Interesting Links for 14-09-2020

[andrewducker]

Walking to the Meadows today and Jane pointed out the German-speaking church we were passing. I had no idea such things existed!

(tags:germany German religion Scotland )

Violating international law, a fairy tale

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1305105853448585217.html
(tags:fairytale law UK Doom )

Deferral: the sociology of young trans people's epiphanies and coming out

(tags:LGBT transgender sociology )

Adults with Covid-19 about twice as likely to have dined at a restaurant

(tags:restaurant pandemic OhForFucksSake viaLilysea )

Fake science led a mom to feed bleach to her autistic sons — and police did nothing to stop her

(tags:autism children fraud medicine OhForFucksSake USA )

Brilliant ten minute deep dive into what the government is up to with regards to the Withdrawal Agreement

(tags:UK Europe law video )

How to tell hard sciences from soft ones

(tags:science comic funny )

What OCD is really like

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1305226398387310592.html
(tags:mentalhealth )

Japan trade deal commits UK to stricter state aid curbs than in EU talks

(tags:Japan Europe UK trade )

Poll warning: Government 'in deep trouble with voters' over plan to break law on Brexit Withdrawal Agreement

(tags:UK Europe crime polls )

Comments

[calimac]

I realize this is offtopic, but what is the extraordinary dialect of the speaker in the Withdrawal Agreement video? I have never heard anybody talk like that before, so I wonder where it's from. In particular, at least some of the time the speaker pronounces "island" and "Ireland" identically.

[andrewducker]

That's David Allen Green, who provides some of the best commentary on the law and policy of Brexit. He's from Birmingham.

This is a pretty good example of a stronger version of it.
https://youtu.be/2IGckWsXvJ8

[calimac]

Stronger? Much weaker, I'd say; and yes, I've encountered people who talk roughly like that. But I'd never heard anybody who sounds remotely like David Allen Green.

[wildeabandon]

Just listening to it, whilst he has a fairly mild Brummie accent, he's also th-fronting, which isn't part of that accent, and I suspect its the combination of the two that you're finding unusual.

[calimac]

That could be part of it, but even that's extended: I hear him pronouncing "the" as "vee" (0.31) which seems to me to extend the bounds of th-fronting beyond the normal: first that it's an initial th instead of the customary final one (which he also does), and also that it's a voiced v instead of an unvoiced f. Other times his "the" is even harder to parse (0.20), but on other occasions he pronounces "the" normally.

But there's lots more. One is the extraordinary things he does with "r". Most people with trouble pronouncing r render it as something like w, but he doesn't do that. He half-swallows it instead, and then half-unswallows it where it doesn't belong, which is what makes his "island" and "Ireland" identical (see 0.43).

Another particularly odd thing from the beginning is his vowel in "does" (see 0.24). If this is part of the Birmingham dialect, it's much stronger from him than from the sample Andrew provided.

I could hunt through it for more, but that's enough to make the point that this is an accent unlike any I'd ever heard.

How to tell hard sciences from soft ones

[jack]

Soft sciences are often scary not for what people successfully achieve but for what people try to do with them, eg eugenics.

Re: How to tell hard sciences from soft ones

[anna_wing]

Would eugenics count as a soft science? Gene editing is definitely hard science.

Re: How to tell hard sciences from soft ones

[jack]

Hm, yes. I guess I don't mean eugenics IS a soft science, but that when people imagine a mad scientist physicist they imagine them building a doomsday machine, but when people imagine a mad scientist anthropologist, they imagine them doing lots of harm TRYING to do eugenics, whether or not they actually have the tools to succeed.

Re: How to tell hard sciences from soft ones

[anna_wing]

Ah, I see. Also I suppose in affecting local societal definitions of 'eugenics'.

[cmcmck]

Hmmm!

When I came out to mine, they threw me out.

I was fifteen..........

[andrewducker]

I'm not surprised it takes some people a long time to come out!