I told a guy his total was 13.21 and he said “wish it were that year, could actually get some good music on the radio”
breaking news from the AP, our boys on the front have just sacked constantinople. take that, heretics. coming up next are the soothing lute dirges of bing crosby
honestly missionaries are evil. the idea of traveling the world to tell people Who Didnt Fucking Ask that their beliefs are wrong in the hopes that theyll adopt your beliefs seems sinister
So, update on the asshole who got himself killed by deliberately trespassing on Sentinel Island… He was not a missionary, but a travel blogger masquerading as a missionary to gain access and treat the Sentinelese as a zoo exhibit (whilst exposing them to germs, and encouraging other intruders).
Again: It is illegal for outside people to barge onto Sentinel Island (borders: they kinda work that way. And a lot of white Americans seem real excited about ‘protecting the border’ with deadly force. Just saying.)
The last outsiders to arrive kidnapped a bunch of Sentinelese people and also introduced deadly diseases, so they have more than enough reasons to use force to fend off invasion.
This asshole was warned multiple time not to go there.
He was going for some extreme travel adventure blog, which is the epitome of colonizer nonsense: disrespecting indigenous sovereignty, endangering indigenous lives, and treating indigenous people like a zoo exhibit, all so he could make a quick buck.
PS. Thanks for getting the right-wing Christian crowd all riled up against indigenous people with your missionary stunt, bro!
While I’m personally grateful services like Tribalingual exist, creating some academic access to Indigenous languages, particularly for Indigenous diaspora (if they can afford it), I’m extremely dubious of the notion that a outsiders learning an Indigenous language is somehow “saving” it.
There was a testimonial from some white American girl learning Ainu itak, and she spoke of it as if she were collecting some rare Pokemon card before it went out of print or something, framing it in typical dying Native rhetoric. What is she going to do with Ainu itak, except as some obscure lingual trophy?
If you want to save a language, save the people.
Language means nothing without history and culture breathing life into it, and in turn we are disconnected from our history and ancestors without it. Support Indigenous quality of life, ACCESS to quality education, quality health services (mental and physical), land and subsistence rights, CLEAN DRINKING WATER, advocate against police brutality and state violence, DEMAND ACTION FOR MISSING AND MURDERED INDIGENOUS WOMEN.
Damn, if you really want to “save the language” pay for an Indigenous person’s classes for them to reconnect to their mother tongues. I’m not saying outsiders shouldn’t learn languages they’re invited to learn, but don’t pretend like you learning conversational Ainu itak is saving it from extinction.
I was lucky enough to take Linguistic Anthropology under Dr. Bernard Perley, a Maliseet Native who brought a very real sense of judgement and urgency to his lessons. One that stuck with me was his framing of Zombie Linguistics. Languages that are “saved” from “death” by people who aren’t of the culture can become ambling, empty shadows of their “living” selves.
Outsiders who record native speakers as disembodied audio spirits frozen in time, or (usually white) linguists who copy down the bones and organs of a language without respecting its body, are guilty of resurrecting something that is not the original language. Language is so much more than files and corpora, and this idea that we who have degrees are the most qualified to “save” a language is colonialist and foolhardy. Every linguist who takes National Geographic money to go to a remote village to analyze an endangered language is just a vulture circling to feed — to truly save a language would be to give the community resources to teach and learn it as they see fit.
But that doesn’t get us published.
Read more on Zombie Linguistics in Dr. Perley’s paper here.
“My rabbi asked me to take him to a place where I felt a particular attachment or a visceral memory. I brought him to a stack in the back-left corner of the basement of my school’s library — the HQ70s in the Dewey Decimal System. It was here, my freshman year, I discovered that there are books all about queer Jewish people, where I read Sarah Schulman and learned about Magnus Hirschfeld. In the HQ70s I felt seen in a new and liberating way. For so long I had felt like there was nobody like me, like there were no other Blazes or Bens.”
are you saying that engagement rings aren’t just cool rocks
They sloth is my favorite
STORY TIME!
Ok so when I was doing a security job on a college campus, the geology club on said campus was having their mineral and fossil sale (which is where the club gets the vast majority of its funds for the year). They had some really cool shit but their sales techniques were… uh, they were bad, just really terrible. They set up the tables, put all their stuff out, hung a sign up… and then sat there, occasionally mentioning quietly to one or two passersby “Hey we’re having our mineral and fossil sale if you want any.” Very boring, overly factual, not very attention grabbing.
Now I’m a fuckin nerd so I’m all over this shit (the sale was literally a foot away from my security post so I wasn’t even getting in trouble for spending literal hours ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the really cool stuff they had). And me being the type of nerd who must SHARE ALL THE THINGS when I find cool stuff (and who also has 18 years of customer service/retail experience to draw on), I start trying to get some of the literal hundreds of students walking by to get some of the cool things. The club only needed a couple hundred bucks and we were on the largest campus in the state so they should have been making their goal easy but almost no one was biting. So my “must share the thing” nerdiness teamed up with my “must help all the people”-ness and I did my best to pitch in and get them more sales.
Now, it was two days before valentines and a lot of the people walking by were dudes. So I start trying to get them interested with comments like “hey come check out the cool stuff you could get for your bae!”
One group of dudes paused but it didn’t seem like they were gonna stop and get any of the cool things, so I go “No, seriously, chicks dig this shit, you literally cannot go wrong here. There’s fossils and cute little carvings of manta rays and kitties, and literal gemstones here; that box is full of fucking EMERALDS that are 3 for $5. GET. SOME.”
They didn’t believe me that the ladies would go nuts for “a bunch of shiny rocks.” So I decide to prove it to them. And in the most booming voice I can muster (and I can muster quite a bit after a decade of choir classes) and yell “THEY HAVE SHINY ROCKS OVER HERE AND THEY’RE REALLY COOL!”
Literally instantly, three separate groups of ladies look straight at the tables and make a beeline for them, all of them saying some variation of “Wait, did you say shiny rocks? WHERE?! WHAT KIND?! OMG!” Suddenly a dozen or so different gals (and several dudes), who seconds ago were only thinking about getting to class, stopped in their tracks to detour to the table full of shiny rocks. Only two left without buying at least one thing.
The dudes I’d been talking to before were bewildered but convinced, so they start looking for the best shiny rocks they can get to give their SOs. Several of them came back a few days later to inform me that my seemingly ludicrous advice of “get them shiny rocks” had gotten them laid or scored them a date.
So, remember kids, GET THE BAE A SHINY ROCK. That shit WORKS.
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