Open Society

People generally are very pleased with themselves when they have made an accommodation for me. I know this because they proudly announce it! In turn, I have learned to say thank you when people announce their thoughtfulness at making an accommodation for me. I truly am thankful because it allows me a fuller participation in the events going on around me. It also makes me smile because I have been making accommodations for people my whole life and it has never occurred to me to announce it! The fact is that autistics are required to make numerous accommodations every day they are among other people. This is because the world is not set up in a neurologically friendly way to autistics. We live in a very fast paced world where speed in understanding and responding to people is expected. We also have much information constantly being delivered over numerous electronic devices. We expect everything to happen instantly! For the most part this isn’t a good match for people with autism because we generally have a “too much” experience of the world due to the way our sensory system takes in information from the world around this. Once that information “arrives” it is then, for many autistics, processed differently. A common result of our difference is referred to as a processing delay. This means it takes more time for us to process and respond. Not only is this is a huge disadvantage in our fast paced world of instant expectation, but one unspoken assumption is that I will accommodate for my differences and act “appropriately,” i.e. act as a neuro majority person acts. It takes time and energy to accommodate another person regardless if you are the person with autism or the person without autism. Based on years of observation of numerous autistics, myself included, I can see autistics pay a much higher cost for the accommodations they must make as compared to the neuro majority person. Part of the reason is the sheer volume of accommodations an autistic is required to make each day compared to others. The really funny part of this is that autistics rarely are in any way acknowledged for the heavy burden of accommodations they must make just to survive in this world while others are thought to be the people making the accommodations! Furthermore, I am expected to make accommodations for you while you have the option to choose when, if, and how often you will make accommodations for me. This differential is a result of assigning the measure of normal to the experience of the majority of the people. Even though I make considerably more accommodations for you than you make for me, because your experience of the world is considered the norm and my experience the deviation it is the understanding of the majority that I need you to accommodate me and this is true. However, nobody notices all the accommodating other autistics and I have done all our lives!

For me, making accommodations is not optional. Because your ways are considered the norm I am expected to do whatever I need to fit into this norm. For me, making accommodations for you is not optional. It is expected and therefore, no credit given. In fact, the only time people notice me in regard to accommodations I make for them is when I neglect to make them! When I cannot or do not make accommodations for you something is considered to be wrong with me.

When they finally learned of their autism in adulthood, they began to better understand who they are and why they experience the environment differently from others. This new understanding taught them that their so-called weird habits are actually part of their authentically autistic ways to cope with the weirder world. This study suggests that autistic adults' insistence on sameness is an authentically autistic way to exercise their right to comfortably co-exist and live as human beings and as themselves.

I think a big thing for me is respect. We’ve constantly had to write in our rider what our pronouns are and explicitly instruct the crew not to call us “ladies” or “gals.” And there will STILL be people who disrespect our wishes and misgender us. At this point, I refuse to work with people like that, no matter how much of a big deal they are in the music scene. If they’re not going to respect me as a person, not only me as an artist, then I don’t want anything to do with them.

solarpunk refers to a political aesthetic that promotes positive externalities, positive-sum worlds and public goods

Men are told to be problem solvers by society…women are told to be caregivers. More specifically…their job in this world is to put their OWN NEEDS and individual identity on the backburner…and to provide CARE to their children, their spouses, the sick, the elderly…they are socialized to believe that their role is to keep the peace…to be socially adept enough to understand the relationships between people around them, to MAINTAIN those relationships, to put themselves in other people’s shoes.

irginia Held, a philosopher whose work I’ll be referencing here throughout says it best, she says that the value of Gilligan’s work has less to do with her expounding everything there possibly was to say about an ethics of care…and more to do with the consideration of a female, largely IGNORED perspective… and the potentially revolutionary ideas that came out of these voices formerly lost in the margins. Gilligan saw the moral significance of CARE in terms of its importance to the entire project of humanity in a way people had never really developed before.

when you willfully IGNORE voices in ANY group setting…you willfully CREATE blindspots for yourself. And those blindspots can turn even the most dynamic genius with the BEST intentions… into a mere technician that spends their career justifying a limited perspective.

“A species of activity that includes everything we do to maintain, contain, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves and our environment.”

“An ethic of justice focuses on questions of fairness, equality, individual rights, abstract principles and the consistent application of them. An ethic of care focuses on attentiveness, trust, responsiveness to need, narrative nuance and cultivating caring relations.”

The FIRST thing that an ethics of care is going to critique is the IDEA…that the BEST way to assess the morality of a given situation… is from the perspective of liberal individualism.

An ethics of care would START by saying that there is a HUGE DISPARITY…between moral reasoning as it exists in one of these thought experiments…and ACTUAL moral reasoning as we experience it on the ground…as REAL people, immersed in REAL WORLD scenarios, without the LUXURY of being so disconnected from the ACTUAL decision.

This whole IDEA…that you are an independent subject navigating the world, SEPARATE from everyone else around you… is a complete, delusion. You are one person… that’s part of an intricate web of relationships ALL AROUND you, that MAKE your existence even possible. Your family, your friends, your coworkers, your community, everyone that maintains society…Virginia Held says the only reason anyone could POSSIBLY THINK that they’re actually independent is BECAUSE of this network of people that take care of the things you take for granted that ALLOW you to CONTINUE in this delusion.

So to an ethics of care…the subject NAVIGATING these moral dilemmas is NOT independent…but instead someone who needs to RECOGNIZE their INTERDEPENDENCE on the world around them… and someone who should consider themselves and their decisions as a PART of that narrative of relationships that extends over time. Every moral decision that we MAKE is going to be in CONSIDERATION of these relationships that make our lives possible. As Carol Gilligan says an ethics of care is: “An ethic grounded in voice and relationships, in the importance of everyone having a voice, being listened to carefully and heard with respect.”

The philosophers Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher lay out five key elements of care…virtues to be developed if you wanted to APPLY an ethics of care to things in your life. Think of this as a sort of HOW TO manual for moral maturity UNDER an ethics of care. These virtues IN ORDER are Attentiveness, Responsibility, Competence, Responsiveness and Plurality

Joan Tronto writes that implicit within ALL care dynamics is the reality of vulnerability and inequality. Whenever there’s a situation where there is one person being cared for…and another person that’s providing care…that INSTANTLY creates a power discrepancy. Even in situations where neither party RECOGNIZES the vulnerability!

The truth about navigating REAL LIFE as a human being…is that inequalities and power dynamics exist in practically EVERY SITUATION that we FIND ourselves in. And WHENEVER there’s a discrepancy in power…it creates the potential for ABUSE. Joan Tronto writes that we have to remain vigilant ABOUT that possibility and to understand that people are not “interchangeable” as she says, in these caregiving situations. You can’t just ASSUME you know what’s best for someone without even LISTENING to them.

And REMEMBER what Carol Gilligan said before…that an ethics of care is grounded in voice and relationships, in the importance of everyone having a voice, being listened to carefully and heard with respect.

Now HERE’S the BIG POINT… ON A SCALE of moral development…that is TESTING children based on HOW WELL they can logically DEDUCE what brings the most justice…Amy, and other young girls LIKE her are going to score LOWER with answers like these, LOWER than the boys around her same age. Implicit within this is the fact that when testing moral development almost EXCLUSIVELY from a MALE PERSPECTIVE…women are STATISTICALLY going to have scores that LOOK… like they are just morally weak men. But this one dimensional view of moral development is WRONG to Carol Gilligan. Women’s answers to these questions are NOT, as Freud might think, a LACK of moral development. Women are viewing the moral dilemma from a totally different perspective with a different end goal in mind.

But another way to think about the answer to this question is to say that every great philosopher in their own way questioned the fundamental assumptions that were present in the thinking of their time. That is a hallmark of a great philosopher because, when seeking solutions to philosophical problems, casting aside the cultural or linguistic assumptions of a particular snapshot in time very often leads philosophers of the next generation to understand how those assumptions have been limiting our ways of thinking about things.

You know, we say things like “liberty and justice for all,” but what exactly do we mean when we say society should be ensuring justice?This is not just an important question to Rawls; this is the question. He has a very famous quote where he says, “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions as truth is to systems of thought.” And what he means there is that, in the same way you would judge the legitimacy of a system of ideas based on how true it is, we should judge the legitimacy of our social institutions based on how just they are. Now, what is Rawls talking about when he references justice? Well, in a lesser sense, he’s certainly talking about things like the criminal justice system or the balancing of the scales within a society. But, if you wanted to understand the scope of Rawls’s work, the far more crucial version of justice that he’s talking about is what he calls “distributive justice.”

Rawls is a statistician. And he’s looking at the numbers, and he sees a huge disparity in the United States in terms of income inequality. To him, this is a failure of the liberal, democratic societies of the past and their silence on the topic of “distributive justice.” He wants to actually start having this conversation, and he wants to begin at one of the most simple questions you could possibly ask about justice. The question is “Should inequalities exist within a just society?” And, sure, there are people out there that would say that everybody should have the exact same thing no matter how hard they work or what choices they make. Equality of outcome is often a desirable end to a person that holds this position.

Now, imagine we’re all standing around on this new planet formulating how a society should be structured. Rawls wants us to imagine a few other things as part of this thought experiment. Imagine you’re structuring this society through what he calls a “veil of ignorance,” or you are asked to decide how this society will be structured without knowing anything about your position within that society once it’s founded. You can’t know whether you’re going to be living in Beverly Hills or in the projects in New York City. You can’t know your age, gender, race, sexual orientation. You can’t know your IQ, your athletic ability, your charisma. You can’t know what kind of family you’re going to be born into. You can’t know whether you’re going to have some mental illness that makes every day miserable.Human beings have the capacity to be rational. Rawls wants to ask, “How would rational beings without a vested interest in one group or another create a society?” Well, one thing’s for sure, Rawls thinks, it wouldn’t look anything like the modern United States. No rational being would look at the statistics and choose that structure because it’s much more likely for you to be born into one of the many millions that struggle versus one of the handful of people with power and resources.

This way of thinking about inequalities within a society is more broadly known as the “difference principle,” or that we should remove inequalities within a society as much as we can until the removal of further inequalities would cause harm to the least advantaged. Now, this is in contrast to the way we’ve often thought about things before, sometimes called part of the “efficiency principle,” the idea that we should find people in society that need help and help them as much as we can until helping them would cause harm to someone else. This is a completely different area of focus. The focus for Rawls is always on ensuring the most we can for the least advantaged person as long as that insurance doesn’t prevent us from contributing to society.

everybody in the family gets firsts before anyone gets seconds.

Peoples are of two types, depending on the nature of their domestic political institutions. Liberal peoples satisfy the requirements of political liberalism: they have legitimate liberal constitutions, and they have governments that are under popular control and not driven by large concentration of private economic power. Decent peoples are not internally just from a liberal perspective. Their basic institutions do not recognize reasonable pluralism or embody any interpretation of the liberal ideas of free and equal citizens cooperating fairly. The institutions of a decent society may be organized around a single comprehensive doctrine, such as a dominant religion. The political system may not be democratic, and women or members of minority religions may be excluded from public office. Nevertheless, decent peoples are well-ordered enough, Rawls says, to merit equal membership in international society.

Rawls’s account of the reasonable citizen highlights his view of human nature. Humans are not irredeemably self-centered, dogmatic, or driven by what Hobbes called, “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power” (1651, 58). Humans have at least the capacity for genuine toleration and mutual respect. This human capacity raises the hope that the diversity of worldviews in a democratic society may represent not merely pluralism, but reasonable pluralism. Rawls hopes, that is, that the religious, moral, and philosophical doctrines that citizens accept will themselves endorse toleration and accept the essentials of a democratic regime. In the religious sphere, for example, a reasonable pluralism might contain a reasonable Catholicism, a reasonable interpretation of Islam, a reasonable atheism, and so on. Being reasonable, none of these doctrines will advocate the use of coercive political power to impose religious conformity on citizens with different beliefs. The possibility of reasonable pluralism softens but does not solve the challenge of legitimacy: how one law can legitimately be imposed on diverse citizens. For even in a society of reasonable pluralism, it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to endorse, say, a reasonable Catholicism as the basis for a constitutional settlement. Reasonable Muslims or atheists cannot be expected to endorse Catholicism as setting the basic terms for social life. Nor, of course, can Catholics be expected to accept Islam or atheism as the fundamental basis of law. No comprehensive doctrine can be accepted by all reasonable citizens, and so no comprehensive doctrine can serve as the basis for the legitimate use of coercive political power.

Separate lines of research in autism spectrum disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder have shown that the two may share several vulnerability factors. One of those is ruminative thinking, that is, one’s tendency to re-hash thoughts and ideas, in a repetitive manner. This article examined the role of two rumination types as potential factors connecting autism spectrum disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder: brooding (continuously comparing one’s current condition to one’s desired condition) and reflection (an introspective effort to cognitively solve one’s problems).

A total of 34 adults with autism spectrum disorder (with no intellectual impairment) and 66 typically developing adults completed questionnaires assessing post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and rumination. The results showed increased post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in adults with autism spectrum disorder, compared to typically developing adults. Brooding rumination was also higher among those with autism spectrum disorder. Finally, brooding, but not reflection, served as a mechanism connecting autism spectrum disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, that is, those with autism spectrum disorder showed increased brooding, which in turn predicted more post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. This study has potential clinical implications. Rumination and cognitive inflexibility, which are common in autism spectrum disorder, could exacerbate post-traumatic symptoms among individuals with autism spectrum disorder who experience traumatic events. Interventions targeting brooding rumination and cognitive flexibility may assist in alleviating post-traumatic symptoms in individuals with autism spectrum disorder.

The results indicated increased post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, as well as elevated brooding levels, in adults with autism spectrum disorder, compared to typically developing controls. Brooding, but not reflective rumination, mediated the association between autism spectrum disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. Rumination and cognitive inflexibility, which are common in autism spectrum disorder, may exacerbate post-traumatic symptoms among traumatized individuals who have autism spectrum disorder. Interventions targeting brooding rumination and cognitive flexibility may assist in alleviating post-traumatic symptoms in individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Future studies should examine other psychological mechanisms which may underlie the autism spectrum disorder–post-traumatic stress disorder co-morbidity.

compared to TD participants, those with ASD reported significantly higher total PTSD scores, as well as higher scores on the PTSD clusters of hyper-arousal and negative alterations in cognition and mood. Marginally significant differences were also found on PTSD intrusion symptoms (p = 0.077). ASD participants also reported higher levels of brooding rumination, as well as marginally significant higher reflection scores (p = 0.053).

This study examined the role of rumination in the ASD-PTSD co-morbidity. We have shown a significantly higher incidence of PTSD, as well as higher levels of some PTSD clusters, among those with ASD. Participants with ASD, as well as participants with a probable PTSD diagnosis, reported increased brooding rumination. In addition, brooding rumination, but not reflection, mediated the association between ASD and PTSD symptoms.

According to Nolen-Hoeksema’s (1991) well-accepted Response Styles Theory, rumination refers to repetitively thinking about the cause, consequences, and symptoms of one’s negative affect. The theory argues that there are inter-personal differences in people’s characteristic response patterns to negative mood. These patterns subsequently have an effect on the course and intensity of this mood. rumination refers to repetitively thinking about the cause, consequences, and symptoms of one’s negative affect.Nolen-Hoeksema and colleagues (2008) indicated that there is a positive association between a ruminative response style and increased negative emotions, decreased goal-directed activity, and burnout in inter-personal relationships. Rumination is typically considered as a dysfunctional emotion regulation strategy, which individuals employ in an inflexible manner. In line with Response Styles Theory, rumination was commonly associated with psychopathology, including depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (Aldao et al., 2016). In recent years, the study of rumination was enriched by categorizing it into two sub-types: (1) brooding (continuously comparing one’s current condition to one’s desired condition) and (2) reflection (an introspective effort to cognitively solve one’s problems), with research showing the adverse effects of the former, and the positive effects of the latter (Wu et al., 2015). Repetition, which is a central component of rumination, is a defining aspect of ASD. Indeed, increased rumination was found among individuals with ASD (Gotham et al., 2014). Rumination is also associated with PTSD, with longitudinal studies showing that the endorsement of rumination shortly after a traumatic event serves as a predictor of later PTSD (Kleim et al., 2007). Both intrusions and rumination are quite common in individuals suffering from chronic PTSD (e.g. Michael et al., 2007; Williams & Moulds, 2007). An increased tendency for rumination may both facilitate the development of post-traumatic cognitions, as well as maintain them once they have developed. This may be particularly true for brooding rumination, which was found to be associated with symptoms of post-traumatic re-experiencing. As noted by Valdez and Lilly (2017), “Passively thinking about the causes and consequences of trauma can provide internal retrieval cues for intrusive trauma memories that can elicit further rumination” (p. 12). This notion also echoes Ehlers and Clark’s (2000) cognitive model of PTSD, which highlights the bidirectional association and mutual maintenance between re-experiencing and rumination. Interestingly, when looking at reflection rumination separately, this cognitive pattern was found to be associated with post-traumatic growth (PTG), which is considered a salutogenic outcome of trauma exposure (Stockton et al., 2011).

Let's go back to the title a moment. Divergent. To differ from what is expected. I've been using Neurodivergent as a self identifier since I was Tris's age. That's a long time. I am Autistic. I am epileptic. I have C-PTSD (Four and I have that in common). And when you are neurodivergent, you learn to hide--just like in the world you built, the Divergent must hide.

“Punk in its very essence is queer,” said Tali Clarke, a London-based filmmaker and creator of the Pride Punx float,

The relationship between the students, and really the parents' and community's need for credentials, and the desire of the teachers and some of the students to have more engaging, in-depth, intellectual explorations of things were really in tension. And so we heard about that from both the students and the teachers. It seemed like both students and teachers had been conscripted into a game that neither of them really wanted to be playing.

They have a lot of kids with disabilities who are in that program. And you don't see a lot of kids with disabilities doing I.B. at schools that have adopted it. So we thought that school, actually, that program and the way the school had adopted the program was a nice blend of some of the qualities that we saw in more extreme forms at some of the other schools.

My big concern is that there is no explanation as to how this classification system (I’m not exactly sure what to call it because the original proposal for the term published in the Lancet referred to the profound autism designation as an “administrative term,” but people seem to be using it in a wide variety of ways) will actually increase access to services or improve services planning. The current system outlined in the DSM-5 is to classify autistic people according to their support needs. The authors of the paper published in Public Health Reports are correct that this classification system needs work, but they don’t provide even a logic model as to how the system they propose will improve providing services to people who need it. They rely on big assumptions that poorly defined criteria such as IQ scores and parent/clinician reports of verbal ability tells us something about the level and type of services that autistic people need. But others have pointed out (see for example Steven Kapp’s work on how scores on IQ tests vary across different tests and subdomains) that these relationships are not clear cut; many autistic people who do not have the characteristics the authors focus on have significant support needs, and support needs can be radically different across different domains, social contexts, and time. If the goal is to make sure that everyone gets the support they need, why not improve our ability to directly assess support needs? Why focus on features that currently do not have well-characterized relationships with support needs? I haven’t seen any clear explanations about how this is meant to work, especially given that this “new” system looks a lot like the pre- DSM-5 system—and I don’t think there is any evidence that service provision was better under that system.

Abled arrogance is intentionally taught. It is intentionally taught to new interpreters and teachers of the deaf who are taught that academic expertise outweighs lived experience and knowledges, that a college degree or credentials should erase the deaf person’s own expressed needs or knowledge about language and access. That degree gives you abled authority- on top of already existing abled authority inherent in society’s perceptions of the capacity of abled people versus the disabled people in the room. You exit with the idea that your language is inherently better (because it’s academic), your language is better because you learned it via a textbook and a classroom. That’s arrogance. You’re taught to intentionally assess a deaf person’s language, their capacities, that you know the best in that room about access and accommodations, including where people should sit, if you should do open or closed processes, etc. So that is not fragility. It is not about you living in a society where you’ve been sheltered from conversations about race (AKA whiteness in American society). This is about you being put on a pedestal for being “nice” or “good” to disabled people whose belonging is questionable and then being uncomfortable when told you shouldn’t be on said pedestal. This is arrogance, pure and simple.This arrogance is fueled by benevolence porn.