"If they are campaigning for themselves, it is bogus"

Dwight Longenecker has a very good article, generally, about people who claim victim status for their group when it is not due.

He gives some good criteria for not mistaking people claiming a due victim status for that.

This post will focus on the one criterium I take exception to:

Third ask if the people claiming to be victims are campaigning for themselves or for someone else. If they are campaigning for themselves it’s bogus. If they are standing up on behalf of the truly vulnerable and helpless, the campaign is more likely to be authentic.

Er, no. Campaigning for oneself does not preclude being a real victim.

I may have the opportunity to campaign for Catholics (as victims in for instance Protestant and Secularist societies) and opportunity to campaign for Creationists (as victims in Secularist and Modernist Christian circles, including some Catholic ones).

I may have the opportunity to campaign for this on my blogs.

This does NOT preclude I was a real victim while at school. For one thing, I had no blogs back then. And for another, legislation being what it was in Sweden (both Protestant AND Secularist) blogging might NOT have offered me a life with homeschooling. Which was my ideal.

And for another thing, even now that I have blogs, I am exposed to:

• intrigues to decrease my free time around library computers (I might be getting a letter from Georges Pompidou about my bags, which might determine if the request was as reasonable as they thought or as unreasonable as I thought, up to a reasonable fate for getting letter, I will abstain from going there, unless reducing bags - which I will do anyway);
• intrigues to decrease what I get from begging when it is after I have written something more Catholic or Creationist/Geocentric than usual;
• intrigues to stop me from getting a revenue from my writings as a writer.

Not to mentions intrigues to get Trad Catholic readers away from my blogs.

So, campaigning for oneself, as exemplified in my own case, but also in many others with which I am less familiar, is not a proof one is bogus in one's campaign.

And when I do campaign for others - like the right a homosexual has to make the normal heterosexual marriages, despite his or her difficulties there might possibly be in achieving it - some will claim I am homosexual and therefore claim I am campaigning for myself. Here also, I am taking myself as an example and supposing, as I presume reasonably, I am one of rather many, as far as the criterium I am concerned with goes.

Note, of course, campaigning for others is not proof one is genuine either. One might be campaigning "for" people and "for" something done "for" them, which they themselves consider as against there interests.

I think some might have done that "for" me behind my back.

There is of course one other criterium I missed at first, which I find somewhat doubtful:

Finally, check the rage temperature. The fake “post Christian Crybaby Bully” (like every spoiled brat) will always be driven by rage. Behind the mask of caring compassion and the self righteous crusader for “justice” will be deep, seething, irrational and unquenchable rage.

The problem with this criterium is that it is so easy to attribute to people - especially to poorer people who are in more provoking situations and therefore sometimes more badtempered than you think the situation warrants (I am 46 and already have white hairs!), as well as to people whom you disagree with.

But do not let this stop you from reading a generally sound (after these my cautions, if you take them into account) post by Dwight Longenecker:

The Rise of the Post Christian Crybaby Bully
July 14, 2015 by Fr. Dwight Longenecker
on Standing on my Head
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2015/07/the-rise-of-the-post-christian-crybaby-bully.html

The Rise of the Post Christian Crybaby Bully – 2
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/the-rise-of-the-post-christian-crybaby-bully

The Rise of the Post Christian Crybaby Bully – 3
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/the-rise-of-the-post-christian-crybaby-bully-3

Yes, there is one more quibble, if you like, against this article, but this time it is not one of the criteria, it's a list, which starts out correctly:

Christians are called to help the truly vulnerable, needy, poor and helpless–and there are plenty of them. I’m thinking of the Christians persecuted and homeless in the Middle East. I’m thinking of victims of human trafficking and sex slavery. What about the most vulnerable and helpless who are murdered in their mother’s own womb?

So far, correct, but "in cauda venenum":

I’m thinking about the urban poor, the homeless and mentally ill, the impoverished and lonely elderly.

Using the word "mentally ill" means subscribing to an ideology where certain states of mind, previously not considered as madness or as at all the concern of any medical practitioner, are now considered as "mental illnesses" or "symptoms of mental illness" - since the words "mental illness" sound so much less dramatic than "madness", they can be so much more applied to so much many more people.

And while juxtaposing the words with those describing bums, in the full phrase I emphasised "the homeless and mentally ill", does not in and of itself totally preclude one considers these as two categories of genuinely unfortunate people, who apart from that have nothing to do with each other, it tends to give the impression that the writer does think they have something to do with each other, it will give readers the impression they have something to do with each other, and on top of that the same professional categories who spread the ideology of mental illness as a broader than but entirely as medically relevant category as madness, these professional categories also spread the ideologeme that homelessness is "often caused by mental illness".

Which brings on to "homeless" (I prefer the word bums, but not the word clochards, especially not as pronounced with maghrebine accent) the very unwanted and last thing needed to improve their situation aura of being on top of obviously sometimes dirty, obviously sometimes lacking sleep, ALSO "mentally ill".

And this is one reason why I prefer to campaign for myself over having others campaign on my behalf, if they do it as badly as Dwight is here campaigning for bums. May God have mercy on his readers, so they are not misled by the "allusive implications" of the phrase I underlined.

To get back to the first criterium I took exception to, so did Chesterton (after whose words about St Francis of Assisi Dwight named his blog), I think from his work about Charles Dickens, yes, here it is:

The thing they set up as a barrier he actually presents as a passport. They think that he, of all men, ought not to speak because he is interested. He thinks that he, of all men, ought to speak because he is wronged.

It is the last sentence in § 13 of chapter VI, DICKENS AND AMERICA. Context is Dickens on copyright laws. Which back then were very much less protective of authors and more protective of printers than is now the case.

But the principle about the wronged man having a certain right to speak up because he is wronged has a wider application than whether he was right or wrong in the question. It applies to me, even if I should be considered by some as breaking their copy right law rights to texts written by themselves or people whose estate they have inherited.* And of course it applies to me on the subjects I cite here.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Henry of the HRE
15-VII-2015

* On the reasonably barely possible complaints, see what I wrote to Douglas Gresham:

En lengua romance ... : Letter to Douglas Gresham
http://enfrancaissurantimodernism.blogspot.com/2012/01/letter-to-douglas-gresham.html

and this general modifier for my conditions:

Assorted retorts ... : Copyright issues on blogposts with shared copyright
http://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/p/copyright-issues-on-blogposts-with.html

There are less reasonable complaints too, like when I mirror a debate on my blogs:

Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : I was Given Advice …
http://filolohika.blogspot.com/2015/04/i-was-given-advice.html

The extremely unreasonable complaint would include about all of my posts because some few (about 70, as yet fewer than 80) are fan fiction, and some, considerable more, though even so a minority, mirror debates. The so far non-printing of my blog posts (except exceptionally by myself basically back in 2011 when a gift from grandma gave me resources) more accurately reflects an extreme unreasonable complaint than any of the possibly possible commplaints. For instance, Dwight would be extremely unreasonable to see in this blog post a copyright breach against his authorship of the post I linked to. I cited a few lines I disagreed with and proceeded to make a refutation. That is common and indeed commonplace procedure between writers.

But I really don't think Charles Dickens was complaining about unauthorised fan fiction based on his characters giving money to their authors, or of such a thing happening after his death without his heirs authorising it, he was complaining, and rightly so, about unauthorised copies of his actual texts not being paid in his own lifetime. On the other hand, the issue of authors rights are an exception and an exceptional privilege made by kings (hence expression royalty) from the general principle that one can handle texts one has a copy of as one pleases. The Irish tribal prelude for copyright shows the Irish back then knew more of cows than of texts. And applied their knowledge of cows and bovine related justice among men to texts mainly due to these being written on parchment.