Is autism becoming infantalised?

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Yes I think it's political. I don't say that the OP consciously intends it to be, but if a person echoes the rhetoric of a political movement, however unaware of it they may be, it becomes political because it helps that political movement.

You're coming across as alt right.

If that's not your intention then you might want to think about it.

Last edited by KT67 on 02 Sep 2020, 6:04 pm, edited 2 times in total.

He's scarily entrenched in it, is the problem.

It's a slippery slope and hopefully he stops at this position.

So I'm a white nationalist now? How have you come to that conclusion.

Why is literally everything Right Vs left with you? Do you not think about anything else? Almost all your posts have been about right vs left or has some sort of political slant to it. You just can't help but shoehorn politics into everything I say on this. Why are you not on PPR or something?

This isn't about race, it's about disability. The far right don't just target ethnic minorities.

Are you sincerely unaware that you're spouting right wing talking points in regards to disability?

Might just be that you don't have life experience so you think that your talking points are 'just my opinion' or 'how everyone thinks'.

If you want to leave politics out of it -

Personalise what you're saying
Realise it doesn't apply to everyone, including other HFA people. Co-morbids exist. Other disabilities exist.
Realise that what you need might change in time
Realise that what you spend wages on is highly personal. (Seriously? You want all aspies to buy sports cars? What if they'd rather get a second hand car and have more money to blow on their own specialist interests?)
Realise that people are shaped by life experiences. Older people will have longer memories. The time you come of age in will affect your opportunities or lack of them.
...

Just ask for a boot up the backside & say 'this might help some other autistic people too, it worked for me'.

If you have big grand visions of society and how to change it, that's called doing politics. If you have your own experiences, that's called your own experience.

If the first impression you make on someone apolitical is 'look at me and my fancy job and car', they will consider you to be 'materialistic' and 'vain'. We're pages into this before I see a different side of you (caring about family). Most people don't value you based on superficial things, and those who do aren't worth having around in the long run.

I'll put some personal stuff. Here are some of the issues I had. Right now, I'm in China about to start a IT teaching job after ten years or so of being unemployed.

These are the barriers that were for me. You don't have my experience and I don't have yours so I will give you and the others on here mine.

There is a lot more and I don't have time to get into the bulk of it.

a. Back in 2006 I graduated with a bachelors in Information Technology. I had jobs in non IT before and I was able to get an internship with help of course. My internship eventually became a job. There are tons of details that I don't have time to get into right now.

b. But, that became a bust.

c. During my time there I tried to find another IT job as I wasn't being paid enough.

d. For an entire month, I had to sit there and figure out what I was to type into the search engine. I had no idea what the positions that I needed to apply for were called and I had to back track into it.

e. When I finally figured out what I needed to type in. I searched day after day, week after week, month after month but I kept encountering the same problem. Everyone required multi-skills with years of experience. This was before I even knew that I was supposed to search in entry level jobs. Even entry level jobs required the same thing. Since, I kept encountering the same problem over and over again, I began to conclude I wasn't understanding something. I was missing information that most people simply knew as common sense that I did not.

f. Eventually, I had to claim disability as even when trying to apply to non-IT places like wal-mart or kroger I didn't know how to present my resume and work experience in such a way that they would hire me for things like bag-boy, janitor, etc. And, then try taking those f*****g personality tests in which the questions are so vague and the answers depend upon the situation. One question for applying to staples.com was "Do I believe life is not fair?" What sort of question was this? It was a riddle of the sphinx question. And, the questions gauge how I feel on things. It doesn't matter how I feel though.

Reality for the most part is independent of my thoughts, feelings, wishes, hopes and dreams. It doesn't matter if I feel life is not fair or if it is fair. Even then, supposedly everyone sees it as an "obvious" truth. If everyone sees it that way and people live their lives and our society and the world is ran on the maxim of life being not fair then why does it matter how I feel about it? I think I can safely assume there is a correct answer that they're looking for. More then likely why wouldn't I give them the answer they want even if I feel otherwise? My answer to the question is neither yes or no because it doesn't matter how I feel about or what my disposition towards the fairness or unfairness of life is since others have objectively concluded that the maxim "life is not fair" is a true maxim. These others make the standards and set the requirements. Why wouldn't I try to objectively conform to reality and society as best as I can unless it becomes detrimental to me?

Reality is absolute. Meaning, reality operates on a set of principles. Yet, these principles are relative only to assumptions made. On Earth, if I jump off of something I fall down. In space, it is not the same thing.

Francis Bacon said "Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed."

Because of the questions, the questions on their personality tests are meaningless to me.

A is A (law of identity) - a duck is a duck.

Going back sevreal pages, the most "political" it got was me suggesting 20 hours of compusory driving lessons and work training at the final year of school. How is that any different to the compusory swimming lessons or work experience in year 10 we need to do? My ideas are not that radical at all. It's just over 3 school days of free driving lessons and work training that I haven't specified. It's not even a suggestion which leans one way or the other politics wise and is barely politics at all. If you have issues with that, then why do you not have issues with forcing kids to attend school for 16 years full stop?

Where on earth have I ever suggested removing people's benefits too? This is a reoccurring theme and not once have I mentioned it or suggested it. So what if someone with aspergers does badly at the driving lessons or work training? It just wasn't for then.

I honestly never knew that the alt right have free driving lessons for all regardless of disability as part of their manifesto. That's news to me.

You didn't. It's that your ideology the UK has is what lead to so many deaths in the UK because they decided that many disabled people were fit to work.

Listen, I am on your side about trying hard and giving people with disabilities a chance to see what they can do and what their limitations are without being coddled. But however I was never against welfare or disability benefits and I knew if the gov decided to just strip it all away, it would lead to something like this the DWP is doing. Perhaps users here read your thread as a dog whistle.

Sure I do not think NTs would commit suicide if they ended up out in the streets if they lost all their welfare benefits vs the disabled.

OK back on to politics now. What I would like to see is a system that let's people get over the initial anxiety of finding a job that suits then while similatiously being a far better assessment of someone's ability to work.

A system that will by its nature be far more accurate than anything the DWP has and a system that might benefit people who otherwise were stuck in a rut.

Have you ever been thrown into an entirely different situation over night with little to no warning? I have and i'm sure 99% of people would burnout severely after week or two. I know I did My Level of functioning as decreases dramatically after that. I'm sure the vast majority of the time all you'd be doing is screwing up their lives more than it already is. Secondly being someone who has pushed themselves time and time again done their best to overcome their problems and has been all the worse for it. THIS DOES NOT WORK!! !! ! I do things that scare me all the time. I'm sure i'm nto the only one. You are seeing what you want to see here. What gives you the right ot make these judgements and screw with peoples lives. There is plenty of right or wrong. Throwing people into situations that aren't ready for that's called wrong. There's no but it might help. IT's just wrong. Hey, let's through you into a different country with nothing to your name and see hwo you like it. I'm sure you'd thrive right.
Firstly, When has this ever taken place in a public society. Maybe in something closed doors. Personally, I Disagree with this as much as you do. It's your responsibility to deal with what your stressors whether it's a sensory or emotional. Not, other peoples. Maybe part of it is me growing up where no one gave a damn about my stress levels.

You know cause the general public is all for Autistic people and don't have a toxic mentality to any of them at all right. /s
In general society has a toxic mentality to most disabled people especially those with 'invisible disabilities'. I don't think extreme safeguarding measures are fair to the people who aren't affected by them etiher. I think it's reasonable to have some small safeguards similar to epilepsy warnings. Like for real, if you can't stand clapping don't go to the f*****g theaters.

I'm glad you can get work after that.

Yes, I kept coming with the same issue. For entry level jobs, they want experience... Including the ones which don't require a degree, they still want experience... Idk how to get around that?

I would put my location into Indeed and similar job sites along with 'tick English degree'. Anything that asked for an English degree and didn't mention maths GCSE, I applied for. Anywhere in the UK. Anywhere in Ireland. Some America. All day, every time I wasn't doing my volunteering or at uni.

Realistically - I would not have been able to move to those places, I'm not that high functioning. But I was desperate to try to be normal. I was desperate to be given a boot up the backside tbh. And I was masking, like a lot of aspie women do.

As well as that, I was applying for any job at all that came up in my town through such sites or the local paper. As long as I was qualified.

How did you eventually get your job? Was it a similar process to the thing that didn't work or did you try a new tactic?

I got 5 interviews out of it except for the office job I got, which turned out to be a scam. I couldn't ask that office boss for references cos he did a vanishing act.

That's what I want theatres to do.

Have a bit of a sense of humility and act like cinemas. Cinemas warn before they do things which are likely to trigger seizures (such as strong lighting etc).

I've been in theatres where they don't.

What would be three days' migraine & eye strain for me, would be a lot riskier for an epileptic person.

Sometimes - esp with things closer to am dram - you even ask the person at the desk and they say 'oh yeah I'm sure it will be fine' and it's full of flashing lights. Cos they don't actually care, as long as it's bums on seats. I've learned in such situations, if it's possible, to take a seat at the end so that I can get out if needed without annoying the actors and audience too much.

Autism friendly shows are an alternative to that. Some are musicals, most are geared towards kids (like pantos etc).

Some autism friendly shows are very close to what I need. The same show but with normal lighting. Or a show which has been produced without thinking about playing about with the lights, I can handle those.

Some autism friendly shows are more for children or maybe LFA people? I don't like them personally. So I don't go. The ones where it says 'yeah it's ok if you walk around, but we banned clapping'. But I have no objection to these existing. They don't hurt me by existing, I just don't go to those ones or to the ones where it's likely to have flashing lights and where it isn't billed as 'autism friendly'. I go to the ones in the middle, sensory wise. If in doubt, I don't go.

Generally the autism friendly shows advertise why they are autistic friendly. So it's easy to avoid the ones with people walking around etc.

They exist cos the theatre can make money out of it. Let's be honest here. But it's a good thing that they're making money by catering to people's needs. It's worse that they're not putting up enough warnings - to autistic people but more vitally to epileptic people - about their shows that don't meet requirements. I think both are about making money tbh.

It's tempting to not care about making life easy for others if you've had a hard life yourself and not been treated well. That doesn't make it the right thing, though. Esp not to strangers you haven't met/society in general, rather than getting your own back on those who deserve it.

My life has been a mix between being treated well and treated horribly/abused. The better I get treated, the more generous I feel when it comes to how I treat others. People who remind me of my abusers and bullies get treated badly by me, sometimes unfairly but my guard is up more.

Out of interest how many times have you tried the GCSE maths exam? You might have mentioned it in a previous post but I probably missed it. You mentioned your difficulties with reading graphs but if that's the only main issue you have with the exam then you can still certainly pass it. You get a lot of marks for showing your working out even if the answer is wrong. If you tried the exam once then you might have just had a rotten maths exam for that particular year. Going over some previous maths GCSE exams and attending a maths course at a local collage where they're told of your issues with graphs might help. The teachers in collages are dealing with class loads of older people who failed all manner of GCSE's for countless different reasons. At least in the college I went to the teacher was great at telling people all the ways to squeeze every last mark out of an exam even with the questions you know full well you can't asnwer which might be all that's needed to get a pass.

Twice.

My dyspraxia gets in the way of making graphs, reading graphs, making 3d shapes, predicting 3d shapes.

I'd need a heavily algebraic, averages and arithmetic based test/course in order to pass it.

Idk if it's changed but that's not what GCSE maths was either in my day or when I did the course again 5 years later. I think it was majorly about geometry and graphs?

I'm HFA but if dyspraxia was in terms of 'functioning' then I'd be 'low functioning dyspraxic'. Basically, very dyspraxic.

I failed maths O level 1st time because there were a lot of geometry questions. Geometry being something I'm abysmal at. I passed 2nd time.

It might be worth going over the last few years recent maths exams to see how they've changed. When I done the exam in 2006 I don't really remember much about graphs but remember putting a lot of my workings out on questions I had no idea what the answer was and somehow passing. Guessing the answers and partially knowing where to begin when working them out seems to really bump up the marks. That was a tactic the teachers said to use and I can't argue with the results on that day in 2006 and this is coming from a guy with the mental arithmetic age of an 8 year old last time I was IQ tested. The logic of maths I can understand, using a calculator I can understand, reading graphs I can understand but like you I had one issue that was I was beyond terrible at mental arithmetic and should have failed as a result but didn't.

I imagine the issue with graphs can be cancelled out in some other way if you tell the teacher about your issues. Some really do know all manners of sneaky tactics that they'll spill the beans with.