Sarah Palin: a "debate" on the website of a Canadian newspaper

It's more than stating the obvious to say that Douglas Todd gives himself away with the done-to-death phrasing from the primer book of PC rhetoric. Here's a selection of what I mean:

"chose not to listen to their high-profile spiritual leaders" ...."Catholics are following their own consciences" ..."Most American Catholics followed more nuanced church teachings"..."most American Jews decided to think for themselves..."

More nuanced teachings...? Oh, yes, opinions that contradict Catholic orthodoxy are always "more nuanced", aren't they? And we Catholics who accept Catholic teaching are too stupid or too fearful to think for ourselves. I'd be embarrassed to write this sort of thing. Doesn't it occur to Todd that people who hold opinions that deviate from the PC canon could actually be on the same intellectual level as him? Probably not. After all, his commentary  is essentially political, not intellectual.

November 10, 2008 7:34 PM

I received the following email reply from Todd:

Gerard,  I think being PC just means following conventional wisdom. In your mind, I follow one form of it. Maybe you follow your own form of it. Thanks for the comments, though. It's all fair game. I would like to get into a more detail back-and-forth, but have to move on to the next story. Doug

And I replied:

Nonsense, Doug. The meaning of PC depends on usage and its references. If PC isn't one thing, it is certainly not conventional wisdom. Your reply reflects the classic PC mind and its framework. If you're interested, have a look at my website for more on PC. Cheers, Gerard (Melbourne)

I did not expect a reply from Todd, who was obviously at home in his PC fantasy world and satisfied with his silly relativist reply. I was prepared to let the matter rest. In the meantime, a furious exchange was going on in the comment section of Todd's blog. As is usual when it comes to matters Christian, especially the Catholic Church, a parade of anti-religious bigots was posting their "thoughts". As an aside, I am still surprised at the fury and the numbers of people with an anti-religious prejudice who immediately hammer away on their keyboards to post their mostly anonymous comments. I'm yet to work it out. The incomprehensible cultural suicide that is an essential part of the prejudice is hard to fathom. It's weird that the writers are unwittingly guilty of what they accuse believers of: ignorance, low level or no reasoning, and blindly regurgitating the rhetoric and views of the PC-class that has comprehensively indoctrinated them. That's leaving aside the indispensable abuse. One of these tackled me. 

Jonn Mick said:

John [sic] Mick clearly displays the blind unthinking prejudice of the anti-religious bigot by lifting my ironic comment out of context, and carrying on with the usual rave. Like most people displaying such prejudice he has nothing of substance to say, nothing that he can provide evidence or argument for. What he proposes - that "Catholics are too stupid etc" - is the monstrous fallacy that Hitler used against the Jews. Einstein was wrong, the Nazis said, because he was a Jew. But it's likely that a person who does not exercise his reason does not know what a fallacy is.

As usual with the anti-religious bigot, the inability to provide argument and evidence is coupled with an appalling ignorance of modern history. A materialist/empiricist philosophy (necessarily atheistic) underwrote the murder and mayhem of the French Revolution - which served as the paradigm for all modern revolutions. The Chinese and Russian atheistic revolutions alone count for more than 100 million deaths. Human history has never seen anything like it.  It's laughable to claim that religion is the source of all political conflict.

I could go on with this sort of response, but I'm sure it would not penetrate the closed minds of those like John [sic] Mick & Co who must cling to their prejudices like a child clutching his favourite teddy bear.

The really serious side to this widely held and publicly approved prejudice is that is undermining the liberal/democratic order of Western society. Such blind prejudice should be the concern of all thinking people, not just of Christians.

November 11, 2008 7:45 PM

Mick showed himself irrepressible and supremely confident. He was generous and big-hearted enough to give ignorant believers the benefit of his Gnostic wisdom and the key to escaping their dark delusion. 

Confusion about what life in general is all about reigns the minds of people who embrace religions whether its Catholicism or Protestantism or any other ism, because you're being duped into believing in a man-made fantasy God.  

The cure is to learn what the real God of the universe is; simply, "God is humanities attempt to explain the dynamic energy that formed and expands the universe."  

Understanding this clears up all the confusing, controlling, baloney that the human mind dreams up imaginatively about a God, duping the fearful and/or serving the deceitful.

Freeing oneself of all the BS that religions entail is so empowering one wonders how it could have ever ensnared one's intelligence.  Stop being duped by clergy.  Use your naturally endowed common sense.  You'll find yourself free of all the gobbledegook being expressed here.

November 11, 2008 2:02 PM

Perhaps it's not generous on my part to mention the sloppy expression, faulty spelling and punctuation, and thus the reflection on his level of education. But it is relevant when Mick is bent on accusing me and other believers of being necessarily ignorant. The main feature of the above comment and others is that no evidence or argument are adduced to defend his claims. His coupling of Catholicism with any other "-ism" shows just how sadly confused he is about categories. Then he obviously read my reply and raced back to the keyboard, barely able to stay coherent in his haste.

WOW!  I've been following Douglas Todd's blog for awhile.  Most of his articles draw modest numbers of comments.  But when he sounds the name of Sarah Palin and Catholics, the comments come rolling in in great numbers.  All defending their BELIEFS, but very few expressing UNDERSTANDING.

If the Palin/McCain win was so important to the survival of the U.S. why did Obama win 56% of the vote?  Is it because only 56% of voters are intelligent?  I think so.

And if religions provide reality, why do religious people from the top down need to continuously defend it and try to prove it?

Its because all religions are man-made. The christian [sic] religions appear to start with men having hallucinations they call visions where an angel of God, or God himself appears and tells them that they are chosen to save mankind by bringing the gospel of God to the people of the Earth. The person having the vision tells others about it and others believe it with awe and see him as a special spiritual being selected to represent God on earth. He then has more visions and the believers of his stories become stronger in their belief, and more people are attracted to the story teller and his story. Then the story teller is directed by God or his angels what to do. And the story begins to unfold and evolve as a gospel, and the believing followers become pious and begin to believe more ardently and become missionaries and the number of followers continue to expand and in turn expand the number of followers. Over a long period of time this new religion takes many turns and tumbles and sometimes survives to become a substantially zealous and jealous spiritual movement. Each one of these movements becomes the only True Church of God. AND GOD HELP THOSE WHO QUESTION AND OPPOSE IT!

So, friends. [sic] is your wrath for us who don't believe your baloney, or is it because you have only nonsensical gobbledegook to say in your defense?

Take a deep breath and come on up out of your fog.  The air is clear and refreshing and the sunshine warm and bright here on top.  You'll love it here if you can ever get clear of your fog.  TRY IT!

November 12, 2008 5:18 PM

I thought I would be wasting my time in dealing with the details of this rambling confused fantasy. I contented myself with this reply:

One has to smile at the blissfulness of Jonn Mick's mindless prejudice. Confronting him with his use of the crassest of fallacies - the same fallacious argument used by the Nazis against the Jews – and citing empirical evidence that contradicts claims for which he provides no evidence, all makes not a jot of difference. He will plough on with his hatred of the target group no matter what. It’s the nature of bigotry. The issue with someone like Jonn Mick is not intellectual, for he has no idea what I’m talking about when I use such phrasing as genetic fallacy, empirical evidence, materialist/empiricist presuppositions and so on. The issue is political. It’s a question of political power. Jonn Mick and thousands like him mindlessly mouth the views of a political class. Orthodox Christians and others who subscribe to the Natural Law have to realise this.

It’s gratifying to see so many defending Sarah Palin and the Catholic Church with reasoned argument and quotations from the relevant literature in this case [on The Vancouver Sun website]. But it is not enough. Whether one is in Canada or Australia (where I am) or in any other Western democracy, conservatives have to understand the intellectual background to their political position (the tradition goes back to Plato and Aristotle) and then seek a unified approach to tackle the political class that after fifty years is morally bankrupt. Like many I have been infuriated by the attempted media assassination of Sarah Palin. I am beginning to see, however, that she is acting as a lightning rod for many different groups who share the same system of core values. People in North America should take advantage of this. Sarah Palin may not be up to answering the “gotcha” questions dreamt up by a pathologically biased media, but she has a quality the political process is screaming out for: a moral backbone and decency of life. This coupled with her executive experience in government is what recommends her. Those interested in further discussion of these thoughts can go to my website

"Jonn Mick is not intellectual, for he has no idea what I’m talking about when I use such phrasing as genetic fallacy, empirical evidence, materialist/empiricist presuppositions and so on."

When people use gobbledegook to express what they want to say its like they're trying to walk through my brain on a pogo-stick.  I realize they are desperate attempting to sell a pig-in-a-poke.  

Sarah Palin, as a Vice President candidate along side John McCain was a pig-in-a-poke with lipstick.

Lorraine, I agree with your wish to put Palin back in Alaska and out of mind forever.

Cheers.  Jonn

November 13, 2008 12:43 PM

I didn't bother to answer. It should be plain to anyone who can think, that Mick is shooting himself in the foot, the bullets being his own words. Misquoting me is hardly noticeable when he starts off agreeing that religious believers are too stupid to think for themselves and ends up proudly claiming ignorance of basic terms in discussions about religion and philosophy, all couched now in anti-intellectualist terms.

My main point in reproducing this exchange is not to show how easy it is to trample over the nonsense Jonn Mick seriously proposes for the edification of his contemptible fellow citizens. No, the main point is that there are millions of Jonn Micks in all the world's liberal democracies who have been indoctrinated by a political class whose ascendancy through fifty years has been the result of feverish manoeuvring and manipulation. Because Jonn Mick & Co are not susceptible to argument or to historical demonstration, the issue is about political power. That's why someone like Sarah Palin is important to the anti-PC forces who are now more than ever under siege with the election of Barack Obama - and in Australia with the election of The Australian Labor Party. Nobody realises this more than the elite in the dominant political class.

It would be only fair to advise Jonn Mick what I have written about him and his type. So I posted this final comment on the The Vancouver Sun website:

Gerard Wilson said: