context also heavily welcome.
"We have no problem with trans people existing.
We just have problems with people making mockeries of trans people. No, your gender is not a dragon, and creating anthropomorphic animal characters is not a disorder, sexuality, or gender identity, even if you dress up as them or get off to porn of them.
You’re why trans and disability rights are always going to be at a standstill. Whenever some stupid thing happens, like cat litter and dog beds in schools to accommodate furries, it’s blamed on disabled and LGBT people, especially trans and nonbinary people, for existing.
You’re why actual children being childish get abused into literally taking their lives, because you broadcast that role-playing as an animal or creating whimsical wacky characters are symptoms of autism instead of a child being a child. They end up in an ABA school that grooms them into believing constant reactive abuse is normal. They’re never allowed anywhere outside of home, the short bus, and the school, because “if they acted like a dragon at a playground, they might actually believe they’re a dragon and they need help”. Then they end up mentally and physically ruined to the point of needing to live in a group home where they’re further abused until they die of stress, a drug overdose by the staff to make them “convenient”, or by their own hand. Because they liked dragons and pokemon a lot as a literal child.
You’re part of the extremely vocal yet incredibly small minority of trans and disabled people that those in power, in charge of those communities’ rights, look at and make decisions based on. You’re why they get dehumanized and divided from society. You’re why everyone else assumes everyone in these communities can’t make rational decisions, and makes arbitrary - and usually unfair - decisions for them. You’re why trans, nonbinary, and disabled voices are spoken over and ignored. You’re why trans, nonbinary, and disabled people are treated like jokes.
We have a problem with the progress of our fight for transgender and disability rights being reversed because some internet users want clicks, clout, and imaginary points that will mean literally nothing in the next five years."
Guess the user and the instance, and who actually got downvoted and banned.
What people tend to also forget is that every letter in LGBTQ stand for an entirely different group of people, yet they are threated as one community. Imagine Mechanics and Sales people would be part of the same union. 2 entirely different branches, with entirely different demands except that they all want to get paid on time.
For most it is just more convenient to bunch everybody who’s apart from the “norm” into a single group and call it a day.
I’m personally against labels, but if you’re going to give them names, then maybe don’t pile them all together.
Edit: This is not personally a critique of what you said, it just fits the topic of tour comment.
The shit I’ve endured for 10 years that destroyed every aspect of who I was as a child. The reason I hate just about everything aside from work and video games. I used to like just about all the entertainment media aimed at my age but that was exclusively caused by that stupid puzzle piece and not because I was a human being who liked stuff. And then that same stupid ass puzzle piece that made me like too many things too much is why I only enjoy work and games. Right, that stupid puzzle piece was why I wasn’t supposed to be able to work at all, but that same stupid ass puzzle piece is why I was So Smart and knew how to get a job.
Actual human beings go through silly phases and emotions when they’re teenagers, but I only did because of that stupid puzzle piece. Wanting bodily autonomy and privacy was a symptom of that stupid puzzle piece. Wanting to fucking shower was a symptom of that stupid puzzle piece, but so was smelling bad. ABA dumbed me down into dead weight alongside several other children. Imagine loving transformers and action movies as a teenager, must be a stupid disorder because no one actually likes those movies at all.
That shit destroys lives before they’re given a chance to start. Literally mentally murdering the child and keeping a corpse alive.
Oh, right, I’m actually wrong because you lived a real life on the right side of society where everyone treated you like an actual real human being for your whole life, went to real school for real humans where you were actually encouraged to grow and learn, graduated a real high school where you were treated like an actual human being alongside all the other actual human beings and most likely have fun high school memories and pictures you actually consented to be in, then took a trendy test online and call yourself autistic for internet clout and “envy” people who were labeled with that shit as children and had their whole lives forcefully taken from them. Right.
Apologies for my ignorance but I’m having trouble following this—what’s ABA and what’s the puzzle piece?
I’m sorry you had such a bad experience. ABA is just a science though, and it’s the way it’s applied that can be good or bad.
ABA should not be used to tell someone to not to like the transformers as a teenager. There are clear ethical guidelines about this. But supervision can fail, unfortunately. You could report your practitioners I suppose. But is that what actually happened? Why did they restrict you from transformer movies?
I have seen unethical practitioners that work with parents who say “this is age inappropriate, my teenager shouldn’t be watching Sesame Street anymore” and try to discourage it. But this is rare these days and the field discourages practitioners from doing this. However, depending on how old you are and where you live and just because shitty people exist this could very well be the case
But I’ll be real with you: I have seen people who are critical of ABA say things like what you said and it turns out they were not given access to their favorite movies because it was made contingent reinforcement. This is how ABA works, it is operant conditioning. But what these people are leaving out is that they were having major functional impairments that required some kind of enticement and there weren’t many things that motivated them to expend effort. They would only shower or brush their teeth once a week or less, they would not do homework ever to the point of failing classes, they would exhibit violent behavior that was dangerous to themselves or others, serious communication deficits, etc.
the way we would encourage the behaviors we needed to see more of and discourage the problematic behaviors was through reinforcement based systems. Of course, reinforcement can always feel like punishment when one fails because a true reinforcement system requires one to withhold reinforcement when necessary so the learner can conflate reinforcement with punishment pretty easily
And I would suggest maybe talking to someone about this, you’ve got a real chip on your shoulder about this. I merely asked you a sentence it and you went into a paragraph long diatribe assuming a great deal about my history. You don’t know me or my experience. You’ve clearly got some trauma, maybe it’s time to deal with that?
I’ll never understand why people give a shit about votes on a form of social media that is clearly pointless. This place is a timepassing entertainment vehicle full of trolling and silliness. The points don’t matter. Why care?
Up there with people who waste their time browsing other users history so they can remark about it.
The points matter in so far as they can be used as a metric of what is and is not acceptable within a group (or even society as a whole in some cases) as well as what is displayed first for users who use the default sort method.
Though it’s a crutch. I also regularly get one or two random downvotes for random uncontroversial stuff. I get some proportion of downvotes if I give a nuanced opinion and/or dispell urban legends. And I regularly get very few (if at all) votes by helping someone in the comments or giving the correct answer to a question, while other people get 800 upvotes for posting a meme picture, which they just took from someplace else… Don’t get me wrong, this might be as good as we can do. But I don’t think voting works particularly well for what it’s trying to achieve.
And it doesn’t really help me. If I do the default sort, it’s mostly news articles and pictures that show up and have a score of several hundreds. And the interesting posts are buried somewhere. So I kind of disregard the votes while browsing Lemmy, making them kind of meaningless for me and that purpose. YMMV. But I think I either need to unsubscribe from all those communities, or use several distinct subscription feeds.
Without looking I’m pretty sure it was something about MLK’s dream speech where he mentions:
“…right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers…”
So, nothing massively contentious so far. The transcriber had capitalised the “B” of black but not the “W” of white. I suggested that seemed a very unequal way to address inequality. There was a mini downvote frenzy - eventually some diamond pointed out “AP” has a style guide that suggest capitalisation of one but not the other is correct. Seems weird, but there it is.
I can’t prove it nowadays, but I once remarked that society should find a way for homeless people to be separated by how they became homeless.
The context was that homelessness is a spectrum and that being indiscriminate when doing anything related to the homeless downplays the enormous gap between forms of it. I’ve been on both sides of it before; I’ve technically been “homeless” (I’ve had a roof over my head for as long as I can remember, but it was often couch-hopping), as well as have done things related to the homeless. Sometimes I ask about it, I expect by now it might range between “I’m a teetotaler whose house burnt down and I’ve been on the streets ever since” to “I keep getting a home but keep losing it in shady gambles”. Surely homelessness is a case-by-case thing, right?
People are blind to these differences, however. To most outsiders, homelessness is just homelessness. From the outside, these things don’t come to mind when people are protective, so if you mention wanting to do it case-by-case, you feel the wrath of the population who I have seen seemingly insist I’m being discriminatory over victims of a sensitive topic. I think maybe a few hundred or so people weighed in against me. It was not only what many might call the most particularly severe example but also one of the earliest. The tragically “funny” thing is that it’s one of those things where most people immediately learn the reality of as soon as they become a victim of homelessness, actually interact with them, or even spend time in a psych ward like me because a lot of them turn themselves in because it means you’ll get care, so it becomes one of those things that’s said to be like a litmus test for if someone is genuinely associated with it versus someone who sees portrayals of it and tries to look like they are.
This was probably all in the phrasing or maybe people just don’t understand the reality of the situation?
I worked for several years doing mobile therapy that included a significant amount of homeless outreach and crisis management. Everyone deserves to be housed, bottom line, but what it takes for that to happen is a complex situation
There’s the “xxx,xxx amount of homeless but xx,xxx,xxx amount of empty homes in america” statistic that people throw around. I forget the exact numbers but I’m pretty sure thats the scale, if not the take away is that you could literally give each homeless person a free house and still have millions of empty houses. But this would not solve homelessness, at least in the current system. The overwhelming majority would be back on the street fairly quickly. Even if you eliminate the need for mortgage there’s still the need for property taxation; if you eliminate that then communities start to get real shitty. Even if you eliminate that there’s still utility and food costs. Even if you eliminate that there’s still maintenance and not actively destroying the place.
Institutionalization isn’t necessarily the answer although in extreme cases it can be. We had supported rehabilitation programs that were pretty successful, basically apartments with staff that would keep tabs on you, help you budget, do resumes, help you get to drs appointments, make sure you took medications (but didn’t force you to unless there was a court order/probation situation and even then it wasn’t like a “force” situation although there was inherent coercion as not taking meds would be reported to po/court), apply for section 8, etc. you would stay there for a year or two and then move to a more independent placement once supports were in place.
There were also longer term programs for people who genuinely struggled and just couldn’t get that step down to work. These were similar but had less focus on connecting to services and were more akin to nursing homes with more psychiatric care
But then there were also more intensive residential programs we referred to for people with more serious mental illness or addiction issues
The issue, of course, was funding. We had like 32 beds in the short term and 11 in the long term. Funding was like 50% state funding, 20% grants, 30% donations and fundraising and the budgets were tight. Meanwhile the town probably had 30-50 actively homeless at any given point on top of whoever wasn’t in the program and another 50-100 with insecure housing. Even the intense programs, which generally had more secure state funding, still had an overall lack of beds and would have very long wait lists. Sad stuff.
That was about a decade ago now, I feel like it has to be worse now post Covid and trump. I can only imagine what the next 4 years will do to their funding
It’s almost as of there are archetypes for patients in hospitals due to common, middle of the bell curve occurrences of comorbidities. Example: diabetic dialysis patient with anemia and 1-2 amputations above/below the knee due to pernicious vascularization complications. No, that’s not your family member, that is a common scenario given the convergence of certain conditions.
Should medical professionals be indiscriminate here? Treat everyone like a dialysis patient? No. That sounds ridiculous because it is. People are wild and varied within every context including homelessness.
Here’s an archetype situation seen among the homeless population. A pernicious issue with lower extremity circulation occurs (due to diabetes, frostbite, infection left untreated) such that patient can no longer walk after receiving medical care (often amputation). Patient is also homeless and can’t just be discharged to street due to inability to walk. Patient needs to be placed, on Medicaid, in a nursing home. Patient is on the sexual predator list and thus no nursing home will allow them in their facility. Patient sits in hospital room taking up space, not receiving medical care because they no longer need any, waiting, for months. That hospital room is now a hotel room with medical professionals supplying room service.
Go to the sex offender registry and do a 3 mile radius search of your own address. Good odds you’ll find some, and more than you think you should. No address, then how do these guys get registered by their location?
It’s not as daily scenario, but a memorable one that happens every 3-6mos like clockwork. And those are just the homeless sex offenders coming in for medical treatment that cannot then just be discharged back to street.
People are not the same and should not be treated as such. You are not wrong there. Destroying children shouldn’t receive the same consideration for an apartment as someone living in their car due to a bit of bad luck.
