Sunday, May 11, 2014
Gun nuts win
After following this thread for a couple days, I think I'll go buy a gun. I don't own one, but I can see where the threats to liberty are. And because of the tone and contempt and self-righteous scorn for gun owners, manipulation of facts, and general Jack Chick style approach to the issue, against most (not all, but most) of the gun owners who have tried to appeal to facts, call bad (even sinful) arguments for what they are, but also try to demonstrate why some solutions might not be good, I'll give it to the gun owners. It's this style, increasingly popular in some quarters of the Catholic Blogosphere, that has me concerned. For the record again, I don't own a gun. But I don't think dropping inaccurate stats, followed by accusations that anyone disagreeing is a gun nut, stupid, doesn't care about dead innocents (especially if the innocents are dark skinned since they're likely racists, too), is the best way to represent the Catholic Faith. If it is, then that says more about the Catholic Faith now than we might care to admit.
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general Jack Chick style approach to the issue
ReplyDeleteThat may well be the best description of his approach I've seen yet. I haven't followed his blog discussion, but it's the same shrillness, sanctimony, slander, and complete disregard for facts from him and his left-wing Catholic choir on Facebook.
Yep, it's a quandary. Mark is a self proclaimed conservative, and yet with a handful of exceptions, accepts the worst possible interpretation of anything to do with conservatives. Meanwhile, with a similar number of exceptions, he seems to have nothing other than praise for what liberalism can be and often sings the praises of liberal activists and pundits and politicians, even when they advocate things Mark would utterly destroy others for supporting. In that regard, it is't really like Jack Chick at all. Jack Chick is, if nothing else, consistent. But the style is similar.
ReplyDeleteI recall a particularly surreal instance on Facebook, where Mark made a post saying that Stephen Colbert was the great subversive evangelist of our time, or something to that effect, because of how he responded to Bart Ehrman on his show.
ReplyDeleteOne commenter pointed out that Colbert advocates for abortion and gay marriage. Of course, Mark immediately laid into him for trying to defenestrate Colbert for "ritual impurity" or something to that effect (this from the guy who automatically condemns any NRA-supporting Christian as a monster who's cool with 30,000 people dying, mind you).
But that wasn't the surreal part. The surreal part was that no matter how much evidence was posted, Mark kept repeating that he had seen "no reason to believe" that Colbert is pro-abortion.
One video that was posted had Colbert ridiculing the Arizona law for defining time of conception based on a certain number of days before the first missed period (you know, the same way medical professionals do), saying that they were "so pro-life, they're pre-life" or something to that effect.
Another video had Colbert ridiculing the Bishops for objecting to having to subsidize birth control and abortificients because of the HHS mandate.
Another video had Colbert asserting that we don't really know what Jesus thought about abortion and gay marriage, because he never mentioned them, but he mentioned the poor a lot, so pro-lifers are inconsistent for caring about abortion while not supporting more socialist welfare redistribution by the state.
Another video had Colbert defending Planned Parenthood, countering a Congressman who said that abortion is "90% of what they do" (he was obviously using an imprecise figure of speech to say that it's what they're about) by repeating and endorsing PP's own riotously dishonest talking point that abortion is "only 3% of Planned Parenthood's services."
And yet, no matter how much proof Mark was presented, he just kept mindlessly repeating the refrain that "For all I know, Colbert thinks abortion is a mortal sin, and I've seen no evidence to suggest otherwise" and "I don't think Colbert is supporting abortion. I just think he's pointing out the hypocrisy of many conservative pro-lifers."
It's like, what planet are you even living on, buddy? It was just bizarre. I don't know if he simply refused to look at the videos that were posted lest they disprove what he was determined to believe about Colbert, or if he was too lazy to watch them but not to comment as if he had watched them, or (most alarmingly) if he actually did watch the videos but his bias towards his pre-conceived narrative was so strong that it actually pushed the conflicting facts right in front of his eyes out of his mind.
Anyhow, it was one of several eye-opening and very unsettling signs recently that he's gone over the edge. I like the guy. He's said some stuff that's really helped me in the past (on issues of doctrine rather than politics, though). But recently he's become almost an absurd parody of an unreasonable rage-filled left-wing blowhard. I wonder if he's having some serious personal problems at home. Part of me worries that it's something *really* serious, like the onset of dementia or something. It's just hard to explain what looks like a descent into literal insanity, or something like it.
I hesitate to analyze, but I think Mark has changed from being a conservative Catholic to being a pro-life liberal Catholic, without either being aware or wanting to fess up. In the early days of his blog, he was clearly conservative, though not beyond pointing out where conservatives could get it wrong. Likewise he was able to praise liberals and liberalism in general where he thought it was right. Which I very much appreciated. But it's almost impossible at this point to read Mark's blog and not see his disdain for almost everyone and anything to do with conservatism, while at the same time being more than warm and affirming to a growing list of self-identified liberals and liberalism in general.
ReplyDeleteOf course some of it is also Mark's personal preferences. In some cases, Mark seems to attack or defend based solely on who he personally likes or dislikes. And that inconsistency is also a problem, as it is for anyone engaged on communicating religious truth to the world.
Yeah, he blames everything on "The Thing That Used To Be Conservatism," but it's more accurate to talk about The Mark That Used To Be Conservative.
ReplyDeleteBecause outside of liberal fantasy, there never was a conservatism that pursued a higher minimum wage and other economic planning, gun control, federal welfare redistribution, centralized government-run healthcare, bashing "the rich," and the various other causes Mark has taken up of late.