why on this earth would you come to the askbox of a multiply disabled person and expect them to respond kindly to your insinuating “y’know since disability makes life harder, wouldn’t it be better if no disabled fetuses were ever born”
note: for people just tuning in, this is in reference to my recent post about selective abortion of disabled fetuses where i goddamn literally say that i don’t support restricting abortion or shaming people who selectively terminate?? because it’s not about individuals??
“why on this earth would you come to the askbox of a multiply disabled person and expect them to respond kindly to your insinuating ‘y’know since disability makes life harder, wouldn’t it be better if no disabled fetuses were ever born’?”
because that’s what being in medical school does to you. i both cringed and laughed at the asker’s use of “indoctrinated” because yeah, the medical-industrial complex, including medical school, does indoctrinate people with ableist ideas of “quality of life” that lead them to conclude that it would be better if disabled people were never born.
i was in a graduate program with med and dental students. i had to take an ethics class with them. it seemed like they didn’t think of disabled people as human; i mean, i had one classmate compare the names for inanimate objects to disabled people’s diagnoses when i said that id/dd/ld people reject the r-slur. dude literally thought that disabled people have the same right to self-identify as an inanimate object. one of the issues we talked about in that class was selective abortion. long story short, i almost flipped a table, and probably would have had the prof not interceded.
i love how this doctor jokes about it as if their medical education was entirely bare facts outside of any paradigm. I’m 100% certain that opinions like “disabled fetuses are better off not being born” are presented (or understood) in medical education as indisputable medical facts.
no doctor likes to think they could be wrong about a belief so central to the paradigm in which they were educated 🙃
I’ve had too many doctors tell me or my loved ones that we’re just faking our medical problems for me to think that medical education isn’t full of intense ableism.
I did a research paper on Deaf culture in high school and one of the stories I found was that a Deaf woman who had to change doctors after the first visit with an unplanned but wanted pregnancy – after years of going to him for pelvic exams, apparently – because he would only agree to schedule an abortion, refused to offer any prenatal care, and kept going on about how she wouldn’t want to bring someone else like her into the world, now would she.
He was so caught up in his own ideas about disability and what lives are worth living and what lives are worth permitting to exist that he wouldn’t shut up and let her communicate for the one minute it should have taken to get it into his over-credentialed head that her hearing loss had been completely accidental with no even faintly plausible genetic component. Her baby had no risk factors.
Because he was the doctor and he had a medical degree and she needed to calmly accept his words about the good of the future of mankind (while not permitted to flip out about the discovery she’d been getting pelvic exams from a doctor who saw her fertility as a negative trait) and get an abortion appointment set up without pausing to consult with or notify her own husband and co-parent-to-be.
Her baby was born with the expected lack of hearing problems.
even if her baby had had risk factors wtf would be wrong with Deaf people wanting Deaf kids?! (if you were studying Deaf culture, this question is probably not even directed at you, it is more rhetorical)
Tag: dehumanization
Seems like your answer to my previous ask is rather pro-life i.e. “all pregnancies should be carried to term regardless of the consequences or the quality of the life resulting from said pregnancy”. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around that kind of logic, it seems the mainstay of neocons everywhere. Maybe medical school has indoctrinated me to care more about quality of life and health than about abstract notions of the worth of unborn individuals. Who can say :/
why on this earth would you come to the askbox of a multiply disabled person and expect them to respond kindly to your insinuating “y’know since disability makes life harder, wouldn’t it be better if no disabled fetuses were ever born”
note: for people just tuning in, this is in reference to my recent post about selective abortion of disabled fetuses where i goddamn literally say that i don’t support restricting abortion or shaming people who selectively terminate?? because it’s not about individuals??
“why on this earth would you come to the askbox of a multiply disabled person and expect them to respond kindly to your insinuating ‘y’know since disability makes life harder, wouldn’t it be better if no disabled fetuses were ever born’?”
because that’s what being in medical school does to you. i both cringed and laughed at the asker’s use of “indoctrinated” because yeah, the medical-industrial complex, including medical school, does indoctrinate people with ableist ideas of “quality of life” that lead them to conclude that it would be better if disabled people were never born.
i was in a graduate program with med and dental students. i had to take an ethics class with them. it seemed like they didn’t think of disabled people as human; i mean, i had one classmate compare the names for inanimate objects to disabled people’s diagnoses when i said that id/dd/ld people reject the r-slur. dude literally thought that disabled people have the same right to self-identify as an inanimate object. one of the issues we talked about in that class was selective abortion. long story short, i almost flipped a table, and probably would have had the prof not interceded.
i love how this doctor jokes about it as if their medical education was entirely bare facts outside of any paradigm. I’m 100% certain that opinions like “disabled fetuses are better off not being born” are presented (or understood) in medical education as indisputable medical facts.
no doctor likes to think they could be wrong about a belief so central to the paradigm in which they were educated 🙃
I’ve had too many doctors tell me or my loved ones that we’re just faking our medical problems for me to think that medical education isn’t full of intense ableism.
I did a research paper on Deaf culture in high school and one of the stories I found was that a Deaf woman who had to change doctors after the first visit with an unplanned but wanted pregnancy – after years of going to him for pelvic exams, apparently – because he would only agree to schedule an abortion, refused to offer any prenatal care, and kept going on about how she wouldn’t want to bring someone else like her into the world, now would she.
He was so caught up in his own ideas about disability and what lives are worth living and what lives are worth permitting to exist that he wouldn’t shut up and let her communicate for the one minute it should have taken to get it into his over-credentialed head that her hearing loss had been completely accidental with no even faintly plausible genetic component. Her baby had no risk factors.
Because he was the doctor and he had a medical degree and she needed to calmly accept his words about the good of the future of mankind (while not permitted to flip out about the discovery she’d been getting pelvic exams from a doctor who saw her fertility as a negative trait) and get an abortion appointment set up without pausing to consult with or notify her own husband and co-parent-to-be.
Her baby was born with the expected lack of hearing problems.
“Are you saying that murderers are right in the head??”
No there’s definitely something wrong with someone’s way of thinking if they can justify killing innocent people, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they have a mental illness.
Extremist beliefs isn’t a mental illness.
Bigotry isn’t a mental illness.
Entitlement isn’t a mental illness.
Hate isn’t a mental illness.
Having a dysfunctional moral compass isn’t a mental illness.
We need to stop categorizing all these things as some undefinable “mental illness” and start looking at what we do as a society to develop and justify these things to a degree where people use them to justify killing.
Yes!
Dehumanization is something you Have to look for. If the murderer doesn’t see the person they killed as a person, then mental illness is probably not the main factor there.
Plenty of people murder women, poc, lgbt people, people of other religions etc. because they don’t see them as people.
Think about genocides – they aren’t perpetrated by big group of people/a government who all got mentally ill together the same way at the same time somehow, they just didn’t consider what they did murder because they didn’t see the victims as people.
I’m probably going to wind up reblogging this more than once because it is really fucking important.
No one costs too much to have access to health care.
No one costs too much to be allowed to live.
This is the language of fascism.
Don’t normalize it.
It’s ok to be fat.
I rememeber as a kid whenever you get mad about being treated “like a kid” and they say “you’ll understand when you’re older”.
And yeah as far as a few times in my teen years that was true but those cases were specifically more like “let me do whatever I want with no supervision” like no 16 year old me, you PROBABLY shouldn’t try to drive 45 miles to try and get into a bar to see a band alone, that is stupid.
But the majority of things? No I still don’t understand why you would teach a 10 year old like they don’t UNDERSTAND what they want or feel or that being upset was unreasonable. I’ve held some grudges this whole damn time from when I was like 5 because something did damage. I could feel the mark it left. My seething angry distrust from doctors in fact, is largely because when I was like 7 a doctor told me I was just a kid and didn’t know the difference between hot and cold and my feet were cold actually. I am still angry that was 21 years ago.
You can treat people like people, actually listen to their feelings, not automatically dismiss shit you disagree with or think is stupid, and still not let them sneak onto a bar because of rock and roll man. It’s not that hard. Kids aren’t stupid they just haven’t learned shit yet. You are the grownup stop teaching you bullshit.
This is all I’m gonna say on the matter, but:
I hope all my allistic followers are aware that books like To Siri With Love are the sort of thing that get autistic people killed. We die in real life because we’re seen as creepy, unsettling, yet still somehow laughable caricatures of humanity, and we are medicated to death, driven to death by family members and medical professionals who treat us worse than how they’d treat animals, and there are people who advocate to stop us from being born if there are “signs of autism” in an otherwise perfectly healthy (and wanted) fetus, because they think our lives are a fate worse than death.
This book is like a cross-section of that culture.
The person who wrote this book is actively and knowingly – I don’t believe for a second that she’s just a well-meaning but misguided parent – contributing to a culture that wants her son dead. I hope he gets away from her quickly and never has to see her again. I hope he meets people who treat him like the worthy individual he is and help him heal from the trauma she’s caused. I’m so fucking sorry he has to cope with this book being out.
I don’t usually say things like “please unfollow me if”, but if you believe that autistic people should be medicated and sterilized against their will, or that cruelly and invasively mocking an already vulnerable 13-year-old in a bestselling book is acceptable, unfollow me.
(Actually, you know what, edit: allistic people are encouraged to reblog this.)
So this was on the local news tonight. A mother in a city about 20 minutes south of me has a 10y/o autistic son, and she said that because he’s autistic, she’s afraid he’s going to get hit by a car on the street because he “can’t think” and might just run out into the street without looking. So she called some city officials and requested that they put up this sign in front of her home to warn drivers that there’s an autistic child in the area. Within 3 days, they put this sign up just for her.
As an autistic person myself, this is just rubbing me an enormously wrong way. I don’t like this. At all. In fact, I kinda hate it. It just strikes me as one of those sympathy-addicted Autism Mom™ things that doesn’t take into account the humanity of their autistic kid. Like she needs to announce to the world that she has no idea how to communicate with her own child, and rather than learning what kind of communication methods he needs as an autistic person, she just assumes that he’s just this unreachable burden she’s forced to bear, and is calling on the community to “help” her deal with this creature she can’t “control.” And that lowers this poor boy to sub-human status. Like she thinks they need their own personal “Deer Crossing” sign, but in her cause “Autistic Crossing.” It just strikes me as so wrong.
What do you think?
i’m autistic and i think someone needs to sit this self-involved human disaster of a mom down and give her a good firm talking to about a great many things. she may also need to be smacked upside the head with a salmon once or twice.
jesus fucking christ. where is this sign. i need to go edit it so it reads “[momname]’s attention seeking behavior area”.
Some autistic kids and kids with other disabilities do run out into the street without looking, may not think beforehand about the danger, may not be able to perceive whether cars are coming, etc. Some wander, meaning that they walk sometimes quite far with no specific destination in mind. I’ve seen autistic adults on We Are Like Your Child and similar communities talking about why they did this and how parents can handle it. This mom picked the most self-involved, stigmatizing possible way. Poor kid is going to be known to all his neighbors as “that autism kid,” “that kid who’s so dumb he can’t even cross the street,” and “the reason they put up that road sign.”
(It’s not even a good sign. WTF does “autism area even mean? It’s not even like those street signs warning drivers that blind people may be crossing, where you can at least tell you’re being asked not to run people over. The same words could be used to warn you an Autism could attack you, or run headlong into your car like a deer. Or to inform you that the entire town is autistic people who’ve been banished and quarantined here, like you might see in a dystopian novel. Or maybe it’s an “autism area” because anyone who enters becomes autistic).
Confession time: I was one of those kids who didn’t really get that streets were dangerous when I was, oh, about 3 to six or so years old. Certainly past the age when most kids know not to run into the street because something they were holding blew away or they saw a pretty rock. As late as college, I found it hard to tell how fast cars were coming and when they were going to stop, so I was overly cautious crossing the street. In between, I hated being bored so much that I would literally read books while crossing the street with my parents (knowing that they were watching for cars, and I could just follow them without having to look).
My parents were scared for me, even though we lived in a safe suburban neighborhood then. If I lived in a city with a lot of traffic, or where an oblivious small child could get caught in the crossfire of gang wars, I could have died very young.
Did my parents pester the town government to put up a creepy sign? No. They would hold my hand while crossing the street. They would yell at me to come back if it looked like I were heading into danger (the way you’d yell at someone to stop if they’re about to touch a hot stove). This scared me and I instantly obeyed. They would constantly remind me not to cross the street without an adult, and continually explain why. They still let me walk around the immediate neighborhood on my own, just like the other neighborhood parents did. They told me extremely clearly where I was allowed to go and where I was not. In other words, they acted like parents. Why isn’t that more common?
On top of everything else, there are already the “Careful! Children Playing” type of road warning signs. Children maybe not behaving so safely around roads is a well-known hazard, regardless of any additional factors. The city probably already has a supply of those signs on hand, and maybe putting one of those up in the area would have been appropriate.
As it is, they chose to warn about an Autism and not Children. Says too much about how that poor kid is getting viewed.
When I was little my biodad got pissed off and briefly installed his own speed bump in front of our house, with the way drivers kept whizzing around a curve. The adults of course tried to keep me out of the street, but my 4-year-old autistic ass really was pretty bad about it. The cops made him remove the unauthorized bump, but the city did indeed put up some general purpose “watch out for kids” and extra speed limit signs on the street after that.
As a normal and reasonable response to little kids and careless drivers. Which also sounds like the actual legitimate concern in this other case.
fight the australian government’s military violence towards refugees
The situation for refugees on Manus Island has always been pretty brutal but the Australian government has been ramping things up through military violence over the last few days and weeks and the situation is more urgent than ever.
What does Australia do to refugees?
Australia holds refugees indefinitely on island prisons in Papua New Guinea, where doctors and teachers who speak about the conditions can go to prison for up to two years and from the leaks that come out of these camps, we know there’s massive human rights violations involved. Australia’s refugee policy is something that right wing politicians like Trump and neo-nazis like Marie Le Pen look to as the ideal model for treating refugees.
What’s happening now?
Over the past few weeks, instead of freeing these people, the government has been trying to move refugees to another camp that is essentially shipping containers for lodgings and with no protection from racist, anti-refugee attacks. 606 men decided to peacefully protest and challenge their horrible mistreatment and stay until they were given freedom and brought to Australia. Electricity has been cut off, all staff have been removed, the water supply has been poisoned with cholera by the military.
As of yesterday the military have invaded the camp and have attacked and beaten the refugees in the camp, destroyed facilities and water storage, and arrested Behrouz Boochani (an award winning journalist and refugee who has been held at the camp for four years). And today the refugees have all been forcibly removed from the camp though violence and threats from the military.
What does this mean?
As much as the new accomodation the refugees are being moved to is sub-par and unsuitable, this isn’t just about the accomodation. These people have been locked up and imprisoned for over four years for simply trying to flee war and persecuation (that the Australian government has often participated in) and want to come to Australia to join their families and be safe. This is about freedom.
Racism towards refugees has always been a particularly useful tool to Australian politians, providing a scapegoat while wages, education, and healthcare keep being cut back at home, and both major political parties have been perfectly happy to sit back and let these atrocities happen.
We need to continue to put pressure on the Australian Government and make this an issue that they can no longer continue to ignore and stand in solidarity with those who have been protesting for weeks and continue the fight for them.
What can we do about it?
If you don’t live in Australia: share this urgently and sign the petition
If you do live in Australia: come to the protests happening in every major city THIS SATURDAY AND SUNDAY (25th and 26th of November)
Melbourne: 12pm Sunday at Federation Square, there are also weekly protests at every Friday at 5.30pm at the State Library until these men are set free or until further notice (you can keep up with these protests here).
Sydney: 12pm Sunday at the First Fleet Park,
Adelaide: 12pm Sunday at Parliament House
Brisbane: 12pm Sunday at King George Square
Perth: 2pm Saturday at the Perth Cultural Centre
Hobart: 12pm Sunday at the Salamanca Lawns
Canberra: 10am Sunday on the Parliament House Lawn
What you need to understand is that the n-word and words like fa**ot and tr*nny and k*ke and sp*c and other slurs are not “just words;” they are implied threats, whether the speaker intends them that way or not.
Not everyone who has been called a slur in America has been physically assaulted, but every person who has been assaulted on the basis of race, ethnicity, or religion has had slurs hurled at them as part of the attack–in part because the use of slurs to
dehumanize the “other” is one way violent bigots work themselves up to
attack. And every time one of those violent bigots hears someone else use one of those terms, they feel just a little more justified, because they hear someone agreeing with them that “those people” are less than human.Those dehumanizing slurs are the last thing many people hear before
being physically attacked. And in some cases those slurs are the last thing they ever hear, period.Jesus fucking christ, people, I’m talking about people using these words as slurs against targeted groups, godsdamnit, NOT about members of targeted groups who collectively elect to reclaim slurs–because what, if any, terms a targeted group chooses to reclaim is none of my damn business, or anyone else’s business unless they are part of one of these groups. I can’t believe I have to specifically fucking spell that out for people.
Belarus court clears way for luxury apartments to be built on top of Jewish cemeteries
A judge in Belarus cleared the way for the construction of apartments atop two former Jewish cemeteries on Monday, saying the court lacks the jurisdiction to take any action, Radio Svoboda reported.
The Tsentralny District Court allowed the planned construction of the apartments on the former Jewish cemetery in the eastern city of Gomel. The motion also pertained to earthworks already underway in the city of Mozyr at another former Jewish cemetery, as per permits issued in 2015, according to the World Association of Belarusian Jews.
The judge was ruling on a motion seeking an injunction against the construction filed by Yakov Goodman, a Jewish-American activist for the preservation of Jewish heritage sites in his native Belarus. Local authorities last year approved a project for the construction of two luxury apartment buildings on the grounds of a former cemetery on Sozhskaya Street.
Both projects mean that bones of Jews buried in the two cemeteries “will end up in city dumpsters,” Goodman told JTA earlier this week.
….Last year, Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makai and Lesley Weiss, chair of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, signed a joint declaration at the World Jewish Congress headquarters stating “Each party will take appropriate steps to protect and preserve properties that represent the cultural heritage of all national, religious, or ethnic groups that reside or resided in its territory.”
Goodman said the signing only encouraged authorities “to further attacks on Jewish heritage sites.”
Before the document was signed, Goodman’s association accused Belarusian authorities under the country’s authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, of destroying three synagogues – one in Luban and two others in the capital, Minsk – and at least two Jewish cemeteries in addition to Gomel and Mozyr.
This isn’t the entire article, but I’m asking everyone to read and research what’s happening in Belarus right now. The graves of Jews are being dug up, our bodies tossed in dumpsters, all for an apartment complex.
I recognize that there might not be anything we can do, but the information needs to be out there. Jewish Cemeteries are desecrated every day across the globe, but this is a different kind of evil.
Belarus court clears way for luxury apartments to be built on top of Jewish cemeteries
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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