older-entrapta-blog

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I'm a homeschool grad and have noticed that all conversations I've had about it as an adult wind up being about public school. (Except for the some of the conversations I've had with other homeschool alumni.)

The method people use to shift the topic depends on whether they're parents who are homeschooling children or people with no connection to homeschooling, but the conversation always gets shifted away from the actual experiences of the people who were actually homeschooled.

It's like my experiences don't exist in any meaningful way unless they're about someone else.

Also this is a nice ableism/neurodivergent feel here but have you ever noticed you get treated like a villain by a vast majority of middle class leftists if you ever admit you had trouble in public school settings or have school baggage?

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Corollary: if something is widely known to be illegal it's virtually certain that many people are doing it and not being caught or punished.

I wish people understood that outlawing a thing and punishing people for doing it does NOT actually guarantee that people will stop doing the thing. Sometimes it does, but people are complicated.

In fact, if you are trying to stop a bad thing from happening, so you put penalties in place if people do something that you think contributes to your problem, often the thing will keep happening and your problem will get WORSE.

It’s often because you haven’t really understood what the problem is, or the law wasn’t actually intended to achieve that goal and politicians are just lying and saying it is.

Just because a thing is bad does not mean punishing people for doing it or things related to it will stop it from happening. You have to actually see if it’s been tried and if it worked.

Outlawing the sale of alcohol did not cause a reduction in urban poverty, crime, or domestic violence. It led to an era of gangsters and rampant organized crime.

Abstinence-only sex education makes teens more likely to have sex younger, while teaching them about safe sex causes a longer delay before becoming sexually active, better protection against sexual assault, and less teen pregnancy.

You can’t just outlaw things and expect them to go away! It’s more complicated than that!

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Social justice spaces I've been in actually come off to me as more dangerous than mainstream spaces sometimes, for this reason. Mainstream spaces aren't free of this kind of abuse, but they're less likely to make moral outage the sole focus.

Social justice looks appealing to a lot of autistic folks because it advertises itself as a place where moralized disgust will finally be aimed at people who do real, substantial harm. But what many social justice spaces actually do is ensure lots of ambient moralized disgust, ready to be diverted toward anyone who is seen as a sufficiently unprotected target.

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Social justice looks appealing to a lot of autistic folks because it advertises itself as a place where moralized disgust will finally be aimed at people who do real, substantial harm. But what many social justice spaces actually do is ensure lots of ambient moralized disgust, ready to be diverted toward anyone who is seen as a sufficiently unprotected target.

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People on the internet do not read situations the way they read them in real life, or when serving on a jury, or when reading a book or watching a movie– even when they talk about those very same things on the internet. It is a common mistake to think so.

The dynamics of “who is being blamed” or “who is punished” or “who is safe and who is under attack” and “who is in the position of power” and that loose cluster of impressions that in real life can be very complicated reduce to mostly one emotion: shame.

Which makes sense. On the internet, you can’t do anything to anyone else, not really. Not unless you SWAT them, dox them, or find some secondary way to impact their real lives. If you have aggression, shame is basically the only thing you can try to impart to other people, and the most common thing people actually fear as a consequence on the internet. The objective of most of the confrontational internet is to impart as much shame as possible, and avoid someone else doing the same to them.

So based on this logic it is really easy to see why a lot of confrontations, interpretations, and other “reads” on situations don’t go the way one might expect, on the internet:

Someone creates a story or media where multiple characters are flawed, but one experiences shame as a consequence for their flaws and others do not, but instead experience other conflicts like confusion, misery, or insecurity… and the internet thinks the character that experiences shame is being disproportionately punished next to the others.

Figures, real or fictional, that are not ‘available’ to experience shame or be shamed for their actions are vilified on that basis in specific.

Identifying yourself and every aspect of your life to strangers becomes compulsory and it’s because people are entitled to your vulnerabilities as you’re entitled to theirs. This is not a very good or safe assumption.

People come to believe or engage in behavior that assumes inflicting shame is some kind of political praxis, even when it has no effects on major forces in our world like wealth or income, or credibility to broader culture.

Movements that are intended to revoke the credibility of those who have violated others, or their wealth/income, are heavily packaged with inflicting shame on the internet as if that’s a required part of damage control.

Those who already fear shame will find their behavior amplified on the internet by those around them. Whether that’s someone who’s been bullied or marginalized before, or the bully who marginalized them, for their own social gain, or a privileged person who has only shame to fear, it is a risk.

Online dramas are ‘won’ by those who project the least shame, giving advantage to 1) public figures with PR teams and 2) absolutely bananas people with no conscience whatsoever. 

Some figures may even be enacting schemes to extract money from reactionaries who want an idol that wards off shame.

internet denizens often believe they are going to ‘take down’ other users by revealing them to be shameful (which is itself, not something able to apply any ‘real force’), but may forget to protect themselves or they may lack insight as to who gains access to their audience. 

Internet audiences respond well to shame, want to be ‘taught’ how to avoid shame as well what is the socially lauded way to shame others

discussions that bear themes of shame dominate the internet even when they are minor or private in other spaces. Like discussions of sexual vulnerability, or even assigning politics to sexual vulnerability.

The concept of ‘shame’ becomes disassociated into discussions of ‘shaming’ which turn it into an action instead of an emotional impact someone can feel– which can be self-contained (we can feel ashamed of ourselves) or imposed without direct action at all. Shame that isn’t the result of direct blame or as a result of someone else’s aggression is poorly understood on the internet.

It is easy to underestimate shame’s significance on the internet, when it’s actually the primary way that people understand and interact with other people, storytelling, and platformed figures.

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The unschooling model would have worked better for me if I'd been offered an array of options and been given a clear understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of each one.

Since I was a kid with no knowledge of how things worked and no ability to realistically assess whether I was learning effectively or what skills and knowledge I would need for adult life, child-led education didn't work well for me. 

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I’ve been lurking on various Gifted Discourse threads and want to add some stuff. 

Stating that giftedness does not exist feels to me stating like disability does not exist. Both statements are denials that my abilities and experiences could be different from someone else’s in any meaningful way.

Being gifted and being disabled aren’t the same thing, and people's individual experiences of each vary widely, and people who are both gifted and disabled often share some experiences that other people do not. All of those experiences deserve their own discussions. 

But there are more similarities than people often realize:

Both giftedness and disability create inconvenience for other people (way more inconvenience for those of us who are gifted and/or disabled, but that’s another post). That affects how they treat us. 

Both giftedness and disability suggest that you can’t, practically speaking, treat everyone alike; the specifics of the person in front of you matter and you have to (or are at least expected to) figure out how that's relevant to what you're doing, and then actually change your approach accordingly. Many people really don’t want to change their approach.

Both giftedness and disability create a moral dilemma for people who (correctly) believe everyone should be treated as though they are equally valuable as people (because they are!!) but who also mistakenly believe that giftedness increases moral worth and disability decreases it. Sometimes they try to resolve this dilemma by saying that giftedness, disability, or both don’t exist. 

Both gifted people and disabled people (and those of us in the overlap) are often implicitly judged on our perceived economic exploitability—how much money other people expect to make from what we do. (This is more complex than it seems, but that's another post, too.)

We are pressured to believe that our differences from non-gifted/non-disabled people aren't real, or aren't that important, when those differences inconvenience other people or require resources.

We're pressured to believe that our experiences of being gifted and/or being disabled are straightforward and fit simplistic narratives, usually narratives that people who don’t share our experiences are trying to assign to us.

We're frequently believed to be using resources we don't need or deserve.

We are underidentified, misidentified, and underresourced.

A couple important caveats before I continue:

Gifted people tend to get more benefit and disabled people tend to get more harm, but this isn't as simple as people sometimes want to make it, especially for those of us who are both gifted and disabled.

Identification of gifted kids and adults, of disabled kids and adults, and of those of us who are both gifted and disabled, discriminates on the basis of race and class and other things (often but not always in a straightforward way).

My main point: 

Systems, and many people, actively avoid accommodating diversity and providing important resources, unless they can hijack things to benefit themselves. This includes diversity of abilities and needs. 

When we fight each other for too few resources, it benefits people and systems who don't want to devote more resources to any of us, because we’re not trying to get more resources from them. 

When we advocate for one group to have their resources reduced or eliminated, we're signaling that diverse needs aren't important to meet. (And it's not a given that eliminating funding for one group will result in it being given to the other group.)

In an ideal world, we would approach diversity of needs and abilities and skills in a way that doesn't ignore our individual strengths and weaknesses by trying to dump us into gifted, disabled, and typical boxes and then pretending that whatever box they've put us in captures all our abilities.

I don't think we can get to that world easily, but I think we can get there a lot faster if we advocate, together, for effective, adequately resourced approaches to learning that correctly identify and actually serve people with diverse abilities and needs. 

One of the prerequisites for that is for us to listen to what we say about ourselves, and to advocate that other people do so too. 

@chavisory Right, like if a kid is gifted, they need to know WHAT THAT MEANS. Not be told that they’re not.

That’s just gaslighting.

Yeah, exactly. And also, I ALREADY had trouble not typical minding. I was already BAFFLED that my peers couldn’t read, and I thought they must be lazy or something. Because the only point of reference I had was me, and I wasn’t even sure what “learning to read” meant—the idea of not knowing these symbols mean words just didn’t make any sense to me. I assumed “learning to read” meant, like, “learning which verbs are irregular.”

If I had never even been told that my verbal skills were obviously different from those of the people around me, I might well have concluded my peers actually were just lazy, and probably been mean to them for obviously failing to apply themselves.

“What does this say, Bob?” “I don’t know, Fiercelet!” “…wait what? I cant tell if you’re lying or not” was already a thing that was happening.

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When and where I grew up, in the 80s and 90s, there were norms about welcoming new people into spaces. If someone new showed up at a group, you would welcome them, ask them some questions about themselves, introduce them to people, and generally support their inclusion. I saw this modeled and, in a rare case of getting needed social instruction, even had it explicitly explained to me. It was seen as basic politeness, not an “above and beyond” thing.

At some point I realized people my age weren’t doing it, or had stopped doing it. It’s been increasingly my experience that no one does it.

I’m tempted to say it was because I moved geographic locations within the U.S., and it’s possible that played a role, but I suspect it has more to do with friendships within the U.S. becoming increasingly solely choice-based, and that the ability to integrate yourself into a group of uninterested people now plays a gatekeeping role similar to that of a job interview. 

(There are some good things about friendships being more choice-based, and some bad ones. Making groups less welcoming to new people is not one of the good ones.)

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Some things that can make activism inaccessible:

Flooding people with fear/guilt/shame/anxiety-inducing appeals to try to evoke action. I honestly doubt this is an effective tactic for evoking participation from nondisabled people, but it can be so flooding that it prevents some mentally ill and neurodivergent people from acting, and can worsen mental health issues and cause new ones. 

Treating actions that are more accessible mobility-wise, sensory-wise, energy-wise, etc., as less important and less morally valuable (and treating people for whom those are the best or only options as less important and less moral). 

Not valuing or supporting sustainable amounts of effort. Expecting everyone to give their all (which is bad even for nondisabled people!) and expecting everyone to be able to put in the same amount of effort. Not doing anything to support people recognizing and setting limits (or actively working against their doing so). 

Not making any provisions for the fact that someone might have unpredictable health problems. Only having activism opportunities available that require consistent commitment, or not having anyone else who can partially or fully take over if someone has to back out of something.

These are all in addition to the ones I hear most about (failure to hold events in wheelchair-accessible places; overvaluing marches; not providing venue accessibility information, or providing inaccurate information). There are many I haven’t even mentioned (e.g., assuming you can just order pizza and that will meet everyone’s food needs). 

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The expectation that we ought to be able to push past these barriers and design and implement our own way to contribute is, also, pretty ableist. Especially when framed as a moral requirement. 

(This doesn’t mean people who do that are wrong; more power to them. But it shouldn’t be *required* of us.)

There’s an activist organization I’d like to donate time to. I get regular emails from them with suggestions for action. And every single one of those actions creates accessibility issues for me (go to or host a group debate-watching event, join a march, join group phonecalls, recruit people).

It’s like they’re trying to be a specifically neurotypical able-bodied movement. And maybe they are.

So much of activism seems to approach recruitment from the perspective that if you give people any opportunities that *aren’t* about in-person stuff they’ll take those instead of doing something in-person. Whether it’s intended this way or not, it comes across as “if we give people the option to do something that isn’t about in-person attendance, phonecalls, or leveraging interpersonal relationships, they’ll do that, and that’s a lazy cop-out.”

As a disabled person, that’s really…disheartening. Especially when it’s delivered alongside a message of “if you’re not addressing the problem in these specific ways, you’re a horrible compassionless person.” And extra especially when the approach consists of flooding people with negative emotions (guilt, shame, fear) in order to try to evoke action. And I see both of those things often, subtly and overtly.

I could contact the organization, but their communications aren’t giving me cause to believe that they would either want the skills I can contribute, or that they would be willing to understand that there are things I can’t do. (This doesn’t even take into account accommodations I might need—I’m not sure anyone has an incentive to provide those to volunteers, who do not actually work for the organization.) 

(I am aware that some organizations suggest alternatives. Part of my point is that those are *alternatives* - they’re typically seen as lesser, or as entry-level commitments you use to try to extract “real” commitments. I am also aware that there are some campaigns that don’t do this, like the text-messaging people. Those are not, typically, the ones I see publicized.)

(I’m also very lucky to be in a position where I can donate money. Many disabled people are not. I don’t get the sense that money is seen as sufficient, either.)

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There's an activist organization I'd like to donate time to. I get regular emails from them with suggestions for action. And every single one of those actions creates accessibility issues for me (go to or host a group debate-watching event, join a march, join group phonecalls, recruit people).

It's like they're trying to be a specifically neurotypical able-bodied movement. And maybe they are.

So much of activism seems to approach recruitment from the perspective that if you give people any opportunities that *aren't* about in-person stuff they'll take those instead of doing something in-person. Whether it's intended this way or not, it comes across as "if we give people the option to do something that isn't about in-person attendance, phonecalls, or leveraging interpersonal relationships, they'll do that, and that's a lazy cop-out."

As a disabled person, that's really…disheartening. Especially when it's delivered alongside a message of "if you're not addressing the problem in these specific ways, you're a horrible compassionless person." And extra especially when the approach consists of flooding people with negative emotions (guilt, shame, fear) in order to try to evoke action. And I see both of those things often, subtly and overtly.

I could contact the organization, but their communications aren’t giving me cause to believe that they would either want the skills I can contribute, or that they would be willing to understand that there are things I can't do. (This doesn't even take into account accommodations I might need—I'm not sure anyone has an incentive to provide those to volunteers, who do not actually work for the organization.) 

(I am aware that some organizations suggest alternatives. Part of my point is that those are *alternatives* - they're typically seen as lesser, or as entry-level commitments you use to try to extract “real” commitments. I am also aware that there are some campaigns that don't do this, like the text-messaging people. Those are not, typically, the ones I see publicized.)

(I'm also very lucky to be in a position where I can donate money. Many disabled people are not. I don't get the sense that money is seen as sufficient, either.)

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“Warehousing children” is a specific phrase used in homeschooling culture. I'm not sure whether it’s used in conservative Christian homeschooling culture, but it was definitely part of left-wing unschooling culture when I was growing up. 

When I hear it, it evokes a broad set of words and assumptions and beliefs, to the extent that it’s hard to engage with the phrase at all, because I’m trying to figure out whether the speaker is using it as shorthand for all those other things or not. 

It’s a weird experience because they may or may not be aware of that particular context for the phrase. 

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Homeschooling isn’t public school minus all the bad parts. 

I think I could write more about homeschooling if it weren’t commonly seen as the opposite of public schooling. Because it isn’t. It’s not even a single thing. Even if you break it down into just the big categories—conservative christian homeschooling vs the (now smaller and less well-known) granola crunchy left-wing homeschooling—each of those involves many different approaches and experiences. (Plus those categories don’t cover people who homeschool for pragmatic reasons very well.) 

It’s very hard to say “my education was neglectful in unusual and unnecessary ways, and I don’t want that to happen to other people” without someone going “you don’t understand that public school traumatizes kids.” 

I do, actually. I don’t talk about that at length when I talk about homeschooling, because people I meet tend to know a lot about problems of public schools and very little about problems that can (and do) happen in homeschooling. 

Dynamics around discussing homeschooling can be really, really weird. It doesn’t help when people talk about public school and homeschool like they’re opposites. 

[older-entrapta-blog]

I think I could write more about homeschooling if it weren’t commonly seen as the opposite of public schooling. Because it isn’t. It’s not even a single thing. Even if you break it down into just the big categories—conservative christian homeschooling vs the (now smaller and less well-known) granola crunchy left-wing homeschooling—each of those involves many different approaches and experiences. (Plus those categories don’t cover people who homeschool for pragmatic reasons very well.) 

It’s very hard to say “my education was neglectful in unusual and unnecessary ways, and I don’t want that to happen to other people” without someone going “you don’t understand that public school traumatizes kids.” 

I do, actually. I don’t talk about that at length when I talk about homeschooling, because people I meet tend to know a lot about problems of public schools and very little about problems that can (and do) happen in homeschooling. 

Dynamics around discussing homeschooling can be really, really weird. It doesn’t help when people talk about public school and homeschool like they’re opposites. 

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weaponized empathy

I think a lot of social media weaponizes people’s empathy against them. Real life, too, but I see it more intensely and more ubiquitously on social media, especially social-justice-focused social media. 

When I say “weaponizes people’s empathy against them,” I mean modes of discourse that selectively harm people who care about other people, by evoking an empathetic response and then using it as a tether to expose that person to harm. 

I’m going to try writing a lot of short posts and expanding on them later as I feel like it, in an attempt to bypass a thing where partway through a post I get hung up on one specific aspect and then give up. So I’ll stop here for now.