As to your usage of “objective,” and related terms, Inigo Montoya has a message for you: “You keep-a using that word … I do not think it means what you think it means.”

I’ve bookmarked this discussion. When I’m ready to take it more seriously, I’ll come back and use your comments above as practice material for more self-training in the deconstruction of fallacious rhetoric.

In the mean time, thanks for the laughs.

That one is especially popular among old-school mental health professionals, and as unsupportable assumptions go, that myth does a great deal of emotional harm to autistics — as it would to anyone, leaving them with feelings of betrayal and abandonment.

Ultimately, it often adds up to a classic “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The distinction is really superficial, but works well enough in superficialities. I just don’t like it when such a thing, with a built-in moral component, is ascribed to a person as an ultimate value.

Cliff

And he functions independently in some ways but cannot remember simple “independent functions” like whether or not his underpants go on first or looking when he crosses the street or how to start swinging on a swing on the playground. His executive processing skills are almost nonexistent. Is he high functioning or low functioning? What is his label? Both? Neither?

He has many many characterstics that they ask about on standard autism scales, but he also has many characteristics that we find on Asperger’s scales. Does he have autism or Asperger’s? Both? Neither?

Interestingly enough, based on DSM-III criteria, he has autism.

Make sure you write to CNN!

You have fully supported the Auton and Wynberg trial decisions.

Both those decisions write off autistics who have not received intensive ABA-based autism interventions starting early in life.

You have also strongly opposed my position in Auton. My position in Auton is in opposition to how both sides wrote off most autistics in Canada (autistics who have not received intensive ABA starting early in life).

Also, you have strongly opposed my Senate testimony, where again I have objected to autsitics being written off. There, as I mentioned above, I argued that autistics are human beings with human rights, and that we deserve recognized standards of science and ethics (this also figured in my argument in Auton).

As with any other group, autistics are very unlikely to have good outcomes so long as we are denied basic human rights and recognized standards of science and ethics.

Here’s a quote from a recent peer-reviewed paper:

“There have been a number of different reviews of evidence-based practices of treatments for young children with autism. Reviews which have critically evaluated the empirical evidence have not found any treatments that can be considered evidence-based.” (Reichow et al., in press)

If you find any factual errors in my reporting of the behaviour analytic literature in my formal and informal writing, please point them out. I always appreciate knowing where I’ve made factual errors. Your repetition of the usual boilerplate does not add to the discussion.

I did not phone your law office. I phoned a number for ASNB. I asked the person who answered the phone for information relevant to my extreme difficulties (which at various times has involved being in danger). You required me to phone back then refused to assist an autistic honestly asking for important information.

More recently, you have publicly taken the position that autistics must not be protected by the laws which ensure that nonautistics have safe workplaces.

I was enormously popular with autism societies so long as I did not in any way question the information they gave me and obediently did as they asked. I could be and was used as a dire warning as to what terrible fate would befall autistic children if they were not in ABA programs starting very early in life.

Now that I have questioned, of necessity (if I had not questioned this, I would be locked up somewhere), the information autism advocates provide, I am considered by autism advocates to be totally ignorant of the “autism reality” autism advocates used to consider me an expert on.

I don’t think the work of People First (or for that matter, the work of the Canadian Down Syndrome Society) has trivialized developmental disabilities. It has done the opposite–it is taking developmental disabilities seriously, and it is the leadership of these groups, which have made society a much better place for developmentally disabled people, that I look up to.