Amanda resigned.
You know, if they were going to hurl this kind of crap at me every day, I'd have resigned, too. Not just that they lie about what she said and what that means, they even lie about who they are:
The Catholic League is the nation's largest Catholic civil rights organization. It defends individual Catholics and the institutional Church from defamation and discrimination.
Yeah, right! Didn't we just spend the last couple of days showing that this is a loudmouth organization of anal sphincters defending other individual anal sphincters from the - oh, horror! - hearing the truth every now and then.
We do not know the complete story yet, but of course trolls arrived on Kos insisting that she was fired, not that she quit. I don't know, but I do not expect Amanda to lie - she would have not posted anything until she could post everything.
The dominant mood, though, at comments there and elsewhere is that this means we need to redouble our efforts in countering the rightwing swiftboaters of all kinds, religious nuts included. Especially religious nuts. Not just Donohue-The-Major-Anal-Sphincter.
Also, support Amanda by blogrolling Pandagon and hit her paypal button. If you think she was too mild on Donohue and religion so far, wait until she unleashes her real wrath on them, now that she is free of editorial shackles. This is going to be fun to watch.
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Yes, Amanda Marcotte was felled by a vast, right-wing conspiracy that had the unmitigated temerity to smear her using her own words.
She was felled by a political rightwing machine whose only raison-d-etre is manufacturing lies. Her words, even when they took them out of context, were still telling the ugly truth about religion and conservatism.
That is an easy claim to make. Where's the beef?
Where's the beef?
Dig through the links here, here, here, here, and here .
That is an easy claim to make. Where's the beef?
That any rational person could object to any of Marcotte's statements quoted by the Catholic League. But in all fairness, we're talking about the hordes who fill the pews every Sunday, and their are not many in that group who can categorized as rational.
Correction: "their" should be "there". Sleepy...
Bora,
If you really support Edwards, you should encourage Amanda to lay off religion! She will be linked to his campaing, fairly or not, from now until December, 2008 and any of her writings that continue to go over the line will be bad for Edwards and, in the end, all Democrat candidates.
Rule #1: Always take seriously your opponent's campaign advice - it comes from the heart! (/end snark/)
No, she should go and rip into Donohue and expose the Rightwing machine. It will help all candidates as media will have to quit their knee-jerk respectfulness of conservativsim and religion.
My good Bora, (May I call you Bora?), do you contend that the links you provide actually demonstrate Amanda's words were taken "out of context," or is it more of the same kvetching sans content? Lindsay Beyerstein attempted to provide a "context" for Amanda's New Orleans histrionics, and I deal with her defense here.
OK. Next assignment. Take the quotes in question. Go to Pandagon. There is a search window there. Insert quote. Click "Search". See the context for yourself.
Official Catholic oposition to Plan B is a) dangerous to people, especially women, and b) motivated by mysoginy. Amanda exposed that and made the point stick with a masterful use of colorful bloggy language.
Those two points she made are incontorvertible facts.
What else do you need?
What else do you need?
Three things:
1. Someone who can spell.
2. Someone who has at least a minimal grasp of Catholic teaching to understand that opposition to Plan B has NOTHING to do with misogyny, and may even work to OPPOSE misogyny, and
3. Someone open-minded enough to do more than dismiss my little commentary here as "conservative idiot speak".
Sadly, Coturnix, from what I have read of your stuff, I fear you're gonna fail on all three counts.
pandagon has been down for over 2 hours.
I am struggling to stifle my urge to say a few annoyed and doubtless in some quarters annoying things but I will just leave it at reminding people we have not yet erased or repealed the 1st ammendment to the constitutuion. Let me refresh your memories with my understanding of the two parts of that first right we all allegedly enjoy. [1]It means its ok for you to practice your religion on yourself but not ok for you to practice it on me. [2]you or I can say pretty much any crazy old thing as long as we are saying it as a private citizen speaking his/her personal mind and neither I nor you respectively nor our government can act to silence such speech.
If exercising your free speech is, in effect, your livelyhood, as it is for persons like Rush Limbaugh or Amanda Marcotte, then the enmies of your freedom do you two harms at once: they take your pay with your pulpit.
The Catholic church lied about the effects of Plan B.
Deception functions as hate.
Since the deception in question is about a treatment for women, said deception functions specifically as misogyny.
After that, no-one needs to know about 'Catholic teaching'.
It's just smoke and mirrors.
I am not open minded. I am 100% certain about everything. If you don't like it, go troll another blog.
Bora:
Amanda's opposition to the Catholic Church's stance re: Plan B is not the issue. (I support access to Plan B, btw.) She was "called out" for her disdainful posts re: Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, as well as her histrionic post re: New Orleans.
If you support Plan B, are you a good Catholic? What does it mean then to be a Catholic? Pick and choose some and refuse some other "official" positions of the church? Is that kosher? What would Papa Razzi say?
It is the most important issue of our times to turn the emotional need of some humans to believe in something bigger than themselves into something positive - like contributing to the society and making the world a better place in one way or another. For that, they need to shed the negative - the church dogmas of various kinds which are always based on the ingroup-outgroup dichotomy and enmity.
For that, the negative needs to become shameful. That is why we need to ridicule religion every day. Only when people become ashamed to admit in public that they are religious/superstitious will they be able to free themselves to join other groups of people in making the world a better place for everyone.
If you support Plan B, are you a good Catholic? What does it mean then to be a Catholic? Pick and choose some and refuse some other "official" positions of the church? Is that kosher? What would Papa Razzi say?
Bora:
Just because I am Irish (and Italian and Portuguese) does not mean I am a Catholic. :) (I am not, in fact.)
However, "Bitch, PhD" calls herself a Catholic and she is pro-abortion, pro-gay rights (presumably) and a polyamorist. If I were a Catholic, I'd look old school by comparison with her.
"Histrionic post about New Orleans"
*Pauses to gaze upon that phrase* *Boggles*
At the time Amanda wrote that post, being angry beyond words, frustrated beyond belief, and completely ready to rip people to shreds was an entirely appropriate set of emotions. Histrionic doesn't enter into it. Heck, I'm still that angry over a year later.
After reading the insults she was sent it appears none of her detractors attended school. If I were Amanda I'd simply consider the source.
There were at least 4 widely repscted hurricane risk analysis for NOLA done between 1985 and 2004. All predicted over 10,000 deaths for a direct hit on NOLA by a major hurricane. Katrina was not a direct hit on NOLA; NOLA saw no more than cat 2 winds, and no more than 5-7 feet of storm surge. By comparison, the right-side eyewall had cat 3 winds, and 25-30 feet of storm surge.
Even now, with much reduced population, if NOLA gets a direct major hurricane hit, it will make Marcotte's Katrina post (made before it was widely known that Katrina had not made a direct hit on NOLA) look like a calm and tepid understatement.
Two widely misunderstood facts about Katrina:
(a) It was not a worst-case scenario. NOt by a factor of 10.
(b) It's not limited to below sea level cities. Analysis of what the 1926 Miami hurricane would do to Miami today estimate about $100 billon in damges and several thousand lost lives.
"I am not open minded. I am 100% certain about everything."
And, thus, Bora is a Liberal scientist.
Glad to see you have a deep sense of sarcasm (and even humor). Most wingnuts do not.
Bora,
You've visited my blog (BTW, I have a new webpage, so your old link needs updating) and you know that while I disagree with many Progressive politics, I do not generally name-call except in obviously-humorous attempts. I don't use 'moonbat', for example.
You, however, consistently use very direct slurs against your political opponents. Why is that? Oh, and please forbear from claiming that calling your opponents 'wingnuts', 'crazy', 'misogynistic', 'femiphobic', "dangerous", and "child abusers" is not personal, but only their beliefs - especially after your attempts to say that such beliefs are held due to being wrong in the head!
"wingnut" is a term invented by the Right which they carry proudly, just like we are proud Moonbats (you have seen the cool moonbat logo on many lefty blogs).
The rest of the terms are not insult, they are diagnosis.
Richard Lewontin and others have discussed how those in power use diagnoses of mental illness to pathologize political dissent. Using psychiatric constructs as an instrument to stigmatize critics is a powerful temptation. I believe it is a temptation that ought be resisted, primarily because it allows one to dismiss conflicting views without critically analyzing one's own beliefs. And that presents the danger of establishing a self-justifying, refutation-proof worldview.
Without doing a complete literature review, my impression is that these studies are tentative at best and dubious at worst. (I recall that Orac has taken issue with the over-interpretation of such studies.) One problematic feature of these studies is the pitfalls involved in defining left/liberal vs right/conservative. (Liberal/left or conservative/right?: Georges Sorel, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, Mirjana Markovic, Malcolm X, Tariq Ramadan, Jacques Verges, Kirkpatrick Sale, Robert Nozick, Jeremy Rifkin, Ulrike Meinhof, Juan Peron, Craig Rosebraugh.)
We all know that conservatism is correlated with religiosity. So religiosity must be bad for kids. Or is it? (I am an atheist.)
http://www.dailypress.com/features/family/dp-39928sy0feb10,1,119544.sto…