Blogaround

1. Dig All Day in the Hot Sun: Prison Labor & the Ethos of Productive Suffering at Camp Green Lake [Meta] (2020) "More broadly, this also positions Camp Green Lake's mission as deliberately individualistic, in opposition to collaboration and teamwork. The hard work of hole digging needs to be undertaken alone in order for prisoners to supposedly 'learn their lesson.' This means that the 'lesson' they're supposed to be learning is explicitly not anything to do with cooperation, coordination, or learning how to get along and work well with others. Otherwise, if these skills/values were compatible with 'building character' as the authorities understand it, then there should have been no reason to object to prisoners working together to dig the same amount of holes." (An analysis of the movie "Holes.")

Also from Coyote (osteophage): The Violence of Fate (or, How To Tell the True Kind of Lie) [Meta] (2022) "Reflecting on this helps to articulate my understanding of the concept of 'fate.' Becoming legible in terms of 'fate' requires highlighting that an outcome is unresponsive to any attempt to change it. It is something that happens to matter what you do, what you choose, or what you want. It is a way of conceptualizing events to say that your will—desire, permission, consent—fundamentally does not matter. In this way, it requires the capacity for violence."

2. ‘Too much to bear.’ The incalculable emotional toll of the Maui wildfires (August 19) "At least 114 people have died in the western Maui wildfires and more than 1,000 people remain missing."

3. This tweet: 

I was talking to my dad about those 1-10 pain scales they use at doctors' offices and how they don't really work and my dad, an engineer, said they should have a standardized needle they stab you with as a benchmark and tell you, "This is 5."

— Abby Denton's favorite Digimon is Koemon (@mizabitha) August 18, 2023

Wow I love the way this guy thinks. Remember when I blogged about the 1-10 pain scale and what it actually means?

4. The Queer Vibes of Guardians of the Galaxy (August 19) 2-hour-15-minute video from Jessie Gender. "I relate to [Nebula] so hard as a trans person, because both of us have had our bodies literally forced to be something that we didn't want them to be."

Also, I love this song from "Guardians of the Galaxy 3": Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 - Dog Days Are Over 

5. A Brand New Puzzle Type - This Is LOVELY (August 12) 31-minute video. Wow this is a cool little puzzle. I didn't understand the rules at first- I thought you were supposed to put a number in every box, like a fillomino (and that wouldn't be possible). No, you don't put any numbers in at all, it's just about dividing the grid up into regions such that the given numbers are in valid places.

6. Meet ‘creation care,’ the evangelical substitute for environmental activism (July 13) "As part of their self-declared role as ambassadors, evangelicals pretend that Jesus is very nicely allowing his most beloved and trusted followers to manage things for him in his absence, like parents allowing small children to help with light housework so they feel involved."

The Slacktivist has also written about how "creation care" is seen as "controversial" in evangelical culture, because it's "liberal" or something:
The Late Great Planet Earth (2017)
Climate change (2005)

When I was an evangelical... typically nobody discussed the question "should we protect the environment?" in a serious way, but there was a lot of mocking of environmentalists- which taught me that Christians aren't supposed to care about the environment, but never gave any reasons why. There was 1 time though, I was at an InterVarsity conference, and we did a bible study about why "creation care" is important. And a lot of us kind of responded like "I always thought Christians shouldn't care about this, but... but yeah, of course we should protect the environment." Like if you actually think about it, there aren't any good arguments to support "let's trash the planet, it doesn't matter" even though we all had been implicitly taught that's what Christians are supposed to believe. (Possible arguments given are: Jesus is going to come back any minute now, so no need to care about the future; the bible says the world was perfect when God created it, and just getting worse and worse since then, and there's nothing we can do to change that; climate change isn't real. None of these arguments really work, though.)

7. Customers wing it, as fried chicken store drums up crowd (August 20) A Popeye's restaurant opened in Shanghai.

8. What put Hurricane Hilary on a collision course with California? (August 20, via) "For at least the last 165 years, these conditions have kept California hurricane-free, experts say."