The Weekly Infodump, 2023/04/26
Welcome to The Weekly Infodump, which contains a short write-up of whatever is on my mind. You are allowed to share this newsletter with others and I hope you will.
I will begin by acknowledging that I have entered a blessed period of my life in which I experience only incidental contact with neurotypicals. I encounter these people, the mini-bosses of humanity, while I'm trying to accomplish basic life activities, but our interactions are short and superficial; I don't even need my Very Best Scripts to dispatch them. It is a much less stressful way to live and I HIGHLY recommend it.
The downside?
Well, ask me how the ongoing medication shortages are affecting my household and wider social circ--SPOILER: IT'S TERRIBLE, Y'ALL! From what I can tell, about half of folks have given up on trying to get anything done and the other half are maybe breaking bad?
(Books) I felt more than a little trepidation as I began I Will Die On This Hill: Autistic Adults, Autism Parents, and The Children Who Deserve a Better World. The publisher description lays out the book's central premise:
There is a significant divide between autistic advocates and parents of autistic children. Parents may feel attacked for their lack of understanding, and autistic adults who offer insight and guidance are also met with hostility and rejection...This book unites both perspectives, exploring the rift between these communities and encouraging them to work towards a common goal.
I am uncomfortable with how blithely this description saunters into the false equivalency trap that too often occurs in dominant-culture-perspective takes on disagreements between members of privileged groups and members of marginalized groups. In this framework, "How DARE you hurt my feelings when I am a good person who is trying my best!" is too often given equal weight to "Your behavior is hurting and/or killing us, so please stop."
However, the book itself mostly comes down on the side of the autists, as it should. It appears that the framing is meant more as a call-in to the Autism Parents(TM) rather than a "both sides" thing, which is a relief.
(Links) As we know, Dubious Autism "Cures" are a bipartisan issue. This piece from Mother Jones examines what is sometimes referred to as the Wellness-to-QAnon or Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline, which describes how the wellness space, often associated with a (superficially) liberal worldview, can be a gateway to right-wing conspiracy theories.
I can't say I'm a fan of this framing, which makes it sound as if one end of the spectrum (wellness) is less harmful than the other (QAnon). It isn't. Both are noxious, although one is more overtly anti-Semitic than the other.
Autism is actually a great lens for examining this issue, as it often serves as a repository for a lot of our collective anxieties. We don't really know what autism is, how it works, or what causes it, and this vast uncertainty, even among people who research it for a living, creates a vacuum just waiting to be filled with misinformation – or disinformation, as the case may be!
Also, autistic people tend to be the lab rats of just about every pseudoscientific "intervention" out there, many of which later become general wellness panaceas. Hyperbaric chambers? Not just for billionaire transhumanists, it turns out. Microdosing? Forget Timothy Leary, autistic preschoolers led the way (not by choice; Different times, the sixties)! Gluten-free, casein-free, *-free diets, even in the absenceo of actual food allergies? Yeah, we had that done to us before it was cool. Anti-vaxxers? Oh, I see you've met our moms!*
(*Not my specific mother, I hasten to add.)
I'm not sure why this is the case, although I'm certain it has something to do with autistic people being 1.) a numerically small demographic, 2.) whose well-being no one really gives a fuck about.
In other words, our misery, while lucrative, does not scale particularly well. When you're only an estimated 2.7% of the human population, there is a limit to how rich you can make someone else. The solution? Bring the NTs on board! Not only do they (on average) have more money, they'll also, it seems, believe just about anything.
Which is why we have Goop. (You're welcome, NTs, and also, take that!)
If I sound callous, it's because 14/10 doctors agree that I, an Autist, am devoid of empathy. JK!!!! (Or am I?)
Actually, if I sound callous, it's because we, the Autists, have been warning everyone for years about this shit and no one has really listened because no one ever listens to us. And now look where we are.
"Over the last three years, advocates of unproven autism treatments have found powerful allies and new recruits in Covid-related conspiracy groups. Likewise, pandemic conspiracists have begun to attend autism treatment conferences, finding receptive audiences for their theories about Covid being a government plot. The two groups are enjoying a fruitful symbiotic relationship, with each amplifying the other’s ideas and benefitting from the exposure..."
Look, I don't know how to end conversations so I just dump some info and then flee the scene. Anyway, soon everyone else will be paying top-dollar for the bleach enemas we receive for free! UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN!
