I don't think I'm one of them either. I'm one of mine.

Month: April 2024

More autism community frustrations

Back when I was on Twitter, I noticed autistic people who would say that anyone who identified as a highly sensitive person was actually autistic and expressing internalised ableism. You can be sensitive without being autistic. People who say they’re highly sensitive rather than autistic are just saying what’s true for them, not trying to dissociate themselves from the disability community.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

“Inclusion”

Offering undifferentiated instruction to students who are getting severely confused or bored to tears isn’t real “inclusion.”

Merely physically including students in a classroom isn’t real “inclusion,” especially if they get beaten up for being too different.

I support accessible and inclusive classrooms, but a lot of the talk about “inclusion” doesn’t support the real thing at all.

The unholy marriage of sexism and anti-intellectualism in the autism community (CW: rape/child sexual abuse)

I find it really fucking infuriating when highly intelligent autistic people attribute every single positive trait or ability of theirs to autism. Typically, these people are women or AFAB nonbinary, which gives it a weirdly sexist feel. (And most of them are white, too. It’s painful to see when you’re Black like me.) Admittedly, this fury is personal and is connected to old, deep trauma.

(I’ve been talking about myself a lot more lately, mostly because I’ve been processing over three decades’ worth of trauma, and it’s inextricably tied to my beliefs. I had dissociative retrograde amnesia for years, and only now am I remembering.)

Continue reading

Why the fuck do certain leftists love using “politic” as a singular?

“Anticapitalist politic.” “That’s not my politic.” “I support a politic of decolonial liberation.” Why not just call it “politics,” “view,” “viewpoint,” “stance,” or just plain “opinion”? Or just replace it with -ism, like “anticapitalism” or “anticolonialism.” “Politic” as a singular is weird jargon.

(As an aside, what is the deal with “praxis” instead of “practices” or merely “actions”? Or just dropping the word altogether, as with “politic,” and replacing it with -ism, -ation, -ity, or some other suffix? For example, “liberatory praxis” instead of “liberation.”)

Is this some subconscious desire to sound more educated or woke if they write and talk like this? I don’t think most of it is intentional, but it makes me want to gouge my eyes out every time I read it.

 

I want there to be more space for…

…leftists who are metaphysical idealists. Religious leftists. Leftists whose views come from their religion, not in spite of it. I hate that, at least for some, to be a socialist, you have to be a materialist. Nope, I tried that for a while. Materialism just doesn’t work for me as a way to understand the Universe, though I respect those who have made it work. As a grad school professor of mine said repeatedly, “Intelligent people disagree.” And I’m going to do that with the materialists.

Ambiguous activist argot

(CW: child sexual abuse, incest, and rape)

  1. Abolitionism or defunding the police. I’m no fan of prisons, policing, or psychiatric wards, but abolitionists need to be clear about what the alternatives are. People aren’t going to trust you if you think “restorative justice” is going to stop murderers, rapists, and child molesters. (I don’t think restorative justice would have stopped my paedophilic child-raping father from attacking me when I was a preschooler. There’s no restoring someone who destroys a child’s innocence.) Rapists, serial killers, and child molesters do not deserve to be in the community. Would you want Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Kaczynski, or Ted Bundy walking free to rape, murder, and torture more victims? I don’t, either. You need to present a solution for policing, forced psychiatric holds, and prisons that is free from logical holes and written in plain language. So far I haven’t seen anything of the sort, even though I’m sympathetic to their cause (with the exception of exceptionally violent criminals).
  2. Decolonial/decolonise. I’ve complained about this term before, since it’s often used to defend authoritarian groups and regimes like Hamas, the Taliban, and North Korea. But it’s ambiguous: do you mean creating systems that include peoples who were or are formerly imperial subjects? Or do you mean that you want to kill everyone who belongs to the coloniser’s ethnic group, regardless of their individual political beliefs (Hamas)? Or are you trying to establish a new form of ethnic supremacy to replace the previous one (North Korea)?
  3. Anticapitalism. What do you mean? Do you mean doing away with the market economy? Or private business? Or do you mean using barter instead of currency? For me, anticapitalism refers to socialist economic systems in which the general public (or a government representing the public) controls some or all of the means of production. Goods and services can be provided by governments, individuals, and unions, depending on the form of socialism. Socialism on its own doesn’t lead to equity (cases in point: USSR and my favourite whipping boy, North Korea).