Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. ‘There’s only one rule that I know of, babies’ (March 6) "It trips me up because I’m still infected with all the White Jesus nonsense I was steeped in growing up, and because I live in a culture shaped by that same White Jesus nonsense, which insists that it is possible to 'be kind' without love and justice."

2. NASA Interns' 'All About That Space' Parody Pimps Orion | Music Video (2014) Parody of "All About That Bass"

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Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Update: Trump administration rescinds stop-work order that halted legal services for unaccompanied immigrant children (February 21) A bit of good news, I guess. This is an update to the link I posted a few weeks ago.

2. Trump Issues Legally Shaky Order Asserting English as Official Language of US (March 3) "In addition to that action, the order rescinds a previous executive action issued by former President Bill Clinton, which required federal agencies to accommodate people who don’t speak English by offering them interpreters or documents in their primary language." 

Ugh, what? What does it even mean that English is the official language of the US- people are still going to speak other languages, this isn't going to turn the US into the utopia that racists dream about, where they never have to encounter anything that reminds them entire other languages exist.

But federal agencies will no longer have to provide translation services. So, this is just making the government worse at serving people.

3. Venezuelan men allege mistreatment while in detention in Guantánamo Bay (February 25) "Durán Arapé alleges he was beaten by guards. He said the mistreatment by detention officers got so bad, he tried to harm himself twice in the two weeks he was in Guantánamo."

4. We can still stop the GOP from destroying Medicaid (February 26, via)

5. Birthright Citizenship Is a Sacred Guarantee (January 27, via) "The attempt to end birthright citizenship in the United States is an attempt to reverse history, to push our nation back, way back, before the Dred Scott decision of 1857 and the secession crisis that soon delivered the nation into the Civil War. Calling this action “unconstitutional” is utterly inadequate; the maneuver is the soiling of sacred text with profane lies."

6. New Texas Bill Outright Criminalizes Being Trans As Felony Fraud (March 6) This bill is very unlikely to pass, but it's a sign of the direction that anti-trans attacks are moving in.

This has always been part of evangelicals' anti-trans belief system: being trans is not a real thing, and if a man says he's a woman, that's just not true, and we must not participate in this falsehood. It would be wrong, in the eyes of God, to refer to a trans woman as "she." This is a very common line of reasoning that I've seen in articles from The Gospel Coalition, Christianity Today, etc.

For those of us who support trans people, we might think "Even if you don't think people can 'really' change their gender, why not just let them pretend? Why not just go along with whatever pronouns trans people want to be called by, and keep your opinions on it to yourself?" Well, there are conservative Christians who really think God will hold them accountable for perpetuating the "lie" by using someone's correct pronouns.

Anyway, we all need to support trans people, and fight back against possible legislation like this.

7. And If You Look This Way, You’ll See The Dead Body Of The Separation Of Church And State (February 7, via) "What does the anti-Christian violence and vandalism he’s talking about even look like? Did it look like Dylann Roof shooting up a Black church and putting out his White pride manifesto before the cops took him to get Burger King? Or a Black church in Texas getting slurs spray painted and summarily burned down? Or are those examples too “DEI” for God to come into the picture?"

8. When Headlines Fail: Trump's Empty IVF Promise and the Woman Who Believed It (March 1) I don't really know what to make of this. First of all, Parker Molloy is right that the media has consistently failed at writing headlines that make it clear that whatever that felon says should be understood in light of the fact that he's a liar, and he just says whatever thought happens to flitter across his mind, and it has no relation to actual truth or his actual intentions or his actual beliefs.

Molloy's post discusses a Washington Post article (which is paywalled so I can't read it) about a woman who voted for that felon because he said IVF treatments would be free. But now she has lost her job because of DOGE laying off thousands of government workers.

My first reaction here was complete shock- the felon said IVF would be free, and someone actually believed that? Someone actually believed that, and then voted for him, like it was a straightforward vote of support for that proposed policy?

???????

What's actually going on here? I'm so boggled at the potential existence of American voters who don't know the felon is a liar. Really? There really exist people who don't know that?????? HOW?????

But maybe let's take it farther than just asking it like it's a rhetorical question. There must be actual reasons people thought it was a good idea to vote for him.

Molloy brings up studies which say something like 60% of people only read headlines, not the actual articles. We could judge them on that, but actually... so much is happening, and social media bombards us with new stuff all the time- it's not actually possible to spend enough time reading to have a solid informed opinion on every recent societal issue. There are things going on that I've heard about from headlines but I haven't taken the time to read up and find out what the actual situation is. (And when I used to be on twitter, this was a lot worse- I would see people's half-baked one-liner opinions on some news story, and I wouldn't read the actual original article.) What's the standard for how "informed" American voters should be?

Another thing I thought of, in regard to this voter who apparently believed the felon was really going to make IVF free (??????) - maybe this is a case where you *want* to believe something, and you're vaguely aware of indicators that it might not be true, but you ignore them. I certainly have that kind of bias sometimes. Everyone does. But then later, when faced with the reality I was trying to ignore, I feel like "you know, there *were* signs that I should have seen earlier, but I didn't want to believe them." But the articles I've seen about regretful voters portray them as like, totally shocked, like they had no idea that his bad policies were going to negatively affect them. 

(At the same time, though, I'm highly skeptical of claims on the internet about his regretful voters- because that's the kind of thing where people on "our side" might take 1 thing that 1 such voter said and blow it out of proportion, talk about it like there's a huge movement of such regretful voters- I won't believe that until I see actual statistics on it. Let's not do this, okay? When we talk about it like it's some big movement, we are spreading misinformation.)

What's actually going on here? There must be reasons people voted for him. Is it worth taking the time to dig out what those reasons were, and understand how they're just extreme versions of the general human tendency to sometimes make bad decisions, which we can all relate to to some extent? I mean, I think that's worth doing if your goal is to convince them to change their minds. But I don't think that *in general* we all need to do that. But at least we shouldn't talk about republican voters like they're one-dimensional caricatures, like they just went into the voting booth and said "I'm really racist." It's more likely to be something like, their racism biased them to not think too deeply about the actual reality of his proposed policies.

I'm not letting them off the hook. Far from it! It was wrong for people to vote for him, regardless of how relatably-human their reasons might have been. I'm just saying, there must be actual reasons there- not good reasons, of course, but reasons that we can understand.