Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. They're Made Out of Weights (June 3, via) "Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of weights."

2. Your Book Review: Breakdown In Pakistan (July 24) This is about the phenomenon of foreign NGOs coming in and transforming local community-led organizations, giving them money but making them no longer able to connect with and raise support from their community.

3. Antiques Roadshow (August 5) From xkcd. 

4. Furiosa’s Cat Feeder (2016, via) About a cat who keeps finding ways to get extra food out of the cat feeder, and the owner's continued attempts to prevent it. "Her next move was to lie on her back in the bowl, and stick her paw up the chute. She could paw the conveyor belt itself, getting it to move. This was very effective, netting an extra meal or more." 

5. Jonathan Haidt is wrong about age-gating the internet (July 13) "I wish everyone giving this parenting advice were first required to actually try, for an hour, to configure a computer such that it gives a user the ability to meaningfully interact with the web without bombarding them with content selected to make them hooked and miserable. It can’t be done. I have tried a wide range of parental control tools, and none of them even seem to comprehend it as an aspiration."

6. Sheep and Goats and ‘Hell’ (August 4) "So they need the Sheep and the Goats to support the claim of a 'literal' Heaven and Hell, but cannot acknowledge or accept what that parable has to say about who is going to 'Heaven' and who is going to 'Hell' and why. That parable, like the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, is explicit, emphatic, and categorical. 'Heaven' is for the poor and for those who feed the poor. 'Hell' is for rich people who neglect the poor. Full stop."

Also from the Slacktivist: No sign will be given except the sign of Jonah (August 7) "And then it struck me that I was sitting there earnestly asking myself one of the most pernicious, corrosive, damnable questions one can ever wind up asking oneself: Who does and does not count as 'our' people?"

7. Why Rachel Held Evans Still Reads Like a Prophet (August 10) There's a new book called "Braving the Truth" which is a collection of Rachel Held Evans's writings. Definitely worth reading. See also, this link roundup I posted in 2019: Link Roundup of Posts Honoring Rachel Held Evans

8. Niagara Falls and the Limits of the Design Inference (July 25) "In its cosmology, then, [intelligent design] finds design in the very law-structure of the universe. In its biology, it finds design in the failure of that law-structure to account for some feature. These are opposite arguments."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Justice department moves to dismiss its charges against Olympian over reflecting pool (July 31, via) "The documents 'indicated a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool,' the motion said."

2. The Assault On Science Funding Continues (July 23, via) "But I mean what I say and I am trying my best to say what I mean: The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands."

3. Truth Social’s Audacious Plan to Sell Banks Early Access to Trump’s Posts Goes Live (August 3, via) "This story has captured our attention because it compounds the corruption that has become endemic throughout the executive branch with a new, ridiculous feature of our economy — Trump manipulating the markets through his bespoke social media platform, prompting sell-offs and rallies with his statements about the status of such things as tariffs or the Iran war, regardless of those statements’ grounding in fact."

4. They lost their work permits and their legal status. Returning to Haiti is still 'unimaginable' (August 5) "Approximately 350,000 Haitians and Syrians who have remade their lives in the United States are now at a crossroads. Their work permits and legal status have expired, yet their home countries haven't recovered from the crises that drove them to seek Temporary Protected Status protections."

5. Trump signs new orders targeting birthright citizenship, weeks after Supreme Court ruling (August 7) The wording of this one is different than the previous one- I would be interested in reading an article explaining those differences and to what extent they matter.

6. Federal funds can't be used to give test strips to drug users, raising overdose fears (August 8)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Types of Tornado Alert (July 3) From xkcd.

2. Chip Off The Old Block (July 1) "I’m not claiming any of this is smart or interesting. I’m claiming he constantly says whatever he’s thinking about to anyone around him, no matter how irrelevant and repetitive, and that this is of course the first sign of a future great blogger."

His kids are about the same age as my daughter, and yeah this whole post is what it's like.

3. On Christianity and Aliens (cont’d.) (June 29) "Your faith can be shattered not just by visitors from Vulcan and Vega, but by visitors from Samaria and the uttermost parts of the earth. It is existentially threatened by the idea that God might also love anybody who isn’t you."

4. Platner formally withdraws from Maine Senate race and Democrats announce process to name new nominee (July 11) "The formal withdrawal comes two days after Platner said he would quit the race, facing an allegation of sexual assault that he has denied."

And: The Banality of Misogyny (July 7, via) "It’s just occurring to me, she says, because I’ve never told anyone he assaulted me, I don’t know how I would ever get anyone to believe me if I needed to down the line. So I wanted to tell you, just in case."

And also, about Graham Platner, there are some corners of the internet (for example) which are discussing the fact that the victim apparently had texted him to say she needed a "glute massage", and he said he was coming over, and she told him not to. Discussing whether this means that it's not really rape.

I'm kind of thinking about this from 3 different angles. First, there's the modesty/ purity culture angle, which says that if a girl/woman does anything that might inspire a man to think about her body in a sexual way, well, men just aren't able to control themselves. From that point, whatever he does is not his fault. She should know that.

There's also the "it was a misunderstanding" angle. Whenever there's a big news story where a victim comes forward to talk about being sexually assaulted, and we hear the details of the story, there are always things that people will point to and say "she was sending mixed messages" and how could the perpetrator have known that the victim didn't want it? If she doesn't want it, but she doesn't tell him that directly, and she just goes along with it, then from his perspective it's consensual, and he is utterly shocked to later find out that she feels it was not consensual. I don't think this applies to the Platner case because the victim says she directly said no (here's the link to the Politico article that broke the story), but I've seen it in other cases.

I think there's quite a difference between "mixed messages" and "literally how could he have known that she didn't want it, there were no signs." And I think it's very normal that there would be [what people call] "mixed messages" leading up to a sexual assault, because the reason the perpetrator was able to get that close is because the victim does like them / trust them / is attracted to them, to some extent. Calling it "mixed messages" assumes that the only 2 possibilities are "she wants to have sex with him, specifically in the way that he wants" or "she doesn't want anything to do with him at all", and when we categorize her actions into these 2 categories, wow it's so puzzling how some of them fit into one category and some of them fit into the other one. Mixed messages. 

Like, uh, maybe she actually wanted something else, and the problem is that we're trying to force it to be one of these 2 specific things.

And then there's the "playing social games" angle (not sure what to call it, but we'll call it that). Basically, there's sort of a set of rules for social interactions between people, and you can manipulate people to get what you want- as long as you stay within the rules, no one can blame you. For example, if someone says "no", then you have to stop, and you can't have sex with them. But if you ask them over and over, and you manage to catch them in a state of mind where they don't say "no" because they don't have energy or they're not thinking clearly- ha, they didn't say "no", that means you *can* have sex with them and you can't be blamed. You've played the game and won, that's how it works.

You see this same kind of thinking when kids annoy each other playing the "I'm not touching you" game. One kid is hovering in the other kid's personal space, but because they are not *actually* touching, they are still acting within the rules, and they claim that the other kid therefore can't complain about it. It's a line of thinking based on "see what I can get away with", where the standard way we interact with other people is that we try to get what we want, we try to do things to people that they don't like, and it's just a matter of being clever enough to do it within the rules that society has prescribed.

So then when people talk about rape and consent, and say things like "drunk people can't consent to sex," for people who are coming from that "playing social games" perspective, it comes across like a slight modification in the rules of the social games. Like, now instead of targeting drunk people, in your efforts to do things to people that they don't want, you can maybe try getting your victim to drink a little bit but not enough to "count" as drunk under the societally-recognized rules.

And for the people arguing "it was a misunderstanding"- maybe we shouldn't take that to mean "if you, as an objective observer, witnessed the entire sequence of events, you genuinely might not realize that this person didn't want it" but rather "this person said something flirty, therefore the rules of social obligation say that the other person is *right* to expect that they are going to have sex. Why are you feminists suddenly trying to change the rules? This is so unfair." The "misunderstanding" is about whether the victim said something which does or does not belong to the category of "flirty things that mean they want to have sex"- if it does fit in that category, then they *do* owe the other person sex- the "misunderstanding" is that the victim believed it did not fit in that category, but the perpetrator thought it did. Rather than the "misunderstanding" being about "I paid attention to all of your behavior and I actually had no idea that you didn't want it."

But the real solution is not about closing loopholes, defining the rules perfectly so that there's no opportunity for rapists to rape while still carefully following all the rules. What we actually want is consent culture. A cultural norm where people own their own bodies, and you cannot do something to someone that they don't want. Like, genuinely, it's not about keeping within society's rules; it's about not doing things to people that they don't want.

It was so mind-blowing to me to learn about boundaries- the idea that the bedrock truth is that I own myself, my body, my money, my feelings, etc, and the challenge of navigating the social games of what to say in a confusing situation is just a superficial external layer, rather than a game that I need to win in order to escape the prospect of people doing things to me that I don't want. 

Like if a pushy salesperson keeps telling me I should buy their product, and I tell them I don't want it, and they explain to me why my reasons for not wanting it are not valid, and we go back and forth, until I don't know what to say anymore- so, that means I have to buy it. Under the "playing social games" logic, that's what it means. The salesperson is better at the game of staying within the appearance of having a polite conversation while also pushing me into something I don't want. But, no, let's not look at it that way, let's look at it from the "boundaries" perspective. My money is mine, and nobody has the right to *make* me buy something- and that's true regardless of my ability to think of a polite/convincing response. "No" is a complete sentence. You don't *have* to explain your reasons. Sure, it's good to be polite about it- it's a little rude to just directly say "you can't make me do this, you have no right"- but that politeness is just a surface-level thing, that's just a layer you put on the top, while the bedrock truth of it is nobody has the right to make you do something you don't want. If you can't think of a polite response, that doesn't mean you lost the social game and now people have a right to do things to you- it means you are allowed to be a little rude, to say "no" even though people might think that level of directness is a bit outside of the rules of the social games.

It's like I said in this post, Welcome to Purity Culture, Today We are Overanalyzing Hugs, where I responded to an article that included a section on what to do "If his hug makes you feel uncomfortable" that gave some tips about how to avoid a hug while still staying within the rules of the social games- for example, "When he reaches out to hug you, turn and give him a side hug rather than a front-on hug." Sure, these can be useful suggestions, but I didn't like how it was framed like, here are some strategies for playing this social game, hope this helps you win. Rather than, like, you have an absolute right to refuse a hug, and here are some tips for how to spin your refusal in a socially-acceptable polite way, but at the end of the day, if someone doesn't get the hint and they're still trying to invade your space, they are the one in the wrong, and you are allowed to be rude.

Anyway, something I've seen on the internet, where people talk about consent and explain it as, literally you should only have sex with someone who wants to have sex with you. It's not about memorizing more and more detailed rules and staying within them while also manipulating people to get what you want. No, it's way simpler than that- it's about whether the other person *genuinely wants to have sex with you*. And then there are replies from people who finally got that that's what "consent" means, and they're incredulous. They reply and say 'this sounds totally unworkable. I can only have sex with someone who genuinely wants to have sex with me? That doesn't sound like something that would ever happen- you feminists are saying I can never have sex at all.' This really says something about them- maybe they haven't technically raped anyone (?), but their entire approach for all of their previous sexual experiences has been about manipulating people into things they may or may not want. Like, approaching dating/sex more as a game theory thing than as a "we both actually want this" thing.

Playing social games vs actually caring about what the other person wants. If someone says she wants a "glute massage", then by the rules of the social games, you can probably get away with claiming that she was asking for it. And, from the "playing social games" perspective, that's what matters- rather than genuinely caring about what the other person wants or doesn't want.

5. Sunday reading (July 5) "There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him."

6. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, dies after a brief and unexpected illness, his office says (July 12) "Graham appeared to break with Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, saying, “Count me out. Enough is enough.” But the senator returned to the fold and remained close with the president during his second term."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Two-hundred-and-fifty years in, Justice Jackson is doing the work that is needed from our leaders (July 5) "On this Fourth of July, I am thinking about how important it is for the United States that we have leaders willing to speak forthrightly about our past and ambitiously about our future in order to make it through the treacherous present."

2. The Wet And Wild Freedom Day Catastrophe (July 7) "The only place for these tens of thousands to go, realistically, was the streets outside the event, which is exactly what happened: a crush of bodies clustered at the entrance points and choking off traffic for blocks. Everyone is just as exposed to the elements out here as we were in there, except now we are angrily bunched together with nothing to do but endure the storm and stew about the stupidity of it all."

Donald Trump Throws Miserable Tribute To Himself On America's 250th Birthday (July 6) "The Trump team claims it had planned for the weather, but the slapdash look and feel of the tents, the free-for-all of water distribution from pallets, and the general lack of common sense and guidance in dealing with (increasingly) extreme weather suggests otherwise."

3. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo shot and killed by ICE agent in Houston, authorities confirm: Live updates (July 11) 

Men who witnessed deadly Houston shooting say ICE statement is false, attorney says (July 10) "But the three men who were riding in Salgado Araujo’s work van told attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra the version of events presented by ICE is false: 'At no point did they use the van to ram into the ICE agents and at no point were these ICE agents’ lives ever in any danger,' the lawyer said in a video posted to his Instagram."

4. GOP governor signs bill forcing trans inmates to detransition (July 6) "The bill does not allow those who have already begun treatment to continue and does not offer any plan to wean them off the medication. Experts say forcing them to stop at all, let alone cold turkey, will have disastrous mental and physical health consequences."

5. The Christian Past That Wasn't (June 30, via) "There are many stories like this that invent a grand narrative about the Christian past of our nation— a Christian past that, put simply, wasn’t. Some of these stories are false. Some contain a measure of truth, but they are exaggerated in such a way that they become mythical. Those who believe America was or is or should be a Christian nation use these fabrications to create myths about America from the days of the first European arrival to the present."

Every Bilingual Child is a Unique Flower

Toy monkey. Image source.

My second kid is 2 years old now, and she is learning language so fast! She mostly speaks Chinese, but I've been really surprised at how much English she uses- this is so different from her older brother when he was that age.

We live in China, and little Wavelength (this is what I'm gonna call her on the blog) is with her Chinese nanny or Chinese grandma while I'm at work all day. So it makes sense that she's mostly speaking Chinese. I'm really amazed at how fast she has been picking up Chinese. She can say whole sentences. Like the other day, at breakfast, her brother accidentally spit food on me while he was talking, and I didn't even realize that little Wavelength saw that, and then a few minutes later, she said "哥哥吐妈妈衣服" which means "brother spit mom's clothes" which is an accurate account of what happened.

Another time, she picked up a little dinosaur toy and said "恐龙尾巴掏牙" which means "dinosaur tail pick teeth" because she had been walking around with that dinosaur and using its tail to pick her teeth, and all of us told her to stop that. But now she's totally sure that's what the dinosaur toy is for, so that's what she said about it.

In English she can also say some sentences, which is great. Not as many as in Chinese though. She says "mama read brown bear" or "mama read monkey" to ask me to read her a book. She says "mama play legos." "Mama sing ABC." Etc.

She knows lots of animal names in English too! Cat, monkey, horse, dolphin, sheep, elephant (but she pronounces it "ofan"), giraffe (but she pronounces it "jwaff"), doggo (I guess I call dogs "doggo" and she has picked up on that), penguin, and probably more that I'm forgetting. She also knows all these, and even more, in Chinese.

And she can say "eat" in English. The funniest time was when she was trying to shove things into a toy T-rex's mouth, saying "Eat! Eat!" Also she knows "sit" - one time I saw her trying to sit on this stuffed parasaurolophus we have- she said her name and then "sit dinfour." ("Dinfour" is her attempt to say "dinosaur.")

The thing that really impresses me is that she doesn't just understand English, she also speaks it. Her brother (whom we call Square Root her on the blog) wasn't like that. He could understand English, but he always talked in Chinese. 

Why is that? Why is the little one speaking English so much more than her brother did at that age?

I thought the reason Square Root didn't speak in English at that age was that I was the only one in his life who talked to him in English. Kids in this kind of environment think to themselves "I have 1 oddball parent who speaks a completely different language that no one else speaks" and don't see any reason to bother speaking it themselves. (Maybe this is not totally true of our situation- because me and my husband talk to each other in English.)

Also, that was during the pandemic, when we got stuck in China for 3 years, lolsob. (Or, rather, it was possible to leave China, but almost impossible to get back in, so I didn't try to leave.) So during the time he was a toddler and was learning language, we didn't have a chance to visit any English-speaking relatives.

But then during the Shanghai lockdown, I was with him all day every day for 2 and a half months, lolsob, and he started speaking English. And now he doesn't have any problem speaking English or Chinese- though his Chinese is better than his English, and sometimes with my relatives he speaks Chinese and they have no idea what he's saying, and he claims he doesn't know how to say it in English, but upon further probing it turns out he can describe what he wants to say in English, even though maybe he didn't have an exact translation for how he would have said it in Chinese.

But his little sister is different! She says lots of things in English, without hesitation. She'll point at a horse and say "马" and then "horse." She taught her Chinese grandma the word "monkey." Why is she saying all these English words, unlike her brother?

(And here's another interesting question: Does she say English words to *me* at a higher frequency than she says them to the people in her life who don't understand English? Does she have an awareness of what language is for what person? I don't know.)

Is it because we have been able to travel outside of China, and visit relatives who speak English? Well, we only do that once or twice a year, and last time we did, she hadn't learned that many words yet, so I don't know if that made a difference. 

Is it because the existence of the bilingual older sibling has changed the language environment?

Is it because she learns languages faster than he did- and we see that in both Chinese and English?

Is it because the two of them are just different people and have different preferences about how much they want to speak English?

Probably it's all of these reasons. And I'm finding it fascinating how her language learning is so different from her brother's.

---

Related:

My Toddler's Experience With Baby Sign Language 

I wonder what my toddler thinks about being bilingual

"The Kingdom of Children" (a book about child liberation theology)

Book cover for "The Kingdom of Children"

I've been reading The Kingdom of Children: A Liberation Theology by R. L. Stollar. This book is great; I'm so excited about it. 

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I want to write down some of my thoughts about what I've read so far. And there will be more blog posts about this book, so stay tuned for that.

"Mother God" (as a queer Christian, I am so into this book)

Book cover for "Mother God"

I got this book for my kids, Mother God, by Teresa Kim Pecinovsky. Here's my review of it.

---

Summary

This book tells us that God is our mother, and every page gives examples of the actions She performs as a mother. For example:

Throughout day and night, God wakes
To nurse the infant at Her side.
She snuggles Her baby gently
Until he closes his sleepy eyes.

The inside cover of the book says it contains "a dozen images of God inspired by feminine descriptions from Scripture."

---

I have ex-evangelical thoughts about this interpretation of the bible

Some of this imagery I recognized- I know the bible passages that they came from. For example, the page about God the mother hen, gathering Her chicks under Her wings, comes from the words of Jesus in Matthew 23:37, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing."

I wish the book included a list of bible references, because I feel some of these might be a bit of a stretch, and I want to check them. There is one page in this book that says God is a leopard taking care of Her cubs, and I'm trying to figure out where in the bible that is supposedly coming from. I did a search, and the word "leopard" only appears in the bible 8 times. The one that I think "Mother God" must be alluding to is Hosea 13:7-8, which says:

So I will be like a lion to them, 
like a leopard I will lurk by the path.
Like a bear robbed of her cubs, 
I will attack them and rip them open; 
like a lion I will devour them— 
a wild animal will tear them apart.

Not really the cheeriest of bible verses. 

I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the imagery of God as a mother leopard. I love that this book has that. I think it's fine to describe God that way, even though the bible doesn't quite do that, not exactly.

It's just that... if you're having an argument with a conservative Christian who believes we're only allowed to talk about God with he/him pronouns, and you want to pull out this book and say "see? The bible itself talks about God with feminine language, so we are so allowed to call God 'her'," well, you're kind of over-selling it. Yes, there are places in the bible where God is described with feminine language. It never goes so far as to use a 'her' pronoun, though. The bible's feminine descriptions of God are comparisons and metaphors, while the masculine ones are literally calling God "he", "Father", "Son", etc. Conservative Christians in arguments about God's pronouns are quick to point this out. They're not really wrong... it's just that... I want to believe in a better God than that, a God who is every gender.

Probably the closest the bible gets to non-metaphorically calling God a woman is 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:16, which refers to Jesus Christ as "the wisdom of God" - and this was originally written in Greek, and the Greek word for "wisdom" is "Sophia," which is a feminine name. Christ is the woman, Sophia Wisdom. (Okay, yeah, this is still pretty metaphorical.)

So yes, I love this book, I love every single thing about it, I love when people call God "Her," I love the bible passages which use feminine language or metaphors to describe God. But not every page in "Mother God" is rooted in such a straightforward reading of Scripture that you can use it to win arguments with Christians of the "God is a he/him" persuasion. I mean, personally I'm no longer interested in participating in such arguments, so this is fine for me. But I'm just a bit concerned that this book is misrepresenting itself... if you're coming at it from an evangelical biblical-inerrancy perspective, you expect this book to be "here are bible verses where God is described as/ compared to a woman." But actually, it's more like, "here are bible verses which allow for an interpretation where God is a woman." And I 100% support doing such interpretations. I am so on board with this. But you'll definitely get people responding with "no, that's not what that verse means." (I mean, I agree that in some cases it's not what the verse is supposed to mean. I'm just not so hung up on only being allowed to think about the bible as what it was originally "supposed to mean." It's living and active.)

Another example from "Mother God":

Granny, Baba, Halmeoni,
God is a woman with gray hair.
She passes down stories of old,
Rocking softly in a chair.

This is great, love this, but also, I have no idea what bible passage this is supposedly coming from. I don't even know what search terms to use- "bible verse where God is a grandma telling stories"?????

So yeah, some of these are a bit of a stretch. I'm sure there is some bible verse, perhaps where God is metaphorically compared to someone who tells stories from one's ancestors, and the author of "Mother God" envisions this person as an old, wise grandmother. Yeah, probably it's something along those lines. 

Like I said, I think this is great. *My* take on biblical interpretation is that you can use the bible as inspiration for whatever story about God is meaningful for you. Make sure when you do that, though, you don't claim "this is true" or "this is what the bible says." Your interpretation makes sense only to the extent that you can present coherent reasons why it makes sense- you can't claim it's just automatically right because it comes from the bible. This approach is very different from "biblical inerrancy" ideology, where we believed we were very seriously adhering to what God and/or the original writer really meant to say, and so our conclusions just simply were true. (We *believed* that, but in reality, "biblical inerrancy" ideology isn't as unbiased and faithful to the bible as it claims to be...)

---

When we call God a woman, does it always have to be in the context of pushing back against patriarchal religion?

Obviously, the reason I love this book has a lot to do with my being a queer Christian with a lifetime of experience hearing people call God "he" but never "she." It just feels so refreshing, to hear people saying that God is a woman.

Also, in the previous section of this blog post, I talked about arguing with conservative Christians who say you're not allowed to call God "she", and the extent to which this book can be used to bolster our side in such arguments. 

Ugh, but does it always have to be that way? When we call God "she", does it always have to be about "wow this is great, because everyone always calls God 'he'" and "yes, we *are* allowed to talk about God in this way"? I wish it could just be... that it could just be what it is, rather than needing to be about Taking A Stand Against Patriarchy. 

"Mother God" actually starts out by saying, 

You know God the Father,
But God is your Mother too.
You are made in Her image--
She is making all things new.

So even this book isn't able to just be about "we are calling God a woman"; it has to be about "we are calling God a woman because everyone always calls God a man." It's unavoidable.

My beliefs about God are in many ways a reaction to the evangelical ideology I was raised in. I always wonder, what does that mean for how I teach my kids? I call God "They" when I talk to my son about what I believe, and the feel of it is like... I'm queer and I chose this. But for him it's never going to feel like that, if he hears someone calling God "They." Soon he'll be at that age where he thinks everything I do is extremely uncool, and that will be the lens he uses to think about the concept of calling God "They."

This isn't just about religion- so many societal trends are like, one generation is reacting to something they didn't like about the way they were raised, but the younger generation didn't have whatever negative experience they are reacting to. The older generation creates a new approach intended to be a healthy correction of the errors of the past, but the younger generation doesn't necessary experience this new approach in that way. Without that context, it will be understood by the younger generation as something else entirely.

So yeah, I bought this book for my kids, but I have no idea what it would be like to grow up with the idea that calling God "she" is just a normal, unremarkable thing. This book means something very different to me than it does to my kids. I don't really know how to understand that. I think it must be a *good* thing to expose them to this idea, and also *not* expose them to the idea that 'we're only allowed to call God he/him or else it's HERESY.' But I can never really *get* how my kids are thinking about this, because for me it always carries that context of rebelling against conservative, patriarchal religion.

---

The actions God takes in this book

A lot of the imagery in "Mother God" is about real actions that real people do, and the book says that God is doing these actions. I'm not sure what to make of that. For example:

God is a skillful seamstress 
Who stitches and sews thread together.
She makes clothes for rain, snow, and sun,
Caring for you in all kinds of weather.

What does this mean? 

1. Does it mean that when we see actual real women making clothes, God is there? 
2. Does it mean that the clothes we wear come from God, in the indirect sense that God created the world and helped people learn the skills to make clothes? 
3. Does it mean that some of the spiritual things that God does are metaphorically similar to sewing clothes- for example, creating the earth, or perhaps this is a reference to Psalm 139:13, "you knit me together in my mother's womb," where fetal development is metaphorically compared to God knitting?
4. Does it mean that when we imagine God performing these feminine-coded actions, like making clothes, that opens up our understanding of God, to help us view God in powerful new ways? Maybe you always imagined God as looking like and acting like your male pastor- but what if you imagine God as a woman making clothes? Don't we believe that a male pastor bears the image of God to the exact same extent that a female seamstress does? Don't we? It brings our biases to the surface and challenges them.

I like interpretations 1 and 4. But I do feel like it's strange, to talk about God doing such concrete actions, and I'm really unclear on what this is intended to mean.

---

Wil Gafney endorses this book

I'm such a huge fan of Wil Gafney. I wrote a bunch of blog posts about her book "Womanist Midrash." One of the endorsements on the back cover of "Mother God" was written by her. Obviously I'm going to love anything that Wil Gafney endorses.

---

Conclusion

I am so into this book. I love it. I love it because I'm a queer Christian- and so I wonder about how my kids will take it, and what it would be like to grow up with the idea that it's just fine and normal to call God "she."

---

Related

"Maybe God Is Like That Too" (kids' book review)

Womanist Midrash 

Reviews of Christian Children's Books 

---

Also please enjoy this song:

Groove Coverage - God is a Girl (Official Video) 

Full-Service Movers (a post about being in charge of your own life)

Movers carrying boxes. Image source.

A few years ago, when my husband and I were moving to a new apartment, we heard about a moving service that said they would do everything for you. You don't have to do anything at all. You don't have to pack or do anything. They do it.

My first thought was "that's not possible."

Reviews of Kids' Books

Children's library. Image source.

I have kids, and every time I look at them, I want to buy them more books. Anyway, I've been writing a lot of book reviews here on the blog, so I want to link them all so they're easy to find.

Here's the post about kids' books related to Christianity: Reviews of Christian Children's Books

And the post with all the grown-up books: All of My Book Review Posts

And here's everything else:

US history:

The Case for Loving by Selina Alko
America: A Patriotic Primer by Lynne Cheney

Science:

The Strangest Thing in the Sea by Rachel Poliquin
The Book of Bok (also titled "Bok's Giant Leap") by Neil Armstrong and Grahame Baker Smith
Priddy Explorers: Dinosaurs by Roger Priddy
Good Night Sharks by Adam Gamble and Mark Jasper

Feelings:

I Want a Popsicle by Anna Huang

Religions:

P is for Passover by Tanya Lee Stone

Lift-the-flap books:

Bizzy Bear by Benji Davies

No, I'm not harboring some kind of wish that my husband will become a Christian

Clip-art image of a bride and groom. Image source.

So JD Vance said that he hopes his wife Usha (who is Hindu) will become a Christian. Here's a link, from Hemant Mehta: JD Vance wants his Hindu wife to convert. It’s Christian Nationalism: Home Edition. 

When asked about this, Vance said a lot of things that sound nice, like how he loves his wife, they talk about this together and work out something that works for their family, he respects that people have free will and can believe what they believe. He's good at saying things that sound nice and reasonable but then when you look at the overall picture of what he's doing, the things he is actively supporting, it's the opposite of that. (JD Vance creeps me out for this reason.)

Anyway, he says they are raising their children as Christians, and that he hopes his wife will become a Christian eventually.

First of all, I want to say I don't find this surprising at all. In my experience with evangelicalism, of course we believed everyone is supposed to become a Christian. Vance is Catholic so there might be some differences between his view and the evangelical view, but yeah overall I get it. We believed that non-Christians are all going to hell. And that knowing Jesus makes our day-to-day lives so much better, and everybody else must be suffering so much, living without Jesus.

There's something kind of ... weird... about being in a marriage and believing that there's something fundamentally wrong with your spouse and they need to change. I'm not sure how to describe it. Disrespectful?

I was taught that Christians shouldn't marry non-Christians- then you will be "unequally yoked" and the non-Christian will be a bad influence, causing the Christian to "water down" their faith. This is an extremely normal thing for evangelicals to say, but I find it really offensive. They use the analogy "what if you were standing on a chair, and you were trying to pull someone up- wouldn't it be much more likely that they would pull you down?" WTF, why are we framing this like Christians are higher, better, more moral than non-Christians. Like a non-Christian can only be a bad influence on you. 

I'm a Christian and my husband is not, and we've been together for a really long time and it just really isn't an issue? Because I don't believe he needs to change. Why would he need to change? What reason is there to think that it would be beneficial to him to convert to Christianity?

(A key part of this is that I don't believe in hell. Or, rather, the evangelical version of hell, where the criteria are one's beliefs about Jesus. But surely there has to be some kind of judgment for people who, for example, go around making up dehumanizing lies about immigrants.)

Sure, if someone is interested in becoming a Christian, then yeah it would be a good thing for them to do so. But if they have no interest in it, then ... why try to convince them? How would that help anything? Even if you make the argument "well it's true, and it's better for people to believe true things than false things"- okay, so if it's true that Jesus was raised from the dead, what are the implications of that? Christians have all sorts of different opinions on what it means for us, what it teaches us about the nature of the world, morality, etc- and some of these interpretations are harmful. It's not clear that the truth of the Resurrection is enough to say that it would be a good thing for people to convert to Christianity- what if they convert to one of the anti-human varieties of Christianity? (Like, for example, one that teaches that non-Christians are lower than us and are only going to pull you down.)

For our kids, my thinking is, I want them to be able to make an informed decision for themselves. I want to teach them enough about the bible and Jesus and Christianity that they can understand why I'm so excited about it, why I find it so amazing and life-giving, why I think about incarnation all the time. To know what I love about it, so then they can decide for themselves.

Sometimes I'm reading a book about Christianity with our son, and my husband walks by and makes some kind of snarky comment about the bible. I appreciate that; we need people who make snarky comments about the bible.

I also want to tell our kids about other religions, and atheism, and that people have all sorts of different beliefs about God, and we can't ever know for sure, BUT the important thing is, we should do good and help people. We can be sure about that.

So no, I'm not sitting here in my marriage, thinking about how I've waited so long and I just hope my husband will become a Christian- no, I don't think like that at all. If he doesn't want to, then why would I want that for him? It's not a matter of "well I want him to, but I'm polite enough to not say it out loud"- no, I genuinely don't believe it's true that everyone would be better off if they became Christians.

---

Related:

My Marriage Is So Good, I Forgot "Unequally Yoked" Was Supposed To Be A Problem

This "Do Not Intermarry With Them" Stuff Hits Different Now

My Toddler's Experience With Baby Sign Language

A drawing showing a person signing "butterfly" in baby sign language. Image source.

I have 2 little kids. The younger one is a toddler and is learning all kinds of new things, including some baby sign language.

What is baby sign language? The way I heard it explained was, before babies are able to talk, learning some signs can help them communicate. The signs for baby sign language are pretty similar to American Sign Language, with some of them simplified to make it easier for babies. It's very easy to look these up on YouTube, just search "pig baby sign language" if you want to learn the sign for "pig", and so on.

American Sign Language is an actual language. With a grammar and everything. Baby sign language is not. Baby sign language is just some words.

A few years ago, when my first child was a baby, I learned a bunch of signs for foods and toys and various things, and tried to consistently make the signs while talking to him. I did that a lot but I don't remember him ever responding by signing back. So uh I guess that failed. (But now he speaks both English and Chinese fluently so I guess he turned out okay.)

(Well, also I have a full-time job, so I wasn't with him for most of the day, and the other adults in his life weren't doing baby sign language with him.)

For my second kid, I wasn't really showing her signs intentionally. But when she was around 18 months, we noticed that she was copying the hand motions from different songs that people would sing to her. We noticed that she's really good at associating a song with a hand gesture. She constantly demands that I sing specific songs to her, by gesturing. Oh my goodness, it's so adorable how she makes a little flower shape with her hands when she wants me to sing "Edelweiss." (Or, for some songs, she says a word, like if she says "ro ro" it means she wants to hear "Row Row Row Your Boat." Or she roars ferociously when she wants me to sing Katy Perry's "Roar." [Fact check: She is a small child and is not anywhere near as ferocious as she imagines.])

So after I realized that she's good at learning signs, I decided I should do more baby sign language with her.

I think my problem before was that I conceptualized this as a really all-or-nothing thing. I thought it was like, during their first phase of life, the baby can't talk or do signs. And then, the next phase- I read on the internet that babies might start doing signs at 8 months, if you're been consistently showing them the signs for a while- so during this phase they do baby sign language, and they don't talk. And then the next phase of development is when the baby talks, and there's no need for baby sign language any more. As if there's a clear line between when the baby "can't talk" and "can talk", and baby sign language is only useful during the "can't talk" phase.

For my little daughter, it's not like that at all. She's learning to talk- she can say a bunch of words, some of them English and some of them Chinese (and a few that she just made up herself)- and that's going great, and the baby sign language can supplement it. Some words are too hard for her to say when she's this little, but she can definitely learn a sign for them. And there are plenty of words she can already say, like "mama", so we're not doing baby sign language with those.

So it's like, a way to help her out while she's learning to talk. So she can communicate, even about things that she's not able to pronounce yet. And the more she can communicate, the better- she's getting to that age where she's starting to have her own opinions, and she often tries to tell us what she wants, and it's hard to understand sometimes.

This all sounds great, but in practice I haven't really done a lot yet. Like I said, I have a full-time job. She can definitely learn more signs, it's just a matter of me thinking of a word that might be of interest to her, and looking up the sign on the internet, and then signing it with her enough times that she'll understand what it means.

This could also be a good way to sort of bridge the gap between English and Chinese. She has some people in her life who speak English with her, and some who speak Chinese- maybe the baby sign language can be something that both sides will be able to understand. 

Anyway, I'll just finish this post by telling you about how cute it is when she does the sign for "butterfly." The sign for "butterfly" is you cross your hands and hook your thumbs together to make a butterfly, and flap your fingers a little bit. She doesn't quite get the sign right- she just crosses her arms in front of her chest, Wakanda-forever-style, and curls the fingers on one hand in and out. Oh my goodness it's so cute.

The other day I saw her flipping through the book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," and when she got to the page with the surprise twist ending where the caterpillar turns into a butterfly [spoiler warning, I guess], she looked at the picture and then crossed her arms and did the sign for butterfly. She also knows the sign for "caterpillar," and when we read that book together, she does the caterpillar sign and then the butterfly sign at the end. It's just the most adorable thing. You can tell she knows many things. Many thoughts in her little head.

Anyway, my point is, baby sign language can be a useful tool! Don't stress about it if you feel like "oh, I haven't done enough, oh, we should have done more"- you can use it a little or a lot, it's no big deal.

---

Related:

I wonder what my toddler thinks about being bilingual

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Air Bud Pt. II: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (Web Exclusive) (October 20, 20-minute video) I love when people take the details of a fictional universe way too seriously.

2. From definitions to motivations (October 21) "Educators must be on guard against the shitty imaginations of skeptical audiences."

3. An explainer about kiwi farms. (October 21) "Kiwi farms has always existed as a community designed to foster, celebrate and encourage online harassment of vulnerable people."

4. Iceland reports the presence of mosquitoes for the first time, as climate warms (October 22) [content note: article has a close-up photo of a mosquito]

5. Reversing peanut advice prevented tens of thousands of allergy cases, researchers say (October 21) I'm kinda surprised to read this- I have little kids and so I've been through the whole process of how to introduce new foods to a baby, and the concerns about allergens, and the impression I got was basically "Don't give foods that are possible allergens to your baby until they are 1 year old! Oh, but wait, there's this other scientific evidence that giving potential allergens to the baby earlier can actually prevent allergies, and that also makes a certain kind of sense. Hmm, both sides have good points here, hard to say which one is right." But this article is saying yeah that standard advice has changed, now we are telling parents they should introduce potential allergens to their babies earlier, and this is a real thing with scientific evidence to back it up, and wow look how many allergies it has prevented. I'm really surprised to hear that "U.S. health guidance changed in 2015 and 2017"- that was before my kids were born, but when I was doing this for my kids, I very much did not get the impression that this advice was well-supported by evidence. I have always seen it talked about in parenting social media groups like "well, there's a certain logic to the idea that introducing these foods earlier can avoid allergies, but who's to say?" 

Could be that different countries have different standard advice? The groups I'm in are moms from all different countries, currently living in China. Or it could be that parents are overly-cautious, and view delaying introducing these foods as the "safer" move- even though that's not what the research says- but I can understand how intuitively it "feels" safer.

6. ‘Huge Lesson’: A Beijing Farmer Learns to Live in Climate Extremes (October 22) "It was 4 a.m. on July 28, when record-breaking downpours struck the mountains in Miyun District, northern Beijing, part of a storm system that swamped valleys overnight. By dawn, the flood had erased his 30-hectare farm."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

A lot of bad stuff going on... don't get discouraged by all of it; instead, find ways to take action. Protest, donate money, connect with people near you to see how you can help.

1. Trump’s college compact is a trap (October 17) "The only reasonable response for now is for colleges to show solidarity and refuse."

2. We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days. (October 16) "'If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,' Kavanaugh wrote, 'they promptly let the individual go.' But that is far from the reality many citizens have experienced."

3. Millions Show Up AGAIN To Tell Trump They Hate Him (October 20) Photos and videos from No Kings protests across the US. [content note: one of the photos shows a giant penis costume]

4. Trump posts AI video showing him dumping on No Kings protesters (October 20) "President Donald Trump on Saturday posted an AI-generated video depicting him in a fighter jet dropping what appears to be feces on U.S. protesters." What on earth.

5. Why the State Department handed U.S. informants over to El Salvador (October 21) "So a core part of an informant relationship is that the United States says, you know, if you give us some information, we're not going to turn around and send you to the very government that you are giving us information about. That just doesn't happen."

6. White House begins demolishing part of East Wing for Trump ballroom (October 21, via) 

7. Legal experts question Rep. Goldman’s call for NYPD to arrest ICE agents if they act unlawfully (October 21) "'It is abundantly clear that the Trump administration is unwilling to police its own officers or hold them accountable for gross misconduct,' the letter states. 'Accordingly, NYPD — pursuant to the department’s own mission, values and oath of office — has an obligation to intervene and take appropriate action, including arrest, when federal immigration officers engage in conduct that is unlawful under state law and beyond the scope of their federal enforcement authority.'"

Also from Gothamist: Federal judge in NYC rules ICE can keep detaining people at immigration court — for now (September 13)

8. Arizona Attorney General’s Office confirms lawsuit against House Speaker Johnson (October 21) "Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva has still not been sworn in four weeks after her win. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is suing House Speaker Mike Johnson, citing 'taxation without representation.'"

9. Home missions (October 21) "For 21st-century white evangelicals, Hudson Taylor and Lottie Moon are too 'woke.'"

Also from the Slacktivist: Get angry. Stay angry. Do better. (October 22) "That anger is the thing missing from all of the recent stories of more than merely 'problematic youthful indiscretions.' These stories involve plenty of defensiveness and dismissal and diminishment, but no self-reproach. No anger."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. 17-year-old trans girl’s suicide over NHS wait times was preventable, coroner rules (October 9, via) "Wait times for each clinic vary massively, from just three months in Nottingham, to 41 years in Belfast, and a staggering 224 years in Glasgow."

2. What Would Billy Say? (October 10) and also Slacktivist's comments about it. Franklin Graham has withdrawn two large evangelical organizations (Samaritan’s Purse and Billy Graham Evangelistic Association) from the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, an organization which keeps an eye on the leaders of evangelical groups to make sure they're not stealing money or abusing people. Uh... why is Franklin Graham withdrawing from this oversight group? Seems very suspicious. As the Slacktivist put it, "Or maybe you’ve got to ask if there could be any possible explanation for this other than the simplest, most obvious one."

3. 男高音艺术歌曲《我会自己上厕所》转自抖音 (2023) This is extremely funny if you understand Chinese.

Okay I'll explain it: So there's a song for Chinese toddlers called “我会自己上厕所” (I can use the bathroom by myself) featuring such profound content as “上厕所时不能吃东西” (you can't eat while using the bathroom), and apparently it became something of a meme on the Chinese internet because everyone found it hilarious, and people were making their own covers of this song. This video is an opera-style cover of it.

See this is what happens if you have kids. You have to listen to songs about potty training, and find humor in them or else you will just lose your mind.

4. Bari Weiss: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (October 13, 34-minute video) Video about Bari Weiss and her media outlet "The Free Press"- apparently she is one of those people who claims to be too liberal for conservatives and too conservative for liberals. Whenever I've come across writing from people like that, it's confusing to me because they might have some "liberal" opinions on specific issues, but they don't seem to really understand the overall big-picture of why liberals would have those opinions, and how they would connect to other issues too.

5. A ‘Hardcore’ theological crisis (October 15) "She is his child and he is going to try to save her even if Almighty God has already decreed since eternity past that she is predestined for damnation."

6. Greta Thunberg: “They kicked me every time the flag touched my face” (October 15, via) "This is not about me or the others from the flotilla. There are thousands of Palestinians, hundreds of whom are children, who are being held without trial right now, and many of them are most likely being tortured, says Greta Thunberg."

7. Photos: Ceasefire in Gaza brings reunions amid devastation (October 15)

8. Doctors Without Borders permanently closes its emergency center in Haiti's capital (October 16) "'The building has already been hit several times by stray bullets due to its location close to the combat zones, which would make resuming activities too dangerous for both patients and staff,' said Jean-Marc Biquet, MSF head of mission in Haiti."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

(I hope someday some historian finds my blog and says "wow, people back then believed Trump was the antichrist.")

1. There will be No Kings protests on Saturday, October 18~

2. Opinion: Why I'm handing in my Pentagon press pass (October 14) "Today, NPR will lose access to the Pentagon because we will not sign an unprecedented Defense Department document, which warns that journalists may lose their press credentials for "soliciting" even unclassified information from federal employees that has not been officially approved for release. That policy prevents us from doing our job. Signing that document would make us stenographers parroting press releases, not watchdogs holding government officials accountable."

Also related: Pentagon reporters have now turned in their badges – but plan to keep reporting (October 15) "Current and former Pentagon correspondents who spoke with the Guardian said that coverage would undoubtedly suffer from a lack of proximity to administration decision-makers – though many are intent on proving that the restrictions won’t stop the work, with some even saying they plan to take a more aggressive tack."

3. Protesters and Members of the Press Challenge First Amendment Violations by Federal Forces at ICE Facility in Broadview, Illinois (October 6) "A new lawsuit filed this morning argues that this wanton violence by the federal government is a blatant attempt to interfere with the most cherished and fundamental rights enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religious belief, and the right to peaceably assemble and express disagreement with the government."

4. Documents Allege a Federal Agent at Portland ICE Threatened to Shoot an Ambulance Driver (October 12, via) 

5. Gavin Newsom Vetoes Important HRT Stockpiling Bill For Trans Californians, Signs Other Pro-LGBTQ+ Bills (October 14) "Among all of the legislation passed this year, few bills would have offered such tangible protection for transgender people as SB 418—and yet, it’s the one that won’t become law."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Fenway Health Restricts Treatment for Patients Under 19 In Capitulation To Trump (October 15) "This is a fundamental betrayal to the core mission of Fenway and the patients they serve. Trans patients cannot trust this organization has their best interests at heart."

6. ‘We’re saving God’ (October 16) "The creeds would have to be completely rewritten to be compatible with the Trumpian theology of 'We’re saving God.' Think of all the arguments among different branches of Christianity, every doctrinal dispute about the nature of God, the relationship between God and humanity, eschatology, sin, salvation, sacrament, whatever. Every Christian in every era on every side of every one of those disputes would recoil at the blasphemous nonsense of 'We are saving God.'"

I wonder what my toddler thinks about being bilingual

A cute little cartoon beaver, with the text 英文儿歌 (English kids' songs). Image source.

I talk to my little daughter in English. Other people in her life talk to her in Chinese. (For the purposes of the blog, we will refer to her as Baby Wavelength.) She has a nanny who takes care of her all day because my husband and I have full-time jobs- in China it's common to have a nanny because there are very few daycares that take kids less than 3ish years old. In China, we call the nanny "ayi." The ayi talks to her in Chinese all day.

My husband (who is Chinese) sometimes talks to our kids in Chinese and sometimes in English. He and I talk to each other in English. Oh, and the ayi doesn't speak English, so I talk to her in Chinese. 

Huh, when I spell it all out like this, I guess it sounds really confusing? It doesn't feel confusing to me as I live my life. I guess this is just normal to me now. 

(I mean, if you research the strategies that people use to teach their children multiple languages, One Parent One Language (OPOL) is common, but we're not quite doing that, it's more like, an assortment of people with all different levels of English/Chinese ability.)

Anyway, what I wonder is, what does little Wavelength think about this? Is it incredibly strange to her, that the entire way that ayi talks is completely different from the entire way that Mommy talks?

One day I was quizzing her on her body parts- "where are your ears?" and she touches her ears, etc. And I said "Where's your neck?" and she didn't know that one. Then I said, "Where's your neck? 脖子 [bó zǐ]" and she touched her neck. I guess she learned a bunch of Chinese words for body parts from ayi. Does she think it's strange that I refer to these body parts by a completely different set of words from what the ayi taught her? How do you make sense of that, if you're a baby?

Another example- my daughter learned to say "up" (in English), and that became her favorite thing to say, because she always wants us to pick her up. Our ayi told me that all day long, Wavelength was saying "up." Not sure if ayi knew the English word "up" before this, but I guess the meaning becomes obvious when a baby is following you around all day with her arms raised.

Maybe little Wavelength doesn't find this weird, because as a baby, everything is new and you have no frame of reference for what's "normal" or "weird."

Or maybe this isn't that different from a more universal toddler experience- they play some game or sing some song with one caregiver, and then the toddler tries to get another caregiver to do the same game/song, but the other caregiver can't figure out what the toddler wants them to do. 

And then I thought, hey, you know who would have some insight into whether it's confusing to be a baby in a bilingual household? Her older brother. His situation when he was a baby was pretty much exactly the same. So I went and asked her brother- my son- on the blog we can call him Square Root- "When you were little, did you think it was weird that some people talked to you in English and some people talked to you in Chinese?" 

He said, "I don't remember" and then wandered off to play with his toys. Okay.

Square Root was born just before the pandemic, and we got stuck in China for 3 years. During that time, he learned to speak- and he basically spoke Chinese only. I always talked to him in English, and he could understand all of it, but he didn't say things in English himself. I guess since nobody else in his life talked to him in English, he thought it was just some niche interest that Mom is into. Then when China's zero-covid policy ended, and we finally got to travel to the US and interact with my relatives, then he started speaking English.

And now, basically whenever we travel to the US, for the first day he talks to people in Chinese, and they have no idea what he's saying, but then he adapts to speaking English and it's not an issue.

I'm a white person in China, and generally nobody expects white people in China to be any good at speaking Chinese. Yeah, there's very much a double standard, where Chinese people apologize for not being able to speak English well, but don't have any sort of expectations that a white person who chose to move to China should be able to speak Chinese. And if the white person says 1 word in Chinese, Chinese people will say "wow! Your Chinese is so good!" (But don't take it that seriously, they are just being polite.)

So yeah, I can speak Chinese, but nobody really holds me to any kind of standard about it. Except 1 person. My son. Oh man, sometimes I catch him telling people I can't speak Chinese, like, what the heck, dude. He tells me I don't speak Chinese well, because sometimes I can't follow what he's saying, like if he had a bizarre dream about Optimus Prime and he's describing it in Chinese. Can you believe I couldn't quite follow that.

Or he says to me "How can you not know this word? This is an easy word!"

And there was one time he was telling me all about this Chinese word that refers to a kind of fruit, but also means jumping on the couch, and I was working very hard to try to follow what he was saying, and then I said, "Is this a real thing, or did you make it up?" and he said "I made it up."

Always fact-check your children!

Anyway, this is what life is like for my kids. I'm so fascinated by the way language interacts with the way that people think. I'm so curious about what it's like to learn to speak in this kind of bilingual environment. I wonder what my daughter thinks about it all. I tried asking my son but he seems to have no interest in communicating it to me.

---

Related:

Raising Mixed Race (a book for parents of mixed-race Asian kids)

On Immigration and Double Standards 

"The Case for Loving" (kids' book about Loving vs Virginia)

"I Want a Popsicle" (a bilingual book for Asian children, about feelings)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. ChatGPT is the new appeal to authority for right-wing Christians (July 21) "Right-wing Christians perform an ecstatic devotion they call speaking in tongues, and then try to get ChatGPT to guess the language they used."

2. Did this Kid Use AI to Fake Research About How Great AI Is? (August 21) "But this is not another case of a few fudged numbers. This is a case of a guy who just straight made up an entire study and convinced the world that it was real."

3. Ministry of Violence (August 22) [content note: physical abuse of children] One of the biggest things James Dobson was known for was his teaching about how to "discipline" your kids, ie, kids are evil little tyrants, and if they are ever stubborn or disobedient about anything, that's a power struggle that the parent needs to win, by hitting the child until the child totally surrenders. He gave detailed advice on how exactly to go about hitting your children.

I didn't mention it in my post because that aspect of his teaching didn't have much effect on me personally. But yes, I'm glad people are writing about this. This was a huge part of what he was teaching.

---

Image text: "In The Lion King (1997), Scar makes false campaign promises by guaranteeing to eliminate hunger, but actively makes the problem worse instead. This is the most realistic part of the movie." Image source. (Fact check: It was 1994.)

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Living in the shadows: Why stateless people fear Trump's immigration crackdown (August 21) "An estimated 218,000 people in the U.S. are stateless or at risk of becoming so, according to the Center for Migration Studies."

2. Judge orders DOJ to give more info on subpoenas targeting trans minors' medical care (August 21) "The subpoena in question, issued to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia1 (referred to in court documents often as “CHOP”), is extremely invasive — not only as to the medical providers but, relevant here, as to their patients."

3. Special Report: U.S. Immigration Policy and the Mental Health of Children and Families (July 25) "Forced family separations, particularly those resulting from immigration enforcement (e.g., detention, deportation), introduce acute psychological risks. A national study of 547 U.S.-born adolescents ages 11 to 16 found that having a detained or deported family member was associated with elevated risk for suicidal ideation, externalizing behaviors, and alcohol use (Roche, et al., 2020). In young children, abrupt caregiver loss has been linked to sleep and appetite disturbances, emotional dysregulation, and developmental regression (MacLean, et al., 2019). Forcible separation from a caregiver is recognized as an adverse childhood experience (ACE) that contributes to toxic stress, ambiguous loss, and long-term risk for psychiatric disorders (Roberts, et al., 2014; Lu, et al., 2020)."

4. Kilmar Abrego Garcia detained by ICE during Baltimore check-in (August 25) "'God is with us. God will never leave us. God will bring justice to all of the injustice we are suffering,' Abrego Garcia said, fighting through tears."

5. ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ may be shut down before Halloween. Florida already has a backup plan (August 24) "The Miccosukee Tribe, a Native American tribe whose reservation lies within miles of the facility, raised serious concerns about the impact the facility will have on their land and the environmentally sensitive area, including the plants and animals that inhabit the Everglades."

6. Concentration camps are not just part of our past, but our present and future (August 22, via) "...the most important aspect of recognizing this history is not so those of us descended from settlers or who have otherwise benefited from the legacy of colonialism feel shame, but rather 'to recognize that these tactics, [a division into] savage vs. civilized, continues to inhabit our society. At any moment, these sentiments are still there and this way of thinking emerges.'"

7. Trump Admin Bans Coverage For Trans Govt Employees, Mandates Conversion Therapy Coverage (August 21) "On Friday, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management issued a memo announcing that, beginning in 2026, all federal employee health plans will be barred from covering gender-affirming care—including hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgeries—for both transgender youth and adults."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The "ministerial exception" is rapidly becoming a civil rights nightmare (August 12) "The precedent here is devastating. Civil rights protections can now be dissolved, not by an act of Congress, but by the stroke of an HR pen in the name of religion."

Ah, it's about World Vision discriminating against a woman in a same-sex marriage, who applied for a job. Well that brings me back to The World Vision Debacle of 2014, where the Christian blogosphere found out that World Vision's policies allowed employees to be in same-sex marriages, and oh my goodness it was a huge scandal. So much outrage on the internet. World Vision is a Christian organization that helps impoverished children around the world, but oh my goodness, the evangelical Christians were just beside themselves, ready to cancel World Vision (I guess this was before it was called "cancelling" though). We absolutely cannot help poor children if a gay person might also be helping them, absolutely not. That was the sentiment that Christians were posting all over social media. And as a result of the backlash, World Vision changed their policy- employees are *not* allowed to be in a same-sex marriage.

That was the point where I officially quit being evangelical. The evangelical Christians were all over the internet, loudly proclaiming that we will throw poor children under the bus in order to reject gay people to the fullest extent possible, and I just... this is unredeemable. I can't be a part of this any more. I can't "change it from the inside." I'm done.

At the time, I wrote about it here: Go ahead and say I'm not a Christian. I don't care anymore.

Also from Hemant Mehta: "Shiny Happy People" sequel highlights Christian boot camp that traumatized a generation (July 30) Oh I really want to watch this and blog about it.

2. Researchers discover a secret weapon that saves babies' lives. And it's not medical (August 18) "Cash cut mortality in children under 5 by about 45%, the study researchers found, on par with interventions like vaccines and anti-malarials."

This is great news! A few questions that are worth exploring: Does giving cash to some people have any negative effects on other people who didn't get cash? Also, in what kinds of situations does it help to give cash, and in what kinds of situations does it not help? For example, if you're in a big city with very high rent prices, and you say "let's give everyone money, then their rent will be affordable"- well if a big proportion of renters get money, the landlords will just increase the rents, and it won't help the renters. So the issue is that there just isn't enough housing supply- it's not clear that adding money to the situation will help.

In this article, though, it's mostly about families being able to more easily access food and medical care, which aren't going to be limited in that way- so that's good.

3. 小鸭子嘎嘎嘎 - In case you would like to know what kind of music Chinese toddlers are into. My daughter's nanny ("ayi" in Chinese) has been playing this song for her. It's about ducklings. "Ga ga ga" is Chinese for "quack quack quack."

4. Exhausted and Alone, China’s Single Moms Are Moving in Together (August 20) "Posts advertising 'roommate moms' circulate widely, drawing responses from strangers across cities. Some end up splitting rent, others share school pickups and grocery runs, piecing together a version of family that is less solitary, less precarious, and a little more possible."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Four More Virginia School Districts Defy Trump, Reject Trans Bathroom Ban Demand (August 18) "As a school board member, I cannot sit idly by while adults who should know better try to pit one group of students against another. Our responsibility is to ensure that every child — including those who are transgender or gender nonconforming — has an opportunity to achieve their full, unique, and limitless potential."

2. After the CDC shooting, federal workers demand more protections from RFK Jr. (August 20) "A letter signed by hundreds of current and former HHS employees, addressed to Kennedy and members of Congress, says Kennedy is 'complicit in dismantling America's public health infrastructure and endangering the nation's health' by questioning the integrity of the CDC's workforce, making false claims that COVID vaccines are not safe or effective, changing vaccine policy based on ideology rather than science, and contributing to 'harassment and violence experienced by the CDC staff.'"

3. Trump vows to end use of mail-in ballots ahead of 2026 midterm election (August 19) EXCUSE ME, WHAT? (I am outside the US and I always vote by mail.)