Discuss anarchist praxis and philosophy. Don't take yourselves too seriously.
Other anarchist comms
Join the matrix room for some real-time discussion.
"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
A quote from a book that I'm currently enjoying: "Do you mean 'respect' or 'obedience'?"
Ohey, familiar. Lately getting that particular bit of equivocation from my own abusive "family" who've been threatening everything from having me jailed to having me "institutionalized," calling the cops on me to evict me without notice, physical intimidation... Turns out "no" is a grievous offense to such people. The whole "children as property" thing is vile, absurd that some clearly think giving birth yields the ultimate entitlement, to an entire person and their life. I wonder if not getting diagnosed is a 'blessing in disguise' :| Tried for a decade or two to tell BioMom I thought I was 'on the spectrum' but always just got bullied out of ever seeing a doc. "There is NOTHING wrong with you!!" she'd say, every time. So now I'm a wreck 'cause two people screwed and entitled themselves to getting by with this crap (and more besides). I hope that person manages better.
...Could really use help escaping before I become a data point, actually :-\
I'd try to avoid getting an official diagnosis until you are free - Autism CAN be used as a way to deem a person incompentent and unable to handle their own living situation, causing a guardian to be assigned power of attourney and control over finances
Source: I have Autism and thankfully am lucky my mother isn't insane as she has effective power of attourney
I wish you luck! Shit's hard, especially in the US.
What's ABA theory? But anyway, spot on.
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.
*therapy. Sounds like some sort of "Autism cure" by christians. Which would be as effective and tortuous as "Gay convertion therapy"
No, it's not that. It's a form of therapy that is highly controversial, and mostly stems from the observation that autistic humans can be brought to “behave” like “normal people” if they are sufficiently conditioned to do that. Yet, it is not founded in religious BS, but rather a result of behavioral approaches to psychology that have been very popular, especially in the US and Canada at least since the 60s (like many addiction-therapies and such). Behavioral therapies aren't bad outright, but have spawned some questionable offspring (like all approaches in medicine tend to do). “Conversion camps” are such offspring. Regarding ABA: While many studies indicate that ABA does, in fact, bring autistic people to behave more like non-autistic people, that in itself is not evidence that the therapy is working. If depressive people behave like I want them to and get out of bed to clean the house because I hold a gun to their head, they are not “cured”. The same goes for this kind of therapy. There are merits to the principles of the approaches bundled under the term “ABA”, but the line between “helping Autistic people” and “torturing autistic people” is razor-thin. Unfortunately, many approaches that call themselves “ABA” are crossing that line, as do many therapists who deny people breaks or meals, or worse.
You know? Humans are cruel dumpster fires of bullshit once they think what they do is right and "for the best".
Tangential, but relevant I think.
“And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that—”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things…”
― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
All too often, people who identify as an authority do so because they think of people as owned things. An ugly situation somewhat ameliorated by Celine's Second Law "Effective communication is only possible among equals."
"If you don't respect the privileges I think I ought to have in my position in the social hierarchy, I won't respect the rights I might be willing to grant to someone in your position in the social hierarchy."
Isn't this nearly verbatim from an old tumblr post? Or is that the girl being quoted?
Yes, that tumblr is gone now. Someone linked to a quote of it in tumblr in the replies on mastodon