Untitled

[poplinguisticsposts-blog]

The White Man's Burden - Wikipedia

[poplinguisticsposts-blog]

[phil-of-phillage]

For all ‘developing’ countries, total external debt owed in 2011 was $4.9 trillion and over the course of that one year they paid $620 billion servicing these debts.* in the same year, the total foreign aid supplied to the ‘developing world’ through the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD was just $133.5 billion.* This means that, in 2011 alone, for every $1 the creditor nations gave the so-called ‘developing world’ in foreign aid, the debtor nations gave almost $5 back in debt repayments. The whole premise of international development is called into question when the nations involved are giving with one hand while taking five times as much as the other. Rather than the mainstream narrative - of advanced industrial nations helping to ‘develop’ inexplicably backward Third World nations, the mask is off. There is no ‘developing’ world. Instead there are a host of countries being deliberately decivilized, in order that corporatised states benefit economically and geopolitically. The Debt Trap has been used to reorientate national economies to the service of unsustainable and unethical debt burden, in order to transfer wealth to the creditor institutions and nations.

- Austerity: The Demolition of the Welfare State and the Rise of the Zombie Economy - Chapter One - Kerry Anne Mendoza *Jubilee Debt Campaign * OECD, nin.tl/TNpTnl (via phil-of-phillage)

[sugarmoonaki]

“I am now 73 years old. I was at Indian residential school from age 11-15. I had to work in the infirmary, where there were many sick and hungry children. I’d steal food like peanut butter and bread to feed them. A lot of kids died there. I had to handle the dead children — wrapping them to be buried. Once I got caught speaking my native language. I wasn’t aware my language was different. My punishment was having four fingernails pulled out. At residential school we all received numbers. I was known as #702. But my name is Sphenia. It’s an Ojibwa name that means ‘on my way’. For many years now I’ve worked as an advocate for abused children. I started a school for indigenous kids in Vancouver called Spirit Rising Cultural Survival School.”

Source

[allthingslinguistic]

It is a well-documented fact that by the age of 5 monolingual White children will have heard 30 million fewer words in languages other than English than bilingual children of color. In addition, they will have had a complete lack of exposure to the richness of non-standardized varieties of English that characterize the homes of many children of color. This language gap increases the longer these children are in school. The question is what causes this language gap and what can be done to address it? The major cause of this language gap is the failure of monolingual White communities to successfully assimilate into the multilingual and multidialectal mainstream. The continued existence of White ethnic enclaves persists despite concerted efforts to integrate White communities into the multiracial mainstream since the 1960s. In these linguistically isolated enclaves it is possible to go for days without interacting with anybody who does not speak Standardized American English providing little incentive for their inhabitants to adapt to the multilingual and multidialectal nature of  US society. This linguistic isolation has a detrimental effect on the cognitive development of monolingual White children. This is because linguistically isolated households lack the rich translanguaging practices that are found in bilingual households and the elaborate style-shifting that occurs in bidialectal households. This leaves monolingual White children without a strong metalinguistic basis for language learning. As a result, many of these monolingual White children lack the school-readiness skills needed for foreign language learning and graduate from school having mastered nothing but Standardized American English leaving them ill-equipped to engage in intercultural communication.

What if we talked about monolingual White children the way we talk about low-income children of color?

Excerpt from a satirical blog post from The Educational Linguist that makes a good point about which language skills we value as a society and the problems with talking about a “language gap”. 

(via lingrix)

[politicalsci]

[midtown120blues-deactivated2018]

this is the one time a corporate version of a meme is 10000x funnier than any other version

[kvothe-kingkiller]

I went to their site and uh

uhhhh

UHHHHH

[lord-kitschener]

This is the shittiest possible cyberpunk future

[weedstoner]

I’m the intern who is forced to spend their workdays making fracking memes and “listicles”

[bimboficationblues]

Tonight We Will Eat at Earthquake and Contaminated Groundwater

[la-laborista-republiko]

[jessehimself]

#NeverForget 

[chase-solidago]

Let’s talk about prairie, history, and language. For communities so focused on “native plants”/”native gardening”/etc there’s so little acknowledgement or engagement with indigenous Americans and their history. 

When we talk about science, there’s a baseline assumption of objectivity. Science is Truth, something apart from messy cultural ideas. The reality is, culture and all it’s messes bleed into science, like here in ecology. We gotta be conscious of the histories we inherit in science.

[justsomeantifas]

them: if you don’t like a corporation just don’t buy from them me:

me: I could go on if you want me to

[black-to-the-bones-deactivated2]

Media is trying to dehumanize black people every single time.

[politicalsci]

[simonalkenmayer]

Your death is a preexisting condition and we cannot afford to cover every resurrection. I already have mine scheduled. Die mad about it.

[cartoonpolitics]

(cartoon by Dave Granlund)

[juneboba]

My boyfriend signed up for an Economics class last semester that had a professor who was described by other students on Rate My Professors as “a little offensive but still funny” and “you will still learn if you do the work and attend his workshops.” On the first day of class, he pointed to an Asian girl next to him.

“Are you Chinese?” he asked.

She looked bewildered and said, “Yes…?”

“How do you feel about the One Child Policy?”

The entire class went silent.

She glared at him, “I’m American.”

He shrugged it off, “Yeah, but you’re Chinese. So how do you feel about being the only child in your family?”

When I peruse through class lists, one of the very first things I want to know is whether or not I will be in a safe environment with a professor who cares about their students. Rate My Professors is the most commonly used tool for students to decide whether or not a professor is right for their learning style. It’s a tool for students created by students. But when such tools actively work against students who want to give proper warning about professors, what does that tell you? Does RMP care about student safety? Or is it doing everything in its power to protect corrupt educators? Should students compile a list of corrupt professors to combat RMP’s new policy if they don’t reverse this rule?

The Chinese woman and the rest of the students had to endure a semester filled with violent racist, sexist, and classist rhetoric (he later humiliated a student for 15 minutes for having an old Ford—what he described as a “loser car”) with a professor who only taught outside of class hours instead of during class hours. There are many more stories like this one because students pay for a class they weren’t expecting.

Because students can’t say “racist and sexist”, people have opted for “problematic” with examples as well as synonyms. You can contact them here to ask them to change their policy.

[poplinguisticsposts-blog]

People Have Been Saying "Ax" Instead of "Ask" for 1,200 Years

[poplinguisticsposts-blog]

A civil rights 'emergency': justice, clean air and water in the age of Trump

The Trump administration is peeling away rules designed to protect clean air and water, fueling a growing urgency around the struggle for environmental justice, say political leaders, academics and activists