guilt by quack theory

SOMEONE POSTING ON THE STURGEON/SALMOND SCANDAL HEARINGS - I have a background in understanding and teaching non-verbal communication having studied it at length, and delivered workshops and training to a multitude of groups including trainee psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, police officers and social workers.

ME - As a civil liberty concern towards this idea of "teaching non-verbal communication" from involuntary mannerisms not intended to be communication at all. - Post-traumatic stress and autism are both things that can make innocent folks show the same nerves or blanked emotion, as hasty or high-handed police/psychiatrists/teachers like to interpret as showing guilt.
Does what you are teaching incorporate that fact and avoidance of that danger? It can only be moral if it does.

spectrumites out of Carstairs hospital !

On the scandal, that was a Sunday Post headline www.sundaypost.com/fp/one-little-step-followed-another-and-no-one-would-listen-to-us-and-no-one-would-speak-to-us-and-all-the-little-steps-took-us-into-hellrestriction-on-an-individual-should-be-the-minimum-restriction-ne/, of putting autistic young adults who had got into vaguely defined behavioural situations ,but no crime, into Carstairs. Then of their families' distress at not enough access to hold to account how they are getting treated in there, which is too hard.

Call for it stopped: http://chng.it/2KKy6dKDFk

we want you to bring someone to your hospital appointment

Consider one of the hospital treatments they can do just in a day visit, without needing any cutting operation or inpatienthood. How it's a weight off our minds, a welcomed good, that space agey technologies, with lasers or sound or microsurgeries, save us trouble.

So, the appointment letter comes. Ever so casually, just by the way, it says: bring someone to acc ompany you home, in case you need the stronger painkiller, because under its effects you can't get home alone.

How the bloody'ell is a spectrumite supposed to arrange that? Many folks who are not autistic would have trouble arranging that, too, so I make the point for them too. For autistics it this request is in obvious conflict with our condition.

You are not going to know the work hour patterns followed by every friend + acquaintance. This is not only for single folks: if you have a partner or offspring who are working or away at the needed time, you are in exactly the same position. A conversationally afflicted spectrumite can't work up the brazenness, first to tell everyone in turn about a physical health condition, which is against privacy too, then to request sacrifice of hours out of that person's own time, for them to sit around in a hospital while you get your treatment.

It's a sharp practice for the NHS to ask folks to achieve something so impractical. It's practical common sense, that if the stronger painkilker will impair for a day your ability to get home, they should keep you in hospital for one night. Or at minimum, take you home in an ambulance. Surely the obvious reason for not wanting to do that, is the pressure from CUTS.

So they try to wing it by asking you for the most they hope you might be able to sort tor yourself.

So with phoning as an autistic difficulty too, you phone them about this. They say you can still come in and we will see how we get on - let's welcome that they have to say that rather than abandon the treatment. But when you are there, they say that because you are alone they can't give the stronger painkiller, so they are more limited in what level they can do the treatment at. Which leaves more question over whether it will work effectively. Clearly the wrong way to organise it. Not equality for us.

Maurice Frank
18 Jan 2020

phased avoidance

SHARED ON FACEBOOK. VERY INSIGHTFUL:

YOUTH: I think I'm [insert neurotype, sexual orientation, or gender expression.]
SOCIETY: No you're not. You're too young to know that. You're just going through a phase.
ADULT: I think I'm [insert neurotype, sexual orientation, or gender expression.]
SOCIETY: No you're not. If you were, you would have known a long time ago.

trial by face.

Letter writers published in the Times yesterday and the Metro today are so important to protecting justice. Saying: a jury is supposed to decide guilt or innocence from evidence, to do it by looking at faces is like relying on witchcraft and is no guide at all to a court case's facts.

More than they may realise, there was a particular minority group put in danger by Kenneth Clarke's outburst about seeing body language in court, us. What can't aspies and all levels of autistics do? Communicate effectively and give normal social signals. That includes engaging visually, includes facial expression. Our instinct is remain stony faced and avoid eye contact because we don't have culturally learned ways to do anything else. We can neither see body language nor show it.

For courts to allow juries to look at body language in judging evidence of crime, as Kenneth Clarke describes, is to load the system unjustly against a section of society. No lawyer is responsible who still invites this to happen. He has spoken without any sign of minority awareness. Autistic people can not do body language, or eye contact. If we are judged on body language or face, we risk appearing guilty by reason of an inbuilt personal disadvantage.

Maurice Frank.

Applied parental ideals?

I found Tannice Pendegrass's talk on autism treatments, at Skeptics on the Fringe yesterday, very sketchy and full of gaps.

Yes she did some important good by itemising the serious harm that can be done by hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) treatment, chelation and names of 4 kids apparently killed by heart failiure or lack of substances resulting from treatments that come from speculative theories of autism's causes that there is no proven evidence for. But when she mentioned the MMR issue she said no more than, this should not be mentioned in an autism talk at all, and moved on - Then in her summing up at the end told folks to help by passing on the news that there is no MMR autism issue as if they had heard actual evidence on it! Several other times with proposed physical causes of autism she just declared they are wrong without going into any details of why.

This approach seems completely wrong for a talk on evidence based scepticism! It seemed to say that the folks she was talking about had an obligation to support their statements with evidence but she had not. But this was likely to go down well with a Skeptics on the Fringe audience and slip by totally unnoticed by them: because, as I and another Elas member have both noticed, this is exactly the same approach as they take towards the paranormal all the time.

Skeptics on the Fringe is a now annual season by the local humanists, held to broadcast their opposition to religion and the paranormal. It sounds quite odd for a talk on autism to feature in that at all. The reason was to show how broad a reach the principle of scepticism has, by featuring scepticism towards quack cures. It is certainly a good message that the evidence for all proposed treatments should be questioned with a presupposition of scepticism, the onus put on the treaters to prove their case. That they not be taken on trust as experts will be familiar to all survivors of arrogance from child psychiatry.

But this whole scene of hardline opponents of religion and the paranormal is a scene with a big ego investment in pushing its own predetermined view, a doctrine, hence exactly like religion would do. If you attend much of Skeptics on the Fringe with a genuinely 2-way open mind, or if you scrutinise the frantic biased rantings in Carl Sagan's later writings, including his shocking wriggle "There are no authorities, only experts," or if you consider whether Richard Dawkins's call for everyone who has seen a ghost to be "gently pointed towards the nearest psychiatrist" is compatible with civil liberty over religion: you can easily notice their sceptical approach is one-sided. They do not apply it even handedly nor believe they need to. Folks who hold the beliefs they oppose, they hold responsible to jump through every possible hoop of evidence and proof, while too often any voice on the disbelieving side they generously and keenly accept on trust as expert, then actually cite their expert opinion as an argument! No surprise then, when the same one-sided accepting as expert with little scrutiny what a voice in sympathy with them says, happens in an entirely secular topic of medicine too. It happened at Pendegrass's talk.

She is a defender of Applied Behaviour Analysis, and she sanitised it by saying it is used with small kids and with more severe deficits of functioning - implying it is only used with them, and only used to find ways out of actual inabilities to function. She did not all discuss it getting used to change behaviours and social choices, to say stop doing this do that instead, in kids who certainly can function.

I got a question in at the end, on the objections I have heard raised from experience, to ABA, for being used for social control like this with older and more functionally able youth, even adults. I have come across such very credible objections, that match all we know of child psychiatry's own behaviour, in the online community. I asked Pendegrass what safeguards there are or there should be, to prevent ABA being used to force a patient into an ideal normal personality decided for them, to take away their own lifestyle choices.

I did not get a straight answer, not any answer about safeguards at all. All the answer given was, it's not about taking away folks' character, oh I have never come across it being used to make all folk's choices for them, and that in the Analysis part of it there is a 2 way discussion of the results a behaviour has, to work out whether they are good or bad. But all that is just defensive talk keeping it sounding right, relying on an appeal for trust, it is not actual safeguards. She said something else that quite gave the game away and points against giving ABA that trust: she said it is about "helping them not to end up ostracising themselves."

All ostracising is a hate crime and instrument of group tyranny over personal lifestyle choices, it is there to be resisted and defied. The entire idea of "ostracising yourself" is about blaming the victim. It is the worst of all ways of saying, conform and be normal or else suffer oppression in society. It is a way of saying the oppression is the victim's fault because they have not chosen to avert it by bowing to the crushing communism of peer groups and giving up all their own distinctive personality. Everyone who belongs to one of the many minorities with histories of unpopularity and persecution will spot a mile off that doctors can tell you, stop being what you are and become what the tabloid mob tell you or else you are "ostracising yourself". The entire idea "ostracising yourself" is a blank cheque invitation for that crushing level of control, for ordering you to make choices that don't work for you, e.g. to obey dress norms that are physically wrong for your body's sensitivities, with the added misery of seeing anyone else succeed in not obeying them.

I put this point of unpopular minorities and the wrongness of forced norms straight back to her, and all she did then was revert to taking about severely affected small kids who were not the point of my question: she said surely it can't be wrong to help a kid who just suits staring at a light all day to function more effectively than that. This was dodging the question. But at this point another of the audience threw in a point on her side, said all parents and folks working with kids are trying to bring them up in a certain way, which means directing their characters, and Pendegrass grabbed this gratefully, said "That's a really good point".

Then, as too often happens under the time pressure of such events, that was the end of the time slot for this question. No chance to come back and challenge the oppression these 2 folks were both defending, and for that to go unchellenged is particularly striking in the setting of Skeptics on the Fringe. ABA was blatantly not given the same level of questioning as as the more physically medical quack cures were. Oddly that is even though Pendegrass admitted ABA is often offered at rip-off prices of several thousand pounds, and when one of her pieces of moral shock info against the quack cures had been the costs they are sold at.

On bringing up kids in character directed ways: the whole point of sceptics and humanists is they are supposed to expose that as the evil oppression and life destruction it is, because often the controlling ideals of parents or teachers come from religion and are about making the kid follow that religion. We have in Elas a member done a lot of life damage to in exactly that way by a too fervently Christian parent. Are the sceptics and humanists going to defend that type of parenting? It would startle all their supporters if they did, it would contradict their fight against religion in schools, a fight that liberally religious folks like me agree with totally. But otherwise, they should have challenged that audience speaker who favoured controlling agendas towards kids, and they have a duty of scepticism towards ABA until they obtain a satisfaction on that point that was was not obtained at that talk yesterday.

Maurice Frank

physical document stolen, no holiday, and listening to us could have prevented it

In today's Metro I was overjoyed to find that someone else, not me, had written in supporting the view favoured by me and the education reformer John Holt, that there should be no age limit on the vote at all. That everyone can start voting when they personally feel ready. You see, whenever you are oppressed, there is always someone somewhere who sensibly realises it.

But never in this world does pleasure last, before pain takes it all away again. The same Metro also told of a couple who got burgled during their wedding, and the man's passport was stolen. Despite the personalised nature of passports the burglars obviously reckoned they could do some fraudulent changing of it, and nicked it, with the result that the couple can't go on their honeymoon to Iceland.

Think about that. They are no longer allowed to do something they have presumably already booked and paid to do, because by no fault of their own a physical object has been stolen from them. For being victims of crime, victims of theft, they personally cease to be allowed to do a thing.

Then remember what I have said here several times before, about how the fine coordination and dyspraxia and attention issues in autistic spectrum conditions increases the losability of small objects like tickets, so makes it disability discrimination for your status as you move around ever to depend on your possession of any small physical object like a ticket. Like a passport too. It is a form of ticket, and it is barbarously primitive to have its losability during your holiday to be able to get you into a frightening practical crisis. Very visibly it is a form of apartheid pass book too.

There is a disability equality duty to listen to all the impacts made by any disability. If there had been no blatant evading of the responsibility to listen to the autism scene concerning this, then the issue of losable documents would already have been forced, including at a brilliantly democratising international level because passports exist. If this had been done uncorruptly, following the medical facts as far as they go, then passports would no longer exist and this couple's experience could not have happened.

Maurice Frank

Don't let the council make it up as it goes along

From Local Government Finance Act 1992 section 81, which creates the power of council tax appeals in the Act's Scottish section:

(1) A person may appeal to a valuation appeal committee if he is aggrieved by -
(a) any decision of a local authority that a dwelling is a chargeable dwelling, or that he is liable to pay a council tax in respect of such a dwelling.
(b) any calculation made by a local authority of an amount which he is liable to pay to the authority in respect of council tax ....

From www.scotland.gov.uk/library3/localgov/ctha-00.asp "What are the grounds for appeal?"

• If you disagree with the levying authority's decision that your dwelling is chargeable,
• if you disagree with the levying authority's decision that you are liable to pay the council tax in respect of a particular dwelling, or,
• if you disagree with the calculation of your bill

You can check out the full act yourself. It states simply and clearly that if you want to appeal any disagreement you have with the calculation, any error that you personally perceive in it, you are absolutely entitled to do that. That power of appeal is written literally in the law. As aspies know, what is literally said is what is said. In the written law and the public info on it there is absolutely nothing, not a word, that says the council ever has any power to say that it refuses to recgonise your appeal's existence or to carry it out as a case, on grounds of its view of your appeal's merits. It has no power whatever to say, we don't think this is a "relevant" subject for an appeal so by our say-so you are not getting an appeal held.

It follows that it has no power or entitlement further to threaten to take you to court unless you acquiesce to this. You would then be under threat of legal penalties precisely for following exactly what the law says!! It would not be possible to rely on any law as literally meant, or to know that following it means less trouble than not following it. A system of law would not be operating, arbitrary terror would be operating instead, if a council was ever upheld in behaving this way. Over council tax appeals or over anything else ever.

The duty that public bodies have to communicate fully and effectively with us, especially with us because we come under disability equality, rules out the council inventing rules of its own that are not there in the rules issued to the public, of a nature as to let it conveniently suppress appeal cases lodged against its own actions - and for it to claim to enforce what it has invented while ignoring the actual position.

More info from within the scene:
Autism, as a recognised disability, implies a number of rights in court settings. Probably the relevant one to follow up here is to have an ‘appropriate adult’ to provide support. The courts will generally take a helpful and sympathetic view of how to help people who are vulnerable or have disabilities, so long as they are primed beforehand to understand the situation. Often what happens with autism is that there is insufficient prior knowledge provided regarding what the problems are, and the person may present superficially as not having any particular disability.

Statutory rights are conferred by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, of which the UK Government is a signatory. These include a number of general principles and obligations in relation to equality and non-discrimination (Articles 3-5), and the requirement for States to take appropriate measures to provide access by persons with disabilities to the support they may require in exercising their legal capacity (Article 12), and to ensure effective access to justice for persons with disabilities on an equal basis with others (Article 13).

The principle is that to provide an ‘equal basis’ a person with a disability requires such measures as will provide a level playing field with people who do not have a disability.

Written straight after a meeting with the council, that had to be lobbied for before it could be held!! about a dispute of this nature.

Maurice Frank

now uniforms take life, preventably

Many papers today carry a child death story that challenges anyone willing to persist in believing there is any good at all in the physical world. In the Australian floods, a boy aged 13 was swept away and killed, along with his mum, when the floodwaters swamped their car, the reason why they narrowly missed rescue by a truck driver was because this boy made said rescuer save his younger brother first !

Now, there is more to this horror than accident. Here is the twist to make you angry, that adds to this story an element of human evil which our scene could have prevented: quoting from the Metro's story, "Ms Rice and her sons were returning from a trip to buy school uniforms when they were caught up in what police called an "inland instant tsunami."""

This is a child's life actually ended, entirely by reason of the prison badge of children's enslavement, and the obligation on families to actually buy with their own money the chains of their own oppression. To make this purchase mattered enough to go driving in the middle of a flood crisis for specifically this purpose, to buy a degrading slave costume whose communist purpose as openly declared by the nutty professor - see last post - is to airbrush away children's personal identity and give physical form to a state of possessed subjection.

For a century we have been told school uniforms do all these wonderful things. Anyone who defends them now is seen to defend costing lives and intentionally to be willing to cost more lives, and this is for a purpose of destroying liberty.

This includes any big autism organisation that continues not to speak out against them, and against all uniforms ever, as they owe to adult workers too. For years the big organisations have known this need exists. For years they have kept themselves on hobnobbing terms with employers and teachers. This boy most likely was not one of us, and there is no need for him to have been. Remember, acting on aspies' biological needs will get rid of uniforms, not just for aspies, but for everyone. If the big autism organisations had done this, then thanks to autism knowledge, uniforms could have been eradicated all over the democratic world years before now, for everyone. Then, by the reported facts, this family's fatal car journey would not have happened.

This be on the head of all limits to publishing of facts, all control and filtering of issues, that has existed in the autism scene. In the media too.

Meanwhile, yesterday, here, parliament threw out Hugh O'Donnell's bill for an autism strategy, at first stage, by 109 votes to 5. I watched them in the public gallery, all jumping on the momentum to say oh it's not proven what difference this would make oh we need less obligations for service users to run around trying to enforce and we need more time muddling along as we are. The way they seized on the committee report to criticise the bill for being too noncommittal! is an irony howling against the way all law is practised at present. All of them every day are in the political class's game of always being noncommittal, and now they have damned a bill for the same thing.

It is an indictment of the NAS for its insistence on legalese drafting of the bill. In the consultations last year, we put in for using ordinary language, and through it, for having some committality about what the bill would definitely make happen. The NAS have dominated this entire campaign, and their aversion to committal obligations to any issues that come from us to them, has delivered this rubbish outcome for them and us alike.

Maurice Frank

horrific professing

A psychology professor, Thomas MacKay, got a story run in the Sunday Herald saying school uniform prevents teenage violence. Front page of today's Metro is about a terrible schoolboy gang murder in London, which on the evidence the story reported, was committed while wearing school uniform. There is the professor's stark answer.

So far from schools meriting respect as in his theory, such murders show also that herding children together like cattle into a jungle-like mass in day prisons called schools is desperately unsafe and destructive of civil order, let alone of personal wellbeing and belonging. It always was, this has always been apparent from all the history of bullying. I have a strong need to make the same case from the history of teachers misusing their power and having greedy ambitions that make the child suffer. But bullying and violence is the present issue this great big professor has argued on.

This professor is popular with politicians, he was praised in a book by Gordon Brown and he has been advising the SNP government on educational psychology. He even used to be head of the British Psychological Society. How rational is that?, 2 items the Herald story did not mention, are:
* that the professor is an Evangelical, which itself involves a psychology for proclaiming truth unsubstantiated out of thin air, and for needing to bend all psychology to match with the social attitudes in a few arbitrary ancient scrolls that oppress women and defend slavery,
* and that he has already worked in autism a lot.

Now, if he knows autism, how can he possibly not know about what are termed "sensory issues"? Our sensitivities to rubbing fabric and texture and heat, which make our bodies often biologically incompatible with narrow Victorian norms of dress and prove our physically real need for total freedom of dress. Autism proves all dress codes and uniforms a serious bodily harmful human rights violation. A sensory irritation undermines our ability to concentrate and to function well. Hence, any discomforting clothes are a serious medical assault on our bodies. School uniform trousers did violence to my body, and gender discriminatory too when girls get a choice over their leg cover and boys don't.

My physically real need of health and wellbeing, to wear shorts perpetually, has always been upheld by the local supported employment service, to employers and to the benefits/training system. An adult precedent of autism need can never be rejected by anyone or else they would commit a disability discrimination. But if this holds for adults, it holds for children too. It is national scale biological harming of children, that this many years into autism awareness, school uniform still exists.

Where are the big autism organisations' efforts to save spectrumite children and indeed all children, and adults in the type of jobs concerned, from the primitive body slavery of uniforms? and to stop the march of oppressive ideas like this professor's going without even media opposition ?

No oppositional letter was printed in the Sunday Herald, which thus appears to be in favour of pushing the professor's oppressive communist-style openly declared keenness to airbrush out individual identity. He openly wants the uniform to symbolise subjection to authority, in effect he openly admits it is a prison uniform. It will express values of violence to their own medical wellbeing, this he intends to make them feel respectful and positive towards adults, and this the Sunday Herald leaves unchallenged.

Not getting letters printed in national newspapers is quite normal or course, but the Sunday Herald can be a decent letter printer if you write a view that is already part of the predictable established package of progressive views. Thus I have had letters printed on proportional voting and on asylum injustice. But not on the moral desirability of exterminating tigers to protect human life, and not on this. The Sunday Herald shows an interest, not in unlimited critical thought, but only in selling already prexisting established safe attitudes on its side of politics.

Meanwhile, the professor himself can't be reached. So says Strathclyde university, for he has moved on from his visitorship there. So he is nicely shielded from ever getting notified of any medical objections to his oppressive ideas.

Maurice Frank

Effort to contribute our issues to another good cause

Is the society around us seriously registering aspie issues? and the beneficial impact they make upon many other fairness issues too? Or are they just saying what the socially minded say too often: Oh dear, will we be understood if we say anything new, let's just keep saying what we find familiar? When a local project starts up for a good cause, does it do its own thing, oblivious to us?

On May 9 the No Borders campaign held a dayschool here, as part of a tour, on the oppression of asylum seekers. Part of its purpose was to assemble such folks as might want to take part in starting a local project for practical solidarity with asylum seekers, similar to one already functioning in Newcastle. There was a predictable way that the prevalence of local faces who are already regular in the left wing or anarchist scenes reduced the likelihood that anyone not of those scenes could be involved and feel comfortable or included. The rigidity of attitude those folks have about most topics, really thwarts the wider growth of projects they would like to see wider growth of.

Some of what they are about was sensible practical sharing of material goods with asylum seekers who can't obtain them, either who are paid in food vouchers of tightly limited usability instead of cash, or who have had all income cut off completely at the same time as not being allowed to get jobs. Solidarity in the face of the unviability of life the asylum system is intentionally designed to cause. Naturally also they are interested in raising public support for our guests, for making the true situation wider known about how folks already come out of desperately dangerous situations are getting treated, and if need arises, for having the means to create campaigns of the community's eagerness to keep someone, around blatantly corrupt refusals of asylum or attempts to deport. There has in fact already been a past campaign in Edinburgh preventing a spiteful deportation of a care worker whose life was totally established here and formed part of the care of learning disabled folks too. These campaigns are brilliant in their impact aginst racism, because they pinpoint how immigration barriers trample over the practical common sense of daily life.

Here is the problem. Folks doing these campaigns, if they seriously and genuinely care and want sheer reasoning decency to win against racsim, then they must want every possible contribution to victory for asylum seekers to be seized on and made maximum use of. This is an automatic duty. In the dayschool, in the session devoted to gathering ideas, I contributed an idea arising from autism. Think about this one:

Disability discrimination is now an established principle, itself owed to a history of struggle too. Among asylum seekers, just as among any other group, there are bound to be some aspies, some dyspraxics, and some attention deficits. To treat them in any way they will have a disadvantage with because of their conditions, is disability discrimination hence must be illegal. This is arguable by 2 separate routes, nationally on grounds of disability discrimination law, and internationally on human rights grounds applying to medically real minorities. But is there a screening system that is diagnosing all the autistic spectrumites among asylum seekers, and doing it straightaway without a wait, and being generous about diagnosing in uncertain cases? Of course not. As there is not even such a system for the ordinary settled population, even less possible is it for asylum seekers. This proves - the system handles asylum seekers completely blind to which ones are on our spectrum. Hence, any way that all asylum seekers are treated, that would be disadvantageous to the spectrumite ones, is a disability discrimination and is invalid to continue. Where there is an impairment of concentration or attention, there is a greater chance, innocently and without blame, of losing physical objects, especially small or flimsy ones. Like - identity papers and cards. It is visibly disability discrimination to make any autistic spectrumite verify their status by carrying documents. Because of not knowing which asylum seekers are spectrumites, disability discrimination is committed by making any asylum seekers at all depend on carrying documents, in any way at all !

This gets rid of the identity cards being introduced for asylum seekers, and it wipes out the validity of ever penalising them for lacking papers or passports on their arrival here.

So we wait to hear that No Borders or any other asylum solidarity project makes some use of an item of this whopping magnitude. How long will the wait be? At the dayschool, my point was just put in the list, with a murmur of uncertainty of how much gain it would be possible to make from it in practice. One more voice, speaking from lack of knowledge of disabilities, voiced the sense of unsure ground hence of need to pass this item on to any folks with more secure disabled knowledge who might pop up in the local project in future. This is all that happened. Indeed from experience this is about all I expected would happen. The item was not focussed on again in the ending. It's obvious what this means: no commitment that the item will be used at all. The project will start with local radicals just saying the familiar things they are already used to saying, that don't force any big shift in the system's nature.

We have never yet had an asylum seeker in Elas. In theory we could, if there was an aspie one living in Edinburgh. Then we would be involved at the real personal level of experiencing the oppression, the global apartheid, splitting friends and vandalising lives. We will all as a community, not only the asylum seeker, have been medically wronged and violated by any functioning local asylum solidarity project, if it claims to have even in theory a choice not to make use of the item I raised. Same goes for all the national projects. If the local project does get going, then any asylum seekers reading this will know whether the project honestly cares a damn and wants to win your cause, by whether it takes up my disability discrimination argument and cites it publicly against the identity rules in the asylum system. It is a simple clear argument.

How many other good causes are there, where the opportunity for autism to force positive advances in civil liberties gets received only with uncertainty and doing nothing, just because it is unfamiliar? This makes all the difference to whether aspies are marginalised, or campaigners for other causes are seen to care at all about the biological needs they raise. The issue about losable documents does not only affect asylum seekers, they are only the most extremely and urgently affected group. For all the settled population too, the issue has the potential to stop identity cards and to force the democratic world to abolish passports and tickets on public transport. Which brings a whole lot more issue campaigns under the same clear test:

EITHER to commit medical betrayal cheating the entire ordinary population out of a great gain, OR to have no psychological barriers ever to immediate takeup of new information heard for the first time.

Maurice Frank