Americans Living Abroad: Register to Vote NOW, In Case They Change the Rules

A sign that says "Vote" and has a US flag. Image source.

You may have heard about the SAVE Act, which passed the House of Representatives. This bill is supposedly about making sure that only US citizens are voting in US elections, but in reality it would block huge swaths of US citizens from being able to vote. If you don't have a passport or birth certificate that matches your current name, if you don't have a chance to go *in person* to show your documents, you will not be able to register to vote.

Everyone, contact your senators and tell them to vote against the SAVE Act!

I am a US citizen living in China- I can't really go and show them my passport in person. I *think* since I have already registered to vote in previous years, I'm probably not affected by this, but who knows? Some states require voters who vote from abroad to re-register every year. Some states purge people from their voter rolls every now and then, meaning you would need to re-register, and bring your documents in person to do so.

Anyway, if you are a US citizen living abroad, register to vote NOW. If the SAVE Act passes, you will likely not be able to register at all. Do it now while you can.

This site will walk you through it: VoteFromAbroad.org

Some states require the FPCA (this is the form to register to vote from abroad) to be mailed, some allow fax or email. This site has all the information. Spread the word. And contact your senators to tell them NO on the SAVE Act.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Twitterlike is a Bad Shape (April 12, via) "A share addition feature (or "quote posts") can poison site culture by giving people a reason to share bad posts for no other reason than just to announce they disagree."

2. Pig kidney transplant fails after patient rejection (April 11) "'For the first time since 2016, I enjoyed time with friends and family without planning around dialysis treatments. Though the outcome is not what anyone wanted, I know a lot was learned from my 130 days with a pig kidney—and that this can help and inspire many others in their journey to overcome kidney disease,' she said." This is really cool! Even though it failed, this is progress.

3. Tennessee’s "Success Sequence" law ignores what really makes kids successful (April 11) Posting this because yeah this is what I always heard, from republican role models when I was growing up, about why we shouldn't push for systemic changes to help minimum wage workers, single moms, etc. Because the way it's SUPPOSED to work [apparently] is you go to college, graduate, get a good job, get married, and then have kids. If there's a news article about a single mom who is struggling to get by in a minimum wage job- well yeah, it's not SUPPOSED to be doable to try to raise kids on a minimum wage income. We don't need to change society, we need to blame people for not following the life plan they're supposed to. If we raised the minimum wage, that would unfairly mess things up for the people who did things the right way. That's what I learned from republicans...

4. What happened to all the clothing donated during the LA wildfires? (April 14) This is really interesting- I'm very curious about how it works when people donate clothes, because I suspect that the reality is very different from whatever magical ideal is in donors' minds. Anyway, the important thing to always remember is, check with the recipients to confirm what kinds of things they want, before you donate- don't just assume that you're doing a good thing by giving them your random stuff.

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Links related to the antichrist. As always, you don't need to read all these if you're too stressed out. Instead, go protest or help immigrants.

1. Trump Is Separating Immigrant Families Again. Here’s What We Can Do About It. (April 11) "The new administration has unleashed a torrent of policies that have caused irreparable harm to people and families seeking safety."

2. Trump attacks on law firms begin to chill pro bono work on causes he doesn't like (April 13) "If the legal profession doesn't push back now, Levi said, the whole idea of equal justice and the justice system is vulnerable."

3. Feds to collect personal info of people exchanging, sending money from U.S.-Mexico border (April 10) "'Providing your social to exchange two hundred dollars is ridiculous,' Guerra said."

So, there are legitimate reasons that governments would want to know who exactly is sending money internationally. But I don't trust this government is doing it for any of those reasons.

4. Think Twice: China Tells Tourists and Students Eyeing the U.S. (April 14) 

5. Trump told us the horrifying reason why Kilmar Abrego Garcia is not back in the U.S. (April 15) "Trump said the plan: The Trump administration wants this foreign prison — and, perhaps, others — to hold many people sent from America, including U.S. citizens."

And: SMART-TD Stands With Brother Kilmar Abrego Garcia (April 10)

6. Trump administration freezes more than $2.2 billion after Harvard rejects its demands (April 14) "Earlier in the day, Alan Garber, Harvard's president, said in a letter to faculty and students that the university would not submit to a list of demands made last Friday. Among them are that it eliminate DEI programs, screen international students who are 'supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism' and ensure 'viewpoint diversity' in its hiring." Good. Say no to him. For the universities/ companies/ law firms who cave to his demands, that won't be the end of it- he will continue to demand more things from them. If they're doing a calculation about how they can manage to kinda accept his deal- well, don't, because whatever he says is not the actual deal. If you accept it, it will end up being worse than what he said.

7. Haunted by hopelessness: 12 Zambians share their stories as HIV drugs run out (April 14) "An untold number of people with HIV have simply and suddenly lost access to their medication."

8. Should I stay or go? Immigrants across U.S. consider self-deportation (April 14) "'We're scared. We stay indoors all day,' Rosa, a heavily pregnant Honduran woman in Waukegan, Ill., told NPR back in January."

9. Trump can't revoke legal status of migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, judge rules (April 14) "The 'early termination, without any case-by-case justification, of legal status for noncitizens who have complied with DHS programs and entered the country lawfully undermines the rule of law,' wrote Talwani, who sits on the federal district court in Boston." A little bit of good news.

I'm FASCINATED By Charities Asking Me To Pay Their Processing Fees

Credit cards. Image source.

Here's something I noticed recently, that happened on several different charities' websites: I go to set up a monthly donation, let's say for $10, and then the website asks me if I want to pay for the credit card processing fee, by changing my donation to $10.30 instead.

I'm so fascinated by this!

Why are they framing it as "pay the processing fees so that your entire donation will go toward supporting our work"? When I was planning to donate them $10, I didn't care about the internal workings of how that $10 gets divided up and spent on different things. Asking me to pay the credit card processing fees feels like we're in a universe where the donor is like, "I want to give $10 to this charity. But what's this? There's a processing fee so the whole $10 doesn't actually go to the charity? Oh no, we can't have that! I want $10 to go to the charity! I need to add this small amount to my $10 in order to pay the processing fee."

Why does it matter that there's a credit card processing fee? This is really no different than just asking me "Hey could you donate $10.30 instead of $10.00?" And if I feel like $10.30 is fine, then I say yes. Why bring up the credit card processing fee, as if that matters? Are they also going to say "25 cents of your donation goes toward keeping the heat running at our office, would you like to increase your donation by 25 cents so that the whole original amount will go to the work we do?"

I mean, the fact that there's a processing fee doesn't really matter. They're just asking if you could give a little bit more, and then floating this excuse about the credit card processing fee so that there's some pretext of logic to their request.

When this happens to me, sometimes I say yes. If I just had a vague idea that I want to give this charity $10, but I didn't plan out a very exact budget- then sure, the 30 cents doesn't matter to me, so I say yes. But if I've already made a plan like "I want to give x amount of dollars to different charities every month, I will subdivide it among these different organizations, I will give this amount to this one", then I say no when they ask me to pay the processing fee. I've already made a plan! I've already decided what amount to give to charity! I'm not gonna just change it- if I was willing to give 30 cents more, then that would have been factored into the plan at a much earlier step.

This "can you also pay our processing fee" is the sort of thing that works well on donors who decided to give $10 just because it's a nice round number, not because that's the maximum amount that would make sense for their budget.

So it's presented like it's for donors who are so incredibly concerned about controlling the exact details of their donation, who feel like "it's VERY IMPORTANT to me that the charity receives 10 dollars from me, NOT less than 10 dollars due to a credit card fee"- but actually it's for donors who are so unconcerned that they're like "oh, 10 dollars, or 10 dollars and 30 cents? yeah sure whatever."

I really don't think there exists a person who says "I am willing to give exactly 10 dollars- oh but now that you've told me that credit card processing fees exist, that changes everything- now I am willing to give $10.30."

Don't get me wrong: when I say I'm fascinated by this, I'm not criticizing the charities. Nothing wrong with them asking for a bit more, and then making it painless for you to say either yes or no. Nothing wrong with that. It strikes me as a good strategy, because probably a lot of donors will feel like "oh sure whatever, just increase it by a few cents, who cares."

I'm just so fascinated by the psychology of it. Why bring up the credit card processing fee? It doesn't matter! I don't care what they specifically use every small part of my donation for- I just care about the work they are doing overall. (And I think if people are overly concerned about the credit card processing fee, that's illogical.) But instead of asking "hey could you maybe give a little bit more?" they say "hey can you maybe give a little bit more because of the credit card processing fee?" Oh my goodness, this is so fascinating.

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Related:

My Weird Hangups About Charity

Children's Bibles and the 2 Creation Stories

Diagram showing what God made on each of the 6 days of creation. Image source.

I've been reading the book "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles," which IS AMAZING. One of the chapters is called "Conflating Creation, Combining Christmas, and Ostracizing the Other," by Mark Roncace. Let's talk about it.

So, this chapter is about how the bible has 2 different creation stories- Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. And 2 different stories about Jesus birth, found in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2. Roncace examines many different children's bibles to see how they handle these stories. Do they tell only 1 of the creation stories, or both? Do they combine them? Same for the Christmas stories.

Here's how the chapter is introduced (p 193):

The Bible is a collection of books written by many different people in a variety of places over a long period of time in multiple languages to diverse audiences in a plethora of social, religious, political, and economic contexts. Children's Bibles are different. They, generally, present the Bible as a single book and are written by one person in one place, time, and language to a fairly specific audience. Moreover, while the canonical Bible naturally features a diversity of stories from multiple points of view, children's Bibles do not. Instead, they harmonize the canon's disparate voices. This ubiquitous tendency among children's Bibles thus eliminates one of the richest and most pertinent aspects of the Bible: its inherent otherness.

Bibles for children are, of course, shorter than the canonical version, so it is to be expected that some of the diversity will be lost. ... But still, abridged children's versions have plenty of opportunities to make the Bible's diversity apparent to its younger readers. Instead, they purposefully eschew such opportunities by blending the different stories or presenting only one of them.

!!!!!! Oh my goodness, this!

Children's bibles are NOT the bible. That has been pointed out by many of the essays in "Text, Image, & Otherness," and I'm so glad I read this book because it's such a good point. In this chapter specifically, we discuss how children's bibles are not the bible because the actual bible has different parts that disagree with each other, but children's bibles are "harmonized" so that the whole thing tells one consistent story throughout. No contradictions.

In this blog post I'll just talk about the creation story. If you want to hear about the Christmas part too, let me know in the comment section~

So, the 2 creation stories in the bible are:

Genesis 1: This is the story about the 6 days of creation. For each day, it says which things God created on that day. Day 1 is let there be light, etc etc etc, Day 6 is the creation of land animals and people. Male and female are created in the image of God.

Genesis 2: This is the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Adam is created first, but none of the animals are found to be a good partner for Adam, so God creates Eve from Adam's rib.

These are 2 different stories.

When I was evangelical, I had no idea that these were 2 different stories. I had read both of these in children's bibles, and also in the actual bible, many times. If you had asked me what Genesis 1 says, and what Genesis 2 says, I totally could have told you which parts were in which chapter. I knew these chapters very well. I totally never viewed them as being separate, contradictory stories though. 

It just totally never occurred to me. I believed the bible stories were true- that they really happened in the same universe that we live in- so obviously they both fit together onto 1 timeline.

From time to time, I would come across lists of supposed "bible contradictions," and the issue about 2 creation stories would be on those lists. I thought, "No, these aren't 2 stories. Genesis 2 is just giving more details about Day 6 of Genesis 1."

And actually, some English translators also try to pass these off as 1 non-contradictory story. In Genesis 2, after God creates the man, verse 8 says, "Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed." This is the NIV translation of the bible- but "had planted" is a choice- I have heard that "planted" would make more sense as a translation. (I don't know much about ancient Hebrew so I'm not sure I'm getting the details right, but this is what I've heard about the translation.) So if it's "planted", then you have a story like this:

1. First God creates Adam
2. Then God creates plants, and plants a garden, and puts Adam in the garden

But Genesis 1 says that God created plants on the 3rd day, and people on the 6th day, so the order of events in Genesis 2 doesn't match. 

But if it's "had planted", then Genesis 2 reads like this:

1. First God creates plants, and plants a garden
2. Then God creates Adam and puts him in the garden

So if you're translating the bible, and you really really believe it's all true and can't possibly have contradictions, you will translate it as "had planted" even though "planted" might be the expected translation of that word.

Take a look at this link to see how different versions of the bible translate this verse.

(Another way to reconcile this difference is to say that God created plants on day 3, then made Adam on day 6, and put some of the plants into a garden, and put Adam in it- so the planting a garden was a separate thing from when God first created plants. All of these attempts to reconcile the contradiction totally miss the point, though. The point is, it's 2 stories.)

Actually, even now that I've been ex-evangelical for a long time, and I haven't believed in biblical inerrancy for a long time, I still subconsciously think of the creation stories as if Genesis 2 is zooming in on Day 6 of Genesis 1 to give more detail about the creation of humans specifically. I wonder what it would even feel like to really internalize the fact that these are TWO DIFFERENT STORIES.

Page 194 of "Text, Image, & Otherness" says this:

While most readers of the present volume are presumably aware of the two disparate creation stories, the majority of people are not, as professors can attest by their students' lack of knowledge about these supposedly well-known passages. Perhaps children's Bibles are in part to blame, for they inevitably fail to present the two stories independently.

Wow, what would it look like for children's bibles to present these as 2 separate stories? You'd have to pretty explicitly say these are not true stories. I can't really imagine a children's bible doing that.

This chapter of "Text, Image, & Otherness" says that some children's bibles combine the stories- ie, the way I always understood the creation story back then. But, there's this problem (p 195):

Conflating the stories in this fashion omits the profound notion that male and female are created simultaneously and in God's image.

Wow. Hold up.

So, maybe one of the main points of the Genesis 1 version of the story is that male and female are created simultaneously, and that they are both made in God's image.

Wow. I mean, yes I always believed that men and women are both equally made in God's image, but the idea that being created at the same time is a significant detail is totally new to me. It's hard for me to even think in that direction, because I know the Adam and Eve story and I'm always subconsciously filling in Genesis 1 with the details from there.

But what if Genesis 1 is saying that men and women were created at the same time? And that this is important? Not like the woman is an afterthought, right?

I mean, I also feel it's hard to make a big deal about "this is important" because we're very explicitly saying that these are not true stories, so how can you really fixate on details like that and make a big deal out of them?

Anyway, my point is, this biblical-inerrancy fan theory that these 2 stories are happening in the same universe really changes the story. If you believe the fan theory, then you end up imagining a version of the story which isn't what the writers wrote at all.

Then "Text, Image, & Otherness" mentions another way that some children's bibles handle these 2 creation stories. Some children's bibles show only the man being created on day 6. And then God looks at the creation and declares it "very good," and then you move on to the story where Eve is created, OH MY GOODNESS. Whoaaaa, not cool. 

Yeah, first you believe the bible has no contradictions, then before you know it you're teaching kids that women aren't part of the "very good" creation God originally made, YIKES.

(Another common way for children's bibles to deal with this is to only tell 1 of the creation stories and just skip the other. Which is okay I guess, but both stories are making different points, so it's nice to have both.)

Then there's this part on p 200:

Finally, a couple of children's Bibles include both stories independently and relatively completely. They are both Jewish, not Christian, Bibles, which is perhaps not surprising since we are, after all, dealing with the Jewish Scriptures, and Judaism has a long, complex history of wrestling with its own sacred text. The only harmonizing redaction by the JPS Illustrated Children's Bible (Frankel 2009) is to retain the name God for the second story. A Child's Garden of Torah: A Read-Aloud Bedtime Bible (Grishaver 1998) significantly summarizes both stories for its audience, but does not blend the two accounts. It also features some surprisingly difficult questions for its young audience-- for example, What do day one and day four have in common?-- but none of these prompts a child to explore the differences between the two versions. In short, out of approximately thirty-five children's Bibles readily available in the United States, I was able to find only two that present both canonical creation stories. The rest conflate and eliminate.

Interesting! There are a few Jewish children's bibles that present the 2 *separate* creation stories, just like the actual bible does. Jewish people have been reading these stories way longer than Christians have, and there seems to be a tradition of really exploring the stories and accepting different interpretations of them- unlike the evangelical Christian approach of trying to make sure everyone believes the "correct" interpretation.

One more quote I want to copy from "Text, Image, & Otherness" (p 205):

In our globalized world, it seems self-evident that cultivating an understanding and appreciation of different views and ideas is an important task for parents and teachers. Children must learn to thrive among people of different races, languages, cultures, and religious traditions. The Bible, indeed, offers a wonderful resource for the facilitation of these skills and habits. Readers learn to listen carefully and attentively, to engage, evaluate, and interact with different voices in the text-- that is, they learn to think critically and to be spiritually and ethically sensitive human beings. But those opportunities vanish when children encounter rewritten versions that conflate stories and omit the various genres present in the canonical Bible. Children's Bibles ostracize the other instead of offering its readers the chance to meet and learn how to treat the other.

This is spot-on, and also very sad.

The bible is so rich and complex. There are so many characters. Writers were writing from different perspectives and for different purposes. Yes, the bible definitely can be a helpful resource for learning to listen to and empathize with a diverse range of people. But wow, that's so not what it was for me. When I was evangelical, everything was so black-and-white... All the violence in the bible that God commands, I had to force myself to believe it was right... God commands his people to commit genocide, to kill every person in the Canaanite cities they conquered, and I was a good Christian who believed all the correct things, and that meant believing that it was right to kill all those people. They were sinners, they deserved it. 

This is the exact opposite of learning empathy. If you read about the violence commanded by God in the bible, and you feel sad for the victims, well you need to stop if you want to be a good obedient Christian. God said those people deserved to die. How dare you disagree with God? Kill your conscience if it's getting in the way.

One especially ironic part of the quote above is the idea that children need to learn to accept people from different "religious traditions." Wow, I was very much taught that the bible said THE EXACT OPPOSITE of that. The bible was about how Christians are the only ones who know the real Truth, and everyone else's religion is bad and wrong, and they're all going to hell- we have to convince them to abandon their own religions and convert to Christianity.

Really sad, huh? Reading the bible could have been a way to learn about and value diversity, to empathize with both the winners and the victims of the stories. But no, not if you believe in inerrancy. Then reading the bible is about how we're right and everyone else is wrong, and God can kill you if he wants because you're a sinner.

That's why I'm so interested in feminist readings of the bible now. There's so much there, so much that I was never really allowed to think about when I was evangelical, even though I read the bible every day. I know these stories so well, but I find that if you just turn them at a slightly different angle, there are things that I never noticed before- like Genesis 1 and 2 being two different stories- and it's mind-blowing.

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Posts about "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles":

"Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" (I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH)
David and Jonathan's (One-Sided) Friendship 
Who Cut Samson's Hair? (a post about reading the bible for what it is) 
The way we write children's bibles is "an act of bad faith" 
Children's Bibles and the 2 Creation Stories
Children's Bibles and "presenting mass slaughter to children" 
Children's Bibles and "turning ambiguity into clear articulations"
Children's Bibles and the Victims of the Flood 
The Problem of Equating the Bible's God with a Real God

Related:

If God Metaphorically Made the World in 6 Days, What Does That Even Mean? 

"The Wise Men Came 2 Years After the Shepherds" Is Just a Fan Theory

The Bible Stories As I Read Them Were Never Actually In The Bible 

The Bible and the Pixar Theory

Blogaround

"Start a blog," they said. "It'll be fun," they said.

Now here I am 13 years later, staying up late every night to round up links about the fascist goings-on in my country.

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Links not related to the antichrist:

1. How the House’s requirement to prove US citizenship could affect the ability to register to vote (April 11) !!!! The SAVE Act has passed the House and will go to the Senate. Contact your senators and tell them to vote against this!!!!!!! This could take away my right to vote. I'm already registered from previous years, and supposedly these new requirements would just be for new registrations- but states sometimes remove people from the voting rolls, who would then have to re-register. *IN PERSON* Which I cannot do since I'm living in China.

2. AI-Generated Slop Is Already In Your Public Library (February 4, via) "The book, which consists mostly of recipes and includes a disclaimer that the author and publisher 'are not experts in the discussed topics,' didn’t include any dangerous information as far as I could tell, but appears to be AI-generated based on its stilted prose and formatting, consisting of summaries broken up with bolded subheadings common in outputs from LLMs like ChatGPT."

3. Congestion Pricing is a Policy Miracle (March 20, via) "First and foremost, congestion pricing has been stunningly effective at reducing traffic in Manhattan and the bridges/tunnels entering the city."

4. This wild new instrument brings a dinosaur back to life (March 10, via) "The instrument, which takes the form of an accurate, life-sized dinosaur skull, allows human musicians to recreate possible dinosaur vocalizations by blowing into a mouthpiece." This is so cool! But, we shouldn't understand this as "this *is* what dinosaurs sounded like"- instead, this is a plausible reconstruction of what this dinosaur sounded like. At many points in the process there's some guesswork.

5. 17 Montana Republicans Cross Party Lines, Defeat Anti-Trans Bill After Nonbinary Rep's Speech (April 9) "It makes no exception for care obtained legally out of state—simply bringing prescribed medication across state lines could render a Montana parent a felon. The bill also does not limit enforcement to Montana residents; even a parent visiting Glacier National Park or Yellowstone with their transgender child could face felony charges for carrying estrogen, testosterone, or puberty blockers."

6. Trans Athletes: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (April 7) "It is not just about denying trans women the right to play. It's about denying them the right to exist."

7. 23andMe Bankrupt! Should You Delete Your Genetic Data? (April 2)

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Shakedown, breakdown, takedown (April 7) "This is, as numerous observers have said, no different than if you refused to buy anything at the supermarket until the supermarket agreed to buy an equal or greater number of things from you."

2. Deporting veterans betrays America’s promise (April 7, via) "Like many other deported veterans, I was stripped of my home, family, and the nation I swore an oath to defend. I spent over a decade south of the border, advocating for other deported veterans while enduring the pain of being cast aside by the country I once served."

3. ‘A Path of Perfect Lawlessness’ (April 7) "The Supreme Court is about to decide whether the Trump administration can exile Americans to a gulag overseas and then leave them there."

4. The She Made Him Do It Theory of Everything (February 26, via) "Behind these stories is the assumption that some people matter more than other people, and that we who matter less have to pander to those who matter more – conservatives when they are imagined as straight, as white, as male, as rural, as salt of the earth, as the real Americans, unlike us ethnic/ immigrant/ urban/ non-male/ non-straight people."

5. Attorney representing a student protester detained by federal immigration agents (April 9) "And it's setting a terrifying precedent if government agents can target a lawyer at the border. What's stopping them from doing it to anyone who dares to speak out?"

6. 'We love them': Small N.Y. town embraces a family freed from immigration detention (April 8) This is great news! But... what now? This family is still undocumented (as far as I know), and ICE knows where they live. I'm confused about how they've been released, if they're undocumented. It's great news, but I'm still worried about them, and about all the other immigrants in the US...

7. AP wins reinstatement to White House events after judge rules government can’t bar its journalists (April 9) "'For anyone who thinks The Associated Press’ lawsuit against President Trump’s White House is about the name of a body of water, think bigger,' Julie Pace, the AP’s executive editor, wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. 'It’s really about whether the government can control what you say.'"

8. Supreme Court says Trump officials should help return wrongly deported Maryland man (April 10) Good news! But also, I fully expect these MAGAs to come up with all kinds of excuses for why they "can't."

9. Homeland Security agents attempted to enter 2 LAUSD schools. Here's what families should know (April 10) "The principals of each school denied the agents entry and contacted the district’s legal department."

10. Utah colleges confirm dozens of international student visas terminated (April 9)

And: Visas revoked for students, graduates at multiple Texas universities amid deportation efforts (April 10)

Video Game Museum of CADPA (Shanghai, China)

Hi readers! I visited the Video Game Museum of CADPA, here in Shanghai, and took a bunch of pictures I'd like to share here. Lots of old games and consoles. Very cool.

I'm not really into gaming like my husband is, but I like pokemon and Mario Kart. The first game I really got into was Pokemon Gold, on the Gameboy Color.

Here are my photos!

"Bizzy Bear" (these books are great for babies)

Book cover for "Bizzy Bear: Christmas Helper." Image source.

My kids have a few books from the "Bizzy Bear" series, and they love them. Usually when I review kids' books on the blog, I have a lot of complicated opinions about them- not so for Bizzy Bear. These are just straightforwardly good baby books. Not really much to say. They're great.

These are board books, showing the bear doing various jobs or going to various places. What makes them really cool is, every page has some kind of little tab or slider that the baby can pull, to make something move. Babies are SO INTO THIS!

And in China, you can buy bilingual versions, Chinese and English, which is great.

Okay that's all I have to say about that~ I recommend these books if you have a baby.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. If you are a North Carolina voter- The Griffin List: Find N. C. Voters Whose 2024 Legal Votes are at Risk of Not Counting "On April 4, 2025, the North Carolina Court of Appeals sided with Griffin’s argument that over 65,000 votes should be tossed out – including those of military members serving overseas." Check to see if you need to "cure" your ballot to make sure your vote is counted. Spread the word.

2. A Ragamuffin Band - My Deliverer (by Rich Mullins) (video posted 2019 but the song is much older than that) I like this song.

3. Montana Adult Trans Bathroom Ban Blocked In Court: "No Evidence" It Protects Women (April 3) "Rather than protect women’s safety, operators of domestic violence and homeless shelters testified that the bill would actually endanger the very people it claimed to protect."

4. Why Your Brain Blinds You For 2 Hours Every Day (March 18) 12-minute video from Kurzgesagt. I am really interested in this- how our brains take all the raw data we constantly experience, and compress it down to some kind of model of how the world works which makes sense to us. Filtering out a lot of things because it's just not possible to handle all of that data. It means our awareness of reality is an imperfect model- it can never be the real reality.

5. Is this a real orange owl — or AI? (March 26) This is so cool! So beautiful.

6. our place in the justice paradox (March 24) "In this reading, the text in question becomes a charge to work for the structural changes that will eventually bring about the end of poverty while also meeting the pressing needs of those around us."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. After Marathon Senate Speech, Cory Booker joins Rachel maddow (April 2) 

2. Chuck Schumer Is Pushing Young People Away From the Democratic Party With His Toothless Leadership (March 31, via) "Whether it’s watered-down climate policies or half-measures on student debt and health care, the Democratic Party’s reluctance to take bold, unapologetic stances clashes with what young people expect from a so-called progressive movement."

3. US defends tariffs on remote island of penguins and seals (April 7)

4. Jewish Students Chain Themselves to Columbia Gates to Protest ICE Jailing of Mahmoud Khalil (April 3)

5. This:

Image source.

6. Posts online correctly cracked the formula for Trump's tariffs (April 3) "This is an insane objective. There is no economic reason to have balanced trade with all countries"

7. Around 1,000 march in Sackets Harbor to seek return of family taken by ICE (April 5, via) "These people are part of the fabric of our community, and we’re not going to let things like this happen without some outrage."

8. Photos: See demonstrators around the country rally in 'Hands Off!' protests (April 5) I'm really proud of all of you who went to these protests.

9. Why has Trump revoked all South Sudanese visas? (April 7)

What I Regret About Twitter

Twitter icon. Image source.

The best thing to come out of twitter was the large boulder the size of a small boulder. Remember that? It was in 2020. The San Miguel Sheriff twitter account tried to write "large boulder the size of a small car" but accidentally wrote "large boulder the size of a small boulder" and PEOPLE LOVED IT. That is top-notch humor right there. That's gonna be what I always remember twitter for.

On twitter, basically every day people would be talking about some new thing that happened, and everyone would be posting their own little jokes about it. Their little one-liner hot takes. That's what twitter did. Ideas would catch on, and twitter would just run away with them. 

When it's just harmless stuff like the large boulder the size of a small boulder, this is great. But sometimes it was about news and politics and "us vs them" issues. And then the "take an idea and run with it" quality of twitter was not good. It meant we were misrepresenting what was going on. We were spreading misinformation. We were making ourselves feel like we're so good and smart, and those people on the other side who disagree with us are so obviously wrong.

I have 2 examples I'll post here:

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Example 1: AOC's dancing video

One day in 2019, twitter was all abuzz over a video that had been posted, showing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing with friends on a rooftop when she was a college student. 

But the narrative on twitter wasn't "lol look at this goofy video, this is great." It was "AOC made a goofy video, years ago, and conservatives are outraged."

CONSERVATIVES ARE OUTRAGED!

Can you believe those conservatives? Can you believe how outraged they are, over college kids just being silly college kids? LOLOLOL, those conservatives! Acting like this is some kind of big scandal! LOLOLOLOL! Conservatives are outraged! LOLOLOL wait til they hear what Brett Kavanaugh got up to in college! LOLOLOL! Point and laugh at all the conservatives who are outraged. They think this is some kind of scandal, but it's not- jokes on them!

So many clever little tweets about how those conservatives are being so illogical, because they are outraged about this video.

And we all got caught up in it. I got caught up in it too. But did we ever pull back and ask the question: "Wait, conservatives are outraged about this? Really? They are? Who, specifically?"

Apparently the video was posted by a right-wing account, in an attempt to embarrass AOC. So, okay, whoever runs that account, I guess they are the "conservatives" who are "outraged." But, any other conservatives? Anyone? Does anyone even care? 

The way people on twitter talked about this, it was like we were imagining a whole movement of conservatives. Like, you meet a conservative on the internet, and probably they are outraged over this video that AOC filmed, years ago. This was not true, at all. Seriously. This whole "conservatives are outraged" thing, that we all made jokes about, all those outraged conservatives that we mocked- they weren't real. There were maybe a few extremely-online conservatives who thought they had uncovered some kind of scandal- but overall, no, it was NOT TRUE that "conservatives are outraged" about that video.

So all those fun little jokes on twitter, about how those conservatives are so wrong and illogical for being outraged about this- we were spreading misinformation. There was no such movement of outraged conservatives. Maybe there were a few of them, but they were not in any way representative of most conservatives.

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[content note: example 2 is about rape]

Example 2: "Rape is a pre-existing condition"

In 2017, there was this health-care bill that Republicans were trying to pass, to make big changes to the Affordable Care Act. (It ended up not passing.) 

On twitter, everybody was saying that this health care bill makes rape a pre-existing condition, allowing insurers to deny health care to rape victims. Here are a few actual news articles that give a more detailed description than whatever you'd find on twitter: Is Rape A Pre-Existing Condition? Not Exactly and Are pregnancy and rape pre-existing conditions under GOP health bill?

But twitter heard "rape is a pre-existing condition" and RAN WITH IT.

It was wild. Everyone was posting their not-well-informed takes about how bad this bill is, because "rape is a pre-existing condition." Someone tweeted something like "your health insurance company just found out your college boyfriend gave you a black eye, now they won't pay for your cancer treatments" and some other over-the-top unrealistic interpretations like that- and I'm embarrassed to say I retweeted that. I got caught up in this outrage too. 

People were really on twitter advising rape victims to never ever tell anyone, because then they would lose their health insurance. 

It was, wow, it was so bad. So much misinformation we were spreading.

There was a little bit of truth to it- the new health care bill would have allowed insurers to deny coverage for a lot of reasons, and in practical terms this likely would lead to rape victims being denied coverage for the types of health care that are often needed by rape victims. It was NOT a good bill. But the way people were talking about it on twitter completely misrepresented what it was. People were talking about it like if this bill passes, then if your health insurance company finds out you were raped a long time ago, they'll just suddenly start denying all your claims out of the blue.

A lot of people were getting their news from twitter rather than reading actual news articles. *I* was getting a lot of news from twitter back then too- this is unavoidable, really. What's the alternative- require everyone to read news articles to get the background information on what everyone on twitter is talking about, before they're allowed to log in? No, that's not realistic- and so what happens is you log on twitter and you see everyone talking about something, a sentence here, a sentence there, and you try to piece together what it's about. And then you tweet your own take on it. Ugh this is such a misinformation factory.

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"The algorithm" that shows us what we want to see and tells us we're smarter than everyone else

In my early days as an ex-evangelical, twitter was a really good place for me. I met a lot of good people on ex-evangelical twitter. I used to say "twitter is my church." 

It really went downhill though, sometime around the 2016 election, and the pandemic in early 2020. Then my twitter feed was all doom-and-gloom, and I wasn't seeing posts from the people I used to follow- not sure if it's because they had left twitter, or if The Algorithm just wasn't showing them to me. As for my own tweets, I typically would just tweet links to my blog posts, y'all know me, when I want to say something, I write thousands of words about it, not 1 little tweet. But toward the end, I wasn't really getting any engagement when I tweeted those links. Maybe they were being suppressed by The Algorithm. Yeah, toward the end, it wasn't about me connecting with people, it was just reading other people's clever takes, people with way more followers than me- and feeling like there's no point to me tweeting anything myself, because no one will end up seeing it anyway.

And all these problems existed before Elon Musk bought it. And then things got worse because of him. There has been a lot of talk about alternatives to twitter- a lot of people are on Blue Sky now- but I've decided that's not for me. Any site that "has an algorithm" is going to end up being just a feed of little jokes about why people on "our side" are right and those people on "the other side" are wrong- how it's so obvious that we're right and they're wrong, so obvious that it can be summed up in 1 little joke. Oh... actually I'm saying more about myself than about "the algorithm"- it shows you what you want to see- what the subconscious instant-gratification part of yourself wants to see- and apparently what I want to see is jokes about why I'm right and other people are wrong.

A whole feed of little tweets, coming at you so fast, and you only spend a few seconds on each one- if you retweet it, that's based on how it makes you feel, not based on whether it's actually true and worthy of being promoted.

There's a place for that- there's a place for this kind of snappy little joke about why other people's opinions are wrong. We need that. We need the comedians mocking the powers-that-be. We need the political cartoons. But jokes and one-liner hot takes shouldn't be your main source of information about the news.

It can be a good thing in moderation. But I've found it's not healthy for me to have a site I can go to, and spend as much time as I want, and look at a constantly-refreshing feed of this kind of content. Then it becomes misinformation- then you feel that the issue really is as simple and obvious as it's described in the tweets. 

When someone tweets a little one-liner about why some political stance is wrong, that tweet reflects that person's opinion on what the key issues are. It's about taking a complex topic and picking out one aspect of it, and showing that that aspect contains a contradiction. It's *your opinion* that that aspect is the important one- and sure, they may be good reasons that you believe that aspect is worth focusing on, your little joke may indeed point out something that people should pay attention to- but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that other people won't frame it in that way. It's not really that simple.

So I've figured out that I can't be on a site that shows me that kind of a feed. It promotes the idea that people who don't agree with me are so one-dimensionally ignorant that a simple little joke can expose them as being completely wrong. And it's an environment where tweets build on other tweets of people's half-baked opinions, like a whirlwind of misinformation.

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See also this post from Coyote: Twitterlike is a Bad Shape

Related:

I'm not sure about "the cruelty is the point"

Blogaround

 Links not about that felon:

1. What does Islam have against sleep? (March 29) "Even if you go to bed right after Isha and wake up at the tail end of Fajr, you will get at the most 6 hours."

2. As measles cases rise, some parents become vaccine enthusiasts (March 30) Yessssss. Love vaccines. Love when my kids don't get measles. It's awesome.

3. ‘I Love Him’: A Suicide, a Student’s Diary, and a School’s Reckoning (March 28) [content note: sexual assault, suicide] 

4. Fed'l court rules Alabama AG's threatened abortion-fund prosecutions unconstitutional (April 1) "In short, people seeking abortions that would be legal elsewhere can do so. Ultimately, he concluded, that right protects those who seek to help them as well."

5. 'Zero to Hero' (From Disney’s Hercules) | Sung by London's West End Muses 🎶✨ (March 7) Wow, love this!

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Links about that felon:

1. Deported over a tattoo? Lawyer claims client is not a gang member (March 28) "DHS wants the public to believe these people are criminals and gang members. So if they have proof of that, why wouldn't they release it to the public?"

And: Trump administration admits Maryland man sent to El Salvador prison by mistake (April 1) "'If they're allowed to get away with this, then it means that the immigration laws are meaningless, all of them,' Sandoval-Moshenberg said."

2. Study: Black Lives Matter Protests Beat Trump (April 2) "So if you’re wondering if it makes any sense to go out and protest your fascist overlords, the answer is “absolutely, yes.” Do not listen to the doomers who tell you it’s too late, that there’s nothing you can do, that no one will listen, that you’re too extreme, or that you’re just encouraging people to go out and buy more Cybertrucks. Show up, meet your fellow activists, and agitate for change."

3. Cory Booker breaks a 68-year-old Senate record with a 25-hour speech (April 2) "Booker's speech took aim at President Trump, White House senior adviser Elon Musk and policies that he said show a 'complete disregard for the rule of law, the Constitution and the needs of the American people.'"

4. Top scientists warn that Trump policies are causing a 'climate of fear' in research (April 1) "'A climate of fear has descended on the research community,' the letter says. Researchers fearing for their jobs are 'removing their names from publications, abandoning studies, and rewriting grant proposals and papers to remove scientifically accurate terms (such as 'climate change') that agencies are flagging as objectionable.'"