***TheMediaReport.com SPECIAL REPORT*** Minnesota Public Radio’s ‘Betrayed By Silence’: A New Low In Vengeance Journalism

Madeleine Baran : Madeleine Baran MPR

Untethered from the truth: Madeleine Baran from Minnesota Public Radio (MPR)

For over a decade now, we at TheMediaReport.com have likely reviewed several thousand news articles, television episodes, radio interviews, and documentary films in our mission to encourage accuracy in the media's coverage of the Catholic Church abuse story line.

However, we don't believe we have seen a piece of media as grossly inaccurate and irresponsible as a recent multimedia special presentation produced by Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), "Betrayed by Silence," which purports to chronicle the history of the Catholic Church abuse scandal as it relates to Minnesota.

MPR's not-so-hidden agenda

MPR's multimedia program is so loaded with flat-out falsehoods and misrepresentations that one hardly knows where to begin.

Part I: MPR Smears Archbishop Harry Flynn, We Uncover the Facts

Part II: Madeleine Baran's Struggle With the Facts

Part III: Guilty Until Proven Innocent: No Accusation Against a Priest Too Old or Wacky

We have already cited reporter Madeleine Baran a number of times before for her biased and inaccurate reporting (1, 2). But with "Betrayed by Silence," it now becomes clear that Baran and her friends at MPR have absolutely no interest in honest journalism but rather wish to damage the Catholic Church for its refusal to march to the step of the "progressives" at MPR.

Just last year, MPR loudly and proudly championed the successful cause for gay marriage in Minnesota, a measure which St. Paul-Minneapolis Archbishop John C. Nienstedt and the Catholic Church vociferously opposed. Thus there is no doubt that MPR's campaign against Nienstedt and other clergy has been a way to further malign the Church.

A heap of hypocrisy

Paula Poundstone

Some child abuse is O.K. at MPR:
Funny woman Paula Poundstone

And whereas MPR dismisses each and every denial made by Catholic priests who assert their innocence – while also publicly degrading those who have done so – MPR never makes mention of the fact that a person who regularly appears on its station was herself arrested and charged with shocking child abuse.

Each and every week, MPR proudly broadcasts the weekly radio quiz show, Wait Wait … Don't Tell Me, which features comic Paula Poundstone.

As the folks at MPR should certainly know, California police arrested and charged Poundstone in June of 2001 after a lengthy investigation on three shocking counts of committing a lewd and lascivious act on a girl under the age of 14 and one count of child endangerment.

[Click to read the 2001 felony complaint against Paula Poundstone]

Poundstone later pleaded no contest to one count of felony child abuse and a misdemeanor count of "inflicting injury upon a child."

But MPR apparently has no problem at all with a person convicted of felony child abuse appearing on its station every week. In fact, it celebrates it.

The hypocrisy could not be more blinding and only underscores that MPR's new-found obsession with old claims of sex abuse in the Catholic Church actually has little to do with sex abuse and everything to do with wreaking vengeance upon a hated opponent in the culture wars.

**Important note** Madeleine Baran from MPR did not respond to repeated requests from TheMediaReport.com to answer questions about her reporting.

Comments

  1. Jim Robertson says:

    According to the latest info out of Germany the catholic church membership who attend mass every Sunday has fallen to 10%. That's down from 22% attendence in 1989.

    Read it for yourselves.http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=22222

    Maybe the not so good Cardinal's $43,000,000 manse put the kiboch on the religious Kaisers for Germany.

  2. Publion says:

    And as if this point (in the comment of the 5th at 425PM) has not been discussed before we now get JR yet again onto it as if it’s a revelation.

    I say again: everywhere in the world except in Western Europe and the US, the Church is increasing its membership. Church attendance in the Western advanced countries has been declining since the 1960s and that hasn’t been ‘news’ for quite some time (before the Stampede ever came together).

    If JR is not prepared to claim and demonstrate that the Stampede is the primary cause of this phenomenon, then what is the relevance and significance and value of the comment?

    But since it is, in any case, irrelevant to the topic of this TMR article, then the whole comment simply reveals itself as yet another Playbook distraction, to substitute for the usual Abusenik inability to make any input that is more substantive and relevant to the topic.

    But of course.

  3. True Catholic says:

    That's it. Smear the messenger. And maybe rest of the media will be afraid to report all of Nienstedt's lies.

    • 'True Catholic' on the 6th August says "That's it. Smear the messenger". Well from experience I know that sometimes the messenger is not as impartial as they pretend to be. Consider this scandal that arose in radio broadcasting, about 15 years ago in Australia. Two very popular radio 'shock jocks' were accused of corruption. Namely that they were asking for illicit payments, from corporations, to say nice things about those corporations on their radio programs. It was called 'the cash for comments affair'. The radio shows included a talk-back segment in which selected callers heaped praise on the bank (or whatever corporation was paying) and the radio host then also spoke glowingly of the bank's great reputation. Actually they were commercials masquerading as normal public comment. It was also alleged that the broadcast comments might also be very critical of a rival bank's reputation, if it were in competition with the paying bank.

      But perhaps journalists and radio broadcasters in your country would not sink as low as some of their counterparts in my country? But I have to wonder?

  4. LDB says:

    The catholic church is growing, if it is growing by anything more than the birth of so-called catholic babies, in the poorest, least-educated, most backwards countries in the world, in Africa and in Latin America. The places most susceptible to superstition.

  5. Publion says:

    Again (the 6th, 216AM), from the imposingly self-named ‘True Catholic’ we simply get the same bit, and again with no explication or demonstration, the assertion about ‘smearing the messenger’. Thus again the Playbook plan: just keep tossing the stuff out there and up there and maybe if they see it often enough people will believe it.

    What is the definition of ‘smear’ that ‘True Catholic’ relies upon here? And how is it distinguishable from simply noting the actual statements of the various media outlets, in this case MPR, and reflecting upon the quality of those statements?

    And until we have demonstration that what MPR reporting is some reasonable effort to convey the factual and the truthful on all sides of the matter, then how can MPR be legitimately characterized as “the messenger” and not as simply – say – ‘the deceiver’ or ‘the manipulator’?

    But instead it looks like – in best propaganda style – ‘True Catholic’ has simply come to the situation with an already-presumed notion of the ‘truth’ and ‘the message’, and anything that interferes with that spin has to be somehow derided.

  6. Julie says:

    Oh, I can see now from his comment that Jim Robertson is only concerned about abuse of children and is NOT just obsessed with bashing the Catholic Church.

  7. Jim Robertson says:

    Hi Julie, Why do you think so many German catholics have walked away? I believe in large part it was due to victims coming forward.

    Let's face it catholicism is a very very strict religion. So when the people who demand so much obedience from their parishiners are caught protecting and even worse transferring known pedophiles to new parishes with no protection of children. The myth of a "clean" priesthood was shattered irrepairably.

    Add to that:  No punishment but more protection (cardinal Law) for the supposedly sane leadership who enabled those abusors to rape again.

    Add in the 43 million dollar home for the German cardinal and it spells : disastor for your church brought upon itself by itself.

    If I'm obsessed with anything it's getting all the truth out.

    I don't rely on "mysteries" in life  particularly when there is no proof. You do. That's your choice but don't expect a free pass when your faith allows for felonies.

    If the coverups hadn't happened we would not be talking about this now. You would have had no scandal. All the stupidvisors would have had to do is call the police. They didn't and here we are.

    • Christopher Browne says:

      Church and synagogue membership is down everywhere.  Sexual abuise of minors also happens in other faiths, and at levels that are no less proportionate than what is reported in the Catholic Church.  Also, fewer people these days are attached to "organized" religion (although I am not sure what the attraction is to an 'unorganized' one), so why is the Catholic Church so unique in this regard, to your mind?

    • Jim Robertson says:

      Great question; but I don't think the church unique in any area other than in it's appraisal of itself. It just has the money and the putative pleasure of re-injuring the all ready harmed.  That's a rather odd thing for people who fiegn to be about kindness to do. Wouldn't you say?

      To me there's a tremendous stench of hypocricy that comes from all religions when you just stare at them long enough. When you really look at them, No religion holds up.

      Yours is no better or worse than any. Your religion is just not used to being criticized for real wrong doing. It's more used to doing all the criticizing of everybody else. Your faith, like all long term cons, hates having the truth told about it. Imho.

      Is there attraction to religion? Safety? Conformity? Feeling you are on the right team?   Those are all human needs not metaphysical.

  8. Jim Robertson says:

    It's extraordinary, P's defense of the indefensable. Any normal adult would admit that the transfer of perpetrators was wrong.

    Not the shop worn st. michael we have here in P..

    And it's because of his lack of respect for others; he gets and deserves to get no respect from me. He set the tone by attack attack attack. What goes around comes around. Karma is indeed a bitch.

  9. Publion says:

    In regard to LDB’s latest bit (the 6th, 906AM): It is an open question as to what precincts in the world most profoundly embrace “superstition”.  Surely the Abuseniks here have offered nothing to eliminate those precincts that embrace the beliefs (in no way scientifically established) that matter itself appeared merely by accident or by chance, that human beings are nothing more than the working of the sum total of their various physical and material components, and that existence is comprised of nothing more than the Monoplane.

    As for JR’s continuation of his assorted 3×5’s: how does he explain the fact that German Catholicism has been losing adherents since – not to put too fine a point on it – the Reformation, and certainly since the 1960s (which antedates the Stampede by quite a few years)? Would the fact of East Germany being under the control of an atheist regime not have had some effect here?

    And now that he mentions it, German history provides us with Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against Catholicism, a government-supported and government-sponsored agenda the objective of which was to undermine and diminish the influence of the Catholic Church in Germany, reducing it to state-subservience as he had the various Protestant polities.

    And – as has been mentioned in comments on this site – the Third Reich provides us with the efforts of that government to achieve that same end by attempting to make priests look like criminals in the public eye, leading to the failed effort to prosecute an entire hospital staff of Brothers and priests as sex-criminals … until public resistance forced the Reich to abandon such initiatives (and it reverted to simply tossing clerics and nuns into concentration camps as some form of ‘political’ enemies of the Reich).

    As for the rest of it, we simply see the Abusenik attempt to shoe-horn whatever they can into their preferred script and vision, and yet (as I have mentioned before on a recent thread) we do not at all know just how many  (or how few) incidents actually conformed to the Stampede’s preferred script and vision.

    As to what has been “shattered irreparably” (correction supplied) in regard to the priesthood, this assertion of JR’s remains simply another instance of his reading his own favorite tea leaves (unless he has convincing and demonstrative proof that he has neglected to put up here).

    But the idea that JR’s only ‘obsession’ is with “getting all the truth out” need only be left up where it was put.

    And if JR doesn’t “rely on ‘mysteries’ in life particularly when there is no proof” then he can of course explain to us clearly – as he has so far neglected to do – how he has embraced the theoretical-system of Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theory as if it itself were not a belief-system but rather contained sufficient demonstrated fact that there is only the Monoplane and the material existing within it.

    And – how could this have escaped him? – has he not been berating many on this site for quite some time precisely because they will not accept without proof certain assertions that he insists be taken as demonstrated fact … ? (Time-saver here: the mere repetition of his own assertions does not constitute demonstrated fact, including the assertion that he is so truthy as to constitute a fundamentally sound factual source beyond which nobody need seek further credible evidence or proof.)

    And again the mantra-type repetition of the bit about “if the cover-ups hadn’t happened” … and how – to repeat – can a) one distinguish cover-ups from a simple hesitation in the face of a highly-dubious ‘story’ and b) how many incidents thus actually qualify for inclusion in the Stampede’s preferred script and vision? Answers to these vital and fundamental questions would require corroboration and/or substantive explication.

    As for why the parents themselves didn’t call the police – being the ones most familiar with the allegants – JR yet again has nothing to say.

    Thus his conclusion in regard to this effort to i) explain the provenance of the Stampede and ii) blame the Church for it (i.e. “They didn’t and here we are”) fails as anything except his own just-so arranging of just the blocks he has selected to play-with here.

    Then on the 6th at 1003AM he tosses up again his bit about my “defense of the indefensible” (correction supplied): which, in the absence of any explication or corroboration, remains merely another instance of his epithetical plop-tossing. And it – yet again – manipulatively seeks to get readers to accept precisely what has yet to be proven.

    As for JR’s further reading of his favorite tea-leaves and informing everyone definitively what “any normal adult” would do … let it simply be left to hang up there where it was put. Has he studied ‘normal adults’ to any great extent?

    The epithet “shopworn St. Michael” (correction supplied) is really too much to be credited to what we have come to see as the usual level of this commenter’s material; and perhaps he might secure from its creator a bit of explanation as to how I am in any way functioning as “St. Michael”.

    What Abuseniks define as “respect” is far too tall an order: accepting their various bits without question and proffering sympathetic clucks and sighs instead. Nor would I fall for the manipulative gambit by which JR here tries to start the play on second rather than at-bat at home-plate by inveigling readers to grant and presume that he is ordinarily a most respectful person generally (and thus that his performance in comments on this site must be excused as merely the consequences of his being victimized by utterly unbearable provocation … perhaps by me acting as St. Michael to JR’s diabolic dragon … ?

    And once again: if i) karma is indeed what JR says it is here, and ii) JR is an agent of karma (as he has said), then … ?

  10. Jim Robertson says:

    "Then…?" Your logic isn't.

    Being an agent of karma is not the same thing as being karma itself.

    Therefore: A) You are illogical. B) You are intellectually bankrupt. C) There are no dragons, diabolic or otherwise. No archangels named st. michael or anything else. No imaginary gods or monsters. D) there are no excuses for child rape enabling.

  11. Jim Robertson says:

    Again with the anti Darwin junk think?

    The idea that you spell well (thanks to Spell check); and that that makes you intellectually superior in these arguments, is pitious.

    My parents did not call the police because my parents did not know what was happening to me.

    I was too overwhelmed to tell them.

    The adult religious at my school, at least two of them, knew and did nothing. Blaming the unknowing parents excuses the transfer of perpetrators by their bosses, who knew, exactly how?

  12. Jim Robertson says:

    "accepting their various bits without question". Where have I ever said I was not questioned about my "bits" Where did I refuse to answer questions about my rape? When did I not supply answers to any questions about my rape when asked by my lawyer, the shrink, the church or it's insurors?

    Do you ever stop being wrong?

  13. thomas says:

    Why is it that it took MPR and the local media to report the many negligences of Mr. Nienstedt and the Archdiocese of Minneapolis and St. Paul? Negligences which the archdiocese subsequently responded by enacting recent changes regarding pedophilia diligence, along with its dismissal of guilty priests? Negligences and betrayals that former cannon lawyer Jennifer Haselberger reported through these media?

    l

     

     

  14. LDB says:

    "And once again: if i) karma is indeed what JR says it is here, and ii) JR is an agent of karma (as he has said), then … ?" -Publion of August 7, 2014 @ 4:03am

    Here Publion cleverly demonstrates the truth of Charles Darwin's claim that man with all his noble qualities still bears the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. He cannot resist some 'plop tossing'. And in a baby-ish way, Publion must avoid writing 'bitch'. (Audible gasp and exeunt omnes.)

  15. Publion says:

    Well, let’s get to it.

    On the 7th at 1045AM, JR asserts that my “logic isn’t” … isn’t what remains the question here.

    In a marvelous example of what LDB might call ‘quibbling’ JR claims a distinction with a difference: “being an agent of karma is not the same thing as being karma itself”. I will say that the transitive property holds valid here, since his distinction is indeed not a difference of any relevant substance. If JR cares to explain what he sees as the substance of his distinction here, he is welcome to do so – so far it appears to have slipped his attention.

    That transitive property being expressed: if a equals b, and b equals c, then a equals c. I thought it fits nicely and relevantly here and works well. Readers may consider it as they will.

    But even prescinding from agreement with my point here, JR’s conclusions as expressed in the last paragraph of this comment of his (so to speak) are not justified by the putative weight of his own objection. But he or the source of this comment under his name is now on a roll mimicking adult style, so he will go on with his ‘conclusions’ A through D. How nice for him or for the source of the material in this comment under his name.

     And don’t the Abuseniks love to deliver pronunciamentos and anathemas. One wonders if perhaps JR (or some other Abusenik) wouldn’t have made a ‘good’ medieval Pope, if that term is defined according to the stereotypical Abusenik fever-visions about Catholicism.

    Although in ‘C’ he now claims that there are indeed “no archangels named st. michael or anything else” – rather vividly demonstrating not only how he can create phantasm with which to have pillow fights with himself, but how he can thus in that process refute himself. We are indeed in ringside seats for something beyond the “normal adult”.

    And as far as ‘D’ goes: whoever said here that there were any “excuses for child rape enabling” (sic)? Nobody on this site has, to the best of my knowledge and recollection. Does JR have a quote (accurate, of course) that demonstrates otherwise? If he doesn’t, then what we have here is a truism and nothing more. But a truism whose appearance of relevance is based on nothing more than his own (or his source’s) selective interpretation of what others here have written.

    Then at 1058AM he characterizes the rather profound and substantial questions and problems with the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian positions as “anti Darwin think junk” (sic). Well, that’s certainly a serious and attention-worthy proffer, and so vividly put, is it not?

    But the record here shows that neither he nor any other Abusenik have made any substantive and relevant response to those questions and problems.

    He then, however, gets trapped in a web of his own weaving: I apparently “spell well (thanks to Spell check)” [sic]). But here he has raised again the lethally inconvenient reality that no word-processing programs are commercially available today that do not contain some form of spell-checking capability, unless the user purposely disables that function. So then: whence his own very oddly unsystematic spelling-misspelling rhythms (let alone the wide variance in (charitably) his own writing and expression styles)?

    We are then brought back to a rather classic Playbook gambit deployed by Abuseniks, and one which in JR’s case were looked-at closely and at length here when he proffered some links to documents from his own case:  allegants did not tell anyone at the time – and thus, neatly, there are few if any corroborative indications of that sort contemporaneous with the alleged abuse – because they didn’t want to.

     (And yet some – including JR – rather quickly ‘told’ peers who, we are to imagine, were supposed to tell those very parents. Or – in a somewhat mutually exclusive alternative variant of the script – parents were too ill or fragile to be told but peers were told anyway; peers who themselves could thus only provide hearsay ‘evidence’ long long after the fact, just in time for the allegations entered into lawsuits.)

    As best I can recall from documentation that we saw here, the “adult religious” at his school at the time did not “do nothing” (which is a classic Abusenik spin and scripting trope); rather, they assessed the claim and dismissed it as being attributable to other – and hardly not-obvious – possibilities.

    And it was not until years or decades later, when the Anderson Strategies opened up an entire world of attractive cash possibilities, that – by amazing coincidence – numerous allegations were suddenly produced. And from what we have seen, most of them rather light on evidence.

    Which problem was neatly sidestepped in that Andersonian synergy with the ‘reforms’ of victimist-inspired law ‘reforms’ (regressions, in my opinion) that avoided the evidence problem by i) introducing all over again the medievalism of ‘spectral evidence’ and ii) seeking to weaken the need for any evidence at all by relying on ‘feeling’ rather than on fundamental principles of Western law and jurisprudence.

    And in that regard, I recall the current President saying at some point in his tenure that when nominating judges he was not so much concerned with the nominee’s knowledge of law or jurisprudence, but rather merely with the nominee’s capacity to ‘feel’. Which is, as I have said before here, both a) a fatal assertion for the concept of the rule of law and b) a regression from the achievements of Western law and jurisprudence that opened up floodgates that may yet swamp the legitimacy of law and Law in our culture and our society.

    Again – also – this exemplifies that “synergy” I had spoken about, without inferring an overt “conspiracy” by which one might claim that the President was engaged in an active and deliberate “conspiracy” against the rule of law, and Law itself, and the Church. And lastly, as I have said before, Anderson saw the possibilities inherent in synergizing his Strategies with this general political and legislative and cultural trend in American and Western society and culture three decades ago.

    Nor do I recall anybody on this site “blaming the un-knowing parents” – which is yet another JR invention of material he finds more congenial to work-with than the actual and difficult material that the consideration of the Stampede generates here.

    Indeed, we see in this bit of JR’s another sly and manipulative Playbook gambit: it neatly seeks to distract from the question as to just who actually was directly responsible for the parents being “un-knowing”. Somehow and for whatever reason(s) that might be proffered, that “who” was the allegator him/herself.

    JR then further tries to distract by now changing the subject to the (still undemonstrated) alleged widespread practice of the “transfer of perpetrators by their bosses”. In just how many cases – especially given the cases we have had a chance to look-at on this site – did this Stampede script scenario actually play out? And the answer to that would have to be: very few indeed.

    On then to 1105AM: JR will now try to distract by re-introducing his bits about his being “questioned”. Neatly avoiding the “questioning” of his proffered material on this site – well established in the record here – and his various contortions in reaction to that (which is primarily what I was referring to), he simply goes back to his claims that he was (purportedly) “questioned” so deeply and extensively and profoundly by attorneys for the Church and the Insurers in the process of the lawsuit (that 500-plus Plaintiff lawsuit that so perfectly embodied the Anderson Strategies) that for all practical purposes he was examined as if at trial, and that therefore his claims were indeed proven at law, and that therefore his stories and claims are formally demonstrated to be true (and thus he himself is – as was said by S.Z. Sakall in Casablanca – “honest as the day is long”).

    But in regard to that ‘questioning’ we have nothing to go on but JR’s recollected assertions, against which must be weighed the problems with the content and subsequent elaborations of the allegations themselves.

    And – as I have said before – once the defense attorneys had made up their minds that the mere number of Plaintiffs and allegations precluded any trial(s), then such ‘questioning’ as would have had to be carried out would have been cursory and pro forma, simply covering required legal procedural steps; attorneys would be looking merely to get down this and that bit of required information, suppressing any instinct they may have had to further ‘question’ whatever dubious bits were thrown at them from across the table. That was the brilliance of the ‘bundled lawsuit’ strategy.

    (Nor, of course, were the torties themselves really desirous of having the various claims, stories, and allegations exposed to the light of day on the stand, let alone – and we have seen why here on this site – letting their according-to-the-script pure and innocent allegators reveal themselves under the pressure of any sustained questioning on the stand. We still see that in the recent Billy Doe events in Philadelphia, which still remain to be played-out.)

    Thus the only basis for the implication that I am “wrong” is that of JR’s own proffered memories and recollections of his time across the desk from the defense attorneys. Readers may judge as they will.

    Meanwhile, in regard to the questioning on this site – to which I was primarily referring – JR has not taken well to being ‘questioned’ at all, nor has his proffered material performed well, as the record voluminously indicates.

    On to ‘Thomas’ on the 7th at 1141AM.

    ‘Thomas’ also seeks to start the play at first or second base rather than with an at-bat at home plate: we still haven’t established – and this series of TMR articles precisely questions – the quality and validity of the “report” and the reporting by “local media” in the first place.

    Ditto the validity and legitimacy of what “that former cannon lawyer … reported through these media”. (sic)

    We also notice that no matter what the Church does, it is wrong: were there enacted “recent changes regarding pedophilia diligence” and also the dismissing of “guilty priests”? Well that just proves – to the Stampede-shaped mind – that somewhere back there the Church didn’t do things so well. And if the Church hadn’t instituted the reforms of the past dozen years … ? You see how the Game is played and The Ball Is Kept Rolling.

    I also point out that only a very few priests out of all those allegated-against qualified for a formal clinical diagnosis of “pedophilia”. But perhaps ‘Thomas’ was simply using the term in that looser PR sort of way, in which ‘everybody knows’ that all or most or many priests are and were and always will be ‘pedophiles’. That sort of thing.

    And LDB comes back, as if he isn’t carrying a rather hefty load of questions-left-unanswered from prior exchanges.

    And what have we got from this allegedly elite-trained philosophical and legally-trained mind?

    We have nothing but an extended epithet, although whether specifically aimed at me or aimed at “man” generally is anybody’s guess (clearly, none of his alleged education taught him clarity of expression).

    Also, in refraining from the adolescent and juvenile practice of deploying scatological terms of abuse or illustration, I am being “baby-ish”. And thus … are those who deploy such terms being – not to put too fine a point on it – adult … ?

    But he seems quite satisfied with the little pile he has produced for us here, and allows himself a classical flourish to go-out-on, to stage-direct his presumed victorious departure from the stage (for this scene anyway): exeunt omnes. This might be some juvenile effort at mimicking Catholic liturgical directions, or it may be a variant of Shakespeare’s stage-direction in Act III of Winter’s Tale. Whatever the case, we once again see LDB declaring victory after a rather unimpressive performance and then going-home.

    It may seem like a lot of work to expend on the type of material we get here from the Abuseniks, but I repeat that Abuseniks provide us with two things, at least: a) they reveal much about themselves and thus the Abusenik mind that they don’t realize and b) they exemplify so many of the gambits in the Playbook. All of which is well worth the effort to point-out.

  16. Publion says:

    In his response (the 8th, 120AM) to ‘Christopher Browne’ JR magnanimously pronounces that commenter’s point a “great question”.

    But not so the answer.

    JR doesn’t “think” that “the the church [is] unique in any area other than in it’s appraisal of itself” (sic). Can JR name some other religion on the planet that has also managed to maintain a centralized structure, relatively clear and coherent body of dogma and praxis, consistent organizational identity, and substantial membership – all over the space of two millennia and counting? (Time-saver: don’t postpone your next meal until the answer arrives here.)

    And to assert that the Church takes “pleasure” in victimization is a bit of plop-tossing that will require some serious corroboration.

    And then the usual bit about presuming what has yet to be proved, in double-whammy form:  the bit about ‘re-injuring’ and then about presuming the injury of the “injured” in the first place. Both of those presumptions have proven more than a little ephemeral by any assessment of what we have seen on this site, including the many bits tossed up by JR himself.

    Thus there is more than a “whiff” of projection in the Wig of Outraged Decency’s declamation about “hypocricy” (sic).

    Especially “when you stare at them long enough” – which is far more accurate in the recoil than in the projectile, since we have been ‘staring at’ (and examining) the Stampede here for quite a while and it is the Stampede that is looking mighty iffy and whiffy.

    As to whether the assertion “no religion holds up” itself holds up, JR could perhaps explain the stubborn persistence of some form of religion over almost all of recorded human history. (Time-saver: the idea that most humans are just superstitious lumps, and only recently have the Abuseniks and assorted ‘atheists’ morphed into a new-model human free of any urge for “superstition” is not going to work. As I have noted before, there is an excellent case to be made that Darwinianism is itself a rather clear form of superstition.)

    The rest of JR’s ruminative assessment of Catholicism is there for the looking-at.

    But we see yet again the manipulatively sly insertion of that which has yet to be proven (i.e. “real wrong-doing”).

    And we also are proffered the idea that the Church has never been “criticized” over the course of the prior two millennia. Seriously?

    But we also see here the self-aggrandizing pretensions of the Abuseniks, perhaps borrowed from the ‘atheists’, that for the first time in recorded history we are seeing a new form of human who is so right and very clever and certainly is not an ignorant or superstitious lump. Readers may assess all that as they will; those with clinical training and experience may find themselves particularly well-suited for this task.

    Thus, in regard to the Wiggy “Imho”: I would say that JR’s is an opinion that – rightly and surely – has a great deal to be ‘humble’ about.

    And as a conclusion – its analytic bent so vividly uncharacteristic of the mentality that usually informs the JR series of comments – we get a pronunciamento about why humans are so ‘attracted’ “to religion” in the first place.

    The answer proffered to us: human beings merely need “safety” and “conformity” and the sense of “feeling you are on the right team”. And that’s about it. And then the capstone piling of the preferred play-blocks: the conclusion that these “are all human needs not metaphysical” (sic).

    This is nothing but a fragmentary shopping-list from the materialist and reductionist schools of thought, which start out with their own presumption that there is no Multiplane or Metaplane, and so any characteristics demonstrated by humans must have a Monoplanar and material source and cause.

    An alternative explanation: Humans are made in the Image of God; they thus seek God as a perfectly natural function of their human nature; and such secondary reasons for banding together in organized religious activity (safety, a sense of active unity with other human beings) are perfectly compatible human needs that are also present in that human nature that God created. Thus human beings, when they seek organized religious activity and religious experience, are not behaving as unripe and ignorant and superstitious lumps but rather are giving actualized expression to their perfectly natural – yet supernaturally created – human nature.

    This approach that I have outlined here (and I am breaking no new ground with it) also would classify ‘scientism’ – the belief that ‘science’ (defined as the mastery of knowledge about the physical dynamics of material existence) is the only true source and font of human knowledge because existence is only a Monoplanar phenomenon – as itself being a rather significant form of superstition.

    Readers may consider as they will.

    • Jim Robertson says:

      What religions think about themselves is pretty obvious. They all think, save for very few, that they are each "the way the truth and the light".

      Why would I care about  "a centralized structure" being important? Important to who? Not to me or to anyone else who doesn't follow your "faith"; fantasy; or whatever delusion you consider valid simply because you believe it to be so.

      "realitively clear body of dogma and praxis" Consistant, maybe; but "realitively clear"? I don't think so. Mumbo jumbo supersition is a better description.

      Since you have no evidence of planes existing period. You should be held right next to Roswell space patrollers in terms of nuttiness.

      I can presume by your definitions of faith that if enough people believe that Dr. Zuess's character the Cat in the Hat really exists; it must be true.

      If "humans are made in the image of God" ; does god have a penis?

      A vagina?

      Both?

      Why would god need sexual organs?  Where is Mrs. God? Or is she (he/ it) the bride of Frankenstien that you call the church?

      Well what God's been doing to Mrs. God is exactly what the church has been doing to it's selected children for 2000 years.

      I wonder if Mr. and Mrs. God only use the missionary position?

    • josie says:

      The word 'repugnant' does not even come close to describing your comment here (and your personality).

    • Jim Robertson says:

      Thank you Josie. better repugnant than plain old stupid. :^)

      I didn't make all 3 of your gods male in one male.

      I simply asked: why would god need to be seen as a male god since his son existed before Mary and his incarnation, supposedly, as Jesus?.

      It's a mystery according to the church.

      It's a con according to me. just one man's opinion.

      Worship away, Princess and all the best to you.

      I didn't makeup the easily contradicted tenents of your faith. Don't blame me for mentioning it's contradictions. You don't like my point of view? Don't read my point of view.

  17. LDB says:

    In re Publion of August 8, 2014 @11:29am

    "Humans are made in the Image of God." Stop right there. There is no evidence for this. Every bit of reasoning that flows from this pretended-knowledge is fatally flawed.

    Also, there is no such thing as 'Darwinism' in the ideological sense that Publion surely implies by using an '-ism'. Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is the cornerstone of modern Biology.

    For Publion to call "Darwinianism," I think that he meant to write 'Darwinism', a 'superstition' places him on a very remote island of thought, inhabited exclusively by religious fanatics striving to protect their so-called faith from the intrusion of knowledge about the real world. Today, rejecting evolution is always and exclusively motivated by religious faith and it has to be because no evidence can be or has been found in reality, aka the real world, to reject the theory.

    It is not a 'presumption' to think that there is no other 'plane' of existence besides the one that we perceive/observe here on Earth and call reality. There is no evidence for any other 'plane'. The 'multiplane' or 'metaplane' must first be shown to exist. Why should I believe in heaven or hell? Both places seem very unlikely to be actual. God too, for that matter. I do not 'presume' to know that Zeus and Jupiter and Thor and Odin do not exist. I just have no good reason to think that they do. I have the same thoghts about other realms of existence (multi- and meta-), heaven and hell, and any inhabitants of these realms. No such thing. No evidence.

    I also do not think that the prophet Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse. Catholics would agree with me, I assume. Am I making a hasty ill-considered presumption about Muhammad? Many many Muslims would say that I am. But they would be wrong.

    I am not sure that the so-called 'Jesus' of the bible ever existed. But whether he did or not, does not matter to me. Nothing for me depends on whether or not Jesus existed or was the son of god or anything. For Publion, so much emotionally depends on the truth of Jesus and his claim to be the son of god and his resurrection that they all must be true/real. But the evidence for such is very thin indeed.

    Faith is believing something without evidence.

  18. Publion says:

    And now for something somewhat different: LDB (the 8th, 253PM) will forego the one-liner approach for a disquisition. Fair enough. With his claimed elite philosophical (as well as legal) education, this should be something indeed.

    After quoting my sentence about humans being made in the Image of God (which I clearly posited as an “alternative explanation” he instructs us to “stop right there” – so he must have something serious and significant and substantive to interpose here.

    “There is no evidence for this”, he says. Would it be snarky to respond “Duh”? There is no physical evidence for it, of course; it is a metaphysical reality, not a physical one. (Which, of course, casts doubt on the capability or competence of physical-sciences to pronounce upon the subject at all.)

    LDB continues: “Every bit of reasoning that flows from this pretended-knowledge is fatally flawed”. Now that is a pretty big chunk to toss up, and it will be interesting to see how he explains or at least explicates this assertion. Especially in light of the fact that he is trying to use the (highly dubious) competence of physical science to pronounce upon metaphysical matters. So how will he go about this.

    Simple as pie. He doesn’t. Not a bit.

    He merely proceeds on to his next bit: “There is no such thing as Darwinism in the ideological sense”. There isn’t? Really? So when Darwin’s theory about the origin of species is used as the basis of claims as to the origin of matter, and conclusions are drawn from that problematic but very real gambit to the effect that there is no metaphysical reality and no Metaplanar or Multiplanar element to existence and to the universe or the cosmos … that is not an ideology? It is a set of assertions not based on any evidence (even evidence presented by Darwin), which numerous persons hold and claim is based on Darwin. It is a set of assertions based on assumptions made by the asserters. That’s an ideology.

    The fact that this ideology is very shakily based in problematic conceptual ground may well make it a flawed ideology, but an ideology it is.

    Darwin’s own theory of evolution (about the origin of species) may indeed be the cornerstone of modern biology, and as an explanation of how matter develops it may have some value (although there are substantive problems with the purported randomness of the natural selection, as I have discussed at length in comments on prior threads), but Darwinism (and its spawn, neo-Darwinism) has taken Darwin as the basis of a materialist and – from the metaphysical point of view – reductionist set of assumptions which claim far more than Darwin’s own theory did, yet do so under the aegis of his name and his work.

    Apparently, LDB is merely making an argument from authority here: since Darwin’s theory is “the cornerstone of modern biology” then … what? It must be right? Or the even more problematic metaphysical conclusions claimed to flow from it must be right?

    Nor has LDB addressed – nor does LDB here address – any of those rather serious problems raised in prior comments in connection with Darwinism and with Darwin’s own theory.

    Nor – I would add – does his one stab at it from a few threads back cover any of the necessary ground. He had tried to go for the point that just because ‘science’ hadn’t figured out everything yet was no reason to call what it has figured out into question.

    But my points precisely called into substantive question what ‘science’ (or at least its ideological supporters) claims is ‘knowledge’ that science (in their view) has already indeed ‘discovered’ and ‘established beyond doubt’.

    So LDB’s misreading (intentional or otherwise) then comes back now to undermine his own position here.

    I use “Darwinianism” and “Darwinism” interchangeably, and if he sees a “fatal flaw” in that he can explain why.

    Then he goes again to the argument from authority: if I am venturing that this ideology derived from Darwin may well be a form of modern superstition then – he says – this venturing of mine “places [me] on a very remote island of thought”. That’s a rather convoluted and vague statement, but I would say that not being ‘in with the in crowd’ is something that LDB himself is used to substituting for serious critical thought. And tends strongly toward the ‘popularity contest’ approach to serious matters.

    His claim about “the real world” begs the question as to whether that “real world” is or is not Multplanar and does or does not include a Metaplane. It presumes precisely what has yet to be demonstrated (although such a question cannot be demonstrated by the physical sciences, since what is proposed is precisely not physical but metaphysical).

    Thus his disquisition in the rest of his third paragraph fails because of insufficiency: it does not grapple with  – let alone resolve – the problems raised by the Multiplanar possibility.

    Ditto his reference to “today”, which is merely a variant on the argument from authority.

    I have not ‘rejected’ the Darwinian theory as much as raised serious problematic questions in regard to it. Rather than address those questions and problems, LDB merely resorts to the argument from authority: lots of people today hold for Darwin and Darwinism and Darwininianism (and its ‘neo’ spawn) so that should – apparently, to LDB’s mind – be enough to shut up anybody who doesn’t go along.

    On, then, to his point about it not being a presumption to assert as fact that there is no Multiplane or Metaplane, since “there is no evidence for any other ‘plane’”. But  I have pointed out that the lack of physical evidence is not conclusive when we are dealing with a ‘meta-physical’ possibility. The repetitiveness of LDB’s point here simply reflects the solid wall of impossibility that science or scientism faces when it attempts to declaim conclusively about matters beyond its competence.

    And LDB himself then goes on quickly to raise the question of ‘belief’ (i.e. why should he “believe” in heaven or hell). But science properly does not ‘believe’; it demonstrates as fact and claims its demonstrated facts as knowledge.

    Of course, it is precisely the problem with the “-ism” in Darwinism (or Darwinianism, or it’s ‘neo’ variants) that its adherents do ‘believe’ – they presume without any conclusive evidence that there is no Multiplane. How have they proven that?

    And furthermore then, how does LDB account for the persistence of the religious impulse in human history? JR recently tried to ascribe it merely to some aberration or weakness in the human psyche (let’s not even raise the question of ‘soul’). But that assertion has not been proven either. And yet the stubborn and consistent persistence of the human religious impulse remains.

    His personal opinion as to the ‘unlikeliness’ of heaven and hell existing (along, one imagines, with the rest of the Multiplane and Metaplane) remains merely his personal opinion and he is welcome to it. But it is not ‘science’ in any sense at all.

    As for his having “no good reason” to believe, he seems to be quite out of step with the majority of human-beings throughout recorded history. Which point I do not proffer here as ‘proof’ of anything, but simply as a historical reality for which his musings do not seem able to sufficiently account.

    So there’s a bit of historical reality that has escaped him. Unless, in the accents of Scrooge confronting Marley’s ghost, he simply wishes to ascribe it all to a somewhat more scientific-sounding equivalent of “a bit of undigested beef”.

    Whether the Prophet Muhammad did or did not fly to heaven on a winged horse is not an article of Catholic faith and belief. From what I have seen here, I could not definitively say that Muslims would be “wrong” and if God is omnipotent and has His own ways of going about things, then I wouldn’t and couldn’t definitively rule out the possibility of the winged horse. If LDB wants to doubt the Resurrection, well that’s more relevant to the Catholic point of view, and rather basic to the entire problem here: how can science (or at least those who embrace ‘scientism’) pronounce upon the core matters of religion and faith and God’s actions definitively?

    But then LDB says – in another bit of personal opinion – that he “is not sure that the so-called ‘Jesus’ of the bible ever existed”. That’s his opinion and he is welcome to it.

    He then goes on in the next paragraph to presume that the whole matter is one of ‘emotions’. And that this is especially so in my case. My case is conceptual, not emotional. And I have been making the conceptual case for quite a while here, with no substantive response to the concepts from the Abuseniks/atheists. I will say that it is LDB’s position that is emotional, since he has not made much conceptual response at all. Or is the distinction between ‘emotional’ and ‘conceptual’ unfamiliar to him?

    Faith, for humans, finally, is a matter of believing something without physical evidence. But in the matter of the Planes, we are precisely in territory beyond the scope of physical science. This is the equivalent of trying to sail a main battle tank into a naval engagement. The tank (science) wasn’t designed to operate on the ocean. To operate on the ocean (metaphysics) one will need a different kind of vehicle.

    In this matter, then, I will say that scientism has reached the point Hitler reached when he took France. His tanks faced the Channel, and that was territory they could not cross, let alone take or hold.

  19. Julie says:

    Jim Robertson, I'm still praying and giving $$ to the Catholic Church in your honor. That is more proactive than bashing, bashing, bashing, especially when you spend an inordinate amount of time putting false information out there. Get out there, do some good. Why wallow in hate.

    • Jim Robertson says:

      You think I hate the church because I simply don't love it like you do.

      Have I ever stopped you from going to church or believing what ever you wish to believe? No; nor would i ever. I respect your right to believe in the tooth fairy, if you want to.

      But I refuse to not talk about the flaws in your hypothasis of god and faith simply because you believe. That does not equate to hate. No matter how many times you may say it does.

      I do, however, truely hate Fr. Tom Doyle's "Project" (SNAP, VOTF, etc.) that is a fraud in it's pretense of "helping victims". That kind of cheese ball low shittery is beneath contempt. Just the same way P's bull apologies for the church are a fraud.

      P is the Herve Vallechez of your Fantasy Island." Thee plane, boss, Thee plane". It's all hokum.

       

  20. Jim Robertson says:

    I'm not religious. Lots of humans aren't. Lots are. So what?

    You ascribe religion to a necessity for women/men. I disagree.

    Unlike homosexuality, religion is a choice. You want it? You can have it.

    But when you try to pass belief off as truth; I ain't buying.

    I don't "believe" I was raped. I know I was raped.

    • JR, on August 9, said…."I don't "believe" I was raped. I know I was raped".  Well that's a very clear statement of his reason for attacking the Church. But my difficulty in believing him relates to the reaction (or lack of reaction) from those around him.  But I will accept, as superficially plausible, the reason he didn't tell his parents. They were getting on in years and he didn't want to burden them with such a shock. Also he was confused and bewildered by what had happened, and he feared being labelled as a homosexual.

      However he did tell his best buddy, who confronted the school principal with the shocking accusation. Obviously an exceptional young man… to have braved the lion's den… in defence of his friend.  But such a brave individual would also have had the courage to tell his friends and family about such a shocking incident. Why would he cover up for the attacker or the principal. He would surely tell anybody who was willing to listen. It would have been all over the school and community within days. The perpetrator would have been branded a 'dirty old man' by the kids and they would have steered well clear of him. Even if he had placed his hand on a shoulder the kids would have told their parents. As much to get attention and sympathy as anything else. This guy's name would have become 'mud' in that school and community. Yet JR has informed us that the perpetrator just went on teaching (and raping boys) for decades afterwards?.

      Honestly it just doesn't ring true.  If it is true then both the kids and their parents must have  been a bunch of gutless wonders.

      Nevertheless I admit that a common fault of most Catholics is something we have been long accused of, namely having a collective 'guilt complex'. Perhaps it's this 'guilt complex' that prevents us from exercising our critical faculties when considering the veracity of such dubious claims and stories.

    • Jim Robertson says:

      How do I say F.U. to Malcolm and get it printed?

      "gutless wonders"!!!!.

      Don't pull your fake macho bullshit on me you Fosters drinking scum. Why don't you trot out to a "footy" or rugby match where you can stare at well built young men all day and still pretend to be butch. You are pathetic.

      Again butt out mate. Your lies aren't appreciated here.

      My parents weren't told. They did not know.

      My friend and i reported it to the school authorities. How is that "gutless"?

      Stupid us to think reporting such horrific behavior to the people in charge should be considered "braving the lion's den". They were supposed to protect us from such horror. We were supposed to tell them and we did. But now we are told that we weren't brave enough???? When the authoritative adults knew and did what they did, which was nothing???? You are a real piece of work Malcolm.

      As far as the perp raping other boys later? Not my responsibility nor my friends. We two 16 year olds did the right thing. We told. Authoritative adults in charge knew and did nothing.

      My friend, Tom, told the dean of students, Bro. Da Silva who told the communities resident priest, Fr. Clemmons, who spoke to me. It was not the principal of the school.

      My friend was my age, 16. He did tell another peer, a guy who I did not like at all. I don't know why; but those guys didn't tell anyone else. Not from cowardice but from fear and ignorance; and embarassement, for me. I'm guessing. Maybe they felt sorry for me. Most catholics , unlike here, are empathetic people you know.

      They may have been told not to say anything under pain of excomunication that was the church "law" at the time. I don't remember. I was ashamed to hang with them afterwards. They knew I'd had been touched sexually by a man. We never talked about it after. I avoided them.

      The perp was transferred to Hawaii, 5 months after my rape.

  21. Publion says:

     First, let me expand upon the concluding image I used on the 9th at 619AM. I had said there “In this matter, then, I will say that scientism has reached the point Hitler reached when he took France. His tanks faced the Channel, and that was territory they could not cross, let alone take or hold”.

    As an analogy concerning ‘scientism’ it also goes further: not only have the tanks reached the Channel and find themselves unable to cross to England, but the tankers then console themselves by claiming that since their tanks can’t deal with it, then therefore England doesn’t exist. And thereby they have not actually solved the problem, but merely relieved themselves (to their own satisfaction) of the responsibility for being any further concerned about the problem they face. Nor does their ‘solution’ here do anything to reduce the reality of the existence of England.

    Now to JR’s of the 9th at 1057AM.

    JR evades the problem he created for himself with his assertion about the uniqueness of the Church by a) merely claiming that they all think they are somehow unique – but that wasn’t the point at issue in the comment.

     And then by b) whining about why he “should … care about” that “’centralized structure’ being important” – in other words, if the Church is very plausibly unique along several axes, and yet he had claimed that it was not unique, then he can just ignore the stuff that doesn’t support his assertion. After all, he doesn’t care and doesn’t need to care.

    This is a signature demonstration of the Abusenik approach to whatever material they don’t want to deal-with (either because they have no answer or because the answer isn’t going to be one that they like). Facts are just blocks or piles of play-dough to them, and disciplined reasoned inquiry is simply some toy that can be used if it gives them the answer they want, and ignored if it doesn’t.

    And as I have said before more than a few times, this mentality was actually allowed to play a serious role in the changes (they cannot be legitimately called ‘reforms’) demanded by Victimist law in regard to evidence and jurisprudential and police procedures.

    The rest of this bit of his is epithetical and nothing new there.

    And then the mere resort to the bit about there being “no evidence” that Planes of Existence exist. And again we see the tankers simply claiming that since they can’t get at it, then England doesn’t exist.

    And then again some epithetical stuff about Roswell.

    Then the curiously well-styled bit about presumptions in regard to “Dr. Zeuss” (sic; did he take this text down over the phone and thus get the spelling wrong?). To which I would respond: if the vast majority of human beings throughout recorded history have demonstrably evinced some sort of awareness-of and attraction-to and concern-for some form of non-physical or beyond-physical or metaphysical levels of their existence (not only of God but of their own soul or spirit) then any theory positing that there is no such metaphysical actuality would have to explain the consistency and near-universality of that phenomenon. And that means a lot more than merely tossing around some variant of (to use Dickens’s fine imagery) the undigested-bit-of-beef ‘explanation’.

    But to consider oneself as being a world-historically enlightened individual who can see what the vast body of human beings has not seen (i.e. that all things metaphysical are merely symptoms of this or that superstition or psychological need or weakness) is certainly a pleasurably self-consoling conceit, is it not?

    And then – in so pitch-perfect a bit of adolescent juvenilia – we get a reversion to thinking on the level of sexual organs and the sex act. And it goes on for a while. A charming self-revelation, although probably not intended as such.

    Then on the 9th at 823PM JR goes on about whether religion is “a necessity” for humans. There remains the demonstrated fact of the vast majority of humans having evinced precisely such a preoccupation with ‘religion’. Which certainly increases the probability that “religion” is somehow a universal source of interest and concern to humans and therefore quite possibly for some reason it is indeed a “necessity” to humans.

    Against the weight of which demonstrated fact, we get nothing from the Abuseniks and cafeteria atheists except variations on the undigested-bit-of-beef bit.

    But then – in yet another fine example of projection – JR claims that he rejects trying “to pass belief off as truth”. And yet that is precisely what the Stampede has – at its genuine best, which is not to say all the time – tried to do: passing off their allegations and claims and assertions as truth. And worse, to do so on the basis of what is nothing more than spectral-evidence (i.e., I can see it – nobody else can).

    Which in a legal forum produces the lethal whackery: I can see it  -nobody else can or did – but on the basis of my spectral evidence I want and demand that the government use its Sovereign Coercive Authority to produce for me (choose one or several: lots of money, the prosecution of the person(s) I have named, and ditto the prosecution of anybody who didn’t buy my story and who thus interfered with my getting the money or interfered with my ‘getting’ the person(s) I have named in my spectral evidence). And that’s how the Game is played.

    And JR then nails down all that by outright demonstrating (intentionally or otherwise) the ‘spectral evidence’ dynamics when he insists “I don’t ‘believe I was raped. I know I was raped”.

    First, we have to consider this in relation to all the other things JR has claimed to “know”.

    Second, we have to ask if what any allegant claims to personally “know” is sufficient, without any actual evidence, to trigger the deployment of the Sovereign Coercive Authority of the government against any other person or persons. In the Salem Witch Trials that Court answered Yes to that question, with the result that a number of persons were executed as ‘witches’. And nowadays we are back to this relatively primitive legal concept again, are we not?

  22. Jim Robertson says:

    And as if on cue. P brings in a plate full of hokum for y'all to munch.

    Bon Appetite, bunk swallowers.

  23. Publion says:

    JR (the 10th, 115PM) now informs us that we have every right to believe in the tooth fairy if we are that gullible. But apparently we run serious risks of being immoral if we don’t believe the Stampede stuff. Go figure.

    Then – the Wig of Deep and Courageous Insight – he heads for the high-ground on his flat little stage, declaiming that he doth “refuse to not talk about the flaws in your hypothasis of god and faith”. To what “flaws”, precisely, does he refer, in the “hypothesis” (correction supplied) of “god and faith”? Is there anything he’s got here beyond the assorted variants of the undigested-bit-of-beef bit?

    And perhaps he has given too much away with that “talk about” – that’s what they do around the table in the cafeteria. In other precincts of the building, things advance beyond mere “talk” to the more strenuous processes of examination and assessment.

    “No matter how many times you say it does”: a marvelous candidate for taping on both his computer screen and his mirror.

    He then proceeds down his little list of what he does “hate”, including everything connected to the Doyle Project outlined by Doyle in 1985 and then piggybacks on that bit another mere epithet about my “apologies for the church” being “a fraud”. And his assertions about the Stampede are not “apologies”? And fraudulent?

    And – without ever having produced a substantive bit in the comment – he delivers his exit-line about “hokum”, with the cutesy bit about Fantasy Island and Hervé Villechaize.

    At on the 10th at 117PM he repeats the “hokum” bit. And then – no doubt of some interest to the clinically-inclined mind – the bit about “swallowers”.

    It was doubly brilliant of Anderson’s Strategies: a) provide an attractive venue for these types to come up to the surface while b) insuring that Anderson and the other torties would never have to be directly associated with these types. (Except when such types made cash-inducing allegations, where – nonetheless – the torties did everything they could to ensure that the material wouldn’t be publicly examined and their connection to such types be more clearly demonstrated.)

    But on to something far more substantive. I am intrigued by ‘Malcolm Harris’s idea (the 11th, 141PM) about a Catholic “guilt complex”.

    If we consider American Catholics (leaving aside thus for the moment a universal sense of all Catholics throughout history) I think that we can see the paralyzing effect of the Blitzkrieg tactics of the Anderson Strategies: enrolling so comprehensive a list of influential synergistic allies (the media; politicians and legislators; secularist-minded intellectuals, academics and celebrities; assorted ‘reform’ advocates, especially in the legal field; zealous critics of the Church both non-Catholic and within the Church; torties whose whiskers were ever-twitchy for potentially lucrative causes of legal action; plus (going into the mid-1990s and ever-increasingly since then) the amplification and un-boundaried dynamics of the internet).

    As the Stampede so quickly and comprehensively deployed its various elements, Catholics – even more than citizens generally – made the hardly-unsurprising assumption that so widely bruited a story must be true. And the claims and allegations made by the Stampede were so expansive that even if some moderate or sober-thinking individuals imagined that only a percentage of the claims and allegations were true, yet in light of the originally massive size of the claims and allegations, then even a fraction would still constitute a large number of (presumably genuine) cases.

    And the basic template or ‘scenario’ of the Stampede was – as I have described on many occasions on this site – perfectly suited as a type of humanly-engaging and humanly-seductive imagining: like the old silent movie plots of yore and resembling the propaganda gambits seen so clearly in the early to mid-20th century, that template or ‘scenario’ limned a simple and simplistic Manichaean dynamic of Pure Innocence bethumped by Pure Evil, with various embellishments added. Many movies have made much money trading on this dynamic.

    Catholics in the U.S., almost all of whom lived with no personal experience of active and dangerous animosity against Catholicism, were taken almost completely unaware. After the tremendously encouraging experience of Catholicism and the Church conducting a long climb up from the nativists burning down the Ursuline Convent in 1834 to the Church-Democratic Party teamwork of the early 20th century and through the powerful bonding of Church and government and culture in World War 2 and on up through JFK’s election … American Catholicism was not well-prepared for the rigors of existing as the target of  broad and deep synergistic coalition of social and cultural and political and institutional forces.

    Those in the Vatican who had lived through Fascist and Soviet and Communist propaganda and procedural attacks against the Church, and as educated Europeans knew well the dynamics of the French Revolution and Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, initially categorized what began in the U.S. in the early 1980s as simply another example of such efforts. (Nor has it been clearly demonstrated that this assessment was not fundamentally the most cogent and accurate; as time goes in I think its essential accuracy is becoming more apparent.)

    And thus the Anderson Stampede blitzed its way, cutting huge swaths in a brief time.

    And thus American Catholics almost immediately became themselves shrouded in a sense of ‘collective guilt complex’ (and the Abuseniks never tire of trying to reinforce that shrouding): if ‘they’ are ‘reporting’ all this, then all or most of it must be true … would have been the presumption many Catholics made, perhaps without even thinking too deeply about it.

    And of course the Playbook (a spawn variant of all the old propaganda gambits of the past) specifically seeks to attack anybody who tries to think carefully and assess. They are ‘insensitive’, ‘sociopathic’, abstracted from reality, ‘proud’ (go figure), gullible and lumpish, evil and ‘enabling’, or fill-in-the-blank.

    American Catholics of the era since 1985 had never imagined nor been prepared-by-experience for this type of broad cultural and political assault. The Stampede succeeded – such as it did – the same way Blitzkrieg succeeded in France in 1940 and Russia in 1941 and the Imperial Japanese ran riot in the Pacific in 1941 and 1942.

    • Jim Robertson says:

      Heaven forfend your church being held responsibile for it's felonies.

      When your charlatans squeal because they are caught in their crimes. You invent a catholic" guilt complex" ????? That used to be called a conscience in catholicism.

       

    • Publion says:

      Another ‘A’ for pitch-perfect self-revelation. 

      The opening line of JR’s (the 12th, 1152AM) pretty much puts it all in a nutshell.

      So JR has so far excused himself from having to demonstrate his assertions rationally because he is merely “mentioning” and “talking-about’ things here, as if this site were simply a variant of the adolescent cafeteria soda-klatsch of yore. 

      Yet he then professes himself – with the help of various Wigs of assorted flavors of Hurt and Indignation – greatly dissed and victimized when his stuff is not given the respect he seems convinced it deserves. 

      This is the Abusenik Game writ small but with vivid clarity.

      And the epithet “pathetic” would seem to work far better here in the recoil rather than the projectile.
       
      What “lies” has ‘Malcolm Harris’ told here? 

      And there is now a divergence (from what we told last summer) in his story of the alleged abuse from half a century ago: now it is both his friend and he himself who “reported it to the school authorities”. 

      And in a trademark Playbook manipulation, he refers to ‘reporting’ his story to school authorities, which moves readers to assume – perhaps unthinkingly – that he was actually ‘reporting’ a fact, rather than – as best can be established – he was telling them a story that had yet to be assessed as true or otherwise. 
      And we see here on an individual level the ‘reporting’ scam deployed so very often by the media in Stampede ‘reporting’. 

      And if his own story from last summer is true, then it could indeed be characterizable as “gutless” of him not to tell the authorities himself (which is what he originally said last summer). Keeping his parents in the dark is another issue, although did he not imagine that if his friend (or he himself) made such a ‘report’ to school authorities then it would not soon get back to his parents? 

      (We have already seen that the authorities considered his story (perhaps delivered with the queasy demand that his parents not be told) and ascribed it to other motivations and causes.)

      Then – building on his initial flaw in characterizing what he told the authorities as a ‘report’ – he works himself up into a lather that those authorities did not act on his ‘report’, at least in the way he wanted them to. 

      And the hyperbolic but manipulatively self-serving characterization of telling the school authorities as “braving the lion’s den”. As if he would be eaten alive when actually – despite his reported failures in academic performance (which, we recall, pre-dated the events alleged in his story) – he was allowed to remain in the school and graduated (he attended his reunion, we have been told here, this past Spring).
       
      And also again the various Wigs donned on the basis of the (undemonstrated) assumption that he ‘reported’ facts – about which those authorities did nothing. When actually, they assessed the story and decided it was not genuine or credible, especially in the presence of other potential causes for his telling the story. (And perhaps they also picked up on certain characterological unpleasantries in JR which we have also seen here.)

      Yes, this ‘report’ was indeed “a real piece of work”. 

      I pursue this point not to get into JR’s life bits specifically but rather to demonstrate just how the basic template dynamics work here. And Anderson was no fool to realize that he was on to a veritable tortie’s cornucopia of claims and allegations if he could manage to get such stuff accepted as evidentiary-grade material.

      As for the accused teacher’s alleged “raping other boys later” … what have we got to go on here? And even if – much much later – other allegations suddenly appeared during the salad-days of the Stampede, how credible can they be considered?

      And was “the principal” told or not? And if not, what are we to make of that? 

      He then seems to imply that he was unhappy that the “peer” in whom he confided told some other student whom JR “did not like at all”. Who can be surprised? These are adolescents in high-school (which was a fact no doubt included in the assessment made by whatever “authorities” were told). 

      And then – marvelously – a slyly neat inclusion of the epithet to the effect that “most catholics, unlike here, are empathetic people you know” (sic). That is precisely what the Stampede and the Strategies counted on: that most people are going to be “empathetic” to any tale of woe, at least at the outset. (How many persons these days fully credit the ‘stories’ told by panhandlers when they approach your stopped car jiggling a cup at an intersection?)

      And then and then and then: in good Playbook praxis, JR tries to shoe-horn-in the Vatican directive that in formal canonical cases involving allegations of abuse made against a priest, official participants cannot mention the material outside of formal canonical procedures (a directive designed to prevent embarrassment and miscarriage of justice all around). But that directive surely does and did not apply to this rather informal (and somewhat ever-changing) story and case we have here. 

      High-schoolers are then characterized as being intolerant of peers who are “touched sexually by a man”. It could easily also be considered by such adolescents as a badge of honor or at least of excitement. And if there was as much of it going on as JR and the Stampede would have us imagine, then what would be so very unusual about it? Or perhaps those adolescent peers had pre-existing reasons for mocking JR? I don’t know the answers here, but the questions are and always have been relevant and JR’s highly selective and self-serving telling is hardly the only possibility, nor does it cohere rationally on its own terms and merits. 

      Again, my interest here is in examining the general template of Stampede dynamics.

      If the accused priest was transferred to Hawaii, was this a direct result of allegations? Or was he up for transfer anyway (in which case, since he was the teacher in whose class JR was failing – as we discovered in the documents we saw last summer – was this an instance of JR’s ‘getting back at’ him for failing him or giving him unsatisfactory grades)?  The possibilities here are – again – not limited to JR’s highly selective and self-serving telling.

      Then on the 12th at 1204 we (myself, ‘Malcolm Harris’, most commenters and readers here?) are informed – with the trademark adolescent scatology replacing any serious demonstration – that he doesn’t care “about what you ‘believe’”. Well – to repeat, since this point has come up several times before – JR is welcome to care or not-care, but he cannot then rationally claim victimization and outrage when his claims, assertions, stories, epithets and assorted other cafeteria and Playbook bits are not received ‘empathetically’ (meaning: accepted whole-hog with respectful clucks and awwws). 

      He’ll have to demonstrate where he is being ‘lied about’, perhaps also in the process explaining the variances in his several versions of his story. 

      Have I ‘generalized’ about the Stampede (perhaps JR was addressing me directly and solely in this comment)? Yes I most certainly have. I have detected what I see to be a pattern or a set of dynamically-interacting patterns and explained my thoughts at great length. That’s what one does when one is examining a topic, especially one as widespread and complex as this one. But, of course, this is not how matters are handled around the cafeteria table.

      I have no idea what “sans stampers” means here. 

      Then the predictable string of epithets, buttressed by the remarkable assertion that I know I am lying. I do? 
      Then – the Wig of both Dignified and Intelligent Disdain and of Brilliant Discovery  perched and nested precariously – I am told (as if, by amazing coincidence, JR were ‘reporting a fact’) that I am “a shill”, and I was “planted here to misdirect, to blur, to obfuscate” – an accusation far more accurate in the recoil than the projectile. Although, again, the brilliance of the Anderson Strategies, especially as the Internet Age so rapidly developed, was precisely that such Stampede-shills as we have seen here would of their own accord rise up to the surface to take advantages of the opportunities for public posturing that Anderson’s Strategies and recognized synergies so shrewdly and seductively dangled in front of them.

       That’s how the Game has been played.  

      And – as I also worked-toward in my prior comment on this thread – it was precisely the Playbook and Stampede intent to capitalize on the “easily confused” and the trusting public (and “the faithful”) by posturing so vividly as being Pure Innocence Bethumped By Pure Evil. 

      And then, slyly, to preclude the problem of his not having any evidence to support any of this, JR simply tries to go out on the exit-line assertion that he doesn’t need “proof” that I “was planted here by [my] owners” because of – doncha see? – my “actions” which are “proof enough”. 

      Which last bit actually should read: JR has his own highly self-serving and manipulative and selective ‘take’ on my “actions”, which – for him – ‘take’ is “proof enough”. And if that is his “proof”, then readers are welcome to make of it what they will. 

      For the record here, I am on this site of my own accord and with no prior arrangement with anybody. Nor am I receiving any emolument whatsoever for my personal efforts here. 

      Which makes me quite different from those who put up their material and told their stories for cash. Those actions, indeed, as further embellished here, may be considered “proof enough”, may they not? 

    • josie says:

      Publion, I thank God that you are here, making some sense out of some of this insanity! (Now, I can go for a swim).

  24. Jessica says:

    https://www.facebook.com/katctv3/posts/10152306724516969?

    Reference the above link to a bigoted TV station in heavily Catholic S. Louisiana that is persecuting Catholicism. Please respond to their hatred…

  25. Jim Robertson says:

    I don't give two shits about what you "believe". Your beliefs mean nothing to me.

    I do care that you're lying about me and generalizing about a stampede, that you've invented, sans stampers.

    You are a shill. A fake. a non decent person not because you don't believe my truth but because you believe no one but the penultimate liars known to man. Particularly when  you know they are lying.

    You, sir, were planted here to misdirect; to blur; and to obfuscate, for your owners, the  easily confused "faithful".

    Do I have proof you were planted here by your owners? Only your actions. Proof enough.

     

  26. Jim Robertson says:

    I didn't think you'd stoop so low as to throw the word "swallowers" back in my face. What a joy u must have been in the locker room. There is no low, low enough for you. What's the matter Mrs. P. doesn't swallow?

  27. Jim Robertson says:
  28. Publion says:

    On the 12th at 1223PM more for the Notebook on the Playbook.

    The Wig of Outraged Innocence and Dignity huffs that I would “stoop so low as to throw the word ‘swallowers’ back in [JR’s] face”.

    I accurately quoted a statement JR made.

    Is it my fault that the material appeared here? Did I invent it through a misquote?

    But if you examine what Abuseniks themselves say, then you are somehow at fault if it doesn’t work out the way they wanted it to.

    Which is bound to happen if their material is examined both because i) so much of their material doesn’t cohere rationally even on its own terms and ii) their apparent lack of self-awareness results in frequent self-revelations or tics about what had previously been invisible to them. No wonder they are so often surprised and confounded by any analytical response to their material (and, of course, they were expecting – in the Age of the Stampede – nothing but ‘empathetic’ clucks and awwws).

    And thus – we are informed – such analysis is nothing but “low”.

    Then – from a commenter who so freely lards his material with queasy sexual and gender-bending bits – an epithetical bit about me and “the locker room”.

    And then – in a crowning bit of juvenilia – a snide bit about my wife.

    Charming. And marvelously revelatory.

    Readers are welcome to consider yet again the brilliance of the Anderson Strategies in a) maximizing such types for the lawsuits while b) simultaneously preventing their being put on the stand where serious and critical examination of them and their claims and stories and allegations would no doubt have sparked just such outbreaks on the stand.

    And on the 12th at 1247PM we get – yet again – merely a link with no effort to explain what he sees as the relevance or value of the story to which he links in proffer.

    And it is a bit from Bishop-Accountability, on top of all that. This is the organization that had to publish a disclaimer that its material may not have been proven to be accurate and the organization, in publishing it on its site, is not thereby vouching for the credibility of the material.

    But – of course – that will do little to deter mentalities who are not inclined to deal in demonstrable fact in the first place. They are the backbone of the Stampede.

    • Jim Robertson says:

      I'm sure it is a revelation to you, that gay men fellatiate. 

      The question is, Does the Mrs.?

      "mentalities who are not inclined to deal in demonstrable fact" You mean like the faithfull?

      They've got zero facts. Nothing "demonstrable" about heaven or hell. Nothing demonstrable about the existence of god, Jesus or anything faith based.

      So it's only certain issues that interest you factually ;.and as for other very big issues,(god) you require absolutely no empirical evidence at all?

  29. Jim Robertson says:

    Your being "queasy" is your own doing.

    Have you got the vapors? Ask the deacon and the altar boys to bring out the smelling salts.  P's swooned with disgust. Lol!

  30. Publion says:

    What now then?

    As to the 12th at 736PM:

    What gay men do for sexual activity is irrelevant and not my concern, but when there’s nothing left, any old distraction will do – as the Playbook requires.

    And continuation of the juvenilia as to “the Mrs.”.

    But then – as if de novo – JR will come back to what is apparently the last of his 3×5 cards about religion: since metaphysical issues by their nature do not provide physical facts in ‘proof’, then there is no metaphysical reality.

    To repeat, then: physical facts as ‘proof’ is proper to physical realities. Which would include evidence in very this-worldly court cases.

    But faith in the religious context has to do with the metaphysical Plane of Reality, and thus faith – rather than physically-derived knowledge – governs in the human experience of that metaphysical Plane.

    Although we then get into a) those areas of human experience where individuals can experience what for them is a clear indication of that metaphysical Reality yet cannot be claimed to third-parties as any sort of physical evidence. And b) those intrusions by the metaphysical Plane into the physical Plane (such as confirmed miracles and physically inexplicable events) that actually do constitute physical factual actualities that are demonstrable to third-parties and are not simply confined to the personal experience of the individual believer.

    Thus the bit about “nothing demonstrable” about “anything faith-based” fails since the metaphysical Plane precisely does not reveal itself generally through physical manifestations (with the exception, of course, of the situation discussed in (b) above).

    Thus too his further conclusion (i.e. that it is “only certain issues that interest you factually”) also fails since I had pointed out clearly that ‘factuality’ is proper to the physical and not the metaphysical Plane.

    But – to repeat again from prior material on this thread – the Abusenik claims and allegations and stories are very much creatures of this physical Plane of Existence and thus they must produce physical factual proof if they are to be used as the grounds for demanding physical action (i.e. legal action) on this physical Plane.

    Thus – to use his own imagery – if JR wishes to personally believe in the tooth-fairy then that is his business and his right and nobody is well-advised to interfere with that personal belief of his. But if he wishes to claim a disability because he was run over by a tooth-fairy driving a pink elephant in the middle of the night with no witnesses, or if he wishes to sue some deep-pockets corporation which he claims employs that tooth fairy, then he must produce factual and physical proof of his story.

    Or if an Abusenik wants to believe that he has a dog that nobody else can see, then that is his business. But if he comes to school with no homework assignment completed and claims that the dog ate his homework, then he would have to produce physical proof of the dog’s existence. That sort of thing.

    As to the 12th at 740PM:

    He has apparently misread my comment and thinks that I described myself or my own material as being “queasy”. Or else this is just another example of his signature I’m Not/You Are defense.

    And the comment trails off in a stream of juvenilia that speaks for itself.

    Again: I think it is crystal clear why torties themselves would i) not want these types put on the stand to face examination by opposing counsel and why the torties would ii) not want their allegants’ actual stories, claims and allegations to remain public for any examination once the checks had been cashed.

  31. Jim Robertson says:

    And exactly what "type" are you?

    "The metaphysical plane"? Oh you mean fancy/ fantasy, nothing, air, your imagination, your religious leaders imagination. The metaphysical plane that used to belong to Zeus? Osiris? Tinkerbelle? and now belongs to the trinity and st. JP2?

  32. Publion says:

    In regard to the comment of the 14th at 923AM:

    Readers may have already realized that the same argument that the Abuseniks try to use against religious belief also works against the Stampede allegants: if there is no proof, then it doesn’t exist (and didn’t happen).

    But – to repeat – that argument works far more cogently and effectively against the Stampede because the stories and allegations and claims of the Stampede are actually supposed to have taken place on the physical Plane and therefore they are theoretically capable of providing proof on the physical Plane and (at least until Victimist legal ‘reforms’ took hold) must provide such proof from the physical Plane.

    And because religion here does not demand or require – or coerce by the Sovereign Coercive Authority of a government – religious belief from persons. Whereas the Stampede and the Abuseniks precisely do demand belief of their claims and all of the bennies that would accrue from that belief – official and individual – being demanded and accorded to their stories and claims and allegations.

    In other words, an individual can accept or reject the propositions and claims of a religion. But individuals (and governments) absolutely must accept the propositions and claims and stories and allegations of the Abuseniks and of the Stampede or else by deemed (by the Abuseniks) insensitive, un-empathic, sociopathic, or fill-in-the-blank.

    This is where the concept of ‘spectral evidence’ inevitably and ineluctably leads. The West came to realize this centuries ago and – to repeat – it is nothing less-than or else-than a profound regression for Victimist law to have been adopted, with its fundamental reliance on ‘spectral evidence’.

  33. Jim Robertson says:

    Denial, not just a river in Eygpt.

  34. Publion says:

    For that Notebook on the Playbook: when you push them right up against it – as JR (the 16th, 449PM) so nicely demonstrates for us – the Abuseniks will, as he writes, simply fall back on denial. And they will do so in a neat double-barreled sort of way: they simultaneously a) deny the problems with their position while b) going for the accusation that those who question their assorted stories, claims and allegations are ‘denying’ their (as ever un-demonstrated) stories, claims and allegations.

    This is the type of noteworthy psychic ‘economy’ that so often creates a certain rueful impressiveness in matters clinical: a certain shrewdness that bubbles up through the rocky psychic terrain and seems to do so without any deliberation or forethought.

    And there is a PR value to tossing around that pop-psychology term ‘denial’ – from Kubler-Ross’s chalky schematization of ‘grief’ upon which the victimists so quickly glommed when it first came out decades ago (although they twisted it like a pretzel to their own purposes).

    From everything we have managed to examine on this site, I would say that the Abuseniks are ‘in denial’ about the increasingly obvious and profoundly iffy and queasy nature of the Stampede, fueled as it always has been by their assorted stories, claims and allegations.

    But – continuing the clinical thought – they are far too heavily ‘invested’ in the Stampede now (using that term in its monetary as well as its psychic sense) to do anything now except to somehow try to Keep The Ball Rolling for themselves.

    So they will stay in “Egypt” (correction supplied) and try to keep everyone else there too. For them, that’s how the Game must be played at this point. Even if only by one-liners.

  35. Jim Robertson says:

    I hear the sound of a rat squeaking.

    • Jim Robertson says:
    • Jim Robertson says:

      If you'll all please read what SNAP Australia says in the post link above..

      It opens with agreement with the church on compensation hoping that the church will live up to it's promises. The question is: Were the victims asked how they feel about the agreement or did SNAP decide, all by itself, what victims want just like they usually do?

      And again a women leader for SNAP Australia; with an 80% male to female victim ratio.. Also SNAP fiegns hostility towards the church after it first agrees "miraculously" with exactly what the church thinks is right. The caveats are window dressing. Again proving my point of who works for whom. Where is the debate taking place within SNAP as to if said agreement is what Austraian victims want? Could it be the vatican?

  36. Publion says:

    Having allowed himself in two brief one-liners to appear on-stage without any Wigs, JR then (the 17th, 927PM) returns to the boards with the Wig of Sober and Respectful Analysis. In the process, he will actually take a stab at explicating a link which he so respectfully (that “please” is a real charmer) proffers to the readership here.

    It should come as a surprise to nobody that in Western countries – especially ones whose political elites and governments seek to maintain or intensify good relations with Washington and/or whose own economies are suffering through the post-2008 Western economic problems – the Stampede (in some variant) starts up. Australia is also an ‘outpost’ country, a member of the Commonwealth yet lying out there in the far Pacific, uncomfortably and strategically close to an ascendant China.

    This possibility was discussed several times on this site.

    But it appears that the Church’s response in Australia takes a different path – perhaps after having noted how the Stampede’s dynamics played-out in the US: the government itself will judge the amount of compensation that will be doled out to prospective and even already-compensated allegants.

    But – at least as it is described in this SNAP-sourced article – there is no mention of any provision by which even the government will judge who is and is-not a genuine victim, as opposed to allegants otherwise-classifiable.

    And this surely is the omission of so vital and key a step in any assessment-process that will render this new scheme profoundly problematic.

    In the US, basic elements of what are called Victimist law ‘reforms’ were already in place in the legal system; indeed, it was the incorporation of this aspect into his Strategies that rendered Anderson’s scheme so impressive, taking advantage of the synergy available to him in this regard. Ditto the media infatuation with ‘victim’ stories generally, and the subsequent manipulation of public opinion toward this entire approach to any claim of victimization by a corporate entity.

    But this is apparently not the case in Australia. Thus where in the US the government could participate ‘from a distance’ by weakening evidentiary principles and jurispraxis prior to any Stampede, in Australia the government will have to step in and do the job more directly.

    Nonetheless, perhaps the Church in Australia preferred to take its risks in this manner rather than place itself in the position in which the US Church was placed by the Anderson Strategies.

    But this remains the fundamental problem: if there is no provision for reliably assessing the genuineness (or otherwise) of any allegation, than this Australian gambit bids fair to turn into just a differently formatted version of the same old Stampede.

    Is it possible that the media element of the Stampede is not so strongly in place in Australia? I would doubt that but I don’t know.

    Is it possible that public opinion among Australians is not so deranged by Victimism as it is in the US? I don’t know but that is at least more possible than the media being more independent and both capable and willing to deal with this issue objectively and honestly.

    And thus the standard tropes we see from SNAP (big ‘promises’ not fulfilled; words but no actions) and from JR (mostly male victims yet mostly female SNAP operatives, no input from the ‘victims’) stand out clearly as – at the very best – secondary aspects, distracting from the main problems with this thing. And each of the tropes is hardly un-problematic in its own right.

    The comments by the Church representative – Mr. Sullivan – seem to indicate that the Church in Australia will simply cave-in differently from the Church in the US; he gives a great deal away by already referring to “survivors” and so on.

    But there is much that is not-known at this point. Perhaps the Church has some legitimately-grounded confidence that the government will perform honestly and competently. Yet I would tend to doubt that such a level of performance is possible: once the piñata is hoisted up and open-season is declared, what government is then going to place itself in the ‘insensitive’ position of actually performing as an objective gate-keeper and exercising a robust analysis of each allegation seeking money?

    And in the “Ellis defence” we see again an echo of the same legal theorizing that fueled the 2002 sue-the-Bishops phase of the Stampede that we have seen in the US: respondeat superior, i.e. that a corporate entity can be sued for damages (actual and punitive) for the actions of its ‘employees’, even if the actions of those employees were in violation of the corporation’s own standards and rules.

    JR’s gratuitous and un-grounded and un-corroborated characterization of Australian SNAP’s ‘feigning’
    “hostility towards the church” – trailing off as it does into a mush of ‘thinking’ that doesn’t make clear sense as written – remains as nothing else but a gratuitous and un-grounded and un-corroborated characterization that is self-serving as well.

    And thus it does not in any way qualify as “proving [his] point about who works for whom”. It requires the utterly non-credible presumption of what has yet to be proven: that SNAP is nothing but a creature of the Church. But without this grossly problematic presumption, JR has no position at all, so it cannot be discarded even if it cannot in any way be demonstrated.

    And then – to top it all off – the signature Abusenik innuendo: perhaps it is “the vatican” that has been squelching the (secondary and distracting) “debate within SNAP” as to what Australian “victims” really want. And yet JR has himself admitted on this site that he has no idea of what American “victims” really want, so I’m not going to imagine that he is any more reliable a guide to what Australian “victims” really want.

    Perhaps the “debate” is not being had because what the “victims” really want is the money that the government – as I have said above here – seems poised to distribute to them without further assessment or examination.

    And perhaps SNAP in Australia is making the best of a bad situation, since it would appear from this new Australian scheme that there won’t be overmuch room for the torties at all, except as mostly procedural representatives who might help aspiring allegants navigate the paperwork, thus largely cutting out the kick-back sharing of sizable attorney fees that the torties have made available to SNAP in the US.

  37. Jim Robertson says:

    Here's another link that shows the effect SNAP and other fake victims groups have allowed in Australia. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/18/catholic-churchs-melbourne-response-under-review

    • Jim Robertson says:

      $80,000 dollar cap on compensation for victims. The church is shameless.

    • Publion says:

      The article in the Guardian – with its long-standing ideological preferences – is revealing, although more for what it doesn’t say than for what it does say, and more for what is hidden in the numbers. 

      There have been 351 allegations for the thirty-year period 1950-1980, a little over 10 per year. 
      77 priests were accused, of whom more than half (42) were dead.

      2 of those priests accounted for 77 of the 351 allegations.

      Of those 2, one was found guilty of 49 child sex offenses and yet spent only 3 and a quarter years in prison before being released on parole. Australia’s legal system is clearly not the US in its Victimist and Stampede-friendly characteristics. 

      And it appears as well that Australian public opinion is also not so Victimist and Stampede-friendly: nobody Down-Under allows themselves the sugar-plum fantasies of a million or more in settlement monies. For the Aussies, apparently, eighty thousand in cash is a pretty respectable sum. So much, then, for cross-cultural judging as to what is “shameless”.

      And the article concludes with the inclusion of the tale of an 87 year-old who claims child-hood abuse (at least 70 years ago, then) at the hands of the Salvation Army. Which has nothing to do with the Church but which appears to be tossed-into the story for the larger purpose of manipulating Aussie public opinion into turning pro-Victimist and Stampede-friendly generally. 

  38. Mary Field says:

    Nienstadt needs to go. He is not a leader anymore. He is reactionary at best. MPR may not be perfect but they are forcing action on the part of the archbishop- action that should've happened long ago.

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