Links not related to the antichrist:
1. Famous Science YouTuber Admits He Has Unhealthy Relationship With AI After Facing Backlash Over Recent Video (July 31, via) "Longtime YouTuber and science content creator Hank Green has announced that his main channel will likely be “paused” as he deals with his admitted overreliance on ChatGPT and other AI tools after some fans claimed a recent video included him reading AI-generated language."
2. The Underlying Misogyny of Grand Romantic Gestures (July 27, 47-minute video) "If you meet your best friend's fiance and all you can think is, 'oh man, she's so hot, let me film intense close-ups of her, then go home and edit them into a weird montage that I will keep in a VHS tape to fantasize about in my house', you're just weird."
Another good line from the video: "It is only by doing the little things, the daily, mundane work, that you can build to a place where your relationship is healthy enough to also accommodate fun gestures and surprises."
And: "No matter how much women say, stop, leave me alone, I don't want to be with you, we'll never be together, the grand romantic gesture argues that it's all just all just pretense. It's this fake defense that women use, almost as a filter to weed out the guys who aren't romantic enough to keep pursuing them."
3. How China Delivers a 14-Yuan Bouquet Over 2,000 Kilometers (August 3) "On China’s major e-commerce platforms, a bouquet of fresh-cut roses from the southwestern Yunnan province sells for just 14 yuan ($2), with free delivery to most parts of the country."
Also from Sixth Tone: Check in, Log on, Stay for Months: Life at China’s 9-Cent Internet Café (August 5)
4. Is Captain Pike's Tragic Fate Actually a Happy Ending? (July 22, 31-minute video) An analysis of Captain Pike's disability in "Star Trek": how it is viewed in different ways in different "Star Trek" series (the 1960's vs now), and the parallels between Captain Pike and the lives of disabled people in the real world.
5. Works of culture from age to age (July 28) "But the other thing Card does here also seems utterly alien to contemporary MAGA worship and MAGA religion: He identifies God through the eyes of Hagar, the abused and discarded concubine, the refugee."
6. The Pastor No One Can Correct (July 11) Posting this because it's related to the question of whether or not children can/should take communion in church, which we were talking about when we read "The Kingdom of Children." Apparently Doug Wilson said "we commune children", and first of all, I have never heard "commune" used as a verb meaning "give communion to", and second, this is definitely a different thing than what "The Kingdom of Children" was talking about. (If you don't know who Doug Wilson is- he's a pastor who is so extremely racist and sexist, like, I didn't even know there were people who were that racist and sexist.)
I guess you can imagine a spectrum going from "we make infants/children/everyone eat communion, whether they want to or not" (is this Wilson's position?) to "we let everyone (children and adults) take communion if they choose to" to "we have an official vetting process to make sure you're a real Christian before you can take communion, and children cannot pass this vetting process." [Okay maybe this isn't a one-dimensional spectrum, maybe it's several dimensions.] What is the role of choice, and what is the role of "understanding" (understanding what communion means, understanding what it means to be a Christian, understanding the meaning of Jesus' death)?
"The Kingdom of Children" talks about communion as "the family meal"- like it's about being included as part of the community, rather than about your own individual feelings/understanding about Jesus- to me, this sounds like if you're at church, you take communion, because that's what everyone's doing. It would be weird if you're having a meal, and some people are eating and some people are just sitting there not eating while it happens around them- but that always happens at church during communion. It's totally fine if some people choose not to do it while everyone else does, maybe because they're not Christians, or for any other reason. It's not weird. I *don't* think children should have communion just because "oh, it's time for us all to have communion now"; I think there should be some "understanding" of what it is. I don't think "The Kingdom of Children" addressed that- it was mainly talking about churches which exclude children who *want* to take communion. The main point of "The Kingdom of Children" was that children should be able to make their own choices about religion.
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Links related to the antichrist:
1. Oh turns out I haven't been following the news this week so I don't have any links