The Cranky Linguist
Observations, thoughts, reminiscences, and occasional rants on anthropology, linguistics, old-time banjo, and anything else that crosses my path...
Friday, October 27, 2023
Word of the day
Thursday, September 7, 2023
Invasive species...
I never caught the story, but last week on the CNN news crawl the theme of the global cost of "invasive species" showed up a number of times.
No mention that I saw included Humans, and yet Homo sapiens is invasive everywhere outside of Africa.
Ad don't even think about the cost to the world of that species' invasions...
Tuesday, July 18, 2023
A couple of thoughts...
Tommy 🥔ville wants the military to bend to his personal fantasies about the world. But in the past, the military has sometimes led the way in establishing rights that "society" has tried to withhold. Access to health care is a human right, not subject to whatever he thinks his imaginary friends want.
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Asa Hutchinson says that women's reproductive health access should be up to each state. I call Bullshit. This is a human rights issue, and not up to the whims of Alabama or Mississippi. Or Iowa.
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
Neandertals, again...
OK, so it has been a while. I'm trying to gear up for more writing here. Meanwhile I posted this on Facebook this morning, edited a bit:
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
"Neandertal" republicans
Last night (May10) on The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, law professor Lawrence Tribe described republican efforts to drag women back to pre-Roe days as "Neandertal." I just want to go on record as saying that the Neandertals were very likely nowhere near as misogynistic as these thugs.
Saturday, February 5, 2022
Guest blog: On Whoopi Goldberg and the "race" thing
My Anthropology colleague Daniel Cring posted this on Facebook a couple days ago and I thought it best go up here as well.
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Whoopi Goldberg:
Friday, January 28, 2022
Some things that are pissing me off
"America." The people who have these red MAGA hats and other paraphernalia have no idea that "America" refers to not just the United States, but to the whole hemisphere. And for the most part they don't care. What they want to "make great again" is just the little part of America that's in the US.
And actually, they can't even do that, because the US has never been "great," and therefore cannot be made "great" again. The US has, for its entire existence, been a nation built on exploitation, oppression, genocide, and internal colonialism; a nation built on two kinds of slavery: chattel slavery (people owning people), and wage slavery (people owning other people's labor).
Republicans. The people who yell "Make America Great Again" the loudest have no intention of actually doing so. They continue to block: efforts to raise the minimum wage, and thus make wage slavery a little less onerous; efforts to put in place a truly sane national health care system by eliminating the "health insurance" industry; attempts to reform laws regarding the possession of firearms; elimination of student debt and extension of free public education to college/university; elimination of medieval restrictions on women's reproductive health care (and why are males even a part of this conversation?); etc.
Critics of Critical Race Theory. As far as I can tell, these critics don't understand the terms "critical," or "race," or "theory."
China. Yeah, China, for its obviously genocidal treatment of the Uyghurs, but also for its stupidity in mistaking communism for fascism.
Владимир Путин. He's on my list for wanting to reconstitute the old CCCP by armed force instead of making Russia a place these other countries, like Ukraine, want to hang with.
The Vaccine Refuseniks. These people who equate remaining unvaccinated with "freedom" and "liberty" are killing us. And they're pissing me off. If nearly all of them had gotten vaccinated when the rest of us did, we'd probably be pretty much over this thing. You know, like how we're over smallpox, and polio, and etc.
Educational administrators at every level. Mark Twain wrote: "In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards." See the recent spate of Boards removing books like Maus (about the Holocaust) from their curricula, or banning use of the word "gay" in classes. People on these boards seem to work under the illusion that children are snowflakes. Well, they aren't. They're tough. They can take it, often better than their parents.
This is only a partial list; I'll be back.
Word of the day
I know I'll get pummeled for this, but: I keep seeing children in Gaza being pulled, some dead, some alive, out of rubble created by bom...
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I only have time for a short note, but I need to get this unbottled. I am becoming ever more disappointed, frustrated, even angered by the...
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I may write more about this later, but for now just examine the differences. Later... (added on Oct 9, 2010): Essentially, in apes the l...
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OK, somebody has to say it. 17 years ago close to 3,000 people died largely because the US was unprepared for an attack of that kind, or for...