Mick called me about this thread this morning, before I had a chance to get online (his time zone is three hours ahead of mine, so I'm allowed to sleep later). He suggested I have two cups of coffee and some Irish whiskey before I started reading.
Well, my AT&T Internet service was down today, so I had to wait until the library opened at 3 PM - and I forgot to bring the whiskey.
I'm going to close down this thread pretty soon and go back to our police of prohibiting threads like this, but I'll let it go a bit longer.

I'm feeling like a poor, whipped puppy about now. Nobody seems to understand me.....

About this Christian thing. I'm opposed to televangelists and door-to-door evangelists as much as anybody here; and I'm a Catholic, but I certainly don't take my marching orders from the Pope. The think I object to at Mudcat is that the Conventional Wisdom defines all Christians as mindless fundamentalist drones, and all Catholics as zombies under the direct control of an evil Pope. There is almost no acknowledgement of those of us who are of the progressive ilk. The mudcat Conventional Wisdom follows the party line of the fundamentalists, who say that we progressives "aren't really Christians" unless we are zombies like they are. Hey, this faith is part of my being, and I'm not about to abandon it to the zombies. Most of us Christian Mudcatters are progressives - don't forget or deny that we exist.

I didn't complain about anti-Americanism, but it does persist among the Brits at Mudcat, who seem to think we all support the policies of Dick Cheney and his lackey, George W. Bush. Most of us hated him.

And about the BNP - I detest it. Don't try to say I don't, just because I cannot support the use of brownshirt tactics to oppose it. All I'm saying that in opposing the BNP, we need to use a peaceful, rational, non-hysterical approach. We won't defeat the BNP by being meaner than they are - we CAN defeat them by being smarter than they are.

As for the false Mudcat stuff on Facebook - I can't control it, so I won't concern myself with it. If you Facebook participants want to deal with Facebook to have it deleted, that's fine. But I have reasonably good information that the Facebook troubles are mostly the work of good, old-fashioned trolls who just want to play us for suckers. Maybe I'm wrong and the Facebook stuff is the work of the BNP, but I tend to doubt that.

And I don't care what a person's political views are - what they think does not justify our bullying or scapegoating them, whether they be MBSGeorge or Walkaboutsverse or whoever the current Mudcat scapegoat is. Mudcatters, especially the 'in crowd' of Mudcatters, have an embarrassing tendency to identify and destroy their chosen scapegoats.

Maybe I'd better go home and have that whiskey....

-Joe-