On throught and communication and isolation...

[pheloniusfriar]

This profoundly affected me when I first saw it in my feminist disability studies class early last summer and I finally went looking for a link to it last night. It continues to affect me profoundly in that it confirms what I have intuitively thought myself from the outside looking in (particularly since I had to raise an autistic child on my own):

Her blog is at: http://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/, and there is a good (multi-page) article on the video at Wired magazine: "The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know". I have an opinion/hypothesis about several "mental illnesses" such as autism... that they are an evolutionary work in progress and are not an illness at all per se. That, of course, implies that "curing" autism or eugenically weeding it out of the genome would be a fatal mistake for our species as a whole. Not to mention the ongoing ethical questions of what constitutes "an acceptable existence"... if autistic individuals are not acceptable because of assumed "quality of life" issues, what about poor people? Should they be sterilized so no new poor people will be created? Or people in developing nations? Maybe they should all be killed off and replaced with rich white Western men? Obviously, these are ridiculous propositions, but they are of the qualitatively same attitude and arise from the same ignorance and fear as leads our society to genetically pre-select for a particular "perfection" that we have been convinced we should want, despite the long-term implications of such decisions.

Comments

[popelaksmi]

I remember seeing this video a couple years ago. Very moving! Definitely made me think outside the of my "normal" way of thinking! (Rung a few bells in some areas too.)

[pheloniusfriar]

Definitely one of the more radical attack on established thinking (and a successful attack at that). It raises so many exciting questions about what is possible versus what we allow...