Tuesday, December 4, 2018

rational = poof

From a post on FB by a guy with schooldays in Fife

"When I was at school, everyone was scared to give the right answer to the teacher in case they were called a "poof".
(In Fife schools all boys were classed as poofs at a moment's notice, for doing anything that suggested they were intelligent or sensitive humans. That was forbidden." ...

"Nowadays, people running about trying to use big words they don't really understand to seem clever.
Ironic, because if they hadn't pretended to be stupid in the first place they would have learned what the big words mean and realise there's no need to use them."

Such a destructive system does any good???
Authoritarian Schooling, a catalogue of damage, by David Gribble

Sunday, November 18, 2018

MINORITY RECOGNITION PAIN SET OFF IN THE MOST CASUAL DAILY LIFE

Today, in the later half of November, is blue sky sunny, but from a frosty start, nippy enough air to have some folks in woolly hats, and some of the seasonal German market's security staff wearing scarves over their mouths. Temperature up to 9 then falling to 6 at sunset.

In this, in the crowd exploring the German market there were as many as 6 other folks in shorts. Both adults and kids, and from both visually apparent sides of the gender spectrum. (Well worded?) I, as an aspie with a shorts sensory issue and a metabolically active body heat, have a lot of pain baggage around a minority identity struggle that I did not get a good life start in. So to see actually what I want, the social liberty I care about doing well and advancing, carries pain. The pain of needing simple equal recognition, needing to be identified as one of the shorts favouring folks comfortable in this type of air and further.

I did not see this in my childhood/youth. Is it climate change, that more folks find days at this time of year sunnier now, hence also milder? Yet there were some folks visibly wrapped up feeling cold, and all of us shorts folks were also wearing coats. Is it this region's climate, helpful to folks finding their cold boundaries: for I have always thought that shorts are seen more and colder here in East-Central Scotland than they were in the unhappy exiled location of my childhood, South Wales. Is it the existence of the web, allowing now for anyone who doubts it to confirm that colder shorts are doable and won't give them colds. Is it a good era shift, away from the evil conformity caused by hard macho attitudes in the punk and alternative comedy eras? I grew up before the web, but after the mid-century tradition of knee-length breeches for boys had died out; and in a region affected by saturated damp air causing cold-like symptoms that prevented me until my 20s from discovering my shortist identity as a real life option; and I was never a cub because my tastes were not outdoor enough and did not at the time know they wore them; and I went to a school whose uniform was rigidly only long trousers right from above the first primary year; and the unfairly difficult older boyhood when there is an irrational age prejudice against shorts I was at exactly in the punk era when shorts were most out of fashion. Amid all that unfair hammering of circumstances, never did I see what I saw today, nor before my 20s get the opportunity to be one of the folks seen in them on this type of day at this time of year. But my soul identity has always been that I should have been.

So even if it's good right social change and to be celebrated, also it's a deep stinging oppression pain concerning life fairness. For all shortists who have been oppressed and in struggle, I have to push society and posterity to consider analysis of the causes.

Maurice Frank
18 Nov 2018

Saturday, October 27, 2018

liberty of a healthy personal taste for fruit flavour

Western Mail (a newspaper in Wales) 19 Jan 1982:
""He has grown up a lot in the last year but he still prefers drinking Ribena to coffee."
It is for reasons like that that Mrs Frank is glad that Maurice is not emulating Ruth Lawrence by heading for university years before the normal age.
"
- age-bigoted words of a journalist keen to promote the ideas of abusive school teachers, that never got me to uni at all, that were already starting to crash, reaching breaking point just 8 months later. Wrong evil words, as kids who went to uni early escaped from the evil oppressiveness of school and had it turn out better for them.

My chapter in Bittersweet on the Autism Spectrum, book published by JKP 19 Jan 2017:
"That I still enjoy cold blackcurrant squash, a lifelong addiction, is actually a serious necessary triumph for personal autonomy. ...Every refreshing, uplifting squash drink is charged with anger, at all the hurtfully illogical family and peer pressures I suffered in my teenage years, to perceive fruit squashes as a juvenile taste that I needed to grow out of."

THE EMERGENCE OF DARK FRUIT STRONGBOW AS A POPULAR BAR DRINK HAS VINDICATED ME BIG TIME. It's a blackcurrant (and blackberry) cider. I celebrate tonight a further vindication: seeing a good number of folks drinking Dark Fruit Strongbow in the punk-themed setting of a pub gig titled Punkoween, in Monty's Bar, Dunfermline.

Maurice Frank

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

teach the teachers from the voices of all

At the now revived autism Cross Party Group in parliament, today Oct 23 the topic was education. Specifically, and nicely accountably, the follow-up to a report on rates of school exclusion, jointly by SA, the NAS, and Children in Scotland.

Among the report's list of "calls for action", enlarged on to us by Charlene Tait speaking for SA: is for more training up of the autism understanding level among teachers, and for schools. As has ever been so throughout the modern autistic scene's existence, here again the case evidence quoted and directly told by school leaver age autistics present, showed that schools widespreadly are brutally deficient in their understanding, and in their attitude towards having any.

There is a perfectly predictable explanation or that. Teachers are piece of shit tyrants by intentional design, and the authoritarian model of school is a disastrous destructive evil and one of the outstanding horrible tyrannies of history -site - Authoritarian Schooling a Catalogue of Damage.

My point given at CPG. After all the consequences they had heard of failed understanding, with even suicidality at issue, when they follow up this training up of teachers there will be an automatic duty to SHEER CHILD SAFETY, that the 3 organisations set up a facility for preventing the autism training from being incomplete by missing things. To date, clearly, teachers and schools have missed a lot of it. So they need a facility that ANYONE who has been part of an autistic school problems case can send in the itemisable school problems shown by the case details. Then the facility's responsibility would be to check whether the items are already recognised in the awareness program for the teacher retraining, and any items that are not already there, to add them in.

From anyone who comes forward with a case experience. Not just a selection of cases, which could miss something, but ALL who come forward. This proposed as explicitly being a duty to child safety. That is the govt's principle of "Getting it right for every child," GIRFEC. That is accountability. That is inclusive, against the problem mentioned by another contributor, of affected families feeling their cases invisible.

Sunday, October 14, 2018

serious claims require serious evidence

Autism Network Scotland's participative book An Ordinary Life Too (PDF book link) speaks out, among many things, against a long term violation by the USA of the oldest most basic human right of all, presumption of innocence, that the media never mention. By its border control requiring declarations of arrest histories and having the power to judge and treat differently INNOCENT PEOPLE, not convicted of anything, who have ever been arrested. Even Obama made no known attempt to end it. How much hope is there that Melania Trump will, now that she has spoken out on MeToo for the need for hard evidence before anyone is convicted of a crime. Has she noticed that one leads to the other? Has any organisation rich enough to try a court case on it noticed?

But credit to her for saying a needed right thing. It's an important moment that a figure as highly placed as her did. She spoke for hearing men as victims too.

Hard factual evidence is the standard that everyone operating a protection system for vulnerable groups, or an equalities policy for non-discriminatory social inclusion, has a duty to follow. This is to take strong moral pleasure in reaffirming ELAS's attachment to that duty. EVERYTHING GOES ON FACTUAL EVIDENCE, NOTHING GOES ON ONE WORD AGAINST ANOTHER.

ELAS knows from painful recent experience with human evil, how important this is and what it is like to stand up for this human right against will to corrupt it. Because a determined breaking of this was what caused the fall and departure of our own disgusting ethically discredited former chair Mark Keenan.

Each group that takes this stand holds the line against the gender one-sided witch hunters trying to terrorise society with the evil of guilt by accusation. Every one highlights that it is the duty of every one. Every code of equalities and inclusion, in any organisation, has the duty to stand with us.

Monday, September 3, 2018

Breakthrough on adult diagnosis in Aberdeen

Aberdeen has been suffering for years a local unjust failure of service re such an important basic as adult access to diagnosis. Doctors have not been available for it, folks have needed to seek access to service from other regions unless they had the means for privately. This affecting such an essential life fairness as employment support.

NAS holding a conference there in 2015 budged nothing, nor even prevented the OSS there (which they ran) closing down! But now the local paper has budged the local NHS, as a follow-on benefit from a campaigning victory on ADHD. It reports this breakthrough in NHS acknowledgement of service duty: NHS Grampian commits to adult autism diagnosis.

Why does it say it is important that folks cease to need to present to mental health service? Of course it's important that autistics are not mental, but that service is long established one of the commonest sources for diagnoses. GP referral to it. If Aberdeen folks have been referrable to mental health, and have been diagnosable by it, then there is no form of words that makes sense, that they could use to reject diagnosing the folks who were not going to stay on the mental health service for something else. Yet that is what the article reads like saying they used to do.

The principle of accessing adult diagnosis is importantly universal everywhere, Aberdeen's experience this far into the autism aware era has been staggering. This is the turning point of their acknowledging this principle for a maltreated place.

Sunday, August 12, 2018

yes you can call a cool swaggery comedian sick

It may well be most prudent for the thinking aspie not to go to any Fringe comedies at all. But a few thoughtful ones on worthwhile subjects do happen. It's so chancy, when you see one billed on a subject worth bothering with, whether the billing is true or whether it's just an attention grabbing device for just another rough biting jerk who wants to spend an hour talking about social humiliations and child maltreatment.

Kevin Precious is a particularly bad case of the latter. Revile and avoid his show. It included a joke about having cancer. He is the next show on straight after our annual aspie visitor Paul Wady's show at the same venue.

Precious is a humanist who used to have to schoolteach religious studies. That sounds of interest to anyone anti-school, and the show's billing sets up a prospect of hearing a lot about intellectual conflict with a system.

No that's not what you get at all, He did not suffer any conflict, he was allowed to teach study of religions witbout asserting that any one is right and to tell the parents he had no belief - and that's about all his material on it, 5 minutes' worth. There is no critique of school at al, despite lots of harsh jokes at its miseries, including against the character of PE teachers yet not making the obvious deduction that there should not be any PE. He is a offputtingly blunt voiced earthy macho type, that's visibly why he has no spirituality!

Most of the show is about Jimmy Savile and the same worn out offensiveness that all the satirical comedians have followed in the time of high child abuse awareness - of making lots of purportedly angry political satire about it, that turns THE ABUSE ITSELF into a joke, and an instant audience laugh trigger.

Why is this not deemed an offence and just as unacceptable to the victims as the crime itself?! References that would not be accepted in more serious talking get actively flaunted in comedy to make the comedian cool, and thid has gone on for years endlessly. It's because folks fear sounding uncool if they criticise comedy - the same reason as why no campaigns or child protectors who can do anything against Blackadder's incitement of and siding with bullying, have ever wanted to, in 32 years since that episode was made. But when you say that about Blackadder, serious minded folks get the point perfectly - it works liks the Emperor's New Clothes, just need to say the visible truth that is not getting said.

So it's the same for stand-up and satirical comedy that goes on at great length and detail about child sbuse. It is another offensive exploitation of the affected folks, an exploitation of them, another act of not caring in a socially including way, a compounding of the actual abuse. It merits anger and moral reaction.

Maurice Frank

Saturday, July 28, 2018

Vagabonde again

Filmhouse is repeating the Agnes Varda season it did in 2010. Nice to know that demand recurs. It will be social progress to have films not be organised in the way we grew up with TV working, where something in a past you had missed they would just let stay missed for ever.

Yet can such a positive sentiment exist in the same world as could create the circumstances of Vagabonde ?! Time to repost my review of it, written last time they showed it:

The Filmhouse's season on French director Agnes Varda featured a particularly haunting moody film I had last seen 20 years before on Channel 4. Conversion to big screen intensity gave a terrific edge to that shaky feeling when you relive in full a distant memory. Vagabonde (also billed as Sans Toit Ni Loi, without roof or law) is about a young woman fleeing from all bonds with the society around her, and the emotional impact she makes before and by her death in a farm ditch. Compare watching it when the film was new and the story felt recent, to revisiting it now after so long, when the perspective is now even more moving, that the world has moved on without this character who it gave no place to and is oblivious to the dimmed trace that she ever lived. Just like life has been for how many millions of real folks who deserved better?

As nothing much has shifted in economic life, the story has not lost its contemporariness, save for the thought that it is about someone who lived before blogs. We are not told how serious is what Mona has run away from, only that she has chosen this aimless rural wandering, with just a backpack and a tent as possessions, over being a shorthand secretary. That is what makes her enigmatic, to the film characters she encounters. Can we who are not making the same choice, make sense of it? and of what our answer says about freedom and society? Mona finds nothing of value that lasts, in her journey, yet there are any number of reasons why she may be right to have fled from oppressive life options, that even knowing her fate we can't say she should have stuck with them.

She liberates for a moment a housebound old lady who is stuck having games of family respectability played around her. They get drunk together. But as for when chances arise for Mona to attach her life to those of any of the folks she meets, the practical questions never work out, and the moment is always lost. We are all drifting around in collision and clash and rivalry and trickery, when you find yourself with no niche amid those negative forces it becomes this impossible to create one yet guard your freedom too. There is a parallel with what happens to refugees.

Even the "counterculture" lets her down, but viewers with harsher down to earth minds might see it as her letting it down. A green philosopher-farmer takes her in and gives her some land, then throws her back out for failing to put the work into it, and calls her hut dirty too. So bloody what, how dare he, it's her own room? and the work is new to her, she needs room to find her pace. While preening his ego with the delusion that he was offering Mona help, he was power-tripping, insulting her, doing her emotional hurt and feeling good about himself at her expense.

This is an all too common pattern: autocratic help. It may epitomise how the counterculture failed, the same way as school and communism and Victorian parenting and psychiatry and the World Bank fail. The giver of help must force the results, loses the faculty of wanting to see that results might be a harder to attain than instantly, brings in ideals of their own to push onto the helped person, becomes a tyrant, takes away their freedom, their own being. It actually ruins the chance of attaining a practical success, it destroys. It's playing God: "I cast you out, a fugitive and a vagabond shall you be." My sympathies are totally with Mona in storming away from him feeling cheated. It sums up the world's failing of her and of millions of folks through history who it has given no niche of viable free life to. THEY ARE THE MARTYRS. Vagabonde lives this failiure of the world at its most intense, when suffered not from the state but from the nature of real people. It deeply offends fairness, that in his high handed sneer the jerk predicts Mona's fate correctly, but that his own treatment of her helps to cause it. How often does that happen? "Yah boo, you'll end up in some stigmatised lowlife state unless you live exactly as I say." It has been said too many times to children by adult controlling egos, and in mental health work.

Mona fits that emotionally egalitarian theme in the Old Testament, of unlikely figures getting called to a task sometimes beyond their own awareness - for perhaps she does achieve a purpose, just by bearing witness to her choice, helping the folks she meets to judge their own life choices with a deeper insight re fairness and ties. They recognise the dilemma just as the viewer does. At the level of practical comforts we who are not living like her may feel lucky for it, yet she is lucky not to be tied down as we often are, to fight prolonged life issues and quarrels. That may be what matters most to her, she may have good cause to feel lucky she has escaped that. It's swings and roundabouts, it is never assumable what is lucky or not in anyone's life.

Yet it seems a clear issue of luck that your martyrdom might happen at the wrong time. It is distressing to have to think and remember the likelihood that there have been unrecognised aspies of my age who got into states of collision with society that led to endings like Mona's in the film's era, which was in the dark ages before aspies emerged, and meant missing out on being in the scene now and all it means for scoring against past wrongs.

Those of us who have made a defining escape at some time in our life, but without it placing us on the streets, are very personally impacted by this question. Like my escape from my teachers, in the same year as Vagabonde was made, 1985: itself also haunting to look back at! I have the anti-school issue in my life, as an emotionally vital prolonged cause, I want the means to pursue it all the way, so I feel lucky that in a sedentary life I have the means. Mona might instead feel lucky not to have any such prolonged issue in her life, or emotional tie to its pursuit. Even when she dies in the ditch she may be relieved she has been sucessful in avoiding the burden of having a prolonged issue to cope with, which would have restricted her choice to march away from her unhappy working life. Maybe if she had been restricted by the emotional importance of other life issues already in progress, she would still just have strongly needed to escape. The threshold might or might not be higher, for we don't know what she escaped from.

Certainly if my escape from my teachers had resulted in a life and fate like Mona's, it would have been every bit as vital a matter of survival, still a million times worth doing. I affirm that from watching Vagabonde. Yet my avoidance of that fate also really matters. Since my first watching, at a hard economic time when my escape was still fairly recent and life not much rebuilt at all, time has let me advance it to a far more complete distance from everything about my teachers and make it clear to all, with successive acts of writing against their ideas. Time, like this, is exactly what Mona's path did not give her. Neither may it be what she needed, and you never want the stress for relying on it when it is still future, but without it, no chance for good surprises like the aspie scene's creation, to come along in your future. Another unsolvable dilemma there. It puts my escape experience, and anyone's, into this context of 2 alternative paths: the effort of long term struggle or the finality of quick martyrdom. Circumstances don't always give us the choice between them, they may lead us to one or the other, and that has to be the weight off our consciences at the hour of our death.

You see that when Mona is lying in the ditch in exhausted tears. Life eventually is just that. Not a place where anything good can be relied on. It is tempting to credit that scene as the meaning of life. Mona dies of living on her own terms, true to herself. Snooty respectable viewers will pounce to judgment against that, yet it is a far better fate than dying in a war for a state that rates ordinary lives expendable, or of an industrial disease after being a good worker who never went on strike, or by violence in a place where you chose to remain, or full of psychiatric drugs. It encapsulates the grounds for a gnostic disgust at this life. If we find ourselves with a better chance than Mona of extending our lives' duration, what does that mean, when it the chance aspect of it is so unfair? Life only has meaning when lived in a state of struggle against all its unfair aspects. Purpose lies in being identified personally with the struggle and with what you stand for, so that it becomes what you are remembered for, by as much of the world after your time as remembers you at all.

If Vagabonde is haunting because of this, then also because any aspie viewer can identify with any figure drifting on the margins, observing society critically and fearfully from the outside, not managing to connect lastingly with it. Mona is certainly not autistic, she is too easily able to hitch-hike and to ask for favours like refills of her water bottle, for that. But here is the amazing twist -not in the story but in real life. The actress who plays Mona is Sandrine Bonnaire, who has an autistic sister and much more recently made the angry documentary film Her Name Is Sabine, which we also saw at the Filmhouse as an Elas party, about how the mental health system drugged her and made her condition worse. Might this biological link to autism have enhanced her acting ability to portray outsidership and engimatic distance? It means looking at Vagabonde now in the eerie light of remembering having no idea of this, no knowledge yet of aspies or of being one, at the time of originally seeing it and feeling such a strong impact.

Maurice Frank

Thursday, July 19, 2018

critical pedagogy in speaking on autism

Critical Pedagogy. Term coined by education liberator Paulo Freire. (Pedagogy is a big word for teaching approach). Local good critical pedagogues the Ragged University were discussing it today. It's when the learner has just as much say as the teacher, on whether they buy what they are hearing, questioning sources, making their own judgment, it's a dialogue. If the teacher wants their view to carry they have to evidence why on its evidential merits. It's a dialogue of critical thinking. Because whenever purported information is given to you, critical thinking on its merits is always the right response. It's part of being careful.

If someone puts on a talk to tell you about autism, critical pedagogy requires that you get a decent go at discussing whatever you need to about it.

Critical pedagogy shows why it's no good to have a public talk on autism given one-sidedly, with just a few quick single questions at the end, by a set only of articulate and economically successful 20s-30s aged aspie speakers, telling their audience "autistics do this", "autistics do that", with no sources cited, no other evidence than that they personally are autistic and say so. As if they could speak for the entire spectrum, with its breadth of ability range, which clearly they can't. That type of autism promotion is not critical thinking nor subjected to critical thinking.

So watch critically the form and nature of events billed as public descriptions of autism, if you choose to go to any.

Maurice Frank

Sunday, June 17, 2018

We disown Autistic Pride Day it has abusive origins

ARGH, Autism Rights Group Highland, was several years ago a partner of ELAS, in the failed venture Autistic Voice. ARGH's leaders threw Autistic Voice away, by taking a huff with anyone who said that differences of need between autistics with or without learning disabilities should ever be stated or admitted to exist! Anyone who wanted any different needs to be stated, they called a wicked "aspie supremacist" + "ableist".

In a SPECTRUM of needs, it's unworkable to say we must always say we all have identical needs, when we obviously don't all have identical strong and weak points. As an objector wrote, ""how do we explain to providers who the people attending particular events are likely to be so that they can provide what is likely to be a good mix of support in the widest sense? "Well, there's this group of people and also there's another group of people and I can't tell you what the difference is.""

Now, ARGH has acted unilaterally, without a word either to ELAS or to the forum + writing group at ANS, + who know how many other grassroots groups - when disastrously + selfishly it has persuaded Scottish government to fly the flag of Autistic Pride Day on its hq tomorrow.

Just a stunt without building up any services: but Autistic Pride Day is evil. It was invented by a cult ruled by purge and terror of disfavour, Aspies For Freedom. They could do it for the UN's World Autism Awareness Day instead.

AFF was created, and run as a dictatorship, by one couple, in Wales, who made a bid to be the world leadership of aspies. They were very ban-happy and turned on many folks in an instant, they even threw out both of the folks who tried to start local AFF groups: one in New York just for naming himself in the credit for a fundraiser he organised, and one in Townsville Australia just for inadvertently asking the couple something they were secretive about. Also, AFF was founded taking a line against medical drugs for us, but within a year its site was proudly announcing connections made with professors who lecture in favour of drugging autistics. Again, just like the pigs in the ending to Animal Farm, when they become indistinguishable from the farmers.

AFF in its original membership form thankfully collapsed in 2013 under its tyranny's own unworkability. But its leaders are still around seeking influence, including through claiming the credit for Autistic Pride Day. Everyone trying to act ethically for any autistics who have ever been socially vulnerable or hurt, has a duty to disown Autistic Pride Day, and through the suicide danger to those folks, the protection principle enforces this.

IT IS A PROTECTION LAW RESPONSIBILITY AGAINST ABUSE TO DISOWN AUTISTIC PRIDE DAY. IT IS ALSO A PROTECTION LAW RESPONSIBILITY AGAINST ABUSE TO BE COMMITTAL NOT NONCOMMITTAL.

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

be ANGRY for our lost generation

Anthony Hopkins and the suffering caused by unrecognized Asperger’s condition

An angry story on how the news of his diagnosis in his seventies highlights "there are currently many adults with the condition who have never been diagnosed either during childhood or as adults. Many have had, and continue to have difficulties in coping with effects of Asperger's on their daily lives."

Given that lost generations must make any reasoning person angry, hear evidence of a cause of the loss and become angry at a terrible evil idea with a long history. The idea of letting go. The idea, sold by religions to oppressed people for 3000 years in the service of power, that it's psychologically good to live in placid passive acceptance of your life injustices and one-sidedly forgive, and bad to fight back and avenge.

I was diagnosed at 35, in 2003, after aspieness was brought to my awareness by passionately following the anti-school cause, hence reading about causes of school troubles. After my school troubles in the 80s, narrowly still pre-awareness! had resulted in a teenage psychiatry political prisoner experience leaving me in long term fear of and potential threat from that system, I was unsafe ever to go anywhere near doctors about anything psychological. So I would never have been found aspie that way. SO I WOULD BE ONE OF THE UNJUSTLY MISSED, IF I HAD LET GO FORGIVEN AND ACCEPTED.

It is entirely thanks to rejecting the evil of those ideas and believing in anger and fighting back, that I am a found aspie at all. Anger and fighting back, which many evil theorists of mental health still argue against, gave me the total life transformation of aspieness's vindication of my nature and all my school age oppressors' wrongness, protection from any more bad expectations, and much speaking out achieved and noticed.

Maurice Frank

Friday, January 19, 2018

the hounders of men don't know autism

Just mailed to the radio news World At One:

《 Someone you had discussing MeToo said that we can all read non-verbal cues, and have a duty to. She even called this part of being humans not animals.
In effect she has called autistics animals, she has shown a key failure of awareness for us. Inability to read non-verbal cues, or to assume signals, is an explicitly degined part of autism. We can only follow the information we are told explicitly.
What would, or did, her attitude do to justice processes for unrealised autistics before modern autism awareness? What has she shown could still happen where an autistic person under accusation is not articulate about this, or not yet diagnosed, and the lawyers all lack awareness? 》


They had broadcast a discussion of grassroots feelings on the MeToo campaign, asking the very necessary question has it gone too far. Which it always inevitably would - its gender one-sidedness,, assuming men are ne er harrassment victims and should be collectively addressed as villains, always went too far. See this on guilt by accusation.

One of the speakers on its side had said these things, on the abilities to be assumed from everyone showing no knowledge of autism at all. Relative to her, autism has just stayed in its own box and the details of it have never mainstreamed, still. She shows this is dangerous.

Maurice Frank