The dudes who want to see Greta Thunberg spanked

@Naglfar

Part of me suspects that a possibility of where such an idea came from is that they are often force fed or otherwise operate under highly narrow and stereotyped assumptions about special needs individuals instead of understanding the realities and possibly think that all special needs people who are neurodivergent are always, and without exception; some kind of always blissfully unaware, child-like individuals who have no real cognitive functions nor posses the ability to reason, posses awareness or otherwise can only grasp and express basic instinct and needs.

And while a number of people on the low funtioning end of neurodivergent special needs can and do fall under such lines at times, it isn’t by any means universal, and there are moments and cases where even low functioning individuals are able to express complex notions, ideas and lines of philosophy; if perhaps struggling to convey such things for one reason or another.

To the point though; people operating under such stereotyped and broad presumptions do not possess critical nuance. And it seems that in doing so they throw neurodivergent individuals, regardless of where on the spectrum they land: under the bus.

Vaccine damaged [Au]tistic children are the gold the elite trade in.

But also it appears to me that with this statement OP is adding an extra layer of ick to the antivax and the ableism: they’re not only claiming that vaccines cause autism; or even that Big Pharma knows this and is suppressing the information; but that “the Elite” are *deliberately* trying to give everybody’s kids autism by vaccinating them, because apparently autistic people are more easily manipulated or something (I’m guessing OP is anti-autist, but not an Autism-Warrior parent, because the latter usually insist their children cannot be reasoned or communicated with).

Anyone else think the punning on Au/gold might be a new dogwhistle to replace triple parentheses?

Even the term “low-functioning” can be problematic because it ends up being applied to people who are simply nonverbal. Look no further than the history of the word “dumb” to see how readily verbal deficiencies are equated with cognitive deficiencies. It’s hard to know if there really even is a meaningful notion of “low-functioning.”

I don’t think this is about not accepting science and reason, either. Anybody can be irrational, and too often science and reason as institutions have been abused for nefarious ends. It’s what they’re irrational about that’s the problem.

@Victorious Parasol

What is it with the lima beans? My mother also was a lima bean enforcer (until one day my sister burped them all the way across the table into my brother’s food and she realised, oh wait, she’s not eating them because something is wrong and hmm maybe this forcing-to-eat shit is a bad idea). No one I know likes lima beans. Why do they pick that hill to die on? Couldn’t they have picked like broccoli or peas or something more nutritious than lima beans? (I mean yes, ideally nothing and we wouldn’t have any food issues, but if something must be picked, why the lima beans?)

@Knitting Cat Lady

I’m so sorry to hear about your father’s experience. My father had just the opposite experience: his meals (and his brothers’) were rationed based on the caloric needs of his oldest brother, who had a metabolism way, way under norm. He can remember stealing handfuls of flour and eating them plain, because no one would notice flour missing–sugar would get noticed, as would fruits or vegetables, but no one expected plain flour to go missing so he would eat that because he was starving.

He tells that story as a “haha, what hijinks I got up to” story, but to me it’s just sad that parents can’t adapt to the unique needs of more than one child. Now he has issues with wasting food even when he is stuffed to the brim, and will go around eating other people’s leftovers if they plan to throw them out, because he can’t stand to see the waste. I mean not wasting food is a good principle to have, but we are talking excessive here. To a very detrimental point.

@ Big Titty Demon:

Maybe it’s the Filboid Studge-ness of lima beans? They taste awful so they *must* be good for you?

@Surplus

Ugh, no. Peas are revolting. Forcing someone to eat them against their will ought to be classified as a form of torture and banned under the Geneva Convention. ?

Same should likely be done regarding broccoli and lima beans.

Don’t forget to also ban cauliflower force feeding. It’s one of the few foods that makes me nauseous just to smell it.

These posts are so fast now, it’s hard for me to keep up. But that’s okay!

Thunberg is going to be in Montreal on Friday for the climate march! It would be cool to see her even if from far away and especially to see everyone else. I was at the climate strike in March and there was a great turnout – it was inspiring to see.

I may still have to stay at work, though, to help train the new admin assistant. 🙁 I’ll gauge what’s the thing to do that will be most fair to people. Not everybody can organize in the same way.

(The Left: let’s organize!
Me: but I’m not organized!)
😛

As a child, I was always very confused by media that presented sick children being cared for and comforted, because I had never experienced anything like that.

My mother was a firm believer that if we experienced illness as in any way pleasant, we would constantly lie and claim to be sick. So she made sure that our illnesses were as miserable as possible.

Not that this stopped her from assuming that any illness, or just feeling unwell, that we claimed was a lie anyway. But once you had finally, finally, convinced her that you were generally ill, the rules were very strict:

You could lay in bed awake, or asleep.

You could get up only to go to use the toilet or empty your vomit bucket.

Nothing else. At all. No reading, no music, no watching TV, no playing with anything. Doing ANYTHING to distract from your misery meant that you weren’t really sick and you were a lying liar.

This was not an idle rule. One time, when I had the flu, I was feeling stir-crazy and started fiddling with some Lego bricks as I lay in bed. She caught me at it, started screaming that I was a liar, and dragged me off to school, where I spent the next two days sick as a dog.

These rules applied whether it had anything to do with staying home from school or not. Sick in the middle of summer break? Same thing. Anything less than abject misery would just encourage us to view illness as a Fun Time to be pursued at all times, leading to the aforementioned lying.

This policy did, in fact, lead to me lying about whether I was sick. It lead to me hiding illnesses from my mother, because I was going to be sick and miserable wherever I was, but if I was at school or at home without my mother knowing I was sick, I would at least have things to occupy my mind and distract from how awful I felt.

@allandrel

So Pippi Longstocking is Swedish Superman? I mean, if I had had boil the concept of Superman down to its essence it would be “What if the most powerful person in the world was also the most moral?”

Pippi is indeed moral–but not above lying. She’s a child after all. Most of all, she’s quirky as hell and intrepid as hell. And to think that she burst on the scene in 1945. That means that all throughout the 1950s Pippi was doing her oddball thing.

This is an interesting perspective:

https://newrepublic.com/article/154879/misogyny-climate-deniers

@ Alan Robertshaw:

I saw similar article the other day with the headline “Why Climate Scepticism Has a Misogyny Problem,” and my response was that apart from the two things likely being intertwined, it’s a little unsettling to see “Why X Has a Y Problem” when X and Y are both bad things – it’s like hearing someone say “Y’know, that Nazi party? I think they’re attracting a lot of racists.”

@Alan Robertshaw
I can’t say I’m surprised that climate change deniers are misogynists. I’d guess many are also white supremacists and Nazis. It seems that if a person is a reactionary who opposes women’s rights, they’d also be likely to deny the science behind climate change. And it seems that if a person is bigoted in one way, they’re likely to have other bigotries as well.