As a 90′s kid, it blows my mind that origami youtube videos exist. You can look up any model and watch a pair of manicured hands assemble the thing in real time, in full color, in 3D, with cheerful flute music in the background. When I was little, you had a library book with no words and these esoteric little dotted lines and arrows and it was just you, your hands, your paper, and the cruel, uncaring eyes of God.
The CBC is increasing security at its downtown Toronto headquarters following the discovery of a post on a popular “incel” message board that encouraged the “shooting up” of the building.
“The Toronto Police just stopped by the [Toronto Broadcast Centre] and are aware of the post as it was reported to them from a person in Montreal. They are going to be filing a report and I will have the report number soon,” Jason Stokes, Security & Life Safety Manager at BGIS, wrote in a Saturday afternoon email to the building’s senior security personnel and producers. BGIS is the company contracted by the CBC to provide property management services for the broadcast centre.
“We will be increasing security, I will confirm when the extra coverage has arrived onsite.”
Earlier Saturday, a post was published on the Incels.me message board with the subject line “[Serious] our next task: shooting up CBC headquarters.”
In the since-deleted post, user “Garbage” wrote that “our next task should be shooting up their headquarters and killing as many of those evil whores and normies reporters as possible.” He then gave the CBC’s Toronto address, adding “Become the hero that the incels deserve.”
“Whitney Ellenby will admit: At times, her approach to raising her son Zack might have looked more like child abuse, especially the day she tried to bring him to a “Sesame Street Live” performance when he was 5 years old.”
It doesn’t look like abuse, it IS abuse.
She’s trying to normalize the notion that it’s abuse to a neurotypical child, but when it’s an autistic child it’s “therapy”.
Fuck that noise. I doubt she spent even a second TALKING to her kid and explaining that the dark isn’t always bad. A young autistic child may not realize that painful sensory stimuli are not actually injuring them.
I was terrified of vacuum cleaners as a kid because the noise they make hurt my ears. I thought they could suck me up. Mom explained to me that no, it can’t, it can only suck up small things. She made me understand that I’m too big to get sucked up by it. Now a vacuum is just a loud, annoying thing.
My older sister dragged me kicking and screaming onto Space Mountain. I freaked out. Not from the speed, but because I thought I was going to hit my head on the beams I could barely see inside the ride. My sister is not super accepting of my autism (and this was pre-diagnosis), but getting me to tell her why I was so scared let her tell me they wouldn’t let people ride if they were hitting their heads on things. I’ve loved Space Mountain ever since!
But these damn fricken Autism Parents™ don’t even bother talking to their nonverbal / semiverbal autistic kids. They assume their children are too incompetent to understand (even if it’s via AAC for people who have trouble processing speech like @lysikan does) and think the only way to get through a day is shove the kid through activities. And while they do that, they act like they’re the long-suffering martyr who should get gold stars for ‘surviving’ their ‘burden’.
Fuck that.
It’s possible to take an autistic child into difficult situations without making it a battle of wills. Forcing them to go when they’re scared without finding out why they’re scared in the first places teaches them that their fears don’t matter. It’s entirely possible that a child will stop making a fuss because they know it’s useless to do so. They’re taught to be passive, to just accept what happens to them for the convenience of others.
Part of being autistic involves having Internal Rules, and instilling an Internal Rule to “always do what other people ask because I’ll be forced to do it if I resist” is not healthy.
Whitney “taught” Zack using fear and trauma, and that’s NOT okay.
She also decided on her own that his reaction must be due to a phobia he needed to be pushed through For His Own Good*–rather than even considering the possibility of overload in a crowded noisy environment.
Or anything else which could be worked through/around in a less traumatic way, for that matter. Never mind trying to find out what the actual problem was from the kid himself.
(Which seems to be a repeating theme in the book itself, not too surprisingly. Including abusive behavior. I haven’t been able to read it myself, maybe especially after a full readthrough with commentary on Twitter from Kaelan Rhywiol. Who also got ableist harassment and threats from the author and her husband.)
* Obviously not how that works, anyway. As discussed.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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