We have a Constitutional crisis on our hands. This level of conspiracy, aided and abetted by a regime hostile to the United States and guilty of human rights abuses against its own people and neighbors, is unprecedented in the history of our country. Behaving otherwise is just another form of gaslighting.
Source: We Have a Constitutional Crisis on Our Hands | Dame Magazine
Look around you right now. How much technology can you see in your house or office? Autistic people designed much of that, came up with the ideas for much of it. And got paid peanuts, probably, to use a phrase. Look at the famous art prints on your walls. Many by autistic artists. Listening to music? Some is by autistic musicians. Driving home in a vehicle, designed and built by autistic people, over a bridge designed by autistic engineers? You bet that bridge works. We built it.
Your infrastructure relies on autistic people, all day, every day. Society makes trillions out of autistic minds. Capable, determined, passionately focused, fair, honest minds of the sort that fill the professional practices across the country. Autistic lawyers, surveyors, bankers, accountants, doctors, scientists. Getting it right. Challenging nonsense. Stopping salespeople from selling ‘snakeoil’ to people.
Source: Ann’s Autism Blog: Let’s look at why “Autism is the most expensive disability” is untrue.
Society insists on making education, healthcare etc into a sensory hell, and we have to navigate it. Headphones, sunglasses, different clothing, etc can make a big difference. That’s really cheap to achieve for a lot of us, with a small budget from a provider. Hold that thought….that it’s really cheap to achieve for a lot of us ….because it is. If you know what you’re doing. If you ask the autistic person what helps, after having autism training from autistic people, so you know your subject.
Source: Ann’s Autism Blog: Let’s look at why “Autism is the most expensive disability” is untrue.
But, someone realised there was a way to say that there is Big Money in ‘fixing’ us so we’re not autistic any more. And Big Business likes Big Money.
So, the myths started. About cost, about danger, about tragedy. Who wouldn’t pay a fortune to fix a tragedy? Also, about disability. It’s a fault, a deficit, something’s gone ‘wrong’, you’ll be told. Except it isn’t, any more than being gay is a fault and a deficit and an opportunity to cure. Groups tried that, too. Remember that being gay was in the mental health books, and people made a fortune out of ‘gay cure therapies’. Now those are being banned after the gay people said how much damage those therapies did. Guess what some autism ‘therapies’ are based on? Same techniques. But now used on people who can’t say that it hurts, or aren’t believed when they say it hurts.
Meantime, we have made society so bad for autistic people and the scaremongering so effective that our quality of life is often really awful. That’s not ‘autism’ that did that.
Instead, if you must hand over money, ensure that actual autistic specialists receive it. Or our allies. People who understand how to actually help your child, because we were once pretty much the same as your child. And we have spent decades in this trade, learning things that help.
Autistic people are not lab rats who exist so that shareholders can make money.
Source: Ann’s Autism Blog: Let’s look at why “Autism is the most expensive disability” is untrue.
A common thread linking “hard” Brexiteers to nationalists across the globe is that they resent the very idea of governing as a complex, modern, fact-based set of activities that requires technical expertise and permanent officials.
The more extreme fringes of British conservatism have now reached the point that American conservatives first arrived at during the Clinton administration: They are seeking to undermine the very possibility of workable government.
Source: Opinion | Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Rise of Radical Incompetence – The New York Times
Society is our user’s manual. We learn how our brains and bodies work by watching those around us. And, when yours works differently, it can feel like you’re broken.
You are not weird. You are not stupid. You do not need to try harder. You are not a failed version of normal. You are different, you are beautiful, and you are not alone.
Welcome to the tribe.
Source: Failing at Normal: An ADHD Success Story | Jessica McCabe | TEDxBratislava – YouTube
‘Inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to technocratic reformers, the kind of people who assume from the outset that any real vision of social transformation has long since been taken off the political table. It allows one to tinker with the numbers, argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (‘can you imagine? 0.1% of the world’s population controls over 50% of the wealth!’), all without addressing any of the factors that people actually object to about such ‘unequal’ social arrangements: for instance, that some manage to turn their wealth into power over others; or that other people end up being told their needs are not important, and their lives have no intrinsic worth. The latter, we are supposed to believe, is just the inevitable effect of inequality, and inequality, the inevitable result of living in any large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated society.
Abandoning the story of a fall from primordial innocence does not mean abandoning dreams of human emancipation – that is, of a society where no one can turn their rights in property into a means of enslaving others, and where no one can be told their lives and needs don’t matter. To the contrary. Human history becomes a far more interesting place, containing many more hopeful moments than we’ve been led to imagine, once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there.
Source: How to change the course of human history | Eurozine
Critical pedagogy is a philosophy that “applies the tenets of critical social theory to the educational arena and takes on the task of examining how schools reproduce inequality and injustice” (Beck, 2005).
Critical pedagogy as developed by critical literacy elements in the classroom invites and encourages students to question issues of power. These issues include multiple indicators: socioeconomic status (SES), race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and age (Cervetti, Pardales, & Damico, 2001).
How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, “If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?”
But if Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being.
I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake.
The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will ‘adapt’ workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that.
rnbn 