Month: September 2017

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

chavisory:

queenshulamit:

ozymandias271:

reading a paper on quality of life among 45-to-70-year-olds with Down syndrome:

“Individuals expressed a desire to be allowed to go to bed when they wanted to.”

😦

Imagine.

I lived in a room and board that failed the burrito test. (”If you’re not allowed to get up in the middle of the night to microwave a burrito, you live in an institution.”) No one stopped me from going to bed, but they did tell me I had to have my lights out by 10, and that I had to be out of the house by 10 the next morning. When I complained to my outpatient program that I needed more help than I was getting, they threatened me with board and care, where my cell phone would be taken away and I would lose contact with the outside world. My case manager sounded so damn smug, like he had caught me out, when he said, “if you’re really as helpless as you say, then you need to be in a board and care.” Like my only options were struggling to do things I couldn’t do, or surrendering my life to an institution.

When I tried to talk about these things with other people, they always rationalized it away. (I told my dad once that my caseworker was reading my e-mails as I wrote them, demonstrating extreme disrespect for my privacy, and he said, “Well, she’s probably making sure you don’t use the internet to goof off.” I was 22 years old.)

 People tend to mock the idea that telling an adult when to go to bed, when to eat, etc., is a human rights violation, even though they would find it outrageous and absurd if anyone came into their lives to do the same thing to them.

And this is what people seem to think when they tell disabled activists we’re just not disabled enough to understand that some people really do need to be locked up and deprived of all autonomy.

queeranarchism:

Here’s a thing: the concept of sex as something dirty, something ‘good girls’ don’t do, is a huge part of rape culture. It creates shame and silence, enables victim blaiming and allows predators to vilify their victims.

So I get pretty pissed off when people try to vilify sex in the name of ‘protection’. From people who get paranoid about parents who kiss their children on the mouth to people who try to limit the acceptable age difference further every year and pretend minors don’t pursue and enjoy sex. People who call places ‘sexualised’ because visitors have the freedom to be sexual beings there. People who use the word ‘sexualised’ as if it means ‘tainted’.

That is not protecting anyone. It’s making sex more unmentionable, more hidden away like a dirty secret. You may claim to protect children but what you’re doing is stopping them from speaking honestly about their lives, their feelings and the times people took advantage of that silence.

Congress Wants to Change the Americans with Disabilities Act and Undermine the Civil Rights of People with Disabilities

urbancripple:

madukrainian:

urbancripple:

From the article:

H.R. 620 would completely change the way in which a business is required to comply with the ADA. Instead of requiring that a business comply proactively, the bill would place the burden on the individual who is being denied access. This bill proposes that after an individual with a disability is denied access she must first notify the business owner, with exacting specificity, that her civil rights were violated, and then wait for six months to see if the business will make “substantial progress” toward access, before going to a court to order compliance.

Business owners can spend years out of compliance and face no penalty even after they receive notice, so long as the owners claim “substantial progress.” By allowing a business an endless amount of time to become compliant with the ADA’s reasonable requirements, H.R. 620 removes any incentive for a business to proactively ensure that people with disabilities have access. Instead, the bill encourages businesses to just wait until an individual’s civil rights are violated before making any changes.

And ya’ll wonder why I scream at people who try and tell me about how expensive and complicated the ADA is to comply with / enforce.

It’s that shit that gives bill like this their strength. Call your representatives. Use Resist Bot. Disabled folk AND OUR ABLE-BODIED ALLIES need to FLOOD the offices of our representatives and let them know that this bill will should not even be debated much less made law. 

Do what you can from where you are and demand that those who can do more step up. I know we’re tired and I know it’s hard but don’t give up. Save yourself one last spoon and make sure the edges are good and sharp.

If you need someone to talk to, feel free to reach out. I’ll listen; I’ll empathize. You are not alone in this. 

Resist Bot only works for your senators. This is a House bill.

They updated it! You can choose which one you need now. It’s super cool.

Congress Wants to Change the Americans with Disabilities Act and Undermine the Civil Rights of People with Disabilities

Attention Florida Pet Owners:

why-animals-do-the-thing:

gracefully-disappear:

gracefully-disappear:

Privately owned hotels, motels, etc., can still legally turn you away if you have pets with you. It just happened to Hurricane Harvey evacuees. Please do not go to a hotel trying to demand that they take your pets – You can get turned away, (the police will assist if needed) and you may end up back on the road in the storm. Which is the most dangerous place to be.

There has been a post going around saying that the PETS act means that hotels have to accept your pets… This is FALSE! The PETS act allows FEMA to spend government funds on creating pet friendly evacuation and disaster response plans, to fund pet friendly shelters, to fund veterinary services, and to pay pet fees to hotels that accept pets for displaced families who receive vouchers after a disaster. It has no bearing on private businesses, private businesses are not required to change or amend their pet policies.

Some hotels do, however, voluntarily change their policies during a storm. This will be dependent on each individual hotel owner, (they are usually franchises). So the best thing you can do is call the individual hotel before you go.

To evacuate, you will need to identify pet friendly hotels, shelters, etc.

To find pet friendly hotels, you can use BringFido.com or Booking.com (on Booking, select “Pet Friendly” in the filters). 

The American Kennel Club has a list of Pet-Friendly shelters for you, your family, and your furry friends here.

And finally, for your general preparedness information, FEMA has a “Helping Pets” page for storm preparedness and facts you need to know here.

Please be safe and have a backup plan in place. I hope that cuddling your furry loved ones brings you much comfort.

I’m gonna keep reblogging this through the day.

I was asked to reblog this post to help clarify the misinformation from a popular post that is circulating, which claims that no hotel can turn you away with your pet due to a FEMA ruling from Katrina. 

chromalogue:

alyesque:

Its important to remember that Richard Spencer is well educated. He has a BA and MA, and was a doctoral candidate at Duke before he left to do his white nationalist bullshit. His MA thesis was on Adorno. 

He’s not “ignorant” or stupid. Hes quite intelligent, and he has chosen not out of ignorance but out of conscious meditated choice to be an enemy of the people of the world.

The other side is not full of people who are less intelligent than you, and the sooner you realize that the sooner you will stop underestimating them and be able to actually fight them effectively.

The first time I saw this, it bothered me a lot.  I mean, I know that smart people can be very wrong about things, but in a sector that manufactures impostor syndrome, it seems weird to have someone emerge so committed to being drastically, appallingly, confidently, steadfastly wrong.  

So I went and did some research.  This article was immensely helpful.   

Spencer comes from a fairly wealthy background.  He doesn’t care about class or religion, and he actually hates democracy.  What he cares about is some nebulous idea of culture of “white Christendom” – even though he himself is an atheist.  And when he did graduate work, he found thinkers who confirmed his ideas about culture – Nietzsche, Herder, and Schmitt.  These thinkers, surprise surprise, were the favourite philosophers of the Nazis.  

And I mean, I know people who work on Nietzsche and Herder, because they did have a huge influence.  But my colleagues regard the Holocaust as horrific, and for Spencer it wasn’t a deal-breaker.  

His work on Adorno alleges that Adorno loved Wagner’s music despite Wagner’s anti-Semitism.  Obviously it got him an MA, but it doesn’t feel like a stunning insight.

Spencer believes in fascism and white supremacy, but he has a complicated, cynical relationship with some of the other ideas he espouses.  He doesn’t believe in Christianity.  He doesn’t support Donald Trump; just finds him awfully convenient.  He doesn’t believe in freedom or democracy.  He professes not be believe in violence, either, although I’d say genocide is pretty darned violent.  He says stuff sometimes just for its shock value, in the belief that it will make people less critical of his ideas.

He’s a privileged boy who found books that tell him why he deserves to be privileged.  He’s trolling people on the left and cynically manipulating people on the right.  And no, none of this redeems him as a person, or decreases by one iota the harm that he’s done.  But it helps me understand how a smart person comes to espouse this very unsmart nonsense.