Blogaround

1. Justice Sotomayor's dissent in Donald J. Trump vs United States (July 1, via) "Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity."

2. Texas’s Abortion Ban is Killing Babies (July 3) "But the people most at risk, in my opinion, are people who DO want children. Because while abortion in the early weeks and months of pregnancy is now safe and easy, pregnancy remains a very dangerous condition. You may be able to detect a nonviable fetus early and fly somewhere to get an abortion if you can afford it, but even a well-off woman can experience an emergency and simply not have the time to get somewhere they can access decent medical care. In an emergency, a pregnant person will need to go to a local hospital, and in Texas a doctor will be forced to decide how much risk they want to take on. Is the woman close enough to death to perform an abortion? Should we roll the dice and hope she lives? Personally I wouldn’t want to bet my life on a doctor prioritizing a fetus over me."

Yes. This. When I was pregnant, I was following all the news stories from the US about wanted pregnancies which had gone horribly wrong. It's so heartless, the way these "pro-life" politicians treat women. Imagine being pregnant, and you love your baby already, and then you find out the baby has some terrible medical condition and is very unlikely to survive, and you spend so much time researching it, trying to see if there's any hope, and finally you come to the terrible conclusion that the least-bad option is an abortion- and then you have to FIGHT for it, fight for something you don't even want, you wanted a living baby but that's not an option, and these "pro-life" politicians act like they love your baby more than you do, like you're the one being bad and immoral, on the worst day of your life when you are finally able to get the abortion.

Makes me so mad.

(And also, if you just simply don't want to be pregnant, that's a valid reason to get an abortion too.)

3. ‘The Political Violence Of Herod’ (July 15) "Voter suppression and voter intimidation is political violence. Forcing women to carry health-threatening, nonviable pregnancy is political violence. Deporting 20 million people is political violence. Declaring some presidents to be above the law is political violence that endorses political violence."

4. LLM error rates (July 16) "If you expect LLMs to have god-like reasoning skills, or to magically know things they were never taught, it’s not going to work. If you expect them to perform well on a task that realistically speaking requires 99+% accuracy, they don’t do that. But if the LLM is trying to complete a task that would otherwise be done humans, we’re also extremely prone to error, so there must be some level of error tolerance. In this case the LLM doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to do better than our sorry human asses."

5. China’s Visa-Free Policies Spark Tourism Spike (July 16) Cool! China has been expanding the list of countries whose citizens can enter China without a visa.

Also from Sixth Tone: China’s MBTI Obsession Has Gone Too Far, Academics Say (July 17) "Users are swapping tips on how to game tests during job applications, and some companies have even begun advertising MBTI tutoring services to help job seekers align their answers with employers’ expectations." Oh geez.

6. United Airlines expands China-US routes with more direct flights (July 17) This is good news for immigrants like me.

7. This tweet

plastic surgery used to make me uncomfortable, but then someone I loved had terrible dysphoria about her small breasts & wanted implants. I said surgery couldn’t fix emotions. But I was wrong! She’s been fine & happy fifteen years on. It helped me understand gender affirming care https://t.co/VArLlB5tWJ

— 🌈Dr. Frizzle (@Swilua) July 16, 2024

Plus the next one in the thread

If you feel miserable in your body and it’s making it hard to live your life and there is something you can do to fix it, why is that bad?

— 🌈Dr. Frizzle (@Swilua) July 16, 2024

This is interesting to me because I grew up evangelical, and in that culture people are always talking about how if there's something you really really want, and you feel like you can't live without it, and you feel like it would solve all your problems, well that's never true. Evangelicals say that the truth is only God can satisfy our desires- if you finally get that thing you really really want, it still won't be good enough, you'll still be unhappy and desiring even more. You're making it an idol. The only solution is to learn to truly be content in God, to truly believe that none of those other desires really matter. (Philippians 4:12)

Fast forward to when I became an adult, making adult decisions about things like my job and where I would live, and- get this- when I made changes to improve my life, it really did make things better! Like "wow I'm so glad we don't live in that old apartment any more." Being much happier every single day because of a life change. Wow! Is it supposed to work that way? Wasn't I just supposed to "be content in God"? (See: In Which John Piper Doesn't Tell You To Find A New Job and I knew Desiring God ideology is spiritual abuse, but wow.)

So this tweet is about getting breast implants- as a cis person, not for transgender reasons- and how it really did improve someone's life. To be honest, I've always wondered how it worked getting breast implants, because in pop culture it's always talked about as a joke. I wonder, do you go to the doctor and say you want bigger boobs, and the doctor is all wink-wink-nudge-nudge-giggle-giggle, like the wedding dress consultants on those reality shows talking about making "the girls" look good? ("The girls" means one's boobs.) Or is the doctor very professional about it and talking frankly about what exactly you want? And what would you even say, in a frank conversation about how you want your boobs to look?

Anywayyyy just linking the tweet here because the idea of breast implants genuinely improving someone's mental health (and not related to transgender reasons) is something I haven't thought about before.

8. Brooks Falls Brown Bears Low powered by EXPLORE.org (started streaming June 21, via) This is a livestream of a bear cam in Alaska. I love this!