Shizune Arc (misha, jigoro)

[Steinherz]

Well, that was a good response from my limited perspective, ProfA. The last few posts here have also provided a useful (if not painless) discussion in terms of what I've learnt about deafness. Thanks!

ProfAllister is amazing at discussions.

[Atario]

I know it's not bad yet, but my experience in coprometeorology indicates that all it takes is a high-pressure front meeting a low-pressure tolerance. Evne the two of us seem to be getting slightly on edge, despite our (apparent) self-awareness.

Yeah… still, as I say, we're holding up pretty dang well. What (relatively little!) sniping and snipping we're doing is at least wrapped in a chewy, crispy layer of politesse. In all, I give it a 9/10, would bother to argue again.

Kinda funny how we're sort of coming full circle here, seeing as much of this newer discussion was started by a hypothetical in which Shizune was not deaf from birth.

Lookit us, staying on topic despite ourselves! I think we deserve a cookie. I'm eating mine right now, yum. (No, I mean it, I'm actually eating a cookie at this moment.)

In this context, what is his native language? Italian, because it was his first language? Or English, because it was the language he used all his life? Even if we grant that "native," coming from natus (birth), allows only for Italian to be his "native" language, English is the language he used to live his life, his language of choice, and the one with which he was most comfortable.

Yeah, the meaning gets sticky here. I knew a girl in college who was born and raised in American Samoa, and as such, she grew up speaking Samoan. But at some point — not even too early in life, either — she was taught English, and moved to the mainland for whatever reason, and in a surprisingly short amount of time, almost fully forgot how to speak Samoan. I was a little surprised that was even possible.

So "native" may have not been the best word. But the (post-speaking) deafie who tries to communicate in a spoken tongue is not working with his language of choice - he is working with a memory of a language from his childhood. And this is the best-case scenario.

It's probably pretty dependent on exactly when in the developmental process it happens. Someone who went deaf at, say, age 20 would probably be a lot more intent on sticking with English than someone at age six.

You're claiming that it's not in the same ballpark as dragging yourself by your arms everywhere you go. Personally, I'd argue that neither of us are competent to make that judgment.

Well, for a start, just imagine the scraping injuries involved, and the destroyed clothing. Not to mention things like getting up a flight of stairs or getting into a car or replacing a light bulb. It's not really the level of effort required that I'm shooting at here; more the practical possibility.

And your argument of personal encounters is 100% anecdotal.

Yes…and? Isn't every argument we're mentioning here in that same boat? I haven't seen anyone citing any studies. Heck, a lot of things people are saying are completely theoretical. An anecdote may not be statistically valid, but at least it has some small grounding in evidence.

If a man lives in Chinatown, his personal experience supports the notion that the world population is 95% Chinese.

True. But I'm not saying 95% of the deaf can do X and/or Y with Z amount of effort.

The controversy comes in this next step. You use more nuanced terms, but your argument is being read as "I know a couple people who get along just fine, so it can't be that hard." Testimony from these people that it wasn't hard, that they get along fine, and they have few or no issues would have some relevance. Not much, because the expected response would be "I'm happy for you, but surely you realise that you're the exception to the rule." But, coming from a hearing individual, and phrased in a manner that implies you haven't actually directly talked to them about how hard or easy it is, it looks pretty bad.

Perhaps the issue is the word "hard". I'm speaking of something like: "hardness" is the percentage of people who cannot do it, even given some humanly feasible amount of inclination and effort. If this number turned out to be 10%, one might fairly say it "isn't that hard". If it turned out to be 90%, one might say it was "rather hard".

Others seem to be taking "hardness" to mean some sort of measurement of the amount of mental energy expended while doing so. That's not what I'm on about, so if that's what the case is, I apologize for not being clearer.

you are presenting yourself as a walking, talking incarnation of the entire Bellite school

I thought the issue with it was that it prescribed certain solutions to the exclusion of others universally, regardless of the wishes of any given individual — not that they are sloppy in their survey methods. Was I wrong about that?

I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what it is you mean when you keep using that word — expects. It sounds like you mean if we were being fair, we'd all learn sign language.

I don't presume to have the right answer.

If you think what I'm proposing — leaving the decision to the individual, given a fully-informed accounting of the pluses and minuses, and without shunning anyone regardless of the resulting choice — is not the right answer, then surely you must have a more considered position than "I dunno".

But I use the term "expects" in a less extreme sense than you, evidently. "A good idea," "for the best," and "not beyond them," among others, are all phrases that, to me, imply expectation. It's a sort of "Yeah, I guess they can opt out if they really want to, but it's such a shame that they'd purposely cut themselves off from the world over some silly sense of tribalism and customs." That may not be a fair representation of what you feel, but it's a reasonable interpretation of what you've said.

That's a little blunt, but actually not that far off from how I do feel. However, to me, that isn't expectation. Expectation, to me, means that I assume a certain thing and take exception when that assumption is contravened. Something like "Oh, you choose not to speak and lip-read? You must be some kinda weirdo-freak!" What I feel, and what you have more or less described, is something closer to what I would call a personal assessment, or even just a simple opinion. Someone who comes to a different conclusion for themselves is perfectly welcome to do so, and I won't be surprised nor offended if they do.

That's fine. I'm not talking about replicating speech so flawlessly that no one can guess you're deaf. I'm talking about speaking well enough to be able to order your meal at a restaurant. You can be pretty sloppy and still manage that much.

For the record, that right there? That's an expectation. "In order to perform a basic task of social interaction, they should really try to do it our way. We're even willing to be patient with them."

Absolutely 100% not. I explained the level of mastery I would consider good enough to make it useful — and, tracing back through the conversation, why I felt it should be "easier" than lip reading (not "easy", but easier) — and said that level of mastery isn't as high as you seemed to think I was saying it was. There's absolutely not one whit of objection there to someone not doing so anyway. It's not even an expectation in the sense you proposed above; I didn't even express a judgement about the wisdom of it either way. In short, there's a lot of reading-into-what-I'm-saying going on here.

Again, you're presuming two things: profound or total deafness; and a pre-consciousness onset.

1: Don't use the term "pre-consciousness" - it carries a whole raft of implications, baggage, and off-topic discussion that would be better for everyone if we leave it alone.

Ummmmm…? Ok? I would have said "congenital", but I wanted to allow that some period after birth would probably be functionally the same. That's what I get for trying to be careful, I guess?

if you were to have some kid with coke-bottle glasses try to draw a pig without his glasses, it probably wouldn't be much better than the normally-sighted people trying with their eyes closed.

That would actually be kind of a fascinating experiment to run…

3: Do you mean to imply that someone who is "merely" hearing impaired has much less of an excuse to choose deaf culture over hearing culture?

I don't know where you're getting such a leap. We were talking about how hard {drawing a pig | talking usefully} would be for someone who had never {seen a pig | heard his own voice} vs. someone who {sees them fuzzily | hears it poorly}.

I'm not suggesting that all movies be shown with open captions, but I challenge you to do a quick search. Do you have ANY theaters within a 60-mile radius that have ANY open captions?

I don't. At the same time, I can find shedloads of CaptiView/Sony Access ones. And I'm not sure why those should be considered so vastly inferior.

As a side note, I will admit that I do find it intriguing that you actually have used closed captioning devices. From the way you've presented yourself, I wasn't aware that you'd have any need/desire to use something like that.

Well, English is a second language for my wife, and she has some minor high-end hearing loss as well; as such she finds it helpful in picking out a lot of words she can't quite catch by listening without asking for a repeat.

But even from before I knew her, and up to this very day, I got in the habit of turning on the closed captioning on my TV at home — my DVR at the time was capable of playing video at 2×, without sound but with closed captioning, so for certain shows I would save time by using that facility. Also, it's helpful apart from that, in quickly catching things people said that I missed, due to my own inattention or depicted people mumbling or what have you. This depends greatly on the quality of the transcription, of course; it kind of dismays me to see how inaccurately the deaf are served sometimes on some shows. For example, Letterman used to be top-notch; really accurate, with full mixed case lettering. Then 9/11 happened, and when they came back it had kind of gone to shit. It still hasn't fully recovered to its previous state, I think.

I suppose all this history helps me get into anime stuff that lacks an English dub but does have English (fan)subs, as I'm more used to reading while I watch than a lot of people are.

And even with the foreign movies, the CC/Sub is only marginally helpful, because (supplementary) lip reading is used heavily by deafies - it's pretty worthless when the lips don't match the subs.

How is an English subtitle ever going to match the lips of a non-English film?

My point exactly. Many people assume that deafies have no issue with foreign films, because no one understands the words and they all read the subtitles.

I'm not sure I follow. Wouldn't they have at least the same level of proficiency with them as the hearing do?

But I can agree that same-language subs should match spoken words. But whenever I say anything, I'm told that it's too hard to keep up unless they simplify the words. Dunno how anyone's coming to that conclusion, though. [shrug] I can only guess they're trying to accommodate slow readers.

Kind of unclear who is telling you this, and what position of authority/expertise they have on the subject.

To me, either. It's just something I've heard variously over the years. Even the Katwa Seiyuu project is rife with this sloppy attitude. Of course they couch it as stuff being too hard to say. Feh.

You want the heads side of the coin without the tails side. You have no issue with people associating with each other, but object if there is a common thread that's considered a requirement for association?

No, it's more about the negativity that grows in the shadows of the positivity. Like the Raiders? Fine. Genuinely shun or discriminate against people who like the Chiefs or the Broncos or whatever? Not cool.

It may be hair splitting, but when you first mentioned the North American Deaf Community, you spoke of it as a monolithic whole that universally reviles CI users. You then drew a false equivalence, implying that everyone in the North American Deaf Community that dislikes AG Bell also hates CI users. It's a fair to interpret your comments as a denigration of the community as a whole.

That could be a problem of my eliding a more complex statement. I wasn't saying the whole community says [X], nor that the whole community shouldn't be listened to. When someone says "the _____ community says/does [X]", I generally take it to mean "some subgroup within the _____ community says/does [X]", as I did with the statement I was replying to — there are few communities that do or say anything without exception, so I took that as read. And when I replied, I kept the same sense: some subgroup within it also said [wrong thing Y], so what some subgroup within it says needn't be considered the final word. Shorthand sometimes bites you in the ass, I guess.

There is simply no excuse for responding to "Parts of [Community A] hold [Position 1]" with "(Parts of) [Community A] also hold [Position 2], therefore the merit of [Position 1] is questionable."

A problem with antecedents. When I said "I wouldn't put a lot of stock in it", "it" didn't refer to a particular position about AG Bell, but rather the citation of any particular position by (some subgroup of!) said community as evidence all by itself that that position is the correct one. It would have been quite a preemptory disclaimer had I said all that at the outset…

Groups of people being marginalized is a common refrain in the music of history. But reacting in an ugly way is a choice too.

It's a bit of a balance. While I can agree that it's better to be the bigger man, it can be hard to fight an emotional response. It may not be justified, but things get uncomfortable if the imagery too closely resembles past discriminations.

[Sigh…] Yeah, I know. Still, we should encourage the doings of the right things.

"Instant teleportation is great - when it works. I'm just a tiny bit concerned that we might be a little hasty in adopting it. We want to still have our current highway infrastructure intact for the cases when we can't use teleportation. And, well, the more people use teleportation, the harder it is to justify the expense of maintaining the highway infrastructure, which really sucks for the people who can't teleport at all. And I know it sounds silly, but I kind of like driving on occasion."

Well, no one is proposing banning sign language. And if the concern is that it will become less useful because fewer people will maintain fluency in it, well, I don't know that anyone can say for sure that that will happen; but even if it does, there's not much to be done short of forced sign-language camps. People make their individual choices, and a cultural segment flourishes, maintains, or withers. That's just how culture works. But people worried about it should take heart; once something becomes culturally established, it rarely goes entirely extinct. Hell, there are still uses for, and people who learn, Morse Code.

we took a wrong turn somewhere in Analogysville

It wouldn't surprise me. All I was originally trying to do with the cell-phone thing was shift the argument by a level, like talking about 4-dimensional objects by making analogies between them and 3D object vs. 3D object against 2D objects. Something where no one has the ability, but a device would allow anyone to gain it. Going the other way would work too, I suppose; something where someone is both deaf and lacks some other ability, vs. someone who only lacks hearing. My analogizer is overheating, can you come up with a good one?

In order to communicate with the rest of society, you need to use a tool that can translate your meat-slapping orifice wind into radio waves (and translate radio waves into meat-slapping orifice wind analogues). Or perhaps enlist a kind soul who is radio-sensate, but also decided to learn how to communicate with meat-slapping orifice wind. Those are workable, but the radio-sensate find it awkward, and a bit of a hassle. They'd much rather you learn to figure out what radio waves they're broadcasting by their body posture, and would really like it if you learn how to control your own radio-wave broadcasting - it doesn't need to be perfect, just good enough that they can understand what you're saying.

Not to belabor our broken analogy, but this sounds like an argument about CIs vs. lip-reading/deaf-talking, not either of those vs. abandoning the hearing world completely.

And you're using a tool specifically designed to facilitate vocal communications (and designed by hearing individuals).

Would a deaf-to-hearing interface device designed by the deaf be better than one designed by others? Maybe. They should try! (Have they not…?)

Venture Capital. Investors. Plausible Market. There's generally one or two big companies that provide accessibility tools. So there's not terribly much competition - meaning high prices and glacial innovation. And very little opportunity for market disruption.

And yes, it is reasonable to expect that a device designed with input from people who have personal experience with deafness has significant potential to be more useful than one designed by a bunch of hearing people who have a vague idea of what deafness is, but no personal or practical experience.

(I'm also hoping you realise just how insulting your suggestion sounds. I hope you were being sarcastic due to honestly not believing that deafies could provide any insight (or believing that they're heavily involved in development of accessibility devices.)

In fact, I assumed such devices could not be made without massive input from the deaf in any case. My question was intended to discover whether any work had been done completely excluding the hearing from the process, since that's what it sounded like you were saying was the problem.

(But you're forgetting what I said about voice being the least-used feature of the thing…)

I'm not forgetting it; I am pointedly ignoring it, because your cellphone example as a whole is a uniquely terrible analogy. The radio waves from a cellphone are derivative of meat-slapping orifice wind.

No. No, no, no. You're pointedly fixating on it, and wrongly too. The radio waves from a cellphone are entirely digital and have no apparent analog correspondence to the sound meat-slapping orifice wind they represent. But that's neither here nor there, since I'm saying the primary way I communicate on the thing has nothing to do with sound meat-slapping orifice wind in the first place. The original thing I was trying to address with the whole stupid idea at all was the objection to communication using a physical medium one is not natively capable of processing by dint of lack of relevant working sensory organs, for that mere fact alone. This is clearly done by all of us, every day. So the objection falls flat. That's all it was ever meant to address.

(I think I'm enjoying the phrase "meat-slapping orifice wind" a bit too much)

It is catchy! And it encompasses multiple bodily processes.

Is someone saying sign language is illegitimate??

Not very often any more, but a quick glance at the history of Sign Language makes it clear that that's a very recent development.

Well then you can count me on your side for that one. Sign languages have been useful even for the hearing in various contexts, so what kind of a special jerk would it take to object to their very existence?

As a society, we have enshrined in our laws that there are instances where the 99.5% are obligated to accommodate the 0.5%.

Sure — and those instances are where it's a facility or agency open to the public (like having braille signage, or standardized orderings of traffic signal colors, or providing ramp/elevator access, or elevator lights and not just bells, etc.). And the accommodations are not unworkably burdensome (like requiring interpreters on staff or the like). It's supposed to be some reasonable level of effort by the majority to refrain from excluding the minority in public life. And that's as it should be. But making ordinary individual people learn sign language, for example, would be a massive overreach. So the state of things is not some kind of conspiracy to oppress a minority. Yet in this thread we're seeing sentiments that the majority world makes no effort and doesn't care in the slightest, and were the tables turned the screws should be turned hard, and so on. It's more than a little unreasonable.

Wheelchairs have never been billed as a cure for paralysis.

I'm still not convinced anyone serious has billed CIs as a cure at the current state of the art, though.

Paralysis does not have a long and troubled history of being considered a mental deficiency (at least, not as long or troubled).

However, it is the go-to symbol of disdained disability. Consider the default "cripple dating sim" terminology thrown around even here.

Paraplegics have generally had a platform to express their own opinions on treatment received.

Not sure what you mean by this. Were the deaf traditionally summarily strapped down and force-fed something (other than at the behest of their parents, which is a whole other — or was it the original? — can of worms)?

A wheelchair is not a (semi-permanent) surgical process.

It is a semi-permanent state of living, though.

yes, Jigoro could be a total asshole without any redeeming qualities; my argument has always been that there are other possibilities, which, it can be argued, are quite reasonable.

I do, now, seem to remember some other threads along these lines long ago, yes. I wasn't convinced then, either, so I hope you won't jump on me too hard now that I'm breaching the subject instead of lurking.

We do not get anything near a complete picture of Jigoro. We get a picture of him from the perspective of his daughter's boyfriend.

Even so, the basic facts are not in dispute. The man:

• Carries a freakin' katana everywhere he goes
• Has written an autobiography despite the fact that he's not famous at all, and what, only around age 45, tops?
• Has alienated his own daughter for at least twelve of her eighteen years
• Approves of nothing apart from himself (that we see, at least; I have to assume he at least approved of Mayoi, though)

Say what you will, but that's not a very reasonable man, regardless of Hisao's opinion.

And, as I noted before, I don't give two shits what the writers intended. They put onto paper what they put - in my opinion, that's essentially the end of their role (generally speaking). I'll certainly take their own interpretations into account when looking at things, but I do not consider it infallible. If the text supports something, it's a reasonable assumption; if the text contradicts, the interpretation fails; if the text doesn't say wither way, it's open to interpretation.

Fine by me!

Looks like there's enough snippiness to go around.

Yep…

I concede that you never explicitly said that you expect anything. I will, however, note that you have repeatedly expressed ideas to the effect of "I don't understand why deaf people make such a big deal about learning how to talk;" "It makes more sense for the deaf person to put in the effort to accommodate hearing people than the other way around;" and "I don't see how people can take pride in being defective - especially when it's so easy to fix." You did not necessarily express those sentiments, and most definitely not in these words

I'd say those are more than a little in basic violation of what I've expressed, but for the sake of shortening this tome of a reply, I'll let it pass in favor of the next passage.

but you have repeatedly presented a worldview in which the ideal is for deafies to learn to get by in a world which ignores them, marginalises them, and, in a very real sense, rejects them. You allow deafies to choose not to conform, but you make it clear that this is not ideal, and is most likely stubborn and shortsighted.

This starts wrong, but ends up kinda right.

I don't see the ideal being that at all. I see that as the current optimum in most cases, which is a subtly but importantly different thing — best that can be managed at the moment, for most people in that boat, but certainly not necessarily all. (The ideal, I suppose, would be an array of perfect or better-than-perfect treatments: say, starting with something that causes fresh new fully-working ears/auditory nerves/auditory cortex/etc. to grow in place by stem cells, or perhaps be built by nanobots, and moving up to super-human hearing abilities via technological wonders of some sort. Cue Lindsay Wagner. Obviously all some ways off to say the least.)

But you end up close to what I do think in saying that it's "most likely" (meaning in most cases) to be sub-ideal (and, even more strongly, I would say suboptimal) to choose to isolate oneself and remove possibilities for one's life (not to say I love conformity, but sometimes you gotta bite the bullet and deal with some of society's bullshit; we all do, y'know?).

This back-and-forth? It's called "scoring points." We both really should be above it. I'll try to do better on my part, and I apologise for any low blows I may have dealt (or have yet to deal

My philosophy is to give as good as I get. So you have my apology too, just like you had my point-scoring too.

being hot-blooded gets to you like that).

If there were one term I would not have stuck on your Permanent Record, it would certainly have been "hot-blooded"!

Let's go back to the pig drawing (did you actually try that, by the way? It is kinda fascinating).

When you just asked that, I actually did. Check it out.



Aside from part of the back and the tail being about halfway down instead of at the top, that's not too bad!

The first time you do it, most people expect that their pig will turn out much better than it does.

Likewise, the first time you say a basic word, you'll likely get it pretty wrong too. Even if you're hearing. We have to practice to get this good, too.

"CODA have major struggles and alienation from their position straddling two cultures. I know it's terrible to say this, but I kind of hope my kids are deaf so they aren't left adrift in the confusing cross-currents of the CODA experience."

That's almost a weaker argument, to me. Like saying whites and blacks should not interbreed because their kids will never be accepted by either world.

And if you feel I should take my own advice, feel free to call me out on it (using specific examples - people are notoriously bad at self-assessment). Please. I can't get better if I don't know what's wrong.

I respect you enough to already have this in mind, Prof.

[Silentcook]

Uh... this is surprising to say the least, but please, people, take a look here.

Nothing else to say, carry on.

EDIT, A FEW HOURS LATER: I had to remove some nested quoting by fiat to unbork the previous page.

[Steinherz]

Uh... this is surprising to say the least, but please, people, take a look here.

Nothing else to say, carry on.

It seems you forget, ProfAllistar writes novels for responses
Well.... only for this topic it seems XD

[Potato]

Uh... this is surprising to say the least, but please, people, take a look here.

Nothing else to say, carry on.

It seems you forget, ProfAllistar writes novels for responses
Well.... only for this topic it seems XD

I submit that Prof is secretly Jigoro and all these big posts are really future excerpts for his autobiography, for a chapter titled "The One Where I Out-talked Everybody Because I'm Just That Good".

[Atario]

EDIT, A FEW HOURS LATER: I had to remove some nested quoting by fiat to unbork the previous page.

I didn't notice the borking, what was happening?

[Umber]

EDIT, A FEW HOURS LATER: I had to remove some nested quoting by fiat to unbork the previous page.

I didn't notice the borking, what was happening?

The link says the format issues only happen to some people, but with the lengths of back-and-forth you two were typing out, you might've been better off writing a couple chapters for Tomorrow's Doom.

This is just slightly more intriguing to read, in my opinion (sorry, Helbereth), some part in civility, some part content.

[brythain]

I've always wondered who Jigoro's biographer really was. He keeps saying 'she' is late, but subsequently when both Shizune and Misha turn up, Shizune goes into the house with Hisao. I submit that by elimination, Misha is Jigoro's biographer. I would wonder, if not Misha, what kind of person would voluntarily do that for Jigoro. I suspect Jigoro has a kind of fatherly affection for Misha (as far as he is able) because she's like the voice of Shizune; from what we see, Misha gets along fine with him.

[Steinherz]

I've always wondered who Jigoro's biographer really was. He keeps saying 'she' is late, but subsequently when both Shizune and Misha turn up, Shizune goes into the house with Hisao. I submit that by elimination, Misha is Jigoro's biographer. I would wonder, if not Misha, what kind of person would voluntarily do that for Jigoro. I suspect Jigoro has a kind of fatherly affection for Misha (as far as he is able) because she's like the voice of Shizune; from what we see, Misha gets along fine with him.

Albeit when he's not yelling extremely loudly while telling Misha not to do so

[Megumeru]

I've pretty much burned myself out explaining this particular topic over and over again as this forum's residential vocal Shizuists. There's a topic around the forum somewhere that covered it already and random discussion covered one other on the cultural aspect.