#anti-scientism

[cosmoshiden]

Math troubles

In my recent experience with taking university math, I was informed to take principles of math, pre-calculus, or foundations of mathematics. My institution insisted that I needed one of these courses in order to continue on with my degree as a bachelor of arts. However, what I was not told at the time is that principles of math was long gone. I will elaborate on this later, but for now I will focus on what happened when I made my choice.

Basically, I took on pre-calculus, but found myself unable to grasp the math. From there I fell behind within several weeks. This caused me to withdraw from the course. About 3 months later, I was about to sign up for a course in logic, but I was informed to take either of the three as mentioned above. In my blindness I took pre-calculus again, and tried my luck by finding a tutor. The course ended in failure for me, as I wasn't able to once again grasp the content, even with a tutor's help and recieved an "F". It also didn't help that I have a learning impairment that hinders my understanding of math. As such, I tried again with a tutor and received a "C-", yet that wasn't enough for the administrators, so I was given a "hardblock" on my attendance. My institution's standards at the time were either a 60% or a 70% in math.

At this point, I was given a choice of signing a contract to take pre-calculus again, taking a placement test or going back to my old high school to take Math 11 or 12. I went with the third option and spent over a year retaking pre-calculus, while failing miserably. My math teacher grew worried about my poor performance, so I told her my situation, and she later informed me that principles of math was discontinued, that the information I was given by my university was misleading, and that as a student in the humanities, I should have been taking Foundations of Math. Meanwhile, I was informed that Pre-Calculus was in fact for students going into the Sciences, Technology, Engeneering and Mathematics (STEM). With this revelation, I came to realize that my university didn't explain this to me when advertised, nor is this explained on their website.

Now I did take foundations of math, and passed with a 62% or a "C", and that should have been enough right? Nope. Once I returned to my university to show to my academic advisor, they later informed me that I needed to score a 70% in math. This came to me as another door slammed in my face. My university had moved the goalpost over, especially as they demand that I take pre-calculus yet again! I find this no only absurd, but that it begs the question, why the heck does a humanities student need to take a math course that's designated for the STEM fields? Even the placement test solely covers pre-calculus.

This changing of the rules also entails that by raising the standards higher, it prevents humanities students such as myself from completing their degrees and graduating. Not to mention that earlier I was informed that the 60% grade in math was reserved for persons with cognitive disabilities. This in turn makes it difficult for neuro-divergent students to continue attending the university, while also being ableist. Also, without making a clear distinction of which math course is designated for which field or degree, it creates confusion for students and is detrimental to humanities students insofar as it would cause them to drop out, waste their time, and money. This has me pondering is my own institution leans more towards the STEM fields rather than the Humanities.

Favoring the STEM fields and showing a disregard for the Humanities is no different from science worship, which is akin to phallic worship. This is especially in the case of hyper-rationality and scientism, where the former is in favor of reason rather than intuition is the primary source of knowledge, while the latter assumes that only science can give us knowledge. In feminist epistemology, the sciences are seen as masculine, as they favor reason.

When trying to explain this to my academic advisor, they told me the conditions and tried to suggest the same hoops I shoot through. However, I wanted none of it, and threatened to move to back to my previous university. My advisor tried to sweet talk me from taking this suggestion, but I would not relent or buy into the same offerings and solutions that didn't work for me beforehand. Even when I tried to explain the differences between the two math courses, they just brushed it off. Hence, I just walked out angrily while never looking back.

So here I am as neuro-divergent person, embittered, humiliated, and feeling hoodwinked. I had my degree in my grasp, only to have it taken away from me. My advice is for students in the humanities is to make sure you ask which is relevant to their fields.

[1000rh]

This is how misogyny works: take a hierarchy, any hierarchy, and use it to derogate a girl or woman. We value intelligence: so call her stupid, inane, clueless. We value rationality: so call her crazy and hysterical. We value maturity: so call her childish and irresponsible. We value morality: so call her a bad person. We value thinness: so call her fat and, implicitly or explicitly, ugly. We value sexual attractiveness: so make her out to be the kind of person whom no one could ever want. This despite the fact that not only can fat people be found sexually attractive, it is a common sexual preference, at least if porn consumption is any indication. And this jibes with the point that, as we saw earlier, it’s not that we downrank fat bodies because we inherently dislike them. Rather, we dislike them because they are often downranked nowadays, following the advent of the fatphobic beauty hierarchies steeped in anti-Black racism.

– Kate Manne, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia (2024)

[airbrickwall]

[wisdomfish]

SCIENCE HAS BEEN LACKING ESSENTIAL QUALITIES, LATELY!

Good science must involve such intellectual virtues as honesty, integrity, discernment, humility, and courage. These moral qualities are part of God’s intended moral law for mankind. Moral principles must be grounded in something objective.

~ Samples, Kenneth Richard. ‘Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions.; p. 194

[regentzephyr]

theology is still an important thing to study precisely because it teaches us a lot about the religion known as atheism lmao

[awakenedsalamander]

So I’ve been wanting to write about this for a long time (my friends can probably attest to the fact I will talk about it unprompted) but I can’t find it way to do so concisely. Here’s my best try.

Is Mage: The Ascension (in its presentation of the Technocracy in specific) anti-science?

I don’t think so, not anymore. But I want to explain why. By the way, I have to imagine that this won’t be all that accessible if you don’t have much knowledge of Mage, but you’re free to stick around if you want to.

So, here’s the thing— the Technocratic Union is pretty much a stand-in for the advancement of the scientific method, “the Enlightenment,” all that. The whole point in the first edition of Ascension is that the Union is science, the science that dispelled notions of magic, and that this is a Bad Thing. They are oppressive, heartless, and cold. The villains, plain and simple.

In later editions, this gets softened, partly due to the notion of “Science is a conspiracy the elite uses to rule the world and keep you down” becoming less fun and more toxic as it gained more sincere believers, and partly because fans really liked the Technocracy.

I think the common read is that Ascension then took the direction of the Technocracy being anti-villains— the Union has noble goals, and many of its members are sincerely brave and compassionate, but ultimately it is too extreme, too callous. It has to be stopped.

This is, to be fair, an improvement over “science is evil,” but “science is too dangerous,” is still not great. And for a long time, this was my view on Mage: The Ascension. Fun ideas, maybe, but the core conflict of the game was just too reckless a portrayal of what seemed to me like a mirror of real-world conspiracist ideology.

And to some extent, I still think that. Especially in the early editions, this is a very fair critique. That said, the game still spoke to me as I looked into it, and for the longest time I wasn’t quite sure why. A piece of it was my own opening up to the notion of our subjective viewpoints affecting our reality— something that deserves its own rambling essay— but a related part of it was me realizing that there was something about the Technocracy that rung true to me, despite my misgivings. And I think I figured it out.

See, the Technocracy isn’t a stand-in for the scientific method, but for scientism.

If you’ve not heard the term, “scientism” is a controversial (we’ll get into why a bit later) pejorative term for the belief/perspective that science, as a body, composes essentially all useful and/or reliable knowledge about the world.

Notably, those who critique scientism rarely hold the view that scientific knowledge is bad or even inaccurate, just that it is an incomplete model of reality. This is not an anti-science position, but a skepticism towards the trust people place in its ability to solve every mystery. Vaccines, for example, are great! No one can reasonably dispute the benefits and efficacy of vaccination. When it comes to medicine, the scientific method has done incalculable good— the lives saved by vaccination alone are countless.

To be against scientism, then, is not to argue that medical science is a failure, or overrated��� but to point out that there is more to life than being healthy. Everyone should be glad we have learned so much about treating illness and alleviating suffering. But what of having a sense of purpose? What about love and compassion and justice? What about satisfaction, having gone through a life worth living?

Again, none of that is to say that science or the scientific community is the problem. But if you take the Technocracy as an example of scientism gone to an extreme, one in which things like kindness and equity must be left behind in favor of only the virtue of material knowledge, I think Mage: The Ascension starts to really work.

(I originally intended to write a MUCH longer piece including references to the military-industrial complex, the rise of automation and AI, as well as the increasingly algorithmic nature of culture but this is so long already. And yet I worry I said essentially nothing. C’est la vie.)

[katatonicimpression]

Has Exodus been Redeemed?

So, I saw someone posting about this the other day, and they made two really good points. Summarised here:

Bennet being redeemed because of Krakoa is weird and bad.

Any redemption Bennet gets should involve children because of that thing when he kinda maybe sorta tried to kill Luna

And yes these are both good points but also... are we supposed to think of current bennet as redeemed at all?

Some thoughts on all the above:

Is Bennet actually doing anything different now than he was in Messiah Complex?

I mean, no. Right?

When it comes down to it, Bennet's moral failings are quite straight forward. He doesn't care who he hurts, who he kills, so long as he conceptualises it as a step towards securing the salvation of mutantkind. He is myopic, narrowly focused on whatever he's decided his goal is, and his thought process is (sorry babe) irrational. He is not stable. He's not able to recognise that instability. Neither is he able to recognise his own hypocrisy when it arises. His worldview warps to make sense with whatever he's decided he needs to do. And, when all is said and done, he'll say it was God's plan.

So, he's like any old cult leader or anti vax podcaster, really. He pedals dangerous nonsense and has the just the right combination of personality flaws and mental illness to still be a true believer and a moral crusader.

Or he's like, you know, a crusader.

In Messiah Complex - an almost incoherent sprawling mess of a crossover event from 2007 - Bennet is distraught and struggling after M Day and ends up taking his Acolytes to meet Mr Sinister because he has come to believe that the only solutions lie in mad scientism or something. Bennet gets on his knees for him (literally) and then he and his Acolytes team up with the Marauders to fight the xmen because something something Destiny's diaries something something baby something something ice-stique something something. Bennet straight up vanishes from the story before it concludes. Idk maybe he went out for lunch.

Anyway, I bring it up as an example of a time where Bennet is looking for direction is his Holy War, joins forces with other mutants/mutates, and tolerates an uneasy alliance because he is 100% devoted to the mission.

Psychologically speaking, is bennet really behaving any differently in the krakoa era? Is he making different kinds of decisions? I don't think so.

In fact, Krakoa challenges his character less than Messiah complex. Which is weird, because in the latter he's straightforwardly a villain. Krakoa era Exodus is not a villain, not even an antagonist.

(I guess he's Sinister's casual antagonist in Hellions, but a) that's a comedic role and b) Nathaniel is the villain of hellions so that wouldn't even count)

He's not a heroic character either. He's just kind of an entity. Protagonist of one issue of Immortal X-Men and primarily featured as an interesting member of the supporting cast.

Krakoa offers Bennet a course of action where he is able to do what he always does (throw himself wholeheartedly at a mutant supremacist project while thinking of himself as the good guy in all of this). He is a defender of Krakoa and an ally to their cause.

So, this is not an arc. Categorically, it is not a character arc of any kind because he does not change. So, in that sense it's not a redemption arc either. But of course he is a character who has gone from villain to "guy who's on the side you're rooting for"

I think it's not wrong, then, to argue that what we're seeing from Fall of X era Exodus is the presentation of an unearned redemption. He's good/better now, but no actual story arc is there to back it up. He's not grown or changed or learnt anything. He's not been challenged. There is nothing in the text to suggest that he would now see non mutant lives as valuable, worth sparing.

So... is this bad writing?

He has not changed or learnt anything, are we supposed to believe otherwise?

The Krakoa era contains many in-story critiques of the nation it depicts, and to mixed results. Interestingly, Bennet is not heavily featured in this regard. Throwaway comments about him being scary or insane are tossed around, but he is not meaningfully involved in a story that questions the ideology of Krakoa - or of his ideology specifically.

It's hard to tell, then, what we're looking at. Let's roughly divide it into two possibilities:

Bennet is being portrayed as nicer, somewhat redeemed, and the mission of Krakoa is understood to be a virtuous endeavour.

Krakoa is understood to be a morally flawed endeavour, and Bennet is just being his same old self and not redeemed at all.

2 seems closer to what Gillen is doing in my opinion, but I think there's room for debate.

It's not like immortal xmen is really about the moral implications in the flaws of Krakoa. It's much more focused on the psychology of the characters on the Quiet Council and their interpersonal conflict and intrigue.

But, of course, explosions go boom.

Despite the intimate themes of immortal xmen (and its adjacent minis and oneshots), its overarching plot threads primarily involve krakoa being threatened with annihilation (inferno, judgement day, dominion crap, miscellaneous orchis crap, etc). Because of this, bennet is primarily featured as a defender of the people of Krakoa when they are under attack. This absolutely does lend itself to interpretation 1, wherein Exodus' zealotry is position's as a (complicated) good in the necessary and just cause of Krakoa.

To me, it feels like gillen is telling a story featuring characters who are predominantly morally grey or outright villainous, and using a setting and plot backdrop that forces them into the same or similar boat, allowing the writing to explore their intricacies. If the setting and plot were too normal - if it were one where the heroes would refuse to work with the villains or one where the villains were constantly being antagonists - many of those more interesting character beats would be cut off.

However, I don't think he has fully succeeded in this regard. The overarching thread of the innocents of krakoa being in mortal danger and needing protection is one that has moral implications. It does end up framing Bennet heroically, even when the on-page material does keep reminding you that he's, you know, a deranged zealot.

There's more that can be said about how the fact that Krakoa is constantly under threat of total extinction undermines any attempt at nuance in its portrayal, and how it contributes to the greatest failings of this era. But I do plan to write that retrospective soon so I'll save it for later.

For now, I'll say that to me it feels like the intent was not to tell a story of redemption arcs at all. Instead, morality was not the focus and the storytelling deliberately steers away from the pedagogical. However, despite this intent, the shape of a redemption story remains, simply due to the nature of Bennets role in Krakoa.

Won't somebody please think of the children?

The one way in which we arguably do see change in Bennet is with The Children.

Bennet is shown telling stories to the children of Krakoa, teaching them and, also, protecting them. His interactions with Kafka in X-Men Forever are a good example of this.

The thing with Luna (he takes her from Fabian who was, unsurprisingly, responsible for all this mess) is a pretty bleak moment in Bennet's history. It also I believe leads to him being stabbed by Dane which I can't imagine him enjoying.

Bennets canon history is actually kind of weird. He's one of those characters with a lot of "idek how he got out of that but he turned up later on so he must have" in his wiki. The krakoa era is probably the most prolonged, stable period of his existence where the audience has had a strong sense of where he's at and what he's doing for the last five years.

Similarly, in universe the krakoa era could well be the first time Bennet's life has been anything close to normal for a long time. He has a home that isn't a supervillain lair, and actual down time for the first time since Mags woke him up. He is walking around in public and kinda sorta socialising for possibly the first time in his entire life.

He has that line about how he's old and wise, and that other line about how he's not naive (a repeat - he says it in the 90s and in krakoa) and both of those things are lies. Because he's, you know, a delusional cult leader. He is not literally old. He was a young man (which in medieval terms could literally mean still in his teens) when he went into that coma. And it's been 30 years real time since he woke up. But no characters who were adults then have aged in that time (and some (emma) have got younger) so whatever it is in universe it's not more than a few years. He's still in his 20s in my interpretation. Moreover, his life experience is extreme social isolation and a series of fanatical violent cults. He is naive. He's not wise.

He's also not really had a chance to just be and coexist with other people. So, in that sense it's not weird to see him be kind to children in Krakoa. Nothing we've seen technically contradicts the idea that he would be. Willingness to threaten a child in one situation and the ability to genuinely care for children aren't actually contradictory. But emotionally, there is resonance to showing this softness to him in this regard.

So, this is the one area where you could say there has been a meaningful change to Bennet, but again it has no narrative arc to it. Beyond simply the implication that if you let this guy chill for a minute, he eventually does mellow a bit.

But it is nice. And it is fitting.

Static characters and hypocrisy

Bennet is a character who fundamentally is incapable of seeing himself as being in the wrong. This is baked right into the type of villain that he is.

Redemption arcs can come in a lot of different forms. Sometimes the fictional universe has concrete concepts of good and evil, and a redemption is about aligning yourself spiritually with the good side (e.g. star wars) or by fulfilling some abstract metaphysical requirement (e.g. Buffy). Sometimes the emphasis is on doing the work to improve yourself (e.g. zuko), and sometimes it's a grand gesture at the right moment. Sometimes it's because a bigger bad came along, sometimes the redeemed one suffers a lot, sometimes they don't.

There's also the fun cartooney type of redemption arc where the bad guy is forced to just kinda hang out with the heroes and becomes part of the team by osmosis. Tgis is a personal fave but I don't think it suits Bennet - he should have an actual arc if it happens at all.

So, if there's an actual arc, it could vary a lot but one thing it requires is introspection and for the character's flaws to actually be confronted in the text.

Now, is it possible to write something like that for Bennet? Yes.

There are limitations, as with any character. He wouldn't suit an arc than evokes a grandiose good/evil darkside/lightside dichotomy because part of his problem is that he already thinks like that. Similarly, you would have to be careful when introducing a character foil (someone to be azula to his zuko for example) because he is not self aware enough to recognise his own flaws in the other. In general, he's someone who can very easily externalise any moral lesson he learns. It's doable, but difficult.

The example I want to evoke is Isaac from Netflix Castlevania. Isaac's storyline in s3 is basically him just travelling from A to B, and on the way he encounters these little vignettes. Some affirm his world view in s2 (aka "humanity sucks might as well help Dracula kill everyone") and some gently challenge it (e.g. "you should consider having friends") and he talks about it. He does philosophy. He reasons through his positions. And, eventually he starts to change. By the time he confronts Hector in s4, he's no longer here for revenge. He's moved on. He's now acting according to what he thinks will make things better.

I love this. I love that it's completely internal as an arc and I love how much agency isaac has. And I love that the dialogue is genuinely clever. Most philosophy dialogue in pop culture is written to just sound deep, but in castlevania they really managed to maintain meaning and coherence throughout.

And obviously the shape of Bennets arc would be different to this, but the idea of a well crafted "man does philosophy, sees the abstract concepts illustrated in narrative vignettes as he does so, and then eventually changes for the better". And a good writer could do this for him.

But should they?

So, this is that lingering thing. You redeem a villain in a comic book and now you've lost that villain. You let Exodus meaningfully improve and then he's no longer available to churn out as a big or medium bad. Maybe you might want to keep Bennet's delightful combination of flaws because it allows you to explore them. Maybe a redeemed Bennet isn't really Bennet anymore, or doesn't have what you want from him as a character. You make the unselfaware villain introspect then what are you left with?

A happier character, sure. But maybe not a good ingredient for a story.

And with bennet, the kind of introspection and self confrontation needed for a redemption arc would change him a lot. It would change him at his very foundation.

Does that mean he's doomed to be a static character? Not necessarily. I think it would be possible to bring shape to his storylines without shaking those foundations, but it is limiting. And also, they don't focus on him enough to do it.

Conclusion

The title of this section is a such a joke because I have nothing conclusive to say. I feel like if you read this far, you've been tricked.

I think Exodus makes for an interesting villain, and (imho) is actually best suited to be posed as not the only/main villain in a story. A supporting antagonist, if you will.

But that doesn't mean seeing him in a protagonist role isn't welcome. I loved it the one time it happened. And as for uncomplicated heroics? No, he's not there yet. And if he got there, it would involve a pretty hefty change to his character.

But it's not like I would be mad if it happens. We don't need a crusader villain (especially as I personally don't think Bennet's zealotry is well suited to paralleling modern religious extremism - at least not the mainstream stuff) and hell, I want to see what a fully sympathetic write of him would look like. Maybe he'd get to talk to Dane again. That could be fun.

But it doesn't look like that's going to happen. He'll probably continue to hover in this "villainous ally" space for the foreseeable future. He's in heir of apocalypse. I doubt he'll get a lot to do.

Anyway. Thanks guys if you made it this far. Hope you have a nice day. I'm currently spending billable hours sitting in a stairwell writing essays about comics. What a time we live in.

[shituationist]

anti-science cranks are the perfect complement to scientism because they make it impossible to criticize mainstream scientistic beliefs without sounding like a crank yourself. want to talk about the tradeoffs to water fluoridation? nah, you're just one of them anti-science people and you should have your vote taken away. want to criticize the gene-centric view of evolution? nah, you're one of them anti-science people and no one should listen to you.

actually on the topic of multi-level selection it seems like with the die out of 80s-90s neo-Darwinian biologists multi-level selection is gaining traction. could be wrong about that, but i remember when EO Wilson got in trouble for saying "hey, there's some weaknesses to this gene-centric view that are only resolved by a different model", which is, incidentally, the reaction anyone gets when they offer a newer and better model.

[alphaman99]

"“If the object of education is the improvement of men, then any system of education that is without values is a contradiction in terms. A system that seeks bad values is bad. A system that denies the existence of values denies the possibility of education. Relativism, scientism, skepticism, and anti-intellectualism, the four horsemen of the philosophical apocalypse, have produced that chaos in education which will end in the disintegration of the West.”

[anthroparis]

btw you can enjoy things even if they aren't good. I just am sick of people acting like barbie was revolutionary.

like you can enjoy something without using politics to justify it! I eat up those jurassic world movies and the anti-scientism elements in them are HORRIBLY handled

[grandhotelabyss]

The reasons for the outsized influence on the academic humanities of the French poststructuralists (as opposed to the more moderate critics of scientism such as Midgley) is no doubt overdetermined, but which explanations do you find most convincing?

I can only speak for the English department, but the most convincing answer is the most benign one, the one that least involves "Cultural Marxist" subversion of the west or CIA anti-communist skullduggery, the one immanent to the institution of academic criticism itself: the humanists had no theory of their practice, no global meta-discourse to guide individual instances of their discourse. This left them at a disadvantage in explaining themselves to their students and to the public in the face of scientific hegemony. They needed a system.

Academic criticism felt too amateurish, too gentlemanly, even after certain modernist assumptions had been assimilated by the middle of the century. New Criticism had rigor but you ran against its limitations very quickly, not even so much because of its ahistorical and Christian presuppositions, but because it only really works at all on certain types of texts, i.e., lyric poems of a riddling disposition, as well as the few larger forms that can look like such poems if you squint (early modern drama, for example, or modernist fiction). Psychoanalysis and Marxism in their pre-theory forms were too reductive, not even textual hermeneutics really, and therefore left the critic too little to say (Hamlet wants to sleep with his mother, Dickens is petit bourgeois: so what?); this goes, too, for the pre-theoretical attempts at identity politics, like early feminist criticism of the "images of women in literature" type. Myth criticism had a certain visionary appeal, but too often decayed into a predictable game of spot-the-archetype (another Christ figure in a modern novel? tell me a new one).[*]

On the other hand, the structuralist and poststructuralist ideas coming out of France promised a theory of language that was also a theory of society—even a theory that language was society and vice versa—and a therefore promised a systematic science of the literary text qua text as well as an Archimedean lever with which to shift the political (and indeed the scientific) in language. "Il n’y a pas de hors-texte." It opened up the whole world of European philosophy to Anglophone literary criticism and glamorously updated everything they were already doing with a self-conscious methodological sophistication. Close reading for balanced ambiguities became textual analysis aimed at subversive aporias.

This turn to englobalizing method would in the long run dissolve any plausible mission for literary studies per se as opposed to an "everything studies" that doubles as a "nothing studies," even as it ironically became the new cultural lingua franca of the whole educated class, supplanting the literary itself. I went to see the horror film It Lives Inside the other day. In the genre-obligatory high-school classroom scene, our heroine, her loyalties painfully divided between white American assimilation and her immigrant family's Hindu culture, tells her teacher that John Winthrop's city-on-a-hill sermon is, and I quote, "a normative fantasy." (The film then labors, with mixed success, to supply a rival normative fantasy.) 40 years ago, in A Nightmare on Elm Street, the teens in their English class just recited a scary speech from Shakespeare.

_______________________

[*] When I used to teach this class, I would look at various handbooks for undergraduates, and it was always interesting to see how they'd characterize the pre-theory era. Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory and Peter Barry in Beginning Theory tendentiously called it "liberal humanist," with their skeptical eye on the Arnoldian idea that literature could unify and redeem an otherwise class-ridden society; but Nicholas Birns in Theory After Theory more persuasively said it was the era of the "resolved symbolic," when critics had faith they could provide a final interpretive answer to the riddle of the isolated text, as opposed to theory's later claims that everything is a text and that texts by their nature are permanently open-ended.

[1000rh]

Healthism is itself a facet of ableism, the web of beliefs, behaviors, and institutional practices that marginalize disabled people. Our cultural perceptions of health and beauty have long been rooted in the rejection of disabled people. For example, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, municipalities across the United States passed so-called “ugly laws,” banning the public appearance of disabled people. According to Canada’s Eugenics Archive, “ugly laws were concerned with more than appearance, prohibiting both the activity of street begging and the appearance in public of ‘certain persons.’” Many of these local ordinances referred to disabled and disfigured people as “disgusting objects,” presumed to be “disease-ridden.” In so doing, these laws tied “ugliness” to poverty, disability, and a perceived threat to wealthy and nondisabled people. They subsequently weaponized “ugliness,” newly enshrined in public policy, against disfigured and disabled people, banning their appearance in public. Healthism and ableism have long sought to ascribe meaning to others’ perceptions of our health.

– Aubrey Gordon, What We Dont Talk About When We Talk About Fat (2021)

[airbrickwall]

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[autoreflexions]

Poetry doesn’t explain. Where philosophy too often seeks to solve metaphysical questions through reason, and scientism seeks to dismiss metaphysical questions through a reductive empiricism, poetry remains content to bear witness to the everyday mystery itself by way of metaphor (even an explicitly anti-metaphysical view nevertheless relies on metaphor while remaining oblivious to it). Meaning strictly reduced to the sayable loses its meaning through purely reasoned formulation, while it is the poetic which brings attention to metaphysical dimension of life but allows it to remain a mystery, not as "problem" to be solved or dismissed.

[0olong]

2023 Roundup

(also posted on my own site)

I started 2023 with pretty bad fatigue, having had covid in December 2022, following on from a different virus in December which had already given me weeks of post-viral fatigue. This improved slowly over the course of the year, only for the same thing to happen at the end of 2023 - this time, I first tested positive for covid on Christmas Day. I missed a significant amount of work as a result of all this, although I was ultimately happy with the progress that all of my students made - including the many who also missed a lot of school...

I started at a new school after the summer, and left both of the schools I'd been teaching at for a few years before that. It's smaller and more outdoorsy, and Maria Montessori's educational philosophy is far closer to mine than Rudolf Steiner's!

Outside of school, it's been a busy year. It was the third Weird Pride Day on the 4th of March; I had a fun online discussion on the day, but only got round to making a dedicated Weird Pride Day site just afterwards. I made a page on it about Weird Pride for Schools, one on the history of the idea, and pages about what Weird Pride is and its relationship with queer/LGBT identities.

Over on the Monotropism site that I made last year, I've expanded the Explanations page, wrote a piece about ADHD and Monotropism, a page for Mike Lesser, and 'I'm monotropic... now what?' to help anyone who's just realised this about themselves. I wrote a roundup of recent writing about monotropism - there's been a lot! I also wrote a piece on the Monotropism Questionnaire after our paper on it went online as a preprint and proved unexpectedly popular. Finally, I added the text of my keynote talk for the Scottish Autism Research Group (SARG) 2023 conference, Monotropism and Wellbeing.

Elsewhere, I adapted an extract from my piece on Musk from late 2022 (Elon Musk's Autistic Anti-Patterns) for Thinking Person's Guide to Autism, as We Need to Talk About Aspie Supremacists. In October, I contributed to Resisting Transphobia in Edinburgh's 'Trans Facts' resource. In November I shared a meditation on the relationships between anger and power on my Medium. In December, I reported for Bylines Scotland on the Scottish Greens voting for a ban on 'behaviour modification' practices for disabled people (which is in the Bylines Gazette for December).

I made a few videos this year: for AMASE, I posted an update on autistic access to mental health with my partner Sonny Hallett doing most of the talking; and interviews with Elle McNicoll and Pete Wharmby. I also had a panel discussion with Pete and Elliott Spaeth at the ITAKOM (It Takes All Kinds of Minds) conference. On my own YouTube channel, I made a video of my piece On Smallness and Power, and my talk on LEANS and neurodiversity at school for a Korean conference, plus a short timelapse film of a sunrise with nacreous clouds. I also made a TikTok account, and posted some videos about Weird Pride and the Monotropism Questionnaire, plus a short rant about how nothing happens for a reason.

I was sole author of a perspective piece on autism & scientism this year, and a co-author on a paper that passed peer-review, about the LEANS project: Evaluation of wider community support for a neurodiversity teaching programme designed using participatory methods. Two more papers are currently going through peer review, with another to follow soon; I also hope to have two or three book chapters published in the new year.

For a year marked by chronic fatigue, I guess I got quite a bit done! I also took some photos and put them on Instagram, made some posts on my waffle blog, and even made a few sculptures - including this fairly silly Christmas present I made for Sonny, which I figure fits in with the rear-facing nature of this retrospective...

[samssn]

Rhett and Link are relics of old Youtube that I remember fondly. Their deconversion happened a while ago, and in this video, you can see their reasoning with more detail. Basically, here is my interpretation of what they said:

Their (probably southern baptist) form of religion was based on blind faith beliefs, traditions, and group conformity.

Their beliefs and traditions could not withstand mainstream cultural (scientism) attacks.

The anti-LGBT branding of their religion was not the branding they wanted to embrace.

I don't blame them, their deconstruction may be something absolutely necessary in their lives. However, I hope they don't stop there, and merely accept that they have purged some measure of error in their lives, but continue to search for truth, as uncomfortable that journey may be.