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.

Is there gentle caring society without religious places in it?

Here's proud of a Youtube comment I just made, on how sneery tough antagonistic character types - the human majority - can't get along well in a thinking way and create local social scenes around their ideas. Anyone who wants that to happen needs to be favourable to making social behaviour softer and more including and welcoming than it usually is.

It's an atheist cartoonist, called "DarkMatter2525", - hey I happen to be sceptical of dark matter. In this cartoon www.youtube.com/watch?v=wguAQHWVcZY he complains that urban America is very densely full of churches, and atheists feel hassled by it. This was one of his emotionally serious offerings, probably his most self-troubled one.

He is a prolific maker of comedy cartoons on theology, though like all the Youtube atheists he never looks at the thesis of a God not having any magic omnipotence. The cartoons directly about conservative and morally harsh religious ideas, and how they would really work out for society if practised literally, are addictively incisive and what any conservative theocracy needs to hear. They are really good and deliciously libertarian. Others are turkeys leaving you furious at wasting time on them: those are the ones where he digresses onto lots of unnecessary sex and nudity themes to make himself look cool. Comics with macho characters always do that. Particularly offensive in some of his cartoons are some too harshly head-on uninhibited depictions of violent or medically tragic deaths, within a comedy context, made shockingly coldly unfeelingly by someone who believes in no existence after death, and wishes to attract his viewers to that harsh macho belief too - all those of his cartoons are just as bad as the harsh scriptures he argues for being offended by.

His sense of humour is emotionally gloating and psychologically sneering in the misery ehancing horrible way that has remained popular ever since the barbaric "alternative" comedy of the 80s started it. There was a clue in there to his complaint, to the social imbalance favouring Christians over atheists in having any neighbourhood social life with likeminded folks towards religion and its issues. And it's not only Christians, it's everyone who feels compatible with a church, you might not be a Christian but still feel likdminded enough with a liberal church to belong to it socially. I wrote -
"
" Plenty of nice folks are atheists. But the milder forms of organised religion, regardless of their content's rightness or wrongness, have a social virtue that practically nothing else achieves [besides the aspie scene, hopefully!] - they bring together softer gentler characters and give them a social space to be themselves and accepted, a refuge. From what? From human uncivilisation, from persecution by all the derisive-hearted macho thug chararcters who are a tyranny of conformity to a futile harsh cycle of sneer and violence which destroys everything nice. And because being macho includes deriding every nice idea in religions, not for being wrong but for being nice, macho sneer characters are always atheists.

This makes it far harder for atheists than for the religious, to like each other and get along well socially. Consequently, they can't form so many local associations equivalent to churches. The religious outcompete you not on ideas, their ideas can be dumb without limit, but on escape from cruel human nature. If humans were socially nicer than we are, there would be an equal spread of atheist churches. If you want to fight back from being surrounded by churches, encourage atheists to be saintly instead of tough personalities, ignore every macho sod who drops atheism in disgust at it, and look forward to the quality life of basking in warm-hearted tolerant soppy company.

That prospect is not shaking your self-esteem, is it? because that wouldn't be the rational response to its reasoned merits.
"

Maurice Frank