Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. China’s Only Solution Yet for Climate-Ravaged Villages: ‘Move Out’ (February 26) "While many families have already agreed to relocate, these are predominantly households whose homes were completely destroyed, leaving them with no real choice. The government’s larger goal is to move everyone from high-risk zones, but the relocation effort is complicated by the uncertainty and risk for those still living in these areas." Part 2 of the article I linked to last week about climate change and rural China.

2. Hercules | I can Go The Distance HD 720p - Posting it because I like the song.

And hey while we're on the subject of Disney songs, I also like this one: Idina Menzel, Evan Rachel Wood - Show Yourself (From "Frozen 2"/ Sing-Along) 

Also: Disney Pixar's Cars - Real Gone

You are welcome to post your favorite Disney songs in the comments~

3. Residents of Bangor’s Cedar Falls officially own their mobile home park (February 20, via) "Prior to the purchase, residents may have owned their homes but not the land the homes sat on."

4. Fabric giant Joann is closing down. What happens to those who relied on the retailer? (March 3) 

5. Hoping to revive mammoths, scientists create 'woolly mice' (March 4, via) This is really cool, but personally I don't think it's worthwhile to bring back the big flashy species like woolly mammoths- instead, we should focus on taking care of the environment and endangered species that exist right now.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Ken Paxton Wants Genetic Testing For 220,000 Women Athletes A Year (February 26) "Paxton is proposing 220,000 genetic tests per year so that women’s sports can exist at all." What on earth.

Also at that link, here's something you can do to help trans people: The US State Department is allowing public comments on recent changes to a policy about passports- specifically, because of the executive order, they are only issuing passports with a gender marker that matches the assigned sex at birth. You can leave a comment about it on the Federal Registrar website.

Comments are open on it until March 17.

2. WTF Is This Trump Gaza AI Video?! (February 27) 

And here's the Slacktivist's take on it: An ethnic-cleansing fever-dream (February 27) "The report barely scratches the surface of how full-gonzo batshit loony this video is"

3. No, Trump's Trans Military Ban Does Not Have A "Waiver" For Openly Trans People Serving (February 28) "It applies only to individuals who have never transitioned, do not experience dysphoria, and who are willing to remain closeted while serving—a regressive return to a worse version of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Senate Dems Show Spine, And National Sports Ban Bill Dies (March 4) 

4. Foreign students say the threat of Trump's executive orders is getting real (March 3) "Abed Ayoub, head of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the threat is getting real. He says the ADC has heard from at least a dozen students who left the U.S. for winter break and were unable to return because their visas were canceled — with no explanation given."

5. These U.S. Companies Are Not Ditching DEI Amid Trump’s Crackdown (February 26, via) Posting this because of this quote from Ben & Jerry's: "'We believe that companies that timidly bow to the current political climate by attempting to turn back the clock will become increasingly uncompetitive in the marketplace and will ultimately be judged as having been on the wrong side of history,' the company said in a statement."

Wow, Ben & Jerry's knows what's what.

6. Internal Memos: Senior USAID Leaders Warned Trump Appointees of Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths From Closing Agency (March 3, via) "One million children will go untreated for severe malnutrition, up to 166,000 people will die from malaria and 200,000 more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade, the memos estimated. The programs were cut anyway." 

7. Euphoria's Hunter Schafer says her passport now lists her as male due to new laws (February 25) "Reacting to the passport in the video, Hunter said: 'I was shocked. I just didn’t think it was actually going to happen.'"

8. Republicans move to repeal lead limits imposed by Biden-era rules (February 3, via) "If the GOP is successful in repealing the lead rule, tens of millions of people would continue to have drinking water contaminated with the heavy metal, a neurotoxin that the EPA has found lowers IQ scores in children, stunts their development and increases blood pressure in adults."

A Story About Bullying

A high school gym. Image source.

So here's a thing that happened to me in high school.

In gym class, we had a unit on volleyball. It was probably a few weeks long, and we were put into teams, and stayed with the same team for the whole unit. I was very bad at volleyball, and there was a girl on my team, let's call her Sylvia, who was always criticizing me for it.

Many times I would try to hit the ball and fail, or I would not hit it because I thought it was going out of bounds but then it didn't, and Sylvia would yell at me at tell me I'm doing such a bad job, and all that.

I'm writing about this because back then, I didn't know what she was doing was wrong. I thought, well, she's correct, I am bad at volleyball, that's an obvious fact. If I didn't want her to yell at me about it, I should stop messing up when trying to hit the ball. I thought it was my fault, and she was justified in constantly criticizing me.

But now I realize that it was wrong for her to do that. This was high school gym class, who cares if you're bad at it? What does it matter? It's not like it's a real sports competition. You are allowed to be bad at it, there's nothing wrong with that.

Another aspect that ties into this: On tv shows, there was a common narrative that went like this: Character A is mocking Character B for being bad at something. But then, it is revealed that Character B is actually really good at it! Wow! Everyone is impressed with Character B, and Character A feels so ashamed at how wrong they were for mocking Character B.

And we like to see that; we like to see bullies brought down and embarrassed for their behavior. But it also sends the message that the way to avoid being mocked is to prove them wrong. Character A was wrong to mock Character B because Character B is actually good at volleyball. If Character B was truly bad at it, well then Character A would be in the right.

I seem to remember that there was a "Bring Your Parent To School" Day, and my mom came with me to school. On that day, in gym class, I continued to be bad at volleyball, but Sylvia didn't say anything to me about it. Wow, fascinating. So she knew it was wrong for her to treat me that way, and that's why she didn't do it when my mom was there. Very interesting that Sylvia knew it was wrong, even though I didn't.

And now I'm thinking about it, and thinking "that was bullying," but, was it? When I think of bullying, I think of something that has long-term mental health consequences for the victim. I think of kids who are so unhappy that they refuse to go to school. I don't really think it had any bad effects on me. It was only during gym class- Sylvia wasn't in any of my other classes. And it was only for a few weeks, during the volleyball unit. So was it bullying? Yes, I think so- because we should define it based on her behavior, not the effect that it had on me. 

I just wanted to write about this because what she did was wrong- but I had no idea back then.

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Related:

Tickling, Consent, and The Way It Works 

Touch (part 2 of Autism & Teaching Kids to Protect Themselves)

The Bible and "Purity"

Bible and rose. Image source.

[content note: it's about rape culture in the bible and in purity ideology]

Purity culture teaches that this is what the bible says about sex: In God's perfect plan for everyone's lives, each person is only supposed to ever have sex with 1 person. (Or maybe 0, if God gives you "the gift of singleness.") You aren't allowed to have sex outside of marriage, and then you get married to 1 opposite-sex partner, and have sex with them, and that's how it works. Purity culture explicitly teaches that this is what the bible says.

(Or... if you're a widow then you're allowed to get remarried and have sex again, but it's not clear how this really fits into purity culture logic.)

Now, there's not *exactly* a bible verse that says "don't have sex outside of monogamous hetero marriage." There are bible verses that say not to "commit adultery." There are bible verses about specific combinations of people who aren't allowed to have sex- for example, a man should not have sex with both a woman and her daughter. There are bible verses about how if a woman is discovered to not be a virgin on her wedding night, she should be stoned. There's "the marriage bed should be kept pure." There are plenty of verses about the sinfulness of "sexual immorality" but the bible never exactly defines what that is.

Of course, though, when I was in purity culture, it didn't bother me that there wasn't 1 specific verse that explicitly said "all sex outside of marriage is a sin" because I felt that was the overall message of the bible's teaching about sex, even though it didn't say it directly. I thought, it's obvious, right? That would be gross, to have sex outside of marriage- obviously that's God's opinion on things.

So that's what purity culture claims the bible teaches: Every person should have at most 1 sexual partner, total, over one's whole life, and this standard is the same for both men and women. 

However, if you actually look at how people act in the real world, they're not applying this same standard to both men and women. Women get judged much more harshly for having unmarried sex, compared to men. 

I believed that in theory it should be the same rules for both men and women, and it was wrong (and didn't make sense mathematically) for men and women to be judged differently. Like... if we're only talking about straight people, it's 1 man and 1 woman sinning together. How can you possibly judge the woman's actions as being more "dirty"/"sinful" than the man's? If it's so terrible that the woman is doing this bad thing, shouldn't the man be held equally responsible for participating in her doing this bad thing? I always thought, the math just doesn't work, so it makes no sense to judge women worse than men for having unmarried sex- so I tried not to pay too much attention to the double standard. Since it was so obviously nonsensical. I was sure that the rules from the bible applied equally to men and women.

Recently, because I read "Womanist Midrash" and "The Red Tent," I had a whole new realization about, umm, how to make the math work, so to speak. "Womanist Midrash" closely examines the lives of women from the bible, from a womanist (black feminist) perspective, and "The Red Tent" is a bible fanfic novel about the 4 wives of Jacob- showing what the women's side of the story of Jacob's family might have been like. These books have a lot to say about women's experience of sex, and how it would have been viewed.

Basically, it goes like this: A girl who's in a good family, with a father who can protect her and have high standards about whom she's going to marry- she is a pure girl. On the other hand, there are plenty of girls and women whom anyone can have sex with, and nobody cares. Slaves, sex workers, girls who don't have their father protecting them, prisoners of war, etc. 

So don't think of sex as being "1 man + 1 woman." It's either "1 man + 1 pure woman" or "1 man + 1 impure woman." 

If she's an impure woman, well, whatever, a man can have sex with as many impure woman as he wants, and why should anyone judge him for that? (Some people would say it's good and normal for a man to be sexually experienced in this way.) Even if he's married, he can still have sex with slaves and sex workers, whatever.

But if she's a pure woman, oh gosh, well a man might actually get in trouble for that- watch out for her father. That would actually be a serious thing, to have unmarried sex with a pure woman. But, still you can't judge the man as harshly as the woman because maybe it's just an honest mistake and he didn't know which kind she was.

In the ancient world portrayed in "Womanist Midrash" and "The Red Tent," women were treated better if they were in the "pure" group rather than the "impure" group, but most of the time they didn't have much control over that. Try as hard as you can to stay as one of the "pure" ones, because we all know it's totally fine for men to rape the "impure" ones, that's just the way it is.

This isn't something that either of those books explicitly spelled out; I'm just kind of trying to summarize the overall ideology that serves as the foundation for the way women are treated in those books.

Here, let's think about these 2 different ideologies and see which one seems to match better with what we see in the bible. Is it "everyone is supposed to have only 1 sexual partner, and stay pure until marriage, and these rules are the same for both men and women"? Or is it "there are pure women and there are impure women, and it's fine for men to have sex with impure women as much as the men want- try to not be an impure woman"?

Hmm. 

Why are there laws in the bible about executing a woman who's not a virgin on her wedding night, but no equivalent laws about men? Why do lots of male bible heroes have multiple wives, and the bible doesn't necessarily portray that as a bad thing* (sometimes it's even described like it's a sign of God's favor)? Why is there a list of specific relatives that a man is not allowed to have sex with, rather than one simple rule "only have sex in a monogamous marriage"?

Huh. Well that's... not great.

I really had always assumed that of course God meant that the rules for men and women were the same. Of course it would be bad for a man to not be a virgin on his wedding night, just like it would be for a woman. Right? The bible just happened to not mention that part, but of course we all know it's true, right? Right? But now I've come up with this alternative framework that fits so much better, and is also horrific and terrible.

(You could argue that the bible is "progressive" on this, in the sense that the rules given in the bible require men to treat women a little bit better than what was typical for societies at that time. Sure, you could make that argument. I personally am not interested in going down that path. I don't think we should let the bible off the hook so easily. Frankly I don't think it's meaningful that the bible is slightly less misogynist than the average stone-age person, and we shouldn't act like it is.)

Okay at this point you are probably saying, "Umm, Perfect Number, you are not the first person to come up with this 'there are 2 types of women' concept, this is called the 'virgin/whore dichotomy', ie, 'every woman is either a virgin or a whore.' How have you not heard of this?"

Well yeah of course I have heard of that, but I guess I never really *got* it? I don't know. I don't think I've ever seen anyone specifically making the connection between the "virgin/whore dichotomy" and the "double standards for men and women about having lots of sex"- how you really need both of these godawful concepts to hold each other up, or else the math clearly just doesn't work. See, it's not *really* about the actual act of having sex. It's about whether the patriarchy judges you to be "pure" and worthy of men's protection, or "impure" and deserving of whatever men do to you.

And the thing is, even though I was taught in purity culture that the rules should be the same for both men and women, there were some purity culture teachings where this ugly "virgin/whore dichotomy" sort of started to show itself. Where the purity teachings were less about "here is God's plan for how everyone can have a perfect marriage and sex life" and more about "it's okay for men to disrespect (and maybe even rape) impure women- make sure you're not one of them." Less about "here is how men and women are supposed to treat each other, how we are supposed to act, we all follow these rules and everything is great" and more about "we protect the women in our in-group, who follow our rules, while the women in the out-group are sluts who are at risk of being raped, what did they expect?"

When they talk about modesty, for example. In purity culture, here is how they talk about modesty: Women, you should respect and value your body instead of flaunting your body. If you don't respect yourself, obviously men won't respect you. D. Anderson had a very good post in 2013 about the way boys in purity culture are taught to view "immodest" women- containing quotes from these good godly teenage boys about how disgusted they are. I basically was taught that if a woman is dressed "immodestly", men are literally incapable of respecting her, unless they wear a blindfold or something I guess. There was a chapter of "The Great Sex Rescue" that did a great job arguing against this ideology.

People who are really into patriarchy like to talk about how "the way it should be" is that men protect women, and feminism is the reason that you hear more about sexual assault nowadays- but what they actually mean is, patriarchy is about protecting the women who follow men's rules. And any women who find themselves in the "impure" group, well they deserve whatever men do to them. Try to not be those women. From that perspective, feminists are the ones to blame, for making women think it's okay to be in the "impure" group, and thereby causing women to lose men's protection.

Anyway...

So what do we do with the bible, then?

Well, first of all, the bible does NOT teach that it is a sin for men to have sex outside of marriage, in the general case. There are plenty of rules in the bible about specific categories of women that men are not allowed to have sex with (and also, rules against men having sex with men), ie, "do not covet your neighbor's wife", and I always viewed this as being part of an overarching "sex is only for monogamous marriage" ideology- but no, it's more like "it's okay for men to have sex outside of marriage, but not with women who, like, actually matter."

And, it's not exactly a sin for women to have sex outside of marriage- the issue is if a woman has sex outside of marriage and then dishonestly tries to present herself like she's one of the "pure" ones.

(One caveat here, I'm focusing on the Old Testament in this post, because I'm thinking about this in terms of an evangelical mindset where the bible supposedly presents one clear and consistent message regarding "God's plan for sex and marriage." But it's possible the New Testament writers weren't coming from quite the same perspective. "Womanist Midrash" and "The Red Tent" focus on the Old Testament, specifically the Torah.)

I'm not sure I would say the bible teaches this view of sex- it's more like, that was the way sex was viewed by the people who wrote the bible. These are the assumptions they brought to it, when they wrote down rules for people to follow. None of this is explicitly spelled out anywhere in the bible- look at me, I used to be evangelical, I read the whole bible multiple times and never noticed this. The writers of the bible were not trying to say "there SHOULD be this double standard between men and women, and feminism is wrong," because they wouldn't have even been able to imagine an alternative. Just like how I was taught by purity culture that all sex outside of marriage is dirty, so I believed that the bible taught that too, and I wasn't able to imagine an alternative.

But anyway, now we know better.

I'm not going to be subtle about this; let me come right out and say it: The bible should not be the authority over our moral beliefs. Instead, we bring our own moral beliefs to the bible, and then we judge which rules in the bible are good ("love your neighbor as yourself", etc) and which ones are horrible. 

Evangelicals believe that if you just have the right technique for how to interpret the bible and parse it into rules for us to live by, this process will lead to a set of rules which we would recognize as good and moral- and if they don't seem good and moral, either our understanding of morality is wrong, or we're misinterpreting the bible. So then you have to keep tweaking things until you can get an interpretation of the bible which you can accept as moral. This strikes me as terribly inefficient. How about we just use our own understanding of morality right from the start, and reject anything from the bible that is obviously terrible?

Then you might ask "well what's the point of even bringing the bible into it, then?" Well, yeah, good point. I like the bible for cultural reasons, but if other people aren't interested in the bible, that's fine. No real reason to bring the bible into it if you don't want to.

Suppose you're a modern-day advocate of purity culture, and you want to combine the bible's emphasis on virginity with modern ideas about how men and women should be treated equally, and so you come up with "nobody can have sex outside of [monogamous hetero] marriage, and the rules are the same for men and women" (ie, this is what purity culture teaches, in my experience). Sure, you can believe that. But don't frame it like you got it directly from the bible. Like you're simply reading the bible and reporting what it says. Like you're not adding your own spin on it. 

I was always so sure that the purity-culture view of sex- that sex outside of marriage is disgusting and nobody should be involved in that- was just self-evidently true, was obviously God's opinion on the matter, and the biblical writers too. I didn't have a specific verse that said it, just a lot of verses about "sexual immorality" and the claim that "well, the readers of the bible would have understood 'sexual immorality' to mean having sex outside of marriage." But now I've found this other explanation... the idea that there are 2 kinds of women, and it's fine for men to have sex with "impure" women- and it's horrible but it fits so much better with what we see in the Old Testament. 

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* I might need to write a whole 'nother post about polygamy in the bible, because the standard apologetics answer is "yes, there's polygamy in the bible, but it's always portrayed as a bad thing, the bible shows that it leads to a lot of problems, so you see, the bible doesn't *really* condone it" and I disagree with that.

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

Womanist Midrash 
The Slavery We Ignore in the Book of Exodus 
The Second-Worst Bible Story 
Michal wasn't here for David's worship, and now neither am I
Why did I think David was the good guy in the story of Abigail? 
David's Womanizing 
The Bible and "Purity"

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Related:

"God has one perfect guy for you!" Yeah, that's not biblical. 

"The Red Tent" (this bible fanfic is great) 

6 Ways Purity Culture Did NOT Teach Me About Consent

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared. (February 20, via) "The surge in this life-threatening condition, caused by infection, was most pronounced for patients whose fetus may still have had a heartbeat when they arrived at the hospital."

2. How China’s ‘Ne Zha 2’ Beat ‘Inside Out 2’ to Become the Highest-Grossing Animated Film in History (February 25) There's a new cartoon movie in theatres, "Ne Zha 2" (pronounced "neh ja 2") and it's HUGE. It's breaking records. Not sure if y'all outside of China have heard about this?

3. Rain, Ruin, Repeat: The Chinese Villages Caught in Climate Chaos (February 25) "At 1 a.m. on July 27, villages across the region awoke to a relentless barrage of phone alerts, broadcast warnings, and the deafening clang of gongs — a rural alarm meant to signal immediate danger."

4. A child has died in the Texas measles outbreak (February 26) This is really sad. Everyone, make sure your kids are vaccinated.

5. Over 7,000 from scam centers in Myanmar are awaiting repatriation after crackdown (February 27) "Amy Miller, who is Southeast Asia director of aid group Acts of Mercy International and is based in Thailand's Mae Sot on the Myanmar border, told the AP she has never seen such a large-scale release of potential victims of human trafficking."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Btw, I don't actually believe in "the" antichrist. I just call that felon "the antichrist" or "the orange antichrist" because it's BONKERS how the people who were always on the lookout for the antichrist (signaling the end of the world is coming), who speculated endlessly about every major world leader possibly being the antichrist (is the pope the antichrist? is Obama the antichrist???), on the lookout for a leader who is greedy and dishonest and immoral and yet the crowds love him and he's even deceived Christians - THOSE PEOPLE are the ones who are now bowing down and selling their souls to him. It's just so unbelievable to me.

Here's what I want to say to them: When Christians say, "Jesus is Lord," what we mean is "Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not." Get it right.

2. "See You In Court": Maine Gov Responds to Trump's Face Over Anti-Trans EO At Governor's Address (February 23) "In a statement, Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey vowed to 'defend Maine’s laws and block efforts by the president to bully and threaten us.'"

Also from Erin in the Morning: Nazis Burned Trans Books To Usher In Fascism: Now Trump Does The Same (February 25) "Trump’s digital erasure of transgender people is more than policy—it is a declaration that the very existence of certain human beings is unwelcome in the official record. This is not a hallmark of a democratic leader respecting courts and laws; it is the move of someone intent on atrocity."

The evangelical position on this has always been that being trans is not a real thing. I'm not surprised that now that they have power, they want everyone to act like being trans is not a real thing. 

We have to resist. 

3. Data Rescue Project (via) A site summarizing the efforts to archive government data because it's being removed from government sites.

4. “We’ve Been Essentially Muzzled”: Department of Education Halts Thousands of Civil Rights Investigations Under Trump (February 13, via) "Since 1979, the department’s civil rights arm has worked to enforce the nation’s antidiscrimination laws in schools. It operates under a congressional mandate to uphold the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as the federal laws that prohibit discriminating against students because of gender or disability."

5. Federal computers are hacked to show fake AI video of Trump kissing Elon Musk’s feet (February 25) "'Building staff couldn’t figure out how to turn it off so sent people to every floor to unplug TVs,' Kabas said, quoting an anonymous agency source."

6. Bad Bosses are not beloved (February 25) "This, again, is part of the definition of a Bad Boss — sneering contempt for whatever it is that you do resulting in interference with your ability to do it."

7. People Are Mass-Emailing Elon Musk In Response To His "What Did You Do Last Week?" Message To Federal Workers (February 25, via) Oh it turns out we can all email Elon at hr@opm.gov and tell him 5 things we did.

8. Jeff Bezos' revamp of 'Washington Post' opinions leads editor to quit (February 26) "'We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,' Bezos wrote in a memo to staffers announcing the changes." What on earth.

That's What Radicalized Me (a post about immigration)

Statue of Liberty. Image source.

The long and short of it is, I have always lived my life with the assumption that I can travel to any country I want. I visited Canada so many times growing up. I knew people who went on vacation to beautiful cities in Europe. And I grew up evangelical, so I heard all about missionaries going to live in various places all over the world. God calls you to go to some strange faraway country, and then you go. It's hard work, but no government will stand in your way. Yeah maybe it's a country that's not too keen on American missionaries- then you just get a bit creative on your visa application. If God wants you to go there, God will make it work out.

I'm American, and I've lived in China for over 10 years now. I'm an immigrant. Why did I move to China? Well, I felt like, the reality is that there's so much I don't know about the world. There are so many different cultures and languages out there. Billions of people, whose lives are completely different from mine, and God knows and lives in them to the exact same extent that They know and live in me. If I stay in the US, it's too easy to fall into the false belief that I basically understand the world. That I basically understand people. That I basically understand God.

I felt I needed to go somewhere where I had no idea what was going on, where I didn't understand the language or culture, because the truth about the world *in general* is I don't know what's going on, and I don't understand the language or culture.

And because I have a US passport, I could do that. 

And then...

And then I found out that for millions of people all over this world, it's not that simple. They are refugees looking for a safe place to live, and governments simply refuse to let them in. The US simply refuses to let them in.

That there are people in this world- ordinary people who just want to make a good life for themselves and their family, and they think "I want to go to [country xyz]" and they just can't. 

This is what radicalized me. I've never gotten over it. I can go live in whatever country I want, and other people just can't. Simply because I was born in the US.

This is unbelievable. I can't even describe how shocked I was when I found this out. Everyone should be able to live in whatever country they want. 

I firmly believe that. Everyone should be able to live in whatever country they want. 

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When you apply for a tourist visa, the main thing your destination country is looking for is whether you're likely to overstay the visa. Are you really coming as a tourist, or are you trying to be an immigrant? If they think you're likely to immigrate, they will deny the visa.

On the visa application, you have to show that you have ties to your home country. Do you have a job? Do you own property? Do you have family members who need you to be there to care for them? Have you traveled to other countries and not overstayed your visa? Write down all those things on the application.

Tourists spend lots of money. Countries want tourists to come. But bringing in immigrants is more complicated.

I've heard of Americans in China who have a Chinese spouse, and the Chinese spouse applied for a US tourist visa and was denied. The US thinks, "you are married to a US citizen- it's likely you are actually trying to immigrate to the US." Especially if the Chinese spouse is from a poor, rural, middle-of-nowhere part of China, the sort of place that makes US visa officers think "why would anyone want to live there?" 

It's outrageous that some people are in this situation where they can never go visit their spouse's family, just because of countries and borders and governments.

I think *most* American/Chinese couples don't have this problem. It's only the ones where, on paper, the Chinese spouse's life in China doesn't really look like it's worth coming back to.

For me and my husband- because my husband is a Chinese citizen- someone gave him the advice to apply for the US tourist visa before we got married, and to not mention in the interview "my girlfriend is American." So he followed that advice and got the 10-year US tourist visa, thanks Obama. Now he has a nice record of traveling to the US, staying for a couple weeks, and then going back to China- like an ideal tourist- so we won't have any issues in the future when he needs to apply for the US tourist visa again.

Here's the thing, though: If you are from a "poor" country, it's likely that you're just not going to be able to convince the US that you won't overstay your visa. If there's a decent argument to be made that you would be better off living as an illegal immigrant in the US, rather than in your home country, the US simply will not issue the visa. Regardless of your actual intentions.

I have read articles about African researchers applying for temporary US visas to attend academic conferences- and being denied. Maybe because they can't prove that their home countries are good enough to go back to, or maybe just because of racism.

No African citizens granted visas for African trade summit in California

Africans Not Welcome: The Punitive US Visa Application Process

And a similar one about Canada: Canada refuses visas to over a dozen African AI researchers 

And Europe: How visa rejections are stalling Africa's health research

That's what radicalized me.

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I can tell you all about the immigration process for China. First I had to find a job. While in the US, I applied online for English teaching jobs, did an interview over Skype, and got an offer. Was I qualified? Uh, no, not really. The main thing was that I am a native English speaker. You have that, and you can get a job teaching English in China.

(Fortunately, after a few years of being an English teacher, I switched to an engineering job, because that's what I'm actually good at.)

I don't mean it was "easy" for me- there were parts of the process that were very stressful and annoying. I didn't *want* to teach English, but it was the job I was able to get, as an immigrant. And you have to be aware of the risk that your employer will turn out to be shady- some people move to China and then find out the job is totally different than what they were told, or that their employer wants to hold on to their passport "for safekeeping" (WTF). But my point is, there was a process, very realistically doable for someone in my situation.

I had also been studying Chinese, and had gotten to the point where I could go about my life speaking and reading Chinese and not using English at all. This helped me a lot in that English-teaching job, but it was very much NOT a requirement for the job. Most of the other international teachers I worked with couldn't speak Chinese, and nobody saw that as a problem at all. 

Actually, the Chinese employees I worked with were all very impressed that I could speak Chinese. It was baffling to me, after a lifetime of hearing rhetoric about immigration that said "they came to this country, they should learn English" (which was often said about people who could speak English but preferred to use their native language when talking with their own family, and Americans who were within earshot were highly offended about it). I couldn't believe that some Americans were really coming to China knowing only enough Chinese to ask "how much does this cost" and "where is the bathroom", and they thought that was fine, and Chinese people thought that was fine, and Chinese people would talk to them in English and say, "I'm sorry for my poor English."

What is going on? Well... how should I put this... No one holds white people to that same standard.

So I could get a job in China with no real qualifications, just that I could speak English- but if we look at the opposite case, at Chinese people working as Chinese teachers in the US- they have actual academic degrees related to teaching. They all speak English fluently. Of course they do.

When I was going through the process of finding a job and applying for the work visa and moving to China, I didn't think about the whole scope of it and my place in the world. It was just, here are the steps to apply, and I did the steps. I wasn't aware of my own privilege and the fact that for the vast majority of people in the world, there are no such "steps" available to them.

But when I found out, that's what radicalized me.

---

China allowed me to immigrate because they determined that I would earn money and benefit the economy. 

Rich tourists are allowed to come because they benefit the economy.

So basically, the people who are allowed to cross the border are the people who don't really need to. They just want to have a fun vacation. They just want to see the world. They could get a job in their own country but they have a sense of adventure and want to live in a different country instead.

But the people who are truly in need, who can't stay in their own country, who are fleeing violence or climate disasters, they're the ones that governments/ people/ political movements don't want to allow in.

You're never going to convince me this is okay. You're never going to convince me that it's right that I can live in any country I want, just because I was born in the United States, and other people can't, because they were born elsewhere.

Everyone should be allowed to live in whichever country they want.

---

I have nothing but admiration for immigrants. The amount of courage and hard work it takes to go to somewhere completely unfamiliar and adapt to it and make a life for yourself there. Wow.

I know what it's like, not understanding what everyone around you is saying. I know what it's like, feeling confused and awkward and vulnerable because you don't know what's going on and everything is so weird, but for everyone around you it's normal. I know what it's like, being stared at because I stand out. 

I know what it's like, trying to just buy a normal loaf of bread to make sandwiches, and I can't really find that in China. First of all, bakeries sell bread in packages that have 4-6 slices. You can't buy a "normal" sized loaf, probably because Chinese people can't even imagine eating that much bread. And there's always something a bit off about it. Either it's butter-flavored, or the difference in firmness between the crust and the bread part is just a bit weird, or it's too thick, or or or...

I think all immigrants have had experiences like this.

Leaving behind your home and your culture and learning to live in a whole new place- that's an incredible thing, and we should be amazed by the immigrants we meet. 

---

So I don't care if they are legal or illegal immigrants. Everyone should be allowed to live in whatever country they want. 

Some legal immigrants will say things like "we did everything the right way, we had to deal with all this paperwork and fees and waiting, and those illegal immigrants didn't have to do any of that and they're getting all the benefits." You won't find any of that here. (Seriously- the system was unfair to you by making you wait or denying your visa, and you're mad at illegal immigrants? Be mad at the system!)

What's the actual difference between legal and illegal immigrants? I have a US passport, and they don't? A US passport is a social construct. It's just something we made up. Visas, borders, countries, all made up. I don't think any of these are good enough reasons to put someone in jail and deport them.

---

Ah, but what about the practical parts? A country can't just simply let everyone in. 

Okay, I don't know the details about the practical parts. Probably there is some limit for how many immigrants a country can reasonably accept. But I know the United States is not anywhere near that limit. We can and should be doing so much more.

---

Why can I live in any country I want, but other people can't? I'm never going to be able to accept this. I support all immigrants. Everyone should be able to live in whichever country they want.

---

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

- "The New Colossus," Emma Lazarus

---

Related:

On Immigration and Double Standards

Culture, Objectivity, God, and the Real Reason I Moved to China

"The Big Wide Welcome" (kids' book review)

Book cover for "The Big Wide Welcome."

Last time I was in the US, I borrowed this book from the library: The Big Wide Welcome: A True Story About Jesus, James, and a Church That Learned to Love All Sorts of People, by Trillia Newbell. This post is my review of it.

This is a children's book based on James 2, a bible passage about not showing favoritism. It's from the series "Tales That Tell the Truth," a series which includes the books Jesus and the Lions' Den and The Storm That Stopped, which I have also reviewed. The idea behind this series is to use bible stories which aren't necessarily about Jesus, and connect them to bigger concepts about who Jesus is.

---

The main message of this book is very good

This book teaches us that we should not "play favorites" with people. We shouldn't treat some people better than others based on how much money they have, or their abilities, or skin color (these are some of the examples given in the book). In James 2 in the bible, the example is about how church members might react differently if a rich person or a poor person comes to their church.

The book says that all throughout history, people have treated each other like this- "playing favorites." On that page, there is an illustration of ancient Egyptians, with the ruler being carried on the backs of other people, possibly slaves. Also there is a bus with white people sitting in the front and black people in the back. I think it's good that these illustrations hint at how real and harmful this "playing favorites" is. The book doesn't comment on these pictures- the language of the book is really kid-friendly, about how this makes people feel sad... It doesn't actually say anything about systemic injustice, but the illustrations show an awareness of how that's really what it's talking about, when the bible talks about "favoritism."

The book says that Jesus talked to all kinds of people, and Jesus loves everyone, and we should welcome everyone. And I'm like, YES!

But then...

---

It takes a sharp turn into some we're-sinners-who-deserve-to-go-to-hell content

This was so sudden. You get whiplash from this. The book is just going along, talking about how Jesus loves everyone (Yes! I am totally on board with this!), and then:

Because Jesus loves all people.

He didn't only want to be friends with rich people, or clever people, or famous people. Jesus knew that everyone was in trouble because they had decided not to live with God as their Savior and Friend. Jesus knew that everyone needed him to rescue them.

Jesus didn't play favorites...

... Jesus chose to LOVE!

[turn the page]

In fact, Jesus loves people so much that he chose to die on the cross so that all people could be friends with him. Jesus welcomes as his friend anyone who asks to be his friend.

Rich people can be friends with Jesus.

Poor people can be friends with Jesus.

People whose bodies work different or look different can be friends with Jesus.

People who speak French or Korean or Spanish or Swahili or English can be friends with Jesus.

O_O

Like, WHAT JUST HAPPENED? The book suddenly veers off into talking about "everyone was in trouble" and how Jesus died on the cross so we could "be friends with him." 

I speak evangelical, so let me tell you what this means: Jesus loves everyone, and doesn't believe that certain groups of people are superior to others, because all people are sinners who deserve to go to hell. All of us are the worst, all of us are the same in this regard, so that's why it doesn't make sense to discriminate. All right, come along now and pray the sinner's prayer and ask Jesus into your heart and become a Christian, then you'll be saved from going to hell.

I gotta be honest, this took me completely by surprise, the first time I read this book. I was all excited about "we should welcome everyone" and "Jesus loves everyone", and then I turn the page and get this we're-all-going-to-hell ideology.

To be clear, the book does NOT say the words "hell", "sin", "ask Jesus into your heart", etc. All it says is that section I quoted above. This leaves me even more at a loss for how to explain this to my son- the book says "everyone was in trouble because they had decided not to live with God as their Savior and Friend." Where do I even begin, telling him what that means? It means hell. But *I* don't believe in hell- and I don't really want to be the one to bring it up, when this book uses indirect "kid-friendly" language which makes it easy for my son to just move along without having any idea what this page is talking about.

The books in the "Tales That Tell the Truth" series are written from an evangelical perspective. I strongly suspected that from the first time I heard about them; there's something about their taking-these-bible-stories-very-seriously-and-learning-deeper-truths-about-Jesus approach which reads as very evangelical to me. Unfortunately for me, I am a bible nerd who is also enamored with the idea of taking bible stories very seriously and connecting them to Jesus, though I'm no longer evangelical and I no longer believe the bible is inerrant. Honestly, I'm not surprised this book has evangelical ideology in it. I'm just surprised at how fast it went from "Jesus loves and accepts everyone" to "everyone is going to hell." (Again, that's not an exact quote. The book does not use the word "hell." The exact quote is "everyone was in trouble because they had decided not to live with God as their Savior and Friend.")

I borrowed this book from a library and only read it to my son once. I don't know what I would do about these pages if I had bought the book and was reading it to him frequently. Obviously, this is a reason why I would definitely NOT buy this book. I feel this is harder to deal with than the part I objected to in "The Storm That Stopped". In that case, I could just tell him I disagreed with the book. But in "The Big Wide Welcome," I can't just tell him I disagree with it- I would have to first explain what the book is saying here, about sin and hell, and then tell him I don't believe that. It's just... I don't want to get into all that. I just want to tell him Jesus loves everyone.

(Oh and since we're talking about the evangelical slant on the "all are welcome" message, I will briefly mention that the issue of queer acceptance in the church is something that evangelicals certainly have some opinions on. This book doesn't go anywhere near mentioning that, but I probably wouldn't like what it had to say, if it did. A church that says "all are welcome" is very different from a church that says "all are welcome" and hangs up a rainbow flag.)

So uh, yeah, I don't recommend this book, because of that. Let me just hit a few more points from my list and finish up this review.

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Elementary school level

I would say the language in this book is right for elementary school kids.

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Also I laughed really hard at this part

So there's one page that says, "See, James's brother was..." 

And then you turn to the next page: "Jesus!"

And I just found that hilarious, like James and Jesus being brothers is this REALLY SHOCKING PLOT TWIST OMG. I laughed so much.

---

Conclusion

This book started out so well. I was really into its message about loving and welcoming everyone, about not discriminating, about how Jesus spent time with all different people. I love that. I definitely want to teach my kids that. But then there were a few pages where it suddenly started saying the kind of things you say when you're telling people that they are sinners who deserve to go to hell and they need to get saved by praying and accepting Jesus... I can't recommend this book, because of that.

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Related:

Reviews of Christian Children's Books

"Jesus and the Lions' Den" (kids' book review) 

"The Storm That Stopped" (kids' book review) 

"Maybe God Is Like That Too" (kids' book review)

"Who Is My Neighbor?" (Kids' Book Review) 

"When Helping Hurts" (I wanted to like this book but it didn't work out)

My Weird Hangups About Charity

Button that says "Donate." Image source.

I wanna write a rambling post about the weird emotions I have surrounding giving money to charity. So here it is.

I think for me the main issue is, I have this fear that I'll give money to something, and then it will turn out that it was a waste. That the charity ended up not doing any good- or they even made things worse. I've seen plenty of articles about how well-intentioned charity campaigns sometimes make things worse.

So I have this fear that I'll give a lot of money to something, and it will end up not doing any good, and that would just be so bad, would make me feel so bad, I can't bear to think about it- and part of it is feeling embarrassed about being "tricked"- and therefore I'm scared to follow-up and look for information on what actually happened after I donated my money. And, wow, you know something's wrong there, if I don't even want information on whether my donation did any good. Shouldn't I want to know that, because it can help me make better decisions in the future? But I just have this fear of how much guilt and regret I'll feel, if I find out "my" money was "wasted."

The way it would go is like this: If my decision about donating is very emotionally-charged, very guilt-driven, very motivated by "it's not right that I have extra money when other people in this world are starving" and therefore leads to the question "what's the maximum amount I can give and still be able to take care of my own needs?" then I end up too emotionally committed, and can't honestly look at what happened to my donation and whether or not it did any good. That was especially the case for me when I was in college- I had a part-time job, so I had some income, but I didn't need to use any of it because my parents paid for all my living expenses. All the money in my bank account existed in the guilt-inducing realm of "I don't actually need this money- so isn't it wrong that I don't donate all of it?" But when I entered the real world and had to pay for everything myself instead of relying on my parents, the situation is totally different- now I have an actual *feel* for how I do need to spend money to take care of myself, and I can't just keep the bare minimum for myself. This is a much better situation, in terms of how worrying about how much to give to charity affects my mental health.

The issue, I feel, is how I would go into those decisions weighing the two sides like this: there's the option of spending money on myself, for frivolous things, or donating it to a charity that's going to jump right in, where those hungry kids in their advertisements are, and fix the problem. Almost like the ratio of "the amount of good this money will do if I donate it" to "the amount of good this money will do if I keep it for myself" was infinite. I think this is the reason people make such a big deal about the "overhead costs" that charities have, and "what percentage of your donation actually goes to people in need" and treat that like it's the most important thing about a charity. Because we're sold this vision of how our donations are going to magically go solve these unthinkable problems, but then whoops there's a catch, the charity also needs to pay the heating bill for their charity office, or whatever extremely mundane thing they need to pay for. Some mundane thing which is actually relatable to my life, unlike those starving kids in their advertisements. Like, wait a minute, I also need money to pay my own heating bill. So the ratio is not in fact infinite, it's more like... the charity is going to pay their own heating bill, so I shouldn't give so much money that I'm left with too little to pay *my* heating bill. 

Or, think of it this way: The charity isn't going to give so much to address the world's problems, that they're left without enough to take care of themselves. They need to pay their employees' salaries, they need to pay rent for their office space, etc. This shows something about how they prioritize their own needs vs the needs of those poor people they are helping. So I shouldn't give so much of my money that I'm left without enough to take care of myself- then I would be giving to a charity that is less dedicated than I am. Or, rather... my starry-eyed naive ideas of what it means to be dedicated to a cause don't match the grounded reality known to the people who are actually doing the work.

I usually try to organize my thoughts in my blog posts way better than this. I usually reword things to make it more clear what I'm talking about. But this is intended to be a long rambling post because these are questions I don't have good answers to, just some ideas. So, uh, I do apologize if you can't really follow what I'm talking about. (Why is she talking about giving so much money that she can't even pay her heating bill? Literally no one is asking her to do that.)

So, I don't think it's good for me, mental-health-wise, to calculate the maximum amount I can give, and then give that much, and feel like I'm morally obligated to do so. That would be a sacrifice. That would make my life much harder. And because it would cause so much difficulty for me, every single day, I would really need to believe that it mattered and made a difference. And so I wouldn't be able to hear factual information about whether my donations are doing good or not. I would avoid such information; I would fear it. I would sacrifice so much, constantly worry that I won't have enough money for myself, and at the same time, constantly worry that I was making bad choices, that maybe my donation money is being mismanaged and I'm making my own life harder for nothing.

(Oh, so maybe the actual issue is the high-pressure-sales-tactics style of charity appeals, which leads to me making an emotional decision I'm not really comfortable with, and then not letting myself be honest about whether I regret it.)

So I strongly advise against "giving sacrificially." Yeah in church I always heard we're supposed to "give sacrificially," that the important thing is your heart and your emotions around giving, and God won't really count it as doing a good thing if it doesn't feel like a big deal to you. I've even heard Christians claiming that your donations don't actually matter in terms of having an effect on the problem the charity is meant to address, because the whole world belongs to God, and if it's his plan, he'll make sure it gets done regardless of whether you donate. In this ideology, the only thing that actually matters is your feelings, as a donor. A donation that is emotionally difficult for the donor is "better", in God's eyes, than a donation that you didn't even notice you made because you just set it up to happen automatically every month. (Thinking about it now, I'm like "this is bonkers.")

I don't believe in "giving sacrificially" any more; in fact, I strongly oppose this idea. My strategy now is to decide, once a year, how much money I'm going to give to charity that year, and it should be an amount where I'm confident I can still have a good life and not be worried about how much money I have for myself. It *shouldn't* feel like a sacrifice. You just decide, "oh, my salary is X, and I'm going to donate Y, and so the money for myself and my family is X-Y," and you plan out how to give yourself a good life with X-Y money. I don't actually think there's much of a correlation between the dollar amount and how much it feels like a sacrifice. I think the emotions are a lot more tied to how much your giving is planned and how much it's spontaneous and therefore feels out-of-control. Feeling terrified when you give doesn't actually help anyone. 

(I'm coming from the perspective of "my income is definitely high enough to give myself a good life and also donate to charity"- probably if your income is not even high enough to meet your own needs, you would have a different perspective on "giving sacrificially." In that case, *any* giving you do would be "giving sacrificially." So if you're in that situation, you'd have to think about this differently than how I am.)

Let's talk about effective altruism, because it's an ideology which addresses some of these hangups. I'm glad that the effective altruism movement exists. It has been helpful for me to read what they have to say. Particularly about things like measuring the actual good that charities do, rather than just how it makes you feel as a donor. And about how it's not right how much people make a big deal about what percentage of the money is spent on overhead costs, as if that's *the* measure of how good a charity is. 

But I don't buy into their ideology myself, because it's not exactly targeted at the questions I have, and my own priorities about charity. Effective altruism makes a big deal about mathematically calculating which charity is THE MOST effective, like you're doing a bad thing if you give to a charity which is doing some good but not THE MOST good- wow, that's something that hadn't even occurred to me to worry about. 

And the assumption that something is only worth doing if it can be quantified.

And also... okay so I care about immigrants a lot, I give to charities that help immigrants, but effective altruism has down the math to prove that THE MOST effective charities, in terms of how much they improve people's lives for every dollar you give, are the ones that help people living in extreme poverty. So, mathematically, let's say my money would do 10 times as much good for people in extreme poverty as it would do for immigrants. That means I value immigrants' lives 10 times as much as people in extreme poverty. I ... I guess I do, then? It sounds like a bad thing, but maybe it's not. God loves everyone equally, but I don't. I'm not God. I don't think it's possible, as a human, to love everyone equally, and I suspect it would be harmful to me to seriously make an attempt. (See: Culture, Objectivity, God, and the Real Reason I Moved to China)

I mean, effective altruism is great in that they do find very good charities that you can donate to. If your concern is that your donation is going to be mismanaged or spent on something that doesn't do any good, you can take a look at the charities targeted at global poverty, recommended by the effective altruist movement. Those ones are going to be good. But I guess my motivation for donating to charity is not "how can I do the MOST good" but "I see problems in the world- and the problems I care most about are the ones that I can relate to in some sense- and I want to do something about these specific problems."

And here's another tangent on this long rambly blog post: So, I've seen statistics about how millions of people live on a dollar a day. The obvious thing that came to mind, when I was a young naive college student- and my parents paid for everything I needed- was that I should donate so much of my money that the amount I have left only gives me a dollar a day to live on. Because, other people are in that situation, and I'm not any better than them- why should I have money, when they don't? Logically, that's what I should do, right? 

But of course I can't do that... 1 dollar a day? I can't live on that. That's unimaginable. I remember thinking about this again, when I was in grad school and my parents *weren't* paying for everything, and I paid my own rent, $800 a month. Thinking about how apparently some people in this world live on a dollar a day, and I'm here paying rent, $800 a month. (There were not any apartments available to rent for $30/month, obviously.) How on earth can this be real, that people live on a dollar a day?

I think part of the answer is, they don't "live" on a dollar a day. People who are in that situation often die from things that I would view as very minor things. Things that, if they happened to me, I would just go to the doctor and get medicine, or whatever, and it wouldn't be a big deal. But people in extreme poverty DIE. Or, even if they don't die, they live with severe medical problems which would be very easy to fix, for someone with access to "normal" medical care, but if left untreated they derail someone's entire life. Living with constant pain, unable to work, etc.

So it's not about "well if it's good enough for them, why isn't it good enough for me, why am I acting like I'm better than them, and not donating all my money except a dollar a day?" The answer is, it's NOT good enough for them. And also that, in parts of the world with that kind of poverty, people have access to extremely cheap and crappy housing, and cheap and crappy food, which is not good enough for them, nobody should have to live like that, it's not safe, it's not healthy, and people do die prematurely because of it.

And all of that is not okay, but it also doesn't logically lead to "and therefore *I* should also live in that horrible situation." So, uh, I guess that helps me out with this particular hangup.

Is it just me thinking like this? Or does every naive idealistic young person who hears "millions of people live on a dollar a day" think "logically, *I* should donate so much money that *I* am left with only a dollar a day"?

Wait, is it weird that having a more realistic conception of what it means to "live on a dollar a day" makes me feel *less* urgent about donating to help them? Well... I mean, in reality what happens to me is, I feel like "logically I should donate so much money that I'm only left with a dollar a day" and then I'm just overwhelmed by how IMPOSSIBLE that would be, and then I'm just very confused (and feel guilty) every time I think about it, and I feel like "I'm gonna look for answers, I'm going to figure this out. I'm gonna find an answer for huge philosophical questions like 'is it morally okay for me to have money in a savings account when some people in this world are desperately in need?' and 'what is the correct ethical response for me to take?'" And then I never make any progress on those questions, of course. So I don't end up donating.

Like, the whole "logically *I* should donate all my money except for 1 dollar a day"... I was never going to actually DO that. I was going to NOT do it and then feel bad about it all the time. And that doesn't help anyone.

Whereas, my current thinking is, just do something. Just find a charity that is doing good work, and set up an automatic monthly donation- in an amount that feels manageable to me, not an amount that's going to cause problems for my ability to meet my own needs. Do that, so I am at least doing some good, and then always have these questions in the back of my mind. 

It's not good to be so paralyzed by these big questions that I never actually take any action. Spend so much time trying to figure out the "right" way or the "best" way, and then never actually do anything.

Besides, nobody ever said that *I* am morally obligated to live on a dollar a day. Why am I so stuck on that?

And... why do I have this tendency to spend so much time analyzing charities, very hesitant to give them money if I feel like "I have no way of knowing if this is actually going to help anyone" when I don't put that level of scrutiny on any of my normal purchases? I'm never like "oh should I buy this snack or not, what if the snack company uses the profits for bad things?" Because when I buy a snack for myself, the entire point is to get the snack, and I don't care what the company does with my money- that doesn't factor into my decision at all. But for a charity, you don't get a "product"- or rather, the "product" you get is the belief that you're helping people. And that "product" could very well be fake.

Or maybe this just means I should put the same kind of scrutiny on my other purchases that I do on donating to charity. Or, here's a question, to what extent can you "help the world" by buying your normal daily things from companies that are more "ethical" (whatever that means), and how does that compare to the good you can do by donating money?

Well I have no idea. Hmm.

And another thing. What about going on gofundme and donating to some stranger? I have done that, occasionally. But I don't really think it's a good thing to do, in general, mainly because it very much depends on how well people can present themselves as a "perfect victim." A donor gets on gofundme and reads people's sad stories and pleas for money, and the donor picks 1 and rejects the others. So its all about your own biases as a donor, and how well the person making the gofundme page can perform their sad story in a way that makes random people with money feel they are deserving of help. It's a really messed-up dynamic. (This is if you're just randomly going on there to see if there's anyone you want to donate to. If it's someone you know, who is sending you the link to their gofundme page, that's a different thing.)

Like, if you are having a lot of health problems, and you lost your job, and you really need money, so you start a gofundme- but also, a month before all this happened, you spent a few thousand dollars to go on a nice vacation, well maybe you don't mention the vacation, right? If people knew about that, they would judge you and not donate any money to you. It's all about presenting your problems in a way that matches the donors' biases about who "deserves" help.

Also, gofundme being filled with people begging for money for their basic needs of healthcare and housing is an indication that something is very wrong in our society. (Speaking from an American perspective here.) There need to be big structural changes so that this doesn't happen. (Universal healthcare, for example.) It doesn't really help, in a big-picture sense, to donate to people on gofundme.

At the same time, though, there's something kind of attractive about just randomly going on gofundme and donating to people. You know these are people who really are in need, and you are directly helping them.

Unless, of course, it's a scam.

Hmm, I wonder how many gofundmes are scams. You have no way of knowing, if you don't know them personally.

Yeah, so, let's be realistic about this. If you just randomly go on gofundme and donate to somebody, you shouldn't have grand idealistic ideas about how you're such a hero. Could be a scam. 

And to generalize this, it's not just about a gofundme being a scam. Any charity you donate to could turn out to be ineffective, or do more harm than good. In every case, there's a certain probability that that will happen. Hopefully it's a low probability- try to do your research and only donate to the ones that have a low probability of being a scam/ a waste/ a mistake. But I do think it is important to recognize that that risk always exists. Don't donate with such lofty fantasies that you'll be devastated if your donation turns out to not do any good.

This is another reason why I don't think it's good to "give sacrificially." Because if you "give sacrificially," that means it's a hardship for you. It's difficult, and you have to believe that the hardship to yourself is worth it because you're doing such a good thing and helping people. Then if you find out actually your donation didn't help people, well, then what? I can easily imagine being unable to handle that, emotionally. Feeling so overwhelmed, so much regret, too traumatized to donate to any charity again.

So instead, I think the key is to be aware that whenever you donate money, there is some probability that it won't help people. Don't donate an amount that makes you emotionally dependent on the idea that "this donation in particular is doing a lot of good." Don't be so emotionally connected to it. Just decide how much you'll donate each year, and do some amount of research into which charities are likely to use the money well, but be aware there's a chance it won't do good (and if you donate frequently throughout your entire life, inevitably at some point, some of those donations *will* be to something that doesn't do any good), and just kind of... be emotionally detached from the specifics of it. 

I don't know, maybe "emotionally detached" isn't the right term. I care a lot about the problems of the world. It's important to me to be part of the movement of people who are working to make a difference. What I mean is, it's not good to be emotionally invested in "I just gave $50 to Charity X, and that's a big deal, that's a lot of money" such that you will feel devastated and betrayed if it turns out that Charity X just wasted the money. So emotionally invested, that you fear getting actual information on what Charity X did after you donated to them, because if it turns out to be bad, you'll feel like you've made a terrible mistake.

No. My thinking now is, just recognize that inevitably it will happen sometimes, and learn from it and try to pick better charities in the future.

Just to have the mindset "I am the kind of person who donates Y amount of dollars every year" and then if you find out that you gave to a charity that wasn't that good, well, it doesn't affect you personally because you were going to donate that money anyway. It's not like the bad charity took something from *you*. Maybe you could make a case that they took something from the people who would have been helped by a better charity. But it doesn't have to be an emotional thing for *you*, because you didn't set it up so it feels like a "sacrifice." Instead, you just know that you're a person who donates Y dollars and lives on X-Y dollars and that's fine.

I want to keep a clear separation between the money I donate to charity and the money I use to take care of myself and my family.

And another thing that should be separate from charity: my job. I don't want to work in a job where "helping people" is one of the biggest motivations. Or, rather, let me say it this way: I want to work in a job where, if I'm unhappy, I can just leave and get a different job, without having to worry about how I'm letting people down by leaving. That's not my problem- see, that's what I mean by a separation. I want my choice of a job to be solely motivated by what's best for me and my family. I don't ever want to be in a situation where I feel like "I'm not happy at this job, I'm not getting paid enough, I could find a new job that pays better- but, no, I can't leave- if I leave, no one will be here doing this work to help people." I don't want to weigh "taking care of myself and my family" against "helping the world" in a context that's as significant as what job I'm working in. 

I mean, sure, if I'm in a job that does good and helps the world, that's great, but it also has to be a job where I can leave and they can just hire someone else. So I don't have to feel like I'm letting everyone down and am therefore morally obligated to stay.

Some people do have to be in jobs like that though. Like the people who run these charities that I donate to. Like doctors who work in places where they don't get paid well, but if they leave, their patients won't have access to medical care. Do some people like that kind of job? Maybe some people like the feeling of "this is a sacrifice, but it's worth it because I'm helping people." I feel like... it carries a lot of risk... What if you sacrifice like that, but you fail to make the world better? Wouldn't that be too terrible to handle? (Maybe go into it knowing there is some probability of failure. Like Jesus said, count the cost.)

And... I don't know... I feel like it's hard for me to talk about this, because I have a very "literal" way of thinking... and so I should be worried that I'll say something and people will take it to mean something very different from what I'm saying... Like if I say "there's always some probability that your donation won't do any good," people will take that to mean they should never donate to charity at all.

And also, I'm coming from the perspective that... I moved to China. I gave up my life in the US and moved to China. So when I talk about not wanting my job to be a site where I'm sacrificing to "help the world", when I talk about my confidence in knowing that I want to put myself and my family's needs first... I mean, keep in mind that back then, I didn't believe those things, and that's why I moved to China, and it's been a bigger sacrifice than I imagined.

I don't regret it- see, again, this is a situation where I say something and then people are going to take it the wrong way. But, my point is... the way that one's grand idealistic ideas about "doing the right thing" stack up against reality. My point is... it's a whole different thing when you're actually living it, not just thinking about it.

Heyyyy this is getting too serious, let's talk about another weird thing about charity. I remember long ago, I saw a photo which was taken in one of those tropical countries which are big tourist destinations but the average person there lives in poverty. I forget which country. This photo showed a really nice luxury hotel, and there was a wall going around the hotel property, and a huge crowded nasty-looking slum right on the other side of the wall. 

The point, I assumed, was the contrast between those 2 things- where people live completely different lifestyles, and yet geographically they are right next to each other. I felt like this photo was telling us we should judge the tourists in the hotel, for, uh, existing geographically close to a slum? Like, the more I thought about it, the more I felt like it didn't really make sense. I felt like the message of the photo was "It's wrong how some people are rich while some people live in extreme poverty- specifically, it's wrong because they are right next to each other." Like those rich hotel residents were "ignoring" poverty in a way that was uniquely immoral. I thought, "Why does it matter how close they are to each other, geographically? Don't I have money that I could be donating online, and that's very easy and not at all dependent on my physical location? And so I am doing the same thing as these hotel guests who live good lives while other people live in poverty."

The photo was very striking and "makes a statement" because they were right next to each other, but the more I thought about it, the more I was like "I can't see how being right next to each other actually matters."

Or maybe the point was just to make me feel guilty. Which, I mean, yeah, that's what this whole post is about. What should I do, morally, about the reality that some people in this world need help? Feeling guilty and then haphazardly donating money until I no longer have those feelings is just not a good strategy. So what is? 

(Like I said, my current strategy is to decide once a year how much money to donate, and then set up recurring donations to do it automatically. This is WAY better than the "feel guilty" strategy.)

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Related:

Here's How We Do Our Budget 

Culture, Objectivity, God, and the Real Reason I Moved to China

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. New Fossil in China Pushes Bird Origins Back 20 Million Years (February 17) "The newly identified B. zhenghensis shares key features with modern birds, such as a short tail fused into a pygostyle, which typically supports the tail feathers." Cool!

2. Dua Lipa - Levitating Featuring DaBaby (Official Music Video) (2020) Just posting because I like the song.

I also like this song: Ed Sheeran - Shape of You (Official Music Video) (2017)

3. Sunday reading (February 16) "'All right, then, I’ll go to hell' — and tore it up."

4. Texas measles cases are up, and New Mexico now has an outbreak. Here’s what you need to know (February 19) 

5. Archive Request (February 17) From xkcd.

6. I don't know if y'all have seen this video from 2010: Too Late to Apologize: A Declaration. It's an American revolution parody of the song "Apologize" and it's AMAZING.

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Luke Skywalker says, "You told me Vader betrayed and murdered my father." Obi-Wan says, "The rules were you guys weren't going to fact check." Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Protests Erupt At Stonewall After Trump Removes Trans People From Monument Website (February 15) 

Also from Erin in the Morning: More Hospitals Resume Trans Care After Trump's EO Temporarily Blocked In Court [AZ, VA] (February 20)

2. Thousands of people protest in Washington, D.C., and across the U.S. on Presidents Day (February 17) "In Washington, D.C., the nation's capital, thousands of people gathered at the Capitol Reflecting Pool chanting "Where is Congress?" and urging members of Congress to "do your job!" despite nearly 40-degree temperatures and 20-mile-per-hour wind gusts."

3. AP reporter and photographer barred from Air Force One over ‘Gulf of Mexico’ terminology dispute (February 16)

4. They Are a Minority (February 15) "Trump voters who are finding out in very tangible ways that Trump’s presidency is going to be materially bad for them."

5. Democracy is Crumbling. Is Anybody Doing Anything? (February 10, via) "But what I hear in the repeated insistence that “no one is doing anything” is the underlying belief that there is nothing that can be done. And this troubles me deeply."

This post is a good roundup of ways that people *are* fighting back, with some success, and ways that *you* can help.

6. Trump administration orders lawyers for vulnerable unaccompanied minors to stop their work (February 18, via) "'People like Thomas Homan state that they care about children and want to protect them from trafficking,' said Jonathan Ryan, an immigration attorney in San Antonio affected by the order, criticizing the Trump administration’s border czar. 'This lays bare the cynical lies he tells the American people. What he really wants to do is hurt children and separate families.'" This is horrifying.