Blogaround

 Links not related to the antichrist:

1. 一隻哈巴狗 (2022) In case you are interested in what songs Chinese toddlers are listening to. This is a cute little song about a pug.

2. PHOTOS: Laundry is a chore but there's a beauty and serenity in the way it hangs out (January 10) "Castañeda Lee photographed locals in hopes of appreciating the invisible workers on the other side of Cambodian tourism, who spend hours each day doing the laundry of tourists."

3. Inside a Gaza medical clinic at risk of shutting down after an Israeli ban (January 11) "'I am trying to provide the best care to patients because I know they don't have any access to this kind of care elsewhere,' Harb says, adding there's a waitlist of people trying to get in."

4. Author Philip Yancey Confesses Affair, Withdraws from Ministry (January 6)

The Terrible Takes on Philip Yancey’s 8-Year Affair (January 12) "I don’t want to be married to someone whose only reason for not falling into bed with another woman is that Jesus performed a miracle."

Something I was thinking about this: So, the conservative Christian response to these kinds of scandals is 'don't judge, we are all sinners, we are all equally guilty, it could have been any of us falling to the temptation to cheat on our spouse [or sexually abuse children, or whatever the scandal is this time].' And then the progressive Christian response is like, 'hey, this sin-levelling is not cool, presenting it like the victims and the perpetrators are equally sinful, so we can't judge or hold people accountable. No, in reality we are NOT all just 1 bad decision away from having an affair, okay? That's not normal! You can say we're all sinners, but not like that, gosh. Some sins are way worse than others.'

So it's like... the conservative Christian point of view is that we're all horrible sinners, and the progressive Christian point of view is there are 2 types of people: 

1. Normal people who just sin in normal ways, like, you yelled at someone about something that wasn't their fault because you were in a bad mood. That's wrong, you should apologize for that. But we don't judge people as a Bad Person Forever if they do these kinds of little normal sins. We've all done things like that before.
2. People who do something really bad, that's totally beyond-the-pale. They are a completely different type of person from us normal people; we are very much NOT "all" susceptible to the temptation to do something so terrible. We shouldn't have empathy for these people, or think we can relate to them. They should be shunned from public life and we can never say any good things about them again.

This "2 types of people" perspective also seems bad. (To be clear, I haven't really seen it presented so explicitly like this- this is my own summary.) So I'm wondering what a better perspective would be. 

Maybe something like this: There's a spectrum of bad things that people might do, and at different points along the spectrum, we should respond with different levels of concern for the victims and for the perpetrators. Towards the lower end of the spectrum, it's like, well, that was wrong, but your victims are also imperfect people who have done similar things, so like, you have to apologize, and then all of us work together to become better people. Towards the higher end, our primary response should be to help and support the victims, and we shouldn't spend our efforts on caring about the perpetrator. But hopefully the perpetrator has somebody in their life who cares about them and will try to get them to be a better person. But that's not something that most people should care about- mostly we should care about helping the victims.

So rather than a clear line dividing the "2 types of people", it's a spectrum where the proportions of "how much we want to help the victims" vs "how much we want to help the perpetrator" gradually change.

See also, this post I wrote in 2015: "Christians Aren't Perfect" When It's Convenient

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Nationwide anti-ICE protests call for accountability after Renee Good's death (January 11) "At least 1,000 events across the U.S. were planned for Saturday and Sunday, according to Indivisible, a progressive grassroots coalition of activists helping coordinate the movement it calls 'ICE Out For Good Weekend of Action.'"

Photos: Protests grow over the fatal ICE shooting in Minneapolis (January 8) 

January 10, 2026 (via) "In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: 'That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,' only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out 'F*cking b*tch' after he killed her."

2. National Park Service will void passes with stickers over Trump's face (January 9) "The use of an image of Trump on the 2026 pass — rather than the usual picture of nature — has sparked a backlash, sticker protests, and a lawsuit from a conservation group."

3. The CDC just sidelined these childhood vaccines. Here's what they prevent (January 9) "Before routine administration of the current rotavirus vaccines began in 2006, about 70,000 young children were hospitalized and 50 died every year from the virus."

4. Tomorrow never knows (January 7) "And then — because their lives are governed by the need for everyone, everywhere to always line up behind every mandatory Proper Christian Stance on everything — they probably would have guessed that you were testing them about their adherence to the PCS on something like melting glaciers and climate change."

Rep. Lieu Says Illegal for Military to Use Force Against Greenland Without Congress Authorization (January 8) "If any military member, including the generals on down...participate in the use of military force against Greenland without congressional authorization, they are following illegal orders."

5. Over 400,000 Transgender People Have Moved States Since Trump's Election (January 9)