Peak Bureausotan

The MN Department of Natural Resources is apologizing for…

…well, I’ll let the story explain it:

“Yesterday we sent out the latest issue of the Trailblazer newsletter with a theme of gratitude. Today I’m sharing with you our deep regret for unintentionally omitting wópida, which is the Dakota word for ‘thank you,’ from what we had intended to be an inclusive message of thanks,” Ann Pierce, director of the DNR’s Parks and Trails Division, wrote in an email Friday.

In addition to Dakota, the newsletter does thank everyone in Ojibwe, Spanish, German, Italian, Somali, Hmong, Greek, and English…

…but not Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Russian, or any of the languages spoken much more predominantly in Minnesota than Dakota is.

But in the spirit of the season? Takk, kitti, dziękuje, spasibo and thankewverymuch for the bounty of material.

14 thoughts on “Peak Bureausotan

  1. I’ve been told that William F. Buckley Jr. didn’t like to participate in the common practice of thanking everyone he could when receiving an award (or he at least acknowledged the shortcomings of inevitably leaving someone out). He would say, “Expressio unius est exclusio alterius” and explain that “To include is to exclude” ( literally a Latin term literally meaning “the expression of one thing is the exclusion of the other”). There are literally hundreds of languages they could’ve included, and some of those are even spoken outside of the MPLS/StP Int’l Airport from time to time. Personally, I’m offended they didn’t include Aboriginal Australian in the article.

    In today’s Woke climate, forgetting to include a marginalized group such as the Dakota is just as bad as “stealing” their land to begin with (all while glossing over HOW it became their land). OTOH, neglecting to include Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, or any of the other languages of those evil white, land stealing settlers is perfectly acceptable. The DNR would’ve left off the English “thank you” if they could’ve done so, but that would’ve meant that all 9 of the readers wouldn’t have understood the point of article.

    And don’t even get me started on including Russian!! Obviously you don’t support Ukraine hard enough if you’re bringing up Russian!!!

  2. Smith;
    Funny that when I was a freshman in high school circa 1970, I took Russian as a foreign language. The teacher was constantly accused of teaching communism and several of the school bullies also accused me and others in my class of learning communism. All of said bullies, now post on social media touting radical leftist mantras. I have had great fun making their heads explode by reminding them of their blatant hypocrisy.

  3. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell explained that the rules of authoritarianism must be arbitrary. There were no laws in Oceania. The citizens were kept in a perpetual state of terror because it was a matter of life and death for them to follow rules that it was impossible for them to know.
    Big Brother liked it that way. Every citizen was spying on themselves and everyone else.

  4. This article by Mary Harrington on Unherd is worth listening to (abt 14 mins) not so much from what she tells us about Musk, but about how she describes illiber rule by our elites. Laws are created almost an afterthought of elite consensus; the CDC recommends against taking ivermectin to prevent or treat covid (a non-democratic process), and medical boards and public health officials (again, non-elected) codify procedures to sanction physicians and media personality who do anything other than characterize ivermectin as “horse deworming paste.”
    https://unherd.com/2022/12/musk-is-becoming-a-true-caesar/
    The “hive mind” of the elites as characterized by Harrington is profoundly illiberal and anti-democratic. It does not believe in rule by the people, it believes in rule of the people by elites. After the 2016 election of Trump the elites panicked. They spent the next four years insuring that no such error by the people would be permitted to occur again.

  5. Bigman, I can only assume that every Dec. 7th from here on, the Japanese will look at the degenerate, dystopian shithole our country has become, and laugh their asses off.

  6. You can see the elite hive mind in operation in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
    The FBI warned the Twitter censors that the Hunter Biden laptop story was going to drop and that it was Russian disinformation (in fact the FBI lied about the Russian disinfo op).
    How did the FBI know about the Hunter Biden Laptop?
    They found Giuliani’s files about it on a cloud server.
    The FBI is not a domestic spy agency (in theory the US does not have a domestic intel agency, aka state security agency). So why was the FBI snooping through Giuliani’s files?
    The FBI was investigating Giuliani’s supposed activities as a foreign agent.
    So what happened to that investigation?
    It was dropped after the FBI got their hands on Guiliani’s files.
    We are now a nation where state security plays a large role in determining who the American president will be, and that is just fine with some people because they certainly will stop Trump or anyone Trump-like from becoming president again.

  7. I hope we have learned, over the past few years, the difference between politics and science.
    Science changes slowly. Research has to be done, and evaluated, the results debated, and a consensus formed.
    Politics is contingent on perceived utility. Political acceptance of an idea can literally change in 24 hours. Human thought is dynamic in a way that the physical universe is not dynamic.
    We went from “masks should not be used as a means to prevent contracting or spreading covid-19′ to “masks are required to prevent contracting or spreading covid-19” in a matter of days.
    Similarly we went from “off label use of ivermectin to treat covid symptoms is okay” to yanking doctor’s license to practice if they advised using ivermectin to prevent or ease the symptoms of covid-19
    That is not science, it is politics.

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