Babies can begin signing as early as a few months old. You don’t have to wait until they’re 9-12 months to start communicating verbally; the parts of the brain that process and use language develop before a baby is able to speak intelligibly with their mouth. Teaching your kid sign language early means that they can communicate effectively months ahead of schedule, when compared to peers that only speak a spoken language.
Additional fun fact: this jumpstart in language is thought to be a possible way to avoid the “Terrible Twos”; that phase of a toddler’s life is thought to be largely due to a toddler being unable to effectively communicate their needs. If a two year old has already been speaking for a year and a half, they’re far more able to communicate to you what’s wrong. Heck, they might also start reading earlier; languages with a fingerspelling component, like ASL, mean that any speaker needs to be able to spell unfamiliar words and ask about them. This can jumpstart a toddler’s ability to recognize letters as components of a word, and teach them to spell, read, and eventually write these letters to communicate.
Which, of course, lends absolutely zero credence to the theory that ASL will inherently stunt someone’s spoken language skills. If anything, sign language fluency makes acquiring any language, spoken or not, easier rather than harder.
wow i wonder if that 300 year gap could be explained by any outside factors…….whoa! for some reason it lines up with the timeline of britain’s invasion and subsequent colonization of ireland! wild, huh? i wonder if the two are connected in some way? i guess the world will never know….
“why do the Irish hate the English so much? It couldn’t have been *that* bad!!”
This was in place till 1973.
Seeing non irish people reblogging this makes me happy
The stereotype of “the Irish are drunks” is English propaganda used to justify paternalism and controlling the Irish. It’s bullshit.
Hey guess what alcohol is often used as a coping method by poor and disenfranchised people in order to get away, if only for a few minutes, from the absolute shithole that is their lives
I WONDER WHY a group that wasn’t permitted to own media, have privacy in their own homes, go to church or any other desired social gathering, and which was considered guilty until proven innocent might have turned to alcohol.
I also wonder why that might have happened at a time when drugging your children with alcohol would quiet their starving screams because the English stole all your food and you had nothing left to feed your babies.
I WONDER.
(In other words any time you see the accusation of “they’re all drunks” leveled at any particular group, it’s a good time to ask what the Irish, Native Americans, Black men, American men in general in the 1930s, Soviet Russian men, and Indians have in common. If you came up with “oh! Absolutely crippling levels of poverty in the face of a government that either valued profit over lives or actively oppressed them, and an inability to change this due to the structural nature of said oppression,” congratulations, you know a depressing amount about history.)
the most unrealistic thing about the barbie movie to me is just how many kens there were in barbieland. no one had that many kens. if there are 100 barbies in barbieland we should be looking at like 5 kens max. of course i love the spectacle of dozens of kens beaching each other off but really that whole scene probably should have just been a ryan gosling and simu liu angrily scissoring
me a few years ago: its so weird how right wingers always wanna blame the “elite” given that alot of them are in the global 1% of wealth and therefore almost by definition the same “elite” they claim to hate. weird right? lol right wing logic makes no sense
me now: oh my god they mean Jewish people. its always been Jewish people. and the insistence of online leftists to use words like “elite” and “cabal” (to refer to a handful of ultra rich people who dictate a lot of how our lives are run) kinda makes them sound like antisemites too. maybe this whole idea that the world is run by a select few is a gross oversimplification which only serves to reinforce antisemitic stereotypes… oh no. maybe i have a lot of shit to unlearn. maybe i need to start vocally defending Jewish ppl. also local community building is the only way out of this
This post has been making the rounds on jumblr and I’ve had a few different reactions so I just wanna weigh into some things here.
First up:
Jews I love you and I’m so glad that this little thoughtramble I wrote a month ago resonated with so many of you. I hope it helps with educating some people on just how widespread and insidious antisemitism is.
Secondly: I’m a gentile so I’m by no means an authority on these things. But a couple fellow gentiles in the notes are saying stuff along the lines of, “but can’t we criticise billionnaires?”
To which I say, watch where you step, cus you’re on thin ice. I’ve learned a litte the past few years and here’s my conclusions:
Of course a lot of stuff a lot of billionnaires do is reprehensible. On the left we should absolutely be criticising them! The best way to do this while avoiding antisemitism is to be specific about who you’re criticising, and what for.
E.g. “The people running Exxon, Shell and BP have been sweeping climate change under the rug for decades while actively contributing it, they think their profits are more important than sustaining life on earth and that’s abhorrent. We need better laws and processes to stop them from poisoning the planet.”
E.g. “Elon Musk is a ridiculous manchild who’s ruining Twitter and endangering people with his self driving cars and stupid ideas. He’s an entitled dickhead and his wealth is mostly derived from colonial exploitation that his parents did. He does not pay enough taxes on what he earns. We need better inheritance laws and to close tax loopholes that allow him and people like him to hoard wealth.”
E.g. “Jeff Bezos exploits his workers and has an unfair monopoly over online shopping and other convenience services. He needs to pay his taxes and pay his workers more and we need better monopoly laws to stop businesses from being able to control the market like this.”
Also, please consider your motives:
Are you trying to make a positive difference for, e.g. Amazon workers? Go ahead, raise awareness of their plight and push for unionisation.
Are you just trying to find a group that is acceptable to hate? Stop right there and reconsider. No matter how privileged or powerful that supposed group, you’re wayyyyyy too close to bigoted talking points.
Are you just making sweeping statements in order to rile up emotions and get people on your side? That’s fascist tactics. Please don’t.
And especially,
If you find yourself wanting to say, “I’m not antisemitic, but–” Please just don’t say whatever you were going to say. If you have to make that qualification, there is an extremely high probability that what you’re about to say is, in fact, very antisemitic. Compare to “I’m not racist but-” or “I’m not transphobic but-” followed by the most vile bigotry you’ve ever heard. Don’t be that person.
Lastly I want to highlight these as well:
Absolutely correct. The amount of times I’ve come across online bigots who are like “George Soros is funding BLM!” or “LGBTs are elites trying to plunge this country into immorality!” This is all antisemitism. In general just be wary of anyone wanting to blame “elites” or “rich people” (yeah even that one cus historically Jews are stereotyped to have money!!! and also not all rich ppl are inherently evil!!!!) or “shadow government” or “globalists” or “lizard people” or really, literally anything that seems to imply that a small, select group of people is secretly running the world: That’s antisemitism baby. It’s all antisemitism. It’s disgustingly common.
By all means, criticise billionnaires. But be specific. It’s one of the best ways to make sure it’s not veering into antisemitism. We know who these billionnaires are, for the most part; we know their names and we know their crimes. Talk about them specifically.
It doesn’t help if you just swap out “elites” with “billionnaires” or “the 1%” if the rest of your rhetoric remains the same. It sounds exactly the same to antisemites, and they will feel empowered. In truth, it is much more complicated than “billionnaires are running the world and fucking us all over”; some billionnaires are using their fortune for good, and they don’t directly cause our problems - they may exploit a system that was set up long before they were born, sure, but your problems are also caused by Sue from accounting and your neighbour ratting you out to the authorities and that kid across the road yelling slurs at you. Your problems exist because society lets them exist, and that includes everyone. The system makes it hard to fight this, and sure, most billionnaires don’t help the issue. But again if you’re just looking for someone to hate on, it’s very likely you’re actually reinforcing oppression rather than “punching up”.
Sweeping statements are dangerous and a lot of your talking points have been used to justify genocide in the past. Just cus the world’s been a lil less overt about its antisemitism post-Holocaust, does not mean antisemitism has disappeared, far from it. And it’s being revived at an alarming rate just now so please, Gentiles, pay attention to what the dogwhistles look like and don’t reinforce harmful stereotypes.
Thank you.
PS: A few blogs that have helped me unlearn and unpack antisemitism are @spacelazarwolf, @hadeantaiga and @gehe-lihiyot-androgynos-varda with a special shout out to @softness-and-shattering for being very patient with me rambling about jewish/antisemitism related stuff in dms. Youre all soooo great n I appreciate you soooo much <3
There’s also lots of Jewish ppl in the notes of this post, I’m sure a lot of them have lovely blogs to follow.
There’s some reading recs in the notes as well:
Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel,
People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn,
The Holocaust: A New History by Laurence Rees
I haven’t read these books myself, I’ve read a preview of Jews Don’t Count and it’s on my list of books to order when I have more money, but basically, go look at what actual Jewish folks have written on the subject, I’m just a random Gentile who doesn’t like bigotry so don’t take it just from me.
Imagine my shock as a neurodivergent teen when I first realized that using large vocabulary and eloquent speech doesn’t make you less likely to be misinterpreted, rather it adds an entirely new layer of misinterpretation I had never even realized existed in the form of people thinking you’re being snobbish or condescending when you’re just trying to be specific
