Hey that’s my cat!

On the eve of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Pierre Poilievre spoke out for the group he says faces the most hate-based violence. Um, and apparently that group is…Christians? (It isn’t). I called for backup on this one. Luckily @pampalmater.com answered:

Orange Shirt Day is a time to reflect on Canada's continuing violence against Indigenous children. It is a time to remember that Canada still takes Indigenous children from their families. It is time to demand that these crimes stop. Not 150 years from now. Not a decade from now. NOW.

While I welcome increasing conversations on residential schools in Canada, after several years of noticing how the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation is engaged with at my kids' schools, it feels like the orange shirt story has become a sanitization of genocide.

"How the Word is Passed" is my favourite non-fiction book of all time, both because of its information and because of its prose. An adaptation for young readers is amazing to hear about.

This....requires a very strange definition of "civilized society".

I have been a little bit under a rock and missed this *horrifying* action at U Alberta. The speed with which these kinds of attacks on freedom of expression are picking up in Canada is incredible - like movement that has finally hit the top of a hill and is racing down now.

Hey. The fragmentation of the social media landscape has been hard on indie #scicomm 🧪 projects So if you'd like to follow a podcast that's enthusiastic about #linguistics, could you check out @lingthusiasm.bsky.social? And if you think your followers might like to, could you give this a repost?

We are less than 24 hours after Kirk's death, and I've seen multiple people fired for saying anything negative about him, mainstream news outlets comparing him to Malcolm X, and a dominant discourse that treats him as a visionary leader. This is fucking *bananas*.

As someone living outside but within spitting distance of the US, the feeling of dread at how the apparatus of maximum violence will respond to political violence against it is both intense and familiar.

Wild how political alliance with Zionism sweeps all sorts of wild statements about Jews under the table

Politicizing tragedy is always out of bounds and a horrific desecration of the victim if it’s in service of trying to prevent future tragedy by taking obvious and proved remedies. But it’s perfectly fine if it’s in service of demonizing an out-group for retaliation with literally zero .

Oh hey, Happy Star Trek Day. I wrote a thing.

I have been slightly AWOL on here, but I am popping in to share a new article that I wrote which has just been published in the Journal of Linguistic Anthroplogy (open access!). It is about Star Trek, the Universal Translator, and utopias. anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Joining ICE to fulfill his lifelong dream of killing some brown people. Pretty fucked up.

"Don't wash your Holocaust trauma with Palestinian blood" Amen.

The heatwaves next week are literally going to kill people even if the grids don’t go down; meanwhile, tech billionaires are trying to convince us that using the fake answer machines will solve all our problems.

Having stood in a lineup starting at 4:00 a.m. to get a family doctor, I can confirm this game would sell out in <30 seconds.

Relatedly in "very specific book details that make me nope out", I have never forgiven Ali Hazelwood for writing a novel in which a tenured Harvard professor accused of sexual harassment was immediately fired and academically disgraced. I like fantasies too, but that one hit too hard.

This is how genocide always sounds. "We are the good, the just, the deserving." This is the same language that still justifies the dispossession of Indigenous lands on Turtle Island, and that always contains the logic that whoever opposes us is therefore evil at worst and misguided at best.

… Team by team, reporters baffled, trumped, tethered, cropped Look at that low plane, fine, then Uh oh, overflow, population, common group But it'll do, save yourself, serve yourself World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed Perhaps a tweak to the algorithm is in order?

Yes yes yes, and: 1) someone leading the NYT podcast on trans youth was cited 3 times by Thomas as reason to restrict care, 2) I don't think this case is the big setback (I think the right/NYT stuff is!), and 3) I don't know any trans person (myself incl) who was optimistic on the Supreme Court?

"I assume most academic research begins with literature scanned and synthesized by [LLMs]" is the functional equivalent of saying "I am willing to accept that all of our knowledge apparatus, moving forward, is going to be built on a foundation of absolute bullshit".

We spent years being manipulated by conservatives with the ear of establishment centrists and liberals into addressing a fake free speech crisis, precisely so people could be punished for speaking out against perhaps the most contemporaneously well-documented genocide in history

“As a commitment to truth and reconciliation, I must acknowledge colonial and genocidal atrocities today, including the massacre of more than 17,000 Palestinian children in Gaza.” That’s what an Ottawa high school Valedictorian said to cheers. She was told not to come to school the next day.

Great to see this! academic.oup.com/jdsde/articl...

Canada has failed its last opportunity to chart a moral course in this defining moment in human history. Condemning the victim of Israeli aggression and lauding disingenuous US ‘diplomacy’ is simply pathetic.

"Now we are forced to choose between two kinds of death: starvation, or bullets"

I'm not sure there's anywhere else in Canada (except maybe St John's) that can answer this as easily as Kingston can. youtu.be/QE2joQsWXJg?...

“Universities have to prioritize space for courageous, and sometimes uncomfortable conversations about honouring Indigenous presence, centring Indigenous voices in hiring and about what affects our sense of belonging as Indigenous peoples navigating academia.” macleans.ca/society/how-...

412 academics, diplomats, former ministers, + lawyers send 🇨🇦 PM @markcarneyforpm.bsky.social letter re: Israel’s Gaza genocide demanding Canada “do everything in its power to stop these atrocities and support efforts to bring those responsible to account,” including sanctions + end to free trade.

This whole conversation about protest "optics" reminds me of all the commentary about how [insert any group other than cishet white men] just needs to stop with the slang/vocal fry/using 'like'/uptalk and THEN we will definitely take them seriously.

Accepting the terms of interpretation that the right wing is imposing on to the symbols of protest is not helpful to the protest. This has been today's lesson in meta-semiotics.

The softening language at the beginning of the linked article helps no one. He “died in a shooting”, like it’s a natural disaster, not “he was murdered in a hate crime”. Even if you have to hedge with “alleged” or “according to witness”.

No end to the depravity: the Bronx high school abducted by ICE and hidden from his lawyers has received a serious medical diagnosis that he can’t be informed of because he has literally been disappeared by the state. www.nydailynews.com/2025/06/02/n...

This is the peak form of a depraved "both sides are suffering in a conflict" approach to talking about the world. Palestinians are starving to death; hospitals, schools, refugee camps have all been bombed and burned; children are being murdered en masse. Elite Israeli athletes are stressed out.

Visit by embodiment of colonialism really sticking it to Trump, smug Canadians say

So let me get this straight, when I say there's no ethical way to use GenAI, it's because I'm wrong and shortsighted and hate technology, but when this guy says there's no ethical way to use GenAI, it's because he's right and super forward thinking and ahead of the game?

My 9 year old woke me up at 4 due to a not-crisis crisis and I'm having trouble writing grammatical sentences on BlueSky, but somehow figure I can polish this conference paper into fully readable form today.

Some ideas are do not deserve "civility".

I mean, the literally mean "do it in the white way". "Civility" is an ideologically loaded and easily manipulated word that pretends that it is just as violent to confront someone over their support for hate as it is to express that hate.

Students usually arrive in my anthro classes believing that racism (which they know is bad) is a set of ideas that build on and respond to pre-existing "race". One of the central points of the class becomes explaining that the concept of "race" exists because of and emerging out of racism.

AI really hitting on the questions that we all want to know.

Steven Pinker is a) admitting that the boogieman of the anti-conservative university he's been screaming about for years is bullshit and also b) proudly touting his student's brilliant work in slapping a marketing label on a simple keyword search

very cool that for ten years people at the heights of political commentary insisted to the point of rage that the paramount threat to free speech was “censorious” college students

Big abusive partner saying "look what you made me do" energy in the comments referenced here, but on a literal genocidal scale.

Let’s be really clear here because it’s VERY important. It’s *christian evangelical Zionism* that is doing this. They are currently in control of our government. And protecting Israel so all the Jews can go there to die and start the rapture is their end game. Jews are a pawn they’re hiding behind.