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We cast her anyway, in a chorus role. Offered her lots of support and encouragement and kindness and grace.

At the next audition she whispered. Anyone who had never seen her before would have thought she was the most nervous kid there. But the directing team was abuzz afterward. Did you see? She did it! Once or twice I could actually almost hear her! Amazing.

Got cast again, in a chorus role. She’d been making friends with the other kids, and they offered her encouragement too.

And the next audition we said wow I can hear her! She’s speaking! Let’s give her a handful of lines! She can do it!

I talked about how conservative authoritarians define "pedophilia" as "youth autonomy," but even among less overtly authoritarian communities, the spectre of The Pedophile is, at best, a distraction from the reality of CSA.

"Pedophiles" are a distinct, discrete type of person. They're Not Like Us, but also, they Could Be Anywhere. They're hiding in plain sight among us, lurking and sabotaging. Anyone could secretly one of them. They're queer, they're Jewish, they're vaguely foreign. They conspire. They're a cabal. They have secret signals. They're rich and powerful and secretly control governments, but they're also poor and dirty and hide in alleyways. They're sexually deviant. They're everywhere and nowhere, and you should constantly be on guard against anyone who might be one.

Child sexual abuse, on the other hand, is abuse. It's an action, not a type of person. Anyone can commit it, because it's an abuse of power, and all adults and many other children have power over all children. Any adult has the ability to sexually abuse a child, because every adult has the ability to wield power over any child. Child sexual abuse is part of the continuum of child abuse, which in turn is part of the continuum of abuse, which can be committed by anyone who has the power to commit it.

The Epstein clients are the most prosaic phenomenon in the world. Rich, powerful people trafficked powerless people to force the powerless people to serve them. Rich, powerful people got away with breaking laws. Rich, powerful people uses people as objects -- in this case, as sex objects, but by the same structural mechanisms by which they use people to clean their houses, pick their crops, and assemble widgets in their factories.

if you are in the united states you cannot choose to stand at a location

«тунеядство» which means not doing anything, being lazy, leading an idle life, “to live off of the result of others’ labour”, “being parasitic to society without any input of your own”

in ussr it was used to persecute people for not holding a job for a certain amount of time, for not “contributing to society in a valuable manner”

if you are in the united states you cannot choose to stand at a location

The key reason why many responses to the og post are so annoying is because they are missing the point. Now, I'll grant that it lacks context, since it was an off-the-cuff rant, so here it is: I was using the built-in STT function on my Windows laptop. I can't remember if I had my current laptop at that point so idk if I was using W10 or W11. Anyway, Windows has two ways of accessing STT. The one I was using was a scaled-down version that is purely for dictation; at the time, there was no way to turn off the profanity filter (although you can now). The other way to access STT in Windows is to use Voice Control, which allows you to control your machine with your voice and also has STT capability; for this, you can turn off the profanity filter, but it is (or was) on by default.

As for the point that so many people are missing: this was primarily a post expressing deep frustration that the needs of disabled people (or anyone who has to use STT) are secondary to the sensibilities of corporations. in my case, that happened to be Microsoft, but the point stands for any STT software that has the profanity filter on by default. Accessibility features should not restrict the user, especially not by preventing them from doing something that an abled user can do just fine. If you have to go hunting in settings or resort to forums or search engines to find out how to turn the filter off, that's a failure of accessibility because a person who can type physically doesn't need to do that.

Now, the profanity filter certainly has an arguable use-case. STT isn't perfect and sometimes it will interpret your words as something completely wrong, which might cause problems in certain professional settings. Ideally, though, the filter would be an opt-in feature rather than set as the default. But the mere existence of a profanity filter presents problems by itself: namely, who gets to decide which words are profane, and why are they choosing those words specifically? As illustrated in my original post, whoever set the profanity filter for Windows had decided that anatomically-correct terms for female genitals were profane (clitoris and clit got masked by asterixes and vagina nearly did, presumably because the filter would mask 'vag'), but 'penis' was just fine (although 'cock' wasn't). 'Nipples' is also masked. Do we think, perhaps, these choices are governed by the long-standing misogynistic framing of female anatomy as something inherently sexual? Even if that wasn't the reasoning, the end result certainly reinforces those beliefs.

The same problem occurs in auto-captions that censor swear words when the audio doesn't. YouTube is notorious for this. It's bad enough that they are sabotaging an accessibility feature, but worse still is that they have placed themselves in a position of power over any d/Deaf and HoH people watching: they now get to decide what we can understand in a video. It's especially galling because textphone workers and sign language interpreters are held to very strict standards re: translating exactly what is said, swears, slurs, slang and all.

Censorship in an accessibility feature also exists in the wider social context of disabled people being controlled and infantilised. Whether the designers of profanity filters intend this or not is irrelevant, because the end result, again, reinforces bigoted beliefs and enables harmful behaviour – in this case, the belief that disabled people must be "protected" from "dangerous" words or concepts / the normalisation of controlling disabled people. You don't need to look far to find this in action, either. Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices often aren't designed to allow their users to swear, use slang or discuss subjects like sex or their genitals. AAC-users are left at the mercy of others, who get to decide which words they can or cannot use, ultimately stripping them of freedom of self-expression and autonomy and increasing their vulnerability to abuse or exploitation.

This is from the blog of a speech and language pathologist (emphasis mine):

As a speech therapist, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been asked by teachers to remove a taboo word from a student’s AAC device because it’s considered “inappropriate.”

To extend an analogy from that post: if that teacher taped a verbal, nondisabled child's mouth shut as punishment for using a specific word, there would be a (much-deserved!) uproar. It is unlikely that teacher would be able to keep their job. But they are perfectly comfortable asking for a disabled child's means of self-expression to be taken away. If that doesn't perfectly illustrate how normalised it is to control disabled people, I don't know what will.

> accidentally meme your way into creating a hit song made entirely out of slurs

> song gets banned from the dance charts right as its about to chart

> every gay bar in the country immediately adds it to their playlist in protest