Sometimes, we need to do something evil to prevent something worse. But that doesn’t make the evil thing good, right or just.

Theologian here, although not Catholic.

We could see this debate as the Catholic church being more progressive than the US and in part it’s true. But it’s a quite conservative view within the Catholic tradition: in the beginning of Christianity, all violence were deemed unjust, and people preferred to die than to be violent. Then Augustine and others theorized the just war, which is the base of the international war law. But in the 20^th century, the Catholic church evolved on the subject, stating again that all war were unjust:

• Any apotheosis of war is to be condemned as an aberration of mind and heart. (Pope Pius 12, 1953)
• It becomes impossible to believe that war is the appropriate means to obtain justice for a violation of rights. (Pope John 23)
• There is no just war (Pope Francis, 2022)

The current version of The Catechism of the Catholic Church never use the expression “just war”, and justifies only violence in case of defense.

So the fact that the pope is arguing about just war is not the church being progressive, but being in fact fusty according to its own tradition. I think the definition the pope has to just war is not the Augustinian one, but one that limit war to defense, so the difference between him and Francis on the ideas is in fact non-existent, but the usage of the expression is by itself a defeat.

Pleasure Steak

I tend to disagree. Firstly, nobody cares about my blog, so it’s more a public personal journal than anything else (a web log, in other words). I do “publish into the void” and I’m not delusional enough to think otherwise, I’m okay with that. Secondly, yes emails are private; but if i have an interesting discussion by mail about a blog post, I can write a second article resuming our exchange in a more easily readable way than the naked messages. Thirdly, and maybe more importantly, if someone want to make their opinion about something I wrote public, they can do it in their own place. For me the blog ideal is not a succession of isolated islands, but a interconnected net. The discussion should occur not within the blogs, but between the blogs.

Free will is a thing, after all.

Is it though? What makes me who I am? We like to portray ourselves as individuals in control, making choices, but when you study the paths of criminals, for example, you often find commonalities. If I’d had a different childhood, if I’d been born to different parents, who knows if I wouldn’t have become a murderer? Even without going that far, if I’d been born in a small town in Texas, I’d probably be a brainless MAGA. I can’t be proud of something I’m not responsible for.

So things are obviously more complex, and there are plenty of people born in small towns in Texas who aren’t MAGA. But I think no one ever decides to be evil (that’s why fighting against evil people is not enough and will never be; it’s necessary of course but we should at the same time study the causes of evil, and fight it).

is because they’re not dead and so they could still repent and change their ways?

Partly, but not mainly. I do think that anyone can change and repent, but in these cases I don’t think they will change, and I don’t see what someone who did a genocide could do to repent, even if he changed. No, it’s not that.

My position is based on broader principles. Human beings have inalienable rights and dignity. I personally base these rights and this dignity on theological grounds, but even remaining purely secular, it is essential that what is inalienable stay so, because if these things are taken away from some, then they are no longer inalienable to anyone. This is precisely what Trump, Musk, Netanyahu and the others are trying to achieve: a society divided between human beings and dehumanized people, and such a society always leads to the dehumanization of the same people, even if they were not the original targets.

I’ll take the example of the USSR. They dehumanized the bourgeoisie, the royalists, the kulaks. But soon, it was the minorities, the homosexuals, the artists, the “oddballs,” and others who ended up in the Gulag (or in psychiatric asylum), while the new bourgeoisie (the Party cadres) had “reclaimed” their humanity. It’s not to protect Trump and Netanyahu that we must always consider them human beings with dignity and rights. It’s for the sake of society as a whole, and especially its most vulnerable members.

But again, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight them, and fight them hard. It simply means that not everything is permissible in this fight or, fighting evil persons, we will reinforce the causes of evil.

Again, it’s not an either/or situation. Musk, Trump and Netanyahu should be fought with everything we’ve got, but the second one stops considering them as human beings with inalienable rights and dignity, one becomes a part of the problem. Let’s not let them transform us; in order to fight them we have to refuse to imitate them.

Nobody is definitively lost. But one can fight someone else compassionately, it’s not an either/or.

It’s a tool for better correction, not for better writing; the fact that you’re mixing the two is proof that you’ve never learned to write. It’s not a big deal; most people don’t want to write, just to compose texts, and that’s okay.

If you think word processors help you write better, you never learnt to write.

Do you mean using LibreOffice to view markdown documents with nicer presentation?

No, I “translate” my .md files into .odt files using pandoc. But I don’t do that often anymore, I prefer groff!

I watched the 3 first episodes. I wasn’t thinking I would like this show a lot, as I’m not at all fan of highschool dramas, but I was kind of positively surprised. The “jock” aesthetic is boring (almost all men have biceps as large as thighs…) but it’s a part of the genre, so I can’t say anything. And despite that, I find the characters interesting, especially Ake. I love her attitude, even if it may be a little over the top (but again, I imagine is a part of the genre…). The questions asked are good ones, and their answers are very “starfleety”. I love the fact that the stakes are (for now) quite low. If you care about the characters, each one is a universe, so you don’t need to threaten the actual universe to make hour show interesting, and after three episodes I do care about the characters. All in all, it’s not bad Star Trek.

The only serious criticism I have is that they’re trying to do two contradictory things at once, and they’re doing it rather poorly. Either it’s a grave show about childhood trauma, the search for a mother, the forgiveness one can (or can’t) grant to an institution that meant well but made an horrible mistake that destroyed a childhood, or it’s a lighthearted show about young people who misbehave and are punished for it. For example, the transition between Caleb’s absolutely terrible childhood and the push-up with a pack on his back gag is jarring. You don’t feel like laughing at him at this point! I don’t say it’s not possible, but it should be done with more finesse than that. A lot more.

But this third episode was all in the lighthearted side if things, and I liked it for that. Starfleet Academy won’t become my favourite show, as just like Prodigy I’m just not the demographics (and that’s okay, there could be Star Trek for everyone!). But it’s fun.

Four years later, do you still use groff? With -me or -mom?

I use it almost daily, weekly for sure, to create PDFs. I used LaTeX to write my PhD thesis, and it gave me a love for the WYSIWYW systems, but as I don’t write texts longer than a few pages and without much references, LaTeX was to complex and heavy for my needs. I used markdown for a time, but i needed LibreOffice for the formatting, so it wasn’t satisfactory. Groff (with -mom) is the perfect middle ground.

They all did other things for which they were first searched, while Tuck did not.

As a Christian minister, I can say that Friar Tuck is one of my models.

Other photos can be seen on the original Mastodon post: https://deacon.social/@emmanuelwald/115810378946662038

I love groff! But i don’t write documentation, so that may be why.

Why not body {margin: auto;}?

I kind of disagree here. The medium is the message, as one said, and I know that I don’t read with the same spirit an e-mail and a snail-mail I received. We are definitively not robots, so the means of communication change drastically the reception of the message itself, even if the actual text is the same. And it’s even more true when I send a message: the very text will be different is I type it on my computer, my phone, or my typewriter as not only my spirit, but also my capabilities and confort of writing will be different.

Also, it feels nice to write longhand using decent paper and a decent fountain pen (or with a pencil).

My problem with that is that I’m incapable to read myself after a few days… that’s why I love my typewriters.

I mean, exchanging good old letters & postcards (snail mail), journals, fictions, poems, essays, sketches and why not even photography (printed, digital or not, just without any ‘smartphonery’ involved). Stuff we would then have circulating among a group of us.

That’s very close of an idea I had a few months ago: some sort of fanzine. People interested would send me (I don’t mind giving my address) their typed pages, and I’d order them (using actual scissors and glue!) in a zine that I would copy and send to the people who sent me something. It’s not actual correspondence, as it’s not one-on-one, but there would be time invested and creativity and exchange. I’d love to do it in French, but I don’t know if there would be enough persons interested (the costs of an international zine of this type would be too much for me).

Find a safe way to share one’s personal address safely and securely in this age of digital weirdos

Your fear of giving your address made me think about something I’ve read in Richard Polt’s novel, Evertype (if you did not bought it yet, I advise you to do so quickly, the book is good). In it, a character (I won’t spoil anything, but this list is important in the plot) has compiled a list of people interested in corresponding using a typewriter. However, this character only shares an anonymised version of the list, where each member receives a number along with a short description provided by the member themselves. Instead of sending the letter directly to the recipient, the sender sends it to the administrator, specifying the recipient’s number, and the administrator then forwards the letter. This would maintain everyone’s anonymity, but it presupposes trust in the administrator…

No, you’re reformulating the verse. I’m asking for context. What was the discussion about?