The Standard Review

The Freedom to Express What You're Told

Whenever there is a discussion regarding the rights of people with neurological and psychiatric disorders, I hope to hear about the people who are prohibited from the conversation and how this prohibition is preventing the needed progress.

Unfortunately, this is rarely if ever mentioned.Again recently after a widely publicized violent act was committed by someone with a diagnosis, many described how support services needed to be improved. However, the voice of the people who need the services was not heard.

Part of the problem is that there is no recognized language for people who are hurt by the system to use which explains their experience. The system is designed for the convenience of the valued public which they are not part of and in order to be educated enough for your opinion to be considered valid you must learn a way of describing your experience which invalidates it.

It's terribly convenient for a support system which sets standards for morality and competence supposedly for the purpose of encouraging these to be able to use the standards to prohibit the recipients of that support from reporting abuse whenever the language they use is considered substandard.

It's outrageous to hear politicians suggest that the system discourage bullying, encourage diversity, and work to become more empowering. In such an oppressive system, bullying must be encouraged, new ideas and the people who have them must be punished, and only the staff can be empowered. In this way compliance becomes the main thing that is taught and abusing compliant people is considered justifiable.

In order to be heard, the talking heads must claim that progress is continuing to be made. Challenging what gets called progress is seen as a threat to the people who must be appeased in order to secure your status. In order for real progress to begin, everything about the current system must be challenged in a radical way and the people who are being ignored need to instead be heard and allowed to have an influence.

The Consequences of Counting Sheep

Knowledge may be power but in this information age, the race for such power is as corruptible as any other and bullies involved in this competition are just as likely to describe degradation as the way to encourage toughness. I often see examples on the Internet where those who are seen as highly suggestible or who lack sophistication or savvy are defined as cattle or sheep.

On the playground, this is similar to calling someone a sissy or highlighting someone's weakness in an attempt to show how someone else is strong or tough by contrast. Of course, this is encouraged in the classroom as a way to coerce people to comply with standard evaluations. This is why psychology became so heavily influenced by the philosophy of behaviorism and why compulsory education focuses more of encouraging the standards of behavior than anything else.

The name of this blog is The Standard Review. What I have attempted to describe is the way that cultural standards influence public policy and how unrealistic expectations can negatively influence our relationship with individuals as well as with our community. Almost every post here is tagged "social Darwinism." Herbert Spencer helped to make this particular cultural standard so popular. This is how Wikipedia explains Herbert Spencer's contribution to the theory described as social Darwinism:

"For many, the name of Herbert Spencer would be virtually synonymous with Social Darwinism, a social theory that applies the law of the survival of the fittest to society; humanitarian impulses had to be resisted as nothing should be allowed to interfere with nature's laws, including the social struggle for existence. Spencer desired the elimination of the unfit through their failure to reproduce, rather than state intervention to secure their physical annihilation.[26]

Spencer's association with Social Darwinism might have its origin in a specific interpretation of his support for competition. Whereas in biology the competition of various organisms can result in the death of a species or organism, the kind of competition Spencer advocated is closer to the one used by economists, where competing individuals or firms improve the well being of the rest of society. Spencer viewed private charity positively so long as it did not encourage the procreation of the unworthy, as he believed in voluntary association and informal care as opposed to using government machinery.[27]"

Spencer suggested that exclusionary and harsh standards would make the valued class stronger, but aside from how the less privileged are treated by it; I don't believe it strengthens anyone at all. Cultural standards can be used to discourage murder, rape, and other abusive acts, but they can also be used to define someone who isn't as skilled or capable as less worthy of respect and dignity. As someone diagnosed with autism who has been punished by the educational/training/rehabilitation/disability system for nearly a half-century, I see the values encouraged by the system to be mainly exclusionary and abusive in that way.

As much as people work towards creating better supports for people with mental illness and intellectual disability, they should also recognize that most people due to class status and disenfranchisement are simply just classified by the system as crazy and stupid and there's hardly a distinction between the two. It's convenient to claim that someone is inferior in the department of sanity or intellectuality due to moral reasons (for example, someone is described as willfully ignorant and/or choosing to be lazy), but it must be understood that the system which is supposedly providing them support uses those same moral standards which are based on nothing more than propaganda as an excuse to treat them as a subhuman species. Although this is deceptively advertised as support, it provides nothing but more unnecessary obstacles for those who are diagnosed.

The encouragement of overcoming is in no way separate from the fear which creates pity in terms of the treatment in this part of the population. The standard is not set so that no one will be left behind as it is advertised to be. Instead, it is set so that competition can be glorified and the abuse of those who are determined losers will appear justified.

It's important to recognize that anything and everything which criticizes someone classified as mentally ill, intellectually inferior, autistic, or with any variation or vernacular, can and will be used to further degrade everyone with such a diagnosis. Most everything we do is criticized and most anything that anyone of us does which society frowns upon is used to degrade the rest of us as well.

As an autistic, I wonder how anyone can believe that encouraging any type of cultural skill standards (standard of so-called appropriate or normal behavior, standard of communication, standard of so-called appropriate or normal response, etc.) can be seen as anything other than a way to encourage fear and degradation for what autistics do, which causes us so much harm.

Maybe people aren't smart or skilled in traditional ways, and maybe we go along and are naïvely accepting in a way that the savvy and sophisticated (otherwise known as the sane and smart) part of the population describes in the same way they describe the ways of cattle or sheep. However, it doesn't help anyone to show how others are less valuable based on their lack of ability. Furthermore, as I said earlier, lack of skill, naivete, and/or lack of emotional or mental stability is described as a lack of morality by the system which defines what skills are valued and which ones aren't.

It's important for everyone to use the skills which they have to perform their best weather that fits within traditional boundaries or whether the expression is completely unique. Doing your best is self-supporting as well as encouraging the strength of others. When instead, someone else must be degraded in order for others to appear better, the standard of degradation and unreasonable expectations is reinforced at the expense of everyone becoming weaker and everyone's contribution becoming less valuable.

Activists Compromising Everything

 

Every time activists in the U.S. have sought to reform the mental health/developmental disabilities/ mental retardation/etc. system, their efforts (which always became compromises) ultimately strengthened the system and made it more difficult to stop.

Dorothea Dix came along when a change was obviously needed and set a president for how reform was to take place. Mainly, this reformation put the determination of rights for those mainly affected by the system in the hands of political opportunists.

 The response to the public recognition of the abuses in places like Willowbrook included the creation the Protection and Advocacy agency which protected the system from being independently investigated.

In the same way, that sterilization was originally sold as a right, forceable institutionalization law are sold as the way to ensure that those who were in the most need of care could be assured adequate support.

Today it's obvious to those who are treated the worst by this system that it was never designed for their benefit but is instead an unfair weapon in the class war for allowing the judicial system to incarcerate misfits and promote the careers of politicians.

There is no mystery in why such low standards are used to evaluate science regarding autism or why the pharmaceutical companies have  started a new propaganda campaign to promote their new products due to the ritalin campaign getting old.

Of course the behaviorists are getting away with more abuse than ever (including murder) and the solution is described as impossible due to the severity of the behavior problems. The abuse is being exposed mainly by those who are advocating more formal integration of standard behaviorism in schools by using laws that claim that children will be safer.

A class war is determined by hierarchy. The people at the bottom of the ladder know very well how the system works and are listened to the least. If you don't yet see that compromise is not an option it's mainly because you aren't at the bottom yet. However, if you review the history of the system and analyze how quickly the system is expanding to include you, you'll understand that either you or someone very close to you soon will be.

Intelligence Required

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People receiving accommodation and accessibility pursuant to policy changes regarding disability does not negate that the intention of the original policy design was meant to provide a convenience for what gets described as the "general public" more so than for aid to those who receive the label. This is especially true for disabilities that refer to intellect and behavior.

The increase in the number of people labeled is in direct proportion to an increasingly exclusive and bigoted society as well as an increase in population. It doesn't seem productive to me to protest the labeling except for the purpose of opposing the harmful treatment. Usually though, such objections are more geared toward the ideal of encouraging people to overcome weakness.  Unfortunately, the language associated with overcoming is often used more to promote the derogatory stereotypes than it is anyone's empowerment.

There is not much of a dividing line in regard to cultural understanding between intellectual deficit and mental instability. The judicial system has greatly influenced these beliefs. The majority of people are hurt by these assertions and are either institutionalized or completely ignored and denied any type of aid as a result.

Since the broader awareness and understanding of deficits are not creating better accommodation and accessibility for the majority of people(and often the bigotry encouraged from broader awareness causes the opposite response) the goal of  promoting the more positive cultural perspectives is essential to inclusion and acceptance. It's irresponsible to attempt policy changes without the preservation of dignity for the person labeled with the deficit being the top priority.

The current cultural understanding of behavior in the U.S. as it relates to intellect, mental stability, and character was greatly influenced by the Eugenics movement and more specifically by the efforts of the American psychologist Henry H. Goddard.

 
http://www.hss.state.ak.us/gcdse/history/Images/section%2005%20-%20eugenics/5a-goddard.jpg

 "Henry Herbert Goddard (August 14, 1866 – June 18, 1957) was a prominent American psychologist and eugenicist in the early 20th century. He is known especially for his 1912 work The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, which he himself came to regard as deeply flawed, and for being the first to translate the Binet intelligence test into English in 1908 and distributing an estimated 22,000 copies of the translated test across the United States; he also introduced the term "moron" into the field.

He was the leading advocate for the use of intelligence testing in societal institutions including hospitals, schools, the legal system and the military. He played a major role in the emerging field of clinical psychology, in 1911 helped to write the first U.S. law requiring that blind, deaf and mentally retarded children be provided special education within public school systems, and in 1914 became the first American psychologist to testify in court that subnormal intelligence should limit the criminal responsibility of defendants."

 

However later,

 

"By the late 1920s, Goddard had reversed many of his early opinions, declaring in multiple public forums that he had been gravely mistaken in many of his most famous conclusions (Zenderland, 1998, pp. 324-326). He had begun to question the validity of the tests that were used to detect morons, and he stated emphatically that his former belief that morons could not be educated satisfactorily was wrong. In addition, he frequently voiced his new opinion that feeble-minded people should be allowed to have children, if they choose to do so. He asserted in a 1927 article for Scientific Monthly that the concept of segregation colonies had been a bad idea (Zenderland, 1998, pp. 324-326).

However, Die Familie Kallikak was printed in Germany in 1914 and reprinted in 1933 shortly after the Nazis came to power. Goddard never intended for his book to be connected with Hitler, Nazism, and the Holocaust. In 1938 and 1939, he tried unsuccessfully to use his influence to help the daughter of a Jewish colleague escape from Austria (Zenderland, 1998, pp. 333-335). Subsequently, a psychology text by Columbia University psychologist Henry Garrett (1961) provided a brief, and rather embellished, overview of the Kallikak study to bolster his eugenicist arguments. Although these interpretations stood at odds with Goddard's opinions later in his life, these and related events have helped to paint the rather negative picture many people still hold of Goddard and his work."

I think it's very important to understand that the most prevalent views regarding these issues are anything but liberating.

Bigoted views result from people's dependence on convenience, their unwillingness to explore the history of language, and the constant submission to shame-based behavior, which encourages us to seek ways of belittling rather than empowering each and rather than staying focused on doing our individual best.

There are people who are so removed from the majority of people and have therefore become completely indifferent to common struggle that they intend to relieve hardship (their own hardship, but it's conveniently described as ours) by eliminating part of the population. Too often people continue to echo the language which was designed by them as well as encourage their agenda without paying much attention to how the attitude continues with a snow-ball effect.

The way we use language regarding intelligence and mental stability is very important and oppression would never survive if the people behind oppressive agendas were unable to depend on the ways we encourage language subtly that support their efforts. If we were more careful to watch the way we contribute to our own demise, their efforts would not be nearly so successful.

Autism and Imagination Deficits

 

When evaluating how well people are able to perform, behave, or learn it would be practical to include an evaluation of the teachers and those who are available to provide an example. These factors are typically not included in the evaluation as much as they need to be and the cycle of burdening those who are most convenient continues to harm everyone's future.

For several decades a community established by and for persons with disabilities has attempted to raise awareness that disability is natural. The alternative view has been the standard and continues to stifle the growth of our communities as well as the broader society.

It would be helpful if labels that describe deficits or a stage of someone's learning was used to provide more support and accommodation. Unfortunately, however, instead the growing industry of psychology(which encourages the psychiatric industry and adds to their corporate earnings) does more to isolate, disenfranchise, and prevent opportunities for the people who are labeled.

This article " Social skills in autism 'improved when patients choose own activities" indicates that research shows the child with autism benefits from choosing their own recreational activities. As simple and obvious as this sounds, the fact that it is even researched and reported is a reminder of how the public is unaware of the dehumanization mainstream commercial autism campaigns are encouraging.

Psychology is a product of the glorification of societies scholastic achievement process and is used to rank people accordingly so that the people who are already powerful pursuant to the advantages this system has provided can be portrayed to the public as having earned this elevated status.

People are not ranked as having a disability, deficit, or less than the standard rate of learning so that society can be altered to provide them with more opportunities. Instead the ranking (whether expressed as pity for their inferiority, disgust for their character flaws, or it's used to blame someone or something for making people appear less valuable or more by the contrast) of people by psychologist and school officials is a method of exclusion.

 
 

Much of the inappropriate behavioral treatment for autistics is not understood as being that due to false impressions pursuant to fear campaigns that justify teacher abuse and advocate their less severe forms of punishment and restraint rather than to abolish them.

This accompanies claims that most treatment deemed inappropriate is excessive rather than unnecessary. This prevents people from looking very closely at the core issues which need radical alteration and encourage them to make the unnecessary political compromises as though that's their only choice.

As a society, we seem to overlook the futility and often destructive results from our constant commercial based ranking of everything  and every person as well as every aspect of them.

The majority of people compete for a small fraction of the world's resources based on claims that we are either more deserving of privilege or accommodation due to our superiority or the severity of our need while allowing a greater percentage of resources to be hoarded and wasted by an elite few who then use their advantage to exploit us.

Insults, bullying, and most of the unnecessary fighting that results from our futile system of ranking is not due to any one being superior or even believing themselves to be. It is instead due to the fear of our own inability and weakness that we have been fooled into believing we can hide from.

We're taught to avoid the competition that causes us shame by making someone else look worse so we don't have to risk the defeat which is possible with attempting to become better. This is similar to accusing others of something that appears worse than what we've done in order to avoid appearing guilty. This is completely unimaginative as well as counterproductive.

Weakness and vulnerability in others are not what stagnates human progress. It is also not the weakness and vulnerability in ourselves. It is instead the needless fear and shame we associate with having to face our weakness and the risks involved with trying to do better.

Of course autistics do better when provided with choices and opportunities. Everyone does.

Others may claim they choose someone's (child, student, disabled, elderly, etc.) activities because that someone needs it and isn't wise enough to make their own choices, but it's often just more convenient to do so. Being given an opportunity to make choices lead to better understanding, more confidence, empowerment, and ultimately better choices.

Furthermore, when people use clinical evaluations to describe a behavior without considering how the language is insulting it alters the direction of future research as well as shape public opinion, and the group being researched is less empowered as a result. No one is helped by that.

The claims that autistics are less imaginative have been associated with similar claims that we lack a theory of mind and even empathy. Rather than seeing how different sensory experience might make people even more sensitive (although expressed differently) to the emotions of others, society's commitment to ranking has instead encouraged negative stereotypes. This has led to unnecessary blame in relationships and even unjust suspicion of violence when statistics don't support the claims.

The survival of our species is dependent on the acceptance of diversity, which includes weaknesses in others as well as ourselves. People are weaker or stronger, younger or older, and have a variety of different symptoms and deficits that range in severity. We as humans are perfectly capable of making decisions as to how we can accommodate and empower each other (and protect ourselves if necessary) by evaluating any given situation with any number of diverse human expressions that are present at any given time. Too often our judgement is impaired by attempting to apply a fatally flawed system of ranking to a situation rather than accepting what intuition would otherwise make clear.

When we choose to face our weakness, we are better able to appreciate all the good and bad that life has to offer and by accepting life on life's terms, we can enjoy living, laughing, and loving a lot more. Fear and doubt are what inhibit an imagination and circumstances are not what decide those things. We can all do better by making better choices.

Smart Enough to Avoid Punishment

 

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In an ideal society, a label that indicated an intelligence deficit would be beneficial. It could be used to provide either accommodations or more realistic and focused expectations. However, the way these labels have been used by the compulsory school system in the United States has taught us to relate this to a value system that can be quite harmful.
 

 The method used for making this judgment is severely limited in both accuracy and practicality. The American justice system depends on such arbitrary evaluations to provide more latitude within law enforcement, which leads to agents having more unlimited control. If this system's leadership were challenged more so that they were required to explain the reasoning behind punishments for the population labeled (either by formal diagnosis or socially acceptable insult) as stupid, crazy, and immoral/lacking in character development, this would ultimately encourage everyone to take more responsibility. It's difficult for people to understand a responsibility and the benefits for accepting it when their leaders aren't willing to.

Thinking skills typically have much less to do with brainpower and formal training than the advertising for academia would lead people to believe. The tests to evaluate aptitude and academic progress provides advantages for a small number of people. The rest is shown  to instead be inferior and taught to be compliant.

The problems faced by business owners during the industrial revolution were met by them claiming that unnatural and inappropriate breeding was a threat to necessary progress and the future of the human race. These claims were used to justify their scientific proposals for population control, which continues to play a dominant role in politics and the judicial system.

Francis Galton called the science eugenics.

"Galton invented the term eugenics in 1883 and set down many of his observations and conclusions in a book, Inquiries into human faculty and its development.[13] He believed that a scheme of 'marks' for family merit should be defined, and early marriage between families of high rank be encouraged by provision of monetary incentives."

Here is some of what has been said by respected people who have influenced the public perceptions of this supposed problem.

This is one example:

“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind...
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
[1.1] Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck v. Bell

 
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And here are others:

"It does not, however, seem impossible that by an attention to breed, a certain degree of improvement, similar to that among animals, might take place among men. Whether intellect could be communicated may be a matter of doubt: but size, strength, beauty, complexion, and perhaps even longevity are in a degree transmissible... As the human race could not be improved in this way, without condemning all the bad specimens to celibacy, it is not probable, that an attention to breed should ever become general."
- Thomas R. Malthus. An Essay on Population. 1798

 AND

"In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it."
- Jacques Cousteau,  1991 UNESCO courier

And here: 

Margaret Sanger, the Founder of Planned Parenthood, advocated eugenics, describing it as a way to eliminate "human waste" from society.

"Everywhere we see poverty and large families going hand in hand. Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly. People who cannot support their own offspring are encouraged by Church and State to produce large families. Many of the children thus begotten are diseased or feeble-minded; many become criminals. The burden of supporting these unwanted types has to be bourne by the healthy elements of the nation. Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of those who should never have been born."

 

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And here:

 
In support of the eugenics movement, (Theodore) Roosevelt wrote that

"it is obvious that if in the future racial qualities are to be improved, the improving must be wrought mainly by favoring the fecundity [fertility] of the worthy types... At present, we do just the reverse. There is no check to the fecundity of those who are subnormal..."

 
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And here:

John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943) a major figure in the eugenics movement founded the American Medical Missionary Board (but soon changed its name to the Race Betterment Foundation). Kellogg himself was an important and respected figure who authored numerous medical and eugenics treatises in order to lobby for policy of "national eugenics." Kellogg, who launched the breakfast cereals industry by introducing granola to the American public as a health food.

The corporate experiment established by Americans (known as the United States) has traditionally attempted to divide and conquer the unwanted public. One method for achieving this is by encouraging confusion over the meaning of personal responsibility. Rather than encourage each other and work together to challenge unfair elitist domination,  society is instead obsessed with following the traditions of unreasonable standards for critical evaluations.

In this video, State Controlled Consciousness, John Taylor Gatto explains how compulsory schooling is used to provide an expanded military that protects the rules which are decided by the state. The United States adopted this tool of government from Prussia, which encourages us to believe that there is little or no value to an individual human or their creative process. Since the rules can be taught by motivating people to avoid punishment, the rules don't get challenged and the elite who possessed the power is allowed to preserve it.

When the government control becomes an unregulated obsession for an elite few, the remaining public is following standards that they instinctively know lacks the sound judgment. At this point, they can either choose to revolutionize the system, or they can instead become apathetic and frustrated from being unable to trust their neighbors or even themselves and their own judgment.

The advances in technology are now accelerating dramatically pursuant to the insatiable appetite of consumers. This appetite was encouraged so that the market could be deceptively described as the answer to the world's problems. This provided industry leaders with more power and ultimately more authority. Most all scientific discoveries are encouraged and glorified based on the establishment of the same misplaced faith in an unregulated market. This creates advantages for a few people and is used as the justification for excluding the majority for being invalid.

An appetite for technical accuracy has been established in accordance with the encouragement of the myth that we can decide the accuracy of information based on the same rigorous scientific evaluations. Due to the lack of ethical regulations that would encourage us to evaluate ideas, we are accepting commercial brands of truth and hyper critically micro managing each other in a depressingly hopeless and fatal way.

Psychology is a brand of processing ideas. It is promoted in order to encourage the validity in scholastic pursuits. The academic industry advertises that those who achieve their awards are superior in  ability, judgment, and character. The science of human behavior(as it's described) is mainly used as a political tool for controlling the public. It's used more as a method for controlling thoughts and behaviors than  for understanding them. It enslaves consumers by outwitting them rather than teaching productive ways for evaluating and using information.

A society that was truly concerned with justice and human rights would not be allowing the continuing abuse of people based on a punitive justice system deceptively defined as the mental health industry. In such a society, the abuses associated with Applied behavioral analysis (ABA)  (originally researched to determine methods of manipulating prisoners of war) would have been enough to warrant an appropriate investigation. Instead, the harmful traditions of the public school system (which have gotten worse since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was established) continue so that radical change is not seen as necessary. The leadership along with their past misdeeds continues to go unchallenged while voters continue to be taught that most all political compromise is necessary.

Since the state agencies defined as Protection and Advocacy have become practically as ineffective as those that serve vocational rehabilitation needs, the concerned parents of schoolchildren who are being abused are deceptively provided with a substitute solution. Rather than look at how the nature of Applied Behavioral Analysis will likely be implemented in an abusive way, the bureaucratic leaders look for ways to justify and protect their reputation. Instead of admitting their mistakes and making the radical changes which are needed, they instead direct the public's attention to teachers being inadequately trained in the proper use of this supposed "discipline".

A newer and better type of ABA described as Statewide Positive Behavioral Support has been substituted for the important regulation that is needed for teachers abusing authority. The goal of the school system (despite the way typically presented) is to reestablish behavior standards as the focus of compulsory education for most students so that federal laws are easier to enforce.

A society that was truly concerned with justice and human rights for everyone would be able to look at the origins and traditions of the public school system and find better ways to help more students become prepared for adulthood. This would include of course addressing the problems presented by intelligence quotient (I.Q.) test, which were based on eugenic goals and finding more appropriate means of evaluating students.

However, in order to avoid accepting this responsibility, the lack of student achievement was used to explain the need for more exclusive standardized test, which was sold by legislation called No Child Left Behind. (Of course this achieves the opposite goal from the one that the name suggests.)

 

Apathy and hyper criticism is two sides of the same coin. Both encourage an attitude that impedes progress and promotes dependence and oppression. Commercial advertisement provides a constant source of frustration and dissatisfaction by teaching people to evaluate their worth in relation to the type of people they can never become who own things that they can never afford.

"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House"~ Audre Lorde

Blaming each other only weakens us so that we are vulnerable to deception. The majority of people are not empowered by standard evaluations, and, unless we challenge those standards we will never recognize and trust the value in our neighbors and in ourselves and we will destroy ourselves in the process.

Personal responsibility should not divide and weaken us so that we can be manipulated by fear and doubt. People don't need to be convinced of the rewards which come from the achievement of truly worthwhile goals. When people believe in themselves and their own ability, they find ways to do things and naturally avoid the punishment which comes from either failure or cheating.

 The value in ourselves which we need to recognize in order to be more successful becomes more apparent when we are willing to accept the same in others. This kind of experience is what will sustain humanity and ultimately the human race.

 

Obsolete

In the past half-century, technological advances have become an increasingly dominant aspect of the global economy. As technological manufacturers have taught us it is impractical to repair our networking devices, we have adopted the belief that humans are composite of efficient or defective independent parts, and that we can be evaluated accordingly as valid or invalid.

Now that the majority of people are serving the enterprise known as science, in one way or another, the corporations which dominate this field have become a political force that works together with government to control as many aspects of our behavior as possible.

We are taught the central nervous system which is most active within the space between our ears is an end unto itself, and that we must submit to the scholastic theories of psychologist and psychiatrist so that our thought processes will be adjusted properly. We've learned to hyper-critically micro manage each other and quickly devalue any diverse expression that deviates from what the current leadership has determined to be the norm.

Medical models are dependent on behavioral treatments that propose to chemically alter the brain structure. These are researched by using the least valued public as expendable products (human lab rats) so that valued workers are more easily manipulated, and the elite are provided with more comforts.

In addition, many among the labeled community aren't exposed to the way that all these specific labels of a learning disability, developmental disorder, psychiatric condition, or psychobiological disorder practically vanishes for most people who are among the class which is least valued once they are institutionalized. In such environments the abuses of control are justified either by the person in care being considered unable to control their actions or unwilling to submit to authority.

Most of what we are taught are cures to the incorrect configuration of our brains or the maladjusted way we respond to our environment doesn't exist in any other way than how close our expressions come to a standard that was set to glorify the characteristics which are most comfortable to the people in positions of leadership. All sorts of atrocities are committed and justified by the claim that it is done in the name of science, progress, and the common good.

The most outrageous and harmful treatments and attempted cures are justified through the sophisticated fear-based advertising campaigns that describe cases of severity. The biggest deception of these campaigns is the exploitation of severe problems. While people with the most severe cases are shown as the reason for more research into cures and treatments, they are not the ones who benefit from scientific discovery.

Instead, in addition to the exploitation, they typically get described as beyond repair, aberrant and unwilling, too old, or that the main problem is due to poor character.

The way severe neurological disorders may contribute to a violent response has never been advertised in order to provide a better understanding or treatment for the people who have them. Instead, in a very few cases it gets accepted in the judicial system as an excuse (which then gets little if any attention or aid) and the belief that these disorders are associated with violence mainly provides justification for incarceration and harmful treatments based on the presumption of guilt for the undesirable and inconvenient public.

If our attitudes about people don't change so that we accept more diverse expressions as valid and important the sophistication of our technology and scientific research will go to provide worse treatment and even more widespread abuse. This is the current trend despite claims that science is leading us away from our barbaric ways.

The design for the cure attitude exhibited in the way it's advertised was never meant to provide more people with aid or understanding and eliminating competition certainly won't make the already accepted any stronger. Unless we focus on acceptance first and gear scientific research toward helping people whom we are already willing to accept as valid regardless, the result will be more expressions, which are shown to be inappropriate and more people who are thereby defined as obsolete.

Controlling Theories for Psychological Treatment

 
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It may be best for industries that the public believes that all sophistication of science and scholarly views are beneficial but this broken-until-fixed-by-the-psych-industry is and always has been quite harmful to the majority of the public.

There are as many successful ways for people with disorders that involve thinking (psychological, psychiatric, learning disability, and developmental disorder)  to live as there are individuals that have them. (This includes both the diagnosed and the would-be-diagnosed).

Unfortunately, the few ways that are advertised most and encouraged by most people as successful/appropriate have the best market value (including what is most funded by government aid as tools for the judicial system) and therefore,  prevent most people from getting any aid all. The ones discouraged and excluded are of course the ones that need acceptance and accommodation the most. The excluded group is subjected to bullying and fewer opportunities for relationships and jobs pursuant to the mainstream attitudes that result.

The system that created these disorders was designed to be oppressive rather than empowering. As more people are diagnosed the cure factor becomes an even more powerful weapon and appeals to more people who become even more afraid of becoming disenfranchised. This creates even more division for people who are already excluded by other social factors.

The Internet is a networking tool that is mainly used to narrow the view of what is and isn't acceptable and prevent as many expressions of diversity as possible. The corporations will be blamed for our ruthless abandonment and harsh treatment of people who are inconvenient and uncomfortable but only because they are seen as profiting the most from it. It could never occur without our help.

Compulsive People Fixing Disorder

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There could never be an official diagnosis for Compulsive People Fixing Disorder (CPFD). It just wouldn't be appropriate for this disgraceful behavior to be focused on in an open and honest way. To do so would challenge too many established authorities and too many traditions that preserve their power. If it was officially recognized as inappropriate or morally wrong, how could boundaries be set for the diagnostic criteria and how could the treatment specialist prove that the application of their technique didn't reflect their own symptoms?

People without the disorder would be healthy but so out of step with others that whatever  inconsistencies could be identified from their conduct would be heavily scrutinised, magnified, and micro-managed. Over comers of the disorder would quickly relapse when they tried to help others overcome using traditional therapeutic persuasion.

People who consistently operate only within the realm of control won't recognize healthier options because to see and understand that requires trust. Trust and control are exclusive behaviors.

This is a serious disorder (unofficially of course) and affects more people than any other. Our cultural expectations in personal and business relationships have become dependent on controlling and fixing due to how we have established this thinking as a societal norm for the sake of convenience. This encourages people to be cunning, manipulative, and harshly aggressive in their relationships and the convenience ultimately demands a very high price.

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The exploitation of people with disabilities and supposed weakness plays a vital role in how our society operates and there is not much effort made to challenge tradition. Too often people want things to change without the discomfort and conflict that accompany challenging the core issues and attitudes that support the harmful policies. We are taught that to attempt such things show us to be uncompromising, noncompliant, and unreasonable. It's more convenient that we show the established authorities, that we are ashamed of what they call our weakness and grateful we have been spared an even worse treatment.

As long as we as a society depend so heavily on control to solve everything, we will have less trust, which makes control something people are even more dependent on in an unhealthy way and there will need to be harsher and stricter methods.

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Trust may resolve many confusing and ineffective relationship patterns but depenance/control just leaves people feeling betrayed, which encourages contempt and bitterness in the treated person who then won't be committed to the process.... Besides diagnosis, treatment, and therapy for social inappropriateness isn't designed to empower the one who receives it. It's designed to give better control to established authority and to upset, confuse, exploit, and exclude people with inconvenient expressions of diversity, so that the abuse they receive will appear justified to the valued/voting public.

Competency on Trial

 

 

Societal arrogance, prejudice, and exploitation are never more evident than when a formal court trial is used to declare a person's competency. Judges who preside over these trials are in no way believing that the sentence they issue has anything whatsoever to do with the persons ability or lack of it, to act appropriately or provide for themselves. This process is strictly an extension of the psychiatric industry and the institutional mentality. It reflects how the corporations/insurance companies have been able to trade what is still described as the service they provide in exchange for these customer referrals.

It is practically impossible to dispute the corporate ties to governmental agency in these matters but no one directly involved ever tries. The way that society strictly enforces competency judgments in the informal ways dictates to the judicial system as well as the industry that there is no reason to be concerned that their deceit and miscarriage of justice will ever be challenged.

It really won't matter much if people who are more widely recognized  refrain from using terms such as retarded or even retard if we continue to recklessly toss about ridiculous and unfounded allegations of incompetence the way we do with terms such as idiot, moron, stupid, and uneducated. All of these terms were created to support the glorification of a very narrow standardized scholastic achievement test. This is a system of ranking and the goal of those who benefit from this is for people to take their focus away from what they are learning and what they don't know, and ignore the discouragement they get from trying to understand their environment in order to instead remain hostage to the social games for cutting each other down and tearing apart each other.


The earliest recorded use of the north American continent being used by Europeans for institutionalization date back to shortly after the invasion of 1492, which is flatteringly referred to as when the "settlers" first arrived. The plantations were set up to use slave labor, and the slaves were brought or natives were captured for that purpose. This was the beginning of a political and judicial system that depended on an institutional mentality.

One example of how this is continuing is by laws, which are made for status offense.

"Status offenses may include consumption of alcohol, tobacco smoking, truancy, and running away from home.

These acts may be illegal for persons under a certain age, while remaining legal for all others, which makes them status offenses.

Status offense may also apply to other classes, including laws forbidding ownership of firearms by felons, where such ownership is otherwise legal.

Laws that prohibit certain actions to certain persons based on their sex, race, nationality, religion, etc., are also status offenses. A law that prohibits men from using public toilets intended for women, or a law that prohibits the use of a drinking fountain by people of a given race, or a law that sets a curfew for people below a certain age, are examples of status offenses, although they are not always thought of as such."

In similar fashion:



"During the mid-1600's, the colonies began to pass laws called slave codes. In general, these codes prohibited slaves from owning weapons, receiving an education, meeting one another or moving about without the permission of their masters, and testifying against white people in court. Slaves received harsher punishments for some crimes than white people. A master usually received less punishment for killing a slave than for killing a free person for the same reason. Slaves on small farms probably had more freedom than plantation slaves, and slaves in urban areas had fewer restrictions in many cases than slaves in rural areas."

 

I see no indication that the laws in the United States are ever relaxed so that any person with any class distinction can be judged more fairly. Instead when there are nuances in the laws it typically indicates a contradiction and provides more authority to the law enforcement which supports oppression.

It says here of a formal competency evaluation:


"In the United States criminal justice system, a competency evaluation is an assessment of the ability of a defendant to understand and rationally participate in a court process.

Competency was originally established by the Supreme Court of the United States as the evaluation of a defendant's competence to proceed to trial.[1]

In a subsequent ruling, the Court held that that an prisoner facing the death penalty must be evaluated as competent to be executed, meaning that he must be
capable of understanding why he has received the death penalty and the effect that the penalty will have.[2] In further rulings, competence was also enlarged to include evaluation of the defendant's competence to plead guilty and competence to waive the right to counsel.[3]"

AND

"The American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Mental Health Standards stated in 1994 that the issue of a defendant's current mental incompetence is the single most important issue in the criminal mental health field, noting that an estimated 24,000 to 60,000 forensic evaluations of a criminal defendant's competency to stand trial were performed every year in the United States.[4] Although estimates vary, a 1973 estimate put the number of competence evaluations at 25,000 to 36,000 each year. There are indications that the number of evaluations of criminal defendants is rising. One comparison of estimates between 1983 and 2004 suggest the annual number rose from 50,000 to 60,000 criminal competency evaluations respectively.[5]" "

Mental health agencies in the United States worked very closely with drug enforcement agencies in order to justify the class war falsely labeled "the war on drugs". The newest agency being used to confuse the distinction between recreational drug use which is not sponsored by a government approved and subsidized pharmaceutical company and criminal activity is SAMHSA (The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration).


This agency has been used to promote the recovery model which blurs the line between self-improvement and the responsibility that accompanies being an individual and that of mandated responsibility from a judicial agency which is used to permit corporate irresponsibility. Although several recent court hearings have found compulsory attendance for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings as a condition of parole to be unconstitutional, this continues to be a typical practice for judges.

In the same way that Henry Ford used publications for spreading anti-Semitic propaganda and socialist values that aided his company, Randolph Hearst used similar means for settling labor issues by publishing false information about the dangers of marijuana use and its relation to racial minorities and crime.

That's described in this article:

A highly disproportionate number of black and Hispanic people in the United States are tried, convicted, and sentenced for drug charges and are similarly abused by the psychiatric system. The scholars in Europe such as Sir Francis Galton encouraged this miscarriage of justice.  Galton defined race purification and population control as eugenics based on the work of his cousin Charles Darwin. Drapetomania is the name of the psychological disorder which shows the intentions of the most revered American doctors such as Benjamin Rush. Samuel Cartwright, a student of Rush, established psychiatric label, Drapetomania:


"Cartwright described the disorder — which, he said, was "unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers"[4] — in a paper delivered before the Medical Association of Louisiana[5] that was widely reprinted.

He stated that the malady was a consequence of masters who "made themselves too familiar with [slaves], treating them as equals."[6]

    "If any one or more of them, at any time, are inclined to raise their heads to a level with their master or overseer, humanity and their own good requires that they should be punished until they fall into that submissive state which was intended for them to occupy. They have only to be kept in that state, and treated like children to prevent and cure them from running away." [7]


Psychiatry evaluates the degree to which someone is behaving normally based on statistics from people who accept a list of character flaws that comes with a psychological label and enables them to receive medication and therapy.

This says of the classification of mental disorders:


"The widely used DSM and ICD classifications employ operational definitions.[1] There is a significant scientific debate about the relative validity of a "categorical" versus a "dimensional" system of classification, as well as significant controversy about the role of science and values in classification schemes and the professional, legal and social uses to which they are put."

To whatever degree, any of this is discussed within an academic environment, it does not change how the labeling of the persons intelligence quotient, psychological profile, and heritage are used to determine a person's human rights as well as their potential liberties.

Judge Rotenberg had a behavioral treatment research facility named after him based on his ability to use his position of court judge to show how autistics would seek aversive treatment to cure their malady if only they were competent enough to do so.

It says here:

"While this litigation was taking place, in late 1985 and early 1986, JRC brought one of its seriously self-abusive, autistic students before the Bristol County Probate Court for a substituted judgment hearing that was held by Chief Judge Ernest Rotenberg. After hearing testimony on both sides of the issue, Judge Rotenberg determined: (1) that the student was incompetent to make her own medical treatment decisions; and (2) that the child, if competent, would have chosen treatment that included the use of the aversives that JRC had been employing, prior to the decision by the administrative judge. This substituted judgment hearing was the same type of hearing that was required in Massachusetts for individuals for whom agencies wished to employ psychotropic medication (or other intrusive medical procedures) and who were incompetent to make their own treatment decisions."

What had to happen is that in order to sustain the belief that children are born broken and need fixing by state-sponsored institutions psychological labels need to be used in the same way that they had previously been used on slaves based on the claim that the means for their treatment was justified by the end result and that they were not competent enough to choose what was best for their own welfare.


When people today think of combating autism it would be helpful to remember that:

"In 1961, President John F. Kennedy created the President’s Panel on Mental Retardation and called upon America to address the significant needs of people with intellectual disabilities and their desire to be a part of everyday life in America. The Panel submitted its first report, “Combating Mental Retardation,” which led to Congressional action to establish new programs for people with intellectual disabilities, including hospital improvement programs."

This article decribes very well a trend that has occured since then:

New Down syndrome test could increase ‘eugenic’ abortions


"Studies in the United States and the United Kingdom have claimed that as many as 9 in 10 unborn children diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted.

Carol Boys, chief executive of the Down’s Syndrome Association in Great Britain, recently told the BBC that the less invasive blood test will make pre-natal testing safer and more common."

AND

“In the 1960s, we were told that legal abortion would be a rare tragic act in cases of exceptional hardship. In the ‘70s abortion began to be both decried and accepted as birth control. In the ‘80s respected geneticists pointed out that it was cheaper to hunt for and abort Down’s babies than to raise them. By the ‘90s that observation had been widely put into action. Now we are refining and extending our eugenic vision, with new tests and abortion as our central tools.”

Surveys of primary care physicians indicate that very few doctors encourage women whose unborn babies are diagnosed with Down syndrome to continue their pregnancies."

When describing Autism Speaks Eugenic Agenda, ABFH wrote this:

"But for the most part, they've managed to put up a somewhat plausible pretense of being a mainstream charity that just wants to prevent suffering, and so forth. Most of the material on their website is carefully designed to keep the public unaware of their close ideological affinity with the white supremacist agenda of creating a master race through eugenics. A casual reader might not notice a page featuring the views of Dr. James Watson, with whom Bob and Suzanne Wright had a friendly chat regarding autism genetic research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory:


autismspeaks.org/inthenews/wrights_cold_spring_harbor.php"

The Rottenburg center has aided other school's in providing them with the authority which encourages an atmosphere of abuse by being examples this kind of regulation manipulation:


"The Department of Education has the authority to approve private school programs for the purpose of providing special education to publicly funded school age students with disabilities.  Under this authority, the Department reviews the program’s educational components as well as its compliance with general health and safety standards.  Judge Rotenberg Education Center (“the program” or “JRC”) operates a program for students with significant disabilities in which it utilizes a behavioral modification program of rewards (positive reinforcers) and punishments (aversives).  The aversives used by JRC include restraint, electric skin shock (“GED”), and the delaying or withholding of food in order to decelerate problematic behaviors. 

Although JRC is licensed by two state agencies, the Department of Early Education and Care (EEC) and the Department of Mental Retardation (DMR), it is under DMR’s authority that JRC’s use of aversives is regulated.  In addition to DMR’s regulation of JRC in this regard, JRC’s use of aversives with an individual student must be authorized by the probate court under a “substituted judgment proceeding.”  This means that for each student for whom JRC wishes to use aversives, it must submit to the probate court a behavioral plan that the court must approve and annually review.  In addition, the court appoints an attorney to represent the student’s interests in the court proceeding and the student’s attorney may request an independent clinical review of the behavioral plan submitted by JRC regarding the student."

Behavioral programs such as Applied Behavioral Analysis would never be considered an educational approach if it weren't for the school system equating appropriate and sophisticated behavior as equal in importance to the acquisition of knowledge. Nothing is more relative and practically useless than the labels society uses to declare a person's competence.

However, JRC is not the exception to the rule (although more is known about their abuses). This behavioral treatment center/mental institution/juvinille punishment and rehabilitation center can't be
 penalized or effectively requested to change until we look at how their methods are in keeping with the goals that progressive education has always maintained.


This describes John Dewey's aspirations for
 compulsory schooling:

John Dewey: Education Was Never About Learning

"(Makow) – No one has had a more pernicious effect on American education, and by extension the corruption of American society today than John Dewey. Born in 1859, John Dewey turned historic American values and logic upside down.

In Dewey’s view, the individual existed only to serve society. “Socialization” (i.e., the individual’s conformity to a group) was seen as more important than factual learning. This twisted view of education infected all of his work, resulting in a century of ever diminishing American academic achievement, with the resultant corruption of American society."

AND

"Incredibly, Dewey ridiculed the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, declaring that knowledge was only valid and worthwhile if “society” decided so.

If the Powers That Be (“society”) decided literature, or geometry, or chemistry is no longer a valid pursuit, but multicultural studies, minority oppression, and remedial basket weaving are, then the individual should have no alternative to that course of education.

Every virtue, including curiosity, resourcefulness, competitiveness, ethical conduct, right reasoning, rhetorical skills, logic and inventiveness — could be considered to be “vices” overnight if the Powers That Be (“Society”) decided they were no longer desirable."

 

I can only imagine that within a week of the introduction of compulsory schooling, parents began to compete with each other to show which of them, by producing offspring, had created a superior product. I'm sure that almost immediately one mother rushed out to put a bumper sticker on the rear of the horse that drew the family carriage which said," my kid made the honor roll." The neighboring parent chose to advertise, "my kids got autism, but I love them anyway." It must not have been long after that when some parent told the news reporter, "I would've driven my carriage off the side of a bridge if it weren't for my competent kids which would also be destroyed in the accident." It may have taken a little time, but I'll bet similar behavior began fairly soon after this age appropriate ranking system began.

People involved in progressive education politics often frame discussions in a way, which encourages the false belief that they are all looking for the best ways to include and provide for the majority of the public. It has never been this way and in the same way that the US political system is falsely defined by two parties in competition with each other, our involvement in these meaningless debates supports the myth of everyone being involved in a noble effort.

It's silly to consider someone to be superior (which is what positive labels of achievement or ability ultimately do) without considering the validity of the standard of measurement. If there is an agenda to provide some people with positive labels, they can then use to their advantage at the expense of most others that receive negative ones, then it's silly, arrogant, and a way to support and mimic corporate values to present your own label or that of someone close to you as being valid due to a fair standard of evaluation.

The people who are behind government decisions that use a person's success and achievement along with another person's lack of it as a means for keeping them hostage don't care about your abilities or your achievements and only present glorified labels to dissuade the public from looking too closely at the flaws in the system and challenging it.


The system can change. Diversity can be encouraged, and we can learn to empower each other. However, this will not happen pursuant to continuing to honor the system and its values which has been used to prevent our empowerment. The system itself was designed and is sustained as an end unto itself. Until we find an appropriate means to encourage our own individual creativity and redefine institutions as a means to our individual goals everyone (whether formally involved in the system or disenfranchised by it) will remain hostage to the inappropriate values it has taught us.