Thread by @ekverstania

[THREAD] KEY CONCEPTS FOR AUTISTIC ADVOCACY

In this thread, I am going to provide definitions for some of the key concepts which often feature in discussions, training, arguments and even academic papers about autism.

Defining them and agreeing about the definitions can help us reduce our arguments and gain consensus more quickly -- or at the very least, it can help to ensure that we're at least arguing about the same thing, even if we don't agree about how to approach it.

We use this approach in my day job (@projectania), where common language about project management takes an organisation one level up from the bottom in organisational project management maturity. projectmanagement.co.za/articles/using…

This thread will take a long time to build. Maybe it will even evolve into a glossary for training purposes after several iterations of tweaking.

Some of the terms I expect to define are:

▪️disability
▪️charity, medical, social and human rights approach to disability
▪️#ActuallyAutistic (the hashtag)
▪️neurodiversity
▪️neurodivergent, neurotypical
▪️nonspeaking, nonverbal
▪️advocacy, activism
▪️early intervention

#intersectionality

I had an easy-to-read article in mind to introduce this term, and sought advice from @kerima_cevik.

She pointed out that "sometimes simplifying blurs the foundational meaning of a term that is often misused."

So...

Oxford Dictionary definition of #intersectionality:
"the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage".

Sample sentence:
"Through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better address gaps in our legal system."

When I first learned the word #intersectionality a few years ago from an autistic trans man (living as a married woman at the time), I had no idea there'd be such vitriol around it from people I had imagined to be quite progressive.

I also didn't know the origin of the term #intersectionality, except that I had heard it was coined by "Black feminists".

I didn't know that it was created by a professor of law to explain a legal problem that came up in a specific court case.

I simply knew that as a #DisabilityRights advocate seeking to educate people on topics such as the health and inclusion of autistic people, I would have to be mindful of #intersectionality to present a more balanced view of important issues.

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438408397293039620?s=19

What does intersectionality mean in practice? I'll explain by means of an example.

One of my friends, a lovely young woman, found it difficult to find a professional who could give her a formal autism diagnosis, because local diagnosticians don't usually have a good idea of what autism looks like in an adult woman.

Eventually, she booked an appointment with a professional in Cape Town, flew here from Johannesburg, and stayed overnight in a hotel.

Now, how would all that have been different had she been poor, without access to the Internet, except for via WhatsApp? How would she have found a professional who could help her, and how would she have gotten to and paid for the appointment?

Clearly, being a woman isn't the only obstacle here: being poor is an additional problem.

A few years after my friend got her diagnosis, a business associate in West Africa contacted me, being concerned about his niece, a young university student. He said he thought she may be autistic, and the family would like to get help and support for her.

They had taken her to an organisation in Nigeria which provides support services to autistic people. She was able to walk around their institution and saw how they work with nonspeaking people with high support needs. There saw nothing she could relate to in that place.

The professionals gave the family a list of deficit-based assessment criteria and explained how they'd work with her if they took her on as a client. It all looked very theoretical and my business associate was quite confused.

This time round, there was no need to travel; I found a South African psychiatrist who is rumoured to be autistic herself, who was prepared to work via Skype.

Fortunately my associate's niece had spent a year in the UK as a student and was comfortable in English. (English is used in business in their country anyway.) She was able to get a diagnosis and some good guidance from the psychiatrist, and is reportedly coping much better now.

However, many people in Africa do not use a word equivalent to the English word 'autism' to describe an autistic person. The person is most likely to be considered possessed or bewitched, and/or mentally ill. To have such a person in the family is usually considered shameful.

So, let's look at the issues here, that are likely to lead to make it difficult to get an autism diagnosis:
- being a girl or woman
- being an adult
- being poor
- being in a country where...
...and so on.

Now let's look at some combinations.

- It's hard enough to get an autism diagnosis when you're an adult.

- It's harder when you are an adult + woman.

- It's even harder when you are a poor + adult + woman.

...and so on.

How likely is it that a poor 23-year-old woman in a rural village in West Africa, who is able to speak Nkim well—and also understand Ogoja, Ishibori, Isibiri, Ogboja, but nothing else—will get an autism diagnosis?

This example is very far from the scene which originally led to the coining of the term #intersectionality.

But let's go back to the dictionary definition of #intersectionality, to see whether it is in fact at play here:

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438408397293039620

You don't have to be very clever or care about people or hold a particular political position to see that the implications of #intersectionality are quite logical: being disadvantaged because of one thing, is a problem; being disadvantaged because of many things, is even harder.

Now, let's take a look at some of the original scenarios which led to the coining of the term #intersectionality. For that we have to zip across the longitudes and zwoop, we're now in the USA.

I'm going to quote first, then give you the reference afterwards.

"DeGraffenreid v. General Motors was a 1976 case in which five black women sued General Motors for a seniority policy that they argued targeted black women exclusively."

"Basically, the company simply did not hire black women before 1964, meaning that when seniority-based layoffs arrived during an early 1970s recession, all the black women hired after 1964 were subsequently laid off."

"A policy like that didn’t fall under just gender or just race discrimination."

The women who sued General Motors lost the case. Why?

Not because they didn't have a point, but because the judge said if you make "Black women" a special category different from just "Black" and "women" you'd have to make special categories for eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevery other possible combo of discrimination...

...and that would be helluva complicated, legally.

What it boiled down to was, "Yeah, we know this is unfair, but the red tape would strangle us if we tried to make it fair."

We can see that intersectionality isn't ONLY about being a "Black woman"...

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438408397293039620

...but in the US and in many other countries, this specific combo has often placed people at a disadvantage, and it was this combo that led to the word #intersectionality being created to describe it.

Now, I'll post a link to the full article from which I pulled those quotes later, but first...

I want to show an example of how the concept of #intersectionality is incorporated in the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (#CRPD) in a rudimentary way without mentioning the word #intersectionality explicitly.

Here's a page with links to all the Articles of the #CRPD. Look particularly at the titles of Articles 6 and 7. In the following tweet I'll zoom into the text of Article 6.

un.org/development/de…

"Article 6 – Women with disabilities"

"1. States Parties recognize that women and girls with disabilities are subject to multiple discrimination, and in this regard shall take measures to ensure the full and equal enjoyment by them of all human rights and fundamental freedoms.

2. States Parties shall...etc."

What they're saying is that if you're a woman and you're disabled, you're likely to face a double whammy of discrimination, so "states parties" (the governments of countries that have signed the #CRPD) must do extra things...

...to ensure your "enjoyment of the human rights and fundamental freedoms set out in the present Convention." un.org/development/de…

So now you may be thinking, "But but but but! That only mentions women and children as 'special cases'. What about...?!"

Yeah, you wouldn't be the first person to notice that!

Remember that the term #intersectionality originated in a LEGAL context, and that the judge who judged against the plaintiffs in that one case said, "Aaargh, no, this is all too complicated, I give up, byeee!" (OK, that is veeery informal paraphrasing! 😁)

And actually, to be more precise, the professor of law who came up with the word #intersectionality mentioned THREE legal cases with similar problems—not just that one case.

Here's her academic article, published in 1989, in which she focused specifically on "the intersection of race and sex" (these days, we'd probably say "race and gender" for what is implied here—the experts can help me out): documentcloud.org/documents/5780…

So, given that #intersectionality was a concept that came up in a legal context, other people with a legal perspective have subsequently also looked at the problem to try to figure out ways of dealing with it in law.

Now, whereas Prof. Crenshaw who coined the term #intersectionality looked at "the intersection of race and sex" in that paper,...

From a #DisabilityRights, perspective, we'd be focusing on intersections like:

▪️ disability and race
▪️ disability and sex
▪️ disability and gender
▪️ disability and culture
▪️ disability and class

...and so on.

I'll probably come back to the point later, about how EVERYTHING actually intersects, so no matter what side you're looking from, you're actually looking at the same bigger picture... but let me focus now, so that I don't lose track of where I'm going with this!

Now, the #CRPD is an international treaty: a legally binding agreement between the countries that sign it. The countries which have ratified this treaty have in doing so, agreed to make laws to ensure that the principles and goals spelled out in the #CRPD are put into effect.

So, we're still talking about LAW here.

Now, remember this? Well, legal experts have been thinking about this too.

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438532654018797573

One of the people who have been doing such thinking is Gauthier de Beco. Writing in the International Journal of Human Rights, Gauthier looked at it from this angle:

The @un has several other conventions (threaties) relating to human rights, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and several others. ohchr.org/en/professiona…

So, what Gauthier de Beco says is that although the #CRPD itself doesn't mention a lot of intersections, some intersections can be addressed by using the conventions in combination.

He mentions that although he's only given three examples of intersections, other intersections could be dealt with in the same way.

Here's his essay:
tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…

Another scholar, Wiebke Ringel, pointed out that the #CRPD (adopted in 2008), was the first human rights treaty adopted by the @UN General Assembly in the 21st century, and includes "new approaches relating to... disability, nondiscrimination, and #intersectionality".

"While some of the aspects discussed may appear to primarily arise under a disability-specific perspective," says Ringel, "it is suggested that they could potentially provide an impetus to advance the UN human rights system in general, beyond the context of disability."

Does that ring a bell? Ultimately, it's all just different angles of the same bigger picture.

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438567921945653252

Here's an abstract of Wiebke Ringel's paper, 'Non-discrimination, Accommodation, and Intersectionality under the CRPD: New Trends and Challenges for the UN Human Rights System' in the Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law Online (2017)
brill.com/view/journals/…

Now, back to the originator of the term, professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. The point of looking at the world from a perspective of #intersectionality, says Crenshaw, is to make room “for more advocacy and remedial practices” to create a more fair system for doing things in the world.

Crenshaw "doesn’t want to replicate existing power dynamics... just to give people of color power over white people, for example."

"She wants to get rid of those existing power dynamics altogether — changing the very structures that undergird our politics, law, and culture in order to level the playing field."

Now here's the point where things turn bizarre.

See, most people understand the basics of #intersectionality, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum.

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438511370123681797

But...

Things got complicated when, inter alia, people who liked to keep things the way they are traditionally (#conservative people), saw that addressing intersectional disadvantages meant whole systems would have to change to remediate the problems, and...

...they didn't like the idea of change.

To confuse matters, from 2015 onwards, people beyond the sphere of legal and policy practice began to use the term #intersectionality in completely new ways. 🤨🤔🙃😯🥴

thecut.com/2018/03/a-brie…

Crenshaw says in an interview, “Sometimes I’ve read things that say, ‘Intersectionality, blah, blah, blah,’ and then I’d wonder, ‘Oh, I wonder whose intersectionality that is,’..."

"...and then I’d see me cited, and I was like, ‘I’ve never written that. I’ve never said that. That is just not how I think about intersectionality.’”

So, weirdly, we're now at a point where conservative people say things like, "Intersectionality means that people want Black homosexual women to be on the top in society and White heterosexual men at the bottom, so intersectionality is a terrible idea, and we must fight it!"

Uh... okaaaaaay... that may be what you think intersectionality means,... 😳 but that's not actually what Kimberlé Crenshaw had in mind...

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438580725255745539

I undertook to link to the article from which I took the earlier quotes, so here you go: vox.com/the-highlight/…

Now, words change their meanings over time, especially as they go mainstream. That's normal, and it isn't necessarily a bad thing.

But, as this article (which I linked to earlier) explains, in the case of #intersectionality, this can be a problem.

thecut.com/2018/03/a-brie…

The article mentions Latoya Peterson saying that "the word 'intersectionality' was losing its punch: it was becoming a label that feminists could claim as their own, which absolved them of any of the hard work required by intersectionality."

So while conservative people moan about having to change to remedy intersectional oppression, the changing meaning of intersectionality itself has given them a whole lot of other things to point at and to say that "Intersectionality is so stupid" (that's a Ben Shapiro quote).

And that brings us to where we are today.

In the third quarter of 2021, a consortium of autism researchers launched a study called #Spectrum10K, wanting to study the genes of autistic people and their families. They put out a call for people to send them samples of saliva.

Now, genomic autism studies are not a new thing; many such studies have been done before, and many are still ongoing.

Typically autism researchers don't ask autistic people what to study. They just ask them (or their parents, in the cause of children) to participate. In many cases the researchers don't have the proper informed consent from the people they're studying.

Here's an interview with Dr. Kristen Bottema-Beutel, a researcher who has written papers about the ethical problems in autism research.

At best, the big-budget autism researchers sometimes consult a few autistic people before they launch the study to pre-empt any problems with participation. citizenshandbook.org/arnsteinsladde…

Now, autistic people who have been around for a while and who have some choice in the matter, are usually quite cheesed off with autism researchers, because the researchers don't like to study what autistic people want.

https://twitter.com/Dave_Thibault/status/1430673167513800707

So the researchers appoint a few 'ambassadors' to help them create awareness of the study and to encourage people to participate. Such 'ambassadors' are typically well-known public figures who are openly autistic or who have autistic children.

One of the 'ambassadors' for the #Spectrum10K project is Paula Wright, a writer, actress, comic, creative artist and current MSc student. Paula is autistic herself.

When the #Spectrum10K study was announced, many autistic people on social media were extremely upset. Paula was soon the only 'ambassador' left visibly defending the study on social media, and she became the target of much of the rage.

Now, let's rewind to more than a year before, to June 2020, when protests in the US made the #BlackLivesMatter movement impossible to ignore in many spheres of work around the world.

Large organisations that didn't say anything about #BlackLivesMatter felt like they were getting the side-eye; and large organisations which said something but didn't take steps to actually change anything internally were getting called out for tokenism and hypocrisy.

The International Society for Autism Research (INSAR) sent out an announcement.

"Recent events attest to the need for broad societal support," they wrote. "INSAR stands in solidarity with the Black community in denouncing racism and prejudice and institutional discrimination."

"As such, INSAR is committed to contributing to a sustained enterprise for social justice for Black people."

"To this end we call upon all members of INSAR to educate themselves about systemic and institutional biases and barriers for Black people, to speak out against discrimination in their professional and personal circles,..."

"...and to take action to advance anti-racism in all aspects of autism research."

So far so good, you may say, but where's the action?

Well, that comes in the next part of the statement... But it isn't what you might expect it to be.

Or maybe, knowing INSAR, it is EXACTLY what you might expect from these people... 😑

Maybe you'd think this is the point where they say they intend to listen to more Black autistic people, to pay attention to what they say they need, and to empower them to move up Arnstein's Ladder to where they get to decide what should be studied in matters that affect them.

"Ehnk! You thought WHAT, you silly autistic laboratory rodent?! Get back into your hole and carry on hoarding marbles, so that we can keep studying you! This isn't about what YOU want to do, it's about what WE are going to do. Same as always."

* Sorry. "Rodent with autism".

So in short, nothing really about the intersection of being Black and autistic.

INSAR's #BlackLivesMatter thingy is basically:

1. Get the treatments INSAR decides autistic people need to "the widest and most culturally diverse community", and

2. Let in more Black researchers and get them up the ladder of seniority in INSAR.

autism-insar.org/page/INSARstat…

For a some white researchers, the timing of the announcement was great, because they were already working on research that focused on Black autistic children, and would be publishing within just a few months. They could look like they cared that #BlackLivesMatter all along.

One such a researcher went on to become an INSAR Fellow in 2021. His name is Dr. Daniel Geschwind.

In 2013, the NIH had awarded Geschwind "a five-year, $10 million grant to continue his research on the genetic causes of autism spectrum disorders and to expand his investigations to include the genetics of autism in African Americans."

Geschwind was to "look for gene variants associated with autism in Americans with African ancestry and then test the genetic risk factors identified in European populations to see what role they may play in the disorder in people of African descent." newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/nih-g…

Geschwind had been working in autism genetics for a long time. In an earlier interview, he expanded on the goal of his work:

"We already know in mice models that if we introduce certain mutations, some of which are related to autism, that cause a severe neurodevelopmental disorder and let their brains develop,..."

"... and if we then turn the gene on or off or give the adult mouse a drug that would treat the pathway, that we can have a major effect on the adult with the disease."

"So, in some cases, it may not even be necessary to intervene at the developmental stage to change the brain development."

"We may be able to affect brain function in children or in adolescents or even adults, and that gives me a lot more hope because the difficulty of intervening in-utero with gene therapy or something like that is really off the table right now in terms of a viable therapy."

"So, the idea of being able to intervene later would be helpful."

Sociability drugs are already being trialed (or about to be trialed) on autistic children and adults as part of the AIMS-2 study, another huge-budget autism study.

aims-2-trials.eu/our-research/t…

Some of the same people involved in #Spectrum10K, including James Cusack of Autistica and Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University, are also involved in AIMS-2.

Geschwind continues, "...we know that... we can take one-third of the children who don’t speak, let’s say, at age 2½ or 3, and with the proper and most state-of-the-art cognitive and behavior intervention, we can get those children speaking."

What Geschwind is talking about here is Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) a method of 'therapy' that actual autistic people around the world are trying to get banned by governments.

Geschwind and the Center for Autism Research & Treatment (CART), where he works, have been involved in ABA for a very long time.

semel.ucla.edu/autism/our-his…

If you expand the 1960s link on that page, you'll see that it says,...

"Dr. Ivar Lovaas [established] behavior modification as the first effective treatment for autism, finding that children make remarkable progress when they received intensive intervention based on applied behavior analysis (ABA)."

"ABA continues to demonstrate efficacy through rigorous clinical trials."

In stark contrast to what Dr. Geschwind says about ABA, here are some of the words of nonspeaking autistic people about this 'therapy'.

There is also a link to more about Lovaas.

tania.co.za/non-speaking-a…

You might think that by studying the genetics of autism for so many years, Dr. Geschwind would have learned some things that are good for autistic people.

And yet Geschwind and many other autism researchers have no intention of listening to what survivors of these abuses have to say.

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438622543544524802

Reference article for some of the previous Geschwind quotes -- this is from a 2009 publication of UCLA, which is the parent institution for CART, where Geschwind works to this day: uclahealth.org/u-magazine/dr-…

Thanks to Geschwind's genetic research on Black American families, autism in Black children can now be 'caught earlier', which also means that intervention in the form of ABA can begin when the children are much smaller.

webmd.com/brain/autism/n…

Dr. Erin Graham is the project manager for Geschwind's work with Black families, which is ongoing.

“At the heart of it, the Autism Genetics Network is a genetics study," says Graham, "but we also want to shed light on the particular barriers that African American families face that might be unique to this community.”

Ooooh! Does that sound like #intersectionality to you? African American intersecting with autism = unique barriers faced?

Yeah. It's that. They recognised an intersectional issue.

The problem is how they responded to it.

The research team knew that they'd have to do a lot of PR because of the "distrust in the Black community based on a prior history of exploitation by the medical and scientific establishment".

Their strategy was not to try to please autistic people. In working with "families", they were mainly dealing with parents and other caregivers. “I want to address their concerns about participating in order to earn their buy-in and informed consent,” Graham said.

By February 2021, she was "tapping targeted media outlets, such as Black community newspapers, with outreach and information about the study’s goals and the program’s long-term investment in supporting families."

This long-term investment meant that they weren't just going to abandon the Black families after studying their children's genes. They were going to "give something back to families who have trusted us with their stories and given us their valuable time."

The something was ABA.

"In response to these data outcomes surrounding barriers to adequate intervention for black children," says an article posted by Autism Speaks,...

"...a generous philanthropic donation to the St. Louis site, supported the cultivation of an Early Intervention program (with an intensive ABA-based clinic-based intervention and a parent-child training component) for toddlers enrolled in the Autism Genetics Network."

“In St. Louis, this program has helped us to continue our recruitment pace throughout the pandemic,” said Anna Abbacchi, project manager at the Washington University site in St. Louis, where the ABA program was suspended briefly due to COVID but re-started mid-year.

“Families are struggling to access interventions for their children during this difficult time.”

Based on these reports, it would appear that Geschwind's PR team had thoroughly convinced Black parents that ABA was the answer for their little autistic children.

autismspeaks.org/science-news/a…

Black autistic children and other and other minorities make up by far the largest proportion of the victims at the brutal Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts, where electric shocks are still used as part of ABA. autistichoya.net/judge-rotenber…

Looking at it through Ringel's intersectional lens,...

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438577442420142080

...we can see see multiple applicable United Nations human rights treaties being violated here:

The Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, Clauses 15 and 16:

ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/CR…

International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD):

ohchr.org/EN/Professiona…

Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC):

ohchr.org/EN/Professiona…

Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment:

ohchr.org/EN/Professiona…

In fact, in 2012, a letter to Members of the Conference Committee of the State Senate and House of Representatives mentioned all these treaties in an appeal to #StopTheShocks.

hrw.org/news/2012/06/2…

Yikes, thread broke; continue here:

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438651729671770113

It didn't help. The intersectional system of oppression was just too strong.

To this day, disabled people—mainly POC, and poor—continue to be subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment at the Judge Rotenberg Center.

Remember that the place where Geschwind works is part of UCLA, the exact same university where the originator of ABA did his experiments in which he shocked autistic children to make them normal. Geschwind's institution is proud of their link to Lovaas:

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438640429675724807

Geschwind's history shows that all his years of neuroscience and genetic research, he has not yet learned to listen to what actual autistic people say helps and harms them.

As we see, his genetic research so far has contributed to:

- drugs trials for sociability in autistic children, where measures like increased eye contact will be used to test whether the drugs are working;

- more ABA for Black children, starting at a younger age

...and more.

Interwoven in this background of decades of abuse of autistic people intertwined with genomic research, a clear message came across from researchers to autistic people:

"We don't like your existence on the planet. Since we can't completely make you like us once you're already here, we're going to try to prevent people like you from being born."

"Our eugenic mission is so important that we will spend millions on it, and there won't really be money left for anything that you might say you want. Whatever that might be isn't valid anyway, because you're too damaged to be the judge of what is good for you."

"Plus, once you're beyond a certain age, you're a lost cause, really. The only way we can sort of redeem your humanity if we start super-early with ABA."

"PS: Rarara, #BlackLivesMatter. You also deserve the same treatment."

So, that brings us back to today: September 2021, with the #Spectrum10K project on pause while the study leaders try to figure out how to PR their way out of a culmination of years of anger from many autistic people who have seen where these things lead.

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438606830154944515

#Spectrum10K 'ambassador' Paula Wright has doubled down and is threatening individuals on social media with legal action, calling those who oppose the study a mob of trolls, and posting screenshots of the most vitriolic comments as evidence.

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438616517327958020

When I wrote that #Spectrum10K violates the #CRPD, she asked me in what way. I responded with a string of tweets, which I tweaked into an article afterwards. autisticstrategies.net/spectrum10k-vi…

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of People With Disabilities is based on the human rights model of disability (an extension of the social model), and incorporates principle of intersectionality.

Paula replied that she does not support the social model of disability or ‘intersectionalism’ (sic), and does not have faith in the United Nations.

I understood this to mean that the people she represents have no interest in what the #CRPD has to say about their work (something which has been clear in their actions for years anyway).

"I am very happy to find myself the catalyst for the collapse of #intersectionality," Paula wrote on 15 September. "An ideology that divides, is viciously sectarian and disavows common humanity. Very happy. Vive classical justice. Logos + pathos in balance. A constant endeavour."

As the definition of shows, #intersectionality is not an "ideology". It's simply a word for how things are for some people.

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438408397293039620

And that discrepancy between what Paula is saying, and what this word was really intended to mean, illustrates why we need to do this:

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438239983182225409

Where the ideology part comes in is once we agree about the meaning of a term, and respond with different goals.

One group may say, "Hey, this is unfair, we should all work together to change this."

Another may say, "Yeah, it's unfortunate, but I believe that people should dig themselves out of holes even if they didn't get there through any fault of their own. Whoever doesn't survive is just a victim of evolution."

And yet another may say, "Let's make it as hard as possible for the people who struggle the most, so that they all die more quickly and we don't have to deal with them anymore."

...and so on.

This thread has had at least two unintentional forks in it so far, which means that some of the connections between the tweets are lost. If I find time, I'll turn it into an article (or a series of articles) so that I can connect everything properly.

And that would also allow me to correct mistakes! ✏️😃

https://twitter.com/ekverstania/status/1438571282610757634