I should note that Shannon at one point says there are "14,000" languages in the world, because people when saying there are "7,000" languages in the world are forgetting that sign languages exist — however it is a bit presumptive to assume that there is a roughly equal number of signed languages as spoken languages.

Still, I think this is an intriguing perspective that makes me want to know more about the language dynamics and language politics of Deaf people around the world.

I dreamed last night about finding a playlist of 55 or so videos published by some probably 30-something white guy from the suburban USA around 2011. The playlist was titled something like "various rants", but really these videos weren't "rants" at all, they were 5~12 minute videos of this guy just being overwhelmingly and infectiously positive rambling about all his frivolous hobbies, mainly anime, video games, and Nerf guns. He seemed autistic if I'm being honest.

Now on the one hand, it feels kind of pathetic to be dreaming about wasting an hour or two on watching old YouTube reviews, 'cause that's like three layers of unreality... But on the other hand, I kind of wish this YouTuber was real. So if you know any old YouTubers matching this description, please send them to me.

Cymraeg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ygr4V829zw

I don't know who Rajesh Bhagwan, Franco Quirin, and Danisha Sornum are but they seem like nice enough people.

Oh, and PTR = Labor Party and MMM = Mauritian Militant Movement. I should note that Mauritian party politics seem a bit strange to me because I go to Wikipedia and all the parties in the National Assembly are listed as "center-left" or "left-wing", except for the Mauritian Social Democratic Party, which is "center-right to right-wing". So what exactly is the difference between the different parties in Mauritius? How do they decide which coalitions to form?

Even the parties that are outside of the National Assembly, multiple of them are again listed as "center-left" or "left-wing", and it's like, why are these parties not successful whereas parties with apparently largely identical politics are?

The best political party in Mauritius seems to be Lalit, one of the parties outside of the National Assembly. It is explicitly Marxist and split from MMM in the 1980s, as MMM was becoming progressively less radical. Lalit's website inexplicably contains a complete translation dictionary of Mauritian Creole to English if you've ever wanted to learn Mauritian Creole.

Still, although Lalit is clearly the best party, for a small peripheral country like Mauritius, social democrats are certainly more deserving of support than social democrats in the imperial core, right?

"Don't just look at my ear. Don't look at it as a physical handicap. We're normal, really. Yes, we do have some accommodations to be made, to survive in a society where it's dominated by hearing people. But at the same time, if you were to come into the room, and it would be full of Deaf people, then you would need the accommodation, too." — Rory Osbrink, teacher

Carolyn McCaskill (Professor of ASL and Deaf studies) shortly thereafter mentioned left-handedness among other things, which I thought was interesting, because I feel like right-handed people don't often describe left-handedness as a disability, while hearing people do often think of Deafness as a disability — but what really is the difference between being Deaf and being left-handed, right?

Edit: Apparently Gallaudet reuploaded the documentary with CC so I've replaced the link and changed the post title.

[TL note: This article was originally written in Nynorsk. My own dialect is generally written in Bokmål.]

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Juliana Mattson was deported from Norway while she was participating in a cultural exchange program. Her case has now become a topic of debate in the Storting, Norway's parliament.

Summary of the issue

• Juliana Mattson, a student from the USA, was deported from Norway while she was participating in a cultural exchange program on a small farm in Innlandet county.
• The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (Utlendingsdirektoratet; UDI) believed that Mattson had taken up work on the farm, which led to the deportation.
• Storting Representative Alfred Bjørlo from the Liberal Party has reacted strongly to the case and is questioning Minister of Justice Emilie Enger Mehl.
• Bjørlo doubts that the legal framework actually puts a stop for the activity that WWOOF offers, and believes that the incident could have been the result of a misinterpretation of the law by UDI.
• Storting Representative Rasmus Hansson from the Green Party also criticizes UDI's actions in this case.
• The case is now being reviewed by the Ministry of Justice.

This summary was written by an AI service from OpenAI. The content is checked for quality by NRK's journalists before publication.

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Last week, NRK wrote about 22-year-old Juliana Mattson from the USA, who was taken by Norwegian police from a small farm in Innlandet county and then deported from Norway.

The cause of the deportation was that the Directorate of Immigration (Utlendingsdirektoratet; UDI) believed that Mattson had taken up work on the farm.

This, despite the fact that Mattson was on the farm because she was participating in a cultural exchange program led by the organization Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF).

Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF)

• Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) is a globe-spanning movement aiming to build bridges between organic farmers and those who want to visit them.
• The organization mediates the exchange of culture and knowledge and is a global community working for organic farming around the world.
• It is not possible to offer nor receive a wage as a participant in a WWOOF-exchange.
• WWOOF was founded in 1971 and is one of the first educational and cultural exchange programs in the world.
• WWOOF today operates in more than 132 countries around the world (and is growing constantly)
• There are 145 farms in Norway today offering stays through the WWOOF-network. They generally take 2-4 "wwoofers" at a time, most of them arriving in the summer.
• In Norway, non-Schengen citizens must have a work permit to come to the country through WWOOF. No other country in Europe has this requirement.

Source: WWOOF NORWAY

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Alfred Bjørlo of the Liberal Party reacts strongly to this affair.

– "This is hopeless. We can't let Norway deport people taking part in a serious international exchange program to learn about agriculture," Bjørlo said to NRK.

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Questions for the Minister of Justice

– "Does the Council of State believe that participation in this type of exchange program in Norway, as the only country in Europe, should be equated to immigration for work, such that people risk arrest and deportation from the Schengen Area?"

This quote is from a letter that Bjørlo wrote to Minister of Justice Emilie Enger Mehl (Centre Party) dated to the 9th of September.

[TL note: "Centre Party" refers to "Senterpartiet", as opposed to "Center Party" which refers to the much newer and much less successful "Partiet Sentrum".]

Bjørlo's question is now being reviewed by the Ministry of Justice.

Alfred Bjørlo strongly doubts that the legal framework actually puts a stop to the activity that WWOOF offers.

– "The first thing we will ask the government about is if this was because of a block in the legal framework, or if this is about how the law is handled by UDI. If this incident happened because of a misinterpretation of the law by UDI, then I expect the government to take this up with UDI," he said.

For the stay was not intended as work, neither by Mattson, nor by the hosts from the organic hobby-farm in Eidskog. They have accepted wwoofers to that farm for over ten years.

The plan was for Mattson to stay on the farm for two weeks.

– "I was just helping out a little with the board and lodging," Mattson said to NRK just after her deportation in August.

– "That was a part of a practical education in sustainable agriculture. It wasn't work, I was there to learn," she continued.

For according to WWOOF's guidelines, there should not be any form of wage in connection to these types of stays.

Nevertheless, the stay on the farm was defined as employment by UDI.

In the official decision to deport Mattson, UDI pointed to among others section 55 in the Immigration Act where it says that a foreign national who is to work in Norway must have a work permit that gives one the right to employment.

>"The seriousness of the situation is exacerbated by that the illegal work can be connected to workplace criminality. Following from this, general preventative considerations and considerations for the legal consensus point to that you should be deported." — UDI

Bjørlo believes that if the law bans this type of practice, that the law should be changed.

– "It must be possible to find a way to open our borders for this type of activity as an exception, without allowing for illegal migrant labor," he said.

[TL note: the original said "the Storting representative" rather than "he", but to me this was a bit clumsy to translate literally.]

Poll: What do you think of the deportation of Juliana Mattson?

Results as of 5:24 PM 9/12/2024:

• 6% — It's completely just, one must follow the law no matter what.
• 10% — It's very unfortunate, 😥 but UDI needs to follow the law.
• 80% — This is just sad! UDI surely has bigger things to worry about! 😡
• 4% — I have no opinion. 🤷

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Read also: Mother of three deported from Norway, very difficult for the children

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"Unreasonable consequences"

Storting Representative Rasmus Hansson of the Green Party is also not particularly impressed with how UDI has interpreted the law in connection with this case.

– "Where on Earth is UDI's understanding of people? This is rigid, bureaucratic nonsense with completely unreasonable consequences," he wrote to NRK.

Hansson is clear about why he believes this.

– "What Juliana Mattson was to do in Norway is 100% positive. She was nothing but a good contributor to Norwegian agriculture bothering neither the state nor the people of Norway. It is pretty hopeless that UDI would pour out buckets of public resources to chase her out of the country," the Green politician said.

NRK has been in contact with the Ministry of Justice to ask Minister of Justice Emilie Enger Mehl about the case. The minister says via the communication department that she cannot answer before she has answered Alfred Bjørlo's question in the Storting.

>Immigration Act section 55 > >A foreign national who intends to take up employment with or without remuneration or who wishes to engage in business activity in the realm must hold a residence permit giving him or her the right to take up employment or engage in business activity, unless otherwise provided in or in accordance with this Act. > >A foreign national who intends to take up residence in the realm for more than three months without taking employment must hold a residence permit. Residence in another country participating in cooperation under the Schengen Agreement is equivalent to residence in Norway. The King may issue regulations containing further provisions on calculation of the period of residence.

[TL note: Translation courtesy of Lovdata]

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Appendix: Image captions from the article

DISAPPOINTED: Juliana Mattson is very dissatisfied with the treatment she received in Norway.

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Alfred Bjørlo (Liberal) hopes that the government takes measures to ensure that a similar incident will not happen again.

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Rasmus Hansson (Green) believes that the deportation is a result of outdated bureaucracy.

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BACK IN THE USA: Juliana Mattson is now back home with her mother and cat in Rhode Island in the USA. She is still disappointed about what happened in Norway. She says that she will probably go on another WWOOF exchange a different time, but not to Norway.

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Åklangenga is an organic hobby farm that cultivates vegetables and holds sheep for their own use. About ten youths visit the farm each year to learn about organic farming.

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Toni Poleo is associate professor in ecology, agriculture and biotechnology at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. At the farm he and his wife show circular agriculture in practice to youths from around the world.

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The Old Norwegian Short Tail Landrace is descended from the Old Norwegian Sheep, the progenitors of the Norwegian Short Tail Landrace breeds of today. Sheep are an important part of the Åklangenga farm.

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André Lemee from Normandy is also at Åklangenga farm through WWOOF. But since he's from the EU country of France, he can stay on the farm as long as he wants.

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Julia Hurter grew up in the USA, but is also a Norwegian citizen. She went to Åklangenga for two weeks in May through WWOOF, and is now back on her own initiative.

YOU WOULDN'T TRUST THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREECE TO HAVE GOOD TAKES ON GAY MARRIAGE AND ADOPTION

YOU WOULDN'T TRUST THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN (MARXIST-LENINIST) TO HAVE GOOD TAKES ON TRANS RIGHTS AND JAN 6

YOU WOULDN'T TRUST THE ITALIAN MARXIST-LENINIST PARTY TO HAVE GOOD TAKES ON ISIS

YOU WOULDN'T TRUST THE COMMUNIST PARTY USA

[pause for comedic effect]

UNCRITICALLY!

TRUSTING!

COMMUNIST PARTIES!

IS A BAD IDEA!

I had lost the arm as a child due to some sort of animal attack, but the fact that I didn't escape the animal before it severely chewed my arm such that it required amputation at the shoulder, was because in the dream I also had some sort of disorder that made me experience occasional "attacks" wherein I lost motor control and sensation in my limbs.

In any case, I was really into guns in this dream, I was in a shooting club and everything, and more specifically I was fascinated by the history of how firearms have been adapted for those with upper limb amputations and prostheses, especially the type of prosthesis that I had. I had in general made the arm a part of my identity, like I wasn't ashamed of it, I'd make jokes about it, I'd wish that the arm would work "more like in the movies" but I still managed to navigate my daily life just fine.

I guess if anything, I woke up feeling kind of freaked out by how my brain had managed to come up with such a radically different path for my life, and made me accept this path so unquestioningly, as if I had really been on it the whole time. It was kinda like Zhuangzi's famous butterfly dream in a sense, and made me wonder how much people should really stake on something so fragile and malleable as identity.

This can be both in-universe (like word origins that say something interesting about the society in which the conlang is canonically spoken), out-of-universe (like little hidden references you wouldn't expect people to notice), or even both.

I could mention a million things in my own conlang, but the example that inspired this post was the slang term "3-zo" or "poeezo" /pøːzo/ which basically means "a recurring expense; a person, form, or notice sent for the purpose of extracting this money; or the money so extracted". And this word "3-zo" comes from a clipping of yaPoeezolloeyya /japøːzoʎ.ʎøj.ja/ literally meaning basically "the three animals" — and referring to a set of three institutions that work together to help the rich and hurt the masses.

And this idea of "three animals" taking money from the poor was inspired by the Occitan folk song "Ai vist lo lop", where the description of a wolf, fox, and hare dancing around a tree is commonly taken as a metaphor for the monarchy, nobility, and clergy engaging in various merriment, while the peasants get screwed over. That folk song also describes how the peasants toil year-round to earn "a few coins", only to find that all their money is squandered within a month.

So yeah, my conlang's word for like "rent" and "taxman" and "utility bill" and "Netflix subscription" is ultimately in reference to an Occitan folk song about dancing woodland creatures.

I'm mostly thinking about video, but things like blogs as well, anything is good. It just feels like kind of a gap, that of all the Deaf content creators I know, their talk of audism and intersectionality never seems to progress into a more holistic critique of capitalism.

But I guess this is the same algorithms and self-selection and other factors they're subject to that make the big trans creators a bunch of liberals, too; most of the less-viewed Deaf content I've found is content from universities, or content funded by this or that charity named after this or that capitalist... And otherwise the small Deaf creators seem rather like myself as a teenager, who saw anti-autistic sentiment as a "problem of NTs" rather than a problem of capitalism, that they might see audism as a "problem of hearies".

But I'm sure there are Deaf and Coda creators who make the exact sort of content I'm interested in. I mean, there just has to be! It's just that search engines are absolutely useless at finding that type of content. Like my attempts at Internet searches only really told me that there was a textile artist in the Bauhaus called Otti Berger who was a deaf communist Jew who was killed in the Holocaust; and that there's a book called Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity and an article called Building an Organization According to Our Own Wishes: Deaf Agency in East Germany, 1945 to 1960, which might be interesting with the right expectations set. Otherwise I can confirm that Deaf communists, like, exist in the present day, which yeah, obviously, and there was a mention of "another deaf communist manifesto" on some odd Japanese and Korean language website about Deaf culture, which I don't know what that's about.

But in any case, you'd think that for such a large, clear form of marginalization with a strong cultural identity, that there would be more than three pages of search results, right? So what's causing there to be no results?

Unfathomably based holy shit

Edit: So a TL;DR is that this was NHK's Chinese-language broadcast, and this Chinese "outsourced employee" who'd been working for NHK radio for literally half his life since the early 2000s, he'd just finished reading a report on how somebody had spray-painted the word "toilet" at the entrance to a shrine honoring a bunch of war criminals and fascist goons — and he just decides right then and there to go off-script for about 20 seconds to state among other things that the Diaoyu Islands belong to China. Like I guess that was just the last straw for him or something.

I do not have a particularly strong opinion on the Diaoyu Islands dispute, I just think that any day is a good day to undermine the "territorial integrity" of Japan. Like the entire prefecture that Japan claims the Diaoyu Islands belong to shouldn't even be part of Japan to begin with.

!japan-cool