#apophasis

Your choice whether for Maria, Helen, or both! #1, 16, 20, 27!

Finally getting around to these three months later.

Let's do both, since it's been so long!

1 Name or Nickname they hate or don’t use

Maria: Actually hates the glaive habit of using last names when they join. Worked hard to change it. She doesn't hate her family, she just wants to be acknowledged as a person not a bloc. Plus, it's easier to tease people that way

Helen: Is far more used to being family-named and doesn't mind it. Wishes someone would give her a nickname, actually. Or a real one. One time Maria called her "babycakes" as a joke and she was so confused and disgusted that Maria has used it (strategically) ever since, in moments of greatest impact. It's very annoying to be deflated from a fully planned rant by being called "babycakes", and she does get her revenge, though it doesn't actually change anything.

16 What food can they not make, but like to eat?

Maria loves sweets, but doesn't have the patience to make them, and any attempts at baking fall frustratingly short. So she relies on Nyx for her fix, sometimes with a little extra pressure when she gets low, and spreads out her treats sparingly as rewards for herself.

Helen is a great baker, but usually doesn't bother with confectioneries. She is great at following recipes and has learned to try some changes, but she usually relies on comments and advice rather than just freely experimenting. This means she is pretty awful at imitating the layered spices of her Galahdan or northern Cleigner friends' home cooking, and has to rely on them to pity her, or Yamachang's.

20 What have they done that they wish they hadn’t?

Maria watched her brother die of the scourge and couldn't help him. She would rather die than watch it happen again.

Helen regrets joining the Glaive sometimes, in secret. She loves her fellow glaives, and she knows she's making a difference, and the Glaive are desperately needed. But she didn't realize how hard it would be on her soul, even if they rarely have to kill humans.

27 Which groups or people at work do they dislike?

Maria hates the traditionalists who treat magic with a little too much awe and not enough practicality. While they insist on doling out mage-specialists in isolation or keep them locked in their research groups, more and more of them die. She knows it's not rational, but sometimes she hates the Captain and the King, too, for their casualty rates.

Helen hates the Guards who are a little too drunk on Insomnian pride, both because it's annoying and hurts her friends and coworkers and because it makes everyone trust her just a little less when her accent comes out.

St. Gregory the Theologian

Brothers, sisters, can't you see? The future's owned by you and me There won't be fighting in the street They think they've got us beat, but revenge is going to be so sweet, oh-oh-oh

worshipping the Wound, oh!

SILENCE SILENCE SILENCE SILENCE

Mauna and the ontology of withholding name a discipline that is routinely misunderstood as negation, repression, or retreat, when in fact it articulates a positive mode of being in which reality is allowed to appear without being immediately seized by language. मौन / mauna (vowed inward silence) does not merely refer to the abstention from speech, nor even to the quieting of overt mental…

For John of the Cross, he writes that we do not find growth in spiritual direction and spiritual life through experiences of fullness and well-being but in being drawn toward emptiness. We discover John’s spiritual growth through a narrative of personal loss and tragedy.

The apophasis of God meets material lived-out kenosis. These ruptures can be a more accurate sign of God’s perpetual presence far more than so-called religious experiences. John points to the imagery of the desert to show us that we should not seek knowledge of God’s Grace in spiritual delights. Instead, God shows us a path in the metaphorical desert that is ‘no way.’ God leads us into a dry and barren land which is vast, deep, and immense—an infinite wilderness that, in its emptiness, inversely mirrors the abundance of God.

Dear Linguistic Society of America,

This is an open letter by members of the linguistics community calling for the removal of Dr. Steven Pinker from both our list of distinguished academic fellows and our list of media experts. We, the undersigned, believe that Dr. Pinker’s behavior as a public academic is not befitting of a representative of our professional organization, that the LSA’s own stated goals make such a conclusion inevitable, and that the LSA should publicly reaffirm its position and distance itself from Dr. Pinker.

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As we demonstrate below, Dr. Pinker’s behavior is systematically at odds with the LSA’s recently issued statement on racial justice, which argues that “listening to and respecting [the experience of students of color] is crucial, as is acknowledging and addressing rather than overlooking or denying the role of the discipline of linguistics in the reproduction of racism.” Instead, Dr. Pinker has a history of speaking over genuine grievances and downplaying injustices, frequently by misrepresenting facts, and at the exact moments when Black and Brown people are mobilizing against systemic racism and for crucial changes.

Though no doubt related, we set aside questions of Dr. Pinker’s tendency to move in the proximity of what The Guardian called a revival of “scientific racism”, his public support for David Brooks (who has been argued to be a proponent of “gender essentialism”), his expert testimonial in favor of Jeffrey Epstein (which Dr. Pinker now regrets), or his dubious past stances on rape and feminism. Nor are we concerned with Dr. Pinker’s academic contributions as a linguist, psychologist and cognitive scientist. Instead, we aim to show here Dr. Pinker as a public figure has a pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them.

Below, we document six relevant occasions that show how Dr. Pinker’s behavior is systematically and directly at odds with the LSA’s stated aims. We believe that these examples show that Dr. Pinker is untenable as an LSA fellow and should not be allowed to retain that status.

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2. In 2017, when nearly 1000 people died at the hands of the police, the issue of anti-black police violence in particular was again widely discussed in the media. Dr. Pinker moved to dismiss the genuine concerns about the disproportionate killings of Black people at the hands of law enforcement by employing an “all lives matter” trope (we refer to Degen, Leigh, Waldon & Mengesha 2020 for a linguistic explanation of the trope’s harmful effects) that is eerily reminiscent of a “both-sides” rhetoric, all while explicitly claiming that a focus on race is a distraction. Once again, this clearly demonstrates Dr. Pinker’s willingness to dismiss and downplay racist violence, regardless of any evidence.

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4. In 2014, a student murdered six women at UC Santa Barbara after posting a video online that detailed his misogynistic reasons. Ignoring the perpetrator’s own hate speech, Dr. Pinker called the idea that such a murder could be part of a sexist pattern “statistically obtuse”, once again undermining those who stand up against violence while downplaying the actual murder of six women as well as systems of mysogyny.

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