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12:44am May 10, 2015
Anonymous asked: I was wondering, what is your opinion on the Rapid Prompting Method? There are many anecdotes that show it allowing non-verbal autistic people to communicate, but I have also read criticisms of it just being another kind of Facilitated Communication, and it is not really the autistic people communicating. Thank you for reading, and if you choose to answer this, thank you as well!

madeofpatterns:

withasmoothroundstone:

I think that like FC it has both great promise and great danger. I know that both FC and RPM can be life savers. I also know the potential for messed up things happening kids high in both. That is due to the collaborative nature of the communication, and can’t be gotten rid of, only worked around. Unfortunately most RPM and FC practitioners refuse to acknowledge the dangers and find ways to work around them as best they can. FC can be real and unreal and in between, so can RPM.

gingerautie:

madeofpatterns:

So, I’m somewhat exasperated about this. I don’t know the asker. I might not be being fair to the asker. This ask is reminding me of a thing I’ve been observing a lot though.

FC and vaccines both have a heavy symbolic role in Skeptic culture. Being for vaccines and against FC is how you prove that you’re a smart skeptic, and not a stupid loser who is taken in by quacks. And, often, to prove that you’re a real person who can really think, unlike the stupid people who aren’t capable of thinking.

Calling people ~sheeple~ and dismissing their capacity to think is the same kind of thing whether you’re calling yourself a skeptic or you’re calling yourself a homeopath.

Vaccines are vitally important and opposition to vaccines is baseless and dangerous. And it’s *also* dangerous to adopt vaccines as a matter of cultural signaling that you’re a real person. Because it goes along with saying things like “get off google and trust the smart doctors, who, unlike you, went to college and medical school and actually know what they are talking about.”

Which is terrible, dangerous advice. People shouldn’t just believe what doctors tell them, particularly if they or their kids have a disability. Doctors *aren’t* always right and it *is* important to think for yourself. *And* you should get vaccinated unless you have a condition that makes it inadvisable. 

And the signaling thing has really dangerous consequences. Most people who are using FC as a symbol of quackery and of them being to smart to fall for quacks *have no idea what FC is or how it works*. 

And it ends up just being a way to call people who can’t talk the r-word and to say you’re too smart to get fooled by quacks who claim that people like that can communicate. 

Which is why people call everything FC that involves a nonspeaking person communicating, even things that aren’t even a little related to FC. 

One of the people I saw denigrating FC as ‘puppetry’ or ‘ouija’ a few years ago thought the entire idea that any autistic person could communicate beyond their ability to speak was laughable.

I see that kind of comment about ~FC~ fairly regularly on stories about *any* kind of AAC. 

This is why random strangers think it’s okay to test me to make sure I’m the one communicating. Including what doubt to Turing tests. And yes I’ve flunked them before because of being too angry to type straight.