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6:13pm
August 3, 2015
I see, often, people use the idea of “people are being hurt by this” as a means of shutting down conversations
Sometimes it’s true, like when you’re trying to explain why slurs are bad.
Other times, it’s not. It’s just someone trying to throw the weight of “innocents being HARMED” into their campaign to silence you.
And in some cases, it’s not your job to avoid “hurting” someone, when they’ve deliberately laid out a carpet of raw nerves all over your boundaries.
Having your own thoughts even though it “hurts” other people is your right, and they need to get their carpet of raw nerves off your thoughts.
Talking about your thoughts and feelings, in your own space, without trying to force other people to accept them as true, is your right, and it’s the height of irony for people to come into YOUR space and tell you you can’t, because you’re “harming others.”
People’s raw nerves don’t belong in your space. Don’t let them grow there.
Yes, also related to the thing I’m going to write about eventually.
25 notes
6:13pm
August 3, 2015
I have to add that this isn’t just a social justice thing, it’s a really common tactic among abusers regardless of political alignment
Abusers who will say you are HURTING them TERRIBLY by doing things like… choosing to work, or go to school, instead of spending all your time at home attending to them
Abusers who say that you’re being monstrously cruel and selfish because you choose to maintain relationships with family and friends in spite of your abuser’s feelings of jealousy and abandonment
And yeah, abusers who try to shape your thoughts and feelings and preferences, and who complain that you’re being incredibly insensitive to them by insisting on thinking for yourself
This is closely related to something I’m going to write about soon.
6:12pm
August 3, 2015
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
—
(via scienceisbeauty)
I always wonder if this is why ADHDers seem to be so creative - we don’t have the mental energy to do things the normal/boring way so we find a better way around it.
We’re not lazy but we are unlikely to spend hours doing something we aren’t interested in when there’s a quicker/ more interesting way.
(via some-other-metal-than-earth)
Can confirm. I’m constantly thinking about faster and more efficient ways to do things.
(via adhdandcats)
Yup. Same token: I’ll overcomplicate something if overcomplicating it means I get to do more of something I really enjoy. See: Every single one of my Excel workbooks for personal use (as opposed to the one I keep track of work hours in).
(via karalianne)
6:10pm
August 3, 2015
yeah I have seen on several occasions someone who is in x group makes a post that doesn’t align with tumblr and have people who are not in x group come and scream at them for hurting people in x group, even though they ARE IN the group they defendingI see that constantly. People are like “protect (minority group) at all costs!” but the fine print says “unless they don’t have an SJ-approved perspective.”
It’s like… not everything people do in the service of social justice is right, in the sense of being ethically right AND factually correct. People need to be able to have conversations about that. It’s absolutely vital that we work toxicity out of activist spaces, because everything a toxic activist group does just turns toxic. People have this “the ends justify the means” attitude but the ends are a toxic wasteland where nobody is actually being protected or supported at all, and everyone is tearing everyone else down.
You can’t set your beliefs up to be beyond criticism and beyond refinement and expect that go well for you or anyone else you’re trying to convince.
6:09pm
August 3, 2015
If I had a solid piece of advice to give anyone it would be just “calm down”
And I don’t mean that in a dismissive sense but like
One of the things being involved in SJ did was give me an immediate panic response every time I saw someone talk about something Forbidden
And slowly learning that talking to people about things is not actually on par with trying to put a fire out before it kills someone has been extremely helpful for me
It’s incredibly important to be able to gain a little perspective. No, someone on the internet being wrong is not the literal equivalent of a bullet on its way to murder someone. Working out right from wrong requires time and patience. It can’t be done with panicked urgency or rage.
I think what’s especially saddening is that you get so many splinter groups within social justice itself because people don’t know how to deal with different perspectives without making it into “you’re wrong, and that’s dangerous, so now we’re enemies.” When some in-group thing becomes controversial, like, “Disabled people all think (thing),” and some disabled people go, “No, we don’t,” I never see that reconciled as a valid difference of perspective. I always just see it turn into enemy factions. It sucks.
So much agreement.
5:49pm
August 3, 2015
➸ Why I'm angry
So little has changed in some ways… here’s a 15-year-old article with a similar title (written by Laura Tisoncik, the first person to make an exclusively political website for autistic people, just to give you a bit of autistic history context here):
I’ll copy the entire post here as a quote, so you don’t have to click through if you don’t want to:
SPOILER: The following contains graphic, PTSD provoking descriptions of the use of restraints.
The following is from an e-mail exchange with someone from my state Autism Society (with slight revisions for improved clarity).
On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, you wrote:
> Hi Laura
>
> It sounds like that you had a bad couple of weeks? Can I help with anything?I doubt it, given that the issue is systemic and not personal, but you might get ranted at.
How do I put the pattern of things into words? About a year ago I founded a small fund for high functioning autistic adults (international, based in London, at least for the moment) with initial financing out of ad revenues from a website (thereby accomplishing as an autistic SSI recipient what no government, corporate philanthropist, autism society, or anything else has ever found themselves capable of or interested in…).
That means our tiny little project gets to field all sorts of crises… the HFA woman in Montreal whose mother (her only source of care) just died and who has nothing in the house left to eat except coffee grounds, the steady stream of abandoned aspie teens on the streets (we do a land office business trying to rescue at a distance aspie and HFA teens who’ve been thrown out by their parents, often after years of physical, psychological, and and sexual abuse– I have at this point precisely no patience with the line of crap that goes “parents have a right to decide what’s best for their child”. Nobody achieves sainthood by having an autistic kid, and plenty of parents have anything but the best interests of their kids at heart), the jobless adults that end up on the streets, etc.
It means our little project gets to do things like dial halfway around the world to an autism society in a small city in Australia to see if we could get an advocate– mind you, not money, not housing, not treatment, just one scrawny little advocate to help her fill out some forms– for a badly abused and abandoned teen, and getting back a reply, after a long delay, that they couldn’t provide an advocate (they’re in the business of serving parents, not autistics, after all) but if our homeless and hungry teen who can’t even use a bus could just travel 1000 miles to the nearest big city, they knew of a psychiatrist who might be able to see her, at $100/appointment.
As an IRC channel manager I get to see other things, too. I get to see the carnage wrought by years of “help”– not just in people my age, who were supposedly misdiagnosed and mistreated, but even in young teens. Ever want to clear out a room full of autistics? Start discussing restraints. But don’t do it unless you enjoy watching a lot of people have PTSD flashbacks. If you think this was all done for our own good, think again. I still have scars on my body, 30 years on, from having been beaten by hospital staff while restrained and drugged to the point where I was unable to sit up for three days. A friend of mine– a 19 year old, so this was not back in the Bad Old Days– tells stories of being restrained face-down, and the staff watching and laughing as she began to suffocate. And if you go peruse the Oasis web board online right now, you can read about a mother upset because her 16 year old aspie son was locked 4 days in a hospital “quiet room” for refusing medication. No, she wasn’t upset at the hospital, staff or doctors– she was upset at her son!
Maybe from your naive vantage point you can imagine those “quiet rooms” are quiet, or at least comfortable, or at least safe. They are none of the above. The number of people who die in them is frightening.
I need to interrupt my rant here with an illustration. I started to type that line about “the number of people who die” thinking “statistics”. About halfway though I suddenly remembered something I hadn’t remembered for years– that someone did die in restraints on one of the occasions I was locked up, about a week after I had been in that same quiet room.
Maybe you don’t know (because the “experts” don’t find it interesting enough to document their own damage) that the apparent rate of PTSD approaches 100% among autistics, and the number of autistics who’ve developed multiple personalities is noteworthy. If the doctors didn’t wound us badly enough, school did– I know autistics in their thirties who have recurring nightmares about school bullying. Of course when we tried as best we could to defend ourselves, we were “aggressive”; yet somehow causing lifelong emotional scars was not “aggressive”, or at least not as inconvenient to the schools.
Maybe you also don’t know that occasionally some of the online autistics brave the flashbacks to go to the parent-oriented message boards to try to warn some of these parents about the damage that is happening. My 19 year old friend did just that on the Oasis message board the other week. She told a few of her stories, to try to save some of the kids from what she had been through. The response she got? One parent told her “That’s a parent’s worst nightmare”, then went on to completely dismiss everything my friend said.
Do you see the problem here? That’s a parent’s worst nightmare?!? Who exactly did she think nearly died on more than one occasion? Who do you think lives with the aftermath every day of her life??? I can tell you, it isn’t my friend’s mother that had those nightmares, and still has nightmares.
A few other parents criticized what she had to say, and a few questioned her motives. Then they rolled right on, leaving my friend crippled by flashbacks for the next day and a half. You know, it is not a fun thing to spend a couple of days giving comfort on the phone long distance with someone who thinks she’s suffocating tied to a table somewhere, when you yourself are fighting off cold sweats and panic. It’s even less fun when you realize that in a few years you might be on the same phone holding the same conversation, this time with the teen damaged by the parents and professionals my friend had tried to warn that day.
And you know what? I hate the autism establishment. I hate the parent-professional axis that rips people to shreds then drops them into oblivion when they hit adulthood. I hate anything and everything that pays lip service to autism services but with with all its resources couldn’t do what I could do with next to nothing. I hate autism societies that have no use or place for autistics except as an occasional token to perform as freak shows at conferences. I hate “child centered” organizations that leave adult children to eat coffee grounds when there are no more parents to serve. I hate a system that mourns for the purgatory of the parent but doesn’t even give a damn about the hell of the autistic. I hate all of this, and so very much more.
I know that not every parent is complicit in this –in fact my ally and partner in my projects is a mother of an 8 year old autistic boy in California– and I know not every professional carelessly or callously destroys lives, and I hear of the occasional autism organization that tries. But I have no illusion that the good guys are in the majority. Or that the bad guys aren’t pretending to wear the white hats.
I also have no illusion that the parent-professional axis will, as constituted, ever do a damned thing for adult autistics, or for that matter honestly put the interests of child autistics before their own personal interests, given that they don’t seem to think we have any part to play in what they decide to do to us. Services go to money, money goes to power, and power right now goes to professionals (insurance payments and research funds) and parents (money to help “autistic children”). There’s no more room in that for us.
In a few days I’m going to be incorporating the fund and the informal structures around it, and we’re going to be a shiny proper international organization dedicated to providing practical help to autistic adults. It would be nice if all it took was raising money and playing Santa Claus. I like to play Santa Claus.
But I know perfectly well that that won’t do. It’s going to take a revolution. It’s going to take overthrowing that axis of power that leaves us voiceless and serviceless and invisible. It’s going to take turning things round so that instead of parents and professionals concocting schemes and then looking around for a Token Autistic to perform a benediction over it, nothing happens without our meaningful input. Services go to money and money goes to power and I want power to go to autistics.
So the state conference might have been preferred a Vidkun Quisling, but in the last few weeks I’ve metamorphosized into Che Guevera. This doesn’t appear to be a passing phase. It’s merely gone from a teetering-on-the-uncontrollable rage to that ice cold determination that I’m glad is not happening outside of me because I wouldn’t want to be in the way of it.
So now I get to try to be a Token Autistic. I understand that another dimension of the Token Autistic phenomenon is that it is an attempt, however weak, to add autistic input. And I’m far too focused right now to have any use for randomly aimed rage. I’m quite sure I’m not going to say anything regrettable. But I’m equally sure I’ve got a message here, and woe be it to anyone who tries to marginalize adults.
Of course I could also be in weird scattered speech mode, say a few incomprehensible things not at all like what I’d intend to and make me wonder why I bother with vocal cords at all when I can actually express myself in writing but just flail at things in speech… oh well.
END RANT
FYI, I was the “19-year-old friend” anonymously described. The woman who wrote this has saved my life many times over both before and since writing this all that time ago.
Laura got a reputation as “always angry” for writing this, by the way. It’s kind of ironic because she’s actually someone who thinks that love is the answer to most political issues, but she got pigeonholed as an “angry activist” and nothing she said or did could remove that idea. She does get angry, we all do, she just doesn’t base her entire political philosophy on anger.
She is old enough to remember COINTELPRO and she says they’re the origin of the idea that you have to be constantly pissed off to be a good activist. They would infiltrate political organizations and try to rile everyone up and tell people they weren’t good enough activists if they weren’t constantly angry.
But at the same time, she’s got nothing against people getting pissed off when it’s appropriate, so don’t make any assumptions in the other direction either. I just thought I’d mention this because I’ve seen people read this and decide (in conjunction with the long-term legacy of COINTELPRO in activist communities, that most people don’t realize the history of) that they had to be angry all the time. And that’s not what she was saying. She was saying why she was angry at that moment, not that everyone has to be angry all the time to be an activist. There’s a difference.
5:33pm
August 3, 2015
“I can’t stand country music
It always makes me cry
Talkin’ ‘bout people’s heartaches
Makin’ me wanna die
Every time I hear a country song
I’ve just got to close my ears
I can’t stand country music
I’m tellin’ it like it is”
— Wayne Parker
Yes, in case you haven’t heard the song directly, this is 100% a country song. And an old one – irony (and being able to laugh at yourself) isn’t some new hipster invention.
5:09pm
August 3, 2015
I’m particularly rolling my eyes at people who think that their personal grievances should dictate the entire political strategy of a movement.
FFS, how self-centered can you possibly get?!!
I haven’t seen whatever’s causing this, but I’ve definitely seen it over and over and over again, and it pisses me off.
In fact I was just thinking about it, because I’m sure someone somewhere is going to bring up the fact that Sharisa is supposedly a victim of something I did years ago (she’s not, but it doesn’t matter whether she is or not, for the purposes of anything important), and tell me that I shouldn’t write about what’s happened to her, or try to get anyone involved in saving her from the hell she’s been put into.
Except, I actually acknowledge that it doesn’t matter whether I like her, or whether she likes me, or whether we had a fight years ago, or whether she’s supposedly a victim of mine or I’m supposedly a victim of hers or anything at all related to that. What matters is that she’s in trouble and I’m a person who gives a shit about whether people are in trouble. There’s very few people in the world that I would not lift a finger to save if they were in this situation. (And in those circumstances it would not be because I didn’t like them, but it’s really none of anyone’s business.) To refuse to deal with this because we had a falling out years ago would be horribly petty when her entire life is at stake.
Also I actually have experience with having similar accusations made against my caregivers to attempt to institutionalize me for life and take me away from people. Not a lot of people in the autistic community can say that. Having experienced that firsthand, of course I’m going to spread the word when it happens to someone else. I just wish I could do more than I’m actually able to do. Which is mostly signal boosting and hoping that the number of followers I have means that the word will get out and something will happen. I can’t even make phone calls, and writing letters would be close to impossible.
But I do fully expect someone to rail against me for getting involved in this, because who am I to step in or some bullshit like that. Who I am is a person who isn’t so fucking petty and heartless that I’d throw someone to the wolves just because they don’t like me. And if that’s a problem to anyone I’d suggest they re-examine their priorities. Will Sharisa and I ever be close friends? Likely not, there’s too much misunderstanding and bad blood between us for that. Do I give a shit that she’s had her communication devices stolen, had her caregivers accused of making her sick, and been imprisoned against her will in a situation she doesn’t want? Absolutely. Twenty years ago something very similar almost happened to me. I can’t not give a shit.
So please, if you want to bring up what happened between her and me ages ago, please just fucking stow it. And actually, nothing directly happened between her and me, what happened was a situation occurred involving
both of us, but that included no actual direct communication between
us, but that I nonetheless got blamed for. (1) [Note: I’m putting the footnote under a Read More, so that nobody actually has to read my account of what happened between us unless they want to. I felt that I should describe it just so people know that it was an ideological conflict rather than anything where either of us directly hurt the other one. But I don’t want to force anyone to read a rehash of a long-dead fight.]
At any rate – there’s more important things to think about than who likes who and who dislikes who and stuff like that. Like, saving someone’s life and getting them their freedom.
And in general, I see this all the time in the autistic community – people have a falling out, and then they base their actual political divisions and stuff on who is on whose side. (Which really sucks for those of us who don’t want to be on anyone’s side, but that’s a whole other thing.) And then they expect everyone to pick a side, and they expect everyone’s actions to mean they’re picking a side, whether or not they really are in the first place. And then it becomes a big Thing.
Like there’s situations where things like that matter. Where a conflict is more than just an interpersonal conflict. For instance, the same stalker who deliberately placed herself between me and Sharisa (which is a side specialty of hers, splitting up alliances and friendships on purpose, when she isn’t threatening people’s lives), is someone who I would not work with a million years because there are actual safety issues there. This is someone who threatens to kill people, that is not on the level of two people who just happen to not get along, it’s not even on the order of ordinary bullying. It’s in fact so far beyond the order of ordinary bullying that unless you’ve experienced something like it directly, you’d have a hard time believing it was possible to do the things this person has done to multiple members of the autistic community. And there’s a tiny number of people like that, in the autistic community, and in any community – people who it’s just too dangerous to work with them on anything.
But most of the time, when nobody’s trying to kill or otherwise generally ruin each other?
Most of the time, people should be able to put aside their personal differences when there’s a problem to solve. And even if two people hate each other so much that the two of them refuse to work together on anything, they should not try and force other people to pick sides, and to choose their ideological or political positions based on which side they pick. That’s just cruel and divisive and self-centered and wrong. People should know better than to play into that kind of thing.
NOTE: Be aware, again, that past the “Read More” is a description of the falling-out between me and Sharisa. It is only there so that you understand it stems from ideological difference over how inclusion should be practiced, rather than either of us trying to hurt the other in any way. And also because most people have only heard her side of it, because I don’t generally run around telling people the details of things like this. In reality, neither of us had any direct contact with each other the entire time things were going down, and I could not have changed things if I’d tried. I was too busy trying to keep myself safe on a basic physical level, to care about who was on what board at what time and all that. But at any rate, don’t click “Read More” unless this is actually something you want to know the details of.
3:59pm
August 3, 2015
“I’m pushin’ all the buttons on the radio
Tryin’ to find a song where I can hide
A song where I can hide”
— Wayne Parker
Okay it’s weird when you literally can’t find any lyrics for an album online, in this day and age. Although there’s one song on this album where I’d be glad if nobody ever had to hear it again. But the rest are really good.
And the bad one is actually a good song, musically speaking, it’s just inexcusably racist. Which I only discovered as an adult, because when I was a kid listening to this I was so young I didn’t understand enough words to know what was being said.
Be warned, if you ever listen to the song “Oklahoma Twilight”… you might want to just skip it, as far as I can tell it tries to set a love story between an over-idealized ~spiritual and close to nature~ Cherokee woman and a white military captain who saved her life during the Trail of Tears (it’s not named, but I strongly suspect that’s where this happened). Supposedly he found her frozen in the snow and ~as he warmed her flesh he warmed her heart and she became his wife~ and ew, and it’s just as awful as all that sounds.
Worse, she becomes so devoted to him that she kills herself when he dies, and even that becomes somehow idealized. (It’s sung from the perspective of their son.) You know a song involving Indians is going to be bad when it throws in lines like ~Sister Moon looked after her and blessed her with a child~ and then ~where the eagle meets the crow~ being a weirdly random description of the place where she killed herself, and… hopefully you know the kind of flowery close-to-nature-y lyrics I mean.
I hated finding out the meaning of the lyrics, because the sound of the music itself is embedded into my head as familiar and incredibly home-like and stuff, but then the song itself says things that make me sick to my stomach.
Oh yeah and how did the guy die? Killing Indians, as part of his military captain thing. And she was still supposedly so devoted to him she killed herself to be with him, because she’d promised she’d “always meet him down the line”. How does this make sense? Who would be so devoted to someone committing genocide against their own people, that they’d not only marry them and have their kids on purpose, but kill themselves when the guy dies so they can be with them forever? And then this is passed off as beautiful and romantic, something that the son wants to sit around remembering in the Oklahoma twilight. “Unfortunate implications” doesn’t even begin to cover this train wreck.
3:20pm
August 3, 2015
People who willfully choose to misunderstand the concept of strategic alliances in politics drive me crazy.
While you sit around and act self-righteous, other people get shit done.
“While you sit around and act self-righteous, other people get shit done.”
That statement applies to so many situations I see around me all the time.
3:19pm
August 3, 2015
Today is August 2nd.
Today is Romani Holocaust Remembrance day.
Today, in 1944, the Gypsy camp at Auschwitz was liquidated.
Today marks 71 years since brave Roma and Sinti lost their fight against the Nazi’s Final Solution.
Today marks 71 years without reparations or even acknowledgement of a Romani genocide during the Holocaust.
Today marks 71 years of continued state-sanctioned oppression and brutality.
Today, there is still Romani genocide.
Today, we still lose our brothers, fathers, and children to police and Neo-Nazi violence.
Today, we continue to be exploited for our labor and forced into slavery.
Today, we still live in ghettos and camps.
Today is August 2, 2015.
Today, our stones have become words and books and education.
And today, we will not stop fighting.
3:16pm
August 3, 2015
