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khizuo [ze/zir] @hexbear.net

Disabled Community Megathread - November 11th, 2024 to November 17th, 2024

Unfortunately I don't have the energy to put together some info for the mega this week, hopefully I can pull together something for next week though. As always, we ask that in order to participate in the weekly megathread, one self-identifies as some form of disabled, which is broadly defined in the community sidebar:

"Disability" is an umbrella term which encompasses physical disabilities, emotional/psychiatric disabilities, neurodivergence, intellectual/developmental disabilities, sensory disabilities, invisible disabilities, and more. You do not have to have an official diagnosis to consider yourself disabled.

Mask up, love one another, and stay alive for one more week.

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134 comments

  • I finally got to get back to FNB this last weekend and we all hung out and talked a bit after we ran out of food(always a good sign) and I feel like a super judgey bastard because, originally, I was like "I'm probably the furthest left person here." I guess I was just going on internal biases due to where I live, but turns out, a lot of those running it are anarchists and other flavor of socialst. I was both humbled and extremely happy that I got to shoot the shit about the current political climate with handful of IRL legit socialists. I love it. I'm a bit shamed that I just assumed. But I was in the presence of people that have been at this since the 90s. Super fucking humbling.

    Also we are all introverts that suffer from major social anxiety lol.

    One of them that I actually met a few weeks ago at my vegan food truck place, was introducing me to her friend and threw me off because she asked me for my pronouns. Def not used to that IRL because I'm pretty male presenting but it was the first time I got to try out "he/him but sometimes they" since I've been doing some personal soul searching and think I might be demi or agender. I've always been male presenting cishet but I've also never really cared about my gender all that much and do "girly stuff" that I like. And a lot of "guy stuff" I kind of hate. I'm not really sure where I land but I'm gonna talk more with my therapist this week about it and try to figure it out. I might just be suffering from patriarchal bullshit.

    Other than that I do have training officially lined up for this weekend so we might have a tiny bit of financial security coming soon. I have a job interview for that Facebook/Meta for a software position that I'm still hoping to get some study time in on. I'm not really qualified for it but I'm not gonna turn it down if they offer it to me. Not gonna keep my hope up though because I can't really afford to do that mentally anymore.

    Anyway, I hope everyone's week goes great. Politics right now is a fuck so don't forget to take care of yourselves.

    • That’s nice. I hope to find cool people like that again.

      Gender isn’t real. My theory is that when we autists reflect on the idea our bottom up processing makes it easy to experience that emptiness, whereas NTs will project their social standards and absorbed ideas as truth. Nothing is bad about not caring about your presentation and such, but if you find that the patriarchal mold has constrained you and trying other things makes you happier then that’s great too.

      Good luck.

      • I'm basically a gender abolitionist but I hesitate to say that even in disabled spaces. I mentioned as much in one of the many weekly "I don't feel like my assigned gender" posts on /r/autism and someone got all spicy saying "here we go with patriarchy bad again" and I just didn't have the energy for it lol. They were trying to defend gender from the perspective of feminism activism, but like if the patriarchy didn't exist, social constructs like gender wouldn't exist, therefore, we wouldn't have a need for activism in the way it exists currently. Basically gender is a tool by the patriarchy to arbitrarily assign oppression to certain classes in society and now I can't paint my fingernails pink without chuds side-eyeing me lol.

        But that's all to say I don't really wanna minimize our comrades who are on their own gender journeys. I just want people to be allowed to be happy as the people they are. I just think I'm sometimes kinda "girly" feeling but I donno what that means.

        • I think we're on the same page but I just want to gently remind you that for some people, gender is really really important. Like, critical to their survival and something they have fought upstream against society for over many years of suffering and hardship.

          I'm enbie and to me, on a personal level, gender is genuinely unimportant to my own identity but when I talk about the abolition of gender I try to frame it in terms of something like abolishing enforced gender or abolishing gender norms because I don't want to unintentionally signal to anyone, least of all to certain trans comrades, that I'm coming to steal their gender from them. All I want is for gender to be optional and based on exactly how the individual feels at that particular moment; you can look how you want, you can act how you prefer, and you can be the gender(s) that you feel and none of these things have to "align" and anybody who tries to tell you that you aren't permitted to do something/that you have to do something/that you're doing it wrong can go straight to hell because unless they abolish that attitude immediately then they're gonna get their dental record abolished.

          I get how it feels because for myself, my experience of my own gender is summed up by one big fucking meh. But I can't univeralise my own experience of being gender's distant acquaintance and I absolutely do not want to replace gender normativity with agender normativity since that's just gonna be the same shit, different texture for plenty of people, especially trans people, for whom gender really does matter. I'm coming for the normativity; I'm not coming for your gender.

          but like if the patriarchy didn't exist, social constructs like gender wouldn't exist

          I don't want to get into the weeds on the ontology of the social construct of gender here however one thing that's important to me is drawing upon Foucault's concept of reverse discourse, especially to do with the term queer; without cishet-normativity, the label queer would not exist. However the original discourse of the label has been subverted and it has been thoroughly reclaimed as a symbol of pride, of unity, and ultimately of power across the queer community. With this in mind, I think the reclamation of the term queer has been even more radical than it would have been if we simply managed to abolish its use from our culture.

          So, for the people who are engaging in a parallel sort of reclamation of gender on a personal level, because for most/all of their upbringing they had faced a constant barrage of proscriptive gender norms from all angles, they bore down against that great and terrible dragon of gender normativity whose scales glittered with the accretion of a thousand years' of gender normative values—each scale being inscribed with a gendered "Thou shalt!"—and they managed to fucking slay that dragon with a resounding and triumphant "I am!"... I have to ask myself, are these not the people who embody the very same spirit of revolutionary reclamation that I described above?

          In my opinion, if you slay that dragon then you get to do whatever you want with the dragon's spoils. You are the hero in this story; I'm not going to deny you the glory that is by rights yours.

          • but I just want to gently remind you that for some people, gender is really really important.

            Absolutely. That's why I don't want to step on the toes of people who are in that camp. Their gender identity is as important to me as it is to them. Something that stuck out with that gender accelerationist manifesto is that just because we may strive for gender abolition, doesn't mean gender identity will go away, it just means it will not longer be a tool to be used by the ruling class(of course ideally the ruling class will be gone) in order to put us in arbitrary boxes. My genderness is gonna be completely different to the next person's genderness. I don't wanna seem like I'm coming as if I'm saying someone's else's genderness is pointless or anything. Apologies to anyone that might have read it that way.

            I'm enbie and to me, on a personal level, gender is genuinely unimportant to my own identity but when I talk about the abolition of gender I try to frame it in terms of something like abolishing enforced gender or abolishing gender norms because I don't want to unintentionally signal to anyone, least of all to certain trans comrades, that I'm coming to steal their gender from them. All I want is for gender to be optional and based on exactly how the individual feels at that particular moment; you can look how you want, you can act how you prefer, and you can be the gender(s) that you feel and none of these things have to "align" and anybody who tries to tell you that you aren't permitted to do something/that you have to do something/that you're doing it wrong can go straight to hell because unless they abolish that attitude immediately then they're gonna get their dental record abolished.

            Ok it does sound we are on the same page :)

            because unless they abolish that attitude immediately then they're gonna get their dental record abolished.

            I have Foucault on my list to read but it probably won't be for a year or 2 because of how backlogged I am but now I'm eager. And you dragon analogy is powerful. I guess at the end of the day, just because my genderness isn't that important to me(I'm probably 60% AGAB and 40% meh, for comparison) doesn't mean others' gender identity should be invalidated.

            • Yeah, we're on the same page. In that case, excuse my yapping.

              I have Foucault on my list to read but it probably won't be for a year or 2 because of how backlogged I am but now I'm eager.

              I'm conflicted about Foucault tbh. But at the end of the day his thought is very influential and there are some useful tools to add to the toolkit which his work provides so even if you don't agree with everything or you take issue with certain things, it's still very useful to read Foucault.

              And you dragon analogy is powerful.

              I have to confess that's really just me regurgitating Niezsche from memory and adapting it to gender normativity. I'm sure he'd hate that, which makes it all the better.

              I think the Foucault thing got my galaxy brain pinging off of Niezsche so it kinda just came pouring out. Also don't read Niezsche unless you really, really have the burning desire to. There are two types of people who read Niezsche: young, mostly white, men who are edgelords that want a philosophical justification for why they are better than everyone else and dusty old philosophy academics who are sequestered away in some university office building. You aren't either of those two key demographics, thankfully.

              • I have some Nietzsche but it's so low on my list it might as well not be there. I have Thus Spake Zarathustra and maybe some other stuff by him. I'm conflicted on reading him for the same way I am about reading Heidegger since they both have a history with fascism. I do wanna read Being and Time and Heidegger's essay on technology and those are probably first before Nietzsche for sure. But that's all lumped in with my next bout of philosophy. I have this anarchist theory kick I'm on, then revisit Marxist works, then possibly gender and queer theory(not sure what is gonna be in that yet), and I have a neurdivergent block I wanna get to some time in the future so philosophy might be after that? Lol. I need to read more.

                I'm sure he'd hate that, which makes it all the better.

                Also, this is praxis lol.

                For Foucault, I have Disipline and Punish, recommended by a friend. And I grabbed his History of Sexuality vol 1 and 2 because it caught my interest.

                • i think it's important to read broadly. Reading the opposition's theory isn't a bad thing - it's not like you're going to come out of that ideologically tainted, as long as you are a principled radical and you have your shit in order. Learning about fascism from fascist theory can give you insights into fascist thinking and strategy, especially if read critically.

                  Zarathustra is hard, especially as the entry point. I'd recommend Genealogy of Morality instead tbh. It depends what you want to get out of reading Niezsche because there are comprehensive reading lists to give you a very rich, start-to-finish tour of Niezsche's thought but I suspect that's not gonna be your angle. I recommend Genealogy because, although it is diving into the deep end, it's not as opaque as Zarathustra imo and it's a good thing to read either before Foucault or after as Foucault was directly influenced by Niezsche and especially his genealogical approach (hence The Birth of the Clinic and Archaeology of Knowledge and The Birth of the Prison and of course The History of Sexuality etc.)

                  and I have a neurdivergent block

                  Cool! If you're partial to audiobooks, don't sleep on TankieTube - there's a pretty comprehensive catalogue of audiobooks on there now including a narrow but growing selection of neurodivergent audiobooks. Most are professionally recorded audiobooks with the main exception being high quality amateur stuff from Socialism For All.

                  The three main audiobook channels to recommend are Neurodivergent Audiobook Library and a split between Communist Broadcasting Service which has an array of uploads but of which the audiobooks are mostly the hard end of theory and the kinda "core" communist stuff whereas Book Broadcasting Channel has stuff that tends to fall outside the "core" audiobooks for communist theory. Blackshirts and Reds? Communist Broadcasting Service. Biographies and works about historical labour struggles or prison uprisings and the like? Book Broadcasting Service. The BBC is more eclectic and broader in scope, so there's stuff of interest to materialists and radicals, with a primary focus on history/anthropology/sociology but also some works of fiction that are of relevance like The Grapes of Wrath etc. Or you could just use the search and see what you can dig up. There's plenty more audiobooks on the way, I've just been derelict in my duties to those channels temporarily.

                  • I went ahead and grabbed Genealogy of Morality and added it to my ereader.

                    I just made an account on TankieTube. I donno how much I'll use it but I might be starting a temp driving job soon so audiobooks are a great idea. Also saw they had NeuroTribes published and that's on my list lol. Thanks for thu suggestions!

                    I still donno how I wanna approach Nietzsche but Genology of Morality might be a good precursor to Disipline and Punish.

                    • Gotta second reading disagreeable and wrong works. Dialectics holds there are both positive and negative aspects of all things and you can both know get to know your enemy and sharpen your own outlook (even incorporating small good things from their outlook in your own). It’s important to read critically anyway, because generally agreeable people are wrong from time to time. I enjoyed Red Menace’s coverage of reactionary philosophers but haven’t had the opportunity to learn about Nietzsche from the source. Schopenhauer kinda sucks tho, and I most got bragging rights for saying I slogged through his “magnum opus.”

                      • I think this is a really good take. My next philosophy stretch is probably gonna start with Heidegger, then go to Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty, and of course finishing the last 2 books I have by Camus. But I wanna start with Heidegger because, aside from Husserl, and I guess a few other earlier writers, I understand that existentialism really took off with Heidegger and "being", but I also know he was at the least a Nazi apologist, and at most a full on fascist by the time he kicked the bucket. I am really curious about his essay on technology and how well it holds up with the 21st century too.

                        I think it's fair to read the stuff that the good writers got their ideas from. And, maybe some day when I'm brave, I might even tackle Hegel, or Bakunin. Hell, maybe I will add Bakunin back to my anarchy list after Kropotkin.

                    • I might be starting a temp driving job soon so audiobooks are a great idea

                      Congrats! I hope it goes well for you. I'm not really publicising it, though I'm not trying to hide the fact either, but those are the channels that I'm running. I wanted to help turn TankieTube from being just a Youtube mirror site to a bit more of resource and a destination site so I threw my efforts behind it when it launched. (A certain Tanuki probably loathes me for straining the server and heaping piles onto the data storage network though.)
                      Idk if you caught the recent discussions on here about using the US election shitshow as a perfect agitation opportunity but comrade Cowbee has been crushing it and he has been developing a De-Libbify Yourself reading list (not the official name btw lol) that includes a lot of the audiobooks that have been uploaded to those channels that he's been using to lure people to the left, so it appears that the system works.

                      Upcoming uploads to the Neurodivergent Audiobook Library are:
                      Different, Not Less by Chloe Hayden
                      It Didn't Start With You by Mark Wolynn
                      Healing The Shame That Binds You by John Bradshaw
                      The Electricity of Every Living Thing by Katherine May
                      Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker
                      No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz
                      The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk (not a huge fan of this one personally but it's wildly popular so you gotta give the people what they want)
                      Transcending Trauma by Frank G Anderson
                      Life of the Mind Interrupted: Essays on Mental Health and Disability by Katie Rose Guest Pryal
                      The Happiness Industry by William Davies (probably going to go into the BBC and not the Neurodivergent Audiobook Library but it's potentially of interest anyway)

                      So there's the preview of the tasks I've been putting off for that channel. At the moment there isn't a groundswell of demand or interest in the ND Audiobook Library currently, not that I've done much to publicise or promote it but I'm okay with that because it allows me to work on other priorities. If it really kicks off I'll devote more energy towards that library at that point but for the moment I'm quite happy to just add a little bit here and there as I remember to.

                      If there are particular audiobooks that you know are available on Audible or similar websites that you want to see uploaded to the ND Audiobook Library or if there any on that list that you'd like to see appearing in the library let me know and I can make them a priority. Honestly us neuroatypicals gotta lift our piracy game though - we aren't doing a great job of distributing ripped neurodivergent audiobooks via piracy sites nearly as much as we could be doing. I intend on signing up for Audible or some other soul-sucking audiobook site to rip some of the audiobooks that aren't available on piracy sites at some point, although that's low on my priority list because of costs and because, clearly, I'm not suffering under a shortage of pending uploads to TankieTube at the present.

                      But yeah, hit me up if there's anything you would like to request and I'll see what I can make happen.

                      • I definitely caught Cowbee's reading list post lol. And also see his comments sprinkled throughout Lemmy. They are very much appreciated. It's also awesome that you are taking up the mantel on TankieTube with worthwhile ND material. I didn't catch whether you have Unmasking Autism on there but I am sure Mr. Price wouldn't mind. I suspect he may a comrade and also even promotes pirating his stuff if you can't afford it. I'm always gonna shill that book because it helped me a lot right after I got my diagnosis.

                        I'm not familiar with whether TankieTube has a mobile app and I'd need that for driving, but if I come up with some I can send you ideas.

          • I'm enbie so gender is genuinely unimportant

            Is a minor point, but it reads (to me) like enby = gender is unimportant

        • Fascinating. I feel compelled to espouse my abolitionist views whenever someone makes it sound like they’re seeking a solid place of belonging on an arbitrary spectrum. I’m conscious of our large diversity, but sometimes I forget how many autists are libs. I’d probably end up arguing with those types, but yeah they are can be well intentioned.

          To draw a parallel from my special interest: as the Buddha knows most linguistic truths are relative he does not tell everyone there is self or no self. It depends on the person what will be fruitful for their own path. He is wise and knows which relative truth will yield a more functional and productive perspective for those inquiring, and tells them such.

          • I read this last night and was having a hard time coming up with a worthy reply lol. I think my hesitation about being an abolitionist about anything is from pushback I've gotten online. I mentioned one time on /r/latestagecapitalism that I was a money abolitionist and people just weren't having it. Bizarre behavior from a sub that was supposed to be "ran by commies" but in the end I marked it up to libs being on there wanting a reformed government instead, and people that just haven't read any theory. I might have to be more in your face about it to others. I have close friends that are on various paths to the left that probably wouldn't bat an eye if I said I'm a gender abolitionist.

            I'm mostly an armchair philosopher and it's somewhat a special interest of mine but more so with how it functions as a foundation to socialism. But I did take a side street into phenomenology and existentialism this summer. With that said, your Buddha line actually weighs quite a bit on some stuff I've been thinking about. Probably not in the Buddhist sense but I've had a really weird relationship with "the self" and I think "ego" because I mostly just feel like a thing in a human suit and I didn't realize that was a thing until I started seeing it get brought up in autism spaces online. It almost feels like there is a conflict between what I am physically and what I am mentally. I'm not spiritual or anything but I just don't know what that conflict is.

            I guess this turned into more of a ramble. I'm so confused lol.

              • Meanwhile I'm probably more dissociated and anxious than ever before lol.

                Good ramble btw. If you had to recommend 2 or 3 Buddhist texts, which would you recommend? Also stuff on ontology and epistemology would be appreciated. My backlog is a mess but Buddhism is something I'm not afraid of reading more on. I did make the mistake of reading The Book by Alan Watts and that was kind of a mess. I'd like more of a primer to ground my understanding lol. I don't really have much to add since I'm more a fly on the wall regarding this side of philosophy and not quite a student of it yet. I do like me some Camus though lol.

                  • Holy moly, you delivered. I grabbed all the books and sent them to my ereader and added a bunch of new bookmarks. I'm not sure when I will be getting to my newly planned Buddhist block for reading but I also tend to shuffle stuff around and split up things so maybe sooner than later? And yeah I've read The Anecdote. I really enjoyed it, but I'm a bit skeptical on the cases of miraculous enlightenment. But I also don't fully understand what "enlightenment" really is.

                    Thanks for putting the effort into this.

                    • You’re welcome! I love effort posting and am thankful for your interest.

                      I’m assuming you’re referring to Elkhart Tolle’s case (please don’t be hallucinating, that was in the book). That’s pretty crazy and unlikely, but not impossible. What do I know? My small experience has given me some faith. There are probably enlightened beings. Science isn’t against it in some ways. Dr. K (healthy gamer gg) has some stuff on meditation and enlightenment and says yogis have far more control over their minds than average people and have more ridges and stuff in their brains. I just read that scientists found that people in deep meditation have all their neurons working in together in sync as the mediator experiences oneness. I know there’s some crazy stuff people have experienced and people talk about touching god in other traditions and the arising and passing away. I think they were using the definition too broadly (I’d say it’s either permanently seeing through the illusion of self or breaking all the fetters) but red menace has an episode talking about perennialism and enlightenment.

                      Also, I just randomly happened upon this passage (having read nothing else from the work):

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