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.

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.

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.

Chasing Validity

Chasing the valid opinion or trying to determine how others will decide what is the most popular opinion is such an exercise in futility. As long as the unreasonably justified methods of such determinations are not honestly evaluated and a fairer and more honest system of equal justice is demanded so much of what we do becomes useless.

Relativity is usually just an excuse for drama and games of better than less than. It needs to be understood by more people that being in the right place at the right time and absorbing the most popular view typically creates nothing more than delusions of grandeur.

Having what you say be seen as valid often has very little to do with being right or saying what is true. It's usually more of a political game or an arbitrary declaration of what events are historical and what is judged as hearsay due to not enough important people declaring it worthy of their attention. The objective of these games is for enough people to join the group for whatever reason in order to overpower the another group they oppose. Once the total focus of a group is to discount what another group says or even one person whose focus is to discount what another person says often the other views that need to be discussed are similarly discounted due to the blindness which comes from seeking the thrill of victory at all costs. Within such an environment, all variations of opinion along with all efforts dissolve into the wave of the mainstream consciousness.

This mainstream consciousness is encouraged by ugly stereotypes that polarize people's opinions
 so that the standards and the people who are already in positions of power as a result of those standards doesn't change. This begins by people being defined as either for or against something or someone. The fate of an idea or even the person who brings up the idea is validated based on the personality of the presenter. To whatever degree this is inappropriate and harmful to other groups having to fight for their civil rights, it is crucially detrimental to autistics who have to do so.

What is unpopular and uncomfortable about autistic people did not only come from the label itself. Instead it is how the characteristics themselves have traditionally made people uncomfortable that created societies need to create a label in the first place. Trying to give credit to the functioning levels of autistic people will continue to isolate and hurt rather than help everyone's cause as long as functioning remains an arbitrary value judgment attributed to the people themselves.

When people try hard to not qualify their statements in an effort to allow an idea to either be seen as valid or invalid based on nothing more than the merit of the idea itself, often people are prone to not be able to suspend their typical and unfair methods of judgment.

An experience demands ownership. There are as many different ways of describing the very same experience as there are people who have the experience. Because no two people can have the same experience the experience itself becomes relative. The trouble is therefore, in the judgment of how others determine the validity of the experience. Because societal rules demand certain types of evaluations of a person's validity based on the unreasonable and unfair classifications and assumptions, fighting against those rules is really the only way to liberate an otherwise marginalized group of people. Attempting to do that by any other means is just a part of the same typical cycle of oppression, which unfairly gives more to those who already have power at the continued expense of those who don't.

However the societal rules that are now in place came into existence it was not done fairly.  It was also not done without giving power to people due to nothing more than their name, social status, or how their particular set of skills (often a matter of personable and personality skill) were arbitrarily given status that would be undue to them in another place and time.

Autistics are an oppressed group. Not just because some are less capable than others or just because some can pass societal standards when others can't. It's also not necessarily because some are employed and others are described as dependents. The main reason is that what autism represents is something that makes people uncomfortable. It doesn't need to make people uncomfortable and all that would be needed to overcome this discomfort is by the same means of understanding and liberating any oppressed group.

This understanding comes from evaluating why the discomfort and therefore, the disrespect exists. It is because people don't ask why certain aspects of people make them uncomfortable that people are marginalized and disrespected due to unrealistic assumptions. That is where opinions are truly made valid or invalid because taking on honest inventory of those discomforts and adjusting ourselves accordingly is what makes people whole and makes us a whole society rather than fragmented by unrealistic and unfair judgments. With fair unprejudiced evaluations, people would naturally be accommodated without all the unfair treatment that typically goes along with that.

The way the United States has traditionally learned to expediently and conveniently deal with unwanted populations is by a method of warehousing. Warehousing (or institutionalizing) provides a way of categorizing people similar to the franchising principles of McDonald's, the auto industry in the way that Henry Ford designed, or the construction practices of the Hoover dam, the interstates, the railroads, and some of our largest bridges. Much of the surviving population who was on this land before the European invasion is today warehoused on land that is sometimes glamorously referred to as "reservations". Many of the surviving populations who were enslaved are warehoused in what are glamorously referred to as ghettos and housing projects. If you look at the way the residents of New Orleans were treated by what was glamorously described as a natural disaster, you will further see an example of the methods the United States uses to herd its most unwelcome citizens.

Every time a decision is made in the United States that does not factor in the well-being of everyone who is affected by that decision, the warehousing principles are again reinforced as to how we do things. I can't think of a phrase that I find more offensive than "that's just the way things are". Every bit of the way things are would change tomorrow if everyone were given a vote. The problem is that this opportunity at this point can only come with encouragement. Without this it is no opportunity at all.

If all opinions were judged equally based on their own merit with personalities not be the deciding factor we would have freedom of thought. Until that happens, we don't have the right to free thinking.

The part of the autism community who is judging expressions based on how they assess which is the most important expression are the ones who are ultimately creating more marginalization, more institutionalizing, and more oppression of autistic people.

When people claim that we as the autistic community should try harder to get along, they often reinforce the validity of the already bad typical standards which create the biggest division of all. The attitude expressed in this validation is ablism. Ablism is the pathway to warehousing. Warehousing for autistics will come in the form of mental institutions and the public programs (including behavioral programs) designed for people who have supposedly been "freed" from institutional living. These opinions are as oppressive as the forces that result from them. Encouraging those opinions is how people have been oppressed all along.

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.

Convenience and Expediency Rarely Promote Human Rights

Too often when people speak about human rights they are speaking of them as if the words were a brand name rather than what the words really mean. People do that sort of thing when they speak of Kleenex and mean facial tissue or Band-Aid and mean adhesive bandage.

It is all too common that we speak for people when making political decisions rather than speaking with them. In the United States, this is the result not only of the fewest people being the ones that vote, but it is also a result which comes from the extremes of capitalism and the unregulated and therefore often unethical hierarchical standards which extreme capitalism has been shown to promote.

I have heard it said that people who aren't in step with the ideals of pragmatic politics and the "reality"which people who operate within this realm demand are egotistical, and what they say is nothing more than a superfluous distraction to people who are "really" trying to get something done.

The problem with this is that what gets done claims to be for many people who have no say in the matter whatsoever.

I was recently reminded of this when I read about the protest from the disability advocates who are part of the group ADAPT. I strongly believe that many things that this group has accomplished would not have been accomplished without the organization and diligence of ADAPT. That is not at all the same though as this group or any other political group doing their best to make the changes that are needed.

In discussing the recent health care system in the US, I have heard some suggest that an unregulated market would ultimately create an ethical system. The problem I see with that is that there are no allowances for the fact that most people in the United States do not speak up and much about the current system and our culture strongly discourages them from doing so. A truly free system would make changes based also on what these people have to say and would therefore, not be an exclusionary system (as it is now) regulated in a way that was even harder to define and therefore, harder to combat.

I think this is very important to realize also when discussing disability rights. It's not just a problem due to those who are most capable of being involved being the ones who get involved and change things, but this problem is also the result of how our hierarchical system of doing things promotes its own brand of exclusion within even the disability rights' community.

Most all of what I write about on this blog is based on the fact that most people are excluded from having any say in the standards and laws that affect them and the reason for the majority of this is not due to physical limitations or even what is claimed is their legal right to vote and have a say in these matters. The reason is that the culture itself strongly discourages them from doing so even to the point that I would say the culture prohibits them from doing so.

This is very important to remember when considering disability rights and when considering what laws are being challenged by disability rights advocates. ADAPT is now challenging the state of Georgia's refusal to close their institutions. Institutionalization is a major problem in the US and the attitude behind the problem is what needs to change.

Institutions have always included autistic people.There are many reasons why autistic people have some of the worst civil rights violations in such places. Generally, everyone from the broader group of people who are most affected by the problems that occur in these human warehouses (not just autistics) have always been the least heard of any group when these problems are politically addressed. Having more of these people speak out in a way that they can better determine their own fate is the most pressing issue regarding these problems. Solidarity just for the sake of closing the institutions continues to discourage the more in depth look that is vitally needed.

The political pragmatism of groups claiming to aid with these problems contribute most to this population's silence. In cases where institutions have been closed down for dehumanizing conditions and treatments some of the patients (or who would better be defined as inmates) have been sent into other horrifying situations due to the attitudes that were present in those institutions not being addressed along with not addressing how they would be expressed in places that were considered alternatives.

I believe based on the unwillingness political groups to listen to alternative views (mine and others, which are unpopular) that don't fit into their political agenda that most people who are most affected by the political decisions regarding institutionalization would not be listened to by them either. The restraints this type of political pragmatism has caused has really hurt this population for a long time, and I find it quite disturbing that their voice is not respected.

There is a reason that people do not hear from this oppressed group and that is the what I have always felt was most important to address on this blog. In a similar way, those who are most affected by ABA programs (including ones such as PBS) are the least listened to regarding decisions affecting their lives. It is not good enough to say that these people don't have an opinion or to accept that a broader set of societal ills is the reason that oppressed groups don't feel empowered enough to speak up. In order to make a real difference, we need to place the majority of our efforts on empowering these people and hearing what they have to say rather than simply accepting that the oppression caused by societal ills must be pragmatically accepted in political matters.

VERY IMPORTANT:It also needs to be understood at this point that the way people among this group  may originally respond when being asked will not be nearly as polite and refined as typical standards demand of those who are allowed to voice their opinions.

The institutions must be shut down. Those walls have created and continue to sustain a very ugly culture of abuse and shame.There would be more than enough power to also change the prevailing bad attitudes that will be present in what are considered alternatives if more people who are directly affected are empowered to speak up and get involved.

The attitude behind political pragmatism has prevented the acknowledgment of the voices of people who are most affected by the decisions these groups make, and they aren't encouraging these people to speak up.

This is the same attitude which promotes the myth that adding people to a spectrum of people (as some have claimed is the case with the autism spectrum) who need aid will allow people who CAN speak to do so for those who CAN"T. Actually, can and can't have never been the problem. The real problem is how standards discourage these people from participating. I recently addressed that problem here in my post about a Rethinking Autism video.

For example, people advocating for disability won't do anything to help change Autism Speaks by getting them to hear from autistics who are the most capable of sounding good by typical standards. The only way we can really help is by showing them how many voices are being ignored because they aren't being acknowledged due to the problems that result from typical standards. Otherwise the standards won't change and all liberating efforts will be useless.

To further promote the ideal of "nothing about us without us" I would hope that ASAN also (now speaking politically on behalf of the Neurodiversity movement) will be more willing to listen to a broader diversity of people so that their claims of supporting ideals of inclusion and neurodiversity will not be regarded as hypocritical.

Exclusion is a movement. Able-ism is systematic exclusion. People fighting for civil rights cannot afford to allow these bad set of values to determine our direction. If we do it will produce the same bad result as it has in the very society that we want to change.

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.