#mod glaceon

Equality Golbat: Radical isn’t liberal. Reactionary isn’t conservative.

Equality Golbat: If society were open to change to improve people’s lives, “radical” thought would just be thought.

Equality Golbat: If you want to be an ally, do not interject your opinions when they are unnecessary.

If there are members of an oppressed group who can and are wiling to say what you wanted to say, let them say it. Don’t silence the voices of the oppressed any longer.

-Glaceon

Equality Golbat: Radical thought openly defies society and calls its principles into question.

All radical thought does is look at societal values and see if they can change, in order to benefit the people society oppresses. Radical thought is only radical because helping oppressed people is widely considered unthinkable and impossible to pull off.

-Glaceon

Asexual Glaceon: Aromantic is not heteroromantic. Asexual is not straight.

Equality Golbat: If you want to be an ally, learn how to listen to people.

Sometimes, you’re going to hear things or see things and you’re going to be shocked. You might even be offended. Do not spend your time refuting those kind of claims. If you’re so upset that people can’t see you’re not “like other white/cis/straight/abled people,” it’s not time for you to be an ally.

Spend more of your time in an effort to see where other people are coming from, instead of trying to make yourself look like a hero.

-Glaceon

Neurodivergent Nidoqueen: The anti-vax movement is based on eugenics.

Even if vaccines did cause autism, it would still be incredibly immoral to put thousands of other people at risk of contracting fatal illnesses. Autistic people are not burdens; we’re people just like everyone else. The idea that we are burdens and must be removed from society is an ableist idea that is rooted in eugenics.

-Glaceon

Equality Golbat: Straight trans people and straight intersex people are MOGAI.

Cis intersex people are also MOGAI, as their experiences of being intersex people in a society that expects them to conform in a binary preclude their experiences of being cis. Trans and/or nonbinary intersex people are MOGAI by default.

-Glaceon

Asexual Glaceon: Aromanticism and asexuality are not exclusive to each other.

Romantic asexual people are commonly invalidated because society at large conflates their romantic attraction to be sexual attraction. Aromantic sexual people, on the flip side, are invalidated because society conflates their lack of romantic attraction as unnatural and inhuman.

We need to take steps to de-stigmatize asexuality and aromanticism in society.

-Glaceon

Equality Golbat: Is considering oppressed groups of people as undeserving of agency, autonomy, and security the right way to live?

Neurodivergent Nidoqueen: Yes, I have done this thing in the past, so I can safely say that I cannot do this thing without putting myself through significant pain.

And “this thing” can be anything from a particularly tasking aspect of your day job, or class presentations, or running a mile within a time limit, or anything else you can possibly think of.

Contrary to popular able-bodied/neurotypical belief, us disabled people do actually have a fairly realistic grasp of our physical, emotional, and/or mental limits. This is a strategy we use to set our boundaries, and in some settings it’s even a valued asset. Still, able-bodied neurotypical people are all too willing to try and nudge us to do things that we know, because we’ve done the same kind of thing before, will cause us significant pain.

-Glaceon

Equality Golbat: There shouldn’t be a compulsory pledge of allegiance to begin with.

I’m fully aware that the US Pledge of Allegiance violates separation of church and state. It’s also horribly inaccurate.

“Liberty and justice for all” doesn’t exist for our enormous prison population, societally oppressed groups, nor for the people whose cultures have been almost destroyed in the aftermath of American imperialism.

The US today is run as an oligarchy, not a republic, and certainly not a democracy.

And children who don’t even know the implications of swearing allegiance are being deprived of the ability to think critically about their country from the start.

-Glaceon

Equality Golbat: No one should be drafted, regardless of gender.

Even if military drafts are an example of sexism harming men, no one should have to be drafted from the start. Military drafts remove all people’s agency. If the people don’t want to go to war, they shouldn’t have to be forced into it.

The people should ultimately decide whether or not to go to war.

-Glaceon

Equality Golbat: Being annoyed with “political correctness”, instead of being hurt by people refusing to be respectful, is a privilege.

Equality Golbat: A rewards-only approach can still be abusive.

Reward actions that should be rewarded. Positive reinforcement helps kids remember things that can help them in the future. It’s important to help your kids and get their opinion if they have trouble doing some things. 

Reward your kid for doing something good for someone else without being asked, for instance. Help your kid and reward them for doing something that might not be the easiest thing for them to do. Why reward your kids if you have to help them do something? Because it shows you understand that they’re putting in a lot of effort to do the thing, even with your help.

If you’re rewarding acceptance of punishment, pain, degradation, helplessness, or withholding vital necessities and putting them under the guise of rewards, that is abusive.

-Glaceon

Equality Golbat: If you’d rather pay a doctor to “fix” your child because acceptance is hard work, did you forget it was hard work to get that money in the first place?

One of things you need confront before you ever think about having kids, is that your kids are not going to be you. Those kids might end up radically different from you. Don’t eversay that if your kids aren’t exactly like you, that they’re bad people. 

There are a lot of different people in this world. All we want is to be happy and secure in our lives and in ourselves. There are a lot of different ways to be happy and secure and to do good in the world. Do not be your kid’s bully. Guide them to whatever way helps them be happy and secure and able to do good in the world. 

You might not understand your kid’s definition of happy and secure. But your kid will be infinitely better off if you help them come into their own, rather than force them into being someone they’re not.

-Glaceon

Equality Golbat: The fact that mindfulness has accomplished anything disproves behaviorism.

Mindfulness is essentially meta-thinking: thinking about your own thought process. That’s a very simplified explanation, but it’s the basic foundation. Behaviorism says that your thoughts, feelings, and awareness don’t matter, only trained responses. The fact that anyone has accomplished anything by being mindful disproves that claim.

-Nidoqueen

I’d also like to add that it’s very difficult to actually be mindful of yourself, especially when behaviorism has taught you that your thoughts, feelings, and opinions are worth jack shit. It’s incredibly empowering for abuse victims to practice mindfulness and use it to draw up and sustain their boundaries.

-Glaceon

Equality Golbat: If you believe what and how people think is irrelevant to the human experience, why call yourself a psychologist?

What it comes down to is this: people think differently. People think differently in every social, political, and cultural group that exists. The point of the psychologist shouldn’t be to make our thinking and functioning more monolithic and homogenous. It should help people find ways to work with their current thought processes and functioning in ways that work for them.

-Glaceon

Behaviorism: A school of psychology that focuses on forcibly training specific behaviors.

Behaviorism is based on neurotypical, able-bodied behavior being the norm, and makes no attempts to be inclusive to neurodiverse and disabled people. According to behaviorists, as long as you display “appropriate” behavior, it doesn’t matter whether the process of acquiring such behaviors was harmful or not. This makes it unsettlingly easy for abusive parents to institutionally abuse their children.

Abuse culture: A culture in which certain groups are treated as problems rather than people.

Let’s not pretend that abuse is “only a family problem”. In every setting, in every aspect of society, abuse runs rampant. Everyone not seen as “normal” is treated violently and inhumanely-whether it be through physical, financial, or emotional violence. Abuse is so ingrained in society that members of the group “normal” can say they believe other don’t people deserve to be happy, don’t deserve to be accepted, don’t deserve to express their feelings, or don’t deserve to live, without any repercussions whatsoever.

That, needless to say, is a huge problem. And navigating through the sea of abuse culture colors our lives in every way imaginable.