Good Advice from Mark Shea

Commenter Nate thinks the quote he references is funny, and it is, considering the source is Mark Shea. But I think he would agree that it is very sound advice. Here is the pull quote from an article Me. Shea wrote in 2010:

"If somebody questions whether you know what you are talking about, you don’t deal with the question of whether you know what you are talking about. You simply say, “So! You want to make excuses for the murder of innocent people by religious bigots!” in the same tone you use to say, “You left your soiled underwear on my coffee table.” For, of course, at the end of the day, it will remain the case that some number of people (46 million? Several thousand?) were put to death… well, not by the Inquisition exactly but certainly by the secular authorities working with the Inquisition. So the story is close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades and that’s all that matters. The idea is not so much accuracy as truthiness: the sense that you have righteously scored off bad guys. And if they are bad guys, then they don’t really deserve to be spoken of accurately, do they? They should have thought about that before they started killing off their millions, or however many it was. The point is: I am righteously angry and when I have righteousness on my side, I don’t need to know what I’m talking about so long as I land some good hard punches on the jaw of Evil.”

The full article is available here for context. But if the pull quote is a little too long for you, I shortened it even more in a nice meme/quote image, suitable for sharing. I suggest people posting it in your office, or maybe on the bulletin board at your parish for reasons which should be entirely obvious.

Pseudoknowledge is a good technical name for what Mark Shea is describing here back in 2010. However it never seemed to get a lot of traction as a descriptive word. Fortunately we have the perfect word to describe it in 2018:

Fake News.

The Right Brothers on the #WalkAway Movement

Worth checking out, not too long.

Favorite quote: "The #WalkAway movement is a repudiation of overt groupthink."

Editorial Opinion With Spittle Flecks

NYT Editorialist Michelle Cottle's breathless over-reaction to the Kavanaugh appointment really piles on the BS in this excerpt:

Monday was the kind of day that the president lives for. As the clock ticked down to the announcement of his new Supreme Court nominee, the entire political world hovered in a state of suspended animation and frenzied speculation. Had the president made his decision yet? Who had he chosen? Would his pick get leaked ahead of time? Had any of the top finalists been seen anywhere near the White House?

With all of the build up to the 9 p.m. announcement, it’s a miracle none of the political commentators’ heads exploded from the suspense. The entire production was, in short, classic Trump — an overhyped, self-aggrandizing display aimed at focusing the spotlight on himself for reasons of both personal gratification and political expedience.

The "entire political world hovered in a state of suspended animation and frenzied speculation"? Uh, no they didn't.

A pre-written — and poorly edited — statement from the Women’s March on President Trump’s Supreme Court nomination became the subject of mockery on Twitter on Monday night, including from Mr. Trump’s former press secretary.

The feminist group blasted out a statement shortly after Mr. Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh, saying him confirmation would “further erode protections for almost every marginalized group in America.”

The introduction to the statement read “In response to Donald Trump’s nomination of XX to the Supreme Court of the United States.

So I'm not objecting to the characterization of people being frenzied, but they really weren't fussed about who it was going to be. The frenzy was that of bulls at a rodeo gate, raring to go, not speculating about whether they'd have Barrett or Kavanaugh to gore. Although "XX" is the gender chromosome for females. It's also the Roman Numeral twenty, as in they will probably be screaming about Kavanaugh for the next 20 years.

Cottle also hits at least three Trump Derangement Syndrome Bingo spaces in the piece. You have some bathroom lingo ("leakier than a busted toilet"), reference to his crisply knotted tie (nota bene: all modern Presidents wear ties for these occasions) and of course the overarching sprinkling throughout with the reminder that all President Trump really amounts to is a reality TV star.

Do you think she seems to dislike this President?

What to expect from Senate Democrats in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings

Mark Shea Attributes Inner City Violence to Trump and the Ku Klux Klan

In a recent public post on Facebook, Catholic commentator Mark Shea used the euphemistic spelling of America as AmeriKKKa — indicative of the Ku Klux Klan — to make point about anti-immigrant, racial violence. To this remark, a commenter points out that the man of Mexican heritage was attacked by a black person.

"AmeriKKKa? The attackers were black."

I checked out the claim and discovered that the commenter was correct. This seems to be a good illustration of posting before you have fully thought through the implications of your assertions. I can type the words Trump's AmeriKKKa in about 2 seconds, Whereas watching the full video took me several minutes. It is possible that Mark Shea did not even watch the video which would explain why he imagined white Southerners committing the crime.

Furthermore we are informed that this is happening in the context of "Trump's America", (sorry, I got tired of misspelling my country) so we are asked to dutifully accept the assertion that this is one of the 4% of black females who voted for Trump. In the Willowbrook section of Los Angeles.

We have to buy that Brooklyn Bridge.

Once again, everything goes back to white racism for Mark Shea, and Republican white racism even when in the inner city a Mexican is beaten by blacks.

Donald Trump received a paltry 24% of the vote in Los Angeles.

Exposing your own thought process in this way would seem to indicate that you are unaware of your own prejudices to a degree which would make the man with the "beam" in his own eye blush.

This is Facebook activism, not sound reason or sensible commentary. Mark Shea is not a reliable guide on moral matters nor on Catholic matters. Period.

The definition of prejudice

Prejudice. Judging someone or something before you know anything about it. Born of ignorance, and rightly ridiculed.



The one girl actually claims she "just saw the pick". False memory. It happens.

Students hate Trump's SCOTUS pick. The first two words are all you need to know: "Students hate."

Hey, Democrats: Thank You and Keep It Up!

So why are Democrats leaving their party? Maybe it is because they are not sure what their party stands for anymore. Or, maybe what their party stands for is being revealed now and the membership does not like it so much. In a good article with lots of links to back up its claims, Christopher Roach asks the question "What does the Democratic party stand for?" I have no idea, but here is a little bit of what it is accomplishing (from the article):

The Democratic Party’s embrace of its left wing has done Donald Trump and the Republican Party a great service. Obama, after all, won in 2008 and 2012 by pretending to be a moderate, deploying unifying rhetoric, and providing social services, including affordable healthcare, to the middle class. Only after his 2012 win did he revert to his Hyde Park socialist background, taking sides on contentious issues like the Trayvon Martin shooting and the anti-police riots in Ferguson. In his second term, he finally decided to push for gun control and the normalization of transgenders in schools and the military. Most importantly, he made it clear that he would do nothing to stop the demographic re-engineering of America and its electorate by stopping immigration, instead, he de facto legalized the-so-called Dreamers through executive order.

As the continuity candidate, Clinton lost. The voters found a voice and a choice in Trump. Instead of going back to the drawing board—as Democrats did with Bill Clinton and his Democratic Leadership Council candidacy in 1992—they have instead shown they think the party simply needs to shout their message more loudly and with greater purity.

My snarky thought as I read through the article was "thanks, Democrats." Then I saw that the author had a similar viewpoint and added the word "thanks" at the end. I would like to see the Democrat Party return to more sane policy positions. But if they are truly moving into the realm of liberal fascism and all this new unhinged fervor is merely a tearing off of their masks, I hope they keep it up.

Democrats are Walking Away from the party

Really interesting new group of people disgusted with liberalism and the democrat party called the #WalkAway Movement or alternatively, the Unsilent Majority. The de facto leader is Brandon Straka, a gay dude from Nebraska who is sick enough of the intersectional groupthink lunacy of the left that he has formally left and is leading a movement out. Naturally he is good friends with Candace Owens, and therefore you are going to hear about taking the "red pill" if you hang around their pages.

The #WalkAway movement has a Facebook page. I don't think they have a regular site yet.



Oh yeah: they also have a Twitter page. I like to listen to them because they're bold, fresh and unfiltered. Their movement is really new and so they have all kinds of equipment failures during their live feeds. I guess Straka's phone actually overheated once and blew up his presentation. But watching the recording actually inspired me to do my own show. It's just raw conviction. They will someday be laughing about this stuff on CRTV or Fox — wherever they end up.

One thing that characterizes all of them is a sort of joie de vivre that you don't see with former-conservatives—especially the anti-Trump Evangelicals—who have become staunch liberals. Usually those people are really anger driven, grew up in a fundamentalist home, etc. Both groups are rebelling against a certain type of self-righteousness, but whereas the #WalkAway people are stressing free-thinking and reason the Christian Leftists are mostly advocating for a more different, ideologically strict self-righteousness based on their newly found leftism. I just had a combox convo with some of them... hoo-boy.