Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogaround

Links not related to the orange antichrist:

1. This Pixar-Inspired Robot Lamp Is the First Apple Intelligence Device I Really Want (February 7) Ah yes, I remember seeing this lamp in "Toy Story."

2. The Racist Cisgender Nonsense of Emilia Perez (February 1) 2-hour-19-minute video from Jessie Gender.

3. He’d Die for You. But Will He Do the Dishes? (February 10) "One of the most bizarre arguments defending men being in authority over women is the idea that one day, he may have to take a bullet for you."

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Links related to the orange antichrist:

1. This Is How Evangelicals Defended Hitler in 1935 (2016 ~ This link was posted in a comment by Matthew James Longstaff.) Many Christians back then supported Hitler- and Christians now need to know this and learn from this history.

When I learned about the Holocaust in middle school, I don't remember learning anything about how Christians in general responded to the Nazis. (I remember hearing about individual Christians who heroically helped Jews hide or escape.) There was one time, one of my classmates asked the teacher what Hitler's religion was, and she said "he was a Christian," and I thought to myself "he wasn't a real Christian," because obviously, look at all the terrible things he did, murdering 6 million people, it's so obvious that's not what a "real" Christian would do. And I didn't think any more of it.

But, no, it wasn't like German Christians supported Nazism because they just didn't care about their Christian identity at all and therefore didn't put any thought into the question "what does Christianity have to say about this?" It's so much worse than that- they really made arguments, based in their Christian beliefs, about why supporting Hitler was the right thing to do. We need to learn from this. We need to know what their arguments were, to make sure we're not making those same arguments now. We need to learn from the way they used Christianity to justify horrific atrocities, so that we don't do the same thing.

2. Trump And 'Don't Say Gay' Come For The National Center For Missing And Exploited Children (February 8) "But like everything else spending-related right now, the executive branch is saying it may not disburse whatever money NCMEC is by law supposed to receive, unless the organization throws gay and transgender children under the bus."

3. “People Will Die”: The Trump Administration Said It Lifted Its Ban on Lifesaving Humanitarian Aid. That’s Not True. (January 31)

4. "Comparison is the way we know the world" (2023, via) "We are not any smarter, kinder, wiser, or more moral than people who lived ninety years ago. We are just as likely to needlessly give up our political power and to remain willfully ignorant of darkness as it’s dawning. But we know something they didn’t know: we know that the Holocaust is possible."

5. Kanye West is selling $20 T-shirts with swastikas (February 10) WTF!

6. Trump's ban on gender-affirming care for young people puts hospitals in a bind (February 10) "After months waiting for an appointment at the gender-affirming care clinic at VCU Health in Richmond, Willow had one on the calendar on Jan. 29. President Trump's executive order limiting transgender health care for youth came out in the afternoon of Jan. 28."

Here's something I don't quite understand- if you have an insight or a link that explains it, leave a comment. I've heard trans people and allies make the argument that the same medical care that is provided to trans kids for gender-affirming reasons is also sometimes provided to cis kids. To ban this care for trans children but not cis children is discrimination on the basis of gender or gender identity- which is not legal.

This strikes me as not a very good argument, but maybe there's something I'm missing? I feel like, if you're talking to someone who doesn't believe being trans is even a real thing, they could just say, "When puberty blockers, for example, are given to cis kids, that's because there's an actual good reason- this happens when a cis kid starts puberty way way too early. Obviously in that case, it makes sense to use puberty blockers to delay puberty to a more normal timeline. That's a good reason to use puberty blockers. But for trans kids, we're talking about completely normal and healthy kids, going through puberty on a normal schedule, and then you want to use puberty blockers to change that? There's no good reason for this- being trans isn't a real thing. All medical procedures and drugs come with risks- so, you should use them if you have a good reason, but if you don't have a good reason, then you shouldn't, because of the risks."

Like, I feel like the situation is not "under this ban, this medical care can be given to cis kids but not trans kids- this is clearly discrimination." It's not *about* being trans or cis- when a trans kid gets treatment, vs a cis kid getting the same treatment, it's a completely different situation. It would happen for completely different reasons. It's not about denying them care simply for being trans, it's about whether there's a good enough reason for them to get this care, and in the eyes of the Republicans making these laws, one's feelings about one's gender is not a good enough reason.

I mean, maybe the pro-trans argument here is that the government shouldn't be in the business of judging what is or isn't a "good enough reason" for receiving medical care? Maybe that's the key? (Oh hey, I also feel that way about abortion.)

It's just that I've seen this argument mentioned ("this is discrimination based on gender because they're not banning this health care for cis kids") but I don't think I've ever seen it clearly explained. Feel free to leave a comment if you know something I don't~

7. Three migrants win temporary block from potential transfer to Guantanamo (February 10) "'Sending immigrants from the U.S. to Guantánamo and holding them incommunicado without access to counsel or the outside world opens a new shameful chapter in the history of this notorious prison,' Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the Immigrants' Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement."

Blogaround + Happy Year of the Snake!

Happy Chinese New Year everyone! January 28 was the big night, and it is now the year of the snake!

For Chinese New Year, there is a tv show called 春晚 [chūn wǎn] (which I like to call "Chinese New Year's Rockin' Eve"). Here are the performances I liked from this year's 春晚:

Magic tricks from Lu Chen (刘谦). The first one, about swapping around the cups and chopsticks and whatever, is boring and not even really a magic trick. The second trick is really clever if you can read Chinese- I loved it! (And there's a joke at the beginning where one of the hosts (小尼) says "please give me another chance"- this is because at last year's 春晚, that same guy was one of the hosts, and Lu Chen was doing a magic trick about instructing all the audience members to move cards around in a certain way, and this guy must have messed up a step and his turned out wrong- all the other hosts got the right result at the end, except him, and this was on live tv and he just kind of pretended it was fine, but we all noticed. Anyway this year he didn't mess up, so all is good.)

Anyway, highly recommend this video if you can understand Chinese! Actually, back when I was first studying Chinese, I watched a lot of Lu Chen videos- magic tricks are a good tool for language learning, I would say, because the magician is always talking about what they are physically doing, or describing the objects they are using.

And if you want to watch something in English, here's One Republic performing "Counting Stars". This is really cool! 春晚 has had international performers before, but I don't think any of them have been, like, big famous pop stars I've actually heard of.

These dancing robots:

This song, featuring athletes from China's Olympic team:

Also, Sixth Tone has a photo roundup of public snake structures for the new year: Collage: The Year of the Snake

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Okay now on to the blogaround links!

Here, I sorted the links. Here are the links not related to that felon:

1. New York becomes the first state to close schools for Lunar New Year (January 29)

2. AlphaMove (January 31)

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And I sorted all the links about the latest fascist nonsense down to here. If you are too burned out, you don't have to read them. Donate to a group that supports immigrants and then do something to make yourself happy.

1. Amazon removes 'equity for Black people' and 'LGBTQ+ rights' from company policies (January 13, via) So... big companies only care about diversity and equality when it's the politically popular thing to do.

2. The Chilling Line Trump Just Crossed On Transgender People (January 29) "The attacks on transgender people are no longer cloaked in the faux respectability of “evidence,” “science,” or “protecting kids.” They never truly were, but now even the pretense has been abandoned."

3. Quakers sue to keep US immigration agents out of houses of worship (January 28) "The lawsuit by five Quaker groups said the policy was infringing their right to practice their religion by sowing fear among congregations and leading to the cancellation of services."

4. Fearing encounters with ICE, tribal leaders offer guidance to their members (January 29)

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. Every Source for The Chosen's "Anointing the Passover Lamb" Goes Back to the Same Person (July 8) The most bonkers part of this is the possibility that this really is a historical tradition, but it was lost to time and nobody wrote it down, and then some time around 2010 we find out about it because Jesus himself reveals it to some pastor. Which, if you're evangelical and you have a "personal relationship with God" then that is totally a real thing that could happen. But also, if it did, what on earth would we- other Christians who didn't hear from Jesus personally- do with it? There's not really any reasonable mechanism by which Jesus could reveal this true information, out of the blue in the year 2010, and have it recognized as real. Or, I guess maybe if Jesus revealed the exact same thing to a whole bunch of people at the same time? Maybe?

2. HSDD was not the beginning nor the end (July 18) "It was an obscure diagnosis, and in all my years I have not heard even a single anecdote of an ace getting diagnosed. And that’s not to say that aces didn’t have issues with psychologists. Ace-competent mental health care is a broader issue that extends beyond a single diagnosis, and continues to be a problem long after DSM 5."

3. Beam of Light (July 15) From xkcd.

4. Baidu’s Robotaxi Stirs Up Controversy (July 22) 3-minute video about Baidu's driverless taxi, in China.

5. East Vs. West (July 21) "We can’t see that from here, but from over there — from, say, some airport in Beijing — we’d have the perspective to view that connectedness and kinship as an indisputable and wonderful fact. We’re not strangers — we share the same continent." As an immigrant in China, I can 100% confirm this.

6. Wednesday Was 'Mass Deportation Now!' Night At The RNC, Everything Totally Excellent For Sure (July 18) What on EARTH. As an immigrant, this is what scares me the most about the Republican party platform right now. I mean, I'm an immigrant in China so it doesn't affect me, but I understand what it's like to work so hard to build a life for yourself in a foreign country, and how traumatic it would be if that country suddenly decided you were bad and needed to be deported.

Support all immigrants.

7. I Want A Popsicle!: A Story about Dealing With Anger (July 23) "A bilingual children's book for AAPI families written by a psychologist that teaches children how to manage their emotions." This sounds really cool!

8. Women athletes are being abused, and the helpful media aren't helping. (June 5) "This trend punishes those who are skilled, who are excellent, who are fast, who are strong. This trend punishes those who gain notice, gain visibility, within a small community or on a national stage."

9. Would you pay to be able to quit TikTok and Instagram? You’d be surprised how many would (July 23, via) "The finding is a measure of the extent to which many, many users hate TikTok and Instagram — even though they feel compelled to use them. To make clear the bizarre nature of his finding, Bursztyn drew the the conference’s attention to another product, a refrigerator. Could you imagine, he asked, 60% of refrigerator owners saying they wished fridges didn’t exist?"

10. When Modesty Rules Make Drowning More Likely (July 24) "I did not do this personally, but it was normal in my fundy circles for girls to swim in ankle length denim skirts."

Blogaround

1. How (Not) To Do Autism Awareness Month (March 1) "I think most people know at this point that autism exists and a few basic traits, and would go 'Oh yeah, I support autistic people' in April, but months later when someone you work with is 'weird' and communicates more directly and bluntly than others, do you just go with it or do you assume they’re being rude to people and complain to someone?"

2. "Complete" Manhood and The Desirability of Becoming Human in Bicentennial Man (1999) (March 7) "I cannot stress this enough. They had the opportunity, right here, to fashion 'Can Andrew open a bank account?' into a central plot point about the legal recognition of his personhood, and the movie just... breezes past it. Andrew gets a bank account and nobody tries to stop him and it's fine."

3. Tom Hanks Mad He Didn't Learn About The Tulsa Massacre In School, And He's Right (March 8) "And it made me mad. It made me mad that somebody had somehow made an editorial process of what was appropriate for us to learn about our own American history."

4. Farewell, OnlySky (March 7, via) Sad to hear that atheist blogging site OnlySky is shutting down.

5. Why is New York Times campaign coverage so bad? Because that’s what the publisher wants. (March 7) "Yes, but sometimes it is obvious what’s right. Defending democracy would age just fine, I assure you."

6. Therapist Reacts to WALL-E (January 10) "I understand that on paper, that sounds ridiculous and kind of stupid. And yet, I kid you not, I think this is one of the most beautiful love stories I've ever seen on film." 29-minute video from Cinema Therapy.

7. This tweet:

Jesus teaching only in parabolas pic.twitter.com/b8Yty5VTVx

— Scott Barber (@thescottbarber) March 13, 2024

8. And this song, if you're into Phil Joel/ Newsboys songs from the year 2000 (I know I am!)

9. At least you quickly know to not bother reading the rest (March 13) Oh ChatGPT.

Blogaround

1. Southern Trans Youth Emergency Project (via) "In response, the Campaign for Southern Equality has launched the Southern Trans Youth Emergency Project (STYEP), a new regional effort which provides rapid response support directly to the families of youth who are impacted by anti-transgender healthcare bans in the South. Through STYEP, and in close partnership with state and local organizations, we are providing grants, patient navigation support, and accurate information to impacted families to ensure that youth can access the care they need and deserve, even in the face of oppressive laws."

2. At a Loss for Words (2019, via) Wow this is WILD- apparently there is something called the "three-cueing method" for teaching kids to read, and it tells kids that when they come to an unfamiliar word, they shouldn't ACTUALLY READ THE ACTUAL WORD, they should use other incidental information to kinda guess what the word could be (picture, first letter of the word, etc). !!! WHAT!

The article is from 2019- maybe the situation is different now? Anyway the article says that instead, kids should be taught phonics. I guess that's how my school taught it when I was little- I remember spending a lot of time on how this letter makes this sound (or sometimes makes this other sound, etc) and how combinations of letters together would make a certain sound. I guess that's phonics. Mostly, though, I didn't need to use the "sounding it out" strategies, after memorizing how all the words are spelled. I just sometimes can't remember the spellings of "choose" and "chose" and so then I have to think to myself that the "oo" makes an "oo" sound and the "ose" has a silent e at the end that causes the single o to say "O".

3. Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot (February 17, via) "Air Canada 'does not explain why customers should have to double-check information found in one part of its website on another part of its website,' Rivers wrote."

4. Death, Lonely Death (February 19, via) "Voyager kept going for another 34 years after that photo.  It’s still going.  It has left the grip of the Sun’s gravity, so it’s going to fall outward forever."

And more about Voyager: NASA's interstellar Voyager 1 spacecraft isn't doing so well — here's what we know (February 16)

5. Reflecting on interdisciplinary journal clubbing (February 21) "While some of the [ace] journal club participants have backgrounds in social science, more broadly, we’re experts of a different sort, in that we’ve been directly experiencing it and have been discussing it with other people who directly experience it. We can tell when an argument doesn’t ring true, or if there are additional factors that the authors ignored."

6. "A man will say he's a feminist but he doesn't wipe the counters": Lyz Lenz on the beauty of divorce (February 20) "So who does that work when he 'forgets?' It was me, always me, coming in and being hit with the smell of rot and garbage. Sometimes it would fall, and there would be trash on the floor. We would have these fights and he would say, it's just a bag of trash, let it go. I cannot let it go. You show complete disregard for me as a person because you're not thinking about who has to do this."

7. Supreme Court Ethics: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (February 22) 30-minute video from John Oliver.

8. The Reformation Project and Queer Theology (February 24) "But to take revolution permanently off the table is—I don’t see how to avoid this conclusion—to chose the system over the wellbeing of individual marginalized people and that strikes me as contrary to the Way of Jesus."

Matthew Vines and The Reformation Project put out a statement that they do "affirming theology" rather than "queer theology." I am not a fan of this (and I'll probably write my own post about it). Here's a really good response from Billie, a trans woman.

"Jurassic World" Exhibition (Shanghai, China)

A "Jurassic World" exhibition recently opened here in Shanghai. I went to see it, and OH MY GOODNESS IT WAS INCREDIBLE. Wow. Like, amazing. It was so awesome.

It's robot dinosaurs. So of course I loved it, because I am a dinosaur nerd and I work in robotics. It was AMAZING, oh my goodness it was AMAZING.

(Oh this is great, I just did some googling and found that Smart Shanghai reviewed the "Jurassic World" exhibition. I love the tone of their article, totally agree.)

My photos:

Sign in the parting lot. 侏罗纪世界 (Jurassic World)

Blogaround

1. “Am I a bad person?” Why one mom didn’t take her kid to the ER — even after poison control said to. (posted May 10) "But make no mistake: Rationing is happening here in the United States; it just happens more quietly. It happens when 11 percent of Americans don’t take their prescription drugs as directed by their doctor in order to save money."

2. You don’t need to tell me you don’t agree (posted 2015) "If we are honest with ourselves, adding the phrase is a form of social insurance."

3. Avengers Endgame Shows Us The Five Stages Of Grief (posted May 9) [content note: spoilers for "Avengers: Endgame"] "Each of the original six Avengers seems to find themself at the beginning of this movie very securely in one stage of the grieving process."

4. The Life of “Be”: Remembering Warren Wiersbe (posted May 3) Warren Wiersbe has died. I read all of his "Be..." bible commentaries, back in the day.

5. ’Arthur’s Mr. Ratburn Is Gay and He Just Got Married (posted May 13) This is great!

6. What is the opposite of guacamole? (posted May 10) Some abominations created by a neural net.

7. How “Stranger Danger” Hurts Kids (posted 2014) "Most people are good, and this means that most strangers are good. "

8. And the 2019 Reader Survey is still open! (Will be open until June 1-ish.) Go over and take it if you haven't yet. :)

Blogaround

Baby walrus. Image source.

1. This AI is bad at drawing but will try anyways. (posted August 17) "It draws the sheep, and then just to be safe it fills the entire planet with wool too."

2. Catholic Priests Abused 1,000 Children in Pennsylvania, Report Says (posted August 14) [content note: child sexual abuse]

3. sin is not just a "heart issue" (posted August 6) "If we actually want to address plastic waste in our oceans, we need to change the behaviors of industries and entire economies, not whether or not Deborah gets a straw in her mocha frappuccino."

4. ICE Detains Man Driving Pregnant Wife To Deliver Baby, Says He Is Wanted For Homicide In Mexico (posted August 18)

5. Infinity War Director Confirms Shuri is the Smartest MCU Character (posted August 14)

Blogaround

A chicken sitting on two puppies to protect them as if they are her babies. Image source.

1. The Bible is literature for the resistance (posted July 12) "And so the Bible honors women like Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives who defied the Pharaoh’s orders by safely delivering the sons of Hebrew slaves, and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who essentially “took a knee” by refusing to show the required patriotism at one of King Nebuchadnezzar’s state parades." Preach.

2. This sun-chasing robot looks after the plant on its head (posted July 12) Adorable!

3. What Reporting Sexual Harassment Taught Me (posted July 9) [content note: sexual harassment, victims being re-victimized when reporting] "These questions convey the message that we should only report incidents that were traumatic, and only if we’re sure that the harasser deserves dire consequences. This is part of a broader pattern of holding people who report sexual harassment to an impossible standard."

4. Film Theory: Can You SUE a Superhero? (Disney Pixar's The Incredibles) (posted June 19) "Clearly this timeline isn't an accident on the part of Pixar."

5. Abortion is Immoral, Except When It Comes to My Mistress (posted July 11) [content note: violence against women, "pro-life" politicians] 

6. Trump’s Spiritual Advisor Calls Babies Smuggled into the U.S. “Sinful” (posted July 16) What Paula White did here is called taking the Lord's name in vain.

Related: If y'all aren't already reading Libby Anne's blog, you should. All her recent posts about immigration, politics, and Christianity are very good.

Blogaround

Shuri, from "Black Panther." I love her because she's a scientist. Image source.

1. Film Theory: Black Panther's Economic CRISIS! (posted February 20)

2. Time's Up For Politely Anti-LGBTQ Christianity: The Truth About "We Want to Be Known By What We're For, Not What We're Against" (posted March 13) "In other words, while he was very much against the LGBTQ community, he simply didn’t want to be known for that."

3. Mike Pence: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (posted March 18) Really interesting for me, as an ex-evangelical, to hear John Oliver talking about Focus on the Family and James Dobson, as if his audience will certainly be shocked by how wrong their ideology is. Yeah, their ideology is terrible, but feels so incredibly normal to me. I grew up reading Focus on the Family magazines and books, believing all their bullshit about how "the homosexual agenda" was trying to destroy "the family."

Also, when watching the video clips of Pence avoiding answering questions, did anyone else get a very creepy evangelical "let's grab coffee instead of answering whether gay sex is sinful" vibe? And the way he acts when asked questions, as if to say, "oh it's so sad that you are missing the point so much, asking me these questions that don't have any relevance to anything", ugh soooo creepy.

(See also: This post I wrote in 2016, Don't Let Pence's Shady Use of Language Fool You. He is Anti-Life.)

4. Patriarchy doesn't "protect" women: A response to John Piper (posted March 20) PREACH!

5. Can this robotic fish fool real fish into revealing their secrets? (posted March 21) This is so cool!

Blogaround

A corgi laying with a stuffed porg. Image source.

1. Female evangelical leaders call on church to speak out on violence against women (posted December 21) "Emily Joy, who created #ChurchToo with fellow artist Hannah Paasch, said sexual abuse is an “epidemic” in all spheres of life, but there’s an “added level of trauma” when it occurs within a religious environment."

2. USA Gymnastics paid Olympian McKayla Maroney $1.25 million to keep quiet about years of sex abuse (posted December 20)

3. How a former sharecropper in an SUV helped drive Doug Jones to victory in Alabama's Black Belt (posted December 14) "She says she simply will not allow anyone to fall through the cracks or avoid casting a ballot in Lowndes County, which has a long history of fighting for voting rights."

4. The True, Secret, Hidden Religious Meaning of ‘The 12 Days of Christmas’ (posted December 19) "We like the idea of knowing the true, secret, hidden meaning of things. Gnoing the gnosis makes us feel special — far more special than we could ever feel just from studying the actual history and context and intent of this initially bewildering old text."

5. Trump Administration Considers Separating Families to Combat Illegal Immigration (posted December 21)

6. Christmas Carols, generated by a neural network (posted December 20) "He was born in a wonderful christmas tree"

7. Redefining Events: Body Concept and Bodily Relationships for Cyborgs, Werewolves, Super-soldiers, and Other Altered Bodies (posted 2013) "Bruce [Banner], for example, has a not-worst-case-scenario RE [redefining event], but due to the dangerous and stigmatized nature of his AB [altered body], he spends most of his time coping with it alone, which impacts his ability to cope with these changes in a healthy way." Wowwwwww this is an analysis of the psychological effects of having one's body altered, with examples from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Note, though, that this is applicable to real life too- for example, pregnancy is a pretty common experience which alters one's body.) Wow I am so glad I found this article because the topic is SO INTERESTING.

And also this fanfic about Captain America dealing with the psychological aftermath of torture: The Healing Properties of Felt-Tip Pens

And this one about Bruce Banner after the events of "The Avengers", dealing with topics of guilt, touch-aversion, and self-harm, featuring a romantic relationship between Bruce and Clint: The Care and Feeding of Lost Causes

8. NPU removes Pastor Judy Peterson (posted December 27) "By now many of you have heard the news that Rev. Judy Howard Peterson, North Park University’s campus pastor, has been removed from her position for officiating at a same-sex wedding last spring."

9. So the World Uses a Calendar That Starts with the Birth of Jesus (posted December 26)

Blogaround

Four kittens laying around. Image source.

1. Roy Moore: Last Time America Was 'Great' Was During 'Slavery' (posted December 7) HOLY SHIT.

2. For many evangelicals, Jerusalem is about prophecy, not politics (posted December 8) "As I watched Donald Trump announce that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and move our embassy to that city, I could only think of one thing: my high school youth group Bible study."

3. Official Toll in Puerto Rico: 62. Actual Deaths May Be 1,052. (posted December 8) "The analysis compared the number of deaths for each day in 2017 with the average of the number of deaths for the same days in 2015 and 2016."

4. Pilots stop 222 asylum seekers being deported from Germany by refusing to fly (posted December 5)

5. 'Grieving in a Fishbowl' (posted November 13) [content note: gun violence] "Survivors of mass shootings recount their experiences coping with trauma in the public eye."

6. Robots are being used to deter homeless people from setting up camp in San Francisco (posted December 12)

7. Why I Believe 'To Siri With Love' By Judith Newman Is A Book That Does Incredible Damage To The Autistic Community (posted December 8)

8. How Coco Fits Into The Pixar Theory (posted December 12) [content note: spoilers for "Coco"] "Basically, as long as a single memory orb of you exists in any living person's mind, anywhere, you get to continue on living as a skeleton."

And also that video contains THE MOST ACCURATE DESCRIPTION OF BIBLICAL APOLOGETICS I HAVE EVER HEARD: "Because how everything fits into the Pixar Theory is endlessly entertaining and we love talking about it here. But to continue calling it a 'theory' at this point almost feels like the wrong word. It seems more like a game or a challenge. People are constantly telling me that they have 'broken' or 'disproved' the Pixar Theory, and my response to every single one of those people is: You don't get it. Because the goal is to make it work. If you've 'broken' it or 'disproven' it, you haven't done that at all, you've just uncovered a plot hole that the theory needs to be adjusted to explain so we can better understand this universe that Pixar has built."

9. Evangelical Blogger: Christian Leaders Need Extra Protection against Allegations of Sin (posted December 11) [content note: silencing victims] Libby Anne's response to a post by Tim Challies, and WOWWW Challies's post is BAD.

10. Perfect Number Watches VeggieTales "Larry Boy And the Fib From Outer Space" (posted December 14)

Blogaround

Patrick Stewart sitting among a bunch of pumpkins. Image source.

1. 7 Things You Need To Know To Be A Good Ally To An Intersex Person (posted October 23) "Despite numerous studies indicating infant genitoplasty does more harm than good, physicians in the U.S. and elsewhere still routinely perform medically unnecessary procedures on intersex babies."

2. On Bisexuality and Reformation Bingo (posted October 23) "For every one thing that I put out on the internet about bisexuality, I've got a couple of women at least emailing me, being like, 'That's also my story, I also came from purity culture, I'm married to a dude, I'm bisexual but like what's the point of coming out, etc etc.'"

3. This tweet in a Twitter thread of "biblical sexual ethics" (such as when Abraham set Sarah up to be sexually assaulted by Pharaoh). The whole thread is good, but that tweet in particular was shocking to me- it says "Leviticus 21:9. If the daughter of a priest has sex not in marriage, she is burned alive." It blew my mind to see that listed as an example of the bible being IMMORAL in terms of sexual ethics. Before, I always read that verse like it was about unmarried sex being a sin, which is a complicated topic we can debate- it's not something that's so clear that you would put it in a tweet to convince people the bible is wrong. But. No. The issue is not whether unmarried sex is a sin. The issue is the death penalty for having unmarried sex. And that is very obviously immoral- but I never noticed it before.

To me, sex was always this huge, scary, terrible thing that of course we shouldn't do. (Until you're married and it's suddenly the best thing ever, right?) It never occurred to me to think, "even if it is a sin, it doesn't deserve the death penalty."

4. Literally, Why Can’t I Say #MeToo? (posted October 16) [content note: descriptions of sexual assault] "I feel guilty using those words. I feel like I’m being dramatic."

5. Fooling Neural Networks in the Physical World with 3D Adversarial Objects (posted October 31) "Here is a 3D-printed turtle that is classified at every viewpoint as a “rifle” by Google’s InceptionV3 image classifier, whereas the unperturbed turtle is consistently classified as “turtle”." Cool!

Blogaround

A very shy little octopus. Image source.

1. Beijing bans new bikes as sharing schemes cause chaos (posted September 8) Yepppp I'm in Shanghai and within the past year-ish a bunch of these bike-sharing apps have appeared and it's getting out of control, there are tons and tons of these public bikes all over the sidewalks, rows and rows and rows of them in front of subway stations, etc.

2. Missouri Court to Hear Landmark Case on Satanic Temple Abortion (posted September 8) "On May 8, 2015 TST [The Satanic Temple] filed both state and federal lawsuits against the state of Missouri on behalf of Mary Doe, a pregnant woman seeking an abortion. Missouri law requires that all women seeking to lawfully terminate their pregnancy must be given reading material claiming that life begins at conception. They must also endure a 72-hour waiting period between their initial appointment and their actual abortion procedure. TST objects to these restrictions on religious grounds because they violate the organization’s belief in the inviolability of one’s body."

3. LGBT groups denounce 'dangerous' AI that uses your face to guess sexuality (posted September 8) All right I work in AI, specifically computer vision, so I have some opinions about this. First of all, the algorithm in the study correctly guessed "gay" or "straight" 81% of the time for men and 74% for women. That's a really significant result in a scientific sense, but it's not 100%, so it's not like we can use this for anything that really definitely needs to be reliable and has practical effects on actual people's lives. Often when scientific findings are reported in the media, the headline makes it sound like the result is way more absolute and definite than it really is (my favorite example of this was a headline I saw once that said "Facebook knows when you'll break up" which was about a study that showed people posted statuses with words/phrases like "break up" more often in certain months than in others).

Also the study only looked at white people, and only people who identified as gay or straight (not bi, ace, or any other possible orientation). And it used photos from a dating site as its data set- perhaps what it's actually telling us is gay and straight people present themselves differently when specifically looking for a partner on a dating website. Maybe if the study used ID photos or photos from some other context, there would have been a different result. (Seriously, I think it's EXTREMELY SIGNIFICANT that these were photos posted with the SPECIFIC INTENTION of finding a romantic partner. Not just any old photos.) More research is needed.

So the result is extremely limited and not anywhere near 100% reliable (but still very interesting and cool to anyone working in AI or computer vision!) so of course it shouldn't be used to actually do actual things to actual people. Of course it wouldn't be scientifically sound to decide someone must be gay, on the basis of this algorithm alone, and then treat them badly because of it. (Or, if you want a laugh, I read another article on this study which mentioned maybe it could be useful for teenagers who are questioning whether they could be gay. LOLOLOLOL as if a computer with 70-80% accuracy knows you better than you know yourself.)

But. Historically, people in power have used "science" as an excuse to oppress certain demographics. It doesn't matter that those of us who actually understand the science can see that it in no way justifies discrimination- all that matters is that someone is claiming that "science" is on their side, and getting away with it. (Exhibit A for "getting away with it": headlines completely misrepresenting the results of the study to make it sound much more absolute and immediately practical than it actually is.) So it's good to be extremely wary of how results like this could be used as an excuse to hurt people who are perceived as gay.

4. Chapters 21-23 - An Atheist Reads Evidence That Demands a Verdict (posted 2013) In this video, Shives discusses a BUNCH of differences between the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2. And I'm angry in the way only an ex-evangelical can be: This stuff is so damn interesting and this is the FIRST time I'm hearing about it. I studied and memorized the bible my whole life and I was carefully trained not to notice that Genesis 1 and 2 are so different that probably they have different authors. I knew that the correct apologetics answer is "Genesis 1 and 2 don't contradict each other- chapter 2 is just giving more details about the part in chapter 1 where God created people." I was taught that answer before I even had a chance to think for myself "hey why are there two different creation accounts?"

On that note, does anyone have any recommendations for books about the documentary hypothesis? (The documentary hypothesis is the idea that the Pentateuch is compiled from sources from 4 different authors, which we call J, E, D, and P. Yeah real biblical scholars don't think it was all written by Moses.)

5. The First White President (October 2017 issue) "Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums. Sympathetic op‑ed columns and articles are devoted to the plight of working-class whites when their life expectancy plummets to levels that, for blacks, society has simply accepted as normal. White slavery is sin. [N-----] slavery is natural."

6. Hurricane Irma Is So Powerful it Sucked Ocean Water Away in the Bahamas (posted September 10)

7. Coping with Suicidal Thoughts (pdf) [content note: suicide] Wow, I don't think I've ever seen a resource like this before, with extremely practical steps that one can take to stay safe.

8. Were You On This Delta Plane That Flew Into Hurricane Irma? (Updated) (posted September 6) Wowwww.

9. B4NP Podcast Episode 19: “The Bible and Intersex Believers” with Megan DeFranza (posted September 11) Also check out her website: Intersex And Faith.

Have a good week everyone~

Blogaround

A cat laying on a rainbow flag on the street at a Pride parade. Image source.

1. Ancient wisdom from the neural network (posted June 22) "Death when it comes will have no sheep."

2. Toy Story Zero: The True Story Of Andy’s Dad & Woody’s Origin (ft. Mike Mozart) (posted June 22) "Woody doesn't even realize that ... the Andy playing with him now isn't the Andy who wrote his name on his boot."

3. Soap, soup, and support for Supreme Court nominees who will overturn Roe v. Wade (posted June 6) "Every medical missionary commissioned by any white evangelical mission board has had to contend with this Great Commission objection. Every mission agency that built hospitals or schools had to have an answer to it — an explanation for why they were doing that rather than building churches."

4. A groovy relic of the forbidden evangelical past (posted June 8) "In 1975 — two years after Roe — Zondervan Press published a book for white evangelicals in which Norman Geisler wrote: “Abortion is not murder, because the embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person.” And nobody freaked out."

5. Behind Wonder Woman Is a Great Man (posted June 6) [spoilers for "Wonder Woman"] "But if it’s important for girls and women to see a female superhero, it’s also important for boys and men to see a man who becomes heroic by following a woman’s lead."

6. If we confess our sins (posted June 22) "It reinforces the idea that “sin” is a matter of transgression against some capricious and inscrutable list of rules — an idea that the Bible repeatedly rejects, rebuts and mocks".

7. Uber sued over lack of wheelchair-accessible cars in D.C. (posted June 28) "The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday, alleges that Uber is violating both the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires transportation companies to offer equal access to all riders, and D.C.'s Human Rights Act."

Blogaround

A box with "(cat + cat^box)^box" written on the side, along with two cats arranged as stated. Image source.

1. Are You Demanding Time for Yourself in Your Marriage? Sharing this because I was struck by how there could easily be an article on a site like The Gospel Coalition with the exact same title, but completely opposite meaning. The link here is from the site A Practical Wedding, which has really useful, feminist advice on weddings, marriage, and being an adult, and it's an article about how it's important for everyone to have some time just for themselves but usually women are expected to do everything and they feel like they're not allowed to insist on "me-time." Very very interesting how the words "demanding" and "yourself" have completely different meanings in feminism vs conservative Christianity.

2. The Gaston Song Explained (posted April 11) "He must be spending a fortune on eggs, I mean that other lady can't even afford six. ... And are the six eggs just for her? I mean, I am personally content with three and I'm a pretty big guy. Does anyone in this town eat anything but eggs?"

3. 24 Seriously Annoying Things That Happen In Every Sex Scene (posted April 14) [NSFW] "The main sexual move appears to be rolling around together while seemingly not actually having sex."

4. The Bible and Mental Illness (posted April 9) "What I perceived as a spiritual attack or some sort of separation from God was a medical issue."

5. The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI (posted April 11) I work in robotics, and deep learning is really not as scary as this article makes it sound. Still a good article worth reading, facts are correct but it's a little over-the-top with the whole "oh noes we don't know why the computer made this decision oh the horror" stuff.

6. We tested bots like Siri and Alexa to see who would stand up to sexual harassment (posted February 22) I'm all for programming female robots to not take this crap from anyone.

7. Holy Saturday (posted April 15)

8. The Greatest Story Never Told (posted 2015) "In all my years in church I don’t recall ever once hearing a preacher acknowledge from the pulpit that a bunch of people were raised from the dead and appeared to many on Easter weekend. Have you ever heard one talk about this?"

Political Correctness and How I Learned Chinese People Don't "All Look the Same"

宁泽涛 Ning Zetao, Chinese Olympic swimmer. Image source.

Several years ago, one of my friends posted a family photo on Facebook, and another friend commented, "Wow, you look so much like your mom!"

I remember thinking that comment was sort of ... awkward. I would never say something like that, I thought to myself. Because the girl who posted the photo is Asian. To me, of course she looked like her mom because ... well I would never say it out loud, but don't Asian people pretty much all look the same?

So this post is about white people who really don't want to be racist, but have some ignorant beliefs like "Asian people all look the same" and think those beliefs are objectively true statements that we're not allowed to say out loud because of "political correctness." And I'm going to use the word "we" because I'm white and I'm guilty of some of these same biases.

Growing up, I pretty much only interacted with white people. In school we learned about segregation and the civil rights movement, how there was racism back then but fortunately Martin Luther King Jr. fixed it. Schools used to be segregated, which was horrible and unjust, and completely different from our school because there was one black girl in my social studies class.

I never thought of my school, church, etc as "all white" because it was easy to name a few people of color I would see there sometimes. I didn't realize that, if you can name offhand all the people of color, then yeah, it counts as "all white."

Anyway, when we come from that kind of environment, it makes sense that our brains aren't able to tell Asian people apart- it makes sense that we would think they "all look the same." But the important thing is, it's not actually true that "Asian people look the same." It only seems true because our experience is very very limited.

When we only have a few people of color in our lives, it's not really necessary for our brains to remember that much detail about what they look like. We just think "Jeff is a tall Asian guy" and that's perfectly adequate because we only know one tall Asian guy. Obviously when we look at him we are able to see all of his unique facial features, but it has just never been necessary for our brains to actually pay attention to those specific features and remember them. We're good at doing that for white people, but for other races, we have just never really had a need for that skill.

Because yes, it is a different skill. Recognizing white people's faces is a different skill than recognizing Asian people's faces. If we congratulate ourselves for how not-racist we are because we "don't see race," spend the vast majority of our lives interacting with only white people, then realize we have trouble telling Asian people apart, and conclude that Asian people just inherently look MUCH MORE similar to each other than white people do (but we're not racist or anything, some of our best friends are Asian guys named Jeff)... well we are being ridiculous. Just because our brains have never had to learn that skill doesn't mean it's actually a difficult skill.

I moved to China in 2013 and started working as an English teacher. My students were adults and they weren't given a fixed class schedule- they just signed up for whichever classes they had time for any given week. So I never knew which permutation of students would show up. And at the beginning of every class, I would go around and ask all the students their names. (English names.) And I did my best to remember. People like it when you remember their names.

Well after a while of doing that, Chinese people no longer "looked the same" to me. I'm serious. I don't mean "well yeah they look really similar but I am able to tell them apart"- I mean "these people look completely different- why on earth did I ever think Asian people looked the same?" There were times I would think to myself "everyone in this room is Asian" or "everyone here has black hair" [except me...] and it felt so WEIRD to think that, because part of my brain still interprets "everyone here is Asian" as "everyone here looks very similar and it's hard to tell them apart" but the reality that I see isn't like that- they don't look similar to me at all.

And there was one time I had two students, Summer and Sarah, who did look very similar. For a while I thought they were the same person- I thought there was one student and I could never remember if her name was Summer or Sarah. Then one day they both happened to be attending the same class, and I realized they were two different people. And the whole thing struck me as so weird- just a few years before, I would have responded to the problem "two Chinese women look similar and I have trouble remembering which is which" by thinking, well yeah, obviously, because Asian people look really similar. But it wasn't like that at all. They didn't look similar because Asian people all look the same. They look similar because they just happen to look similar. Asian people in general don't look similar at all.

Or the time I was doing an English activity for kids, and one of my colleagues said she would be bringing her daughter, whom I had never met before. So I get there and there's a few kids there already, and I see this one little girl, and I'm like, WOW yeah that is DEFINITELY her daughter. (And yes, she was.) And again, it surprised me because a few years before, I would not have been able to do that. A few years before, I thought Asian people pretty much all looked the same. I wouldn't have been able to identify which ones actually do look similar on account of being directly related to each other.

Anyway, the reason I'm talking about my experiences here is not so you can be like "wow isn't Perfect Number amazing, she moved to China and somehow overcame the incredibly difficult challenge of telling Asian people apart." No, white people don't deserve congratulations for being less racist than usual. I'm talking about this because I've realized that recognizing Asian people and telling them apart is actually not hard at all. I only thought it was hard because my own experience of the world was so limited- not because it actually is hard. Seriously, all it takes is interacting, day after day, with dozens of Asian people whose names you need to remember- after that, the idea that they "all look the same" is just blatantly absurd. They don't look the same at all.

Really, it's about training our brains to focus on particular features. Our brains have to learn which aspects of people's appearance are most useful to remember for purposes of identifying who someone is. And the set of features we learn to pay attention to if we only interact with white people is not the optimal set of features for identifying Asian people. For example, among white Americans, there is significant variation in hair color and curliness. Our brains learn that paying particular attention to someone's hair color and curliness is very very useful for the task of identifying people. (I remember in middle school gym class, when we all had to wear swim caps in the pool, and everybody's hair was covered up and it took me a second to figure out who everyone was- my brain wasn't used to identifying them by their face alone.)

But if we use that same strategy for Asian people, it won't work well. The vast majority of them have straight black hair. Our brains are storing that data about their hair color and curliness- which is pretty useless for identifying Asian people- at the expense of noticing features which actually are useful. I don't know exactly what features those are, because all of this is happening subconsciously. Give it enough time, enough experience, and our brains will figure it out automatically. It's not actually hard. It's only hard if our brains have never had to learn it before.

And maybe now is a good time to mention I work with vision systems for robots. (And yes, there have been times when this problem has literally happened to an AI system- the system trains on data where white people are better represented, and ends up outputting results that are pretty racist.) Pretty much my entire job is teaching a computer how to tell which visual data is important and which parts to ignore. The robot may have a camera or a 3D sensor, which returns hundreds and hundreds of numbers representing colors or coordinates in 3D space, and I have to teach it how to figure out what the hell it's looking at. Our brains work in a similar way. We get the raw data from our eyes, and we ignore most of it and just focus on the parts that are important. We have to ignore most of it because there's just too much. That's what's happening when we look at people's faces and decide if we recognize them or not. Our brains have learned which parts to pay attention to and which parts to ignore. The problem is, if we trained our brains on white people, we will suck at it when it's time to recognize Asian people. (Or any other race.)

But it's easy to think our experiences are "normal", to be completely unaware that the dataset we've used to train our brains to identify people was incredibly limited. We think we are able to see people clearly and in an unbiased way- we don't realize how much visual data we're constantly ignoring. (And we ignore it because it's not useful if all we need to do is interact with white people.) We think we are objective, and the fact that we have trouble recognizing Asian people means that, in an objective, absolute sense, Asian people basically all look the same.

And we don't want to be racist, but we believe that's just an indisputable fact, that Asian people look the same. And since we don't want to be racist, we never say it out loud in public. But sometimes we complain about political correctness- how it's so unreasonable that there are things that are just objectively true (like "Asian people all look the same") but we're not allowed to say them.

See, we white people have completely misunderstood "political correctness." We think it means "there are many things which are just OBVIOUS, they're COMMON SENSE, we all KNOW they're true, but we're not allowed to say them because some over-sensitive minorities are going to get all upset. We're not allowed to tell the truth because those people are so unreasonable and easily offended. So unfair."

It's not like that at all. When there are things we're "not allowed to say" because they're "not politically correct", it's not because "some unreasonable person is going to get offended", it's because those statements are actually not true and they promote ignorance and hatred of minorities, which does real-world damage.

It's understandable that we would believe those "politically incorrect" things. For example, it totally makes sense that, if we interact almost exclusively with white people, we will have difficulty with recognizing Asian people. Our limited experience of the world causes us to regard certain stereotypes as being reasonable and true. That's not our fault. It doesn't mean we're bad people.

But it becomes a problem when we don't realize we're not objective, when we think that we have the truth and the "easily-offended" people who enforce "political correctness" have it all wrong. It becomes a problem when we internalize the message that "these things are true, but we're not allowed to say them", when we don't want to be racist so we try to remember the list of statements which, for arbitrary, nonsensical reasons, we're not allowed to say out loud. It becomes a problem when nobody ever teaches us "the reason you shouldn't say this is because it's NOT TRUE, and you only think it's true because your experiences are so limited."

It becomes a problem when we believe it's literally true that, by some objective measure, there is less variation in Asian people's appearance than there is among white people. That's absurd. (How would you even measure "variation" anyway? What does that even mean? Sure there's less variation in the features that our brains have trained us to pay attention to, but so what? That's our own problem.) It becomes a problem when we look at someone's face and have no idea we're so biased, no idea that we concentrate more on certain features while completely ignoring others, no idea how much information our brains are just throwing away. (Again, we need to throw a lot of data away. There's just too much. And if we mostly interact with white people, the strategy we develop concerning which facial features to notice and which to ignore will work really well for identifying white people, but it will be awful when it comes to other races.)

It becomes a problem when we are too afraid to say anything about race at all, because we've seen how other white people have gotten in so much trouble for just making the most obvious, self-evident statements. They said things we agree with, things that "we all know" are true, and for some reason everyone got upset about it. So we make sure we never say those things, but we don't really understand why. Or we make apologies which boil down to "I should have known better than to say that out loud", when we should be saying "I actually believed this, but now I see how ignorant I was, I'm sorry."

White people: We're not unbiased. We're not "objective." Just because something seems like "common sense" doesn't mean it's true. It may mean we have far too little experience and we have no idea what we're talking about.

--------

One more thing: In China, I've heard Chinese people say "white people look the same" or "black people look the same." It's the same idea- when your brain hasn't had enough experience interacting with a particular race and needing to identify individual people, it will be really hard for you.