Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. George Washington praying for the return of his slaves (May 28) "She boarded a ship to New Hampshire and never looked back. George Washington sent slavecatchers and government officials after her to recapture his “stolen property,” but her neighbors in the free state of New Hampshire helped her elude those kidnappers. Bounties and rewards were offered for her capture and re-enslavement for years afterwards."

Also from the Slacktivist: A first person, extremely possessive pronoun (June 1) "The subject of this song is, rather, a smallish neighborhood God. This is a puny God who is not the God of Haitian refugees, not the God of second-generation immigrants — not the God of LGBT people, not the God of women, not the God of widows and orphans and the poor, not the God of the sick and the immunocompromised, not the God of any of the billions of people living in any of the other 194 countries of this world, let alone the God of any of the billions of other stars in our universe."

And: Flattening and collapsing, egad! (June 2) "'Love your neighbor' is both necessary and sufficient." Preach!

2. What will it take to get a vaccine for the Ebola strain driving the current outbreak? (June 4) The good news is there's already a lot of scientific research and some vaccines that are likely to be effective. It's just a matter of actually having the money and resources to make it happen.

3. Interesting Pitch: ICR Says NO to Plain Reading of Noah's Ark (June 1, 16-minute video) Young-earth creationism says that the whole fossil record was formed during the year of Noah's flood, when all the animals and plants were buried, rather than being formed by millions of years of slow normal processes. And, therefore, all of the world's oil deposits come from the organic material buried during the flood. 

But, here's a problem: In Genesis 6:14, when God instructs Noah to build an ark, he says to coat it with pitch. !!!! Pitch! Oh no! Pitch comes from oil! There was oil before the flood? How can this be?

Please note that the bible does *not* say that all of the world's oil was formed by the flood. That's a young-earth creationist fan theory. And some young-earth creationists have realized that their fan theory contradicts the bible verse that says Noah used pitch to waterproof the ark, so now they have to come up with another fan theory about how it didn't really mean pitch, it meant pine sap or something.

Anyway, this is a video from Joel Duff which takes these young-earth creationist fan theories very seriously and explains why they don't make sense.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Todd Blanche says DOJ ‘not moving forward’ with ‘anti-weaponization’ fund (June 3) Hooray! But also, I don't think this is the end of it- they're probably going to do a lot of other shockingly-corrupt things.

2. Musk Attacks Nyong’o For The Same Reason Hitler Attacked Jewish Art (May 26) "Musk is not just some asshole complaining about Hollywood casting choices. He is one of the most horrific mass murderers in history."

Also from Everything is Horrible: Fascists Lie (Even When They Seem To Be Confessing) (June 3) This quote from Vivian Wilson: "Him going further on the right, and I’m going to use the word ‘further’ — make sure you put ‘further’ in there — is not because of me. That’s insane."

3. Republicans' sweeping election overhaul fails in the Senate (June 4) "The SAVE America Act, a far-reaching Republican election overhaul that President Trump said should be his congressional allies' top priority, has officially failed in the Senate." This is good news for overseas voters like me.

4. House passes war powers resolution directing Trump to end hostilities with Iran (June 4) This is good, but it would still need to pass the Senate and also the antichrist would have to sign it, in order to become a real law, so that is unlikely.

5. You Can’t Raise Children to Obey and Expect Them to Defend Democracy (June 4, via) "It begins when a child learns that the person with power does not have to be truthful. Or when a child learns that obedience matters more than conscience. Or when a child learns that being hurt by someone who claims to love you is normal."

6. Screwworm In Texas Cattle Could Drive Up Beef Prices—After DOGE Axed Prevention Efforts (June 4)

7. The Side That Won the Civil War is Now Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought (June 3, via) "Censorship often works like this—indirectly, requiring no specified demands but rather a vague climate of intimidation that encourages “an abundance of caution” when making decisions about what voices should be heard."

8. When U.S. foreign aid changed, AIDS workers in Africa felt it (June 7) "The program is often cited as the most effective public health campaign ever, and is estimated by the State Department to have saved roughly 26 million lives since its inception."

9. Pete Hegseth shrinks military's recognized religions list, erasing atheists and Humanists (June 5) "The Department of Defense/War, under Secretary Pete Hegseth, has just pared down the list of recognized religious labels in the military to a mere 31, making it harder for service members to use the proper identification. A decade ago, as part of a larger mission to be more welcoming to people outside traditional faiths, the list of labels had expanded to well over 200."

10. After D.C.'s Reflecting Pool gets repainted, visitors ask: What changed? (June 5)

11. Deported Filipino sailors say they were falsely linked to child sexual abuse material (June 6) "Soriano Versoza's organization, which helps Filipino sailors with paperwork and other support, documented hundreds of deportations of Filipino seafarers and all follow the same playbook: CBP agents board the ships in the morning at the dock, they round up a handful of Filipino mariners, take them off the cruise ship, and interrogate them."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Can Complementarians Please Stop Using the “You’re Equal to Your Boss” Analogy? (March 2) "When complementarians say, 'Well, that’s what the Bible says' it is fair to answer them back, 'Well, either you are wrong in your interpretation or God is sexist.'"

2. on the other trafficked girls in Esther (February 26) "All of them are captured by agents of the State— "deputies" – to take these girls from their families and get them to travel sometimes exceedingly far distances so that the king can decide if they "please" him."

3. Created to Die? Exploding Termites and the “Very Good” Creation (February 8) "It’s a familiar strategy: describe complexity, express incredulity, declare design."

4. The market for marriage (February 19) "The usual pattern is that pastoralists are inegalitarian, inequality drives polygyny, and polygyny drives male control of women."

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As a reminder, you don't have to read all the news links. But, *do* something. Check on your trans friends, protest, call your congress people, get connected to local groups, donate to groups that help immigrants.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. ACLU Files Lawsuit Against Kansas Trans Drivers License Revocations, Bathroom Bounty Hunter Law (February 27) "The lawsuit is being brought by two anonymous plaintiffs, both transgender men. Both hold driver's licenses with male gender markers. SB 244 retroactively invalidates those licenses, which will 'forcibly out Plaintiffs as transgender.'"

2. Trump administration drops suits against law firms after judges find president's orders unconstitutional (March 3) "'This episode will be remembered as demonstrating the difference between institutions that had the ethical courage to uphold the Constitution and fight bullying and then won, and those that compromised their ethics and gained nothing,' Gupta said in a statement Monday. 'Let’s hope that media companies, universities, and other organizations pay heed.'"

Oh but wait, DOJ is [not?] dropping its appeals of losses in the law firm order cases. What is going on? (March 3) 

3. Who attacked a girls' school in Iran, and will there be accountability? (March 3) "As the death toll in the conflict passes 175, calls rise for an investigation into potential human rights violations and war crimes."

4. Before you share that story about how troops were told the Iran War is for "Armageddon," read this (March 4) Yes, we should fact-check and not believe everything!

5. Why supporting a shelter for women is now 'kind of radioactive' (March 4) "A global survey by U.N. Women published in October 2025 found that more than 40% of organizations working to end violence against women and girls had to scale back life-saving services or shut down completely in the past year because of funding cuts."

These MAGAs talk about how they're the ones "protecting women" by discriminating against trans people, and at the same time they're massively cutting funding for women's shelters. It's another example of the ideology I talked about in my post about being right vs doing good.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. On 310 Yuan a Day, She Builds China’s Towers — and Streams the Struggle (February 25) "This is her sixth year bouncing between construction sites across China. As one of the few young women in a workforce dominated by middle-aged men, she stands out immediately — not just for her age or gender, but for her determination to survive."

2. Remembering the Mothers of Gynecology (February 28) "But like a lot of early heroes of medicine, Sims was an absolute monster."

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Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. A Chance To Establish The Run Against Authoritarianism (February 12) This is something we can do to help the families who have been hiding for weeks in Minnesota. Donate to funds to help with rent.

2. The U.S. Men's Hockey Team Failed the Locker Room Test (February 25) "I can’t help but wonder how many of these players have daughters—and whether they’ve told them that they can be hockey players one day, too. How many have told them that the women’s game matters just as much? Do they think their girls will still believe them after they hear their dads laugh?"

3. Deadline looms as Anthropic rejects Pentagon demands it remove AI safeguards (February 26) "For months, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has insisted that Anthropic's AI model, Claude, must not be used for mass surveillance in the U.S. or to power entirely autonomous weapons, such as a drone that uses AI to kill targets without human approval. He has described those uses as 'entirely illegitimate' and says they are 'bright red lines' for the company."

OpenAI announces Pentagon deal after Trump bans Anthropic (February 28)

4. A nearly blind refugee is found dead after Border Patrol agents drop him at Buffalo doughnut shop (February 27) "'A vulnerable man — nearly blind and unable to speak English — was left alone on a cold winter night with no known attempt to leave him in a safe, secure location. That decision from U.S. Customs and Border Protection was unprofessional and inhumane,' Mayor Sean Ryan said in a statement."

5. Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, And The Construction Of Political Crisis (February 21) [content note: child sexual abuse] "The broad Epstein files scandal is already salient. But the questions of how it will ultimately be understood, and where political accountability will fall, are still up for grabs. Is this mostly a story about elite impunity, bipartisan failure, bureaucratic incompetence and/or corruption? Or will it be just as much a story about how the country was deceived into electing a sex predator angling to cover up his own crimes and got caught. Where we look back and say there was a specific moment when the government had to decide whether there would be any consequences for this depravity, and we, the public, got to see in real time who tried to do the right thing and who sided with the dregs of humanity?"

6. Vanderbilt To Drop Major Gender-Affirming Surgeries For Trans Adults (February 24) "It was only after reaching out to VUMC that she received a message in her patient portal—a pattern seen across the country, where hospital gender care rollbacks have often been haphazardly announced through terse press releases from nameless hospital bureaucrats."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Kansas Sends Letters To Trans People Demanding The Immediate Surrender Of Drivers Licenses (February 26) "The Kansas letters arrive amid an accelerating nationwide campaign to strip transgender people of accurate identification documents."

7. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been killed (February 28)

3 American troops killed, and Trump says more 'likely,' in war against Iran (March 1)

8. Federal judge blocks new DHS policy that would allow arrest of thousands of legal refugees (February 28) "'The Government’s actions in this case beg the question: Why?' Tunheim wrote. 'The Government suggests that they are looking for terrorists, but there is not a shred of evidence in the record that the Named Plaintiffs or the putative Class they seek to represent pose serious national security risks.'"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. First things first: Biblical priorities (September 4) "This is the first thing we hear God telling us — the first thing God has to say. Religion without justice is detestable." Preach.

2. Texas lawmakers approve letting private citizens sue abortion pill providers (September 4) "Opponents see it as not only another way to rein in abortion but intimidate providers outside Texas who are complying with the laws in their states. They also say it would encourage a form of vigilantism."

3. The Super-Weird Origins of the Right’s Hatred of the Smithsonian (August 21, via) "Childress relied on Victorian reports about large bones that Powell’s team, led by Cyrus Thomas, had dismissed in 1894 as unevidenced. Hundreds of such reports littered the papers in the late 1800s, and claiming to find the bones of giants became a popular appeal to “prove” the Bible’s superiority to Darwin. The Smithsonian politely informed inquirers that these bones did not belong to the mythical Nephilim."

I never heard about this "we found the bones of biblical giants" when I was a young-earth creationist, but I gotta say I'm 0% surprised. Like, OF COURSE there's some young-earth creationist crackpot out there claiming they found the bones of biblical giants, and that scientists are trying to cover it up because they hate the bible or whatever. I've definitely heard of YECs claiming "we found Noah's ark!" and this is basically the same genre.

4. Israel is blasting through Gaza City neighborhoods, but people have nowhere to go (September 5) "The International Committee of the Red Cross says the evacuation of Gaza City cannot be done in a safe or dignified manner, calling it "unfeasible and incomprehensible." It noted that people are starving, wounded and unable to relocate, and that no area in Gaza can handle an influx of displaced people due to extreme shortages of food, water, shelter and medical care across the territory."

5. Dimensional Lumber Tape Measure (September 5) From xkcd.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. President Trump plans to rename the Defense Department as the Department of War (September 4) Uh, wtf

2. Senators from both parties grilled RFK Jr. on vaccines and more (September 4) "Another Republican physician on the Senate Finance Committee, Dr. John Barrasso of Wyoming, joined Democrats in criticizing Kennedy for undermining vaccines."

3. How Trump's latest crypto launch enriches his family (September 3) Corruption.

4. 'Founders Museum' from White House and PragerU blurs history, AI-generated fiction (September 3) What on earth. What. They "used AI" to make videos of the founding fathers, and they're showing these at a museum? 

5. Trump keeps moving the U.S. closer to being the fascist war machine he wants (September 5) "Earlier this week, in one of the more alarming actions of this administration, Trump ordered the murder of 11 people that the Trump administration claims were drug traffickers on international waters."

Also from Law Dork: Holding vigil in "a post-USA America" as Trump orders the vigil gone (September 6) "As The Washington Post reported last month, 'The demonstration is widely considered to be the longest continuous act of political protest in U.S. history. It has survived seven presidents, countless global conflicts, hurricanes and blizzards, heat waves and floods. It has outlasted several U.S. wars, including the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War, the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.'"

6. Trump walks back Chicago 'war' threat, but vows to 'clean up' cities (September 7) "In response to the post, Illinois' Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, wrote on X that Trump was 'threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal.'"

7. In April NPR profiled people who couldn't get their HIV drugs. How are they faring now? (September 6)

8. Judge steps up to block ICE's kidnapping of Guatemalan kids (September 4) "It was a remarkable display of judicial tenacity. It was also a testament to how thoroughly the Justice Department has shredded its credibility with the courts in just eight months." I posted a link about this before, but this gives a lot more detail. It is just shocking to me how ICE got children out of their beds in the middle of the night, with only a few hours' notice, and was going to send them to Guatemala. How can people do that, to children? But I guess this kind of cruel, inhumane behavior is what ICE does every single day.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Chess Grandmasters Do Not Burn 6000 Calories Per Day (June 28, via) "Robert Sapolsky then cited this thesis in his popular book, dropping the distinction between maximum and average to give a 3X breathing rate."

2. How a Nazi Helped the New York Times Smear Zohran Mamdani (July 29) "So the New York Times accepted hacked data that a 'scientific racist' got from a violently racist Nazi and chose to publish the data as an indictment of a Brown African-born South Asian Muslim man who wants all children to have access to pre-K education, instead of asking themselves, 'Hey, is the real story here something about how a self-described violently racist Nazi currently has the private data of millions of people, including their Social Security numbers, addresses, family members’ information, and citizenship status?'"

3. ChatGPT will apologize for anything (August 8, via) "I'm sorry for advising you to accept the trade of your cow for three beans."

And: Stop Pretending Chatbots Have Feelings: Media's Dangerous AI Anthropomorphism Problem (July 22) "Think about that. A product owned by the world’s richest man was spewing Nazi propaganda on his social media platform. That's a scandal that should have Musk answering tough questions about his company's engineering practices, safety protocols, and values. Instead, we get 'Grok issues apology.'"

4. The Scholars Helping to Keep WWII Sex Slavery From Being Forgotten (August 14) [content note: rape] "The history of 'comfort women' represents one of the most horrific, systematic violations of women’s rights in modern history."

In high school history class, I remember reading that the Japanese army had "comfort women"- I think there was 1 line about it in a textbook- but somehow I didn't get that it meant sex slavery. It meant rape.

5. New study: State medical examiners wrongly excused homicides committed by Maryland police officers (July 21) "And of course all of this has been really complicated by the emergence of bullshit medical theories about about deaths in police custody, and particularly this theory of excited or agitated delirium."

6. The Existential Horror of Thomas Riker (August 13, 18-minute video) "Then, he finally gets rescued off of that planet, which should have been the happiest day of his life, but the first face he sees is you. And then he finds out what happened, and he realizes that in the eyes of the rest of the world, he's not Will Riker- you are."

7. What is identity? (August 17) "However, sometimes when people talk about identity, they simply mean, 'this word describes what I am'. Under this definition, you could identify with a word even if you never actually heard of the word. Therefore, if a survey asks you whether you identify with a word you’ve never heard of, you have to look it up to discover the answer."

8. One neurosurgeon, 8 million patients (August 17) "'Before Dr. Kamara, there was no hope,' said Dr. Kehinde Oluwadiya, acting chief medical director of the University of Sierra Leone Teaching Hospital Complex. 'If you are lucky and rich, you will go to another country and be treated. But if you are not, it's either you die or you live with a lot of disability.'"

9. Amid growing 'scandal' of elder homelessness, health care groups aim to help (August 16) "'It's a national scandal, really, that the richest country in the world would have destitute elderly and disabled people,' Culhane said."

10. Al Jazeera reporter's death a 'significant escalation' of dangers media face, CPJ says (August 15) "Al-Sharif was among six journalists killed in a targeted Israeli strike on Aug. 10. The Israeli military said al-Sharif was the head of a Hamas 'rocket-firing brigade,' and published spreadsheets that it said showed he was on Hamas' payroll. Salah Negm, Al Jazeera's director of news, rejected those allegations calling them 'completely fabricated' in an interview with Morning Edition, adding al-Sharif was 'a journalist doing his job, nothing more.'"

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Understanding MAGA’s Obsession With Pedophilia and No Other Sex Crimes (July 24) "A friend asked me recently: how is it that MAGA is so over the top about finding out which rich and powerful men may have had sex with 16 or 17 year old girls when it’s apparently fine that the leader of their movement is a longtime sex abuser and serial predator? On the one hand, this person was saying, how is one thing so beyond the pale and the others are completely fine? On another level, this person was asking, is it really so hard to believe that a guy who appears to have routinely assaulting women just over 18 did the same with those just under?"

2. Hundreds march to White House to protest Trump's D.C. crackdown (August 16) 

3. Our leading papers failed to stand up to Trump's criminal justice authoritarianism (August 18) Wow, look at this completely wild sentence from the New York Times, in a paragraph supposedly giving background on the trends about crime, in relation to that felon's claims: "A close presidential election eventually led to a violent attack on Congress."

Blogaround

1. A branch of the flu family tree has died and won't be included in future US vaccines (March 7, via) "A type of flu virus that used to sicken people every year hasn't been spotted anywhere on Earth since March 2020. As such, experts have advised that the apparently extinct viruses be removed from next year's flu vaccines." Cool!

2. Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent (March 20, via) "Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week."

3. Therapist Reacts to THE LION KING (2023) "When adults tell us things when we're children, and we internalize those messages, and we have a hard time challenging them once we're adults." (28-minute video from Cinema Therapy)

4. What Biden Would Do if He Were Serious About Ending the War in Gaza (March 19, via) "This was about as weak of a position as could be imagined: The President had definitely thought about maybe doing something."

5. Is It Possible To Solve This? (March 22) 1-hour-2-minute sudoku solve video. I like this one because you have to spend a lot of time thinking through the overall nature of the puzzle first, before you can even begin to think about which digit can go in which cell.

6. Omelas, Je T'Aime (2022, via) "Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are—at this very moment!—already in exactly this situation."

7. “What Can I Even Say Without Having to Go to Jail?” (February 22, via) "Across the country, domestic and sexual violence treatment and prevention programs are run by state-led, federally funded coalitions tasked with overseeing organizations in their state. These groups, in theory, should be grappling with how to incorporate information about state abortion bans into advocates’ daily work."

8. Apple Jing’an now open in Shanghai (March 21) Tim Cook came to Shanghai for the opening of Asia's biggest Apple store.

9. Trump is selling ‘God Bless the USA’ Bibles for $59.99 as he faces mounting legal bills (March 27) "Besides a King James Version translation, it includes copies of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Pledge of Allegiance, as well as a handwritten chorus of the famous Greenwood song." Eww, gross, how will I explain this to my children? This reads like he's viewing the bible as a symbol of being a good American, instead of actually understanding anything about what the bible is. 

Tell me you've never read the bible without telling me.

Blogaround

1. I’m a “Gray Asexual.” My Partner Isn’t. (January 10, via) "'Mainstream media rarely covers gray asexuality,' says Tristan Miller, director of the Ace Community Survey team. 'When they do, they rarely go beyond providing a definition—and the definition is often bad.'"

2. UN warns Gaza is now ‘uninhabitable’ as war continues (January 5, via) [content note: war, genocide] "He said the humanitarian community is facing an 'impossible mission' – trying to help more than 2 million people while UN staff and aid workers from partner organisations are killed, communications blackouts continue, roads are damaged, truck convoys are shot at and vital commercial supplies 'are almost nonexistent'."

3. Republicans are torturing pregnant women with lethal diagnoses.... (January 2) [content note: pregnancy loss, all of this is really tragic] 24-minute video from Mama Doctor Jones, an obgyn who grew up in Texas. She talks about her own journey to becoming pro-choice, and about the lawsuit against the state of Texas for denying abortion care to women with medical emergencies or fetal anomalies where the baby would not survive.

4. OH MY GOODNESS I LOVE THIS SO MUCH:

I was not prepared for @FlamyGrant to lead a “Testify To Love” singalong. And it was perfect. pic.twitter.com/5DybJGD5wP

— Matt Nightingale (@mattnightingale) January 13, 2024

(Some background info: Flamy Grant is a Christian drag queen, queer Christians love her, and "Testify to Love" is a Christian song from the 90s.)

5. Help A Queer Couple Rebuild Their Lives in Safety. A GoFundMe for a lesbian couple in Ethiopia. This link was sent to me by a queer friend who used to live in China and is living in Ethiopia now- she knows the organizers of this fundraiser personally. Please donate if you can!

6. Yes, can confirm this is true:

Every time you ask a woman about pregnancy or childbirth she’ll go “Oh it wasn’t so bad, I was actually really lucky. All that happened was—“ and then tell the most terrifying story you’ve ever heard.

— Moira Donegan (@MoiraDonegan) January 14, 2024

Blogaround

1. Tumblr is downscaling after failing to ‘turn around’ the site (November 10, via) On Pillowfort I've been seeing a LOT of new members who have migrated from Tumblr. Looks like Tumblr might shut down, but we don't really know yet.

2. Israel-Hamas War: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (November 13) Wow, John Oliver does a very good job with this.

3. Inside the Mind of one Evangelical Republican Voter (November 13) "She does not believe that she can or should try to change the world or to fix broken systems—anything larger than what she can personally control is God’s domain. She wouldn’t use this analogy, but she acts more or less a first-person video-game character for whom all of life is a series of tests created by the Game Designer for her to personally pass or fail."

4. One in three (November 10) "Generations of relentless teaching have made it clear that any expression of this belief is not acceptable in those communities and that support for criminalizing abortion is mandatory dogma for all white evangelicals and all American Catholics. And yet none of that aggressive, constant, emphatic propaganda has altered those consistent poll results."

5. Stereotypes & media about Black masculinity made it harder to come out as asexual (October 27, via) "In another instance, I was told by one person that I would probably be really good in bed, because I’m Black. It didn’t matter whether or not I even wanted to have sex. In their minds, I was only a sexual object due to my Blackness."

6. Minnesotans detest our state flag (November 9) "The state is currently accepting submissions for redesigns, and you can view all 2,123 online. Yikes."

7. Journal Club: Heteronormativity Theory of Low Sexual Desire (November 15) "The paper very vehemently argues against biomedical treatments, lamenting how people still believe them despite the evidence going against them."

Blogaround

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogaround

1. You're single and pregnant? Now you can claim maternity benefits (August 19) An article from China, saying that now unmarried women can get maternity pay when they give birth.

On the one hand, this is great news! On the other hand, WTF, why on earth was being married a requirement for getting maternity pay??? WTF????

China: we want to encourage people to have more children
Also China: *sets up legal hurdles to make life difficult for single moms and children born "out of wedlock"*

2. Woman with disabilities nears medically assisted death after futile bid for affordable housing (April 30) and Are Canadians being driven to assisted suicide by poverty or healthcare crisis? (May 11) [content note: euthanasia, eugenics, ableism] Oh wow this is bad.

3. Doctor Reacts To Marvel Medical Scenes (MCU) (2021) "WHOA, WE DON'T DO IT LIKE THAT, BRO!"

4. Making A Murder... Scene (July 31) 1-hour-22-minute sudoku solve video.

5. The Manipulations of Matt Walsh's "What is a Woman?" (August 12) 1-hour-10-minute video from Jessie Gender.

Jessie's videos are very good, very in-depth, but also I totally understand if you do not want to spend 1 hour and 10 minutes of your time thinking about Matt Walsh. If you are unfortunate enough to know who Matt Walsh is, then I'm sure you can already guess what his "What is a Woman?" documentary is about, and you'd be exactly right: it's not a sincere attempt to investigate the question "what is a woman"; it's all about mocking liberals/ trans people for saying that the definitions of concepts like gender and sex are complex and there's not one simple answer.

Jessie's video examines the ways Matt treats his interviewees disrespectfully if they don't agree with him- refusing to listen to their answers, editing the video to make them look bad, asking bad-faith questions. And also, it turns out that Matt's team lied about the purpose of the documentary in order to deceive trans people/ allies into participating in the interviews.

But yeah, if you know who Matt Walsh is, none of this is surprising.

6. This tweet about student loan forgiveness:

what’s next? casting down the mighty from their thrones?? lifting up the lowly?? filling the hungry with good things?? sending the rich away empty?? slippery slope

— Erin Jean Warde (she/her) (@erinjeanwarde) August 25, 2022

(If you don't get it)

7. Google’s Revolution in Historical Research (August 18) "If I had been doing this book 25 years ago, say, in the era of BG, Before Google, there is literally no way I could have found it, not if I was a multi-millionaire antiquarian of Bruce Wayne proportions commanding legions of research assistants."

8. Because of Texas abortion law, her wanted pregnancy became a medical nightmare (July 26) [content note: pregnancy loss] "It's just really unimaginable to be in a position of having to think: How close to death am I before somebody is going to take action and help me?"

9. Atheist to send Texas schools ‘In God We Trust’ signs written in Arabic (August 22) Sort of interesting how conservatives' racism/ cultural ignorance/ anti-Muslim hatred is kind of taken for granted here and not questioned... Like I agree with the point that this atheist is trying to make, but I'm not comfortable with how he builds his point on a foundation of conservatives' hatred towards Muslims, without calling it out.

10. ‘In memory of water’: The Zone Rouge and the stupidity of war (August 22) [content note: war] "The grievances that motivated World War I have faded into irrelevance, but people are still living with the consequences."

Related: Collections: No Man’s Land, Part I: The Trench Stalemate (2021) About common misconceptions about trench warfare in WWI.

Blogaround

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love Stack Exchange for the discussions like this.

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

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

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

"For Pregnant Women and Nursing Mothers"

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

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

Baby born in subway station used as bomb shelter in Kyiv 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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UNHCR - The UN Refugee Agency

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Related:

Why Does the Kingdom of Heaven Belong to Children?

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

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

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

Click here to go to the beginning of the series.

Blogaround

1. "Every Person Is Afraid of the Drones": The Strikes' Effect on Life in Pakistan (posted September 25)

2. Call It Maybe (NFL Replacement Officials Parody) (posted September 21) I lolled.

"The jumbo screen showed the replay, I missed it so bad, I missed it so bad, I missed it so so bad."

3. The Simple Things (posted September 26) "The church would let me or they're not Christians." Sometimes obeying God is simpler than we'd like.

(Or is it?)

4. Systems, privilege, and the "Top 200 Church Blogs" list (posted September 25) Why using "objective measures" to determine the "top 200 church blogs" inadvertently produces a list dominated by white, straight men.

5. 113,000 Reasons Why We Love Portuguese (posted September 26) Just a reminder that large sections of the internet are not in English. This makes me smile.

6. More thoughts on Salvation and urgency... (posted September 6) "Too often in our modern era, we have seen methods where we urge, plea and coax for people to come to Christ. High pressure tactics or emotional manipulation can be used." As Christians, if we try to pressure people into believing in Jesus, then evidently we do not really believe in the power of the gospel- we think we need to help it along.

7. Brave and the Legacy of the Anti-Princess (posted July 26) Great article if you are a fan of Disney, feminism, and analyzing things. It's about Disney's non-traditional princesses, non-princesses which are inexplicably (*cough* money *cough*) included in the "Disney princess" line, and princesses/ other women which are left out.

8. Modest is Hottest? The Revealing Truth (posted September 27) "If we are teaching the girls in our lives that the primary objective of modesty is to keep themselves covered so boys and men don’t think sexual thoughts about them, then we are teaching girls they are responsible for other peoples’ thoughts and they are primarily sexual objects in need of covering." Yes! (See also my posts on modesty: here and here.)

9. Feminist Odyssey Blog Carnival, Fourth Edition: Faith & Feminism (posted September 28) Lots of blog posts on the topic of "faith and feminism"- many of them by feminist Christians.