- 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.
Showing posts with label aspie groups. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aspie groups. Show all posts
Monday, December 9, 2013
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?
Thursday, October 17, 2013
I've started so I'll finish.
A tip to autism workers throughout the entire scene. The type of tip that only an experience prompts you to realise is needed to give. Concerning us speaking in meetings, and "facilitation" or chairing.
A basic item you will have been trained is that anxiety affects our confidence and fluency to be able to speak up in a group, even at the moments when we have something to say. Now, one of anxiety's focusses is on successfully conveying what you want to say. By common sense, this means being allowed to complete saying it.
But aspies can become focussed on banging on at length on the topic that concerns them, losing all focus on the audience and the discussion's need to flow on. When we are saying something long, it is not necessarily the case that we are going to monologue endlessly until stopped, but of course, to any worker hearing it the possibility exists. The potential problem exists, and any worker or meeting facilitator does not know whether we are going to monologue or finish our point quickly, and the discussion might get disrupted. So what should they do?
Obviously, they should find out. They should ask us how much we have to say, to complete our point. That way they will find out if we are focussed enough that we are completing a single point at all. if we are, we are taking part in the discussion fairly. If there is a lot left to say it might need abbreviating - but having started, having been allowed to start making a point, which includes stating the facts that back it up, we must be allowed to finish. So that we are heard and construed correctly. So that our communication succeeds. SO THAT WE ARE CARED ABOUT as participants. Find out how much is left to say to complete the aspie's point, engage with them to fit that to the discussion's available timescale.
What then is obviously wrong and workers should not do? They should not assume "oh, aspie banging on, must cut the flow" without further thought. They should not cut across our flow without intent of letting us continue, to just assert that it will fit better to say at a possible later time and the meeting must now move on. If they do that, if they don't bother about letting us finish what we have started, that is uncaring towards the content of what the aspie has to say. It shows unconcern for it to be heard accurately, which means completely. It shows disregard of the potential for embarrassment when an unfinished half-said point is misconstrued.
Sometimes a monologuing aspie may be of a type who habitually has no awareness of how long they intend to go on speaking and who is regularly not offended by curtailing unfinished and gets to live with it habitually. The danger is this makes it a habit for the autism worker too, to apply the same standard towards every aspie, and towards the very different ones who are not regular monologuers and who are saying something a bit long because they need to, with every clear idea of its ending. The one case is no guide to the other. They are 2 very different circumstances of meeting participation fairness, and hence of impact on the person when it is got wrong.
A basic item you will have been trained is that anxiety affects our confidence and fluency to be able to speak up in a group, even at the moments when we have something to say. Now, one of anxiety's focusses is on successfully conveying what you want to say. By common sense, this means being allowed to complete saying it.
But aspies can become focussed on banging on at length on the topic that concerns them, losing all focus on the audience and the discussion's need to flow on. When we are saying something long, it is not necessarily the case that we are going to monologue endlessly until stopped, but of course, to any worker hearing it the possibility exists. The potential problem exists, and any worker or meeting facilitator does not know whether we are going to monologue or finish our point quickly, and the discussion might get disrupted. So what should they do?
Obviously, they should find out. They should ask us how much we have to say, to complete our point. That way they will find out if we are focussed enough that we are completing a single point at all. if we are, we are taking part in the discussion fairly. If there is a lot left to say it might need abbreviating - but having started, having been allowed to start making a point, which includes stating the facts that back it up, we must be allowed to finish. So that we are heard and construed correctly. So that our communication succeeds. SO THAT WE ARE CARED ABOUT as participants. Find out how much is left to say to complete the aspie's point, engage with them to fit that to the discussion's available timescale.
What then is obviously wrong and workers should not do? They should not assume "oh, aspie banging on, must cut the flow" without further thought. They should not cut across our flow without intent of letting us continue, to just assert that it will fit better to say at a possible later time and the meeting must now move on. If they do that, if they don't bother about letting us finish what we have started, that is uncaring towards the content of what the aspie has to say. It shows unconcern for it to be heard accurately, which means completely. It shows disregard of the potential for embarrassment when an unfinished half-said point is misconstrued.
Sometimes a monologuing aspie may be of a type who habitually has no awareness of how long they intend to go on speaking and who is regularly not offended by curtailing unfinished and gets to live with it habitually. The danger is this makes it a habit for the autism worker too, to apply the same standard towards every aspie, and towards the very different ones who are not regular monologuers and who are saying something a bit long because they need to, with every clear idea of its ending. The one case is no guide to the other. They are 2 very different circumstances of meeting participation fairness, and hence of impact on the person when it is got wrong.
- Just saying it's the wrong moment to bang on and cutting off our speech arbitrarily without regard to its content: wrong, bad, damaging, harmful.
- Asking us how much more to say and arranging that, even if rushed, we get to finish the point we have started: good practice, always the right thing to do, caring, need.
Monday, April 29, 2013
attack on the core of a genuine aspie scene
Picked up in conversation within Elas a morally shocking news of local group practice elsewhere, in south west England particularly. Not knowing how many groups this applies to, nor wanting to back them into a corner when it needs keeping easy for them to change away from this horrid practice, it is better not to name a particular group. Instead, to flag up that this needs checking out by prospective joiners of aspie groups in that whole reigon. There is an aspie group maybe several, run by one of the big autism charities, newcomers to the group are getting vetted, for their compatibility and whether they are disruptive, before they are being allowed to join.
Even worse, it is said to be existing women members of the group who want this nastiness done, in order to filter out men for acceptable non-lustfulness of character - that is gender discrimination and PC taken to a tarring attack on all men. For no clear line exists between social behaviour to befriend a group and social behaviour that a cliquey bully can conveniently interpret as sexual.
Both groups and charities included in these vetting practices are a direct cause of any suicides that result from the rejection experience. England still lacks an outlet like we have in ANS to pursue the cause of holding perpetrators to account on exactly those terms. Aspies who have already experienced emotionally damaging wrongs or feuds from what turn out to be other aspies, in other places, might then see the vetting charity for its own reasons decide to reject them and accept their adversary. That would be an emotional abuse.
These things are a test, and they must be kept glaringly publicly a test, of the aspie scene's genuineness in each region. For the many of us who have signed up to the message of "nothing about us without us", to speak for ourselves without going through the big charities, we know that our true voice is only through a free and tolerant aspie scene, without any purging rejections affecting who it consists of. It does not consist of the voice of the filtered favoured select of a big charity. That is a controlled puppet false scene.
The concept of "disruptive" is very obviously politically abusable. Throughout life it can be used for controlling and manipulating any group into consisting only of who it suits the folks already dominating it to have it consist of. This is a fundamental test of liberty and of being a genuine voice: any participant group of any nature that has a filter for being disruptive is an unfree facade and effectively a cult, and merits distrust accordingly. Anyone who determined to continue to pursue an item of fairness, an undoing of an injustice done to them, such as a rubbishing of their character or a kicking into an inferior social status, or a very practical exclusion that worsens their lives, can be called disruptive. Unscrupulous groups who prefer them to shut up and accept a noncommittal brushing off will do this. Every case of calling such a person disruptive is always a case of abuse.
Maurice Frank
Even worse, it is said to be existing women members of the group who want this nastiness done, in order to filter out men for acceptable non-lustfulness of character - that is gender discrimination and PC taken to a tarring attack on all men. For no clear line exists between social behaviour to befriend a group and social behaviour that a cliquey bully can conveniently interpret as sexual.
Both groups and charities included in these vetting practices are a direct cause of any suicides that result from the rejection experience. England still lacks an outlet like we have in ANS to pursue the cause of holding perpetrators to account on exactly those terms. Aspies who have already experienced emotionally damaging wrongs or feuds from what turn out to be other aspies, in other places, might then see the vetting charity for its own reasons decide to reject them and accept their adversary. That would be an emotional abuse.
These things are a test, and they must be kept glaringly publicly a test, of the aspie scene's genuineness in each region. For the many of us who have signed up to the message of "nothing about us without us", to speak for ourselves without going through the big charities, we know that our true voice is only through a free and tolerant aspie scene, without any purging rejections affecting who it consists of. It does not consist of the voice of the filtered favoured select of a big charity. That is a controlled puppet false scene.
The concept of "disruptive" is very obviously politically abusable. Throughout life it can be used for controlling and manipulating any group into consisting only of who it suits the folks already dominating it to have it consist of. This is a fundamental test of liberty and of being a genuine voice: any participant group of any nature that has a filter for being disruptive is an unfree facade and effectively a cult, and merits distrust accordingly. Anyone who determined to continue to pursue an item of fairness, an undoing of an injustice done to them, such as a rubbishing of their character or a kicking into an inferior social status, or a very practical exclusion that worsens their lives, can be called disruptive. Unscrupulous groups who prefer them to shut up and accept a noncommittal brushing off will do this. Every case of calling such a person disruptive is always a case of abuse.
Maurice Frank
Friday, April 5, 2013
Atomised
There are several atomic clock exact time websites, that you can google in an instant. Surprisingly, why should I be surprised what a cynic, yes they do show the same minutes and seconds, the same time. They may not show the same hour depending on what time zone they are for, of course.
Useful if you are a scientist timing an experiment or a sporty competitor stressfully timing a race, and you have a spare computer screen handy or perhaps most folks bring them up on their web connected mobiles. But when else in your life would you think you might have any need to look up the atomic pinpointed time?
How about, when see that the digital clock at the Ferrytoll park and ride bus station north of the Forth Bridge is 2 minutes fast? You see, as I did this evening, that while the clock is displayed to passengers, it appears to be being used to time bus departures too. Several buses itemised as departing at what that clock showed as their correct times but were in fact significantly earlier.
It explained the mystery of an absent and missed connection that I had clearly got there in time to catch, onto one of the town routes into east Dunfermline. The atomic clock sites were the confirmation I needed that it was not my time that was wrong, to know for a fact there was a clock fault to itemise to Stagecoach along with the early departures. But arriving just after working hours had ended on a Friday evening we can guess this will go on all weekend at least. Anyway, if you travel through the Ferrytoll, check your watch by the atomic clock websites before you go, and you can check on whether the clock there is still wrong, and complain about the effect on passengers if they don't fix it for their timekeeping.
That is when we need atomic clocks. When we are trying to keep transport running properly instead of lying down and accepting having it run any old how. It is also when we need a blog based in Edinburgh to write about Fife on. You notice that 2 successive posts here have been about Fife, but the now defunct aspie group that used to exist in Fife and became too controlled never chose to go for enough of a free speaking culture to have a blog, did it, you will remember? Even when that group was still going it was still us who served Fife for this democratically necessary voicing side of what should be all local aspie groups' life.
Maurice Frank
Useful if you are a scientist timing an experiment or a sporty competitor stressfully timing a race, and you have a spare computer screen handy or perhaps most folks bring them up on their web connected mobiles. But when else in your life would you think you might have any need to look up the atomic pinpointed time?
How about, when see that the digital clock at the Ferrytoll park and ride bus station north of the Forth Bridge is 2 minutes fast? You see, as I did this evening, that while the clock is displayed to passengers, it appears to be being used to time bus departures too. Several buses itemised as departing at what that clock showed as their correct times but were in fact significantly earlier.
It explained the mystery of an absent and missed connection that I had clearly got there in time to catch, onto one of the town routes into east Dunfermline. The atomic clock sites were the confirmation I needed that it was not my time that was wrong, to know for a fact there was a clock fault to itemise to Stagecoach along with the early departures. But arriving just after working hours had ended on a Friday evening we can guess this will go on all weekend at least. Anyway, if you travel through the Ferrytoll, check your watch by the atomic clock websites before you go, and you can check on whether the clock there is still wrong, and complain about the effect on passengers if they don't fix it for their timekeeping.
That is when we need atomic clocks. When we are trying to keep transport running properly instead of lying down and accepting having it run any old how. It is also when we need a blog based in Edinburgh to write about Fife on. You notice that 2 successive posts here have been about Fife, but the now defunct aspie group that used to exist in Fife and became too controlled never chose to go for enough of a free speaking culture to have a blog, did it, you will remember? Even when that group was still going it was still us who served Fife for this democratically necessary voicing side of what should be all local aspie groups' life.
Maurice Frank
Monday, April 16, 2012
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.
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
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.
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
Monday, March 21, 2011
no loo Inverness to Edinburgh
"Stagecoach trains its entire staff in the importance of customer care and does not tolerate incidents such as the one you have described in your letter." So they welcomely wrote on 25 May 2007, concerning a jobsworth driver who was stuck in a queue on a sliproad at the Forth bridge and refused to let passengers off before reaching the stop, even though some were desperate for a pee which they had to take behind a junction box as soon as they got off. By that time the situation on that bus had got aggressive. I should think so.
Now that Stagecoach and Citylink have become half-merged, can we rely on the same principle to be brought out again? Yesterday, they put an ordinary Stagecoach express bus such as you see around Fife, with no toilet, onto an Inverness to Edinburgh Citylink service lasting 3 1/2 hours. Its driver was very good about it, full marks to him, when I asserted the right to get off for a pee at Broxden, the coach stop site on the edge of Perth - which itself has no loo. But what position are Citylink going to take on the driver of the connecting Glasgow coach, who refused to allow me to use his onboard toilet? "Absolutely not, no way, as soon as I'm loaded up I'm away." Peeing in the bushes instead meant climbing over a fence and squeezing under some very thorny vegetation, obviously without time to waste. An older passenger with limited mobility might find this too hard to do, yet is even more likely to need the loo. There was no other way to get out of sight, at least not without taking a long walk away from the coaches who might then go without them. They will be entitled by the facts of biology to go right where they are, the indecency will be Citylink's fault not theirs, won't it? I challenge Citylink to find any way to say otherwise, and next time we write any diversity feedbacks for the police we should put this to them too. This point needs committally forcing, to make the bus companies work properly.
Clamber into the bushes I did, promptly, in front of this driver. He knew it meant no chance to wash my hands, I suppose Citylink expects its other passengers to be happy with that? If his ego seriously expected me to continue my journey without going, he was delusional, with a delusion of authority over biology. No it was not established at any sod's order that I would hold on. If y' gotta go y' gotta go, asserted.
Sometimes it is part of autism, its metabolic and digestive issues, to need the loo more frequently. The willingness now found, of the operator of the longest trunk coach service through the middle of Scotland, to do this, puts a barrier between the aspie communities of the Central Belt and the north.
Maurice Frank
Now that Stagecoach and Citylink have become half-merged, can we rely on the same principle to be brought out again? Yesterday, they put an ordinary Stagecoach express bus such as you see around Fife, with no toilet, onto an Inverness to Edinburgh Citylink service lasting 3 1/2 hours. Its driver was very good about it, full marks to him, when I asserted the right to get off for a pee at Broxden, the coach stop site on the edge of Perth - which itself has no loo. But what position are Citylink going to take on the driver of the connecting Glasgow coach, who refused to allow me to use his onboard toilet? "Absolutely not, no way, as soon as I'm loaded up I'm away." Peeing in the bushes instead meant climbing over a fence and squeezing under some very thorny vegetation, obviously without time to waste. An older passenger with limited mobility might find this too hard to do, yet is even more likely to need the loo. There was no other way to get out of sight, at least not without taking a long walk away from the coaches who might then go without them. They will be entitled by the facts of biology to go right where they are, the indecency will be Citylink's fault not theirs, won't it? I challenge Citylink to find any way to say otherwise, and next time we write any diversity feedbacks for the police we should put this to them too. This point needs committally forcing, to make the bus companies work properly.
Clamber into the bushes I did, promptly, in front of this driver. He knew it meant no chance to wash my hands, I suppose Citylink expects its other passengers to be happy with that? If his ego seriously expected me to continue my journey without going, he was delusional, with a delusion of authority over biology. No it was not established at any sod's order that I would hold on. If y' gotta go y' gotta go, asserted.
Sometimes it is part of autism, its metabolic and digestive issues, to need the loo more frequently. The willingness now found, of the operator of the longest trunk coach service through the middle of Scotland, to do this, puts a barrier between the aspie communities of the Central Belt and the north.
Maurice Frank
Monday, February 28, 2011
Invitation to an autocratically restricted group's members to escape it and join us
Elas is open to all spectrumites who can reach us and want to, any radius, and we go visiting the aspie scene in other places too. All who want to link up with an aspie scene where folks communicate freely across region and groups are democratic and uphold personal wellbeing with everyone getting their say. That is the aspie scene we want, and folks beginning to network across Scotland want too, and all spectrumites with important stuff to say want it.
We extend a standing invitation to all folks on the spectrum who are unhappy with groups of a less free nature, to link up with us. Nobody must feel stuck in a group that is not the right type for them just by where they live. There is a disturbing case happening in an adult aspie group in a region near us.
There is a group where all the deciding power belongs to the chair and committee of a broader autism society also working with kids. The society set up the group, and in that society the chair, who until recently was also the founder, has always been the dominant leader, the committee following like sheep. So the group's members don't have their own direct say in how the group runs, what practices it follows. Imposed on them from above like that, as a "code of conduct", they are not allowed to communicate with each other, using contact info given in their contact list, for any other purpose than to arrange social meet-ups. Unlike Elas they never do arrange meet-ups, either: how can they feel close enough to each other to do that with all their contact censored? How is such a ban enforceable, it has been asked? Data protection law, designed to fight spam and junk mail, can be misused to set conditions like this to what types of messages folks consent to receive using their data. But in that group, the trap comes from how this rule was first imposed. It was announced to be in effect without advance notice, before its contents were even declared, and before the members had any chance to make known to each other their own consents to receive other types of messages. So they can't make that consent known to other members who have not already consented to them to have it made known to them, and who for the same reason can't make that consent known either. So any 2 members are trapped in a vicious circle of neither being allowed to open up closer terms of contact with the other.
Members have been cut off from each other, and from receiving info from outside the group by email from other members. The leader hence holds control of what they receive. This Orwellian rule was introduced openly for the purpose of preventing members discussing with each other anything going wrong with the group, without having to go through the leader. Needless to say they have no blog like this one: they have always been welcome to use this one but did they know? Consider too that in this now low attendance and socially dead group whose meeting last week was actually abandoned, it is clear that a large proportion of the contact list is of lapsed or ex-members, yet their ability to contact each other or the remaining members or be contacted by them remains under the same restraint. They have no say over it, if they even realise it is happening. Elas's response to the autism bill consultations contrasted that model with our open and decentralised model. Watch out for this if you are joining or visiting any aspie groups in central/south Scotland: do they follow Elas's model or the other group's?
The problem society has also appointed a spokesman for the ruling committee on all issues to do with the contact list and banned all contact with any other committee members about those. Are you keeping up? Layer upon layer of paranoia. No sensible thinker can feel safe in an organisation that behaves like that: like a cult, tying you up in gags on talking about what is happening to you and hogging all power to the leadership. How are we going to retrieve our fellow spectrumites entangled under these tricky controls they have never had proper opportunity to consent to? Is that the challenge to its legality that will break it? we have that committee spokesman already questioned thus. This should concern the whole rest of the scene in Scotland, the free scene as it may now be worth calling it.
2 members of Elas used to also belong to this other group, and as a part of Elas's far wider success in keeping socials going it used to have some contact established with one of the other group's members. All swept away now. That is really helpful in defending and growing the scene's wellbeing, eh?
The group's trouble began when a member X, volunteering at an ecology centre, recommended another member Y to do the same. When the ecology centre discriminated against Y for being a victim already and rejected him, X brushed it aside and defended the ecology centre's discretion to do it and refused to take any stand against it. Y as a result made a complaint that X should not do support work, including for teenagers, in that autism society, and the bully-hurt of being expected to endorse that as part of life in the society. He tried to overcome prolonged hurtful noncommittality from the leader and force the right outcome on its moral merits by an email to the group members. This issue could not even arise in an independently organised adult group like Elas that is not tied to a bigger society and/or to endorsing any support work. If an X/Y situation happened in Elas, Y could just cut off speaking terms with X and not be pressed about it, and could tell the story and be deemed the justified hurt party, and X might have the brass neck to stay around but would not impinge on Y's life in any way.
The problem society's committee has defended and sided with X, this being paired with the ban on members discussing its merits as justice, and answered an inaccurate rewritten version of Y's complaint with a pile of personal attacks on Y that making the complaint was aggressive and constituted not caring about anyone. This when Y had obviously cared about fair play in the ecology centre's community, and when they made no comment at all about what had happened to Y in a previous workplace.
They ranted like the Tea Party extremists in America who don't believe in autism at all, saying aspies must not lobby for any special treatment at all, and must take "life's disappointments" as they come without lifting a finger to anticipate and prevent an unfairly big share of "life's disappointments" or else they are to blame for "expecting problems." They defended X as "being realistic". These are a rejection and denial of the same organisation's whole history and all the care which the parents in it have argued with schools for and expected this society's support against getting labelled arguers or troublemakers. It contradicts the whole principle of a support scene and the whole idea of supported employment services like Intowork, it is a harsh right wing attitude that we should go back to sinking or swimming in a neocon economy geared to reject us, exactly like before we were known to need any different at all. The committee spokesman accompanied this with reckless defamation threats against Y making any outside criticisms of the society at all no matter what happens inside it: say anything to the outside world and you risk being criminalised and going to jail. (Yet defamation is civil law, he had not even realised.) More sinister behaviour like a cult, constituting an attempt to blackmail through fear and to enslave a person into a control trap and into fearful silence. It has no force: it is an established part of fair civil life that an organisation's ideas and practices can be criticised on merit, accountably to factual accuracy.
Now, you would think it is important to challenge every member of the committee on whether they are behind this or are spoken for by it. No no, can't have that - contact with the committee about it, except the spokesman, is also banned !!! How then does Y even tell anyone else in the committee if the answers to issues never raised show that the complainer has been wilfully misrepresented, hence defamed indeed, to the committee? If the spokesman can imtimidate the person he is writing to, like Y, like this, then the same intimidation hangs over any committee members who step out of line. This kafkaesque tangle of bans on who may contact whom and about what, has grown into a monster. It allows no way to find out whether all the committee are behind any decision or spoken for by any answer and no means for dissenters to be discovered or to advertise their own existence. In such a situation, to set out these obvious facts in public and not succumb to the undemocratic threatening into silence, is actively a duty of not defaming the committee members: any of them might not be behind the shockers hissed in their name and might be gagged and in fear. The only way to see that nobody is under control and in fear of speaking, will be when that whole society that has so tragically chosen power against long lasting friendships and by it has collapsed into this horrifying condition, breaks under the self-inflicted cumbersomeness of its own barminess and falls apart.
But all the innocent members in it must be able to get out without having the aspie scene lost to them, and to find refuge in the rest of the scene unintimidated and no longer obeying any of that cult regime over who they may contact. Join us, or use us as a base to bypass that controlling society and to reestablish your local scene in a form with free contact again.
We extend a standing invitation to all folks on the spectrum who are unhappy with groups of a less free nature, to link up with us. Nobody must feel stuck in a group that is not the right type for them just by where they live. There is a disturbing case happening in an adult aspie group in a region near us.
There is a group where all the deciding power belongs to the chair and committee of a broader autism society also working with kids. The society set up the group, and in that society the chair, who until recently was also the founder, has always been the dominant leader, the committee following like sheep. So the group's members don't have their own direct say in how the group runs, what practices it follows. Imposed on them from above like that, as a "code of conduct", they are not allowed to communicate with each other, using contact info given in their contact list, for any other purpose than to arrange social meet-ups. Unlike Elas they never do arrange meet-ups, either: how can they feel close enough to each other to do that with all their contact censored? How is such a ban enforceable, it has been asked? Data protection law, designed to fight spam and junk mail, can be misused to set conditions like this to what types of messages folks consent to receive using their data. But in that group, the trap comes from how this rule was first imposed. It was announced to be in effect without advance notice, before its contents were even declared, and before the members had any chance to make known to each other their own consents to receive other types of messages. So they can't make that consent known to other members who have not already consented to them to have it made known to them, and who for the same reason can't make that consent known either. So any 2 members are trapped in a vicious circle of neither being allowed to open up closer terms of contact with the other.
Members have been cut off from each other, and from receiving info from outside the group by email from other members. The leader hence holds control of what they receive. This Orwellian rule was introduced openly for the purpose of preventing members discussing with each other anything going wrong with the group, without having to go through the leader. Needless to say they have no blog like this one: they have always been welcome to use this one but did they know? Consider too that in this now low attendance and socially dead group whose meeting last week was actually abandoned, it is clear that a large proportion of the contact list is of lapsed or ex-members, yet their ability to contact each other or the remaining members or be contacted by them remains under the same restraint. They have no say over it, if they even realise it is happening. Elas's response to the autism bill consultations contrasted that model with our open and decentralised model. Watch out for this if you are joining or visiting any aspie groups in central/south Scotland: do they follow Elas's model or the other group's?
The problem society has also appointed a spokesman for the ruling committee on all issues to do with the contact list and banned all contact with any other committee members about those. Are you keeping up? Layer upon layer of paranoia. No sensible thinker can feel safe in an organisation that behaves like that: like a cult, tying you up in gags on talking about what is happening to you and hogging all power to the leadership. How are we going to retrieve our fellow spectrumites entangled under these tricky controls they have never had proper opportunity to consent to? Is that the challenge to its legality that will break it? we have that committee spokesman already questioned thus. This should concern the whole rest of the scene in Scotland, the free scene as it may now be worth calling it.
2 members of Elas used to also belong to this other group, and as a part of Elas's far wider success in keeping socials going it used to have some contact established with one of the other group's members. All swept away now. That is really helpful in defending and growing the scene's wellbeing, eh?
The group's trouble began when a member X, volunteering at an ecology centre, recommended another member Y to do the same. When the ecology centre discriminated against Y for being a victim already and rejected him, X brushed it aside and defended the ecology centre's discretion to do it and refused to take any stand against it. Y as a result made a complaint that X should not do support work, including for teenagers, in that autism society, and the bully-hurt of being expected to endorse that as part of life in the society. He tried to overcome prolonged hurtful noncommittality from the leader and force the right outcome on its moral merits by an email to the group members. This issue could not even arise in an independently organised adult group like Elas that is not tied to a bigger society and/or to endorsing any support work. If an X/Y situation happened in Elas, Y could just cut off speaking terms with X and not be pressed about it, and could tell the story and be deemed the justified hurt party, and X might have the brass neck to stay around but would not impinge on Y's life in any way.
The problem society's committee has defended and sided with X, this being paired with the ban on members discussing its merits as justice, and answered an inaccurate rewritten version of Y's complaint with a pile of personal attacks on Y that making the complaint was aggressive and constituted not caring about anyone. This when Y had obviously cared about fair play in the ecology centre's community, and when they made no comment at all about what had happened to Y in a previous workplace.
They ranted like the Tea Party extremists in America who don't believe in autism at all, saying aspies must not lobby for any special treatment at all, and must take "life's disappointments" as they come without lifting a finger to anticipate and prevent an unfairly big share of "life's disappointments" or else they are to blame for "expecting problems." They defended X as "being realistic". These are a rejection and denial of the same organisation's whole history and all the care which the parents in it have argued with schools for and expected this society's support against getting labelled arguers or troublemakers. It contradicts the whole principle of a support scene and the whole idea of supported employment services like Intowork, it is a harsh right wing attitude that we should go back to sinking or swimming in a neocon economy geared to reject us, exactly like before we were known to need any different at all. The committee spokesman accompanied this with reckless defamation threats against Y making any outside criticisms of the society at all no matter what happens inside it: say anything to the outside world and you risk being criminalised and going to jail. (Yet defamation is civil law, he had not even realised.) More sinister behaviour like a cult, constituting an attempt to blackmail through fear and to enslave a person into a control trap and into fearful silence. It has no force: it is an established part of fair civil life that an organisation's ideas and practices can be criticised on merit, accountably to factual accuracy.
Now, you would think it is important to challenge every member of the committee on whether they are behind this or are spoken for by it. No no, can't have that - contact with the committee about it, except the spokesman, is also banned !!! How then does Y even tell anyone else in the committee if the answers to issues never raised show that the complainer has been wilfully misrepresented, hence defamed indeed, to the committee? If the spokesman can imtimidate the person he is writing to, like Y, like this, then the same intimidation hangs over any committee members who step out of line. This kafkaesque tangle of bans on who may contact whom and about what, has grown into a monster. It allows no way to find out whether all the committee are behind any decision or spoken for by any answer and no means for dissenters to be discovered or to advertise their own existence. In such a situation, to set out these obvious facts in public and not succumb to the undemocratic threatening into silence, is actively a duty of not defaming the committee members: any of them might not be behind the shockers hissed in their name and might be gagged and in fear. The only way to see that nobody is under control and in fear of speaking, will be when that whole society that has so tragically chosen power against long lasting friendships and by it has collapsed into this horrifying condition, breaks under the self-inflicted cumbersomeness of its own barminess and falls apart.
But all the innocent members in it must be able to get out without having the aspie scene lost to them, and to find refuge in the rest of the scene unintimidated and no longer obeying any of that cult regime over who they may contact. Join us, or use us as a base to bypass that controlling society and to reestablish your local scene in a form with free contact again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)