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. Oaths aren't about oaths, they're about performative speech acts (November 5) "How do we tell apart fancy official promises people are supposed to keep and fancy official promises people aren’t really supposed to keep?"

2. Playing Tag: Oversized Clothing Labels Aim to Curb Order Returns (November 7) "China’s online fashion retailers are implementing oversized, stiff, and brightly colored clothing tags in an effort to curb the industry’s notoriously high return rate."

Also from Sixth Tone: Minding Nemo: Vlogger Finds Fatal Flaws at China’s Aquariums (November 7) "Many exhibition spaces are still chaotic construction zones the day before the grand opening, with tanks filled with fresh saltwater just hours before the first batch of fish is introduced. These so-called “pioneer fish” — usually cheaper species — often die within a short time."

3. “I Won’t Change My Body to Fit Your Expectations”: Reflections From a Masculine Woman with PCOS (July 14, via) "It soon became very clear to me that my doctor at the time was hoping I’d “fix” what he thought was “wrong” with me. My masculine features were seen as a glaring issue to be solved. My doctor thought he had the solution and suggested I start estrogen to maintain my hormone levels."

4. OpenAI's new web browser has ChatGPT baked in. That's raising some privacy questions (November 7) 

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. “New York City has Fallen”: MAGA erupts after Mamdani’s victory (November 5, via) A roundup of quotes from right-wing people being really racist about Mamdani's victory. In particular I'd like to highlight what Matt Walsh said: "A third world communist just won in New York because New York is a third world city now." WTF? Remember this, in case anyone ever claims that these are people whose opinions should be respected.

2. Foreign aid from the United States saved millions of lives each year (September 29, via) "AIDS programs saved the largest number of lives: over 1.5 million per year. Between a quarter and half a million were saved by vaccines, tuberculosis, malaria, and humanitarian response each."

3. Supreme Court temporarily blocks full SNAP benefits even as they'd started to go out (November 7) "The Supreme Court's decision means states must, for now, revert back to the partial payments the Trump administration had earlier instructed them to distribute."

Trump admin order to 'immediately undo' full SNAP benefits leaves states scrambling (November 9) 

As millions of Americans struggle with SNAP lapses, food banks are swamped with demand (November 7) "'It's painful when someone comes in and we have to say, 'I just don't have anything for you today,' ' says the pantry's client advocate, Juliet Smith. 'We've never had to do that before. Never.'"

All this back-and-forth about SNAP during the government shutdown has made me realize something: I've always thought of SNAP as a "safety net," like just a temporary thing that people should use only a few times in their lifetime, when they happen to be going through a hard time. But now I'm finding out how *real* this is, how people really need it and rely on it- some states have something like 15-20% of their population on SNAP. 42 million Americans. This isn't just some "safety net" which a negligible amount of people will need to use every now and then- this is essential infrastructure. Is it supposed to be essential infrastructure? Well, yeah, we need to have it because that many people really do need it. 

People shouldn't be shamed or judged for getting SNAP benefits. It should be just as neutral a thing as going to the library, or expecting the government to maintain the roads. I grew up among Republicans, and the vibe I always got concerning people who get food stamps is "well, they shouldn't, they should take responsibility and get a job and then they wouldn't need government handouts"- and therefore it's justified to judge them and put all kinds of rules and requirements on them. But, wow, something is *wrong* with society if seriously 42 million Americans aren't able to get jobs that pay well enough that they can afford food. Food! Something is wrong with society, and the government has a responsibility to do something about that. Either by giving them the money for food, or transforming society (specifically the job market?) such that people who do a decent normal amount of work will have a good enough income that they can live on. Hard to say which option is "better." I mean, I know that people would say it's better if everyone can get a job and get a good enough income, and then the government doesn't have to give them SNAP- but I can also imagine a society where people view it like "yeah, the government gives food to people who need it, of course they do, of course our tax dollars go to that, that is a normal thing that a society should do, not something we would want to minimize."

(Caveat: The fact that 42 million people receive SNAP benefits is not the same thing as saying 42 million people are in the situation like the people you see interviewed in these news articles, where they really don't know where they're going to get food if they don't get SNAP this month. Perhaps some significant fraction of these 42 million people have their finances generally under control, and have emergency savings available, and it's very helpful that they get money from SNAP every month but it's not the end of the world if they didn't? ... I think regardless, they really are in need. "People who receive SNAP" and "people who literally can't feed their families without SNAP" might not be the *exact* same group of people, BUT still, they really are in need and I am seeing that this really should be viewed as essential infrastructure.)

4. Judge orders White House to use American Sign Language interpreters at briefings (November 5)

5. SCOTUS Rules Against Trans People's Passport Gender Markers In Shadow Docket Ruling (November 7) "The Government seeks to enforce a questionably legal new policy immediately, but it offers no evidence that it will suffer any harm if it is temporarily enjoined from doing so, while the plaintiffs will be subject to imminent, concrete injury if the policy goes into effect."

6. Trump has accused boat crews of being narco-terrorists. The truth, AP found, is more nuanced (November 8) "They were laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver. Two were low-level career criminals. One was a well-known local crime boss who contracted out his smuggling services to traffickers."

7. Senators take first step toward reopening the government after historic shutdown (November 9) This just in, apparently some of the Senate Dems have caved and there's an agreement to end the government shutdown. Not sure what to make of this yet.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Real Talk: Why China’s Deaf Creators Feel Pressured to Sell Out (September 15) "In this context, the recasting of deaf people as “cute, submissive, and longing for love” trivializes Deaf culture as something to be consumed rather than taken seriously."

Also from Sixth Tone: Street Smart: Why China’s 5-Star Hotels Are Now Cooking Curbside (September 18) "At Kang’s hotel in Henan, a 398-yuan set meal was quickly undercut by rivals offering similar packages for 358 — then 298 yuan. 'Now everyone’s on the street,' he said, 'selling even cheaper takeaway.'"

2. A humanitarian expert says civilians in Gaza City are facing an 'impossible choice' (September 17) "Right now, people in Gaza City are facing an impossible choice: live under bombardment and famine or risk the dangerous journey to the south, where they know that there are no services that can accommodate them, that there's no aid to be distributed to help them in their displacement.What we are witnessing is mass forcible transfer of Palestinians from Gaza City, which is a war crime and must be stopped."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause (September 16) "Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself."

And: Why did alleged assassin target Kirk? Evidence paints complicated picture (September 18, via) Yeah, the "leftist" parts of the internet are all taking this "he was a groyper! he was far-right!" and running with it, but I don't think we really know that for sure. Let's not spread misinformation. I don't like the idea (which both sides are promoting) that once we find the killer's motive and ideology, we can use it to make big sweeping statements about "the left" or "the right."

Sen. Chris Murphy warns Trump is exploiting Kirk's death to squash dissent (September 16)

2. Who Can Get a COVID Vaccine? (September 17) "So! I know that it’s all very confusing, but please don’t just get overwhelmed and give up."

3. GOP lawmaker pulls measure to allow Marco Rubio to revoke US passports (September 16) "But the new measure would have significantly escalated these efforts by targeting US citizens."

4. ABC pulls Jimmy Kimmel off air after comments made about the Charlie Kirk killing (September 18) In all the coverage I've seen of this, I haven't seen any actual comments from Kimmel saying anything bad about Charlie Kirk. He just said the right is politicizing it, that the killer is also far-right, and that the president doesn't seem to be mourning like a normal person.

WGA Statement on ABC’s Decision to Pull Jimmy Kimmel Live! (September 17) "Shame on those in government who forget this founding truth."

5. Trump moves to scrub national parks sites of signs that cast America in a 'negative light' (September 17) "Park employees also flagged a panel that reads: 'As the new federal government embraced the lofty concept of liberty, slavery in the President's House ... mocked the nation's pretense to be a beacon of liberty.'"

6. Most American Jews say Trump is using antisemitism as an 'excuse' to silence free speech at universities (September 17)

7. RFK Jr. wants to end mental health screenings in schools. Experts say it's a bad idea (September 16) "U.S. Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and Education Secretary Linda McMahon want schools to do away with mental health screenings and therapy. Instead, they argue in a Washington Post opinion piece that schools 'must return to the natural sources of mental well-being: strong families, nutrition and fitness, and hope for the future.'" Oh, so just telling everyone to try harder to be normal, instead of recognizing that mental health is a real thing.

This article does a good job explaining what school mental health screening is and why it's just a common-sense way to identify kids who might possibly need help. Not about labels and stigmas.

8. Judge criticizes Trump admin, blocks effort to quickly deport children to Guatemala (September 19) "The administration’s initial argument that the effort was all about reunifying children with their parents, Kelly wrote, 'crumbled like a house of cards about a week later.'"

9. Judge orders Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil to be deported to Algeria or Syria (September 18, via) "'It is no surprise that the Trump administration continues to retaliate against me for my exercise of free speech,' Khalil said in the statement. 'Their latest attempt, through a kangaroo immigration court, exposes their true colors once again.'"

His lawyers are still fighting this though. It's not over.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Sting in the Tail: Life’s No Fairy Tale for Mermaid Dancers (July 11) "To make matters worse, to save on costs, many aquariums refuse to assign professional safety personnel to guard performers, and lack proper emergency response protocols. 'In scuba diving, we follow the buddy system — no one goes in the water alone,' Lin says. 'Why is such a critical safety rule suddenly ignored when the dive is a performance?'"

Also from Sixth Tone: The Promise and Pitfalls of China’s AI Sign Language Interpreters (July 9) "Deaf people reported having difficulty accurately understanding the signing regardless of whether they watched the video directly or read the transcribed records. On closer inspection, the movements of the avatars differed considerably from everyday sign language in terms of hand shape, position, direction, and movement."

2. Scientists find Uranus is surprisingly warm, heating up the case for a new planetary mission (July 14, via) Cool!

3. The Best 4x4 Sudoku Ever Made. (June 9) 1-hour-11-minute sudoku solve video. This sudoku is based on that genre of logic puzzles where one person says "I don't know the answer" and then another person says "I don't know the answer" and then the first person says "well now I know the entire answer." Love this.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. ‘Perversion of Justice’ revisited (July 14) For those of us (like me) who haven't been following all the details about this Epstein thing since 2018, the Slacktivist has a timeline with links.

And: Trump doesn’t realize why MAGA needs the Epstein files (July 15) "For Trump, this has to be bewildering. His supporters do not treat sexual violence like it’s a bad thing. So why do they care about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, or the identities of his alleged co-conspirators?"

2. Will the Government Ever Do Right by Mahmoud Khalil? (July 15) "In a just country, Khalil would be entitled to legal recourse and monetary recompense for his unlawful arrest and imprisonment."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Problems with the Asexuality Identification Scale (May 27) "The AIS is not bad research. But the potential uses are few, while the potential misuses are greater."

Also from Siggy: Why loans cost money (May  28) "If you’re keeping track, that means that not only is it expensive to be poor, it is nonlinearly expensive. Poor people have a greater need for loans, and they tend to pay higher interest rates on loans."

2. I Transferred a Pokemon from Gen 1 to Scarlet & Violet. Here's How... (March 12) [16-minute video] "Was this worth it? Umm, not really. Was it cool? Yes." Wowww this is fantastic. I have so much nostalgia- the pokemon games I played back in the day were Pokemon Blue, Pokemon Gold, and Pokemon Diamond. Of those, I spent the most time on Pokemon Gold. Pokemon Gold was my game.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. A certain man went down to Jericho and fell among leopards (May 28) "This clarifies how grossly misleading and stupid-making that language of “illegal aliens” turns out to be, creating a false impression of invaders and interlopers when the overwhelming reality is that most “illegal aliens” are people like Eriksen — good neighbors who work hard, follow the rules, care for their families, pay their taxes, and live responsibly, but who will also, inevitably, have some equivalent to a missing Form I-751 somewhere in their past."

2. Federal trade court blocks Trump's emergency tariffs, saying he overstepped authority (May 28) "In their ruling, the court's three-judge panel wrote that Trump's worldwide tariffs had exceeded his power under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, or IEEPA, which the Trump administration cited in imposing those tariffs."

But apparently some of the tariffs are still in effect? I can't even keep up any more.

3. Rubio says U.S. will 'aggressively' revoke visas for many Chinese students (May 28) WTF?

And related to that: U.S. stops scheduling visa interviews for foreign students (May 28)

And also: An Own-Goal of Historic Proportions (May 29) "For decades, a degree from a U.S. university was the golden ticket, and not just for the prestige and the improved job prospects back home. It was often the start of a lifelong affinity for America, its values, and its people. Some of China’s best-known reformers and tech founders were educated in the U.S. They returned to China with not just skills and credentials, but admiration for an open society that welcomed them. Those days are ending. We are actively teaching the next generation of global talent that America is hostile, capricious, and unwelcoming. We are ceding the moral high ground — one that was, I’ll grant, already eroding fast — with alarming speed."

I just don't get this. Wasn't Marco Rubio friends with any international students when he was in college?

(Also, anyone remember during the campaign, a video surfaced where that felon floated the idea of giving international students US green cards on graduation? See this is why you shouldn't take anything he says seriously.)

4. Trump administration cancels plans to develop a bird flu vaccine (May 28) "Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of Brown University's Pandemic Center, said the decision was 'disappointing, but unsurprising given the politically-motivated, evidence-free rhetoric that tries to paint mRNA vaccines as being dangerous.'"

Remember when that felon was president the first time, and the actual greatest accomplishment of his term was the programs that produced the mRNA vaccines for covid? But I guess now the MAGAs think that's bad.

5. Marco Rubio said no one has died due to U.S. aid cuts. This mom disagrees (May 28) [content note: child death] "Babagana's doctor at the clinic — Edifre Jacob — says he'll never know exactly what happened to the youngster because he did not get medical help before dying, but Jacob feels confident his team could have prevented his death."

6. Judge says Rubio 'likely' violated Constitution in ordering Mahmoud Khalil deported (May 28) "In a statement issued by the ACLU, Khalil's lawyers vowed to keep fighting for his release."

(Marco Rubio has really done a lot to restore my belief in hell.)

7. The White House is sued over lack of sign language interpreters at press briefings (May 29) Good. 

8. Trump administration seeks to end basic rights and protections for child immigrants in its custody (May 22) "The protections, which are drawn from a 1997 consent decree known as the Flores Settlement Agreement, limit the amount of time children can be detained by immigration officials. It also requires the government to provide children in its custody with adequate food, water and clean clothes." Children. Children.

9. Ice arrests at immigration courts across the US stirring panic: ‘It’s terrifying’ (May 22) "Arrests near or in the immigration courts, which are part of the US Department of Justice, are typically rare – in part due to concerns that the fear of being detained by Ice officers could discourage people from appearing. 'It’s bad policy,' said Lindsay Toczylowski, president of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef). 'By putting immigration officers in the courtrooms, they’re discouraging people from following the processes, punishing people for following the rules.'"

And Wonkette explains how exactly this loophole is being used: ICE's One Weird Trick To Deport Asylum Seekers Who Come To Court! (May 30) "Isn’t that great, especially how the people being grabbed were dumb enough to think that following the law and attending their scheduled court hearings would do them any good? They couldn’t be 'following the law' anyway, because after all they’re illegals, dummy."

Blogaround

1. What does it mean that AI is “remixing existing work”? (January 13) "What does that even mean?"

2. Zendaya and Tom Holland Are Engaged! (January 6) 

3. With a TikTok Ban Looming, Users Flee to Chinese App ‘RedNote’ (January 13) "As of Monday, Xiaohongshu was the number one most-downloaded app in Apple’s US App Store, despite the fact that it doesn’t even have an official English name."

I wrote this comment about it on Pillowfort:

Lollll I'm in China so I have to weigh in on this. (I'm American, my husband is Chinese.) I haven't used xiaohongshu but my husband has it on his phone and has used it very occasionally.

So last night my husband hands me his phone and shows me how his whole xiaohongshu feed is all Americans- "tiktok refugees." And then I get to work this morning and my Chinese colleagues are talking about "why are there a bunch of foreigners on xiaohongshu all of a sudden?"

I find the whole thing extremely funny!

I've typically seen xiaohongshu described as a Chinese equivalent to Instagram. It's known for having mostly women users, and people use it to post about their lifestyle/ travel/ things like that. (The linked article does a good job describing it.) My husband says it's mainly used by the people who have enough money to travel and who live in the biggest cities in China, so it doesn't show what the "average" Chinese person's life is like.

When we wanted to take our daughter to get pictures taken, we searched for a local photographer on xiaohongshu. It's useful for that because businesses post there to advertise. And one time we took a cruise to Japan, and we were looking for information on what to do in the various Japanese cities we docked at- we searched on xiaohongshu and found posts by other Chinese tourists, showing interesting things you can do in the area near the dock. Really useful and practical, with maps and photos. Xiaohongshu is good for things like that.

And over the past few days that this has been going on, my husband has been showing me a lot of videos of Americans talking about the things they've learned about normal life for Chinese users of xiaohongshu. Americans are finding out that the cost of living is SO MUCH LOWER in China than in the US. Chinese people finding out about frankly dystopian aspects of US society, like school lunch debt, kids in school saying the pledge of allegiance every day, people in the midst of a medical emergency asking everyone to NOT call an ambulance because it would cost thousands of dollars... and so on.

I think this is great. Just normal people talking about their normal lives. To show you what is really going on, which isn't like what you see in the news or the way politicians talk about China. Seeing that the problems we have in the US aren't inevitable- there are other countries which simply don't have those problems. A better world is possible.

In some of the videos from American tiktok users talking about what they learned about China, though, I'm seeing them making statements which very much oversimplify the situation. (Which is not their fault I guess- it's their first time finding out about these things, so obviously they don't understand all the details.) For example, talking about how in China you can buy a home... uh... what... in reality, it's SO EXPENSIVE to buy a home in big cities in China. We're talking about a husband and wife getting their parents on both sides to contribute their life savings, that's how expensive it is, and that's seen as normal. (And there's nonsense gender roles involved in this too- people talk about how a man has to own an apartment or else no woman would agree to marry him, ugh. In practical terms though I think both partners are contributing to the cost- but people always *say* it's a requirement for the man.) 

And also, it's normal for a mortgage to be WAYYY HIGHER than the price of renting an equivalent apartment. I was super confused when I heard this is the case in Shanghai- isn't a mortgage supposed to be lower than renting, because when you rent you're also paying for the landlord to do maintenance if necessary? That's what the typical financial advice in the US says. But in China people view buying a home as an investment. People will buy an apartment and just leave it empty because the money you could make on rent is not really that much in comparison. Personally I feel like it's a bad idea to buy an apartment as an investment, because what if the market then goes down? 

(I mean, the housing market in Shanghai is absurd though- maybe this is not true of smaller cities.)

But I think the American tiktok users were excited about how China doesn't require homeowners to pay property tax every year. And Chinese users were super confused about the concept of property tax. And like, somehow that message mutated into "people in China can buy homes and everything is wonderful."

And the cost of living is much lower in China than in the US, and for someone like me who works as an engineer, that's great- my salary is lower than what I would get in the US, but it's much higher than the average salary for an average person in Shanghai. So because the average salary is so low, I'm not sure how much it really *helps* that the cost of living is low (in absolute terms compared to US dollars). 

But anyway, I think it would be great if these Americans stick around on xiaohongshu and keep learning more about the world.

4. Democrats Rail Against "GOP Child Predator Empowerment Act" (January 16) "What followed was a series of Democratic representatives hammering the same point home with fiery rhetoric. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez railed against the notion that the bill was about protecting women and girls, stating, 'Republicans, who have voted consistently against the Violence Against Women Act, who have taken the rights of all women to have control over their own body, who as women are bleeding out in parking lots, now want to pretend today that they care about women… And why? To open up genital inspection on little girls across this country in the name of attacking trans girls. We have two words. Not today.'"

See, THIS is what I want to see. Democrats actually taking a stand for trans people. Normally what I see in news stories in Republicans taking a strong stand that trans people are disgusting sexual predators, and Democrats kinda waffling around like "uh I don't know, maybe it's politically beneficial to throw trans people under the bus?" and "yeah I guess I'm not really supposed to say this but I do feel uncomfortable with my daughters playing sports with biological males." Come on! 

This is a clear moral issue, not something to be embarrassed about. Trans people are just normal people who just want to go to the bathroom like everybody else. For sports, let's be reasonable about it and base it on actual scientific evidence, not just ban trans people entirely. It is DISGUSTING that Republicans are spending so much energy attacking this tiny group of people.

5. 'Concerns About A Stronger-Than-Expected Economy' Is A Real CNN Thing We Just Read (January 12) 

6. Resentment vs. gratitude: from parking spaces to ASL (January 14) "I suppose they can shoehorn this into the generic category of a “my tax dollars are being spent on other people who aren’t me, personally” complaint."

So, some right-wing weirdos think there shouldn't be ASL interpreters on tv during the broadcasts about the fires. I mean... this is so absurd, but I feel like I kind of understand it, because I grew up around Republicans and they often made little comments about how exhausting it is that we constantly have to be "politically correct" about some new thing. (Yeah back then it was called "politically correct" instead of "woke.") The logic goes like this: The way things are now is fine for regular people. And now apparently we have to change it, we're not allowed to say certain things, we have to hear "press 2 for Spanish" on the phone, it's like there's always another group we have to "be inclusive" of, and it's just too much. All these things are meaningless- they're just things that we're told we have to do now, otherwise we're not "politically correct" but there's no actual reason for any of it. Just a bunch of inconveniences to regular people. Enough is enough.

And then I found out, those things that we labelled as "politically-correct nonsense"- those things actually matter for people who are affected by them. They are real people. This isn't just some pointless contest about who can be the most politically correct. 

The argument only makes sense if you think deaf people don't actually benefit from having ASL interpreters on tv. Or if you think that they matter so little compared to "regular people" that they should just have to rely on imperfect closed-captioning, in order to not potentially inconvenience any "regular people" by reminding us of their existence. Once you realize that they are real people and ASL helps them a lot, the whining from these MAGA types comes across as obviously ridiculous. 

And, I mean, when I was a child it was understandable that I bought into that, because my Republican role models were very negative about efforts to "be inclusive", and I had to believe that they had a good reason for that- but if you're an adult and you still can't grasp that people who are different from you are people... I don't know what to tell you. That's a YOU problem.

7. Radon (January 13) "When was the planet under this house built?"

I also liked the Chess Zoo.

8. Flags to be raised for Trump's inauguration, despite half-staff order for Carter's death (January 15) What is this nonsense

9. Immigrant workers are helping investigate labor abuses. Will Trump let them stay? (January 15) "'Employers look at you completely differently when you have a social security number,' he says. 'In every sense you feel safe. You feel comfortable. You are free to go anywhere.'"

This is really interesting! I had never heard about this before. The US government gives legal protections to undocumented immigrants who are helping give evidence about employers breaking the law. This is really clever, because it's a big problem that businesses can get away with mistreating undocumented workers, who feel like they can't report it because they'll be deported. 

And it shows that maybe it's easier to give them legal status than one might think. That's great. I support all immigrants.

10. Trump coverage needs to change and here’s how (December 31) "'You’ve got to stop covering him like he’s just another politician, with a different agenda,' Johnston told me recently. 'He’s a criminal and a con artist. And that has to be central to everything you cover about him.'"

11. Lifeboat Capitalism (January 9) "If the term 'crime against humanity' has any meaning, it must apply to very wealthy people who—knowing that their actions are causing a climate change crisis that will devastate future generations and destroy hundreds of millions of lives—chose not to stop those actions, but instead to undertake a systematic campaign of lies and propaganda in order to continue making themselves money. Is there anything, really, more contemptible than this?"

Blogaround

1. Egypt is certified malaria-free by WHO (October 20, via) This is great!

2. Lauren Stratford, The Survivor Who Never Was (October 15) "True change cannot be built on falsehoods, and people who try to do so create more victims, not fewer."

3. China’s Solution for Trash-Strewn Mountains: Robot Dog Porters (October 24) "The four-legged robots could be seen trotting up and down the steps of Mount Tai, or Taishan, in eastern China’s Shandong province last weekend, often laden with huge bags of garbage, sparking amusement among the hordes of tourists at the site."

Also from Sixth Tone: What’s Chinese for ‘Midwest Nice’? (October 24) LOLLL oh this is so real. You text with customer service on Taobao (Chinese shopping app) and they constantly call you "qin" [亲]. A dictionary will tell you this means "dear"- and I have seen plenty of Chinese people using "dear" in English the way they use "qin", which just sounds odd, like "Dear, can you bring in these documents next week?"- but I've always felt like it shouldn't be understood as "dear" but more like a polite title you use in administrative sorts of interactions. Loved reading this article about how Chinese people also find it weird to be called "qin" on Taobao all the time.

And also: Signs of Unity: Can China’s Deaf Community Find a Common Language? (October 28) "China’s large size, coupled with a history of sign language use dating back at least 1,500 years, have made China’s sign languages especially fragmented."

4. Former envoy says Americans in Canada ‘could determine’ next president (October 20) Love this! Americans living abroad, VOTE VOTE VOTE!

5. Nazi shit (intra ecclesiam nulla salus) (October 23) "'Round them up and put them in camps' is unadorned Nazi shit. It just is. There’s no way of qualifying or caviling or weaseling out of that. 'Round them up and put them in camps' is the essence of the thing itself."

6. What NOT To Say To People Trapped In The MAGA Cult (October 24) "One day he’ll be gone [hopefully very soon] and you’ll need to be there to help them process what happened and perhaps find a way back to sanity."

7. Police and poll workers train for possible election threats (October 24) 

8. American Airlines fined $50 million for its treatment of passengers with disabilities (October 23) "Duckworth said airlines routinely damage her own wheelchairs and others. In fact, Duckworth says they broke 892 wheelchairs in a single month last year. 'Imagine if the American public saw that the airlines broke 892 pairs of legs in a single month. There would be hue and cry, but there hasn't been.'"

9. Biden apologizes for forced Native American boarding school policy that caused abuse and deaths of children (October 26) "President Joe Biden delivered an apology Friday for a United States policy that forcibly separated generations of indigenous children from their families for more than 150 years and sent them to federally backed boarding schools for forced assimilation."

10. MAGA’s Closing Argument: Dad’s Coming Home (October 28) "The core MAGA message is that all these problems are really one problem: The world feels wrong now, because people don’t know how to behave."

11. Your Fave Is Problematic Politics (October 18) "This is an annoying approach to media analysis. It is a batshit approach to getting people to vote for a candidate."

12. Relatable: AOC Doesn't Want Four More Years Of Waking Up To Trump's Bullsh*t (October 29) "We should not have to live that way again. We shouldn’t have to wake up every morning and think “OK, what’s it gonna be today?” Our elected officials shouldn’t be spending their time crafting responses to everything he says or does, only for no one to even remember what they were the next day because the next day we’re onto another horrible thing."

13. Many state abortion bans include exceptions for rape. How often are they granted? (October 26, via) "Bertram Roberts says she’s never seen anyone in that state get an exemption — for any reason, let alone rape."

14. New Acquisitions: 1933 and the Definition of Fascism (October 25) "Indeed, an unprecedented number of Donald Trump’s closest, handpicked aides and advisors have refused to endorse him, many warning publicly that Trump was a danger to democracy. It is rare for any advisor or official so close to the president to refuse to endorse them; nearly half of Trump’s have so refused."

15. 《目标是宝可梦大师》中文版MV 腾格尔 (October 26) For fun, here's a Chinese song about pokemon!

Blogaround

1. The Many Faces of Sun Wukong (September 23) "Some critics complained that Game Science, developers of the wildly popular game 'Black Myth: Wukong,' did the Monkey King dirty. But the mischievous simian has always defied easy categorization."

Also from Sixth Tone: Throwing Shapes: The Rave Experience for Deaf Clubbers (September 25) "The biggest difference between BassBath and other clubbing experiences is that mid- and low- frequency music is played all night, using deep sounds to create somatosensory vibrations."

2. FTC Sues Prescription Drug Middlemen for Artificially Inflating Insulin Drug Prices (September 20) Interesting... When I hear people talk about how certain things are too expensive, like prescription drugs, or housing, etc, and they say it's because big corporations are greedy, I'm kind of skeptical- it must be more complicated than that. For prescription drugs, there's the cost of the research, right? While they're doing the research, they're not making any money from that, and then after they develop a drug, the drug is super cheap to make, but they need to charge a higher amount than that, to make up for the money they spent on research. If uninformed people on the internet are saying "it's so cheap to make, they are being immoral by not selling it for that exact cost", well, if they were required to do that, then it disincentivizes the research. Why spend money on researching new medicines if there's no way for that investment to pay off? Also, factor in the money they spend on research that's not successful- there's an element of risk, and it only makes financial sense for companies to spend money on medical research if then they're able to sell the successful ones for a higher price than simply the manufacturing cost.

I heard that line of reasoning a long time ago, and it came from a Republican perspective so maybe I need to revisit it and ask "Is that *really* how this works, financially, or is this just something people say because they don't want to change anything about the system?"

Because, actually, maybe we should take a closer look at the idea "if they have to sell these medicines at a low cost, then there's no way to make money off them" and ask, wait, should medicine be an area where private companies should expect to make money? Maybe it should be government-funded instead? Maybe that's actually the entire problem, how this line of thinking is locked into the assumption that there needs to be a business model that makes a lot of profits by developing medicines. Rather than thinking "wow it's so great that this medical technology exists, it means we can have a society where everyone has access to the medical treatment they need."

I've seen a lot of social media posts, on twitter and elsewhere, confidently offering ideas for how systems should work differently, and I pretty much roll my eyes at this because people who make these posts don't seem to be thinking it through at all- they have a very very oversimplified idea about how the economy works. Here's an example I saw a while ago- "rent should be lower in February because it only has 28 days." I mean, okay, I guess we could have a system that worked that way, but it wouldn't make a difference in the total amount you're paying over the course of a year- it would mean you paid an amount *higher* than your current rent in a month with 31 days. Like, I recognize that this person is making this social media post because of an actual real problem they are having, about not having enough money to pay rent- and that is a problem which society should take seriously and do something about- but the problem has nothing to do with the fact that the specific dates when your rent is due are not spaced at *exactly* equal intervals. (Or maybe I'm taking it too seriously and it was a joke rather than an actual policy proposal?)

Anyway, when I see people criticizing drug companies for raising prices just because they're greedy, I also feel skeptical about that- is it "just because they're greedy" or is there more to it than that? Surely the company would argue that it's just the cost of doing business, and they could show you a budget breakdown structured accordingly. It's not like they just have a giant pot of money and it's so much they don't even know what to do with it. It's not like they have a budget where one line says "overcharge by thousands of dollars just because we're greedy."

Yes, I do recognize that the price of prescription drugs is way higher than it should be- because other countries don't have this problem. But locating exactly where the problem is, that's gotta be more tricky.

So, the reason I'm sharing this link about the FTC is that this is an actual legal case. This isn't just people on social media complaining about the price of medicine (a very real problem, but I don't think people on social media have a good understanding of the causes or what should be done about it!). The fact that the FTC is suing over it makes me think there *is* a specific problem that they can point to and say that companies broke the law and made prices higher just because they wanted higher profits.

3. A dramatic rise in pregnant women dying in Texas after abortion ban (September 21, via) "Beyond the immediate dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, there is growing evidence that women living in states with strict abortion laws, such as Texas, are far more likely to go without prenatal care and much less likely to find an appointment with an OB-GYN." This is horrifying. 

4. DNA test helps identify sailor from doomed Arctic expedition (September 25, via) "Fitzjames was one of the captains of British explorer Sir John Franklin's two ships that went missing in the summer of 1845."

5. Tips for respecting microlabels (September 25) "Perhaps you’ve seen label stacks provided as a rhetorical example of someone worthy of respect, as if to say, 'yes, we even tolerate those people'."

6. Missouri executes Marcellus Williams despite prosecutors and the victim’s family asking that he be spared (September 25)

7. Chase Bank says it is aware of viral 'glitch' inviting people to commit check fraud (September 4, via) "But in this case, people online seem to be simply committing check fraud against themselves — making it relatively easy for a bank to catch on and hold them accountable." Like I said, people on social media who don't understand how financial institutions work.

8. Stem cells reverse woman’s diabetes — a world first (September 26, via) "They’ve completely reversed diabetes in the patient, who was requiring substantial amounts of insulin beforehand."

9. Maggie Smith, beloved ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘Harry Potter’ star, dead at 89 (September 25)

Blogaround

1. The shredder of history and the oldest song in the world (May 2) "To reach the present day, it must be the case that no person or thing destroyed the document—not just in its own time, but also in every year, every decade, every century that followed."

2. This post is about the pruning process I associate with trying to manage the risk of escalation in a conflict. (May 8) "If I'm concerned about escalation in a tense conversation online, sometimes I'll go back over my message draft and try to prune down the number of provocations."

3. Daddy’s Little Interpreter (May 10) Video about a girl in China who helps her deaf father by acting as a sign language interpreter at his nail salon.

And this article, also from Sixth Tone: A Tale of Two Giants: How India’s and China’s Demographics Differ (May 9) "Additionally, India has a much younger population than China. While the median age in China in 2023 is around 39, India’s is just above 28."

Also from Sixth Tone: US Returns Two Stolen Relics Worth $3.5 Million to China (May 11) "According to the district attorney’s office, thieves used saws to cut the antiquities from a tomb in China in the 1990s then smuggled them out of the country. They were then loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than two decades by private collector Shelby White, with one of the two never exhibited, 'never cleaned and … caked with dirt.'"

4. LinkedIn to cut 716 jobs and shut its China app amid ‘challenging’ economic climate (May 9) 

5. Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows (January 18, via) "The research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that, based on analysis of a significant percentage of the projects, more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be 'phantom credits' and do not represent genuine carbon reductions."

6. The Meltdown of a Gay Bank (March 31, via) "Curtis said there was a big new funding round to toast — but first there were team-building exercises, and they quickly got uncomfortable. For a 'speed-dating' session, managers handed out white labels and instructed employees to fill in their identity, which led to workers wearing stickers that read 'formerly homeless' and 'sexual assault survivor.'"

7. Brief interludes with hideous men (part 1) (May 11) [content note: John Piper] "A man like that is not going to see her as a stranger in need of simple assistance but as a bit player in his own personal dirty joke, or porno, or horror movie, or treatise on divinely ordained gender roles — or even some combination of all of those."

8. Deliver Us (Opening Song) | The Prince of Egypt | TUNE. I've been listening to the soundtrack from "The Prince of Egypt", as one does.

And here's the same song in Mandarin Chinese.

9. Girlhood, Purity and Religious Trauma: A Taylor Swift Study (May 2) 42-minute video which analyzes Taylor's Swift's song "Would've, Could've, Should've", which is (apparently) about her relationship with John Mayer when she was 19 and he was 32.

Blogaround

1. AO3 Comments and Why People Aren't Leaving More of Them (March 5) About comment culture on Tumblr and its influence on Archive Of Our Own.

And another one also from Coyote: Arguments Against Wikia/Fandom (March 3) About wiki sites hosted by Wikia/Fandom and how the whole system is kinda dysfunctional.

2. Here Is Our Registration To Blog In Florida, Mister Knucklef*ck Sh*thead State Senator, Sir (March 3) "You really thought that through! You don't mention whether the bloggers must be resident to the great state of Florida, one of those oversights that can happen when a bunch of [*******] idiots get elected to make 'laws.' We'll assume that it applies to everyone everywhere in the known universe, since you didn't say it ain't."

3. A Summary of Issues with Every Man's Battle (with Download) (February 22) [content note: quotes from "Every Man's Battle" describe women in disgusting oversexualized ways] I never read "Every Man's Battle" (or any of the related books) but I knew it was a well-regarded best-selling book in Christian circles. Umm, turns out the book is actually about how men are all disgusting pigs who want to objectify women constantly and masturbate about it- like, presenting this as perfectly normal behavior for men, this is what we should expect from all men, it would be unreasonable to hold men to a higher standard than that... and apparently the solution is men need to learn how to *only* objectify and use their wife, rather than every woman they happen to see. Eww.

Anyway, glad I never read that book. It would have messed me up even more than The Modesty Survey did.

In reality, it turns out that men are perfectly capable of respecting women. And in fact, the vast majority of men go about their lives treating women like normal people rather than sex objects. The church explicitly teaches that this is not possible.

(Also gotta love the asexual erasure right there in the title- "Every Man's Battle.")

And a follow-up post: You Don't Need to Objectify Women to Identify with Those Fighting Lust (February 27) "The descriptions of women’s and girls’ bodies are everywhere, and they are salacious. Fred Stoeker, in Every Young Man’s Battle, goes on and on about the specific type of porn he loved, describing it, and the girls’ bodies, in detail."

4. Why doesn’t EA divest from crypto? (March 7) "But perhaps these critiques lack specificity, so let’s add some in. Lack of internal diversity causes EA to be dominated by the viewpoints of techies who tend to be into crypto. Reliance on wealthy people such as SBF makes EA unwilling to fight the systems that created that wealth such as crypto. Earning to give practically encourages the most exploitative career paths such as when SBF was advised by EA leaders to follow his career path. It all points to crypto."

5. China’s First Deaf Lawyer Beat The Odds. Now, She’s Giving Back. (March 8) "The problem is further compounded by the fact that interpreters and the deaf community use different forms of sign language. While interpreters use Chinese Sign Language, the standardized form officially promoted since the 1990s, many of China’s deaf only use Natural Sign Language, which has different grammar and varies from region to region."

And another article also from Sixth Tone: Chinese Boss’ Call to Work Weekends Sparks Discussion on Overtime (March 10) "'When I was still in that company, many people envied me,' Chen told Sixth Tone. 'I was the example to follow for younger students. I gave up my break time for those pointless expectations.'"

6. Is the sun setting on solitary confinement? (March 8) "For instance, in day-to-day practice, solitary confinement is less a punishment for in-prison violence and more a 'catch-all' for anyone (seriously mentally ill, pregnant, gender non-conforming, litigious, juvenile) who cannot function within the existing rules of the prison system. And there is no evidence that solitary confinement reduces in-prison violence."

7. The Nonsense of Nonviolence (King Legacy Pt. 2) (February 8) "When you hear these principles, one thing ought to strike you: this seems like it would be impossible for someone if they aren’t a Christian. ... It requires a trust in a Savior who will win even if you lose. It requires trust in a God who will bring justice even if you die in the struggle. That takes courage indeed."

Also from the same blog: Slavery and Redemption in the New Testament (February 2) "How do we translate doulos in this passage? In the original context, it unquestionably meant 'slave,' but if we use the word today, then a modern reader will be so focused on that fact as to miss any other points in the story. We are  likely to to ask: how on earth can that man justify keeping a slave in the first place, and to treat him so roughly? So we say servant (or handmaiden), and miss the total subjection and constraint implied by slave. Quite likely, the word slave is now so tainted as to be (so to speak) beyond redemption. So what do we do? Any translation we offer will miss the cultural context."

Blogaround

Nativity set figures of Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus, in 3 separate cages. (From link #2 in this list.)

1. Regulators: Healthcare Sharing Ministries Can Only Scam Christians (posted December 4) "In effect, federal and state regulators have struck a bizarre bargain in which they have decided to let healthcare sharing ministries sell a subpar, shitty product, without requiring them to meet the typical quality standards for this product … so long as they only sell it to Christian individuals and families."

2. Church's nativity scene depicts Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as a family separated at the border (posted December 9) Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.

3. What would happen if we randomly gave $1,000 to poor families? Now we know. (posted December 4) "Their findings are significant: Cash transfers benefited the entire local economy, not just direct recipients. As money made its way through the area, both families who did and did not receive cash ended up substantially better off."

4. Deaf Actor Makes Star Wars Debut In The Mandalorian (posted December 8)

5. Harry Potter Theory: Snape Killed Hedwig?! (posted December 5) [content note: spoilers for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"]

How About We Let Disabled People Tell Us What to Think About Jesus' Healings

Blind man walking with a cane and dog.

Let's look at Matthew 20:29-34. In this story, two blind men call out to Jesus and ask him to give them their sight, and he does.

In my experience, when Christians read biblical accounts of Jesus' healings, we discuss and interpret them from a certain set of assumptions about disabilities. These are assumptions which seem, to abled people, to be so obviously true, we never even question them or realize it's possible to think in a different way. Specifically, I'm talking about beliefs like:

1. The #1 thing a disabled person needs most is to become not-disabled.
2. After Jesus heals them, everything is good, and they can immediately go ahead and "be a normal person."

However, I have now learned that society's beliefs about disabled people are often wrong and harmful. In particular, many disabled writers talk about how they want people to listen to them instead of spreading ignorant stereotypes, and they want society to be accessible so disabled people are not barred from participating in everyday activities that abled people take for granted. They say that it's not the disability that limits them, it's people's stereotypes and ignorance and how society is basically designed with the assumption that disabled people don't exist or aren't important. To imagine that they just need to be "healed" and then everything would be better just perpetuates the idea that there's nothing wrong with society and it's totally fine that we constantly exclude disabled people.

In my own case, loud sounds are painful for me (because of sensory reasons related to autism). If Jesus "healed" me so loud sounds weren't painful, that would be great, but it also wouldn't mean the whole loud-sounds problem is solved and done and it's all good. I have an entire lifetime of experience of people not taking me seriously when I was upset by a sound, people laughing at me, people saying my pain isn't real and "it's not that bad." I have all this emotional trauma that I'm working through now, trying to make sense of my childhood and what was really going on all those times adults told me to "be brave" and stop being so "sensitive"- and it takes years. (Blogging is cheaper than therapy...)

It would be just THE WORST if Jesus "healed" me and then other people thought, "ugh FINALLY she got over it and quit complaining"- as if my "healing" justified all the times that they wished I would just shut up and act normal. Like they did nothing wrong, all their attempts to shove a square peg in a round hole, because I finally became a round peg and gained the ability to act like they always wanted me to act. Why does "healing" mean a person becomes not-disabled, rather than abled people learning how to stop excluding and stereotyping disabled people?

So anyway, my point is, when I read this story about Jesus healing two blind men, I wanted to know what blind people think about it. And in general, what do disabled people think about Jesus' healings in the bible? I've gathered some articles here, and I would like to know if my readers have any other good resources about it or book recommendations.

Here are the links I've found:

Out of the Darkness: Examining the Rhetoric of Blindness in the Gospel of John

[In the gospel of John, p]hysical blindness may provide the necessary ground for faith to grow and emerge, but the person cannot remain physically blind. There are biblical scholars and disability activists alike who note that there are no blind disciples. Grant (Eiesland & Saliers, eds., 1998) writes, for example, "It is true that at one level the healing stories are stories of inclusion in that Jesus heals and welcomes all sorts of people into God's reign. However, the very fact that they are physically healed by Jesus suggests that physical restoration is a necessary component of their entry into the community" (p. 77). Grant also cites Donald Senior, Frederick Tiffany, and Sharon Ringe, all who have made similar points. From her perspective working with people with disabilities and government agencies in Australia, Elizabeth Hastings writes:

...with all the respect due to the ten lepers, the various possessed, and the sundry blind, lame, and deaf faithful of scripture, I reckon people who have disabilities may have been better off for the last two thousand years if Our Lord had not created quite so many miraculous cures but occasionally said, "your life is perfect as it is given to you – go ye and find its purpose and meaning," and to onlookers, "this disability is an ordinary part of human being, go ye and create the miracle of a world free of discrimination" (quoted in Calder, 2004, p. 12).

John Hull (2001) in his recent reflection on reading the Bible from his own blind perspective tries to conceive of blind men and women following Jesus through the Galilee—he cannot. Blind disciples would have been an affront to Jesus' power.

Although physical infirmity is not connected to sin in the example of the man born blind, it is, in this case, connected to ignorance of truth. In John 9, the physical condition of blindness always also connotes metaphorical blindness as a mental or spiritual condition, or ignorance. Both the literal and metaphorical meanings of blindness are always present every time the words "blind" and "to see" are used in the story. The literal and metaphorical meanings of blindness have the potential of contaminating each other in any context. There is a danger of at least implicitly, if not explicitly, associating physically blind people with mental and spiritual incapacity, and associating Jewish people, whether blind or not, with the same shortcomings.

In Search of a More Robust Theology of Disability

The idea that sight=good and blind=bad is so deeply ingrained in our culture that most of us are not even aware of its existence. I can't begin to cover all of the ways that this idea manifests itself, from sighted people giving pity to finding inspiration in how we "cope" with our "suffering" to fearing us, to assuming we have substandard lives, to fervently thanking God they are not us, to rushing up to us on the street and laying hands on us to receive healing, when we are trying to run to the grocery store before an appointment. We are constantly told in numerous subtle ways that we are "broken" or "damaged" and then in the same breath told that we are "brave" and "inspirational" when in reality to us it feels about as important as being tall or short. It is merely a physical attribute and life goes on. For a blind person, being able or willing to return the gaze of a sighted person is not an accurate measure of his dignity or self-worth. By the same token, to the blind person, the sighted person he is talking to seems undignified as a result of the noxious body odor or the grating, gravelly voice and repulsive manner of speaking even though he is meeting the other's gaze. I realize the above was used metaphorically, and thus am I also using it. Consider the actual source of dignity!

The disclaimer that "real blind people don't count" doesn't hold any water at all, because to talk about an attribute of our lives is to talk about us. You cannot propose a theology of dark skin without involving people who have dark skin, or a theology of Asian people without involving people who live in or come from Asia. You cannot talk about how God treats women in the abstract without it affecting real women and how people think about us and treat us and the ways we as people empower or disempower other people to live as Christians, or how apt we are to reject Christianity because it simply does not work as a realistic worldview.

An example of this is a discussion I read recently on social media between a group of mixed blind non-Christians and blind Christians who have experienced sighted Christians approaching them on the street and asking to lay hands on them so that Jesus can heal their blindness. The non-Christians in particular were incredibly repulsed by this experience, which unfortunately stems directly from the theology as put forth in the quoted post above.

Biblically, blind people are beggars, like Blind Bartimaeus, who come to Jesus asking to be healed, to be redeemed, to be given social standing and allowed re-entry into society. Blind people in ancient times were cursed; there is no denying that. They could not navigate or work at meaningful labor. They could not participate in civil government and were hardly better than lepers.

In third-world countries, blindness is the same today. Blind people are not offered an education and usually do not marry or have children. They are taught menial tasks such as basket weaving and are often a lifelong burden on their families or communities. They are poor, pitiful, in short, everything we assume blindness to be. My daughter, adopted from Ethiopia was "rescued" (cringe) from just such a life.

Contrast this with a blind person living in the Western developed world. Here, a blind person in ideal circumstances is taught to read and write using alternative methods. This blind person (we'll use the male pronoun for convenience and brevity) is taught to navigate using a white cane or guide dog (for example), and is allowed access to all public facilities and places of business. He can travel anywhere he wants to go by himself, and can hold a job is nearly any field. He can work meaningfully, marry and support a family, have hobbies, own and maintain a house, contribute to society, have honest dealings with other members of society and have a comparable quality of life to a person with perfect sight.

‘Lord I was deaf’. Images of Disability in the Hymnbooks

Before we began to refer to the metaphor of sight and blindness we had arrived at a discriminating criterion. This was to ask ourselves if the metaphor suggested a disparaging comparison with groups of disabled people. I would now like to suggest a more searching rationale for this. If sighted and hearing people use the imagery of light and sound to express their experiences in the world they inhabit that is natural and inevitable. However, if able bodied people make disparaging allusions to people who have very different experiences this may not only betray ignorance of those ways of life and is discourteous, but may reinforce a prejudice against disabled people that will in turn give credibility to the view that Christian faith does not offer answers to the search for equal opportunities: it may actually be part of the problem. In other words, when we consider the sliding scale of metaphors from those that refer explicitly to various impaired states through to those which merely use the various ideas of light and sound, sight and speech, we should distinguish between those that speak to our own world, the one we know and experience, and those that refer negatively to other peoples worlds of which we have no first-hand experience.

In saying this, I do not overlook the fact that there may be hymn writers who are themselves blind yet continue to use disparaging metaphors of their own condition. This is to be explained by the combination of a piety which does not adopt a critical stance towards the tradition, and immersion in the assumptions of a society in which the inferiority and the marginalisation of disabled people were simply taken for granted.

In the light of our new principle it is possible to comment on the situation of people with other impairments such as those who use wheelchairs for mobility. Biblical precedent such as the eschatological hope expressed in Isaiah 35.5 and some of the miracles in the gospels do encourage the hymn writers to refer to lame people. Lameness can be used as a disparaging metaphor for sin. Such expressions are as unacceptable as the explicitly pejorative references to blind and deaf people. Merely referring to standing up, however, comes into the category of speaking of the body’s symbolism which is natural to those who have legs and can use them. A wheelchair user should no more object to ‘stand up and bless the Lord, ye people of His choice’ than I as a blind person have any right to object to ‘the Lord is my light, my strength and my salvation’. True, the Lord is not my light, because I have no light sensation, and wheelchair users cannot respond to the invitation to stand up in the presence of the Lord. However, just as able bodied people should not thrust the demands of their experience upon others, so people with impairments should not demand that able-bodied worlds should conform to theirs. The principle is to rejoice in your own world without making disparaging remarks or setting unreasonable limits upon the natural life-worlds of others.

A limited range of disabilities are referred to in the hymnbooks. These are usually those that find a symbolic place within the vocabulary of the bible: blindness, deafness, being lame or having leprosy. We referred earlier to the hymn ‘Thine arm O, Lord in days of old’, quoting the line ‘the beggar with his sightless eyes’. This replaced the line, found in the older version, ‘the leper with his tainted life’ which has not reappeared in that particular hymn since about 1950. References to diseases such as AIDS and cancer are rarely if ever found in hymns, partly because they are contemporary conditions, and partly because they are not referred to in the bible.

Disability Theology

The most powerful discussion of God to arise from within disability studies comes from Nancy Eiesland's proposal of the Disabled God, in the book by the same title (Eiesland, 1994). Eiesland identifies herself as "a woman with disabilities, a sociologist of religion, and a professor at a seminary in the United States" (Eiesland, 1998a, p. 103). These three elements come together in her theology, which centers on what she calls "the mixed blessing of the body," especially as these relate to the lived experience of disability. From her sociological perspective, she is especially interested in theories and methods that empower and provide a foundation for political action. She uses the image of the Disabled God to support such political action, particularly through processes of resymbolization. She is also interested in deconstructing notions of normalcy. She writes: "My own body composed as it is of metal and plastic, as well as bone and flesh, is my starting point for talking about 'bones and braces bodies' as a norm of embodiment" (Eiesland, 1994, p. 22). Her proposal is a model of God that makes sense of her "normal" experience of embodiment, as well as one that supports and participates in the struggle for liberation of all people with disabilities.
Eiesland argues that traditional images of God, especially those that lead to views of disability as either a blessing or a curse, are inadequate. Within her own experience, she wondered whether such a God could even understand disability, let alone be meaningful to her. While working at a rehabilitation hospital, she asked the residents one day what they thought.
After a long silence, a young African-American man said, "If God was in a sip-puff, maybe He would understand." I was overwhelmed by this image: God in a sip-puff wheelchair, the kind used by many quadriplegics that enables them to maneuver the chair by blowing and sucking on a straw-like device. Not an omnipotent, self-sufficient God, but neither a pitiable, suffering servant. This was an image of God as a survivor, as one of those whom society would label "not feasible," "unemployable," with "questionable quality of life" (Eiesland, 2002, p. 13).

Eiesland made a connection between this image and the resurrection story in which Jesus appears to his followers and reveals his injured hands and feet (Luke 24:36-39). She notes "This wasn't exactly God in a sip-puff, but here was the resurrected Christ making good on the promise that God would be with us, embodied, as we are — disabled and divine. In this passage, I recognized a part of my hidden history as a Christian" (Eiesland, 2002, p. 14). Eiesland suggests that Jesus reveals the Disabled God, and shows that divinity (as well as humanity) is fully compatible with experiences of disability. The imago Dei includes pierced hands and feet and side. According to Eiesland, this Disabled God is part of the "hidden history" of Christianity, because seldom is the resurrected Christ recognized as a deity whose hands, feet, and side bear the marks of profound physical impairment. As Rebecca Chopp notes in the introduction to this work, "The most astonishing fact is, of course, that Christians do not have an able-bodied God as their primal image. Rather, the Disabled God promising grace through a broken body is at the center of piety, prayer, practice, and mission" (Eiesland, 1994, p. 11).

Strength in Weakness: The Bible, Disability, and the Church

From an able-bodied reading of the Bible, it is easy to assume God wants to heal every person with a disability. In the New Testament, every person who encounters Jesus blind, deaf, or lame is restored to health. But theologian Amos Yong wants the church to read the Bible differently, seeing good news for people with disabilities as they are, and not as God might change them.

Crooked Healing: Disability, Vocation and the Theology of the Cross

There are few things more potentially useful to the disabled experience than the idea of vocation. Vocation places disability in a wider spectrum of the sacred calling. It implies that disabled people and their able-bodied counterparts are on equal spiritual footing. More than that, it suggests that disabled people can be seen as conduits for God’s grace and service rather than it only images of a broken creation in need of “fixing.”

Christians who aren't disabled have a much too simplistic view of Jesus' healings in the bible. And even the biblical authors had some of the same prejudices, equating disability with sin or portraying it as incompatible with following Jesus. Just because the bible has a certain view doesn't mean it's right- it could be ableist (or anti-Semitic, or sexist, etc). We need to learn about disability by listening to actual disabled people.

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

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