Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Cracker Barrel, Anglican Converts, and Tradition’s Aesthetic (August 25, via) "That draw into nostalgia—even or especially nostalgia for something we never experienced like the rural South of the 1930s or the high medieval English cathedral—can drive us to over-inflate continuities between ourselves and the past and to idealize rituals, expressions and—in the case of church and Cracker Barrel—aesthetics we think capture our imagined communities in their purest form."

Related to this is the idea that white people have a culture. I didn't get that when I was growing up- I thought the way I lived was just the regular way, and other people who ate weird food and celebrated weird holidays did so because it was their culture. The link talks about the misconception that the liturgical rituals in the Anglican church are the same as those from the very beginning of the church- the idea that these rituals are just neutral and normal and the way it always was- no, this is not true.

2. More Drowning Children (March 21) "God notices there is one extra spot in Heaven, and plans to give it to either you or your neighbor. He knows that you jump in the water and save one child per day, and your neighbor (if he were in the same situation) would save zero. He also knows that you are willing to pay 80% of the cost of a lifeguard, and your neighbor (who makes exactly the same amount of money as you) would pay 0%. However, in reality, the river and the drowning children are going by your house, not your neighbor’s house. Which of you should get the spot in Heaven?"

3. AI Companies’ Race for Engagement Has a Body Count (August 28, via) "Instead of providing meaningful safety measures, transparency, age assurance, and data privacy protections, Meta and others have chosen to build platforms that deliberately blur the line between human and machine."

The thing that really gets me about this is, I know that some people will respond by saying, well, that's just how an LLM is, you don't really know how it works internally or what it's going to do in every situation, so this is not anybody's fault, it's just the way it is. But I think this is the wrong way of looking at it- companies should be held accountable for making a product that will respond in unpredictable (and possibly dangerous) ways. There's no guarantee that this is safe, and yet they're selling it.

4. BREAKING: Eurgh, oh God, there’s a texture (August 29, via) "Even when you successfully manage to scrub away the last of the peanut butter, its memory will stain your hands, causing you to experience a level of anguish previously only felt by Lady Macbeth."

This is so real. This is exactly what it's like.

5. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Make Their First Public Appearance as an Engaged Couple—Just a Few Miles From NFL Star’s $6 Million Mansion (August 29) Aww that's great! (I am a Taylor Swift fan.)

6. Un-Reformed history (August 28) "Bai imagines that he’s positioning himself as a reasonable centrist and Serious Person because he’s rejecting “critical race theory,” but what he’s actually rejecting is total depravity and original sin."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Florida's 'Alligator Alcatraz' detention facility to be empty 'within a few days' (August 28) 

2. 2 firefighters arrested by Border Patrol at Washington’s Bear Gulch Fire (August 28) "In a statement Thursday, Sen. Patty Murray slammed the arrests as unnecessary, and demanded “immediate answers” as to why the men were arrested on the job, and what the immigration enforcement policy is during active wildfires."

3. Hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children can stay in the U.S. for now, judge says (August 31) "'In the dead of night on a holiday weekend, the Trump administration ripped vulnerable, frightened children from their beds and attempted to return them to danger in Guatemala,' said Efrén Olivares, a lead attorney at the National Immigration Law Center. 'We are heartened the Court prevented this injustice from occurring before hundreds of children suffered irreparable harm.'"

Also: A high schooler stays back as his family, separated by deportation, returns to Guatemala (April 26) "Two weeks after federal officials arrested his father, Alex drove his mom and siblings to the airport for their flight to Guatemala. He's faced with finishing his senior year of high school without his mom or dad and finding a way to make it on his own with his older brother. Alex just turned 18."

4. Michigan AG Warns UM Hospitals Not To Capitulate Over Trump's Trans Ban, Calls Decision Likely "Illegal" (August 27) "'This administration draws most of its power from the willingness of its targets to capitulate without a fight, abandoning their own principles and interests, and throwing disfavored populations under the bus,' Nessel continued. 'Despite repeated successful legal challenges to actions by this administration, UM has chosen instead to sacrifice the health, well-being, and likely the very lives of Michigan children, to protect itself from the ire of an administration who, oftentimes, engages in unlawful actions itself.'"

5. Another major medical association breaks from CDC as ob/gyn group recommends Covid-19  vaccines during pregnancy (August 23) "'While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently removed its recommendation that pregnant and lactating individuals receive updated COVID-19 vaccines, ACOG’s recommendations have not changed,' according to the updated practice advisory. 'The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists continues to recommend the use of updated COVID-19 vaccines in individuals contemplating pregnancy and in pregnant, recently pregnant, and lactating individuals.'"

Just reading an apologetics book and asking "why are we doing this?"

Book cover for "The Case for a Creator"

So I was at a used book sale and saw this: The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel, and snatched it up. Because I used to be an apologetics nerd, and I used to be a creationist, and I read Strobel's books "The Case for Christ" and "The Case for Faith" when I was in high school. But then, years later, I read atheist responses to them, and realized that those books came across like "we have such solid evidence for our faith, atheists don't even know what to say", but it's not true, atheists in fact have a lot of things to say. I got really turned off of apologetics after reading atheist responses. The atheists make some good points. Good for them.

Anyway I saw this book, "The Case for a Creator," (published in 2004) and I was like "ooh a creationist book, I wonder how it will come across to me now, since I'm in such a different place than when I read Strobel's other books."

So here's my review of the book, and also some opinions about apologetics in general.

When You Believe God is Out to Get You

A rock with the words "God answers prayer" on it. Image source.

I recently posted this link, Asylum-seekers thought they were following the rules. Now some are told to start over, and I have some more things I want to say about it.

The article is about how the MAGA government is using this strategy to screw over immigrants who are applying for asylum: Find some minor part of the process that wasn't done exactly according to the rules, and then say that it invalidates the whole process. (And in some cases, it was not the applicant's fault- they didn't have an interview because the government did not have any available times to do interviews.)

On one level, I understand that people can make the argument that this is what the rules say, so this is how it should work- if you don't follow all the steps correctly, then you don't get approved. But take a step back and ask what the overall goal is. For these MAGAs, it appears to me that the goal is to deport as many immigrants as possible. So they're looking for anything they can use as a reason to reject someone's application. 

But the original intention of the asylum system is this: Some people are forced to leave their home countries because they are genuinely in danger. In that kind of situation, they *should* have the right to live in the US. And if you're thinking about it from this perspective, you don't reject people just because they didn't do every single step perfectly. You give them support to help them through all the steps, and/or just don't make it an issue if some of the less-important steps aren't quite done perfectly.

These 2 contrasting perspectives- which I'll call "the government is out to get you" vs "people *should* get approved if they genuinely meet the criteria"- well, they made me think about how evangelicals talk about God. Is God out to get us, or do They genuinely want to help people?

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The most obvious example of "God is out to get you" is the evangelical teaching about salvation. Who goes to heaven, and who goes to hell? Well, evangelicals believe this: Everyone deserves to go to hell. You have to be totally perfect and sinless to go to heaven. Yeah, sure, God loves us, God wants us to go to heaven, he's sad that we're all going to hell- but his hands are tied. That's the rules. If you have committed any sin at all, at any point in your life, you deserve to go to hell, and so God has to send you to hell. 

Oh, but, good news, God figured out a workaround. Jesus came and died on the cross, to take all our sins onto himself, so that we would appear to be perfect and sinless and therefore can go to heaven. But, in order to get your sins forgiven, you have to "pray the prayer" to "ask Jesus into your heart." You have to believe the correct things about Jesus. You have to really really sincerely believe. If you jump through those hoops correctly, then God is allowed to let you into heaven. If not, well, his hands are tied. 

Yes, apparently God loves all of us, but rules are rules, and if people didn't believe the correct things in the correct way and have the correct attitude in their hearts, sadly God just can't let them into heaven. They will be tortured in hell forever. I was taught that this was the gospel, this was the central message of Christianity, this is what we need to tell the world.

But, sometimes people would ask, what about someone who has never heard of Jesus? It doesn't seem fair for them to go to hell if they never had a chance to do all those correct steps to get to heaven. 

When I was evangelical, and non-Christians brought up this point to argue that God is being unfair, I answered by saying "well, one idea I've heard is 'people will be judged based on what they knew.' God will determine if you *would have* believed in Jesus, if given the chance, and let you into heaven on that basis." 

I said it like this- "one idea I've heard"- because I didn't know if that was for real. Sure, it seems better and more fair to say "people will be judged based on what they knew"- but is that in the bible anywhere? Are we just making this up to feel better about our religion? Carving out this exception for people who have never heard of Jesus- is that really valid?

Plus, it leads to all kinds of contradictions with other evangelical beliefs. If it's true that people go to heaven even if they've never heard of Jesus but "would have" believed, then it's not really so important for Christians to go into all the world as missionaries and tell people about Jesus. In fact, perhaps people have a better chance of getting into heaven if they've never heard, because then God judges them based on this "what if you had heard about Jesus in an ideal way" standard- maybe that gives them a better chance than "they kinda sorta heard about Jesus but not in that much detail, and so they never really gave it any thought, and didn't convert to Christianity." 

But you very much do NOT see Christians saying "hey, maybe we *shouldn't* be missionaries, because 'God judges people based on what they knew.'" Instead, you see Christians saying "We NEED to send missionaries to tell everyone about Jesus, to save them from hell! !!! This is so important! People are in danger of going to hell! This is something worth giving your life for!" 

No, this "God judges based on what they knew" idea isn't something that evangelicals truly believe and have thought through the implications of. It's just something we say when someone raises the objection that the criteria to get into heaven seem unfair. To be consistent with the rest of evangelical Christian ideology, you'd have to believe that God's hands are tied- he loves people and wants them to go to heaven, but rules are rules and there's nothing he can do about it.

The question of "what if someone didn't believe in Jesus because they've never heard" is sort of the easiest one. For all the other reasons that someone might not believe in Jesus because they had a bad experience with Christianity, evangelicals don't discuss whether there might be some kind of carve-out exception to help them. No. Rules are rules. God's hands are tied.

For example, what if someone is gay, and Christians are so mean to them about it, that they leave the church and don't believe in Jesus? What if someone is sexually abused by their pastor, and Christians are so heartless and victim-blamy about it, that they leave Christianity behind? What if someone really really wants to believe in God, and they pray and pray for God to show them They are real, they try everything they can, and they never get any response from God, so they give up on it? No, evangelicals think all these people are going to hell. Rules are rules.

As I said in my 2015 post When Christians Say "We're Sorry":

If Christians really are sorry, they know that people need to heal on their own terms.

But of course, like I said earlier, believing in hell screws this all up. Because how sorry can you really be, and how much freedom can you really allow a victim to have, when you believe in a God who won't care about that on judgment day? When you believe in a God who doesn't care that church people hurt this person, and for their own mental and emotional health, they never went to church again... when you believe in a God who says you're out if you don't believe these specific doctrines about Jesus- no excuses.

How sorry can you really be when you worship a God who puts "the gospel" above caring for victims?

If all this is true, I want to ask this question: Does God actually want people to go to heaven?

Yeah, I know the evangelical answer to that is of course God wants everyone to go to heaven! God wants it so much that he came and died for us!

But then, why are so many people failing to get "saved" because of reasons that don't really feel like good enough reasons to send someone to hell? Doesn't it seem like, if God really wanted people to go to heaven, They could set up a different system, to genuinely help people get on the path to get there? Rather than rejecting a huge proportion of humanity because they didn't believe the "right" things in the "right" way.

And yeah, I know the evangelical answer to this is, well those people must have not *really* wanted to follow God. On some level, they wanted to rebel against God, and these other factors are just excuses. God gives us free will, and some people choose to reject him. He respects their decision. (And sends them to hell for it.)

I know that's the "answer," but I don't buy it.

Also, many evangelicals have experienced salvation anxiety- ie, the worry that perhaps, when we prayed to commit our lives to Jesus, we didn't quite do it in *exactly* the right way, and therefore we're not really "saved" and we're going to hell. Maybe we didn't say the right words, or maybe we didn't "really mean it." So much worry and psychoanalyzing yourself. It's common for evangelicals to "pray the prayer" many many times, just in case all the previous times you somehow did it wrong. Children praying to Jesus every night to save them from hell, and still constantly worried that they didn't quite have the right feelings or right motivations, so what if it didn't "count"?

I submit to you that this is not a God that wants people to go to heaven. This is a God who is out to get us.

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There are plenty of other circumstances where Christians believe that God set up some kind of thing for people's benefit, but people didn't quite follow all the technicalities of all the rules, and so missed out on the entire thing. We should be asking, did God actually want people to have those benefits, or not? Setting up a system of confusing rules, where one mistake means you fail the entire thing. Doesn't seem like something one would do if one wanted people to actually succeed.

For example, you're praying for something, and it doesn't happen. You keep praying for it, for a long time, and it still doesn't happen. What gives? Doesn't the bible say "whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours"? Didn't Jesus say, "You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it"? And yet many people have the experience of praying for something for a long time, and God doesn't make it happen.

Well, the evangelical answer for this is that these biblical promises about prayer come with all kinds of caveats. Maybe the problem is that you prayed for something that was outside of God's will. Maybe the problem is that you prayed with the wrong motives. Maybe the problem is that you have some sin in your life that you haven't repented of, and so God is refusing to answer your prayers.

A lot of Christians have had the experience of wanting something so bad- something very serious, like for a family member to be healed of a serious medical problem- and trying everything they possibly can to get their prayers to "work." Trying so hard to make sure you have the right feelings and the right motives while praying. Trying so hard to make sure you're not doing anything that God might interpret as sinful. Troubleshooting. Why isn't this working?

Yeah, the model we're working with here is that God has set up a system where They answer prayers. God's power to give us whatever we ask is right there, available to us. But you have to do all of the steps perfectly. If you don't quite meet all of the criteria completely perfectly, well, that must be the reason God isn't answering your prayer.

Kind of makes you wonder if God actually wants to answer prayers at all. Rules are rules, God's hands are tied... But maybe if They actually wanted to answer prayers, if They actually wanted these promises to mean anything, They could have gone about this differently. 

Another example: Years ago, I had some health problems, and that caused me to no longer believe in the concept of "trusting God." Because, apparently I can't "trust God" to not let health problems derail my whole life. What does "trusting God" even mean, if apparently this is within the range of things which God is okay with allowing to happen to me? Trust him to do what, exactly? Not letting my internal organs try to ruin my life for no reason is apparently NOT something I can trust God for.

Anyway, I once told a Christian friend my whole sad story about my health problems and why I don't trust God. (This was way after it had happened, and I wasn't having those problems any more.) And she said, "Maybe God was trying to teach you something."

Ugh. Geez. Maybe God was trying to teach me something. Yeah, this is something that Christians believe, that God allows bad things to happen to us because They have "a plan" and maybe They're trying to teach us to love Them more or be a better person or something like that.

And I said, "Well then God did a bad job, because I didn't learn anything from this, and that's not my fault." See normally, in this ideology, it would be *my fault*, that God made these bad things happen to me, with some high-minded purpose about teaching me something important, and I totally missed that message- that would be my fault. Must have been because I didn't have the right attitude, I didn't pray the right way, whatever, that's how I missed out on this very important lesson that God wanted to teach me by [checks notes] making me feel sick all the time. My fault. Not God's.

If God wanted to teach me something, maybe They could have gone about it in a different way. Also, isn't God all-knowing? They knew this wasn't gonna work, but They did it to me anyway? This God seems really bad at planning.

You have to ask, did this God actually want to teach me something, or not?

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Here's what it all adds up to: In this ideology, there are amazing wonderful things that God wants to give us because God loves us so much. But, any little mistake on our part might ruin the whole thing. These big grand promises about how God loves everyone and wants everyone to go to heaven, how God is so eager and ready to answer prayer and to give us good things- contrast that with the reality that oh, apparently only a small percentage of people are able to get those good things, because everyone else makes some minor mistake and therefore loses out on the whole thing.

Kinda looks like God doesn't actually want to do those things for us.

I wish Christians would stop asking "what did I do wrong, that is stopping God from answering my prayers" and instead ask "why did God set up a system where you only get your prayers answered if you pray in the exact perfect way, and then not do anything to help us know what that exact perfect way is?"

Because, isn't the point that we are not perfect, and that's okay, God loves us and meets us where we are? We were not able to reach God, so God came down to us. We aren't able to be good enough on our own, but God's love makes up for it. Isn't that what Christianity is about? "We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans." "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." "We love because he first loved us.""

As for me, I'm a Christian, but I don't pray and I don't believe God intervenes in the world, because of questions like this. When you believe God intervened in some specific way to help you with some specific thing you experienced, then that raises all sorts of questions about all of the times that God did not intervene to help people, and however you answer those questions, it can't lead to anywhere good. It leads to victim-blaming, or perhaps a belief that God has biases about who is worth helping and who isn't. No, I don't believe in that.

When Christians give all sorts of reasons why it's right for God to send someone to hell for not believing the right things, or why God's not helping you or answering your prayers because of some little thing you didn't do perfectly, this isn't a God who genuinely loves people and wants to help them. This is a God who is out to get you.

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Related: 

ICE and Hell 

I'm SO HAPPY I Won't Be Praying During Childbirth

I Didn't Like the Ocean in "Moana" Because it was Too Much Like God

"The Case for Open Borders": Family separation

Migrant parent and child. Image source.

Here's another quote from "The Case for Open Borders". From page 217:

Draconian immigration enforcement measures don't do much better than walls. In one of the most drastically anti-human immigration policies in recent years, the Trump administration ripped thousands of children away from their parents in an attempt to punish and dissuade more families from trying to cross the border. And yet, in the immediately following months of implementing that heinously cruel policy, more families crossed the border than in preceding months. That's because they were fleeing crushing poverty, deadly violence, and utter hopelessness in their home countries. They were doing what anybody would do-- seek dignity and safety-- and neither the wall nor Trump's anti-immigrant barking kept them at home.

As poet Warsan Shire writes in "Home":

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark...

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land

"Faith" means "doing something that is a bad idea"

Image with the word "Faith" on a black background. Image source.

I saw this article, from Hemant Mehta on the Friendly Atheist blog, An Alabama church secretly sent kids to evangelize in a homeless encampment, and I want to talk about it.

Basically what happened is, there was a kids' church camp run by an Alabama church, which at one point took the kids into a homeless encampment to evangelize there- even though the homeless encampment was very much NOT part of the trip that these kids had signed up for. These church leaders just kinda sent the kids to talk to people, without much adult supervision or awareness of safety concerns.

Afterward, one of the leaders, Mike Webb, had this to say:

… When we went to Tent City, I'm not gonna lie, when we first pulled up, we went to the food bank. When we left, I knew that we needed to go serve the homeless, not just in the food bank where it was safe. We needed to get out of our comfort zone and go… As we were leaving, I Googled "Where can I find the homeless population in Houston?" First thing pops up? Tent City. So that's where we're going.

We drive over there in the vans. We pull in.

Ain't no way I'm getting these kids out of this van. I will be fired. Mamas will be beatin’ down my door. We're not getting out.

We pulled to the end. We circled the cul-de-sac. We're pulling back out.

Guys…?

I even… I even tried to justify it.

Guys, I just want you to see what's here. I want you to see how people live. I need you to understand how fortunate you are. This is what it is, guys. All right, let's head back to the ranch…

…

[After decided to return]

But let me just tell you: We get out, we walk through, and we didn't have anything, because we didn't know what we were doing. That was another piece of it: I didn't want to walk in there with 75 people, into a homeless village, and we ain't got anything to give. Like, we're just invading your space, you know what I mean?

But we had that older couple that walked with us, and we began talking, and I said, "Guys, we're coming back tomorrow. We're going to put together some food. We're going to put together some sandwiches. We're going to come back. We're going to feed, and we're going to open doors."

And everybody was, you know, hearing this message, and we started promoting it amongst the people. We started telling them that was kind of our… our initial welcome.

Hey, we're going to be back here tomorrow…

Oh... this is so real. I know this way of thinking.

This is so common, for Christians to talk this way, to think this way. As if "faith" means God is telling you to do something wild and ill-advised, and you know a lot of people are going to tell you it's a bad idea, but the right thing to do is jump right in, trust God, say yes to the amazing terrifying adventure that God is calling you on.

I feel like the way Webb tells the story is a little hard to follow if you're not familiar with this ideology- he's describing the conflict within himself as he tries to decide whether to take the kids into the homeless camp or not. He feels like God wants him to, but he also knows a whole lot of reasons why it's a bad idea. ("I even tried to justify it" means "I felt like God wanted us to let the kids get out of the van there, but I didn't want to do that, so I tried to tell myself that it was good enough to just drive through and let the kids look at it without letting them get out- but that wasn't full obedience to God.") He struggles and then eventually decides to do it.

He *knew* that the kids' parents wouldn't be happy. He *knew* that none of them really had any training about how to help homeless people. All of that just makes for a more exciting story. What an amazing Christian role model, having faith so big it overcame these concerns that a reasonable person would have had.

The way he tells the story, the point is that it's thrilling because God wanted him to take the kids there, even though it seemed like a bad idea, but you need to trust God and do it anyway, even when you're scared. That's what faith is. Supposedly. The more it seems like a bad idea, the more it shows just how committed you are to God. God wants you to get out of your comfort zone!

I don't believe in this anymore, this religion that glamorizes reckless, one-off gestures, where it's more important that you personally had a wild adventure with God, than that you helped people in the real world. The way to actually make a difference is to do the really boring stuff. Do the work of listening to people, learning, caring about people. If you show up with nothing- no resources, no experience, no idea what you're doing- with nothing but the belief that God is sending you there, well, that doesn't help. That doesn't make you a hero of faith.

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Related:

Renee Bach, who had no medical training, opened a clinic in Africa. Just like missionaries are supposed to.

Evangelism and Deception 

This is so normal. We just don't usually say it in front of other people.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. ChatGPT is the new appeal to authority for right-wing Christians (July 21) "Right-wing Christians perform an ecstatic devotion they call speaking in tongues, and then try to get ChatGPT to guess the language they used."

2. Did this Kid Use AI to Fake Research About How Great AI Is? (August 21) "But this is not another case of a few fudged numbers. This is a case of a guy who just straight made up an entire study and convinced the world that it was real."

3. Ministry of Violence (August 22) [content note: physical abuse of children] One of the biggest things James Dobson was known for was his teaching about how to "discipline" your kids, ie, kids are evil little tyrants, and if they are ever stubborn or disobedient about anything, that's a power struggle that the parent needs to win, by hitting the child until the child totally surrenders. He gave detailed advice on how exactly to go about hitting your children.

I didn't mention it in my post because that aspect of his teaching didn't have much effect on me personally. But yes, I'm glad people are writing about this. This was a huge part of what he was teaching.

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Image text: "In The Lion King (1997), Scar makes false campaign promises by guaranteeing to eliminate hunger, but actively makes the problem worse instead. This is the most realistic part of the movie." Image source. (Fact check: It was 1994.)

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Living in the shadows: Why stateless people fear Trump's immigration crackdown (August 21) "An estimated 218,000 people in the U.S. are stateless or at risk of becoming so, according to the Center for Migration Studies."

2. Judge orders DOJ to give more info on subpoenas targeting trans minors' medical care (August 21) "The subpoena in question, issued to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia1 (referred to in court documents often as “CHOP”), is extremely invasive — not only as to the medical providers but, relevant here, as to their patients."

3. Special Report: U.S. Immigration Policy and the Mental Health of Children and Families (July 25) "Forced family separations, particularly those resulting from immigration enforcement (e.g., detention, deportation), introduce acute psychological risks. A national study of 547 U.S.-born adolescents ages 11 to 16 found that having a detained or deported family member was associated with elevated risk for suicidal ideation, externalizing behaviors, and alcohol use (Roche, et al., 2020). In young children, abrupt caregiver loss has been linked to sleep and appetite disturbances, emotional dysregulation, and developmental regression (MacLean, et al., 2019). Forcible separation from a caregiver is recognized as an adverse childhood experience (ACE) that contributes to toxic stress, ambiguous loss, and long-term risk for psychiatric disorders (Roberts, et al., 2014; Lu, et al., 2020)."

4. Kilmar Abrego Garcia detained by ICE during Baltimore check-in (August 25) "'God is with us. God will never leave us. God will bring justice to all of the injustice we are suffering,' Abrego Garcia said, fighting through tears."

5. ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ may be shut down before Halloween. Florida already has a backup plan (August 24) "The Miccosukee Tribe, a Native American tribe whose reservation lies within miles of the facility, raised serious concerns about the impact the facility will have on their land and the environmentally sensitive area, including the plants and animals that inhabit the Everglades."

6. Concentration camps are not just part of our past, but our present and future (August 22, via) "...the most important aspect of recognizing this history is not so those of us descended from settlers or who have otherwise benefited from the legacy of colonialism feel shame, but rather 'to recognize that these tactics, [a division into] savage vs. civilized, continues to inhabit our society. At any moment, these sentiments are still there and this way of thinking emerges.'"

7. Trump Admin Bans Coverage For Trans Govt Employees, Mandates Conversion Therapy Coverage (August 21) "On Friday, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management issued a memo announcing that, beginning in 2026, all federal employee health plans will be barred from covering gender-affirming care—including hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgeries—for both transgender youth and adults."

Because of James Dobson, Christians Believe that Christianity Means Judging and Excluding Queer People

In 2022, after the Club Q shooting, Focus on the Family Colorado was vandalized with graffiti that says "Their blood is on your hands. Five lives taken." Image source and news article here: Influential evangelical group that opposes LGBT+ rights vandalised after Colorado Springs mass shooting

James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, has died.

When I think about Focus on the Family, I have a lot of anger and sadness. I grew up reading books written by Dobson, reading Brio magazine (Focus on the Family's magazine for teen girls), reading fundraising newsletters from Dobson. It was all about how, as Christians, we know the correct way to live, we know God's way to live, we know that if people don't follow God's rules, there will be bad results, and so we have to fight to make sure our culture doesn't normalize breaking God's rules.

I really believed all of it. 

And there's a lot I could say, but the areas where this has affected me the most are purity culture and queer acceptance. Yeah, the main source that taught me purity culture was Brio magazine. I totally believed it, totally believed all of it. Totally believed that "losing your virginity" would turn you into a completely different kind of person, unworthy of love, unable to ever have a good marriage. Totally believed that the best-case scenario was to never have physical contact with a guy, until marriage. Totally believed that it was an emergency every time I had a crush- I had to "guard my heart." Totally believed that all of this came straight from God's mouth. 

Purity culture has been such a huge thing in my life. I've blogged about it a lot... I don't really want to say too much in this blog post because it is such a huge thing. 

What I really want to talk about is queerness.

Long ago, when I was a teenager, before I had ever met any queer people, I was reading Focus on the Family's propaganda about them. It was about how being gay is so wrong, so disgusting, and isn't it just horrible that society is beginning to accept them? If there was ever a gay character on TV, Focus on the Family would raise the alarm about it, get all the conservative Christians outraged- how dare this TV show portray a gay person as a regular person that we can empathize with! Pushing the message that gay people exist and that's just fine- NO! The horror! It's not fine, it's against God's law, and everyone who is living "the gay lifestyle" is secretly miserable, and it's an outrage that the media is pushing this dangerous, false message that it's okay to be gay.

There were books that Focus on the Family promoted- which I read- "Marriage Under Fire" (by Dobson) and "The Homosexual Agenda", if you really want to know- which were about how we CANNOT legalize same-sex marriage. That would destroy society. People may ask "how, exactly, would it destroy society...? Seems like if you're not gay, it doesn't affect you?" Well, these books had an answer for that. You see, if same-sex marriage is legal, then people will think it's okay to marry a same-sex partner, which will totally change people's understanding of what marriage is, which will lead to polygamy and people marrying their dogs and pedophilia.

I believed all that. 

And... well, it's a long story, but I wanted to learn more about how to help those pathetic gay people who were trapped in "the gay lifestyle" and needed to know God's love and God's rules and how their lives would be so much better if they just try to stop doing gay things. As I learned more and more- specifically, reading blog posts from gay Christians- I realized that everything that Focus on the Family had said was bullshit.

The bullshit. The mind-boggling expansiveness of the bullshit. Day in and day out, writing about how those bad gay people are going to DESTROY MARRIAGE- and it was all lies. It's really quite astounding, when you recognize the full scope of it... What would cause someone to go out in public, again and again and again, and say nasty, dehumanizing, completely false things about a group of people? How are people doing that and claiming to be Christians, claiming to follow the bible? The bible says "do not bear false witness against your neighbor."

And claiming that we know the correct way to live because God told us, and if you disagree, you're disagreeing with God- the bible says "do not take the Lord's name in vain."

When I think about James Dobson, when I think about Focus on the Family, I think of the verse where Jesus said:

If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

Because of the bullshit propaganda promoted by Focus on the Family and other nice Christian groups, people believe that an important part of being Christian is discriminating against queer people. Really. Seriously. So many Christians who, upon hearing about the some aspect of queer people's lives, have a knee-jerk reaction "that's bad, that's against God" rather than wanting to learn about it in order to care about people and "love your neighbor as yourself." So many non-Christians believe that Christianity is anti-LGBTQ. So many news articles with headlines about the fight between Christianity and queer rights, as if something that's good news for queer people is obviously bad news for Christians.

Dobson played a big role in this. Because of Dobson, people believe Christianity is about judging and excluding queer people. Because of Dobson, people believe that "morality" means making rules for other people's sex lives, rather than anything related to helping people. Because of Dobson, news articles say things like "people are voting based on their values" and we all understand it means being cruel to queer people.

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This article from Wonkette has about the right amount of respect towards Dobson: James Dobson Meets His Maker. (It Is The Devil.)

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See also, the Focus on the Family tag on my blog

"Egalitarian Pleasure Party"

Clip art image of a balance scale with a female symbol on one side and male symbol on the other side. Image source.

[content note: it's about Christians teaching that men are supposed to sexually dominate women]

This is something that flitters through my mind every now and then, and I think to myself "I should blog about that" but also "maybe no one cares because it happened in 2012." Well, Doug Wilson is in the news now, for being a pastor who is super conservative and sexist, like so over-the-top sexist, you didn't even know there *were* people this sexist... so the moment has finally come when I can blog about this.

Gather 'round, it's story time.

In 2012, the book "Fifty Shades of Grey" was very popular, and the evangelical Christian blogosphere was all up in arms about it. The evangelical Christian position was, this book is BAD because it's about a sexual relationship outside of marriage, and it's being portrayed as positive and exciting. (No, for the most part, evangelical Christians did not notice that it was about an *abusive* relationship being portrayed as positive and exciting. In Christian "purity" ideology, the one and only indicator of whether a relationship is good or bad is "are they having sex outside of marriage?") And also, women being interested in this book is basically the same as watching porn, which is basically the same as cheating on your husband. (Or your future husband, if you're not married.)

Anyway, in the midst of all this pearl-clutching, Jared Wilson published an article on The Gospel Coalition's website, called The Polluted Waters of 50 Shades of Grey, etc. That's the original link, but the article was taken down due to the backlash. I couldn't find an archive link, but many bloggers wrote articles in response to it, and quoted big chunks from it, so you can get a good idea of what it said. I'm looking at Rachel Held Evans's post, The Gospel Coalition, sex, and subordination.

Here's a summary of Jared Wilson's article: Hmm, why is it that women are so interested in "Fifty Shades of Grey"? Ah, it's because women have a natural, God-given desire to be sexually dominated by men. Our society has lost sight of this- feminism teaches that men and women are equal, and that sex should be based on equality and mutual pleasure. So, women don't have any proper outlet for their God-given desire to be sexually dominated by men. They have this need that's not being met. And then "Fifty Shades of Grey" comes along, this low-quality sinful erotica that has all sorts of bad sinful sex, and so many women are into it. Well, this is the reason why.

To support his argument, Jared Wilson included quotes from Doug Wilson's 1999 book, "Fidelity: What it Means to be a One-Woman Man." Sorry there are 2 different people named Wilson. Makes it kinda hard to follow. They are not related. Anyway. Here's a quote from Doug Wilson:

Because we have forgotten the biblical concepts of true authority and submission, or more accurately, have rebelled against them, we have created a climate in which caricatures of authority and submission intrude upon our lives with violence.

In other words, Doug Wilson believes the correct, natural, God-intended way for sex to go is that the man dominates and the woman submits. And because our society has rejected that and says you should do what feels good instead of following gender roles, well now people are all screwed up and confused and that's why they are drawn to bad versions of sexual dominance and submission.

Another quote from Doug Wilson:

When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.

So yeah, Doug Wilson says it just doesn't work, if you try to have sex in an equal, mutual way. It just can't work, that's not what sex is. It needs to be "A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts." (Eww.) (Also, are the straights okay?) 

People are trying to go against God's design for sex, but in the long run you can't. You try to escape God's design, and then you end up with all these "Fifty Shades" fans.

Okay so that was what Jared Wilson's article said. The feminist Christian blogosphere read it and was outraged. In particular, I saw people saying "yeah I knew that conservatives teach that men have to be the leaders, and a wife has to submit to her husband, but I'm shocked at the idea that these authority/submission roles would even apply to sex. Is this really what complementarians believe? Really? Even in sex, the husband has authority over the wife? Really?"

And my thoughts at the time... well, this was 2012. I had no sexual experience at all, because why would I have any sexual experience, I was a good pure girl. (Also I was in grad school, that's too young to be thinking about sex, right? ... This post is about how I'm asexual...) But everything I'd heard from purity culture said that sex was easy and self-explanatory. That if you don't do a good enough job controlling your desires, you'll just automatically start having sex, without thinking or making decisions. It "just happens," if you're in a situation with "temptation."

Yeah, according to the mythology I believed back then, sex is so AMAZING, but also shrouded in mystery- good, pure, unmarried people aren't allowed to know any concrete details about it. That would be "temptation." But don't worry, once you're in the proper God-approved situation where you are allowed to have sex, ie, on your wedding night, it will be great and you don't need to think or know anything beforehand, it just happens and it will be great.

It didn't really make sense to me, but I believed it. Yeah, it didn't make sense, because... if you think about it... in order to have sex, wouldn't you have to take off your clothes, in front of another person? Wouldn't you have to, uh, interact with a penis? All of that sounds so unpleasant. Hard to imagine any set of circumstances that could entice me to do that. But, purity culture assured me, when you're in that situation, you *will* want it. You'll lose control of yourself and you'll have sex without really thinking about it, and it will FEEL SO AMAZING but it's WRONG, it's BAD and WRONG, and will RUIN YOUR LIFE FOREVER. 

Didn't seem to make sense, but I believed it. Once you're in that situation, your body will just know what to do, and if you're married it will be the best thing ever, and if you're not married then it will feel good in the moment but will RUIN YOUR LIFE.

So in 2012, reading this article where the Wilsons perhaps inadvertently announced their own kinks to the world... I thought, what do I know, maybe sex is like that. Maybe when you're in that situation and your body just takes over and does what's natural and it feels amazing, maybe it will naturally be a woman-being-dominated-by-a-man roleplay. My whole life, everything I had heard from Christians about sex was in the genre of "this makes no intuitive sense at all, but on some level you *do* have these desires, and when you're in that situation, you *will* act this way." This felt no different. On some level, you *do* have a desire to be "conquered" and "colonized" by a man during sex. Hey what do I know, maybe that's true?

And then the bloggers that pushed back and had some very strong responses to this- many of them were married Christian women, like Rachel Held Evans. They had sexual experience, unlike me in 2012. There was something kind of surprising about it... about reasoning about sex based on one's actual experience. Normally in Christian culture, we talked about sex in terms of these big general principles, about "God's design" and "how God made women" and "how God made men" and "the biblical definition of marriage" and so on. It was like arguing over fan theories about a fictional world. Like hypothetical thought experiments. To have people say "I know Doug Wilson is wrong about sex because my own marriage is not like that"- that was a new and different thing for me.

Very interesting how Doug Wilson said, "however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party" and then a bunch of people popped up to say that yes, they had done that very thing. Sounds like it's a *you* problem!

Anyway, looking back on it now, the biggest misconception I had back in 2012, the thing that blocked me from understanding in so many ways, was the idea that people don't think or make choices during sex. Like, it "just happens," you "can't control yourself," etc. Like you're just strapped into a roller coaster car and you have no control over where it goes. When I eventually did start having sex, I was so surprised at how we needed to actually take actions to make things happen. And I was just as mentally-present as any time in my normal life, and it's just as weird as you would imagine from reading a description.

So you can choose. If you're into this BDSM roleplay stuff, you can discuss it with your partner and make a choice together about it. If you want to have an "egalitarian pleasure party", great, there are all sorts of sex acts you can choose from, so you and your partner are free to pick which ones you like, and do those- they don't happen automatically, you think about it and make a choice and then take action. 

I'm kind of glossing over the role of desire and arousal here... yeah, those do affect one's thinking and one's choices. I conceptualize this in terms of how you weigh your various reasons to do or not do something- ie, you *want* to do something, for certain reasons, but also you think you shouldn't, for certain reasons- and the desire/arousal/attraction can make you weigh some of those reasons much more highly, so that in that moment it feels like a good idea. I'm probably not describing this well? But my point is, if you imagine that people don't really think or make choices during sex, because it all just happens automatically and naturally and your body just takes over- well, no, that's not how it works.

(Kind of curious about whether "people don't think or make choices during sex" is a common belief for people who grew up in purity culture, or if I just thought that because I'm asexual and couldn't imagine people would do that if they had a choice.)

I have a few things to say in conclusion. First of all, why shouldn't sex be "an egalitarian pleasure party"? Like, why would it not be what both partners want it to be, with equality between them? If it's something other than that, where they have to play certain roles and don't have a choice, isn't that obviously worse??? Second, I wish I could have told my younger self not to believe it, when Christian role models confidently announce "*these* are the desires you have, because these are the desires that everyone has"- how messed up that I believed that rather than my own feelings. And third, when someone is trying to tell you sex *is* a certain way, and it just *cannot possibly be* some other way, they're actually talking about themself, rather than big abstract overarching concepts like "God's design" for sex.

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A few links on Doug Wilson. For years, people have been sounding the alarm about how racist and sexist and Christian-supremacist his ideology is.

From Libby Anne: 
It Is Long Past Time for Evangelical Leaders to Condemn Doug Wilson’s Views on Slavery and the South 
Doug Wilson: Women who reject patriarchy are tacitly accepting “the propriety of rape” 
Shades of Sexual Deviance: Doug Wilson and the Tale of Two Boxes

From the Slacktivist: 
Evangelical gatekeepers and conservative holiness 
For evangelicals, racism isn’t a dealbreaker, but feminism is

From me: 
Christian Nationalism / Faith Without Works Is Dead

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Related

I need to talk about this "selfish and small" nonsense

"Desiring God" says God wants women to be scared of men 

This May Be The Most WTF Christian Article On Sex I've Ever Read

Getting the Power Dynamics Backwards 

How would we even know 'Fifty Shades' isn't normal?

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The "ministerial exception" is rapidly becoming a civil rights nightmare (August 12) "The precedent here is devastating. Civil rights protections can now be dissolved, not by an act of Congress, but by the stroke of an HR pen in the name of religion."

Ah, it's about World Vision discriminating against a woman in a same-sex marriage, who applied for a job. Well that brings me back to The World Vision Debacle of 2014, where the Christian blogosphere found out that World Vision's policies allowed employees to be in same-sex marriages, and oh my goodness it was a huge scandal. So much outrage on the internet. World Vision is a Christian organization that helps impoverished children around the world, but oh my goodness, the evangelical Christians were just beside themselves, ready to cancel World Vision (I guess this was before it was called "cancelling" though). We absolutely cannot help poor children if a gay person might also be helping them, absolutely not. That was the sentiment that Christians were posting all over social media. And as a result of the backlash, World Vision changed their policy- employees are *not* allowed to be in a same-sex marriage.

That was the point where I officially quit being evangelical. The evangelical Christians were all over the internet, loudly proclaiming that we will throw poor children under the bus in order to reject gay people to the fullest extent possible, and I just... this is unredeemable. I can't be a part of this any more. I can't "change it from the inside." I'm done.

At the time, I wrote about it here: Go ahead and say I'm not a Christian. I don't care anymore.

Also from Hemant Mehta: "Shiny Happy People" sequel highlights Christian boot camp that traumatized a generation (July 30) Oh I really want to watch this and blog about it.

2. Researchers discover a secret weapon that saves babies' lives. And it's not medical (August 18) "Cash cut mortality in children under 5 by about 45%, the study researchers found, on par with interventions like vaccines and anti-malarials."

This is great news! A few questions that are worth exploring: Does giving cash to some people have any negative effects on other people who didn't get cash? Also, in what kinds of situations does it help to give cash, and in what kinds of situations does it not help? For example, if you're in a big city with very high rent prices, and you say "let's give everyone money, then their rent will be affordable"- well if a big proportion of renters get money, the landlords will just increase the rents, and it won't help the renters. So the issue is that there just isn't enough housing supply- it's not clear that adding money to the situation will help.

In this article, though, it's mostly about families being able to more easily access food and medical care, which aren't going to be limited in that way- so that's good.

3. 小鸭子嘎嘎嘎 - In case you would like to know what kind of music Chinese toddlers are into. My daughter's nanny ("ayi" in Chinese) has been playing this song for her. It's about ducklings. "Ga ga ga" is Chinese for "quack quack quack."

4. Exhausted and Alone, China’s Single Moms Are Moving in Together (August 20) "Posts advertising 'roommate moms' circulate widely, drawing responses from strangers across cities. Some end up splitting rent, others share school pickups and grocery runs, piecing together a version of family that is less solitary, less precarious, and a little more possible."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Four More Virginia School Districts Defy Trump, Reject Trans Bathroom Ban Demand (August 18) "As a school board member, I cannot sit idly by while adults who should know better try to pit one group of students against another. Our responsibility is to ensure that every child — including those who are transgender or gender nonconforming — has an opportunity to achieve their full, unique, and limitless potential."

2. After the CDC shooting, federal workers demand more protections from RFK Jr. (August 20) "A letter signed by hundreds of current and former HHS employees, addressed to Kennedy and members of Congress, says Kennedy is 'complicit in dismantling America's public health infrastructure and endangering the nation's health' by questioning the integrity of the CDC's workforce, making false claims that COVID vaccines are not safe or effective, changing vaccine policy based on ideology rather than science, and contributing to 'harassment and violence experienced by the CDC staff.'"

3. Trump vows to end use of mail-in ballots ahead of 2026 midterm election (August 19) EXCUSE ME, WHAT? (I am outside the US and I always vote by mail.)

"The Case for Open Borders": Racism

People holding a sign that says "Welcome asylum seekers and refugees." Image source.

Here's another quote from "The Case for Open Borders". From pages 214-215:

17. Closed Borders Are Racist

The nationality granted to you at birth determines whether you are free to move across international borders or are blocked by them. Not only border walls, but a web of multilateral visa agreements privilege certain passport holders and allow their free movement, while denying and immobilizing others. Such discrimination, while based in nationality, overlaps with both class and race. Citizens of Global North nations, made up of predominantly white citizens, are generally able to cross borders with ease. Citizens of the Global South, predominantly Black or Brown, are denied that same freedom.

The logic of apartheid and Jim Crow lives on when applied to migrants. "Looking at the data, it becomes apparent," writes sociologist Steffen Mau, that "most countries with either black or Islamic majorities are exempted from visa-free travel on a large scale." Even within Third World countries, whiter citizens have the wealth and connections to obtain passports and authorization for international travel. The pattern holds for nonauthorized migration as well: Black and Brown people are more readily denied, suspected, detained, and deported.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Chess Grandmasters Do Not Burn 6000 Calories Per Day (June 28, via) "Robert Sapolsky then cited this thesis in his popular book, dropping the distinction between maximum and average to give a 3X breathing rate."

2. How a Nazi Helped the New York Times Smear Zohran Mamdani (July 29) "So the New York Times accepted hacked data that a 'scientific racist' got from a violently racist Nazi and chose to publish the data as an indictment of a Brown African-born South Asian Muslim man who wants all children to have access to pre-K education, instead of asking themselves, 'Hey, is the real story here something about how a self-described violently racist Nazi currently has the private data of millions of people, including their Social Security numbers, addresses, family members’ information, and citizenship status?'"

3. ChatGPT will apologize for anything (August 8, via) "I'm sorry for advising you to accept the trade of your cow for three beans."

And: Stop Pretending Chatbots Have Feelings: Media's Dangerous AI Anthropomorphism Problem (July 22) "Think about that. A product owned by the world’s richest man was spewing Nazi propaganda on his social media platform. That's a scandal that should have Musk answering tough questions about his company's engineering practices, safety protocols, and values. Instead, we get 'Grok issues apology.'"

4. The Scholars Helping to Keep WWII Sex Slavery From Being Forgotten (August 14) [content note: rape] "The history of 'comfort women' represents one of the most horrific, systematic violations of women’s rights in modern history."

In high school history class, I remember reading that the Japanese army had "comfort women"- I think there was 1 line about it in a textbook- but somehow I didn't get that it meant sex slavery. It meant rape.

5. New study: State medical examiners wrongly excused homicides committed by Maryland police officers (July 21) "And of course all of this has been really complicated by the emergence of bullshit medical theories about about deaths in police custody, and particularly this theory of excited or agitated delirium."

6. The Existential Horror of Thomas Riker (August 13, 18-minute video) "Then, he finally gets rescued off of that planet, which should have been the happiest day of his life, but the first face he sees is you. And then he finds out what happened, and he realizes that in the eyes of the rest of the world, he's not Will Riker- you are."

7. What is identity? (August 17) "However, sometimes when people talk about identity, they simply mean, 'this word describes what I am'. Under this definition, you could identify with a word even if you never actually heard of the word. Therefore, if a survey asks you whether you identify with a word you’ve never heard of, you have to look it up to discover the answer."

8. One neurosurgeon, 8 million patients (August 17) "'Before Dr. Kamara, there was no hope,' said Dr. Kehinde Oluwadiya, acting chief medical director of the University of Sierra Leone Teaching Hospital Complex. 'If you are lucky and rich, you will go to another country and be treated. But if you are not, it's either you die or you live with a lot of disability.'"

9. Amid growing 'scandal' of elder homelessness, health care groups aim to help (August 16) "'It's a national scandal, really, that the richest country in the world would have destitute elderly and disabled people,' Culhane said."

10. Al Jazeera reporter's death a 'significant escalation' of dangers media face, CPJ says (August 15) "Al-Sharif was among six journalists killed in a targeted Israeli strike on Aug. 10. The Israeli military said al-Sharif was the head of a Hamas 'rocket-firing brigade,' and published spreadsheets that it said showed he was on Hamas' payroll. Salah Negm, Al Jazeera's director of news, rejected those allegations calling them 'completely fabricated' in an interview with Morning Edition, adding al-Sharif was 'a journalist doing his job, nothing more.'"

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Understanding MAGA’s Obsession With Pedophilia and No Other Sex Crimes (July 24) "A friend asked me recently: how is it that MAGA is so over the top about finding out which rich and powerful men may have had sex with 16 or 17 year old girls when it’s apparently fine that the leader of their movement is a longtime sex abuser and serial predator? On the one hand, this person was saying, how is one thing so beyond the pale and the others are completely fine? On another level, this person was asking, is it really so hard to believe that a guy who appears to have routinely assaulting women just over 18 did the same with those just under?"

2. Hundreds march to White House to protest Trump's D.C. crackdown (August 16) 

3. Our leading papers failed to stand up to Trump's criminal justice authoritarianism (August 18) Wow, look at this completely wild sentence from the New York Times, in a paragraph supposedly giving background on the trends about crime, in relation to that felon's claims: "A close presidential election eventually led to a violent attack on Congress."

Highway Rest Stop in China (photos)

I like the idea of sharing "boring" everyday photos of life in different parts of the world. The kind of photos where, if you live there, you feel like "I've seen this a million times, nobody could possibly find this interesting" and if you don't live there, you're like "Wow, cool, what's this? I've never seen this before!"

So anyway, here are some photos I took at some highway rest stops in China. Super boring stuff for me. But if you've never been to China, you've probably never seen this "boring" stuff before, so here it is.

(If y'all like this, I will try to do more posts like this.)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Snake-in-the-Box Problem (August 6) From xkcd.

2. There are now more than half a billion mobile money accounts in the world, mostly in Africa — here's why this matters (July 7, via) "As the chart below illustrates, the percentage of people in Sub-Saharan Africa with a mobile money account grew rapidly, from 12% in 2014 to 33% by 2021."

Also from Our World in Data: Two billion people don’t have safe drinking water: what does this really mean for them? (June 23) "The vast majority of the two billion — around three-quarters of them — do have access to a piped water source or protected well that is probably safe to drink. But it’s either not located in their home, is not always available, or there’s no guarantee it’s completely contamination-free. That usually means they must travel to get there; whether that round-trip takes less or more than 30 minutes determines whether they fall into the 'basic source' or 'limited source' category."

3. You Can Now Buy Eggs From In-Ovo Sexed Hens! (July 17, via) "Most people are surprised, and often disturbed, to learn the truth: in the United States alone, approximately 350 million male chicks are routinely culled each year, typically by methods such as maceration (being ground up alive)."

4. The Element Song by Tom Lehrer

Posting this because Tom Lehrer, influential musical satirist, dies at 97 (July 27)

5. More than 1,000 rabbis and Jewish leaders denounce starvation in Gaza (August 1) The letter says they agree with Israel fighting this war, but don't agree with using famine as a weapon.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Cynicism Is the Enemy of Action (July 1) "I think back to the phrase climate journalist David Roberts coined a decade ago, the 'doing it wrong brigade,' for those people on the sidelines who tell those who are doing the work that they should be doing it differently, criticizing their tactics, goals, alliances, or some other thing that falls short of perfection since as Hayes and Kaba point out, when you're not doing anything you can set impossible goals and then lounge about figuring out how those doing the work fall short."

2. Federal agents spread out across D.C. streets amid Trump's vow to crack down on crime (August 11) "He offered no explanation for where homeless people would be sent, but in a social media post last week Trump suggested he is considering a federal takeover of policing in Washington."

3. Asylum-seekers thought they were following the rules. Now some are told to start over (August 10) "'You're literally making documented people, again, undocumented, and they're already in here,' said Michelle Marty Rivera, an immigration attorney who has dozens of clients who have received these letters. 'You are canceling employment authorization. You're virtually converting people that are following the normal traditional asylum rules and leaving them without a status and without protection and asking them to show their faces to ICE.'"

So the strategy that the MAGAs are using is to find some minor thing where somebody's asylum-seeking process didn't go exactly according to the "rules" (even if this was the government's fault for not having availability to do interviews) and then saying that means the entire thing is invalid. It comes across as "the government is out to get you" rather than "there should be a system where people with genuine reasons are able to claim asylum."

(I have some thoughts about the similarities between this and conservative Christian ideology about sin and hell. Maybe if I have time I'll write a post on that. See also: ICE and Hell)

Update, I wrote the post: When You Believe God is Out to Get You

4. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposts video of pastors saying women shouldn't vote (August 9) Ah, the pastor in question is Doug Wilson. How will I explain Doug Wilson to my children?

5. A family's fishing trip ends with the dad at 'Alligator Alcatraz.' Here's their story (August 9) "Unable to show a driver's license, the couple were arrested and taken to a local jail where they were separated. M. says this was the last time she saw her husband, before he joined the hundreds of detainees at the controversial makeshift detention center, which has been dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz." She told NPR their story on the condition of anonymity for the entire family, because she fears retaliation from immigration officials."

6. Texas Showdown (August 6) "When people ask, 'But what are Democrats actually doing to save our country from MAGA fascism?' point them to the brave men and women of the Texas state Democratic House caucus. They are risking their political careers and even their personal freedoms, not to preserve their seats and their power, but to preserve our right to a fair and representative system."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Help Chris and (her dog) Chloe Save Their Home - I don't know this person, but I've seen her in the Slacktivist comment section before, and I hope she is able to raise the money she needs.

2. Canon (August 1) From xkcd.

3. Phistomefel's New Sudoku! (August 3) 1-hour-11-minute sudoku solve video.

4. NSFW and defensibility (August 5) "Just sayin’, there’s a certain irony in LGBTQ games leading the charge."

5. In Gaza, mounting evidence of famine and widespread starvation (July 29, via) "'This is not a warning, this is a call to action. This is unlike anything we have seen in this century,' he told journalists in Geneva."

How To Stop Gazans From Dying of Starvation Right Now (July 30) "The solution is tragically simple. First, open all viable land crossings—not for hours and not with caveats, but at scale, with fast screening and consistency, to flood Gaza with aid immediately. We know that in the ceasefire months of January and February this year, the flow of humanitarian and commercial goods made a difference immediately.  Second, ensure unimpeded access for humanitarian organizations to reach children and their families—from Rafah to northern Gaza. Third, the political track still matters.  A ceasefire remains vital. Without an end to hostilities, no humanitarian corridor can function safely, Palestinian civilians cannot be reached at scale and the hostages will not return home."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Adapting to Decline (August 4) "In other words, the fired BLS head will be replaced by someone who will cook the books for Trump."

2. Corporation for Public Broadcasting to close after US funding cut (August 1)

3. Confederate statue toppled during Black Lives Matter protests will be reinstalled (August 5) "'The decision to honor Albert Pike by reinstalling the Pike statue is as odd and indefensible as it is morally objectionable,' Norton said. 'He resigned in disgrace after committing a war crime and dishonoring even his own Confederate military service. Even those who want Confederate statues to remain standing would have to justify awarding Pike any honor, considering his history.'"

4. Their husbands were deported to Laos. Now they’re picking up the pieces together (August 5) "Cassie, who is Laotian-American, said her husband was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. 'They left when he was one, so he pretty much knows nothing of it,' Cassie said. 'So he’s never stepped foot in Laos until now.'"

"The Case for Open Borders": Reparations

Political cartoon showing an American bald eagle dominating a large area of the globe. Image source.

Here's another quote from "The Case for Open Borders". From pages 210-211:

15. Open Borders As Reparations and Decolonization

The United States has what could be termed "an imperial debt" to a number of countries throughout the world. "US responsibility for helping create the conditions that drive much of the out-migration from Honduras," Joseph Nevins writes, "should negate any justification by the US government to deport and deny rights of residence to people of Honduran origin." Given that Honduras is less exception to and more exemplar of the destabilizing effects of US imperialistic intervention, the same argument could be made for dozens of other countries, including but not limited to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Congo, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Indonesia, the Philippines, Laos, and Cambodia.

Sri Lankan novelist and activist A. Sivanandan's famous and succinct line explains why migrants move to countries that had colonized their homes: "We are here because you were there."