Reblogged foxbirdy
Reblogged foxbirdy
avalanche
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You gotta understand that the difference between level one, two and three autism is vibes. It's just vibes. It isn't some intensive scientific distinction formed through decades of scrutiny and effort. It is and always has been vibes. Autism was originally differentiated from schizophrenia based on perceived vibes and it has been vibes all the way down since Eugen Bleuler, Fritz Künkel and Grunya Sukhareva in 1911 and the mid-1920s respectively. In fact, you ever notice autistic pseudohistory focuses on Sukhareva and Leo Kanner as "the start of autism research" when they demonstrably aren't? Why? Vibes.
Why do you see stories about idk pre-colonial Irish people leaving their wee young Seamuses out for the fairies because their aversion to eye contact marked them as changelings and shit, and there's always some autistic cunt in the comments like, "that's autism, that's me, I'm the changeling baby." Vibes. It's all vibes.
Fuck mate, one of the cunts who expanded the diagnostic criteria has since admitted that it was an oopsy doopsy moment. His motivation? Vibes.
There are black kids diagnosed at level three who have all the same competencies as white kids diagnosed as level one, but they have a "higher needs vibe" in the eyes of the diagnostician. Hmm.
Girls are often diagnosed as having lighter support needs than they actually do. Boys are often diagnosed as having more serious support needs than they actually do. Socioeconomic background also plays a role. It's all vibes. Mate with migrant kids and the foundations of special needs education, you have Reuven Feuerstein noticing the cruel and malicious vibe that existed around classifying children during the immigration process and how kids not met with appropriate accommodation were deemed disabled when they were actually just not fluent English speakers. Vibes vibes vibes.
Psychology and psychiatry aren't exactly what the streets call "hard sciences," and the primary thing being assessed is conformity to existing stereotypes. That's seriously all it is.
Who fucking cares if Barbie "looks level one?" What the fuck does that even mean? Goddamn
Reblogged orcboxer
Someone on Amtrak’s social media team deserves a raise like N O W. 😂
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The worst part of those stepparent forums is that they refuse to admit that being a stepchild sucks. Not because you want your mommy and daddy to get back together soooo bad or because you’re jealous that you’re not daddy’s only baby in the world anymore. It sucks because you are a child with absolutely zero agency. It sucks because you have no say on who your parents choose to bring into your life and you can’t do anything about it if that person hates you, mistreats you, has beef with you, a literal child. It sucks because you can’t even choose where you lay your head at night, you are bound by court order to go stay in a house you know you are not welcome in. It sucks because adults often take their hatred of another adult out on you and there is nothing you can do about it. Being a child sucks in a lot of ways, beyond the childlike wonder and the lack of financial responsibilities. It really does suck to be dependent on the adults in your lives and have them fail you. Being icy to your dad’s girlfriend of the month is sometimes the only way you can exert your power and hopefully warn her to get away, even if you can’t.
Reblogged totalitariandemocracy
1928 c. Uranium glass. From Art Deco and Art Nouveau, FB.
Truth oozing out of her bath to irradiate mankind
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It's often said but always bears repeating: the problem with emphasizing cures in disabled life is not that a cure will destroy your soul or whatever.
We are not in an X-Men: Days Of Future Past scenario regarding cures for most people. It's not a choice to leave the neurodivergent homo superior and join the inferior human race. It's not a vibes thing. For most disabled people, a cure would in fact be massively beneficial to their quality of life.
The problem with emphasizing cures is that it involves sacrificing available resources that could be used to improve the quality of life of people currently living with disabilities, based on a slim chance that some miracle treatment might emerge. It shifts the focus for abled people from living alongside and adjusting their environment to accommodate disabled people, to waiting it out until the disabled people aren't around any more, whether by cure or other means.
If they cured schizophrenia tomorrow: rad! Currently many abled people think that antipsychotics do functionally "cure" schizophrenia, and that if you just take your meds you will not be schizophrenic in a meaningful sense any more. Therefore, schizophrenics live constantly under the stigma of "going off their meds," to the point where many are living worse lives than they could be with intense side effects, or the looming threat of more severe institutionalization, to manage something that could be accommodated environmentally, because this is nearer to the social construct of "a cure." Where I live, if you have a diagnosis and are involved in any kind of reckless or violent crime, like a car accident or a punch-up on a friday night, you are far, far more likely to be prosecuted with higher sentencing, institutionalization, yada yada, based on the societal stigma that we are normal when medicated, monsters when not.
Or, the intense pressure that deaf people face to have cochlear implants installed. Did you know that cochlear implants have a regret rate of over 40% in some surveys? It turns out this is because a lot of people have unmet expectations of what the implants will actually do. How? They're having conversations with surgeons before getting them, right? Well, the marketing is mostly handled by hearing people and promises deaf people that they basically won't be deaf any more. In a lot of ways, cochlear implants are treated by hearing people as a cure for deafness, and thus like "going off your meds," being actually deaf becomes a disability of choice in the hearing mind. The reality is that they're still going to be hard of hearing, and imagine that. You've just bought into the hype that your disability is basically going to be gone, you're no longer going to be isolated or treated like a punchline by the hearing world, you pay all this fuckin money -- and the best you get is that everybody sounds like the parents in Snoopy.
Finally, you see how people act when they think they've found a "cure" for their child's autism, right? So many autistic kids are subjected to torturous therapies meant to make them neurotypical through concepts like "errorless learning." You have parents slathering their kids in essential oils or forcing them onto batshit diets that fuck up their nutrition while they're growing. Meanwhile, as we see under the current American "MAHA" administration, the budget seems to have bottomless resources for "cure" projects (scams and assorted bullshit) but absolutely nothing for healthcare reform or welfare for autistic families, because again, when you prioritize cures you don't really give a fuck about the quality of life of the people currently living.
When you couch this all in "but I am my wheelchair!" rhetoric, you end up with the most annoying fucking liberals in the universe, cunts like Bill Maher, making fun of the whole concept of disabled rights on a national stage. It's just not really going to persuade any abled people, ever. In fact, they love the idea of cures because it's a compassionate way to not care about disability issues any more.
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me, whispering: portraying nonavian dinosaurs as living/thriving in tropical rainforest environments like those of today is just straight up racism
other people: what
me, still whispering: modern tropical rainforests are one of the most recently evolved ecosystems, only truly appearing in the early Paleogene, after all nonavian dinosaurs went extinct. They did not live in them, and if they were brought back into the modern day, they would not thrive in them. the only reason we associate tropical rainforests with primitiveness is because POC live there, and the associated narratives around jungles and savagery. that's it. that's the whole thing.
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There's a very specific strain of pseudo-feminist rhetoric that flows like,
I agree that institutionalization and compelled treatment are bad, but some schizophrenics really do need it. My [male relative] is schizophrenic, and he [list of reactions to abuse framed as evil].
You see this around all kinds of cognitive disabilities, but especially lately autism. In its more severe forms, it's sometimes some shit like,
Male autistics are coddled, and that's why they're like that. Male autistics will become abusive toward women and then you're expected to do nothing and take it, just because they're disabled!
It is vital to understand everybody, especially feminists, knows these people for fake. No, disabled men are massively over-represented in prisons, institutions, psych wards and all other systems meant to keep them from living alongside you in the general public. This is actually a major issue.
Additionally, the reason disabled women are not as institutionalized has nothing to do with suppressing their access to treatment, because institutionalization is not treatment. Rather, it's because women's suffering in medicine is systematically downplayed and ignored, elements like fertility are prioritized over wellbeing (denying tubal ligations to able women while forcing sterilization on disabled women), and ultimately while men's disabilities are blamed on environmental factors like substance use and trauma women's disabilities are often blamed basically on womanhood.
This has been the baseline entry level Disabled Feminist Theory understanding since the 1970s. In fact, deinstitutionalization began as a primarily feminist movement with writers and activists like Judi Chamberlin. There is, in fact, a feminist model to approach feminist discourse, and "men are ontologically evil and disabled men, inheriting the lack of impulse control inherent in the disabled villains of true crime and Dahmer biopics, are doubly evil" is not it.
To be blunt, comments like "my evil schizophrenic brother refuses treatment, he just calls me a bitch and avoids me all the time" always read as if they're missing some important context. How, exactly, do you attempt to compel his treatment, Helen? Is the failure of treatment his fault or is he one of the almost half of schizophrenics for whom conventional treatment is ineffective? Is the treatment actually just woke-sounding abuse? What fiendish shit are you doing to him? Are you giving him space? Are you being sympathetic to his actual needs, or are you just annoyed that he's in your way? Do you actually care about this person, or do you see them purely as a filial burden? Because frankly as someone who's worked with a LOT of disabled people and therefore met a lot of their family members, I promise you, you are almost certainly an actual barrier to that person's recovery.
You see extremely similar patterns of rhetoric around parents of disabled children, and it's why the Autism Advocacy Network feels the need to release anti-filicide kits, and why a genuine thing we work toward in disabled rights spaces is securing equal sentences for parents who murder their disabled children. See, killing your disabled kid tends to result in much lighter sentencing than killing an able-bodied kid, because the parents play like "oh it's so exhausting changing diapers and I was so absorbed in the natural suffering of their body (that I did almost nothing to alleviate) that I thought compelled euthanasia was the only way for them to be at peace." And it works all the time. It's insane.
And that's what you sound like when you show up like this.
The reason I've chosen to complain about this specifically in the women's rights space is that I keep seeing the same shit posted as "and I'm burdened with excessive emotional labour because my disabled family member won't take personal responsibility to stop being disabled." And it drives me up the fucking wall because no, no no no, feminism is vital to disabled liberation and this TERF-adjacent, "but I feel bad therefore it is bad" bullshit unseats its progress evety time.
Reblogged emiliosandozsequence
my understanding and interpretation of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” cannot be untangled from the fact that it was originally published to follow her poem about childhood sexual abuse, “Rage”
i just don’t think it was unintentional that these were presented flush against each other
[Transcripts:
Rage by Mary Oliver
You are the dark song of the morning; serious and slow, you shave, you dress, you descend the stairs in your public clothes and drive away, you become the wise and powerful one who makes all the days possible in the world. But you were also the red song in the night, stumbling through the house to the child's bed, to the damp rose of her body, leaving your bitter taste. And forever those nights snarl the delicate machinery of the days. When the child's mother smiles you see on her cheekbones a truth you will never confess; and you see how the child grows— timidly, crouching in corners. Sometimes in the wide night you hear the most mournful cry, a ravished and terrible moment. In your dreams she's a tree that will never come to leaf— in your dreams she's a watch you dropped on the dark stones till no one could gather the fragments— in your dreams you have sullied and murdered, and dreams do not lie.
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
]
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Maria Skłodowska-Curie's notebooks are crazy once you think about it. They're so radioactive they have to be sealed in a lead box. Imagine a world where atomic theory is forgotten and a dude just goes "yea there's a book that details the secrets of the universe, the machinations of the creation of existence down to its barest essentials, but if you get close to it you fucking die. The more you read it the more your body slowly disassembles into mush." like wat excuse me
Reblogged totalitariandemocracy
for no reason whatsoever here’s a reminder that if you consider yourself a leftist/punk/abolitionist/anarchist/radical in any sort of way and get called into jury duty, you are to become the most square person on earth during the jury questionnaire!!!
don’t be that guy who says fuck the police in the jury questionnaire! that just gets you sent home! if you want to generate change, interact with the case and use your jury vote for good! ESPECIALLY if it’s a high profile case!
Remember, when you're on the jury, a good "that cop's story didn't add up" will sway a lot more Chads and Karens than "fuck the police."
Had jury duty, can confirm!
An innocent man is home with his family instead of spending his kids' whole childhoods in jail for "resisting arrest" when none of the cops could agree on why he was being arrested in the first place. (But it definitely had nothing to do with him being a Black man in a nice car, honest! 🙄)
And it still took like two hours of delibration after we'd heard all the evidence because one lady was so gung ho about believing everything the cops said, even when not a single goddamn one could agree with their own testimony, let alone their colleagues'.
Pointing out all the inconsistencies and admitted misconduct and letting people slowly come to their own conclusions as the trial played out was fucking hard, I won't lie. I can be patient, but it doesn't come naturally to me.
But. Yelling about how this was obviously a bs case would have shut everyone down and made them stop listening. Asking questions and letting people discuss how the cops tried to make xyz sound suspicious but it was totally normal, or about how if things played out the way the cops said then logically events should have proceeded in a totally different direction, and positing different theories that actually lined up with the evidence presented?
That got people thinking, and everyone realized that for a variety of reasons we all had reasonable doubts that the defendent had committed any of the crimes of which he was accused.
Being able to raise reasonable doubt among a jury of one's peers saves lives. If you get the chance, take it.
"Jury Room / The Holdout" (1959) by Norman Rockwell. One of my favorites of his. Particularly the gendered dynamic he depicts here.
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I feel like portrayals of autism mostly always default to "don't understand social norms/boundaries and so cross them" rather than "don't understand social norms/boundaries and so overcorrect in the other direction to avoid the possibility of crossing them."
Like I don't understand social norms or people's boundaries around casual friendly/familial touch--so I don't touch my friends ever to avoid crossing a potential boundary or violating a potential norm.
And obviously the whole spectrum happens, but I feel like when I see "don't understand social norms" portrayed, it's really just in the direction of "so violates them and doesn't notice and/or care."
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butterflies are beautiful skinny sexless androgynes. moths are cute fat women in furs. bees are sexy but in a girl next door/hardworking soviet laborer type way, while wasps are more like domineering women in suits who will paralyze you with their stingers and then lay eggs in you. none of these elicit even similar kinds of desire or attraction. get it right.