Real Changeling 🏴 @forAll52@deadinsi.de

love it when my family members tell me math is terrible and a waste of time. Thanks for being so supportive.

@GreenandBlack left unity was the ultimate piece of tankie propaganda

@garfiald
I think I said this a while back but the mental block that most liberals have with the concentration camps is that the camps force them to reckon with the fundamental evil of mass incarceration, and simply ignoring the real lesson is much easier than being forced to say "no but it's good when we do it" out loud

@garfiald People get rather impulsive and jump at anything they're told will help regardless of consequences when it's directly following an attack. That's got the US got the Japanese internment camps and the Patriot Act.

@garfiald they will literally never ever ever fucking accept that all the fucked up things that take place in this country are "bipartisan"

its interesting to me that the conclusion liberals are drawing from the american concentration camps escalating is "trump needs to be removed", rather than "holy shit, our supposed "democracy" and "checks and balances" are incapable of preventing a literal genocide"

@revenant headline in image: "Airbnb Is Partnering with 23andMe, so Let Your DNA Plan Your Next Trip"

me: [screams in moderately informed about actual biology]

@_ampersand @revenant

A while back Air Mexico did a PR stunt where they got a bunch of Texan white people tested and when, surprise, some of them had markers for meso-american ancestors, offered them free air-fair to Mexico.

I'll bet this is similar.

@revenant other than just 'racism' what is even the technique/theory under here. Like, are they going to see a predisposition to diabetes and recommend areas that have low sugar diets or something?

I mean 23andme is so dumb they can't tell when people send them cat dna and they'll give different results to identical twins, so it's not like it matters, but what the fuck

@revenant oof, as if every european country doesn't have enough americans going "you know I'm 12% <country>!"

finally an Algorithm that's going to be even more racist than all the other existing ones

ancestry sites reinforce and condition white peoples minds so that they're more malleable to white nationalism. this comes in two broad ways.

the first is the obvious, "oh i have common ancestry with these great white heroes of culture and whatever the fuck, being me, a boring white shithead, is special"

the second is "um actually i can be as racist as i want because i'm 1% native american and 2% african"

ancestry is bullshit. more like.. incestry huehueheu

So, to wrap this up: harm reduction needs to become a standing community practice. To no small degree, it already is in the Autistic self-advocacy community, but this really needs to be a front-and-center effort in the neurodiversity movement in general.

Hopefully from that, perhaps we can influence therapists, but a lot of us don't need therapy (at least in relation to neurological issues), some of us benefit from medication and others don't, and either way, there's no catch-all in relation to that for any given neurodivergence. Just client needs (which always should be the priority, period) and theraputic trends (which can be non-beneficial if not harmful, as noted earlier).

We need our own communities of mutual support and transformation.

I should also note that the first suggestion that my ex-therapist made when I told him that his "anti-anxiety" approaches weren't working, and made things a lot worse almost immediately, was to suggest ABA. This is coming from someone who professes to be adamantly opposed to ABA. 🤔

And from the looks of things, CBT is *very* popular these days. So this isn't an aberration from an especially ignorant, if not deceitful, therapist -- this is standing practice, at least to a noticable degree.

In the UK, it appears that CBT is the go-to in general for many mh clients, including neurodivergent ones.

in contrast, i've used artistic practices, walking and grounding techniques to focus the kinds of interests that can start to veer into obsession territory, as well as forms of self-care and sensory self-regulation.

what finding relevant resources and support in the Autistic self-advocacy community did for me -- and for us, as a plural system -- is provide ways to improve on the self-regulation and self-care work we were already doing.

in contrast, therapy with a sort-of-paradoxically "pro-neurodiversity", very CBT-focused (although he didn't tell us that), former ABA therapist, was largely a waste of money.

a meal with a close, insightful friend would've been more useful theraputically, and much better company.

to extend the analogy further, the tendency to look at any form of clarification or non-compliance as "resisting treatment" is essentially like the old saying, "if you have a hammer, everything becomes a nail". which i've also had happen, and it also was unpleasant.

not "growth and change can be hard" unpleasant, "gaaaaaaaaaah" unpleasant.

i tend to look at patterns of behavior as tools. there's a reason that someone is using said tool, and on some level it is working. it may have side effects, including harmful ones, but also, tools can be put to good use. so then the objective is figuring out how to make the most beneficial use of said tool, without negating its value.

the way some clinicians use CBT is more like *takes the hammer away without asking*, *pulls out a chainsaw marked "scalpel"* and starts in on someone. which is counter-productive, if not harmful.

this is especially true in situations where CBT will likely not work as a "cure", anyway.

for example, trying to "program" an autistic client out of interests, sensory self-regulation, or modes of *necessary social interaction* in an NT-run society is demonstratably harmful. and yet, it happens anyway. (i've had it happen personally, and it most definitely was neither pleasant or beneficial).

i think the idea that some behaviors are inherently maladaptive is incorrect and virulently toxic, as well as being anti-harm reduction and anti-self-managed therapy.

at the core of this, on a clinical level, is behavioralism. while some forms of behavioralism can be helpful for some people in some situations, there's also a tendency (as with behavioralism in general) to look at all forms of behavior through that lens.

so then, anything a client does becomes a possible if not probable nail for CBT's hammer.

Yesterday, as we were walking out, I saw perhaps the worst thing about corp pride. It was a big picture stand with face holes. The figures you placed your face into were supposed to be historic Stonewall figures. The main face hole was a black trans body, with a flower headdress that was clearly done up to look like Marsha. As I was watching, an old white man placed his face into her body.
These are the people that kicked Silvia Rivera off stage, and now they want to wear the Pride those women created like a carnival show.