{"id":4078,"date":"2024-10-13T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-13T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/?p=4078"},"modified":"2024-10-12T17:58:50","modified_gmt":"2024-10-13T00:58:50","slug":"two-weeks-in-the-life-october-13-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/?p=4078","title":{"rendered":"Two Weeks in the Life: October 13, 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hello, friends and enemies. I’ve got an assortment of unrelated topics here at the top of the post today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The election is less than a month away (thank god. Let’s get this over with). I’m proud to say that I got my voter guide done early! Here’s the English version<\/a> and here is the Spanish version<\/a>. I know my Spanish is getting better because it only took Ana and I about three hours to review my translation this time. NorCal Resist<\/a> also posted a guide to the propositions<\/a> and had the same recommendations as me, so I feel like I got them all right (something that is normal to want and possible to achieve).<\/p>\n\n\n

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If you have ever done a genetic test through 23andMe, it’s a good time to download your data and delete your account. The company is probably going to declare bankruptcy<\/a> soon, and that opens up the possibility of some other company buying all that genetic data. We don’t know who that would be or what they would use it for, but it’s really a lot of very personal information (and that information isn’t protected by HIPAA). I was considering the fact that 23andMe going out of business means the main company doing DNA tests for people who are just curious about their family history would be ancestry.com, which is run by Mormons. For anyone who isn’t aware, Mormons are obsessed with their genealogy because they believe in posthumously baptizing and performing other religious rites for people so they can get into the top-tier heaven. This reminds me that I really need to write a post about Mormonism and my Mormon upbringing one of these times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, is anyone else kinda freaking out about global warming? According to Scientific American<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A new report from the European Union\u2019s Copernicus Climate Change Service<\/a> warns that the last 11 months in a row have all seen global average temperatures above the 1.5 C threshold. And the last 12 have all been characterized by record-breaking monthly heat; temperatures last month hovered about 1.52 degrees above Earth\u2019s preindustrial average.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And “there’s an 80 percent chance at least one of the next five calendar years will exceed a 1.5 C average. Nearly a decade ago \u2014 in 2015 \u2014 that chance was nearly zero.” The 1.5 C number comes from the Paris Climate Accords<\/a>, which “has a long-term temperature goal … to keep the rise in global surface temperature<\/a> to well below 2\u00a0\u00b0C (3.6\u00a0\u00b0F) above pre-industrial<\/a> levels. The treaty also states that preferably the limit of the increase should only be 1.5\u00a0\u00b0C (2.7\u00a0\u00b0F).” I can’t help but think about how the shitty wars the U.S. funds are a big part of the problem. Research published in June<\/a> found that “the emissions from the first 120 days of the conflict alone were greater than the annual emissions of 26 individual countries and territories.” We’re sponsoring war to secure oil but the war is setting the Earth on fire faster and using the oil is also going to heat the Earth. What’s the plan here? What’s the end game? The U.S. is just five arms companies in a trench coat<\/a> and we’re all being sacrificed on the altar of shareholder profits. Where is the option to vote my way out of being a country whose economy is fully intertwined with making weapons? I have no answers here but I am publicly logging my opposition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Books and Other Words<\/h2>\n\n\n
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Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation<\/a> by Kristin Kobes Du Mez goes deep into the history of the American evangelical Christian movement and how it has “embrace[d] militant masculinity” and a become vehicle for nationalism. Evangelicalism is a major proponent of “complementarianism,” a doctrine that states women and men have separate responsibilities and men are the head of the household. This has given way to an obsession with a certain kind of masculinity, with a framing of Jesus as a “badass” and “warrior,” and thinking of the United States as a country that needs protecting from bad guys, that is, non-Christians and Christians who aren’t Christian enough. This leads to a lot of wild beliefs, like that women who don’t practice this specific brand of gendered behavior aren’t worthy of men’s “protection,” (protection from whom??), which is basically the idea that women who don’t submit to men deserve to be sexually assaulted. Unfortunately for the rest of us, as Du Mez chronicles, evangelicals have embedded themselves into the country’s political scene. For example, James Dobson’s political activism in the 1990s resulted in a million callers contacting their representatives about proposed legislation that would require “homeschool teachers to obtain state certification in each subject that they taught, a requirement that would make homeschooling prohibitively difficult.” The bill did not go through and Congress instead passed legislation “guaranteeing greater protections to homeschooling families.” The book also goes into how evangelicals ended up supporting Trump, which seems hypocritical to us on the outside. However, Du Mez explains that Trump’s brand of masculinity aligned with what evangelicals think a leader needs to be, so rather than a contradiction, for many, Trump made total sense, especially in response to eight years of the Obama administration. The book ends with a bleak litany of evangelical pastors, authors, and other high-ranking men of the evangelical movement who had sexual assault allegations levied against them. This leads one man to ask himself if complementarianism is “‘just camouflage for abusive males,'” but he concludes no, it’s not. Self-awareness: not even once. This book is very good for understanding another aspect of how we got here as a culture, but it will probably make you mad and upset, so proceed with caution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics<\/a> is a sapphic romance set it what I think is the Victorian era, but we are a little fuzzy on the details here and honestly it’s not important. This is an enjoyable, romantic tale about two ladies falling in love and doing their best to stick it to patriarchal society in their own way. One of the main characters, Lucy, wants to be an astronomer and has worked with her dad for years in his observatory. When he dies, none of the men in the scientific establishment take her seriously. However, she receives a message from our other protagonist, Lady Moth, who is looking for a translator for an important work on astronomy. The two get together for this project … and other activities. I thought it was well written and I liked both the sexy and non-sexy components of the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Assassin of Reality<\/a> by husband and wife duo Sergey and Marina Dyachenko is the sequel to Vita Nostra<\/a>, which I read two weeks ago. Although I thought it felt less like a sequel and more like the rest of the book, which is a distinction that may not make sense for everyone but it does to me. I am still incapable of actually describing this book but I will say I think this one is about whether we have free will, but expressed through the medium of depressed 20-year-olds who are at a university to learn their potential as words in the Great Speech (yes, really). I liked it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alexandra Rowland’s latest book, Yield Under Great Persuasion<\/a> was so fun and sweet. It’s set in the same world as all of her books, a pre-industrial alternate reality where gods are real and may choose to get involved in people’s day-to-day lives. This story is part of Rowland’s Seven Gods series, which seems to be exploring the people who are favored of each god, but that makes this book sound a lot more serious than it is. The story is about Tam Beckett, who basically hates himself and assumes everyone else must hate him too. This does not stop him from hooking up with local lord of the manor Nicolau Lyford. It’s clear to everyone but Tam that Nicolau loves him and it’s mutual, but Tam is deeply invested in hating Nicolau and has been nursing a grudge for years because young Nicolau knocked over Tam’s plant in some kind of country fair-type competition. I deeply appreciated that, although Tam hates himself, he does not hate himself for being gay, which is a frequent enough trope in certain stories. Rowland’s world is truly neutral on homosexuality (though the author herself is clearly very pro considering her oeuvre so far\u2014and aren’t we the better off for it). This is a great book for someone who wants to read a gay romance with small-town drama and enjoys characters who are just kind of stupidly in their own way, but somehow manage to grow as people anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jesus and John Wayne<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Assassin of Reality<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Yield Under Great Persuasion<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, on the internet:<\/p>\n\n\n\n