Faking Aspergers? brain cancer, and wheelchair

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Pepperfire
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30 Mar 2008, 3:40 pm

TLPG wrote:
Setting out to upset people is entertaining??? WTF???


I gotta agree with that sentiment.

It's difficult enough going through life accidentally offending people even though I didn't mean to. Why would anyone want to do it just for entertainment?

That's a distressingly sad thought.



Number_2
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30 Mar 2008, 4:22 pm

I don't know.

I'm not ascribing motives to the original poster, as I don't know who they are, and I don't know what their aim is or is not (nor do I care).

I found the article itself interesting, and this is why:

Where ever I go in this world, I encounter people who assume I am "faking" something. It can be as simple as me having read / researched a whole lot about a particular thing and the other person behaving / saying that I don't know what I'm talking about / am not qualified to talk about it. It can be as serious as a new doctor not believing that I actually have a medical condition that is well documented and diagnosed.

No matter what it is, it is very frustrating for me.

When I read articles such as the one posted, I am reminded of why most of these people are so jaded. The woman in that article is not the exception, by far. Papers and local news programs are filled with stories of con artists.

I live in a major city. I had to go to the emergency room. I am allergic to codeine. The doctors would not give me any pain killers. Why? Because (I learned later) drug addicts tell emergency room doctors they are allergic to codeine so that they can get more powerful medicine. In response, the doctors give them nothing.


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richardbenson
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30 Mar 2008, 4:33 pm

TLPG wrote:
Setting out to upset people is entertaining??? WTF???
shes a troll dude


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shadexiii
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30 Mar 2008, 4:46 pm

TLPG wrote:
Can't this person be IP banned?

A persistent troll isn't slowed much (if at all) by an IP ban.



anbuend
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30 Mar 2008, 5:18 pm

Actually, how often you see something in the news isn't a legitimate measure of how common it is as opposed to something that doesn't appear in the news.

In fact, often it's the other way around.

Plane crashes, for example. Many people become terrified of plane crashes, even though they're far less common per flight than automobile accidents. Why? Plane crashes make the news. Successful flights rarely do. And humans have instincts that teach them to fear unusual things like flying over "ordinary" things like driving, and this is especially triggered when they hear such news, even though the "ordinary" things are possibly more dangerous.

It's the same way with con artists. They say 1 in 5 Americans is disabled in some way. But you don't see that proportion of disabled people in the news. If someone gets caught faking a disability, however, then that does make the news.

In fact, even many people "caught faking" are not really faking. People just have such stereotyped notions of disability that if a person in a wheelchair wiggles their toes or stands up and walks (both of which are possible for many people who legitimately use wheelchairs for disability-related reasons), a person who uses a white cane to cross the street sits down and starts reading a regular-print book (also very possible for legitimate reasons), etc., then someone or another will insist they're faking, including sometimes news people. (I say "sometimes news people" because I remember a friend of mine talking about a news show where someone used a hidden camera which caught a woman's feet wiggling and that supposedly proved she was non-disabled, even though her disability wouldn't have prevented her feet from moving like that.)

Not to mention the fact that there are people with genuine disabilities who scam the system, usually by doing something like claiming their disability benefits twice, usually out of a desperate effort to get livable amounts of money from a system that gives amounts of money that very few people would be able to live on without further assistance.

So anyway, if you take the amount of con artists pretending to be disabled, and you take the amount of genuinely disabled people in America, I am sure that the overwhelming majority would be genuinely disabled people, not con artists. It's just not generally a news story to say, Joe Blow down the street has real paraplegia or something, so you don't hear that as much.

The problem is that all of this equates to a stereotype, and many people believe the stereotype, or can be made to believe it, even though it's a tiny minority of people. And then (like I mentioned in a recent thread), disabled people will start saying that that tiny minority of people really cause the stereotype and thus make it worse for real disabled people because there are so many con artists out there, rather than saying that the stereotype itself is the problem and not representative of disabled people at all.

I mean, the fact that there are ditzy women (or people who seem to fit the stereotype of the "ditzy woman" but actually have learning disabilities, ADD, are hiding their intelligence in order to conform to a stereotype, etc) out there doesn't mean that they are the real reason for the stereotype (now fading somewhat) that women are ditzy, or that ditzy women (or their existences) are to blame for women being considered ditzy in general.

It's just that that's an easier stereotype to see the truth of, because it's fading. When disability stereotypes fade some more, it'll be easier to see that very few if any disabled people are con artists, monsters, bitter and nasty just because they're disabled, constantly self-pitying, amazing and courageous just for not killing ourselves, enjoying getting a free ride off of society, worthless eaters, evidence of our sin in past lives or our parents sin in this one, prophets with amazing wisdom, constantly waiting for death to make our lives "better", or any of the other stereotypes out there (whether positive or negative). It'll be easier to see that it's the stereotypes causing the true problems for us, rather than the people who either fit them or seem to fit them. When we're seen for who we really are, it'll become obvious that all the people who do fit those current-stereotypes are, rather than representatives of all or some huge proportion of disabled people (which is what stereotype would make them), just one more form among millions that disabled (or apparently-disabled) people can take.


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Number_2
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30 Mar 2008, 6:10 pm

anbuend wrote:
Not to mention the fact that there are people with genuine disabilities who scam the system, usually by doing something like claiming their disability benefits twice, usually out of a desperate effort to get livable amounts of money from a system that gives amounts of money that very few people would be able to live on without further assistance.

Desperate or not, this is illegal.

But it also is not germane to the topic of this thread (scamming for benefits, that is).

anbuend wrote:
The problem is that all of this equates to a stereotype, and many people believe the stereotype, or can be made to believe it, even though it's a tiny minority of people. And then (like I mentioned in a recent thread), disabled people will start saying that that tiny minority of people really cause the stereotype and thus make it worse for real disabled people because there are so many con artists out there, rather than saying that the stereotype itself is the problem and not representative of disabled people at all.



So, I guess the next time I need to go to the emergency room, I will bring my own Morphine/Valium/Miscellaneous Benzodiazepene.

Because it is actually a stereotype issue with a non-verbal, decently attired, insured person in epileptic status arriving by ambulance with their family. Not with the fact that the hospital is inundated with addicts and drug seekers.

Your example may fit some scenarios, but it doesn't fit the one I gave.


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cas
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30 Mar 2008, 7:08 pm

Number_2 wrote:
anbuend wrote:
The problem is that all of this equates to a stereotype, and many people believe the stereotype, or can be made to believe it, even though it's a tiny minority of people. And then (like I mentioned in a recent thread), disabled people will start saying that that tiny minority of people really cause the stereotype and thus make it worse for real disabled people because there are so many con artists out there, rather than saying that the stereotype itself is the problem and not representative of disabled people at all.



So, I guess the next time I need to go to the emergency room, I will bring my own Morphine/Valium/Miscellaneous Benzodiazepene.

Because it is actually a stereotype issue with a non-verbal, decently attired, insured person in epileptic status arriving by ambulance with their family. Not with the fact that the hospital is inundated with addicts and drug seekers.

Your example may fit some scenarios, but it doesn't fit the one I gave.


2

Sorry, but if they thought that you were an addict faking allergy, how can you or they judge how many people are drug-seeking fakes and how many are being true, and thus decide that it's a person issue and not a stereotype issue? Unless you are an addict faking allergy and so know definitely that it happens and often, then how do you feel so comfortable believing that you are the truthful exception but they are faking?



anbuend
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30 Mar 2008, 7:14 pm

I was referring to the part about seeing disability-related con artists everywhere in the news being evidence of them actually being everywhere.

But legitimate prescription drug use actually is more prevalent than prescription drug abuse, although drug abuse is obviously a problem (if one that America has mishandled to the point of making doctors be some of the only places that addicts can get drugs that are reliable in terms of purity and dosage, and then also frequently punishing doctors for even legitimate prescriptions). Keep in mind, also, that if they messed up with you, they could have messed up with a lot of other people: You're probably now included in their minds as one more example of a drug-seeking junkie they had to turn away, so how many of the other ones could have been just as legitimate as you were?


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Woodpeace
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01 Apr 2008, 8:50 am

The case of Azalea Cooley also involves issues of race and sexuality. It reminds me of the novel 'Black Girl/White Girl' by Joyce Carol Oates.

Set in a liberal arts college for women students in Pennsylvania in 1974-1975, it tells the story of Minette Swift (the black girl) and Genna Meade (the white girl), two 18-year-olds who are roommates at the college.

Minette is the subject of racist messages and drawings. The perpetrators are not discovered and there are rumours that Minette wrote and drew them herself.



01 Apr 2008, 3:28 pm

TLPG wrote:
Setting out to upset people is entertaining??? WTF???



No that's not what I meant. I meant trolls make this place more entertaining, everything I said. I've trolled here last summer with my Benny and Joon posts after two members here did their cat posts and I did it for fun and to see what people are going to say and I was being funny. But I got very few responses so it wasn't any fun so I stopped and I ran out of questions. Lot of people troll here anyway. Sometimes old WP members come back and troll.