The Standard Review

Medicine for Social Anxiety

In order to market a product a desire for the product needs to be developed. Business today is much more about either establishing that desire or following the already established trend. Marketing practical products by appealing to people's need to have basic security is more difficult and less profitable.

The market driven unhealthy competition encouraged in most social situations creates anxiety that can be very advantageous to the industry that provides the products to help with that anxiety but most people are ultimately hurt by these enterprises. Their welfare is of little concern to these businesses because they worry about money now rather than long term security. What they have now gives them leverage for creating a future and marketing trends are difficult to anticipate.

A commercial on television for psychiatric drugs so clearly describes to me the creation of social anxiety, which then provides the product for the relief. The commercial targets people who are alone and yet not wanting to be by showing the pleasant social interaction in contrast. The voice at some point during the advertisement becomes more monotone as they describe the side effects of these drugs. They of course say nothing about the population of people using the drugs having a 25 year less life expectancy, the lack of research and efforts to make the drugs safer, nor do they mention how the drugs are tested first on the people who are least able afford them.

Using drugs, which lighten the physical and mental distress of social situations that are not directly controlled the FDA are considered by psychologists to be self-medicating drugs. Psychology is an industry who works together with the pharmaceutical industry to define normal vs. abnormal and then treats the deficits they define.

The drug industry, however, is showing no responsibility in association with this control.

This is a very interesting article: The Truth About the Drug Companies

Concerning US health care it says:

Drugs are the fastest-growing part of the health care bill—which itself is rising at an alarming rate. The increase in drug spending reflects, in almost equal parts, the facts that people are taking a lot more drugs than they used to, that those drugs are more likely to be expensive new ones instead of older, cheaper ones, and that the prices of the most heavily prescribed drugs are routinely jacked up, sometimes several times a year.

AND later it says this:


Furthermore, in one of the more perverse of the pharmaceutical industry's practices, prices are much higher for precisely the people who most need the drugs and can least afford them. The industry charges Medicare recipients without supplementary insurance much more than it does favored customers, such as large HMOs or the Veterans Affairs (VA) system. Because the latter buy in bulk, they can bargain for steep discounts or rebates. People without insurance have no bargaining power; and so they pay the highest prices.

AND:

But while the rhetoric is stirring, it has very little to do with reality. First, research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies—dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration, and smaller even than profits. In fact, year after year, for over two decades, this industry has been far and away the most profitable in the United States. (In 2003, for the first time, the industry lost its first-place position, coming in third, behind "mining, crude oil production," and "commercial banks.") The prices drug companies charge have little relationship to the costs of making the drugs and could be cut dramatically without coming anywhere close to threatening R&D.

Second, the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The great majority of "new" drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market. These are called "me-too" drugs. The idea is to grab a share of an established, lucrative market by producing something very similar to a top-selling drug. For instance, we now have six statins (Mevacor, Lipitor, Zocor, Pravachol, Lescol, and the newest, Crestor) on the market to lower cholesterol, all variants of the first. As Dr. Sharon Levine, associate executive director of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, put it,

   


             "If I'm a manufacturer and I can change one molecule and get           another twenty years of patent rights, and convince physicians to prescribe and consumers to demand the next form of Prilosec, or weekly Prozac instead of daily Prozac, just as my patent expires, then why would I be spending money on a lot less certain endeavor, which is looking for brand-new drugs?[4] "





The me-too market would collapse virtually overnight if the FDA made approval of new drugs contingent on their being better in some important way than older drugs already on the market. Probably very few new drugs could meet that test. By default, then, drug companies would have to concentrate on finding truly innovative drugs, and we would finally find out whether this much-vaunted industry is turning out better drugs. A welcome by-product of this reform is that it would also reduce the incessant and enormously expensive marketing necessary to jockey for position in the me-too market. Genuinely important new drugs do not need much promotion (imagine having to advertise a cure for cancer).

A second important reform would be to require drug companies to open their books. Drug companies reveal very little about the most crucial aspects of their business. We know next to nothing about how much they spend to bring each drug to market or what they spend it on. (We know that it is not $802 million, as some industry apologists have recently claimed.) Nor do we know what their gigantic "marketing and administration" budgets cover. We don't even know the prices they charge their various customers. Perhaps most important, we do not know the results of the clinical trials they sponsor—only those they choose to make public, which tend to be the most favorable findings. (The FDA is not allowed to reveal the results it has.) The industry claims all of this is "proprietary" information. Yet, unlike other businesses, drug companies are dependent on the public for a host of special favors—including the rights to NIH-funded research, long periods of market monopoly, and multiple tax breaks that almost guarantee a profit. Because of these special favors and the importance of its products to public health, as well as the fact that the government is a major purchaser of its products, the pharmaceutical industry should be regarded much as a public utility.

Autism Speaks is an excellent example of how industry is making decisions about autistics without autistics. The charity Autism Speak's demands are consistent with how the drug industry creates profits. However, with what I am reminded of in this article, the drug industry that is tied to psychology industry is not only deciding who we are and how we should act (along with how we are acting wrong), but they are designing what and how we think in ways that serve the industry's welfare.

Of course allowing industry to design and implement a behavioral modification program such as ABA/PBS in public schools and other institutions where people have been diagnosed as behaviorally unfit would give a great deal of authority to that industry. People need to be very careful before allowing that industry to assume such authority.

We all aren't going to be politicians and political policy is decided by industry profits in ways that will lesson our rights. Autistic people aren't being heard and our exclusion is based on the same standards that have always excluded us. It's impossible to judge each other by mainstream standards that ultimately exclude us and rise above those standards at the same time. Either we change the standards, or we won't fit. The compromises aren't practical.

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.

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.

Individuality & Respect

 

This is cross posted at Turner & Kowalski

Individual people and individual thoughts are very important to recognize and respect in order that a civilization that still includes ethical boundaries is protected from corruption. No group can effectively fight for the civil rights of some at the expense of the civil rights of others. The number one concern of any civil rights group needs to be the encouragement of individuality. Otherwise their message will contradict itself.

The denial of civil rights is based on exclusive standards that empower some at the expense of others so in order to combat this it won't work to discourage individuality and individual expression. Individuality is validated when it is seen as diverse rather than being ranked by typical hierarchical standards.

A society that discourages regulations can allow power that does not need to be earned and the corruption that follows it to exclude and even destroy those who cannot or choose not to defend themselves by unethical means. This denies people their civil rights by encouraging people who have attained and established power by unfair means to continue in their oppressive ways.

Those who are considered disabled have often had their rights denied because others chose to (in a way they often call charitable) reinforce the standards by which disabled people were oppressed while at the same time claiming to be helping them. Doing this seems to suggest that somehow oppressive means are not systematic in nature and that what needs to be overcome is simple. It is also a way of validating the standards that exclude most disabled people by showing how their favored few are worthy of the elite's acceptance. This ultimately excludes more people than it includes.

Oppressed people are exploited and otherwise used to support a very few with their excessive consumption. The only way that this consumption is ever justified is by how people who would not otherwise be employed are given the opportunity to benefit by serving this insatiable apatite.The justification isn't valid because this servitude displays and promotes a class system that continues to oppress the majority. People are formally and subtly educated to believe in revering specific symbols of class status that are unattainable to them. They are not taught to be the best that they can be and to accept themselves as valuable. All they see are unattainable images that discourage their security and self-worth.

Once people understand and are educated in the way that they unknowingly promote standards that exclude and demean them, they will hopefully stop fighting against each other by either claiming they deserve assistance while someone else doesn't, or that they are further up the ladder of being someone that deserves respect due to status they have fairly achieved. Either way, this is reinforcing standards that exclude all of us.

In the US where commercialism is king, celebrities and the commercially advantaged are our royalty.The disability community has recognized that oppression is the result of a set of values and has attempted to assert themselves as who they are rather than attempting to present themselves in ways that compliment exclusionary standards. This unapologetic expression is done as a sign of unity and respect for each other.

Since autistic people have now been recognized for being able to assert themselves against their own oppression some seem to want support from the disability community while at the same time separating themselves as better than "those" people.

The disabling ways that society treats autistic people are now being fought in commercial and political arenas by a movement defined as (you guessed it) neurodiversity. It is an unfortunate trend among some within this movement who not only don't want to be associated with any type of disability, but they don't want to be associated with other autistics whose abilities are less respected.

They use words like Aspie, spectrumite, and spectrum people, which show (in ways they may not be fully aware of) how some autistics are more worthy of respect than others in a similar way that broader exclusive standards show admiration and respect for one group at the expense of another. Anyone without a valid societal classification is often seen by the majority as deserving of charity and sometimes even unethical treatments.How society interprets these terms is most important in how they are publicly used.

I can't imagine any other group defined by their classification of disability aligning themselves politically with groups that encourage a treatment that is as harmful and disrespectful to those within that classification as ABA is to the autistic population.

When such a group also demands absolute solidarity and will target and exploit any individual who is seen by how their questions and concerns may compromise the momentum of this group, they are hurting themselves and their cause. Individuals who are only seeking validity often have their valid concerns dismissed and/or attacked by those who are seeking power and who will only regard any dissent from their following as a threat to that power.

A civil rights group that goes by the name Neurodiversity and yet discourages individual expression along with only listening to people who have attained celebrity status (in their group or the broader public) is a bit of ironic to say the least.

Exclusion is no more advantageous for a civil rights group than it is for an exclusive broader public. Exclusion is not practical and the few that may be served originally will ultimately be hurt just as bad.

If people allow for and participate in unregulated and unethical methods of thinning the herd and promoting exclusive and elitist standards they need to be very careful to recognize, they too will ultimately be rejected by the set of values they have encouraged.

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.

Not Rethinking Autism

Autistics Speak Video

This video is soooo bad. This is NOT a parody. Promoting diversity means advocating for new more inclusive standards. There is nothing new about the standards promoted in this video.

Their message is clear. There is no nuance or subtly involved and no indication of this being a parody. The video says that we are using sex-appeal and celebrity as tools to promote what really matters. It states that people who sell pseudoscience and have personal agendas are benefiting by further marginalizing and disrespecting autistic people BUT their sales technique must be copied in order to combat that marginalization and disrespect. The problem is the sales technique not only sells the product, it sells a set of values. In this case, the values being sold go against all that those who have struggled for their civil rights stand for.

This video is not promoting civil rights for autistics or anyone else. They are promoting elitism for a select few autistics. There is nothing new about having other people who display the achievement of meeting all the bigoted and prejudiced standards speak for those who don't. This is "about us without us" at its worst.

Nothing about this video challenges typical ablest standards. There is no ethical or moral code promoted here. This is cut-throat crass commercialism at other peoples expense.

This message gives the impression that sexuality is for a select few who are able to follow the latest trends of the rich and famous. They don't just not show the autistic people while their words are being spoken, they show close-ups of the crotches of models in tight fashionable jeans while the words of autistics are being spoken.

Few will ever meet the standards this video promotes while many waste abundant resources in the attempt. That's how exclusivity is protected. If people believe they have or can attain the resources needed to make the cut and be included into the small minority of people who are glorified in this video, they need to reevaluate the odds and fight for more inclusive standards. It would be even better if they would  just be civil and fight for more inclusive standards to avoid excluding everyone else.

There really is no rethinking autism in this video at all. It displays the method for marginalizing and excluding people that has been around all along. Repeating such mistakes are a bad idea.

Enemies of Autism Speaks

Autism Speaks new video

It's very clear that the intent of Autism Speak's latest video is to create fear and hatred of autism. Unfortunately there is little if any attempt to separate autism from autistics. They even went so far with their attempt to put a face on autism by using a horrifying voice to represent autism that sounds like the devil himself.

The people making this video are not overcommers at all. The focus of what they claim is so difficult to contend with are autistic people and an attack on someone (or even something) that you don't try to understand is a cowardice act.

They are not breaking down any walls but instead are creating them. This video shows the harsh realities of how charitable organizations promote their cause at the expense of those they claim their cause is supposed to serve. The act of people being assigned worth based on what is seen as their capabilities is the real enemy of all civilization. People who don't recognize this are making enemies of disabled people rather than encouraging them or providing them any aid.

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.

In Your Dreams

The struggle for autistic rights is often dismissed as unimportant or as a just another diversion from the "real" autism "crisis".

Of course it is those involved with the autism hysteria that are diverting attention from the practical matters and there is some perverse need for some of them to blame advocates of neurodiversity for the chaos in their lives.

I personally am quite accustomed to having my disability advocacy be used by differently-minded others as the catalyst for the problematic issues they are dealing with but individual responses to those who require me to validate my every expression seems to be futile at best.

The easiest way to dismiss human rights is by promoting the necessity of aggression and the validation of one group of people or type of person ruling supreme over another. While it may seem completely impractical that anyone needs to battle over human rights, unfortunately too many privileged people are too driven to recognize other peoples needs.

Even more important than educating everyone on how to survive is the need to teach people the value of human existence and the futility of war. Instead, unfortunately, the importance of war is subtly taught in numerous ways.

Drama is too often the way that people define their role in society as being sophisticated. There is some twisted logic that encourages the belief that if we can complain that we don't have certain luxuries it at least it goes to show we deserve them.

The problems with this stem from how our self esteem is affected when we can't get what we have been taught that we need or what "worthy" people deserve.

When these values are projected on to others a cycle of disrespect is created. When public policies are designed based on market-based views of who a person should be, what they should be able to do to honor marketing based aspirations, and what they should own to increase profit and encourage the demand for particular products, it's sure to follow that this is how peoples worth is decided.This of course leads to some people being seen as disposable.

The main reason people are disenfranchised from the basic resources they need to survive is because the people who have an abundance of those resources use them to design a society that only profits themselves.When people accept consumerism and the myth of ownership as reality it ultimately leads to determining human worth by the arbitrary standards of characteristics which of course then leads to objectifying people, usery, and dependency issues.

Neurodiversity is basically just about acceptance. The trolls who stalk neurodiversity blogs (whose comments are deleted on this blog) seem to be terrified of acceptance.

They seem to never really experience any reality because they attempt to eliminate (by whatever means necessary) any characteristics in others (or the others themselves) that make them uncomfortable. When their unrealistic expectations are not met and their fantasy world is further compromised, they tend to repeat the behavior that created their trap to begin with.

These trolls deny themselves the quality experiences that include being with autistic people because they mentally block or attack these human traits that upset their fantasy. Their fantasy world is where their fleeting insecurities demand the perfection which they change the standards for whenever they are uncomfortable. It may seem to them that this protects them from dealing with what they don't like but the shield also prevents them from truly experiencing any kind of quality interaction with anyone.

They are continually betrayed by their fantasy because their obsession for perfection causes them to focus only on what they hate. It continually consumes all of who they were which was once kind and generous as the reality of how they can't meet their own strict standards closes in on them more every day.

The key to remember for people who are exposed to these trolls is that this form of escapism was once sold to them as a way to avoid  having to deal with their own imperfections, the imperfections they saw in other people, and the problems that cause them to be interdependent with others. It's important for people to remember this so they don't fall into the same trap.

The allure of this fantasy is that more people buying this illusion will lead to a more perfect society. That won't happen because when people seek perfect performances in themselves and others, they inhibit the emotions that help them enjoy life. If people aren't enjoying life no one's performance will mean anything to them.