muck that is child abuse to claim to even have any choice to think.

Utterly disgusting idea presented as one of those fluffy-positive thoughts, shared on the fb page of "Autism To Maxx" -

" Don't regret anything. Good times become good memories. Bad times become good lessons."

My reply:

" Rape is not a lesson and it would be misogyny to conceive for a second that it is. Murder of a loved one is not a lesson and it would be fascism to conceive for a second that it is. Being in either side of the Israel-Gaza war or in Ukraine is not a lesson and it would be utterly evil to conceive for a second that it is. Having your child die is not a lesson and it forfeits membership of an intelligent species to conceive for a second that it is. Therefore likewise the monster, in an autism forum 20 years ago, who dared for one second to suggest treating as a learning experience a life defining child abuse that I survived and did not choose or consent to and that did not happen to several less nice people who got the thing the abuse took from me ".

Referring to the evil that my speaking out on has been well known in the autistic scene and helped others, particularly its permanent record go posterity in the book Bittersweet on the Autism Spectrum. The destruction of my child authorship by homework.

IT WAS REMOVED WITHIN HOURS. Original post morning. Because of its disappearance, posted the same evening this reply to Cindy Vien:

" which is exactly why, this morning I posted a response I can no longer see: that listed several types of unconsented serious life wrongs that it would be utterly evil to conceive of telling the victim to treat as a lesson. Concluding with:

Therefore likewise the monster, in an autism forum 20 years ago, who dared for one second to suggest treating as a learning experience a life defining child abuse that I survived and did not choose or consent to, and that did not happen to several less nice ppl who got the thing the abuse took from me. "

Maurice Frank<)b>
27 Jun 2024

NAS slaps aspie grassroots in the face again

The multiple signed letter to the NAS's trustees, just last year, on ordinary aspies' dissatisfaction with NAS's lack of accountability and responsiveness towards us, us on whose behalf NAS supposedly exists, might never have happened. NAS's Scottish director Jenny Paterson has shown, openly in her emailed reply to an enquiry from ELAS, that the big charity culture continues as determined as ever to seek to get away with arrogance.

This is a one-off answer, which an ELAS enquiry on their general standard of responding to contacts extracted. It followed 7 months of total silence from her towards the personal contact previously made. Hence it does not follow a spurt of correspondence. Yet she is rude enough to write a bureaucrats’ closure, a proclamation of final answer:
"this is my final position on our campaigning plans and priorities, and I am unable to offer any further assistance regarding child authorship."

Even nasty bureaucrats usually only do that after a spurt of correspondence when they have run out of evasions. She does it in her one-off late answer to something she had simply sat silent on for 7 months. See how aggressive that is? Hostile to an issue of maltreated aspie kids, an agenda the whole time against them and doing anything for them. Also she does this deviously so as never to actually answer what she was asked! For she was asked simply to mention that wronged child authors exist, in every literature that mentions or advertises successful child authors. That is not campaigning that needs any resources or time priorities allocated to it. She answers only to the practicality of big extra campaigning then rudely shuts down all contact with her on child authors at all, KNOWINGLY LEAVING NEVER ANSWERED THE SIMPLE NO-EFFORT ACTION THEY CAN TAKE!

Even her timing is sneaky: she sent this email on Sep 20, just 2 days AFTER the Autism Europe conference here in Edinburgh, which had NAS involvement, had ended. Avoiding this being out as an issue at conference time.

All autism workers and projects: you can’t ethically afford any connection with NAS, with an organisation that behaves like this.

You pass on the word

See, I want wronged child authors publicised, circulated more into public knowledge as an issue. Exposed as an issue. The world is still too oblivious, and that is a further abuse of every victim.

There is a site on youth mental health, with health links on it, that I have succeeded in getting to remove their link to Luke Jackson's notorious F+G. I had put to them the damage and emotional wrong done to abuse survivors if any book attributed to a child author is publicised without publicising that wronged child authors exist.

I say attributed because the Times of 16 Aug 2002, among other profiles, revealed that it was not an unaided child author work at all, as it was structured into a book by his mother and would not exist without that.

Getting the link wiped is better than not doing anything, it's a success to count as necessary - but it's not what I actually wanted. What I wanted was to get wronged child authorship mentioned on their site, publicised to a further audience. They had an obvious logical duty to do that after they had had the Jackson book link on their site for some finite period. They could have kept the link so long as they told about wronged child authors.

Instead: "I’m sorry for any anguish this has caused by including this link on our website. At the time of producing the content for this page we were linking to information and resources we thought would be useful for our audiences. Following your concerns this information has now been removed so as not to cause any further distress."

Kindly put, but - this is more of that terrible human problem of avoiding responsibility for facts, avoiding taking positions. They have chosen avoidance of the whole thing, instead of the act of compassionate help to hurt wronged oppressed kids, the action of actually passing on the word about wronged child authors.

You pass on the word.

Maurice Frank

a famous aspie does not mean all is right for us.

Let's see. You've come for a look at what aspies are all about because you heard the news about Susan Boyle? Splendid: here's what the media should be telling you. Are they?

• Our heightened physical sensitivities, including to fabric and heat, are biologically incompatible with dress codes and make them an assault on our physical wellbeing. Our existence abolishes all work dress codes and school uniforms. This has been known for years and the big charities have not been choosing to push it.
• Because some aspies find it easier to focus on the written word than the spoken, there is a correlation between aspies and child authors. There is a succession of books by aspie child authors, and there is a child cruelty offence done in long history of big charities' total avoidance and failiure to publicise that there are WRONGED child authors, like me, whose chance to write was destroyed by harmful school pressures and homework.
• With the big charities' big failings to speak for us where needed, you can see how seriously we have needed the voice developed for us, to contribute into professional awareness and policymaking, by the AUTISM NETWORK SCOTLAND, developed out of Strathclyde University and now a part of the national strategy. It's invaluable, and its creation is the great success of the scene in Scotland. So IT NEEDS COPYING IN EVERY COUNTRY. If you are outside Scotland do you think your aspies deserve not to have any ANS?
• The NAS is to be complimented on attending properly to striking off its contact list a bent autism legal service that advised me to surrender in a dispute with a council tax malpractice where I was in the right by statute law and won. There needs to be a media consumer exposee of bent services that will prey on their clients instead of stand up to councils - you want to know more, you need it publicised.
• Likewise you want to know that aspies' local groups can't be corrupted and seized control of by malpractisers bent on hushing up emotional abuses, as happened to a group near us, defunct since stood up to by an earlier post on this blog describing its malpractises: 28 Feb 2011, Invitation to an autocratically restricted group's members to escape it and join us.
• It's only the same common sense that all the details should be published of the ways we have been harmed by schools and by child psychiatry. Aspie kids not safe until these things stopped, and how do you stop them unless you have heard widely what they are? In a safely non-deletable way on paper: for it's no good putting them in an Amazon e-book where the site's lawyers reserve a power to turn round and say, no no no, delete to be on the safe side. So the media are turning their backs on child safety unless they read this and chase after these things' publishing.
• Where competitive jobsearch utterly has never worked for us, the approach that works is to have aspie employment services who talk through both our strengths and our limitations with an employer to work out a working niche for us. But more ethical accountability upon these services is needed, to prevent the malpractice of them turning round and claiming that a third party problem that arises after you are in a job is not in their remit to deal with. By obvious definition, a remit to support employment automatically includes any problem that affects the work's doability or the work environment's justice in any way. This an item I am holding Edinburgh's new local Autism Plan responsible to put right locally.

Maurice Frank

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