Hey that’s my cat!

On the eve of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Pierre Poilievre spoke out for the group he says faces the most hate-based violence.

Um, and apparently that group is…Christians? (It isn’t).

I called for backup on this one. Luckily @pampalmater.com answered:

"Everyone should be able to express themselves in the way they want to!"

And also to not be subjected to state sponsored kidnapping of children, but ok.

Orange Shirt Day is a time to reflect on Canada's continuing violence against Indigenous children.

It is a time to remember that Canada still takes Indigenous children from their families.

It is time to demand that these crimes stop. Not 150 years from now. Not a decade from now. NOW.

My kids are now in grades 5 and 9, and past the age when one might suggest that only these stories are "age appropriate", fwiw.

While I welcome increasing conversations on residential schools in Canada, after several years of noticing how the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation is engaged with at my kids' schools, it feels like the orange shirt story has become a sanitization of genocide.

"How the Word is Passed" is my favourite non-fiction book of all time, both because of its information and because of its prose. An adaptation for young readers is amazing to hear about.

This....requires a very strange definition of "civilized society".

I have been a little bit under a rock and missed this *horrifying* action at U Alberta. The speed with which these kinds of attacks on freedom of expression are picking up in Canada is incredible - like movement that has finally hit the top of a hill and is racing down now.

Hey. The fragmentation of the social media landscape has been hard on indie #scicomm 🧪 projects

So if you'd like to follow a podcast that's enthusiastic about #linguistics, could you check out @lingthusiasm.bsky.social?

And if you think your followers might like to, could you give this a repost?

Oh god, the resurrection of “Je suis Charlie” 🤢

I wrote a previous reply because I misread this as saying I was underestimating; the "we" here is probably true. Whatever semblance of a formal political left still exists is not actually in opposition to this.

We are less than 24 hours after Kirk's death, and I've seen multiple people fired for saying anything negative about him, mainstream news outlets comparing him to Malcolm X, and a dominant discourse that treats him as a visionary leader. This is fucking *bananas*.

As someone living outside but within spitting distance of the US, the feeling of dread at how the apparatus of maximum violence will respond to political violence against it is both intense and familiar.

Wild how political alliance with Zionism sweeps all sorts of wild statements about Jews under the table

Politicizing tragedy is always out of bounds and a horrific desecration of the victim if it’s in service of trying to prevent future tragedy by taking obvious and proved remedies.

But it’s perfectly fine if it’s in service of demonizing an out-group for retaliation with literally zero .

Oh hey, Happy Star Trek Day.

I wrote a thing.

This paper started years ago because I have never been able to stop thinking about the weird ideological implications of a universal translator as presented on Star Trek, and took a lot of work to wrangle into something worth saying about embodiment, mediation, and translation

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology | AAA Journal | Wiley Online Library This paper uses Star Trek's “Universal Translator” (UT) as a point of departure for considering the imagined future of mediated linguistic interactions and of contact across difference. Although such...

I have been slightly AWOL on here, but I am popping in to share a new article that I wrote which has just been published in the Journal of Linguistic Anthroplogy (open access!).

It is about Star Trek, the Universal Translator, and utopias.

anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Joining ICE to fulfill his lifelong dream of killing some brown people. Pretty fucked up.

"Don't wash your Holocaust trauma with Palestinian blood" 📍From Berlin, Germany

"Don't wash your Holocaust trauma with Palestinian blood"

Amen.

Bro — Scott F. Kiesling Matthew J.X. Maladay is a journalist who writes excellent language pieces for Slate magazine . (My favorite is the one on Pennsylvania , of course!) He recently contacted me about the term bro . ...

Here's a conversation he had about "bro" that I'm embarrassed to realize is much older than I thought: sfkiesling.com/dude-of-the-...

The heatwaves next week are literally going to kill people even if the grids don’t go down; meanwhile, tech billionaires are trying to convince us that using the fake answer machines will solve all our problems.

Having stood in a lineup starting at 4:00 a.m. to get a family doctor, I can confirm this game would sell out in <30 seconds.

Relatedly in "very specific book details that make me nope out", I have never forgiven Ali Hazelwood for writing a novel in which a tenured Harvard professor accused of sexual harassment was immediately fired and academically disgraced.

I like fantasies too, but that one hit too hard.

Bill C-5 and its provincial counterparts are founded on the idea that Canada is good, just, and deserving of the land we have occupied.

We all laugh and smile when the PM and Mike Myers say "elbows up" and "there will always be a Canada", but these are pieces of genocidal logic as well.

Bill C-5 ushers in new era of reckless Canadian extractivism The federal Building Canada Act follows alarming Trump-like trends.VANCOUVER / UNCEDED xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh AND səlilwətaɬ TERRITORIES — Wilderness Committee is sounding the alarm over the expec...

Canada's Liberal government is constantly affirming Israel's right to "defend itself" at the same time as they are pushing through a bill strengthen our own insidious and widely accepted forms of colonial violence. www.wildernesscommittee.org/news/bill-c-...

This is how genocide always sounds. "We are the good, the just, the deserving." This is the same language that still justifies the dispossession of Indigenous lands on Turtle Island, and that always contains the logic that whoever opposes us is therefore evil at worst and misguided at best.

… Team by team, reporters baffled, trumped, tethered, cropped
Look at that low plane, fine, then
Uh oh, overflow, population, common group
But it'll do, save yourself, serve yourself
World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed
Perhaps a tweak to the algorithm is in order?