timorl @timorl@qoto.org

@maia Yeah, she definitely has Presence. And she could barely be contained at her talk.

@luci I'm pretty sure you are right about this effect existing, but there are also people who have trouble with the concept of "meta". You can recognize that by them implying at the end of an explanation that they thing a pointer is just the variable it refers to or something very close to that. Most often happens with children/early teenagers, but I have seen this with adults as well. It can still be explained then, but first requires explaining the concept of "meta" (with the name being optional, just the concept suffices), which is when people should use the silly examples. The problem is people try to short-circuit the process by starting out with this explanation, thus confusing the ones who understand meta as well as the ones who don't, and then you get the cultural problem you describe.

@LunaDragofelis Fuck, that's simply abuse. ._.

I read the Wikipedia article trying to check whether this is in any way popular in Europe and thankfully it doesn't seem to be, but if you know of it being used anywhere here let me know, I'll at least keep an eye out for ways in which I might be able to fight it.

Also damn, it was already clear it was abuse form your post (obviously), but reading between the lines on Wikipedia (not even counting the explicitly spelled out stuff) makes it worse. ._.
@dangerdyke

@dangerdyke I don't know what ABA is, and judging by your vague description I probably don't want to know... Eh, I definitely understand your anger, society is clearly very unjust in this respect. :(

At the same time I think the reasons you give make going the education route even more tempting – if it's underfunded then any effort put into this has bigger effect than trying to fight against money being poured into lobbying by the creators of "cures".

But these are political practicalities, my main moral argument is still that the collateral damage of forbidding prenatal testing is too great, so we shouldn't be going for that even if it was politically easier.

@dangerdyke Although I use "enjoy" in the loosest possible sense. <_<"

@dangerdyke I weakly disagree with the former and strongly with the latter.

The majority of people ignorant about the topic will react negatively to autism in their children, but I'm very unconvinced they would directly want autistic people not to exist (although I see how the former semi-implies the latter as a practical consequence).

But I think that there are other ways than these two, in particular making people understand the neurotypical/neurodivergent distinction better. And I know this is harder and slower than outlawing one of the things you suggest, but this outlawing creates quite a lot of collateral damage I'm really worried about. :/ (obvious for abortion I hope, for prenatal testing it has many more applications than just "helping to decide on an abortion") Not to mention that growing up neurodivergent in a family that isn't supportive also can have quite severe disadvantages.

Sorta related – you might enjoy "Cocoon" by Greg Egan.

@dangerdyke Also sorry if I'm doing any "reply-guying", feel free to ignore me and the discussion if I overstepped.

@dangerdyke Well, no, you just made a general post about morality though, which kind of implied much more than that.

And I also think that I wouldn't prevent a person from having an abortion if they wanted it purely for the reason of not wanting to have an autistic child, even if I thought what they were doing wasn't right. Although I'm not sure you disagree on that.

@dangerdyke This still sounds somewhat confused to me, so my attempt:

leaving the abortion decision to the pregnant person: cool, good
a specific abortion: might depend on the situation

Although I also think that deciding to bring a person into the world means you should influence the person at least in some ways (take your prenatal vitamins people!), so maybe I actually disagree?

@maia I'm gonna be there tomorrow.

The name was also a reference to a reference to 4chan culture, somewhat less happy about that.