Compelling example of the need for digital privacy in a post-Row world.

I’ve been thinking this since yesterday. It’s telling how so many “law and order” conservatives who make a big deal about being pro-police reverse on those positions as soon as law enforcement is inconvenient for them.

A worrying look at CPAC. What is happening to the Republican Party?

McCarthy isn’t saying the same thing as these Telegram channels, but he’s making it easier for them to say what they’re saying.

Disappointing but unsurprising.

I’ve long lacked confidence in my own opinions (as a general rule—I can also be an opinionated jerk), so even the simplest disagreement with a position I’ve taken can take some wind out of my sails. When I read the official Latter-day Saint response to the recent AP story, I didn’t agree with it, but it still slowed me down some. “Maybe I should consider things from another point of view,” I thought. I do think it’s important to consider things from all angles, and I don’t think I have the full story, but Michael Austin’s response is the right one gere. When we’re talking about an instance where church inaction allowed for horrific child abuse to continue unchecked for SEVEN YEARS, complaining about unfair treatment in the press is not the right way to respond. Furthermore, if the church is upset by implications that it cares more about its public reputation than about victims of child abuse, responding the way it did only adds fuel to that fire. Again, Austin’s response here is spot on.

Why do we let inkjet printers get away with this nonsense?

This reporting is from a couple of years ago, but I wasn’t paying enough attention at the time, and recent events make me regret that.

Musk continues his trolling. This is a dumb proposal, and Twitter shouldn’t accept it.

Some good points about how Amazon owning Roomba is scarier than just Roomba existing on its own—even if I didn’t realize that Roomba was creepily mapping houses.

I haven’t attended the Latter-day Saint congregation I officially belong to since March of 2020, and I’m coming up on one year of being an official member of Community of Christ. It’s pretty clear to me—and, likely, to others—where my religious future is headed.

Yet, I’ve always expected that I would remain a de jure—if not de facto—member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Even if it’s not the right spiritual home for me or my family any more, and even if I have major disagreements with it, this church has been an important part of my life, and I’ve always wanted to preserve that by retaining my official membership. I’ve never thought of myself as an “ex-Mormon,” I don’t like to talk about my faith transition as “leaving the Church,” and when I was recently described as a “Latter-day Saint professor” in a Salt Lake Tribune article, I was briefly perturbed but ultimately decided that I thought the description worked, even if it was a bit misleading. (To be clear, though, this isn’t a dig at Peggy, who knows that I’m a BYU grad and returned missionary but doesn’t/didn’t know that I’m practicing in Community of Christ.)

Amazon keeps getting bigger, and I don’t think that’s for the better.

This is a horrifying, sickening story. When it’s marriage equality, the Church is eager to say that being legal doesn’t make something right (a bad take, for the record), so to hear “it was fine because it was legal” as a defense for bishops’ failure to report child sexual abuse (at Salt Lake’s encouragement) is sickening.

Unsurprising, but still a valuable read.

I don’t believe nuclear disarmament will be easy, but I’m increasingly convinced that it must be done. Just a single mistake or miscommunication could doom our entire planet.

There’s a similar amendment on the ballot in Kentucky in November; here’s hoping for similar results.

A friend gave me this book as a gift for my confirmation nearly a year ago. I wasn’t sure what I would think about it, but I was excited about Merton’s connection with Kentucky, and I figured that if my friend liked it, it ought to be pretty good.

I finally decided to dive in and while I have a good opinion of it overall, I think my response is better described as mixed. Not all of the book resonated with me—I felt that Merton talked a lot about contemplation (sometimes in very interesting ways) without ever really giving any practical information on what contemplation is and how to practice it.

This week and last, I’ve been reading up on Mormons’ commitment to both the language of the King James Version (Philip Barlow’s Mormons and the Bible is a fantastic read) and what is seen as the authoritative text of the Book of Mormon. In Paul Gutjahr’s The Book of Mormon: A Biography, he quotes the official Latter-day Saint Scripture Translation Manual as including the following guidelines for translators of the Book of Mormon:

Nearly a year ago, a friend gave me a copy of Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation as a gift for my confirmation into Community of Christ. It (obviously) took me a while to start it, and it’s taking me some time to read through it, but there’s a lot in there that I like. This afternoon, this passage stood out to me:

Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God, for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice, your mediocrity and materialism, your sensuality and selfishness that have killed his faith.

We’ve had a rough year of natural disasters.

Compelling podcast episode from Mozilla highlighting morally dubious uses of AI. It’s really important that we be more reflective about this instead of trying things and seeing where they lead.

So much of modern right-wing politics boils down to concerns about masculinity.

I knew that Gab was supporting Mastriano, but I didn’t realize ties ran this deep. Gab is a toxic hellhole, and if Mastriano is sending them money, that should rule him out as a candidate.

Look, I’m a critic of Apple’s closed system, but it’s laughable for Meta to set itself up as an oprn alternative.

This case seems so clear cut to me, and the American right’s willingness to harass this doctor suggests that things are going very wrong.