#New Zealand education system

[disemboweledcorpse]

americans acting like their entire prison system isnt a glorified version of slavery. slavery is literally legal as long as the slaves are incacerated, its literally in your shitass constitution

[newzealandstudyabroadprocess]

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[thisisgraeme]

Te Ara Whakamārama: 4 Powerful Steps to Transformative Te Ao Māori-Inspired Development

Explore the transformative "Te Ara Whakamārama," a framework with four stages inspired by Māori wisdom. Embrace a journey of innovation from the conceptual void to the luminous world of realization and beyond. Dive into the essence of Te Ao Māori and unlo

Te Ara Whakamārama or The Pathway to Enlightenment By Conny Huaki and Graeme Smith The journey of creation, from the first seed of an idea to its full expression, is a sacred and transformative process. “Te Ara Whakamārama,” or “The Pathway to Enlightenment,” is a design and development framework that mirrors the natural progression from dusk till dawn, a symbolic representation of the journey…

[dividicus]

I need more! Give me greedy ass mayan, aztec, Incan, give a database with as many native North American tribes as possible (please include a map so I can understand geographically where the f they are so I can learn the s*** that the school system never God damn taught me!), where's my indigenous Australian and New Zealand folklore? Papua New Guinea and all the Pacific islands! I want to understand all the amazing cultural significances of all the people of the great savannah, the endless Sahara and the breathtaking jungles of Africa! The fact that I can't name a single people from an entire continent simply goes to show how displaced and groups together they have been made. Please help me educate myself!

Hey, don’t cry. Free online database of Japanese folk lore

[peridot-tears]

The way that Europeans in particular say "this is US-centric" or "typical Americans" when someone (usually a white person) acts ignorant or has privilege in another country (usually outside of Europe, the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand) as a knee-jerk reaction is actually a sign of a much deeper issue.

(Buckle up, when I say "Europeans" in this post, I mean specifically Western, Central, and Scandinavian Europe. The ones with the history of colonialism and imperialism and the strongest, most influential economies and education systems. I know Scandinavia didn't colonize the Americas, but your education and welfare systems are so high-ranked, there's no excuse for the ignorance you display. Sorry boo.)

I never get mad about people insulting my country, because quite frankly, despite being born and raised in the United States, this is the same country that's committed hate crimes towards me and my neighbors and put its imperializing little hands on our ancestral homelands. We're the ones fighting every day to make this stupid-ass country a better place.

The reason Europeans defaulting to "America stupid" is such a horrible way to respond to a westerner acting out isn't because I'm in denial of American exceptionalism, but rather because Europeans exhibit the same behaviors, and by pushing it onto another country, shift any accountability for those behaviors aside, never to address them, let alone correct them.

There's just something so ironic about Europeans dubbing two entire continents with rich, ancient civilizations "the New World," systematically wiping out the thousands of cultures here and coercing everyone to live by their own...and then turning around and laughing at the mess they made, using it as a scapegoat for when they don't want to confront the terrible things they're still doing. They're pointing at the mirror and laughing at their own reflection. "I didn't do that, they did."

[amuseoffyre]

Was thinking about accents in OFMD today and how it works out well that Stede doesn't have the English accent he was originally meant to have. The original actors they were looking at for him were all English, if I recall right but the fact Rhys is from Aotearoa New Zealand actually adds another layer into Stede's social position/class within the story.

His father has an English accent and his father clearly was the one who made them the money (and is very bitter about the fact it'll just pass directly to his flower-loving soft son), which would make Stede a first-gen of the family to be born in Barbados. Since thousands of families flocked to the British colonies to make their fortune, it tracks that Stede's dad did exactly that.

Thing is that Stede's family may have a fortune, but in terms of class and position, that's all they have. Mary's mother says "he's not a derelict, he has money" and his father fully admits "she has acreage". He's buying Mary for her land and they both know it, because if you have land, you can gentrify yourself and move up that slippery ladder.

Sending Stede to get an education at an upper-class boarding school is another bit of Stede's dad's attempt to socially climb, but from the way the Badmintons treat him at school and in adulthood, he was never going to fit. He was the butt of the jokes, the jolly-jump-up who was never going to be good enough since his father was in trade, not to mention Stede's personality was at odds with everything that was expected and demanded of him.

With all that in mind, him having an accent that very clearly identifies him as not just gentry but gentry from one of the colonies? He would slide even further down the social pecking order. Accents are such a big thing in the British class system and it would be an immediate marker of him being Othered again.

brb, going to go and gnaw some more on class divides and social structures and how Mary is higher-ranking than Stede but had to defer to him as her husband \o/

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved in our archive

By Tom Peters

Late last month the New Zealand government released a 700-page report from the first phase of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19, examining the country’s response to the pandemic from 2020 to 2023.

The commission was chaired by Tony Blakely, a University of Melbourne epidemiologist, assisted by John Whitehead, a former New Zealand treasury secretary, and Hekia Parata, a former National Party government minister of education.

These appointees were intended to produce a predetermined conclusion: that any public health measures to stop the spread of COVID and save lives must be “balanced” against the need to protect “the economy.” This is the dominant theme throughout the commission’s report, which is designed to ensure that in any future pandemic the response is subordinated entirely to the profit interests of the corporate and financial elite.

Blakely initially supported stringent lockdowns and border quarantine measures in Australia and New Zealand. Later, after the emergence of the highly-infectious Omicron variant of COVID-19, he minimised the severity of the virus. He advocated a “let it rip” policy, telling Radio NZ in February 2022 that the government was being “too cautious,” and should work faster at dismantling public health measures in order to “let Omicron wash through in a timely manner.”

The commissioners’ report seeks to justify the overall response of the former Labour Party-led government—above all, the decision announced by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in October 2021 to end the elimination strategy, which had kept the country almost entirely free from COVID-19 during the first two years of the pandemic.

This was followed by the progressive removal of all restrictions on the spread of the coronavirus and the adoption of a criminal policy of mass infection, which had already killed millions of people worldwide.

In 2022, lockdowns and border quarantine measures were overturned; schools and workplaces fully reopened without social distancing; mask and vaccine mandates were ended, and COVID testing was discouraged in order to keep sick people at work.

In August 2023, the last remaining requirements for people to self-isolate if they had COVID, and to wear masks in healthcare facilities, were scrapped by the Labour government.

These steps—all of which are tacitly or explicitly supported in the Royal Commission’s report—produced a public health disaster. Total deaths from COVID-19 sky-rocketed from around 30 in late 2021, to over 4,500 to date, with more people dying every week. More than 44,200 people have been hospitalised for COVID-19, placing an enormous burden on the healthcare system.

The Royal Commission noted the “clear and consistent pattern of higher hospitalisation rates for people living in higher deprivation areas” and greater fatalities among Māori and Pacific people, who are largely among the poorest. Hospitals in working class areas were frequently overwhelmed with COVID cases, a crisis exacerbated by the running down of public healthcare under successive governments.

Despite this, the report complacently states that the surge in deaths in 2022 was “not the best scenario we might have hoped for [but it] was a pretty good one,” because the initial elimination strategy and vaccination meant that there was “a much lesser cumulative mortality burden than we would have experienced had we allowed the virus in during 2020.”

In fact, while vaccination reduced the risk of severe illness it did not stop mass infection, illness and large numbers of deaths from the highly-infectious Omicron and subsequent variants of COVID-19. During July 2022, as the WSWS reported, New Zealand’s weekly rate of deaths from COVID was among the highest in the world. COVID remains the country’s deadliest infectious disease.

The Royal Commission highlighted the initial success of the elimination strategy, noting that from 2020 to early 2023, New Zealand “experienced ‘negative’ excess mortality, meaning there were fewer deaths in that time period than what would have been expected during a ‘normal’ year.”

The border quarantine measures and the closure of schools and businesses in March-April 2020 succeeded in stopping circulation of the virus, allowing daily life to proceed in a relatively normal way. As well as stamping out COVID-19, these measures eliminated influenza and RSV for approximately two years, a significant achievement that contributed to a fall in the country’s mortality rate.

The commissioners then justify the ending of the “zero COVID” policy by arguing that the lockdowns were no longer working. The report echoes the Labour government’s position that the “social licence” for such measures, especially support among business leaders, was eroding. In deciding to ease and then completely end a lockdown in Auckland in late 2021, while the Delta variant of the virus was still spreading, the report says, “Cabinet had to balance many different outcomes and impacts—health, social and economic—as well as equity considerations.”

The commissioners describe the decision as a “judgement call” and even suggest that the lockdown could have been ended sooner—as was done with the lifting of similar restrictions in the Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales. They also make the unsubstantiated claim that the Omicron variant that became dominant in 2022 was “probably impossible to manage with an elimination strategy.” In fact, China was able to suppress Omicron outbreaks, including in Shanghai.

Ardern’s announcement on October 4, 2021, that the government would move away from an elimination strategy was the outcome of a concerted pressure campaign by big business, both in New Zealand and internationally. It was immediately applauded by the New York Times and other mouthpieces for the financial elite, which insisted that the world had to “learn to live with” mass COVID infection.

The decision was made without consulting the government’s own public health experts, who warned against ending the Auckland lockdown and called for it to be strengthened to stamp out the virus.

The current Labour Party leader, Chris Hipkins, who served as COVID-19 response minister during the transition to the “let it rip” policy, responded to the Royal Commission’s report by stating: “I think we lost the room in Auckland… people stopped following some of the lockdown restrictions.” The lockdown lasted from August to early December 2021 but it was undermined, not by public non-compliance, but by the government’s decisions to ease restrictions.

Hipkins blamed Labour’s crushing election defeat in October 2023 on the supposed unpopularity of lockdowns. In fact, a New Zealand Herald poll published on September 2, 2021 found that 85 percent of respondents supported the elimination strategy, including 87 percent of people in Auckland. Only 13 percent said the country should “live with” COVID-19.

Labour won the 2020 election, with more than 50 percent of the votes, largely because of public support for the elimination strategy. Its support dropped precipitously in 2022, as thousands of people became sick and died from COVID-19, and amid escalating social inequality, poverty and homelessness.

Hipkins also told the media he accepted the Royal Commission’s finding that border restrictions should have been lifted sooner and that vaccine mandates, in Hipkins’ words, “went too far.” He pointed to anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown protests—including the occupation of parliament’s lawn in early 2022—as evidence that such measures became unpopular. In fact, the protests were supported by a small minority and organised by far-right groups such as Voices For Freedom and Destiny Church.

Members of the current National Party-led coalition government have attacked the Royal Commission report for failing to openly repudiate public health principles. The far-right NZ First and ACT Parties, which play a major role in the government, repeatedly minimised COVID and attacked lockdowns and vaccine mandates during last year’s election campaign.

NZ First leader Winston Peters, the deputy prime minister, who courted anti-vaccination groups during the election, said in June that the Royal Commission was “nothing more than a Labour Party political tool.” On NZ First’s insistence, a second phase of the inquiry will be held next year to investigate “vaccine efficacy and safety” and “the imposition and maintenance of lockdowns” especially in 2021. The aim is to further undermine and discredit these life-saving measures.

Meanwhile, the government is systematically attacking the public health system, including through the destruction of thousands of jobs, even as COVID-19 continues to spread and scientists are warning that bird flu threatens to become another pandemic.

This is part of an international process: the ruling class throughout the world is attacking science and dismantling public healthcare, which is seen as an unacceptable drain on the wealth of the billionaires who run society. Hundreds of billions of dollars must also be slashed from healthcare and other social programs to pay for imperialist wars against Russia, Iran and China.

Most notably, US president-elect Donald Trump has named anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Junior to run the Department of Health and Human Services, and proponent of mass COVID infection Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health. This is the equivalent of putting arsonists in charge of the fire department.

The scientific knowledge and resources exist that could eliminate COVID-19 and other preventable diseases, which are now resurging throughout the world. If the elimination strategy initially adopted in New Zealand and China had been implemented on a global scale, the COVID pandemic could have been ended within a matter of months.

Such an undertaking, however, is incompatible with the capitalist system, in which all of society’s resources are subordinated to the dictates of the financial elite and its insatiable drive for profits. The only way to put an end to the pandemic and prevent an even more catastrophic outbreak in future, is through the mobilisation of the international working class in the fight for the socialist reorganisation of society.

[sapphia]

Can I get more info about what's going on in nz? I watch global news regularly and nothing about this has come up and I find this highly disturbing.

we elected a neoliberal nightmare of a government who are destroying our health system, water system, ferry and rail system, environment and democracy for profit. people are literally dying in hospitals because there is no doctor in hospitals in multiple rural towns and they just have a consultation on an ipad. the government are trying to frame Health NZ as having a budget deficit of 1.5 billion when in reality that deficit exists because they provided like 3 billion dollars with of tax cuts they couldn’t afford. National cuts spending to health every time they get in government and the disjointed DHB system has been unable to keep up financially with the growing population and health needs.

i personally have just been FUCKED by national as for the last two years i have been navigating our labyrinth of a health system, not working due to being intensely suicidal, trying to find therapy to get better and there just isn’t any available. so i payed for a private autism diagnosis to try and access funding for therapy through the ministry of disability and also get under their umbrella because they actually treat you like a person there and also don’t actively seem to want you dead like they do in the mental health system. but the process took so long that by the time i got my diagnosis and through the referral system, national had yoinked the funding and deemed that therapy will no longer be covered by the disability funding system. all therapies. for disabled people.

oh also they’re like trying to start a race war or something as both minor parties in the 3-way coalition government are trying to negate the Treaty of Waitangi in law, and they’re also attacking the judiciary and had to be told to stop by our attorney general, who they ignored obviously.

our prime minister answers every question with “i say to you” followed by just a literal lie, they’re all just lying through their teeth, i literally have an OIA request about when David Seymour, our deputy-PM-in-waiting (don’t ask) said that preschool education needed to be reviewed because they were being prevented from teaching phonics. they’re not. someone just expressed concern that that might be happening to him, and apparently he is basing government policy on that?? or at least using it to falsely justify it to the nation.

their ideas are all bad and disproven by evidence-based studies, despite their slogan being “we’re going to make evidence-based decisions”. New Zealand has hit a funding wall where we’ve kicked the can too far down the road on like everything and it’s all starting to collapse at once and this government are not only letting it happen, they’re actively helping it along because they’ve all got shares in private rival companies or mates they want to give contracts to (our former national PM got paid insane money to write an insanely biased report attacking our ministry of social housing) or they’ve had their careers helped along by lobbying firms or they want to work for lobbying firms after they leave parliament.

the speaker of the house (who is right now being accused of not dealing with racism within his own party because of course he isn’t, he’s gerry fucking brownlee, the most hated man in christchurch) has allowed lobbyists unprecedented unrecorded entry to parliament. the minister for conservation keeps “forgetting” to write his lobby dinners in his diary. one of them told an mp “he’s not in mexico anymore”. no one is getting in trouble for this shit while the left are being raked over the coals. there’s like so much more. no one can keep up. and nothings being done about it.

tldr; help

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 93: How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq Jones

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode 'How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq Jones'. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about nonbinary speech with Dr. Jacq Jones. They’re a lecturer at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa / Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. But first, our most recent bonus episode was about various kinds of fun mishearings and missayings and misparsings that people make in songs, in phrases, in idioms – all sorts of, like, you know when you hear “an acorn,” and you think it might actually be “an egg-corn” because it’s like the egg of the tree? Well, we talk about what strange things that you mishear, or misparse, can tell us about how language works. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to listen to this bonus episode, many more bonus episodes, and help us keep the show running.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello Jacq!

Jacq: Hi Gretchen!

Gretchen: Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Jacq: Thanks for inviting me. It’s awesome.

Gretchen: Before we get into all of the cool research that you’ve done about how nonbinary people talk that you’re working on, let’s talk a little bit about your origin story. How did you get into linguistics?

Jacq: Okay, well, I mean, how far back do you wanna go, I guess? I was a high school dropout. I was in my teens. I was going around North America, in Canada and the United States, working and this and that. I decided I wanted to go back to school. I did get into an adult education programme and finished up my high school. It was in a really small town in rural Alberta. It had a community college, and they didn’t have that many classes. I went into geography.

Gretchen: That’s super related to linguistics.

Jacq: You’d be surprised.

Gretchen: Great.

Jacq: Yeah, because I had spent time in the southern United States and in Alberta and in Ontario and things, and so I liked seeing all the different places. I went into geography. For people who don’t know, geography has these two big branches. There’s physical geography and human geography. Physical geography is rocks and trees and mountains and weather, and human geography is how people affect the world and how the world affects people.

Gretchen: So, like cities and stuff.

Jacq: Yeah, right. So, I was sitting in a class, and we were talking about how goods move across borders and how a lot of human influences – including language and political borders – can affect the movement of goods and, alternatively, how languages can be stopped by things like mountains.

Gretchen: Oh! Okay.

Jacq: You’ll have dialects that won’t go over the top of a mountain because you have this physical barrier. I was like, “That’s amazing.” Somehow, something about this interaction between this natural world and something like language, which is very, sort of, in your heads – but of course, you’re not gonna walk up a mountain to go talk to the person on the other side.

Gretchen: I live in Montreal, which doesn’t even really have a mountain by proper mountain-people standards, and I don’t wanna walk up that mountain just to talk to someone at the top. I totally understand that prehistoric people also did not wanna do this.

Jacq: Exactly. People, you know, live along rivers, so you have languages and language change and language contact all along these natural systems. That was the bug.

Gretchen: That’s fascinating. That’s so cool.

Jacq: And then I went from this community college – this adult education programme – to university, took a linguistics class, and as they say, that was it. Fell in love with phonetics and acoustics and all the meaty bits inside of you that create language. And here we are.

Gretchen: You do sounds – phonetics, how people talk – and specifically, I first encountered your research when I was in New Zealand last year at the New Zealand Linguistic Society Annual Meeting in Dunedin. You were giving a talk about your dissertation on how nonbinary people talk. How did you get into that topic?

Jacq: Sure. I think for most linguists, if you can press them, for most people in academia, what you’re into – there’s always something personal in it. There’s always something in what you’re doing. As a nonbinary person, navigating the 2010s – the late 2010s – trying to navigate what “gender” means, I kept catching myself really interrogating, really thinking about how I interact with people around me and what assumptions they’re going to put on me, what assumptions I’m putting on myself. You know, I’m getting on the bus, how low do I wanna talk to the bus driver? Just really silly stuff like that.

Gretchen: Like, are they gonna “sir” or “ma’am” me to show how they’re parsing my gender?

Jacq: Exactly. And do I want either of those options? Not really.

Gretchen: Which are both wrong.

Jacq: But if I can barely figure out what being nonbinary means to me as a nonbinary person, how can I expect the, you know, 60-year-old parent that I’m talking to, or a random person at the coffee shop I’m talking to, to understand all these backflips that I’m trying to do in presenting my gender? I mean, I’m into phonetics. I’m into acoustics. I’ve always been interested, linguistically, in this space between “This is how people talk because they are from Canada,” “This is how people talk because they’re a woman” – or because they’re a certain socio-economic class, or this – versus “This is how a jock or a burnout talks,” “This is how somebody asserts their identity.” When you’re looking at gender, that’s really this difference between a lot of stuff that we’re taught growing up and a lot of stuff that people might argue is inherent – a lot of stuff that is constrained by physiology, in some ways, by your existence in a meat suit – but you still always have control over it. That’s where this is. Part of it is being nonbinary and wanting that legitimacy of examining the numbers and proving that I exist, and nonbinary people exist, which are not represented historically. That’s changing now. And so, wanting that studying me and people like me to show “Hey, we exist. This is a thing that we can measure. This is a thing that we can look at,” and studying why, and yeah.

Gretchen: If you study all the other nonbinary speakers, then they’ll just tell how you need to talk now. So, that’ll be really handy.

Jacq: I mean, that’s part of it, too, right, is something that’s really exciting about studying nonbinary people during my dissertation – and I think that this is very much changing for the better, and I’m so happy that there are so many more options for young people in terms of gender and for old people in terms of gender and for anybody in terms of gender, but at the time, it really felt like all the templates that were out there were very binary – all the methodologies for studying speech, all of variation studies, everything, was, “This is how men talk,” “This is how women talk,” “This is how you’re supposed to talk if you’re a man or a woman,” or you want to present yourself – it was all binary.

Gretchen: I remember even when I was just being trained at grad school, everything was very binary. People weren’t even really questioning that. Even 10 years later, it seems like there’s been a lot more people thinking that through.

Jacq: Exactly. That is so amazing. From the point of view – putting on the researcher hat – studying it at the point where the speakers are making these first decisions without any templates – without a YouTube person to look at to model this kind of language on – felt really exciting.

Gretchen: And then somebody else who’s doing this study in another 10 years or 20 years or something when possibly nonbinary identity may have coalesced a bit more, then they have this to compare to as a baseline to see – it’s not often we get to watch a new gender evolve in real time. I mean, that’s not quite true because non-cis people have always existed, but the coherent, legible, nonbinary category, we get to watch it evolve in real time.

Jacq: Exactly. Traditionally, in these linguistic studies of dialect formation, that’s the 10-dollar word. You’re looking at something that’s very geographically bound. You have a group of people from one dialect that are moving to another place for another dialect. You have this contact, and you can study things coming out of that. But for nonbinary gender, even now, I can say, “Aw, there’s so many more nonbinary people out there.” I mean, realistically, if we think about our own networks, we do not have – I mean, I guess I can’t say this about everybody – but most of us don’t have a huge amount of nonbinary people in it compared to how many other LGBT people or how many other men or women – there just aren’t that many nonbinary people. We do tend to find each other, but we don’t have these big communities.

Gretchen: There’s a certain clustering, but it’s also not absolute, and there’s lots of other stuff. Do you feel like the internet has an influence on how nonbinary people talk?

Jacq: I think it does in the sense that the internet – and in particular, that kind of American sphere of the internet – influences everything that everybody does all of the time in some ways. But I also think that gender – sex and gender, in particular – these core identity things interact so strongly with where we are and our immediate context that it’s not quite as – in terms of speech, I don’t think it’s quite as strong. I did have one participant – if I can talk about my dissertation a little bit.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, please, no, tell us about how the nonbinary people talk.

Jacq: One of my participants, Istus, is nonbinary and very femme. One of the things I talked about at that conference talk that you saw me – the slides are on my website, if you wanna take a look.

Gretchen: Excellent, we can link to those.

Jacq: Sweet. Istus is nonbinary and also very femme. This is something that really challenges the stereotypes that we have. Even me as a researcher coming into this had this idea of you have these men and women, and then you have these nonbinary people that are challenging these stereotypes, but “nonbinary” is not necessarily “non-femme.” So, Istus’s femininity was very nonbinary. When she talked about trying to construct her voice, this femininity that she wanted to get across, she would talk about putting on, basically, a Californian accent. She would say, “I can talk like this, and I sound very feminine, but I also sound like I’m smiling all the time, and I’m not that nice a person.”

Gretchen: Is Istus a New Zealander? Because you’re doing your PhD in New Zealand.

Jacq: All of my participants were from Christchurch (Ōtautahi), New Zealand. They were mostly between the ages of 18 and 22 – so this really specific first year of university cohort where you’re learning your identity and really stretching out from under your parents’ wings for the first time. I also had a couple of participants that were over 40. That’s interesting because it also challenges our stereotypes of gender as this static thing that you’re a man or a woman. When we look at how language can change over time, we don’t always think about how the people that are speaking can change over time.

Gretchen: A lot of the most visible nonbinary people are younger, but there’re also older people who are saying, “Oh, these young people have described a word for this thing that I’ve felt my whole life, and actually, I’m also this identity, and now there’s a word for it.”

Jacq: Absolutely. I mean, being a 45-year-old nonbinary person, you don’t necessarily want to speak like a 20-year-old nonbinary person, right.

Gretchen: Totally.

Jacq: If 20-year-old nonbinary people are trying to navigate what sex and gender is, if you’re 40, there’s that much more history of trying to figure all of this out.

Gretchen: Absolutely. Going back to Istus, who is the subject of the talk that you gave at the New Zealand Linguistic Society, one of the things that struck me about this talk when you were doing it is that you had participants take selfies of what they wearing at the same points as they were doing recordings. They did a bunch of recordings with different people in different environments, so you could see how they changed how they talked in relation to both what they’re wearing and also who they’re talking to.

Jacq: Absolutely. Because I think all of us have this experience of thinking about how we’re perceived by somebody else. That perception, for many of us, isn’t limited to just our voices. We don’t exist as a voice that wanders around in the ether.

Gretchen: We are not disembodied voices. We are meat suits wearing clothing suits.

Jacq: Yes. Which is super frustrating for many people, too. I call these recordings “in the wild” because I had this idea of David Attenborough following – “And here, he encounters the cis person.” But yeah, knowing that how we choose to present ourselves in that way is gonna change the way that we talk. This is pretty established. Also, the person that we’re talking to is gonna change the way that we talk. If you’re talking to your parent, you’re gonna talk to them differently than if you’re talking to your boss. We know this. But I was particularly interested in the way that these gendered relationships are navigated for nonbinary people.

Gretchen: Do you have an example of how some of your participants talked differently with different people?

Jacq: One example is Istus would play with makeup in really interesting ways. When I had the participants come, they would show me their selfies of these recordings, and I’d say, “Describe this outfit to me,” so I could see what they found really important because what you choose to wear has a lot more different – like, you know what is significant to what you’re wearing versus you don’t know if I’m wearing my lucky socks. That kind of thing.

Gretchen: Yeah, I dunno if your socks are lucky. I dunno if this is, like, the same shirt I’ve been wearing for three days which gives it a different valance to me compared to “Oh, yeah, this is my favourite shirt that I never wear, and I only wear on special occasions.”

Jacq: Istus didn’t have this in a picture, but she described her “stealth outfit,” which was every aspect of the outfit presented very masculine – sort of a suit jacket and loafers and this kind of thing. But every minute aspect of the clothing was actually feminine. The buttons were on – I can’t remember what side buttons are supposed to be on – but the buttons were on –

Gretchen: Neither can I.

Jacq: – the buttons were on –

Gretchen: The feminine side.

Jacq: Yeah, and the shoes were from the women’s section. There was this whole stealth coding that Istus was doing for herself – not for other people unless they’re cued in.

Gretchen: If she needs to go about as someone who doesn’t want her gender remarked on that particular day.

Jacq: Yeah, then she can choose where that gets presented. She would also wear different kinds of makeup. She would describe it as “enough eyeshadow so you can’t see the bags under my eyes” was one of her quotes.

Gretchen: Love it.

Jacq: The other quote was “makeup for the sake of wearing makeup” versus makeup that you would wear sort of a more natural face. You’ll forgive me if I get any of this wrong. I am not a makeup person. It was interesting because the – in her voice – the feminine cues that she used would change based on how overt her makeup was.

Gretchen: This is something that stood out to me about your talk, the makeup thing, because I’m very femme, I’m very cis. To me, I want all of my gender vectors or all of my gender points in the femme tally. But what Istus did in this thing was, if she was wearing makeup, she would do less femme gender vocal cues, like she’s counterbalancing the gender points, and as long as you have enough in the femme category and enough in the masc category, then it balanced in her head for whatever her personal definition of “balanced” is, which isn’t how I approach gender but is a really interesting thing that I learned from your talk.

Jacq: Aw, thank you. I’m glad that you found it interesting. Yes, Istus – and this is a theme throughout all of the participants. I should say that I also interviewed binary participants – men and women – and there were certain themes there, too. I don’t want to leave them all the way out.

Gretchen: Totally. You gotta have a control group.

Jacq: Yeah. But for the nonbinary participants, there was this – in my dissertation, I called it “incongruence” – but this idea that if you want to create some kind of mixed signal or if you wanna create something that isn’t quite in the two boxes that the people who are listening to you maybe have, then you can either take cues from both, or you can try to find some kind of middle ground. Those are two quite different things. Something very overtly feminine in your physical presentation combined with something a little bit less feminine or more masculine in maybe your vocal presentation, that can still get to something that isn’t binary in a way different than being very neutral-sort-of-middle-ground is.

Gretchen: The neutral-middle-ground is like, “I’m just gonna wear a hoodie and jeans because every gender can wear a hoodie and jeans, and then nobody will be able to perceive me as any gender at all,” whereas in a clothing way, doing something that has mixed signals would be like, “Okay, I’m gonna have a beard and also this super sparkly eyeshadow” or something like that.

Jacq: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that wasn’t quite where any of my particular participants went. But the idea that if you only have these two options, and you need to create a third option, there isn’t only one way to do a third option. There isn’t only one way to be nonbinary. A lot of how you do that, I found in my dissertation, is based on your own personality, which is like, “Oh, surprise, people have agency in how they talk,” and some people don’t like wearing super sparkly eyeshadow.

Gretchen: Totally. But also, sometimes you need to do the academic version of establishing that baseline because you could say, “Well, based on my friends, a lot of them which are nonbinary, people seem to do these strategies,” but having written it down in this academically legible place and gone through and done it with some statistics or something lets you say, “Okay, here’s what we have in terms of what we know now and maybe this would change in another decade if there becomes a more socially legible category of nonbinary-ness.”

Jacq: And I think, also, part of including binary participants in this work is to bring nonbinary people into both an academic conversation that’s already happening, which is, again, that sort of talk of legitimacy and saying, “Here’s an established body of work,” and bringing a “new population” – I’m making finger quotes; they’re not actually new – but bringing a different population – an “understudied” population, let’s say – into the fold, at the same time, that allows you to interrogate what’s already there. We have this whole body of literature that ignores that nonbinary people exist –

Gretchen: But that also doesn’t ask cis people or people that we’re presuming are cis, “How did you know that you’re cis? How do you know your gender? What are you doing to signal your gender with your voice? And how much of that are you doing deliberately?”

Jacq: I think that that’s really valuable, too, the idea that – I mean, there’s nothing that says a cis person isn’t allowed to think about masculinity, or how they present masculinity, or how they present femininity, or what that means. I mean, personally, I think it would be really useful if more cis people did that. If more people just thought about gender in ways that weren’t binary, talking to the binary men and women in my study, I was a little bit surprised, but it was amazing to see – I mean, some people never thought about it. There’s questions about “How do you feel about being a woman?” or being a man, and people said, “I dunno. I never thought about it. It just felt right.” But not everybody. Some of the participants that I spoke to did deeply interrogate their gender at some point in their lives. One of my cis male participants talked about thinking that maybe they were trans for a while and then realising they weren’t. I think the fact that we, as people – and also, we as linguists doing these studies on language – can interrogate even binary gender from these perspectives is really valuable.

Gretchen: This was something that came up in a recent episode that we did about the vowel space and how gender affects the vowel space, which we can link to. One of things that I find neat about that research is that even kids who haven’t gone through puberty yet who still have all identical vowel spaces or vowel spaces with as much variation as they have in heights but nothing specifically affected by the physical changes of puberty are still doing social genders and actually have different vowels based on the genders in their heads even though their bodies aren’t affecting what sounds they can produce yet.

Jacq: That works the other direction, too. We often think of puberty as this thing where a bunch of stuff happens to you, and then you pop out the other end like, talking and looking like –

Gretchen: A gender, now.

Jacq: A gender. You are this. But that’s not – I mean, the variation that almost any given human can produce is so much wider than the constraints of physiology. I’m not the only person to look at this. I know that Viktoria Papp has done really excellent work with transmasc people. Lal Zimman also works with transmasc populations a lot, too. You can take testosterone, and it can thicken your vocal folds, and it can create a drop in pitch, but that’s not what it means to talk like a man if you’re transmasc. That’s not the end of it. At the risk of summing up someone else’s research in two sentences, what you tend to see, I think, in Vietze’s work is a drop, an initial drop, from testosterone, and then it kind of pops back up again with the idea that, as people become more comfortable in their bodies and in their lives and in their situations, there’s less pressure to perform some stereotypical masculinity and more to just be the person they are, the transmasc person they are, or the nonbinary person they are.

Gretchen: That sounds neat. We can link to that study so that if people want to hear more than the two-sentence summary version, they can follow up on that.

Jacq: And Lal Zimman’s work is amazing. Every single thing that Lal has written is fantastic, too.

Gretchen: Yes. Everyone’s in the Lal Zimman fan club. So, you have a corpus, which is delightfully called, I think, “The RAINBO Corpus.”

Jacq: Yeah, “Recorded Audio-visual Interviews with nonbinary and Binary Orators. It’s “RAINBO” without a W.

Gretchen: Oh, and it spells “RAINBO” – that’s so good!

Jacq: For the sake of the acronym.

Gretchen: That’s such a beautiful acronym. You have six nonbinary participants in there, and six binary participants, and they held this speech that you looked at the pitch of it, and you’ve looked at how they do their vowels and things. You also have a talk and a paper, I think, you’re working on that’s co-authored with one of those research participants who then de-anonymised themself from the previous anonymous corpus work that they were in.

Jacq: Yeah.

Gretchen: I find this really interesting because there’s this interesting balancing act in academic between, “Oh, I’ve got a research participant. They’ve got sensitive data. I’m going to preserve their anonymity,” and also, sometimes when people are telling us really interesting things about their lives or their language choices or their identities, giving them credit for that intellectual contribution to the work which names them – yeah, can you talk about this balancing act about participant and researcher collaboration?

Jacq: Absolutely. I would love to. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I don’t want to portray myself as an expert. There is a whole other body of work where your collaborators, your language consultants, work very closely with the researcher, but that’s not always the same methodology as the bigger picture, what we call “variationist,” studies where we’re trying to look at large groups of people and how they speak. Kaspar is the name of the person that I worked with. And I got their permission before this episode – I asked them how they wanted to be referred, and they said, “Okay.” We’ll call them Kaspar, which is great because that’s their name, so it’s super easy for me to remember.

Gretchen: But they also had a pseudonym in the study originally.

Jacq: Yeah. In the study, if you read my dissertation – which you don’t have to, but if you do – in the study, they were called “Alex.”

Gretchen: Dissertations are notably very long and, often, in the years after a dissertation comes out, people will write some shorter papers that summarise small bits of the dissertation. Keep an eye on Jacq and their website. Maybe there’ll be shorter versions. But if you really wanna read the whole dissertation or skim through it and pick out the bits that look interesting to you, we will link to it.

Jacq: I had set up, for my dissertation, you know, as a – I think there’s something else. Dissertations are a long work, and you’re learning as you go. That’s the point. When you’re planning these ethics and all of the things in planning this dissertation, you go through the process that has already been established. I did that. It’s fine. Kaspar came and was recorded. It ended up, as it happens, after I had done my data collection, Christchurch is not a huge place. Kaspar and I were in the same social circles, and we became friends after the data collection. Every once in a while, we would talk about the work that I was doing and stuff I was studying because they were super interested. They have a background in mathematics, and they’re familiar with linguistics, so it’s not like they knew nothing about linguistics.

Gretchen: So, when you were showing them some pretty graphs, they were like, “Oh, cool, graphs. I like those.”

Jacq: Yeah. And then I can’t remember if I asked them or they offered to do some proofreading before I had submitted it, and I sent them a draft. I got it back, and there were smiley faces and frowny faces on a lot of stuff. Then because we’re friends, we went and hung out and talked about it, and there’s something different. You’re participating in research. You’re getting recorded. And then research comes out. You know that you’re maybe nonbinary. You’re this population. And then you see yourself on a graph that plots your pitch somewhere, and you know what the stereotypes about feminine pitch and masculine pitch are. I mean, I did a bad thing in that sense. I hurt somebody, right, in not earth-shattering ways, I don’t think – or at least Kaspar didn’t tell me it was earth-shattering.

Gretchen: But in frowny face ways, yeah.

Jacq: And we share this perspective of the importance of examining new populations using established methodology and these traditional ways of doing things to grant – whatever you wanna call it – some kind of legitimacy from the academy – or however we wanna navigate this – but then this is still real people that are given little dots or little diamonds and plopped on a graph. I can say in 300 words how this isn’t meant to tell people how gendered they are; this is meant to examine nonbinary people and compare them on equal footing with binary populations, but of course, nonbinary people don’t come to the table with no baggage, with nothing behind them. You come, and you come with a gendered upbringing, a gendered – you exist in a world, right. You can’t just not.

Gretchen: Totally.

Jacq: That was really hard. We had a lot of conversations about that through the course of proofreading a dissertation and submitting it and trying to get to a point. And I didn’t have – because of the way that the ethics works – I couldn’t contact every other participant afterward and get the same insights and things. But it’s not all bad. Kaspar expressed to me how interesting it was and how amazing it was to see their plots there and the joy of seeing themself not in the ASAB cohort that they expected versus the sadness when they came a little bit too close or that kind of thing. We gave a talk about this and, hopefully, a paper that examines that a little bit more. The other benefit is that, now I have a collaborator and a co-author, it means that we can do a lot more really interesting stuff with data.

Gretchen: Well, and if they know all this math, you can do such cool math.

Jacq: And we can track them over time, and we can do new recordings and even stuff about how these interviews with people, or these recordings, are still a snapshot in time. Things aren’t static. People change, and people’s interpretations of themselves are reinvented constantly. I’m really excited. Watch for that paper.

Gretchen: That sounds really cool and really exciting. We will look forward to the Jacq-Kaspar collaboration, Kaspar-Jacq collaboration. You can keep swapping your names for who goes first if you do a whole bunch of different co-authorships like people do.

Jacq: It made me glad that I wasn’t recording myself.

Gretchen: Were you sometimes interviewing or the interlocutor?

Jacq: Yeah. We did these “in the wild” recordings, and then we had the traditional sociolinguistic interview with all of these questions. We recorded me at first thinking there might be accommodation stuff, but then it’s also just like, I can’t transcribe, like, 400 million hours of –

Gretchen: So, “linguistic accommodation” is the thing where, when you’re talking with someone, especially if you like them or you’re trying to get along with them, you talk more like the person you’re talking to, which happens to lots of people lots of the time. I certainly do it. And you were thinking, well, maybe if people are talking more like you when they’re talking with you, then that might shift things, but also, you end up with a lot of data.

Jacq: Yeah, that’s true. It ended up doing a little bit of spot checking. It didn’t seem quite there because of these outsider-insider relationships of I am Canadian sitting in New Zealand interviewing people. There was enough of a gulf that it didn’t seem –

Gretchen: They didn’t all start sounding Canadian when you were interviewing them. I’m shocked.

Jacq: They weren’t like, [stereotypical Canadian accent] “Oh, hey, thanks for interviewing me.”

Gretchen: Maybe this is a good segue actually because you’re a fellow Canadian, hello, “Welcome to the podcast, eh” – [laughter] – who’s been living in New Zealand for nine years now.

Jacq: Yeah, almost a decade.

Gretchen: Amazing. We’ve had a previous interview with Ake Nicholas talking about Cook Islands Māori if people want to hear someone with a more New Zealand accent.

Jacq: Actual New Zealand accent.

Gretchen: An actual New Zealand accent. But this is presumably a linguistic experience for you. Do you wanna say anything about what it’s been like? Do you talk differently to people other than me who don’t have a similar Canadian accent?

Jacq: It’s kind of hard to know. I think there’re a few things. I noticed about four or five years in that I was losing my Canadian raising. We had gone somewhere, and I said, “Aw, look at those three houses.” I was like, “Ah! What did I just do?” Instead of saying /haʊsəz/, I said /haʊzəz/. I was like, “Ugh.” Which is funny because when I lived in Canada, I never noticed Canadian raising. It was one of those things that was so –

Gretchen: So, Canadian raising, which we actually haven’t talked about on Lingthusiasm yet – so maybe someday in the future –

Jacq: What!

Gretchen: – is the thing that is responsible for the differences between how I say the vowel in “house” [noun] versus “house” [verb] or in “height” versus “high” – “height,” “high,” “house,” “house.” I will say, I don’t Canadian raise that much, so it’s a difference in terms of how you say the vowel between /t/ and /d/ or /s/ and /z/. There’re some people who say something like, “about,” more like /əbo��t/. There’s a stereotype that Canadians say /əbʊt/, and that’s not true. I want to correct that right now. People in lots of other English-speaking environments don’t do this Canadian raising, and you noticed that you were stopping doing it. Anecdotally, I also notice people that move to Canada do start doing more Canadian raising, so this seems to be one of the ones that’s flexible in people’s speech.

Jacq: Yeah, I think that’s true. It’s funny because it’s so stereotyped in Canada. I don’t think it’s as strong as the stereotype, but it’s definitely sticky in a weird way. I did lose it. But probably, in this interview, it’s back.

Gretchen: It clicks back in.

Jacq: Yeah.

Gretchen: Any other things that you’ve noticed?

Jacq: I remember when I first landed in New Zealand – so New Zealand is non-rhotic. There’s no R. Words that are spelt E-A-R, like “ear,” and words that are spelt A-I-R, like “air,” have merged, so they’re pronounced the same. I was sitting on the airplane waiting to disembark, and the announcer came on, and they said, “Could everyone exit via the /ɹiəɹ stiəɹz/?”

Gretchen: Oh. [Laughs]

Jacq: I had this moment of, like, cows stacked up at the back of a plane. Like, and it’s sat with me, and I think it’s because the context wasn’t quite enough for me to get – but I was like, “Rear steers? Rear steers. What?”

Gretchen: Well, it’s what you exit the “ear-plane” by, obviously.

Jacq: “When you exit the ear-plane by the rear steers, or alternatively, exit the airplane by the rare stairs,” which are the stairs that they don’t bring out that often.

Gretchen: We have to save the rare stairs and the fine china for guests.

Jacq: Exactly.

Gretchen: That’s exactly the kind of thing that, especially, when you’re hitting something out of context, and they seem to be more fond of using that, so if you weren’t used to that particular phrase, either, it would catch.

Jacq: Yeah, and I mean, you’re also in a new place and all of this, and you’re trying to pay attention because you have to do what the airplane people tell you because that’s the rules. I have one more anecdote that is very deeply only Canadian and New Zealand overlap.

Gretchen: Please, I wanna hear it.

Jacq: Maybe this is only western Canada. We’ll see. So, Gretchen, what do you call the front row of seats in the classroom?

Gretchen: Oh, that’s where the “keeners” sit.

Jacq: That’s where the “keeners” sit, right, that’s the “keener” seats, right?

Gretchen: I dunno if I have “keener seats” specifically as a phrase, but like, absolutely, totally understand you when you say this.

Jacq: So, if somebody’s a “keener,” that’s the person at the front of the class, yeah.

Gretchen: Absolutely, yeah. I have told people about this Canadianism myself.

Jacq: Amazing! I’m glad it’s a super salient Canadianism.

Gretchen: I’ve introduced Lauren to it, in fact.

Jacq: So, it’s not a thing in New Zealand. They don’t have keeners, but New Zealanders say “keen” all the time.

Gretchen: Oh, but for something different.

Jacq: You’ll say – and apologies to any New Zealanders if I get these pragmatically a little bit wrong – but you’ll say, “Ah, I’m going for coffee. Is anyone keen?” Or you might say, “Ah, the movie’s coming out next week,” and someone else might say, “Keen,” like they’re keen to go.

Gretchen: Oh, okay, yeah, I think I could say, “I’m keen to go,” but not “keen” by itself in a phrase like that.

Jacq: No, and I think that my impression – my 8-year-old, 9-year-old Canadian impression – is that you don’t really use “keen” – because it has a little bit of that odd, negative – I mean, it’s a “keener” thing, so unless you’re really claiming –

Gretchen: That you’re a big fan of Star Wars, and you’re a Star Wars keener, and you definitely have to go see the new one.

Jacq: If you’re keen to go to Star Wars, you wanna be in the front row.

Gretchen: Of course! Yeah, okay, yeah, I sort of get that. It’s not as neutral. It’s like you’re really actively excited. You’re not just like, “Oh, yeah, I’d be good to go” or like “I’d be down to go.” “I’d be keen to go” is like, “I’d be so keen to go! That would be great!” not just like, “It’d be fine.”

Jacq: Yeah, but if you’re keen, you’re like, “Yeah, I could” – if you wanted to be extra, you could double up the New Zealandisms and you could be “keen as.”

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, I’ve heard the “as.”

Jacq: You could be “keen as,” but I don’t know – that’s where my knowledge of New Zealand lexical items stops is at “as.”

Gretchen: I love “keener” as a Canadianism because my prof friends will be like, “Oh, one of my keeners came to my office hours today,” and they’ll mean that student who’s always asking really good questions and is really excited to be there and stuff like that. It’s very positive when my prof friends who were all themselves keeners back in the day use it. Maybe some people use it negatively, but I sure don’t know any of them.

Jacq: If you are a keener, then “keener” is quite positive, but maybe less so if you're not.

Gretchen: Maybe less so. So, you finished your PhD, and you’re teaching now. I have been told that you make students stab themselves with toothpicks for science. Can you tell us about that?

Jacq: I would love to tell you about that, with a caveat: I tell students to very carefully try not to stab themselves with toothpicks, but it doesn’t quite translate. I teach phonetics, which involves learning about all of the sounds and how we make them. If you’re a speaker of English, you might be familiar with this little sound called “R.”

Gretchen: R is a sound, yes, that I’m familiar with.

Jacq: The alveolar approximate, the /ɹ/ noise. The R sound, the /ɹ/, can be made about 16 million different ways. There’s something like eight or nine different things that you can do with your mouth that will get you close enough to /ɹ/ for people to understand you.

Gretchen: Oh, wow. When I was learning phonetics, they told us there were two different ways, and there’s actually six or eight of them.

Jacq: There’s two different tongue positions, and that’s where the toothpick comes in. But you can also do – there’s different stuff with the back of your mouth. Some people have lip rounding, and some people don’t. Some people raise this and that – yeah, there’s different ways to do it. But you were right when you were learning phonetics.

Gretchen: But because it all produces approximately the same sound, kids just hear adults making the sound, and they experiment with their mouths to produce The Sound, and because the meat suit part of our throats is kind of squishy, you can manipulate it in different ways and end up with the same thing that comes out.

Jacq: You get close enough. In English, we don’t have a lot of other stuff in that area, too. When you think about it, if you’re a kid, if you think about something like a /p/, if you’re a baby looking at a caregiver going /p/, you can really see that, right, but a /ɹ/, you get a face, and you don’t really know what’s going on.

Gretchen: You just get a blank face. You can’t see what they’re doing. With something like a /k/, you can’t necessarily see what they’re doing, but the sound is very distinct that they’re making. /ɹ/ is this approximate sound, which is why it’s called an “approximant” in the International Phonetic Alphabet because it’s just sort of like, “Eh, I dunno.”

Jacq: Close enough, yeah. What you get is you have this sound where there’s a bunch of different ways to make it, and also a bunch of speakers that don’t really know how they make it. When you say something like a /k/, you make that sound, and you’re like, “Oh, my tongue goes here.” But when you’re making a /ɹ/, it changes – depending on where it is in the word – all this stuff. As you learned in your phonetic class, there are two ways that your tongue can be shaped when you’re making a /ɹ/ sound. This may blow some people’s minds because they never thought about it before and didn’t realise that the other way is possible. The two big ways are – they have a million different names because of course they do – but one is called the “bunched R,” usually.

Gretchen: This is when your R, like the back part of your tongue sort of crunches up or gloms up into a bit of a shape at the back that doesn’t actually touch the roof of your mouth.

Jacq: The back of your tongue is all crunched up, and the front of it is down at the bottom of your mouth. The other way to do it is often called the “retroflex R,” or the “curly R,” so you have bunch-y R and curly R. The curly R – the retroflex R – the front of your tongue is curled up and back a little bit.

Gretchen: It’s almost like the tip of the bottom of your tongue is touching, or almost touching, the roof of your mouth.

Jacq: Yes. Which one do you make? It’s hard to –

Gretchen: I know which one I make!

Jacq: Awesome! One of the important points of science is confirmatory analysis. You should replicate this finding and see if it still holds true. If you wanna know which R you make, there’s a way that you can do this with just a toothpick. It’s really easy. All you do is you take a toothpick, a clean one – and make sure you wash your hands – and then you take your toothpick, and you make an R sound – /ɹ/ – or you can pretend you’re a dog and go [imitates dog growl], something like that, just make your /ɹ/ noise. Then you take your toothpick, and you rest it on your bottom teeth or however you wanna – kind of have it centrally into your mouth – and as you go /ɹ/, slowly and carefully, and not stab-ily, put the toothpick into your mouth, and then go, “bleh,” stick your tongue out. The toothpick will either be touching the top of your tongue or the bottom of your tongue.

Gretchen: Whoa! And this tells you which R you have?

Jacq: Yes. And if it’s touching the bottom of your tongue, you’re making a retroflex – you’re making a curly R. And if it’s touching the top of your tongue, you’re making a bunched R.

Gretchen: So, you’re either a curler or a buncher, and you can tell this based on which side you are. I actually went looking for toothpicks so that I could try this and ended up finding a cotton swab, like a Q-Tip, before I saw my toothpicks, and so I tried this with a cotton swab and did not stab myself. This is the safety conscious version you can do if you like because it also works.

Jacq: As long as it’s clean and your hands are clean, that’s a good, safe way to do it.

Gretchen: I’m a buncher, which I thought I was, and I have just confirmed that.

Jacq: Anecdotally, in Canada, it was usually about 50/50 when we go through classes, or we try it. This is in Alberta.

Gretchen: And in New Zealand is it also 50/50, or is it different?

Jacq: In New Zealand, there are a lot more bunchers. I think this might have to do with New Zealand being non-rhotic. I don’t have a paper on this. I don’t know anything. But there’s also a lot less lip rounding. In Canada, lip rounding is almost universal, like it’s on Rs a lot.

Gretchen: Yeah, I lip round.

Jacq: But in New Zealand, that’s not the case. Most people don’t round their lips.

Gretchen: Jacq, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. As we ask at the end of every interview, “If you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would it be?”

Jacq: It would be that you’re the boss of your language. How you communicate with people – it’s all on you. People can tell you how they think you should talk. Even linguists can say, “Well, this is how people talk.” But if you’re not feeling it, do something different. You can change it. You can do whatever you want, communicate however you wanna communicate. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all of the podcast platforms or at lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. You can find our co-host, Lauren Gawne, on social media, and her blog is Superlinguo. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet. You can find our guest, Jacq Jones, on their website at jacq.land – that’s J-A-C-Q-dot-L-A-N-D. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus episodes include spoonerisms, mondegreens, and eggcorns; secret codes and the joys of cryptic word puzzles; and inner voice, mental pictures, and other shapes for our thoughts. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Jacq: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[qrosewinter]

Toxic

Prev-Next

Description : Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3... To be continued.

Summery: Where a girl from New Zealand goes to brooklyn to live with her Auntie and Uncle, mets a brooklyn boy with secrets and a voice like honey with pretty hazel green eyes.

Where a brooklyn boy mets a girl from New Zealand with an accent he's never heard before, who he can't seem to forget.

And a Polynesian girl struggling to find who she is in the concrete jungle of NYC so far from home.

The start of the most unlikely relationship between two people starts to bloom, between a brooklyn boy who's just a little misunderstood.

Will this relationship bloom or stay untouched? Maybe we should let fate take the lead for this one.

Fic summary: slow burn, obvious to flirting, a little bit of angst, romance, revenge, anger.

WARNINGS ⚠️: Horrible attempts at slang, Horrible attempts at Spanish, Swearing, Weapons, Gore, Drugs, Alcohol, Mature themes, Spelling mistakes.

Chapter 2: Am I seeing shit again.

Are you hearing voices again? -Unknown

{{♤♡♤♡♤♡♤♡♤♡♤♡♤♡♤♡♤♡♤♡}}

It's been about 3-4 days since I went to Visions and walked right into someone making a damn fool out of myself, but then again, what's new?

Not gonna lie it wasn't one of my best moments how awkward I felt I mean like, why in hells name did I say 'Have a good day' so god dammed awkwardly, why the fuck did I even say it at all!?

Could have said something like, "Well, sorry about that, but I gotta go, see ya. But not you had to go and say".

'Have a good day?', if I could punch myself so hard right now to make myself forget I ever said that I would, in a heartbeat.

But too bad you can't now can you :/

I'll be starting at Visions next week though, so I guess I have more chances to male myself out to be a fool, they did tell me during my little interview thing or whatever you wanna call it.

They didn't have any dormrooms ready for me at the moment.

so I won't be moving to the dorms anytime soon, which is fair.

I did so happen to start up at that school. What? A little past first term or semester, I think they call it here in America?

I don't know. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the education system here, and I still don't understand a damn thing.

But anyway, I won't be put in a dorm room yet until they find an either an empty one or someone without a roommate, which I don't think will happen anytime soon.

But the good news is I don't live very far from school. The bad news is I'd have to wake up earlier to get ready and be out the door before school starts, which sucks ass.

But beggers can't be choosers, so I'll take it, means I won't have to share a room with someone I don't know that's a plus, I guess.

Still don't know how I'll handle seeing that guy. It'll be awkward. That's for

《 ○ 》

"Y/N!" My Auntie lily yelled from the kitchen, and I snapped out of my thoughts and looked away from the little notebook I was writing in seated at my desk.

"Yeah?" I called back out to her as I leaned back in my desk chair, tilting my head towards the door and waiting for a response.

But when I didn't get one, I groaned, frustrated, and rolled my eyes.

I hated when people did that. Even when parents did that, call out your name to get your attention, but don't say a damn thing, so you gotta get up to see what they want.

Only to be asked to do the most simplistic things ever, like pass them the TV remote.

But it's right in front of them on the coffee table, or they don't even remember anymore and tell you never mind.

I got up grumbling to myself under my breath as I walked out of my bedroom.

in the simplest outfit of an oversized black hoodie with a small red and white mushroom on the front over my left breast and two bigger ones on the back, with the words 'Let's take a trip' and just some simple army green shorts that used to be pants before I cut them up into shorts.

My hair was pulled back messily into an attempt at a bun before I gave up and left it as is.

I walked down the hallway towards the kitchen, my bare feet barely making any sound on the carpet until I got to the kitchen.

And I leaned against the doorframe. "Yeah?" I said to my auntie, lazily raising an eyebrow at her with my hands stuffed into my hoodie pocket.

"Ah there you are, Me haere koe ki te toa maku ki te tiki i etahi mea maku, he rarangi takuKa taea e koe te haere ki te toa maku, ki te tiki etahi mea, he rarangi taku me etahi moni hei tiki." my Auntie said to me as she said to me as she picked up a list she had written out for me and held it out for me to take, along with a few bills to pay for everything on the list.

I groaned tipping my head back "ko te iwa i te po ka hiahia koe kia haere ahau ki te toa ko ahau anake" I said back to her as I dropped my head forward and took the list and money reluctantly.

"Yes, you'll be fine. Just take a knife and put it in your pocket." My Auntie huffed at me, waving my words off as she turned around to finish putting the dishes away.

I grumbled but didn't complain openly at least as I plucked a semi-sharp knife from the knife block and shoved it into my pocket as I turned and walked back to my room to get my jandels (Flip flops for the Americans :) )

I slipped them on, pulled my hood up over my messy hair shoved the list and money into my pocket along with putting my phone in my back pocket and taking just one earbud out of my JBL case and putting it in my ear.

Before I left the apartment, after going down some stairs out of the apartment building.

I tapped the side of my earbud about two times to skip through the songs I didn't want to listen too until I settled on 'Never enough by Six60' a classic song from a band back home.

"Still can't shake the feelin' in my bones, it won't leave me, it won't let me go," I sung under my breath to myself as I kept walking down the dark empty streets to the store about three blocks away.

It was dark besides a few lightposts lining the streets, some flickering others doing just fine. Brooklyn in the daytime was so different compared to the nighttime.

At night, it was dangerous. You had to keep your guard up, and I wasn't stupid. I knew crime ran wild at night in brooklyn.

I'd seen enough of it on TV, hearing people tall about it, and so on. It's the reason this city had a curfew, and why it kept getting early depending on just how bad it kept getting, and so far, it was getting worse before it's ever going to get better.

The once lively streets looked so much darker, like something out of a horror movie, not a sound besides the faint buzzing of streetlights.

feral cats digging through trash, the odd whisper of something in the alleyways and the sound of TV's playing from inside buildings.

But I wasn't completely dumb, I knew as quiet as it was, as empty as everything seemed around me.

I wasn't actually alone out here tonight, there was others out here, none with good intentions and anyone who did.

well, let's just say they wouldn't be there for long.

which is the reason my aunt made me take a knife with me for self-defense.

And what I knew I had to do was keep an eye out so I was, I kept an eye on my surroundings.

but made sure to make myself look relaxed and not all tense knowing that I'll just draw attention to myself if I did.

I glanced up and around me, though the streets were dangerous at night. I couldn't help but find them strangely beautiful too.

The way the stars just barely, peeked through the clouds in the sky under the pollution in the air, the way the street lights cast light on curtain parts of the streets and slowly left the others bathed in darkness.

The way the colours played off of everything around me was just in a strangely weird and beautiful. It's in its own dark twisted kinda way, of course, but still had a certain charm to it.

"There was a time when you would've given me everything that you own, The only thing you left me was alone.." I sung to myself under my breath as I kept my hands in my pocket.

my right hand gripping the handle of the knife loosely judt in case.

I sighed softly, sqinting my eyes as i looked in front of me.

I was tired from not sleeping properly the past few nights.

for some reason staying up until five in the morning then going to sleep, which yes I know is fucking stupid.

But I just couldn't get to sleep, for some stupid reason or another.

But still, I kept walking. I had just 2 more blocks to go before I hit the store to grab a few things, and then I could go home, collapse in bed, and die until tomorrow afternoon hopefully.

~I guess our time is up, I've given you too much, I just need to keep on movin', cause I still crave your touch, why won't you fade to dust?~

~so I can line you up, enough is never enough (ooh-ooh), enough is never enough(ooh-ooh), with every single does (oh-oh-oh), losin' all control (oh-oh-oh), never is never enough(ooh-ooh)~

( Miles's POV)

Meanwhile, with Miles....

~as I walk though the valley of the shadow of death, I take a look at myself and realize there's nothin' left, 'cause I've been blastin' and laughin' so long that, even my mama thinks that my mind is gone~

Miles hummed along to the music playing in his ears from his earbuds plugged into his phone shoved I his front pocket, as he he slipped on his jacket, a a dark purple nearing black in the low light of his Uncle's apartment.

Just another night as the prowler, and another night of getting his Mami the supplies she needed for the hospital she worked at.

so underfunded sometimes patients who needed their medicine who didn't get it in time, didn't make it.

~but I ain't never crossed a man who didn't deserve it, me be treated like a punk, you know that's unheard of, you better watch how ya talkin' and where ya walkin'~

Music was one of the ways Miles pumped himself up as he got ready to go out there with hi mask on, on the streets that he remembered used to be so beautiful before the corruption sunk its claws into his city and with it his Dad.

~or you and your homies might be lined in chalk, I really hate to trip but I gotta loc, as they croak, I see myself in pistol smoke, fool, I'm the kind of G that little homies wanna be like, on my knees in the night, sayin' prayers in the steertlights~

Miles clenched his jaw and shook his head, rolling his shoulders.

'Naw ain't got time to think like that, get your in the game Miles' he thought to himself as he finished suiting up, he took one look at himself in the reflection of the windows in his Uncle's living room and stood a little straighter.

~we've been spendin' most their lives livin' in a gangsta's paradise, we've been spendin' most their lives livin' in a gangsta's paradise, we've keep spendin' most our lives livin' in a gangsta's paradise, we've been spendin' most our lives livin' in a gangsta's paradise~

'I'm gonna make you proud Dad, swear it' Miles thought as he took his earbuds out and unplugged them from his phone the music of 'Gangsta's paradise by Coolio, L.V' spilling from his phone as his mask smoothly slid over his face.Lookingng back at Miles was the prowler in his reflection.

"Ay Neph time to ,go," Uncle Aaron called out from the door, and Miles nodded.

"On my way, Unc," Miles said to Aaron, his voice distorted by the voice changer in his mask as he made his way to the door.

Long since having paused his music as he put his gloves on with a Sharp click.

~look at the situation they got me facin', I can't live a normal life, i was raised by the stripes, so I gotta be down with the hood team, too much television watchin' got me chasin' dreams, I'm an educated fool with money on my mind, got a ten in my hand and a gleam in my eye~

Miles followed Aaron to the rooftop of the apartment, building his clawed hands clenching and unclenching as he walked.

"You remember the plan?" Aaron said, walking in front of miles looking through his phone at the time, before he tucked his phone back in his pocket

"Mm, I remember get the shit be in be out," Miles muttered to his uncle as they made it to the rooftop, and he looked over the buildings around them.

Some had fires going on top of them, others didn't, but you could see the gleam of neon lights of tall skyscraper buildings in the distance and people moving around under the glow of lights shining though there apartment windows.

~I'm a loc'd out gangsta, set trippin' banger, and my homies is down, so don't arouse my anger, fool, death ain't nothin' but a heartbeat away~

"Got yo earpiece?" Aaron asked Miles before he got ready to leave, handing Miles a black backpack.

"Yeah, it's in," Miles replied as he shrugged on the bag, Aaron handed him.

"Eyes sharp," Aaron said to Miles, nodding at him, standing back and tapping his earpiece in his own ear to turn it on.

"Mind steady," Miles said back with a nod before he was off using his grappling hook in hand to swing odd through the city under cover of the night towards the docs where a new shipment of medical supplies were waiting.

~I'm livin' my life do-or-die, uh, what can I say, I'm 23 now, but will I live to see 24?, with way things is goin', I don't know, tell me why are we so blind to see, the ones we hurt are you and me~

Miles weaved in and out of alleyways High above on the air, flipping through the air and rolling along the side of buildings to build momentum as he headed for the docs using his titanium claws to grip onto the ledges of buildings to throw himself forward.

~we've been spendin' most their lives livin' in a gangsta's paradise~

//////////

(Y/N's POV)

Seeing the store up ahead, I signed in relief.

"Thank fuck man" I grumbled under my breath as I pushed the door open and walked inside taking the list out of my pocket pocket I picked up a basket nearby from the door.

And started on my walk around the store for the items on the list my Auntie gave me.

"Dried chilli's, tortilla's, milk, bread and a juice" I mumbled under my breath reading over the list with a nod to myself as I repeated over and over in my head what was needed as I shoved the list in my pocket.

I walked around the store, throwing what was needed into the basket, and then, lastly, the juice.

I grunted softly, feeling how heavy the basket was now. The juice was in it.

"Damn," I muttered under my breath, gripping the handles of the basket just a little tighter as I walked towards checkout.

I paused, looking down at a shelf with some lollies on it- sorry, correction candies, my bad, I forgot I was in America.

I snorted softly to myself, amused as I picked up an interesting looking candies I'd never seen before or tired.

"Milk duds? Looks interesting, " I muttered to myself, and with a shurg, I dropped the box in the basket, a little treat for myself when I was walking home.

Making it to checkout, I set my basket on the counter.

"Hi, just these, please," I said politely to the casher, who looked like she'd rather be anywhere but here right now.

I shoved my hands in my hoodie pocket, standing there a little awkwardly as she checked them out for me.

'Mood, I feel you, my G', I thought to myself, glancing up at the girl at the counter, checking out my items for me.

She was actually really pretty, dark skinned with cornrows, and really pretty blue eyes that contrasted beautifully with her skin.

"That'll be $36.50, cash or card?" The girl spoke up a little drly, sounding tired, which is fair, so I didn't hold it against her.

"Cash, thank you," I said to her with a small smile as I counted out two $20's from the cash my Auntie gave to me and handed it to her.

"You wanna a bag?" She asked me as she counted out my change, which came to $3.50 as she handed it to me, and I took it, putting the change in my pocket.

"Yes, please," I said to her as she bagged up my items and handed me the bag.

"Thank you, have a good night," I said to her before I left, more in habit really from growing up in New Zealand, anytime.

"Mm," the girl muttered as she went back to playing on her phone, what she had been doing before I got to check out.

And I once more started on my walk home, glancing up at the sky every once in awhile hoping to see stars but only really managing to see planes or helicopters flying around

I frowned in disappointment before shrugging it off with a sigh.

With the bag of stuff in my left hand, I reached into my pocket with my right hand for my phone and used my fingerprint ID to open it.

I scrolled through my playlists, looking for a song to listen to as I walked, something I was in the mood for.

I scrolled for a bit as I walked every once in awhile looking up to make sure I didn't walk into anything, as I kept scrolling not finding a song I was interested in as I switched between another playlist had.

And when I thought I found a song, I heard the rustling of clothes, pained grunts, and low voices speaking coming up ahead from an alleyway.

I kept walking curiosity peeked, even in my tired state. i couldn't help but be nosey.

I shoved my phone back in my pocket, coming to a stop next to the alleyway, and I turned my head to look down it.

And there was a man being pinned to a wall, an arm against his throat making it hard to breathe for the overweight white man, a hand pinned to the wall by metal claws gleaming in the faint moonlight.

And the one holding the overweight man, he was interesting, to say the least.

Purple and black dominating his outfit, from the shoes to the accessories on his clothes, a mask over his face, like pixels on an old ass box TV, the kind before flat screen TVs, but not really as pixilated as yours think.

And two braids running down the back of his head that looked familiar stopping just past his shoulders.

They both seemed to pause after hearing my foot steps and turned to look at me.

But me being tired, overly exhausted, blinked at them lazily and confused, my brows frowned.

"Fuck I need to sleep more I'm starting to hallucinate again" I grumbled to myself my voice echoing a little down the alleyway as I started walking away rubbing at my eyes unimpressed at myself.

Just chalking what I saw up to my imagination fucking with me for not sleeping properly, honestly wouldn't be the first time, always had a shitty sleeping schedule.

Very few times I'd get the maximum eight hours of sleep, I'd either go to bed between 11pm to about 5am, cause I'm that stupid to stay up that late, only to be pissed off and tired the next day.

I shrugged and let my hand drop from my eyes.

I walked slightly hunched and legs feeling heavy, it felt like my legs were gonna give out on me, but well mama didn't raise no bitch, so we keep on going.

I didn't realise when I started daydreaming, or maybe i was dissociating again?, who knows.

But by the time I snapped out of it, I was home, standing in front of my apartment door, before I ever realized where I was.

"Mm," I mumbled to myself, paying it no mind as I opened the door and stepped inside, kicking off my jandels by the side of the door.

"I'm back," I called out as I walked into the kitchen and dropped the bag on the kitchen counter, digging through it for my milk duds I got.

Once I had the box in hand, I shoved it into my pocket and wondered off to my room.

"Any trouble well you were out, bub!" Lily called out from the living room.

"Nah, it was algoods, Auntie!" I called back out to her as I crawled into bed, flinching just a little when I felt something sharp poke my stomach.

Reaching into my hoodie pocket, I dumped out everything that was in it, from my phone, the change and extra cash I was given, my milk duds, and finally, the knife I forgot I had.

"Forgot about that," I mused to myself as I dumped the change and knife on my bedside table, picked up the box of chocolate covered lollies, and opened the box.I dumpedng a few in my hand before popping them on my mouth and chewing.

I scrunched my nose up at the taste. It wasn't the best candy I'd ever had or lollie for that matter, tasted too well fake to me, far too artificial then anything I'd ever tasted before.

So I dropped the box of sweets on my nightstand and picked up my water bottle. I always left on my bedside table and took a swing to wash out my mouth with a small grimace.

"Well that was disappointing" I muttered to myself setting my water bottle back down, as I picked up my phone and slid down more in my bed to get comfortable as I pulled the blankets up to my neck.

Turning it on, I went onto Tiktok and used the automatic scrolling feature, as well as plugged my phone in as I propped my phone up against the wall.

Watching the random videos that played as my eyes grew heavy.

Before sleep finally claimed me, and I was out like a light.

(MILES POV)

Miles had just gotten home after taking a bit of a detour after dropping off the supplies at his Mami's hospital.

He grunted as he kicked off his shoes, and dropped his jacket on the floor, taking off the black collar around his neck that held his mask and dropped it into a box he kept all his dad's all accessories and his own.

He stripped off the layers of his Prowler suit and replaced it with his own tank top and some sweats before putting on his purple durag that had little gold crowns on it over his braids.

He then picked up the pieces of his suit and dropped them into a box he took aw, y hidden in his closet.

He then dropped onto his bed with a si. Onene had taken behind his head as he picked up his phone to check for any messages from his mami.

He tapped on his Mami's contact after seeing an unread message from her.

'Gonna be working late again tonight, leftovers are in the microwave, Te amo duerme dormido ❤️'

Miles signed softly, another night shift. Made him glad he cleaned the house before heading over to his uncle's.

He pulled his hand out from behind his hand and started to type a message.

'Te amo Mami, no trabajes tan duro ❤️'

He hit send, plugged his phone in, and shifted to pull his blankets over himself as he rolled over to go to sleep.

'That girl again, huh shame I still ain't know her name,' Miles thought to himself amused.

Remembering how those sleepy tired eyes had looked at him tonight, or should he say the prowler.

How she had looked at the prowler had convinced herself what she'd seen was nothing but hallucinations cause she was so tired.

He was sure he'd see her again, and he knew just like the first time, and the second it'll just be as interesting as the first.

Then maybe, just maybe next time he'd know where she was from, know what that accent she had was.

Until then, he'd sleep. He had school tomorrow after all.

So he shut his eyes, got comfortable, and let himself relax enough to maybe, this time, sleep a full night.

And if not, well, he'd deal with it in the morning.

{{♤♡♤♡♤♡♤♡♤♡♤♡♤♡♤♡♤♡♤♡}}

Hi! Sorry for the delay in this chapter, I'm gonna try and write at least two before I post another and work on a schedule to be able to post them.

I try and work on them when I'm not busy at home, and when I'm not busy at work, I'll let you guys know now. Until then, happy reading.

Translation:

Ka taea e koe te haere ki te toa maku, ki te tiki etahi mea, he rarangi taku me etahi moni hei tiki. = can you go to the shop for me, and get a few things, i have a list and some money to get them.

ko te iwa i te po ka hiahia koe kia haere ahau ki te toa ko ahau anake = it's nine at night and you want me to go to the store by myself

Te amo duerme dormido = I love you, sleep tight.

Te amo Mami, no trabajes tan duro = I love you Mommy, don't work too hard.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazil’s Challenges in the Education System

When talking about education there are a few countries that are the set example, like Japan, New Zealand, and so on, but there are also a few countries that are examples of what not to do in the education system, one of these countries is Brazil. However, that perception is completely wrong, and the country has evolved and seeks to improve its system regularly. The appearance of a challenged education system comes from other factors that come to the detriment of the education of millions of young people in the country.

The notion of a struggling education system in Brazil stems from deep-rooted issues like socioeconomic inequality, high dropout rates, limited resources, and the need for better special education services. These challenges are not merely a reflection of the system’s inefficiencies but are also indicative of broader societal problems.

Brazilian educator Andrea Miranda highlights one of these key challenges:

“Many students are unable to get the support they need to complete their studies, facing challenges such as having the internship report ready, which complicates the evaluation of the supervised aspects that exist, along with other final challenges.”

Through this article, we seek to explain the main points that challenge the Brazilian education system, like inequality, dropout rates, resources, special education needs, and others.

Continue reading.

[methed-up-marxist]

These attacks on the welfare system are the tip of the iceberg. It’s a sickeningly cruel strain of capitalist, right-wing policy. But of course they aren’t doing it for the sake of cruelty; they are doing it to serve their own class interests—to take from the poor and give to the rich, to take from the workers to give to the capitalists. We’re seeing rampant cuts to welfare, transport, healthcare and conservation to fund massive tax cuts for landlords and the rich. Part of the project of class war here is to manufacture desperation. By putting thousands upon thousands of workers out of their jobs and onto the welfare safety net and then proceeding to attack said safety net, they are adding to a section of the working class desperate enough to work for low pay and poor conditions. This reserve army of labour is required under capitalist society to keep wages down. Why would a boss pay you more if there are a hundred people lined up behind you to take your job? You don’t want to end up like one of them, do you? This is the goal of the capitalists; this is the goal of this coalition government: leverage market forces to keep workers desperate and fearful. ... For decades the political class have been attacking workers organisations like unions, which have been debilitated to the point where their operations and capacity are very limited. If the unions were ever to lead the workers in a general strike again, it would have to come from the rank and file members, not the union bureaucracy or paid organisers, but the members and the delegates. In the meantime, we must build a spirit of resistance among the working class, including the unemployed. For every attack on the workers, we must fight back. These struggles are the schools of revolution, participation necessarily teaches us lessons that theory alone cannot . So we’ll agitate, we’ll educate, we’ll organise, and we’ll disrupt this vile system.

[neverlandnightingale]

Hi there! hope your day is going well :) I was curious about a comment you left on this poll about preferred autism terminology/labels

you mention that getting an autism diagnoses would mean never being able to move to new zealand. I was just wondering if you meant personal, or legal limitations and b) if it's a legality issue, would you be comfortable naming the country in which you live (and ofc absolutely no worries if not!)

So unfortunately, there are countries that don't allow autistic immigrants to emirate there; namely: New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, and potentially the United Kingdom. New Zealand, in particular is known to explicitly discriminate against autistic folks in their immigration law: "An applicant for permanent residency will fail if they... Have condition(s) that fall within the extensive range of conditions listed at A4.10.1 – including conditions ranging from uncontrolled epilepsy to autistic spectrum disorders, from paraplegia to any psychiatric illness that has required hospitalisation."

(Canada used to be on this list until 2018, when they updated their immigration policy.)

These countries often include a strict medical examination as part of their immigration policy and argue that accepting immigrants with autism might burden their country's health system and special education services. And if it's discovered that you're autistic after you move there, they can deport you.

I live in the U.S., and our last president's administration tried to ban all immigrants with disabilities for these same reasons.

Sometimes these countries will allow immigration if an autistic person has low enough support needs that it's under a certain monetary value. For New Zealand, anyone with expected medical costs over $41,000 over 5 years are barred from immigrating.

But we do know these countries have barred autistic people from immigrating before. Here's an example from New Zealand.

But let this be a warning to anyone who is suspecting they may be on the spectrum: even if you're not planning to immigrate ever in your life, an autism diagnosis can often open you up to discrimination. This Twitter thread details some examples: including having your children taken away from you, being denied access to trans-affirming healthcare, and even being denied life insurance.

If your support needs are low enough that you're able to get by without an official diagnosis, I would seriously consider not pursuing a diagnosis for your own safety and well-being. Be careful out there.

[fatehbaz]

The archipelago of uplifted coral that is my mother’s homeland surfaced during the earth’s ancient cycles of glaciation. The early people came in sakmans, carried by wind and seas, guided by stars and clouds and bioluminescence, the fragrance of flowers, the flight paths of birds. Settlers lived and fished and farmed in this part of Oceania for thousands of years, but the naming history issues forth at the moment of subjugation. Islas de los Ladrones -- the Islands of Thieves -- they were called by the first Europeans who came. Then Islas de las Velas, the Islands of the Lateen Sails. Then the Mariana Islands, in honor of Spain’s queen regent. Before it was Guam, Guåhan was known, under Japanese rule, as Omiya Jima, the Great Shrine Island. [...] Elsewhere, settlements recall the body of the creation god Puntan: Tiyan, his flat stomach. Hagåtña, his blood. Toto, his resting back. Mongmong, his beating heart. [...]

These small islands have grown crowded with denotations, I try to tell a friend, except it comes out as detonations. [...]

---

I am reading from a passage on CHamoru history and culture. Kåntan Chamorita is an ancestral form of call-and-response, a spontaneous sung dialogue. [...] Thumbing the texts, I brandish our histories: the brutality of Japanese rule; the architectural colonization that drove the CHamoru from los antiguos, their dwelling places in latte houses; the violation of natural resources brought about by American occupation.

She [mother] tsks, waves impatiently. Hekkua’. An expression that means at once “I don’t know” and “Forget it.”  [...]

In 1917, the U.S. Navy banned the CHamoru language in the Mariana Islands. A few years later, by order of U.S. naval captain Adelbert Althouse, all CHamoru dictionaries were burned. The language was said to represent a cognitive deficiency. The adoption of English would ensure, among other things, mental well-being.

The ban has since been lifted, but my mother hid her language for so long, it’s become hard to find.

What is the word for sky? I ask her.

She shakes her head. Nothing word for sky. Only heaven: långet. [...]

---

And so did we sail out. For more than ten years [...]. We moved into other countries where other languages had been suppressed and where other people had been made invisible. There were signs [...]. In New Zealand, where I went to kindergarten, Ma¯ori children were beaten for speaking te reo in schools. Bislama was prohibited in Vanuatu, but I only remember the quietness of the bay, the great banyan trees, the malaria pills. In New Caledonia, where I went to elementary school, the Kanak languages were banned from the education system from 1863 until 1984. Gendarmes in Nouméa stood on street corners with machine guns slung across their chests. [...]

My mother is telling us something exciting. She trips happily over the words, her face laughing. [...] My mother did not want me speaking like her. She wanted me to be better than that, which is to say better than her. [...]

Kao piniten hao? -- Have you been hurt?

Hunggan. Mayulang, yu’ -- Yes. I’m breaking.

My mother corrects me: mayulang only applies to a thing that’s broken, not a person. You can be hurt, she tells me, but not broken. [...]

---

The etymology of translation refers to the removal of a saint’s body to a new location, to bearing bones and words, both sacred, across. As if anything can be moved whole [...].

We never heard the end of my mother’s stories. [...] These days, she is happy to let most of her sentences go unfinished. [...]

She raises her eyebrows, juts her chin.

I tell her, You’re a book of lost endings.

Which one? she asks.

---

It’s too small here, I said. It’s boring, hot. It’s too small. [...] We spent two years sleeping on my auntie’s living room floor. Unrolling futons and lying under the weeping air conditioning unit and peeling paint. We ate Spam and rice with ketchup. [...]

Lately, I have been confusing the CHamoru word for flight, malagu, with the word for flee, falagu. [...]

I dream now of the islands and wake with my head barely above water, my mouth filling with salt. [...]

Mamaolek ha’? -- Are you doing okay?

Maolek. I’m doing okay.

---

Text by: Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams. “Moving the Saints: Passages from a deconstructed homeland.” Orion Magazine. Spring 2023. [Some paragraph breaks and contractions added by me.]

[rabbitcruiser]

(California) Western Monarch Day 

California Western Monarch Day, known informally as Western Monarch Day, was established by the California State Legislature in 2004. The day celebrates the annual migration of the Western monarch butterfly during the winter months—from about October through March—to California's central coast, the only major overwintering spot in the world for the butterflies. The holiday was established with the understanding that it would positively impact tourism and educational programs. Indeed, many visitors come to the area during the migration, boosting tourism at a time of the year when it is otherwise sluggish.

Events are held around the state of California on the day or on a nearby date. In past years, an event has been held at the Mile Square Regional Park in Fountain Valley, California; a "citizen science butterfly count" led by the Irvine Ranch Conservancy has been held at the nearby Limestone Canyon, and the largest celebration in the state has been held at the Pismo Beach State Monarch Butterfly Grove in Pismo Beach. One of the most popular destinations for butterflies in the state, and one of the largest butterfly colonies in North America, Pismo Beach regularly has over 20,000 monarch butterflies clustering in its tall eucalyptus trees.

In addition to Pismo Beach, monarch butterfly groves can also be found in Nipomo, Los Osos, and Morro Bay. In Nipomo, at the Monarch Dunes Butterfly Habitat, up to 60,000 monarchs visit each winter, and make their homes in a grove of blue gum eucalyptus trees. There are two groves in Los Osos: Monarch Grove Natural Area and Sweet Springs Nature Preserve. Monarch Grove Natural Area is made up of 18 acres and is located at the end of Monarch Lane. Sweet Springs Nature Preserve is made up of 24 acres and is located on the Morro Bay estuary. It has been managed by the Morro Coast Audubon Society since 1989. In nearby Morro Bay, Morro Bay Golf Course Monarch Butterfly Grove can be found at the center of Morro Bay Golf Course. Monarchs sometimes come to the grove of eucalyptus trees by as early as August and cluster themselves low on the branches.

As monarchs can't survive cold northern climates, they migrate to warmer climates, sometimes traveling a distance of over 1,000 miles. One of the only insects that migrate, they do so twice a year—like birds do—traveling to a warmer climate and then back again. Western monarchs live west of the Rockies. During the summer months, they can be found in canyons or near rivers in the West, Southwest, and inland in states from California all the way up to British Columbia. A few can be found on the coastal Pacific Northwest as well. Numbering in the tens of thousands, they migrate west and south, mainly nesting in California's central coast. Eastern monarchs, which far outnumber their Western counterparts, live east of the Rockies and migrate south to the high mountains of central Mexico. Monarchs can also be found in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, New Zealand, and on some islands in the Caribbean; those butterflies do not migrate.

Monarchs start as caterpillars. They subsist only on milkweed, a plant that produces glycoside toxins. The caterpillars are immune to the toxins, but predators are not, and are deterred from feasting on the caterpillars because the toxins get stored up in the caterpillars' bodies and make them taste bad. The caterpillars grow and molt for two weeks, form a chrysalis in which they complete metamorphosis, and turn into butterflies. As butterflies, the toxins are still in their systems, still protecting them.

Most adult butterflies only live for a few weeks. During that time, they subsist on nectar from many kinds of plants, search for mates, and look for milkweed on which to lay their eggs. The last generation of monarchs hatch in late summer, and they may live as long as eight months. They don't reach sexual maturity right away and instead make the fall migration. Despite never making the journey before, they know exactly where to go. They remain inactive during the coldest months, but around March, they become sexually mature and then mate. They die soon afterward, and their offspring finish the migration back north.

Between the 1990s and the end of the 2010s, the monarch population declined by about 90 percent, largely on account of habitat fragmentation and loss. Both urban development and intensive agriculture took a toll on habitats. In addition, herbicides killed the milkweed and nectar plants the butterflies feed off of, and insecticides killed the monarchs themselves. Lastly, climate change altered weather patterns and the timing of migration. Because of the drop in monarch numbers, it seems all the more pressing to have a holiday dedicated to them and to the beauty and the mystery of their yearly migration.

How to Observe California Western Monarch Day

Many events are held on or around the date and can be attended if you are able to travel to California. You could check to see if an event is being held at Mile Square Regional Park in Fountain Valley, where in past years butterfly experts have educated and answered questions, and native plants have been available to plant. You could see if the Irvine Ranch Conservancy is hosting a "citizen science butterfly count" at Limestone Canyon. The best place to go for an event is Pismo Beach State Monarch Butterfly Grove in Pismo Beach (the event may be held on a nearby Saturday). At this event, there are butterfly talks and educational booths for adults, and art activities for children. The biggest part of it, of course, are the thousands of monarchs that can be seen hanging in clusters from eucalyptus and pine trees. The grove usually opens in October and stays open throughout the month of February, and docents can be found giving daily talks. You could also visit other butterfly groves today, such as the Monarch Dunes Butterfly Grove in Nipomo, the Monarch Grove Natural Area or Sweet Springs Nature Preserve in Los Osos, or the butterfly grove in the Morro Bay Golf Course. If you can't travel to California, there are still ways you can celebrate. You could take part in the National Wildlife Federation's Garden for Wildlife program, and plant a habitat garden with milkweed and nectar plants for returning monarchs to enjoy. Planting locally native species of plants is the best. Look over some regional guides so you know what to plant in the area you live. You could take part in Butterfly Heroes, another program of the National Wildlife Federation, which is designed to help kids and families raise awareness about declining populations, and to help them to get involved in helping monarchs and other butterflies. The National Wildlife Federation is working to save and restore monarch habitats, and more could be learned about it. You could also learn about the number of Western monarchs in California with Western Monarch Count, encourage your mayor to take the Mayors' Monarch Pledge, or could watch a documentary about monarch migration.

Source

[ashadowofburnedoutstardust]

I'm bored and still not sleeping and still scrolling tiktok for what is pretty much the first time

I've come across a few Americans attempting to explain the debt that you encounter in your College/University education system

I've been well aware in New Zealand of what your tertiary education costs in the United States for quite some time

Comparative to here it is horrendously expensive

From my understanding the majority of you end up taking out Bank loans or something along those lines, I understand there's also student loan debt which I am less clear on how that operates but as far as I am aware you also get charged interest on both of these things

In New Zealand our education is still middle range in terms of cost but you should be able to reach PhD level still being under 100K, although you may not reach this level of debt it can greatly depend on what you study and how long you study

We have something similar to your student loans but our conditions are very different

So long as you live in New Zealand after your study while you are still paying off your loan, you are not charged any interest on your loan and your loan repayments are automatically deducted at a rate of 12% from your wages.

We also pay staggered level income taxes on top of that, as well as our ACC levy, but out of that we get healthcare as well as liability insurance in case of an accident. Keep in mind you can't sue people for that in this country, you're simply not able to legally do it without a lot of difficulty

If you have a legal issue with a government agency we also have government funded independent agencies that are able to act on your behalf in place of lawyers, so those ones that stand on street corners waiting for an accident chasing you with a card, they don't exist here

Anyway you can borrow the course fees, you can also borrow up to a thousand dollars per year to help with course related costs, I will admit this amount never covers the actual course related costs and as a bit of a running joke because it's piss all in terms of the cost of books etc although the movement to online learning has helped greatly reduce this over time, but it did mean arise in our course costs so that the provider was then required to provide you with all of your course materials

You can also borrow something called living costs where if you are unable to cover your bills you are able to borrow a little bit extra every week in order to meet your living costs

You are however required to pay back your course fees, your course related costs, and your living costs; all three of these things contribute to your loan total

We also have something called as student allowance

This is basically equal to a UBI that is applicable to students only. You are also able to borrow an accommodation supplement that goes along with your student allowance which is based entirely on your total income and how much you pay in rent. The accommodation supplement is exactly that, a supplement to help fund your accommodation

You are also able to get a job as a student while receiving the student allowance, you are able to earn up to a certain amount before your student allowance will start to be gradually decreased, it's something like it will be decreased 80 cents for every dollar you earn over a certain amount. The last time I studied while I was working the capped amount was about $180 before they would begin the reductions in your allowance amount, but this was also over a decade ago so I imagine it will have increased a bit since then

There is a limit to how much you are able to borrow and we use a system called EFTS or equivalent full-time study, which is basically a measure of time that should enable you to reach a master's level at the very least

We have had restrictions placed on masters degree students by the current ruling party in their previous term that put limitations on their access to the student allowance which enabled people to reach a higher level of study.

As a result people paid off their bachelors degree and then simply saved all of their money moved overseas and studied over there and got jobs there so great job to a shitty government that we are stuck with again on that one

While there are advantages to having this system in place, the student loan system was only introduced in the early 90s as a measure to stem the loss of qualified people leaving New Zealand due to low wages

The system may enable people to gain and education but it also change the student to what is equivalent to a modern day indentured service to the government that refused to improve workers conditions in terms of wages

I will mention that the entire reason that the wages sucked was due to the fact that the country was still recovering from the economic depression intentionally caused by the British government after we kicked them out in the 60s and 70s

This is the real reason you will have come into contact with millennial New Zealanders overseas and as part of the reason we do what is called an OE, or an overseas experience, what the Americans call a gap year

The idea behind it is first and foremost exploring the world as an adult, getting some life experience behind you. But if in that process you find yourself a better opportunity overseas when you were able to get a job that will train you, pay you better, and give you a better quality of life then you would seize it

Wow this post ended up a lot longer than I thought it would be I can't really put a tdlr after that can I?

Anyway it's not perfect, and we end up indentured slaves, but we can still access and education a lot more easily

Personally I think that education, especially higher education should be free at the very least for the citizens in the country that they are born, live, and reside in

It's a bit farfetched to dream that education would simply be free everywhere for everyone in the world but wouldn't that be a nice thing? Everybody could lift themselves up as well as each other