Interesting Links for 20-10-2020

[andrewducker]

Most ballet dancers retire in their early thirties. They then struggle with what to do next.

(tags:ballet dancing jobs )

Earth just had its hottest September on record

(tags:globalwarming )

Students from northern England facing 'toxic attitude' at Durham University

(tags:bigotry university UK OhForFucksSake )

The world is stranger than I can imagine: Kentucky meat shower edition

(tags:weird meat history usa )

Scotland Independence: UK Leaders Make Plan to Avoid Second Referendum

(tags:conservatives Scotland independence )

Met police body-worn video footage reveals poor communication, a lack of patience, and a lack of de-escalation before use of force is introduced

(tags:police London cameras transparentsociety )

Tom Lehrer releases song lyrics to public domain

(tags:music copyright GoodNews )

Reviewing Chuck Tingle's Trans Harry Potter novel

(tags:harrypotter transgender LGBT )

Comments

[symbioid]

That Durham University story sucks :(

Like - the University is IN the north... Who the fuck are these people going and thinking its their right, they should be glad to be guests. Ugh, elitism.

Obligatory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDpBQys7wcg

[amaebi]

You may or may not have read that when the dancer Lydia Lopokova married John Maynard Keynes, he tried to prime her a bit for his famously intellectual Bloomsbury friends, as like most serious Russian dancers of the time she hadn't had much formal education. As a consequence, when she met Gwen Raverat, she exclaimed, "So I have heard that your grandfather wrote Genesis!" Raverat's maiden name was Darwin.

[andrewducker]

Hah! I hadn't heard that.

I'm amused, and I also feel bad for her being dumped in to them and having to do homework to fit in!

[amaebi]

Yeah, they seem largely to have treated her as a sort of pet. :/ But I think she and Maynard were very happy together, which as much as anything else goes to show what a complicated thing gets made of sexuality and romantic interest and partnership interest, in each and every person.

[armiphlage]

That's north?

The distance between Durham University and Southampton on the south coast of the UK is about 300 km.

My CITY is about 175 km across (from Halton in the southwest to Durham Region, in the northeast).

How can you view people living next door to you as being inferior? How can you even develop and maintain a detectable regional accent?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Toronto_Area

[andrewducker]

The UK has 37 *dialects*
https://englishlive.ef.com/blog/english-in-the-real-world/rough-guide-british-dialects/amp/

And it's easy, if you have a few thousand years, during most of which there was no transport for the vast majority of people.

[symbioid]

To follow on with the language example from Andrew, take a look at Papua New Guinea:

Papua New Guinea has what is probably the highest language density on the planet, with 830 languages in a land area of 462,840 sq. km (or about 178,700 sq. miles). In other words, there is one language every 558 sq.Jul 24, 2011

Cultures can get very very specific and Othered based on "the narcissism of small differences".

Add in what I imagine is the class differences (I'm not British and haven't studied in any sense, so this is just what I get from reading random things through the years)....

The looking down with language as a signifier of class, that people going to Uni are probably perceived as "upper class" (or middle-upper) and "deserving".

Have an accent like a working/lower class schlub, and you find yourself castigated as "not worthy". As "trash".

I think the fact the US/Canada are such large land masses helps distort our perception of just how much a small geographic difference can matter. What's the old saying?

"The US/North America is measured in miles, and Europe is measured in Time"

(of course, from a European colonialist perspective, plenty of Native Americans/First Nations people would have an issue with that statement, I imagine).

[cmcmck]

Exactly.

Where we live, there are five dialects and two languages!

[anna_wing]

People are a lot more diverse in a lot more ways than people think, but in general their acceptance of diversity (assuming that they accept it at all) stops at the point where they observe behaviour and attitudes which they, for whatever reason, dislike.