Reply #11: I don't think I've seen you since that evening at Kempe's a few years back. [View All]

If I recall correctly, you were working hard on election reform at the time, so I'm pretty sure I'm not talking to an empty-headed neophyte. In particular, I'd bet you've walked the halls around the government mall in Raleigh enough to know the importance of getting the details correctly and accurately. I feel certain, too, that you've cracked open a paper enough times to know that not every story is quite right -- and if you're like me, you've seen yourself or your friends misquoted in the media more than once over the years

American political discourse isn't in a particularly good state nowadays, and while the intertubes puts more information at our fingertips more quickly than ever before, I'm not sure that certain online cultural trends really help us cultivate the habits we need to build the lasting broad-based coalitions we need to move the country in a progressive direction. Snark and anger, of course, can be effective tools, when used precisely and with some disciplined restraint -- but freely indulging them will be counterproductive in almost any context

It's fine with me if you don't like the Catholic church: I have quite a long list of my own substantial disagreements with them, and I won't bore you by repeating it here. But get a clue, yourself: it's a large and complicated institution; it is not uniformly reactionary but has some definitely progressive communities inside it; for various reasons, sex-abuse stories about the Catholic church have received more attention than awarded other groups, but there's no reason to think the Catholics' have more such problems than anybody else -- and you know perfectly well that the Catholics never offered molesting children as a "charitable service." I will guess most of us never heard Paprocki's name before this thread, but whether or not that's true, and whether or not you like him, Paprocki is being misquoted by half-sentence to perpetuate a stereotype, and the noisy content-free emotional outbursts in this thread don't help any of us think lucidly about anything