This is such a fucking scam, Jesus Christ. No wonder my immediate response to this news was “That was a lot sooner than I expected!” — no, it’s still gonna be a long time yet before the Brits and Seps will actually concede their rule of Diego Garcia in any meaningful way. This agreement is as good as toilet paper.

I wonder when Lalit is gonna make a statement about this agreement.

♫ Everything I used to love has turned to shit ♫

John Kirby’s just trying to figure out whether or not he’s become a real boy yet.

“…also every 39 minutes they stab your balls”

구글, 조선으로 어떻게 이주하나요?

We love us some Simon Roper, don’t we!

while autists often have a really hard time with [conversational maxims] (from what I’ve informally noticed they need to actively rationalise the neurotypical utterance in order to decode it).

I have noticed this too, but it is something that’s highly variable, like with anything on a spectrum. My brother and I are both autistic, but he struggles a lot more with conversational maxims than I do. It’s to the point where half of his utterances are perfectly grammatical but also completely meaningless for anyone else, because his way of processing and using language just isn’t supposed to be cooperative. I’ve heard people say that conversational maxims are socially determined, so for someone who generally doesn’t follow social norms, it makes sense to understand and use language with different conversational maxims as well.

In some ways, my brother’s way of speaking is comparable to Darmok from Star Trek, because it often relies primarily on a very rich set of allegories based on his interests, that he’s the only person who actually knows how to decode. I swear that I read or heard somewhere about what this type of autistic speech is actually called, but I don’t remember.

Anyways, there are some people who believe that without the social pressures of masking, that there would’ve been a lot more people who we’d now call neurodiverse, and that these would’ve also been more integrated into broader society, with specific roles best suited for their neurotypes. So if that were true, then I could see this group being “patient zero” for the spread of some sort of unconscious language change, and maybe even having some sort of prestige. Who knows, though.

Edit: Because I feel like this idea of “ancient autism” is sort of modern mythology, even though I want to believe it and don’t think it’s necessarily false.

This is very interesting, thank you.