TIM CLARE: Calling someone a coward historically has often been a social lever used by the state to shame them for not doing something the state wants them to do - often walk into machine gunfire. Which, to me, doesn't seem like an act of cowardice to not want to do that.
Read moreAllusionist 118 Survival: Bequest transcript
ELIZABETH KEREKERE: I'm so convinced that transphobia, biphobia, homophobia are such an integral part of colonisation, I reject that as a colonial construct, I reject it as racist.
As they took our land - tried to take all of our land, tried to take all of our language and suppress our culture, they also took our expressions of sexuality and gender. And that is important to us in a core part of our culture, especially because the way that the institutional racism, the intergenerational trauma that is the legacy of colonisation has impacted on us and the levels of discrimination against people with diverse genders, sexualities and sex characteristics, that we see that all of this, all of this was a massive attempt to cover up what was already there and pretend it never happened.
Allusionist 114. Alarm Bells transcript
ROBIN WEBSTER: I am as guilty as any, having worked as a sort of techie professional in this for a long time of writing those sentences that go "By 2050, the trajectory of the curve will be movement this and carbon capture and storage," these paragraphs that just mean nothing to nobody. And they are about things which are far away in time, far away in place. We were using these words like ‘sustainability’ and ‘trajectory’ and ‘parts per million’. And I was like, what on earth is this language? It doesn't say anything.
HZ: ‘Parts per million’: that's the stuff to get people up and ready for action.
ROBIN WEBSTER: 450 parts per million, let's go!
Allusionist 74. Take A Swear Pill - transcript
HZ: So why is swearing good for you?
EMMA BYRNE: It's good for us socially, in that it is this really useful telegraph of our emotions; it's a good way of avoiding physical conflict. It's also a really good way of bonding, of saying "I hear you. I feel the strength of your emotions," like saying "Fuck that shit" when someone comes to you with something that's obviously upset them. Sometimes it needs to be something stronger than just putting your arm around their shoulder going, "Oh there, there". It's also really useful individually, both for a cathartic side of things when you do something painful or frustrating, letting it out there.
HZ: Another reason swearing is good for you: it relieves pain.
EMMA BYRNE: That is really potent and surprisingly well documented. When you stick your hands, for example, in freezing cold water, you can stand it for about half as long again if you’re using a single swear word than if you're using a single neutral word. Not only that: when afterwards you're asked about how painful that experience felt, you report that cold water as feeling much milder than the water that you had your hand in while you were using some neutral word. So we know that it's really handy for dealing with pain that's being inflicted on you. We also know that it's quite useful, for example, among people who are suffering from long term conditions - so not pain that's been inflicted in a lab, the pain that is ongoing. So managing particularly the emotional aspects of long term pain, a good swear can be cathartic.
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