3:31am June 9, 2014

➸ This is how I feel when I read a lot of posts about the Judge Rotenberg Center.

Close the Judge Rotenberg Center. For the love of everything holy, close the Judge Rotenberg Center. Stomp it into the ground and dance on its fucking ashes. But. You won’t be done. You’ll just h…

So the above link goes to the permanent home on my main blog, of that really long post I wrote about why the Judge Rotenberg Center is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to closing down bad institutions, and how focusing on the “one bad institution” can make you lose sight of what actually makes an institution bad, and the fact that many of the “good institutions” could be doing far worse damage. (Someone referred to the damage done by “good institutions” as “subtle”. It’s not subtle at all, it’s grievous gaping wounds in your soul. It’s just not recognized for what it is. That’s different than ‘subtle’. Most damage done by 'good institutions’ is seen as simply mental illness on the part of the inmates, and that is seen as cause for building more and more 'good institutions’, which creates a nightmare scenario. Basically all your most utopian institutions are dystopias at heart, and many of them are capable of damage at least as bad, if not worse, than the institutions that everyone agrees are bad.)

Anyway, that’s the post’s new home, so if you want to direct anyone to it, that’s a good place to look. It’s extremely long, but I couldn’t think of a single idea that I could cut out to make it shorter. The problem with trying to explain things that people really have never heard of before, is that it takes a lot of… length, because you have to tell them what they think they know, explain why what they think they know is wrong, and then tell them what’s actually going on. And this is definitely an “everything you know is wrong” kind of post.