@pathfinder @autistics Interesting! In quite different contexts, I'm starting to realize just how desperately toxic it is to insist on understanding something before acknowledging its existence. It is critically important to be prepared to do the opposite: to accept realities that we cannot presently understand.

My wife and I recently watched "The Most Reluctant Convert", a dramatization of the intellectual journey of C. S. Lewis, ultimately based on his autobiography "Surprised by Joy". Watching the movie, and thinking back to my reading of the book, I realized how, at certain crucial turning points, Lewis's thinking was driven by insistence on accepting only what he found comprehensible. Thus it was that a brilliant and deeply skeptical intellect, who should by rights have been a champion of rationalism, ended up as an apologist for a vile and pernicious body of traditional superstition.

I'm also currently reading Maria Rosa Antognazza's biography of Leibniz, and before that I had read Alexandre Koyré's "From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe". These books shed light on a controversy between two of the greatest intellects in history — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Isaac Newton — over the nature of gravity. Leibniz, like Descartes before him, insisted on understanding how gravity worked as a condition of accepting its reality — and ended up with some beliefs about the nature of matter that rate as quite bizarre, both by the standards of the 18th century and of the 21st. Newton famously replied "Hypotheses non fingo", usually translated as "I feign no hypotheses". By which he meant: "Observations of heavenly and earthly bodies have revealed certain regularities in their motions which cannot be explained by direct contacts among them, or by any other type of causal interaction that we can presently understand. But I can describe those regularities by laws stated in the language of mathematics. That is the basis of my law of universal gravitation. It would be pointless to add guesses as to why these regularities hold."

In the 20th century, Einstein — building on two and a half centuries of science in the Newtonian tradition — finally did come up with some reasonable hypotheses as to why gravity exists and how it works, in his general theory of relativity. But science would never have gotten to that point if it had insisted on starting out, in the late 17th and early 18th century, by "feigning hypotheses" about the nature of gravity. Newton was right: sometimes you just need to accept and describe first, and explain later.

Now if we could just get social scientists to accept what physicists had to learn centuries ago.

@dedicto @pathfinder @autistics

Hmmm but I like that part. Kinda hoping they get better at it… seeking more accurate labels and help so I can advocate for myself easier without others with the same label feeling like its about them.

Im noticing my conditions manifest differently than a lot of people online and in groups… similar symptoms… greater severity… additional comorbids that pile on high.

@dedicto @pathfinder @autistics

I am disinterested in cause but interested in genetics for complex diagnosis reasons.

I want more efforts on what helps. I like your OP post cause yes, I feel a major factor is a refusal to change. But there is a group of autistic people who dont want to be seen or treated differently… and then there is me who keeps reaching for treatment option ideas that dont exist…. (Yet)

@dedicto @pathfinder @autistics

Wow these people are sad… anyways… im getting that barbie for a level 3 autistic who will love it like all his other dolls.

@dedicto @pathfinder @autistics

I am excluded from public life and Im happy about autistic Barbie…. 🤷‍♀️

@dedicto @pathfinder @autistics

From their horrible article

“Nevertheless, the version of autism presented to the public through toys, marketing, and media overwhelmingly reflects the smallest and most advantaged segment. This portrayal is tech savvy, functionally typical, cognitively gifted, emotionally legible, and socially palatable. It reassures the public that autism is manageable, tidy, and compatible with existing social norms.”

What!!! Its an ACC device! She is non-speaking!

@dedicto @pathfinder @autistics

“Many in this population are left languishing without a single friend outside their immediate family. However, these realities do not appear in celebratory “diversity” campaigns. They do not translate easily into merchandise. They are fundamentally incompatible with narratives that frame autism primarily as a cultural identity rather than a disabling condition.“

NOBODY SAID THIS ABOUT DOWNS SYNDROME BARBIE or BLIND BARBIE!!!

Da F! I am in that position!

@dedicto @pathfinder @autistics

I fit most of their descriptive words in their article! And my housemate fits all of them! And guess what!? My Housemate is happier than I am!

@pathfinder @Energetic_Nova @autistics Admittedly I'm still very new to all of this, and these "severe autism" groups haven't been my principal focus as I've tried to learn more, but AFAICT so far, they aren't really groups for autistics at all; they're "autism mom" groups, focused first and foremost on the needs of caregivers, not of autistics, "severe" or otherwise. And they are basically HATE GROUPS and self-pity parties. The agenda appears to be:

(1) Divide and conquer: find justifications for treating "severe autism" as a fundamentally different phenomenon from any autism that shows potential for anything positive.

(2) Paint "non-severe" autistics as basically just lifestylers who are essentially normal and need little or no support; paint autistic self-advocacy as a distraction from the needs of poor struggling autism moms saddled with the care of "severe" autistics.

(3) Paint "severe" autistics as subhuman monsters with little or no potential for anything good, so as to justify whatever treatment their caregivers feel is necessary to minimize the burden they impose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Council_on_Severe_Autism