It is not mere semantics.

Where do you people come from? Seriously, I want to know. And yes, I mean “you people” in the most derisive sense. No, wait, what I really mean when I say that (I know my co-GM would raise an eyebrow if she saw me writing those words that way) is “you [are not actually] people [to me]“.

Neurobigots can all go to hell. I will be happy to send them.

I suppose that I should learn to not be surprised by how disappointed I can get with people in the media, but the shooting in the Century 16 cinema at Aurora, Colorado has brought out a level of bullshit that I just find so disheartening to be on the same planet as. Previously, I wrote about a gun lobbyist rhetoric proclaiming the Wild West fantasy that if everyone in the theatre had a firearm, the death toll would be lower. First, so what? One person being shot dead when they were only out in search of a good time is still wrong. Second, when dozens of people start shooting, stray bullets tend to kill more than just “the offender”.

Infantalisation (why?)

Infantalisation is a word that I use with some frequency, especially in recent years. It has a very specific meaning to me. Specifically, it denotes trying to reduce a person to the living level or function of an infant. There are other connotations, such as trying to make a person see themselves as an infant or in a way commensurate with a lower age. I also have a couple of synonyms I use when speaking aloud. Baby-fication or kiddy-fication are ones I utter aloud, usually to others.

Identity and respect… how the two combine.

It has occurred to me that I do not write nearly enough (in my view at least) about autism, what place there is in this world for me as an autistic adult, or the way forward for the autistic. I will try to correct this as best I can, but as anyone with a WordPress account knows, one can also look at their own statistics and see for themselves which tags and categories on their site are getting the most reads. Presently, the Media category gets nearly twice as many reads as does Autistic Identity, and a hundred more than its nearest competitor, Social Studies.

They sink to a new low. Autism Speaks think they own a colour.

So, I was discussing the urgent need to replace the puzzle piece with one of our own, with an individual who is more inclined toward illustration and related visual art than I am. As has been discussed already, my candidates mostly have a TRON: Legacy theme to them. But the salient point in this writing is that according to the other conversant in the discussion, Autism Speaks has apparently decided that the colour blue is theirs and their campaign colour.

Goals. What ones should the autism civil rights movement have?

I think if one looks at the situation quite literally, the autistic civil rights movement as it presently exists and occurs has a bit of a problem. In contrast to the enemy, which is very well-organised and well-directed, the autism civil rights movement is basically a lot of different groups of people meandering about without a clearly defined purpose or even a sense of a decision-making process.

Yet another post about why “person first” language is *bad*…

In my written work, I sometimes attempt to mimic in text my everyday patterns and quirks of speech. And by speech, I mean the speech to myself (thinking to myself) as well as exterior, to others. That part is because the two often converge, anyway. Such is the case when you almost never fail to mean what you are saying, even if the meaning you have in your consciousness and the meaning your audience thinks you are trying to impart are two different things.