Sunday, April 5, 2009

Thoughtful culture

Popular culture at mob level has never exactly been famous for its civilised tolerance. So it can hardly be a priority of life to become a winner in a minefield of unreliable friendships and cliques. That is not the place to look for deep acceptance, it is the place where our survival advantage is the ability to go without deep acceptance and follow our own consciences. Above all, it's never worth being submissive in search of acceptance. How miserable is that? You won't know what directions it will push you in, which innocent folks the social leaders will force you to exclude and pick on, which bigotries they will force you to pretend to believe in? You could be alone in the world and still none of that will be worthwhile.

In family, in political or religious or hobby social life, at work, at volunteer days, basically at anywhere normal, there is no formula beyond personal chance that determines how much acceptance and fitting in is possible. Living within reach of as many options as possible, for the sake of adaptability, must be one sensible tip. Then it just becomes a question of trying to observe, in each person you associate with, whether they are just a closed mind, then it would be damaging to mention AS, or they have any spark of thoughtfulness and civility. If they have, I find, then a casual mention of AS, not a deep sermon about it, is good because it helps to secure that the person stays a nice way. It gives them a reason not to drift towards being on more dumbed-down and ribald terms with you just from thinking you want that normality, which is exactly what we don't want. From chances grabbed as they arise here and there, with the right folks, ground can be gained for awareness and acceptance on decent terms. Slowly it builds up, to all our benefit.

Thoughtful folks have always aspired to find or own congenial community outside the conformist horror world of the type of normal thickos who booze and gamble and iron and believe what the tabloids tell them about foreigners. That type of popular culture is a starkly treacherous place to get by in, even to win a place in at all. It does not operate rationally or thinkingly. So the point of describing it so grimly is not snobbery, it's to illustrate that culture's own choice of enmity towards us. How it is not designed for anyone guided more by reasoning and logic than by gang following, to survive or thrive in. Thoughtful folks of all types need to defend ourselves from having to belong in social conditions like those. We have always needed an alternative and been in search of one.

What better justification can there be, for needing our own scene, our own space, than an impairment to communication? But even in thoughtful activities, groups become ruined by the normal cultures' influence and the resulting fear of ribaldry and derision that comes to enslave the socially minded to take the rougher and more dumbed down life attitudes. I have watched an astronomy society die in this way. As the traumatic nature of science education has driven away from enjoyment of science the potential keen new blood the society could have kept attracting and formerly had, firstly the more practically minded strongman types came to stand out as the leaders. Then that meant all abstract chat about the subject's wonders petered out and stopped being expected or thought comfortable. Then that left the shrunken society's core life reduced wholly to happening among a few normal hard-edged cynical sneery impatient men, further alienating the non-core membership. To a comment on the virtues of serving ethical coffee the vice-president could say, "Don't let's bring ethics into it, this is the astronomical society not the ethical society, I'll get some more Nescafe." Any time you are thinking of joining an astronomy society, quote that and ask them if it could happen.

Casual evil like this, and like the pointless cliquiness we all know can pop up out of the blue in the personal boundaries of workplace social life when least expected even in health-conscious workplaces, are why the struggle for a secure thoughtful counterculture to belong to has repeatedly been defeated and savaged all through the history of semi-civilisation. Before AS was known, I had already seen, and been dismayed by, the failiure of such scenes to last permanently, in 2 settings: around children with unusually intellectual interests, and around folks going through emotionally intense problem youths.

Aspies are another grouping who could deliver a parallel culture for nice thoughtful non-ribald characters totally opted out of the majority hard soul-dead culture. We need each other's acceptance as a higher priority than to dream about finding it with any consitency outside the caring circles. Trouble is, aspies are no more immune from having nasty ways than any other grouping are. It's only as an overall tendency that our society is made nicer than average by our willingness to think critically. There are still some aspies who don't think much at all, who just want a quiet life, or who feel clever by having sarcastic uncaring characters. So the quest depends on willingness go be combative about the aspie scene's standards of personal fairness whenever they wobble, and never just passively take what the big organisations deign to give us. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

The work the Scottish Autism Services Network is doing with us, putting our own voice into the info produced about us for all sorts of health or other service providers, is part of this vigilance. That won't be delivered to us by submissively trusting the big organisations who speak without consulting us, to "choose their priorities."

All organisations who don't speak out about how school homework destroys some aspies' chance to be child authors like the 2 well-known ones, commit a crime of child cruelty and endangerment. All organisations who ignore the case that because aspie clumsiness and gaps of attention give us a greater than equal likelihood to lose small objects, public transport can no longer require any passengers to carry losable tickets or passes, commit an endangerment of our safety. Yet one director of a lobby group for us just wrote to me, "I note what you say", a well-known bureaucrats' answer that says utterly nothing. If they lobby employers about us without mentioning the biological entitlement to dress freely, that is proved from our sensitivity and metabolism issues, they have lied about us while gambling with our life opportunities. Which all makes it important to keep local groups self-run, not provided by the big organisations, and independent of any urge to keep in their favour. There must be no divisive attitude of one generation against another, because that's not friendly, and there must be a declared automatic right for all members to count each other as equal in social worth and wantedness.

No group, big or small, local or national, is ethical unless it declares that in every conflict between personal fairness and the group's wider interests, personal fairness shall always automatically win. Our web communities too have good and bad among their number. It would be so much easier on emotionally stressed aspie reasoning if our scene was all good, it's not, but a dedication to keep the good parts of it going is our best strategy to belong and keep some part of society even half-reliably worthwhile.

Maurice Frank

Library internet

What is the point of making known the particular needs or medical interests of a minority, unless it is to ensure those needs are never abused? Malpractice is usually reckoned the right word to describe decisions made in disregard of any group's biologically real needs, and made without even giving any committal answers to aspects of need that will be overridden. The type of politician you know to run a mile from, is the type who leaves any point about harm, that you have put to them, utterly not acknowledged by so much as a word. Your disgust is invited at the smug ruthlessness of our local politicians, who are treating in this way a problem put to them on these terms. It concerns an idiotic change being threatened to the library internet service.

It should not be down to 50-50 luck, as it is, whether each county's library internet uses a system with automated timers, that cut you off when your time is up, or not. It makes a big practical difference. Timers are unfriendly, they force you to rush to save work for fear of losing it, instead of completing it, in case your time runs out seconds before you can complete your task. As you know, in all internet work there is always the chance of making a bad connection, and being stuck fuming while you wait for the screen only slowly to show any result, which even then might be a failed connection. That can happen when your time is close to running out, and it means, however careful you are about remembering to save your work, you are always at risk of losing it. Bad connections can result in you failing to save before the timeout happens. Then, all your work and a big chunk of your time have been wasted. That possibility is an abuse.

If there is no timer, you can make sure your task is safely completed before you hand over to the next user. That way, everyone is happier and less stressed. The occasional problem of a user encroaching seriously upon the next user's time and having to be pushed out, and from experience in Edinburgh that is rare, costs you far less user time than the danger of losing all your work because of a timer, and than the way a timer deprives you of effective use at all of your slot's closing minutes because of the risks in starting any new task. Timers don't protect library staff from a difficult user, either, for they provide no physical means to make that user leave their seat and instead they can make it worse by giving the difficult user justified anger over lost work.

They obstinately persist in having timers in Fife, and the difference between their library internet and Edinburgh's, in neighbouring regions, is extraordinary. I belong to both. The line taken by Fife, and by Galloway which shares its system, towards cases of lost work, is: we sympathise but tough. Yet the problems suffered in Fife have discredited timers utterly.

The timeout often does not happen exactly when it should, it can happen up to 2 minutes early or late. You can have less time left than the clock on the screen says you have. You know what that means: work is lost or not accomplished. As for when you log in, sometimes you get connected within a half minute yet the timer appears showing only 57 minutes left. Several staff at Duloch library in Dunfermline told me some most insightful info - the timeout drifts out of sync with the clock, this problem increases over time, until periodically they have to reset the system. Where does that leave the users?!

When printing is done, it is more work for the staff to worry about not letting the timeout happen during the printing. The system does not freely let you log out and back in if the computer gets clogged up, which in Edinburgh's you can do perfectly easily. At 5 minutes and at 50 seconds before timeout, a reminder appears, that locks the screen until you acknowledge it, so further interrupting any writing you are doing and costing time and adding to the stress. Yes you can ask for extra time if it is available, but the act of going to the counter and asking for it consumes some of the time you already have, and you are panicking to get served in time as well as to save your work. Those 2 needs are in conflict.

Then, as recently as within the last year, Fife's system sprang a fault where the timer can jump to zero and cut you off, just spontanously at any moment during your whole session. They had to stick up notices, and they only bothered in some libraries, warning users to keep saving their work very frequently for fear of losing it: all through your session. Which disrupts flow of work and takes up time, and is always subject to the danger of bad connections. This is a system that does not work.

It is not practical for anyone to rely on at all, a system that can function as chaotically as this. Timers' unreliability impacts on the communication needs of those autistics who can express themselves with less difficulty by words composed on screen than by conversation or phone. Timers are easily discriminatory to our friends in the dyspraxic community, for the demands they make on dexterity both mental and physical. Mental because it takes quick thinking and a build-up of multitasking, especially if you have to panic what to do about a slow connection. Physical to get mice clicked and keys pressed quickly to beat the clock, or even worse, to beat an unreliable timer that may malfunction.

Last summer, some of us took part in an AS research project by an Edinburgh University student, but done through NHS Fife and so with sessions held in Fife. I suffered disruption to organising my participation, when a bad internet connection was overtaken by a timeout on a Dunfermline library computer and resulted in loss of a message. For this, I got the fact recorded in the project, that the computer system with timers had disrupted medical research by frustrating participation in it, thus working against our interests as a minoirty group, and has added unnecessary coping stress to the whole process, for the participant to deal with. This would not have happened in a system without timers, like Edinburgh's, hence it proved the timer system is both medically harmful and an obstruction of science. This was recorded as a real fact experienced in practice.

This should be a basis for me to get timers abolished and banned everywhere, as discriminatory and a medical abuse of us. Discriminatory also upon all the populations of counties with them, compared to without them. Edinburgh's present system stands proved the ideal model for introducing everywhere. Our friends in Fife need the case proved for this change. Edinburgh owes them that. Imagine then the inconceivable looking-glass horror, of instead catching early word of a plan for the head-on opposite to happen, for Edinburgh to change to using timers too? In the face of the harmful mess they have made in Fife?

This is what I was lobbying my 3 local councillors for help to prevent, on grounds that it would be knowingly a medical abuse and intrusion upon our needs. My council ward is called "Almond" because there is a river called that. Its 3 councillors all belong to different parties, you would expect them to be keen to score against each other's ethical failings. I put that to them all at once. Norman Work, SNP, Kate Mackenzie, Conservative, and of particular interest because he is actually the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, George Grubb, Lib-Dem. These councillors are public figures, elected to keep all the health needs in their community remembered by the planners, right? There is a pressing public interest in revealing them falling short of that.

At first the only response to me came from the first named. He said he had gone to speak to the staff of 2 of the outlying and less busy libraries, not saying if he had mentioned my point about the medical research record. Nor the point about timers being bad for library staff's safety. He wrote not a word about that to me either, made no acknowledgement of its existence at all, as he wrote: "As the staff I spoke to were in favour of a timing system I am not going to go against their wishes". He then argued ridiculously that the time extension system, problems of already discussed, should be a reassurance!

The second named has never said a word. The third named declares these councillors all work together and answer on each other's behalf - and remember he is Lib-Dem, the party with the longest history of keenness for the electoral reform that gave us multi-member seats. "Thank you for drawing this to my attention. The 3 Almond Ward councillors are working together on most community issues." That is not the choice that multi-member council seats were created for. They all belong to different parties, yet the voter struggling to stop medical abuses is presented with a single line of brush-off from them all jointly, that is not even an answer to the problem. On what basis is there any party contest?

So you can put to them a point of medical harm and they are capable of completely ignoring it without mention, as one gives you the wrong answer and the others back him. Where does this leave you if you are a parent fighting a more serious issue over children's illnesses? Looks what it shows: that they don't have the first shred of an ethic to hold their answers accountable to whether they knowingly approve medical harm whose nature is on scientific record. Whose health is ever safe in hands like these?

"If he had acted supposedly for all 3 councillors and not just for himself", I asked, then the only way for the other 2 councillors not to be seen by name to choose culpably in favour of doing medical harm and hurting vulnerable groups, was "if they are committal not noncommittal in disagreeing with" his line. That is logical. Answer: "I have been following your emails about the libraries situation and I will ask Head of Libraries for an update on the situation". This resulted only in getting a copy of a report on the plan.

No position taken against the plan, by any of them. NO ANSWER, from any of them, to the medical harm point, or on the needs of groups affected adversely by the change. Does that sound at all committal to you?

Any answer directly from libraries management, to justify the change, is still awaited, since Feb 3. So in conclusion: Here is the state of democracy and of disability rights, going on all around you. Councillors across party are allowing a disability wrong to be done without taking any position against it, and he is ignoring how local scientific research already records that the proposed change will abuse us. The Lord Provost of our capital is going along with this and not a word of committality on it can be extracted from his office. If you are a visitor here in the Year of Homecoming, these are the standards you are homecoming to.

Maurice Frank

PS - added Jul 28. The library has now taken its first step, introduced the timer system in one department of Central library, the "Learning Centre" where the computers were already unstaffed. The result? Nobody uses them! Previously this section of computers was always full, now it is often empty and you never see more than the occasional user. The library users have voted with their feet, between the merits of the 2 systems. They have all totally chosen the old system without timers, as easier and friendlier to use. Observing this, the library now has no other honest choice than to find that the timers system is a total failiure, to cancel all further extension of it, and to share this practical test result with the rest of the country to force banning of the timers system wherever it is used.