There’s a lot to unpack here.
+the flexibility to get in that pose
+the balance to stay on the skateboard
+the strength to pull back a bowstring with your toes
+the dexterity to hit a target while moving
+the coordination… not hand-eye, but foot-eye
…I don’t know what to do with these things now that I’ve unpacked them…
For the record, she actually abandoned the movement BEFORE they all got whooping cough, but abandoned it too late. There’d been a breakout of measles in her area that caused her to reassess, and she and her doctor had already drafted and started a catch-up vaccination schedule, but her kids caught whooping cough just before it could be started. Then she wrote a blog post for The Scientific Parent explaining how she and her husband had come to wrong decisions in the first place, how they changed their mind, the consequences they suffered as a result, and asking other parents to please vaccinate their kids. And now she’s an activist for destroying the misinformation of anti-vaxxers, and reaching out to anti-vaxxers because she’s understands their fears but knows their kids deserve better.
She was trying to the best for her kids and just didn’t know how to interpret the validity of information or its sources, an actual skill that can be actually difficult and that is under-taught and a necessary first step to being able to trust vaccination research, so chose no action over taking an action she wasn’t sure of. She kept looking into it with family and friends and even eventually came to the right conclusion before her kids became sick, but it was still too late.
Honestly it was pretty brave of her to publicly admit she was wrong. She could have just quietly vaccinated her kids and not become a national news story, but instead she spoke out, even saying “I’m writing this from quarantine, the irony of which isn’t lost on me.” and also “I am not looking forward to any gloating or shame as this ‘defection’ from the antivaxx camp goes public, but, this isn’t a popularity contest. Right now my family is living the consequences of misinformation and fear. I understand that families in our community may be mad at us for putting their kids at risk.”
She understood the consequences and still put herself and her story out there.
You know what, it does take a big person to admit they were wrong so publicly and work to undo the harm. I believe I made fun of her in the past, but timemachineyeah changed my mind.
This.
Give people room to learn and change and grow and don’t punish them for getting it wrong the first time.
We need a name for the shock-trauma that comes from reading a long fic, chapter after chapter, barely pausing to eat let alone pay attention to what chapter you’re on, and then scrolling down to click a button that isn’t there. There needs to be a word for the way all of the emotions you’ve been carrying that were hurtling forward with you as you read non stop, suddenly crash into a wall around you. There needs to be a word for the way you’re abruptly unbalanced and lost. There needs to be a word for how you futilely attempt to refresh the page, even though you know the next chapter won’t appear.
Villains in Addams Family movies go to really unnecessary lengths to defraud them of the family fortune. These people just give it away on whims all the time. If I just walked into the house and started wearing their clothes and spending their money, they wold start introducing me as Cousin Intruder and forget there was ever a time I didn’t live with them.
This is true. Possibly, though, there would be consequences, since fate seems to favor them. It’s quite possible that, in time, you would forget that you weren’t always an Addams, too.
I have read (and see) something about Hades and Persephone having chickens in the underworld, but this is really a fact or is something invent?
Chickens were indeed sacred to Hades and Persephone and an example of this are the terracotta votive tablets from Locri -the ones of the pictures-. There are some books about this subject like Iconography of Religions by Bianchi or Locrian Maidens by Redfield.
The cock/chicken “became the chthonic bird, and was used on tombs, as emblematic of the hope of a reawakening to life”. (Peters) and it is also refered as “an infernal animal of passage” by Bernabe in his book Instructions for the Netherworld: the orphic gold tablets.He also says: ”Cocks allude to the world of the afterlife: as intermediaries between the soul and the Beyond, they intercede between the world of the dead and that of the living”.
Remember Persephone was the goddess of renewal, so at least in Locri, the cock was an usual attribute of her. And in other cultures cocks-chickens were seen as animals related to renewal and life (eggs have that symbolism tooo).
😀 so. chickens for Hades and Persephone all the way.
Tumblr likes to spin its wheels and spend time yelling at each other, so here’s a nice comprehensive guide. Five Things You Can Do Now That You Know We Were Serious About The Antisemitism:
1) Accept that if you’re in this to be an ally, you’re going to have a tough road ahead of you. We’re traditionally very wary of outsiders in our spaces because when we welcome them, well … this happens. In fact, if you want to convert to Judaism, you traditionally get rejected three times, just to make sure you’re serious and not shitting with us. Expect wariness. Expect to get your feelings hurt, because a lot of us are very raw right now. Stick with us anyway–once we know you’re not just bandwagoning us, you’re going to end up with a lot of friends who are relying on you. Nobody said allyship was easy.
2) Learn about Judaism. Note that I DO NOT MEAN LEARNING WITH INTENTION TO CONVERT. We don’t proselytize and it would be against Torah for me to even suggest it. What I mean here is, you can’t call bullshit if you don’t know what we’re about. Some good basic resources are The Jewish Book of Why by Alfred Kolatch; My Jewish Learning; and for a strict Orthodox standpoint, Chabad. You’ll find that some things in these sources contradict each other. That’s pretty par for the course in Judaism; we don’t have a single dogma or point of view.
3) Consider calling a local synagogue and asking if they have volunteer work for a gentile ally. Introduce yourself, explain (briefly) what got your attention, and offer your services–to stand outside during services, to walk folks to and from shul (this is particularly important in Orthodox communities, where driving on Shabbat is forbidden), hell, to help stuff envelopes for whatever vigil or service they may be holding in memoriam. Anything will help.
4) You may wish to make a donation to a local synagogue or Jewish charity. I strongly recommend the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), which is a Jewish charity focused on combating antisemitism. Jews traditionally give monetary gifts in sums of $18, which corresponds to the numeric value of the word “chai,” or “life.” The last time this happened I made a post about this tradition and got accused of being a Nazi because of the whole 1-8 A-H thing, so let’s just nip that right in the bud: yes, we know. It’s a horrible coincidence. We’re not giving up a few-thousand-year-old tradition because of some dipshit with a bad moustache. If you can’t afford $18, consider moving the decimal over and donating in multiples of 18, like $3.60. Your meaning will still be perfectly clear, and anything helps. If you wish to make a donation in memory/in honor (which many synagogues appreciate), I suggest either choosing the name of one of the shooting victims–giving tzedakah, or charity, in their names is considered a great mitzvah and a blessing to their families–or using the phrase “am Yisrael chai.” It means “Israel lives.” Although the country in the MENA region is called Israel, this is not what the phrase refers to–the traditional patriarch of Judaism was named Jacob, and renamed as Israel following a wrestling match with a messenger of G-d. To say “am Yisrael chai” is to say his people, that is, the Jewish people, live.
And on that note …
5) In the coming days and weeks, you’re going to see a lot of people making this about Israel or Zionism. Please tell them to shut the fuck up. Israel, Zionism, and Jews are three completely different, albeit related, things. To wit: Israel is a geopolitical country situated on the site of our ancestral homeland and currently headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Zionism is the belief that Jews deserve a safe homeland; and Jews are a group of people spread across six continents and most countries who are united by a common group of ancestors from the Levant (the part of the world now occupied by the geopolitical entity known as Israel). Saying the victims of this shooting had anything to do with the political situation in Israel would be like saying I, personally, am responsible for Vladimir Putin because I have a Russian ancestor. I speak exactly two words of Russian, have never been to Russia, have no family left living there (and haven’t for four generations), but I’m totally responsible for Russia. You see how ridiculous that sounds? The same applies to Jews and Israel. Please, please, PLEASE do not conflate this event with Israeli politics. I’m not saying Israeli politics aren’t a topic worth discussing–I’m saying this is not a discussion they belong in. Don’t let the powers that be (or the alt-right sleaze that sucks the dicks of the powers that be) distract from the topic at hand, which is “out of control guns meet out of control xenophobia and antisemitism,” by throwing OMG ISRAEL AND ZIONISM AND GLOBALISM into the mix.
And finally: yes, gentiles, this is okay for you to reblog. In fact I encourage it. And I will answer any questions you have to the best of my ability, if they’re asked in good faith. Please just follow the most basic tenet of Judaism, which is: don’t be a dick.
If you’re ready to stand and help, now is the time.
It is sad and fascinating at the same time that it is way harder to find a job as interpreter or translator with an MA in translation and interpreting (and being a state-certified interpreter and translator in Germany) than finding a dull office job where you are just sitting around waiting for someone to give you work. At the same time, the German government cannot get enough interpreters but the conditions they offer are worse than for a simple office job…and the office job pays better as well. I don‘t understand today‘s economy and labour market 🤦🏻♀️
#germany #interpreter #translator #bored
That’s pretty much why the German public service can’t get any interpreters: pay and working conditions can’t even compare to boring office jobs, let alone conference interpreting. But it’s very true that, in general, getting a job as translator or interpreter is HARD. And I have lots of thoughts on why that is.
Basically, my theory is that (in Germany more than in the UK, imo) our professions have absolutely no visibly in the media and very, very little in the professional world, and that the value of our work is constantly downplayed.
First, there’s the entertainment media. There are almost no interpreters in the media (apart from that one Nicole Kidman film), and if there are, they are not portrayed accurately. In films and series they just have the one guy who once learned that language in school translate documents or interpret at interviews. Then, of course, none of those “interpreters” or “translators” adhere to the code of conduct. They just do whatever the writer, a non-linguist with no clue about our profession(s), thinks we do, and then you end up with people summarizing, speaking in third person, forgetting or purposefully (!) leaving out details, not taking notes etc, a.k.a doing a completely inadequate and shitty job. And thus people think that’s what we do, think that they can do that themselves and the cycle continues. In other situations in films, books, series etc where you would normally have interpreters, the writers just have the other person speak the required language perfectly (which is unrealistic, but better for storytelling I guess). So people don’t think they’ll need an interpreter if they and the other person speak one common language. But what they tend to forget is that that’s fine if they wanna talk about the weather, their weekend or even their field of specialty, but if they want to discuss that one specific clause in a contract, if they want to defend themselves in a court of law or if they need that trademark application translated into German, your average language skills just aren’t gonna cut it.
And in the rare case they have interpreters or translators in entertainment media, they aren’t represented accurately. Examples I’ve seen include the one interpreter in Mar del Plastico, who didn’t take any notes and spoke in third person, the translator in Inspector Lewis, who translated a whole crate of files by herself in two days and called conference interpreting boring and unchallenging, and, of course, the interpreter in Corazón tan Blanco, who interpreted everything incorrectly in a meeting between the British PM and the Spanish president JUST FOR FUN. In conclusion, in entertainment media we’re underepresented or misrepresented, and the value of our work is often downplayed to “anyone who speaks two languages can interpret or translate” With representation like this, it’s no wonder people think they don’t need interpreters or translators.
But of course it’s not the entertainment industry’s job to make us look good and to promote our profession. That’s OUR job and thus also the job of our professional associations. And it’s a job we as an industry have neglected too much, imo. As far as I’m aware, the BDÜ, the German Association of Interpreters and Translators, does have an awareness campaign, which I don’t know much about (which, tbh, is a bad thing for an awareness campaign). I’ve seen a few posters from that campaign which say “Do you need an interpreter/translator?” and then something like “here’s where you can find them” and contact info, and yes, that’s a great thing; it’s good when people who need our services know where they can find us! But we also need to make people understand WHY they need our services, what exactly those services are and how they’re different from the common misconceptions about interpreters and translators. We need to tell them that they deserve something better than the bad portrayals of our professions in entertainment media and show them how we can create value for them. If we don’t do that, the situation won’t improve. So far, the only people who value the work of translators and interpreters are those who have worked with translators and interpreters in the past. Those who haven’t worked with translators and interpreters don’t know about the value our services provide and thus don’t work with us. It’s a bit of a vicious circle.
The latter is definitely the case in the German public service, which is suffering most from lack of interpreters. There is no public service interpreter training in Germany, let alone training for the police on how to work with interpreters (like there is in the UK). The UK has researchers like Jo Drugan who work hard to make co-operation between interpreters and law enforcement agencies easier. We need people to do something like this in Germany as well.
And lastly, machine translation (MT). The tech world has been going on for FOREVER about how they’re soon gonna replace us with machines. I’m not joking, it’s been going on since the 1950s. So, for almost 70 years they’ve been working on that, and while they’ve made progress we’re still lightyears from human parity. The thing is just, you only know this and all the issues with MT and MI (machine interpreting) if you’re involved in the industry. And if you just hear some tech companies talking about how they’re all gonna put us out of job soon, you might be starting to think that the MT available (Google Translate, DeepL, etc) really are enough to translate whatever document you have, or you might say: “How hard can it be if a machine can do it?” Again, the only thing we can do (and should do) is make clients aware that, no, there’s no human parity and there won’t be for quite a while, there’s huge data protection issues if you feed your data into public MTs, etc.
In conclusion; what our profession(s) need is way more visibility and for us to get out from behind our computers and tell people WHY they need us and how hiring us will benefit THEM.
And yes, I’m aware of the irony that I’m writing this on my phone, but in my defense, I’m on holiday and if as many people as possible reblog this we might actually get a bit more visibility.
Adriellyn's Wandering Home 