French pastor here: at least in France, I am bound by professional secrecy, except for crimes. If I hear someone committed a crime, even more so if it’s a repeated offense, I can and will report it. I believe it’s the same for other professions, except perhaps lawyers: if a doctor learn that someone did or do a crime, they have to report it.

It’s probably different in your country, I just said that because I find that interesting.

Oui, c’est issu de la mouvance évangélique (les évangélistes c’est les rédacteurs des évangiles, pour les protestant·es littéralistes on dit évangéliques), mais c’est volontairement assez interdénominationnel pour laisser toutes celles et tous ceux qui croient en Jésus, au-delà des divergences assez importantes entre nous, marcher ensemble. En tant que pasteur protestant (canal historique, donc théologiquement assez éloigné des évangéliques), je n’y ai jamais participé, mais je vois pas ça d’un mauvais œil.

Mais je serais curieux de voir ce qu’il y a dans cette revue… pas sûr qu’iels parviennent à être si interdénominationnels que ça.

“Black Oriel” is a cool Gothic band name.

In my region of France, there are a lot of old apartments with oriels, but less decorated than this one. It’s great, there are often little benches under the windows.

🦫

As a pastor I say: amen!

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.