Blogaround

VOTE!

If you are a US citizen, then make a plan and vote!

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1. Trump's Recreating Actual Racist History Not Just Remaking 'The Purge' (October 1) "Aaron Rupar compared Trump’s call for extrajudicial police violence to the German Kristallnacht or the 'Night of Broken Glass' when Nazis led a violent riot against Jews as German authorities stood and watched. Nazi paramilitary forces ransacked Jewish homes, hospitals and schools. They destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. More than 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps."

2. Canceling subscriptions has to be as easy as signing up, the FTC says in a new rule (October 16) Wow this is great. This is revolutionary.

3. We Need To Get Junk Science Out of Courtrooms (2023) "Isn’t it outrageous that we have lay jurors that are relied upon to distinguish nonsense from sense in criminal courts where life and liberty is at stake? There’s no federal oversight. There’s isn’t something like the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] where consumer products like toothpaste and aspirin are tested for their safety before they’re used by the general public, because we care about the reliability of those products. We care more about the reliability of mouthwash in this country than we do about forensic sciences that are used to sentence people to death and to life in prison."

4. The Weaver Bird Dilemma: Creationism’s Struggle with Diversity (October 7) "This striking bird, with its enormous tail, builds a very different type of nest compared to the Southern Masked Weaver. Yet according to most YEC classifications, these birds would be considered part of the same 'created kind.'"

5. Musk offers voters $1 million a day to sign PAC petition backing the Constitution. Is that legal? (October 21) 

6. Missouri AG in abortion pill lawsuit argues fewer teen pregnancies hurt state financially (October 22) Yes, really, they are really arguing this in a court case. I don't even know what to make of this, because it goes against the typical "pro-life" talking points about "if you didn't want a baby, you shouldn't have had sex"- presumably abstinence would also "hurt" the states of Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho by reducing the teen pregnancy rate. It's like... instead of a "pregnancy is the punishment for having sex" "pro-life" argument, it's more along the lines of "women [and teenage girls] should be required to have sex and then required to have babies." ??? I haven't seen "pro-life" people making this argument before. (Though I suppose it's kind of implicitly there in all the "pro-life" hand-wringing over low birth rates.)

7. On Univision, ordinary citizens step in for cowardly journalists (October 18) "Why didn't Trump have a ready answer to this question? Why hasn't he been asked this before? Why haven't journalists asked him this every time he makes his terrifying calls for mass deportation? How can we be less than 20 days from the election, and Trump doesn't even have a pretense of an answer to the most fundamental effect of his most frequently stated policy?"

8. Targeted Advertising: Good or evil? (October 22) "So if failed advertisements are the worst kind, then you must prefer targeted advertising, right?"

Blogaround

A poster for the tv show "Loki", with gator!Loki. Image source.

1. Preach.

america: telling children that they’re individually responsible for the crucifixion of Christ on the cross but nobody is responsible for Black bodies on the lynching tree

— Tori Williams Douglass (@ToriGlass) June 13, 2021

2. What’s the Difference Between a ‘Borb’ and a ‘Floof’? (posted 2020) Extremely important article from Audubon. 

3. ‘Avengers: Endgame’ Explained By a First-Time Marvel Viewer (posted 2019) I LAUGHED SO MUCH. "He encounters a man named Howard Stark. It’s not clear who that is, but from the movie theater audience’s murmur, he must be a person of significance."

4. Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift (posted 2017) "Kirk, as received through mass culture memory and reflected in its productive imaginary (and subsequent franchise output, including the reboot movies), has little or no basis in Shatner’s performance and the television show as aired. Macho, brash Kirk is a mass hallucination."

5. This blog series from the Slacktivist is very good: 'For you were [redacted] in Egypt': Concordance-ism and the ESV (part 1), part 2, part 3, and part 4. "After centuries of insisting that the best way to understand 'what the bible says' about slavery is to look up every occurrence of the literal word 'slavery,' they cannot imagine any way of avoiding a pro-slavery interpretation of the Bible that does not also involve looking up every occurrence of that same literal word and then replacing it with the different word."

6. Gather round and laugh at Owen Strachan, everyone:

Tell me you don't understand how translation works without telling me you don't know how translation works. pic.twitter.com/bHXENSBq1Z

— Jeremy, Pelagian Reconstructionist (@jeremymcnabb) July 18, 2021

It reminds me of how I always heard evangelicals making such a big huge deal about how the bible is so perfect and valuable and life-changing and we need to read it every day, but the vast majority do NOT read it every day, and if they did, they would see that all this fluff about how perfect the bible is doesn't really make any sense. Like, seriously, changing one comma is going to "drastically demote it"? That sounds like something you say when you love the idea of the bible and its perfection, but you're not actually engaging with it as a "living and active" account of how people have struggled to connect with God over thousands of years.