The Standard Review

The Paper Factory

Originally posted on Eds autism page May 19, 2008

Sometimes agencies are developed and maintained for no other reason than to allow a certain part of the population or advocacy groups that represent that population to feel secure that what they are seeking help with is being worked on.

I have heard these agencies referred to as paper factories. The idea is that as long as they produce enough paper that contains the right words they can postpone (too often what seems like forever) doing anything about what they were assigned to do.

In order for a paper factory to really work some people's needs must be met. Politicians and political groups that create these paper factories try to appease a part of the population that will provide them with support and they in turn will assure them that some parts of their population that the agency is supposed to serve (and by that I mean the most visible and loudest part of that population) are given all they need and sometimes all they want as well.

This creates security for not only the politicians who create these agencies, but also for the agencies themselves to survive as an agency. Then the "one hand washing the other" and "political backscratching" creates a situation where the majority of unwashed hands and unscratched backs are ignored, blamed, and sometimes descibed as the casuties of a necessary evil.

I remember hearing Bill Clinton speak extensively about how many student loans go unclaimed every year. By saying that, the point that he was trying to get across was that the government was doing their part but that people were not making the effort to get these loans. What he failed to explain was how many other reasons there were for these loans and even similar grants not being applied for. The reasons are many and there are many barriers that the US government knowingly creates to prevent these kinds of programs from being accessed by the majority of the population. As is the case with agencies, the way to secure the false claims of unlimited access to these programs is by parading the few who have been successful at using these programs in front of everyone else and have those people tell everyone else how great these programs are and how anyone can access them the way they did.

The way such things work (or rather don't work) for those claiming to be promoting education are very similar to the ways things are tried with in these agencies or paper factories that I'm describing. Unfortunately they have been successful at preventing real progress by promoting the illusion of success for too long.

This illusion is also very prevalent in how many public agencies are claiming to attempt to serve the disabled. Acknowledging neurological difference is one of the biggest threats to hiding the failures of agencies claiming to serve the disability community in the United States and hiding how the old system that has not worked for so many for so long.

If the US government truly accepted that disability was, in most (if not all) cases, an issue based on a lack of an appropriate job being offered to a person who is capable in ways that were not being acknowledged by the government and the public at large, they would need to change the core of their belief system and how they do things.

I don't believe that the US government is organized enough to create the massive conspiracies that many people claim. I do however think that it is safe to say that somebody somewhere who is making major decisions about government policy knows that such things such as glamorizing mood disorders and blaming hyperactive kids while feeding them amphetamines will reduce the population of those they see as unwanted without being blamed for it.

But how can autistics who are known to have a neurological difference be contained and maintained by the old-fashioned governmental paper shuffling rules and rulers? There will need to be a strategy to train the next generation of autistics to accept what the rulers (so to speak) describe as being their defects before the older autistics get the word out and spread their ideals that describe an "autistic culture".

Of course behaviors have to be given pathological reasons and treated with behavioral therapies. Some of those therapies will be brutal but can be justified by claiming that they prevent self injury if enough influencial people describe them that way.

The claims of outside sources such as vaccinations and inappropriate foods causing autism will allow for the growth of the industry described as "therapies" along with marketing more of the lethargy and confusion causing toxic drugs that promote the pharmaceutical industry.

The one thing that will make traditional methods of isolation and exclusion look bad and ultimately less effective is allowing people to believe that differences can actually be accommodated. Tradition is protected by describing things as dis ease so that ease can be marketed based on the claim that this ease (or answer to the dis ease) will come in the form of fixing, curing, and possibly eliminating differences that we find it to be uncomfortable and/or inconvenient to support or encourage.

The accommodations that have been provided for people with all types of disabilities within the United States to be more productive has increased in an alarming slow rate in comparison to the rate of expansion and development of the products and services that we as a nation offers. Our traditional paper shuffling and ignoring people who are seen as inconvenient has created nothing but an enormous debt and a larger part of the population than ever who is seen as unproductive. While it may be difficult for some people to recognize, these kinds of inappropriate and irresponsible management practices have a way of catching up with everyone.

Determining the Future of Aspergers and Attacking Character

This is the link to a story about the future of Aspergers.

The industry of psychology has been encouraged by parents seeking learning accommodations for their children and adults searching for answers to why people behave improperly.

Society can't be very accommodating when industry and the politics that support it are dependent on showing the worth of products and people at the expense of defining products and people that are worthless.

These comparisons are often justified by claiming that this is instead a competition to find what is best and what is true. Unfortunately, that alone wouldn't stimulate the economy. Therefore, comparisons are made without the necessity for any of them being ethical or good. It is only important that something or someone is described as bad so that something or someone else appears better and can therefore, be marketed.

Thinking as it relates to either pathology, mental illness, learning disability, or neurological impairment has always been described by the degree of impairment as it relates to the fleeting, unrealistic, and unattainable definition of normal and is supposedly used to define whether someone needs nothing but care or is in need of (or able to receive) some type of therapy.

Due to the market driven mentality that creates these comparisons based on nothing more than popularity, different degrees of impaired thinking can only be given so much aid. If the solution to the problem ever becomes too attainable people will see the true goals of the industry and their stock will plummet.

In whatever way that Aspergers is now used to define a higher functioning level of autism a similar word or diagnoses will ultimately replace that word if it's taken away. We who are attempting to better define a social model for autism are fighting against an industry and a mindset that the industry uses to create profits. Politics is an extension of industry so the same exclusionary and discriminatory methods are used there as well.

In order to create a product/person that people will buy a determination must be made of what people don't want and how to get people to invest in preventing or fixing what is considered to be the problem. In psychology this product is basically defined as abnormal.

The two leading industries who make decisions about autism are the must-be-cured/must-be-fixed disease model and the behavioral deficit model defined by ABA/PBS etc. Most of the decisions I see being made in politics will create profits for one of those industries.

Like all other definitions of thinking impairments, it will not be profitable to encourage "treatment"to this population based on their impaired skills. People don't typically buy based on practicality but rather on emotion and impulse. Peoples character needs to be suspected for people to get emotional enough so they will buy something. If people believed that people were being mistreated based on their level of skill, they would see the injustice more clearly and work to end it. Therefore, the marketing campaigns are designed to describe the spectrum of skills as a spectrum of moral character as it can be associated with appropriate behavior.

Claiming that people are diseased and can't help what they're doing, people are misbehaving and need to have that misbehavior treated, and people are too lacking in self-awareness and empathy to be given respect, makes up a lot of how people are characterized and dishonored by the psychology industry, and it provides the justification for the neglect and abuse.

The most important way I can think of to encourage the respect of autistic people is to expose how the industry's are profiting by using the most convenient and effective way they know to assign what they claim is our deficit of skills an association between that and ugly stereotypes about our character.

In order for people to encourage autistic people they/we need to get away from the unfair commercially driven standards which are used as reasons for treating this population so badly.

Don't the Privileged Deserve Privileges Too?

There seems to be a theme in many of what are considered life's most important questions. The discussions and debates which focus on those questions seem to be whether or not we are striving for perfection and sophistication at the expense of our humanity.

What doesn't seem to be discussed enough is who is benefiting most from our desire to become better and more sophisticated and in what ways is the general public manipulated into chasing an ideal in a way that will ultimately lead to our demise.

There is no longer any way to track what is considered knowledge about most subjects and what isn't by anything other than popularity. Popular opinion is what gets written about most and therefore, the exposure defines its validity. The subjects that matter to the people with the most power are what gets written about. However, what this population is concerned with is mainly privilege and therefore, basic human rights are ignored by default.

The best way to protect this privilege and keep the focus on privilege rather than what will best provide basic human rights for everyone is for privileged people to use their resources to persuade the belief in whatever they claim is true and to get people to strive for the unattainable in a way that they exclude and even abuse the basic human rights of their neighbor. Once a standard is set that the majority of people don't have the resources to achieve the people with the resources to manipulate the standards can manipulate and enslave this population.

The way to create discourse among these people is to teach them that privilege is just normal (which means they are abnormal) and to focus their attention on the claim that society is overly concerned with providing for the poor and disadvantaged who are unworthy due to their bad character. As long as people believe the advantages are earned those who have them are enabled to believe in and abuse their authority over those who don't.

I often hear from people who won't acknowledge what I write, unless I validate it in their eyes by borrowing credibility from someone who has written the same thing. Thinking is considered mysterious and dangerous to many people. This is how many serious issues concerning human rights are treated as nothing more than a superfluous game.

Unfortunately, due to people with the experiences I write about being so discouraged from feeling that they will have any impact on changing things and due to them not having the knowledge of how to speak in a way that people are accustomed to hearing so-called credible people talk/write, they are silenced. The association of people with these experiences creates a force that society can easily be attacked and broken.

This means that no culture can be established, no pride in that culture empowers them, and ultimately no progress is made in establishing the respect that people look for when determining who has rights.

Education is not only a privilege, but it is the privilege of knowing how to sell particular knowledge so that you and the people you learned it from are accredited and revered for salesmanship skills. The freedom of information has been hijacked by people who decide what is and isn't information.

Although most educational pursuits may have been liberating to others in the past it is now too often nothing more than an industry (as well as a part of and beholden to many other industries) who use their product as a means of oppression.

Many types of intellectual disability as well as other labels that describe how people are excluded from education are associated with ugly stereotypes and this population is silenced in a multitude of ways.

Neurodiversity as a movement cannot build and sustain momentum by showing how some autistics are able to achieve an education thereby separating themselves from the plight of the intellectually disabled. People showing how they can meet standards that are exclusionary is fine for individuals but true liberation of a group cannot come at the expense of other groups.

Education is also not just a road to academic pursuits. Many other vocations and achievements that socially validate people are based on the same exclusionary standards.

Too many subcultures are describing their oppression based on specific means that target their specific groups rather than accepting a broader systematized attitude and by doing so they often unknowingly adopt the same attitude. Of course people can change and of course humans are very resilient and able to overcome great obstacles. However, if the standards don't change for how standards are arbitrarily made and changed due to privileged whims  then whether or not any of us are liberated will be decided by the view of those with the resources who do not need to be concerned with our welfare.

Conflict of Interest

One myth that causes a lot of confusion and upset is that people are either competitive or lazy, or they are instead being passive/aggressive. Such motivations can only be attributed to people based on their behaviors and behaviors are too often narrowly judged by too few comparisons.

Once these judgments have been made in error they are too often accompanied by undue punishment. This is one reason that behavioral therapy can be so destructive even when it is described as constructive.

Due to the way that society is taught to chase trends based on emotion and impulse, independent thinking and the liberation it encourages is greatly discouraged. The ways we are taught to be consumers is heavily influenced by behavior modification methods.


Once people who for whatever reason are otherwise unable to determine their circumstances has their motivation judged by a narrow set of standards the ways they can be controlled and manipulated have few limitations.

It is very inconvenient to not be chasing what someone else claims that the majority wants (which is typically motivated by commercialism) or to want something so extravagant as safety and individual expression. It is typically fine for people to join in and advocate with others to attain something so that everyone can be judged by the same standard but to individually express what no one else seems to be in control of, even an expression that is an essential need such as safety or human rights, it is seen as aberrant and dangerous.

At the same time, evidence is growing to show the mental health industry as serving as the protectors of the public rather than wanting to provide therapy and rehabilitation to the population they label. The education that psychology provides is also meant to provide a standard of normal behavior that they know will exclude many people who society wants to dispose of. What are described as learning disorders can exclude people for racing thoughts, attention deficit, being overly excitable, and for generally not being able follow directions.

Thinking in specific ways and the ability to chase trends is very important in today's society. It not only determines what we buy and when we buy it, but it also impacts what products are chosen for international trade, what employers are looking for, and therefore, how we judge intelligence and even character.

The combination of quick prejudicial and unreasonable judgments about what people think along with a growing demand for a mainstream consciousness allows autistic people to be very vulnerable to abuse and neglect along with warehousing for the disenfranchised or for when all else seems to fail.

The best way I know for including more people and changing the thinking that leads to so much oppression is encouraging people to think independently and express independent thoughts. The narrower our judgments become about what people want and what their motivations are the more dependent we are on people who can make our decisions for us. Including more people who think different things or think in different ways is an important part of what will turn that around.

Incomplete Assignment

The judgment of how people think as in good vs. bad and smart vs. not smart is how the terms high vs. low functioning are justified.

When it comes to types of thinking (in three divisions of intelligence, pathology, and neurology) all labels are assigned in terms of severity by the amount which is determined that someone's thinking deviates from the norm.There is no diversity but instead only hierarchy.

People who are with the least resources will ultimately have all these divisions disappear and will be classified as simply having their thinking to be wrong and bad. The only reason the divisions exist in the first place is so that supposedly there will be therapy and/or accommodations but once someone has reached a level of convenient isolation from the public, they are all placed in one group who are simply seen as bad and a drain on public resources.

Sometimes that includes warehousing with walls and sometimes the warehousing that is isolating and abusive by the same institutional methods is without the walls.

Advocates often dismiss this population in the same way as public programs do. People who have attempted to create advocacy movements or a culture who speaks on a behalf of a group that includes this population have been every bit as exclusive.

Debates are held within a realm that discounts every statement made by them and demeans them as much and sometimes more than those who were considered their oppressors.

One of the ways people in the United States declare a democracy is by those who have the power to do so assigning a false label of power to oppress populations so that they will seem justified in further oppressing them.

It's sort of like planting a weapon on someone after they've been killed by someone else with a weapon. The weapon really never did them any good, but now it can be seen as though the killers aggression was justified by needing to protect themselves.

This is the largest group of people and yet those who claim to be helping them never encourage them to have independent thoughts or to share what they have learned from their experience.

For whatever reason they have become isolated, they are now seen as the craziest, the dumbest, or those with the greatest impairment in thinking for whatever reason in order to justify the original false hierarchy of judgments that divided them in the first place. My experience is that these judgments are due only to their circumstances and resources and serve only to "protect" the public from having to acknowledge their existence by conveniently making them invisible.

The moral justification for excluding this group has no basis in fact. Yet they are further labeled as having rights and being empowered in places where they are not. The claim is that the standards are the same for everyone, but it is not factored in how most people who have no way of determining our fate do not have anything like the level of resources as those who speak on our behalf.

The claims I have seen of creating an autistic community have not accepted any responsibility for avoiding this injustice as they move forward. Instead I see political pragmatism as being a guide for all decisions made on behalf of the autistic population. I sincerely hope this will change.

I have never seen a political effort to liberate this group. I have never seen a culture who aspired to include them. Many who are part of this group at this point will tell you that they don't care. Many are also accepting of the value judgments of others who see them as unworthy of encouragement. For this group to be encouraged the standards that exclude them need to be reviewed. The walls created by privileged peoples attitudes need to be torn down and then people will see this otherwise invisible group and hear from them as to what they want and need for true inclusion to occur.

Ghosts Matter; Autistic Inclusion

There are many reasons that so many people in our society are silent or are hidden. As I have written about in previous posts one of the reasons for this is that forms of media, which are considered mainstream encourage a narrow set of unattainable elite standards, which encourages people to want to achieve what they can't and are reminded of how they are seen as unimportant until they do. However, the main reason for this group's exclusion (which most other reasons can be attributed to) is the lack of encouragement.

It's not just that this population is fed a constant stream of images, which reminds them of what it takes to be considered important but everyone else in their environment is fed the same. This is how people draw conclusions about themselves as well as how they judge and often discount others. Oppression is most easily achieved when the oppressed accept standards that can be used to discount each other.

I'm glad that something I say on the internet sometimes seems to be important to others. If I was required to say these things by being directly in front of someone rather than writing them (even if I could string words together) many things about my appearance and my presentation would remind people of how unimportant my thoughts were. I have found though that there is enough lacking in how I present myself on the Internet also which reinforces the same standards.

I have heard that even the Internet may become much more exclusive soon. It seems to me that it would of course become that way. This means that more of a financial investment would be required to have a website that the general public can access. This means that this medium (the Internet) will become more exclusive, more commercial, and the commercial interests of those who run the websites will demand the same typical unattainable and exclusionary standards of those who present their message.

I don't believe that anyone ever thought that the Internet would be used much as a tool for liberating oppressed minorities. To whatever degree it has been used in this way I imagine this window of opportunity is quite limited by time.

I'm very appreciative of others who have spoken up on the internet before me about the things that I feel are important and those who continue to do so. I especially appreciate when they've done so in an environment where it wasn't popular.

What is considered truth and even the so-called facts that we use to determine what is logical are tainted by a set of values, which excludes the worth of most people.

At times when I was hospitalized, I would see someone who was being treated badly by a staff member fighting back in a quite unfashionable manner. I look back at that now, and I consider that to be advocacy. The only place that advocacy may have really changed things is in the mind and heart of the person who is being abused by helping them to realize that they didn't deserve to be treated that way. However, now for those who read what I write I can tell you that you also benefit from what those patients did because what I saw ultimately affects what I write. It also affects why I write.

Too often I hear people speaking of solutions to oppression by means, which are less-than-radical when they aren't considering how unreasonable that it is to expect in some places and by some people based on how they have been treated, and what they have been taught about their personal worth. If we wait until everyone meets the typical standards for expressing themselves before they are listened to those standards will continue to become narrower as will our version of the truth.

Whatever I have felt I needed to do to get heard is something that I hope others won't need to do. All the abilities I have, which are the result of extreme pressure and abuse (which pretty much includes all of them) are worth very little to me except for how I'm able to protect myself and others.

I appreciate hearing comments on blogs from people who are speaking up and speaking out more than I do from what is otherwise considered a formally educated opinion.

The autistic people that aren't being heard right now are most likely not formally educated nor do they most likely appear fashionable. Sometimes they are people who have put up the worst shit and told more often and more strongly than anyone, of how they are viewed by society as worthless. Typical standards are not likely to encourage these people and adhering to those standards is not likely to encourage them to begin to feel empowered and to speak out.

Without what I am suggesting autistic people will have a few (or only one) political groups with very narrow views who speak on our behalf and those groups will not be required to accept much if any alternative opinions.  Like most political groups the objective will be pragmatic and momentum will be protected at any costs to the population being advocated for. Autistic people will continue to be divided between the high functioning token performers and the low functioning who are considered to deserve pity and treatment by whatever means necessary.We will have one monopolizing commercial method of control used by schools (sometimes referred to as  educational supports) and all other public institutions which will define us as behaviorally challenged and will set and change the rules at will by which we are restrained and punished.  We will need to qualify our every statement and refer to how it qualifies as valid based on the statements of celebrities whose accomplishments set the standards by which we are judged.

This is the future I want to avoid. Autistics just like all minorities need to speak out with whatever means they have available. Even more importantly I hope those who can see how these voices have been suppressed will be encouraged to find more ways to include them. The standards and values we show appreciation for are what will determine our future and the typical standards we have now were not created with these voices in mind.Our inclusion won't be created without work, and if we want a society that includes more people we need to include those who are now excluded in the decision of what the society we hope for will look like.

Disabling Attitudes

Around 1980 the mood and attitude toward civil rights changed quite drastically in the US.

Along with more incentives and less regulations on business came a resurgence of the idea that better enabling the best and the brightest would also allow resources to trickle down to those who were really in need.

The ideals of unregulated capitalism support the old ideas of how charitable organizations pity disabled people rather than getting involved and accepting their difference in how that requires support.

The slogan of the disability community "nothing about us without us" is meant to help in the battle against the hierarchical notions that exclude disabled people. This means that a disability is not simply similar to a characteristic of our appearance but instead is something that defines how we need to be equally enabled like the rest of society. You can't truly be respectful of disabled people by showing their strengths in the way that they would commonly be revered in typical society at the expense of the people who are truly in need in of what are now considered atypical supports. You can't overcome ugly stereotypes of people by supporting values that encourage those people to be seen as ugly.

It is insulting to disabled people to focus on how some people can overcome the unrealistic typical standards that other disabled people do or how they are simply not the ugly stereotype. Doing that supports the standard rather than changing it. It makes disability advocates less unified and more competitive rather than encouraging and supporting people right where they are.

In the early 1980s the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) which has been shown to receive more than half of its funding from the pharmaceutic industry stole the independence from the population they claim to serve along with many of their opportunities to personally fight for their civil rights.

The majority of the participants in this so-called advocacy organization where parents of those affected rather than the people themselves. As the result of the parents domination within this organization NAMI was enabled to be highly instrumental in government decisions that were not in the best interest of those who are most affected by the laws.

Kendra's Law is an excellent example of this. Kendra's Law is based on the claim that schizophrenic episodes are likely to result in violence. The claim goes to support a law that allows family members, spouses, friends, and mental health workers to demand that someone be admitted to a psychiatric facility (which can begin with out patient care and forced medication)without their consent.

The people who are allowed to make these decisions are not the ones who have an understanding of what these facilities are like as a result of having been there. They would also not have the same understanding of how the police and mental health workers would be likely to abuse this law in ways that would justify their abuse.

The majority of people who understand how these laws directly affect this population would not support this law. The fact that most of these people don't vote is part of how they are further exploited. Supporting standards that give the best and the brightest the right to make all the decisions that affect them is extremely disabling.

This is Mental Illness Awareness Week and I would like to remind people that there is little power that this population has to influence decisions that are made about their lives. It is a perfect example of everything "about us without us".

People who advocate for the rights of autistic people need to be very cautious and remember how historical events have exposed our disabling attitudes and exposed what are methods of advocacy that have harmed rather than helped those whom they claimed they were serving.

When I hear people use the term "with autism" rather than autistic (and at the same time claim that they are neurodiversity advocates) in order to have their message more broadly heard and accepted it causes me to question their sincerity or at least their judgment. Jim Sinclair as shown the importance for using first-person language very clearly. To claim that it is more reasonable to join the majority is a way that people show their support for personalities and personal messengers and getting any message across rather than support for the real message and disrespects the experiences that have taught people why this is important. Ultimately disrespects and even exploits the people themselves.

It is not reasonable to support standards that glorify the pursuit of what is unattainable for most people. Neurodiversity advocates need to be careful of how they dilute what is important about the message at the expense of those whom it is important to.

I am often reminded of the following message and its importance in the struggle for human rights. It shows why we should be most concerned with not promoting exclusive standards. Supporting exclusive standards is simply exploitation. Someone's rights are protected at the expense of someone else's.


When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

The Allure of the Dragon

One of the most important ways to empower yourself and others who are categorized in the same way as you is to avoid being defined by people in authority who are not looking out for your best interest.

When someone you don't know does not appreciate you because of your style or lack of it, and you change in order to impress them, they have often taught you to appreciate a standard that makes them look better at your expense rather than encouraging mutual respect. When they then decide to change their style based on what is considered the new trend, and you again change yours to show yourself worthy of their pointless attention you have reinforced a standard of trend chasing where any relationship (however casual) of mutual respect and honor are ultimately impossible.

When someone says you are not as valuable as this other person who does or has something (which is a relative and fleeting standard designed only for exclusionary purposes), and you respond by attempting to show that you are more valuable because you do or do have that something, you are reinforcing that standard and aiding in the oppression of all those who will never be able to meet it.

When people fight viciously about an issue that they really aren't too concerned about they reinforce the standards of unattainable debating success which associates peoples worth so closely with what they think that it will ultimately consume and break everyone involved. Also, the back-stabbing, innuendo, and undefinable subtle attacks associated with many debates will never promote fairness or empowerment. These methods can only be used to tear people down.

All this is not just how people lose their individuality and their right to be individuals but this is how exclusive standards are praised and oppressive methods are reinforced for entire categories of people.

The people who wrote the criteria for the DSM-IV which defines autism had little or no experience in diagnosing people for better educational opportunities and more inclusion in their community. They are closely associated with the treatment industry. The dominant current standards this industry adheres to discourage products and services that are attainable and promote security along with a sense self-worth because they are seen as the enemy of economic stimulation. It is thought that we have to keep chasing the carrot and therefore, the carrot cannot ever become too attainable.

Based on the credit that is given to the typical ways of stimulating the economy, what do you think would happen if autistic people were empowered and given more educational and training opportunities? What if the dominant view that autistics need to be put in normalizing programs and classrooms was accepted as false and degrading.? Some very large financial investors would no longer be able to define autistics so that we can be exploited. They would have to find someone new to exploit. People need to be careful of how their views are influenced by elaborate ad campaigns.

It would be good for autistics and those who advocate on our behalf to be careful of personality entanglements that show the principles we believe in to be less worthy of respect. It's important to be careful of exclusive standards that alienate some autistic people for the glorification of other autistic people. In whatever ways we need to get involved politically, it's important to (as individuals or as a group) be careful of blind loyalty to political predators who will chew us up and spit us out.It's good to encourage diverse forms of involvement among ourselves and protect our right to question what is done in our name above all else.

Impulsively chasing dragons is how people who deserve respect lose their human rights. People who think they won't get burned are underestimating the beast and its fury along with the abundant resources it can afford to use against us.

Science and Thinking

When different minds are explored science is typically used to find methods of treatment which are based on preconceived hierarchical notions of what type of people should be preserved and promoted and what type shouldn't. Even if there is a clearly defined dysfunction of the brain that can be positively altered by scientific methods, there aren't many ways that anyone would know the best, safest, and the most efficient way to create such an alteration because the focus of the research is normalization and mind control of this population rather than their preservation or health.

Some have suggested that the dramatic increase in the diagnosis of learning disabilities, psychological maladjustment, and neurological disorders is the result of societal failure and a more toxic environment. Rather than look at whether or not this is true I believe it is more important to look at how different cultures have approached social reformation based on scientific research, what the goals were, and who the goals were designed to serve.

Faith based programs such as religion are certainly one way that is used to govern or reform a society. The practice of psychology as a whole (with all its inconsistencies and the variety of ways it's practiced) is basically faith based so it is a religion in that sense even though scientific research is used to promote it.

Within such religions, rules are established of right and wrong so that one type of behavior is praised while another is rebuked. Punishment (both physical and verbal) along with expulsion is a powerful motivator, but I don't think there is any more powerful motivator than shame. That feeling of shame goes a long way in keeping people in their place and out of the way.

Unfortunately, the goals of social reformation go much further than reducing crime and promoting ethics.The laws are used more in ways that shame is encouraged for societal misfits and unpopular subcultures. Having fewer acceptable expressions will help to promote the narrow set of products and services that have already proven to stimulate the economy. With fewer diverse expressions being recognized and accepted the companies that already have power will keep it as will the people who run them.

To treat learning disabilities schools claim to have special classrooms to help. The main focus of public schools however is to promote as many successful graduates as possible so the separation is really more geared toward providing the most likely to succeed with an opportunity to not be held back by being in the presence of these less capable students.

Deinstitutionalization for people with mental illness has provided little or no real changes in how this population is understood and treated, and therefore, it's not even a Band-Aid on the problem but more of a way to distract people from the more important issues.

Prescribing psychiatric medication is described as an art rather than a science because even if they could better understand the brain functions involved, the goal of mental health has always been to protect the public.

Science will likely not be useful for empowering people with learning impairments or psychological and neurological disorders as long as the promotion of certain products which are marketed with little or no regulations is what is mainly influencing the research.

The best scientists can do to help autistic people within such an environment is to refute bogus claims like "vaccinations cause autism" and "normalizing behavioral programs are needed to treat autism".

As long as the prejudices about autism have such a influence in what may be considered by some as "scientific research" or "scientific discovery" the human rights of autistic people will not be served by scientific thinking.

Fall in Line

Advocates of disability rights have taught many ways to honor a social model of what is considered a disability by the medical establishment. This has been of particular help to autistics who are constrained, misunderstood, and subjected to wrongful treatment that the medical model of autism encourages.

Certainly part of the empowerment that accompanies questioning and critiquing the medical model is encouraging more equal rewards for the accomplishments of disabled people in ways that society often overlooks due to the over emphasis placed on people's deficits.

Another part of the empowerment that I feel is most important comes from questioning and critiquing the core reasons for why certain accomplishments and certain abilities are determined to be valuable contributions while so many others that disabled people have are not given the same respect.

Encouraging equal rewards are certainly important, but it also needs to be understood that many societal schools of thought align those efforts with the encouragement of overcoming. While overcoming should always be respected, the claim that some have been able to overcome their circumstances is not used to encourage others to do the same as much as it is used to deny certain people equal rights by not changing inappropriate and unnecessary social views (and the public programs those views encourage) that people are required to overcome.

With the current statistics that show how much of the US population is uneducated and unemployed it is unreasonable to blame this many people for being unable or unwilling to meet current standards rather than finding ways to change those standards so that more people with diverse talents and abilities will be included.

The emphasis on the military industrial complex (which is seen as so essential to the US economy) is one way that shows how we "could" choose to honor equally profitable products and services that would provide better lives for more people but that isn't really the priority. Unfortunately, the encouragement of the view that there is a scarcity of funds rather than the view that shows how much  emphasis there is on allocating funds for special projects which are chosen by the corporate elite has led people to be unnecessarily competitive and exclude more people due to what are seen as their weaknesses. While this is often justified by people claiming that we need to tighten our belts and "thin the herd", it's the part of the population who is most in need of support who is asked to do the most compromising.

Whenever there is a mainstream political view that is obviously influenced by the marketing campaigns of corporations, I automatically suspect that it will not be geared toward helping the people who need it the most.

Many have complained that affirmative action programs don't empower people who take advantage of them because the effort that would be required otherwise would help to make them strong enough to create a better future for themselves and their families. I, on the other hand, believe that this promotes the false claim that an ample amount of equal opportunities without such demands being placed on schools and employers actually exist. Unfortunately, because too many other restrictions on the opportunities of this population are not understood, without such advantages, the cycle of oppression is further promoted.

It is also unfortunate that rather than looking at all of what causes this problem, people are too willing to simply make the decision between encouraging affirmative action or banning it. If the problem were better understood there would be a wider diversity of options that would provide solutions. Too often people's idea of leveling the playing field is limited to the only incremental changes they believe it is practical to ask for. The problem with this is that too few people are aware of the dangers that not making radical changes will cause.

The mainstream views of how to aid autistic people are extremely limited and offer few solutions. Autistic people are discouraged from offering alternatives and sharing our experiences. We are strictly  (and unreasonably) divided into two categories (low and high functioning), the focus of research is how to cure or alter autistic people rather than create more opportunities, and the ugly stereotypes are justified for how they affect the emotions of people who fund the research (the dominant emotion being pity).

The more narrowly we define what are acceptable contributions to our society the fewer contributors we will acknowledge and benefit from. This will indeed "thin the herd" but it is the practice of herding that needs to be abolished. Otherwise people will seek more ways to exclude people until it will be obvious to everyone that the standards for inclusion are so arbitrary and fleeting that eventually no one will be spared.