I’ve been informed that the family is still in need of donations after this awful injustice that was brought upon them. If you have anything to spare, please help this family who lost one of their own.
#justiceforcolten
Click here to support Justice for Colten Boushie organized by Erica Violet Lee
What 50 states might look like if they were redrawn today based on economic connections.
What’s that big empty space?
Desert and forests, mostly. Not many cities in that area.
bad and naughty americans get sent to the NULL STATE to atone for their crimes
I always thought Montana was kind of mythical.
This is interesting, but it misses a political point, that some (a few? many? most? not sure) states deliberately did not make the then-largest city the capital of the new state. It was a way of limiting the control of the largest city in the state over the rest of the state, to make sure that people outside the area of the city weren’t locked out of both the major economic power and the state government. These proposed replacements, on the other hand, would presumably make the main city in each one the capital, which might be extremely controversial in some cases.
The real-world state of Illinois, for example, made its capital Springfield, rather than Chicago, to make sure that Chicago didn’t control the state absolutely — which must have been a relief in, for example, the era of Al Capone. But even so, most of the non-Chicago part of the state thinks Chicago has too much influence on the state’s government, quite reasonably. Politicians representing the Chicago area in the state government treat the rest of the state with contempt, doing things like cutting funding for infrastructure and education — I remember hearing of an area in downstate Illinois which repeatedly petitioned for the state to fix up the local drainage and water retention system, and the resolutions were blocked by Chicago area representatives who regarded this as a waste of money. The area flooded repeatedly as a result, which meant that all the houses lost their value (which prevents people from leaving — they would have to sell at a loss) and drove all the businesses out. All of which is why, on any map showing election results of the last few decades, Chicago is mostly Democratic but the rest of the state is mostly Republican. (It works out to be majority-Democratic overall.) Republicans can win downstate Illinois elections by simply saying “Chicago hates you, Chicago votes Democratic, I am against Democrats”.
These things have real-world consequences even now, so I’m not sure that this map is very realistic as a result.
I am disinclined to buy into the “cities oppress rural people” argument because it usually has racist roots.
No, it predates the concept of non-whites as people. For exposition:
The reason we have the Senate is because the rural states were afraid the high-density-population states would run the country in ways that would harm the farmlands (and rightfully so, since that was a contributing factor to the Civil War). It was a compromise – the populationists got the House (where the more people you gots means more votes), but they are countered by the Senate, where population density doesn’t matter (you only get 2 votes even if you gots people stacked on top of each other). The urban/rural political divide is not based on race, it’s just that racists use it as a deflection from their real motives – but it still exists.
Long story short: The science is solid enough that at this point it is completely reasonable to state unequivocally that spanking is a bad idea. It does not produce good outcomes, it does produce bad outcomes. It produces antisocial behavior and slows development. It is bad. It should stop. We are out of good excuses for believing otherwise.
i was possibly the sole exception: a single hard swat on the butt was the best way to reboot me when i was having a meltdown.
that’s not exactly spanking, though. that’s more of a glass-of-ice-water utility.
That’s more “surprise” rather than “hurt”. Shocking somebody’s system in order to break them out of a feedback loop is LOADS different from corporal punishment
well, my parents thought it was corporal punishment at the time, is the thing. it was the 70′s. we didn’t know why i’d get stuck in freakout mode and have to be restarted via sharp whack like a faulty engine.
but my parents were good parents and didn’t do it to express their anger feelings. they did it because it worked. it didn’t work on my brother, so they didn’t do it on him. and we were all really open and communicative about this – when my brother was out of control, he was sent to the quiet corner to look at houseplants for ten minutes. spanking only hurt and upset him. me, if they sent me to the quiet corner, i went into a weird escalation spiral, unable to stop demanding attention with worse and worse acting out, but a good hard swat blanked me right out and then i could calm down. i much preferred it to time out. it had to be hard enough to sting, to work properly, but it wasn’t really painful.
anyway, the reason i brought it up wrt spanking is because it’d be hard to draw a clear line between it and spanking. some kids are rough and sturdy and prefer a swat to a talk or a time out. but i agree it’s an absolutely lousy default.
Something I haven’t seen addressed (to be fair I don’t plan on having kids so I haven’t exactly been looking hard) is the best way to deter kids from dangerous behaviour without smacking? In my household smacking was what happened if you ran in front of a car – it taught you that running in front of cars meant pain, with the convenient advantage of being non fatal. It’s always struck me as a really logical shorthand, though since smacking is now illegal here it obvs doesn’t happen anymore. I just don’t know enough about kids to know the best way to teach them not to injure themselves?
my parents didn’t punish us for that, they treated us like we’d had a close call. like if i’d run toward the road in front of a car, dad would’ve grabbed me and stopped me, going like “whoa, whoa, there’s a car! did you not see the car? jeez, that was close. you gotta pay attention!”
but dad being an engineer, and a lot of our bonding time being spent with power tools and on boats and with hunting gear and so forth, safety was a prepare thing, not a react thing. we got drilled on safety protocols. and if we ignored one, like if we didn’t buckle our life vest before getting in the boat, or aimed a gun downrange while someone was switching targets, we got scolded and quizzed. but not punished.
when i grew up i discovered that he was treating us the same way you treat students in a lab or trainees in a workshop. if a student doesn’t turn off their bunsen burner before walking away, you don’t spank them, you point it out and make them go back and fix it, and explain what they need to do differently next time.
anyhow, it worked, we’ve both got all our fingers and eyeballs to this day. 😀
Many of my adult autistic friends are uncomfortable in the company of the vast majority of parents of autistic children.
That is one of the most disheartening sentences to have to write, but the truth in it is undeniable. And it’s something that we, as parents, have to change and have to change NOW.
My kid, at almost fifteen, is just as close to being 25 as she is to being 5. I cannot stomach the idea that she will feel anything less than welcome, fully included, and empowered by any group of my peers. Right now, that’s just not the case.
In advocacy circles, my autistic friends are constantly told, both implicitly and explicitly, that their voices are only relevant in describing their own experiences. Their advocacy on behalf of their community is routinely dismissed by those who assume they do not or cannot understand the needs of their more ‘severely’ disabled brethren.
But that notion – that their advocacy is limited to themselves and to others who share their own exact profile is not only flawed – it’s dangerous.
It serves as the primary mechanism by which we continuously silence the voices of those for whom we claim to fight. It sets up this bizarre paradigm in which anyone who has the ability to make themselves understood is not disabled enough to qualify as an advocate for those who have not yet found the means to do so. I beg you to really think about that.
What about someone like our dear young friend Rhema? She is one of the most impacted people I know (and I know a LOT of people). But now that she can type, she’s facing a wall of skepticism about whether or not “it’s really her” communicating. I’ve sat next to her on countless occasions while she pecked out words and I will tell you that it is absolutely, positively, 100% HER communicating HER thoughts. But I will also tell you that despite incontrovertible evidence, there are parents and “experts” who have and who will continue to challenge the provenance of her writing, thereby marginalizing and devaluing one of the most important perspectives we have available to us, not to mention Rhema‘s own agency.
And what about an adult who went to college, is an articulate and eloquent speaker, and who *appears*, for all intents and purposes to be nothing like Rhema? What right does she have to claim to be fighting for her needs too?
Come closer, friends, I need you to really hear this ..
She has every right under the sun and just as much, if not more understanding, of what it is we’re really fighting for.
Having had the privilege of getting close to a number of folks who fit that latter description, I will tell you that they often have far, far more in common with our kids than we think. But they also have a lot of years of therapy, experience, practice, learning, human development, support .. things that will make our kids look a whole lot different in twenty years than they do now too. But also? And I really need you to hear this too ..
They hide a lot. They were raised with the belief that looking indistinguishable from their neurotypical peers was the highest achievement possible. They were taught to pass. To stuff it all down. To be someone else in public. And yeah, some of them are able to do that, at least for limited periods of time, where others simply can’t. But the stuff that we see with our kids – the stuff that we think differentiates our lives from theirs – the spinning, the flapping, the meltdowns, the shutdowns, the heartbreaking self injury .. the dysregulation and sensory overloads, the anxiety, the rigidity, and the private challenges that we don’t talk about because they’re private .. well, guess what? These adults experience it too.
Because try as they may to fit into a world that doesn’t fit, time runs out on that limited window of time in a day in which they can keep it all contained.
It’s like social media. We compare our own messy, behind-the-scenes lives to friends’ artfully posed Instagram photos. And while the photos might be real, ten minutes later, I promise you the frames look a whole lot different.
But still we insist that this limited snapshot of autistic adults in our shared spaces provides an accurate – or remotely relevant – comparison to our children’s abilities and that the contrast we think we see justifies shutting them down when they say, “I get it.” It does neither. And it has so stop.
Because to force them to share their most private challenges to prove themselves “disabled enough” to be worthy of being heard is a pretty hideous dynamic for a relationship with people who say they have your best interests at heart.
Most of us, at least the nautistic* and not otherwise disabled among us, discovered this community when we learned about our children’s challenges. Autistic adults have lived their lives in this community.
They have a unique perspective as advocates, the breadth and depth of which many of us can only imagine. They speak from experience, with a long lens spanning entire lifetimes, having seen the effects of various movements, methodologies, and ideologies and they have incredibly valuable insight into what works, what doesn’t, and what may looks like it’s working while causing unintended yet irreparable damage.
The bottom line is that their voices matter. And it’s long past time to stop looking for reasons to dismiss them.
*nautistic is Brooks word for neurotypical. It is pronounced NOT-tistic.
I’m going to make this as quick as possible before you scroll by this with boredom, I swear to you it’s very important.
Please end craptions.
I was just watching the “Who Killed Markiplier,” series and being very hard of hearing, use closed captions for everything I watch. In this case, the captions ruined some of it for me.
Very few Youtubers caption their own videos, even less have good volunteers for it. Please don’t scroll by just yet, and remember that you’re not the only one who enjoys watching videos.
Many captions are awful, spoiling, or downright ableist with several slurs. Here is an example that actually makes me sick to my stomach.
If you have to time to help out the Deaf/Hard of Hearing community by captioning videos, here are some examples of what not to do.
- Please do not add your own commentary.
- Please don’t put your own sentences in parenthesis.
- Please no “That’s what she said,” Lenny Faces, or XD’s in your captions.
- Please don’t add actions if they’re visible on camera.
- Please don’t add things such as “*Sassy face.* “(Bye Felicia!)” etc.
- Don’t add things such as [ ___ is tired of ___ shit.]
- For things like Antisepticeye, or Darkiplier, don’t type ļị̱̙k͇̺͚͜e̫ ͙̩th̞i҉̭̯̙s͕̠̪͍̤͞, it’s too hard to read and captions go by fast.
Things you can do!
- Add everything said! No line is too unimportant to be skipped or shortened!
- If everyone is talking at once, add [Name], hyphens to show an interruption, etc.
- Add [Offscreen] and the noise heard/things said.
Just remember this, if it’s not in the video, don’t put it in the captions!!
Thank you, and love from this HoH kid.
Ditto to all the above.
Don’t rely on auto-generated craptions. Sometimes they fool you: they can seem okay for a few lines, then suddenly have all kinds of weird transcription errors that only a human being can recognize and correct. If you genuinely care about enabling people who are deaf, hard of hearing, or have auditory processing disorder actually understanding what is said or done in your videos, then use HUMAN edited captions.
In addition to the tips shared by @plap-slap above:
Also include information on tone of voice, especially in circumstances where the tone of voice conflicts with the facial expression/body language, or where the person’s body language can’t be seen because they’re off screen, or if the tone of voice conflicts with content of what is said. For example, someone says “I’m fine” but they sound angry or sad, then indicating their tone of voice matters in how the viewer interprets the scene. Tone of voice can be indicated in parentheses.
During conversations, be sure to indicate who is speaking, ESPECIALLY for off-screen speakers, but even for on-screen speakers. I can’t count the number of times I have had to re-watch and re-watch a poorly captioned video before finally making sense out of a conversation where it wasn’t clear who was saying which line. Or the number of times that I have belatedly discovered that I had completely misinterpreted what was happening because I thought one person said a thing, when it was actually the other person who said it. You can indicate the speaker similar to how it is done in a script, for example:
Victim: Help, save me!
Supergirl: I will save you!
(Except you might use the victim’s name, if the character has a name.)
It helps if you put a line break and start a new line each time that a different person is speaking. Don’t mush one person’s line into the line of the next person, even if there’s still room to fit it in. START A NEW LINE. This will help signal that the person speaking this sentence now, is not the same person who said the previous sentence.
YES, do indicate noises that are happening, particularly sounds that tell you what is happening off screen or that are not otherwise obvious from the action that we can see on the screen. (Sounds usually go inside parentheses, so they won’t be interpreted as lines being said by people.)
I once watched a scene at the start of a comedic show with Spanish subtitles instead of English captions (for reading practice in Spanish). Foreign translation subtitles usually leave out sound descriptions, so in this scene I just saw a woman who was trying to sleep but tossing restlessly in bed unable to sleep. I thought she just had insomnia and thought the rest of the episode was going to be a series of hilarious attempts to solve the insomnia or something. But then when I got to the next scene, I realized part way into the woman’s conversation with her friends about her restless night that something was REALLY OFF in how I had interpreted what was happening when she was tossing so restlessly in bed. So I went back to re-watch this scene, this time with English captions written for deaf viewers, which meant that it included references to what sounds were happening in the background. This is when I finally understood that there were a lot of random noises in the background–and from the way the woman kept reacting exactly as each sound was reported in the captions, it was so clear that she was reacting directly to each sound, being annoyed and distracted by the sound. So she wasn’t struggling with insomnia, she was struggling with the annoyance of these noises keeping her awake.
Leaving the sounds out of the captions can in some cases COMPLETELY TRANSFORM how deaf/HoH viewers understand or interpret what’s happening on the screen. Sounds convey a lot of information that might not come through in dialogue alone: someone slamming a door off screen or slamming plates or whatever onto a table tells us a lot about their mood, for example.
Is someone knocking at the door? Or calling out someone’s name off screen? Put that in the captions. Are there footsteps being heard in what is otherwise a seemingly empty parking garage? Say that in the captions! Phone ringing? Microwave dinging? Say it in the captions! Any sound that helps us understand what is happening in the environment should be indicated (in parentheses) in the captions.
Any sound that a person reacts to should be indicated in the captions so we understand what they’re reacting to. I have often been confused by characters who just randomly stop talking and look at the door for no immediately apparent reason. Sure, I do usually figure out there must have been either a knock or a doorbell once I see them open the door and see that someone is there. But it would save me that annoying/frustrating moment of confusion if the captions could just SAY that there is a knock or ringing doorbell.
Any important sound that the character is ignoring should also be indicated, so we know the sound is there and realize they’re ignoring it. For example if someone knocks at the door but the character maybe looks at the door but otherwise just ignores it, that tells us they’re either avoiding people in general or maybe ignoring one person in particular who they think might be at the door.
Since getting top surgery, I’ve been thinking a lot more about pain and the ways I experience and define it internally. Pretty soon after I woke up after surgery, I was asked to rate my pain by assigning it a value. I said that pain scales have never been very easy for me to work with, but did offer a number to the best of my ability. I based it off of what impression I wanted them to have, instead of my own internal feeling though, because how I felt was impossible to translate, but how they should treat me was easier to aim for. Since then I’ve tried to figure out a way to make a more personalized scale that will be easier to use in the future. I ran into some problems though, which is what this post is about.
First I’m going to separate two terms that have the same word just to make it easier to use both in this post. Normally both are called pain, but I’m going to call them red-pain and white-pain. Red-pain is the pain of a cut or a bruise or a burn or anything along those lines including more painful iterations of similar things. White-pain includes red-pain, but also includes other kinds of pain that are less obvious to some. Pain from sensory processing disorder is included here. Anything defined by the person experiencing it as pain is what I’m using white-pain to mean. I don’t know if these terms are defined well enough, but hopefully my use of them will make it clearer what they mean to me. I suspect different people define red-pain differently to some degree.
Even with red-pain, I can’t really assign it to a scale. I’m hypersensitive to red-pain, and there are things that I would call red-pain that don’t feel painful to me, but are instead a hint at it that I suspect many other people don’t notice if they even experience it. At some level, red-pain for me mixes with “unpleasant sense of touch” so most points of strong contact my body has with any solid surface fall in this range. Right now, my elbow on my chair’s armrest, my foot’s two points of contact with the floor and my desk frame, and my bottom on my chair’s seat are all examples of this sensory-space where for me, red-pain blurs with something else I don’t feel justified in calling pain even though it is white-pain.
A few days after surgery, I still had surgical drains in which needed to be emptied and measured every so often. One particular time they were being drained, my mom tried to pull some of the fluid through the tube into the bulb. There was absolutely no red-pain from this. Even still it was awful and I cried held my hands over the place that felt so bad from what felt like an internal vacuum under my skin while I told my mom to stop repeatedly. At the time I felt like I was lying, in letting my mom think that it was painful, because it wasn’t red-pain, and I’ve never been good at recognising when I can call something white-pain.
I was realizing that after something similar occured when the drain tubes were removed, that maybe a pain scale that asks me to look into my brain and directly see my pain isn’t at all what I need. I connected it to alexithymia, and the way I’m pretty good at figuring out what I feel when I have a strong enough emotion to leave an impact on me outside of my brain. Maybe there are indirect clues that are better to inform me of how to quantify my pain.
I haven’t built a detailed scale for myself yet, but I think I would have much more luck putting a number to a pain, if my response to the pain is what I’m going by instead of some abstract continuous line of values.
I plan to include things such as “uncomfortable enough to try frequently to alleviate the feeling, but distractions can keep mind mostly off of it.” and “makes me take up a defensive/curled posture” and “crying” as various things that would be behaviors of my own that help define pain. I also want to include more mental things, like how hard it is to think about anything else, or how often my mind is brought back to it.
It isn’t perfect because other factors will inevitably influence some of these a bit, but that doesn’t matter much, because if i’m crying for example, even if it’s for relatively lesser pain, I’m still crying for a reason, so there’s probably still something significant to address. Maybe that reason is some sort of overload that I’m bad at recognising too, and that white pain combined with another white pain is enough to add up to a higher number.
My only question with this all is if it’s fair to classify different things similarly. My experience of when the air has a bad smell that I walk around quickly to find some someplace that doesn’t smell bad in spite of social expectations for stillness has not even a hint of red-pain. Even still my behavior for it is in essence very similar to the way I’ve been shifting in my seat to minimize my experience of my weight pressing the skin between my chair and my bones in a way that is similar to but not entirely red-pain.
Has anyone else worked out anything like this? I don’t know at all how anyone would classify my experiences, because I can’t know any one else’s experiences to compare, nor them to mine.
But basically, I’m suggesting that pain from hypersensitivities is something I never learned how to process as pain, because it isn’t red-pain. (and growing up undiagnosed, I’m sure I was told that things like that don’t hurt plenty.) So to work around that, I can understand it the same way I understand my emotions in spite of alexithymia.
I hope you don’t mind me reblogging this to say how I relate. I think the somatic head pain I get is red pain, and the uncomfortable side effects of the migraine are white pain.
I hate being asked how bad they are on a pain scale because the worst ones are like a 4 from red pain but I literally can’t move at all because I’m so disoriented from head motion.
The light sensitivity is the hardest to explain. It doesn’t make the red pain much worse at all, but any light is just horrifyingly BAD and I would do anything to avoid it.
I could manage it by lying very still in the dark, and then I think I’m probably overreacting and I would test to see if moving and light would make the pain return. It can’t only hurt when I sit up. I must be staying in bed longer than I need to skip school or something. Maybe it’s hysteria.
I’ve also been thinking about this in the context of my gi symptoms. I can feel bloated and nauseated and overfull without actual somatic pain, but those sensations are painful in their own way and still worth paying attention to.
I think that’s why “malaise” is an actual sign of diseases like heart attacks. It’s a white pain that is so infrequent we lack any more specific descriptors.
If you need a white pain to describe for other people, I think vomiting is one. You feel like crying afterwards, your mouth tastes bad, you feel defeated, and you’re exhausted.
But it usually doesn’t physically hurt. But it is very unpleasant to the level of pain and indicates distress or illness like pain does.
(The extreme discomfort I get from this could just be me being hypersensitive though)
i have blurred out icons and safe mode off ama
Check your safe mode again. They turned it back on three times today, for me.
still off no matter how many times I check. even flipped the switch a few times to be sure. icons have been blurred for weeks or months, i just assumed it was another garbage global change to this shipwrecked hellsite
That is not right – make a support ticket. They usually get back to you within 3-4 months.
lmao I’d rather chew rocks but i do genuinely appreciate your efforts to help, if this wasn’t tongue in cheek
Was a little teasing – I Has filed support tickets in the past and got response over three months later. Response was usually “we’re sorry you’re having difficulty accessing our site” with no reference to the actual ticket/complaint. I think they hired Helen Waite as their complaint handler – if you gots a complaint you can goes to Helen Waite.
The headline does not do this story justice. Let me retell it.
Thomas, a goose, fell in love with a black swan named Henry. Henry loved Thomas, but he also mated with a female of his species, Henrietta. Henry and Henrietta both cared for Thomas, and he became a partner in their relationship. For 24 years, he lived with his swan mates and helped them raise 68 chicks. Sadly, Henry died, and Henrietta did not wish to remain with Thomas without Henry. After she moved on, Thomas found a mate of his own species, but lost his chicks to a rival goose named George.
As he aged, Thomas began to lose his sight. He was taken into a retirement community with other visually impaired birds, where he made new friends and continued to foster cygnets as he had done for his mates. He died at the age of forty and will be buried next to his beloved Henry.
There. Polyamorous, romantic, sad but sweet. Thomas and Henry were together longer than my ex and I–24 years versus 22. Think about that.
Blind bisexual goose stuck in love triangle with two swans dies aged 40
Plot idea: A character in a fantasy setting who uses a dragon as a wheelchair.
Bonus points if everyone who knows the character well acts as if it’s no big deal, but whenever they meet new people they’re fully shocked, because dragons are actually totally dangerous and untrainable, and it’s just this one dragon who decided that the character was their human, and that they wanted to hang out with their human all the time, and help out whenever they can.
SUPER bonus points if there is actually some form of wheelchair in the afore mentioned fantasy setting, and the character used to have one, until their dragon kept on setting it on fire because, HUMAN, those wheels can’t even go up stairs, and get stuck in the mud of the unpaved tracks around the village, we can do so much better!
yes, love of cat is unconditional, unless transition to vacuume or veterinerian
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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