Category: Ableism

Good morning mOm

Check out the masks that Jan made with your fabric that I sent her!!!

VERY SOGGY and abbreviated walk at Oakalla yesterday. Brought Paul back here for Ciabatta/pulled pork and tea.  The snow was all slush. No otters. Towhees though.

Paul wanted to make sure that you knew mOm, that we were walking out of the park, and talking about you, and just as we did so a pterodactyl (Dryocopus pileatus) called to my right, and its mate called from the other side of the woods, to Paul’s left. We both burst out laughing at the idea that you and p0p got represented for our walk… and as I say, Paul was adamant that I advise you.

Coming up to a romantic and emotional writing session but I’ve been working on it for about a week now in the background (thinkita thinkita). I am trying to write it without using ‘love’ or ownership words which is going to be brutally hard, but I hope to manage.

Radam Ridwan’s message on instagram this morning about beach bodies and fatphobia GIVETH ME LIFE. I love them so.

Learned this morning that a NYC police officer assaulted one of the Capitol police on Jan 6. You know that what we’re looking at is a civil war; it hasn’t been declared, but there are 500K in the ground already.

This starfish, snapped by @figureoutthesea on Insta, appears to be saying ‘fuck you!’ to the juvenile glaucous winged gull.

right okay fine let me kick this in the goolies

How to Stop Being Offended by Everyone (in just 13 steps)

JFC. This woman need a course correction, but I’m not giving her one in the comments. Here’s the skinnified version of what she said:

My being offended is a choice; take a few breaths before responding; consider the source; discern if it was intentional; interrogate the sense of being offended, is it you or the circumstances; locate the part of you that feels victimized; send yourself loving energy rather than going off; listen to the opposing perspective; release yourself of the duty to police other people’s views; wait 24 hours to respond; and I’m quoting #11 in full because it’s SUCH BULLSHIT I WANT YOU TO SAVOUR er EXPERIENCE ITS EXCESSIVELY SHITTY QUALITY: “11. Remind yourself that we are a collective, and that the person that “wronged” you is from the same Source as you. We all have the same “cosmic DNA”. So hating them is hating you”; see the lesson from the offence as a gift; don’t stay offended.

I’ll be simple, I’ll be brief. Imagine giving this advice to a Black person who’s reading about how Black people are terrible workers; to a trans woman who’s experiencing harassment from cis-magats on the internet; to a woman reading something about feminism and allyship from the man who raped her; to an Indigenous person being mocked for eating country food when they could be vegan and ‘save the planet’; or a Jew sent the long-nosed Pepe meme; or a disabled queer person encouraged to just die already and quit ‘draining the public purse’.

THE ADVICE LOOKS DIFFERENT NOW DOESN’T IT. Don’t tell me who I can’t hate, you peccary-approximate clickbaiter. Listen to the opposing perspective when THEY WANT TO KILL ME and or MY FRIENDS. GET FUCKED! NO, SERIOUSLY! AFTER YOU!

Kelly Albano wrote the above noted clickbait. I’d like to annoy her until she drops the pretence that she’s calm, but I have other shit to do today than tell another white woman that she’s totally fucking clueless about how this feel-good advice appears during climate crisis, fascism on the march, destroyed norms of media balance and public behaviour, kids incarcerated and separated from their parents for being brown and poor, and the future of our young people destroyed by crony capitalism. Fuck you, Kelly Albano. Stay in your bubble and quit posting crap.

Yes yes, Kelly, this is advice for something that ‘offends you’ — not for something that’s an existential threat. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT, you oft-scratched scab, white women have this tremendous tendency to send shit like this to marginalized people. Yup, I see it ALL THE FUCKING TIME on twitter; they will repurpose this feelgoodery to douchewaddery in four seconds flat and some poor schlub who’s legit angry is going to get told to wind it in by a thirty-five year old white woman who’s never been stopped by the cops for anything and who thinks this shit’s a blessing on a troubled world, when it’s just going to get used to hurt people who aren’t ‘evolved enough’ – Jesus wept – not to get angry when someone’s trying to KILL THEM.

And I’m not talking on twitter about this. The idea that someone I know might forward this shite to a marginalized person who’s suffering is fuckin’ more than I can handle.

 

 

There are names for specific ableisms

Vidism is the bigotry encompassing hatred, fear and disgust of Blind people or people with differences in vision;

Audism – bigotry against people who are deaf and hard of hearing

Distantism – bigotry against people who don’t have senses which allow them to communicate when physically removed (hearing and sight)

Phonocentrism – bigotry based on perceived differences in vocal ability, fluency and timbre

THIS IS KOYUKI

He is a ‘cat monk’ in Japan. Nice blink, Koyuki.

Brief walk with Paul yesterday. Weather outrageously glorious. Four hundred words of fanfic. No practicing of instruments.

Katie will never read this, or not likely read this, but this is for her. Image

SPRITES

Image

PHOTO CREDIT STEPHEN HUMMEL MCDONALD OBSERVATORY FORT DAVIS TEXAS from an extensive wild storm in May of 2020

seven mutuals toasted

That means nothing to you but

I’m on twitter

I follow people on twitter

I find out that other people on twitter are following a writer who gives the most disgustingly ableist writing advice I’ve ever seen. Rants ensued. I read the advice READER IT SUCKÈD

So I found the person who gave the advice on line, found who follows me who follows her, and unfollowed them all (and I know one of them IRL, although I doubt like hell she’d remember me). They were all middled aged white writers.

that was easy, and I still follow hundreds of people

the Indigenous people I follow on twitter put baby Yoda beadwork and yawning bobcats into my feed, not pathetic ableism

the Black people (especially the disabled Black women, my god) I follow on twitter make me feel before I think new thoughts because I can’t hyper intellectualize my way into a better world

and that’s good because science says that white people are less empathetic than people who aren’t white, AND WHY WOULD THAT BE

more hypochondria and RIP Mel Baggs

Mel Baggs the disabled activist is dead. Sie went into hospital a couple of days ago, not sure why, and hir last post was about how alienating the hospital was. That made me cry.

I must sadly say that I followed hir on twitter for a while and stopped because I found what sie said unchallenging and the way sie said it so annoying that I couldn’t deal with it. I kept wanting to argue with hir or high key mock hir and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s not to white lady on people, so I just backed off.

Now sie’s dead and I’m reading her blog. Reading the temporal lobe epilepsy symptoms on hir blog freaked me out, since at various points in my life I’ve had symptoms identical; just never all at once.

I have a deeply weird brain, but I’m quite attached to it. Mel also pointed out that ‘status migraine aura’ is possible which is when you’re in a migraine state all the time without head pain. I’ve gone months like that.

2019 commitment to not being an ableist fleshwad

So I’m working through my Youtube videos and captioning them. Already done: my most popular effort, at 14.2K distinct views! How to Cut Up a Pineapple. Lemming’s Twofer, Neener Neener and Blasteez (my advertisement for laxative coughdrops which, as you can likely imagine, work as poorly as advertised).

I shall continue with the making my videos more accessible until they are all done.