Category: [Religion & esoterica]

Babylon Bullshit

So the Babylon Bee is a right-wing religious political humour site, of which this is an example:

Oh what a comedy classic. John Fetterman is a Democrat senator and, as of last year, a stroke survivor. Whether or not he should be in politics in his not exactly optimal state of health is a question for which I don’t there’s an easy answer, except to note that an appearance he made where he greeted the audience by saying “good night” (I presume that’s at least in part what inspired this “joke”) did him few favours…

Anyway, he’s in politics with a disability (he apparently has no cognitive damage but does have auditory processing disorder; I’m not sure how that doesn’t constitute a cognitive issue) and he’s a liberal politician at that, so obviously that makes him a fair target because disability is FUNNY AS FUCK, isn’t it, when you don’t have one. And, well, I responded to the Babylon Bee by hoping that they did.

And then a moment later this happened:

…OK, then. I fired back a response asking them to explain why my tweet was apparently so much more abusive than the BB’s original post mocking a man’s health issues, and they basically told me to go fuck myself (not in those words as such, but you know what I mean). Anyway, I didn’t feel like pulling a Jordan Peterson cos I find Twatter useful enough even now that I don’t want to abandon it entirely (too many people I follow there don’t want to switch to Mastodon), so I deleted the tweet and have to wait until tomorrow to use the account again… but, while conceding I said something pretty harsh, I stand by it nonetheless. Fuck Babylon Bee.

RIP Father Bob

Bob Maguire, professional crusty old bugger and much loved Catholic priest who made the critical error of taking his vocation seriously and caring for people, has left us at the age of 88, and he shouldn’t have done. By several accounts, he was ousted from his own Father Bob Maguire Foundation last week, and was apparently unaware of the fact himself until it was reported on social media. I feel there’s more to the story regarding what’s happened and why it’s happened now, but the foundation appears to have pulled off an absolute cunt act against an old man in declining health during his last days, and indeed probably helped make them his last days.

I think it’s appropriate to let John Safran have the last word, since he helped bring the old boy to the nation’s attention, and he shall miss him more than most of us.

EDIT: Well, actually, let’s give the p.s. to the Foundation themselves, who I’ve now seen issued a statement the other day:

“…The issues at stake were thoroughly canvassed and considered at a recent VCAT Hearing in which Fr Bob participated. The result of that hearing was that Fr Bob’s family were granted Guardianship in relation to where he lives and what care he gets. VCAT does not make such decisions lightly. It relies on a number of medical views of Fr Bob’s physical and mental condition.
Of particular relevance is that the VCAT decision means that Fr Bob is no longer eligible to be a Board member (or Chairman) of the Foundation. This is a legal dictate under the Guardianship and Administration Act 2019.

I don’t know about anyone else, but that reads to me like a tacit admission that, yeah, the Foundation kind of lied a bit in their previous statement about Bob “stepping down”. If this is a VCAT rule (and it may be, I don’t actually know) that he had to step down, why didn’t they say as much earlier? I also thought this was an interesting further remark after denying all the claims being made against them:

Those familiar with Fr Bob’s mental state are not surprised by recent comments attributed to him. Fr Bob has always been someone who ‘comes out swinging’ in any context. However, in recent times his opinions have taken on an eccentric flavour.

And, obviously, I’m not familiar with his mental state, which I’m guessing was indeed less than optimal, but I do smell a hint of well-poisoning here despite that.

Incidentally, it’s nearly 9.30pm as I write these last words and I find it interesting, shall we say, that I’ve seen no word (at least not on the SMH site, The Age, News.com.au or the Guardian) from any representatives of the Catholic church here in Australia, or from their representatives in the Liberal party, or from anyone in the Liberal party in general (all I’ve seen from the latter is a comment from the Victorian opposition leader John Pesutto) so far today. Weird how quick they were to praise that pedophile enabler a couple of months ago but not Bob now, eh. (I’d be a lot more OK with Bob getting a state funeral than I was the other guy, I must say.) Maybe the church’s media team are just trying to find a way of expressing sadness over his passing without admitting what they really thought of him…

Whoops

So some dickhead called Stephen Wolfe said something on Twitter about white evangelicals being the bulwark against “moral insanity” in America, and a company called Canon Press objected to this politely:

That’d be the same Norman Rockwell who underwent an unexpected leftening in the 60s and got hate mail from racists over his painting “The Problem We All Live With”, and who wasn’t a particularly regular churchgoer of any kind, let alone Evangelical

They are, I think, not wrong about this. But this is a little rich coming from Canon Press specifically…

To be clear, THIS is dumber

…given that they’re the right-wing Christian publisher who published Stephen Wolfe’s book The Case for Christian Nationalism. I feel like whoever’s looking after Canon’s social media is going to be reassigned shortly to a position where they can’t publicly call shit on their authors, even if they’re right…

Physician, heal thyself

Fascinating viewing from the Holy Koolaid channel. I don’t think I’d heard of Jack Coe until now, and certainly didn’t know anything about him and his somewhat short life story, and, well, I’m sure I’ve said before that I don’t like celebrating people’s deaths, but Coe deserved something bad to happen to him. And what happened was not only bad, it had multiple elements of irony to it; it was the sort of death that, if I were inclined to believe in that sort of thing, I’d have considered it a sign that God was kind of pissed at me for the sort of life I’d lived. And frankly, I’m ten years older than he was when he died, and with all my issues I look a lot better at 48 than he did in his mid/late 30s…

Terror Thomas

The downside (OK, maybe that’s a bit harsh; Amy’s pretty great really) of having a friend who’s very left-wing but otherwise a good Catholic is that, when she bites back at some idiot on Twitter, I am thereby exposed to that idiot when I otherwise might not have been. There’s so many idiots I already can’t avoid cos everyone talks about them (hi Elon), but my friends all have their own specialty idiots on top of those. And oy but this one was a particular goon…

I don’t know much or indeed anything about Thomas Merton other than him being a prominent Catholic of decades past, and as an avowed non-Catholic (or indeed religionist of any sort) I consider his “heresy” meaningless. That said, I understand where Michelle’s coming from; after all, any time I see a major religious figure realising that people are good, even the ones from other religions, and that social justice is actually a better thing than social injustice, the first thing I want to do is puke vehemently over their grave. Common fucking decency towards other people, even the ones who aren’t like you, what an appalling thing…

Yes, Jordan, I suppose it is

No shit?

So Jordan B. Peterson has been having a somewhat baffling argument with the Pope of all people on Twitter about the true nature of Christianity, which is… something. The whole thing began with this tweet from old Frank:

Frank’s getting his Marx on

Jurr Durr, of course, is so allergic to the very concept of social justice that he sharply corrected the Pope on that point:

Well that’s HIM told!

…and if you want to see some of the responses to that, George Takei has a bunch.

Of course, if you’ve read 12 Rules for Blah-de-Fucking-Blah at all, then you’ll know that compassion is very far from being Jordan’s strong suit, and I think that’s true on a broad societal level as well as the personal level. If nothing else, Frank’s tweet expresses a noble sentiment (how well the Church has lived up to it is a matter for another time, perhaps); the fact that Jordibles finds the idea so unacceptable says much about him.

The weird thing is that he’s refusing to let the matter go, too; he’s had a few posts up now taking digs at Frank, including with this poll:

Nice?

Even the poor should set their houses in perfect order first, I suppose. The poll, incidentally, led to the somewhat bizarre pair of tweets I began with; Jordan helpfully clarified that the “goats” thing was a reference to something about sheep and goats in Matthew chapter 25, which I suppose demonstrates that he remembers more about Matthew than me (the percentage of goats grew to 31 in the end, evidently). But I just found those two tweets so silly on the face of it that I couldn’t resist taking them out of context (and goats are a change from lobsters)…

Oh, and the Pope hasn’t replied to any of Jordan’s nonsense. I mean, he never replies to anyone on Twitter, but him not replying to Jordan is somehow funnier than usual. At what point do you suppose he’ll finally realise Frank’s not playing and the whole argument has been completely one-sided?