Here is a video about that one excuse involving autistic children who get bullied. It makes my blood boil when professionals act so omniscient about what is best for children on the spectrum. I let them have it under the name AnElephantThatPaints.

That–as it seems to me–the training is in the reverse, that practitioners are being trained to see autistic children as uncute, unadorable, unlovable, and unprecious is a very sad and dangerous thing.

Maturing and compensation. Uta Frith said something about that back in 1991 in her second book. And Oliver Sacks referred to it in his Anthropologist on Mars.

I was looking in “Images” (great blog tag category by the way) and when I put two and two together! Thank you for the clarification. I didn’t exactly want to say it was you because I wanted to look at the 2 people in the photograph without bias.

Wikimania is the yearly conference of the Wikimedia Foundation, the people who administrate Wikipedia and all the other Wiki projects created and evolved under their aegis. Next year the conference will be in Haifa, Israel. This year’s conference was on the 9th – 11th July in Gdansk.

Here is its link:

http://toolserver.org/~emijrp/wikimania/
(the IRC-streaming-twittering mashup!)
http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
(The Haifa Wikimania link).

The only thing which was a bit of a fizzle was the Accessibility Workshop, which was run by Rodan from the French Wikipedia. My favourite was probably about civic virtue by Joanna Kulesza from the Polish Wikipedia. And I liked “From Russia with Love” and “We were promised Xanadu”.

Benzion:

“It matters to me whether someone living in this country has the physical capability to serve in the draft and the mental and communicative capacity to vote and serve on a jury. Other than that it is none of my business as to what you can or cannot do.”

Just a quick point about the judges.

This morning there appeared an article about jurors and judges being excluded on the basis of physical or mental illness. For instance, there was a judge who was asked to leave their post because of sleep aponea.

As long as you don’t try to tell other countries what to do, then I accept that.

And it’s not an either-or thing, where you lower the standards so everyone can do it or make them high so that nobody can.

(I would like to have the “standards” made the “fall guy”).

When can we start suing neurotypicals for prejudice and discrimination every time they talk about the value of friendship and that it is a bad thing to spend most of your life by yourself? :p

This comment also allows me to clarify a couple things (which inevitably happens once I write a long, rambling post — I keep thinking of things I should have mentioned). I like the way you put it about maturing with age! Autistic kids become autistic adults; inevitably we mature, we compensate.

Additionally, I do think there’s a big difference between helping autistic kids to lead happy, fulfilling lives vs. trying to make autistic kids into non-autistic kids.

The thing that bothers me about Rogers’ statement on functioning, or just on the whole ideological conception of functioning — she verbatim said that she wanted “less disability and more functioning.” This plays into the notion that disabled people cannot function, as if there’s some sort of existing bar graph that displays functioning going up as disability goes down. (It assumes that disability is some static, linear phenomenon, and it likewise very problematically assumes that functioning is empirical, concrete, and antithetical to disability, as opposed to functioning being normative and socially constructed. Functioning centers nondisabled people as ideal and reduces disabled people to, well, nothing positive — and certainly not valued members of a community or society.)

I’m rambling again.

Thanks for your note about the photo — it’s actually a photo of me and my cousin. I’m guessing that one of our parents told him to try and get me to face the camera. (Though I might be wrong.)

What is wikimania? Sounds interesting!

http://distractible.org/2010/07/28/arbitrary-normality/

He came to quite a different conclusion than Rogers and Davis.

Though some things were not quite so different: for example, he mentioned “as their function increases, they reveal a sense of humour”.

(Like cheese, crackers and wine; we mature with age!)

Have been most interested in the conference since you and Benzion tweeted about it last month.

The title reminded me very much of a Glenn Doman book. (of the How to increase your baby’s intelligence type).

As for the picture, I think both children are cute.

I also think the boy holding the girl’s chin is … violating. I do not know if he means harm. The boy’s smile is direct, and the girl’s eyes are lovely.

In the interim, I “went to” Wikimania in Poland. Some of the keynotes were 45-60 minutes: I mostly listened to the ordinary speeches. Those three days were great.

Her keynote was also about two hours long — which, in my mind, is one hella long keynote. But that might be the norm for professional/social science-y types? (I’m not sure. My scholarly home is the humanities.)