Key phrases: Inequality, poverty, violence, cruelty, povertyism, misogyny, diversity, bias, othering, discrimination, sadism, ageism, decision-making, otherisation, marginalisation, ableism, inclusivity, gerontophobia, stranger-stalking, aggression, sadistic stalking, zen approach, misogyny, governance, hate groups, fairness, racism, justice, philosophy, law, hacking, homophobia, contempt, bioethics, health inequalities, cruelty, ELSI, homelessness, politics, public policy, policing, science and biotechnology, conspiracy beliefs, speciesism, light pollution, callousness, security, mechanical pollution, hate, violence, safety, chemical pollution, conspiracy thinking, social security, forensic psychology… and 20+ years of experience in earth and life sciences as well as nearly two decades with what appears to be "sadistic stalking" or whatever. Some of those crazy nihilistic extremist sadistic networks involved, possibly? (This website is currently paid for by an anonymous sponsor who has full access to the site, without my consent.)
Human rights – diversity – neurodiversity – equality – inclusivity – discrimination – otherisation – speciesism – planet – consumerism – bioethics sensu lato
Here is what I suggest you say to any medical professional (or other person) who treats you as if you are a 3-year old, just because you are disabled or over 45, black or female or indigenous or lower class.
“You are committing an epistemic injustice.”
“You are depriving me of my epistemic agency.” [or “taking away” or “eroding”]
Feel free to add the word “dear”, “son”, “child”, “sweetie”, “Madam” or anything else that you think fits well, but does not distract too much from the main message. (You want the person to feel puzzled or surprised, off-balance but not personally insulted.)
They won’t expect that and it will likely shut them up for a moment. It may give you a chance to speak and be heard instead of getting tossed out with the trash again.
You have unique knowledge and that knowledge is as valuable as the doctor’s or the nurse’s.
The word “epistemic” is often used in the field of bioethics.
Bioethics is a combination of law, science, medicine, technology and philosophy. (Mentioning philosophy is overkill to some degree as philosophy is part of the foundation of law as well, but few people know that and there is a lot of philosophy in bioethics.)
I just had an e-mail from Adam at the UK charity Sense, for disabled people, about the parents of autistic children.
Autistic people experience the world very differently from mainstream people. They interact with it very differently. The sensory information their brains receive and how their brains deal with that input, it is all very different from what happens in the brains of mainstream people.
Autistic people see, hear and feel differently.
In my opinion, it is wrong to call all autistic adults and children “disabled” unless you stress that the “disablement” mostly refers to the constraints that society imposes on the lives of autistic children and adults.
Society expects all of us to think and behave in a certain way and make largely the same choices. That means that society is flawed because this is an irrational expectation. Ask any digital nomad or vanlifer how traditional “get a job” (“for a lifetime so you’ll have a good pension, too”) people respond to their decision to live life differently and you’ll get a sense of what I mean.
When parents of autistic children state that their child is different, believe them and accept that as a fact. Dont call them paranoid. Don’t tell them that they are just bad at parenting.
But there’s something else that we have to remember.
Autistic people are all different, too. No two autistic people are the same.
Until very recently, I knew nothing about autism and was convinced I had never known anyone who’s autistic. After I started reading up about autism, I discovered that I had in fact since 1982 known a woman who’s autistic. She’s meanwhile confirmed that and she too had only learned recently that she is autistic. Then, to my astonishment, I discovered that I know another person who’s autistic, someone who I first met in 1984. Both people are university-educated and have what is called “high-functioning autism”.
The first one deals with auditory overload from people talking by filtering out that external input, shutting off the gateway to the input internally some way. (This causes frustration for mainstream people because nothing they say gets through. They simply cannot get through to her.) The second one responds with irritation and deals with it by walking away and going into a separate room, shutting the door to external auditory input quite literally. (This too can cause frustration, but also and probably mostly in the autistic person.)
Until you spend enough time with autistic people in private, you rarely get to see that – and in which ways – they are different, because they have learned to “mask” from a young age.
Almost like with DID (dissociative identity disorder, which is something very different), the person who goes out into the world to interact with it is not necessarily the same “person” you’d get to see if you were to observe an autistic person relaxing at home. Masking = trying to look like everyone else and hiding that you are different. (Why? To avoid friction.)
If you want to have some idea of how masking works, just picture yourself interacting with the CEO of the company at which you work versus interacting with your two-year-old or your husband or wife at home or at the supermarket when you’re out shopping. Your behavior toward the CEO will be quite different from how you deal with your child, your husband or your wife.
Don’t tell the parent of an autistic child that he or she is a bad parent or just plain paranoid. That would be you making an ass of yourself.
If you want to take your understanding one step further, think about whether wanting to eradicate autism from the world could be like wanting to eradicate giraffes because you like cattle and are used to dealing with cattle.
I just had this e-mail from Calum at Crisis. I was replying to him, and then I remembered that I was asked to share the story. Calum already knows what’s what. It’s other people who need to hear this.
Sister stand up For what you believe I hear anarchy in the way you speak Teach her not to give up Only how to seek Ain’t no anarchy in the way they cheat
Sister stand up for what you believe Fight the power Or die at their feet I know they don’t see what you see But don’t fight the people For being sheep
God are the men who make you pay God are the men who force your way Play God is the image that he made To make you obey Play God Play God He plays god He plays god
Brother stand up Admit to what you do This complex ain’t helping me or you Changing the world starts with you Don’t tell me you don’t know what you do
Brother listen up She’s tryna tell you This system’s failed us both it’s true Time to wise up You know it’s overdue Stuck in limbo can’t follow through
God are the men who make you pay God are the men who force your way Play God is the image that he made To make you obey Play God Play God He plays god He plays god
Ill health is not a crime. Neither is neurodivergence or being deaf or in a fugue state or just plain devastated and exhausted and too worn out to care about who can hear you cry in agony.
This is what England’s class system looks like in real life.
This is a private patio where people like to sit in the summer and enjoy a barbecue. Yes, literally.
But these are ordinary people without any clout. Lower class.
(This includes people like me too, yes, in England.)
Unable to get any support with this from Portsmouth City Council – including Gerald Vernon-Jackson, the Lib Dem city council leader – I eventually demolished the mattresses myself. Mattresses out in the open not only are an eyesore, they can get really moldy and smelly.
As it had become sheer impossible for me to do much high-end work, tackling the rubbish hands-on gave me something to do, too.
In case you still wonder, yes, Gerald Vernon-Jackson was fully aware of this.
I provided him with copies of photos and with copies of letters sent to Grant Murphy by recorded postal mail or special delivery.
I enquired here and there how much it would cost to get the fridges removed, but I couldn’t afford it, certainly not right away. (A hilarious fairly standard response to “I don’t have the money” is “no problem”. 😂)
Next, I ordered a bunch of signs and stickers in an attempt to put a stop to the rubbish dumping. (It’s helped.) I also put a webcam in my office window. Below are screenshots of some of my order confirmations.
The rubbish dumping was actually started by Grant Murphy’s people after the police interfered when there was illegal drugs activity in one of the front three dwellings.
Once you dump rubbish, it encourages others to do the same. Everybody knows that.
I had been trying to address this for many years. I repeatedly had offered to help Grant Murphy’s people with this, too. To no avail.
This is a paper by a woman who couldn’t get a pupillage (traineeship), which she needed so that she could become a barrister – not even when a successful business man did his best to arrange one for her – because England’s class barriers ran too deep for both their humble beginnings.
(Until the entrepreneur stepped in and stepped up, she was actually working at a betting shop.)
The beasts are behind me, in the trees, shrubs and water. Bird reserve.
(I had a vegetable samosa for lunch!)
Am tackling things one by one – and making progress – but am hampered very badly by overwhelming allergies. They are even keeping me from sleeping (well). So I will need to tackle that issue first. Conditio sine qua non. Allergy pills aren’t quite the answer in this case. They only have a small effect for a few hours.
However, the situation in Portsmouth was completely unacceptable for me. I couldn’t live there, could not breathe there because of forces at work there.
That is completely independent of what exactly was (is) behind it.
Nah, I hadn’t lost the plot. I badly needed out and I did my best to place myself in the best situation for it.
I didn’t want to have to keep fighting back any longer. I didn’t want to fight back any longer.
I’d totally had it with Portsmouth’s perpetual guerrilla wars and I think I wanted a thoroughly clean start, with very little still around me to tie me to the place or perhaps rather to force me to start over in a different area, professionally. This is an area that I had been exploring for a while and really enjoy.
Some occupations are heavily tied to earthly possessions. A few aren’t.
I’ll probably remain a highly guarded and somewhat prickly person for the rest of my life.
What went in Portsmouth shocked me deeply. The hate behind it, the utter contempt with which I was bombarded so often wore me down. All that ugly senseless negativity from folks who did not even know me, the endless misogyny and the rest of it, it ate away at me and corroded my soul over the years. I did not like the way it changed me and it even made me stop liking myself.
Very scary stuff goes on in Portsmouth. Too much of it.
Blimey, I miss England. The quality of the shops, also in Portsmouth’s Commercial Road area, generally speaking, is much better. TK Maxx is much fancier too, there. Much better quality products.
Primark is more or less the same, though.
There is much less nature here, too. Lots of bricks, asphalt and concrete everywhere I look, with – granted – a lot of green mixed in. A lot of green. Even between the tram rails, nowadays.
In addition, I must admit that have just found some of Amsterdam’s/Amstelveen’s poorer folks. I went to Osdorpplein and found it a bit depressing. That’s probably an understatement. (No, an exaggeration. It’s also where I ate a vegetable samosa a few days later before I realized how English that is. There’s an indoor market area there with a lot of ethnic food.)
I also just ate my last bit of fastfood. No more fastfood for me. I took the opportunity last year to start eating much healthier and catch up on my nutritional deficiencies and it did me a world of good. At my age, eating healthy seems to matter much more. I feel so much better when I eat fresh fruits, fish and vegetables. No more crisps, no more MacDonalds.
That said, I have to keep repeating that I do not miss all the hate, contempt, gossip and dark political intrigue, as well as notably random people in the establishment’s unhealthy obsessive focus on me. Nobody on the street or in the shops here pays any undue attention to me. That is worth a lot!
Occasionally, I get friendly grins from men around my age, but there’s never any kind of aggression or hint of a threat or demand in it, not even when I bump into the person’s cart at the supermarket. Just a friendly grin is all I get. It’s nice. So I am slowly starting to feel human again. 😌
Looking back, nope, I simply could not be happy just watching YouTube all day and reading library books, while hardly ever having positive interactions with anyone. I need more than that. Also, Portsmouth has become quite a scary place to me now, scary in the sense that what goes on there is pretty spooky and unhinged. Over the top.
Maybe a place like Liverpool or Brighton would have been bliss for me. I wish I’d been given the opportunity to find out, but that’s water under the bridge.
Also, the Dutch banking system means that you have online access to much fewer sites and services, as many don’t accept the Dutch banks’ standard system of online payments. (The market share is too small.) I’ll find a solution for that. No problem.
I particularly also miss English caps. I had a pretty black and white checkered one, by a Dutch brand whose name I have forgotten but it sounded Italian. I liked it a lot. Here in the Netherlands, all the caps are baseball caps! I finally found a proper one, a brown one. By a British brand. It makes me look very British, I’m sure. 😁
(Of course, I also continue to sign petitions that pertain to Britain.)
This alto SINGS – zoom in – and one of the tunes that I recognised was Joe Dassin’s L’été indien. Station Zuid. (That is Amsterdam.)
Yes, I have a bad cold. Hence the Dutch licorice. It helps! Initially… Unfortunately, and oh so stupidly, the stuff also contains sulphites: https://www.allergyuk.org/resources/sulphites-and-airway-symptoms-factsheet/ (No more licorice for me, for sure. The stuff ended nearly killing me, so to speak. Holy smokes. Very unpleasant, and lasting for hours. Though I must admit that I’d been coughing very badly last evening too, except not this bad and this long. It’s horrible. I have no N-acetyl cysteine with me; have ordered some now but should have done it before. An dealing with bad allergies, too, at the moment.)
Parsnips are very English. I love their taste and texture.
Amstelveen has changed a lot. I recognise old bits, but there’s been a heck of a lot of construction in the past few decades. I used to cycle a lot there, towards Uithoorn to cycle back along the Amstel river, before I moved to the States, and I used to have a friend there, too. Halte Sportlaan!
So many of my friends and professional contacts have passed away while I was in England.
