Uriel238 [all pronouns]

Without question. Corruption and abuse within institutions is epidemic throughout human history. Child sexual abuse runs lousy in religious institutions. The youth-pastor problem is pervasive.

If you want to create a church, and figure out how to keep its elders free of vice and corruption, I applaud you. But I don’t think you’re going to succeed, if ever your ministry gains any significant following.

A more realistic ambition (if your congregation is more than a dozen folk) is for absolute transparency. A bigger problem in the religious sector is the incentive by ministries to cover up scandals, and silence victims in order to preserve the reputation of the institution. (And predators looking for a hunting ground often seek positions of authority in religious institutions because of this trait.) If your church had the policy of reporting wrongdoing to the authorities and to the press, quickly and openly, then, yes, your ministry will have a lower rate of misconduct, but it will appear to be more corrupt, because of your sunshine rules. Kinda like Florida.

The primary reason the Catholic church is so ridden with corruption and scandal is because it’s big and it’s old. It’s the largest Christian denomination, and it’s been around the longest.

Don’t think this doesn’t happen to non-Christian religious institutions as well. Unchecked power breeds abuse of it, and scandals run thick in temples, in mosques, in secular community centers. The larger the institution the worse the entrenchment.

The term nepotism comes from the root nepot meaning nephew.

Nepotism comes from the practice of high-ranking clergy siring children, and then wanting to promote their bastards into choice positions. They couldn’t claim to be the lad’s father, so they’d instead claim to be his uncle. Thus the kid was his nephew.

Catholics are Christian, at least according to those of us who are not Christian.

It’s like the LGBT+ community: someone is how they personally identify. Even if their behavior doesn’t meet expectations. (Russell T. Davies did a series about this phenomenon, Bob & Rose) If a man claims to be lesbian, than he is. And yes, this pisses off the gold-star lesbians.

Anyone who identifies as Christian, is Christian. Full stop.

They might not be very good at it.

They might disagree with what qualities a Christian should have.

They might, themselves, decide you’re not a Christian either.

If they belong to a mainline or fundamentalist ministry, they probably think your faith is a deception by the devil, and only by joining their church will you receive salvation. That is more common ministerial position than not.

If they’re Universalist, then they don’t care if you’re Christian, you get salvation anyway.

If we don’t look at all the terrible things done in history, we’ll never figure out how to not repeat them.

In terms of child casualties, it’s the deadliest American military targeting error of the 21st century.

This should not be construed to say the United States has been mindful about not killing children.

I did a bit of research regarding the CIA drone-strike program in Afghanistan. It ran about five-hundred sorties a year. The approximate rate was fifty civilians killed for every person-of-interest. Drone operators called casualties bugsplats. They called children fun sized terrorists. This was the lingo in used in the operation. When reported to the press, dead people, men, women, children, all were reported as militants.

Drone-pilot burnout was epidemic in the program. It turns out soldiers get PTSD from killing people whether it’s up close or thousands of miles away. And often the drone would lurk for a while, watching all these people eat, work, play, sleep, fuck (they had IR and could see into buildings), and would clearly understand these were just people living their lives when the order would come down to incinerate them.

And this wasn’t under George W. Bush (who still wiped out villages, but used PMC raiders doing black ops) this was under Obama. The disposition matrix and the FISC decided whether a POI needed to be executed. They didn’t consider the people that lived at the target site.

And that’s just the Afghanistan program in the International War on Terror. There was also a Pakistan program.

The United States in its military operations has been really merciless, and at some point we need to collectively decide if we’re okay with that, or are driven to change.

Paywall / Subscription / Privacy Bypass

Masturbating doesn’t warrant hurricanes.

But using fossil fuels and methane to run your hyperscale data centers absolutely does.

The Israel-Palistinian affair reflects the larger dichotomy of principle vs. loyalty.

The enlightenment values behind the US and French revolts and transformations are propped up by the principles that everyone is entitled to equal regard by the society, are endowed with the same rights, are treated equally by the justice system in so on.

(Mind you, both of these nations failed to embrace these principles fully, still don’t, and progress towards this ideal is slow and meandering — to say the least.)

Of course the challenge, then, is extending that degree of citizenship to the worst wrongdoers, even after they’ve profiteered on war and drug addiction, wrecked the economy through financialization and turned entire government institutions against the people they were supposed to protect sexually assaulted kids or killed with intention.

We don’t like giving our criminal suspects their day in court. When convicted, we don’t like to consider that they were, wrongfully, and in either case, we want them to suffer not just incarceration, but to languish in squalor, abuse and neglect. We want them afraid to reach for the soap. We don’t like extending rights to those we regard as outcast.

But if we don’t, we dip into the other side of the coin, in which criminal is not defined by what you did, but who you are. Feudal society is structured based on contracts of loyalty. If you are born of the better blood (monied, ethnically pure, faithful to the orthodox) then you deserve all the benefits of the doubt. Whereas if you are alien or other, you deserve to be outlawed.

And this applies when the good guys fuck children, murder with intent, profiteer on war and drugs, wreck the economy though financialization and capture government institutions so they don’t protect the people. And yeah, at it’s worst, we see things like genocide and torture become controversial because the heroes are doing it and the goblins are on the receiving end of it.

So not just the US and Israel, but the entire world needs to reflect on what kind of society they want to be. Unlike economic structures that can be blended, guiding ideology tend to be a slippery slope. Once it is established that some people can be denied rights and regard by fiat because they’re of the wrong faith or the wrong blood, or aren’t rich enough, then that refusal of access can extend to anyone else, and eventually everyone else.

And we’re seeing this develop in the US, as MAGA circles talk about liberals in blood libels and calls to hunt and execute them. In this case liberals includes anyone who isn’t MAGA.

I hope the lawsuit succeeds and stings the precinct hard.

Since the officers themselves can hide behind good faith and qualified immunity it becomes necessary to penalize the institution for hiring unprofessionals who overdepend on technology and draw their guns in advance.

It’s crap like this that fuels the movement to abolish the police. And yeah, I think that model for responder is obsolete.