The item the customer chooses is the item the customer chooses

I no longer go to Holland + Barrett. Not that I went there much, give how dry in the mouth most of their stuff is. I have returned my points card to them, repudiated and cut in half, with a strongly worded note and email.

It's not because there was anything wrong with a bought item - in my view. It's actually the offensiveness of the opposite situation - the till cashier having the arrogance to insist on changing an item that I thought was okay and did not want changed, and when I was in a hurry. It was nothing more than a single vegetarian scotch egg! For which, their shop in Dunfermline Kingsgate mall, on the cashier's opinion not mine that it was "all broken", ignored that I was in a hurry and persisted in expecting me to wait tor them to change it, until instead I stormed out not buying anything. As it was labelled reduced and the replacement would not have been, they were also attempting a rip-off by this.

As I have told H+B: For customers in some vulnerable social groups, who I have experience of working with - that's not only autism - changing their chosen purchase for another against their will would constitute illegal monetary taking advantage of. This case flags up against H+B that prospect. No literal minded aspie can disagree with that. H+B stands under shadow of being a place of risk to go to, risk to more manipulable customers and insulting offence to all customers.

Until H+B stands nationally committed to blank cheque automatic backing of the wronged customer in absolutistly absolutistly every case ever. And H+B would not do this. Its customer services e-address, for which its website promises "we'll respond within 24 hours", never responded at all. Either to the first email warning that unless they gave the right answer I would repudiate my card and never go them, nor to the copy of the notice I handed in with my cut in half card to their biggest local shop. It's critical to civil liberty and not having controlled lives, that high handedness by shops must never exist and must never win.

Maurice Frank

BBC openly prevents a civil liberty question getting answered

For a month, here www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b077n7ks/scotland-2016-12042016 is a BBC election debate broadcast Apr 12.

There is a question on mental health. It is in progress when, at time 39:52, Claire Muir of Psychiatric Rights Scotland, a survivor of sectioning that was proved wrong after the event, raises the civil liberty question of mental health sectioning. She tells them about the United Nations, UNCRPD, now taking a position against forced mental health treatments, for their bad and traumatic outcomes in many cases, and seeking for all countries to abolish them. You then see the BBC presenter immediately switch the debate back to resources and stigma, so deciding that the point on forced treatment will not be answered, and she saves the 4 politicians from having to answer it. She directs them away from it.

And indeed, none of them do answer it. Citizens' safety, your safety, from a loss of liberty, was shut out of politics, on open TV and by the broadcaster that never stops claiming worldwide admiration. Now do you still trust the BBC? Or kid yourself other than that it is part of a political class intentionally filtering and manipulating the range of issues to be recognised?

Maurice Frank

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.

'tis a bit serious innit?

Be angry, be very angry, because a celebrity tells you not to. Be angry because they have a public voice but you have no voice in answer.

Stephen Hawking's interview in the Radio Times (not a mag I've actually bought for a generation): oh no don't be angry because then how will you have any hope in your life, just laugh at yourself instead. The media select in favour of messages like that, to give to audiences whose own lives have been less fortuitous so are less easy to just shrug off with levity. By definition, any celebrity's life has turned out well and they are in no place to give throwaway advice to the rest of us to be accepting. That's what self-deprecating and laughing at your own misfortunes is - accepting, a choice of docility.

Yes this can be said even when the celebrity has had a serious disease for a long time and we as yet have not. Hawking establishes that, if you think about it. He has been wronged by biological chance - big time, besides being lucky still to live so long with it. But he has not been wronged by personal agency, by people choosing to do stupid things to his life and prospects, which they could have chosen not to do. Instead he has had a very successful life despite his physical condition, so he is in a position to be reflective on that and to choose to take life lightly. Not so any of the aspies who have been messed with by school or other youth social services. Not so anyone who has had a life opportunity stolen from us wrongly by the consciously choosing wrong action of jerks.

However physically healthy we are as yet, we have lived in a world where that is chancy and is a shadow over anyone's coping with any loss. If you laugh off a wrong you accept it. If you accept a wrong you do yourself further wrong and give the evil a victory, because you live the life it wrongly gave you instead of the life you justly should have had. Where the hell is your HOPE if you do that?

Folks who have lost careers to achieve struggle against an injustice, if they succeeded in their objective then the anger that defined their lives was clearly a good and a right choice: a right choice for themselves not just for others. Meaning and rebuilding in their life: which is hope. Sometimes though it's not a choice. Sometimes the angry path is also your only survival course of action. Sometimes the folks around you can't yet see that or are fighting against wanting to believe it, making it all harder. I did not lose any career by choosing the survival path of bringing down my teachers. Only such as who still believed the teachers' impractical fantasies thought I did.

Besides, after all the pressuring weight to succeed put on me from quite small childhood by fantasists with irresponsible imaginations, I could never have coped with having a science career like Hawking's: there was too much predecided success in it, when all the sceptical scrutiny by scientists of each other's work goes out of its way to set you up to fail. You can see the tensions and fears of that in The Big Bang Theory, including the episode Hawking himself appeared in, devastating Sheldon by telling him his mathematical theory forged in hard sweat was wrong. The bad way Hawking's ex-wife Jane experienced the peer pressure for atheism and closed minded anti-paranormalism, also shows there is no light hearted dream life in a science career. There could well be moral challenges against toeing institutional lines. There is a dishonest rot at the physics scene's core, which explains why it has been stuck in a rigid rut unable to progress its ideas much for the whole lifetime since quantum physics was discovered.

Does Hawking as a lifelong Labour supporter disagree with the anger of early socialists at unjust life conditions? That was hope in anger. Even properly peaceful civil rights movements were still angry. We owe anger most morally of all to anyone affected by murder: how sick for anyone to take life light heartedly in a world where we know it exists. How dare any of us not live morally serious low mood angry lives just for that reason? Aren't we all safer because angry journalists have gone after major miscarriages of justice? Humour sometimes has a use in getting serious messages across, but it must never replace seriousness. Because ripped-off consumers are angry and share their stories, we can keep trading standards needing to show an effort, and avoid buying beds with wooden dowel joints in the corners that can snap?

It was by anger that I discovered being aspie at all. By retaining my libertarian passion against school, by following all the new awarenesses of causes of school problems. By hating and not following any of pop-psychology's transparently evil propaganda for accepting hurts passively and letting go: that way offered hopeless loss. The aspie scene, all its writing outlets, recognition of my sensory issue and its cause, employment support taking account of it, ELAS, ANS: I got all these much needed good things, condition of life made much more just, THANKS TO STAYING ANGRY.

If I was right to continue the anger against my school that helped to discredit and close it, so was the schoolmate who wrote online here "I left that school an angry person".

Maurice Frank

Auntie Psychiatry

A recommendation for an inspired cartoon blog critiquing psychiatry,
www.auntiepsychiatry.com, by Frances Culshaw.

Vivid bright and colourful, like you can't be on these gooogle blogs, It has a great scrollable format letting you scroll a year of incisive cartoons in one sitting. It is anti-psychiatry as a system, its mechanical resort to major drugs and its dangerous undemocratic powers. Not anti every doctor, or every medicine which a troubled person using by choice has a good experience with. If they can do it right, that reproaches every time when they don't.

adult diagnosis in another East Coast city

It is obviously out of order for budgeting decisions in NHS and Scottish government to leave no diagnosis service functioning at all for aspie adults in Aberdeen. So that some who can afford so have even been paying hundreds of pounds (which go towards what the hell?) for private diagnoses.

This is one of the places that has a drop-in One Stop Shop since the second round of them opening. It is practising well, setting a good standard, by extending help to adults who can't access diagnosis. The whole scene should think so.

Adults who were not picked up as kids, wherever they are, are visibly entitled to be recognised now and supported the same as they can see happening in other places such as here in Edinburgh. A service's existence in another location is factual evidence and grounds to cite your entitlement to it too. Referrals out of area should be happening to obtain diagnoses. Where is Aberdeen's local autism plan, it's required to have one, addressing sorting this scandal out?

Autistic Groups Fairness Watch

Autistic Groups Fairness Watch is a new name and site for Spectrum Fairness, the blog project on giving voice to injustices suffered from autism groups. Originally in 2004 SF was conceived as being about online groups, and a deterrent to them banning members too easily. There is now interest in it having offline scope too. The new name should give clear voice to that.

The move was prompted by the closure of blog.co.de , but the new site is more versatile readable and better. Benefitting from how you can now make your own sites that are a mixture of blog form and static site pages.