BeautifulMind ♾️ @ BeautifulMind @lemmy.world

Late-diagnosed autistic, special interest-haver, dad, cyclist, software pro

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2 yr. ago

They could argue it was over the displaying of “political” symbology, and not for the perceived sexuality of the employees.

They could, but the article quotes text messages from the lawsuit that very strongly indicate it was explicitly about perceived 'gay pride' being the kind of "political" they don't want:

On June 22, Splitter, a temporary summer library employee, complained about the display to Lancaster, saying she found the “gay Pride” symbol offensive and going into “an anti-LGBT diatribe” even though Lancaster explained that the infinity symbol represented neurodiversity and autism.

Splitter then complained about the display to Michelle Miller, vice chair of the library board. Miller reportedly told Lancaster that she could get her fellow board members to have Lancaster take down the display.

“I am totally fine with diversity of skin color display, just not represented with rainbow colors,” Miller texted Wheeler, the director, according to the lawsuit. “I do not want any kind of rainbow display especially in this month. We have a conservative town and as a library do not need to make political statements (see Target and Budlight as negative examples). I certainly do not want the library to promote LGBTQ agendas.”

From context, not only did the plaintiffs explain that the rainbow-infinity is an autism symbol, they also went so far as to take down the display to seek guidance on how to change it- and even after those accommodations they were fired. But at least they put their intent to discriminate in text messages that would be discoverable at trial

No I read it, I just thought you missed my point and wanted to clarify

The subtext of the point I was trying to make was about whether or not your politics leave people feeling understood or respected. NGL I wasn't feeling either

They're suing.

I hope they win. If the basis for their firing was the presumption that they were gay (hint: being gay is a protected class, you can't fire someone for being gay), this would be an open-and-shut case of employment discrimination.

But if it's all a big dumb misunderstanding and they're not gay (and not part of that particular protected class) but they're still fired over it, let me remind you that being autistic is a never-ending ordeal of being misunderstood, often mixed with a sense of justice that could be characterized as white-hot.

...or at least, my sense of justice about this might be in the range of over-wrought, or just blazing.

It means that person does not have the votes to win.

It means that people who want to vote a certain way are being pressured to vote a different way.

This in turn means the way the votes went is not a measure of what people want, but rather of what they can be pressured into doing. These are different things, even if it's convenient to dismiss it as a distinction without a difference.

LOL he knows that they might not be able to pick a new speaker willing to put up with their shit

"Lady sobs because she imagined things that don't happen"

This kind of performative rhetoric, invented to assign wicked or demonic qualities to your scapegoat, is not a new thing. It's just a retread of the blood libel, the red scare, the lavender panic, reefer madness, and today's bathroom panics. All of them were lies told to justify violence and the criminalization of things that could be used to persecute their targets.

In the primaries, I supported progressive candidates like Sanders and Warren because I think their policy prescriptions would make for a better America. In the general, I voted for Biden. That was a harm-reduction vote.

What I don't like to hear, in the primary, is the 'you have to vote for the candidate who can win' line of argument, which begs the question it pretends to answer- if everyone who says "I'd vote for x but x can't possibly win" just voted for x, x would actually win. This gives whoever tells you that "x can't possibly win" the power to get you to give up on voting for what you want, which seems to wag the dog.

In the general, between dem and gop control, it's not a close contest for me; it's between a party afraid to do progressive things the voters want and a party that will do whatever the fuck it wants no matter that nobody wants that.

Yes, our electoral system of first-past-the-post demands that we hedge our bets and compromise in order to avoid the calamity of electing a fascist in this election cycle, but it's hard to support with evidence the idea that what makes a progressive candidate "risky" isn't just a self-fulfilling misperception that causes the party to spend (or not-spend) money to prevent progressives from becoming party nominees. After all, research consistently shows that politicians of both parties routinely overestimate the conservatism of the voters.

I'm glad to see the Biden admin embracing the progressive changes it has been able to get to, but I'm also sooo tired of being told 'we can't nominate a progressive, they'll be called a communist' when no matter who we nominate they'll be called a communist and decades of voting a harm-reduction ticket has rolled back much of the New Deal

This is probably what you can expect when the subject matter is as fraught as anything-mental-health can be, and when what passes for clinical experts willing and able to share information on it are so rare as to be unicorns, plus many of them are working from outdated DSM criteria anyhow.

I was clinically diagnosed during the pandemic, then turned unpacking my own experience of autism into a new special interest (lol of course I would do that). I specifically follow quite a few accounts on tiktok belonging to health care practitioners and researchers, and I regard what they have to say in that light, while I also follow lots of 'hey-I-self-diagnosed-now-let's-talk-about-it' accounts and consider what they have to say in that light.

I'm left with the impression that the researchers and practitioners are in an exciting, evolving field in which the subject matter is less-well-known than we might all like, and that the lay autistic folk sharing their experiences are doing it because frankly, the experts weren't filling that need and what do high-masking/hyperverbal autistic folk do when we know a thing or two? We infodump, that's what we do. (like this. you're reading it now. sorry, not-sorry)

Are we always right? Heavens, no.

But, is the bar low to begin with? Oh, yes. Yes, it is. For example, while these tiktokers are sharing what they think (maybe it's wrong, or DSM-inaccurate, etc.) there are also charlatans out there waving autism around like it's a boogeyman your children get if they receive vaccinations, when there's no evidence to support claims like that.

For clarity, I'm not arguing against age limits- I just think that these things:

• old politicians are out of touch and mental decline is a problem
• corrupt politicians aren't held accountable

...are separate problems. If we solve the first one, that'll be a good thing, but if we do it without also addressing the second one, we'll still have the same accountability/corruption problems but with faster turnover.

Worse than that, setting up rules that go a bit like: [after n terms/x age, we can't elect you even if we love you and you're great] will go a long way towards addressing that first problem, but could create problems down the line.

For example, when we created the notion of a debt ceiling (we can't do the thing without a supermajority, even if it's the right thing) seemed reasonable on its face, it would bind the hands of future profligate spenders and that would solve the debt problem, right? But, we really just tied the hands of majorities and gave bad-faith minorities the power to ransom their political demands against turning the world economy into a dumpster fire.

Fundamentally, it's the voters' job to vote out the people that aren't fit to serve, and the reasons we don't reliably do that seem to be that machine politics and corrupt democracy seem to make it risky to vote out your McConnells and Grassleys and Pelosis and Feinsteins and such, because so much of the institutional gravity of the parties revolves around them.

I say, yes! Forcibly retire the dinosaurs with a pension and make them develop their successors before they're dead. But, don't expect that to solve the democracy problem, work on that too

what Putin might possibly have over Musk’s head

Well they both had connections with Epstein and have moved in similar circles- that whole thing smells like a long-running Kompromat operation targeting top industrialists and financiers, frankly.

As for Elon's wealth making him untouchable? My dude, leverage is a thing and he is leveraging other people's money and as such, he depends heavily upon those arrangements staying where they are. The interest on loan he took to fund the Twitter takeover (with other people's money) is a lot, and whether or not Twitter can cover those costs is a very real question. This looks a lot like the debt traps Trump is in- they might both have money, but their money is tied up in assets it'll cost them something to liquidate (and which they can't readily get more of) and when that starts to look like cycling loans around to stay liquid, that adds up to pressure.

But like, how can they milk us for more than we’re able to give?

The logic of the market is that if there's anyone in the market that can afford it, whether or not you can't isn't their problem, it's yours.

This is one of the basic reasons why wide income inequality is a problem- when the going housing market rate is a measure of what the wealthy people in that market can bear, it creates serious problems for everyone else. For example, the median home in Seattle lists at $800k and that's not a measure of what the median earner can afford, it's a measure of what Blackrock is willing to pay to outbid folks earning in the $250k/yr range.

There's good reason to expect that Putin has some sort of hold over Trump- he fits the profile (bad at business, constantly needs money, will do anything for attention, has been mob-adjacent his whole life, has been actively groomed to be an asset by soviet-bloc intelligence services, etc).

Now that I see Elon getting the same sort of head-pat treatment, I expect he's in similar thrall and begin to wonder if that kind of public statement from Putin is anything but a public, encoded reminder that the leash is still there and if he doesn't behave it all comes tumbling down.

Y'know, I had a love/hate relationship to twitter in the before-elon times.

On the one hand, it was a strange, toxic brew of hellish nonsense and porn On the other hand, there was a critical mass of engaged experts on lots of subjects, weighing in on current events in near-real-time.

It was like having the history faculty of several colleges on hand when historical questions came up, but in order to get their takes on anything you'd have to wade through trolls and bots and fascist sycophants to get there.

I'm a sucker for learning things and I'll put up with a lot for the pleasure of feeding my brain but by the time Elon took the reigns the signal:noise ratios had gone too far negative to be worth it.

Y'know, I wanted one until I learned anything about Tesla as a company or about Elon, and then I decided it's vaporware and will probably never be delivered for reasons that are stupid. Looking from the outside but with experience shipping big software releases, this smells a lot like what you get when you think of QC not as an engineering discipline, but as a cost to be minimized.

Yeah. If that keeps money in small towns and going into small businesses vs. big-box chain stores, it's well-spent. Especially if it means your transport fuel dollar isn't funding fossil energy(?)

At the moment, Michigan sources about 2/3rds of its electrical power from coal or natural gas but wind and nuclear are a growing piece of that. Where I live, in WA, most of our electricity is Hydro (and it's cheap, at ~10¢/kWh). Also, fueling up on electricity (even in MI, where electricity is ~19 ¢/kWh) was pretty cheap compared to gasoline.

I think if we don't put those in local, small-town small-business lots everywhere it'll be bad for small businesses, small towns, and in marginal ways, for the environment.

Ghoulish.

Reducing the 'value' of a life to monetary terms just means it's legal to kill them if you have the money.

Also, that shit should be disqualifying in people supposedly sworn to uphold the law

water down and spread out the shittiness

I'm not arguing to keep bad politicians around for no reason, just observing that the reasons they're shitty in the first place are separate from how long they have to do it. If we solve the problem of politicians staying in office too long but we don't do anything about their incentives and ability to be on the take, all we've done is make their time in office maybe more urgent and valuable.

When in doubt, expect your designs to create unintended consequences- especially if they are simple and optimistic and don't deal directly with the actual source of the problem.

This is not to say that we should have septuagenarians in office- I really think we shouldn't- but fundamentally the problem is we don't vote these people out.

It would probably also be helpful to have financial oversight for officials of all 3 branches of government that doesn't assume the heads of each of those branches will just police their own.

Rented a Tesla this summer for a trip with my family- where I was in Michigan, the nearest superchargers were in the lot at Meijers (a regional supermarket chain), which made sense for Meijers (there's already a big lot there, already infra, it's a place you can tie fueling up with getting groceries) but it meant I had to drive half an hour to shop instead of going to the local market.

My thought is that they should be planting superchargers (or their functional equivalent) in every store or restaurant parking lot because when the only place to get a charge is in the next county over, that's directing EV drivers there and not local

Yeah, it'll cost something to build out infra to support that much power but honestly the US grid needs the upgrades anyhow- and if anything, electricity is relatively cheap compared to buying gas