The Standard Review

Tools

The public education system in the US was designed to create dependence on the system as being the ultimate authority. It is therefore, not necessary to have everyone be educated in the belief system they designed for it to be secured as a powerful tool. It is only necessary that those who are educated in this way to be the  best able to dominate those who aren't.

Once the tools of manipulation and domination are created compliance to a set of nationalistic goals is much easier to demand. Nationalism encourages laws that are void of reason. Nationalism is dependent on militarism so militarist virtues are what a nation with empirical aspirations will encourage the public to learn. Building an empire depends upon aggression so those who are deemed to be the most successful in a culture with these goals will be the ones who are best able to intimidate and/or manipulate the most people.

Many academics absolutely believe that they do and should own, regulate, and police the Internet and any other method the public may use to communicate. The purpose for understanding and helping others to understand has been completely obstructed by academic debates where the winner of the competition that academics design and regulate can reinforce their illusion of superiority.

Many of the so-called skeptics within the autism wars I find on the Internet seem to reinforce an ablest value system. Many are constantly using names to insult people's intelligence and attempting to show how autistic people already have superior intelligence based on typical standards. This is self-defeating and contrary to the goals of neurodiversity.

Insults that describe selfishness, ignorance, self-serving attitudes,etc., are also meaning stupid, dumb and retarded. These insults are typically used to describe someone who is thinking independently from the established norm. Therefore, using such insults in this way support the established norm, which ultimately restricts diversity and independent criticism so all the problems with the established norm are not only not solved but the evolution of intelligence is stifled.

As I said in my previous post Mindectomy, the control of the condescending and manipulative discipline known as behaviorism fits very well into further establishing the US public school systems as a military training ground. Using such a value system to train public students will further normalize or otherwise exclude any diverse and/or independent thinkers.

All the social programs that have been described as progressive in the public school systems have claimed to encourage inclusion. However, this inclusion is meant to promote socialization by way of either normalizing or excluding the students. This ideal is not contradictory to the encouragement of further institutionalizing dissidents and social outcast that could not otherwise be controlled.

The failure of our other forms of institutionalization are now encouraging a firmer control by the federal government on the behavior of school children so the children are taught early how to be obedient to the state.

As terrible as I'm sure the Judge Rotenberg Center is, it is not operating independently from how behaviorism is being practiced in other institutions. Using words of propaganda such as "positive" and "support"does not in any way show how the form of Applied Behavioral Analysis known as Positive Behavioral Support will use restraint and seclusion in any safer or more humane way.

Industry depends on repeat business and government contracts ensure industries the ultimate authority to create and demand the only rules that govern them.

In the same way that John D. Rockefeller created a monopoly of Standard Oil by controlling every stage of the production and distribution of its products the US government understands very well the importance of controlling every aspect of the industry of public education.

Science and mathematics are languages, which are created to understand the nature of our relationship to the environment. Since very few people are given an opportunity to understand these languages and therefore contribute to the expansion and depth of understanding these languages are claiming to promote, everyone's understanding of that nature is severely limited.

In the same way that industry in the United States has promoted institutionalization, behavior modification works as well at promoting consumerism as it does in neutralizing the progress of our educational system and making it more exclusive. Unless we want our nation to be nothing but an empire protected by a strong military, we need to consider other ways to engage people in learning that are less manipulative and domineering. If freedom and democracy are the goals then intimidation will not serve as an effective tool for accomplishing our goals.

Competence Means Conformity

Money and political power must remain the determining factors for a person's acceptance into society in order for those who have the most to continue to dominate. Competence outside of what the people who have these decide is a threat to their security. The public security is designed to depend on their leaders ability to make decisions for them so alternative thinking and diverse thinkers must be discouraged to keep things in order.

Enough money will turn the political winds of change so that anyone or any marginalized group can then be validated. The reason political power is allowed to be bought is because people don't feel empowered enough to exercise the freedoms they have in order to protect them. Anything that discourages that empowerment will help to prevent the changes that are needed.

The few people who are now controlling the currency exchange, the food industry, the industry that provides mind altering drugs, and even the judicial system that determines who will be institutionalized are using this control to design people and encourage a set of values.

Claiming that political policies won't teach people to be respectful are responding to a question that is misleading. The political policies are designed to show the public who should not be respected. Once everyone is included into a marginalized group the policies are tools to demand conformity. ( I wrote about that here in my post about identity politics)

Each marginalized group demanding that they are treated worse than another or encouraging the multi-labeled and severity-is-more-deserving-of-aid approaches to gaining security keeps everyone fighting and secures the well-established power structure.

Unregulated industry has allowed greedy people to desensitize and ultimately dehumanize the public. For an industry to be successful they will often stress the importance of uniformity in their product even more than the quality of their product. Once they have established a market for their product and a method for production, so they can demand a narrow uniform type of behavior for their employees to follow, the employees are as disposable as the inanimate object they are producing.

Unfortunately, this industrial thinking is encouraged in the industry of psychology and psychological labels are used to show how nonconformist are less worthy of dignity and respect. Psychological labels are too often the product that encourages those who received the labels to also be nothing more than products.

The more production oriented the thinking of consumers of products and producers of products becomes the more creative thinking is discouraged and people who are prone to think in diverse ways are declared incompetent.If neurodiversity isn't challenging the way that conformity is shown to be competence and the lack of this competence is made to be a disability then it is just a meaningless word.

This meaningless word is then used to encourage the presence of an ideological agenda that serves only a few select autistics and their families. Not only will this not provide more support for the autistic population but advocating for it in this way will support the ideals of the larger political agenda that is preventing us from being heard and our needs from being met.

If autism is going to be seen as a diversity in thinking rather how the medical industry presents autism with their medical model, we will need to show the contrast between the two.

As Kowalski has shown very well in this post some blogs that show how autistics are denied the advantages of unbiased scientific research are encouraging how that research remains biased. The bias is based on how autistics and other diverse thinkers are judged by narrow typical standards and demeaned for our nonconformity.The conforming nature of slurs against intellectual disability is contradictory to empowering people who are marginalized and discriminated against because they are different.

In order to truly encourage the rights for diverse thinkers and other marginalized categories of people, it's important to keep the broader picture in mind of what types of standardized judgments we've been taught that cause the oppression to begin with.

Superior Thinking Traps

Achievement of authority and/or class is how someone's sanity is decided and authority is achieved by following a narrow set of standards that serve the small group of people who decide those standards. The standards are learned in formal educational settings. Planning a strategy in competition in this way is a method of creating an offense. Offense in a game with such few boundaries (and boundaries which must remain fleeting and unattainable by most people) is the best, if not the only, defense.

Academics participate in exclusive debates not only to sharpen their knowledge and skills but also to sustain the exclusive ways they are revered in society. Once it becomes a competition like any other, the merit of the idea is based solely on someone's ability to sell it in the same way all commercial products establish their worth.

Because academics decide what is true based on what serves them as a commercial entity more than any type of objective investigation into the truth it can be used in many types of manipulation on the masses of people who don't have any opportunity to get this education. The current educational system both prevent most people from getting an education and labels them as thinking in inferior ways when they don't get the education they have prevented. This is how commercialism is maintained.

Claiming that education is a way to liberate the masses in a place like the United States where most people don't have an opportunity for an education becomes a tool of oppression instead.

In the United States, the class system is still more important in determining a person's value than anything else. The way that groups of people are discriminated against does make it more difficult for those within that group to achieve a higher class, but it is the class itself that ultimately defines their worth rather than the discrimination against a group they belong to.

The current educational system was created to serve industry. In the same way, the industry survives based on a hierarchy of what particular jobs are worth, the educational system must do the same to serve and preserve the industry of education.

Disability rehab in US was originally geared toward helping soldiers injured in the war. Mental disability was aided by a psychological process for those recovering psychologically from the horrors of war. As different types of thinking are seen as a threat to both industry and military (especially in the US where the military is one of the largest most important industries) the culture is gravitating toward putting all types of thinking that have been labeled inferior (such as learning disabilities, psychological maladjustment, and neurological impairment) into the same category of inferiority for the sake of convenience.

To maintain the security of such an environment, thinking must be structured and the only ones who need to be encouraged to think are people who have achieved acceptance into a particular class based on their education. Again that education must also be seen as the only way that truth can be established or understood.

Nothing is more vulnerable than how a person thinks and nothing provides more opportunity for oppression. Public education has no future where the price of education and the determination of educations worth is based on whatever the market will bear.

Whether it should be or not, autism is still a part of a category of mental illness, which includes all types of inferior thinking. To understand what that means politically you can see how a group like NAMI (who began being described as grassroots advocacy) is now receiving 75% of its funding from pharmaceutical companies. The therapy for inferior thinking ( a therapy which ultimately hinders more peoples thinking ability than it helps) has become the method of advocacy for people who are labeled as having inferior thinking. This provides a very narrow context for how inferior thinking is thought of and demands that inferior thinking never include any type of diversity.

Autism Speaks is certainly the best example for showing how autism needs to be seen by our culture, which depends on commercialism, industry, and a narrow set of standards, which secure those things. These ideals supported and maintained by formal education.

However, there are many other types of similar petty differences, which are supported by other political groups so that such oppression can continue. The political compromises which people make for what seems to be their own immediate benefit ultimately isn't beneficial to them at all.

Small groups and the compromises they make are often disguised as being encouraging of solidarity for a larger goal when actually it's a very small goal and benefits the smallest number of people. This is what creates fighting and needless bickering, which is the very thing they claim to be trying to avoid. This is extremely shallow, impractical, short sighted, and oppressive.

Our culture can't afford this and most people are being held captive, by the way our decision makers are encouraging us to think we can. There is too much at stake to keep sacrificing our neighbor's survival in order to protect our own luxuries. It's too late to see this as "The rest will get their aid after I get mine and can change things for them."

We've been taught for too long that the neighbors we are hurting live far away when actually they have just been conveniently hidden. The problem is now become bad enough so the person who's getting hurt by our convenience and expedience is living right next door. It's time we met our neighbors and stopped ignoring how what we do affects them.

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.

The Race for Competence

Racing toward being better than you were at something for personal reasons will most likely still be seen as part of the broader exclusionary race to win at others expense. By believing that this is the dominate force that drives all people, no matter what someone feels, they are categorized as a competitor like everyone else who is competing for the same things as everyone else.

Often the problem is a lack of trust. Too often people believe that if someone is doing well at something they may very well be trying to attain dominance over them, and they can't allow that because in their life dominance is traditionally abused.

For someone to not be seen as likely to achieve as much as the mainstream they must signify that by the acceptance of being put in a category separate from achievers, so they don't get in the way. To claim that by putting people in such a category doesn't create many disadvantages along with labeling them as less worthy of respect and dignity is a method of denial that leads to pity and other types of disempowerment. The idea is that if people aren't in the "real" race, they exist to empower the racers that matter as toys or tools.

In much of modern society, for those who govern to maintain their position, they need to control the masses.They tend to want credit for supporting societal burdens, and they disguise discouragement and oppression by holding up their programs of pity, and what they call inclusion (which are actually exclusionary) as examples of their goodwill.

Autistics are given categorical labels such as high and low functioning to copy the exclusionary ways of society.

The right to have our accomplishments not be ignored and be allowed to compete for jobs, training, and a more respectful treatment doesn't need to come at the expense of others. If the exclusionary ways of society aren't exposed by people who are fighting for civil rights then who will expose them?

Competition is part of consumerism and as consumerism rules us so does the competitive drive that supports consumerism. In such an environment, not only does everyone want to find manipulative ways to sell their product (which makes the influence of information a product that everyone competes for marketing rights and/or bragging rights of) but also the buyer/standard consumer must have the standard products that symbolize their status which is often at the expense of those who can't afford those products being seen as less worthy of respect and dignity.

How this competition plays out among autistics is this: Because achievement being used to label one as a societal tool or a competitor is seen as fundamentally necessary in a commercially competitive society, the label that describes ability defines how autistics who have traditionally been denied their rights can be kept in that position.

For this exclusion and oppression to continue everyone needs to participate in it. Parents need to show what a burden their children are to their family so that all of society can then convincingly describe them as a societal burden as well. Autistics need to compliment this view by showing both how their struggles are worse than other autistics and how their achievements are greater than other autistics. The conflict this creates of course ensures that aid is impossible to provide for any autistics.

Intellectual ability tests and psychological tests must remain arbitrary in ways that can at any time change to be used to exclude the the misfits and the unwanted within society.

Laws for autistics need to first define autistics as violent people who exist within two categories. Those who can't control their violence and those who can. To confine all autistics to such simplistic negative stereotypes must be the only program that "aids" autistics that today's police will buy.

For this oppressive competition to continue people who don't follow these mainstream conventions must be seen as independent of the "real" struggle. They need to be seen as overly radical and unwilling and/or unable to relate to others. If they refuse to allow themselves to be ignored or else provide a higher standard for autistics to strive.... for or a lower one to stoop to, they must be....dealt with....or else....

There are lots of things in this world to strive for. We need to be sure that what we strive for doesn't sacrifice others rights in order to ensure our own. That's the type of competition where nobody wins.

 

A New Generaration of Suspects

This post yesterday: Diagnosis, Supports, and Avoiding Crime by Dora at Change.org was really good. She wrote about how people with learning disabilities (including autistics) are part of the population of people with legal trouble and how supports were important to help prevent that. Whatever the statistics reflect won't include how often the difficulty may be undiagnosed or how better understanding of people's differences and deficits in learning could help avoid this.

This article linked to the post: Police beat: Spotting learning disabilities early says this:

I will, however, share an official definition for “learning disabilities” just to ensure we start from the same page. The Learning Disabilities Association of Canada defines “learning disabilities” as “…a number of disorders which may affect the acquisition, organization, retention, understanding or use of verbal or non-verbal information. These disorders affect individuals who otherwise demonstrate at least average abilities essential for thinking and/or reasoning. As such, learning disabilities are distinct from global intellectual deficiency…learning disabilities range in severity and may interfere with the acquisition and use of one or more of the following: oral language, reading, written language, mathematics. Learning disabilities may also involve difficulties with organizational skills, social perception, social interaction and perspective taking.

I would guess this accounts for many who are in jail. Certainly autistics would be included in those defined that way.

I think this sentence was a good summery of the post;

"Staying out of the criminal system may be another reason to ensure that adults on the spectrum are given both maximum tools for self-awareness about their disability and full access to appropriate supports."

My comment was in regards to how systems supposedly geared toward aid for learning disabilities(though I'm only aware of U.S. systems) are encouraging rather than discouraging the problems:

"This is excellent. I agree with what you've written.

The thing is that LD supports begin for people at any age as  programs named rehab and they quickly merge with programs that are designed as punishment/segregation for the public's safety or for providing convenience and uninterrupted encouragement for the more established, societal fitting,"normal", better capable, or faster track learners.

Once someone is in certain a environment, they won't see encouragement for doing their best but instead will learn why their better behavior is all people care about even if it wasn't bad to begin with.

No one over-seeing people in this mixed environment will stop to consider if those whose behavior they may be misunderstanding in an emergency situation were placed there due to LD (diagnosed or otherwise), impairment, or instead were confined there for punishment. Eventually the people being overseen won't know the difference either.

The more masses of people are publicly warehoused (which can include schools) the more the communication will be strained and the more events will be seen and therefore approached as emergencies. Behavior modification/control is always easier and preferable to the controller/modifiers than attempts at respectful communication.

Unless the programs are focused on encouraging achievement rather than suspecting inappropriate behavior (mainstream public prorams aren't designed to do this) they will be promoting the evironment that creates supects who learn to adapt to behaviior that reflects how they are profiled."