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

Safety of your own property

Even the Autism Services Network, whose meetings' accessibility for us in the east is affected by Citylink's practices, have not received a word of answer, been completely ignored by Citylink. Even a project working with government funding.

Folks need to be warned against travelling anywhere by Citylink, on a free bus pass, outside the main population belt, off the frequently bus served roads. It is operating an arrogant policy of seizing bus passes from passengers without their consent, either if they don't work on the scanners or if the photo is eroded. Some weeks ago I saw it happen to an old couple not even at the point of boarding, when they might have a chance to grab the pass back out of any thief's hands, but in mid journey at the hands of an inspector. They were on their outward journey of a holiday and concerned about the effect on their return journey, and the coach was in remote country at the time, where if thrown off it for not cooperating they would have no other means of travel.

Citylink when complained to called this a "policy" and made not a word of admission of folks' right to hold on to their personal proerty. They even denied it would be violence for a driver to steal a pass and refuse to give it back.

Folks known to Elas through Number 6 have had it done to them and not had their new pass arrive in time before the temporary paper pass they were given expired, which is only a week. With the onus on you to apply for as new pass, you could very easily not have time to do it in time if you are on the outward journey of a holiday.

THIS IS A DANGER TO PERSONAL PROPERTY. That it can be stopped is an absolute test of the autism strategy's efficacy. Maurice Frank

Have you passed through the chamber of paradox at the airport

Aspie or not, wouldn't you be confused if you were directed into a room and a recorded voice started howling "You have entered a resrticted area. Exit immediately." Wouldn't you think you were in the wrong place?

All folks with friends or good contacts abroad, and we have some helfpul ones among aspies now, know how horrible the system of entering Britain has been made by all the tabloid racism. Have you seen the "UK border" section at the airport, with all its prominent notices openly using the word "tougher"? Openly unfriendly to all the folks arriving. When we travel, even for a diplomatic purpose like the twin town visit to Norway I have just taken part in, we have to walk through this nonsense and offensive gateway of global apartheid, and succeed in carrying safely a losable document, which is in fact our apartheid passbook, past a lot of legal warnings to foreign visitors about prosecution if they lose it and are thought to have destroyed it. After not seeing anything like that in the entries to neighbouring countries.

How functionally odd it is that the baggage reclaim always comes after the passport barrier, so that anyone who suffers the apartheid evil of getting blocked by the barrier appears to be exposed also to the danger that anyone could walk off with their luggage? Then, how often is the experience I had yesterday, arriving back on my flight from Norway, experienced? After passing through that morally chilling passport barrier whose existence prevents any thinking person enjoying foreign travel, we passed baggage reclaim. This was in its own room, not in the open airport space. Then the directions led through customs, but no staffed operation of the green channel was taking place. Then passed that unstaffed point there appeared to be closed room not leading anywhere, except for a closed door marked as automatic.

It all looked very confusing, and I was at first unsure whether to retrace my steps, but there was no other way to go. Anyway I only ventured through said automatic door when some other passengers did too and I could go with their flow. This door just led into a smallish and seemingly pointless empty room, which turned a right angle then had a second automatic door out of it again. As soon as I entered that room, this voice blasted out "You have entered a restricted area. Exit immediately."

Surely anyone would think they had walked into the wrong place? I whirled round on the first thought that it must mean I should exit the same way as I had entered. But from this side the first door now said "No entry!" complete with road sign too. While the second door was there to exit through, and was the only apparent exit. There had been nowhere else that our directions off the plane and through the passport evil had led to, than into this kafkaesque chamber that seemed to tell us we should not be there! Lo and be staggered, the second door opened into the main airport space, duly completing our arrival. In front of us were the folks waiting to meet folks. When I looked back, above the door out of the chamber of paradox was the sign "international arrivals". This experience that makes no rational sense really was part of the entry to Britain provided to the passengers of that flight from Norway.

Some airport signing is bilingual, and out of the airport the road signs reminding you we drive on the left are in 5 languages. But the voice in the kafkaesque chamber was only in English. A visitor without a good knowledge of English would not know what was going on, when the signs directed them through a chamber that treated them like a criminal for following the signs, they could be caused a lot of fear and panic? Was this a freak error of them not switching off the voice or does this happen frequently? Is our system now so wilfully nasty to the outside world that it has set up this chamber of paradox to test visitors' psychology with? Then what do the resident population think of coming home through such a hurdle? Consider how an autistic person unable to sort out the mixed messages, suddenly finding themself in this chamber that made no sense, could be thrown into panic? and meltdown and cessation to cope?

A really odd story from the yukky global apartheid of our times.

Maurice Frank

Rare piece of insurance common sense

Travel Guard, answering a travel insurance enquiry for a company their claims line serves, said something worth hearing concerning a topic that no travel insurance policy is satisfactory on: lost or stolen travel documents including passports. To my enquiry as to what happens if you can't get a written police report, they say you can now give them a note explaining the circumstances that you could not get one.

The rule they always have in travel insurance, that you must obtain a written report to base your claim on, conflicts with the whole nature of travel risk. How can they possibly know that the police or other officials will be willing to provide the written report? What if they won't, and in a foreign country, how are you supposed to make them? Even in a European democracy, let alone in totally corrupt countries?

To a common sense enquiry as a buyer, for once I have got a better answer than I expected to get. It is some progress on the issue that concerns me so intensely, of losable travel documents and your safety when having to use them: particularly for spectrumites because of dexterity issues dyspraxia and attention deficit that make small objects easier to lose. Of course, given the complex trickiness of insurance and all the unpredictable details of a loss situation that you can not know what they will be until it happens, the value of this consumer victory remains small compared to the safety need that folks' safety when travelling should not depend on carried physical documents at all, and the safety victory if this 200 year old practice that big business interests have habituated our culture to accept was actually stopped.

Maurice Frank

Covering ground

It matters to be an independent group that runs itself, not tied to any council funding nor run by the big charities. It matters because to be a genuine voice in what you say. But there is a very clear top reason why it matters, which Elas is living now. It means we are free to have no territorial boundary.

Elas has been the core of making a string of successful meet-ups happen all round the Central Belt, as recently at Perth and Paisley. In them we have put face to face reality to personal links made beyond our own region, in 2 ways.

• So that aspies within reach of us have joined us, who have no similarly independent group running in their localities: our filling of that void has been right and made a needed practical difference in several cases.
• Or, so that folks in those places where a new venture can start up cautiously, that is independent like us, can use us as a reference point and a friendly link to meet up with and share with. Supporting the free aspie scene to take root in new ground.

We can do this because nobody's office is in a controlling place to tell us to only serve folks inside a defined boundary line. Number 6 and its Glasgow counterpart the Arc have not been allowed to succeed in the same way, as what would be a good part of their service. By their state funding to serve particular councils or health regions, they have been tied into functioning only inside territorial boundaries. Of NHS Lothian's region, or of the terribly arbitrary Glasgow city boundary that is smaller than the physically real city and is often just flung between 2 houses in long streets of unbroken habitation, causing division and exclusion and pain as we have heard when visiting the West. The autism strategy is now to extend Number 6 type services to everywhere, but presumably they will still each be little islands whose users are separated from each other by boundary lines. It still won't be a cross-regional scene for folks in places of well developed service to help out folks in places of rudimentary service. But aspies organised independently to meet up can be that.

Now we hear of a new group in Stirling with the council paying Scottish Autism to run it. This arrangement again ties it to only serve the territorial boundary of Stirling, We have seen this result in exclusion from that local scene, in time of need, be experienced when resident in an adjoining council area, clearly inside the radius of having Stirling as a focal place. Incredibly ironic of SA to accept deals like this to run groups, when its own head office is in Alloa, one of the places this group is barred from serving.

In common sense care for the participants, SA should want this arrangement to be as temporary as possible. The folks in Stirling need their group to evolve to the model of running independently same as us, and as Argh in the Highlands. So that it can include folks' friends in Alloa and all the places around there regardless of what council they are in, and so it can make the same non-local links as us, maybe including with us, and be part of the growth of a speaking out scene that covers everywhere. Local groups don't need funding to exist, members just need to agree a place to meet up that does not involve expensive room booking and they are all comfortable with. Local groups by contact and meet-ups, and by folks crossing region to belong to whichever group they feel best in, helping each other to make the scene cover everywhere, is the vision. We are already starting to make this happen. It also protects our freedom everywhere to speak on problems with services and to have blogs like this, when what we want to say goes well beyond what the big charities want to say.

Remember another way these links massively importantly protect our free voice, and indeed our personal links and friendships. By our links with each other in different places we will all safeguard each other against getting trapped by any authoritarian takeover in any group, like the cautionary horror story of what happened to a group in a region adjoining us, that was run by a bigger society whose committee suddenly passed Orwellian cult-like rules misusing data protection to ban members from speaking freely to each other, before they had even had the chance to consent to this being put in place, so that it interfered in communication between friends and cut folks off from each other. A sinister story I told here a year ago, it is time to remind ourselves of it. In fact the group concerned has remained suspended from meeting ever since then, supposedly temporarily, which is now a farce. It is a clearly failed and destructive outcome to how to run a group. Compare that with the success of the total opposite model, the free model, ours.

The folks who were in that group, now unjustly adrift without an aspie scene, or who have been in any type of controlled group, have a need to find the scene all over again, but our free scene of independent groups that all support each other's members in keeping it the free scene.

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

Getting your classic Yahoo mail back

Anyone who has the "upgrade" version of Yahoo email and has found it total rubbish, here is a way to change it back. The upgrade version is full of difficulties the old did not have, you can't backspace or else you just have to put your password back in, and you can't delete drafts without getting a crazy message "one of the drafts you are trying to delete is open. Please close it " - and what the hell do open and closed mean? There is no explanation of that from Yahoo.

Go here: help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/ymail/context/migrationv2.html

When the page opens---scroll down about midway until you see this---"What if I don't want to upgrade to the newest version of Yahoo! Mail"?----If you do not want to upgrade, please "click here" to use Yahoo! Mail Classic.
("click here" is a blue link). Return to Classic is immediate and permanent.

This came from here answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AgLeOawNBx_FJd7AqN2xgXcD.Bd.;_ylv=3?qid=20120113110800AAOha2E fantastic how many folks will be grateful for this answer. As written there, the New "Improved'' (sic) Mail is very buggy, unstable & a total pain in the butt. There are literally thousands & thousands of users complaining they can't use their mail like they used to.