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#Disability Rights
crippledpunks · 1 day
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i wanna say fuck you to anyone who shame disabled, chronically ill & neurodivergent people, especially homebound folks, for "spending too much time on their phone/on the internet/etc." when it's the only (Somewhat) accessible way for them to experience the world. many people don't get to get out much even if they want to because of their disabilities. shaming someone for trying to connect with the world, make friends and engage with hobbies in ways that are accessible to them is beyond cruel and unnecessary
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rebelwheelsnycpoetry · 18 hours
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And The Papers Said
TW: ABLEISM & EUGENICS by Michele Sommerstein
Part One And the papers said Michael Hickson, a black disabled man. And the papers said Hospital. Texas. COVID. Infection And the papers said Killed. For his doctor did not feel And the papers said that a… quadriplegic could possibly have a quality … of life. And the papers said and thus was not worth saving And the papers said (was not saved) disabled people are not of worth message repeating and… sent.
And the papers said the doctor had the audacity to say And the papers said it's not personal, to Hickson's wife, And the papers said There are set criteria from the state And the papers said As to who will live and who they let die And the papers said Michael Hickson. a black disabled body, that did not comply
Once again, reunited Eugenics & Capitalism America's not so secret friends fucking each other furiously for the sake of mindless fucking, like machines wallowing in their own stains, covered in their own blood and filth, crimes. unclean Disgusted? You should be.
Part Two Shortages! Hospitals! Ventilators! Low! This that was avoidable & created by the vulture capitalists who see death… elated - pandemic as an opportunity – Cha-ching! Soulless! Shortages! Created by, the powers that be Like when, Cuomo – the hero praised at times for merely being, better than Trump! (Raise the bar! This drinks on me) cut funding, healthcare. home care. hospitals (before and during the pandemic) Shortages! So the billionaires would be spared from paying their fair, share, of… taxes Shortages! While marginalized people are blamed for, “costing too much” the audacity of austerity…
Shortages created when patients, infected knowingly sent to nursing homes, locked up. death traps, unleashing COVID on the people in places where social distancing was never, even, an option.
Part Three There are those, who will hear these words, shrug and nonchalant they will say things like Well, these things happen, what can you do? Those who are complacent, able bodied, complicit, still living but numb. They will repeat, their response so casually even to the face of those visibly disabled, as if it's nothing in a tone used to discuss sweaters and their… plans for lunch as if we as a society can't do better? (We can. We must.)
Who taught you about disability? Who lied to you saying disabled people are less than, undeserving That we are better off dead?
Part Four And the papers said… His wife implored, insisting, knowing he lived a full life. And the papers said for in her eyes, in her heart, her love's life was worth saving. And the papers said, doctors withheld treatment including hydration… nutrition read: starving him for six. days Michael Hickson. a black disabled body that did not comply. “Michael Hickson, [a black disabled man] died leaving, his wife and five children, behind.“
About the poem: I originally wrote this poem because, so often as a disabled person, you read these headlines and it’s absorbed into you, but there's not always an outlet to really express the emotional toll.
A lot of times, I 'd read the headlines and somewhat shut down because I can’t feel every time I read something like this, but it’s still in you. Michael Hickson was the first time I read an article that actually included a name when they were discussing “state criterias' and the pandemic. The conversation between the doctor and Hickson’s wife was recorded and when I heard it, it just hit me on a deeper level and I had to write something.
That said, to learn more about the intersections of ableism & racism, I suggest checking out the following peoples: @Imani_Barbarin , @VilissaThompson , @BlackDisability & @powernotpity on Twitter.
You can read more about Michael Hickson’s story here: https://notdeadyet.org/2020/06/adapt-of-texas-protests-hospital-killing-of-michael-hickson-a- black-disabled-man.html
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sayruq · 2 months
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10 children a day lose their limbs in Gaza. All hospitals in Gaza are basically barely functioning and the amputations are done in unsanitary conditions and without anesthesia
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alcorian · 9 months
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disability rights involves the right to do fuck all. the right to be a useless member of society and STILL be loved and cared for and have a fair standard of living. human beings are not defined by the capital we produce.
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misantherapy · 5 months
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US people with disabilities in the supplemental security income (SSI) program can't have a penny over $2K in their bank account at any time in order to keep their benefits.
You know this economy. That amount is completely unlivable & makes it hard for people with disability to save for the future or have a safety net for emergencies.
A new bill would raise the max to $10K (or $20K for married couples). It would make a world of difference.
Show support by contacting your reps.
Edit: Had the word petition on the mind, mistakenly called it that.
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Source video
Please reblog and share.
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neuroticboyfriend · 8 months
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IM GOING TO CRY THEY MIGHT INCREASE THE SSI ASSETS LIMIT TO $10,000.
it's a bipartisan bill too! and for anyone unaware, people on SSI (which is different from SSDI), can only have $2,000 in assets (unless they have an ABLE account, which comes with its own rules). this assets limit has been in place for FORTY YEARS and is a giant part of why being on SSI keeps people incredibly impoverished.
i've also heard they might remove the marriage penalty but i don't have the spoons to read or explain it so someone else please add on!
this is huge! please spread the word and do what you can to help ensure this happens!
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gentlemanbutch · 8 months
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the way that no one wears a mask at my local LGBTQ clinic, and in fact comments on my mask like it's just this hilarious little idiosyncrasy that I still wear one and not because I'm immunocompromised and we're in the middle of a pandemic ... as if there isn't an airborne virus that literally fucks up your immune system ... as if we didn't lose a generation of queer people to another virus that fucks up your immune system ...
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whereserpentswalk · 18 days
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The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.
The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)
The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.
Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.
Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.
The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.
The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.
The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.
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autismserenity · 3 months
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know someone who enjoys horror stories? share this one! it's true!
hahahahahahahahahaha aarrggghhhhhhhhhh 3,000,000 deaths due to COVID-19 last year. Globally. Three million. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. The reason people are still worried about COVID is because it has a way of quietly fucking up your body. And the risk is cumulative.
I'm going to say that again: the risk is cumulative.
It's not just that a lot of people get bad long-term effects from it. One in seven or so? Enough that it's kind of the Russian Roulette of diseases. It's also that the more times you get it, the higher that risk becomes. Like if each time you survived Russian Roulette, the empty chamber was removed from the gun entirely. The worst part is that, psychologically, we have the absolute opposite reaction. If we survive something with no ill effects, we assume it's pretty safe. It is really, really hard to override that sense of, "Ok, well, I got it and now I probably have a lot of immunity and also it wasn't that bad." It is not a respiratory disease. Airborne, yes. Respiratory disease, no: not a cold, not a flu, not RSV.
Like measles (or maybe chickenpox?), it starts with respiratory symptoms. And then it moves to other parts of your body. It seems to target the lungs, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain the most.
It also hits the immune system really hard - a lot of people are suddenly more susceptible to completely unrelated viruses. People get brain fog, migraines, forget things they used to know.
(I really, really hate that it can cross the blood-brain barrier. NOTHING SHOULD EVER CROSS THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER IT IS THERE FOR A REASON.) Anecdotal examples of this shit are horrifying. I've seen people talk about coworkers who've had COVID five or more times, and now their work... just often doesn't make sense? They send emails that say things like, "Sorry, I didn't mean Los Angeles, I meant Los Angeles."
Or they insist they've never heard of some project that they were actually in charge of a year or two before.
Or their work is just kind of falling apart, and they don't seem to be aware of it.
People talk about how they don't want to get the person in trouble, so their team just works around it. Or they describe neighbors and relatives who had COVID repeatedly, were nearly hospitalized, talked about how incredibly sick they felt at the time... and now swear they've only had it once and it wasn't bad, they barely even noticed it.
(As someone who lived with severe dissociation for most of my life, this is a genuinely terrifying idea to me. I've already spent my whole life being like, "but what if I told them that already? but what if I did do that? what if that did happen to me and I just don't remember?") One of its known effects in the brain is to increase impulsivity and risk-taking, which is real fucking convenient honestly. What a fantastic fucking mutation. So happy for it on that one. Yes, please make it seem less important to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I'm not screaming internally at all now.
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I saw a tweet from someone last year whose family hadn't had COVID yet, who were still masking in public, including school.
She said that her son was no kind of an athlete. Solidly bottom middle of the pack in gym.
And suddenly, this year, he was absolutely blowing past all the other kids who had to run the mile. He wasn't running any faster. His times weren't fantastic or anything. It's just that the rest of the kids were worse than him now. For some reason. I think about that a lot. (Like my incredibly active six-year-old getting a cold, and suddenly developing post-viral asthma that looked like pneumonia.
He went back to school the day before yesterday, after being home for a month and using preventative inhalers for almost week.
He told me that it was GREAT - except that he couldn't run as much at recess, because he immediately got really tired. Like how I went outside with him to do some yard work and felt like my body couldn't figure out how to increase breathing and heart rate.
I wasn't physically out of breath, but I felt like I was out of breath. That COVID feeling people describe, of "I'm not getting enough air." Except that I didn't have that problem when I had COVID.) Some people don't observe any long (or medium) term side effects after they have it.
But researchers have found viral reservoirs of COVID-19 in everyone they've studied who had it.
It just seems to hang out, dormant, for... well, longer than we've had an opportunity to observe it, so far.
(I definitely watched that literal horror movie. I think that's an entire genre. The alien dormant under ice in the Arctic.)
(oh hey I don't like that either!!!!!!!!!) All of which is to explain why we should still care about avoiding it, and how it manages to still cause excess deaths. Measuring excess deaths has been a standard tool in public health for a long time.
We know how many people usually die from all different causes, every year. So we can tell if, for example, deaths from heart disease have gone way up in the past three years, and look for reasons. Those are excess deaths: deaths that, four years ago, would not have happened. During the pandemic, excess death rates have been a really important tool. For all sorts of reasons. Like, sometimes people die from COVID without ever getting tested, and the official cause is listed as something else because nobody knows they had COVID. But also, people are dying from cardiovascular illness much younger now.
People are having strokes and heart attacks younger, and more often, than they did before the pandemic started. COVID causes a lot of problems. And some of those problems kill people. And some of them make it easier for other things to kill us. Lung damage from COVID leading to lungs collapsing, or to pneumonia, or to a pulmonary embolism, for example. The Economist built a machine-learning model with a 95% confidence interval that gauges excess death statistics around the world, to tell them what the true toll of the ongoing COVID pandemic has been so far.
Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.
3,000,000.
Official COVID-19 deaths globally so far: Seven million. 7,000,000. Total excess deaths during COVID so far: Thirty-five point two million. 35,200,000.
Five times as many.
That's bad. I don't like that at all. I'm glad last year was less than a tenth of that. I'm not particularly confident about that continuing, though, because last year we started a period of really high COVID transmission. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. Here's their data, and charts you can play with, and links to detailed information on how they did all of this:
Here's a non-paywalled link to it:
https://archive.vn/2024.01.26-012536/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates
Oh: here's a link to where you can buy comfy, effective N95 masks in all sizes:
Those ones are about a buck each after shipping - about $30 for a box of 30. They also have sample packs for a dollar, so you can try a couple of different sizes and styles.
You can wear an N95 mask for about 40 total hours before the effectiveness really drops, so that's like a dollar for a week of wear.
They're also family-owned and have cat-shaped masks and I really love them. These ones are cuter and in a much wider range of colors, prints, and styles, but they're also more expensive; they range from $1.80 to $3 for a mask. ($18-$30 for a box of ten.)
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niconebula · 1 year
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I need you guys to listen so bad, but I’m at least glad people on Twitter are starting to talk about this. The government of Canada is expanding Medically Assisted Death to cull the poor and disabled, and now suicidal and mentally ill (these are usually interchangeable of course here). It is EUGENICS and every single disabled rights organization is against it.
Disability payments are $1,200 a month. The average one bedroom apartment rent in the Greater Toronto Area (greatest pop. area by far here) is $2,000 a month. People with mental illnesses are on months long waitlists to get even a single publicly funded session. Weeks to get privately funded care which costs at least $200 a session. There is no housing here for disabled people. We are in one of the worst housing crises in the world right now.
Doctors are now offering MAiD unprompted to young suicidal people. This woman is 21, a health practitioner literally suggested she kill herself.
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This is one of the worst Disability Rights Violations we’ve ever seen in Canada. The government is killing us because it is cheaper than funding healthcare, cheaper than giving people housing and food and basic human rights.
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hyperlexichypatia · 3 months
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As I keep shouting into the void, pathologizers love shifting discussion about material conditions into discussion about emotional states.
I rant approximately once a week about how the brain maturity myth transmuted “Young adults are too poor to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own” into “Young adults are too emotionally and neurologically immature to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own.”
I’ve also talked about the misuse of “enabling” and “trauma” and “dopamine” .
And this is a pattern – people coin terms and concepts to describe material problems, and pathologization culture shifts them to be about problems in the brain or psyche of the person experiencing them. Now we’re talking about neurochemicals, frontal lobes, and self-esteem instead of talking about wages, wealth distribution, and civil rights. Now we can say that poor, oppressed, and exploited people are suffering from a neurological/emotional defect that makes them not know what’s best for themselves, so they don’t need or deserve rights or money.
Here are some terms that have been so horribly misused by mental health culture that we’ve almost entirely forgotten that they were originally materialist critiques.
Codependency What it originally referred to: A non-addicted person being overly “helpful” to an addicted partner or relative, often out of financial desperation. For example: Making sure your alcoholic husband gets to work in the morning (even though he’s an adult who should be responsible for himself) because if he loses his job, you’ll lose your home. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/codependency-addiction-recovery.html What it’s been distorted into: Being “clingy,” being “too emotionally needy,” wanting things like affection and quality time from a partner. A way of pathologizing people, especially young women, for wanting things like love and commitment in a romantic relationship.
Compulsory Heterosexuality What it originally referred to: In the 1980 in essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/493756 Adrienne Rich described compulsory heterosexuality as a set of social conditions that coerce women into heterosexual relationships and prioritize those relationships over relationships between women (both romantic and platonic). She also defines “lesbian” much more broadly than current discourse does, encompassing a wide variety of romantic and platonic relationships between women. While she does suggest that women who identify as heterosexual might be doing so out of unquestioned social norms, this is not the primary point she’s making. What it’s been distorted into: The patronizing, biphobic idea that lesbians somehow falsely believe themselves to be attracted to men. Part of the overall “Women don’t really know what they want or what’s good for them” theme of contemporary discourse.
Emotional Labor What it originally referred to: The implicit or explicit requirement that workers (especially women workers, especially workers in female-dominated “pink collar” jobs, especially tipped workers) perform emotional intimacy with customers, coworkers, and bosses above and beyond the actual job being done. Having to smile, be “friendly,” flirt, give the impression of genuine caring, politely accept harassment, etc. https://weld.la.psu.edu/what-is-emotional-labor/ What it’s been distorted into: Everything under the sun. Everything from housework (which we already had a term for), to tolerating the existence of disabled people, to just caring about friends the way friends do. The original intent of the concept was “It’s unreasonable to expect your waitress to care about your problems, because she’s not really your friend,” not “It’s unreasonable to expect your actual friends to care about your problems unless you pay them, because that’s emotional labor,” and certainly not “Disabled people shouldn’t be allowed to be visibly disabled in public, because witnessing a disabled person is emotional labor.” Anything that causes a person emotional distress, even if that emotional distress is rooted in the distress-haver’s bigotry (Many nominally progressive people who would rightfully reject the bigoted logic of “Seeing gay or interracial couples upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public” fully accept the bigoted logic of “Seeing disabled or poor people upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public”).
Battered Wife Syndrome What it originally referred to: The all-encompassing trauma and fear of escalating violence experienced by people suffering ongoing domestic abuse, sometimes resulting in the abuse victim using necessary violence in self-defense. Because domestic abuse often escalates, often to murder, this fear is entirely rational and justified. This is the reasonable, justified belief that someone who beats you, stalks you, and threatens to kill you may actually kill you.
What it’s been distorted into: Like so many of these other items, the idea that women (in this case, women who are victims of domestic violence) don’t know what’s best for themselves. I debated including this one, because “syndrome” was a wrongful framing from the beginning – a justified and rational fear of escalating violence in a situation in which escalating violence is occurring is not a “syndrome.” But the original meaning at least partially acknowledged the material conditions of escalating violence.
I’m not saying the original meanings of these terms are ones I necessarily agree with – as a cognitive liberty absolutist, I’m unsurprisingly not that enamored of either second-wave feminism or 1970s addiction discourse. And as much as I dislike what “emotional labor” has become, I accept that “Women are unfairly expected to care about other people’s feelings more than men are” is a true statement.
What I am saying is that all of these terms originally, at least partly, took material conditions into account in their usage. Subsequent usage has entirely stripped the materialist critique and fully replaced it with emotional pathologization, specifically of women. Acknowledgement that women have their choices constrained by poverty, violence, and oppression has been replaced with the idea that women don’t know what’s best for themselves and need to be coercively “helped” for their own good. Acknowledgement that working-class women experience a gender-and-class-specific form of economic exploitation has been rebranded as yet another variation of “Disabled people are burdensome for wanting to exist.”
Over and over, materialist critiques are reframed as emotional or cognitive defects of marginalized people. The next time you hear a superficially sympathetic (but actually pathologizing) argument for “Marginalized people make bad choices because…” consider stopping and asking: “Wait, who are we to assume that this person’s choices are ‘bad’? And if they are, is there something about their material conditions that constrains their options or makes the ‘bad’ choice the best available option?”
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northern-punk-lad · 1 year
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This is exactly what I mean when I say the society even more “progressive” societies are inherently ableist
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sayruq · 1 month
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cyanomys · 1 month
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yes, there are that many really disabled people on the internet actually
When I was less sick I used to think, "It seems like such a large portion of people on the internet are disabled, it can't possibly be that large of a percentage of the population" and then let my ableism demons tell me it was because they were faking (the same ones that told me I was faking, until I made myself really ill.)
But now that I'm sicker and wiser I realize I was logically just wrong because
The internet is disabled people's lifeline. There are more disabled people on the internet because OF COURSE. People who aren't disabled can be less chronically online because they don't have to be. This is textbook selection bias!
But actually also I was almost right, because there are way more disabled people in society than you would think! They're just systematically hidden and excluded from public spaces for abled peoples' convenience! 🙃
Anyway maybe this will help you understand and/or explain to abled friends and family.
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phoenixonwheels · 9 months
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If you have a medical condition that makes you at high risk for Covid (which is a long fucking list) or you live with or care for someone who does, under the ADA you can require that every person you will come in contact with in a medical facility be masked and that they properly filter the air.
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