Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 147

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. Inside the White House Bible Study group (Owen Amos, BBC): “But is a bible study for Cab­i­net mem­bers, with polit­i­cal themes, not a merg­ing of church and state? ‘I believe in insti­tu­tion­al sep­a­ra­tion, but not influ­en­tial separation,’ [Drollinger] says. ‘No mat­ter what the insti­tu­tion is — the fam­i­ly, com­merce, edu­ca­tion — it needs the bul­wark pre­cepts of the word of God in order to func­tion cor­rect­ly… But the minute I start to amal­ga­mate the church and the state insti­tu­tion­al­ly, then I’m into theocracy.’”
2. Why you stink at fact-check­ing (Lisa Fazio, The Con­ver­sa­tion): “First, peo­ple have a gen­er­al bias to believe that things are true. (After all, most things that we read or hear are true.) In fact, there’s some evi­dence that we ini­tial­ly process all state­ments as true and that it then takes cog­ni­tive effort to men­tal­ly mark them as false. Sec­ond, peo­ple tend to accept infor­ma­tion as long as it’s close enough to the cor­rect infor­ma­tion. Nat­ur­al speech often includes errors, paus­es and repeats. (‘She was wear­ing a blue – um, I mean, a black, a black dress.’) One idea is that to main­tain con­ver­sa­tions we need to go with the flow – accept infor­ma­tion that is ‘good enough’ and just move on.” The author is a psych pro­fes­sor at Van­der­bilt.
3. One extra glass of wine ‘will short­en your life by 30 min­utes’ (Sarah Bose­ly, The Guardian): “The risks for a 40-year-old of drink­ing over the rec­om­mend­ed dai­ly lim­it were com­pa­ra­ble to smok­ing, said one lead­ing sci­en­tist. ‘Above two units a day, the death rates steadi­ly climb,’ said David Spiegel­hal­ter, Win­ton pro­fes­sor for the pub­lic under­stand­ing of risk at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cambridge.” This is cer­tain­ly going to be con­test­ed research, but it caught my eye.
4. The 10-Year Baby Win­dow That Is the Key to the Women’s Pay Gap (Claire Cain Miller, NY Times): “When women have their first child between age 25 and 35, their pay nev­er recov­ers, rel­a­tive to that of their hus­bands. Yet women who have their first baby either before 25 or after 35 — before their careers get start­ed or once they’re estab­lished — even­tu­al­ly close the pay gap with their husbands.”
5. Two dif­fer­ent analy­ses of California’s state pol­i­tics:
   • CA is awe­some! The Great Les­son of Cal­i­for­nia in America’s New Civ­il War (Peter Ley­den and Ruy Teix­eira, Medi­um): “California today pro­vides a mod­el for Amer­i­ca as a whole. This mod­el of pol­i­tics and gov­ern­ment is by no means per­fect, but it is far ahead of the nation in com­ing to terms with the inex­orable dig­i­tal, glob­al, sus­tain­able trans­for­ma­tion of our era. It is a thriv­ing work in progress that gives hope that Amer­i­ca can pull out of the polit­i­cal mess we’re in.”
   • CA is a train wreck! Cal­i­for­nia Is the Mod­el for Nation­al Divorce, Not Demo­c­ra­t­ic Dom­i­na­tion (David French, Nation­al Review): “…it turns out that Cal­i­for­nia pol­i­tics and poli­cies are repel­lent to mil­lions of Cal­i­for­ni­ans. Between 2007 and 2016 rough­ly 6 mil­lion Cal­i­for­nia res­i­dents left the state. Only 5 mil­lion peo­ple moved to Cal­i­for­nia from oth­er Amer­i­can states. And where did a plu­ral­i­ty of for­mer Cal­i­for­ni­ans go? Texas.”
6. The Sam Har­ris Debate (Ezra Klein, Vox): this is a long, inter­est­ing debate part­ly about Charles Mur­ray but ulti­mate­ly about much deep­er issues.
   • Sam Har­ris: “How can we get to a world where the max­i­mum num­ber of peo­ple thrive? I view iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics as among the worst pieces of soft­ware you can be run­ning to try to get there. I want to get to a world where, I mean, it’s Mar­tin Luther King’s claim about the con­tent of your char­ac­ter, rather than the col­or of your skin. That is the goal, and if you want to reverse engi­neer that goal, giv­ing pri­ma­cy to iden­ti­ty is one of the worst things you can do.”
   • Ezra Klein: “To Har­ris… iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics is some­thing oth­ers do. To me, it’s some­thing we all do, and that he and many oth­ers refuse to admit they’re doing. This is one of the advan­tages of being the major­i­ty group: Your con­cerns get cod­ed as con­cerns; it’s every­one else who is play­ing iden­ti­ty politics.”
7. There was a big ker­fluff­fle about The Atlantic fir­ing colum­nist Kevin Williams over his views on abor­tion. I was real­ly stunned by how much ink was spilled over it — this is just a small sam­ple. The authors make inter­est­ing obser­va­tions about dis­agree­ment in Amer­i­ca.
   • Kevin Williamson, Thought Crim­i­nal (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Nation­al Review): “Editors or own­ers should have absolute author­i­ty to con­trol what appears in the pages of their mag­a­zines. How they exer­cise that author­i­ty, i.e., how much ortho­doxy they want to impose or how much free-for-all they want to encour­age, is a pru­den­tial ques­tion (and one I often have strong opin­ions about). What edi­tors should not have any con­trol over is what their writ­ers are allowed to think.”
   • Among The Abor­tion Extrem­ists (Ross Douthat, NY Times):  “…this is a case study in exact­ly the prob­lem estab­lish­ment edi­tors are try­ing to address by widen­ing their pool of writ­ers: the inabil­i­ty of con­tem­po­rary lib­er­al­ism to see itself from the out­side, as it looks to the many peo­ple who for some rea­son, class or reli­gion or his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ence, are not ful­ly indoc­tri­nat­ed into its increas­ing­ly inco­her­ent mix of ortho­dox­ies. By this I mean that my pro-choice friends endors­ing Williamson’s sack­ing can’t see that his extrem­ism is mir­rored in their own…”
   • Bias against con­ser­v­a­tives works like any oth­er prej­u­dice (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In a bet­ter world, this moment would help us under­stand each oth­er, and come to some sort of rea­son­able agree­ment, rather than swear­ing mutu­al­ly assured destruc­tion. That’s because what con­ser­v­a­tives are say­ing about media bias sounds a lot like what lib­er­als are say­ing about race and gen­der — and vice versa.”
   • Con­grats, Jeff Gold­berg. You Just Mar­tyred Kevin Williamson. (Jack Schae­fer, Politi­co): “I’ve long admired Williamson’s writ­ing, if not his ideas, for the way he’s inter­nal­ized Michael Kinsley’s warn­ing that if you’re afraid to go too far, you won’t go far enough. Williamson almost always goes too far, tak­ing his argu­ments to thought fron­tiers where there are no roads, no mobile phone ser­vice and some­times bare­ly enough air to breathe.”
   • A Twit­ter thread by Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig giv­ing anoth­er point of view: “So the mar­ket incen­tives inside the rightwing media world — the things you need to do to get ahead there — are oppo­site those out­side of it. To put it anoth­er way: You can get famous trig­ger­ing libs, but if you’re real­ly good at it, well…it works?”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Grace­ful­ly Graces Me (YouTube): I am grate­ful that our wor­ship team doesn’t sing songs like this
• Nev­er Throw Any­thing Away (Pearls Before Swine): I am pig, to the tremen­dous con­ster­na­tion of my wife.
• What is Skim Milk? The FDA ver­sus Dairy Farm­ers (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “South Moun­tain Cream­ery sells skim milk, i.e. milk with the fat skimmed off. The FDA, how­ev­er, wants skim milk to con­tain as many vit­a­mins as whole milk so they define skim milk as includ­ing vit­a­min A and D. If farm­ers want to sell skim milk and call it ‘skim milk’ they have to add vit­a­mins. To avoid pros­e­cu­tion the FDA is requir­ing South Moun­tain Cream­ery to label their skim milk, ‘imitation skim milk’! Yes. War is Peace. Free­dom is Slav­ery. Real Skim Milk is Imi­ta­tion Skim Milk.” This is actu­al­ly true. I still found it amus­ing.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have some thoughts about slav­ery and the Bible – Does The Bible Sup­port Slav­ery? (a lec­ture giv­en by the war­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, the link is to the video with notes) and Does God Con­done Slav­ery In The Bible? (Part One – Old Tes­ta­ment) and also Part Two – New Tes­ta­ment (longer pieces from Glenn Miller at Chris­t­ian Think­tank). All three are quite help­ful. (first shared in vol­ume 76)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

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