Weekend Reads 8/31/19

The Myth of Consumer-Grade Security

Barr can't weaken consumer systems without also weakening commercial, government, and military systems. There's one world, one network, and one answer. As a matter of policy, the nation has to decide which takes precedence: offense or defense. If security is deliberately weakened, it will be weakened for everybody. And if security is strengthened, it is strengthened for everybody. It's time to accept the fact that these systems are too critical to society to weaken. Everyone will be more secure with stronger encryption, even if it means the bad guys get to use that encryption as well.

Conservative Evangelicals Aren’t Hypocrites, They’re Sadists

White evangelicals and other conservative Christians believe that God has ordained certain ways of being and doing in the world. That’s the order part. Daddies are leaders, then mommies, then kids. This is the traditional cis-het thing you’re familiar with.

Again, not all—it’s important not to caricature them—but a healthy portion of conservative white evangelicals impute a racial hierarchy into this scheme as well. Partly, that’s a contingency of where white evangelicalism has been traditionally strong. Partly it’s because they tend to conflate hierarchies of all sorts with order. And yes, partly it’s because some of them are racists. They don’t see the injustice or power imbalances in the social order as it’s presently constituted, so they perceive today’s situation as “things were a lot better when everybody just stayed in their lane.”

For first time, more voters see economy fading than improving under Trump

Even so, the mounting costs of Trump’s trade war with China have damaged his leading argument for reelection. Forty-one percent of poll respondents blamed the president’s policies for damaging the economy, the highest level since Trump took office.

Rachel Held Evans, public theologian

As a student at Bryan, Evans slowly awakened to an absence of grace in the fundamentalist tradition she’d inherited. And she started asking questions: If non-Christians can’t be saved, are victims of terrorism just as bound for hell as their murderers? Are there not obvious similarities between arguments used to exclude gay people now and those used for slavery not so long ago? If every passage of scripture is equally authoritative, shouldn’t we be much more keen to ban Cretans than we presently are (Titus 1:12)?