https://t.co/gfXjaJF2tc New study re the views of nonautistic people towards autistic individuals. The aim - to move away from negative stereotypes.
But the 'sample fictional autistic person' is a white male who likes to only talk about fantasy fiction (LOTR).
Er.../

OK, that describes about 1% of autistic people.
And it exactly matches the stereotype myth that all autistic people are like this.
But...if the aim is to improve how people respond to autistic people...how does this fictional character help?/

My concern is that the more we focus on that 1%, the more we a) forget the other 99% exist and b) the more we set people up to fail, on encountering us. I cannot begin to tell you how confused people are that I'm not a young male who can only talk about Sci-Fi & IT, for example/

...and teaching people how to think positive thoughts about a white male fantasy-fiction-fan doesn't get them anywhere when asked to collaborate with a middle aged gay mum. Let alone one who can manage a decent chat on almost any standard topic on earth/

As it happens, I can chat about LOTR, and IT. But probably no more than anyone else on the street.
If we're serious about improving autistic lives, we need to be serious about diversity.

Normally at this time of year, I get to tout the successes we’ve enjoyed in #Chattanooga in the past 12 months, like initiatives that help our families, ribbon cuttings for park improvements, and economic development deals that bring good jobs.

This year has been different. 1/

As we enter 2021, it is also important to count our blessings. This painful, strange year, for example, has indeed brought renewed clarity to a lot of what is truly important. 2/

I’m thinking about the nurses, doctors, home healthcare staff, and medical providers who have been working harder than ever to care for COVID-19 patients and others. Every day, we witness their sacrifice and service. 3/

I’m thinking also about the police, firefighters, public works employees, teachers, child care workers, and other truly essential personnel who have shown unrelenting dedication to keeping us safe and educating our young people against truly staggering odds. 4/

The pandemic has been brutal on our small businesses and Chattanoogans already living on the edge. I appreciate our Economic & Community Development Dept giving rent and utility assistance and other kinds of support to the business owners and employees who need it the most. 5/

[Thread: Fandoms]
I was called by a long lost friend's parents today. A bit of history, she was involved with the fandom(?) of a popular sports team for the past year or so. The involvement grew so intense that she was engaged with the fandom-things for better part of the day ->

She administered multiple social media "fan-accounts" for the team and the players, had a huge "friends-group" within the fandom itself etc.

In the last few weeks, she almost stopped speaking to her parents, and lost all the contact with her friends in the lockdown. ->

3 weeks ago, somehow a (alleged) rumor spread within their fandom circle's social media that she is a "mole for the opposite team" (or something like that) and she faced everything from abuses to rape threats (was reported to authorities. More on that later) ->

From what the description sounded like, the harassment was really worse than what political social media has (in my experience of hot takes in the past year)

Anyway, 2 days after this rumor, their "fandom team lost to opposite fandom team" on some online contest thing. ->

She was blamed by the "friends" in the fandom "for conspiring" and this person went into a literal shock.

Couldn't speak, couldn't eat, lay in bed all day, didn't even get up to visit the restroom and was deaf to everything. FOR 48 HOURS. Had to be taken to a doctor. ->

#NHSwhitepaper Thread:

Contrary to some of the headlines, the reforms are NOT the
‘end of privatisation’

(Will explain below)

The white paper wants to reverse legislation that mandated competitive tendering, which meant every contract had to be put out ‘to the market’....

1/

Which was a nuisance
Created unnecessary beurocracy And wasted a lot of money

This legislation was brought in under Cameron’s coalition government

(Against the advice of the unions, health think tanks, royal colleges...basically everyone)

2/

PUBLIC DEBT HYSTERIA IN ITALY 🇮🇹
Each passing day, I'm more and more astounded at the hysteria surrounding public debt in Italy. This hysteria has country-specific peculiarities. In Italy it's somehow different from the US, the UK or Germany. 1/18

This hysteria is due not only to ideology, but also to provincialism, pusillanimity, rancor towards the State and disregard for legitimate national interest. Let's analyse these issues. 2/18

IDEOLOGY. The Italian free-marketers ("liberisti all'amatriciana") are often a parody of their American and British counterparts. They seem to lack (or pretend to lack) basic understanding of the functioning of government bonds. 3/18

There's no such thing as a free market of government bonds. Or better: a free mkt of gov't bonds can exist only in a monetary union where the central bank doesn't guarantee that single national governments will not fail. We've seen the negative effects of such architecture. 4/18

However, thanks to PEPP, the @ecb implicitly prevents governments' failure. At least for the moment.
This means that the mkt for gov't bonds is controlled by a public authority:it's what usually occurs(and should occur) in every well-functioning modern economy(and democracy) 5/18

I'm disappointed that the following needs to be said, because professors ought to educate themselves on basic facts, instead of accepting myths uncritically and behaving harmfully towards minoritized women in STEM.

People, especially women, who are Black and/or Indigenous have especially challenging pathways into tenure track faculty positions, because academia is still racist and sexist in ways that are intersecting and nonlinearly compounding.

The following myths and facts are paraphrased from the 1996 research article about Ford Foundation Fellows by Smith, Wolf-Wendel, Busenberg et al, "The Pipeline for Achieving Faculty Diversity: Debunking the Myths" at

Academia changes slowly, so these 1996 research results still hold, and in fact other studies indicate that the representation of Black faculty has worsened since 2005.

To summarize the research...

Myth: Potential faculty of color are sought out by numerous institutions, and the competition to hire them is fierce, because there are so few candidates of color.

Fact: Supply and demand statements like this are greatly exaggerated.

1/ Further thoughts on @DavidAFrench's important essay on #ChristianNationalism.

It's great to see a leading evangelical thinker publicly engaging the topic.

But....

2/ It would be even better if @DavidAFrench would engage with work on #ChristianNationalism by scholars and journalists like:

@ndrewwhitehead @socofthesacred @praxishabitus @sarahposner @kathsstewart @AntheaButler @Nicholef and yours truly @GorskiPhilip

Also...

3/ With the work of black theologians such as:

Willie Jennings, @JemarTisby @stewartdantec @esaumccaulley to name just a few.

If he did, then....

4/ He'd know that there are much better and more nuanced definitions of #ChristianNationalism than the one offered by @ThomasSKidd, who is a smart guy, but not a scholar of the subject.

Plus...

5/ He'd know that the phenomenon is, in fact, much more widespread than he implies, not just amongst white evangelicals but also amongst non-evangelical white Protestants and white Catholics....See "Taking America Back for God" for the receipts.

So, why do I keep saying "white"?

So what happens now?

Let me try to peer into a crystal ball here in 2021 so we can drag this thread up & laugh at me and/or praise my vision in 2024

This is not what I WANT, it’s just what I think is likely to unfold over the next four years

Chime in if I forget your pet issue

First, there’s still a split Senate & a bare majority in the House, they can’t just ram through everything Nancy has put in the docket since 2018 on Day One unless Manchin & Sinema play ball.

Which I don’t think they will on everything. No packed court, no nuked filibuster.

We will see a second stimulus & possibly a third.

Vaccine distribution will normalize & by the end of summer we’ll be in a rocky recovery.

There will be a big fight for a public option that the Dems will probably lose unless they win big in 2022 because again Manchin.

Marijuana will be rescheduled & decriminalized but likely not federally legalized unless some GOP cross the aisle. Biden will be blamed because people don’t know how the system works.

But more & more states will legalize until it doesn’t really matter.

Trump’s tax cuts will be repealed, funding will be restored to gutted departments, but the brain drain will take a long time to heal, & no one will understand why everything doesn’t go back to normal like killing the head vampire so all the other vampires just vanish.

If someone’s an asshole to you, it’s your right to decide not to work w/them. Right?

If someone’s an asshole to your friend/mom/kid/neighbor, etc., it’s still your right to decide not to work w/ them. Right?

So...

If someone’s an asshole to people you don’t know personally, but you disapprove of the assholery... it’s still your right to decide not to work w/them.

It’s not a blacklist if people choose not to work with you b/c your views make them or others feel unsafe.

At a certain point, conservatives are going to have to recognize that “views” are not academic when they have real-world effects and consequences for other people.

Like, “X got fired for being conservative!” implies those conservative views exist in a vacuum and are purely thought experiments, whereas in actuality those views are likely affecting other people quite fundamentally.

If you insist that people who cut ties w/ bigots are doing it just because of pressure from “cancel culture,” you’re basically saying they can’t tell the difference between which values matter to them and which don’t. That’s pretty patronizing.

A recipe for slavery, regardless who is President:

1. Gates owns the WHO.

2. Gates controls info—YouTube censors videos that contradict WHO.

3. Gates & Bezos will change our diet & control food supply—by law (EAT Forum).

4. Bezos controls flow of goods.

Receipts below.

If you are still suffering from cognitive dissonance and can't seem to interpret what is going on around you, let me see if I can at least help you understand what is happening within broader evangelicalism and the Roman Catholic Church:

(2) The "church" is becoming the state church. The church that doesn't just obey the state and governmental authorities but that is incorporated into the state.

Ecumenism will be based upon subjective economic, social, and supranational policies: and you must believe.

(3) And along with this transition you must obey and do whatever the state tells you to do. This is now "loving thy neighbor". This is the new collective.

And you must hate the old nation, the old constitution, the old economy, the old ways.

You must embrace the new systems

1/@RANDCorporation just put out a report on drug prices amongst the G7, and the methodology is somewhat appalling. I'm kind of hoping @DrugChannels looks at it because it contains such glaring errors worthy of an Adam Fein Policy Roast.

2/In the introduction of the report (p.viii) they admit that they can't actually compare prices of drugs because US drugs include rebates and many of those aren't public info. So they start out the report by saying they're going to use incorrect numbers....

3/"Although prices net of rebates and other discounts paid by manufacturers after drugs are dispensed are particularly relevant in the United States, these prices are generally not available to researchers."

4/Honestly the report should have stopped right there. How do you honestly proceed after such a whopper of a flaw in your own methodology? What's worse is they buried the useful observation

5/"for unbranded generic drugs (with U.S.
prices at 84 percent of those in comparison countries). Unbranded generics represent 84 percent
of volume in the United States, compared with 35 percent of volume for the other OECD
countries in the study."

I’ve been seeing tweets from women demanding not to be treated as sex objects so I figured an exposition on the subject matter may help us all. First, let’s remind ourselves what a sex object is. In simple terms, a sex object is a person who is regarded primarily...

1/12

in terms of their sexual attractiveness or availability.

When women post pictures that highlight their boobs and ass on social media, (which they do all the time) they primarily want men to see how sexually attractive they are. In other words they want men to see them...

2/12

as sex objects and that external validation in turn, boosts their self esteem.

It's called thirst trap because that's exactly the effect they want to achieve. They want men to thirst for them. On a conscious and subconscious level, they want you to see them as an...

3/12

object of sexual desire.

And contrary to what some would have you believe, it's absolutely normal for heterosexual men to see women they're attracted to as sex objects.

It has nothing to do with misogyny and this is proved by the fact that homosexual men see men they...

4/12

are sexually attracted to as sex objects. If heterosexual men are misogynists in this regard, then homosexual men are man-haters.

Go through the TL and you'll see tweets like "If you can't AFFORD EXPENSIVE women, stop trying to date them" They've made themselves into...

5/12

I asked the Taoiseach to ensure that the coroner carries out its duty in respect to the mass infant and child deaths in mother and baby homes👇.

It is the duty of a coroner to hold an inquest when a body is found in their district. See here: ℹ️ https://t.co/jQmq6ex1GK

The Government Action Plan👇published in response to the report makes no mention of inquests or accountability and simply does not reflect the magnitude of the crimes committed. In fact, it seems like a blatant attempt to avoid these very issues.

ℹ️

We need to make sure survivors get justice.

If you agree, I am asking you to email your TDs, the Taoiseach & the Min for Children to tell them there needs to be an inquest into the deaths, as well as redress, access to data, a commission for the disappeared and further research.

If you need some help getting started, you'll find a draft email template here: 📧https://t.co/h5v4LY3mkr

I recommend reading the joint statement from Adoption Rights Alliance, Justice for Magdalene laundries and the Clann Project: ℹ️

I have also put together a brief Q+A below on what has happened and will happen next in terms of the Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes👇👇👇.

Q. Where can I read a copy of the report for myself?

A. Right here: