There are people who try to work nontenure jobs, of course, but usually they’re nuts and have very dysfunctional personalities and lives, and are unpleasant to deal with, because they feel disrespected.
Tuesday Shoesday
Camper Agatha
Native Tongue
In Native Tongue, women in a patriarchal society develop a new language, with new words to express new concepts, and teach it to their daughters in order to free themselves.
In our society, oppressed groups also develop new language, though not quite so dramatically. Things like vocal fry, uptalk, “like.” When they use their altered speech, they are further marginalized. But like in the novel, the language is passed on to the next generation:
as women tend to be primary caregivers, the next generation develops language with those speech effects in place, so these changes to language are female-dominated. The changes happen incrementally over time as children and adolescents alter their modes of speaking to align with their groups. As the speech feature becomes more widely spread across a range of speakers and speech groups it appears it may be adopted, often unconsciously, by more conservative speakers until it is eventually a stable part of mainstream speech and becomes uncontroversial.
This doesn’t have the happy ending of Native Tongue, however. Rather than using the new linguistic elements as intended, they can be perverted by the powerful:
When uptalkis used by young women the common interpretation has been that it is suggestive of weakness, as though the speaker is uncertain of their information or lacks self-confidence. But from a discourse point of view, it may be that, as women are socially conditioned to be cooperative rather than competitive, uptalk has evolved as a linguistic method for verifying that a listener is following the conversation in rather an efficient way. What’s also interesting is rather than indicating weakness, there are studies which show uptalk may be used more often by people in dominant positions to assert power
Suzette Haden Elgin, the author of Native Tongue, died a few months ago. She wrote numerous science fiction novels and also published in linguistics. In her novels, she explores what it means when “language enforces a particular understanding of the world,” especially in the context of patriarchy.
Maybe we shouldn’t put the oil in a pipe or on a train
It looks like Keystone XL isn’t going to be built so all that bitumen from the tar sands is going to have to find another way to market. That means oil trains.
“Lac megantic burning” by Sûreté du Québec – https://twitter.com/sureteduquebec/status/353519189769732096/photo/1. Licensed under CC BY-SA 1.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Lac megantic wasn’t the only oil train accident, though it was very deadly. Another particularly large accident was in West Virginia recently (it was one of four in just the last few months). Oil trains tend to blow up, burn, and spill lots of crude into local waterways.
Transporting oil is basically always going to carry some risk, but we could mitigate some of this with better regulations. Some crude is worse than others (like the stuff from the Bakken shale in North Dakota) and it could be treated prior to shipment to be less volatile. We should also make sure we’re shipping it in the safest cars with good rules to minimize operator error and collisions.
But tar sands production is quite expensive and shipping bitumen by rail is, too. Once you add in regulations to make it safe to ship, it may not be worth it. Especially since some think taxpayers instead of industry should foot the bill for implementing the regulations:
The issue “starts to revolve around the dollar sign,” Canadian Pacific Railway CEO E. Hunter Harrison told the Wall Street Journal. “Can we do this safer? Yes. But who’s going to pay? If you decide this commodity must be moved in the public interest, then I think all of us have to pay.” [link]
Oil companies already aren’t paying for the massive externalities of their heavily subsidized industry. I think they should cover the don’t blow us up in our beds fee.
The CEO of a railway is concerned about costs because operational regulatory changes could affect their profit margins:
The combined rulemaking has been a sticking point between the railroads, which want stronger tank cars but are more reluctant to embrace operational changes, and tank car owners and manufacturers, which say railroads need to prevent trains from derailing. [link]
I’m not going to comment on the balance of regulatory and cost responsibility between the railroads and oil companies. Instead, I’d like to draw your attention to the hilarity of an oil company criticizing the transport of their product.
In the meantime, we can use our money to switch to renewable energy sources. It’s nowhere near the public interest to support an industry where everything from getting their product out of the ground, to transporting it, to using it has unavoidable and terrible consequences.
You can read proposed regulations for new tank cars in Canada here.
Hahahahahahaha
Instead of opening the field for actors of any race to compete for any role in a color-blind manner, there has been a significant number of parts designated as ethnic this year, making them off-limits for Caucasian actors,” complains Andreeva.
Link.
While you’re waiting for the bus
The math of Ferguson: percentages don’t show how bad it really is
Are walking and cycling as green as we imagine?
The other issue is that cars look relatively good because the comparison is on a per kilometre basis. The emissions associated with the manufacture and disposal of cars are averaged over thousands of kilometres annually whereas the sort of trips where you could walk instead of drive might amount to hundreds of kilometres per year.There’s an irony in cars looking relatively better as the number of kilometres of driving – and hence the consumption of fuel – increases! There’s a natural limit to walking so pedestrians use local facilities and make fewer trips than drivers; the difference in the kilometres travelled by walkers compared to drivers is an order of magnitude; and so, therefore, are their emissions.
Researchers may have solved origin-of-life conundrum
The HDP is the latest attempt by Turkey’s Kurds to advance their interests by parliamentary means, and plays a crucial role in these talks—not yet negotiations—with its delegates relaying messages to and from Ocalan as he serves out his life sentence in an island prison. The party has much to its credit. A social-democratic bloc of Kurds, secularists, feminists, LGBT activists, and greens with twenty-eight seats in the Turkish national assembly (making it the fourth-largest party), the HDP has roots in the Turkish left of the 1960s and a lineage that goes back to the Democracy Party of Leyla Zana. It advocates equal rights for all minorities (including Alevis and Armenians) and state neutrality on matters of religion, as well as mandating at least one female co-chair at every administrative level and applying a sort of “affirmative action” for LGBT candidates.
Brutal Murder in Bangladesh Highlights Growing Religious Intolerance
A common over-the-counter cough suppressant can boost insulin
Who the hell doesn’t know Stromae?
So sometimes I get really sad and dance and somebody wrote a song for that.*
Stromae is kind of insanely famous not-in-America. When he played at SXSW the marketing and crowd were very weird.
All over SXSW, kiosks were plastered with posters that posed a provocative question: “Who the hell is Stromae?”
It’s a question you wouldn’t ask in many places outside North America. The impeccably groomed Belgian singer is a massive global superstar, which created a funny juxtaposition at NPR Music’s SXSW showcase, held at Stubb’s BBQ in Austin, Texas. SXSW is an international festival, so for every curious would-be convert still hanging around after Courtney Barnett’s set, a Stromae superfan was in danger of losing bladder control at the sight of him.
* Actually this mood forms a significant part of my music collection (e.g.). Please post your favourite dance-while-sobbing songs in the comments. I need more.