Tag: china

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 357

lots of arti­cles from a busy week — skim the titles and you’ll find at least one that intrigues you

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.

357 is an idoneal num­ber, only 65 of which are known to exist (and there are at most 2 more). A num­ber is idoneal if there is no way to write it as ab+bc+ac where a, b and c are all dif­fer­ent pos­i­tive num­bers. I did­n’t know idoneal num­bers exist­ed until today. Here’s a paper about them.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. AI Relat­ed Arti­cles (Inter­est­ing and Ter­ri­fy­ing)
    • GPT‑3 is ‑right now- already more than capa­ble of enabling stu­dent pla­gia­rism (anony­mous, Sub­stack): “I can­not empha­size enough that this is not ‘some­time vague­ly in the next five years’, nor is it ‘acces­si­ble only to stu­dents with a back­ground in comp sci’. It’s a 6 cents per thou­sand words pla­gia­rism ser­vice avail­able to every­one right now.… One idea- play around with your own ques­tions before assign­ing them to stu­dents and make sure GPT‑3 has trou­ble answer­ing them.” This is actu­al­ly quite stun­ning.
    • AI Wrote and Per­formed a Jer­ry Sein­feld Rou­tine (YouTube): one minute. GPT‑3 wrote a Jer­ry Sein­feld joke and this YouTube chan­nel did a deep­fake of his voice deliv­er­ing it. Not per­fect… but sur­pris­ing­ly good.
    • Google Engi­neer on His Sen­tient AI Claim (Bloomberg Tech­nol­o­gy, YouTube): ten min­utes. This is, to be clear, a dif­fer­ent AI sys­tem than GPT‑3.
    • ‘An Invis­i­ble Cage’: How Chi­na Is Polic­ing the Future (Paul Mozur, Muyi Xiao & John Liu, New York Times): “The lat­est gen­er­a­tion of tech­nol­o­gy digs through the vast amounts of data col­lect­ed on their dai­ly activ­i­ties to find pat­terns and aber­ra­tions, promis­ing to pre­dict crimes or protests before they hap­pen. They tar­get poten­tial trou­ble­mak­ers in the eyes of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment — not only those with a crim­i­nal past but also vul­ner­a­ble groups, includ­ing eth­nic minori­ties, migrant work­ers and those with a his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness. They can warn the police if a vic­tim of a fraud tries to trav­el to Bei­jing to peti­tion the gov­ern­ment for pay­ment or a drug user makes too many calls to the same num­ber. They can sig­nal offi­cers each time a per­son with a his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness gets near a school.” Empha­sis added.
  2. Weed users near­ly 25% more like­ly to need emer­gency care and hos­pi­tal­iza­tion (Sandee LaM­otte, CNN): “When com­pared with peo­ple who did not use mar­i­jua­na, cannabis users were 22% more like­ly to vis­it an emer­gency depart­ment or be hos­pi­tal­ized, the study revealed. The find­ing held true even after adjust­ing the analy­sis for over 30 oth­er con­found­ing fac­tors, includ­ing oth­er illic­it drug use, alco­hol use and tobac­co smok­ing.”
  3. Some Supreme Court arti­cles:
    • Dobbs Is Not the Only Rea­son to Ques­tion the Legit­i­ma­cy of the Supreme Court (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Our polit­i­cal sys­tem is not designed for polit­i­cal par­ties this dif­fer­ent, and this antag­o­nis­tic. It wasn’t designed for polit­i­cal par­ties at all. The three branch­es of our sys­tem were intend­ed to check each oth­er through com­pe­ti­tion. Instead, par­ties com­pete and coop­er­ate across branch­es, and pow­er in one can be used to build pow­er in anoth­er — as McConnell well under­stood.”
    • The End of Roe Is Just the Begin­ning (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…any con­fi­dent pre­dic­tion about this ruling’s con­se­quences is prob­a­bly a fool­ish one. There can be no cer­tain­ty about the future of abor­tion pol­i­tics because for almost 50 years all pol­i­cy debates have been over­shad­owed by judi­cial con­tro­ver­sy, and only now are we about to find out what the con­test real­ly looks like. It’s mere­ly the end of the begin­ning; the true end, in what­ev­er set­tle­ment or vic­to­ry, lies ahead.”
    • After Dobbs, mar­ried women keep­ing their sur­names regains polit­i­cal mean­ing (Kim­ber­ly A. Ham­lin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Today, sur­veys esti­mate that between 10 per­cent and 20 per­cent of Amer­i­can women keep their maid­en names, though the per­cent­age is high­er for women with advanced degrees and those who mar­ry lat­er in life. Debates about sur­names are, in essence, debates about women’s auton­o­my. Do we regard women as indi­vid­ual cit­i­zens or, pri­mar­i­ly, as wives and moth­ers?” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Mia­mi Uni­ver­si­ty (in Ohio).
    • Vouch­ers for Reli­gious Schools Don’t Threat­en the Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State (Chris Freiman, Sub­stack): “Crit­ics of vouch­ers fail to dis­tin­guish between a direct sub­sidy for reli­gion and a tax-fund­ed enti­tle­ment dis­trib­uted to cit­i­zens who may use that enti­tle­ment for reli­gious pur­pos­es.… Cit­i­zens should be free to use school vouch­ers for pri­vate reli­gious edu­ca­tion because every­one should be free to use their state-sup­plied resources to pur­sue their own good in their own way, whether their good is reli­gious or not.” The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at William & Mary. This is pithy and well argued.
    • The Supreme Court hands the reli­gious right a big vic­to­ry by lying about the facts of a case (Ian Mill­his­er, Vox): “Kennedy will no doubt inspire oth­er teach­ers and coach­es to behave sim­i­lar­ly to Coach Kennedy, but those teach­ers and coach­es will do so at their own per­il. Gorsuch’s opin­ion doesn’t weigh whether a coach is allowed to do what Kennedy actu­al­ly did. That remains an open ques­tion, because the Court did not actu­al­ly decide that case.” A while ago I men­tioned that Mill­his­er often has a hard time under­stand­ing those he dis­agrees with or por­tray­ing them sym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly. I give you exhib­it A.
    • Court’s Excel­lent Rul­ing in Coach Kennedy Case (Ed Whe­lan, Nation­al Review): “The school dis­trict dis­ci­plined him only for his deci­sion to per­sist in pray­ing qui­et­ly with­out his play­ers after three games in 2015. It sought to restrict his actions at least in part because of their reli­gious char­ac­ter. Its poli­cies were not neu­tral toward reli­gion. Nor were they gen­er­al­ly applic­a­ble: In response to Kennedy’s reli­gious exer­cise, the dis­trict imposed on him a post-game oblig­a­tion to super­vise stu­dents that it did not impose on oth­er mem­bers of the coach­ing staff.” You would not know any of these facts had you only read Mill­his­er’s arti­cle.
    • Jus­tice Thomas and Lov­ing v. Vir­ginia (Josh Black­man, Rea­son): “…Lov­ing was premised on both the Equal Pro­tec­tion Clause and the Due Process Clause. Even if you reject sub­stan­tive due process, you could still find that Lov­ing reached the cor­rect result on the basis of the Equal Pro­tec­tion Clause. After all, the law lit­er­al­ly treats peo­ple dif­fer­ent­ly on the basis of their race. Two white peo­ple can get mar­ried, but a white per­son and a black per­son can­not. Even the most con­ser­v­a­tive jurists would deem such a law uncon­sti­tu­tion­al.”
    • Politi­co, Axios, and NBC News ped­dle a weird smear of Clarence Thomas (Tim­o­thy P. Car­ney, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “Thomas didn’t claim that the cells of abort­ed chil­dren are in the vac­cines, but NBC News, Politi­co, and Axios all wrote as if he did. They were dead wrong on an eas­i­ly check­able fact. How did this hap­pen? How did three out­lets all ‘fact check’ a claim Thomas nev­er made, imply­ing or stat­ing that he did make it?”
  4. The Cathe­dral Vs. Yeshi­va (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “How will­ful­ly blind do you have to be to say that Yeshi­va is not a reli­gious insti­tu­tion? Some­thing tells me that the judge had her mind made up before the first argu­ments were heard. Anoth­er thing that ticks me off is that LGBT rights are wide­ly accept­ed and cel­e­brat­ed in near­ly every col­lege and uni­ver­si­ty in this land. Yeshi­va is one of a rel­a­tive hand­ful of insti­tu­tions of high­er edu­ca­tion where peo­ple who choose to attend do not have to vio­late their reli­gious con­sciences by burn­ing a pinch of incense to the LGBT Cae­sar. But the Grand Inquisi­tors of the new reli­gion will not tol­er­ate any dis­sent. Their god is a jeal­ous god.” The updates at the end are worth read­ing.
  5. A Can­did Con­ver­sa­tion with Reporter Jeanne Lenz­er on Uncov­er­ing Cor­po­rate Influ­ence in Med­i­cine and the Media for Over Two Decades (Paul Thack­er, Sub­stack): “I called the Amer­i­can Heart Asso­ci­a­tion and found out that they were tak­ing Genen­tech mon­ey, and when I asked them about any finan­cial con­flicts among their pan­elists, they said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. When we put peo­ple on a pan­el, we insist on finan­cial dis­clo­sure.’ I said, ‘Fine, would you send me those dis­clo­sures?’ They said, ‘We don’t dis­close dis­clo­sures.’ ”
    • Inter­est­ing through­out. From Aug 2021. Also, that excerpt is fun­ny.
  6. Ire­land’s COVID Response, Part 4: The Def­i­n­i­tion of Insan­i­ty… (Sam Enwright, Sub­stack): “The vac­cines proved that our civil­i­sa­tion is still capa­ble of great­ness on the scale of the Apol­lo pro­gram. Yet, can the aver­age per­son on the street even name a sin­gle indi­vid­ual that designed and built them? This New York Times arti­cle about Katal­in Karikó, pio­neer of mRNA tech­nol­o­gy, is unbe­liev­ably depress­ing. She spent decades on the fringes of acad­e­mia strug­gling to get research fund­ing or recog­ni­tion. After Salk devel­oped the polio vac­cine, peo­ple par­tied in the streets. Today, we get end­less screeds about how ‘tech can’t save us’ and Big Phar­ma is ‘prof­it­ing from pain’. I’m not say­ing there is no mer­it to these com­plaints. But a word of advice: before you crit­i­cise, go to where peo­ple are doing tru­ly extra­or­di­nary things, and observe. Lis­ten, for ye have much to learn.”
    • This is much bet­ter than the title might lead you to assume.
  7. Acad­e­mia
    • Account­ing For Col­lege Costs (John Went­worth, Less Wrong): “In this post, we’ll dig into the account­ing data for col­lege costs, espe­cial­ly for 4‑year pri­vate non­prof­it col­leges. The main the­o­ry we’ll end up at, based on the account­ing data, is that col­lege costs are dri­ven main­ly by a large increase in diver­si­ty of cours­es avail­able, which results in much low­er student/faculty ratios, and cor­re­spond­ing­ly high­er costs per stu­dent.”
    • It’s Time to Review the Insti­tu­tion­al Review Boards (Willy Chert­man, CSPI): “Insti­tu­tion­al Review Boards (IRBs) are ethics com­mit­tees, ide­al­ly com­posed of sci­en­tif­ic peers and lay com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers, that review research before it can be con­duct­ed. Their osten­si­ble pur­pose is to pro­tect research sub­jects from research harms. But often­times, IRBs are cost­ly, slow, and do more harm than good. They cen­sor con­tro­ver­sial research, invent harms where none exist, and by des­ig­nat­ing cer­tain cat­e­gories of sub­jects as ‘vul­ner­a­ble,’ cause a cor­re­spond­ing dimin­ish­ment in research on those sub­jects.”

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 hear­kens back to the 90’s, when polit­i­cal sci­en­tist J. Budziszews­ki wrote two arti­cles back-to-back for First Things, The Prob­lem With Lib­er­al­ism and The Prob­lem With Con­ser­v­a­tivism. I encour­age you to read them both — espe­cial­ly read the one that describes your team. (first shared in a non-Fri­day blog post)

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 356

from the week abor­tion fell

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.

This is vol­ume 356, which is a hap­py num­ber (some­thing I learned about only today). A hap­py num­ber is a num­ber whose dig­its when squared sum to 1 if the process is repeat­ed long enough. 356 takes six iter­a­tions.

  1. 356 ==> 32+52+62 = 9+25+36 = 70.
  2. 70 ==> 72+02 = 49.
  3. 49 ==> 42+92 = 16+81 = 97.
  4. 97 ==> 92+72 = 81+49 = 130
  5. 130 ==> 12+32+02 = 1+9+0 = 10
  6. 10 ==> 12 + 02 = 1

I got way more into that than I expect­ed.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The huge news today is that abor­tion is no longer a con­sti­tu­tion­al right in Amer­i­ca. I expect deep­er analy­ses to appear by next week — most colum­nists appear to be sav­ing their big pieces for the Sun­day papers. Send rec­om­men­da­tions my way!
    • What changed from Jus­tice Alito’s draft opin­ion to final rul­ing on Roe (Kel­ly Hoop­er, Politi­co): “…Ali­to did add to his orig­i­nal opin­ion, with a fierce rebut­tal of the court’s lib­er­al dis­senters, plus a direct shot at Chief Jus­tice John Roberts in the final text. Roberts was the only con­ser­v­a­tive jus­tice on the court to side with its three lib­er­als, mak­ing the final vote 5–4 in the deci­sion to strike down Roe and give states the green light to ban abor­tion.”
    • Supreme Court over­turns con­sti­tu­tion­al right to abor­tion (Amy Howe, SCO­TUS­blog): “Stare deci­sis, Ali­to stressed, ‘is not a strait­jack­et’ when a rul­ing is griev­ous­ly incor­rect.… Notably, the dis­senters fin­ished by not­ing only that they dis­sent­ed, omit­ting the word ‘respect­ful­ly’ that com­mon­ly accom­pa­nies the dis­sent.”
      • A good sum­ma­ry of the opin­ion. The author used to teach at Stan­ford Law School. That last sen­tence is impor­tant.
    • From the right: The Land is Bright (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Some desire to down­play this vic­to­ry or even to lament the man­ner of it. We should not. Fed­er­al law in Amer­i­ca once rec­og­nized a right to kill unborn chil­dren. Now it does not. Our feel­ings should be unam­bigu­ous: it is a great good that over half the states in our union are soon like­ly to have laws grant­i­ng sweep­ing pro­tec­tions to the unborn. And we can just say that it is good.”
    • From the left: Which rights are next on the Supreme Court’s chop­ping block? (Ian Mill­houser, Vox): “In any event, the future of rights oth­er than abor­tion will like­ly need to be lit­i­gat­ed. There is no doubt that Thomas would hap­pi­ly light many exist­ing rights on fire. And there is lit­tle doubt that Ali­to, based on his Oberge­fell dis­sent, would also hap­pi­ly tear down same-sex mar­riage. But it takes five votes to strip away an exist­ing con­sti­tu­tion­al right, and it remains to be seen whether Jus­tices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Bar­rett — con­ser­v­a­tives who some­times break with Alito’s most aggres­sive attempts to dri­ve the law to the right — will sup­port mass roll­backs of exist­ing rights.”
      • Mill­houser is often hyper­bol­ic and fails to read ideas he dis­agrees with fair­ly, but this is a pret­ty good sum­ma­ry.
    • From the right: The Supreme Court strikes down Roe and Casey (Albert Mohler, World): “…pro-life Amer­i­cans have learned not to assume any­thing and to wait to see any deci­sion in the black and white of plain text. Well, we have the plain text. It is explo­sive. It is earth­shak­ing.… It is an answer to prayer.”
      • The author is a sem­i­nary pres­i­dent and also the pres­i­dent of the Evan­gel­i­cal The­o­log­i­cal Soci­ety.
    • From the left: Get­ting Real About the Post-‘Roe’ World (Scott Lemieux, The Amer­i­can Prospect): “The the­o­ry went that Repub­li­can elites didn’t real­ly want to over­rule Roe, but were mere­ly pre­tend­ing to for the sake of pan­der­ing to their base. This nar­ra­tive was always false; the sur­vival of Roe was always a high­ly con­tin­gent fluke, the prod­uct of sev­er­al mis­takes by Repub­li­can pres­i­dents.”
    • From the right: The Long Bat­tle to Over­turn Roe (Ed Whe­lan, Nation­al Review): “There are at least two large rea­sons that the long bat­tle to over­turn Roe has suc­ceed­ed. First, pro-lif­ers did not heed Casey’s com­mand that they give up on work­ing to defend the lives of unborn human beings, and they remained a pow­er­ful polit­i­cal force in the Repub­li­can par­ty, all the more so as near­ly all Democ­rats had aban­doned the pro-life cause. Sec­ond, the con­ser­v­a­tive legal move­ment grew and flour­ished, thanks in large part to the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety and to Jus­tice Scalia and Jus­tice Thomas.”
    • From the left: Repub­li­cans Are Will­ing to Pay a Polit­i­cal Price to Ban Abor­tion. It’s Up to Democ­rats to Make Them Pay It. (Josh Bar­ro, Sub­stack): “After the draft deci­sion leaked, Democ­rats brought a wish-list bill to the floor of both cham­bers that even pro-choice Repub­li­cans — even Sen. Susan Collins — were able to com­fort­ably vote against on the grounds that it was too extreme, more expan­sive than Casey. Democ­rats need to break the agen­da into pieces.… Unlike a catch-all bill, there are many indi­vid­ual ideas about pro­tect­ing abor­tion rights that are very broad­ly pop­u­lar — bring­ing them to the floor puts Repub­li­cans in the posi­tion of either vot­ing for poli­cies to pro­tect abor­tion rights, or going home to defend votes that are actu­al­ly hard to defend in elec­tion cam­paigns.”
      • Both par­ties should do this on a whole host of issues. Pol­i­tics would change quick­ly if our lead­ers gov­erned this way. Bar­ro is right about the shrewd strat­e­gy, but I think it unlike­ly that his par­ty will heed him.
  2. Made in Amer­i­ca: Goods Exports by State (Raul Amoros, Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist): “Texas has been the top export­ing state in the U.S. for an incred­i­ble 20 years in a row. Last year, Texas export­ed $375 bil­lion worth of goods, which is more than Cal­i­for­nia ($175 bil­lion), New York ($85 bil­lion), and Louisiana ($77 bil­lion) com­bined. The state’s largest man­u­fac­tur­ing export cat­e­go­ry is petro­le­um and coal prod­ucts, but it’s also impor­tant to men­tion that Texas led the nation in tech exports for the ninth straight year. Cal­i­for­nia was the sec­ond high­est exporter of goods in 2021 with a total val­ue of $175 bil­lion, an increase of 12% from the pre­vi­ous year.”
    • Sur­pris­es here, rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. Empha­sis in the orig­i­nal.
  3. Mike Pence and the Chris­t­ian Con­flict on Jan­u­ary 6 (David French, The Dis­patch): “A healthy nation­al cul­ture both con­demns cow­ardice and hon­ors val­or, even when val­or is sim­ply part of the job. And we should do both with an immense mea­sure of humil­i­ty. How many of us have proven our own courage under sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances? Pence faced threats to his fam­i­ly, threats to him­self, threats to his pow­er, and threats to the rest of his career. How many of us have pre­vailed in the face of such pres­sure?  To scorn courage in such cir­cum­stances fur­ther incen­tivizes cow­ardice. At least the cow­ard­ly retain their polit­i­cal pow­er and their polit­i­cal home.”
  4. In Defense of Polit­i­cal Esca­la­tion (Abi­gail Shri­er, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “If our ulti­mate goal is return­ing to a nor­mal­cy in which gov­ern­ment agen­cies and cor­po­ra­tions treat all Amer­i­cans fair­ly regard­less of view­point, how are we to achieve this? At a min­i­mum, we must acknowl­edge that these insti­tu­tions are already weaponized and their artillery points only in one direc­tion: against the oppo­nents of the left.”
    • To my knowl­edge Shri­er is not reli­gious and is in no way con­ser­v­a­tive, but she is artic­u­lat­ing an argu­ment that I see fre­quent­ly on the right (most famous­ly in the French/Ahmari dust­up). It ani­mates Trump­ism and is one of the rea­sons DeSan­tis is so pop­u­lar on the right and that Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives have such a fas­ci­na­tion with Orban in Hun­gary.
  5. Pen­te­costals’ Polit­i­cal War­fare (Miguel Pet­rosky, The Reveal­er): “Issues like abor­tion and same-sex mar­riage, and even fears of creep­ing ‘Marx­ism,’ have long been of con­cern to some fac­tions of Amer­i­can con­ser­vatism. But in parts of the Pen­te­costal and charis­mat­ic world, these issues con­tain cos­mic impli­ca­tions for the country’s rela­tion­ship with God. In the Hebrew Scrip­tures, each of Israel’s kings either ‘did what was right’ or ‘did what was evil’ in the eyes of God—with either bless­ings or curs­es for the king­dom. Since Pen­te­costals view them­selves as being a con­tin­u­a­tion of the bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive, they are cer­tain God will judge Amer­i­ca by the issues they view as stray­ing from the Bible.”
  6. Leaked Audio From 80 Inter­nal Tik­Tok Meet­ings Shows That US User Data Has Been Repeat­ed­ly Accessed From Chi­na (Emi­ly Bak­er-White, Buz­zFeed News): “Law­mak­ers’ fear that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment will be able to get its hands on Amer­i­can data through ByteDance is root­ed in the real­i­ty that Chi­nese com­pa­nies are sub­ject to the whims of the author­i­tar­i­an Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, which has been crack­ing down on its home­grown tech giants over the last year. The risk is that the gov­ern­ment could force ByteDance to col­lect and turn over infor­ma­tion as a form of ‘data espi­onage.’ There is, how­ev­er, anoth­er con­cern: that the soft pow­er of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment could impact how ByteDance exec­u­tives direct their Amer­i­can coun­ter­parts to adjust the levers of TikTok’s pow­er­ful ‘For You’ algo­rithm, which rec­om­mends videos to its more than 1 bil­lion users. Sen. Ted Cruz, for instance, has called Tik­Tok ‘a Tro­jan horse the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty can use to influ­ence what Amer­i­cans see, hear, and ulti­mate­ly think.’ ”
  7. Quest to Con­quer a Dis­ease (Amy Lynn Smith, AG News): “Gib­son met Hong as he ate lunch with anoth­er intern in the stu­dent union. Hong asked to join them, and after­ward Gib­son and Hong began meet­ing for tea or cof­fee every week. Gib­son learned that Hong, the night before he intro­duced him­self, had a dream in which a man encour­aged Hong to meet peo­ple on cam­pus. Hong lat­er came to rec­og­nize the man in the dream as Jesus. A friend­ship devel­oped between Hong and Gib­son.”
    • This is about two of our alum­ni: Dan Gib­son, who did his min­istry train­ing with Chi Alpha Stan­ford sev­er­al years ago, and Guosong “Frank” Hong who did his PhD here and is now a pro­fes­sor.

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 How To Ask Your Men­tors For Help (Derek Sivers): this is super-short and very good. Excerpt­ing it would ruin it. Read the whole thing. First shared in vol­ume 224.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 355

Two pieces crit­i­cal of Stan­ford plus lots more.

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.

This is vol­ume 355, which is 5 times 71. It’s also appar­ent­ly the num­ber of labeled topolo­gies with 4 ele­ments, but I think know­ing that it is 5 · 71 is cool­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Two fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cles about Stan­ford:
    • Stanford’s War on Social Life (Ginevra Davis, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “The Uni­ver­si­ty sent a clear mes­sage with its treat­ment of the Band. Spon­ta­neous orga­ni­za­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly when they could become chaot­ic, con­tro­ver­sial, or oth­er­wise a space for break­ing rules, were now some­thing to be con­trolled. Rather than treat­ing free­dom and spon­tane­ity as strengths, the dynam­ic became one where stu­dents had to jus­ti­fy their projects and ideas while under sus­pi­cion from admin­is­tra­tors. Stu­dent life was becom­ing dom­i­nat­ed by restric­tive bureau­cra­cy.” I believe this is sub­stan­tial­ly cor­rect.
    • How I Almost Did­n’t Grad­u­ate From Stan­ford (Maxwell Mey­er, Sub­stack): “Appar­ent­ly, in order to grad­u­ate from Stan­ford while not offi­cial­ly enrolled, I need­ed to be placed in a spe­cial 0‑unit ‘course’ that exists only on paper. And because Stan­ford requires boost­er vac­cines in order to enroll in cours­es, the degree progress office was lit­er­al­ly unable to place me in the fake course.”
  2. The Google engi­neer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life (Nitasha Tiku, Wash­ing­ton Post): “As he talked to LaM­DA about reli­gion, Lemoine, who stud­ied cog­ni­tive and com­put­er sci­ence in col­lege, noticed the chat­bot talk­ing about its rights and per­son­hood, and decid­ed to press fur­ther. In anoth­er exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine’s mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robot­ics.” Spec­u­la­tive and dis­put­ed.
  3. This traf­fic stop between a Black man and a White state troop­er began with fear. It end­ed with a sur­pris­ing act of kind­ness (John Blake, CNN): “Doty closed his tick­et book and opened his car door. He walked back over to Wilk­er­son­’s car and turned to Ged­dis. ‘Sir, do you mind if I ask what kind of can­cer you have?’ ‘No, I don’t mind. I have colon can­cer.’ Doty took a deep breath and looked at Ged­dis. ‘Can I pray for you?’ Doty said.” Heart­warm­ing.
  4. In the world of med­i­cine:
    • A turn­ing point in can­cer (Eric Topol, Sub­stack): “The con­ver­gence of genomics of the cancer—be it from the person’s DNA or tumor direct­ly or the blood (known as liq­uid biopsy)—matched with the appro­pri­ate ther­a­py is lead­ing to out­comes that are being described as ‘unheard-of’ by expert oncol­o­gists.”
    • The Bat­tle Over Gen­der Ther­a­py (Emi­ly Bazelon, New York Times): “ ‘Being trans comes with goals — this is what to do,’ Butzen says. ‘It comes with a sup­port net­work and a cause to fight for.’ Online, where the stakes start rel­a­tive­ly low, teenagers in pro­gres­sive com­mu­ni­ties can trade in a cis­gen­der, het­ero­sex­u­al, white iden­ti­ty — the epit­o­me of priv­i­lege and oppres­sion — to join a com­mu­ni­ty with a clear claim to being mar­gin­al­ized and deserv­ing of pro­tec­tion.”
      • It is sig­nif­i­cant that this report­ing is in New York Times. This is a long arti­cle and it was dif­fi­cult to find a pas­sage to excerpt. I am con­fi­dent the jour­nal­ist would not con­sid­er this a rep­re­sen­ta­tive excerpt nor the one she con­sid­ers most impor­tant.
  5. Pro­fes­sors Need the Pow­er to Fire Diver­si­ty Bureau­crats (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “At present, sanc­tions in high­er edu­ca­tion flow in one direc­tion: Diver­si­ty bureau­crats exert con­trol over fac­ul­ty mem­bers whose speech alleged­ly under­mines inclu­sion. I pro­pose giv­ing fac­ul­ty the pow­er to inves­ti­gate, sanc­tion, and fire diver­si­ty offi­cials if they under­mine free speech. Admin­is­tra­tive abus­es will con­tin­ue as long as bureau­crats can pun­ish speech, even in fla­grant vio­la­tion of uni­ver­si­ty pol­i­cy, with­out any con­se­quences.” I like this. I don’t think it’s struc­tural­ly pos­si­ble at most uni­ver­si­ties, but I like this.
  6. Inter­na­tion­al per­spec­tive:
    • Five Blunt Truths About the War in Ukraine (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The Rus­sians are run­ning out of pre­ci­sion-guid­ed weapons. The Ukraini­ans are run­ning out of Sovi­et-era muni­tions. The world is run­ning out of patience for the war. The Biden admin­is­tra­tion is run­ning out of ideas for how to wage it. And the Chi­nese are watch­ing.… an army that can­not wage a high-tech war, rel­a­tive­ly low on col­lat­er­al dam­age, will wage a low-tech war, appalling­ly high on such dam­age. Ukraine, by its own esti­mates, is suf­fer­ing 20,000 casu­al­ties a month. By con­trast, the U.S. suf­fered about 36,000 casu­al­ties in Iraq over sev­en years of war. For all its brav­ery and resolve, Kyiv can hold off — but not defeat — a neigh­bor more than three times its size in a war of attri­tion.”
    • China’s mil­i­tary expan­sion is reach­ing a dan­ger­ous tip­ping point (Josh Rogin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Chi­na is build­ing the capa­bil­i­ty to use nuclear black­mail to deter a U.S. inter­ven­tion if it invades Tai­wan, fol­low­ing Russia’s mod­el. China’s region­al mil­i­tary pres­ence is expand­ing, includ­ing a secret naval base in Cam­bo­dia and a secret mil­i­tary coop­er­a­tion agree­ment with the Solomon Islands. Chi­na has devel­oped new tech­nolo­gies, includ­ing hyper­son­ic mis­siles and anti­satel­lite lasers, to keep the U.S. mil­i­tary at bay in a Tai­wan sce­nario. And now, Chi­na no longer rec­og­nizes the Tai­wan Strait as inter­na­tion­al waters.”
  7. Ele­phant in the Zoom (Ryan Grim, The Inter­cept): “…Planned Par­ent­hood, NARAL Pro-Choice Amer­i­ca, and oth­er repro­duc­tive health orga­ni­za­tions had sim­i­lar­ly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between com­pet­ing fac­tions of their orga­ni­za­tions, most often break­ing down along staff-ver­sus-man­age­ment lines. It’s also true of the pro­gres­sive advo­ca­cy space across the board, which has, more or less, effec­tive­ly ceased to func­tion. The Sier­ra Club, Demos, the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union, Col­or of Change, the Move­ment for Black Lives, Human Rights Cam­paign, Time’s Up, the Sun­rise Move­ment, and many oth­er orga­ni­za­tions have seen wrench­ing and debil­i­tat­ing tur­moil in the past cou­ple years.”

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 The Impor­tance of Stu­pid­i­ty in Sci­en­tif­ic Research (Mar­tin A. Schwartz, Jour­nal of Cell Sci­ence): “At some point, the con­ver­sa­tion turned to why she had left grad­u­ate school. To my utter aston­ish­ment, she said it was because it made her feel stu­pid. After a cou­ple of years of feel­ing stu­pid every day, she was ready to do some­thing else. I had thought of her as one of the bright­est peo­ple I knew and her sub­se­quent career sup­ports that view. What she said both­ered me. I kept think­ing about it; some­time the next day, it hit me. Sci­ence makes me feel stu­pid too. It’s just that I’ve got­ten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I active­ly seek out new oppor­tu­ni­ties to feel stu­pid.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Yale. First shared in vol­ume 221.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 352

a heart­break­ing week

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.

This is vol­ume 352, which is (I am informed) the num­ber of ways to place 9 queens on a 9×9 chess­board so that they can­not attack each oth­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The South­ern Bap­tist abuse cri­sis:
    • South­ern Bap­tists Refused to Act on Abuse, Despite Secret List of Pas­tors (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Guide­post Solu­tions, the third-par­ty inves­tiga­tive firm, wants the 13-mil­lion-mem­ber denom­i­na­tion to cre­ate an online data­base of abusers, offer com­pen­sa­tion for sur­vivors, sharply lim­it non-dis­clo­sure agree­ments, and estab­lish a new enti­ty ded­i­cat­ed to respond­ing to abuse. The direc­tives in the 288-page report will sound famil­iar for sur­vivors and advo­cates, who have been call­ing for those mea­sures all along.”
    • This Is the South­ern Bap­tist Apoc­a­lypse (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Indeed, the very ones who rebuked me and oth­ers for using the word cri­sis in ref­er­ence to South­ern Bap­tist sex­u­al abuse not only knew that there was such a cri­sis but were qui­et­ly doc­u­ment­ing it, even as they told those fight­ing for reform that such crimes rarely hap­pened among “peo­ple like us.” When I read the back-and-forth between some of these pres­i­dents, high-rank­ing staff, and their lawyers, I can­not help but won­der what else this can be called but a crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy.”
    • No Athe­ist Has Done This Much Dam­age to the Chris­t­ian Faith (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “It’s near­ly impos­si­ble to over­state how much dam­age these new revelations—these nec­es­sary and long-over­due revelations—are doing to the Chris­t­ian wit­ness. No athe­ist, no sec­u­lar­ists or mate­ri­al­ists, could inflict near­ly as much dam­age to the Chris­t­ian faith as these lead­ers with­in the Chris­t­ian Church have done.“This is a gen­er­al prin­ci­ple: skep­tics rarely hurt the Church. Chris­tians, though, hurt the Church all the time.
    • Avoid­ing Finan­cial And Gov­er­nance Dis­as­ters (War­ren Cole Smith, Min­istry Watch): “…in some very impor­tant ways, sex­u­al abuse and sex­u­al harass­ment in the church are effects. They are con­se­quences. They are fruits, not the root, of the problem.So what’s the cause? It’s pret­ty un-glam­orous. It doesn’t gen­er­ate as many head­lines, and when it does gen­er­ate a head­line, that head­line tends to be ignored, or quick­ly for­got­ten. And that cause is mon­ey. More specif­i­cal­ly, the love of mon­ey.… So, at a min­i­mum, I think we evan­gel­i­cals should be spend­ing as much time under­stand­ing and uncov­er­ing finan­cial fraud as we spend on sex­u­al abuse and tox­ic lead­er­ship.”
    • How the ‘Apoc­a­lyp­tic’ South­ern Bap­tist Report Almost Didn’t Hap­pen (Bob Smi­etana, Min­istry­Watch): “In oth­er words, the Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee would be put in charge of inves­ti­gat­ing itself. Then-Pres­i­dent J.D. Greear was ready to move on when Benkert stood up at a micro­phone with a motion of his own, based on anoth­er sec­tion of bylaw 29. ‘I would like the oppor­tu­ni­ty to make a motion to over­rule the Com­mit­tee on Order of Busi­ness at the appro­pri­ate time,’ he said. Benkert’s motion was met with applause. Then a sec­ond, and then almost all of the 15,000 local church del­e­gates, known as mes­sen­gers, raised their yel­low vot­ing cards in the air—far more than the two-thirds major­i­ty need­ed to over­rule the com­mit­tee.”
    • In ref­er­ence to the imme­di­ate­ly pre­ced­ing arti­cle: know­ing how the sys­tem works is real­ly impor­tant. I’ve seen shady stuff hap­pen at some meet­ings but was­n’t quick enough to get to the floor or was­n’t sure enough of the rules to inter­vene. In a busi­ness meet­ing knowl­edge tru­ly is pow­er.
    • In ref­er­ence to the larg­er sto­ry, there are so many things hap­pen­ing here:
    • This is an occa­sion for lamen­ta­tion. I have long said that the Protes­tant sex­u­al abuse cri­sis will dwarf the Catholic Church’s (because we tend to have less control/screening of min­is­ters) and that both will be dwarfed by the pub­lic school cri­sis (which is yet to ful­ly reveal itself but I believe will be far worse).
    • The South­ern Bap­tist exec­u­tives gen­uine­ly had less con­trol over the situation(s) than some of their crit­ics allege, but they had far more con­trol than they pre­tend­ed and when they did act it was often to con­ceal wicked things.
    • The fact that the SBC com­mis­sioned this report and made it pub­lic is very much to their cred­it and over time will loom larg­er in the remem­brance of this.
    • The scope of the abuse, while broad, appears to be less than I feared.
    •  The SBC legal team and the for­mer exec­u­tives come off look­ing like evil reli­gious lead­ers writ­ten by a lazy hack writer. It’s stag­ger­ing­ly bad.
    • This entire deba­cle is ger­mane to the Tim Keller/winsomeness debate: do we oper­ate accord­ing to the stan­dards of our cul­ture or the stan­dards of the King­dom? Christ demands anoth­er way, and if that opens us up to neg­a­tive cul­tur­al con­se­quences (whether elec­toral defeats or ruinous law­suits) then so be it.
  2. The school shoot­ing:
    • A fourth-grad­er who sur­vived the shoot­ing says she smeared friend’s blood on her­self to appear dead (Nora Neus, CNN): “Miah said she was scared the gun­man would come back to kill her and a few oth­er sur­viv­ing friends. So, she put her hands in her friend’s blood, who laid next to her— and already looked dead—and then smeared it all over her­self to appear dead.… She says after­wards, she over­heard talk of police wait­ing out­side the school. Recount­ing this dur­ing the inter­view, she start­ed cry­ing, say­ing she just didn’t under­stand why they didn’t come inside and get them.” Heart­break­ing. Details are still com­ing out, and none of them are good.
    • Texas school shoot­er Sal­vador Ramos once cut up his face with knives ‘just for fun,’ friends say (Yaron Stein­buch, New York Post): “The gun­man who slaugh­tered 19 kids and two teach­ers at a Texas ele­men­tary school report­ed­ly exhib­it­ed increas­ing­ly bizarre behav­ior lead­ing up to the ram­page – includ­ing cut­ting up his face with knives just ‘for fun,’ friends said.”
    • Pass and Enforce Red Flag Laws. Now. (David French, The Dis­patch): “Mass killings are their own thing. Mass shoot­ers are fre­quent­ly law-abid­ing, right up until the moment when they com­mit mass mur­der. Mass shoot­ings are often metic­u­lous­ly planned, which means that they can cir­cum­vent com­mon gun con­trol laws. For exam­ple, the Buf­fa­lo shoot­er legal­ly pur­chased the weapon he used and then ille­gal­ly mod­i­fied it to make it more lethal. So when we talk about com­mon gun con­trol pro­pos­als after mass shootings—whether we’re refer­ring to expand­ed back­ground checks, assault weapons bans, or lim­its on mag­a­zine capacity—the gen­er­al rule is that none of those mea­sures, even if imple­ment­ed, would have actu­al­ly pre­vent­ed any recent mass shoot­ing.” This is a thought­ful piece with a spe­cif­ic and con­struc­tive pol­i­cy sug­ges­tion.
    • The Chil­dren Who Kill Chil­dren (Samuel D. James, First Things): “There are some who sneer at peo­ple, like me, who offer prayers in times like these. Prayer, they say, is non-action: an inef­fec­tive, mean­ing­less piety meant to main­tain the sta­tus quo on gun con­trol. Yet it’s these same scoffers who instinc­tive­ly piv­ot to the top­ic of gun con­trol when­ev­er a child takes the lives of oth­er chil­dren, and their polit­i­cal rage is no less a reli­gious recita­tion sim­ply because they con­fuse Con­gress for God. An inabil­i­ty to talk about any­thing oth­er than gun con­trol threat­ens to dead­en our lament and neu­tral­ize a vital con­ver­sa­tion about why so many of our country’s most lost, most hate­ful peo­ple are boys with their whole lives ahead of them.” This is a strong arti­cle.
    • ‘The Onion’ has repub­lished a grim head­line about mass shoot­ings 21 times since 2014 (Rachel Treis­man, NPR): “There are a cou­ple of inevitable respons­es to a mass shoot­ing in Amer­i­ca: funer­als and fundrais­ers, prayers from politi­cians and the resur­fac­ing of one par­tic­u­lar arti­cle from satir­i­cal site The Onion. ‘No Way To Pre­vent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Reg­u­lar­ly Hap­pens’ has been repub­lished 21 times in almost exact­ly eight years.” The rep­e­ti­tion of this head­line has prob­a­bly shift­ed more hearts than any oth­er argu­ment I am aware of.
  3. Covid was liberalism’s endgame (Matthew B. Craw­ford, Unherd): “The inno­va­tion achieved here is in the way gov­ern­ment con­ceives its sub­jects: not as cit­i­zens whose con­sid­ered con­sent must be secured, but as par­ti­cles to be steered through a sci­ence of behav­iour man­age­ment that relies on our pre-reflec­tive cog­ni­tive bias­es.”
  4. A Com­mit­ment to Kind­ness Does Not Mean Sur­ren­der­ing Your Con­vic­tions (David French, The Dis­patch): “Time and again I read about how bad things are now, how vile the left has become, and how a com­mit­ment to ‘win­some­ness’ or kind­ness is sim­ply inad­e­quate to the moment. Even worse, it’s some­times seen as evi­dence of weak­ness or fear—an effort cur­ry favor with peo­ple who hate you.  But the con­ver­sa­tion con­sis­tent­ly mis­con­strues what com­mit­ments to civil­i­ty and decen­cy do and don’t mean—that civil­i­ty is some­how a short­hand for sur­ren­der on mat­ters of deep con­vic­tion. It is not. Or that a com­mit­ment to civil­i­ty implies an aver­sion to con­flict and a timid­i­ty in the face of oppo­si­tion. It does not.”
  5. The LGBT­sQew­ing of Amer­i­ca (Alexan­der Zuba­tov, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “We have strong­ly sug­ges­tive evi­dence, more­over, that social cues can play causal roles in sway­ing impres­sion­able teens to adopt new sex­u­al iden­ti­ties.… The sim­ple mes­sage such research con­veys is some­thing that those of us who have not lost touch with our child­hood and our awk­ward teen years will find unsur­pris­ing, and indeed, even obvi­ous: Most kids and teens are works in progress and unde­cid­ed and con­fused about many key aspects of their lives.”
  6. In Par­tial, Grudg­ing Defense Of The Hear­ing Voic­es Move­ment (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I still remem­ber a patient who asked me if I could cure his anx­i­ety with­in a week. I told him absolute­ly not — med­ica­tions take a few weeks to even kick in, and man­ag­ing anx­i­ety can be a life­long process — and why did he need a cure in a week any­way? He said he was an inspi­ra­tional speak­er on the top­ic ‘How I Over­came My Anx­i­ety’, and he had a speech sched­uled next week, but was too anx­ious to work on it. I think about this per­son often.” Inter­est­ing through­out and the anec­dote I excerpt­ed is actu­al­ly tan­gen­tial to the main point.
  7. Why This Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Says All Cryp­tocur­ren­cy Should “Die in a Fire” (Nathan Robin­son inter­view­ing Nicholas Weaver, Cur­rent Affairs): “Is it accu­rate to sum­ma­rize what you were say­ing before as, essen­tial­ly: There is no prob­lem that cryp­tocur­ren­cy solves, and to the extent that it is func­tion­al, it does things worse than we can already do them with exist­ing elec­tron­ic pay­ment sys­tems. To the extent it has advan­tages, the advan­tage is doing crimes. And every oth­er claim made for the supe­ri­or­i­ty of cryp­tocur­ren­cy as cur­ren­cy falls apart if you scru­ti­nize it.” This spicy meat­ball comes rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  8. Glob­al reli­gious per­se­cu­tion:
    • The faces from China’s Uyghur deten­tion camps (John Sud­worth, BBC): “The doc­u­ments pro­vide some of the strongest evi­dence to date for a pol­i­cy tar­get­ing almost any expres­sion of Uyghur iden­ti­ty, cul­ture or Islam­ic faith — and of a chain of com­mand run­ning all the way up to the Chi­nese leader, Xi Jin­ping.”
    • Niger­ian Chris­tians Protest Deborah’s Death (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Two weeks ago, in Nigeria’s north­west­ern-most state of Soko­to, Deb­o­rah Samuel was beat­en to death and set on fire by fel­low stu­dents at She­hu Sha­gari Col­lege of Edu­ca­tion. Offi­cials and police inter­vened in vain.”

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 Con­ser­v­a­tives Clash on the Goal of Gov­ern­ment (Jonathan Lee­man, Prov­i­dence): “There is no neu­tral­i­ty. The pub­lic square is a bat­tle­ground of gods. Our cul­ture wars are wars of reli­gion. For the time being, lib­er­al­ism keeps us from pick­ing up sixteenth-century swords for those wars, which is no small achieve­ment. But don’t assume it won’t con­trol us with the sub­tler tools of a twenty-first cen­tu­ry legal total­i­tar­i­an­ism.” Insight­ful reflec­tions on how Chris­tians should form their polit­i­cal posi­tions. First shared in vol­ume 218.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 351

this week’s news was full of stuff I did not like

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.

This is the 351st install­ment. 351 is, I am told, the small­est num­ber such that it and its sur­round­ing num­bers are all prod­ucts of 4 or more primes (in the case of 351=3·3·3·13).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. My Col­lege Stu­dents Are Not OK  (Jonathan Malesic, New York Times): “High­er edu­ca­tion is now at a turn­ing point. The accom­mo­da­tions for the pan­dem­ic can either end or be made per­ma­nent. The task won’t be easy, but uni­ver­si­ties need to help stu­dents rebuild their abil­i­ty to learn. And to do that, every­one involved — stu­dents, fac­ul­ties, admin­is­tra­tors and the pub­lic at large — must insist on in-per­son class­es and high expec­ta­tions for fall 2022 and beyond.” The author has a PhD in reli­gious stud­ies and was a tenured the­ol­o­gy prof, but now teach­es writ­ing at anoth­er uni­ver­si­ty. His per­son­al jour­ney seems inter­est­ing.
  2. MIT, Har­vard sci­en­tists find AI can rec­og­nize race from X‑rays — and nobody knows how (Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe): “Ghas­se­mi and her col­leagues remain baf­fled, but she sus­pects it has some­thing to do with melanin, the pig­ment that deter­mines skin col­or. Per­haps X‑rays and CT scan­ners detect the high­er melanin con­tent of dark­er skin, and embed this infor­ma­tion in the dig­i­tal image in some fash­ion that human users have nev­er noticed before. It’ll take a lot more research to be sure.”
  3. Pan­dem­ic news, not great this week:
    • The Covid Capit­u­la­tion (Eric Topol, Sub­stack): “To recap, we have a high­ly unfa­vor­able pic­ture of: (1) accel­er­at­ed evo­lu­tion of the virus; (2) increased immune escape of new vari­ants; (2) pro­gres­sive­ly high­er trans­mis­si­bil­i­ty and infec­tious­ness; (4) sub­stan­tial­ly less pro­tec­tion from trans­mis­sion by vac­cines and boost­ers; (5) some reduc­tion on vaccine/booster pro­tec­tion against hos­pi­tal­iza­tion and death; (6) high vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty from infec­tion-acquired immu­ni­ty only; and (7) like­li­hood of more nox­ious new vari­ants in the months ahead” The author is a pro­fes­sor of mol­e­c­u­lar med­i­cine at the Scripps Insti­tute.
    • Per­ma­nent Pan­dem­ic (Justin E. H. Smith, Harper’s Mag­a­zine): “That the polit­i­cal is always biopo­lit­i­cal, in at least this gen­er­al sense, may be a fact that recedes from view in those rare moments when things are func­tion­ing smooth­ly. At such times, the var­i­ous doc­u­ments that gov­ern­ments make us fill out and sign, or fill out on our behalf when we are born, mar­ried, arrest­ed, or dead; the var­i­ous licens­es we get renewed; and the accred­i­ta­tions we col­lect come to appear as ends in them­selves rather than as part of a vast appa­ra­tus that lim­its what we can do with our own bod­ies.” The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Paris.
    • The new Covid equi­lib­ri­um (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I know many of you like to say ‘No worse than the com­mon cold!’ Well, the thing is…the com­mon cold impos­es con­sid­er­able costs on the world. Imag­ine a new com­mon cold, which you catch a few times a year, with some sliv­er of the pop­u­la­tion get­ting some form of Long Covid. One 2003 esti­mate sug­gest­ed that the com­mon cold costs us $40 bil­lion a year, and in a typ­i­cal year I don’t get a cold even once.… Even under mild con­cep­tions of cur­rent Covid, it is entire­ly plau­si­ble to believe that the costs of Covid will run into the tril­lions over the next ten years.”
    • With Plung­ing Enroll­ment, a ‘Seis­mic Hit’ to Pub­lic Schools (Shawn Hubler, New York Times): “No over­rid­ing expla­na­tion has emerged yet for the wide­spread drop-off. But experts point to two poten­tial caus­es: Some par­ents became so fed up with remote instruc­tion or mask man­dates that they start­ed home-school­ing their chil­dren or send­ing them to pri­vate or parochial schools that large­ly remained open dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. And oth­er fam­i­lies were thrown into such tur­moil by pan­dem­ic-relat­ed job loss­es, home­less­ness and school clo­sures that their chil­dren sim­ply dropped out.”
  4. Abor­tion-relat­ed:
    • Roe draft is a reminder that reli­gion’s role in pol­i­tics is old­er than the repub­lic (Ron Elv­ing, NPR): “The ques­tion aris­es: Since when did so much of our pol­i­tics have to do with reli­gion? And the answer is, since the begin­ning – and even before. Reli­gion was a dri­ving and deter­mi­na­tive force in pol­i­tics on this con­ti­nent even before the ‘Unit­ed States’ had been formed.And it has been brought to bear in wide­ly dis­parate caus­es. Reli­gion has been invoked to con­demn slav­ery and seg­re­ga­tion, to ban alco­hol and the teach­ing of evo­lu­tion­ary sci­ence and to bol­ster anti-war move­ments.”
    • When an Abor­tion Is Pro-Life (Matthew Lof­tus, New York Times): “I view my work as a physi­cian as part of a bat­tle against bro­ken­ness in the phys­i­cal health of my patients, a bat­tle whose tide was turned when Jesus Christ rose from the dead. The Bible teach­es that our phys­i­cal bod­ies will one day be res­ur­rect­ed as Christ’s was, mys­te­ri­ous­ly trans­formed but some­how also con­tin­u­ous with our present flesh and blood — like a seed is trans­formed into a plant. I teach and work along­side local health pro­fes­sion­als so that we can care holis­ti­cal­ly for peo­ple in need, fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of Jesus, the heal­er.… Here, I think the excep­tion proves the rule: End­ing a child’s life before birth is so wrong that only sav­ing anoth­er life could be worth it.” This is a remark­able op-ed.
    • A cri­tique of the reli­gious pro-life move­ment: The Reli­gious Right and the Abor­tion Myth (Ran­dall Balmer, Politi­co): “White evan­gel­i­cals in the 1970s did not mobi­lize against Roe v. Wade, which they con­sid­ered a Catholic issue. They orga­nized instead to defend racial seg­re­ga­tion in evan­gel­i­cal insti­tu­tions, includ­ing Bob Jones Uni­ver­si­ty. To sug­gest oth­er­wise is to per­pe­trate what I call the abor­tion myth, the fic­tion that the gen­e­sis of the Reli­gious Right — the pow­er­ful evan­gel­i­cal polit­i­cal move­ment that has reshaped Amer­i­can pol­i­tics over the past four decades — lay in oppo­si­tion to abor­tion.”
    • But actu­al­ly no: What every­one gets wrong about evan­gel­i­cals and abor­tion (Gillian Frank & Neil J. Young, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Twelve years before the Roe deci­sion, a young woman wrote to the lead­ing U.S. evan­ge­list, the Rev. Bil­ly Gra­ham, with the fol­low­ing ques­tion: ‘Through a young and fool­ish sin, I had an abor­tion. I now feel guilty of mur­der. How can I ever know for­give­ness?’ Gra­ham, whose syn­di­cat­ed news­pa­per col­umn ‘My Answer’ reached mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, replied: ‘Abor­tion is as vio­lent a sin against God, nature, and one’s self as one can com­mit.’ Gra­ham telegraphed evan­gel­i­cals’ unease with abor­tion, which would become increas­ing­ly polit­i­cal in the com­ing years.”
    • Real­ly actu­al­ly no: There’s been some dis­cus­sion about how evan­gel­i­cals in the U.S. didn’t start oppos­ing abor­tion until the late 1970s – sev­er­al years after Roe v. Wade in 1973. There’s a lot more nuance to that his­to­ry. (Andrew Lewis, Twit­ter): an inter­est­ing thread from a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cincin­nati.
    • As in strong­ly no: Ballmer also mis­rep­re­sent­ed the legal aspects of this sto­ry (Jon White­head, Twit­ter)
  5. How Mary White­house Waged War on Pornog­ra­phy (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “White­house was mocked for pre­dict­ing that sex­u­al mes­sag­ing would soon tar­get chil­dren; it is now the norm for LGBT con­tent to appear on children’s TV shows and in sto­ry­books. She warned that films such as Bernar­do Bertolucci’s Last Tan­go in Paris crossed a line; it was lat­er revealed that the rape scene in the movie deeply trau­ma­tized the scene’s young actress, who received vile treat­ment at the hands of old­er men. On the big cul­tur­al ques­tions, White­house was right and her crit­ics were wrong.”
  6. Nao­mi Judd: ‘It’s scary to show that part of you that is the not so smart, not so togeth­er side’ (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “Nao­mi Judd thought she under­stood the ties that bind coun­try-music stars and their audi­ence – then one aggres­sive fan went and joined the Pen­te­costal church the Judd fam­i­ly called home. ‘It real­ly bur­dened me,’ said Judd, after sign­ing hun­dreds of her ‘Love Can Build a Bridge’ mem­oir back in 1993. ‘I just don’t sign auto­graphs at church. The best way I can explain it to chil­dren … is to say, ‘Hon­ey, Jesus is the star.’ ” What a great open­ing sto­ry.
  7. On the shoot­ings:
    • Faith on the ground in Buf­fa­lo: Voice Buf­fa­lo exec­u­tive direc­tor Denise Walden (Adelle M. Banks, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “They are some of the matri­archs and the pil­lars of our com­mu­ni­ty. They will be missed in ways that I don’t think I can do jus­tice to describ­ing, but who bring joy to this com­mu­ni­ty. They’re the ones who help stand and hold this com­mu­ni­ty togeth­er.”
    • The FAQs: What Chris­tians Should Know About the ‘Great Replace­ment’ The­o­ry (Joe Carter, Gospel Coali­tion): “The recent shoot­ing in Buf­fa­lo is the fifth ter­ror­ist attack in the past five years in which a white suprema­cist gun­man made ref­er­ence to the Great Replace­ment con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry.… Chris­tians should be the first to decry the racism and xeno­pho­bia of the the­o­ry, along with con­demn­ing the vio­lence it has per­pet­u­at­ed.”
    • Doc­tor Who Fought Church Gun­man Remem­bered as Kind Pro­tec­tor (Julie Wat­son, Min­istry Watch): “The fam­i­ly and sports med­i­cine physi­cian was like fam­i­ly to the staff and he encour­aged them to learn kung fu, telling them about the impor­tance of know­ing self-defense tech­niques. He also learned how to han­dle a gun for that same rea­son. That pre­pared­ness com­bined with Cheng’s serene dis­po­si­tion like­ly gave him a pro­cliv­i­ty for act­ing hero­ical­ly, accord­ing to active shoot­er experts.… Author­i­ties cred­it Cheng’s quick action with sav­ing per­haps dozens of lives at a cel­e­bra­to­ry lun­cheon for con­gre­gants and their for­mer pas­tor at Irvine Tai­wanese Pres­by­ter­ian Church, which wor­ships at Gene­va Pres­by­ter­ian Church in the Orange Coun­ty com­mu­ni­ty of Lagu­na Woods.”
    • After Shoot­ing, Church­es Nav­i­gate Chi­na-Tai­wan Ten­sions Under the Sur­face (Kate Shell­nutt & Sean Cheng, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “As soon as they heard that a gun­man attacked a Tai­wanese church in Cal­i­for­nia on Sun­day, some Tai­wanese cor­rect­ly assumed polit­i­cal motives.… The shoot­ing sus­pect, David Wen­wei Chou, was born and raised in Tai­wan but con­sid­ers him­self Chi­nese. (Chi­na cur­rent­ly claims Tai­wan as its ter­ri­to­ry.) He left notes in Chi­nese in his car stat­ing he did not believe Tai­wan should be inde­pen­dent from Chi­na. Chi­nese social media cir­cu­lat­ed pho­tos of Chou indi­cat­ing that he was a leader of a Chi­nese pro-uni­fi­ca­tion orga­ni­za­tion in Las Vegas.”

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 A Study Guide For Human Soci­ety, Part 1 (Tan­ner Greer, The Scholar’s Stage): “…there are two meth­ods [for find­ing good his­to­ry books] in par­tic­u­lar I have often have use­ful. The first is to Google syl­labi. If you are inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of the Roman Repub­lic, Google ‘Roman Repub­lic syl­labus’ and see what pops up. Read a few cours­es and see what books are includ­ed. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you just read a book you thought was par­tic­u­lar­ly good, put its title into Google and then the word ‘syl­labus’ after­wards and see what oth­er read­ings col­lege pro­fes­sors have paired with that book in their cours­es.”  First shared in vol­ume 217.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 350

Few­er main top­ics than nor­mal, but a bunch of arti­cles in the top­ics

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.

This is vol­ume 350, and 350 is a very respectable num­ber. I’m impressed.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Pol­i­tics Poi­soned the Evan­gel­i­cal Church (Tim Alber­ta, The Atlantic): “Hav­ing grown up just down the road, the son of the senior pas­tor at anoth­er church in town, I’ve spent my life watch­ing evan­gel­i­cal­ism morph from a spir­i­tu­al dis­po­si­tion into a polit­i­cal iden­ti­ty. It’s heart­break­ing. So many peo­ple who love the Lord, who give their time and mon­ey to the poor and the mourn­ing and the per­se­cut­ed, have been reduced to a car­i­ca­ture. But I under­stand why. Evangelicals—including my own father—became com­pul­sive­ly polit­i­cal, allow­ing spe­cif­ic eth­i­cal argu­ments to snow­ball into full-blown par­ti­san advo­ca­cy, often in ways that dis­tract­ed from their mis­sion of evan­ge­liz­ing for Christ.”
  2. Being a Polit­i­cal Jour­nal­ist Made Me a Bet­ter Chris­t­ian (Jon Ward, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “But Chris­tians can­not be the con­science of the state if we are not first the con­science of whichev­er polit­i­cal par­ty we belong to. We have the dif­fi­cult task of belong­ing to polit­i­cal par­ties and work­ing for the good of the coun­try through those insti­tu­tions, while also stand­ing apart from those par­ties to crit­i­cize them at times for their weak­ness­es, errors, and cor­rup­tions.” The entire essay is delight­ful.
  3. A con­tro­ver­sy about how Chris­tians should engage in the pub­lic square:
    • How I Evolved on Tim Keller (James R. Wood, First Things): “If we assume that win­some­ness will gain a favor­able hear­ing, when Chris­tians con­sis­tent­ly receive heat­ed push­back, we will be tempt­ed to think our con­vic­tions are the prob­lem. If win­some­ness is met with hos­til­i­ty, it is easy to won­der, ‘Are we in the wrong?’ Thus the slide toward sec­u­lar culture’s rea­son­ing is greased. A ‘sec­u­lar-friend­ly’ pol­i­tics has prob­lems sim­i­lar to ‘seek­er-friend­ly’ wor­ship. An exces­sive con­cern to appeal to the unchurched is plagued by the accom­mo­da­tion­ist temp­ta­tion.”
    • A Cri­tique of Tim Keller Reveals the Moral Devo­lu­tion of the New Chris­t­ian Right (The Dis­patch, David French): “Yet even if the des­per­ate times nar­ra­tive were true, the des­per­ate mea­sures ratio­nal­iza­tion suf­fers from pro­found moral defects. The bib­li­cal call to Chris­tians to love your ene­mies, to bless those who curse you, and to exhib­it the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kind­ness, good­ness, faith­ful­ness, gen­tle­ness, and self-control—does not rep­re­sent a set of tac­tics to be aban­doned when times are tough but rather a set of eter­nal moral prin­ci­ples to be applied even in the face of extreme adver­si­ty…
    • Is it Time to Move Past Tim Keller? (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “The ques­tion is not whether love of neigh­bor doesn’t work and should be for­got­ten, the ques­tion is what love of neigh­bor demands from us, and whether such love might look dif­fer­ent when the pre­sent­ing moral and spir­i­tu­al needs of our neigh­bors might not be what they were a gen­er­a­tion ago.”
    • some thoughts on Tim Keller (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Like Dio­genes with his lantern, I’m look­ing for one crit­ic of Tim Keller who shows some aware­ness that Chris­tians are com­mand­ed by their Lord to act in cer­tain ways and to refrain from act­ing in oth­ers. To think only in terms of what is effec­tive or strate­gic is to fight on the Devil’s home ground.”
    • This Arti­cle is Not About Tim Keller (James Wood, Amer­i­can Reformer): “How do we know what the future holds for the public’s per­cep­tion of Chris­tians and their attempts to love their neigh­bors through polit­i­cal action? We might be sur­prised what the judg­ments of his­to­ry have in store. Not only do I ques­tion the cer­tain­ty we can have in these assess­ments about how our polit­i­cal actions will impact our long-term gospel wit­ness, but I also think this is a cat­e­go­ry error. Pol­i­tics is not about min­i­miz­ing offense in order to max­i­mize open­ness to the evan­ge­lis­tic mes­sage. Pol­i­tics is, rather, focused on the pur­suit of jus­tice and the just order­ing of soci­ety.”
  4. Against longter­mism (Phil Tor­res, Aeon): “…longter­mism might be one of the most influ­en­tial ide­olo­gies that few peo­ple out­side of elite uni­ver­si­ties and Sil­i­con Val­ley have ever heard about. I believe this needs to change because, as a for­mer longter­mist who pub­lished an entire book four years ago in defence of the gen­er­al idea, I have come to see this world­view as quite pos­si­bly the most dan­ger­ous sec­u­lar belief sys­tem in the world today.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who thinks this is espe­cial­ly impor­tant for Sil­i­con Val­ley peo­ple to hear. From Oct 2021.
  5. More on the Supreme Court and abor­tion
    • How Roe Warped the Repub­lic (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “And the way Roe was decid­ed made this polar­iza­tion worse. From the per­spec­tive of geog­ra­phy and class, a group of robed lawyers in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., demand­ing that the coun­try sim­ply accept their set­tle­ment on one of the gravest moral ques­tions imag­in­able is the per­fect primer for a pop­ulist revolt. What has hap­pened in sim­i­lar ways with oth­er issues — immi­gra­tion, most notably — hap­pened with abor­tion first: The elite set­tle­ment failed to set­tle the issue, and the back­lash encom­passed not just the issue itself but elite legit­i­ma­cy writ large.”
    • Protest sup­port­ing Roe v. Wade takes over cam­pus (Bryan Steven Mon­ge Ser­ra­no, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “About 250 stu­dents, fac­ul­ty and staff came togeth­er to chant and march.” ]
      • “Takes over cam­pus” is an exag­ger­a­tion. 250 peo­ple? There are class­es larg­er than that. Hav­ing said that, the bulk of the stu­dent body at Stan­ford is unde­ni­ably on the pro-Roe side. I won­der if the small ral­ly indi­cates a lev­el of apa­thy or sim­ply a desire to wait for the actu­al ver­dict to be released.
    • Why I wel­come the prospect of Roe v. Wade being over­turned (Avi Shafran, NBC News): “Roe was a sledge­ham­mer, and wrong­ly wield­ed. In the wake of its rever­sal, cit­i­zens in each state would be charged with using a scalpel to instead craft laws that treat nascent life with respect while accom­mo­dat­ing the pro­tec­tion of women’s well-being.”
      • Inter­est­ing thoughts from a Rab­bi. He comes down in a dif­fer­ent place than most peo­ple you have heard from.
    • How Dare They! (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “What strikes me most in these takes is the under­ly­ing con­tempt for and sus­pi­cion of the demo­c­ra­t­ic process — from many of the same peo­ple who insist they want to save it. How dare vot­ers have a say on abor­tion rights! The issue — which divides the coun­try today as much as it has for decades — is one that appar­ent­ly can­not ever be put up for a vote. On this ques­tion, Democ­rats real­ly do seem to believe that sev­en men alone should make that deci­sion — once, in 1973. Women today, includ­ing one on SCOTUS? Not so much.”
    • Pro-Life Min­istries Have Been Car­ing For Women And Babies For Gen­er­a­tions (War­ren Cole Smith, Min­istry Watch): “More than 2500 pro-life Preg­nan­cy Resource Cen­ters (PRCs) are a com­pas­sion­ate army of staff, donors, and vol­un­teers that num­ber in the hun­dreds of thou­sands. They are com­mit­ted to help­ing women make life-giv­ing choic­es, and they often sup­port these women for years after their babies are born. The total amount of mon­ey these orga­ni­za­tions spend in sup­port of women and babies is not known, but it like­ly exceeds $1 bil­lion annu­al­ly. We should also note that the vast major­i­ty of adop­tions in this coun­try are done by Chris­t­ian fam­i­lies and through Chris­t­ian adop­tion agen­cies.”
    • The Supreme Court Leak Was an Unplanned Com­pli­ca­tion for Preg­nan­cy Cen­ters (Emi­ly Belz, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I try to shield my team from it here,” she said, telling them not to get online and try to defend them­selves. “I saw a post on Insta­gram: ‘I’ve nev­er met a pro-life per­son who is address­ing access to health care, acces­si­ble child­care, col­lege edu­ca­tion.’ Hun­dreds of peo­ple are com­ment­ing, ‘Yeah I’ve nev­er met one of those.’ I’m think­ing I’m going to lose my mind. We’re here! We’re get­ting women into hous­ing same day, we’re get­ting them out of domes­tic vio­lence same day, we’re get­ting them fur­ni­ture the same day,” Marten con­tin­ued. “For my team to go home every day and turn on the news and social media and get gaslit, say­ing, ‘If you real­ly cared …’ It’s an emo­tion­al toll.”
  6. On Chi­na
    • China’s Bizarre Author­i­tar­i­an-Lib­er­tar­i­an COVID Strat­e­gy (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “On the one hand, Chi­na has con­fined mil­lions of peo­ple to their homes, even to the extent of out­law­ing walk­ing out­side or hav­ing food deliv­ered. Many thou­sands of oth­er peo­ple have been tak­en from their homes and put into quar­an­tine cen­ters. On the oth­er hand, vac­ci­na­tion is not manda­to­ry! I can under­stand author­i­tar­i­an­ism. I can under­stand lib­er­tar­i­an­ism. I have dif­fi­cul­ty under­stand­ing how jail­ing peo­ple, poten­tial­ly with­out food, is ok but requir­ing vac­ci­na­tions is not.”
    • Dra­mat­ic sto­ry of Kyr­gyz Chris­t­ian swept up in Chi­na’s Uyghur repres­sion gets very lit­tle ink (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “While unimag­in­able hor­rors per­sist­ed in the camp, Joseph tes­ti­fied about how God worked in the hearts of the inmates around them. They had no pri­va­cy in any part of the com­plex, with cam­eras in their rooms and micro­phones for mon­i­tor­ing. Thus, 50 to 60 inmates filled the show­er room every day and it was the only place where Joseph could share his faith. The water from the show­er heads made enough noise to mask their con­ver­sa­tions.  In the first few months, there was hard­ly any­one who would talk to him about God. Then the ques­tion began. ‘How could God let us be here in this place?’ they would ask. ‘How could God allow our chil­dren to be aban­doned?’ ” Crazy details, espe­cial­ly if you fol­low the links in the arti­cle.
    • Tik­Tok May Be More Dan­ger­ous Than It Looks (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Tik­Tok is owned by ByteDance, a Chi­nese com­pa­ny. And Chi­nese com­pa­nies are vul­ner­a­ble to the whims and the will of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.… TikTok’s real pow­er isn’t over our data. It’s over what users watch and cre­ate. It’s over the opaque algo­rithm that gov­erns what gets seen and what doesn’t. Tik­Tok has been thick with videos back­ing the Russ­ian nar­ra­tive on the war in Ukraine. Media Mat­ters, for instance, tracked an appar­ent­ly coor­di­nat­ed cam­paign dri­ven by 186 Russ­ian Tik­Tok influ­encers who nor­mal­ly post beau­ty tips, prank videos and fluff. And we know that Chi­na has been ampli­fy­ing Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da world­wide. How com­fort­able are we with not know­ing whether the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty decid­ed to weigh in on how the algo­rithm treats these videos?”
    • Why Chi­nese Cul­ture Has Not Con­quered Us All (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Out­side of its own bor­ders, post-Deng Chi­na has a poor record sell­ing the intan­gi­ble. Chi­nese cul­tur­al influ­ence is not com­men­su­rate with China’s eco­nom­ic pow­er or geopo­lit­i­cal heft. For the last two decades observers of Chi­na have pon­dered this mys­tery. Why has China’s grow­ing glob­al promi­nence, pros­per­ous com­mer­cial­ized econ­o­my, and huge glob­al dias­po­ra not led to cul­tur­al influ­ence? Why have both China’s intel­lec­tu­al high cul­ture and its expan­sive pop cul­ture offer­ings failed to take root out­side of the Sinos­phere?” Very thought­ful, as I have come to expect from Greer.

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 The Pint-Size Nation off the Eng­lish Coast (Ian Urbina, The Atlantic): “Though no coun­try for­mal­ly rec­og­nizes Sealand, its sov­er­eign­ty has been hard to deny. Half a dozen times, the British gov­ern­ment and assort­ed oth­er groups, backed by mer­ce­nar­ies, have tried and failed to take over the plat­form by force.” First shared in vol­ume 217.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 348

A reminder not to be cool plus oth­er provo­ca­tions.

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.

348 is the sum of four con­sec­u­tive primes: 79 + 83 + 89 + 97 = 348.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. “Extra­or­di­nary claims require extra­or­di­nary evi­dence”… And oth­er stu­pid state­ments (C. Michael Pat­ton, Cre­do House): “ ‘Extra­or­di­nary claims require extra­or­di­nary evi­dence.’ While this may seem like sound rea­son­ing at first glance, it fails in sig­nif­i­cant ways. Try using this phrase and switch out the mod­i­fi­er. What if I said, ‘phys­i­cal claims require phys­i­cal evi­dence.’ Or what about this: ‘mirac­u­lous claims require mirac­u­lous evi­dence’? How about ‘canine claims require canine evi­dence’? Of course, you would see the fal­la­cy right away. The equiv­o­ca­tion cre­ates an appar­ent pro­fun­di­ty that mis­di­rects our sens­es. In every case claims just need evi­dence.”
  2. In Praise of the Bor­ing, Uncool Church (Brett McCrack­en, Gospel Coali­tion): “It seems almost every ‘leader of Chris­t­ian cool’—whether a tat­tooed celebri­ty pas­tor or a buzzy night­club church—flames out and los­es its foot­ing fair­ly quick­ly. Which is not at all sur­pris­ing. By their very nature, things that are cool are ephemer­al. What’s fash­ion­able is, by the neces­si­ty of the rules of fash­ion, quick­ly obso­lete. This is one of many rea­sons why chas­ing cool is a fool’s errand for church­es and pas­tors…”
  3. Unex­pect­ed neg­a­tive impacts of COVID:
    • Report: 26 Mil­lion Amer­i­cans Stopped Read­ing the Bible Reg­u­lar­ly Dur­ing COVID-19 (Adam MacIn­nis, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Plake thinks the dra­mat­ic change shows how close­ly Bible reading—even inde­pen­dent Bible reading—is con­nect­ed to church atten­dance. When reg­u­lar ser­vices were inter­rupt­ed by the pan­dem­ic and relat­ed health man­dates, it impact­ed not just the cor­po­rate bod­ies of believ­ers but also indi­vid­u­als at home.”
    • Researchers: COVID-19, Israel-Gaza war fueled anti­semitism (Lau­rie Kell­man, AP News): “The study com­piled data from 22 coun­tries. French author­i­ties, for instance, report­ed a 36% jump in anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents involv­ing phys­i­cal vio­lence, from 44 to 60. The Unit­ed King­dom saw a 78% jump in inci­dents of assault, from 97 to 173. The num­ber of anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents in Cana­da rose 54%, from 173 to 266, the report said.… [In Amer­i­ca] The Anti-Defama­tion League count­ed 2,717 anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents of assault, harass­ment and van­dal­ism in 2021, a 34% increase over the pre­vi­ous year. It was the high­est num­ber since the New York City-based group began track­ing such inci­dents in 1979.”
  4. Red Flags for Faith-Based Lib­er­ty in Hong Kong (Susan Crab­tree, Real Clear Pol­i­tics): “Under Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping, all reli­gions have faced per­se­cu­tion.… For sev­er­al years, the Chris­t­ian church in Hong Kong was large­ly spared. But recent actions tak­en against Hong Kong’s Chris­t­ian church­es are chip­ping away at the reli­gious free­dom the city has enjoyed since the British estab­lished it as a colony in the ear­ly 1840s.”
  5. Tips From the Top: Do the Best Per­form­ers Real­ly Give the Best Advice? (David E. Levari, Daniel T. Gilbert & Tim­o­thy D. Wil­son, Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence): “Although advice from the best-per­form­ing advi­sors was no more ben­e­fi­cial than advice from oth­er advi­sors, par­tic­i­pants believed that it had been—and they believed this despite the fact that they were told noth­ing about their advi­sors’ per­for­mance. Why? The best per­form­ers did not give bet­ter advice, but they did give more of it, and par­tic­i­pants appar­ent­ly mis­took quan­ti­ty for qual­i­ty.” The researchers are at Har­vard and UVA. I did not read the arti­cle itself because I found the abstract instant­ly plau­si­ble.
  6. John Adams’ Fear Has Come to Pass (David French, The Dis­patch): “…the most polar­ized Amer­i­cans are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly white and col­lege-edu­cat­ed on the left and dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly white and retired on the right. The peo­ple dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly dri­ving polar­iza­tion in the Unit­ed States are not oppressed minori­ties, but rather some of the most pow­er­ful, most priv­i­leged, wealth­i­est peo­ple who’ve ever lived. They enjoy more free­dom and oppor­tu­ni­ty than vir­tu­al­ly any pri­or gen­er­a­tion of humans, all while liv­ing under the pro­tec­tive umbrel­la of the most pow­er­ful mil­i­tary in the his­to­ry of the plan­et.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  7. A Polit­i­cal Sci­en­tist on Ukraine (Mike Mazarr, Twit­ter): “Very struck by recent analy­sis + report­ing that high­lights a risk–highly uncer­tain but not so far wide­ly discussed–of a sig­nif­i­cant esca­la­tion of the Ukraine war in com­ing weeks. What it means, and what it implies for US pol­i­cy, are not at all clear.”

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 The Real Prob­lem at Yale Is Not Free Speech (Natalia Dashan, Pal­la­di­um): “The cam­pus ‘free speech’ debate is just a side-effect. So are debates about ‘diver­si­ty’ and ‘inclu­sion.’ The real prob­lems run much deep­er. The real prob­lems start with Mar­cus and me, and the masks we wear for each oth­er…. In a world of masks and façades, it is hard to con­vey the truth. And this is how I end­ed up offer­ing a sand­wich to a man with hun­dreds of mil­lions in a for­eign bank account.” I liked this one a lot. First shared in vol­ume 215.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 347

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.

This is vol­ume 347, a Fried­man num­ber. That means it can be writ­ten as an equa­tion com­prised of its own dig­its (3+4=7).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What John Updike and Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins knew about the pow­er of East­er (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “If Jesus wasn’t actu­al­ly res­ur­rect­ed, then East­er is less real than the bud­ding buzz of spring, less real than a dying breath, less real than my own hands, feet and skin. I have no inter­est in a Chris­tian­i­ty that isn’t deeply, pro­found­ly, irre­ducibly mate­r­i­al.”
  2. Frag­men­ta­tion Is Not What’s Killing Us (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “[The break­down at Babel] does indeed sound like now. But the lessons we learn will be wrong if we don’t see the pri­ma­ry point of the Babel sto­ry: The prob­lem wasn’t the frag­men­ta­tion. The prob­lem was the uni­ty.”
  3. Chi­na Covid #2 (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “I want to empha­size that it is very dif­fi­cult to know what is going on inside Chi­na and my sources for this are not the best. I find the Ukraine war a rel­a­tive epis­temic cake­walk com­pared to this. So please under­stand that the alarmist claims from var­i­ous threads are to be tak­en with large heap­ings of salt.”
  4. Solve for the wartime pre­sen­ta­tion equi­lib­ri­um (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The country’s IT Army, a vol­un­teer force of hack­ers and activists that takes its direc­tion from the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment, says it has used [facial recog­ni­tion search­es] to inform the fam­i­lies of the deaths of 582 Rus­sians, includ­ing by send­ing them pho­tos of the aban­doned corpses. The Ukraini­ans cham­pi­on the use of face-scan­ning soft­ware from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a bru­tal but effec­tive way to stir up dis­sent inside Rus­sia, dis­cour­age oth­er fight­ers and has­ten an end to a dev­as­tat­ing war.” Tech­nolo­gies always have unex­pect­ed appli­ca­tions.
  5. Help­ing the Poor: The Great Dis­trac­tion (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Gov­ern­ments around the world impose numer­ous poli­cies that active­ly hurt the poor. The whole debate about ‘help­ing the poor’ cre­ates the illu­sion that the sole rea­son for their suf­fer­ing is mere neglect, even though out­right abuse is ram­pant.… They don’t need us to help them; they need us to stop hurt­ing them.”
  6. There is No Pink Tax (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Pref­er­ences dif­fer sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly across gen­ders lead­ing to sub­tly dif­fer­ent prod­ucts even in cat­e­gories which appear sim­i­lar on the sur­face.… Women and men could save mon­ey by buy­ing prod­ucts pri­mar­i­ly mar­ket­ed to the oppo­site gender–like 2‑in‑1 shampoo+conditioner–but only by buy­ing prod­ucts that they pre­fer less than the prod­ucts they choose to buy.”
  7. Study explores aca­d­e­m­ic suc­cess among Jew­ish girls (Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty, Phys.org): “Girls raised by Jew­ish par­ents are 23 per­cent­age points more like­ly to grad­u­ate col­lege than girls with a non-Jew­ish upbring­ing, even after account­ing for their par­ents’ socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus. Girls raised by Jew­ish par­ents also grad­u­ate from more selec­tive col­leges, accord­ing to a new­ly pub­lished study by Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Ilana Hor­witz.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. One of our PhD can­di­dates is coau­thor on the paper — con­grat­u­la­tions!

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 The Revolt of the Fem­i­nist Law Profs (Wes­ley Yang, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “The sex bureau­cra­cy, in oth­er words, piv­ot­ed from pun­ish­ing sex­u­al vio­lence to impos­ing a nor­ma­tive vision of ide­al sex, to which stu­dents are held admin­is­tra­tive­ly account­able.” First shared in vol­ume 214.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 335

spici­er con­tent than nor­mal — you have been warned

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.

This is vol­ume 335. The num­ber 335 is pret­ty cool because it is divis­i­ble by the num­ber of primes below it (335 = 67 · 5, and there are 67 primes less than 335).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. No, Reli­gious Free­dom Doesn’t Send Peo­ple to Hell (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Reli­gious free­dom is a restric­tion on the pow­er of the state to set itself up as a medi­a­tor between God and human­i­ty. It is not an affir­ma­tion of idol­a­try, just as say­ing, ‘The gov­ern­ment shouldn’t take your baby away and raise your chil­dren’ is not an affir­ma­tion of bad par­ent­ing. Say­ing par­ents should raise their chil­dren, instead of the gov­ern­ment, does not mean everyone’s par­ent­ing is good.”
  2. About iden­ti­ty issues
    • No, the Rev­o­lu­tion Isn’t Over (N.S. Lyons, Sub­stack): “In what is rapid­ly becom­ing one of my pre­ferred expla­na­tions for the Rev­o­lu­tion, the evo­lu­tion­ary anthropologist/mathematician/prophet of doom Peter Turchin has iden­ti­fied ‘elite over­pro­duc­tion’ as hav­ing been one of the top dri­vers of rev­o­lu­tion and civ­il con­flict through­out his­to­ry. He points to the ten­den­cy for deca­dent soci­eties to pro­duce far more overe­d­u­cat­ed elites than there are elite-lev­el jobs, lead­ing to large num­bers of under­em­ployed, resent­ful elite-class intel­lec­tu­als of the type who tend pine after the posi­tion and sta­tus they ‘deserve’ and even­tu­al­ly start spend­ing their free time start­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary cells.”
      • This is long and full of insight. And very, very spicy. I have no idea who the author is — N.S. Lyons is a pen name for a DC area ana­lyst with exper­tise in the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty. I assume he finds the pen name nec­es­sary to pro­tect his pro­fes­sion­al rep­u­ta­tion when he writes about Amer­i­can cul­ture. Did I men­tion it was spicy?
    • The Trans Move­ment Is Not About Rights Any­more (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “This week, the writer Col­in Wright posed on Twit­ter the fol­low­ing ques­tion: ‘What rights do trans peo­ple cur­rent­ly not have but want that don’t involve replac­ing bio­log­i­cal sex with one’s sub­jec­tive ‘gen­der iden­ti­ty’?’ And the response was, of course, crick­ets. The truth is: the 6–3 Bostock deci­sion places trans peo­ple in every state under the pro­tec­tion of the Civ­il Rights Act of 1964. It’s done. It’s built on the stur­dy pro­hi­bi­tion on sex dis­crim­i­na­tion. A Trump nom­i­nee wrote the rul­ing. What the trans move­ment is now doing, after this com­pre­hen­sive vic­to­ry, is not about rights at all. It is about cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion.”
    • Why I am no longer a tenured pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to (Jor­dan Peter­son, Nation­al Post): “My stu­dents are also part­ly unac­cept­able pre­cise­ly because they are my stu­dents. I am aca­d­e­m­ic per­sona non gra­ta, because of my unac­cept­able philo­soph­i­cal posi­tions. And this isn’t just some incon­ve­nience. These facts ren­dered my job moral­ly unten­able. How can I accept prospec­tive researchers and train them in good con­science know­ing their employ­ment prospects to be min­i­mal?”
    • Being Jew­ish in an Unrav­el­ing Amer­i­ca (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “The bad guy was killed. The good guys were saved. It doesn’t often turn out that way. All the Jews I know—even the atheists—are thank­ing God.  But why, despite my grat­i­tude, do I feel so much rage? Why does it feel like there is so lit­tle com­fort to be found? What has changed? I did not feel this way in the hor­rif­ic after­math of the Tree of Life massacre—the most lethal in all of Amer­i­can Jew­ish his­to­ry.… What I now see is this: In Amer­i­ca cap­tured by trib­al­ism and dehu­man­iza­tion, in an Amer­i­ca swept up by ide­olo­gies that pit us against one anoth­er in a zero-sum game, in an Amer­i­ca enthralled with the poi­so­nous idea that some groups mat­ter more than oth­ers, not all Jews—and not all Jew­ish victims—are treat­ed equal­ly. What seems to mat­ter most to media pun­dits and politi­cians is not the Jews them­selves, but the iden­ti­ties of their attack­ers. And it scares me.”
  3. The Pro-Life Move­men­t’s Moral Dou­ble­s­peak (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “But the mod­ern Chris­t­ian church has put forth a fake real­i­ty in which women are almost always the vic­tim except in rare, extreme cas­es. They seem inca­pable of admit­ting that women who abort their babies know what they are doing. They can’t bring them­selves to even acknowl­edge that women ini­ti­ate about 70% of all divorces. When pas­tors write entire books about mar­riage and nev­er once men­tion the basic and well known fact that women file for the vast major­i­ty of divorces – and that’s every Chris­t­ian mar­riage book I’ve ever read – they aren’t seri­ous peo­ple. They jus­ti­fy and excuse almost any female behav­ior, and even twist real­i­ty to some­how blame men for it.” There are sev­er­al uncom­fort­able insights in this essay.
  4. China’s Births Hit His­toric Low, a Polit­i­cal Prob­lem for Bei­jing (Steven Lee Myers and Alexan­dra Steven­son, New York Times): “The num­ber of births fell to 10.6 mil­lion in 2021, com­pared with 12 mil­lion the year before, accord­ing to fig­ures report­ed on Mon­day by the Nation­al Bureau of Sta­tis­tics. That was few­er even than the num­ber in 1961, when the Great Leap For­ward, Mao Zedong’s eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy, result­ed in wide­spread famine and death.”
  5. Buy Things, Not Expe­ri­ences (Harold Lee, per­son­al blog):  “…the focus on min­i­mal­ism sounds like a new form of con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion. Now that even the poor can afford mate­r­i­al goods, let’s den­i­grate goods while high­light­ing the remain­ing lux­u­ries that only the afflu­ent can enjoy and show off to their friends.”
    • This is a short, well-argued con­trar­i­an take. Stuff like this is cat­nip to me.
  6. About the pan­dem­ic:
    • Hong Kongers Rebel Against Order to Hand Over Ham­sters (Rob Quinn, News­er): “After a woman and 11 ham­sters in the pet shop she worked in test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID, author­i­ties said Tues­day that any­body who bought a ham­ster on or after Dec. 22 should hand it in to be euth­a­nized. But while the ter­ri­to­ry gen­er­al­ly has a high lev­el of com­pli­ance with COVID orders, the ham­ster order was wide­ly seen as a step too far…”
    • To Fight Covid, We Need to Think Less Like Doc­tors (Aaron E. Car­roll, New York Times): “Car­ing for an indi­vid­ual and pro­tect­ing a pop­u­la­tion require dif­fer­ent pri­or­i­ties, prac­tices and ways of think­ing. While it may sound coun­ter­in­tu­itive, to heal the coun­try and put our Covid-19 response on the right track, we need to think less like doc­tors.” The author is both a physi­cian and also the chief health offi­cer at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Omi­cron opti­mist, pes­simist or fatal­ist – which are you? (Tim Har­ford, per­son­al blog): “Is this the point at which we should shrug our shoul­ders and give up? Omi­cron has prompt­ed three kinds of reac­tion: opti­mism, pes­simism and fatal­ism.… What’s con­fus­ing is that all three views may be right. Omi­cron is quite plau­si­bly mild, cat­a­stroph­ic and inevitable all at once.” The author is a British econ­o­mist. 
    • Lying About Covid For ‘Inter­na­tion­al Har­mo­ny’ (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Inch by painful inch, the truth is being dragged out about how this pan­dem­ic start­ed. It is just about under­stand­able, if not for­giv­able, that Chi­nese sci­en­tists have obfus­cat­ed vital infor­ma­tion about ear­ly cas­es and their work with sim­i­lar virus­es in Wuhan’s lab­o­ra­to­ries: they were sub­ject to fierce edicts from a ruth­less, total­i­tar­i­an regime. It is more shock­ing to dis­cov­er in emails released this week that some west­ern sci­en­tists were also say­ing dif­fer­ent things in pub­lic from what they thought in pri­vate.” Con­tains excerpts from a pay­walled arti­cle.
    • School Clo­sures Were a Cat­a­stroph­ic Error. Pro­gres­sives Still Haven’t Reck­oned With It. (Jonathan Chait, NY Mag­a­zine): “It is always eas­i­er to diag­nose these patholo­gies when they are tak­ing place on the oth­er side. You’ve prob­a­bly seen the raft of papers show­ing how vac­cine uptake cor­re­lates with Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ing and COVID deaths cor­re­late with Repub­li­can vot­ing. Per­haps you have mar­veled at the spec­ta­cle of Repub­li­can elites active­ly harm­ing their own audi­ence. But the same thing Fox News hosts were doing to their elder­ly sup­port­ers, pro­gres­sive activists were doing to their side’s young ones.” It may not be obvi­ous, but this arti­cle dove­tails very nice­ly with the Dreher arti­cle about elites not being truth­ful and not reck­on­ing with mis­takes.
  7. The long-term effects of protes­tant activ­i­ties in Chi­na (Yuyu Chen, Hui Wang, Se Yan, Jour­nal of Com­par­a­tive Eco­nom­ics): “Our find­ings imply that late-nine­teenth- and ear­ly-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Protes­tant mis­sion­ar­ies pio­neered that mod­ern­iza­tion move­ment by dis­sem­i­nat­ing, along with Chris­tian­i­ty, West­ern sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy to even the most remote regions of Chi­na. Such efforts accel­er­at­ed the pace of mod­ern­iza­tion, con­tributed to the accu­mu­la­tion of human cap­i­tal, and reshaped the social val­ues of local peo­ple. Although these his­tor­i­cal lega­cies of mis­sion­ar­ies’ under­tak­ings were sup­pressed dur­ing the Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion, they rapid­ly resurged and began to con­tribute to socioe­co­nom­ic devel­op­ments when Chi­na began to open up and reform.” The authors appear to be schol­ars at Peking Uni­ver­si­ty.

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 Jesus, Mary, and Joe Jonas (Jonathan Parks-Ramage, Medi­um): “How, in famous­ly lib­er­al Hol­ly­wood and among sta­tis­ti­cal­ly pro­gres­sive mil­len­ni­als, had good old-fashioned evan­ge­lism [sic] gained pop­u­lar­i­ty? In this con­text, a church like Real­i­ty L.A. seemed like some­thing that could nev­er work. But that evening, as I reflect­ed on the trou­bled actress and the psy­chic bru­tal­i­ties inflict­ed by the enter­tain­ment indus­try, it occurred to me that I had under­es­ti­mat­ed Hollywood’s biggest prod­uct: lost souls.” First shared in vol­ume 192 

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 334

a whole lot­ta mag­ic tricks at the end of this one

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. A Nation of Chris­tians Is Not Nec­es­sar­i­ly a Chris­t­ian Nation (David French, The Dis­patch): “There are influ­en­tial peo­ple and insti­tu­tions in this coun­try who’ve tak­en the posi­tion that ortho­dox expres­sions of Chris­t­ian sex­u­al moral­i­ty rep­re­sent noth­ing more than big­otry and hatred.  But as much hos­til­i­ty as I’ve seen and expe­ri­enced from some sec­u­lar left­ists in response to the pub­lic expres­sion of my Chris­t­ian val­ues, noth­ing com­pares to hos­til­i­ty I’ve seen and expe­ri­enced from self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians when I root­ed my oppo­si­tion to Don­ald Trump in the same Chris­t­ian val­ues that some­times earned me scorn in the Ivy League.”
    • Con­tra French on Chris­tian­i­ty’s Decline (Ross Douthat, Sub­stack): “In oth­er words, in the his­to­ry of the Unit­ed States from the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion to Mar­tin Luther King Jr. you see two things hap­pen­ing togeth­er: the pri­vate prac­tice of faith becomes pret­ty steadi­ly more robust, and the gov­ern­ment becomes more com­mit­ted to what most of us, reli­gious and not, now con­sid­er basic ele­ments of jus­tice and mer­cy. Over this mul­ti-gen­er­a­tional process, you could rea­son­ably say that Amer­i­ca remained man­i­fest­ly imper­fect but came clos­er, how­ev­er lurch­ing­ly, to the com­bi­na­tion of wide­spread per­son­al faith and greater polit­i­cal jus­tice that French argues char­ac­ter­izes the Chris­t­ian soci­ety. That this hap­pened, quite often, through con­flict between Protes­tants (both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, etc.) is unde­ni­able but not, it seems to me, a par­tic­u­lar­ly telling cri­tique: In a heav­i­ly Protes­tant soci­ety how else would change come?” A very impres­sive response.
    • America’s Chris­t­ian His­to­ry Is Broad­er Than Its White Protes­tant Past (David French, The Dis­patch): “Because Amer­i­ca is a major­i­ty Chris­t­ian nation, Amer­i­can progress has depend­ed on Chris­t­ian action. But also because Amer­i­ca is a major­i­ty Chris­t­ian nation, Amer­i­can oppres­sion has depend­ed on Chris­t­ian action as well. And a move­ment that’s dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly white and Chris­t­ian needs to remem­ber that sober­ing fact.” A sol­id sur­re­join­der, but I think I award the match point to Douthat even though I usu­al­ly agree with French more.
  2. Pan­dem­ic stuff:
    • One More Time: What Do You Want Us to Do About Covid that We Aren’t Doing Already? (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “I will not live in fear. And I sus­pect that this is at the heart of all of it — for com­plex soci­o­log­i­cal rea­sons, [our] elites are made up of peo­ple who suf­fer from anx­i­ety and inse­cu­ri­ty at vast­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate rates, and they go through life need­ing their own feel­ings to be val­i­dat­ed by every­one else. This is very scary for them, and if it’s not scary for some of the rest of us, they expe­ri­ence that as implied judg­ment.” This is very, very good once you get past the Syr­ia stuff up top (which is help­ful as a fram­ing device, but goes on a lit­tle too long).
    • Why UCSF COVID expert Bob Wachter will soon be ‘over’ the pan­dem­ic (Eric Ting, SF Gate): “I believe it’s like­li­est that it peaks soon and comes down in Feb­ru­ary, and we’ll find our­selves in a world where the risk to ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed indi­vid­u­als is quite low, and it gets low for a few rea­sons. For one, every­one should have some immu­ni­ty because with the unvac­ci­nat­ed, most if not all will have been infect­ed by the time this wave ends. This vari­ant of the virus, which is now dom­i­nant, is more mild on aver­age. And the risk is low­er for immuno­com­pro­mised and high-risk indi­vid­u­als because of the increas­ing avail­abil­i­ty of med­ica­tions that decrease the chance they’ll get super sick.” The inter­vie­wee is chair of the Depart­ment of Med­i­cine at UCSF.
    • Dear Stan­ford: don’t force boost­ers on stu­dents (Monte Fis­ch­er, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “When Paul Offit — direc­tor of the Vac­cine Edu­ca­tion Cen­ter at the Children’s Hos­pi­tal of Philadel­phia, mem­ber of the FDA’s vac­cine advi­so­ry com­mit­tee, decades-long ene­my of the anti-vax move­ment and co-inven­tor of a rotavirus vac­cine — tells his own twen­ty-some­thing son not to get boost­ed, you might start to ask some ques­tions about the wis­dom of Stanford’s lat­est man­date.” The author is a PhD can­di­date in MS&E.
  3. Is the West Becom­ing Pagan Again? (Christo­pher Cald­well, New York Times): “Ms. Delsol’s inge­nious approach is to exam­ine the civ­i­liza­tion­al change under­way in light of that last one 1,600 years ago. Chris­tians brought what she calls a ‘nor­ma­tive inver­sion’ to pagan Rome. That is, they prized much that the Romans held in con­tempt and con­demned much that the Romans prized, par­tic­u­lar­ly in mat­ters relat­ed to sex and fam­i­ly. Today the Chris­t­ian over­lay on West­ern cul­tur­al life is being removed, reveal­ing a lot of pagan urges that it cov­ered up. To state Ms. Delsol’s argu­ment crude­ly, what is hap­pen­ing today is an undo­ing, but it is also a redo­ing. We are invert­ing the nor­ma­tive inver­sion. We are repa­ganiz­ing.”
  4. New Math Research Group Reflects a Schism in the Field (Rachel Crow­ell, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “A new orga­ni­za­tion called the Asso­ci­a­tion for Math­e­mat­i­cal Research (AMR) has ignit­ed fierce debates in the math research and edu­ca­tion com­mu­ni­ties since it was launched last Octo­ber.… The AMR claims to have no posi­tion on social jus­tice issues, and crit­ics see its silence on those top­ics as part of a back­lash against inclu­siv­i­ty efforts.… The con­tro­ver­sy reflects a grow­ing divi­sion between researchers who want to keep sci­en­tif­ic and math­e­mat­i­cal pur­suits sep­a­rate from social issues that they see as irrel­e­vant to research and those who say even pure math­e­mat­ics can­not be con­sid­ered sep­a­rate­ly from the racism and sex­ism in its cul­ture.”
  5. We need to be able to talk about trans ath­letes and women’s sports (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Male puber­ty makes you taller, con­fers greater mus­cle and bone mass, larg­er heart and lung capac­i­ty rel­a­tive to your size, and more hemo­glo­bin. For cis­gen­der men, this trans­lates to rough­ly a 6 to 10 per­cent advan­tage over bio­log­i­cal women in sports such as run­ning and swim­ming, though the gap can be larg­er in oth­er domains, and in a few sports female biol­o­gy actu­al­ly con­veys some advan­tage. That 6 to 10 per­cent might sound mod­est, but at the elite lev­el, where 1 per­cent to 2 per­cent dif­fer­ences can eas­i­ly make the mar­gin of vic­to­ry, it’s over­whelm­ing. Jamaica’s Elaine Thomp­son-Her­ah, the fastest woman in the world, would lose to America’s best high school boys, and the fastest pitch ever record­ed by a woman would be unim­pres­sive for many high school base­ball teams.”
  6. The Bad Guys Are Win­ning (Anne Apple­baum, The Atlantic): “As Vladimir Putin fig­ured out a long time ago, mass arrests are unnec­es­sary if you can jail, tor­ture, or pos­si­bly mur­der just a few key peo­ple. The rest will be fright­ened into stay­ing home. Even­tu­al­ly they will become apa­thet­ic, because they believe noth­ing can change.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­na.
  7. Why the Catholic Church is Los­ing Latin Amer­i­ca (Fran­cis X. Roc­ca, Luciana Mag­a­l­haes & Saman­tha Pear­son, The Wall Street Jour­nal): “The rise of lib­er­a­tion the­ol­o­gy in the 1960s and  ’70s, a time when the Catholic Church in Latin Amer­i­ca increas­ing­ly stressed its mis­sion as one of social jus­tice, in some cas­es draw­ing on Marx­ist ideas, failed to counter the appeal of Protes­tant faiths. Or, in the words of a now-leg­endary quip, var­i­ous­ly attrib­uted to Catholic and Protes­tant sources: ‘The Catholic Church opt­ed for the poor and the poor opt­ed for the Pen­te­costals.’ ” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

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 A (Not So) Sec­u­lar Saint (James K.A. Smith, Los Ange­les Review of Books): “Mill’s lega­cy was effec­tive­ly ‘edit­ed’ by his philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal dis­ci­ples, excis­ing any hint of reli­gious life. One would nev­er know from the canon in our phi­los­o­phy depart­ments, for exam­ple, that Mill wrote an appre­cia­tive essay on ‘The­ism.’” First shared in vol­ume 190.

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.