Stormchild knight

Hey friends, if I can ask for a moment of your time and ask you to sign this petition.

The Telegraph recently posted a horrifically ableist piece about chronically ill “influencers” (most people involved would consider themselves advocates), blaming chronically ill people for dropping employment numbers by “normalizing wokeness” and insinuating that visibly disabled and chronically ill people online are only doing so for monetary gain.

I’m not going to link to the article because I don’t want to give it any more views or clicks but you can feel free to look it up yourself. There are also excerpts from the article included in the above petition.

The journalist involved, Natasha Leake, intentionally lied to the influencers involved, claiming she supported what they were doing and wanted to raise awareness about their conditions. Needless to say what was printed was not supportive and the people involved are devastated.

And if you’re thinking this sounds like a rehash of something the BBC did a few years ago when they tried to pit disabled people against chronically ill people and made insinuations about “sickfluencers” being in it for the money, you’d be right.

Same old shit, different media outlet.

There has been a huge push back in media against chronically ill and disabled people over the last few years, in part because our governments are moving more toward fascism and they want you to feel apathy towards the neglect and suffering their policies cause. The media is a tool of this.

Please don’t let us be the only ones fighting back against it. No matter how healthy and abled you currently are, you are just one bad accident, one unexpected illness or fluke of genetics away from joining us.

who had innocent people she thought of as enemies (Jews "of course" because antisemitism held sway over all of Europe but especially Spain; they're pretty fash to this very day) hanged by their wrists in chains ON THE SIDES OF CATHEDRALS AND LEFT TO DIE. Source: I have laid my personal eyes on these chains and asked about them. Spanish Inquisition? Some of the worst atrocities ever to be cloaked by/stain the name of Christianity, in order to sow evil and murder and kill people in hideous ways for the sake of hate?

That Isabella. She did that. her and her messed up hubby.

When I became freelance, one of my first marketing contracts was fixing my boss' blog posts and articles that he had 'written' with ChatGPT.

It was the single most soul-sucking task I have ever done in my life. I could have ghostwritten it for them faster than it took me to edit it.

ChatGPT would often hallucinate features of the product, and often required more fact-checking than the article was worth.

It is absolutely no surprise that 77% of employees report that AI has increased workloads and lowered productivity, while 96% of executives believe it has boosted it.

The reality is that it's only boosted the amount of work employees have to do which leads to increased burnout, stress and job dissatisfaction.

My sibling has a child with a chronic, incurable medical condition that requires daily medication. (UHC requires the child be seen in a doctor’s office (not virtual/remote) 2x/yr to confirm the diagnosis of an incurable chronic condition, btw. And doesn’t fully cover the cost of these visits, but will cut off all medication coverage if they’re skipped.)

So my sibling’s out-of-pocket healthcare cost doubled overnight. Now they have to meet the family deductible, not the individual deductible, before insurance starts paying for anything.

Worstie, that’s called death.

If your vagus nerve shuts down, you’re dead.

I’m a chronically ill person with a disease known as MCAS. Both the symptoms of MCAS and the treatment can lead to secondary adrenal insufficiency.

Adrenal insufficiency can lead to the body not producing enough cortisol.

I need you all to understand the sheer malicious glee I feel in my soul when one of these wellness frauds message me about having excess cortisol and how their 30 day program of bath salts and dopamine deprivation plans will cure my idiopathic anaphylaxis, and I get to laugh like a maniac as I inform them, actually, because my body is constantly over burning adrenaline to keep me alive, I don’t have enough.

Ahahaha

“Dopamine addiction” was a phrase casually coined a short while back to describe the phenomenon of people engaging in harmful behaviors, specifically things like doom scrolling, because even harmful behaviors can give you a dopamine fix.

I’m sure it’s been used before that, but it started trending recently in that context.

It was a simple way to explain why so many people struggle to give up social media even though it might actively be making their mental health worse.

What these wellness influencers frauds have since done was take the phrase and run with it to such an extreme that any behavior that gives you “dopamine” (and I put it in quotes because I don’t actually think these assholes know what dopamine actually is) is bad.

Actually any form of dopamine seeking means you’re an addict and that’s why you’re miserable. It’s not burnout or trauma from having just gone through a massively traumatic and ongoing event (the pandemic) it’s you.

You personally, are out of alignment with your core self—your spiritual self. Your female archetype, if you will. And by golly gosh have they got all the products for you to buy to fix it while simultaneously making you feel guilty about all of it.

It’s pseudoscience with a spiritual twist.

A lot of the marketing spiels are bastardized versions of indigo child starseed shit. You don’t have ADHD or Autism, you’re actually a witch—what kind? Take our personality test and we’ll tell you. That’ll be $50 please.

And one of the things they talk about to “reset your alignment” is getting yourself into a state of “dopamine deprivation” because again, they don’t have a fucking clue what the word actually is or how the body works.

If they did they’d know that dopamine deprivation leads to debilitating mental and physical health problems.

But it sounds good, doesn’t it? Because they’ve got you believing you’re too reliant on dopamine and well. You really have been on your phone too much… maybe you should give it a try…

And thus they’ve taken a very reasonable, “hey, quit torturing your brain by exposing yourself to harmful shit on your phone and relearn how to engage with things meaningfully and intentionally” and turned it into a wellness scam that people are unfortunately buying into because they’re desperate and at this point they’d crawl into a meat grinder if someone told them it would make them feel better.

It’s the new age cult shit I was raised in and I hate how prevalent it’s become again.

No, actually I’m not secretly a maiden witch archetype who needs to eat certain foods according to the moon cycle.

It often assigns traits and attributes of the child—attributes most likely rooted in Autism and ADHD—and claims them to be the product of special gifts such as magic or in some cases, being an alien from another planet sent to earth to guide “normal” folks to spiritual enlightenment. (That’s where starseed comes from.)

Sometimes it’s used in a throwaway term to simply mean creative and “marches to their own tune” sort of way, but when you get deeper into it, a lot of the time it was being used to deny neurodivergent kids access to mental wellness care, or even physical care.

The children are often put on an unhealthy pedestal and taught to believe that they are “special” and that the reason they struggle to fit in with their peers and to understand social norms isn’t because there is anything wrong with them, it’s because they are {insert pseudoscience new age spiritualism here.}

You’re not Autistic, Autism is bad, you’re just an old soul.

You’re not ADHD, ADHD is bad, you’re just connected to another planetary wavelength, that’s why you can’t focus on anything here on Earth.

It can become exploitative and harmful very quickly depending how far down the new age rabbit hole the adults are.

For example, my “emotional maturity” from about the age of, oh, five, was attributed by an outsider of my family to me being “an old soul” and that meant it was okay for the adults in my life to place their emotional wellbeing and stability on me, because I was secretly older than them and more emotionally advanced.

The chronic pain I started self-reporting from about the age eight or nine wasn’t actually mine, it was the manifestation of my ability to absorb the pain of others and I just needed to become more spiritually enlightened to stop feeling it. (spoiler alert it was EDS and a whole bunch of other stuff)

My trauma and my response to it, ie placating the emotionally immature adults in my life, was twisted into a positive spiritual trait that could be explained in such a way that it made it okay to exploit.

I wasn’t a traumatized child with ADHD learning to manage the emotions of people around me because it was the only way to survive—I was gifted. The universe had made me this way to teach humanity a lesson and to heal it.

I hopefully don’t need to explain how abusive and harmful this is. And regrettably, my experience was not rare. There are survivor groups for this shit and honestly sometimes when I read what other people went through and what they continued to go through (this shit makes you extremely susceptible to joining cults as an adult) I got out relatively unscathed. Traumatized and probably more disabled than I would have been had I gotten help, but nowhere near as bad as some folk.

For some people, it's simply a way of acknowledging their child is different without using a label they don't like (because ableism!)

For others its a pathway to justify serious neglect and abuse and it drives me fucking bonkers to see how quickly people are latching onto it again now that it's being repackaged as self-empowerment and wellness.

You’re not from another planet, Sharon. You’re just bad at social cues. You’re not an angel or a higher being of consciousness sent by the divine energy of the cosmos to sell essential oils. That's an MLM and you’re just another brick in the pyramid scheme.

And these scammers know that. They’re trusting that you’re vulnerable enough that you’ll keep paying to have your insecurities affirmed in a positive, often spiritual sense, usually to the detriment of your wallet, your mental health and sometimes your physical too.

It gets so bad he's always being woken up by adverts that offer insomnia cures and better bedding that play when he tries to sleep.

So he buys the ad-free tier, and it's great... for a few months. And then he starts getting adverts from 'premium partners'. So he goes up a level... and the same thing happens.

So he jailbreaks his wallpaper and sends all the ad servers to 0.0.0.0 and voila... he can sleep.

Until this SWAT team blows his door off and drag him off to jail. The Ad companies are suing him for loss of revenue for the products he' notionally have bought if he'd watched their adverts, based on some weird 'The average consumer buys X products with an average value of Y' calculation.

The judge is like 'well I dun wanna annoy the sponsors' so he RICO's this guy's house and possessions and sends him to jail.

... which is a nice relaxed non-volent offender jail for the corporately disenfranchised. But because these people have no money... there's no ads and now he's happy because the only place he's free... is in prison.

Which at the time was a bit much and now it's like: Called it.

Elon's suing companies for not advertising because he's losing revenue. He's also cranking the price of Ad Free Twitter. Disney and Amazon play adverts on their paid service when services used to be free because of the adverts... and now you have to pay to watch the adverts or go up a couple of tiers.

Every time I see that discourse, all I can think about are the very real queer men I once knew, who, before their deaths, lived their lives posing as "stepbrothers." The only way to avoid suspicion for being two older unmarried men living together in a rural conservative area was to pretend they were from the same family, even though the truth was that they were lovers.

They were never out in life. Their relationship was a strict secret to nearly everyone. They never knew that I knew, and sometimes it fucks me up inside that they never got to come out to me. It fucks me up that they had to hide behind a fake "brotherly" relationship for their own safety. It fucks me up to look at a gravestone that reads "beloved brother" and know what it really means, and what it could have said if they'd lived under different circumstances.

In another world, they could have been husbands, but they never had the opportunity. The world will remember them as brothers, because, even in death, that is what was safest.

“In 1960, at the age of eighty-six, Robert Allerton adopted his longtime partner, John Gregg. Allerton was twenty-five years Gregg's senior, and they had been referring to themselves as adopted father and son since the 1920s. Although not a well-known practice, over the course of the twentieth century, some gay couples used adult adoption to secure family rights. This strategy accelerated significantly in the 1980s when AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) made questions of the legal recognition of queer partnerships desperately pressing.”

Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.