You can tell a lot about a person by how they view themselves, the people they are a part of, or a particular outside group. This is an extension of “show me your friends and I will show you who you are”. It is about how you talk to your friends.
Sometimes I feel compelled to comment whenever autism (or diabetes, or…) is mentioned in an article online. Not just because I want to set some facts straight. I also want to be able to judge the sort of characters that might also offer comment. For example, about three weeks ago an author named Tommy Christopher posted this article entitled Autism Is Not About You. Immediately, he writes “People with autism get a relentlessly raw deal in the media”, and that flipped all of my switches.
So I posted the following comment:
All of you know that I have been engaged in a constant war of words with both the social housing agency of one state and people who are supposed to be about the promotion of equality because a twerp I would pay to see being tortured for months straight asked me so what makes me think I “have autism”. I expected to be “corrected” by morons who think they know better than I do in spite of the fact that I am the autistic one in the conversation.
Several people posted statements that, for once, made me feel like I was not totally alone. They follow (online names/identities redacted):
Just a small correction to the opening statement: the correct wording is “identity first”. Deaf people also use identity-first. The deaf culture movement and I disagree about a lot (which I might explain at some other time), but the point is that “person with” is not just scorned by autistic people. Even people who live with true disabilities oppose it in significant volume.
But here is the ultimate statement concerning “person first” when it is applied to autistic people:
That is right. I feel demeaned when someone says “with autism”, “have autism”, and so forth.
This last one I will quote for now is not being redacted at all. Partly because the person who has written the comment I wish to highlight has done a very good job of anonymising themselves. But mostly because people who post the kind of garbage that is in the comment we are responding to should have it tattooed into them before they are marched through crowded places at gunpoint:
There is no such thing as suffering caused by autism. If you believe otherwise, save the world’s limited sense of true justice some strain and go kill yourself now, because a good world is one without you in it.
Now, you know that I am quick to promise people that if they come to me saying “we are going to cure you”, I will kill them. Thankfully, nobody has tested me on this yet. But every day, I feel the sensation of my asshole idiot male parent invading my space and consciousness in some manner, and I am flooded with imagery of me murdering him. I react to that, react as if he is really trying to grab hold of me, and I am putting my heavily-booted foot into one of his kneecaps before throwing him in front of a speeding car or similar.
This is the result of my male parental unit’s actions, the unwillingness of social services in any part of this country to step up to the plate and offer some path of restitution, and the willingness of complete idiots to “correct” me when any idiot can see how wrong they are. It has nothing to do with my being autistic. In fact, if I were not born to a mother too young (and poor) to cope with an autistic child, there is a good chance I would have grown to my present age without even knowing that I am autistic.
Instead, we live in a culture tolerant of child abuse, a culture that has its sights set on only one kind of person being allowed to reach their potential, and a culture that despises not being told only what it wants to hear.
I have also stated that I am not happy with the autistic civil rights movement as it presently exists. How can I be? Lest you think I am the only person who sees the connection between rights and violence, let me quote a black civil rights activist:
Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them. Do I really have to keep repeating that to you, passives?
And here is another point passives need to consider. When even a children’s educational television show is siding with the oppressors, that means we really, really need to start acting. Like throwing red paint on curebie marchers, shooting them, or even torturing them to death for the camera. Because that is the next step of what curebies will start doing if we refuse to go away quietly but do not meet their ante in terms of force.
Another individual involved in the struggle, with whom I am experiencing the communication difficulties that prompted this post, contacted me about the original posting of this image. (Does this sentence make any sense after the edit I have made for wire-crosses?) Their point was about confusion regarding the satiric designation of the enemy, the name I use, Autism Speaks For Normie Assholes.
The confusion is merited because I have never been able to offer sufficient explanation of “normie” as a designation. When I say it aloud, every ounce of my hate for normies is evident. Michael Ironside on his angriest day could not speak a singular word with as much hatred as I do when I use the word “normie” in an offhand manner.
I created this image because of a sketch on Sesame Street that I saw when I was at most five years old. After a spirited mouthing off about the game of “May I?” that was taking place within his field of view, Oscar found himself confronted with the adult Humans asking him if he had a suggestion for a game. This prompted the creation of “Do I have to?”.
“Take fifty steps back away from me.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes, you do!”
You see, what Oscar contributed to the episodes of Sesame Street that I watched as a boy is a sense of true diversity. In the image above, I state that Oscar taught me that people are not always polite, kind, loving, caring, or even gentle of voice. And that there was a reason for this. And it was not necessarily a bad thing.
Sesame Street, by giving Autism Speaks For Normie Assholes the time of day, you have turned that around 180 degrees. You are now telling children that good people always have good thoughts, good feelings, good ideas, and so forth. I would expect this from Barney The Purple Dinosaur. You know, the children’s show that tried to supplant you and ended up being used as an example of how the wrong media can send extremely harmful messages to the children? That is the level you sank to, Sesame Street. It would be no different if you had started taking advice from the Ku Klux Klan or the dipshits in Texas who protest that Mexico even exists about what kind of content to present in your episodes.
In fact, it is worse. Because if you started presenting the kind of content that made those jack-offs happy, the people who fund you and enable you to broadcast your content would cancel you. People would know that you are committing an outrageous act entirely contrary to the purpose of educational television.
This is merely further evidence that autistic people are a social minority and one that should be responding to the clear and pervasive threat from the rest of the world with violence.
Now, to get back to what I was saying about the actual image, it might perhaps be best to offer some sort of table that illustrates the relationships in the struggle. This will be based on analogies to World War II because, as this meme so brilliantly illustrates, there can be no fairer way to begin analysing the behaviour of Autism Speaks For Normie Assholes.
In order to help clarify and promote further discussion of the “For Normie Assholes” bit, I decided to quickly slap together a loose table of elements that clashed in World War II and its prelude compared with the pieces on the board in the autism civil rights struggle. Note that this table of definitions is loose and only meant to begin discussion of which piece in the puzzle goes where, not as a definitive comparison. As follows:
This is very loosely organised, as I said, but as a guide to what I mean when I say “normie” in a similar tone to how Michael Ironside says “Quaid” during the real Total Recall, all one really needs to know is this. “Normie” means the occupants of the top three rows. It has nothing to do with the people in the bottom two. Notice anything about those bottom two rows?
Oh, and please, if you are about to flood my comments box with quips about “normal people” and how the words mean this or that, save your breath. When people use words to refer to themselves so constantly that images of them come to mind when the words are mentioned, that is basically what they are.
Now that I am done explaining the above, I bid you all a good evening. I wish to get on with things that do not sap my health and wellbeing.
I Still Find It So Hard... 