I don’t like Paxton, and I can’t imagine this is much more than performative railing against a strawman version of Big Tech, but this is a real issue, so I’m interested to see where it goes.

Yesterday, I listened to a new episode of the Project: Zion podcast, the semi-official podcast of Community of Christ. This episode was an interview with Shandra Newcom, one of two apostles-designate who will begin their service after the April 2023 World Conference of the church. It was a delightful episode, and I posted something to the Community of Christ subreddit that I wanted to repeat here:

What a great episode! I loved getting to know Shandra, and I appreciated her opennness and vulnerability. In an LDS context, we never would have had (or at least talked so openly about), an apostle who experienced depression or divorce, and it’s so much of a relief for me to hear from a future apostle who doesn’t have to fit a model of perfection to be called to serve God and God’s people. This was very much what I needed to hear this week.

Insightful speculation by Masnick. Ye’s said some horrible things recently, but that doesn’t mean Parlement can’t be taking advantage of him.

I’ve been worrying about 2024, but 2022 is going to be bad enough. GOP needs to do something about this.

We’ve had it better than some states, so it’s disappointing to hear all of this.

Oh no. This can’t be good.

I had not thought this much about the privacy implications of VR, and ooooof.

Wild story, and heck of a scoop. Says far more about Tucker Carlson than about Ye.

Politicians need to better understand the internet. This is just as dumb (and perhaps more devious) than the nonsense the governor of Missouri was up to.

The Salt Lake Tribune’s Mormon Land podcast is one of my favorites—I’ve gone so far as to support it on Patreon so that I can get all the Tribune’s religion coverage without having to subscribe to the entire newspaper. Mormon news interests me a lot, but Utah news doesn’t interest me at all. Yesterday’s episode on age and Latter-day Saint leadership was one of the most interesting episodes that I’ve listened to. In particular, two of Greg Prince’s comments during his interview stood out to me.

This is a terrible idea, and it is wildly irresponsible to do research like this.

I am growing more and more nervous about our future.

Amazing stuff here.

During the last few years I spent as a practicing Latter-day Saint, one recurring pet peeve that I had was the overbroad use of the term “gospel” to refer to all Latter-day Saint doctrines, teachings, and beliefs. In hindsight, learning to separate the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ from everything that I believed was a major part of my faith transition—and my ability to continue in Christianity even when the version that I was used to started to no longer work for me.

After recently finishing an excellent biography on Brigham Young, I’m starting to make my way through some other Mormon Studies books that I own but have not yet read. This has brought me to Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness. It’s very good so far, and I regret having waited until now to read it. I’m currently working through Reeve’s chapters describing Mormons’ relationship with American Indians, and I just now read a paragraph that really surprised me. First, though, some background:

Russia is currently demonstrating just how powerful and dangerous nuclear weapons are—and, unfortunately, how complicated disarmament is.

Unsurprising but disappointing.

Good read on the emptiness of recent Musk bluster.

Good reporting on a scary but important subject. I’ve been collecting Gab blog posts to eventually study some of this Christian nationalism.

Very interesting article on how Tolkien can inspire far right thinking.

This is juvenile enough that I feel guilty finding it funny, but it’s a good demonstration of the problems with this backlash against content moderation.

Ooof. AI-generated art is fun, but it comes at a price, and we can’t afford to forget it.

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to preprare a “focus moment” for today’s worship service in my Community of Christ congregation. There are some things I might change for a different audience (putting more nuance into my current view of God, for example), but I’m still pretty happy with what I came up with. I’m particularly happy about the translation of the song—I didn’t bring it up when sharing, but this is a French Canadian song that I translated for today’s purpose. I recently blogged about this same song, because I’ve been listening to it for years but only just recently learned what the words actually meant (this happens a lot to me in French music). I ended up learning a some new French Canadian vocabulary from this, and I’m pleased with how I managed to translate the lyrics in a way that mostly preserves rhymes and rhythm in English.

Lots to love in this article, but I especially appreciate the point that God and Creation resist binaries.

Great movie, great example of the difficulty of content moderation.