Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 427

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.

427 feels kin­da prime-ish, but it’s not. 427 = 61*7.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ‘Gen­der-Affirm­ing Care Is Dan­ger­ous. I Know Because I Helped Pio­neer It.’ (Riit­tak­ert­tu Kaltiala, The Free Press): “Soon after our hos­pi­tal began offer­ing hor­mon­al inter­ven­tions for these patients, we began to see that the mir­a­cle we had been promised was not hap­pen­ing. What we were see­ing was just the oppo­site. The young peo­ple we were treat­ing were not thriv­ing. Instead, their lives were dete­ri­o­rat­ing. We thought, what is this? Because there wasn’t a hint in stud­ies that this could hap­pen.”
  2. More Israel/Gaza per­spec­tives:
    • The Decol­o­niza­tion Nar­ra­tive Is Dan­ger­ous and False (Simon Sebag Mon­te­fiore, The Atlantic): “The decol­o­niza­tion nar­ra­tive… holds that Israel is an ‘impe­ri­al­ist-colo­nial­ist’ force, that Israelis are ‘set­tler-colo­nial­ists,’ and that Pales­tini­ans have a right to elim­i­nate their oppres­sors. (On Octo­ber 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as ‘white’ or ‘white-adja­cent’ and Pales­tini­ans as ‘peo­ple of col­or.’ This ide­ol­o­gy, pow­er­ful in the acad­e­my but long over­due for seri­ous chal­lenge, is a tox­ic, his­tor­i­cal­ly non­sen­si­cal mix of Marx­ist the­o­ry, Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­da, and tra­di­tion­al anti-Semi­tism from the Mid­dle Ages and the 19th cen­tu­ry. But its cur­rent engine is the new iden­ti­ty analy­sis, which sees his­to­ry through a con­cept of race that derives from the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence.”
      • Long but good. The author, who is Jew­ish, is well-known for his his­to­ry books (per­haps the best way to describe him is as a non-aca­d­e­m­ic his­to­ri­an).
    • Whose Geno­cide Is It Any­way? (Zachary R. Gold­smith, Quil­lette): “Since the year 2000, the pop­u­la­tion of Gaza has near­ly dou­bled; it boasts the 39th high­est birthrate among the world’s coun­tries, and the aver­age life expectan­cy is near­ly 76 years of age (the aver­age life expectan­cy in the US is just over 77 years of age). If Israel is intent on com­mit­ting geno­cide in Gaza, it is doing a very poor job.… Since the Mid­dle Ages, Jews have been accused of mur­der­ing chil­dren and using their blood for rit­u­al pur­pos­es. This blood libel lives on today in a new form, as the Jews of the state of Israel are accused of pur­pose­ful­ly killing chil­dren in a cam­paign of geno­cide.”
    • Hamas’ Bid for Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Legit­i­ma­cy (Damir Maru­sic, Sub­stack): “…for rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ments, vio­lence is a polit­i­cal act. Like any num­ber of rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ments, Hamas knew exact­ly what it was doing. But in my ini­tial read of its cyn­i­cal cal­cu­la­tion, I didn’t give them their due. They weren’t mere­ly try­ing to tor­pe­do a deal that could be their undo­ing. They were mak­ing a bid for full polit­i­cal legit­i­ma­cy among Pales­tini­ans.”
      • The author is an edi­tor at the Wash­ing­ton Post.
    • Stop help­ing Hamas win its dis­in­for­ma­tion war (Sam Wineb­urg, Times of Israel): “Along with my col­leagues at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, I have spent the last sev­en years study­ing how peo­ple learn to make bet­ter deci­sions about what to believe online.… Here are four guide­lines for see­ing through the fog and stay­ing sane in the midst of this cur­rent infor­ma­tion war.”
      • The author is an emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor of edu­ca­tion at Stan­ford.
    • What Hap­pens When There Aren’t Enough Jews to Lynch? (Avi­tal Chizhik-Gold­schmidt, The Free Press): “…a flight from Tel Aviv was land­ing on Sun­day evening at the air­port in the city of Makhachkala. Hun­dreds of peo­ple stormed the air­port to greet that flight—of 45 pas­sen­gers, 15 were Israeli, many of them chil­dren. ‘Allahu Akbar,’ they shout in videos that have emerged online, some men wav­ing Pales­tin­ian flags. On the tar­mac, they attack an air­port employ­ee, who des­per­ate­ly explains: ‘There are no pas­sen­gers here any­more,’ and then exclaims, ‘I am Mus­lim!’ Some of the riot­ers demand­ed to exam­ine the pass­ports of arriv­ing pas­sen­gers, seem­ing­ly try­ing to iden­ti­fy those who were Israeli, and oth­ers searched cars as they were leav­ing. Anoth­er video emerged of two young boys at the air­port, proud­ly declar­ing that they came to ‘kill Jews’ with knives.”
      • Anti­semitism is surg­ing glob­al­ly and it is ter­ri­fy­ing to watch.
    • The Israel-Hamas War Will Reshape West­ern Pol­i­tics (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “These [decades-old Amer­i­can] group­ings still exist — evan­gel­i­cals are still very pro-Israel, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dent is a Zion­ist lib­er­al, the pro­gres­sive move­ment is pro-Pales­tin­ian — but in the cur­rent cri­sis you can see a more com­plex align­ment tak­ing shape, with impli­ca­tions that extend beyond the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian ques­tion alone.”
  3. Just the Facts on ‘Geofenc­ing’ (Mag­gie Mac­Far­land Phillips, Real Clear Pol­i­cy): “Data bro­kers, includ­ing Safe­Graph, insist that their infor­ma­tion is anonymized. But it is pre­cise­ly the lack of speci­fici­ty that wor­ries crit­ics. ‘There’s no par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­ual who the gov­ern­ment is sus­pi­cious of,’ Adam Schwartz of the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion, told Real­Clear­In­ves­ti­ga­tions. ‘It’s a drag­net.’ More­over, there is no guar­an­tee that the data col­lect­ed through geofenc­ing stays anony­mous. ‘It is often very easy to take sup­pos­ed­ly de-iden­ti­fied data and re-iden­ti­fy a per­son,’ said Schwartz, ‘And it’s very, very easy to do that with loca­tion data.’”
  4. Movies, Moral Revul­sion, and a Post-Chris­t­ian Age (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “It seems to me that the idea that you can elic­it moral revul­sion mere­ly by depict­ing evil assumes two things. First, it assumes that the realm of the visu­al can be manip­u­lat­ed to bypass tit­il­la­tion and pro­ceed straight to con­dem­na­tion. Sec­ond, it assumes an audi­ence who pos­sess a moral imag­i­na­tion that would both moti­vate and equip them to do this. The first assump­tion could be false. The sec­ond assump­tion absolute­ly is. Sec­u­lar soci­ety, aid­ed by the litur­gi­cal effect of the Inter­net and the porno­graph­ic nature of the Web, has long been feed­ing itself on images of the moral­ly out­ra­geous.”
    • Chris­tians were famous­ly hos­tile towards mass enter­tain­ment a few decades ago. The next gen­er­a­tion of evan­gel­i­cals rebelled against that and too often became uncrit­i­cal­ly accept­ing of all forms of enter­tain­ment. We need to get to place of reject­ing what needs to be reject­ed and allow­ing free­dom oth­er­wise. There are shows you should not watch and songs you should not jam out to. And you should be will­ing to tell peo­ple why, “Yeah, I did­n’t watch Game of Thrones once I real­ized how porno­graph­ic it was.” Or in a paper about a film you had to watch for a class, “The direc­tor made a mis­take includ­ing [what­ev­er it is]: it does­n’t advance the plot or enhance the theme. It actu­al­ly under­mines the pur­pose of the work and seems to have been includ­ed most­ly to appeal to a cer­tain intel­lec­tu­al demo­graph­ic, there­by mak­ing the film’s mes­sage need­less­ly inac­ces­si­ble to those not already pre­dis­posed to agree with it.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have

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). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. 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. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

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