WANTING TO HEAR IS OBLIGATORY IN A SUPPORT SCENE

SUPPORT, by definition, includes automatically caring about any perceived-unfair experience anywhere for anyone who you share a support circle with, e.g. fellow member of ELAS. That vulnerabilites are involved and suicidalities could ever be triggered by not following this, rightly forces your hand to agree it - that is the good strong way to hold fairness ethics in place.

Because presumption of innocence matters equally strongly the obligation does not include having to accept at the upset person's word that the place they are upset with is guilty. They have to be simultaneous, and to explain that: observing presumption of innocence towards the upset-with party, and besides that, supportiveness towards the upset party. Holding that their experience MATTERS.

It is always a breach of support to say that any person's social trauma ever matters less than some wider social convenience for yourself. Now, important progress, we can say this also breaches vulnerable groups' safe space. That is a point of law on the honesty of safety + supportiveness in absolutely any aspie organisation. On both counts it illegally risks prompting suicidality. You commit this breach if you ever, ever, tell someone with a grievance against an organisation or service, that your own good experience of that organisation or service makes you upset to hear their angle and that they should not say it. If you tell them that your preexisting belief that the organisation does good work and has done for you, means they should not say anything to you against that organisation.

It is unscrupulous ever to tell anyone that, + if is an abuse crime to do it in a support group. Impacting unfairly on every witness of it as well as the victim. Why is it these things? Because it rejects an unjust experience from getting heard and supported. It's a form of "I'm all right Jack." It announces that your happy good perception shall selfishly kick aside someone else's real situation + suffering, shall annul it from mattering.

Whatever organisation or group you defend when you do this evil, you turn it into a cult. For non-hearing of criticism is a cult situation - and an exploitation relationship, which is another point of the vulnerability law. It does the abuse of making a person feel gagged about their own maltreatment if they want to stay in social favour.

In the Jehovah's Witnesses, members are instructed never to listen to any criticism of their organisation, to automatically believe it comes from Satan! Combined with which, dissension from the leadership's instructions can result in "disfellowshipping", which means complete social cutting off of speaking terms by everyone. To take part in the shunning is itself one of the instructions that it can be a disfellowshipping offence to break! Which set-up obviously keeps their leadership from having any accountability at all from their followers, for anything they decide or do. If obviously works as a social trap upon everyone who has joined JW and complied with its instruction to drop their social ties outside it. Several controlling religions have disfellowshipping, it was the Plymouth Brethren who invented it, Scientologists call it disconnecting.

ELAS in fact has submitted to parliament that there is a public health duty for disfellowshipping to be banned. This was when new science on physical health effects of loneliness prompted a parliamentary consultation on it, in 2015, which ELAS was actually invited to respond to.

So look at the total parallel that is committed, when any aspies declare that their own good experience and opinion of a particular autism service makes them not want the upset of hearing another aspie's bad or critical experience of it. It sets up exactly the same silencing and hiding of any problems at all, as in a cult. It puts the service's managers beyond accountability. But no service, no matter how much good it does, ever deserves that loyal level of character trust. Only with accountability are malpractices + abuses deterred. Compare with the church child abuse scandals where there has been loyal trust in clergy's character. Compare it with patriotism: why is patriotism a discredited nonsense? Because it was the same loyalty to accept, or to refuse belief in, bad things from leaders, and that produced some: produced big wealth disparities and the horrors of WW1. No matter how good a particular government does, democracy always needs to watch out for it doing any bad. Consider whistleblowers, from Chelsea Manning to Peter Gregson's local campaign for them in Edinburgh council. No matter how well an institution is running, blind trust in its character will allow the types of hidden wrongs to happen that whistleblowers are needed to stop. You are a self-endangering fool if you reject the whistleblowing and declare that you would rather comfortably believe your council us above criticism because your own life is okay. When it stops being okay, you will have nowhere to turn, exactly because YOU TOOK AWAY FROM OTHERS ANYWHERE TO TURN.

That is the sheer

• folly for themself,
• maltreatment of others,
• irrationality, of openly announcing a choice to live in fantasy,
• human nastiness,

committed by any aspie who tells another not to speak ill of a particular service or organisation. That is why, on pain of several points of vulnerable groups' law, no ethical support society can ever stand for that wrong.

Maurice Frank
8 Jul 2019

Offensive

ELAS is a much SAFER, nicer, all-round better group without, and since seeing the back of, the unscrupulous faction of 4 who split away from it 15 months ago openly opposed to us observing our carefully developed fairness ethic. Including a former chair, who had been brought down from that office by determining on a corrupt breach of that code, they in a faction of 4 openly wanting us to be tough social cynics and not have any binding ethics. Illegal against the law of adult protection, and opposite of the whole point of support society for a communication-troubled minority. Immoral animals weeded out by morally good ethics.

In their split, they dropped cut off and rejected the whole rest of ELAS, nearly all of whom had had nothing at all to do with the events leading to their departure, by it suddenly ending for those folks, some quite vulnerable, some personal support ties that had been well established for years. THIS INCLUDES THE MEMBER WHO RECENTLY DIED, which means they did that breach to him, dumped him, IN THE LAST 15 MONTHS OF HIS LIFE. For something whose causes he had had nothing to do with.

Their presence today, all 4, at the memorial gathering for him was particularly offensive, 15 months after they unscrupulously backstabbed him !!

Trying and failing to erase that they did that. It does not erase it, it compounds it. Towards all of ELAS it compounds all the illegal aspects of their past actions, to have such an offensive height of brass neck. Held in contempt. Underlines them being seriously bad people.

Maurice Frank
26 Feb 2019

seen a light?

Comedy billed as not for the easily offended usually fairly certainly means not for me. I'm ever so'seeeeeerious, ya see, with a sick world of injustice always at the forefront of thought, and seriously down on all the ethicality of everyone who has an emotionally cruel sense of humour, which is indistinguishable from being an emotionally destructive person seriously. 1980s alternative comedy was just a fashion statement for blatant bullying and violence, for delight in destroying everything anyone cares about.

But there is a very real practical question around how referring to injustices in comedy sometimes helps the serious impact against them. Like the old Berlin Wall graffiti "Jump over and join the party". Like Life of Brian. When is comedy that refers to injustices ever constructive? Ever not just a further kicking in suffering's face?

When it is open to thinking about. When it is not an act of bullying aggro with a socially intimidating effect. The way all that distressingly aggressive 1980s alternative comedy fired up all that is ugliest in peer groups, is why it failed to get across the serious political messages it sometimes hoped to.

Fringe stand-up performer Abigoliah Schamaun makes you think, because every time she crashes through an offence barrier she actually pauses and reflects on it, checks out how the audience feels with it. It gives the whole question of offence a significantly different feel. It is more survivable for the audience, and each time you wonder whether it is more justified for the performer, because you are not just getting hammered by it, passively. For usually that aspie unfriendly helpless position, take whatever I throw at you and like it, is the relationship an audience who feel ever so super-cool really have towards a comic who wants to make them sick. An audience who have the fairness of their own feelings acknowledged are in a stronger feeling, better feeling, less pushed around, position.

Seriously don't want that light bulb she eats to be real, or she won't be performing for long. No audience can pass on the reason for doing it, because there isn't one.

Maurice Frank

Advice Shop

The Advice Shop, on South Bridge, the council's so-called service for money problems, advertises in its own shop window that it's impartial. It's not impartial at all, and has now admitted the fact in the written minuted record of meetings hosted by social work about a complaint.

I have been fighting for years over a council tax appeal, which I repeat annually, which the council refuses to recognise as an appeal. This is obviously a money problem of malpractice - lodging council tax appeals is an entitlement enacted in law, and the council absolutely does not have the power it is claiming to exercise,. it does not have a power unilaterally to decide that any appeal should not be recognised as an appeal.

The Advice Shop will refuse to take up such a case or represent you. It is outside its powers, because it is a conflict of interest to pursue your fight against the position taken by the same council as pays their salaries. This they have openly said in answer to the complaint. How impartial is that?

But there is a deeper concern, for the ethics being shown to vulnerable groups, and specially to those with a communication problem. Advice Shop will not actually take this position of refusing until you complain against them through social work, and in my case it has taken as long as 2 years, from first contact, to reach this position. The type of case that Advice Shop now say they can't take on, at first oh yes they do take on. They take you on, on a false basis, but never actually engage with the council on behalf of your case. They try to manipulate you into giving in to what the council says. They keep sneaking that assumption into their advice, while declaring themselves not qualified to answer your reasons for holding that the council is wrong. If you stand by it and press them for a committal position on what you are saying, they will take a view against pursuing your conflict with the council's position, on the excuse of the worst-case legal risks, no matter how obviously the council's position is wrong, while continuing to refuse to take any position on the merits of your reasons for saying the council is wrong.

In effect this means they will side with the council, against you their client, and test your will to stand up to it. Then they will say, we have reached an impasse and you won't cooperate with our advice.

They won't do what they literally claim they will do. Indeed, at the time of accepting my case they gave me a form to sign to allow them to represent me, which would give them a blank cheque over what to do, and when I carefully added extra words to it to tie them only to uphold my case not retract it, they made pressurising noises and hand moves trying to stop me. I knew not to trust their agenda, from that moment on, after seeing them willing to try to make you sign things under pressure instead of you taking your time to scrutinise them first. This is a public help service towards folks in all sorts of vulnerable positions, doing this. Testing our ability to stand up to themselves, in the hour when we had come seeking support in standing up to the council!

I have established now, factually, through social work, the well foundedness of complaining of these practices. It is an ethically disturbing pattern of testing our vulnerability to manipulation in conflict with our own wishes.