I recently found a rap song in the endangered Tlingit language, I also recently had the opportunity to speak to a cousin in a language that stopped being passed down on that side of the family with our shared grandpa, and I also recently got to speak with an Ojibwe woman who is learning that language, about her experiences with it. An Ojibwe dub of Star Wars was recently released, as was the first ever feature film in Norwegian Sign Language. As someone who is interested in languages, their preservation and revitalization, I feel like experience and recent news gives me reason to be optimistic.

Earlier today I learned that there is such a thing as pea milk, which means that there is another and more nutritious plant-based substitute for dairy milk which can be made entirely with local-grown ingredients in Norway. As someone who wants to both see food sovereignty and veganism in Norway, these sorts of advancements in food science leave me optimistic.

When it comes to the topics mentioned in the OP, what keeps me optimistic is just remembering that the course of history is really just entropy, right? Suppression of activism, the erosion of people’s rights, the rise of fascism and the epidemic of hate crime, these are all symptoms of a broader power structure trying to sustain itself by force. But that system just doesn’t have infinite energy to sustain itself, it doesn’t have infinite resources. We see evidence of this in the “little things” like my cousin learning a language that had been forced out of our family: the forces that had pushed the language out of the family could not keep it out indefinitely, because with the effort one family member would take to relearn it, the effort needed for others to do the same gets progressively smaller.

Humans are known as persistence hunters: we certainly don’t need to hunt for food anymore, but the same strategy is certainly useful for hunting down our own oppressors. Oppressors will grow exhausted of trying to fight their inevitable failure, and that’s when they’ll easily be slain as “paper tigers”.

The best thing to focus on in the present moment is simply what you can do. Because any new skill you master, any positive interaction you have, any good news you read, all of that will prove to you that challenges can be overcome, that you can make a difference and that there is still good in the world. It is the little challenges you overcome that make the big challenges easier to overcome in time.

redherald.org perhaps.

The Circassian genocide is the example that comes to my mind first. In my experience, most people, at least in Western countries, when they hear “Circassian”, they will immediately think I’m actually talking about Cardassians, a race of fictional aliens from Star Trek (or they’ll at least remark on how similar these words sound).

I also think the Milan Congress is an event more people should know about. This was a congress on Deaf education in 1880 that declared a ban on sign languages in schools, causing trauma and poverty and general harm to Deaf people for nearly a century until around the time of Stokoe’s research on ASL.

Really, the amount of history that people should know is abundant, but a lot of it is also very clearly more important to know if you live in a certain area, right?

So you’re certain that revolution is impossible, but you’re also certain that if there is a “strong middle class” in the future, that you would actually be a part of it?

Well, it seemed like you were saying that if given a choice between more racism and more climate crisis, that you would choose more racism because of how “climate crisis is worse”. Don’t you think that’s at all a weird or uncomfortable thing to say, given how there’s a frightening number of people nowadays who genuinely are trying to present “more racism or more climate change” as an actual choice that people will have to make?

“I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at climate crisis!”

“You can excuse racism?”

It isn’t like American elections are in any way real or the government of the United States gives a fuck about the people who live there.

Pfft! Obviously elections in the USA are legitimate. After all, every single US state and electoral district is situated entirely on land that the USA legally annexed, right?

I should clarify that I am not a parent nor a child psychologist nor anything else to that effect, I am only speaking from my own experience of being parented—

I remember being around that age and I had a similar problem of just watching absolute political slop on YouTube. My access to content was never restricted nor closely monitored, but when my mom caught me watching some reactionary bozo on occasion, she would just call it what it was — and then all of a sudden I found myself a lot less interested in that type of content. When she or others would point out the problems with what I was watching or the messages I got from the content, that showed me the “smoke and mirrors” of it. And insofar as I engaged in that content out of a desire to appear precocious… Well, realizing that I was manifesting the exact phenomenon that C.S. Lewis described in that famous quote of his about the “fear of childishness”, and that my attempt to convince myself that I was more grown-up than I really was was collapsing in front of me, I just felt ashamed — but very specifically not humiliated.

So I think the best thing you can do is to understand what role these streamers really play for the child. Because it’s probably not all wanting to be popular, it’s probably not all wanting to appear precocious, and it’s probably not all wanting to build an identity; just as it’s probably not all noticing the ways in which they’re genuinely getting screwed over, and acting on genuine frustrations, genuinely trying to understand why this is and what to do about it even with the limitations of their own lived experience; nor is it probably all learning about the world’s issues and wanting to do their best to be a good person even about things that don’t very obviously affect them personally.

Rather the child’s enjoyment is in all likelihood probably some sort of blend of these or perhaps other things. If you can determine the composition of the blend, you will know where to strike to most effectively reveal the “smoke and mirrors”, and make the child feel that sort of productive shame that causes actual self-reflection. You should aim to be like the elderly Hungarian-born immigrant saying “And that makes a difference, doesn’t it?”, if you’re familiar with that old propaganda film: shame is a negative emotion that makes one want to avoid the cause of the feeling, and it should be your aim to make the child identify the cause of the shame to be the shameful thing rather than the one shaming.

I trust that you’re on good terms with your child and only have good intentions, so I think that you will succeed. And of course I should reiterate that my own perspective is limited, and what worked for myself might not work for everyone.

What do you think the purpose of copyright is?

Frankly, if you’re a small creator, copyright already doesn’t really exist for you in any meaningful sense: because copyright is enforced through the courts, you only really have rights over your work to the extent you can actually pay the court costs of continually defending your rights again and again and again — and if you have that kind of money to spare you aren’t exactly a starving artist.

I support complete abolition of intellectual property as a whole.

Say you want to write closed captions for a movie, or even film a sign language interpretation of it, such that d/Deaf people can enjoy the movie better, among other reasons — even if you don’t post the movie itself, you’re still creating a derivative work and hence violating copyright.

Or say you want to record an audio description such that blind people can enjoy the movie better, among other reasons — again, even if you release only the AD track, this is still a derivative work and hence violates copyright. This obviously also goes for audiobooks.

Or say you even want to make a full-on dub of a movie into an endangered language, to try to break the reliance of its dwindling speakers on dominant-language content — in this case, unless you’ve secured a deal with the rightsholders such that you have access to the original SFX and music tracks, your only choices are VO dubbing like is common in the Former Soviet Union, or painstakingly redoing all the sound effects and music, before you can add the dialog. In any case, without a license, you’re still violating copyright even if you only release the dub track.

Now obviously the fact that these things violate IPR doesn’t stop people from making these things anyways, but IPR does still end up greatly limiting volunteer work in scope and visibility, and creates an antagonism between the rightsholders and those volunteering to make the content more accessible. So intellectual property in practice then ends up being among other things yet another mechanism through which the sighted oppress the blind, the hearing oppress the d/Deaf, the settlers oppress the Natives, et cetera. There is no universe in which accessible media and intellectual property coexist: as long as there is intellectual property there is a profit motive, and profit motives will never prioritize accessibility.

And this is not to get into a greater discussion of how private property in general oppresses the working class, although I should disclose that I support the abolition of all private property and not only intellectual property by itself.

Nothing is exactly set in stone (no pun intended), but my current idea essentially involves updating the letter forms to be better suited for writing on paper, and I was also thinking of using a dot diacritic for voicing and umlaut, and having the staves be x-height normally but extend downward for doubled consonants.

Ideas that are more sort of “on the table” are whether to use monographs for ⟨sj⟩ and ⟨kj⟩ etc, and monographs for the diphthongs; whether to have an optional diacritic form of ⟨r⟩ to represent the assimilation of /r/ in Eastern Norwegian; whether to use the same letters for certain sounds in complementary distribution; whether to extend the usage of the dot diacritic to alternate between otherwise similar sounds, rather than only voice and umlaut; and whether the runes should indeed have staves at all.

The problem is that depending on how many of these ideas are implemented, and the ways in which they are implemented, you eventually end up basically abandoning the idea of “modern runes” in favor of basically reinventing Shavian script but for Scandinavian. So it’s difficult to strike that sort of middle ground between ancient and modern, especially when trying to balance that with practicality of use and ease of learning. Another matter is of course which forms of runes to actually base the script on: if we stick to just Scandinavia, we have Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark, medieval runes, staveless runes, and Dalecarlian runes, and these often have very different letter forms from each other.

Bokmål and nynorsk without a space, yes.

I have thought about developing an alternate script for Norwegian/Scandinavian based on the old runes, really just because I think that would be fun and interesting, but insofar as I haven’t done this yet, I don’t know of any alternate scripts for Norwegian, and obviously there isn’t much point in talking about English.

So I will instead share an alternate script for a language I do not speak: Circassian, or specifically West Circassian or Adyghe.

Father and son duo R. I. Daur and I. Yu. Daur together developed an alternate script for that language in I think 2012. The script was dubbed “Mifo-Circassian”, and as I understand it, it’s an attempt to give the Circassian language a more unique visual identity, by using letters based on old inscribed symbols — I think the emblems of clans more specifically — rather than using an adapted foreign alphabet like Latin, Arabic, or Cyrillic. Furthermore, Circassian has a very unique inventory of sounds that interact with each other in unique ways, that foreign alphabets can’t really do justice, so this alphabet is more uniquely suited for the challenges that come with representing Circassian in writing. Mifo-Circassian writing seems like it may be used both alphabetically and alphasyllabically, but the alphabetic form is far more common.

Well, “more common”, not that many Circassians actually do use this Mifo-Circassian script to begin with. Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic have the benefit of being supported by Unicode and of also being used by neighboring languages, and they work well enough for representing Circassian. So it seems like the primary usage of Mifo-Circassian is not necessarily for communicative writing, but rather for more ornamental or artistic usage.

Honestly I would just keep self-describing as “weird” if I were you. If it really is damé to do so, then use a thesaurus; or if you’re multilingual, be a little macaronic.

Bilibili and Niconico are often called “Chinese YouTube” and “Japanese YouTube” respectively, to get the general gist of the websites across even though that isn’t quite right. These video sharing platforms are known for their danmaku subtitle/comments system, and are to some extent aimed more at anime-otaku/ACG audiences than general audiences — for instance if you use the official Bilibili app, the not-logged-in default avatar is actually a reference to the YuruYuri anime/manga.

However, while these two video sharing platforms are associated to some extent with anime/manga/video game fans, you can find all sorts of content on either platform. You’ve probably seen memes that first became popular on Niconico without realizing it.

There is some small amount of English-language content on these sites, but you’ll get a lot more out of Bilibili and Niconico if you speak Chinese and Japanese. Otherwise, Bilibili can be useful as a “backup” if YouTube ever stops working on NewPipe/PipePipe, or there’s something uploaded there that’s (no longer) available on YouTube; or Bilibili can sometimes be nice as a way to find things with Chinese subtitles if you know someone who speaks Chinese and has limited English proficiency. As said, Niconico is down right now so that isn’t very useful for anything at the moment.

I’ve started using PipePipe. It’s basically the same as NewPipe except it also supports Bilibili and, if it weren’t down right now, Niconico.

To spare the more morbid details, I somehow got it into my head that my dad died because he’d been “poisoned by accidentally swallowing mouthwash”. And so I stopped using mouthwash because I was scared that it would kill me “too”. Eventually this came up in conversation with my mom, and she told me that I was mistaken — but I just never really got back into using mouthwash despite that reassurance. I think a part of this was just that I associated mouthwash with my dad so strongly that using it without him was too uncomfortable.

I mean, my dad dying when I was a preteen, is the thing that stands out. Pretty much everything that’s happened since then has been shaped by his death in some way, everything from my philosophy and politics, to my material hardships, to my heroes and role models, to the way I clean my teeth, to the places I’ve been and people I’ve met and media I’ve enjoyed, and even to the ways I relate to gender, family, work, nationality and language, and society in general, and that’s certainly not an exhaustive list, and all of these things go into each other as well.

I’m not sure if something so profoundly impactful on every facet of one’s life can be described as “for better or worse”, though, rather than that it simply is what it is…

TO COMMUNISTS, ANARCHISTS, OR ANYONE ELSE CALLING FOR THE OVERTHROW OF SOCIETY

THIS OBVIOUSLY ISN’T MEANT FOR YOU.

It takes either a complete lack of self-awareness or a simply incredible amount of gall to ask a yes-no question and then tell all the people most likely to answer one way to zip it. You might as well have just written “la-la-la-la I can’t heaaaar yoooou”