Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Blogaround

1. You Can Buy A Malaria Net (November 7) "My ability to buy a bednet isn’t dependent on the behavior of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. I can buy a bednet even if Joe Biden waited too long to drop out of the race, or the Kamala Harris campaign was too risk-averse, or the Democratic Party elites need to do a better job of disciplining their base. Buying a bednet in no way requires appeasing the Americans with the most confused, ignorant, incoherent, and self-contradictory beliefs, otherwise known as 'swing voters.'"

2. Steps For Transgender People Preparing For Federal Crackdowns Under Trump (November 12)

Also from Erin Reed: Opinion: The Trans Sports Attacks Were Never About Sports (November 16) "But by the end of 2023, the reality was clear: every state that passed a transgender sports ban went on to enact some of the most draconian anti-trans laws in history."

3. The 5Ds of Bystander Intervention (via

4. Elon Musk is sued over $1 million election giveaway (November 6) 

5. Sub-Radio - Bi Bi Bi (2023)

6. redbeardace says sex is like "bins at the Goodwill Outlet" and I love this analogy.

7. Harris lost the war of “ambient information” (November 18) "That’s how you wind up with a result like this: Harris won handily among people who were paying attention, but got clobbered among voters who just 'knew things' without checking them out."

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Michal wasn't here for David's worship, and now neither am I

King David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant. Image source.

I've been reading Wilda Gafney's book "Womanist Midrash," and it's got me thinking about the story of Michal, in the bible. Let's talk about Michal.

Specifically, I want to talk about the scene where Michal judges David for how he worships God. But, "Womanist Midrash" has made me realize we can't just look at that 1 passage by itself. We need the whole history between David and Michal, the way he treated her. So here it is:

  • Michal was one of Saul's daughters. Saul was chosen by God to be the king, but later God rejected him and chose David instead. So you've got this awkward period of time where Saul is still the king, but David has God's promise that someday he'll be king, and there's conflict between Saul and David because of that.
  • Anyway, Saul sees that his daughter Michal loves David, so Saul tells David he can marry her, and the bride-price is 100 Philistine foreskins (wtf). Saul hopes that maybe David will die in battle fighting the Philistines. But David succeeds and comes back with 200 Philistine foreskins (WTF). So he and Michal are married.
  • Then Saul decides to kill David. He sends men to David's house. Michal helps David escape out of the window, and she lies to the men, saving David's life.
  • While David is on the run, he marries a few other women: Abagail and Ahinoam. Saul ends up giving Michal in marriage to another man, Paltiel.
  • Oh and at some point David married 4 additional women: Maakah, Haggith, Abital, and Eglah.
  • Years later, after Saul dies, Saul's son Ish-Bosheth becomes king. There is conflict between David's supporters and Ish-Bosheth's supporters. Finally, Abner (who was originally on Saul's side) comes to David to negotiate how to make David king. One of David's conditions is that Michal comes back to him. So, she is forcibly taken from her husband Paltiel, who follows after her, crying, until Abner tells him to give up and go home.
  • Even though David and Michal were "together" again, it seems he wasn't having sex with her, or acting like a husband at all really. We can infer this because he's having lots of babies with his other wives, but none with Michal.
  • And then, after all this, we come to the scene where Michal criticizes David for how he worships God. Now, after establishing all this history, we can talk about that.

2 Samuel 6:12-23

Now King David was told, “The Lord has blessed the household of Obed-Edom and everything he has, because of the ark of God.” So David went to bring up the ark of God from the house of Obed-Edom to the City of David with rejoicing. When those who were carrying the ark of the Lord had taken six steps, he sacrificed a bull and a fattened calf. Wearing a linen ephod, David was dancing before the Lord with all his might, while he and all Israel were bringing up the ark of the Lord with shouts and the sound of trumpets.

As the ark of the Lord was entering the City of David, Michal daughter of Saul watched from a window. And when she saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, she despised him in her heart.

They brought the ark of the Lord and set it in its place inside the tent that David had pitched for it, and David sacrificed burnt offerings and fellowship offerings before the Lord. After he had finished sacrificing the burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord Almighty. Then he gave a loaf of bread, a cake of dates and a cake of raisins to each person in the whole crowd of Israelites, both men and women. And all the people went to their homes.

When David returned home to bless his household, Michal daughter of Saul came out to meet him and said, “How the king of Israel has distinguished himself today, going around half-naked in full view of the slave girls of his servants as any vulgar fellow would!”

David said to Michal, “It was before the Lord, who chose me rather than your father or anyone from his house when he appointed me ruler over the Lord’s people Israel—I will celebrate before the Lord. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes. But by these slave girls you spoke of, I will be held in honor.”

And Michal daughter of Saul had no children to the day of her death.

Back when I was a good evangelical, "on fire for God," I loved this passage. I danced at church when we sang worship songs, and I had complicated feelings about it... I felt good, I loved God and wanted to express it in that way, but I also felt very self-conscious and kinda embarrassed. What if everyone is looking at me and thinking I'm weird? What if I'm bad at dancing? What if this is just super awkward?

I always heard Christians say "worship is just you and God." Meaning, we shouldn't care what people think. We should just repress those feelings of embarrassment; all that matters is that in God's eyes, you're genuinely expressing your worship towards Them.

And I truly believed that was the ideal. I strove to worship God in all the big wild ways I wanted to, and to repress my fears that I was being weird and people were judging me. This passage about David was an inspiration to me. The way I understood it, David was being a role model of what worship should be like, dancing in the streets without caring about how weird he looked, and Michal was being a wet blanket and judging him. She was in the wrong, and he told her so. He even told her "I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes." That verse was one of my favorites. It's all about expressing our love for God, I thought, regardless of what other people think.

(There's even a song about it, "Undignified" by David Crowder Band.)

But now that I'm reading "Womanist Midrash," which has a section on Michal, tying together all these events from her life, giving the reader a clear picture of how David and Saul mistreated her throughout her life, now I'm seeing 2 Samuel 6 completely differently.

Now I see it like this:

When Michal judged David for how he worshiped God, it wasn't about "wow you look so weird, dancing in the streets in your underwear, you should feel embarrassed about that."

Instead, her feelings were more like this: "You love God? You love God? After what you did to me, you have the audacity to go out there in public and act like you're just so wholeheartedly devoted to God? Come on."

She had loved him. She saved his life. And he used her as a political pawn in his quest to become king. (Both David and Saul used her in their struggle for power.) He tore her away from her husband, purely as a symbol of his dominance over the house of Saul, and then he didn't even seem to want her as a wife. Just the status, no actual relationship.

You can understand how, if someone treats you like that, and then they're like "I LOVE GOD SO MUCH, I SIMPLY MUST DANCE," you might hate them.

It's like the apostle John says in 1 John 4:20, "For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen." David treats Michal this badly, and then he's all excited about worshipping God- no. Michal doesn't buy it.

It's like Jesus said in Matthew 5:23-24, "Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift." I remember reading that long ago, reading it as Here Are The Rules For How To Worship Correctly. The hoops that God has arbitrarily set up for us to jump through to get our worship to "count." But wait a minute, maybe it's not about that at all. Maybe Jesus is saying, if you've wronged someone, you need to go make it right, and that's a higher priority than coming to church to participate in "worship."

Maybe Jesus is saying, your relationships with other people have to come first, before your relationship with God. It's not "just you and God."

I think of Michal looking out her window at the way David performed his worship in front of everybody, playing the part of "a man after God's own heart," and I think of sexual abuse coverups in the modern church. Victims are told that they shouldn't speak up, because their abuser is such a good man of God, doing great things for God's kingdom, and to tell the truth about their abuse would [supposedly] be going against God's work.

She saw David dancing, and "despised him in her heart." We see an echo in the words of God, in Amos 5:21-24,

I hate, I despise your religious festivals;

    your assemblies are a stench to me.

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,

    I will not accept them.

Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,

    I will have no regard for them.

Away with the noise of your songs!

    I will not listen to the music of your harps.

But let justice roll on like a river,

    righteousness like a never-failing stream!

Michal was right.

Let justice roll like a river. And after that, you can dance for God.

---

Posts about the book "Womanist Midrash" by Wilda C. Gafney:

Womanist Midrash 
The Slavery We Ignore in the Book of Exodus 
The Second-Worst Bible Story 
Michal wasn't here for David's worship, and now neither am I

---

Related:

Why I Don't Want to be at a "Revival"

The things I've never let myself say about worship 

"You Weren't There, the Night Jesus Found Me" 

For Rizpah (or, a post about human sacrifice in the bible)

Thursday, November 14, 2024

Blogaround

1. Do not obey in advance (November 9) Yes, good advice. I think right now people are feeling like, the orange antichrist won and he'll have the power to actually implement all the bad ideas he campaigned on. And, yes, maybe, but he'll have to do a lot of work to get there- maybe his people will be incompetent. Let's hope for that. Don't act like he's already done it. Don't help him along.

2. Links to donate to help Palestine: Palestine Children's Relief Fund and American Near East Refugee Aid 

3. This Was Always Going To Be A Generational Fight For Transgender People (November 7) "To those who feel hopeless—don’t. The story didn’t end in 2004. Obama would eventually go on to champion gay rights, and public opinion shifted significantly over the next decade. Allies stood by gay people and grew in number, helping to foster broader acceptance. Anti-gay policy platforms slowly but surely became positions held only by the most fundamentalist religious politicians."

4. Number Shortage (November 8) Lolllll

5. We Fell For The Oldest Lie On The Internet (October 29, 13-minute video from Kurzgesagt) Love this! It's a video about tracking down the source for the "science fun fact" that the total length of all blood vessels in a person's body is 100,000 km.

6. She Helped a Survivor. Now She Is One. (October 25) "One thing that struck me repeatedly in this is that some level of fact-checking would have debunked some of these claims much earlier, if someone had had the presence of mind to attend to them (I dearly wish Abby had simply taken a medicine vial out of the trash and photographed the label — Abby does too). But these claims weren’t fact-checked, because to investigate the belief that someone you love isn’t telling you the truth is incredibly frightening. They weren’t fact-checked because the people who knew the facts were exhausted, caring for a newborn, toddler, and adult. They weren’t sleeping. They were largely isolated from others and had been pressured by someone they cared about deeply not to tell anyone what was happening in their home. They didn’t just do it out of fear of the next blow-up, and exhaustion. They did it out of love. They wanted this woman who they cared about to be happy and safe."

Very long post from Laura Robinson about Hannah-Kate Williams (a survivor of child abuse) and Abby Osborne, who opened her home to Williams and helped her with medical care and paid thousands and thousands of dollars for Williams' expenses- Abby has now come forward to say that Williams was dishonest and manipulative and all of this has been very harmful to Abby and her family. 

It's important to be honest about stories like this. Simplistically, we want Williams to be on the "good" side because she's an abuse survivor and she's involved in legal advocacy to hold the Southern Baptist Convention accountable for that. And so, we feel like we're not "supposed" to say anything bad about her. That's messed up.

7. Human Nature, Hope & Ice Cream (November 9, 11-minute video) A video from Pop Culture Detective making the case that it's NOT true that human nature is basically evil.

8. Two kinds of LLM hallucinations (November 13) "It’s not just about models saying something wrong, it’s about the way they say it. People are used to expressing some degree of uncertainty when they feel uncertain, and used to picking up uncertainty in other people. AI models often lack these signs of uncertainty, and this can be a problem in natural conversation. However, this subject is not discussed at all in the review, and so it appears not to be a major research area."

9. The US Is a Civic Desert. To Survive, the Democratic Party Needs to Transform Itself. (November 11) Posting this here because wow I've never heard of anything like this before. Imagine a world where a political party is manifested as a local group of real-life people who meet up and get to know each other, and support each other.

10. How Originalism Ate the Law (May 8, via) "They understand intuitively that while public opinion favors reproductive freedom and sensible gun regulations and the right to vote, the MAGA faction of the Supreme Court has found a doctrinal party trick to ensure that nobody can have any of those things because they weren’t protected at the founding or at the time of the Reconstruction Amendments, or whichever point of history the high court deems relevant (it varies)."

And I'm noticing some interesting parallels between "originalism" and how evangelicals read the bible.

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

The Kleenex Box Guitar is Part of My Culture

The tissue box guitar- with rubber bands and an old paper towel tube. Image source.

When I was a little kid, I remember making this craft: you stretch some rubber bands over an empty kleenex box, and it makes a guitar because the rubber bands are right over the hole. Very cool when you're 8 years old!

I'm American, and I made this kind of kleenex box guitar in the US. Now I live in China, and here's something fascinating: You can't really do this craft in China. Because kleenexes don't come in cardboard packaging. In China, they're in plastic.

Like this:

Package of tissues in plastic. Image source.

So when you use up all the kleenexes, you're just left with a plastic wrapper. You can't make a guitar out of that.

I'm writing about this because it's about culture. The best definition I've heard for "culture" is this: "Culture" is the things that you think of as normal, but they might not be normal for someone else. This little tiny mundane detail- that in the US, tissues are typically sold in cardboard boxes, but in China they're in plastic- and because of that, this kids' craft project has arisen where you make a guitar out of the empty box, but you can't do that in China. 

(And yes, I'm aware that my use of the word "kleenex" also says something about the culture I come from. The "correct" word is "tissue" but I grew up calling them kleenexes. Good luck having anyone in China understand what you're saying if you use the word "kleenex" though. When they learn English, they learn "tissue"- or they just translate from Chinese directly and call it "paper.")

Of course, Chinese culture has other things instead. Off the top of my head, here's one: I started learning to crochet, and I saw this cool crochet project in a WeChat post. (WeChat is the social media app we all use in China.) Here are some photos:

A toy chicken, crocheted out of different colors of yarn. The whole chicken is very triangle-shaped and the side of the body has a really colorful large flower pattern.



Cute! I need to learn how to make these!

I showed them to my husband, and he immediately said, "That looks like a zongzi."

What is a zongzi, you ask?

3 zongzi in a steaming basket. Image source.

These are 粽子 [zòng zi], a food made by taking sticky rice and some kind of filling like meat or red beans, wrapping it all up in leaves in a tetrahedron shape, tying it up with string, and then steaming it. They are the traditional food for Dragon Boat Festival, a holiday in June.

So I scrolled up on the crochet chicken post, and sure enough, the page title says this is a guide to crocheting "粽子鸡", zongzi chickens. 

I know what zongzi are, but I hadn't noticed that these chickens look like zongzi. My husband noticed right away because he's Chinese.

This is culture. The little everyday objects, which people can creatively reimagine as something else- but it shakes out different depending on what "everyday objects" you have.

---

Related:

I Didn't Know I Had a Culture Until I Lost It

Tipping, Fruit, and Jesus 

Chinese Jokes Make Me Think About God

"The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special" is About Being an Immigrant

Saturday, November 9, 2024

Keep Helping Each Other

Image text: "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'" - Mr. Rogers. Image source.

The orange antichrist won the election. Now we're in this weird situation where we know it's gonna be bad, but we don't know how. We can just hope he doesn't actually do all the bad things he said he'd do. (Be a "dictator on day 1", etc...)

What I want to say is, there are things we can do to make this not as bad as it could be. In every crisis throughout history, there have been ordinary people, doing what they could to help their neighbors- making it not as bad as it could have been. 

So don't give up. You can make a difference. Help each other.

What I'm doing, since I'm not physically in the US, is making recurring donations to organizations that help people who will be targeted by his bad policies. This is a great way to help- if you're able, give $10/month, or whatever amount you can. Here is a list; please feel free to leave comments if you have more recommendations.

Immigration:

  • RAICES 
  • Find an organization in your local area which helps immigrants, and donate to them. I think this is really important- working with immigrants directly, getting them connected to communities which can help them and protect them.

Trans people:

  • Transgender Law Center 
  • Also it would be good to donate to a charity that helps trans people with funding for medical care, but I don't know of one offhand- leave a comment if you have a recommendation.

Abortion:

Rights/ democracy:

---

Okay, I can't think about the problems of the world right now. I'm gonna look through my drafts and find the most whimsical, low-stakes blog post and that will be be next thing I post. 

Sunday, November 3, 2024

Blogaround

1. A Special Monologue for the Republican in Your Life (October 30) Video from Jimmy Kimmel, making the argument that Trump is unfit to be president. This is meant to speak to the average Republican, and mainly shows clips of Trump, so you can see for yourself what he is really like.

2. A few xkcd comics that made me laugh: Wells (October 28) and Demons (November 1)

3. Say their names: Savita. Josseli. (October 30) [content note: it's about women who died because they were unable to get abortion care] "It took six years, but there was a direct line from Savita Halappanavar’s agonizing, preventable death to the amendment of Ireland’s Constitution in 2018."

4. UNICEF warns of 'deadly' effect on Palestinian children after Israel ban on UNRWA (October 31, via)

5. Fairness in Sports (October 13) "If all the ad money spent screaming about trans people in sports were instead spent on providing scholarships, you would have far more new scholarships than there are trans scholarship athletes in the entire country." An article from a trans person, which goes through different levels of sports competition and talks about what policies actually make sense.

Also from Crip Dyke: Pro Publica has it half right. (October 19) "What was remarkable about all this was that in each case [since the 1600s] the people seeking to block some marriages argued that such marriages were anti-god, anti-family, sexually perverted or debauched, prone to illness and encouraging of drug or alcohol abuse."

6. Star Trek Retro Review: "Yesterday's Enterprise" (TNG) | Alternate Timelines (November 1) "Picard's like, 'whattttt?' Tasha says, 'I talked to Guinan.' Picard's like, 'Oh Jesus, what did she say?'" (27-minute video)

7. Workers Say They Were Tricked and Threatened as Part of Elon Musk’s Get-Out-the-Vote Effort (October 30) "But by Sunday, the door knockers were loaded into a rented U-Haul moving van with no rear seating or seatbelts, in a photo and videos viewed by WIRED. 'We were all told our transportation would be handled and we’d be in rental cars. It turned out to be U-Haul vans, and I felt embarrassed and played,' the door knocker tells WIRED."

8. PBS KIDS shows that you totally forgot existed 📺📚🦁 (August 21, 52-minute video) Oh look, it's a video about my childhood. This makes me want to find episodes of "Liberty's Kids" for my son to watch.

Thursday, October 31, 2024

On Washing Machines and Republicans

Kids hugging Minnesota governor Tim Walz after he signs a bill to provide free school lunches for all kids. Image source.

Here's a recent post from Adam Lee, More washing machines in schools, please, about washing machines in schools. It mentions schools in New York City and other US cities which have washing machines that students can use, and how this can be extremely helpful for students whose families aren't able to wash their clothes (maybe because they're homeless, for example). There are schools where a significant fraction of students frequently miss school because they don't have clean clothes. The post quotes an article which gives some statistics about the difference it can make if the school provides washing machines- "Similarly, in 2017, a Kansas City public school reported that only 46% of students were meeting the requirement to attend school 90% of the time. After installing a washing machine, this figure shot up to 84%."

My first thought, when I read this, was, wow this is great! If this helps people, then schools should totally do it! I never would have thought of this- I had no idea there were students who were missing school because of laundry. But if this helps, then society should provide washing machines.

My second thought was, I grew up in a conservative Christian environment where most people were Republican, and I just KNOW that my "Republican role models" would NOT like this. Oh, I KNOW that some of the good people who were my role models growing up would totally scoff at this and think it was absurd. I want to unpack the reasons why.

Basically, the Republican belief was that parents are supposed to be responsible and take care of their kids' needs. Parents are supposed to make sure their kids have clean clothes. And if some parents are failing at that, now these liberals are butting in and saying "oh we feel so BADDDD for them! It's so SADDDD! The government should do it!" Utterly ridiculous. People are failing to be good responsible parents, and liberals are saying "that's okay, no need to take responsibility and be good parents! We'll just make this another task for our bloated, meddling government to take on! We'll just make the good responsible taxpayers pay for it!"

(This is what Republicans believed back when I was a teenager. Now the Republican party has turned into a nakedly racist personality cult around Trump. I won't even try to explain that.)

The thing I was missing, back then, when I heard Republican-leaning adults say things like that, was the fact that some people really are poor/homeless, and it's not simply a matter of "they're lazy and irresponsible." It's about structural disadvantages. It's not something they can easily change by "being responsible." They really are in that situation, and it doesn't help to say "here are all the things you should have done differently in your life." What if, instead, we actually help them?

I have more examples.

Back in 2012, I was telling someone about Libby Anne's viral post, How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement. This post is fantastic; you should read it. It's about how Libby Anne was "pro-life" because she genuinely did want to save unborn babies, but then she found out that the "pro-life" movement wasn't actually doing the things that have been proven to reduce the abortion rate. Things like making sure everyone has access to birth control and good sex ed. The "pro-life" side was actually fighting against those things!

One thing that she mentioned in her post was that sometimes pregnant people have abortions because they don't have the financial resources to take care of a baby. They would prefer to keep the baby, but they look at the reality of how much everything costs- medical expenses for giving birth, daycare, etc- and it's just not reasonable. If the government made sure that everyone had prenatal care, if the government paid the hospital costs for giving birth, if the government paid for daycare- that would reduce the abortion rate.

I was telling someone about this, someone who was "pro-life" and tended to vote Republican, and she laughed at the idea that the government should pay for health care for pregnant people, and for daycare. To her, it was just utterly absurd, laughable. Making the good responsible taxpayers pay these high costs- daycare is expensive!- just because some people aren't responsible enough to avoid pregnancy if they're not financially ready to have a kid. So ridiculous, wanting the government to swoop in and solve everyone's problems, instead of teaching people to be responsible and take care of themselves. Making the government huge, adding more and more expensive government programs, so people can be lazy and the government will do everything for them. Ridiculous.

And another time, someone was showing me the hospital bill from a family member who had had surgery. The numbers on this bill were ridiculous, a few thousand dollars here or there for little minor things, in addition to the huge costs for the surgery itself. And at the bottom of the page, it added up to an astronomical number- and then it showed what part the insurance paid for, and what part the patient had to pay for, and fortunately the patient's part was pretty small and not a problem. (They told me that actually, the insurance doesn't even pay what this bill says the insurance should pay- the insurance company will negotiate with the hospital and come to a smaller number. So basically all the numbers are fake.)

So, they told me, this is why it's so important for everyone to have health insurance. Can you imagine if this family member didn't have health insurance, and literally had to pay those amounts? Gosh.

They said "this is why it's so important for everyone to have health insurance", and I felt like... wait, don't we oppose that? They didn't mean it like "this is why our society should have universal health care, so it's not possible for someone to be in a situation where they're sick, they're recovering from surgery, and on top of that they have to pay tens of thousands of dollars." They meant, "see, when you are an adult, you will have to learn how insurance works, and make sure you buy good insurance for yourself- see, this is what can happen to people who don't have insurance. Every adult should know about this and take responsibility to make sure it doesn't happen to their family. That's the way it is."

And do you remember in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee for president, and a video leaked where he said:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

And also:

[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

When this leaked, it was a huge thing. People were so angry about it. 

And I was confused... I couldn't understand why people were so angry, because... I thought, yeah, this pretty much is what we as Republicans believe. I have heard "Republican role models" state it this directly. Yes, I have. I didn't know such remarks would be such a scandal. They were very much in the normal range of things I often heard normal Republicans say. "People vote Democrat just because the government gives them free stuff," etc.

I remember back then, I read a blog post about Romney's "47%" comments, and the blogger said, "I do believe people are entitled to food, health care, and housing. These are basic needs, and society has a responsibility to make sure everyone's basic needs are met."

All of this, all these examples about Republicans not wanting the government to spend money on meeting people's basic needs, all of them come down to this question: What is the purpose of government?

Long ago, when I was growing up in a conservative environment, I guess I would have answered like this: Well, a society needs to have a government, to build the things that are needed for a functional society but aren't cost-effective for people to build on their own. For example, roads. You have to have roads. If the government doesn't build roads, what are you gonna do, build your own road every time you want to go somewhere? No, that doesn't make any sense, there should be a society-wide organizational structure that handles things like that.

Things that kind of run in the background, that you take for granted as parts of a functional society. Roads, libraries, police, public schools, standards about how medicines get approval to be sold, standards about cleanliness in restaurant kitchens, laws against murder, you know, things like that.

Here's what doesn't make sense about this perspective: Basically, it views everything the government is *already doing* as normal things the government needs to do. Having the government pay for libraries is fine because the government is already doing that, and we feel that it's normal and not "too much government." And public schools- can you imagine if public schools didn't exist, and there was a movement of people saying "government should pay for schools for all children"- can you imagine what the Republican response would be to that? They would think it was absurd, that it was way too expensive, and people should "take responsibility" and not have kids if they don't have the money to send them to private schools. But since public schools already exist and we all feel this is normal, I've never heard any of my "Republican role models" say they shouldn't exist. I went to a public school. Yeah there was a lot of complaining about how public schools are teaching sex ed, and evolution, etc, but I never heard anyone say the entire public school model is bad.

But anyway, that's more or less how I viewed the purpose of government back then. Just do the minimum-level things that need to be done to have a society.

If someone suggested "hey, what if the government starts this new program that helps this or that group of people?" I would have said, well, maybe, but that's not really the government's role. You shouldn't add government programs to help people just because you want to be nice. That's not really how it's supposed to work. And besides, then you have to raise taxes- the people who don't need the new program will be disproportionately paying for it, and that's not fair.

Back when I had that mindset, one of the things that challenged it was this: I read an article about poor people being drug-tested before they could get food stamps. And this article said, actually it would be cheaper for the government to just give them all food stamps regardless. Doing the drug testing and the paperwork is an extra government expense which outweighs the amount of money the government is saving by denying benefits to people who don't pass the drug tests.

Hmm, interesting! So if our concern was mainly about how it's not fair for the people who don't need help to be paying taxes to benefit poor people, well, then don't require drug testing for people who get food stamps. Save the taxpayers money!

And then there were studies about how government programs can actually save money for the government in the long run. For example, the government pays for public schools, and then in the long run you get a society where everyone is educated, and the economy is more productive, which benefits the government. The government pays for vaccines for children, and then in the long run you get less sickness and a more productive workforce. And so on.

So, hmm, one might say, even though the "purpose" of government isn't to help people, maybe the government should do things to help people, if those things benefit the government and good responsible taxpayers in the long run.

And maybe you could even take it a step farther and say "If the government pays for this, even if it doesn't result in 'greater productivity' that you can measure in dollars, it gives everyone the benefit of living in a society which provides for everyone's basic needs." I want the US to be that kind of society. 

This whole line of reasoning is based on the idea that the government is "supposed to" just do a few minimal things to set up a society, but isn't "supposed to" have a goal of helping people. But what if we view this completely differently?

What if we view it like this: We have a structure which has the power to make policies which can really help a lot of people. We have the ability to create a society where everyone's basic needs are met. A government is big enough that it's actually capable of doing this. So, let's do it! 

I don't know if that's the "purpose" of government, but hey, since government exists, we have the means to make society so much better, so let's do it!

What if it's not just about creating a society where people kinda sorta have the opportunity to make a good life for themselves, and if they don't it's their own fault for not "taking responsibility"? What if we really had a "safety net"? What if we made sure that, no matter what, everyone had access to food?

Sometimes I think about how amazing modern medicine is. How, 100 years ago, if you had this or that medical problem, you would die from it, but nowadays we have treatment and you get better and it's no big deal. And here's my question: If we discover an amazing new cure for some disease (or other medical problem), does it mean "now we can have a society where no one has this disease"? Or does it mean "now if you have enough money, then you can pay to be cured, but if you're poor then tough luck"? Sometimes I imagine kids in history class learning, "This society discovered a cure for this horrible disease. But, they only let rich people have the cure." And the kids would all be like "oh goodness, that's terrible!"

I started this blog post by linking to Adam Lee's blog- let's go back to that. In his post, he discusses school lunch debt, and he says:

It’s obscene that there’s such a thing as school lunch debt. Only a mind so warped by capitalism that it’s lost all its morals could conceive of something so sick and cruel. The occasional feel-good stories about donors paying off lunch debt don’t disguise the fact that it shouldn’t exist in the first place.

I have to admit, this isn't intuitive to me. I don't feel appalled at the concept of school lunch debt. My intuition is more like "well to get food, you have to pay for it." So, for anyone coming from that background, let me talk about the logic behind "It's obscene that there's such a thing as school lunch debt."

These are children, whose families are too poor to afford food. Society should not stand by and let this happen. This is a judgment on our society. Allowing children to accumulate debt, for food. Society should give them the food for free. And "society" means the government, because the government is able to collect taxes from everyone, and thereby spread the costs out fairly.

A society which allows children to accumulate school lunch debt, rather than giving them food for free- that's awful.

But the typical Republican answer to this is "yes, we should give money to help poor people. But it should be charities or private individuals doing it, not the government. That's not the government's job."

My take on where this argument is coming from- and I can't speak for the motivations of everyone who uses it, but generally this is the way I've viewed it- is this: Giving money to help others should be a choice, which can serve as a kind of indicator about whether you're a moral person or not. In church, there are sermons about how you should give money, God commands you to give money, it's a sin to not give money, etc- and in some sense people want it to be this way, rather than the government automatically taxing everyone's paycheck and so removing the elements of choice and sin.

What if the government raised taxes and then gave food to everyone who can't afford it? Well, that takes away rich people's opportunity to feel like "wow I'm such a good person because I decided to donate some money to feed people." When Republicans say "that's not the government's job," I take that to mean "there should exist people who don't have enough money to meet their basic needs, as a test for us, so we can step up and prove we are good moral people, by giving them some money." So the important thing is not to actually solve the problem and ensure everyone's needs are met, but to lift up some role models among the population of rich people, to praise them for being such good people because they donate money.

If the government taxes you more and then feeds people, well, nobody's going to admire you for your generosity, because it wasn't your choice to give the money.

(Very interesting, though, that these are the same people who oppose marriage equality- ie, the "sin" of being gay-married isn't something people should get to have a "choice" on, unlike the "sin" of not being generous.)

Also, the "it's not the government's job" argument treats caring for poor people as a sort of optional extra thing that very very good moral people do, rather than a bare-minimum-level obligation. And the donor can require the recipients to jump through hoops to prove that they "deserve" help. It's based on the idea that the normal state of the world- the way it should be- is that people "take responsibility" and don't need help, and then if there are some people who made bad choices, it's their own fault, they deserve to be poor, but we feel some pity for them, so we'll give them some money, and maybe require them to show they're grateful and they're taking steps toward "being responsible" before they can get the money.

But what if it was like this instead: What if "the way it should be" is that society is obligated to give money to poor people, to make sure everyone's needs are met? What if it was just normal that kids at school get free lunch? What if we didn't think of these things as "charity" but as something that people are entitled to?

Maybe people say "that's not the government's job" and sure, maybe, in some theoretical world where you have abstract discussions about "the government's job"... But if the government can actually get things done, more effectively than private charity can, doesn't it make sense for the government to do it?

Really weird how apparently "making sure this actually get done" is less important than "making sure the government doesn't do something that's not its correct role."

And here is where Republicans will bring up the argument "government programs are inefficient." I don't know enough details about this to know how good of an argument it is- I'm sure that yes you can find plenty of examples of government programs being inefficient or wasteful. But what matters is the results. If the government is able to, say, provide health care to everyone, even if it does so "inefficiently", isn't that better than an ad-hoc network of gofundmes? 

I don't know the details about how it would work, how to pay for it- obviously you can't just indiscriminately fund every program anyone suggests- but my point is, let's dream big. Let's imagine a society which really does a good job of helping everyone, and then let's take a look at what practical steps could help get closer to that. The Republican approach is more like, let's not even consider funding new government programs, because we already know it will screw up the economy, and reward people for being lazy- let's just not change anything, we already know the effects will be bad, even without thinking about any actual policies or doing any actual math.

Maybe the key difference is that Democrats are making policy based on the question "how can we make society better?" and Republicans are basing it on the question "how can we make society the way it SHOULD be?" Ie, people should go to college, and get married, and have kids- so make policies which encourage and reward those things. Make people do what they're supposed to do.

So, these are my thoughts on Republican opposition to government programs giving people "free stuff." There is an overall framework to this ideology which makes logical sense- it's about Republican views on how people "should" live and how society "should" be and what the government "should" do. If you grow up in an environment where everyone believes that, and you don't have access to information about what life is actually like for poor people in the US, then sure, it makes sense that you would believe that. 

But if you listen to people, and learn about how poverty and structural inequality actually work, how it's not just a matter of being "irresponsible"- and how much of a difference it can make if the government steps in to help them... We have the power to do a lot of good and improve society. Let's do it.

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Related:

My Republican Role Models 

Christian Nationalism / Faith Without Works Is Dead

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Blogaround

1. Egypt is certified malaria-free by WHO (October 20, via) This is great!

2. Lauren Stratford, The Survivor Who Never Was (October 15) "True change cannot be built on falsehoods, and people who try to do so create more victims, not fewer."

3. China’s Solution for Trash-Strewn Mountains: Robot Dog Porters (October 24) "The four-legged robots could be seen trotting up and down the steps of Mount Tai, or Taishan, in eastern China’s Shandong province last weekend, often laden with huge bags of garbage, sparking amusement among the hordes of tourists at the site."

Also from Sixth Tone: What’s Chinese for ‘Midwest Nice’? (October 24) LOLLL oh this is so real. You text with customer service on Taobao (Chinese shopping app) and they constantly call you "qin" [亲]. A dictionary will tell you this means "dear"- and I have seen plenty of Chinese people using "dear" in English the way they use "qin", which just sounds odd, like "Dear, can you bring in these documents next week?"- but I've always felt like it shouldn't be understood as "dear" but more like a polite title you use in administrative sorts of interactions. Loved reading this article about how Chinese people also find it weird to be called "qin" on Taobao all the time.

And also: Signs of Unity: Can China’s Deaf Community Find a Common Language? (October 28) "China’s large size, coupled with a history of sign language use dating back at least 1,500 years, have made China’s sign languages especially fragmented."

4. Former envoy says Americans in Canada ‘could determine’ next president (October 20) Love this! Americans living abroad, VOTE VOTE VOTE!

5. Nazi shit (intra ecclesiam nulla salus) (October 23) "'Round them up and put them in camps' is unadorned Nazi shit. It just is. There’s no way of qualifying or caviling or weaseling out of that. 'Round them up and put them in camps' is the essence of the thing itself."

6. What NOT To Say To People Trapped In The MAGA Cult (October 24) "One day he’ll be gone [hopefully very soon] and you’ll need to be there to help them process what happened and perhaps find a way back to sanity."

7. Police and poll workers train for possible election threats (October 24) 

8. American Airlines fined $50 million for its treatment of passengers with disabilities (October 23) "Duckworth said airlines routinely damage her own wheelchairs and others. In fact, Duckworth says they broke 892 wheelchairs in a single month last year. 'Imagine if the American public saw that the airlines broke 892 pairs of legs in a single month. There would be hue and cry, but there hasn't been.'"

9. Biden apologizes for forced Native American boarding school policy that caused abuse and deaths of children (October 26) "President Joe Biden delivered an apology Friday for a United States policy that forcibly separated generations of indigenous children from their families for more than 150 years and sent them to federally backed boarding schools for forced assimilation."

10. MAGA’s Closing Argument: Dad’s Coming Home (October 28) "The core MAGA message is that all these problems are really one problem: The world feels wrong now, because people don’t know how to behave."

11. Your Fave Is Problematic Politics (October 18) "This is an annoying approach to media analysis. It is a batshit approach to getting people to vote for a candidate."

12. Relatable: AOC Doesn't Want Four More Years Of Waking Up To Trump's Bullsh*t (October 29) "We should not have to live that way again. We shouldn’t have to wake up every morning and think “OK, what’s it gonna be today?” Our elected officials shouldn’t be spending their time crafting responses to everything he says or does, only for no one to even remember what they were the next day because the next day we’re onto another horrible thing."

13. Many state abortion bans include exceptions for rape. How often are they granted? (October 26, via) "Bertram Roberts says she’s never seen anyone in that state get an exemption — for any reason, let alone rape."

14. New Acquisitions: 1933 and the Definition of Fascism (October 25) "Indeed, an unprecedented number of Donald Trump’s closest, handpicked aides and advisors have refused to endorse him, many warning publicly that Trump was a danger to democracy. It is rare for any advisor or official so close to the president to refuse to endorse them; nearly half of Trump’s have so refused."

15. 《目标是宝可梦大师》中文版MV 腾格尔 (October 26) For fun, here's a Chinese song about pokemon!


Saturday, October 26, 2024

"Color Taste Texture" (a cookbook for autistics/ anyone with food aversions)

Book cover for "Color Taste Texture."

I very much enjoyed reading Color Taste Texture: Recipes for Picky Eaters, Those with Food Aversion, and Anyone Who's Ever Cringed at Food [affiliate link], by Matthew Broberg-Moffitt. The author is autistic, and according to their twitter, uses he/she/they pronouns. I'm also autistic, and I think this book is great from an autistic perspective, but it can benefit lots of people even beyond that. Anyone who is "picky" or has food aversions. (For example, the book mentions that it's common to have food aversions during pregnancy. TRUE FACTS.)

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I love the overall idea of this book

In the beginning pages of this book, Broberg-Moffitt says that there is lots of advice out there about how to "trick" picky eaters into eating things, but this is NOT their approach. No. Instead, their approach relies on thinking carefully about what specific aspects of the food you are averse to. For example, do you not like the taste of onions, or the texture? And then finding ways to work with those aversions/preferences so that you have food that you do like. 

It's fine to eat the same thing all the time, as long as you're getting enough nutrition and calories! Don't force people to try things they don't like!

I love this. I feel like I don't need the recipes in this book, but I'm really glad I read this because of its overall philosophy. Instead of feeling like you're supposed to "get over" your food aversions, or feeling like they're just silly things that you shouldn't expect other people to take seriously, this book advises that we should treat them as serious things and work with them. If you don't like to eat xyz, then let's find a way for you to eat a healthy diet which doesn't include xyz. This is great!

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Discussing individual tastes/colors/textures and how to cook food to attain these tastes/colors/textures

There is a chapter on tastes, which goes through the different tastes (sweet, bitter, etc) and gives tips for small ways you can modify your cooking process in order to give the food more of that kind of taste. 

Similarly, there is a chapter on color, which lists different colors and gives tips for how to change the food into that color without affecting the overall taste. (You could use food coloring if you want, but this book gives ideas which don't use food coloring.) For example, if your kid really wants to eat yellow food, you can add a little bit of turmeric.

Maybe it seems a little strange to care about the food's color- if the taste is the same, what does it matter? But, yeah, it matters. If the food tastes fine but it looks disgusting, then it totally makes sense that people would be too grossed out to enjoy it. Slight changes to the color can make a difference.

And there's a chapter on texture, and how to achieve certain textures when cooking. In particular, autistic people often prefer soft or smooth textures, because every bite is basically the same. You're not suddenly going to bite into something weird. *shudder*

Temperature is also important! Maybe you don't like cold food, maybe it just feels gross to you to eat cold food. That matters! Don't eat cold food then!

And the book discusses what to do if you can't stand the sound of people chewing. The book gives various suggestions- and one of the suggestions is to let the food-averse person eat alone. You might think that's not acceptable because the "ideal" is to have a nice family meal together- but if the food-averse person really really can't stand the sound of people chewing, so family meals are unpleasant for them, then you should consider the option of letting them eat alone.

In practical terms, in my own life, I don't feel I need to implement any of these suggestions. But I think the author's way of thinking is very valuable here. Instead of expecting autistic people and picky eaters to "get over it", they should think about what could make it better for them, and do that. Are there certain tastes/colors/textures you prefer? Well let's cook food that incorporates those, then.

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Recipes

About one third of this book is the discussion of practical tips to achieve certain tastes/textures/etc when cooking (as I described above), and the remaining two thirds is recipes. I just sorta skimmed the recipes; I personally don't feel that I need them. 

As I was reading this, I was thinking to myself "well, I don't really have food aversions" but actually I do. It's just that as an adult, being a "picky eater" is treated as less of a big deal, because *I* do the grocery shopping, and I just don't buy things that I don't like.

I really have "gotten over" a lot of my food aversions, though, compared to when I was a child. I don't really know how, I guess they just faded away. But, I don't like meat that has fat in it, and I don't like eating meat where you have to spit out the bones, or eating fruit where you have to spit out the seeds and skin. (Food that requires you to spit out bones/seeds is common in China. Blah. I avoid it as much as I can.)

I sometimes feel like I have to "protect" myself from food I'm eating, like kinda have to cringe away from it and not think about it as I eat it. Like there's an equilibrium between how hungry I am and how weirded out I am by the food. (Anybody else feel this way?) Eating just enough that hunger is not bothering me anymore, and then after that point I just can't. I mean, for foods I genuinely like, of course I don't have to do that, but sometimes I'm at some fast food place and there aren't any good options so I just eat a little, until I'm too repulsed to eat any more.

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Quotes

A few quotes I LOVED:

  • "I'm a classically trained chef who has never worked in the food industry because some food is just gross." (p 1)
  • "If your kid only eats chicken fingers and mashed potatoes and absolutely refuses anything else, make them the best chicken fingers and mashed potatoes. If they are getting adequate nutrition and calories, this cookbook isn't going to try to force anything else on them." (p 2)
  • "Not wanting your food to touch is, frankly, logical." (p 45)

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Conclusion

This book is great because it's about how to actually work with food aversions and cook something that people will like, rather than forcing them to "get over it."

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Related:

“Easy” Jobs and “Hard” Jobs

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