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Dawson Vosburg

@dawsonvosburg.bsky.social
1.3K followers 119 following 789 posts

sacramental evangelical | class struggle social democrat | sociologist studying capitalism, race, and Christianity | postdoctoral fellow at Bryn Mawr College dawsonvosburg.com

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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
a break from the straight-ahead evangelical poverty content to talk about a book that I really struggled to articulate my feelings about. (but don't worry I still find a way to talk about evangelicals, poverty, and the welfare state)
dawsonvosburg.substack.com
Whose Culture, Which Despisers?
A bittersweet review of Bonnie Kristian’s “In Defense of Evangelicalism”
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
there's this sense that we have to treat it as a difference of opinion whether we should fix poverty with welfare or work. you straightforwardly, as a simple matter of fact, cannot reach low levels of poverty with changes to work!
dawsonvosburg.substack.com
How Much Poverty Can Work Alleviate?
Way less than the evangelical poverty story would tell you.
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
I remember seeing a graph Matt Bruenig posted a few years back and it helped clarify so much for me about why you can’t get rid of poverty without welfare. I built it with the latest wave of data and made it interactive!
dawsonvosburg.com
Workers and nonworkers at every age
CPS ASEC 2025 (2024 work experience). Centered three-age average. Figure concept and classification adapted from Matt Bruenig, People’s Policy Project.
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Evangelicals tell a poverty story, and even many liberal evangelicals buy it: the welfare state and “handouts” backfire by creating dependency and discouraging work. The problem? That story is provably false. This is the first in a series of posts I’m dedicating to it.
dawsonvosburg.substack.com
Does Helping Hurt?
The evangelical poverty consensus is dead wrong.
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
the american inability to actually understand class continues apace. when it’s mostly about aesthetics it means most people don’t recognize that farmers are more often bourgeois managers who inherited the farm, not farm laborers—and that they have suffocating local political/economic control
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ghost malone ergo propter bones @proptermalone.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
i keep saying this but LLMs are almost ideally shaped for collective ownership. the union idea is a super interesting direction to go with that
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
look, if you want a sociologist lying with impunity who instead gets fawning praise in the press, you don’t want to look to critical race theorists. Brad Wilcox has an ultra-endowed chair at UVA and constantly spouts obviously false, ideologically motivated nonsense!
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
sound smarter
podcast artwork that declares "We Are Libertarians: Sound Smarter"WikiHow illustration of man pointing at himself in the mirror, giving himself a stern talking-to
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
there is no more painful, accursed format than the PDF. want to use a screen reader? want to copy and paste text from it? good luck! also btw almost every document you interact with as an academic will be in this format
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
I think most people mostly don’t like capitalism (ownership) when they can really understand the stakes. it’s bad to distribute the 30% of our production outputs that doesn’t go to workers to a collective of people massively concentrated at the top
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
well our 3 year old is obsessed with doing the laundry, you have to hide anything made of textiles that you don't want to get shoved into the washing machine (and possibly washed on extra-hot). so don't worry it can become a huge problem in the opposite direction
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
I have a very strong sense for when people's words are LLM. extremely recently saw someone I respect copy-paste what was (to me) obvious claudeslop in their writing, and I felt betrayed by it. I think there is zero justification for the level of vitriol Hank Green's getting.
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
it’s a very depressing experience to open a link with interest and discover almost instantly that every single article on a website reeks of AI writing. nothing at all against anyone who shares it, it’s just something I have seen more and more
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
dissertation defended!
my bio which previously read “sociology PhD candidate” now with a red X through the word “candidate”my bio updated to say “sociologist studying capitalism, race, and Christianity | postdoctoral fellow at Bryn Mawr College”
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Matt G. Metcalf @mattmetcalf.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
I just feel like I have been to small-city strawberry festivals with vastly more people than I’m seeing in these photos.
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
earlier today I saw a friend on facebook repost this graph from Institute for Family Studies, coauthored by Brad Wilcox. immediately it felt fishy to me not only because of the source but because something just smelled off about the graph. what would be the mechanism for that kind of plunge?
Graph Title: High school ideology and marriage expectations. % of 12th graders who expect to get married by ideology, split by sex across three binned date ranges: 2000s, 2010s, and 2021-2024. Conservative boys and girls both remain stable at a very high percentage for all three times. Moderates are somewhat below, decline slightly across all three periods. Liberal line is slightly below moderates, extremely steeply declining at the 2021-2024 period especially among liberal boys.
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
it’s wrapped up with a bunch of arguable tactical claims, but I think this video captures the problem I have with how people tend to respond to AI in a kneejerk way that reveals they don’t have a theory of technology, just feelings about each individual technology youtu.be/Z75hlhgchQ4?...
youtu.be
The Left Has An AI Problem
YouTube video by Harper O'Connor
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
Garfield looking at a “No Garfields” pictogram, captioned, “Huh. I wonder who that’s for.”
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
I am not joking when I say the primary biblical justification people give for the justice of material inequality is the Parable of the Talents. Since they’re given unequal amounts and the ones who earn more are rewarded, therefore to God, equality is unfair. I am just floored by the illiteracy.
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
man. Jean Twenge, not even once. this is partly why I think the generations stuff is garbage because its biggest boosters are wrong about almost everything else!
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Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
The writing life, courtesy of Franz Kafka.
EXCERPTS FROM KAFKA'S DIARIES
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JANUARY 20. The end of writing. When will it take me
up again?
JANUARY 29. Again tried to write, virtually useless.
JANUARY 30. The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.
FEBRUARY 7. Complete standstill. Unending torments.
MARCH 11. How time flies; another ten days and I have chieved nothing. It doesn't come off. A page now anc hen is successful, but I can't keep it up, the next day m powerless.
MARCH 13. [.] Lack of appetite, fear of getting ba te in the evening; but above all the thought that I wr
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
on the one hand it’s always crazy to see people like Megan Basham or Joel Webbon get mad at the president for blasphemy but on the other…it’s grounds for reflection on the man’s underlying nature to approximately none of them, ever, even though it’s not anomalous. he blasphemes constantly!
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
I am going to join the Women's Christian Temperance Union bsky.app/profile/josh...
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Jeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
NSF Update through March 13, 2026 1/2
A line graph of the number of NSF awards in fiscal 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025. The fiscal year 2026 is well below the other curves and increasing only very slowly.
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the babahuck @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
There are a lot of people on this website who think they want God's Not Dead But For Leftist Politics and my very simple rejoinder to them is: no you don't
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
the advent of LLMs newly demonstrates that capitalist institutions have a massive distorting effect on how technology aligns with what people want life to look like: new genuinely good things end up driving the destruction (not merely replacement) of existing genuinely good things
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Kara N. Slade @karanslade.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
“For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.”
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GOLIKEHELLMACHINE @golikehellmachine.com · 11/03/2026
i assume dem leadership knows this, but i don’t think they’ll be able to count on fetterman for anything if they take the senate back; he’s becoming more and more juvenile and unable to control himself.
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
citation matching is a massive headache in my academic writing life and unless you want to use a LaTeX editor which is a bit of a learning curve and aesthetic compromise (at least to me) you had to settle for zotero integrations in word/google which for me have always been…less than speed-of-thought
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
genuinely do not know why no one else has built this
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
I think frankly the buried lede here is that academia really needs a digital distribution standard other than PDF, because PDFs make all kinds of things difficult for users too. PDFs are great for making print ready files with guaranteed formatting stability, and that’s about it.
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
ok so: if you’re a qualitative researcher let me know because I accidentally started building a qualitative data analysis app and i’d love to have some user testers! I plan to have a coding workflow prototype working by the end of the week.
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Sam Thielmonster @samthielman.com · 06/02/2026
“I am a cynical, protean party operative and I am hitching my wagon to a socialist because he is popular!” “I am a principled leftist and I’m glad a centrist shares one of my principles!” Yes! Like grownups, instead of pretending that cynicism is principled and principles rule out cooperation!
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Ross @trusty.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
As followers of Jesus Christ it is our responsibility to call for nonviolent and LOUDER THAN HELL resistance to this evil regime. On the last day God in his justice will demand an answer for your silence
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 21/01/2026
constant discourse about how bluesky is good or bad makes me wonder if anyone actually remembers pre-Elon twitter. it was bad in all of the ways people complain bluesky is bad, down to the very discourse about its badness!
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
I spent a probably dumb amount of time today writing out my dreams for a better qualitative data analysis application than the presently available options. I use MaxQDA and while there’s stuff that’s helpful it’s also just massively clunky and takes longer to code data with than my manual methods.
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
the right wing obsession with the church interruption really signifies the asymmetry in discourse. nobody vested the church protesters with any power! they’re ordinary citizens that no one else actually has to answer for. ICE agents and the president are literally the government.
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
I’ll confess to not being as generally bearish on AI as some folks on the left. I think, though, that the criticisms that are most compelling to me don’t get addressed in this post. The first is teaching writing and the second is internet experience degradation.
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Jake @waveturtlejake.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
He was a Communist, Elmo.
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
going into the game I had serious doubts that either of these teams could beat the seahawks. they and the pats are the only ones that feel like they could take the whole thing
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
no matter how OT goes, my memory of this game will be the most incredible pass I've ever seen
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 17/01/2026
martin buber eats. I and thou are hungry. is this anything
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 17/01/2026
I think what a lot of folks really want is a party where this kind of commitment is the norm: both seeing that better is possible and tirelessly selling it to the public. This is why I find the organizational hostility to Bernie and Zohran so discouraging.
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
man, this reminds me of when CT excerpted "the benedict option" years back. at least that title pretended to a level of sophistication that this...lacks. what's amazing to me is that Shenvi has all the evidence in the world that he's doing yesterday's shadowboxing, but he keeps at it!
christianitytoday.com
Evangelicals, Get Back in the Game - Christianity Today
An excerpt from Post-Woke: Asserting a Biblical Vision of Race, Gender, and Sexuality.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 09/01/2026
because I can freely download two different child pornography generating apps on Apple's App Store and the Google Play store, both very popular and highly ranked, I must conclude that Apple and Google endorse that activity
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
“Are we only fish to be caught and killed? Are we only sea creatures that have no leader? Must we be strung up on their hooks and caught in their nets while they rejoice and celebrate?
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Dawson Vosburg @dawsonvosburg.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
I continue to be surprised at my own capacity to be shocked. I feel so angry and ill. I dread what horrors would be required to set in motion the uprooting of all of this—not just from the government, but in the millions who eagerly chose and even now cheer this inhumanity.
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BCP Minus Context @bcpminuscontext.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
the rulers of this world
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the babahuck @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 01/01/2026
I finally laid out the details for my Christian plan to help billionaires. My offer stands, billionaires! sojo.net/articles/opi...
sojo.net
A Christian Plan to Help Billionaires
There is no logical reason for people to live like this. We should help them.
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