#disability rights

[pansy-crutch]

Urgent: Disability Rights Under Attack - Comment Closes Tonight

In the US, section 504 is under imminent threat from the Department of Energy. They are trying to use "direct final rule" to speed run rescinding part of section 504 and make it so new federally funded buildings no longer have to be accessible. Unless "significant adverse comment" is received by tonight at 11:59 EDT, this will go into effect July 15th.

Please help, I've seen very little discussion about this, and I am worried it will quietly take effect.

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[bicokun]

Wow, that’s messed up. My mom worked at group home for mentally disabled men when I was a kid, and I would hang out there pretty often. Some of them I know for a fact had jobs, too, but nobody ever mentioned they were getting below minimum wage. I guess they were at least in a situation where they lived in a place that had a lot of subsidization, but honestly… tying one’s ability to pay to stay alive with one’s usefulness to capitalists is still jacked up.

Hell, my dad who is legally disabled moved in with me last year after he retired and he’s been wanting to get a part time job, too, but I imagine some of this might be why he’s having so much trouble finding anything.

my radical belief is that the disabled and the elderly should be paid at least the average cost of living, regardless of the life they lived. regardless if they ever worked or what work they did or if they were responsible with their choices in life or not

[vetteldixon]

special shoutout also to robert kubica win as a win for all us disabled folks 🤍 we are strong!

[northgazaupdates]

UPDATE: *NEW* NEW LINK!

Yahya and his family were displaced by the IOF, and are currently residing in Deir al-Balah, south-central Gaza.

Life as displaced Gazans was already extremely difficult for them. Food is very scarce, and their living conditions leave them exposed to the elements. Here is the frequent condition of their tent now that the winter rains have come:

Then, Yahya’s father was injured. Some cartilage was damaged in his neck, and doctors say he requires IMMEDIATE surgery to avoid permanent paralysis.

Yahya and his family previously had another campaign, but it was suddenly shut down by GFM with no explanation. They have created a new one, but it has EXTREMELY LOW FUNDS.

The surgery is a stifling $16,000 USD. Yahya and his family have no hope of paying for it without your help.

I am currently watching an elderly loved one lose their mobility, and it is an extremely heartbreaking and isolating situation. I cannot imagine what Yahya and his family are going through, having no social or financial support and only minimal medical care.

Please give what you can to this family. You are their only hope to save their beloved father’s mobility!

[icarusinfreefall]

reminder that adhd medication isn't a luxury or preference, but a lifesaving medication. a 10 year long study in the usa showed that, when properly medicated, the rate of car crashes people with adhd get into goes down significantly--men's rate drops by 38%, and women's by 42%. the med shortage, denial of meds by doctors, rising prices, and the "war on drugs" has killed--with such a car dependent society, not driving frequently isn't an option, which means we need better healthcare and need it now.

https://shorturl.at/8VD8B

edit because i forgot to explain: short link is to an article by the washington post, it should be free to read

[luulapants]

If we wanted to engage in nuance (lol, lmao) on the "are audiobooks reading" debate, we really do need to bring literacy, and especially blind literacy, into the conversation.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.

So, yes, audiobooks should count as reading. But, no, they should not count as literacy.

[sayruq]

10 children a day lose their limbs in Gaza. All hospitals in Gaza are basically barely functioning and the amputations are done in unsanitary conditions and without anesthesia

[bisexualbaker]

In the early naughts, when I was first learning about the US's fight for same sex marriage, a handout I was given stated that, IIRC, there were 1045 rights at the time that applied to married couples but not unmarried couples.

One thousand and forty-five.

I don't know if that number is larger or smaller these days, but I feel like even one is enough to fight to keep same sex marriage on the books, as well as continuing to fight for marriage equality for other groups.

im going crazy you have GOT to decouple romance/amatonormativity and marriage in your mind. you have GOT to understand that marriage is a legal document that protects you from exploitation especially if you are a woman or a stay-at-home anything. it is not some evil unique to heterosexual people. it is a legal document that says 'this is who i want in my hospital room when i die, this is who i want to have my stuff when i die, THIS PERSON OWES ME RECOMPENSE IF THEY KICK ME OUT OF THE HOUSE I LIVE IN"

You are not immune to being taken advantage of by your partner if you are queer. do not wind up homeless because your garbage live-ins name is on the lease and they decided to drop you like hot coals.

[whereserpentswalk]

The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.

[forsapphics]

Happy Disability Pride Month! 🩶💚❤️🤍💛💙🩶🌈 (x)

[sparklefartstheunicorn]

Source video

Please reblog and share.

[queerpunktomatoes]

Since we're doing Eugenics 101! Also note—there are positive eugenics and negative eugenics. This is not a comment on morality. All eugenics are bad. It's a comment on the style of the eugenics.

Negative eugenics: Selective abortion for embryos with disabled diagnoses or intersex conditions, forcibly sterilizing x group of people based on "undesirable traits", marriage restrictions, segregation, euthanasia.

Positive eugenics: Financial and political encouragement for select people to have children, embryo preimplantation genetic diagnosis for the sake of selective breeding, cloning, selective legality of abortion based on one's social position/identities.

In full agreeance with OP's point, don't just call people eugenists for acknowledging the hereditary nature of some "undesirable" traits. And also, you are in the right for calling, say, pronatalists, eugenists. Just because you're not killing people doesn't mean you're not in favor of a fully white, cishet, abled, (Christian) population.

Hey, a little bit about recognizing eugenics. Eugenic logic often consists of 3 steps:

Some people have a trait that makes them less 'productive' or different.

The trait is hereditary / fixed from birth

Actions must be taken to prevent the occurrence of this trait, like preventing the births, killing the current trait-havers or promoting the health and birthrate of the people without this trait and with traits that we like.

And that's bad.

But I see a lot of conversations about whether something is hereditary / fixed from birth, here people assume that the yes/no answer to that is defined by eugenics.

So for clariry: NOT eugenics is:

Some people have a trait that makes them less 'productive' or different

The trait is hereditary / fixed from birth

Being different or less productive is totally fine actually! Everyone has inherent value. Diversity and co-dependency are strengths, even if we can't always see why.

So, ya know, if you see someone arguing that a trait is partly or completely hereditary or fixed from birth, maybe check what value they assign to that before calling someone a eugenicist?

I see some people insisting that any nature/nurture debate must always be settles as 'it's nurture' because anything else would be a slippery slope to eugenics, and that's often just not the case. It's all about what value you assign to difference.

Enforcing a dogmatic insistence that hereditary or unchangeable disabilities or traits don't exist at all isn't the great anti-eugenics strategy that you think it is. At best it's factually inaccurate, at worst the idea that everything must be changeable can lead to the insistence that everyone who is different should just change to become more productive or more normal.

And that's also bad.

[majaurukalo]

Disability benefits shouldn’t be tied to the income of a disabled person’s partner/spouse/parent.

Do you hear me?

DISABILITY BENEFITS SHOULDN’T BE TIED TO THE INCOME OF A DISABLED PERSON’S PARTNER/SPOUSE/PARENT.

This is the straight forward way to deprive a disabled person of their financial freedom and independence and trap them into possible abusive relationships.

[writing2changetheworld]

The Rollettes are in a Lady Gaga music video! This is huge! This is amazing!

[alvie-pines]

disability rights involves the right to do fuck all. the right to be a useless member of society and STILL be loved and cared for and have a fair standard of living. human beings are not defined by the capital we produce.