To Me That Always Came Across As Making A Point About Radical Ideas Not Actually Being Unthinkably Extreme

Post-9/11 kids nowadays

This is a fantastic linguistics paper – the researcher observed the artificiality and social pressure imposed on kids when they're asked to produce language on the spot, so instead had them talk to a rabbit in a room with a tape recorder. He found that when talking organically, without an adult authority figure around, their speech was exponentially more sophisticated, socially fluid, and creative.

As someone in the twitter thread points out, this has obvious implications for situations in which cued language production is used in diagnosis e.g. for autism. I'd add that (while this particular paper's remit is limited to children) it should also make us think about situations where adults are pressured to speak by authority figures: court hearings, police encounters, benefit assessments, asylum interviews, etc. If the presence of power hampers your ability to advocate for yourself, these are all rigged propositions.

Anyway, you can read the whole piece here (taken from a talk on his research, so it's very readable):

https://betsysneller.github.io/pdfs/Labov1966-Rabbit.pdf

e: sorry, I should add the context that this is a language study situated in Hawaii in 1970 so there are also some very significant racial socio-linguistic politics discussed here that might be distressing to read about. I don't want to discount that aspect of the power dynamic studied here either.

people on the left love to point out instances of hypocrisy because its easy and you never actually have to make an argument, but you always leave the door open. i don't know how this keeps happening, like everyone says "hmm isn't it strange that chuds say racial diversity in a fantasy setting is 'unrealistic' but they're fine with dragons and magic" without fucking thinking for even a second. like, that implies that realistic grounded historical fiction is fair game to be all white, right? like you never actually said whether diversity is good or not, you just offered a contradiction that can super fucking easily be remedied and cruised over.

i go into fight-or-flight when a sales person talks to me

i dread having to negotiate a salary or a major purchase, or do any kind of haggling.

there's a real person right there in front of me and they do not want what is best for me. they are going to try to harm me, even if it's only financial harm. i care about other people, right? i don't want to hurt them by making them accept a bad deal. i want to surrender, to let them have whatever they want, but i’m not allowed to. i’m punished if i do.

above all, i loathe the fact that i'm supposed to be nice and pretend that we're friendly when money is turning us into enemies.

i love graffiti. "comics and jazz are the only american art forms" you forgot graffiti. did you remember graffiti? That art form birthed in Philly and NYC in the early 70s by poor Black kids. that art form that spread all over the world and influenced so many. that's used without irony in commercials when they're trying to appeal to a "young urban" customer.

did you forget graffiti? that racism broken windows theory victim? that reach the establishment takes claiming that it's exclusively violent gang members throwing up those full-color pieces and wildstyle tags in the middle of the night outsmarting fifty security cameras because the billboard was ugly anyway. as if, even if it was, it wouldn't be impressive as all hell. risking brutality and fall damage so your art can occupy the space a gentrified condo named something like "Coluumna" took away from you. proving that despite only assholes affording to live here anymore there's still a soul beneath it. an animal with dripping stripes and teeth that go clack-clack tsssss

I love talking with neurotypical people about my executive dysfunction because I'm like "yeah there's this invisible wall in my head that I'm incapable of getting past no matter what I do and it stops me from doing things" and they're like what the actual fuck

Meanwhile other neurodivergents are like

There should totally be a movement called “Sleep in Public” where people defend their right to sleep on public property. Sleep in your cars. Sleep on benches. Sleep at the park. Just make it a mundane and regular part of life to see someone napping in the library. It would make it much harder to single out the homeless for harassment if everyone else is doing the same thing and much harder to argue that it’s a “threat to public safety” when it’s so clearly harmless.

Source

IN A WORLD WHERE BEAUTY AND ATTRACTIVENESS HAVE BECOME SO COMMONPLACE AND MUNDANE THE EXCEPTIONAL UGLINESS HAS BECOME DIVINE