Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Journal Club: An Ace Reading of Frodo (June 29) "Hobbit culture emphasizes the importance of family and lineage, but Bilbo and Frodo are both highlighted as strange for being perpetual bachelors. This puts a lot of distance between them and their home culture."

2. The Lexicon of Revolution: Tracing the Origins and Global Journey of China’s ‘Long March’ (June 30) "In 1976, 'Long March' was first added to the dictionary, merely as a subentry under 'long.' However, in June 2016 — coinciding with the 80th anniversary — the OED upgraded it to a standalone main entry with a comprehensive historical definition: 'The retreat of Chinese Communist forces ... in 1934–35 ... over a distance of 6,000 miles.'"

Also from Sixth Tone: Investigation Uncovers China’s Underground Height Surgery Market (July 1) Wow this looks horrifying.

3. Jurassic Park but with a Cat (2021, 1-minute video, via) and Jurassic Park with a Cat — Behind the Scenes (7-minute video)

4. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are married. What to know about the wedding (July 5)

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. The Supreme Court upholds grace periods for mail-in ballots, siding against the GOP (June 29) I don't really *get* this case- so, the question is about how the deadline for mail-in ballots is defined: is it that your ballot has to be received by election day, or postmarked by election day? Both of those seem like reasonable policies to me; either one should be fine, as long as everyone is clear on which one it is. I'm confused about why this is always framed as "Democrats are in favor of counting the ones that arrive after election day, Republicans are not" and also why Democrats are talking about this like it's about the big questions of democracy and fairness to voters- it *doesn't* seem intuitively obvious to me that being on the side of fairness and democracy means that even the ballots received after election day should be counted.

(Okay, but from the Supreme Court's perspective, the question is about whether states are in charge of their own election policies.)

My initial thought was, maybe it's about "people who have enough money and resources that they're able to live their lives in an organized way and don't have trouble with meeting deadlines" skewing Republican, and "people who are poor and therefore never have enough time or money for all the things they need to deal with, so they often miss deadlines" skewing Democrat- so that's why Democrats want to count them and Republicans don't? Or maybe "people who aren't paying attention and didn't realize there was an election until the last minute" correlates more with voting for Democrats. Something like that?

*I* vote by mail- I wonder if any of my ballots have ever been received after election day. I try to get it done as early as possible, because I know there's uncertainty in how long it takes to mail stuff from China to the US (unless you pay like 50 bucks for a good shipping service like DHL or Shunfeng). But yeah, sometimes the time between when the ballot becomes available to download and print, and the election day, is not that long- maybe it makes sense that a lot of mail-in voters send in their ballots and they *don't* arrive by election day, even if these voters are being responsible and aware of what's going on. 

Maybe the partisan angle is about how Democrats are more likely to vote by mail than Republicans. So I should think of it not as "this is about counting the ballots of people who are bad at meeting deadlines, apparently a key demographic for Democrats???" but more like "it *is* reasonable that some proportion of mail-in ballots arrive after election day- this is about protecting the right to vote, for people who vote by mail." (I would be interested in seeing the statistical distribution showing when mail-in ballots arrive, relative to election day.)

And then another way to think about it is, those ballots are already in the mail. People *want* to vote, they have the right to vote, and they did the work of filling in the ballot and mailing it. You *should* count them.

2. Immigration is about Race (June 29) "Both of Alito’s opinions are mockeries of legal reasoning. He had a conclusion to get to, and he got there. He can’t say it in so many words, but he wants to Make America White Again. And the other five conservative justices agreed with him."

3. Megyn Kelly faces backlash over ‘profoundly racist’ rant against Haitian immigrants after Supreme Court ruling (June 26) "'We don’t care if you’re offended. Get out! Go home! Go back to f***ing Haiti!' Kelly said on her podcast."

And also about Haitians: The U.S. healthcare system is in crisis. A Supreme Court ruling could make things worse (July 2) "Experts say deporting Haitian TPS recipients will have a catastrophic impact on the nationwide healthcare workforce crisis — a workforce that is hugely dependent on immigrant labor."

4. Israel Bombed a Turtle Sanctuary & Killed Mona Khalil (June 29) "In my opinion, Israel destroyed the Orange House, and Khalil, because they want to destroy what it and what she stood for: hope. A better life. A life where even poor refugees can care about helpless little turtles."

5. Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds (June 30) So the court ruled 6-3 that the 14th amendment says what it says. Uh. Jonathan Last writes, "The first time the Trump administration was able to find any judge, anywhere in America, to state that it had the ability to do away with birthright citizenship was when it got to the Supreme Court. And then it found three of them." (And Kavanaugh, even though he sided with the majority, it was for other reasons, not because he believes the 14th amendment says what it says.)

The six opinions in the birthright citizenship ruling have a lot to teach us about the U.S. today (July 2)

And apparently a bunch of MAGAs are really unhappy about this, and have a lot of racist things to say about it. My "favorite" is Steven Crowder, who is mad that "little Josue born to illegal Haitians in Springfield, Ohio is just as American as you and me." Um, yes? That's what America is about? So I guess they're not even going to pretend America is about equality for everyone. And for the MAGAs who make a big deal about being Christian, I guess they aren't even going to pretend that Christianity is about a God who loves everyone.

6. He sent a harsh email to ICE's top official. 5 months later, federal agents tracked him down (July 1) "'It's starting to look like a pattern of knocking on people's doors to ask them questions about clearly constitutionally protected speech. And that is very troubling,' said Nathan Freed Wessler, the deputy director of ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project."

7. House Democrats accuse Trump of 'hijacking' America's 250th birthday for his own gain (July 2) "'They had a chance to do this in a bipartisan way or a way that wouldn't enrich cronies, but they pretty clearly didn't do that,' said Zibel. 'I think that this is a follow-the-money situation that needs to be explored.'"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Something Still Could: Courage for a Turbid Anniversary (June 9) "The Declaration’s words outran the intentions of the men who wrote them. “All men are created equal” meant, in 1776, free men of property, and everyone knew it. But the sentence did not say that. Lincoln saw what Jefferson had done, perhaps without fully meaning to: created a rebuke (even to himself) timed unintentionally to detonate in every coming day. The distance between what the sentence said and what its authors meant became a standing invitation to everyone it was never meant to include."

2. 134 Days, 68 Places, Zero Internet: One Man’s Journey Through Digital China (June 23) "One of the initial challenges was hotel reservations. At his first stop, a chain hotel in Linfen, another city in Shanxi, he couldn’t get a room in person because the hotel only accepted online bookings. The front desk staffer told Yang there was nothing he could do to help him check in, though kindly drew him a map to another location of the same chain that could accommodate walk-in guests."

Also from Sixth Tone: Through the Eyes of Shop Cats (June 23) "Shop cats originally existed to drive away rats and protect goods in old, simple stores. Now, many old shops are renovated or closed, and the new commercial spaces are cleaner and do not need cats to catch rats. Therefore, the number of shop cats is decreasing year by year, especially in Shanghai."

3. Where Did All the Dinosaurs Go? Answers in Genesis and the Problem of the Missing Evidence (June 12) "We have found, quite literally, billions of fossils in the layers that young-earth geology must assign to the post-Flood world. We have found the rhinos and the horses and the tapirs and the cave bears. Somehow every last one of two hundred kinds of the most charismatic animals that ever lived slipped through that net entirely, and left behind not a fragment."

4. On Christianity and aliens (part 2) (June 23) "But the fact of the matter is that the sin and/or salvation of other intelligent creatures on other planets or in other galaxies is their business and we have no idea. We do not have their Bible, only ours, and ours is about us, not about them."

Also from the Slacktivist: God’s wrath on the jerks (June 24) "God could send a tornado to destroy the house of such a preacher — and only their house, leaving the rest of the community unharmed. And God could have that tornado carve out the full text of Isaiah 1 in deep trench letters in the remnants of that house. But God knows that it wouldn’t help. That same preacher would be back on his cable TV station the next day, explaining that this extremely localized natural disaster was clearly evidence of God’s wrath over a Girl Scout troop welcoming a trans member three states away."

5. 'If you are alive, make any noise': Venezuela searches rubble on Day 4 (June 28) "On Saturday, the government said the death toll had reached 1,430, with nearly 3,500 injured."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Trump’s “Open-Border” Policy For Parasitic Worms (June 19) "So, what went wrong? Why is the average American now cursed to once again know what the [****] a screwworm is?"

2. The “Massive Human Consequences” of Ending Birthright Citizenship (March 31) "'The initial order gave the federal government a 30 day implementation window. This is the federal government that can’t even get TSA lines working at an airport. They’re going to figure out a new class of citizenship in 30 days?' He added: 'There would be really immediate and long term and probably irreversible harms to individuals, babies born here, their families, the services they they get, the quality of their lives, disrupted and impacted in ways that we can’t possibly even fathom right now. No one has ever really thought that the government could do this, and then for them to sort of cavalierly go and do it with no plan: massive human consequences.'"

From a Chinese perspective, this whole thing about "wow it would be an unimaginable bureaucratic nightmare if birthright citizenship ended" seems kind of... odd. China doesn't have birthright citizenship, and yet it's not a constant nightmare of citizens being unable to prove their citizenship. Chinese citizens all* have an ID card, that they have to show whenever they deal with bureaucracy stuff that requires real-name verification. As an immigrant, I have to show my passport instead. (This can be really annoying, though, when the systems are set up to require a Chinese ID card and they don't have an option to use other forms of ID instead.) Finding out that the US just doesn't have a way to easily verify who's a citizen sounds just unbelievable, from a Chinese perspective.

*I have heard of Chinese people who weren't able to get an ID card because of the one-child policy- ie, they were the 2nd child in their family, and so their parents just didn't report their birth anywhere official. (Apparently there are fines for violating the one-child policy. It's not in effect anymore though- it ended in 2016.) This sounds like an impossible situation to be in- you can't do much of anything if you don't have a Chinese ID card. 

(But also, I'm sure China has problems I'm not hearing about. Just because the system works fine for the people I know doesn't mean it's actually fine. What is the situation for undocumented immigrants/ stateless people in China?)

As for establishing babies' citizenship in China- well, when you apply for the baby's ID card or hukou, you have to show the parents' ID card or hukou. (I didn't even get into what a "hukou" is, basically Chinese citizens are all supposed to have a hukou, it's a document that says very officially what city you are a resident of- this may have little connection to what city you actually live in, which is fine but you have less rights when signing your kids up for public school and things like that. Having a hukou proves Chinese citizenship.)

My husband is Chinese, so our kids have Chinese citizenship through him. (Also US citizenship because of me.) *Not* birthright citizenship. If both parents are immigrants, then the kid will not have Chinese citizenship, even if they are born in China. This sounds annoying to deal with- you have to get your baby a Chinese visa, within some number of days (60 days? I'm not sure) after they're born, but they don't even have a passport yet- some countries don't issue passports to their citizens fast enough to meet China's deadline, but from what I've heard it's not really a big deal, China is okay with babies missing this deadline.

The thing is, though, the big thing that makes the overall situation in China completely different from the US: In China, no matter how long I live here, I can never *be* Chinese. And children who are born here, if both their parents are foreign, they can't *be* Chinese. It's like, no matter what, you're always *different*. The concept of being Chinese is very strongly associated with ethnicity and family heritage- if you don't have that, you aren't Chinese, no matter what you do. 

This is completely different than the concept of being American. And ending birthright citizenship would change that.

3. In reversal, Senate votes to block war powers resolution, delivering Trump a win (June 25)

4. The Supreme Court says the U.S. can turn away asylum seekers at the border (June 25) "The Obama administration was the first to try stemming the flow of asylum seekers that way. But the lower courts blocked the policy on grounds that it violated federal law by denying asylum to people who otherwise would have qualified for it, had they been permitted to literally put one foot over the border."

Because of an imaginary line.

5. 4 surprising things to know about abortion in America since Dobbs (June 25) "The number of abortions nationally has increased each year since the national right to abortion was overturned."

6. US Supreme Court rules against Haitian refugees who were given Temporary Protected Status (June 25) and Trump can begin deportations of Syrian, Haitian TPS holders, Supreme Court says (June 25) This is just so shocking and sad, why would you want to send people back to a place that's not safe for them?

7. A federal judge in Boston blocks key parts of Trump's order to limit voting by mail (June 25) "The judge also found USPS has no legal authority to control mail-in voting."

8. Does Trump Know How Passports Work? (June 27) Seems not!

(I did see a blog post that said it literally does say "Welcome, but be good" in this edition of the passport- but this has NOT been confirmed so don't believe everything you read on a blog.)

Chinese Shopping Apps: Ziploc Bags Edition

Here's a post about how I bought ziploc bags from Jingdong, a Chinese shopping app.

This is extremely boring for me. I use apps like Jingdong all the time, to buy really boring stuff like ziploc bags. But for those of you outside of China, perhaps you've never seen what the process is like to search for a product and check the options and prices and pay for it, with an interface entirely in Chinese. I think it's so fascinating how people in different parts of the world can have such different experiences, in the normal boring parts of their life, the things they do every day, which are so boring that they would never think to even talk about them.

Anyway, so, I need to buy some ziploc bags. Let's open up the Jingdong (京东) app on my phone and search for ziploc bags, which is 密封袋 [mì fēng dài] in Chinese.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. California judge bans Kars4Kids ads for hiding Orthodox Jewish agenda (May 16) Wow, I never knew that Kars 4 Kids uses the money to promote Orthodox Judaism.

Also from Hemant Mehta: Former "ex-gay" leader Alan Chambers charged with soliciting a minor (May 20)

And: The evangelical Christian hit “Testify to Love” just got a powerful pro-LGBTQ reboot (May 22) Avalon was a Christian band popular in the 90s. We're just finding out now that when one of the singers, Michael Passons, left the band in 2003, actually he was kicked out for being gay. Now here he is, 20-some years later, proud of who he is, singing Avalon's hit song "Testify to Love" as a gay man. I am so here for this.

EDIT: okay that video link no longer works, try this one: TY HERNDON + MICHAEL PASSONS || Testify To Love (feat. Melissa Greene)

"For as long as I shall live, I will testify to love / I'll be a witness in the silences when words are not enough."

See also, Christian drag queen Flamy Grant performing this song at Q Christian Fellowship Conference in 2024:

I was not prepared for @FlamyGrant to lead a “Testify To Love” singalong. And it was perfect. pic.twitter.com/5DybJGD5wP

— Matt Nightingale (@mattnightingale) January 13, 2024

2. Before WeChat, There Were Qiaopi Writers (May 20) "Unable to type or use a smartphone herself, the woman sat beside Jiang and dictated the letter sentence by sentence while he wrote each line down by hand."

3. The Rise and Fall of Misery Memoirs (April 11, via) 2-hour-5-minute video. It's about "misery memoirs" that turned out to be completely fabricated (about the Holocaust, drug addiction, satanic rituals, etc). It's about the McMartin preschool trial, where investigators pressured children into making up stories about satanic abuse and secret tunnels and all kinds of wild things. It's about what kinds of "trauma stories" sell, what audiences want to hear and feel. It's about how scammers make up stories that fit The Template, and how real survivors are pressured to present their stories in a certain way. 

One thing this makes me think of is the feminist slogan "believe the victim." The thinking goes, if you come across a story of someone being raped or abused, you should believe it, because only a tiny percent of rape accusations are false, because victims who come forward are often put through a traumatizing process of interrogation and victim-blaming, because there's nothing to gain from making up a story, and a victim would only put themself through that because they really want the truth to come out. 

But it has to be more nuanced than just "believe the victim." It depends on *where* you're encountering this traumatic story. If it's a friend telling you about something that happened to them, you should give them emotional support and try to help them connect with whatever resources they need (therapy, etc). Within that context, you should just believe them and help them. But if you're a journalist writing a story, you should *not* just "believe the victim." You should only publish a story if there's evidence. And if the victim has a large platform and is making this traumatic story into their whole identity, uhhhh, that is even more suspect.

4. On Grindslop (May 20) "What this reveals is that the wealthiest generation of human beings in the history of our species has become so frightened of being seen as a class so terrified of their position being legible that it has begun performing the lives of people who assemble iPhones in near-slavery conditions in Foxconn plants."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Justice Department announces nearly $1.8B fund to compensate Trump allies in a deal to drop IRS suit (May 19) Wait, what? What on earth? The government is just going to give the antichrist $1.776 billion (that's $1,776,000,000) to give to whatever criminals feel they have been mistreated by being prosecuted for their crimes? 

"'This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,' Donald Sherman, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in a statement."

2. Colorado Supreme Court Rules Hospitals Must Not Comply With Trump, Must Continue Offering Trans Youth Care (May 19) "In Monday’s decision, the court rejected the hospital’s central defense: that it had not discriminated against transgender youth but had simply declined to offer one category of treatment. The justices found that distinction meaningless, noting that the hospital continued to provide the very same medications, puberty blockers and hormone therapy, to cisgender youth while denying them to transgender patients."

3. Trump administration to force foreigners in the U.S. to apply for a green card abroad (May 23) This is absurd. Plenty of immigrants come to the US for education, to work, etc, legally, and then end up building a whole life, maybe even marry a US citizen, and it makes sense for there to be a process for them to get a green card and eventually citizenship. This new policy says they have to uproot their whole life and go to their own country, for who knows how many years, in order to apply for a US green card.

4. US senator says he was pepper-sprayed by federal agents during protest at ICE facility (May 26) "'Some of [the people detained] have been detained more than eight to 12 months,' Ana Paola Pazmiño from Resistencia en Accion New Jersey, a migrant rights organization, claimed, adding: 'The horrible conditions that they’re living in inside are terrible.'"

5. Tennessee judge dismisses federal human smuggling charges against Kilmar Abrego García (May 23) "Abrego Garcia's lawyers argued that the government's criminal case was retaliation because of the embarrassment it caused the Trump administration. After he won his deportation case, he became a sort galvanizing force for critics of the president's hard-line immigration policy. His lawyers asked the court to dismiss the charges under a vindictive prosecution claim." But I think this still isn't over.

6. More people are going hungry now than at the height of the pandemic (May 27) "The New York Fed survey from February found that nationwide, 10% of families reported missing meals for lack of food and nearly 16% relied on food donations."

7. Trump DOJ mass-deletes info on Jan. 6 riot cases, including violent assaults on cops (May 26) "A review by NPR found that the deleted material included information about some of the most serious assaults on law enforcement that occurred that day. NPR maintains the most complete database and visual archive of the Jan. 6 prosecutions."

8. SPLC seeks dismissal of charges, citing Trump admin's "vindictive motive to punish the SPLC" (May 27) 

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The Long Hunt for China’s Vanishing Elephant Slides (April 16) "She often navigates narrow alleys, old residential compounds, ruins, and abandoned industrial sites, asking for directions along the way. At some point, an elephant slide simply appears — a moment Sun describes as similar to “clearing a level” in a video game." Wow definitely check out the photos in the article - all the slides are different.

2. Harvard Legacy of Slavery Initiative Releases Database Identifying 1,613 Enslaved People (May 13, via) "Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative released a public database Tuesday identifying 1,613 people who were enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff or who labored on Harvard’s campus between 1636 and 1865." The database is here. 

3. KUA MUSIC【祢是我的一切／You Are My All In All】蔡佳靈 (2024) Mandarin Chinese cover of the worship song "You are my all in all."

4. Red vs blue button (May 16) "In other words, game theory says the correct strategy is to argue loudly and meaninglessly on the internet."

5. Unprecedented corruption and Calvinism (May 18) Linking this because I was struck by what it says about this "blessing of the bikes" event, where a Lutheran church invited motorcycle riders to "receive blessings and prayers."

These rituals can cater to a superstitious understanding of religion, with participants viewing the “blessing” as a kind of talisman against the potential danger of their vocation or avocation, and it’s important to conduct such rituals in a way that doesn’t encourage that understanding. But they can also be a demonstration of solidarity and neighborliness — a way for the church to say “You are a part of this community and we care about you.”

!!!!! Wow, this is a take I haven't heard before. In other words, we have to be careful that people do not interpret "the blessing of the bikes" to mean we are actually blessing the bikes and God will give you protection specifically because you attended this event and got "blessed." It's really striking to me that Fred frames it like 'that would be unfortunate if people interpreted it that way' [my paraphrase, not an actual quote] rather than that just being the default obvious interpretation. 

I'm over here asking "what if prayer isn't 'talking to God'" feeling like I'm breaking all kinds of rules... are there Christians out there saying, "Wow, that would be unfortunate if people interpreted prayer as literally talking to God"?

6. Results Age (May 13) "Please, we need your help. Our research suggests you're the last living descendant of the person who knew how to format this config file."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. WWND? (What would Nebuchadnezzar do?) (May 14) 

An Evangelical Case for Trump as the Antichrist (May 4) This is exactly what I'm saying! I don't even believe in "the" antichrist, but he checks all the boxes!

2. Lessons in Training, Strategy, and Discipline From the Civil Rights Movement (April 27) "With that, the civil rights movement had won. The American public had been made aware, Bevel said, 'in the most graphic way possible, that a sheriff in Alabama was beating law-abiding citizens whose only offense was asking for the right to vote.'"

3. Revealed: The Trump administration arrested the parents of at least 27,000 kids in seven months, ICE records show (May 8) "Families described scrambling for funds after a primary breadwinner was detained or deported. Teens and young adults had to drop out of school to take care of younger siblings after both parents were deported. Children were left wondering when or whether they would ever be able to see parents who had been deported back to countries where they faced death threats."

4. NYU Langone Releases Grand Jury Subpoena: Feds Want Names Of Every Trans Youth Care Patient (May 15) "In addition to the names of providers, the DOJ wants the names and medical histories of every trans youth patient who received gender-affirming care from Langone since 2020. The DOJ also asserted that “de-identified information” is insufficient." Holy crap.

Also from Erin in the Morning: Federal Court Finds Trump Admin DOJ Misled Courts To Target Trans People's Private Data (May 15) "DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case. It has misrepresented and withheld information to both this Court and the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas." 

Marriage

 

"Mawwiage." (From "The Princess Bride.") Image source.

[content note: it's about how, historically, sexual violence has always been a big part of marriage]

Thinking a lot about marriage lately, and what marriage is overall, in a general sense. As in, if you look at all marriages throughout history. The overall picture of it is very bleak for women, and I don't know what to think about that. My own marriage and my own culture- where you get married to someone because you genuinely love them and want to marry them, and you are equals- this is very much an anomaly if you take an outside, objective view of what marriage has always been.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. That "Pending PayPal Charge" Email Is a Scam — Even Though It Really Came From PayPal (April 28, via) "Don't call the number. Don't reply."

2. The hard problem of AI therapy (February 26, via) "Suppose you’re a high-functioning person with anxiety who discovers that the chatbot can always soothe you on the spot. You ask one question—Do you think I handled that email wrong?—and feel relief. Ten minutes later: But what if she’s actually mad? Then: Can you rewrite my follow-up? Then: List ten reasons I’m not a bad person for sending it."

3. How China’s Deaf Delivery Riders Find a New Life in Gig Work (April 20) "By contrast, most deaf interviewees described becoming delivery riders as turning a new page, one of less discrimination and greater autonomy. Delivery platforms offer features that make interacting with restaurants and customers easier, such as voice-to-text conversion, pre-written messages, and digital badges that will alert users that the rider is deaf."

Also from Sixth Tone: Nine Months After Cloning Its First Yak, China Has 10 More (April 30) "To date, the team has generated over 200 cloned Tibetan yak embryos. By the end of 2028, they aim to build a core herd of over 100 cloned yaks, develop a new high-altitude yak breed, and establish standard breeding protocols."

4. 1 Corinthians 13 in the news (April 27) "Read the Beatitudes from Luke’s Gospel you cowards!"

Also from the Slacktivist: The literary puzzle of Isaiah 1 (April 29) "The current form of our Bibles tricks us into reading Isaiah 1 and Amos 5 as critiques of the religious observance prescribed in the Books of Moses, but actually what we have is the Books of Moses configuring their religious commandments, in part, as a response to and a defense against those critiques in Isaiah and Amos."

5. Soniferous Aether (April 27) From xkcd.

6. Women Have Agency: You Don’t Have to Obey Churches or Husbands Who Want to Control You (April 29) Posting this here because it's important to get the word out about this: If you are a woman who has decided to divorce your abusive husband, and now your church leaders are requiring you to come to a meeting so they can decide if you're allowed to do that, you can just not go. !!! Yes, really! You can just not go! Say no! They can't do anything to you! Even if you signed a "church covenant"- those things are not legally binding. It will not hold up in court. You can say no!

A lot of us spend our whole lives with the mindset "I need to be a good girl" which means when some authority figure says "you have to" do something, then you have to do it. We might not even realize there's another option: NOT doing it.

I'm so glad I learned about boundaries- I really had no idea about any of this before I learned about boundaries.

7. This week in "what Chinese songs is my toddler listening to": 蹦蹦跳跳 沒煩惱 李昕融 舞蹈完整版 簡單舞蹈 律動 廣場舞 洗腦歌 幼兒律動 幼兒舞蹈 兒童舞蹈 兒童律動 抖音舞蹈 動態歌詞 TIKTOK KidsDance【#波波星球泡泡哥哥bobopopo】

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Trump’s cruel plan for Afghan refugees, briefly explained (April 23, via) "Many of the 1,100 Afghans now stuck in limbo in Qatar aided the US over nearly two decades of war as interpreters working with US troops or served as members of the Afghan special forces. Some, the Times reports, are family members of American soldiers, and more than 400 are children."

2. Texas Tech Issues Ban On Students Writing On LGBTQ+ Topics (April 24) "The implications are profound—and at times border on absurd. In core and lower-level courses, there are no exceptions at all. A history professor course could not allocate instructional time to the Stonewall riots or the gay rights movement. If a U.S. history textbook includes a chapter on the AIDS crisis, the professor must skip it."

3. White House posted photo of Trump, King Charles III with 'TWO KINGS' caption (April 29)

4. James Comey posted a picture of seashells by the seashore. Trump's DOJ indicted him for it. (April 29) "The most embarrassing 24 hours (yet) of the Justice Department in President Donald Trump’s second administration continued apace on Tuesday, when Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced another indictment of James Comey, the former FBI director. This time, Comey — targeted by President Donald Trump as a political enemy — was indicted in North Carolina in connection with his since-deleted Instagram post showing a photo of seashells laid out in the shape of the numbers '8647.'"

Also from Law Dork: SCOTUS guts what remained of the Voting Rights Act before taking on TPS termination case (April 30) "The decision in Louisiana v. Callais upended the pivotal civil rights era voting law that Congress initially passed in 1965 and reauthorized several times since, leaving the section at issue “all but a dead letter,” as Justice Elena Kagan said with a somber voice, nearly stone faced, as she announced the dissent from the bench."

I don't really understand this Voting Rights Act case- all the articles I've read say it's so terrible that the Supreme Court has ruled this way, because it allows states to draw districts in a way that racial minority voters are always grouped together with a population of white voters which outnumbers them, and therefore the racial minority voters don't have any meaningful representation. This is confusing to me- it seems to rely on the assumptions that all people of color vote the same way, all white people vote the same way, and white people wouldn't vote for a candidate who would take minorities' needs seriously. Probably this is me being naive about how racism works, and missing some key facts about the history of racist voter suppression. If anyone has an article that explains this, post it in the comment section~

5. U.S. to issue commemorative passports with Trump's picture for America's 250th birthday (April 29) Fortunately it's only the Washington DC office that's doing this, and if you apply for a passport at any other location, you will just get a regular one without the mark of the beast.

6. The Trump team is quietly eliminating U.S. support for birth control abroad (April 29) This makes me so mad. Having penis-in-vagina sex is really common, and for women who are doing that, they *need* to have some kind of birth control, otherwise their lives will be completely dominated by the huge burdens of pregnancy and caring for babies. Those MAGAs claim they are "helping women" by being mean to trans people, while ending the programs that *actually* help women.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The Pagoda Puzzle: What Can Save China’s Oldest Wooden Tower? (April 21) "First, the pagoda’s unique structure and scale make the risk of disassembling and replacing original components extremely high. It is a spatial high-rise framework, not a conventional single-beam structure. It would be extremely difficult to reset tens of thousands of rotted, cracked, and deformed components, restore the structural logic of the hidden layers, and avoid secondary damage during disassembly and reassembly."

2. Falling Leaves and Failing Arguments: Why Autumn Adaptation Doesn’t Prove Irreducible Complexity (April 21) "This is the kind of question that sounds simple but turns out to be remarkably difficult for young-earth creationists to answer consistently. Either the pre-Fall world had deadly winters and needed deciduous trees, or it didn’t and the whole system was purposeless until after the Fall."

3. Gene therapy for a rare type of deafness shows lasting results (April 22) "The results indicate that this could be a one-and-done treatment that lasts a lifetime, profoundly transforming patients' lives, Chen says."

4. Journal Club: Sexual pain in Christian Women (April 22) "In the lit review, the paper says that sexual pain may affect up to 46% of women, and that 6.2% of White Christian women report lifetime sexual pain with obstructed penetration."

5. Penn & Teller & the Supreme Court & BS (April 23) "Despite the fact that he had an alibi and bore no resemblance to the witness’s sketch, the police were sure Flores was the second man and they arrested him. So they brought Barganier back in and an officer “hypnotized” her in order to improve her recollection, telling her that hypnosis allows her to tap into the “tape recorder” in her brain."

6. The Onion has agreed to a new deal to take over Infowars (April 20) "Families of those killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who sued Jones for defamation, want the sale to happen. They're still waiting to collect on the nearly $1.3 billion judgment they won against Jones for spreading lies that they faked the deaths of their children to boost support for gun control. That prompted Jones' followers to harass and threaten the families for years."

7. We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI (March 6, via) "A student praised for years for being an exceptional writer now feels like a cheater because she had to learn how AI detection works in order to protect herself from being falsely accused. The surveillance apparatus has turned writing talent into a liability."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. The tariff refund process has begun for businesses. What about customers? (April 22) "That's because a product, like a TV, often has parts from multiple countries, and each was hit with different tariff rates. Those rates changed over time by presidential decree, which makes calculating a customer's actual cost even more difficult. Plus, the retailer likely absorbed some of that tariff expense. The tariff burden was also shared up and down the supply chain, between vendors, distributors and finally customers."

2. More immigrants are being held in detention for over a year. NPR followed one family's ordeal. (April 22) "This isn't legal. According to a decades-old federal settlement, children can't be detained for more than 20 days. But data from the non-profit newsroom The Marshall Project shows, since the start of Trump's second term, more than 1,600 children have been detained for longer than that."

And update on that: Alleged Colorado attacker's family released after nearly a year in detention (April 27) "Back home in Colorado on Saturday, two days after their release, El Gamal and her children reported to an ICE office for a required check-in. There, ICE detained them again, told them they were being deported to Egypt, and rushed them onto a plane, their lawyers said."

3. They got to the part with the cattle and the creeping things (April 22) "They were taught 2 Timothy 3:16 as a promise and a contract. They were told what they could and should expect to gain from reading every word of every scripture and they were told what others would expect them to gain from it, and so what they learn — not just from this single passage, but from the entire experience of cover-to-cover reading — is to cultivate those expectations while ignoring the often-boring or confusing or unexpected aspects of the actual text itself."

This! This is exactly what it's like, being evangelical and really taking seriously the "read the entire bible" task that evangelicals are always saying we should do. You have an idea of what the bible is, and what the experience of reading it is supposed to be, and then when the actual bible itself doesn't match those expectations at all, you learn to subconsciously ignore what the actual bible is saying.

Also from the Slacktivist: Text and contexts: More Bible in the news (April 23) "That gets very antisemitic and very blasphemous very quickly, and it’s particularly dumb and dim as a reading of this passage, which involves God making a promise. See, the whole basis of supercessionism is that God’s promises are not worth diddly squat and can be revoked at any time because God is a capricious liar."

4. A chaotic White House Correspondents' Dinner, as told by NPR reporters in the room (April 26) "Just minutes into the dinner, guests heard muffled popping sounds as a gunman attempted to charge past a security checkpoint."

5. Justice Department makes it easier to deport those with DACA status (April 25) "DACA, created in 2012 to protect children who arrived in the country illegally prior to 2007 from deportation, now covers around half a million people. Starting last year, DHS officials began urging DACA recipients to self- deport, arguing that the program itself does not equate to automatically providing legal status."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Make It Myself (April 15) From xkcd.

2. Why cheap waste management is key to stopping plastic pollution (March 16, via) "In many low- and middle-income countries, people find themselves in a very different situation: less than half of solid household waste is collected. People often have little choice but to burn or dump it. But even the waste that is collected is often left in open dumps, where it’s at risk of leaking into the environment."

3. He won a major school prayer case. It took years to get a proper obituary. (April 16) "Despite all the backlash and threats his family received, Jaffree told an audience at the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s convention in 1985 that he would do it all over again because he was 'absolutely committed to the idea of separation of church and state. There’s no question that my religious view is a minority, and unless people like me are willing to challenge these cases, then we don’t have a chance.'"

4. Trolleyology bad (April 20) "Do we believe this stipulation? To state the obvious, it’s ludicrous."

5. Here's some good news: Despite Apocalyptic Warnings, California Fast Food Wage Hike Didn’t Kill Jobs (April 9, via) 

6. Chinese humanoid robot beats world record for fastest human half-marathon | ABC NEWS (April 20) This is really cool, and also you have to watch the video of the robot running- it looks very funny.

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Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Democrats file articles of impeachment against Hegseth for ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ (April 15) He absolutely should be impeached. This particular attempt isn't going to get anywhere, because the Republican Congress members have all sold their souls, but it's good that Democrats are at least trying.

2. Businesses race to apply for tariff refunds (April 20) "In fact, many retailers find themselves in a similar quandary because tariff refunds will go to whoever paid the actual customs bill. It's unclear how, or if, the refunds might trickle down to store owners who paid tariff surcharges to their suppliers."

3. Logjam of U.S. immigration applications puts millions at greater risk of deportation (April 17) "The 11.6 million pending applications in the "backlog" include forms to become a citizen, acquire a green card, work or seek asylum. There are also 247,974 applications in what USCIS calls the "frontlog," which is tracked separately. Those are applications, likely sent by mail, that have been submitted but that the agency has not physically opened and assigned a category."

These are people who are following the rules, jumping through all the bureaucratic hoops, and the government is making it harder for them. I know a lot of average Americans say the problem is just *illegal* immigration, and want a system that works for people who are doing it the *legal* way- but the MAGAs in the government *never* wanted that.

4. Epstein survivors have mixed feelings on Melania Trump's call for hearing in Congress (April 10) "'You want to retraumatize us and ask us to go in front of Congress and tell them our story, which we have told some of them already,' Lacerda said. 'And then do absolutely nothing.'"

5. ICE deported 174 Daca recipients through most of last year, agency head says in letter (April 18, via) 

6. The white evangelical Bible in the news (April 16) "And so it was darkly hilarious to watch white American evangelical leaders rushed to Twitter and in front of the cameras to proudly reveal that they cannot recognize the Bible when someone quotes it back to them." This whole entire post is spot-on.

7. Montana Supreme Court Rules Its Constitution Entirely Protects Trans Citizens In Landmark Ruling (April 17) "Transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Federal Judge Vacates Kennedy Declaration, Permanently Blocks Trump's Trans Youth Care Hospital Threats (April 21) "On the government’s core argument—that the Kennedy Declaration was merely Kennedy’s personal, non-binding opinion—the judge was withering: 'Defendants’ jurisdictional arguments are based on the bald-faced lie that the Kennedy Declaration amounts to nothing more than one man’s musings on gender-affirming care. This Court is not persuaded by Defendants’ attempts to gaslight it into believing that the Kennedy Declaration does anything other than what it says.'"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. How a Buddha Got Its Sight Back (April 13) "The small circular cavities visible on their faces once held inlaid ceramic or glass pupils. These were fixed in place using a technique known as qianmu, in which the eyes were inserted into carved sockets. Over the centuries, as Yungang’s soft sandstone yielded to wind and rain, and later to war and theft, these fragile elements loosened, slipped free, and vanished."

2. Countdown Standard (April 13) From xkcd.

3. ‘Everything is gone’: Israel destroys entire villages in Lebanon (April 12, via) "The tactic of mass destruction of homes in Gaza, where Israel has been accused of committing genocide, was described as domicide by academics, a strategy that is used to systematically destroy and damage civilian housing to render entire areas uninhabitable."

4. “They Hopped” — Ken Ham’s Answer to Kangaroo Ark Migration Based on False Information (April 11) "The only placental mammals that appear to have reached Australia before human arrival are rats. And rats, as anyone who has studied dispersal biology knows, are perhaps the single most capable overwater dispersers among all mammals. The fact that only rats made it is actually powerful evidence for how difficult the crossing was, not evidence that a land bridge made it easy." (Similar to the video I wrote about here: Kangaroos and Creationist Fan Theories.)

5. 【可一儿歌】050 小燕子丨KeYi Children's Song丨【三淼儿童官方频道】 For those of you who are interested in what kind of Chinese songs my toddler is listening to.

6. Newcomb’s Paradox occurs in real life (April 17) "I’ve never heard anyone say, 'I’m a one-boxer if the second box contains $1M, but a two-boxer if the second box contains $1,001.'"

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. ‘One of the good ones’ obscures a dangerous lie (April 9) "So this man who had fled a country where he had been beaten and imprisoned by military police for no reason encountered America’s militarized police who beat and imprisoned him for no reason."

2. And this take from the Onion (parody site, not actually true): Melania Trump Slams Baseless Reports Linking Her To Wrong Wealthy Pedophile (April 10, via) 

3. The American Gulag (April 6, via) "Damas and Lunas Campos were among the roughly 73,000 people whom ICE currently holds in a tangle of detention camps sprawled across the country. And more centers are under construction. Many of them are former warehouses designed to function, as ICE acting director Todd Lyons put it last year, 'like Amazon Prime for human beings.'"

4. Trump's 'Praise Be to Allah' Easter Taunt Should Be Immediately Recognizable to U.S. Christians (April 7, via) "When the Roman state executed Jesus, according to John 19:19, it placed above his head a sign that read Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews."

5. Conversion therapy is soul-crushing — and it doesn't work (April 2, via) "I know this because I lived it for eight years. The guidance I was given ranged from the practical — “Don’t watch gay porn” — to the outlandish — “By developing platonic relationships with other men, my sexual desires for them would disappear.” But what it truly does is try to disintegrate a person’s body, mind and spirit."

6. Hegseth leads Pentagon prayer service with faux Bible verse made famous by ‘Pulp Fiction’ (April 16)

7. ICE detains 86-year-old in US to marry long-lost love, family says (April 15)

Update on that: 85-year-old French widow detained by ICE returns to France (April 17)

8. Amid quarrel with pope, Trump strips Miami charity of funding to house migrant kids (April 15) "'It’s incredibly psychologically harmful to be moved,' sometimes as stressful as serious illness or a death in the family, Latham said. 'For little kids, moving repeatedly creates bonding issues and destroys the sense of both self and community. They don’t know who they are and where they will be' from day to day."

9. Minnesota has charged an ICE officer with assault for alleged actions during immigration surge (April 16) "One victim told state law enforcement the encounter led them to believe there was a "crazy person driving down the road aiming guns at people," the complaint says."

10. She Helped the Authorities Deport Her Abuser. Then They Deported Her Back to Him. (April 6) "Carmen’s lawsuit, ICWC v. Noem, accuses the Trump administration of ignoring deferred action status and removing survivors from the country anyway; the administration is also deporting people like Carmen who don’t yet have the status but may be eligible once USCIS reviews her application. The case was filed against ICE and USCIS and seeks to represent a wide class of survivors who applied for U visas, T visas, and other protections under the Violence Against Women Act."

Really rich that these MAGAs are claiming they're "protecting women" by being mean to trans people. Here's something that would actually protect women: Don't deport immigrants who are survivors of domestic abuse.

A Box of Kiwis

Someone gave my husband a coupon for a box of kiwis, as a gift. This is a thing in China- giving a big box of fruit as a gift. If you got to someone's house, you should bring a gift, like a nice big box of fruit. Chinese people like fruit. My kids are Chinese and they eat fruit all the time.

Anyway, we had this coupon for a free box of kiwis, so we filled in our information on the fruit company's app and they sent it in the mail.

Here it is!

Behold, the kiwis!

When I first came to China and saw gift boxes like this, it struck me as really weird. I guess this particular kiwi box isn't super fancy, pretty much a regular grocery-store fruit box- but sometimes these boxes are really nice, red, for gifting. Fresh fruit- something that you have to eat fast because it will go bad- seemed to not really be the right thing to put in a many-layers-of-nice-packaging gift box. (Like, we immediately put all these kiwis in the fridge and threw away the box.) But somehow this is a really common thing.

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Related:

German Christmas Market (Shanghai, China)

Highway Rest Stop in China (photos)

A church for a small population of Christians

A church in Shanghai. Image source.

I recently went to an international church in Shanghai, and I have some thoughts about what church is, what we want to get out of church, and how that looks different when Christians are a small minority, vs a majority.

But first, a basic overview of churches in China. Americans have a lot of misconceptions, so here, let me fix that. I'm not involved with any church group in China now, so I don't know the whole picture, but I have at least attended different kinds of churches in China.

Also, this is specifically about Protestant Christianity. In China, Catholicism is categorized as a different religion from Protestantism, and I don't have any experience with the Catholic churches in China. (Except the one in Sheshan, which I visited one time because it's a landmark of interest for tourists.)

Here are the 3 types:

1. Chinese "3 Self" churches. These are the government-approved churches. In my experience, it's very easy to find them. You can just, like, search for "教堂" [church] on any map app. The church buildings look like obvious church buildings. It's not like "oh we have to be sneaky, we're not allowed to be Christians in China" like American Christians imagine.
   These churches are supervised by the Chinese government, so I know there must be some kind of restrictions on what they're allowed to say and do. But to an average churchgoer, you wouldn't notice there are any restrictions. I know that American evangelicals would be concerned "these churches are only allowed to say what the Chinese government lets them say, so they're not preaching REAL CHRISTIANITY" but I've attended church services at Chinese churches and I never noticed anything being censored. Like, I never noticed anything that was like "they're not preaching the REAL GOSPEL, they're preaching a censored version of it." All the doctrines that were preached were basically within the range of what I've heard in American churches.
   I'm sure that the leadership of these churches is aware of being watched by the government and maybe not being allowed to do some things, but without any clear rules. I once heard a Chinese pastor talking about feeling like "are we allowed to have a Sunday school? We don't really know... let's just start doing Sunday school and see if the government says anything."
2. International churches. These churches are required by law to check people's ids, and only people with a foreign passport (or Taiwan/ Hong Kong/ Macao id) are allowed to attend. (Yes, people from Taiwan/ Hong Kong/ Macao are explicitly allowed by the Chinese government to attend international churches, whereas citizens of mainland China are not. Make of that what you will.) It must be the case that international churches have more freedom in what they're allowed to do, compared to Chinese 3-Self churches- but I am not familiar enough to know any details on this. The Chinese government always says their main concern about religion (and the reason why there is persecution of Christians) is that foreign groups will come and influence Chinese people. So, if your church does not allow any Chinese citizens to attend, the government is not as concerned about what exactly you're doing in there.
   When I first heard about churches literally barring an entire demographic of people from attending, I was like, wtf, that doesn't seem like what Jesus would do. I guess there's sort of a trade-off- if you follow this rule, your church has more freedom in what you can do. And maybe it's not that big of a deal because Chinese citizens have other churches they can go to.
3. Underground churches. I don't really know anything about these because they're secret, obviously. American Christians have the idea that all churches in China have to be underground churches, but wowww that's not true!

So these different types of churches exist in a sort of ecosystem, and I think each type has a valid role. I think American evangelicals might totally write-off the 3-Self churches and say they're just worthless and totally misguided because they're only teaching what the Chinese government approves of, and the only real church is the underground church, but that's vastly oversimplifying it. 

SO ANYWAY. Recently I went to an international church here in Shanghai. Why? Well, I don't want to be a member of a church. I don't want to attend regularly. But just on that one particular day, I wanted to experience a kind of churchy atmosphere. So I did.

The greeter at the door made me show a photo of my US passport- because only non-Chinese are allowed to attend. It was nice to not be racially profiled in China for once! Hooray! Everywhere else I go, everyone assumes I'm not a Chinese citizen, because I'm white, but at this church they explicitly asked. 

(It has not escaped my notice that, as a Chinese citizen, my husband would not be allowed to come to this church. He's not interested in church anyway, but that's one of the reasons I don't really want to get that involved.)

This church was extremely diverse. Wow. Just a huge mix of people, from different countries all over the world- Africa, Asia, etc- people talking with different accents, people expressing themselves in different ways during the worship songs. 

And so it made me wonder, how does it even work, having such a diverse church? These people are all coming from different church systems in their home countries. Different flavors of Christianity, with different beliefs about what it even means to be a Christian, what the non-negotiable Christian beliefs are. What do they do about the question "are women allowed to be pastors?" Or "are same-sex relationships sinful?" These are questions that, in the US, frequently cause half of a church to split off and go start a new church. (And who knows what issues cause church splits in other countries?) But that doesn't really seem like an option here in Shanghai- the population of international Christians is so small, you can't sustain that many different churches for every little niche.

And so, doesn't it follow that the model of what a church *is* has to be different, when we're talking about a place like Shanghai where international Christians are such an extremely small percentage of the population, and you need to cast a wide net and gather a very diverse group of people, in order to have a church, compared to a place like the US, where there are lots of Christians, and large swaths of them are culturally similar to each other.

In my experience with evangelicals in the US, when people are "church shopping," they're looking for a church that agrees with them on all of the big doctrines that they consider essential to Christianity. Evangelicals believe that many many churches are not preaching "real" Christianity, the real gospel, biblical Christianity, but have been led astray by our sinful culture and are just preaching nice things that people want to hear, rather than real Truth. So, you have to find a church that's "really preaching the gospel." You might have to filter out quite a few churches, if they have a belief about something, which you feel is not the "correct" belief that Christians should hold. Or, filter them out because they *don't* have an official belief on some issue, they think different Christians can have different opinions, and you think that's unacceptable and there's only 1 right answer. 

And then you would also have additional preferences about music styles, how well you get along with the other churchgoers, etc. And that's how you choose a church.

It's based on a model of church attendance where the church is in charge of you. You carefully research churches and find one that believes all the correct things, and then you commit to them, and you are subject to their teaching. (And perhaps at some later point, something happens that causes you to have concerns that this church is not "really" preaching the "real" gospel, and so if that happens, you leave and look for a different church.)

But that's not really possible for me in Shanghai, and actually, I don't think it is possible for *most* international Christians in Shanghai. You're not going to find a church that explicitly agrees with all the beliefs that you personally consider essential to Christianity- there just aren't enough churches for that.

So, under these circumstances, church has to be something different. It can't be "the church is in charge of me"; it has to be more like... there are certain things I am looking to get out of this church, and that is why I choose to attend, but I'm in charge of my own beliefs and my own spiritual life- I know that I'm not going to agree with everything the pastor says, and that's fine because I'm not expecting the church to be in charge of me.

It seems like the church's overall approach has to be, this is a group of Christians who want to have a church. And they can't really get extremely specific about "here's our official position on this or that controversial issue." Yeah, sure, the church should have some standard "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth" and so forth, the abstract doctrines that are the foundation of Christianity, but different Christians understand those doctrines completely differently, and so your church policy can't really get into those specific details.

The church can't really take a stand on any of the "controversial issues", but instead has to be inclusive of a wide range of opinions on what Christians are supposed to believe. And therefore even if you choose to be a member of this church, you can't really look to them as an authority on the "controversial issues" that you think are very important. So, your motivations for attending the church have to be something other than that.

(I guess? This is my speculation, upon seeing how extremely diverse this church was.)

So if, as a churchgoer, you're saying to yourself "there are certain things I am looking to get out of this church, and so obviously if the church isn't giving me those things, then there's no reason to attend"- wow, I find this very interesting. You have to understand yourself and your own desires, and what kind of church would be worth attending. And everyone's answer is going to be a little different. 

This is a completely different mindset from the evangelical view on church- there have been so many articles posted on conservative Christian sites about how it's terrible that people are going to church less and less, that Christians think it's okay to not go to church, that Christians think it's okay to have requirements about what they want from a church, and to stop going if those aren't met. These conservative organizations, scolding us all and telling us how wrong and sinful it is to not go to church. Listicles about excuses people give for not going to church, and why all of them are invalid. You have to go to church.

So it seems like, if you're in Shanghai and you're looking for an English-speaking church, you have to see what churches are available- there aren't that many- and kind of see how they are and what you're able to get out of them, and decide if it's worth your time to attend. You have to be in charge of your own religious life, because you won't find a church that perfectly fits your ideals about what Christianity is supposed to be. It's not like I always conceptualized it when I was evangelical- that you find a church that is preaching "real" Christianity, and then that church is "in charge" of you (unless you ever determine that they have stopped preaching "real" Christianity)- and that Christians are all obligated to do this.

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Related:

Persecution

Churches in Xiamen, China

So I've Discovered That (For Me) Church Culture Causes Depression 

I Did Easter in English This Year

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Cleft Lip: The Long Road to Repairing a Smile (March 5) "When I saw other children like me for the first time at the hospital, I began to feel less alone."

2. The Gender Politics of Abandoning Your Girlfriend on a Mountain (March 3) "For that reason, there’s a warning sign posted that tells climbers 'If it took you more than 3 hours to get here, turn back! Your life depends on it. Expect major difficulties from here on!' It took them nearly SEVEN hours to get there, but they decided to continue, as Plamberger stated they still felt fresh."

3.  The Mundane Misery of MAGA's Bluey Copycat (January 19, 1-hour-59-minute video) "No one in their right mind is going to be like, you know what I want my kids to watch? Something associated with political commentary. Conservative political commentary."

4. Why people fail at learning languages (January 3) "The goal in learning a language is to acquire so much of this tacit knowledge that the illusion becomes so strong that you can’t encounter these sounds or these symbols without associating them with a meaning."

I speak Mandarin Chinese as a second language, and I have some opinions about language learning and how American culture views language learning. Maybe I'll write about that some time. Basically the strategy I used was, talk to actual Chinese people, make a lot of embarrassing mistakes. If your goal is to be able to talk to people, you need to learn by talking to people. 

Contrast this with the French classes I took in high school, where I thought the point was to get everything correct and never make mistakes. Sure, you do well in class with that approach, but then the moment you encounter native speakers or a French movie or whatever, you feel like "they're talking too fast" and you understand nothing and have no confidence.

5. Here's a fun little game about how well you can remember colors (via)

6. We Know What’s Killing Loons and How to Stop It. So Why Are They Still Dying? (January 2, via) "In nearly every place—from the Maritimes to Minnesota to Washington State—lead poisoning is the leading cause of death for adult loons in freshwater habitat."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. How to Resist Like Minneapolis (February 6, via) "These will be the people in the encrypted chat."

2. Trump fires Homeland Security Secretary Noem after mounting criticism (March 6)

3. She’d Never Changed Her Gender Marker. Kansas Invalidated Her License Anyway. (March 3) "Once Ellis arrived at the DMV, she presented the letter to a confused employee."

4. Caught in the Middle East, Chinese Tourists Scramble for Way Out (March 6) 

5. A Courthouse Arrest, a Surprise Pregnancy, and One Family’s Shattered Dreams (January 7, via) "The other family members were determined to keep fighting for their asylum, but they’d already accepted that Daniela wasn’t coming back, and Andres’ little family would be separated before it could even begin."

6. Jan. 6 plaque honoring police officers is now displayed at the Capitol after a 3-year delay (March 7) "The plaque was placed on the Senate side of the hallway because that chamber voted unanimously in January to install it after House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., had delayed putting it up."

7. U.S. Tomahawk Hit Naval Base Beside Iranian School, Video Shows (March 8, via) "A newly released video adds to the evidence that an American missile likely hit an Iranian elementary school where 175 people, many of them children, were reported killed."

8. Bodycam video contradicts ICE claims in fatal shooting of U.S. citizen Ruben Ray Martinez in Texas (March 7)

9. Thrift-Store Bibles and the Execution of Renee Good (January 15, via) "Flipping through roughly 1,300 pages of pink-accented ancient Near Eastern religious literature reveals numerous quizzes, including one (image below) to help determine whether you’re a 'Diva, Doormat, or Dream Date.'"

This is so real- bible publishers make all these little niche bibles, targeted at different groups, usually gendered. It's the entire text of the actual bible, plus little text boxes inserted all throughout, to tell readers from that specific subgroup what the bible is supposed to mean for them. 

I've always interpreted the message of these bibles as, 'We don't read the actual text of the bible. That's boring. We have to print it all here, because Christians are supposed to own a bible, but we don't expect people to actually read it and notice how jarringly different it is from the cutesy little messages we've stuck in here.'

Like, take whatever message you want, and tack it onto the text of the bible. Nobody will notice it has nothing to do with the bible- Christians treat owning a bible as an identity marker, but it's not like they're actually going to spend time reading it.