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.

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.

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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

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:

• National Network of Abortion Funds 
  
• Planned Parenthood 
  
• And it's good to donate to local organizations because they know the challenges in their specific area and they help people directly.

Rights/ democracy:

• American Civil Liberties Union 
  
• Common Cause
  

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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. 

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.