Thought For the Day

Mark Shea is a “Pope” Francis Catholic, i.e., Protestant.

I don’t think Mark has a mental problem per se. I remember ages ago, as he was making his move to the Left, on his old blog (or perhaps it was in the comments) he said something to the effect of ‘I once confused American Conservatism with Christianity.’ Well yeah, that was dumb, since the two are not the same. But that always stuck It could be that Mark is that type of believer who has to believe any team of his is always the one with the Trinity, the angels and the saints, and any opposing team must necessarily be Nazis, devils and unclean spirits. Therefore everything not on his side must be evil, while his side can’t be anything but good. And since, despite its many flaws, American Conservatism was still easier to square with a historical Christian view, he didn’t get himself into the bind he’s now in of squaring the Faith with the Left and all its increasingly proud heresies, blasphemies, intrinsic evils and sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance. That could account for his descent into attitudes and behaviors more at home in Waco or Guyana than Jerusalem or Rome. Just a thought. I could be wrong.

@Foxfier – it’s not even the counting, it’s the fact that he thinks a long term UBI is going to be sustainable when the economy is shut down.

Also him taking a pot shot at a black doctor when I’ve seen him call anyone on the right racist for less harsh criticism of black people.

Or the whole “human life before property rights” which is just a ready made justification for communism and far worse suffering.

People attending the Traditional rites are a single-digit minority everywhere in the world except in France and the places in the world where the Eastern rites prevail. The only influence they have in the church-o-cracy is in the Eastern-rite eparchies and in a count-on-your-fingers population of Roman-rite dioceses which have sympathetic bishops. And it’s my job to change his mind?

Feel better. He has a family that’s subjected to this in meatspace.

I can certainly believe he’d get Conservatism wrong. I just wonder if it is due to some desire to always be on the right side,

He has a tendency to caricature people, then think the caricature is strictly representational. With few exceptions, this is how liberals ‘think’. People with large quanta of academic education have thought processes which work this way. The closest you get to the mirror image that I ever encounter would be Sailerite / alt-Right types who yap on as if half the black population were collecting welfare payments too stupid to hold a job (one insisted to me the other day that the only reason people hire blacks is to avoid legal trouble). I’ve never actually met a Sailerite / alt-right type in meatspace. Liberal caricature artists include a list of relatives and quondam co-workers as long as your arm.

It’s circular reasoning when it comes to who the hateful ones are. Every time a liberal says something hateful it will be rationalized away. For example: “His heart is in the right place, but his passion caused him to not be careful in his choice of words ” or “he was probably mistreated by conservative Catholics and is just lashing out against a false notion of the Church” or “That isn’t hateful, it’s just harsh truths!”

On the other hand, conservatives will be given the most hateful motivations even when their actual statements show no such thing. For a specific example of Mark Shea, he will condemn any conservative who thinks the death penalty is licit is only saying that because he wants to kill as many people as possible (despite Shea himself supposedly agreeing that it is licit in the right circumstances!)

As such, literally every interaction only strengthens his conviction that conservatives are hateful and liberals are caring, which in turn causes him to view all liberal actions as caring and all conservative actions as hateful, which further strengthens his view and so on. It’s a neverending spiral.