Honestly, I get the original call, but I’m glad Bluesky backtracked. Content moderation is hard.

What a mess.

What gross software.

Yes please.

Oh, please no. I get (and support) that Community of Christ wants to explore doing digital church, but it also has really compelling theological reasons to not deploy generative AI products, and this makes me sad.

I’ve had many good church experiences in my life, but today’s listening over Zoom to a former pastor give her sermon calling out billionaires by name while filling in the last few details on kiddo’s D&D character sheet ranks hiiiiigh.

I have qualms about the U.S. providing military support to any cause, but if there is such a thing as good U.S. military support, Ukraine is a clear example of it, and either way, this is an embarassment.

Some bonkers details in here.

I soured on Section 230 for a bit, but I came back and largely because of arguments like this one.

If Jordan Bardella thinks it was a Nazi salute… gift link

Taking a moment to remember that the Garden of Enid webcomic is a pinnacle of Mormon arts.

DOGE continues to insist on the dumbest way to carry out its dumb goals.

It’s all bad right now, but it’s still important to call out the particularly bad stuff.

One more thing right out of the Twitter playbook from DOGE: Firing people without understanding how important they are.

When I was in grad school, I was pretty centrist: more liberal than most of the students from BYU (where I’d just finished my bachelor’s) but more conservative than most of the students at MSU. I had an odd experience one day when a fellow student far, FAR to the left from where I was teasingly chided me for a Facebook post I’d made defending Common Core from one of my BYU friends who was convinced it was a communist plot. This really confused me, since it had never occurred to me that one could critique Common Core from the left.

Bookmarking this in case I need to show it to a family member.

This is an excellent graphic novel adaptation of the earliest of Mormon history. The art is good, the story is compelling, and I enjoyed reading it. I came close to buying this twice in the past year after finding it in comics shops, and I was delighted to find that my local library had a couple of copies.

I do wish that I either knew a lot more history or a lot less history going into this. The details of Joseph Smith’s life and early Mormon history are sometimes sparse or ambiguous; more importantly, they’re hotly contested. I don’t mind at all a critical take on Smith, but even though the author is clearly respectful of the historical figure even with his warts and all approach, there’s a deeply ingrained Mormon skepticism in me that wonders if any of the choices verged on the salacious. That’s not a critique of the book so much as a personal observation and a wish that I could have enjoyed the story while setting aside the instinct to be skeptical of non-LDS tellings of the history (which is all the more ridiculous given that I’m going on 5 years of not practicing in that faith).

McSweeney’s pulls no punches, but Vance has earned no mercy.

This book has been on my radar for a few months, and I’m glad to have found an audiobook I could check out (though I doubt I’d have regretted an impulse buy—this would be a good book to have on hand).

Palestinian Christian ministers and theologians always call me to account in a way that I appreciate. I don’t think I should need someone from my own faith tradition (broadly speaking) to tell me how bad the situation in Palestine is (i.e., I should have already figured that out by now), but this book pushed my thinking in ways that are going to stick. I’m more informed than many on Israel and Palestine thanks to a few classes in college, but this still brought in new perspectives that had never really landed before.

The headline is a little provocative, but it’s scary that we live in a world where it makes some sense.

More broadly, though, I found that the first Trump administration converted me to nuclear disarmament—yes, this president is scary, but that any president has access to that much destructive power is scarier still. I expect I’ll go further in that direction this time around.

Starting to sense a pattern.

The rules seem to be that it’s okay to do whatever in the GOP, but no Democrat can even seem to be in a sticky situation. What a joke.

Like everything I’ve read from Graeber, I appreciate the overall argument that he’s making and I find the evidence he marshalls compelling. At the same time, there’s a density to the latter that I admit having trouble following, so I don’t always see how it leads to the overall argument.

Even with those caveats, I’m happy to endorse this read. I’m interested in how Graeber explores the relationship between moral thinking and economic modeling—as I posted earlier, I also find his thoughts on the moral dangers posed by abstracting interpersonal obligations into quantifiable debt with the help of money.

Bookmarking for… sigh… teaching purposes.

As usual, lots to like in this post from Mike Masnick.