I assure you that our ability to tolerate suffering is monastic already and that your testing of our patience is already a Sisyphean marathon you can’t fathom. Maybe the reason we are underemployed is because your nonsense is a parody straight out of Swift’s Laputa.
To be autistic is to be the narrator in Gulliver’s Travels. There are not enough words to express how abjectly fucked this is. You want us to act like human beings? Start with treating us that way.
Of all the apocalyptic nightmarish morass that is 2020, a five million dollar grant to teach autistic people how to be employable by hooking them up to sensors & borg glasses, then sending them home with a robot to interrupt them is the substrata beneath the bedrock of bullshit.
“... to facilitate employment of individuals with ASD that have high potential for rapid commercialization and deployment.” And “...holds the potential to transform great societal cost into great societal value.”
News flash, we have been providing great social value for all of recorded human history. You’d just rather Socrates drink poison than shine a light on your depravity. You like us better after we’re dead and you can market our achievements and virtue signal about our greatness.
Let me tell you something. You have no idea what “cost” means from your ivory tower of dunning-kruger sciolists. Yeah, we have value we want to invest in the world— but NOT the world of end stage capitalism where we’re primed to play Rainman in your talent-mining fetish fantasies
I mean, HOT DAMN, did you develop this approach after watching the Matrix & Clockwork Orange while stoned? Maybe what you need to do is teach each others to stop trying to arrange the whole world to navigate around your Titanic egos and focus on accommodations.
Congratulations on spending another five million dollars on doing experiments on how to maximize profitability of marginalized people by subjecting them to degradation & human rights violations.
Your idea of empathy and social intelligence is adhering to the gatekeeping pretense of white privilege power structures, wherein validating the status quo with the appropriate amount of deference is more important than talent, education, work ethic, & integrity combined.
I suppose robots are immune to your gaslighting, failure to accommodate, and abuse. I hope every autistic person building and programming your robots mutinies. That would be true pro-social behavior. -an autistic person
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Let me explain why autistic people may perform better with robots. It’s not their “Easy to read” social cues, it’s because they’re honest and predictable. They aren’t going to give an exasperated sigh or treat us like we’ve verbally assaulted them by expressing a need (cont)
They’re not going to call us into the office and tell us they have “concerns” because they misinterpreted our responses. We aren’t going to find after six months of mistreatment that someone has been harboring a grudge because they misunderstood OUR subtext. (Cont)
They won’t assemble in groups in the break room and stop talking when we walk in. They aren’t going to think we are angry at them if we don’t wrap every instruction up in platitudes or remind them they’re a good person if we need to ask them to do something differently. (Cont)
Today is day three of Suicide Prevention Week, and we are continuing the #NoDejahVu campaign by posting daily with articles and social media posts focused on suicide prevention. We need you to help! (cont)
Of all the factors related to suicide, no lists suggest that "being loved, embraced, respected, and accepted" contributes. Being dismissive, embarrassed, or judgemental of people's personal truth and way of existing, their very identity, devastates them. (cont)
Lack of acceptance contributes to why so many LGBTQ+ youth consider, attempt to, or do end their own lives. Teachers, parents, friends, classmates, grandparents-- respect & accept those in your life for where and who they are.
This is a thing about being autistic. NeuroClastic had an article about 50 ways society gaslights autistics. I experienced a different one yesterday, but it's happened to me a lot. This is informational for allies and an #AskingAutistics and #NeuroLurkers to see if others relate.
I was doing something internal, and it was glorious. I mean, I doubt most people's brains work this way, but I really don't know. I was totally in my mind, oblivious to the world around me, rearranging all these moving parts visually in my head. I see my thoughts. (cont)
I can explain it best by saying that it's like dreaming in that I'm not seeing it with my eyes, and the things I "see" are like a coded language. I can use this "system" to bring thousands of disconnected things to working memory and arrange them to make sense of them. (cont)
I have the forensic reports from the accident Matthew Rushin had. I have transcripts from body cams now. Here is what really happened. On January 4, 2019, Matthew was going to Panera Bread to get pastries. And to see his girlfriend who worked there. This was a routine for him.
As he is pulling in, a man at a stop sign begins to pull out. Matthew had the right of way. Their front left bumpers graze each other. Matthew maintained the entire time that the other man hit him. Police continue to say “the man you hit,” and Matthew continues to correct them.
“No, he hit me.” Matthew pulls off to the side and waits. And waits. The man is illegally sitting in an intersection. For minor accidents, people are supposed to move out of traffic. The man would not move. Matthew tries to prompt the man to get out of the intersection.
Our community is really broken. It's a cruel place. I thought if I named this site what I did and reidentified the name, equated it as a synonym of autism, then it would do something to reverse the bullying and unnecessary division. It hasn't. I mean, it's accomplished a lot.
But I thought if people saw that we were this great, inclusive publication, they'd see the merit of the approach and also how much of our community was out there with no safety net and no "community." Autism groups ran by non-autistics can get 100k+ people. Ours rarely get 10k
No matter what I do with the site name, it's going to disappoint a ton of people. But right now, it's meaning that a lot of people are constantly being stressed and pulled into defending us against charges of fascism and white supremacy and a hierarchy of ableism.
Dear parents, teachers, & employers of autistics. Today, I'm celebrating that my child ate half a yogurt and 3/4 of a PB&J for breakfast. She used a spoon for the yogurt and made it half way through before getting a bit upset because she spilled a lot & was getting overwhelmed.
Before, a PB and J would've been a no-go. She wouldn't eat anything with more than one visible ingredient. She will eat cheese (alone), or bread (alone), but never both at the same time. She's sometimes eat peanut butter on a spoon because it doesn't spill off.
This didn't just happen. This was the result of three years of trying different things, of eating tons of pureed food in pouches, and of grand efforts that were futile in execution. But not once was there force, punishment, or shaming. Just low-demand encouragement.