Blogaround

Merry Christmas everyone!

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1. Power Banks: How Businesses Are Leading the Charge (December 20) An article about the little vending-machine-type things where you can rent power banks from, to charge your phone, at various little stores in Shanghai. I live in Shanghai, and yeah I think it's great how power banks are available to rent everywhere. And very cheap too- I can charge my phone for an hour or however long, for just a few yuan (about 1 dollar).

Also from Sixth Tone: As China Shivers, a Hot Debate Over Risks of Food Delivery (December 22)

2. Most people don’t realize how much progress we’ve made on climate change (November 27, via) "On the one hand, that’s not yet good enough to meet the target set in the Paris agreement. On the other hand, climate policies and clean technologies deployed over just the past eight years have already erased a full degree Celsius of global warming from the future world in 2100."

3. Journal Club: Gender Detachment (December 21) "Almost all of them, when asked, provided a specific gender identity label, but when prompted, described feeling detached from their gender."

4. Love Songs (December 20) Very useful graph from xkcd!

5. Missions, Race, and Me (November 14) "White American Christians were organizing and raising money and literally building corporation-like entities and taking months-long ship voyages and even dying of malaria in some places—oh and seriously abusing their own children but I’m not even going to get into that—to go and “serve” non-white people elsewhere in the world while AT THE VERY SAME TIME, IN THEIR VERY OWN COUNTRY, LITERALLY THEIR VERY OWN FOLK were lynching black people and generally doing everything they possibly could to disenfranchise and pillage and steal and discriminate against people of color of all kinds and generally behaving like really sh*tty human beings with very few exceptions."

6. Christian College Recovers After Campus-Wide Sex Week (December 19) "Those of you who don’t have personal life experience within the white evangelical subculture might think that the phrase 'Holy Sexuality' is a little bit cringe-y, but let me assure you that for those who have lived within this subculture, that’s not the case. It’s incredibly cringe-y."

One thing I will say, though, is that in this article and in a lot of other articles I've seen criticizing Christopher Yuan, Yuan's statement that "the opposite of homosexuality is holiness" is being misrepresented. (I have seen him speak in person, a loooong time ago, and even back then he was using this catchphrase. Back when I was an evangelical I thought it was very profound.) I've seen people on the internet assuming that he means "straight people are holy" and being mad about that- but that's not what he means. What he means is, for people who "struggle with same-sex attraction", the point isn't to become straight (because being straight also leads to sexual sin!), the point is to become holy. Like, it's okay if you're still not straight- but you definitely can't ID as gay! If you're not straight, you just have to repress your sexuality and try to be "holy" instead.

So, uh, I very much disagree with Yuan. But also I just wanted to point out that criticizing him for saying that straight people are automatically holy is a misinterpretation of what he's saying.

7. Finally, The EU Is Banning Fashion’s Dirty Secret: Destroying Unsold Goods (December 7, via) "The question of what happens to these unsold goods if they are not destroyed is yet to be answered. 'Will they be shipped around the world? Will they be reused as deadstock or shredded and downcycled? Will outlet stores have an abundance of stock to sell?' asks Grogan."

8. We were personally victimized by James Somerton (December 13, via) "So a combination of the fact that the projects you pitched to us that were allegedly in process, that allegedly had two Asexual characters, are just gone — you’re not working on them — you’re supposedly working on something else new and shiny, but the only thing you’ve actually done that you’ve told us that costs money is you’ve moved to a big city? What on earth?"

Also related: This 1-hour-42-minute video from Todd in the Shadows, I Fact-Checked The Worst Video Essayist On YouTube (December 4) Wow, I am very impressed by how much time Todd spent fact-checking.