politics

A Neurodiversity-Affirming Code of Ethics for Online Participation

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Articulated as personal responsibility — what I hold myself to, not a standard imposed on others. The online public space serves overlapping, non-competing functions — information exchange, community formation, identity articulation, advocacy, and low-cost contact for people otherwise isolated by geography, access, or circumstance. No single function is the “real” one that the others distract…

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From the Inside Out

A Reading List in the Spirit of Tōjisha-Kenkyū · 当事者研究

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Within Tōjisha-kenkyū lies the potential of rearranging the relationship between the tōjisha (the person with lived experience of the condition being studied) and the specialist — in other words, between experienced knowledge and specialized knowledge. . . . The mutual respect from the tōjisha and the specialist for each other’s knowledge, along with the collaborative…

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what i brought with me

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ever since i was young, i’ve felt like i was from a different culture, and was dropped into this one by a stork. somewhere along the way, i decided to stick by this, and honor the integrity of my original culture, and not get too deep into this dominant culture that i still feel like…

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what does autism even mean?

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peers, autists, human companions: lend me your cognitive architecture (ears are not enough). what we now call “autism” originally described a way of thinking that its own framers acknowledged that everyone experiences. If “autistic thinking” is something that everyone experiences, where is the line drawn between “everyone” and the autistic person? Is everyone temporarily autistic…

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unfit

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fitness, in the modern economy, is the ability to engage in any given task, for as little or as long as one is conscripted, without asking what the project contributes to; propelled onward by a belief that the designers of the project have our collective interests in mind; that the project is always becoming more…

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call to action: mutual support for Tammy Zo

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Our friend Tammy Zo (Pollard) needs our support. She is homeless, and in grave danger of losing her belongings, many of which are cultural archives and work that she has created herself. The fact that she needs our support is a consequence of our culture’s failure to maintain mutual support networks independent of institutional channels,…

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isolation ↔️ resolution

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the etymology of the term ‘autism’ derives from an idea that a person with autistic traits is somehow isolated in a world of their own, that others can’t reach. i would offer that this is exactly wrong, and a projection by an observer with a mindset built from a variety of assumptions that prevents them…

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Toe-walking: red flag, or somatic wisdom?

The adaptation-to-pathology pipeline, pt 1

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This series explores human traits and behaviors that are pathologized in the modern Western office-industrial complex, with the intent to spark cross-cultural discussion, and reassessment of what it means to be divergent. Two gait strategies, same anatomy, different verdicts—depending on what the ground is asking of the foot, and who’s asking the questions. Toe-walking—prioritizing the…

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care is more than a brain tumor

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Many traditional cultures around the world—what I would call emplaced cultures—have sustained populations for millennia, within different watersheds, meeting different needs with different answers. Care distributed through community and across generations, calibrated to the place the community inhabits. Western medicine arrives with its own language—what is right and observable in every case across place and…

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Normalize casual intimacy.

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I’m a bi-gender person—masc and femme together in parallel unison. Like a Tootsie Roll, a Twinkie, a Ho-Ho, or a KitKat, I have a more brittle, masc outer layer; and a creamy, femme inner core. The femme part of me has been surprised when I have proposed activities to femme friends that I think of…

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