April 2020. Things are going very well. For a global pandemic.
I am writing at home, where by our count it is week six of the global event that is the Covid - 19 pandemic. Week five of the UK lockdown, in which citizens are requested to stay at home and avoid social contact as much as possible.
This subject dominates news and media. With good reason. People are dying. On mass. All for one very good reason.
We do not have a vaccine for the virus anywhere on Earth.
The great anti Vaccination (known as Anti Vaxx) lie that you just get any old disease, get sick, get over it and have immunity thereafter is simply not going to survive 2020. If I am right. Because as of this week, nothing is certain about the virus and its effects. What we need absolute knowledge of is:
So here I am, not going on about all matters NeuroDivergent. Thing is, to an extent I never really have. What I think I've been up to is a combination of detective work and research, with a bit of writing/steering human history thrown in.
Any guesses how the above works? Okay, let me explain.
As with Covid 19, it's all being worked out as we all go along here. This time next year many things will hopefully be known that are not now. Oh sorry no - MUST BE KNOWN THAT ARE NOT NOW. Because the epidemic business is far too serious to have uncertainty around. This is literally a life and death issue. Science must provide. Huge amounts of money are being allocated overnight by governments the world over, to the pursuit of a vaccine alone.
I think it was the start of 2019, one of the Anti Vaxx/autism is brain damage lobby tried to post a petition to have 'autism' per se declared a national emergency in America. It got about 19, 000 signatures and petered out. Mark Blaxill, the noted one-man vaccines cause autism campaigner and author was said by some to be behind it. Blaxill's signature paranoid writing also turned up in a wonderfully written comment on a Guardian article about autism rates around that time.
I wish I'd copied it...sigh. Oh, it was wonderful. It talked about the world being hit by 'a tsunami of autistic children', whom we were led to believe would be mentally disabled. This seemed to be integral to their being so many of them. So disabled that our world would shudder to a halt by the end of the century due to their dysfunctionality. Very much like a neurological zombie apocalypse.
The posting was deleted by the Guardian by the end of that day. What the author failed to realise was that not all autistic people were as mentally disabled as he implied.
Meanwhile here in april 2020, something is going on. Something real. Now spot the difference between what I have described and what is happening with the Coronavirus outbreak at this time of history. If you are reading this weeks, months or years later you may understand my point.
My work has been all about discovering what I am doing as an autistic advocate as much as doing it. The central buddhist motive of trying to make compassionate sense and facilitating others is still at the heart of my work. So all of 2019 on social media I was as much trying to be convinced of other peoples points of view and realise and convey my own. I remain as usual, open to others to change my ideas and thinking. But so far that's rarely happened. Excepting my view on autism as mental illness - and mental illness in general. Ah, now there I have evolved.
I now see autism as varying in such definitions. For some, it is disorder and disability. But not others. For some still, it can be both. You see, you have to QUALIFY to have a disorder. You have to have the PROPERTIES of a disability. You cannot make these absolute statements about 'autism is only one thing'. It varies from person to person.
Mental illness is something that comes and goes in peoples lives, just like virus based illness. The lie that all people have this ongoing steady, stable state of mind has long been debunked by many now. People vary and change, and in lots of different ways. Some recover relatively. Some go in and out. Some are lucky to remain relatively without definable disorder of the mind.
Yeah, but then what? What is this normal and healthy. What is this ongoing state of clear function? Ever wonder what's going on here in the mind. I mean something must be. Instead of the many and complex models of mental confusion, instability and distress....what's the model for the opposite.
In buddhist all I ever studied and heard about was the healthy, insightful, compassionate mind. All we ever considered and learned about, were the properties of healthy minds that either had or were on the way to enlightenment. Simple. It was nothing but compassion, loving kindness and awareness.
Erm...that was it. Insight itself was a bloody mystery. That's the point. I mean people certainly though they had an idea of what it was all about. But don't you see that so called 'healthy' minds are clearly on a scale as well? that you get some people who are definable as healthier than other relatively healthy people?
Where does it all end!! With superhumans?
The funniest thing I found on Twitter last year was an 18 year old who made out he had Tourettes, Learning Disorder and 'Classical Autism'. Whatever he meant by the last one. This was the most lucid, rational, stable, manipulative and strategically clever individual on there. I spent most of the year challenging his identity. I had to publically apologise for being wrong about his age. I used to chat to him privately. Great company. Utterly biased dialogue without any compromise. A future pro' on social media. He'd post publicly that he thought he could never live an independent life. A few months later, he openly discussed when he was leaving his parents home.
The rest of his friends were a waste of time due to their nastiness, self centerdness and classic autistic personalities which were best summed up as over intellectualising and under developed in terms of empathy and compassion for others opinions.
It was hilarious because this teenager was acknowledge by a number of us as the co leader of an organised trolling gang, blatantly working for ABA proponents and attacking anyone like myself they could find on Twitter whom they disagreed with. He did nothing but claim he was not whilst clearly only relating to everyone he opposed, in such a way as to make them ALL look stupid. This was done by filtering out the dialogues so he only concentrated on things people said that he could criticise and argue with, in order to make their thinking look wrong. He was brilliant at it. People double his age had trouble with him.
All good sport for me. I wanted to develop my faculties and found the perfect seminar. An online dojo if you will? I finished with him start of the year, and on good terms too. All the best, Kid.
That my friends was the Autistic Dark Web group. That's it. The entire story of my 2019 Twitter dialogues summed up. That was all it ever came to.
So how does all this connect up in one simple conclusion? A bit all over the place? Okay, it works like this:
This subject dominates news and media. With good reason. People are dying. On mass. All for one very good reason.
We do not have a vaccine for the virus anywhere on Earth.
The great anti Vaccination (known as Anti Vaxx) lie that you just get any old disease, get sick, get over it and have immunity thereafter is simply not going to survive 2020. If I am right. Because as of this week, nothing is certain about the virus and its effects. What we need absolute knowledge of is:
- Are any of us likely to get infected. How and where? Because right now a huge percentage of the UK does not have this disease. But all it takes is one mass infection in say a local shop, supermarket or any social gathering space....and off it goes. Also just a ride into town and back, or absorbing virus from a surface you touch, or the air around you. Anywhere. Anytime.
- What happens when you get over it. Do you have antibody immunity thereafter or could you get infected again?
- When will a vaccine be ready, and do we have to live this way until then?
- How long would a vaccine protect you for?
- Is there a scenario in which the world, yes the entire planet right now, returns to relative functionality as before without a vaccine that can be called upon?
- What will the future bring for the global economy, let alone your regional one and your own?
So here I am, not going on about all matters NeuroDivergent. Thing is, to an extent I never really have. What I think I've been up to is a combination of detective work and research, with a bit of writing/steering human history thrown in.
Any guesses how the above works? Okay, let me explain.
As with Covid 19, it's all being worked out as we all go along here. This time next year many things will hopefully be known that are not now. Oh sorry no - MUST BE KNOWN THAT ARE NOT NOW. Because the epidemic business is far too serious to have uncertainty around. This is literally a life and death issue. Science must provide. Huge amounts of money are being allocated overnight by governments the world over, to the pursuit of a vaccine alone.
I think it was the start of 2019, one of the Anti Vaxx/autism is brain damage lobby tried to post a petition to have 'autism' per se declared a national emergency in America. It got about 19, 000 signatures and petered out. Mark Blaxill, the noted one-man vaccines cause autism campaigner and author was said by some to be behind it. Blaxill's signature paranoid writing also turned up in a wonderfully written comment on a Guardian article about autism rates around that time.
I wish I'd copied it...sigh. Oh, it was wonderful. It talked about the world being hit by 'a tsunami of autistic children', whom we were led to believe would be mentally disabled. This seemed to be integral to their being so many of them. So disabled that our world would shudder to a halt by the end of the century due to their dysfunctionality. Very much like a neurological zombie apocalypse.
The posting was deleted by the Guardian by the end of that day. What the author failed to realise was that not all autistic people were as mentally disabled as he implied.
Meanwhile here in april 2020, something is going on. Something real. Now spot the difference between what I have described and what is happening with the Coronavirus outbreak at this time of history. If you are reading this weeks, months or years later you may understand my point.
My work has been all about discovering what I am doing as an autistic advocate as much as doing it. The central buddhist motive of trying to make compassionate sense and facilitating others is still at the heart of my work. So all of 2019 on social media I was as much trying to be convinced of other peoples points of view and realise and convey my own. I remain as usual, open to others to change my ideas and thinking. But so far that's rarely happened. Excepting my view on autism as mental illness - and mental illness in general. Ah, now there I have evolved.
I now see autism as varying in such definitions. For some, it is disorder and disability. But not others. For some still, it can be both. You see, you have to QUALIFY to have a disorder. You have to have the PROPERTIES of a disability. You cannot make these absolute statements about 'autism is only one thing'. It varies from person to person.
Mental illness is something that comes and goes in peoples lives, just like virus based illness. The lie that all people have this ongoing steady, stable state of mind has long been debunked by many now. People vary and change, and in lots of different ways. Some recover relatively. Some go in and out. Some are lucky to remain relatively without definable disorder of the mind.
Yeah, but then what? What is this normal and healthy. What is this ongoing state of clear function? Ever wonder what's going on here in the mind. I mean something must be. Instead of the many and complex models of mental confusion, instability and distress....what's the model for the opposite.
In buddhist all I ever studied and heard about was the healthy, insightful, compassionate mind. All we ever considered and learned about, were the properties of healthy minds that either had or were on the way to enlightenment. Simple. It was nothing but compassion, loving kindness and awareness.
Erm...that was it. Insight itself was a bloody mystery. That's the point. I mean people certainly though they had an idea of what it was all about. But don't you see that so called 'healthy' minds are clearly on a scale as well? that you get some people who are definable as healthier than other relatively healthy people?
Where does it all end!! With superhumans?
The funniest thing I found on Twitter last year was an 18 year old who made out he had Tourettes, Learning Disorder and 'Classical Autism'. Whatever he meant by the last one. This was the most lucid, rational, stable, manipulative and strategically clever individual on there. I spent most of the year challenging his identity. I had to publically apologise for being wrong about his age. I used to chat to him privately. Great company. Utterly biased dialogue without any compromise. A future pro' on social media. He'd post publicly that he thought he could never live an independent life. A few months later, he openly discussed when he was leaving his parents home.
The rest of his friends were a waste of time due to their nastiness, self centerdness and classic autistic personalities which were best summed up as over intellectualising and under developed in terms of empathy and compassion for others opinions.
It was hilarious because this teenager was acknowledge by a number of us as the co leader of an organised trolling gang, blatantly working for ABA proponents and attacking anyone like myself they could find on Twitter whom they disagreed with. He did nothing but claim he was not whilst clearly only relating to everyone he opposed, in such a way as to make them ALL look stupid. This was done by filtering out the dialogues so he only concentrated on things people said that he could criticise and argue with, in order to make their thinking look wrong. He was brilliant at it. People double his age had trouble with him.
All good sport for me. I wanted to develop my faculties and found the perfect seminar. An online dojo if you will? I finished with him start of the year, and on good terms too. All the best, Kid.
That my friends was the Autistic Dark Web group. That's it. The entire story of my 2019 Twitter dialogues summed up. That was all it ever came to.
So how does all this connect up in one simple conclusion? A bit all over the place? Okay, it works like this:
- The US government declared a national emergency over pet owners stealing their own animals opium based medications in order to consume them. But would not consider Autism to be worth doing the same with.
- Millions of pounds are being spent on vaccines, and the US are right there with the rest of the world in committing to spending on developing the very thing that Anti Vaxxers say are mass brain damaging and even killing the babies of all humanity. The death bit turns up in the truly macabre fan-film Vaxxed 2 The People's Truth. I protested this thing being shown in Ladbroke Grove in January. Please listen to my first Guerilla Aspies podcast on Acast/Soundcloud and iTunes to hear a live recording of how that went. Anyhow, point is that the film has to be seen to be believed in it's message that vaccines kill and main children - and that the unvaccinated are both physically and mentally superior to those who receive the dreaded injections. For real. They finish the film with these bizarre scenes worthy of the Nazi's eugenics propaganda....etc
- There are many different equally valid ways of seeing reality, but the world I have been operating in is full of groups who can ONLY be right in their particular vision of everything. All else is wrong.
- The detective work I mentioned has all been about finding out HOW GROUPS AND INDIVIDUALS SEE AND THINK ABOUT THE SUBJECT OF AUTISM AND NEURODIVERGENCE (if you want to use a more precise term). Are they right or wrong? Are they compassionate or does hammering into peoples heads that they are disabled and have a disorder, just cause them depression and sadness? Counterproductive internal materialism. Sorry - you are a psychological loser in life etc.
- Some people out there have no interest in the above and are ruthlessly asserting their own, mono tropic, self focused agenda's on everyone. As if the world could not work this out nor have the capacity to argue. This last point is interesting because as I explained about trying to make everyone else look stupid, the people doing this sort of thing I encountered appeared to genuinely believe what they were doing was a real thing. That is was not just some trick or opinion they had but how reality actually was. Sounds....rather autistically minded to me, eh?
- From the above, that all that I found was autistic people being autistic people. Hehehe.
So there you have it. Lots of strands that are not necessarily tied up at the end. A bit incoherent? Well that's the point. It's all ongoing right now and hopefully I will produce a more refined and focused statement of how all the above pieces fit together.
Meanwhile in reality, the questions I posed about Covid 19 remain hanging. Peoples lives have been put on pause in a way never before seen since World War 2. In fact as far as I who was born in the Cold War am concerned, this is it. This is World War Three. Biowar.
Where is NeuroDivergence in all of this? Oh, we are there. We are there and we always will be.
Let time move on and the scenario progress and change. I have no idea what is next. Apart from one of our regular walks, dodging people.
Be happy and well x
posted by PAUL WADY at 7:13 AM
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