Choosing To Allocate Spoons To Hanging Out And Having A Good Time At The Cost Of Perfectly Completing

i want casual, everyday autism in shows. i want autistic characters who need sensory symmetry, who casually mimic anyone's touch on one side of their bodies on the other (or who have friends who do it for them). i want a friend with flashcards or signals for when their friend loses speech. i want people on video calls and body doubling when they do jobs. i want people having conversations without eye contact. i want excited stimming. i want to see someone getting really excited about the tiniest thing thats related to a safefood or a special interest. i want casual, everyday autism.

(edit: october 22, 11:04am - "nonverbal" -> "nonspeaking") (edit: october 24, 9:44pm - "nonspeaking" -> "loses speech")

This is a fantastic linguistics paper – the researcher observed the artificiality and social pressure imposed on kids when they're asked to produce language on the spot, so instead had them talk to a rabbit in a room with a tape recorder. He found that when talking organically, without an adult authority figure around, their speech was exponentially more sophisticated, socially fluid, and creative.

As someone in the twitter thread points out, this has obvious implications for situations in which cued language production is used in diagnosis e.g. for autism. I'd add that (while this particular paper's remit is limited to children) it should also make us think about situations where adults are pressured to speak by authority figures: court hearings, police encounters, benefit assessments, asylum interviews, etc. If the presence of power hampers your ability to advocate for yourself, these are all rigged propositions.

Anyway, you can read the whole piece here (taken from a talk on his research, so it's very readable):

https://betsysneller.github.io/pdfs/Labov1966-Rabbit.pdf

e: sorry, I should add the context that this is a language study situated in Hawaii in 1970 so there are also some very significant racial socio-linguistic politics discussed here that might be distressing to read about. I don't want to discount that aspect of the power dynamic studied here either.

What, this? Oh, it’s just my Krana. Yeah, I always wear it while I clean the house, it gets me in the zone.

the problem i have with the whole "humans and nature as opposed and mutually exclusive forces" style of environmentalism is that it discourages people from a sustainable, mutualistic relationship with the ecosystems around them, because getting resources from an ecosystem is Bad. Therefore it requires you to think that parts of Earth that provide resources are not ecosystems.

this is where you get unbelievably stupid crap like the "half earth" project that proposes "protecting" half of Earth's land mass as nature preserves, never mind how we choose what half or what happens to the other half.

this type of environmentalism literally encourages people to think of their own presence as excluding or cancelling out "Nature."

And so people think of their lawns as Not Ecosystems, as Not Nature, so they cannot think "How do i live in right relationship with my ecosystem, as its caretaker?" This is death to ecological thinking.

The lawn was consciously created by intention and design, with heavy machinery that was manufactured, sold, and operated, it is not spontaneously created by fumes that the human body gives off.

You act upon the land, now time to learn what you are doing, and who you are doing it to.

Matoro Mahri

people who dont experience it cannot comprehend how awful executive dysfunction is. I WANT to do the task, i have the resources TO do the task, i will feel better having DONE the task

but i cant fucking do the task

it's interesting to me that torture just works to us, as a literary device. It's everywhere in movies and stories and whatnot, from big-budget dramas to little grindhouse short stories. It fits neatly into the requirements of plot: character doesn't want to offer information, Gets Tortured, has to offer information.

the issue with this is that it isn't how it works.

torture is a display of power. It fouls interrogation, this is known; a person being tortured will tell you whatever you want to hear to make it stop, which is more often than not a lie, made up on the spot, or if the truth an incomplete and useless version of it. It isn't generally done for information's sake anyway, but as a form of what the ancient Greeks called hybris, the violent exhibition of your power over another person.

This is, every once in a great while, done right in fiction, but it's a challenge to write vs. the idea that it's a shortcut to one character revealing plot-critical information to another. Pretty much every form of torture works this way, even the ones that are legally permissible. Psychological torment or physical discomfort also produce an animalistic desire to escape harm and foul interrogation. The forms of torture the cops can do? The cops do it not to gain information (or if they think it will, they're lying to themselves) but because it makes them feel powerful.

There's probably a master's thesis in it for somebody studying the rise of torture as a plot device since the beginning of the war on terror and the contemporaneous development of the Broken Windows theory of policing. I'm not really aware of any similar level of disconnect between what Works in fiction and what happens in real life!