Joseph Hippolito compares Mark Shea and Ezra Pound
Joe and I have argued on the web before, and one thing I think everyone can agree on is that the man brings a lot of passion to all the subjects on which he writes. That's why it is impressive to me that he can be so thoughtful and measured in his FrontPageMag critique of Mark Shea, a man who has baited him and made fun of him for years. Here's an excerpt:
In “6 B.S. Myths You Probably Believe About America’s ‘Enemies,’” Cracked.com’s Mark Hill wrote that 1) Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s comment about obliterating Israel was mistranslated and taken out of context 2) Iran has a smaller military budget than either Greece or Australia and 3) Ahmadinejad can be overruled by his superiors and has no significant power.
“It’s sad when the writers of Cracked,” Shea wrote, “know more about the Imminent Threat that is not Iran than the warmongers of the Right and the combox cowards who…defend their rhetoric in favor of cold-blooded murder of innocent human beings.”
Shea ended by asserting that “all the panic about Ahmadinejad with his finger on the button is pure provincial ignorance…using his stupid blather as a justification for praising cold-blooded murder of civilians as ‘wonderful’ is both ignorant and evil.”
However, the German newspaper Die Welt reported in May 2011 that Iran was building bases in Venezuela for intermediate-range missiles, complete with anti-aircraft batteries and commando facilities. Engineers from a firm owned by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard visited the site three months earlier.
The purpose, reported Die Welt, was to attack Iranian enemies — likely the United States — if Iran itself was attacked.
Since Shea’s post, the Washington Post reported on Jan. 31 that “Iran is prepared to launch terrorist attacks inside the United States,” according to intelligence officials testifying before Congress. On Feb. 24, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported on Iran’s accelerated production of enriched uranium that could be converted easily into weapons-grade stock.
The Revolutionary Guard’s own news service published an article on Feb. 4 by Alireza Forghani, a strategic analyst who advises Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. Forghani called Israel “this corrupting material” and stated that “it is a ‘jurisprudential justification’ to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”
It is sort of amazing that Mark Shea gets a paycheck from EWTN for his uninformed rants. You can email them at viewer@ewtn.com, or use this page to tell NC Register what you think.
Good stuff.
ReplyDeleteAnd EWTN/NCR has the bulging file of deranged rants from Joe, screaming at them about how the Church is damned by God, JPII is in hell, everybody Joe hates needs to be put to death with extreme prejudice and go to hell, nuking Muslims and Japanese is the will of God, Jesus loves capital punishment and pre-emptive war, the bishops are all going to hell, as well as many of NCR's writes (especially Yr Obdt Svt) and all his other helpful contributions to Catholic political thought over the years. I'm sure they will be on the edge of their seats listening to your appeal that they heed his wisdom. :)
ReplyDeleteMark Shea
Maybe we should let EWTN know what Mr. Shea did to people who disagreed with him. Say what you want about Joe, he has allowed people on his blog who disagree with him. Unlike certain other bloggers.
ReplyDeleteUm, Joe has never had a blog. He parasitically lives off the blogs of others. If, by "doing things to people" you mean "not allowing rude wahoos on my blog" that's true. If you mean I never allow disagreements on my blog, you are either illiterate, stupid, or a liar, Jonathan.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I've never suggested that people who disagree with me should be murdered or prayed for their death and damnation. Joe's done that multiple times with me. Enjoy your bedfellow.
"On the other hand, I've never suggested that people who disagree with me should be murdered or prayed for their death and damnation."
ReplyDeleteNo, you just mock, hurl epithets and try to humiliate them. A paragon of virtue, for sure.
Mark, does that mean you will allow me or Pauli to post when ever we want? Not like you did in 2007-2008. I am not holding my breath.
ReplyDeleteNo. I'm not a paragon of virtue. I commit the same sins as you, Kathleen (whose writing is, after all, suffused with mockery, humiliation of others, and epithets). My point is not that I am a paragon of virtue. It is that Joe's hatred of both the Church and me is legendary throughout St. Blog's and that the editors at NCR are not unaware of it, since he has subjected them to it for years. So failure to acknowledge that little detail as Pauli makes the preposterous case for the sobriety of Joe's libel is a non-starter.
ReplyDeleteMark
Jonathan (and Pauli):
ReplyDeleteYou are welcome to post. However, you have to obey the rules. You're in my comboxes on my suffrage as guests. Disagreement is fine (as even a cursory read of my comboxes shows). Just be polite and honest.
Mark
"whose writing is, after all, suffused with mockery, humiliation of others, and epithets"
ReplyDeleteEven if that were true -- which it isn't, and I note you provide zero examples of such: I don't get paid to write. I don't put myself forward as a public voice for catholicism. You, sir, do a grave, grave disservice to Catholicism when you do behave the way you do. Shame on you!
This is Kathleen *Reilly*, correct?
ReplyDeleteAnd you seriously assert that nothing you've had to say about Rod Dreher is mocking, or aimed to humiliate, or chock full of epithets? Not to mention suffused with naked contempt for the guy?
Reeeeeeally?
Well, I suppose we'll just have to disagree about that.
No argument that I'm a terrible witness to the faith. But I'm all I've got and Jesus says to bear witness to him, so I try. Are you saying I shouldn't try? Or are you merely saying that it's worse that I do a bad job of witnessing to the faith than that Joe is actively trying to destroy the Church while urging mass murder.
Curious priorities.
Mark
I'm not in the business of doing comparisons. Regardless, Joe sounded eminently reasonable in this particular article. And yes, you do an egregiously lousy job of "witnessing the faith". So much so, that the fact that anyone pays you to do so is in itself a scandal.
ReplyDeleteAnd by the way, the Dreher stuff was from a parody blog that shut down six years ago. You sound more than a little obsessive. I recommend some time offline.
ReplyDeleteMark Shea has no right to complain about 'deranged rants' from Joe. He has a history of stalking people on the internet, and using untrue and inflamatory terms like 'death penalty maximumists' to deride the perfectly legitimate opinions of others. Whenever he opens his vemonous yap to spew his poison, his blog, other blogs, and his publishers should be flooded with e and snail mails to let everybody know that his slanders and libels are not Christian and not appreciated by decent people.
ReplyDeleteShea's response is typical. He takes responsibility for nothing. It's all somebody else's fault. He doesn't even bother to defend the rationale behind his own opinions and interpretations! All he does is rely on his "traditional" weapons: non sequiturs, personal attacks, false humility and distraction from the real issue: the lack of thought behind his rhetoric and the profound unwillingness to examine its implications.
ReplyDeleteIf you re-read the article, you'll come across Stephen White's rebuttal to Shea's interpretation of "just war" doctrine. White is a fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in D.C. Shea never even bothers to address that objection! All he does is attack, attack, attack...
One doesn't need to be Catholic, to have any relationship with Shea, even to have heard of the man to connect the dots, as it were.
The fact that I have engaged in "deranged rants" mostly a decade ago, though true, is irrelevant. It's just another red herring to distract from Shea's actual, immediate opinions.
Besides, there's a tremendous diference between hyperventilating on a comment thread and expressing an opinion for publication.
BTW, as far as having a "blog" goes, I do have a Facebook page. Jonathan and I have disagreed in posts on that page (as have Stephen Dalton and I in private) but we've never resulted to the scurrilous rhetoric Shea regularly uses.
Shea has gotten away with massive character assassination for nearly a decade and noboby -- not EWTN, not Catholic Answers, not Crisis Magazine, not his book publishers -- have held him accountable. It's about time somebody did.
One final note:
I watched the World Trade Center go down in flames on television, like most of you. I've paid close attention to what Islamic imperialists have been doing, and how the Church has been (to put it politely) lax in responding. There is no way in Hell that I'm going to be silent when some half-assed curmudgeon abuses his religious identity to downplay a legitimate threat not only to the United States and Israel, but to the Western World as a whole -- not the least of which contains the Catholic Church!
BTW, Pauli, thank you very much for posting my commentary.
ReplyDeleteShea's response is typical. He takes responsibility for nothing. It's all somebody else's fault. He doesn't even bother to defend the rationale behind his own opinions and interpretations! All he does is rely on his "traditional" weapons: non sequiturs, personal attacks, false humility and distraction from the real issue: the lack of thought behind his rhetoric and the profound unwillingness to examine its implications.
ReplyDeleteIf you re-read the article, you'll come across Stephen White's rebuttal to Shea's interpretation of "just war" doctrine. White is a fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in D.C. Shea never even bothers to address that objection! All he does is attack, attack, attack...
One doesn't need to be Catholic, to have any relationship with Shea, even to have heard of the man to connect the dots, as it were.
The fact that I have engaged in "deranged rants" mostly a decade ago, though true, is irrelevant. It's just another red herring to distract from Shea's actual, immediate opinions.
Besides, there's a tremendous diference between hyperventilating on a comment thread and expressing an opinion for publication.
BTW, as far as having a "blog" goes, I do have a Facebook page. Jonathan and I have disagreed in posts on that page (as have Stephen Dalton and I in private) but we've never resulted to the scurrilous rhetoric Shea regularly uses.
Shea has gotten away with massive character assassination for nearly a decade and noboby -- not EWTN, not Catholic Answers, not Crisis Magazine, not his book publishers -- have held him accountable. It's about time somebody did.
One final note:
I watched the World Trade Center go down in flames on television, like most of you. I've paid close attention to what Islamic imperialists have been doing, and how the Church has been (to put it politely) lax in responding. There is no way in Hell that I'm going to be silent when some half-assed curmudgeon abuses his religious identity to downplay a legitimate threat not only to the United States and Israel, but to the Western World as a whole -- not the least of which contains the Catholic Church!
It seems like there's a rather large pile of evidence crammed into this little ol' combox o' mine here that someone knows when he has been pwned.
ReplyDeleteJoe, you're welcome. I truly enjoy reading your astute observations on the topic of Middle East policy. If more Americans would educate themselves rightly on the topic, as you have done, then we would have more clarity and less confusion in our foreign policy.