"Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”
and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”
and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay."
-a 15yo autistic girl experiencing ABA therapy
From a quick search, it's basically a therapy where, instead of figuring out why the patient is upset, you train them like a dog. And not even the training where you do gentle redirection from bad behaviours. The kind where you whap the "patient" (ie victim) for being "abnormal" so they effectively become a nervous wreck who does as you please to avoid being hurt
Sounds like every conservative's wet dream.
In a conservative and nothing about this sounds appealing to me.
Do you know any conservatives in real life or do you just have a notion of who they are from memes?
Well, I know the policies they've been advocating for. You know like, taking away women's bodily autonomy. Denying them reproductive healthcare. Taking away the rights and dehumanising anybody who doesn't conform to their very narrow (and utterly unscientific) ideas of gender identity. Making healthcare unaffordable to the point where live expectancy in the richest country on earth is falling. Letting any idiot buy an assault rifle, leading to countless deaths and a population living in fear. An inhumane and deeply racist prison system. Letting police get away with open blatant murder. I could go on. So pardon me if I think that a "conservative" is a person who simply likes to make other people suffer.
I see three possibilities:
One, you have a different definition of conservative than what is currently the general definition of that label in the US.
Two, you're lying.
Three, you're in a country other than the United States and therefore 'conservative' doesn't mean the same thing in general to you.
Quick test: if you agree with or vote for any US Republican politician, you're just lying. In any other case, there may be a misunderstanding.
Note that even what we pejoratively call "training like a dog" is so obsolete that I've seen/read more than one dog trainer get a bit offended for comparing their profession to ABA. Ultimately, the problem with ABA is that it assumes that the object to be worked with isn't a subject worthy of being considered sentient, or of being capable of accurately expressing their needs or preferences, or that their mental processes are either too obscure or too wrong to even begin to take them into consideration, but rather that it's just a very simple organism that you have to punish or reward until it learns to pretend to appear "human enough" in your eyes.
You'd think we would have shelved it already when we already know a lot in the differences in the mental processes of autistic people.