Non-theist Christian and elder in Community of Christ. I have Mormon roots and aspirations to do better with justice and peacemaking—especially in the digital sphere but also in Lexington, Kentucky, the U.S., and the world more broadly.
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🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Mozilla is eliminating its advocacy division, which fought for a free and open web'
- kudos:Well, this sucks. link to “Mozilla is eliminating its advocacy division, which fought for a free and open web”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:I appreciate these thoughts from Doctorow. I understand the excitement around Bluesky, I’m happy to follow people there, and I will likely lean into it more as a POSSE vector. That said, I still don’t know that it’s what I want the future of social media to look like. link to “Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
on art and punching Nazis
- kudos:A brief, entirely-unrelated-to-this-post conversation on Mastodon this afternoon got me thinking about an art exhibit that I saw in college and still think about every once in a while. The exhibit was on something along the lines of pop culture and politics, and one of the only two things that I remember from the exhibit (the other being D&D character sheets for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney) was a statue depicting an action figure-y Captain America brandishing the severed head of Saddam Hussein.
a local news dilemma
- kudos:A while ago, the RSS feeds for my local newspaper stopped working (at least with my feed reader), which caused me some consternation as I tried to decide whether to build a workaround or just give up on the Herald-Leader. I believe in supporting local news, so I’ve wanted to find a technical solution to this, but a lot of the decision making is out of my hands, and I don’t really have time on my hands to build myself the kind of webscraper that would be fun to try out.
- kudos:
Between class, early voting, and Halloween yesterday, I did not get to much of my email inbox. Today’s going to have to be “All Sends Day.”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Beshear calls for electing president by popular vote, says it would be better for Kentucky • Kentucky Lantern'
- kudos:Andy is a good one. link to “Beshear calls for electing president by popular vote, says it would be better for Kentucky • Kentucky Lantern”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Long lines reported on first day of early voting in Kentucky'
- kudos:Standing in one of these lines right now! Fingers crossed for the future. 🤞🏻😬🤞🏻 link to “Long lines reported on first day of early voting in Kentucky”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Second Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality, by Matthew Harris
- kudos:I’ve read a number of books on Mormonism and race, but this one might be the most compelling. Its focus on the 20th century is important, and it has the most thorough discussion of the 1978 lifting of the priesthood and temple ban that I’ve ever seen. It’s maddening to see all these details in one place, but I’m grateful that Harris made that available to readers.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles'
- kudos:Some powerful stuff in here. link to “A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles”
- kudos:
The only good thing I got out of reading a blog post arguing that ChatGPT leaves open the door for young earth creationism just now was a reminder to reread Hervé Le Tellier’s « L’Anomalie ».
- kudos:
Sure looks like someone finally got fed up with the majority of Harris signs in our cul-de-sac and decided to swipe them all overnight.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Elon Musk worked in US illegally in 1995 after quitting school – report'
- kudos:Rank hypocrisy. I don’t necessarily think Musk should have been deported way back when, but I think he should be called out on this. link to “Elon Musk worked in US illegally in 1995 after quitting school – report”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Real Monsters of Street Level Surveillance'
- kudos:This is cute, but also Ring doorbells are seriously the thing that scares me most on Halloween. link to “The Real Monsters of Street Level Surveillance”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu
- kudos:I saw the trailer for the upcoming Hulu series earlier this week and decided to give the book a try. It’s a quick listen, though I probably should have read it to really lean into the metafictional aspects. Weird in all the right ways and got me thinking.
letting go of what made others proud of me
- kudos:As I continue to digitize old journals and documents by copying them into Day One (which is a great app, though I wish it hadn’t been acquired by Automattic, given all the drama currently happening there), I am regularly confronted with tensions between past-Spencer and present-Spencer. Maybe “confronted” and “tensions” aren’t the right words, because it’s good and natural for people to change, and I get some benefit out of making these observations, but there are ways that noticing these things can be difficult.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up, by Sara Horowitz
- kudos:I picked this book up at an anarchist bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. Of all the books I was considering, this one seemed the most likely to give practical advice: How can we practice anarchist forms of living today? Horowitz never uses the word anarchist—which doesn’t bother me—but it’s also more ruminations and abstract ideas than specific calls to action. I enjoyed the book fine and “appreciate its rhetorical goals” (to quote Dan McClellan), but it wasn’t as helpful as I hoped in terms of concretely imagining better futures.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment'
- kudos:There are countless GOP politicians and voters who believe Harris is unqualified for the job for lesser (and often exaggerated or fabricated controversies), and yet none of this seems to bother them. gift link link to “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Baseball Baptisms and the British Mission'
- kudos:Fascinating look at a controversial element in Mormon history. I wish more of the data here were firm rather than anecdotal—I think this topic is enough that it could be its own book if there were enough data (made) available. link to “Baseball Baptisms and the British Mission”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'McConnell called Trump 'stupid' and 'despicable' in private after the 2020 election, a new book says'
- kudos:McConnell comes so close to having a conscience and then seems to always bail when it becomes inconvenient to him. That makes him more of a disappointment than if he showed no moral awareness at all. link to “McConnell called Trump ‘stupid’ and ‘despicable’ in private after the 2020 election, a new book says”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Trump Escalates Threats to Political Opponents He Deems the ‘Enemy’'
- kudos:Like so many other things, this alone should disqualify him. Gift link. link to “Trump Escalates Threats to Political Opponents He Deems the ‘Enemy’”
funerals, business meetings, and church futures
- kudos:When I was ordained an elder a couple of months ago, my congregation gave me the gift of a full set of the 1976 History of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I genuinely love this gift and am excited to one day make my way through all eight volumes! Yet, it’s also gotten me thinking a lot about what I want my service in this denomination—now, of course, named Community of Christ—to look like.
- kudos:
I have made so many sneering comparisons between sports fandom and blind nationalism as someone who doesn’t really care about sports, but now that I’ve got a team (my kid’s) to be super invested in… yeah, I actually feel the comparison more, just with more self awareness.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'We watched 20 Trump rallies. His racist, anti-immigrant messaging is getting darker.'
- kudos:This is terrifying—but needs more attention. link to “We watched 20 Trump rallies. His racist, anti-immigrant messaging is getting darker.”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Twitter Barred Them. What Happened When Elon Musk Brought Them Back?'
- kudos:I don’t understand why anyone would stay on Twitter at this point, unless they’re staying for the nonsense. gift link link to “Twitter Barred Them. What Happened When Elon Musk Brought Them Back?”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Elon Musk's Robot Tricks Were Used on Soviets in the 1950s, Too'
- kudos:A good, informing read. link to “Elon Musk’s Robot Tricks Were Used on Soviets in the 1950s, Too”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Elon Musk Is Now Seizing Other People’s Twitter Accounts To Promote Donald Trump'
- kudos:Masnick is excellent at balancing “Musk has a right to do this” with “the hypocrisy is shameful.” link to “Elon Musk Is Now Seizing Other People’s Twitter Accounts To Promote Donald Trump”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Michigan Father Dies in Israeli Airstrike in Lebanon, Family Says'
- kudos:This article was a one-two punch for me. I hoped that the death of a Michigander might draw more attention to victims of the conflict, but his daughter’s comment that “The fact that he was an American citizen should not make his story more important than others” quickly called me to task. Gift Link link to “Michigan Father Dies in Israeli Airstrike in Lebanon, Family Says”
- kudos:
I appreciate Bible scholar Thomas Römer in an academic sense, but I also sometimes remember that I first discovered him through a French comics podcast where he showed up to say that he thought R. Crumb’s adaptation of Genesis could have been more imaginative, and that’s what really sold me on him.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'State Education Department Seeks Bids for 55,000 Classroom Bibles - Oklahoma Watch'
- kudos:This makes a bad story even worse. What a joke. link to “State Education Department Seeks Bids for 55,000 Classroom Bibles - Oklahoma Watch”
the incarnation and a relatable Jesus
- kudos:Several years ago, while I was sharing a Bible story with my daughter, she interjected with an urgent thought: “I hope that Jesus knows that I have a pig.” As I wrote in my journal at that time: She’s been big on showing people her stuffed piggy recently: the movers, the plumber, anyone we’re Facetiming with, it doesn’t matter. So, it makes sense that if she got the chance to see Jesus, she’d want to show Him her pig, too.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
- kudos:This book was repeatedly mentioned in Scott Branson’s Practical Anarchism, so I’ve wanted to read it for a while. It took me three tries, but I finally followed through and just finished the audiobook. It is a fascinating book for the way that it dares to imagine a way that society might be different than what we know now. Wikipedia says that the original subtitle was “An Ambiguous Utopia,” and that tracks with what I read, in that the book isn’t blindly naïve about the anarchist society that it lifts up.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Big Tech’s Promise Never To Block Access To Politically Embarrassing Content Apparently Only Applies To Democrats'
- kudos:Worth reading (and bookmarking). I’ve been hesitant to make the “no, actually, Big Tech is biased against liberals” argument, but this seems a compelling datum for that conclusion… link to “Big Tech’s Promise Never To Block Access To Politically Embarrassing Content Apparently Only Applies To Democrats”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Trump condemned for suggesting ‘one really violent day’ to combat crime'
- kudos:How is this guy a legitimate candidate? link to “Trump condemned for suggesting ‘one really violent day’ to combat crime”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Biggest Sting Operation Ever, by Joseph Cox
- kudos:This is the story of when the FBI ran an encrypted phone company marketed to criminals. Working with Australian Federal Police and European partners, they had a glimpse into gangsters’ and drug dealers’ conversations for years before they wrapped it up with a series of worldwide arrests. It’s a wild story that sounds like fiction but happens to be true. In fact, that’s Cory Doctorow’s blurb on the back—his recommendation on his blog is what got me to check this out.
Nephi's violence and Book of Mormon intertextuality
- kudos:A number of years ago, I read this blog post, which linked to this podcast episode about intertextuality between the New Testament and the Book of Mormon. The post and episode both focus on the work of Nick Frederick, a BYU professor who argues that: If we’re comfortable saying that the New Testament is an antecedent text for the Book of Mormon, for the King James English 19th century Book of Mormon, then that opens up some wonderful avenues of inquiry.