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

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

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

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

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

Well, I want to say “vampire angel from space with a super cool robot gun arm” but the better answer is probably just, like, “immortal shapeshifter”

redherald.org perhaps.

I favor gorilla tactics in conservation the same as I do in many other respects!

Those two parties are cooperating, aren’t they?

One of the PFLP’s songs refers to America as the “Head of the Snake” specifically, which is coincidentally not actually dissimilar from Benjamin Franklin’s own choice of political symbolism — except Franklin, radical that he was, chose to represent the Thirteen Colonies as a whole snake rather than just the head.

In any case the PFLP didn’t choose to hate the USA, in the same way Ned Kelly didn’t choose to hate cops. Acting like the PFLP’s hostility to the USA is completely irrational and literally just came out of nowhere helps nothing except Septics’ cognitive dissonance about the nation’s grotesque banditry abroad — it’s just wilful ignorance, it’s pure and simple “My Little Pony logic” to act as if the world’s anti-Americans are just Evil Changelings who hate “a beautiful land abounding in the Magic of Friendship” for no reason other than that it is “a beautiful land abounding in the Magic of Friendship”.

Never think that geocentrists were stupid. They were wrong, certainly, but they were not stupid: while it doesn’t take much intellect to initially conclude that Earth is the center of the solar system, it does take a very great amount of intellect to rationalize away the mountain of evidence to the contrary.

This is not a comment about people who voted or are planning on voting for Kamala Harris — this is an entirely unrelated observation about a completely different topic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You can excuse racism?”

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

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

Yim Yum!

My mental MP3 player in response to this image decided to put on “Blumenkranz” from the Kill la Kill soundtrack

And when everyone’s female… Muahahahahaha, no one will be.

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

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

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

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

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

This is going to sound really tedious, but what I’m trying to get at is this:

To justify that “no more or less than the author’s lifetime” is the perfect length of time for copyright to last, you must at the same time justify that “more or less than the author’s lifetime” is not the perfect length of time for copyright to last.

The time limitations of “0 seconds” and “until the heat death of the universe” are more and less than the author’s lifetime, which means that you must justify why these are not the perfect length of time for copyright, just the same as any finite time limitation.

In other words, in order to justify that the author’s lifetime is the perfect length of time for copyright to last, you must first justify both that copyright exists and that it expires. Hence, “What do you think the purpose of copyright is?”

It’s from the answer to that question that you come up with criteria to judge time limitations, and it is from those criteria that you decide on an ideal time limitation. On the other hand, without an answer to that question, your beliefs have no actual basis beyond gut feeling.

Likewise, to criticize someone’s understanding of the purpose or nature of copyright, is criticizing the criteria used for finding an ideal time limitation, is criticizing the favored time limitation itself. My first reply was then based on an assumption of what I figured you thought the purpose of copyright was.

What do you think the purpose of copyright is?

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

I support complete abolition of intellectual property as a whole.

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

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

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

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

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