Blogaround

1. Not Your Mom’s Trans 101 (2010) "'Cisgender' is the term for people who have no issue with the gender that they were assigned at birth. For whatever reason, they are able to live somewhat comfortably within the gender in which they have been cast. No one really knows why so many people are capable of fitting into such arbitrary categories."

2. “The sub is the one who’s really in control” (2016) "And in this style of response, instead of affirming that not being in charge is okay and delving into the ethics of hierarchy, the approach is to bizarrely abandon D/s practitioners’ habitual language (in which dramatic power-loss is fine and okay and also sexy) to, suddenly, define the sub as a dom, which makes it okay because it’s understood that being a dom is best."

Reminds me of Christians who say "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist"- like, uh just a minute ago weren't you talking about faith like it's a good thing? And now suddenly you're saying atheists have more faith than you but that's bad?

3. ‘No Way Out’: Why China’s Mortgage Strikers Refuse to Back Down (November 29) This is wild to me- buyers paying mortgages on apartments that are still under construction, and then the building company stops construction, with no timeline on when the apartments will actually be built, so the buyers stop paying their mortgages, and then the financial system acts like the buyers are the bad guy here?

4. New era begins with China’s launch of crewed mission to its space station (November 30) Cool!

5. Jiang Zemin: Former Chinese leader dies aged 96 (December 1)

6. The Svalbard seed vault: A survival bunker for civilization (December 1) "What if we wanted to reconstruct the entire planet as a unified survival village, rather than a jostling sprawl of rivalrous nations? How would we re-engineer civilization to be resilient against catastrophe?"

7. The longtermism that works—and the kind that doesn’t (November 25) "The problems begin when we presume that what imaginary future people, along with people elsewhere in the world today, really need is someone else to make decisions for them."

And this, linked in that article: Best intentions: When disaster relief brings anything but relief (2017) "There was no time for disaster workers to sort and clean old clothes. So the contributions just sat and rotted."

8. Cryptocurrency's Dirty Secret: Energy Consumption (May 4) "Perhaps even more concerning, some companies in the U.S. are now bringing retired power plants back online in order to cash in on crypto."

9. Senate passes bill to protect same-sex and interracial marriage in landmark vote (November 30) "While the bill would not set a national requirement that all states must legalize same-sex marriage, it would require individual states to recognize another state’s legal marriage. So, in the event the Supreme Court might overturn its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage, a state could still pass a law to ban same-sex marriage, but that state would be required to recognize a same-sex marriage from another state."

Also interesting how this bill is called the Respect for Marriage Act, but laws that stopped same-sex couples from getting married have also had similar names (for example, the Defense of Marriage Act). So, here's a question: Do you respect/defend/protect marriage by limiting it or expanding it? 

And, on the topic of limiting it- I also think there are certain situations where a couple should not legally be allowed to marry (for example, an underage girl getting married to an older man)- but I don't think of that as "protecting marriage" in some big abstract sense.