Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Graham Platner is an Embarrassing Liar (November 13) "They don’t care. They don’t think they’ll ever face consequences–not for the imperialism, the violence, the racism, the misogyny, and no, not even the Nazi tattoo because they know there will always be another white man in those Reddit comments explaining that it’s not a big deal and we just don’t understand what it’s like to be in the military."

2. The developing world needs more roads (November 11) "This problem shows up most clearly in the differences in land allocated to road networks: 27 percent of Manhattan is dedicated to roads, as is 24 percent of London. These cities are typical for their income group. ... For the average city in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, only 16 percent is reserved for streets. Just 12 percent of Dhaka, 10 percent of Kolkata, 14 percent of Dakar, 13 percent of Addis Ababa, 12 percent of Nairobi, and 14 percent of Accra are dedicated to roads. Instead, lax building rules have allowed homes and workplaces to take over public spaces."

Also from Works in Progress: How market design can feed the poor (September 22) This is an article about a system that was set up to efficiently distribute food to food banks. Instead of just assigning them whatever, like the old system did, the food banks have a currency called "shares" and they can make their own choices and bid their shares on the available food, according to their own needs. 

3. Philosophical issues with transness are a symptom of dysphoria (November 15) "But in my experience, if your hormones are on point and you’re generally seen the way you want to be seen, then it’s not a big deal if you’re in some abstract philosophical sense your assigned sex at birth. You might prefer to be in some abstract philosophical sense the gender you identify as, but it doesn’t cause you persistent unhappiness."

4. The U.S. just produced its last penny after a more than 200-year run (November 12)

5. A 'breakthrough' drug to prevent HIV, an 'unprecedented' rollout (November 18) "Just two injections a year provide near-complete protection against an HIV infection."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Epstein survivors release MUST-WATCH new PSA as Congress prepares to vote on releasing the files (November 17)

2. Gregory Bovino is exactly who E.B. White — author of 'Charlotte's Web' — warned us about (November 17) "But, to use a book authored by E.B. White as your name is an offense to history. White was a leading voice for American democracy and freedom and against fascism and tyranny. Abusing his life’s work like this cannot stand without a response."

3. State Department Reverses Course, Says Trans Passports Will Be Valid Until They Expire (November 18) There has been a lot of back-and-forth about passports for trans people. The latest update is that, even though the Supreme Court says the government is allowed to stop trans people from getting passports with their correct gender marker, the good news is that passports which already have been issued will still be valid.

This whole thing is extremely stressful for trans people in the US (and it's still going on). Cis people should all be thinking about what we can do to support them.

4. Food stamps are back, but millions will soon lose benefits permanently (November 15) "The loss of SNAP 'was really stark during the shutdown,' said Dottie Rosenbaum, director of federal SNAP policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 'But [the One Big Beautiful Bill Act] is the largest cut in the program’s history. That is also going to be really deeply felt.'"

5. What Counts as Political Violence? (September 26, via) "Ezra Klein did not write a high profile essay about how Villegas Gonzalez was doing democracy the right way by working hard and taking care of his kids."

Also from Noah Berlatsky: First-of-its-kind LGBTQIA+ hotline in Illinois offers support amid sweeping attacks (November 3) "One caller to Illinois Pride Connect, according to the caller description, was “a parent of a trans adolescent seeking information on the risks and benefits of applying for a passport to reflect her child’s gender identity.” The family had updated birth certificates and state ID but had not changed their passport or Social Security record, and was worried about trying to get through customs with inconsistent gender information."

And: Republicans Want Poor People to Suffer (November 4) "This is the Newsmax logic; if anyone anywhere is misusing federal funds, that offsets the benefits of 3 million children a month being lifted out of poverty. Stopping one evil welfare queen is worth starving any number of children."

6. U.S. deports dozens of migrants to Ukraine amid war (November 18)

Blogaround

1. Ukraine war: Shock and joy in newly liberated villages (September 11)

2. How to tell if you’re allosexual, if you’re a journalist (September 8) "It reads like it comes from a parallel universe where asexuality is the default, and questioning people wonder if just maybe they’re not asexual after all."

3. The tangled web of evangelical opposition to abortion while believing in original sin, eternal conscious torment and the mysterious age of accountability (May 10) "Would a blastocyst soul that dies three days after conception with no consciousness suddenly wake up with a fully developed human body burning in eternal conscious torment?"

4. Collections: War Elephants, Part I: Battle Pachyderms (2019) A blog series about war elephants, which were a real thing in history!

5. Zhengzhou Becomes First Big City to Scrap ‘Hukou’ Restrictions (September 15) "China’s hukou system has been in place since the 1950s and is tied to certain social welfare benefits, including access to health care, education, and the right to purchase properties. Recently, a Chinese province and cities with fewer than 3 million people have either scrapped or readjusted their hukou policies, with Shanghai becoming one major city offering the hukou to master’s students graduating from the city’s universities."

6. ‘Ask how the Americans did it’: How racial bias in US medicine inspired Hitler and persists today (September 10) [content note: descriptions of evil racist medical experiments] "My medical training had taught me that diseases common in Black people, like diabetes and high blood pressure, were the result of race itself—that Black people had a biological tendency toward certain conditions. There was no mention of the structural racism that creates the conditions for ill health to thrive."

7. Judge: HIV drug mandate violates religious freedom of anti-gay Christians (September 7) "If all of this holds up, and PrEP drugs become harder to access, it would have disastrous consequences"

8. Mainland China reports first imported monkeypox case (September 17)

Blogaround

1. I guess I should say something about the shooting at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where 21 people were killed. Just kind of been... laying awake thinking about it... I have a kid, and his smile lights up the world. Don't really know what to say, I just hope that the US can pass better gun control laws. Go and protest about it if you can.

Mother who ran into Texas school during shooting discusses moments inside (posted June 2)

2. Christian predator Josh Duggar sentenced to over 12 years in federal prison (posted May 25) 

3. How can I explain bad grades in a PhD application due to bad lecturers? (posted May 29) I really like the Stack Exchange forums because they teach you how the real world works. The OP in this question is applying for a PhD, and is concerned because they had low grades in a few courses, and the reason [according to OP] is the lecturers for those courses were "bad"- so should they give that as the reason, in their application?

And the answer is NO. In a job interview (or in this case a PhD application) you should never blame your problems on someone else. Even if it's 100% true, it makes you look bad. If there's something on your transcript or resume that you worry doesn't look good, the interviewer doesn't want to hear "the reason I did bad at this was xyz which wasn't my fault" and leave it at that. NO. To look good in an interview, you have to say, "here's what I learned from that situation, here's what I would do differently in the future." (Or, just not mention it at all, if it's something pretty normal like having low grades in one or two classes.)

Job interviews are such a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THING than a student being graded by a teacher in school. The teacher's objective is to give a fair grade that reflects the student's knowledge and abilities. It's centered on the student- here's the student, let's fairly evaluate whether they met the goals for this course. (And if you give an excuse for why you didn't do well, and the teacher thinks it's a reasonable excuse, they won't penalize you. Note: "your lectures are bad" is not a reasonable excuse.) A job interview is completely different. It's centered on the job position- we need someone in this role, so is this candidate the kind of person we'd like to have here?

If you did a bad job of something, but you can explain why it's not your fault, well, who cares? Bosses don't want employees who give excuses for why things can't be done- they want employees who get things done.

It's not just about you and whether or not it's fair to apply a certain standard to you because there were other factors beyond your control that affected your ability to meet that standard. No, that's not it at all. It's about the job. Can you get things done or not? If something's not working the way you've been promised it should work, do you say "well this is not my fault" and do nothing, or do you take on the extra task of finding a workaround even though it's not "fair" that you should do that? Yes, it's TRUE that it's not your fault. But you still need to keep trying to solve it.

And there are some tasks in one's job that will be easy and some that will be hard, and the reward and recognition you get for them doesn't at all match how hard they were. Your boss might have no idea which things were easy and which were a nightmare because the previous developer left you with spaghetti code. That's just the way it is.

And also, as an adult, your own academic and career development is your responsibility. If, for example, you're taking a class where the lectures are awful, it's on you to find other ways to learn the information you need to learn. At the end of the day, if you don't learn it, it affects you, even if the reason you didn't learn it was that the professor wasn't good enough.

I love Stack Exchange for the discussions like this.

4. Makeshift graves and notes on doors: the struggle to find and bury Mariupol’s dead (posted June 1) [content note: war, death]

5. The Masterpiece (posted May 20) A 1-hour-37-minute sudoku video. This is INCREDIBLE. Very hard puzzle. Wow.

6. And the 2022 Reader Survey is still open (until June 30). Thank you to all the readers who have taken it already!

"For Pregnant Women and Nursing Mothers"

Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus escaping to Egypt. Image source.

Looking at some of the news from Ukraine as it is being attacked by Russia, and thinking about Matthew 24:

Baby born in subway station used as bomb shelter in Kyiv 

California Couple Says They Escaped War-Torn Ukraine with Days-Old Newborn

"So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel—let the reader understand— then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no one on the housetop go down to take anything out of the house. Let no one in the field go back to get their cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath. For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again." Matthew 24:15-21

Matthew 24 is labelled "The Destruction of the Temple and Signs of the End Times" in the NIV Bible, and it's basically Jesus predicting big disasters. Typically modern American Christians read this as being about the end of the world, but really it was probably about the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD.

I remember reading this passage, back in high school. And verse 19- "How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers"- just seemed completely out of left field. Like, what on earth? What does Jesus have against pregnant women and nursing mothers? Why does God want to make them suffer more?

It's very revealing of the way I viewed the bible back then. When I read the (many many) passages where prophets went on and on and on about how this or that city is going to be destroyed as punishment from God, I believed that those people in those cities totally deserved it because of their sin. And that the punishment that God was sending made sense. That it was the right punishment for their sin.

But Matthew 24... I had no way to understand this verse, about how pregnant and breastfeeding women will suffer more than the average person during this disaster. Why would God want that? If the disasters prophesied in the bible were specifically engineered by God to target people whose sin needed to be punished, well... it doesn't make sense!

I remember asking my mom about it, back then. She said, well, if you have to flee your home, it's way harder when you're pregnant or when you have a baby to take care of.

Which, yes, clearly in practical terms that is true. But I had never read the bible that way. The idea that Jesus was describing the human consequences of this disaster, and how, practically speaking, those consequences fall on vulnerable members of society moreso than others. I don't know if I had ever heard that before.

That's not the way it should be, but it's the way it is.

In every kind of society-wide problem, it's the people who are vulnerable (poor, minorities, disabled, children, etc) who suffer the worst, while people with money and privilege are able to shield themselves from it to some extent. It's always like that.

No, I haven't heard modern Christians claiming modern wars are punishments from God- but there have been many times that it was said about natural disasters. Whenever that happens, immediately a bunch of other Christians stand up and say "no, we DON'T believe this disaster was a punishment from God, and no one should say that." Which is good, but... but we also need to be doing the work of grappling with the biblical passages that said exactly that. Wars and natural disasters being sent by God as a correct punishment for sin is a huge theme in the Old Testament. Yes, it's in the bible, but it's still wrong.

And that's the way I read Jesus' words in Matthew 24, back when I was in high school. But no, it makes much more sense to read them as Jesus describing what actually happens, not what is just.

I can't imagine what it's like for the refugees from Ukraine who need to flee their homes. And for those who are pregnant or taking care of a newborn, it's even worse. You just want to give your kid the best life you can... and... 

Well, me being sad about it doesn't help anyone. I encourage everyone to direct your feelings of compassion toward doing things which can make a difference. Donate to the UN Refugee Agency.

Jesus pointed it out all the way back in Matthew 24. It's still true today. It's always true. When there is a huge disaster, it doesn't target people who are the most "sinful" or "deserving of punishment" or anything like that. That's a fantasy- it never works that way. It hurts the people who are already the most vulnerable. It hurts pregnant people. It hurts children.

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UNHCR - The UN Refugee Agency

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Related:

Why Does the Kingdom of Heaven Belong to Children?

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This post is part of a series on the gospel of Matthew. 

Previous post: On Not Being A Whitewashed Tomb (Matthew 23)

Next post: I don't believe in a literal "Jesus coming back." But, be ready. (Matthew 25:1-13)

Click here to go to the beginning of the series.

Blogaround

First of all- yeah I'm reading the news about Ukraine and I'm scared and worried about the world. 

Don't really know what to say or do... I guess donate money to the UN Refugee Agency.

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1. We Don't Talk About Pluto - Encanto Parody (posted February 16) This is INCREDIBLE.

2. New documents reveal abolitionist's court case to free her child from slavery (posted February 27) About Sojourner Truth: "Archivist Jim Folts, who uncovered the documents, told CNN that this was the first time in history a Black woman successfully sued a White man for a family member's freedom."

3. How China’s Youtube Became a Rare Safe Space for LGBT Streamers (posted February 24) "The case of coming out vlogs on Bilibili, more specifically, calls attention to an alternative queer politics, one imagined in relation to the Chinese family."

4. Roundup of Submissions | February 2022 Carnival of Aces | Beyond Attraction (posted March 1) A lot of good posts here about how to conceptualize asexuality in other ways besides "not experiencing sexual attraction."