sapiophobic

It's hard to explain to zoomers just how insanely homophobic the early 2000s were. If you were male, and like, washed your hair regularly, people would call you a faggot.

Not gonna lie I think that some of you guys on the far left are catastrophically bad at threat assessment and completely unable to meet this moment where it is.

You can be as pissed as you want at the Democrats, but the Republicans trying to install a right-wing dictatorship is not business as usual. In fact one of the biggest reasons the Democrats suck so much is that they're still acting like it is!

obviously this is like a single possibly questionable source and on wikipedia of all places but just for a sense of rough scale i would like to offer this statistic.

that is not a coincidence and that is not because autistic people "Cannot Contribute To Society" or whatever. it is an expression of structural violence which exists in service of the biopolitical regime of imperial capital and specifically to the benefit of allistic people.

and i know we Talk about autism nowadays as this kind of quirky trait, and the implication is that this is a form of Difference that Society Has Come To Accept. but that's just not true. autistic people continue to be the subjects of immense violence. if anything, it's just that the violence has gotten subtler, more insidious, in how it identifies its victims. "the vibes were off." "idk she was just kind of odd." "she was really awkward and kind of uncomfy." "not very professional." "abrasive and grating." the knife has just found a better way of hiding under the folds of the robes.

autistic people continue to be some of the most vulnerable people in society but especially under the system of imperial capital, where human autonomy is directly linked to potential labor output under a very particular paradigm. and when combined with the fact that the average autistic person is undoubtedly profoundly traumatized by how they are treated for being autistic, this confers a significantly higher rate of "mental illness" among autistic people which further forces us onto the outskirts of society where we are more and more vulnerable to exploitation and violence.

and like, obviously this should not have to be true to justify the cessation of violence against autistic people. but we literally keep the world afloat. do you know how many industries would shut down immediately, just completely collapse, without the specific labor of the specific skillsets of autistic people? and in particular, how much physical infrastructure would simply cease functioning? every workplace that is held up by "strangely, mysteriously" and incredibly disciplined and rigorous documentation, every computer infrastructural project upheld by One Guy's lifelong commitment to doing this critical project completely thanklessly, every workplace which is carried by That One Woman who seems to understand how everything works even though nobody else does. How many of those people are simply autistic people who have to hide this fact because we are targeted for violence for being this way? And if those are the success stories, the ones who managed to slip under the radar because they weren't Visibly Autistic Enough to get caught, how many more of us could be rotting in living circumstances where we are essentially kept prisoner by "caretakers"?

[source]

I am not trying to single out this person but i've received a number of responses to this post already (which is encouraging in the sense that it is seemingly proving my concerns that this post would gain no traction to be incorrect) but like. i want to be explicit about this. i am so terribly sorry you went through this. and while i was like, subject to physical and psychological torment many times in my life, it was the isolation and loneliness that left some of the worst lasting scars on my person, both in the physical and emotional sense.

isolation and loneliness are just as functional and violent forms of social punishment enacted against autistic people to break us down and Other us. humans are a social species. to be completely isolated and alone is a terrible violence to have done to a human being that is a fracturing and traumatic experience. there is a reason that for many cultures and eras, exile is considered a serious enough punitive measure to be considered almost equal to death. in some cultures it is considered worse. solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment which is considered by many to be explicitly a form of torture. to tear a human being out of their community, or, far worse, to force a human to grow up and live their whole life completely separate and distinct from the rest of society -- that is a horrifying thing to do to a person. it is a thing that breaks people.

“Hear me out”s say something about the shooter: They too want to Have Seen More Fucked Up Things, and not only have they normalized it, they get off on it. They usually append “cowards” to the “hear me out” because it is a statement of me > you. The most annoying kind of person, in the most annoying arena, challenging you to the most annoying duel. The best counter is to shoot it down because that has no counter in this context: They already showed their hand, you can simply call it a bad hand and win.

UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting (4 December 2024)

there are literally hundreds of thousands of people whose lives have been personally ruined and destroyed by UnitedHealthcare

actually shooting this man in the chest was pretty merciful compared to what he & his investor buddies regularly and routinely put disabled Americans through

…maybe…

Cocacola, regularly:

In my head: ah! The archaic form of the letter s! Being a casual scholar of linguistics myself I am well aware that though it resembles the letter f in modern typography in fact it is phonetically identical to s! How foolish it would be to stumble into such a simple lexiconical pitfall!