linkspame: stolen liberally from my tumblr dash

[nerdflighter]

Why is Aziraphale so gay? [good omens meta]

A brief note on social constructs
a while back my friend made this post and it spawned a long, ugly back and forth between two other users, and it was...bad. it was terribly bad. on one hand you had this white trans woman with little idea what a social construct is or what it means and on the other side a trans person of colour and the argument got pretty vicious and everyone blocked everyone else. anyway, discourse circles being what they are, this post was pretty much written directly @ this conversation.

Zombie Linguistics: Experts, Endangered Languages and the Curse of Undead Voices, Bernard C. Perley

I know what you think of me, the article that originated this quote:

Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.

I'm thinking about this article on abortion again.

should therapists write about their patients?". full disclosure: i haven't read this yet.

Comments

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

I'm pretty sure I either read the zombie linguistics paper for a linguistics class once or I read something with a very similar premise, and yes. The words which tend to be used with regards to language "preservation" have some insidious and imperialist savior-y implications.

[nerdflighter]

I have a deep and abiding suspicion-edging-into-hatred for the practice of conservation in any context at all ever since I was forced to study Sanskrit for three years against my will and to the detriment of my grade. I'm sure there are good ways of doing conservation, if efforts are led by the people of that language and culture, but I still don't have to like it