstrable and resolvable case that we had in the Bishop’s running-over the pedestrian.
The two instances – the pedestrian and the allegants – are fundamentally different precisely in that in the latter cases we do not have such clear and demonstrable evidence at all.
Thus then the second paragraph merely demonstrates the usual Playbook and Abusenik gambit of compensating and substituting for lack of logic and evidence and rationality by larding on the imaginative and emotionally-manipulative bits (about body rotting and decay and so on).
Then, in conclusion, an apparent effort to cover any possible inaccuracies in the story, which simply serves to demonstrate that in compiling this entire bit yet never once did JR or the team actually check back on the story itself. But – of course – that would be “fact-checking” and that’s not at all how Abuseniks roll.
And now for some further vivid examples of JR’s ‘logic’.
On the 5th at 430PM in the first paragraph: the settlements from the 550-or-so plaintiff case in L.A. are now “just” (meaning not too-small or insufficient). So far so nice.
But that hardly resolves the issue as to whether they were sufficiently grounded as to merit the payouts in the first place.
But then we immediately get the attempt to slide the usual phantasmagoric bits by: “we are to ignore the fact the rest of the world have gotten next to or literally nothing?”.
We have not established that the existence of storied myriads of un-reported allegants in “the rest of the world” is indeed, if at all, a “fact”. So we cannot “ignore the fact” since it has not at all been demonstrated to be a fact in the first place.
In the second paragraph, a rather too sly (there is a muse’s hand in this) effort to imply that the Church merely did “settle with victims in the media capital of the world” (scare-caps omitted) but hasn’t dealt with the storied myriads of un-reported allegants in “the rest of the world”.
The Stampede took place in the U.S. (in large part precisely because it is “the media capital of the world”) and so the situation had to be dealt with as it mutated in the U.S. There was no element of choice in it on the Church’s part.
And we also see in that paragraph the sly effort to now include both “the church and the state” (sic) as being in cahoots in all of this (because if any government somehow doesn’t take the type of actions that further enable the development of the Stampede then that government is also in cahoots with the Church – rather than, say, such a government simply not wanting to do what the U.S. government has done to further enable the Victimist agitprop of which the Stampede is a variant subset).
On then to the third paragraph: with the checks long-ago cashed, the Abuseniks can now claim that that monster (and monstrous) settlement was nothing but “Poppycock!” (and all the rest, scatology included). To which bit is then appended the further (and undemonstrated) assertion that now both “victims and the public are being had”. I think that “being had” constitutes a fair characterization of the Stampede and always has.
On then to the fourth paragraph where we get more of JR’s (and the muse team’s) ‘logic’: JR will declaim that he doth “know” now that the Church “mocks injured people for getting not only just compensation but for getting any compensation for our damages” (scare-caps omitted).
But this is – yet and yet and yet again – precisely the problem: we really haven’t demonstrated (and certainly not from any stories we have been able to examine here) just who is (and is not) genuinely “injured”, for which any “compensation” would be “just”. As always, this specious mimicry of logic seeks to presume what has yet to be demonstrated.
And then this bit – the logic of which apparently even JR and the team realize is seriously flawed – is immediately reinforced, apropos of nothing under discussion here, by a reference to a Bishop who killed “a street person … while driving drunk”. As if the dead pedestrian (who was undeniably an actual individual killed by that Bishop who was driving drunk) is somehow the same as the myriads of allegants about whom it is at this point impossible to determine or demonstrate if they were genuine victims or not.
And the whole sly bit is then bolstered in a riff introduced by another of those “I bet” bits that is nothing but innuendo and insinuation about what I might ‘think’.
Although, come to think of it – we are then informed – JR isn’t sure if the pedestrian was killed or it was in New Mexico at all.
And following that larding, JR returns to his “logic” by which we are to presumptively equate the undeniably demonstrated death of a pedestrian with the huge array of undemonstrated (and un-demonstrable) stories, claims, allegations and assertions that lubricated the Stampede.
And thus – so slyly, neatly and manipulatively – JR can stitch this little Frankenstein’s-monster of “logic” together by trying to equate my doubt as to the genuineness of allegants’ material with some fantasized (and not logically-derived) refusal to approve an award of damages to the deceased or family as if it were “immoral” to compensate them.
I would say that if it were demonstrated (as I believe it was) that that Bishop – driving drunk – killed the pedestrian, then it is perfectly ‘moral’ to compensate. But – again – the example of the pedestrian has nothing substantive to do with the example of the myriad allegants and their undemonstrated material.
Thus then JR’s “logic” here is the “fraud”, since it is not any actual form of “logic” at all.
Nor have JR or the muse team done themselves any credit by simply trying to nail down his whackery here by merely insisting that “that’s what P is saying … it’s the same thing”. As I have demonstrated clearly here, “it” is precisely and utterly n-o-t “the same thing” at all.
On then to the 3rd at 608PM where JR will attempt to extricate himself by saying that he precisely did mean “intently” when he said on the 1st at 539PM that “victims distrust authority intently”.
Let us then take him at his word. In that case, he has a) merely stated an irrelevance: victims are very intent in the manner in which they distrust authority.
And yet in that case he has b) set up a situation where persons who – he declaims – do so very much “distrust authority intently” went to such undeniable “authority” as the torties and the courts, collected some hefty sums, and then made no further complaints.
Logic is not your friend.
"Victims distrust authority intently" doesn't mean victims are idiots.When victims hire lawyers they stupidly think the lawyers are working for them and a few are; but once you've signed with a lawyer, one learns quickly they are ego maniacs. (I'll never forget our lead lawyer in L.A. (Ray Boucher) wanted victims to dress as franciscans. He even had costumes made with cowels for us to demonstrate in, in front of the L.A. cathedral. We refused to wear them. (It would have been comparable to Jews dressing up as Nazis).
The church believes intently in god yet they paid millions to lawyers on this plane; and yet they still lost. God may not be on their side after all. Maybe the magic man in the sky is on the side of victims.
The" hefty" sums you so worry about; in fact that seems to be all you worry about. victims not a jot. the American catholic church is a $16 billion a year profit machine. The 3 billion you whine about the church handing out to victims is really only $1.5 billion the insurors paid half. (as they rightly should they were co-conspiritors with the church they willfully failed to be duely diligent
At this point, I have a comment that I had to submit directly to DP/TMR because of computer glitches and it has just gone up. That would be “my immediately prior comment here” to which I referred in my comment of the 7th at 631AM.
On the 7th at 1039AM JR informs me that “logic is not your friend”. And how will he demonstrate and support that assertion? Let’s see.
First, we note that again we get a well-formatted comment that is different from the usual JR production. But even if there is a team of muses at work here, the material is Abusenik and let’s get to it.
In the second paragraph JR will attempt to a) retain his (inapt, I had said) use of “intently” while also b) trying to make it make sense.
In this little project he fails, and the manner of it is on this wise:
He says that “victims” do indeed hire attorneys, but that they do so “stupidly” because “they think the lawyers are working for them and few are”. Torties (or ‘the plaintiff bar’, as it is more formally – and more politely – known) work for a payout settlement for their clients according to a pre-arranged fee agreement; that’s the only way, usually, that the tortie gets paid. Is this “working for” the client or is it not? And are the torties here being set up to be insinuated to be yet more participants in that ever-increasing roster of those who are in cahoots with the Church to make “victims” look bad?
Are they “ego maniacs” (sic)? No doubt some of them are; so what? Such a personal trait is hardly demonstrative of bad-faith and is actually useful in some types of professional endeavor. And I suspect that somehow some tortie told JR something JR didn’t want to hear, and this is somehow beneath the otherwise irrelevant epithetical dig about “egomaniacs”.
Then we get some bits of epithetical story about a particular tortie. Readers must judge a) the credibility of the story and b) whether it is at all relevant to the point JR claims to be making in his comment.
And then in the third paragraph the comment goes off the rails as JR tries merely a riff on “intently”, somehow raising the epithetical bit about the Church ‘believing in God’ and yet the Church “paid millions to lawyers” – the ‘logic’ of which escapes me rather completely, but perhaps some other reader might be able to help here.
And the further bit about “on this plane” makes no sense as it is deployed here.
Continuing with my remarks on JR’s of the 7th at 1039AM:
But then JR goes for the fact that the Church “still lost”. This bit demonstrates the fundamental incoherence of Abusenik ‘logic’ and the plasticity of its approach to truth and actuality. Because JR has previously insisted that the torties are in cahoots with the Church and that the Church had successfully induced these settlements in order to avoid even more astronomical payouts (which, in the Abusenik cartoon, would most surely have resulted if all of the allegations had gone to trial and been subjected to adversarial examination).
And, further, since these allegations were settled ‘out of court’ (meaning ‘without trial’), then one must be careful in claiming that the Church “still lost” since the Church did not actually ‘lose’ at trial. (This is a problem resulting from the lawsuit-settlement route: none of the allegations thus covered were actually subjected to trial process.) But certainly, the Church and the Insurers lost somewhere near 3 billion dollars (spread over those paid allegants and their torties).
Thus the further epithetical and snarky attempts about God not being on the Church’s “side” fail as well.
JR will then, in the fourth paragraph, try to make it sound as if my only concern – rather than his – is about the “’hefty’ sums”. My concern is about the monies being paid out on the basis of almost zero demonstration of the accuracy and veracity of the allegations. Had those allegations been clearly demonstrated to be accurate and veracious in terms of actual tort and actual damages caused to the allegants, then my position here in regard to the monies and the Stampede would have taken a very different form and shape and substance. But that is not the case.
And before I can “worry” even “a jot” about the “victims”, I have to be reasonably certain that the “victims” were genuine. And that also is not the case.
Then this bit is buttressed merely by further distracting riffs on how much the Church (somehow, allegedly) amasses in “profit” annually. But a) we don’t know where this figure comes from or how it is derived and b) it is in any case irrelevant to the argument. Unless, of course, we are seeing an echo of the Abusenik argument to the effect that it doesn’t really matter how much the allegants banked since the Church could afford it anyway (which rather closely resembles the self-serving stereotypical criminal ‘justification’ that if you take money from some source that can afford it, then it’s OK).
And then the highly uncharacteristic snippet of a stab at informed discussion about matters-legal: the Insurors also ‘deserved’ to lose all that money since they had failed in ‘due diligence’.
In what way did the Insurers fail in ‘due diligence’? And would a (hypothetical) failure of ‘due diligence’ render the Insurers legally classifiable as “co-conspirators”? (Especially since, in order to reach an affirmative answer to that question, we would have to have a clear knowledge of the genuineness of the original allegations and claims.)
So then (as if it has to be stated in so many words) not logic nor rationality nor coherence nor accuracy nor veracity are the Abuseniks’ “friend”. Indeed, I think it has been frequently and vividly demonstrated that those elements are, by necessity, considered ‘enemies’ by the Abuseniks.
2 things.
First of all I think every one who bothers to wade through P's bombast, deserves a college degree.
Sheesh! If verbosity were king, P would be an emperor.
How is insulting every person who is either a victim or defends victims (except for SNAP it seems) helping the situation?
It isn't .
P's here to exacerbate the scandal not heal it. The very same way SNAP exacerbates the scandal to keep a "no man's land" between the victims and the people in the pews.
A "Don't go out there you'll die!" song and dance done on both side's trenches; by the church appointed leadership on both sides. It goes exactly where the church wants it to. It goes to Silence. Silence of victims AND of the "above it all"; "so sad"," so caring"; "so humble" church hierarchs. WAR! and bombast from the Catholic League; TMR and SNAP. Quite a show!
I have an idea. Let's put SNAP and TMR and Bill Donahue in a room and lock the door and keep them there to duke it out.; and the rest of us will talk.
And since I'm speaking of the show business. Let's talk about pope Frank's humble "royal" progress( costing states Millons of $. they can't afford) That the superstitiously ignorant might "See the Light"? No. That the church re establish it's self ruined reputation.
The church loves a good procession. Months to get to Philly and New York where liberals and even atheists (Bill Maher) just love the new revised Frank.(He's for the poor; the victims and gays even though tens of millions were spent in "lawyering up" [by THE richest entity of a religion on the planet] to fight all the afore mentioned people. the church's hostility towards contraception being a major cause of poverty for catholics worldwide.)
So the U.S. media falls down and kisses Frank's…………………..ring.
And Philly and John Doe are waiting like land mines to blow up. Just like all preplanned weaponry to go off on purpose and on time. Not to injure the people the "planners" work for; but to help them publicly. (Like the Gulf of Tonkien fiasco that cost millions of human lives and dollars). Making the church the "real' victim after all. I tell you this as a spoiler.
Let's just wait and see.
On the 8th at 245PM in the first paragraph JR says he will give us “2 things”.
In the second paragraph, we are given an epithet (and hardly a zinger).
In the third paragraph, we are given an epithet (ditto).
In the fourth paragraph, we are given an epithet in question form, to the effect that I am “insulting every person who is either a victim or defends victims”.
And all this yields is the same old dodge about a) questioning and pointing out problems being “insulting” to b) persons who are not demonstrably and credibly “victims”.
And the further bit about my defending SNAP (which is apparently a fixed delusion through which JR is going to continue to embarrass himself and that’s not my problem).
And what can be defined as “helping the situation”? Apparently examining and assessing the proffered material is not definable (in the Abusenik dictionary) as “helping the situation”. So what would ‘help’? (Short answer: only one thing will help and that is to accept everything pushed our way with empathetic ooohs and ahhhs and clucks.)
In the fifth paragraph – as so very often – JR has to make sure readers don’t come to the wrong conclusion in regard to these bits in the fourth paragraph, so he hammers it home with the flat (though hardly weighty) scripted assertion: “It isn’t”.
I’m not here to ‘help’ anybody; I’m here to assess and examine material on the basis of which huge amounts of money and tremendous amounts of damage have been done; justifiably, if we accept the assertions of the Abuseniks, and not justifiably, if we examine the material they proffer.
After all, I can’t “help” any persons or any situation without a clear and full grasp of just what is going on. But that is precisely what the Abuseniks claim is not ‘helping’. Neat.
In the sixth paragraph, JR will try to float the idea that I comment here “to exacerbate the scandal not heal it” (sic). And that’s not quite so: I am here to examine the material proffered in support of the Stampede to see which is the greater scandal: i) the alleged widespread and profoundly-rooted ‘abuse’ or ii) the Stampede that has so remuneratively turned the Church into a piñata for those hardy entrepreneurs ‘intent’ on scoring.
And then he tries to shoehorn in SNAP as also exacerbating the scandal by – if you can follow the bouncing ball here – keeping “a no man’s land between the victims and the people in the pews”. I can’t figure that bit out, unless it indicates an attempt to lay on SNAP the blame for the Abuseniks’ lack of popularity (and perhaps credibility) with “the people in the pews”. Is JR under the impression that any reading of a selection from his comments here from any pulpit will improve the standing of ‘victims’ in the eyes of “the people in the pews”?
On then to the seventh paragraph where the JR ‘logic’ train once again goes off the rails with a (far too rhetorically clever) riff on the no-man’s-land theme (“Don’t go out there you’ll die” – sic) which yet, marvelously, seems to envision the Church on “both side’s trenches” – go figure.
As best I can make out of a paragraph that then descends into some rather queasily rant-like territory, “silence” is bad and – therefore (if you buy the ‘logic’ here) – any ‘noise’ that is made is a good thing (and – therefore again – since it’s a good thing then only sociopaths would question it).
On then to the eighth paragraph where JR declares that he has “an idea”, which actually turns out to be nothing but a fever-vision in which SNAP and TMR and Bill Donahue (however he got into this thing) will “duke it out” although – it apparently has to be pointed out to JR – in his cartoon they are all on the same side.
And meanwhile “the rest of us will talk” (using the term in the Abusenik dictionary sense of making nice noise about “victims” and no other sense of the word is acceptable here, on pain of being declared a sociopath and un-Christian by this or that Wig).
On then to the ninth paragraph, where JR apparently thinks he has been “speaking of show business” and on the basis of that odd presumption will take the train even further off the rails by hauling in the Pope’s “humble ‘royal’ progress” (an antique historical term that surely bespeaks a muse). Here, the Wig of Benevolent Public Economy will decry and denounce the monies that all this is “costing States”.
Was he under the impression that any State or venue the Pope will be visiting did not first invite him or accept his offer to visit? Does he think that the Pope merely informs subordinate local authorities that he will be arriving, as Henry VIII or Elizabeth I would have done in a genuine “royal progress”?
This is, I would say, merely a pre-emptive gambit to minimize the problems created for JR’s cartoon universe by the fact that the Pope – after all JR’s epithets – appears to be rather popular among those “masses” for whom JR considers himself the Sole and True Tribune. Ah well, that’s showbiz.
Nor does the Sole and True Tribune hesitate for a moment in “insulting” his erstwhile wards: they are “superstitiously ignorant” (and no doubt will remain so until they acknowledge him).
And the tenth paragraph merely continues the riff (or delusion, as it appears to have become), stitching together an assortment of bits from the shoebox 3x5s.
And in the eleventh paragraph JR will toss an epithet at the “U.S. media” – which is rich, considering how very much “victims” owe to that very same media for helping the Stampede provide them with their checks.
On then to the twelfth paragraph where once again we are given the curious insinuation that “Philly and John Doe” [who is this “John Doe”?] are waiting like land mines to blow up”. What can this possibly mean? Nor is this the first time JR has been asked to explain his bits about some “plan” allegedly driving the Pope’s visit.
Readers are then ‘helped’ to comprehend these bits by references to the “Gulf of Tonkien fiasco that cost millions of human lives and dollars”. Which makes no historical sense whatsoever as written.
But in regard to the whole whacky bit here, we are informed by the Wig of Insight and Foresight that JR doth “tell you this as a spoiler”. Any reader wishing to proceed to Examining Room One and have a go at unraveling this skein is welcome to have a try.
But – in a sly gambit to forestall further discussion or “talk” about all this – JR immediately seeks to cut off further discussion by piously exhorting one and all to “just wait and see”.
Have we not seen enough already?
And what were the “2 things”?
Every body who's a victim's lying, right?
O.K. if not all, then what percent of us are lying?
That! the percentage you don't know, you use as an excuse?
If you did know some false percentage. Wouldn't that be world news by now? but it isn't is it?.
How cheap of your church to let some little hick, like you, break the hot not info to the world. Alert the fuckin' media.! Ah but nobody's listening to you. Welcome to my world! :^)
Don't you think the church and catholic league would have pushed that nonextant info to the four winds; If they had any shot at proving that?
They threw everything else at us but that. Do you think they'd let some schmuck like you and Bill Donahue break this?
No, Frank's coming to Philly on a mission. And you know how catholics like their missions or "Project"s like SNAP and VOTFs The first jesuit pope comes to shine a light on a preplanned scandal. Qel miraculous! Start building hotels Watch out Lourdes here comes Philly!
On the 9th at 159AM:
In the first paragraph JR tries to avoid the hugely problematic issues of a) probability and b) the specific Abusenik material we have been able to examine here by trying a distraction: he tries to reduce it all to a generalization I did not make (i.e. that “everybody who’s a victim’s lying, right?”).
No, that is not “right”. What I have said over all this time is that a) nothing in the material we have examined supports the probability of veracity and b) given all the other factors also considered, the probability of non-veracity is much higher than the media or the tortie-front organizations dare to acknowledge.
That’s a bit too nuanced for a cartoon or a cartoon-mentality, but that’s not my problem.
And on top of all that: the question JR poses is neatly designed to presume precisely what is at question: that persons claiming to be victims are demonstrably victims.
But this opening gambit then gives him the room in the second and third paragraphs that he needs for more distractive riffing: what “percentage” are lying? This is merely a variant of his familiar “proof” bit and we’d need to look at the stories, claims and allegations individually. But t-h-a-t is absolutely and precisely what the lawsuit route shuttered from examination.
But then – on the basis of his little play-block construction of ‘logic’ here – JR platforms his little epithetical romp in the fifth paragraph: the Church is “cheap” indeed to let “some little hick” like me … and the rest of that sentence drifts off into the nonsensical in the text.
But he also then quickly reinforces the nonsensical with the scatological, in a virtuoso demonstration of Playbook tactics.
And wraps it up with an epithet from his very own personal tea-leaf collection: “nobody’s listening to [me]” and that’s the same for JR (Welcome to my world!” – emoticon omitted).
Continuing my thoughts on the 9th at 159AM:
Actually I think that a number of people read this site, and that also means that JR is being read (if not actually “listened to”) on this site. That’s the value of this site: nobody would believe what Abuseniks and the Playbook are like if they didn’t actually read the stuff first-hand for themselves.
And thus he can consider himself welcomed to the real world.
The sixth paragraph seeks to run one of the oldest and most fundamental Victimist plays: you can’t prove ‘victims’ are lying without re-victimizing them because you can’t question or doubt them without re-victimizing them and therefore – tah dahhhhh! – you haven’t got proof and therefore everything they claim and allege is true.
And thus, once you have already been alleged to be a victimizer, then to question the allegations purporting that you are a victimizer would merely be to ‘re-victimize’ your victim (i.e. the allegant), so – for any and all practical purposes – once somebody has played the Victim Card, then you the alleged Victimizer cannot even defend yourself. Thus the Church and – in today’s episode – “the catholic league” (sic) couldn’t put up much of a defense (although the Catholic League, not having itself actually been accused of clerical sex abuse, still has room to offer its views).
And the deployment of this hoary old Victimist gambit in the sixth paragraph is made the basis of further utility in the seventh, where it is histrionically reported that “they” indeed “threw everything else at us but that”.
What precisely was left once “that” (i.e. the analysis of the allegations and claims) was swept off the table?
And what “they” is it who would then not “let some schmuck like you and Bill Donahue break this”? How Donahue and I wind up in the same sentence is still not clear to me, but are we to infer that the Church would not let anyone “break this” (i.e. the thoughts about the Victim Gambit) if the Church itself could not … ?
But the whole riff is useless and fails here, because it is built not on my own position but rather on the little toy play-block position JR assembled to his own satisfaction and for his own purposes.
Continuing my thoughts on the 9th at 159AM:
And the whole shmoo concludes in the eighth paragraph with yet another variant on the Papal “plan” pipedream: the Pope is “coming to Philly on a mission” – but Yes, most heads of state have a purpose for making official visits and they rarely just drop in for a cup of coffee. So what’s JR’s point?
And for those taking note in Examining Room One the answer to that question is: the Pope has a purpose and is on a mission with his visit to Philadelphia; Catholics “like their missions”; SNAP and VOTF are missions or Projects of the Catholics (and, we are to presume, of the Church); the Pope is a Jesuit and the first Jesuit Pope; and the “scandal” is “preplanned”.
If you hadn’t been overly impressed with the preceding bits in the eighth paragraph, then you might be truly dis-impressed with the slyly-placed howler at its very end: “the scandal is preplanned”.
What is this supposed to mean? As best I can grasp JR’s cartoon here: the Billy Doe case was fomented by the Church, in cahoots-with and ably assisted-by the Philly DA, the Philly police, all the levels of the Pennsylvania court system (except maybe the Superior Court), the media, Ralph Cipriano, Doe and his parents themselves (although maybe they were just poor victimized patsies), various jurors Grand and Petit, and numerous other Parties presently unidentified … in order - had you been waitttttttttttting forrrrrrrrrrrrrr ittttttttttttttttttt? – to make victims look bad.
Thus this ‘preplanned scandal’ is – apparently – going to somehow recoil on its fomenters during the Papal visit. How would that recoil take place? How will it blow up and in whose face will it blow up? What would be the dynamics, even in terms of logical conceptualization, of such an envisioned recoil (based on an even more whackulently envisioned “preplanned scandal”)?
About such rational complexities JR has – of course – nothing to say. But he does have stuff to throw up to distract us from the fact that he he’s got nothing here: somehow this whole thing is going to wind up with Philadelphia as a new Lourdes.
Thus the Abusenik mind (or minds) under full sail.
Really how hard is it for a pope to get invited anywhere?
The pope (rather his secretary) announces a trip to the New World. And the engraved invites come a rollin' in. Doesn't mean it's a natural occurance. The pope had nothing to do that week and thought: !Yes I'll go to Philly . Such a nice card they sent me" ( the pope talks with a Jewish accent. He's an old comic.)
i'm just saying the cops who are paid to protect him are being paid for, in no small part by Protestants and Jews and Atheists and Islamists and Gays) I'd rather not have any part of my tax dollar going to support a religion that hates me by lobbying against me, thanks. Bigots should pay for their own hatred grandstanding not the people hated by them.
But since this is going to happen with me or without me. let the cops protect the man.
But periphally in Philadelphia, the Monsignor and the Heroin addict show should, for max effect happen, just after the pope leaves, Riding in on a wave of pope fevor. Or it could happen before too. I don't know.
It could also not happen at all. I could be completely wrong.
But a lot of efforts been put in there by Cipriano and others. Wll it be a big build up to a let down?
On then to the 9th at 619PM where JR tries to save his fever-visions by pooh-poohing the complexities of Papal visits (or of any formal diplomatic visit by a head of state). This is similar to his assorted other recent efforts to insist – for the sake of saving one or another of his cartoons – that such and such a complexity really wasn’t complex at all.
As for the second paragraph’s Report From The Tea Leaves as to how a Papal visit is arranged, readers may consider it – and the mentality behind it – as they will.
As for the third paragraph, delivered by the Wig of Public Economy: this is a matter for the local citizens to take up with their elected officials. That’s how things work in a democracy – which, we had been led to believe, was the one thing JR had sought to bring to SNAP. And now we find out he doesn’t really understand much about democracy either – add that to the list.
The fourth paragraph rather encouragingly indicates that JR does actually realize that some events in the world do not require his pre-approval. Not quite enough here to merit a day-pass, but encouraging nonetheless.
The fifth paragraph opens with the deployment of “peripherally” (although misspelled) and that’s definitely a bridge too far for JR. And then the text (and JR and the muse) trails off into incoherence.
And having led us this far down the twisty trail, JR – careful now not to set himself up too clearly as being a failed (if not also fake) Tea-Leaf Reader – completely undermines everything he’s said: all of this may happen … or none of this may happen … JR “could be completely wrong” and JR doesn’t “know”.
Who could deny that?
What the pope don't make plans, Numb nuts?
Oh never an ulterior thought has ever come to the jesuit pope and friends?
the pope and crew are just a really sweet bunch of guys. Just waving hallelue to the sky and friendly as heck?
What catholic church do you go to Cumbaya Boy? We can all well see how the peace of christ just flows from you like a fount.
On the 9th at 631PM:
The first sentence makes no sense as written, always a give-away with JR that he’s trying to toss up something of little or dubious accuracy. But while he fails to convey the content, yet he manages to get the epithet across clearly.
Then, however, the JR logic-train again leaves the rails, going after “ulterior thought” and such.
And then some cartoonish fever-vision of “the pope and crew” (sic).
And the, apropos of nothing, a concluding epithetical stab that somehow winds up with JR – his trusty favorite pope-y tiara balanced precariously atop his Wig of Theological Pronouncement – bleating about how “the peace of christ [sic] just flows from [me] like a fount”. Readers may take the bit for what they might consider it to be worth. As shall I. And are we to consider JR’s material as actually being such a “fount”?
On July 9th, at 4.27 pm, Publion refers to "two things" that JR said he would point out. But it appears that JR forgot what his "two things" were. So guess we'll never know?
But I would like to ask him "two things"… out of my own curiousity. Questions that he would have answers for… because they would have made up part of his own claim for compensation. A very successful claim, from what he has told us. I think he said the sum of one million dollars was awarded to him.
First question….how old was he when he first realized that the historical sexual abuse was affecting him… to the extent that it was ruining his life?
Second question….how old was he when he went to his own doctor…. to seek help, to talk about the abuse, and did his doctor record this in the patient notes?.
The reason I ask is because a relative suffered shocking victimization in his workplace. No physical scars but lasting phychological damage. It forced him out of the workforce permanently. He got no compensation because it was a case of his co-workers persecuting him. They were not inclined to rat on themselves… so he hadn't any witnessess to support his claim. The technical name for this is "mobbing". But he did tell his doctor all about it, and the doctor recorded this in his clinical records.
Hence my curiousity about whether JR went to his doctor… and when?
I'm so terribly sorry I didnt headline my second "thing". Oh damn!
Oh! How incredably unimportant.
Answering Malcolm:
I was in my mid '20's before I finally had the courage to tell my friends about what happened o me. And that's after I'd come out of the closet to them but not my family. I told an aunt about it in my 30's. It was in my '30's I came out as gay to my parents and family around Anita Bryant time, in the gay struggle. but I never told either of my parents my mom never knew My father was told by my Aunt his sister. He never spoke about it to me. that's just the way my family was.
It was at this time I found myself through therapy at my local free clinic.
I wanted to sue the church in the 1970's but when I saw the neighborhood (Echo Park) lawyer Art Goldberg asking him to rep me. He said he'd love to but couldn't because the then statutes of limitation, for me, had run out. (Art Goldberg in the Cal lawsuits in the 2003 repped 8 or 9 victims and he only took 25 % in his fees).
In the ' 90's I went to a Rape Crisis center in Worchester Mass. It was a male group there were 2 or 3 men there. We met for a year with a therapist.
It takes a great deal of time for victims to process and analize what happened to us. By the time I found the strength to accept myself. how ever I am. it was long past the statute of limitations.
I should also say I was so pissed off at the church. I didn't want anything from them. I was going to make my life everything I wanted it to be. the only problem was due to the abuse I didn't have the tools to get from point A to point B. I had no way of reaching my objective. It fucked me up so bad.
I went to my family doctor, Dr. Lewin, in my senior year in high school. Not talking about the rape or about the crushes I was getting on my friends. but about what I could get to make me more manly ??? He wanted me to see a shrink. But I didn't want to touch the word "crazy" and sadly given my families educational limitations I was as afraid of being crazy because I was gay. Trapped in my own ignorance.
What can I say? I was lost I only had a traumatized 17 year old as an advisor: me.
I was also keeping a sworn to promise I had made to Fr Clemmens to never tell about the abuse. He was the school priest I reported to about my abuse. Keeping your word was very important to me. That was the manly thing to do: be a person of one's word.
I was drafted when I was 19. I checked the attempted suicde box in the exam. The Army shrink kept asking: are you gay? etc. etc. I shut up. I said no. Better to die in Viet Nam than to tell.( I had taken 9 or 10 asprins then threw them up when I was 17).
That's the truth. Most of your church's victims were heterosexual males. They too had their own self horror to deal with because of the abuse. None of us got out of our abuse unharmed that's just the clinical fact of it.
I await the barrage of nonsense to come from the usual "merry maker" Pbut that's the truth.
Try and be a bit sensitive….. Oh why bother? I'm dealing with a sociopath.
On the 10that 812PM, in response to the question-comment from ‘Malcolm Harris’, JR also gives us a nice example of more Playbook tactics.
Rather than come up with an excuse for his failure to keep track of his “2 points” he will simply make fun of the question as to what those “2 points” were. And – on top of that – he apparently has to be informed that he not only didn’t clearly indicate what his second point was, but he also didn’t clearly indicate what his first point was either.
Because – doncha see? – trying to make sense of Abusenik comments is just nitpicking and quibbling; and demonstrates that such persons are merely nitpicky and quibbly in the face of the monstrous, and are thereby and therefore un-Christian, un-loving, and sociopaths as well.
Alas. Why does he even bother? After all, it’s all so “incredably unimportant” – that “it” being accuracy, clarity, coherence, comprehensibility and – for all we know – veracity as well. But – doncha see? – those requirements are the requirements of un-Christian, un-loving sociopaths. Man up, readers! You’ve been given the story in all its outrageous outraginess; more than that you don’t need to know!
But MH has put a question that enables another tread out onto the boards with the familiar script Wig collection, and what old hoofer can turn down an opportunity like that?
Thus the paragraphs roll on, from the third through the fourteenth.
Then, in the fifteenth, JR slyly tries to do some pre-emptive damage control: he will await “the barrage of nonsense”.
And – had you been waittttttttttting forrrrrrrrrrrrr itttttttttttttttt? – in the sixteenth he tosses the Wig of Ruefulness ruefully: “Oh why bother”, he asks himself, since he is “dealing with a sociopath”. Ovvvvvv coursssssssssssssssse.
Well, let me see what can be done, since there are a few choice bits, beyond material we have already seen.
We had not seen before the bit (in the eighth paragraph) about it taking “a great deal of time for victims to process and analize what happened to us” (sic), and thus by the time all that had been done over the course of a year in the 1990s, it was too late for the statute of limitations. (But it had been too late, JR says he was told by attorney Goldberg, even in the 1970s.)
This is a familiar Victimist trope: the reason nothing was reported was because it took so long to comprehend it. But while it may take a long time to fully comprehend an Event X, yet it needn’t take any such time to recognize the Event X itself for what it was. If one is in a car accident, one may need to take quite a while to fully comprehend all its aspects, but it need take only a moment to realize that a) a car-accident Event has occurred and b) one has personally been involved in it. And thus call the relevant authorities and services. One need not wait years to call the police to report the car-accident Event, even if it might take quite a while to fully comprehend the Event and subsequent experience.
Surely if one were “raped” (in the classical sense) one might indeed recognize the fact. But as Victimism mutated in the U.S., “rape” in the classical sense proved to be an obstacle, since if one were indeed raped in the classical sense one would surely realize it right then and there. So instead, the very definition of “rape” had to be turned into play-dough, so that – as we have since seen – almost any unwanted sexual experience that one (allegedly) underwent could qualify as “rape”, and especially if it is claimed to have happened in the long-ago.
Thus a) ‘the numbers’ could be hugely increased and b) the allegant need not be asked why s/he did not report or even realize the “rape” at the time of the Event and c) the legal problem with Statutes of Limitations could be sidestepped (because the time-period when one ‘knew or should have known’ is now vastly extended to include in that ‘known’ not simply the recognition of the fact that the Event occurred but also the achievement of a full and complete comprehension of the Event in all its myriad aspects). From a tactical point of view, one cannot deny that Victimism had been doing its homework from the get-go.
Further, in that eighth paragraph JR indicates that i) he had to “accept himself” before proceeding with the report (or lawsuit, actually) and that bit actually runs up against the fact that he had ‘told’ a friend (and later that Fr. Clemmens or Clemmons) quite soon after the Event (or Events, since I recall he had mentioned plural ‘perps’).
And in regard to the ninth paragraph: he had certainly wanted something from the Church in the 1970s (when he went to attorney Goldberg); so why that is now said to be not-the-case in the 1990s remains a question.
What “tools” were required to “get from Point A to Point B”? What was Point A and what was Point B? And what was the “objective” that he says he had – the frustration of which was “fxxking [him] up so bad” … ?
We seem to have a hefty number of stock tropes deployed here, but they don’t appear to have an actual coherently-connected (or connect-able) content.
And, of course, the slyly-inserted “due to the abuse” precisely raises the Causality Problem yet again.
From the material in the tenth paragraph, it appears that whatever behavior or characteristics might have suggested “crazy” were simply (and rather conveniently) reduced to the sequelae of being “gay” – which is in itself a large presumption, since there are many possible characteristics of ‘being gay’ that do not at all in and of themselves evoke impressions of “crazy”.
So while JR may indeed accurately be characterized as “trapped in [his] own ignorance”, yet it seems this “ignorance” was to some extent self-imposed; he rejected the advice of the family doctor and thus precluded psychiatric assistance.
Which is also relevant to the following (the eleventh) paragraph’s claim that all he had for advice was “a traumatized 17 year old as an advisor” – unless this person was JR himself, in which case this is a bit of histrionic spin.
In the thirteenth paragraph we are now informed that JR lied during his military induction interview with a psychiatrist. This would fit in with the generally familiar plaint that in those days homosexuals would lie about their orientation for various reasons. However that simply raises the fact that we would then be dealing with someone who was oft-practiced in lying, and that – without drawing any conclusions at this point – raises various problems of its own.
And taking “9 or 10 aspirins” and then quickly throwing-them back up might not have been considered quite the “suicide attempt” it would be considered nowadays. Although in the event, for whatever reasons, the Army didn’t send JR into combat anyway, and put him in a clerk position elsewhere.
And the fourteenth paragraph simply gives us a specific form of ‘causality’ for the Causality Problem that abides here: it was i) the sequelae of ‘being gay’ that ii) apparently were created by the “abuse”. But one would have been gay before the abuse, so this connection doesn’t work: the ‘abuse’ could not cause a heterosexual male to suddenly become ‘gay’.
And I am not sure of the reliability of the assertion that most of the allegants were “heterosexual males”; nor is it easy to determine this in the contemporary atmosphere wherein one simply takes the individual’s word for it as to his orientation or – as they say now – ‘self-identification’.
And I absolutely cannot allow to pass without comment the attempt to guide our conclusions: “None of us got out of our abuse unharmed that’s just the clinical fact of “ (sic). As I have said before, this fails legally because of the Causality Problem (i.e. which came first: the (alleged) abuse or the panoply of personal problems?).
But it also fails clinically for the same reason: competent therapy requires that the clinician determine whether a) the presenting-problem(s) is/are caused by the claimed ‘abuse’ or b) the presenting-problem(s) pre-existed the ‘abuse’. If (b) then sooner or later the clinician is going to have to bring the patient to that realization. Especially if the patient is using the abuse as an excuse to avoid the panoply of pre-existing personal problems (which themselves are not often completely reducible to being a repressed gay).
It is a clear indicator of the Victimist derangement of therapy (as well as law) that assorted therapy practitioners need (or perhaps must) merely take the claim of abuse as veracious and then go on from there – which is yet another example of how Victimism insists that the play always begins on-base and not with an at-bat.
And if being “sensitive” simply means letting all of these questions go unasked and these points go unremarked, then we see clearly how manipulatively incomplete such story-telling can be.
I've answered every question asked by anyone who has asked.
No one has ever asked you to not ask questions but after awhile I began to learn of you that no matter what I said. I wasn't going to be believed by you.
I can't fix that. I can't fix you. You're more broken than I am.
The pope is popular amongst the "masses" because he's the new Obama. And like Obama he's a "creation"(more like a contraption).
He is the new "HOPE" and is being heavily promoted as such by the media.
I don't know the man but has he changed anything substantive in the church but "image"?
And the media fairly wets itself to give the world en mass his latest "cutest" acts of humanity and or humility. You want to buy the product "Pope Francis"? Good luck. It's mutton dressed as lamb. Long live the king! I'm not buying it.
On the 11th at 937AM, in the first paragraph, JR attempts to wish-away both a) the Pope’s popularity and b) JR’s own belittlement (as their Truthy Tribune, no less) of “the masses” (not my term, but his): we are informed by the Wig of Sociopolitical Knowledge that the Pope is “the new Obama”, and thus the Pope resembles Obama in that the Pope is “a ‘creation’” and indeed “a contraption”.
It might seem strange that so erstwhile a Progressive a Tribune would denigrate Obama, but i) if Obama hasn’t gotten around to acknowledging the marvelousness of JR then Obama is clearly not a true Progressive and ii) if plop must be tossed at the Pope and if Obama (for whatever reason) appears useful for this purpose, then Obama will be drafted as a piece of plop for the tossing.
I would agree that the media have at this point chosen to cast the Pope under the rubric of “hope” (as they once did Obama). Does JR here seek to imply that the Pope controls the media? If not, then this is a point relevant to the media, but not to any alleged Papal machinations.
And, looking over the various twists and turns of JR’s own self-presentations here over time, is it really wise for JR to cast stones at somebody else as being “a contraption”?
What “substantive” has the Pope “changed” in his first two years? An interesting question, but it remains posed but un-answered and un-explicated, and thus remains yet another example of the Abusenik innuendo-question, whereby any dark suspicions a reader might develop would substitute for the mental heavy-lifting that the Abusenik propounder of the question has chosen to avoid.
And again, is it wise for Abuseniks to be tossing stones about “mutton dressed as lamb”, when clearly so much of the Victimist and Stampede strategy is precisely built on assorted persons wrapping themselves up in the flag – as it were – of being a “victim” or “Victim”? Have they not come to us bleating of their lamb-hood, only – when questioned – to turn like hyenas with bared fangs on any questioner?
JR is “not buying” this presentation of the Pope. Fair enough; that’s his right. But surely then he cannot legitimately claim to be outraged and dumbfounded by those who are “not buying” his own presentation.
By the way, abuse kills.
Not only victims but our family members who blame themselves for their kids going off the tracks. Especially when we keep the "secret" out of fear of harming our loved ones. It's an horrific act on more levels than the obvious ones.
On the 11th at 943AM we are given a bumper-sticker type of mantra to the effect that “abuse kills”. If that were literally true, given the claimed prevalence of “abuse”, then there should be a lot less people in the world. And, of course, “abuse” can be physical or emotional, comprised of acts of omission (neglect) as well as acts of commission (beating), and not simply ‘sexual’, which itself can comprise a wide range of acts from verbal suggestions to touching to classically-defined rape.
But in the second paragraph JR (unwittingly, no doubt) let’s a familiar cat out of the bag yet again: “family members who blame themselves for their kids going off the tracks”. Precisely. And the next question must be: had they gone off the tracks before any alleged abuse or was some alleged abuse the only and the complete cause of that “going off the tracks” … ? But this is exactly the type of question that isn’t asked and cannot be asked according to Victimist dogma.
Thus whether an alleged “act” was “kept ‘secret’” and thus not reported, or whether an alleged act was merely “a contraption” designed afterwards like a surfboard to capture the wave of a remunerative and risk-less Stampede … this is another question that isn’t asked and cannot be asked according to Victimist dogma.
And if the answer is closer to the latter than the former possibility, then is such an act itself not also “horrific … on more levels than the obvious ones”?
I was fired from every job I ever has (save for three) I had "issues" with authority. Very common for victims according to the shrinks I've talked to. A far cry from being the straight A student I was before the abuse.
I was also extremely promiscuious. Looking for love in all the wrong places.
P, keep your trap shut. my life is not up for your dissection. Get it? I'm living here.
Go "epithet" yourself!
On the 11th at 1207PM JR volunteers that he “was fired from every job” he ever had “(save for three)” – and we notice again that curiously antique usage of “save” in the sense of ‘except’.
But this life-course is “very common” for a number of diagnoses and hardly proves that “abuse” was the cause. Indeed, it can just as easily (to say the least) indicate a panoply of pre-existing and deep problems that would have been capable of wrecking a life without any abuse having occurred at all.
And now we are informed – rather contrary to material introduced on this very thread – that JR had “talked to” at least some “shrinks”. To which I can only say that if such “shrinks” did not point out to him the point that I just made in the preceding paragraph here, then they were not particularly competent.
Or perhaps JR was just very selective in what he ‘heard’ when they were speaking with him; perhaps they had – appropriately – used the subjunctive and told him that ‘abuse’ could or might be the cause but that a great deal of work had to be done to establish whether ‘abuse’ was the primary or sole cause of the life-wrecking trajectory reported by the patient.
He was “extremely promiscuous”, which is certainly not a symptom solely attributable to ‘abuse’ and as such constituting indubitable proof of some causative ‘abuse’.
And then in the third paragraph – having of his own volition put up such material about his story as he has here – JR orders me to “keep [my] trap shut” because his “life is not up for [my] dissection”. Alas, I am not trying to ‘dissect’ his life; I am merely trying to assess the story he is telling about himself. And I continue to find – and explain at length – problems with the coherence and plausibility of that story.
But what we are actually seeing here is an echo of a vital and key Victimist/Abusenik presumption: the facts don’t matter, the story does. And readers may consider the validity of that presumption as they will.
Does JR “get” that? He may be “living” his life, but “here” he is telling a story and has chosen to do so and it is the right of any commenter to consider that story since on the basis of that story JR has put forth a panoply of allegations, assertions, characterizations and claims that he demands we ‘believe’.
And the fourth paragraph concludes the whole thing with further epithet. But of course.
I see where the former arch-bishop who was defrocked for child abuse.Got ill just before his trial in the vatican. Mustn't cast a dark shadow on the pope and the media's triumphant tour. Talk about false values. The media is salvating over the pope. One might even think the media might be owned in large part by the church the way the press wets itself over popes; and dahli lamas too. Religion is always good. No matter what it does to people. No questions asked.
On the 11th at 841PM – having perhaps received some further inspiration from a muse – JR doth “see where” a “former” archbishop “defrocked for child abuse” had fallen ill “just before his trial in the vatican” (sic).
Consider that.
If JR is referring to a former archbishop in the Vatican diplomatic service, then that hierarch was stripped of his offices and then defrocked … by the Vatican. And as a member of the Vatican diplomatic service he is a citizen of the Vatican State and thus is subject to not only its sovereignty but its courts. Which is precisely what he was facing when, approaching trial, he fell ill.
Such illness is hardly rare in court trials anywhere, especially if the accused is elderly. But in any case, this man is facing judicial process precisely because the Vatican took strong action against him.
But the Abusenik spin on the thing is that – as best can be determined by (yet again) the innuendo muttered by JR here – his illness is merely some sort of tactical ploy and one arranged by the Vatican itself.
To achieve what? The Abusenik innuendo would have us go with the idea that the Vatican wanted to prevent the trial from interfering with the Papal visit to the U.S. But if that were the case, then the Vatican could simply have held-off the trial completely until after the visit. Instead, the Vatican had already taken – and publicized – this man’s removal from office and the other sanctions. So then, the Vatican would not only have left itself little traction for manipulating the trial itself by some faked illness, but also the Vatican would have left itself open to suspicion if it then arranged a faked illness.
Did the defendant fake his own illness for his own purposes? Did the defendant suffer actual physical illness when facing the prospect of so grievous an experience as a criminal trial? Few Abuseniks, no doubt, have ever (so far) faced a criminal trial where they were the defendant, so perhaps it is understandable that they might be able to indulge in a certain callow attitude toward such an experience.
But this little foray into the familiar swamp of innuendo fails here for the reasons I outlined above.
And – in a marvelously vivid demonstration of the essential Abusenik whackery – JR will even propose (by innuendo, of course) that “one might even think” that “the media might be owned in large part by the church” (sic). Perhaps, one would have to add, in the same way that the Vatican owns most of the land under downtown Chicago (as ‘reported’ originally by Al-Jazeera, which was discussed in a recent thread here).
And to paraphrase JR’s final three sentences in the paragraph: Victims are always good. No matter what stories they tell to people. No questions asked.
As clerk-soldier JR perhaps did not learn during his Army hitch: poison gas is as dangerous for those who launch it as for those who receive it.
I have lied before, absolutely. You haven't?
I lied about my having same sex experience before I went in the Army.
I still served this country and served it well as gay people have since Valley Forge. So much so, I came out a Spec 5 (the equivalent of a buck sergant) after 2 years. I was never arrested during my Army time even if I made love illegally and smoked grass illegally. [I was a head of my time.:^)]
I could kill a man and be called a hero but if I made love to one I was called a pervert and a criminal. That contradiction has, at long last, been fixed.
The question is: Am I lying about my abuse or SNAP? No.
You'll never believe that because it's your choice to not believe. That's on you. It has naught to do with me.
I remind readers again that the purpose of following the JR material is simply to demonstrate the ins and outs of so many Abusenik and Stampede practices.
On the 12th at 642PM JR will now try a different gambit to deal with his lying: Of course he’s done it, who hasn’t?
But as I said: this creates even more of a problem: the story-teller is by his own admission a practiced liar (and by that I mean not that he has occasionally lied – every human being has – but rather that because of his sexual orientation and how he describes his experiences with it then it appears he has become quite a practiced deceiver)
And while that is what it is, yet he will, I trust, understand why that perhaps adds more burdens to his credibility, especially when he is presenting such problematic material to us and demanding that he be ‘believed’ and making some pretty serious accusation against those who have reservations (e.g. they are sociopathic, un-Christian, un-loving, un-empathic, un-believing, and sociopathic).
In the third paragraph, again some familiar tropes without actual relevant content: he served his country well and – cue the band – just like “gay people have since Valley Forge”. Perhaps our respectful thoughts of “Valley Forge” will float us over the sandbar of JR’s specific case.
And again, readers will recall that we are to believe that a man with so pronounced a ‘spelling problem’ was quickly promoted through the ranks as a vital-documents processor and then a supervisor of vital-documents processors. Did the rather pronounced (if oddly episodic) ‘spelling problem’ – which was apparently the result of the ‘abuse’ of this ‘A-student’ – not surface until after his Army hitch? Once again, we encounter the Magic Bullet Problem in regard to the spelling-problem as result-of-the-abuse.
And while he then seeks to burnish his creds as a gay hipster by admitting to violating the laws that governed the Army society that he had lied his way into, he instantly excuses himself while simultaneously complimenting himself by claiming to be “a head of my time” (sic … that spelling problem again).
Then further distracting but familiar tropes about how a gay soldier could kill someone and “be called a hero” but if he made love to another man … and so on. And the band plays on.
But then but then but then: he gets down to the major and core issue: Is he or is he not “lying about [his] abuse or SNAP”. This is indeed the crux of the matter for readers. And what do we get? From an avowed and practiced deceiver, in the matter of the two most important issues upon which he declaims, we get – had you been waittttttting forrrrrr itttttttttttttttt? – merely a simple and unsupported assertion (“No.”) that he is not lying.
This is beyond parody.
But he has – slyly – prepared an excuse (rather than any relevant or persuasive demonstration): I will “never believe” his stuff (merely) because “it’s [my] choice not to believe”.
Sorry, Charlie – as they used to say in the canned-tuna commercials. For matters of the Metaplane, one operates in the realm of belief. For matters of the Monoplane – such as the historical veracity of JR’s ‘abuse’ – one must play according to the rules of actual and factual evidence or at least rational and coherent explication and persuasion.
But JR – by his own admission – has throughout most of his life rarely played by those rules (although he has this and that excuse for it).
And that has everything to do with JR and “naught to do with me”.
My story, my narrative of my own life's facts as they occurred, is fact. You don't like it? Tough.
I had/have no need to embelish the facts. the facts are what they are. The events happened exactly the way I said/say they did. Like them or not. They still happened.
Who ever said( save you) that "the facts don't matter. the story does." ?
What planet are you on? Have you mistaken SNAP's corrupt false flagged behavior as truthfully representing all victims? SNAP's fuck up's were planned to look like "facts don't matter just get gooey for victims" that's SNAP's behavior not victims. The press still want facts (with in a limited range) They just don't print SNAP's fake goo and that's it.
No one's ever asked you to not ask questions. It's just that no matter how many times we answer you. You still refuse to believe the facts simply BECAUSE we are the one's presenting them. That's why you're damaged.
I had missed the JR bit on the 12th at 624PM.
Readers may consult the record – even the very recent record here – to consider the veracity of his claim that he has “answered every question” and so on.
In the second paragraph, he will try a different tack to avoid the problems with his material: he is just the ‘victim’ of my not believing him, and when he realized his stuff wasn’t going to be believed then … what? He did answer the questions? Of course not. Rather: he didn’t.
Thus: he didn’t answer questions because he knew he wasn’t going to be believed.
In the first place, that’s rather a criminal’s kind of excuse. Especially since his ‘being believed’ would rely on the credibility of his story and his material, which bounces the ball back into his court, where – but of course – he doesn’t want the ball to be.
In the second place, if his material were credible there is a much better chance of his being believed. But here we see his attempt to make the situation more convenient for himself by trying to put the cart before the horse: if he doesn’t think his material is going to be believed, then he won’t answer the questions. (But he will happily lard on his “contraption” of a story, well-burnished and oft-rehearsed.)
Essentially, he is trying to a) disconnect ‘being believed’ from the credibility of his material and b) connecting being not-believed to some personal issues through which he can more easily don the Wig of Victimhood.
But the core Issue remains: ‘belief’ (if this is indeed the accurate term) is intimately connected to the credibility of the material.
And then – trying a new tack to deal with the probabilities of his problems – he will simply blather (the Wig of Justly Exasperated Competence) that he “can’t fix” me and lard onto that bit the epithetical declamation that I am “more broken” than he is. And readers may judge as they will.
And again, imagine a tortie’s nightmare: the witness refuses to answer the question, Your Honor, because he figures he wouldn’t be believed anyway.
On the 13th at 1151AM JR will once again try to avoid the credibility problems with his stories and material by reducing the matter to one of personal choice: as if I ‘choose’ not to believe the stuff because I don’t “like it”.
And I say yet again: ‘liking’ it has nothing to do with the matter. There are serious credibility issues that I have seen, I have explained them, and no reasonable person could legitimately accept his stuff in light of those issues.
The Victimist/Abusenik gambit here is to wheedle or threaten until readers/hearers accept the stories and claims. Thus to wheedle by presenting themselves as poor bedraggled victims and play (or prey) on the ‘empathy’ of readers/hearers; or else threaten by insisting that if their material is not ‘believed’ (regardless of any problems, which shouldn’t be mentioned anyway in the first place) then that will ‘prove’ that the readers/hearers are nothing more than (fill in the blank: sociopathic, un-Christian, un-caring, hateful, bigoted, oppressive, un-charitable, and sociopathic).
Thus too then there are no “facts” in the sense that third-party observers can legitimately use that word. And thus the second paragraph’s distractions about whether there is a need to embellish such “facts” fails.
And indeed, as I have been demonstrating with his material, the “facts” themselves, as he relates them, cause more than enough credibility problems on their own.
In regard to my observation that “the facts don’t matter, the story does” JR simply avoids the content of that observation and tries to distract and avoid by noting that I am the only one who has ever said it. So what? Again, the gambit here is to avoid dealing with the content and to somehow try to disparage the source.
Then in the fourth paragraph – and at this point it, after all my explication and explanation, it really does have to be considered from a clinical point of view – JR simply tries to bethump me yet again with his signature accusation that I don’t believe SNAP is “false flagged” (sic) and that I do believe SNAP is “truthfully representing all victims”. As I have I said before many times now, I see SNAP as a front (although for the torties) and as a front it does not “represent” the interests of anyone but the torties for whom it is a front.
Less effort at scatology and more effort at thought might be needed here, but I sense that this is precisely a path JR chose long ago: avoid the thinking and toss around the scatological bits instead (as if they could effectively substitute for actual thinking).
The rest of the fourth paragraph trails off into incoherence, as so often.
And in the fifth paragraph, echoing his gambit in the comment of the 12th at 624PM, JR will attempt to imply that he has answered all the questions arising from his material and then – slyly – that nobody has “ever asked [me] not to ask questions”. JR perhaps does not recall the many times he has told me to not consider his material, and that his life (and its “facts”) are his own and not open for analysis, and the many times when the only ‘answer’ to my observations and assessments has been distraction and epithet.
And he also now attempts to also slyly imply that all of the foregoing gambits have been some species of “answer” and thus – had you been waitttttttttttting forrrrrrrrr ittttttttttttttttt? – that the Wig of Pure and Innocent and Exasperated Bemusement simply cawn’t think why I would “still refuse to believe the facts” (as if the ‘answers’ had been forthcoming and responsive).
But then but then, JR adds another sly manipulation: I have simply chosen not to believe all that material (and all those ‘answers’) merely “because” (scare-caps omitted) it is the Abuseniks who are “presenting them”. Meaning: this is nothing more than a ‘personal’ thing in which I merely refuse ‘ipso facto’, ‘prima facie’, and ‘ab initio’ to believe anything Abuseniks say.
You can see here just how sly Abuseniks can be in trying to avoid the problems with their stuff.
But I read the stuff and simply point out the problems, explaining the problems I see at length and with care. And that’s exactly what the Abuseniks don’t want to see happen. And I point out problems, which then leaves them in the position of having to deal with those problems in the material. And that is exactly what the Abuseniks don’t want to do. And quite possibly can’t do.
And on the basis of all these sly manipulations and avoidances, JR will then try to wrap this whole bit about in a bow with a queasy epithet from the Wig of Diagnosis: “That’s why you’re damaged”.
And thus his epithetical bit here recoils nicely and says a great deal.
"Alas I'm not trying to 'dissect' his life" What you're sorry you can't dissect my life? But that's all you do. And the facts are still the facts of my life in spite of what you think about them.
On the 13th at 1158AM JR goes on for a bit on the basis of a misreading of what I wrote.
When I wrote in a prior recent comment “Alas, I’m not trying to ‘dissect’ his life” that “Alas” was not intended as an expression of regret on my part, but rather as an expression of irony, i.e. ‘Alas for JR’s little plan here’.
And I am not “sorry” at all. What we have had an opportunity to do here on this site, courtesy of JR’s (and others’) various stratagems and statements, is something that few sites have ever been permitted to do: actually and honestly analyze and assess Victimist and Abusenik claims, stories, allegations and assertions in a sustained and thorough manner.
That’s what I do. Although that’s not “all” I do – since there are opportunities to contextualize various bits and bring in assorted discussions from other fields such as History and Theology and Law and Psychology.
And thus his concluding sentence also fails because – as so often – he doesn’t distinguish between “facts” as ‘personal truth’ and “facts” as acceptable third-party objective-observer truth.
And because in some instances the very “facts” he claims create precisely the credibility problems that undermine his efforts and purposes here.
I leave it to the readership to decide who's telling the truth.
On June 30th Bill Thomasson comments on Father Joseph Jiang….saying…"bless him" and… "I sure hope he has a good lawyer".
Well have just read part of the Statement of Complaint… against the defendants in this matter. It's not easy for a layman, like me, and only limited myself to that part of the complaint against the St. Louis Police detectives.
Based on what has been specified I have concluded that Father Joseph does have a good lawyer. Very good in fact.
We should now pray that he gets an impartial jury…. who must hear and evaluate the case against the two detectives.
Just to give a quick insight. He was arrested and charged just one day after the accusation.. Basically on the unsubstantiated accusation of the alleged victim, no other investigation conducted at that point. Yet even a rookie cop would know that it is basic that the accused person must have… the opportunity and the motive. This must be demonstrated by the facts before charges are laid.
The accusation was that alleged statutory sodomy occured in a bathroom, at the church, after the 8.00 am mass,, which the entire grade 4 class attended. The mass took 30 minutes, so that would make the alleged offence taking place about 8.30 am. Problem is that bathroom is not unlocked until 9.00 am?. Also the class teacher said it was impossible for the boy to be taken anywhere without her knowledge. Moreover the other parishioners at mass would have seen it.. and been puzzled.
So the vital requirement of 'opportunity' was never established by the facts.Yet they charged him…. Why?
Because it is a witch-hunt… and also a treasure-hunt… working together in tandem.
Now I'm "sly"? "Sly"! I'm not the one hiding here. You are. I'm not the one ignoring clinical studies on the damages that come to the victims of childhood sex abuse by priests.
What a lying bag of s@#t you are.
In regard to the 17th at 144PM:
Once more, an attempt to toss what little plop JR has left: he is not “sly”, but I am because – had you been waittttttttting forrrrrrrr itttttttttt? – he is “not the one hiding here”. Since we are working on the quality of content in the material, then I have hidden nothing. One might wish that JR were hiding his better material and capacities, but one is well-advised not to postpone one’s next meal waiting for a resolution to that wish.
But then but then but then: despite the fact that when Abuseniks have claimed the existence of them, I have on several occasions asked for links to specific studies as to the damages specifically and demonstrably and uniformly caused by sex-abuse (priestly or otherwise), which I would be happy to review and discuss; and despite the fact that no such references to support their claims have ever been provided by the Abuseniks, yet JR claims I am “ignoring” all of those (at this point phantasmagoric) studies.
And in an apparently “sly” effort to avoid making too clear an assertion (for which he might be held responsible), JR uses a curious circumlocution to avoid the Causality Problem: he refers to “the damages that come to” such victims.
I have discussed the general issue of Victimist studies in prior comments on prior threads: generally, the problems with them fall into three categories.
First, they accept without corroboration the claims of abuse and victimization.
Second, they then accept without corroboration that any problems that are claimed were caused by the abuse.
Third, they confuse or conflate various types of ‘abuse’ (physical, emotional, mental, sexual) and perhaps include ‘neglect’ as well.
A fourth problem is two-fold: either a) the study makes Victim-congenial conclusions that are not supported by the research (such as it may have been) from which the study’s results and conclusions are drawn; or b) – and this is not so much the fault of the study as of those who wish to make convenient use of the study-results – the study properly casts its conclusions in the subjunctive (may be caused by; might cause; and so forth) but assorted types ignore the subjunctive and presume the indicative.
In the comment under consideration here, JR refers to “clinical studies on the damages that come to the victims of childhood sex abuse by priests”. Can he provide the identifying information or links for one or several such actual “clinical studies” that he claims I am ‘ignoring’? I would be happy to review the text of such studies and assess them.
Let JR provide his references then. Otherwise, he stands in the direct path of the recoil of his concluding epithet.
I'm sorry it's not my job to provide you with data. I'm not working for you. It exists.You want it/ them? You find 'em. Look to Australia or Ireland. Do you think their hearings/reports are based on nothing?
Are we to pretend you have studies backing your pov? You provide your data to back you. You're the fake professional. Why not ask the "types" you admire to provide you with data to back you up. I'll show you mine if you show me yours. LOL!
We are indebted to JR for so pitch-perfect and vivid an example of the Abusenik Scam and Game: asked to provide some examples of the “clinical studies” which he himself asserted that I was ‘ignoring’, he tries a juvenile dodge any grade-school teacher would recognize (and we recall that JR was supposed to have been an “A-student” in grade school).
It’s not his “job to provide [me] with data”. (This pronouncement delivered with the Wig of Mock Sorrow and Mature Regret – a nice double Wig.)
So true: it is not his “job to provide [me] with data”.
However, it most certainly is his job to back up his assertions with corroborative evidence and references and explication, especially since he then uses the assertion to ground the accusation that I am ‘ignoring’ these (still invisible) “clinical studies”.
But that’s not how JR or his muses or the Abuseniks or the Stampedniks roll. Rather, they very much like to toss off zippy and catchy assertions and then whine and bleat and bray about ‘re-victimization’ if they are asked four sources of documents that they insist exist (in this case, the implication is that I am victimizing or re-victimizing JR by asking for demonstration and sources of such assertions).
And neatly, as a matter of Tone, JR will assume not the overt Victimist pose of the befuddled, sore-bethumped ‘victim’, but of the sassy assertive independent truthy in-your-face kinda Tribune of Truthiness.
But the Content remains the same: asked in essence to demonstrate and ground his assertions, a) JR’s got nothing to back them up. And on top of that he then b) tries – had you been waitttttttting forrrrrrr ittttttttttttt? – to make it seem like he is being imposed-upon.
Oh, and he also insists – yet again and yet again without any corroboration whatsoever – about such claimed documentation that “It exists.”.
Perhaps the documentation does exist … in that same universe where his other claims, stories, allegations and assertions also exist.
Then he tries to distract further: we can simply go and “look to Australia or Ireland”. Why? Have they issued such “clinical studies”? So far they have issued nothing, but when they do – if ever – issue some documents, they won’t be “clinical studies” (does JR actually know what a ‘clinical study’ actually is?).
And then he tries to imply the proof that he refuses to provide: surely we cannot think that the Australia and Ireland “hearings/reports are based on nothing”, do we?
Well, we haven’t seen any “reports” and we don’t have transcripts of the “hearings”. So once again JR attempts to lead us into the Abusenik Hall of Mirrors rather than provide any documentation for his claims and assertions. Which is surely one of the hallmark elements of the Catholic Abuse – or any – Stampede. (And another reason why the torties didn’t want to go to trial: can you imagine an Abusenik telling a judge and jury ‘The witness refuses to answer, Your Honor, and says the court can go take a hike and look up the stuff on its own’ … ?)
Of course this isn’t a court here. But it most certainly is a forum for adult discussion of serious issues and this is how such exchange – it apparently has to be pointed out to JR and his muse(s) – is conducted.
Nor does he “work” for me. So true. But if he intends to be taken seriously as an adult engaging in serious exchange about serious issues, then he has taken on the responsibilities of that role. (Although, as we have so often seen, taking on the responsibilities of serious adult roles is not actually the way he rolls.)
And – like the fabled Dutch Abuse Report – perhaps they will be based on nothing more than recitations of stories and claims and allegations and assertions. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what we have when we look at Abusenik material purporting to support their own personal claims and stories and allegations and assertions.
So far, so not so good.
Then the second paragraph tries to support the first paragraph’s gambit by then claiming that I don’t have “studies backing [my] pov”.
In the first place, let’s not change the subject.
In the second place, I merely questioned JR for his the identity of material he i) asserted to actually exist and ii) on the basis of which assertion he accuses me of ‘ignoring’ such material (and now further accusing me of being a “fake professional”). So that ball still remains in his court.
And the whole ball neatly wrapped up in that ketchup-stained juvenile way with – marvelously – the snarky concluding bit that he will show me his evidence if I show him mine.
The point thus remains that since he made the assertions and accusations here, then it is his responsibility to provide some credible back-up that can be examined. (But why should he? Were the original stories and claims and accusations supported with any credible back-up?)
But beyond that, in addition to the various references I have discussed over time here, I would proffer the following:
The work of Frederick Crews demonstrating beyond a doubt not only that ‘repressed memory’ is a dubious and indeed neurologically impossible theory, but that it is indeed a species of pseudo or ‘advocacy’ science that is not concerned to actually increase knowledge of an issue but rather to manipulate factoids and actually avoid scientific method in an effort to smooth the Victimist path. Readers may want to consult his 1995 book “The Memory Wars” for openers.
The work of David Finkelhor in examining scientifically (and “clinically”) not only i) the problem of child sexual abuse but also ii) the problems with ‘the problem of child sexual abuse’. Readers may begin with Chapter Four of his book “Violence in America”, where, inter alia, he concludes that “All the data sources on child sexual abuse have serious problems … [that] all conspire to create serious obstacles to valid and reliable data”. He especially notes the lack of longitudinal studies that are essential to track the course of any such alleged consequences of abuse in an individual over time.
In his article (with Angela Browne) “Impact of child sexual abuse: A review of the research” he refers to the “controversy over the impact of child sexual abuse” and discusses it.
Joseph H. Beitchman (et al), writing in the journal “Child Abuse and Neglect” acknowledges that while “the evidence suggests” that child sexual abuse is “an important problem”, yet “the specifics are yet to be clarified”. Interestingly, the authors of this article do say that vital factors affecting seriousness of effect are a) penetrative abuse and b) long duration of the abuse and c) perpetration by a father or step-father and d) the age of onset of the abuse (younger age being more dangerous).
And even from an advocacy group (‘ASCA’, meaning Adults Surviving Child Abuse) one gets a quotation from the US Surgeon General: “severe and repeated trauma during youth may have enduring effects upon both neurobiological and psychological development altering stress responsivity and altering adult behavior patterns […] these individuals experience a greatly increased risk of mood, anxiety and personality disorders throughout adult life”.
And we note here a) the use of the more general “trauma” rather than the more specific term “sexual abuse”; and b) requirement for “severe and repeated trauma”; and c) the use of the subjunctive and avoidance of the indicative; and d) the failure to consider the many alternative and equally – if not more – plausible causes for problems (e.g. pre-existing psychological or even psychiatric issues, family history of same, and such disorders of character, affect and mentation as may well pre-exist any (alleged) sexual abuse and which in any case exist in the general population independent of any claims of childhood sexual abuse).
So the issue of the effects of the already complex formulation ‘child sexual abuse’ remains greatly problematic. And that is even before we consider the even more complicated formulation of ‘the effects of childhood sexual abuse by priests’.
However, if one enters into a search engine a parameter such as “effects of childhood sex abuse by priests on adults”, one gets at the top of the list articles from SNAP and Bishop-Accountability. And in those articles and others, as I had indicated in a prior comment on this thread, the various general problems with so many of these ‘advocacy’ studies are in evidence: presumption of the veracity of the allegations and claims of those ‘surveyed’ as ‘reports’; presumption of the prior substantive mental health of the individual(s) surveyed for the study; and the drawing of conclusions unsupported by the material presented.
And once we get beyond the question of i) the actual effects, we then ii) have to establish the actual extent of the problem. (Without, of course, simply presuming in a non-inductive way that if a) a person allegates abuse by a priest and b) presently has a lot of mental and/or emotional and/or behavioral and/or life problems, then the existence of the problems proves the perpetration of the abuse.)
So the ball remains in JR’s court to provide references to those “clinical studies”, which would purport to demonstrate conclusively the definitive consequences of sexual abuse by priests.
And while we are waiting for further from JR on this point, his little gambit in this comment of the 18th at 313PM remains a victim of its own “LOL!” recoil. But “LOL!” is indeed so apt a deployment here: the Abusenik gambits are indeed laughable, constituting a species of vaudeville.
Personally, I presented at least one "corraborative" witness to my abuse. Who told how I behaved and what I said happened 52 years ago. A person who I hadn't spoken to in 40 + years told the investigator (Who was oddly enough a former FBI agent, Paul Griffith. I say oddly because the church had an incredable number of former FBI agents investigating for them. Cincidence or plan? I don't know but very odd) who worked for my lawyer exactly the same things I said. The majority of sex abuse of children and adults have no witnesses save the perpetrator and the victim. That's the nature of the beast. It's in the details. God; Truth and the devil are all in the details.
On the 19th at 358PM what do we get?
A change of subject: now JR is on about ‘witnesses’ and not on about “clinical studies”.
Let us, for a moment, allow ourselves to be distracted from the “clinical studies” and consider this fresh bit of distraction about some “corraborative [sic] witness to [his] abuse”.
First, there was no witness to his actual abuse; had that not been established here long ago? He was alone with the teacher(s) he later accused.
Second, all we do get – presuming the actual existence of this “witness” – is a description of “how [JR] behaved and what [JR] said happened 52 years ago”. I am going to imagine this “witness” was not a clinician but another kid. And to what might this kid’s statements bear “witness”? Did JR put on an act and then feed it to this kid (hardly beyond the possibilities for so practiced a deceiver as JR reports himself to have been all along)? Did JR enlist the kid as an accomplice and was the kid thus knowingly involved in the plot? These are valid possibilities and – given JR’s demonstrated characteristics here – might even be considered probabilities by some.
In the third sentence we find out that 40 and more years after the original allegated event, that some “person” whom JR “hadn’t spoken to” in all that time “told the investigator” … what? Or was this “person” the same kid from 40-plus years before?
And note the distraction within a distraction: this “investigator” was apparently a former FBI agent and “employed by the church” (sic). So this must have been some run-up procedure connected to the Great Lawsuit of 500-plus plaintiffs in the mid-00s.
From this JR will insert a classic bit of innuendo: isn’t it suspicious that the Church has an “incredable number of former FBI agents investigating for them”? Is it? Would the Abuseniks have been any happier with a bunch of small-office private gumshoes doing the interview? Was it “coincidence of plan”? JR professes demurely not to know. Perhaps it was the Church’s (and Insurers) desire to ensure some competent interviewing.
This bit then trails off – in a characteristic give-away – into grammatical and conceptual incoherence: to read the remainder of the sentence it would appear that the former FBI agent “worked for my lawyer exactly the same things I said”.
Prescinding from the nonsensical grammatical bits here, we are still left with the problem of just what it was JR “said”: it could only have been his story, and his only “witness” would have been a hearsay kid who was told by JR the story of the (un-witnessed) alleged event after the fact.
And – yet again – JR informs us, and accurately enough, that the “majority” of child sex-abuse cases “have no witnesses” and that is true (as it is true for most sex-offense allegations generally). So what conclusions can be drawn from this reality? For the Victimists, there was only one conclusion: in order to smooth the path and open up the possibilities for sex-abuse/offense stampedes, Western law principles and American law and jurispraxis must be regressed back to the Medieval and Reformation era of ‘spectral evidence’ (i.e. ‘evidence’ that only the accuser can see and nobody else can see but which has to be believed because … well, just because witches and demons and warlocks and the Devil are so dangerous that you have to believe whatever you are told by the accuser).
And to save some time here by precluding the usual 3×5 bits: the Church formulated the Roman Inquisition (distinct from the government-run Spanish Inquisition) precisely to prevent such circus-trials as we saw in Monty Python’s “Holy Grail” film, substituting for that circus the Church’s rational and rule-bound trial process that was the predecessor of classical rational Western legal jurispraxis – at least until the Victimists got involved in the late 20th century).
And JR is quite right to say that “that’s the nature of the beast”. But that’s not the key issue here: the key issue is: What do you do when you a) have an allegation in regard to a species of claimed offense that by its very nature does not often have witnesses and yet b) you have a fundamental legal system that is precisely based on rational assessment of evidence and the testimony of witnesses? And – on top of that – c) when you have such an allegation purporting to have taken place years or decades before when there is also at this point no surviving evidence (if indeed there was any evidence in the first place)?
The Catholic Abuse Stampede and its various other siblings (e.g. the assorted university cases such as Duke and the University of Virginia) are the answers fomented by Victimism.
Thus JR is also quite correct to say that so much of these cases depend on “the details” and indeed that it is “all in the details”. But “the details” are precisely what the classical Western evidence/witness-based approach is designed to establish, and precisely what the Victimist regression to ‘spectral evidence’ is designed to sidestep, override, and avoid.
And at the end of it all here, nothing about the “clinical studies”.
No surprise. Had JR no particular knowledge of such “clinical studies” when he made his assertion that they existed and his accusation that I am ‘ignoring’ them?
Funny when I Googled: Clinical studies on effects of childhood sex abuse. I got all these connections: https://www.google.com/search?q=Clinical+studies+on+effects+of+childhood+sex+abuse&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
“Funny” isn’t quite the word for JR’s attempt at mimicking competence on the 20th at 952AM.
First, he didn’t enter the search parameters that would include “by priests”, so this is a listing (that I also found) of general clinical studies on the effects of ‘childhood sexual abuse’.
Second, he hasn’t actually given us i) any particular study that he might claim backs up his assertion nor has he actually given us ii) any explication of this or that particular study such that it would be clear that the specific study or studies to which he refers actually support his assertions (and do not suffer from the assorted general flaws I have noted in comments above on this thread).
So we really haven’t gotten an answer at all. For all we know – or JR knows, or his muse knows – these clinical studies don’t support his claims and assertions at all. Had JR no specific study or studies already in mind when he made his assertion and his accusation? Is it possible that he had no such study or studies in mind, with the content and results of which he was sufficiently familiar? Now that would be “funny”, and so predictable.
Yep I grammatically f^*ked up. P finally you're right about something. Congrats. Even a broken clock's right twice a day.
What a bitch you truely are. You may not think priests are human but they fall into the same parameters as any other child rapists. So those clinical studies I did manage to reference count.
I attempted to post 3 links yesterday I got 403 error in response over and over again.. Contray to P I don't have all day to spend attempting to post and then typing it all again when in fails to post no matter how many times I try to do just that.
And again I found zero clinical studies on fraud against priests or the church. Maybe you can post a link to the not there. I can't.
I know you're Mr. Hidden Catholic, The Bill Donahue of TMR, but do you really think good catholics are stupid? Do you really think they are illiterate? That they lack common sense? I'm supposed to have named clinical studies in mind before I speak?????? When the whole world knows such studies exist? To say nothing of the John Jay report and the 2 Irish reports on priest abuse etc. etc. etc.? Who died and made you the King O' Smart? Donald Trump?
For those keeping a Notebook on the Abusenik Playbook, there are some worthwhile bits in the recent crop.
On the 20th at 1122PM JR will admit that he “grammatically” erred (manipulative scatology omitted. As if, one might imagine, this were the first time such errors had appeared in his material. But then he concludes this admission/apology with an epithet. But of course.
And we note that we get nothing on the major topic at issue here (those “clinical studies” on the effects of childhood abuse by priests).
Then on the 21st at 1037AM:
It opens robustly with – had you been waittttttttingggggg forrrrrrrrrr itttttttttttttt? – an epithet. I am apparently a “bitch” for … what? Pointing out problems? Asking questions? But of course, in the Abusenik universe.
Nor did JR actually “reference” (or – oddly – “manage to reference”) any clinical studies at all. He simply directed us to Google. But he (and his muse advisory panel) then try a rather interesting ploy: since all priests are human, then I am a “bitch” because – try to follow the bouncing Abusenik ball here – all of those (non-referenced) clinical studies that might appear under the (already inaccurate) Google parameters that he entered would “count”. Which is not even logic; it’s merely a wishing-it-away assertion that leaves us with absolutely no specific studies that justify either JR’s assertion or his accusation – or accusations, since now I not only ‘ignore’ the studies but I am also a “bitch”. Wheeeee.
But wait – there’s more.
In the second paragraph, apparently well aware that he is now stuck between the already-out-there rock of his assertions and the hard-place of his ignorance of any such studies, JR will now imply that as a matter of fact (as it were) JR had not one, not two, but three links (to specific studies?) which he had tried to post yesterday but he kept getting one of those error messages with which readers (myself, certainly) are familiar.
So … what? We are to believe that JR has links to specific studies but he tried for a while and couldn’t get through the error messages? And couldn’t email DP his text at the TMR Contact email address?
And even better: we won’t be seeing these links – doncha see? – because JR is reely reely reely a very busy guy and doesn’t have the time to waste.
So – if the Cartoon here is played out – then JR i) has indeed ‘answered’ the question about providing links (although we won’t be seeing them); and ii) he has been victimized by the error message proclivities of TMR’s ISP; and iii) he rahhly rahhly, dahlings, is simply tooooo tooooo busy to be wasting his time. We must – dahlings – absolutely must empathize with his victimization and his so-busy schedule. Or else we are un-Christian, un-caring, un-empathetic, sociopathic “bitches”. Ovvvvvvvv courssssssssssse.
And then he claims to have found “again” (I can’t recall a prior assertion in this regard) “zero clinical studies” dealing with the subject of “fraud against priests or the Church”.
Well now.
First, that wasn’t the subject at issue, so this is nothing but a manipulative distraction sort of gambit.
Second, the subject of “fraud against priests or the Church” does not actually pose any clinical questions that would justify – how to put this nicely? – a “clinical study”. Unless, of course, one might wish to pursue a “clinical study” on the psychology of persons who – as JR has suggested – perpetrate fraudulent accusations and allegations against the Church. And any reader who has been keeping a Notebook on the Playbook here is already well-placed to give that topic-proposal of JR’s some serious attention.
On then to the 21st at 1045AM:
JR here will continue his distraction campaign by now delivering more readings and revelations from his pile of personal tea-leaves.
Do I “really think good catholics [sic] are stupid?”. Well, prescinding from the question as to the definition of “good” here, I think Catholics are essentially rational and decent folk and many have had the education to give things serious thought when the need arises. But like all humans, they can be stampeded if the necessary conditions are created.
But what’s the point of the question here?
JR was getting to that: how was he supposed to “have named clinical studies in mind before” he speaks?
Let’s give this a bit of thought for a moment. He makes an assertion and an accusation, both on the basis of “clinical studies” that he tells us exist.
OK then.
What studies specifically did he have in mind? Surely he must have seen one or two on the topic (the effects of childhood sexual abuse by priests) that were the basis for his making the assertion and the accusation? Otherwise it can only be that he tossed off the assertion and the accusation with no basis in any knowledge or fact or study whatsoever. But – not to put too fine a point on it – that would be grossly incompetent and irresponsible, both as an educated adult and as a participant in the commentary on this site for the purpose of the enlightenment of the readership.
And is he in the habit of making assertions and – far more importantly and relevantly – accusations and allegations without any basis in fact or knowledge?
But he has an ‘answer’ to that? Why does he need to do any such referencing when – had you been waittttttttinggg forrrrrrrr ittttttttttttttt? – “the whole world knows such studies exist”?
But this is a classic example of appealing as if it were demonstrated fact to the very point that precisely has not yet been demonstrated or proven to exist in the first place. This is fraudulent conceptual praxis, this is manipulative, this is deceitful, and this is a scam. We do not know a) whether the specific type of study under consideration exists, b) whether JR knows anything about any of them at all if they do exist, nor c) whether “the whole world knows” that they exist.
And then he tries to mimic competent analytical style but adding “To say nothing of” … and he lists “the John Jay report” (yet there are two of them) and “the two Irish reports on priest abuse” (I haven’t seen any formal government report yet, which even JR said on a recent prior thread is still in process), and then the cheap “etc. etc. etc.” as if JR knew of multitudes of further evidentiary materials (that – what? – he is simply toooooo tooooo busy, dahlings, to waste time identifying?).
And the whole bit then concludes with – had you been waitttttttttingggg forrrrrrrrrr itttttttttttt? – a particularly juvenile, even childish, bit we have seen before from him: “Who died and made you …?”. So I will repeat what I said when this bit was run by us before: It is easily to imagine JR – never one to accept correction well – telling his grade school arithmetic teacher: ‘2 plus 2 equals 4? Who died and made you King/Queen of Smart?’.
And at the end of it all, nothing relevant on those “clinical studies”. Although JR assures us he has the information in those links he’s too busy to put up.
Does he really think we are that stupid?
No P you're a bitch because you're a bitch. It's a mystery.
In naval warfare back in the days before radar and satellites, destroyers would ‘make smoke’ or ‘lay smoke’ to cover a retreat; thus the retreating ships could not be seen behind the smokescreen.
And – who could be surprised? – we see some fine examples of the technique, transferred here to the conceptual realm.
On the 22nd at 1243AM JR will simply give us a one-liner repeat of his prior epithet and then – with that ever-favored Wig of Pronouncement capped, it would seem, by some mimicry of a papal tiara –a pronouncement that there need no nor can be any explanation as to why I am – in JR’s cartoon – a “bxxch” because it doth be “a mystery”. And as the readership may well infer, there is no rational dealing with a “mystery” … just as, it may also occur to readers, there is no rational dealing with Abusenik claims and allegations and stories, which seem rather uniformly to fall into that same category.