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

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

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

My reply:

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Frank<)b>
27 Jun 2024

gettng away with inaccurate pro-homework spin

Did you hear Good Morning Scotland mention anything about this today? I didn't. If they mentioned it at any other time, then it missed reaching the regular Sunday audience.

Re their review of the papers, covering a Sunday Herald front page on an initiative of increasing school time for kids from poorer backgrounds. Complaining that: the radio reviewers were convinced that this plan when used in America had had only good results, and there was no balance because there was no asking if a more intense regime would be a pressure and harmful, and the actual article had not mentioned homework.

Dear Mr Frank
Reference CAS-4202564-ZBGB9X
Thank you for getting in touch about Good Morning Scotland broadcast on 29 January 2017.
The paper reviewer on the programme mentioned ‘more homework’ as being a feature of this proposal, and that was not backed up by the newspaper piece under discussion. This was however a single fleeting reference and the substance of the discussion focused on the two issues of longer school days and shorter holidays.
The newspaper review is an informed and opinionated take on a range of stories across the Sunday newspapers and is driven by the opinions of the reviewers. That should be tempered and challenged by the presenters, and on this occasion that didn’t happen.
We’ve shared your feedback with the production team. Furthermore, all your comments have been fully registered on our daily audience log. This internal document is made available to all our production teams and senior BBC management.

stressing me

In the news today a compensation award for stress for a teacher who suffered a ridiculous workload. Resulting in a radio Scotland phone-in this morning on teachers' work conditions and stress. I failed to get mentioned on it that the media has regularly shown interest in overstressing of teachers and none at all in overstressing of their students. Never have I heard a phone-in on that.

It's now hitting 30 years since I was overwhelmed by a ridiculous workload at school, and I never got any chance to seek a compensation award through any industrial injury type of route. Employees get that, school students don't. The system assumes their abilities can be decided for them, and they are not free to walk out of the situation if it becomes impossible as it did for me. It is a lot harder and riskier a prospect for the mishandled school student who has left school with consequently no prospects, to simply sue, and besides, crises at school bring in the teenage mental health systems, who themselves can take sharply against you if you resist getting bossed around by them just as badly as by your school. The student becomes a mental health issue, with all that means for civil status, because of their teachers' actions which are not the student's fault. Then they are not going to be supportive witnesses for you, instead their attitude that you are mental unless you change yourself to fit in with all their ideals makes any suing impossible.

The emergence of aspies has been the life miracle I needed delivering into my hands proof that aspie skills at some limited types of fact retention had been the real explanation of the personal strengths that made my teachers recklessly greedy. Never was proving this point helped by the media recognising student stress as any sort of major issue. Now, we in the aspie scene know that student stress has been a recurring aspie experience from constant misreading of us by educators. The trusting public who believe reality is everything the tabloids and BBC say it is, still have no knowledge of this at all. They still only hear of the teachers suffering.

Maurice Frank

Thoughtful culture

Popular culture at mob level has never exactly been famous for its civilised tolerance. So it can hardly be a priority of life to become a winner in a minefield of unreliable friendships and cliques. That is not the place to look for deep acceptance, it is the place where our survival advantage is the ability to go without deep acceptance and follow our own consciences. Above all, it's never worth being submissive in search of acceptance. How miserable is that? You won't know what directions it will push you in, which innocent folks the social leaders will force you to exclude and pick on, which bigotries they will force you to pretend to believe in? You could be alone in the world and still none of that will be worthwhile.

In family, in political or religious or hobby social life, at work, at volunteer days, basically at anywhere normal, there is no formula beyond personal chance that determines how much acceptance and fitting in is possible. Living within reach of as many options as possible, for the sake of adaptability, must be one sensible tip. Then it just becomes a question of trying to observe, in each person you associate with, whether they are just a closed mind, then it would be damaging to mention AS, or they have any spark of thoughtfulness and civility. If they have, I find, then a casual mention of AS, not a deep sermon about it, is good because it helps to secure that the person stays a nice way. It gives them a reason not to drift towards being on more dumbed-down and ribald terms with you just from thinking you want that normality, which is exactly what we don't want. From chances grabbed as they arise here and there, with the right folks, ground can be gained for awareness and acceptance on decent terms. Slowly it builds up, to all our benefit.

Thoughtful folks have always aspired to find or own congenial community outside the conformist horror world of the type of normal thickos who booze and gamble and iron and believe what the tabloids tell them about foreigners. That type of popular culture is a starkly treacherous place to get by in, even to win a place in at all. It does not operate rationally or thinkingly. So the point of describing it so grimly is not snobbery, it's to illustrate that culture's own choice of enmity towards us. How it is not designed for anyone guided more by reasoning and logic than by gang following, to survive or thrive in. Thoughtful folks of all types need to defend ourselves from having to belong in social conditions like those. We have always needed an alternative and been in search of one.

What better justification can there be, for needing our own scene, our own space, than an impairment to communication? But even in thoughtful activities, groups become ruined by the normal cultures' influence and the resulting fear of ribaldry and derision that comes to enslave the socially minded to take the rougher and more dumbed down life attitudes. I have watched an astronomy society die in this way. As the traumatic nature of science education has driven away from enjoyment of science the potential keen new blood the society could have kept attracting and formerly had, firstly the more practically minded strongman types came to stand out as the leaders. Then that meant all abstract chat about the subject's wonders petered out and stopped being expected or thought comfortable. Then that left the shrunken society's core life reduced wholly to happening among a few normal hard-edged cynical sneery impatient men, further alienating the non-core membership. To a comment on the virtues of serving ethical coffee the vice-president could say, "Don't let's bring ethics into it, this is the astronomical society not the ethical society, I'll get some more Nescafe." Any time you are thinking of joining an astronomy society, quote that and ask them if it could happen.

Casual evil like this, and like the pointless cliquiness we all know can pop up out of the blue in the personal boundaries of workplace social life when least expected even in health-conscious workplaces, are why the struggle for a secure thoughtful counterculture to belong to has repeatedly been defeated and savaged all through the history of semi-civilisation. Before AS was known, I had already seen, and been dismayed by, the failiure of such scenes to last permanently, in 2 settings: around children with unusually intellectual interests, and around folks going through emotionally intense problem youths.

Aspies are another grouping who could deliver a parallel culture for nice thoughtful non-ribald characters totally opted out of the majority hard soul-dead culture. We need each other's acceptance as a higher priority than to dream about finding it with any consitency outside the caring circles. Trouble is, aspies are no more immune from having nasty ways than any other grouping are. It's only as an overall tendency that our society is made nicer than average by our willingness to think critically. There are still some aspies who don't think much at all, who just want a quiet life, or who feel clever by having sarcastic uncaring characters. So the quest depends on willingness go be combative about the aspie scene's standards of personal fairness whenever they wobble, and never just passively take what the big organisations deign to give us. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

The work the Scottish Autism Services Network is doing with us, putting our own voice into the info produced about us for all sorts of health or other service providers, is part of this vigilance. That won't be delivered to us by submissively trusting the big organisations who speak without consulting us, to "choose their priorities."

All organisations who don't speak out about how school homework destroys some aspies' chance to be child authors like the 2 well-known ones, commit a crime of child cruelty and endangerment. All organisations who ignore the case that because aspie clumsiness and gaps of attention give us a greater than equal likelihood to lose small objects, public transport can no longer require any passengers to carry losable tickets or passes, commit an endangerment of our safety. Yet one director of a lobby group for us just wrote to me, "I note what you say", a well-known bureaucrats' answer that says utterly nothing. If they lobby employers about us without mentioning the biological entitlement to dress freely, that is proved from our sensitivity and metabolism issues, they have lied about us while gambling with our life opportunities. Which all makes it important to keep local groups self-run, not provided by the big organisations, and independent of any urge to keep in their favour. There must be no divisive attitude of one generation against another, because that's not friendly, and there must be a declared automatic right for all members to count each other as equal in social worth and wantedness.

No group, big or small, local or national, is ethical unless it declares that in every conflict between personal fairness and the group's wider interests, personal fairness shall always automatically win. Our web communities too have good and bad among their number. It would be so much easier on emotionally stressed aspie reasoning if our scene was all good, it's not, but a dedication to keep the good parts of it going is our best strategy to belong and keep some part of society even half-reliably worthwhile.

Maurice Frank