One historical myth I think has surprisingly long legs is the idea that for most of human history marriage was between a very young girl and a much older man.
We kinda get that idea laundered to us even through fantasy (Game of Thrones did this a lot) but the reality is just way more complicated in the west.
Yes, in the Roman Empire, you do see some urban records of older men marrying younger girls, but that was usually in contexts where those men's primary sources of income were estates they owned that were run by slaves or lending.

First, this story is horrible.
Second, I think what's even stranger about Trump is that in Trump's case, people usually have to repent on his behalf.
Trump can't actually bring himself to say "I did something awful but Jesus forgives me," so someone like Franklin Graham

https://twitter.com/RancidGinger/status/1948177785052385520

has to go out and say "Trump did something awful but he's so incredibly sorry and has asked Jesus for healing and cleansing." Then Trump strenuously denies he ever did such a thing if he's ever asked about it.
This has happened like nine times.
And, it's more than enough for MAGA

Off the top of my head, here's a list of ideas in Eddington that Eddington is 100 percent right about.
1) Some people who think they aren't racist, are racist and just haven't thought about it yet (A number of supposedly enlightened characters are incredibly quick to blame the

https://twitter.com/MadisonRaeGun/status/1946053876484043066

town's only black guy for a murder.)
2) People who are more interested in personal gain than their convictions are extremely easy to draw into and out of ideological movements (Brian goes from performative protestor to right wing politician).
3) More societal change is driven by

Another thing about the Mary-Joseph thing as I'm blogging about it.
One of the arguments I've also seen flying around is that men would usually be older than their wives in the ancient world, so the idea of Joseph being an old/older man is historically plausible.
1) Sort of. The pattern of girls marrying men ten-fifteen years older than them tended to be more of an urban phenomenon. In rural areas, though, wives and kids are workers. There's not really a normal rural channel to go work into your 30s and save up for a house so you can take

So, real quick, here's a list of things that are never stated in the Bible but often assumed when it comes to the "Jesus's siblings were all older half-siblings from Joseph's first marriage" thing.
1) "Joseph was much older than Mary." No. No ages are given of either Mary or

https://twitter.com/Sola_Requiem/status/1946338638255522047

Joseph, though Mary was probably in her teens if this was her first marriage. He doesn't appear in sequences in later part of Jesus's life where Mary appears, which has led to some speculation that he was dead. If he was dead, though, this doesn't mean he died in his 80s.

Yeah so Trump is all over these and is extremely incriminated. If his story is that the records were made by his enemies and we need to all move on, then I think it's pretty straightforward what's in there.
Why didn't Biden release it? Same reason Biden didn't fire Garland - the sense that the civil, decent thing to do, which the voters want to see, is everyone getting along. And, almost certainly some people personally close to that administration were also implicated/other favors were called in (Clinton, Andrew, maybe Gates.)

Couldn't get all these comments in one screenshot so unfortunately I'm just retweeting this guy.
Anyway - a few years ago when I reviewed Beautiful Union, one thing I kept running into is the fact that the agricultural metaphor for human reproduction isn't just biologically

https://twitter.com/ofcrdeonjoseph/status/1939560079776514511

wrong, it's that it actually does some really particular work to devalue motherhood -- and in fact, when you look at early Greek texts, this is ALWAYS how it functions. (One seed v two seed theories, look it up).
The one-seed agricultural metaphor posits that sperm is like a

I keep thinking about those studies like "65 percent of women under 30 are depressed" or "70 percent of college students are depressed" and I keep thinking there actually has to be some element of privilege there because everyone I know knows someone who would be called "depressed" if they were a white woman.
"Depression" is a state of affairs where you actually can pursue treatment options or talk about how you're feeling to manage your symptoms.
For guys who barely made it through high school and sit at home all day because there's no

Okay, I'm just going to put this out there as some free advice for people:
It's not good for a movement to have the stereotype that its members are all dumb hysterical psychos.
It's almost never completely true but if you put together some really unflattering images of public demonstrations and social media presence, some of you are definitely more of your own worst enemy than others.
And this is just something I want to put out there for people: When you are arguing for something, whether it's on the phone to your state legislature or to your

Okay, so, let's break this down.
Adriana Smith is braindead. That means there is no chance of recovery. She has no function in her entire brain, including the brain stem.
That means that all functions that keep Adriana alive are entirely artificial. Heart,
nbcnews.com/news/us-news/f… lungs, hormones -- it all has to come from doctors. This isn't a coma. She's not unconscious. She's dead - except for machines.
When Smith died, she was nine weeks pregnant.
Now, the situation is that she is being kept on all those machines, against the wishes of her family,

Yeah so let me walk you through how this goes:
1) Companies won't itemize their bills and will simply raise their prices. This means Trump can keep pretending, and telling you, that he's not taxing you, it's just that pesky Bidenflation
2) Trump cuts deals with some of his

https://twitter.com/JakeSherman/status/1917295552292643104

favorite billionaires so they don't pay import taxes. They do, though, keep prices high. You don't know about it, because your bill isn't itemized. Meanwhile Mom and Pop shops fold because they can't keep up with Trump's taxes. Darn Bidenflation, they say, and of course, Trump

So here's a thing I got asked when I was talking about teen birth rates and the national birth rate generally:
"If girls/women are most fertile from 15-30, why are we losing more than a decade to that for education for no good reason?"
I'm not going to entertain "why 15-17 year olds shouldn't have babies" because I think it's self explanatory, but I want to make one thing really clear.
If the reason a woman doesn't have babies until she's in her 30s is "because she wants to," that is not only an excellent reason, but the only reason that matters.

Things I Have Been Told Tariffs Do by Twitter
1) Raise IRS revenue by raising prices
2) Raise IRS revenue by charging other countries money, which US consumers don't pay
3) Bring back unionized manufacturing jobs
4) Bring back non unionized manufacturing jobs but hey at least it's a job right
5) Create jobs for STEM grads on the coasts, but that's really it, yeah
6) Protect small businesses
7) Wipe out small businesses but that's good because we don't need them
8) Replace the income tax (there is no plan for this)
9) Replace property taxes (literally

There's some interesting online pieces of data showing the extent to which it really does seem men think that the point of tariffs is to cause economic hardship *specifically for American women.*
Most of the articles I've read where women business owners are talking

https://twitter.com/maxlugavere/status/1908646961764589937

about the fear they will have to close up shop are besieged with comments like "you should make an OnlyFans" or "get married."
Not to be Freudian about this but I really do think the sub rational reason for a lot of this (and why no one can articulate a rational reason) is the

Hi Victoria.
One thing you and I don't have in common is -- I actually grew up in Indiana and I know what Hoosiers look like.
Crunchy Hoosiers are in Bloomington and, ten years ago, maybe Broadripple. They don't look like this. These are Waffle House Hoosiers. They were

https://twitter.com/RepSpartz/status/1906062431421714508

yelling because they are mad at you because you're doing a bad job. Go to a sports bar during the NCAA tournament and you'll see them doing the same thing at basketball coaches. They're not mad because they're far left plants, they're mad because you suck and they know it.

So if DOGE doesn’t decrease the deficit, and it doesn’t decrease taxes, why do people like it?
I don’t think it’s any deeper than the joy of knowing that somewhere in the country, you wiped the smile off the face of someone who was working happily and comfortably in their chosen field.
I think that’s where most of this comes from. People who are miserable who see other people going to school, making money, working in the field they’re passionate about, and having a family, and for MAGA it’s thrilling to feel like someone is finally making

You know, I really think "I'd love to stop Musk, but I can't get primaried and people are threatening my family" is weak sauce.
There are 435 reps and 100 senators. A little over half Republican. Ten of you get together and say "sorry, our districts come first, we are with the car manufacturers and farmers and veterans and children, we don't care what a drug addict from South Africa says."
Do you really think that Elon is going to drop one billion in liquidity in response? Or that Trump supporters are going to kill 10 congresspeople? No, of course

I've said this a lot and I'll say it again.
There is a very particular cultural construction of "sex trafficking" that exists in conservative religious/political spaces that concerns very small children, and sometimes cannibalism.
It exists to provide a contrast for the kind of

https://twitter.com/JediGhostBear82/status/1895257687501484307

trafficking those people agree is fine, which is the sexual exploitation of teenagers and women. They think that is okay, because the domination and abuse of young women is a core part of their ideology.
That is why it's not hard to find people who think of themselves as cultural

I think a huge part of the draw of tradwife content is that it markets the idea that we actually don't need social services, schools, or a government because everyone has an endless possibility of bootstrapping inside them.
Tradwife content usually deliberately obscures or misrepresents where the money is actually coming from, or creates a fictional narrative of the guy with no education who just works really hard and owns his own business and can provide for a family entirely by himself. And, of course, the wife figure herself doesn't need

One thing I remain convinced of is that I'm the only evangelical or post evangelical who has ever actually read The Screwtape Letters.
So many of y'all out here confidently explaining that it's good for other countries to stumble because that means the US is doing better.
No, and also, the idea that Christians ought to be deceived into thinking that all of life is a 0 sum competition is Letter 19 from Uncle Screwtape

Okay, we clearly need to re-evaluate the whole "ordered love" conversation because some of you are applying it in some really screwed up ways.
1) "So I'm supposed to let my kids starve and feed someone else's because their child is hungry?"
No, but also -- is this actually a situation you're in right now? I'll talk to anyone who is, but are you really, really sure the situation isn't "So I'm supposed to enroll my child in only one travel sport so someone else's kid doesn't go hungry?"
2) Appealing to Calvinism -- the "God plays favorites so I do too"