So what has happened in my rather unusual life recently?
Well I am nursing a swollen ankle again, having injured it on the last day of Autscape after an evening's stargazing at the Perseids I was told by the Dr to rest it. Well I got impatient after a week and took it up Snowdon, no wonder it has returned to plague me now, as I don't suppose a week was really enough to let it heal. As for my two big toes, you do not want to see them, under the nails they are black.
So today my ethics poster has had its final (?) outing at one of the Festival of Science events at Birmingham in what was optimistically described as a showcase for the very best of postgraduate research at Birmingham.
Well that leads me on to the week prior to this where I ended up dashing down the motorway from Lancaster to Cambridge to experience culture shock in more ways than one.
I was presenting my ethics paper, the one that is complemented by the poster to the Disability Studies Association biennial conference. That to me is now a comfortable place to be presenting in that my paper was a well received as other recent presentations were, but I do feel there however that I am preaching to the converted and that is not where my mission lies.
At Cambridge on the other hand I was not amongst what I would regard as allies, and I have to say I found a lot of the presentations there very hard to stomach.
I'm not naming names but there was guy there, part of the main event who trumps me for academic arrogance anyday, who was asserting that he might have the equivalent of the grand unification theory for autism.
Alas it was very apparent that he did not, all that he had was to put it into the popular jigsaw analogy, was an unfortunate and embarrasing delusion that the picture he had completed resembled in any way the one on the box, since it was readily apparent to anyone with a bit of critical nous that far from being a complete 1000 piece puzzle, what he had before him was a set of pieces which included a large number from a completely different puzzle and consequently missing a lot of the genuine pieces, in that he was putting together a theory which excluded a lot of recent developments and included a lot that has been increasingly losing ground.
Could he be told that? No of course not, he was an established academic, they cannot be corrected. In contrast I have to say I was more impressed by more recent and sceptical researchers who have yet to be convinced of their own invincibility.
There were some good posters, some bad, and some plain ugly. It was ironic that another delegate had elected to put a poster beneath mine which was the very epitome of what mine was warning against. That is to say it was the poster from a company (Gawd only knows what they were doing there?) whose claim is to be putting genetic research into practice... Aaaaaargh.
Which is as good a point to go back again to the disability conference where one of the keynote speakers was a disabled film maker Liz Crow which Godwins law notwithstanding was a timely reminder that the same rhetoric that led to disabled people being the first in the gas chambers is abroad today, with talk of the cost to the economy and of lives not worth living.
Well shiny shiny boots of leather and all, you can protest I am one of the shiny academic glitterati, but there is a consistent theme in all this, and swollen ankles apart, there is a cost to what I do, I seem to be shuttling up and down the country a lot recently and it goes on, I am back down in London next week for the first meeting of a new group comprising of academics and activists that is addressing the ethics and outcomes of autism research.
If you want to hear what I, and others had to say at the day conference at the UCL which seems like months ago now, but was part of my hectic summer activities, it's all online here.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cpjh/autism.
Well at least kept my clothes on for that one :)
14 comments:
Of course after a slapping from Steve and the compensation of the Autistica gig, His Imperial Majesty's 60,000 Reichsmarks quip on the frontispiece of his new vanity mag shouldn't trouble your new found sense of professional discretion.
Have you actually read Asperger's '44 paper? [opps: swear word deleted, don't want to give the Dame an attack of the vapours, now, do we?] The best bit's at the end, where he tells the fuhrer he needs to go find himself in the outside lav with a laminated copy of Popular Electronics or alternatively, fuck-off.
Heavens to Betsy! Mitzi's Poodle in a Diamante collar.
Well yes me old pal me old beauty I did read Asperger's paper as a friend of mine sent Uta's book with the translation all the way from sunny California for me to digest way back when we were both diagnosed around the same time.
I've not got round to reading Molecular Autism yet, I am wondering when Quantum Autism will trump it.
(trombones and clarinets notwithstanding)
As it happens I mentioned Asperger's contribution to Liz Crowe as well as Dr Kreutzfeld (yes that one) who refused outright to be involved in T4.
I do what I do because someone has to and like the dog and his bollox because I can.
Molecular Autism is the eugenicist's Anarchist's Cookbook.
Quantum Autism Therapy will inevitably lead to the defeat of Chancellor Goering's Third Reich and the eventual foundation of the United Soviet States of Europe.
My dogs' bollox have successfully impregnated a neighbour's bitch. They both had a go, but that's brothers for you.
Was Rutter there? Is he still even alive? Has he worked out yet why Haloperidol doesn't make autistics neurotypical - wanker.
Save for the supervention of a bonanza global jihadi we're heading straight for Huxley's nightmare.
You're wasting your time. Your frame of reference is obsolete - we are not smoking dope on the Frontline of a provincial town in the 70's. You're staring down the lasersight of a Drone, you're wearing the keffiyeh you bought during fresher's week and you haven't shaved for a month.
The battle's lost.
Well if all of us go publishing our intentions on facebook and our blogs for sure the battles lost.
My trouser bottoms are rolled, and is it Aldous or Julian who will win?
I reckon just as Cesare Borgia was well and truly done over cos old man Alexander copped it just as some renaissance rival had put sommat nasty in Cesare's buffet, the unexpected is what you have to worry about, not the predictable.
Larry, you are a dear sweet lamb - while you've been off doing overtly manly things in the mountains, I've been rooting around some ambiguous genitalia.
I have been waiting all year for someone to pick-up of this. Not surprisingly they were too busy trying to slay the already long dead mercury dragon.
This is how it starts.
arrrrgh! The wrong link!
This is the Right Link
What's in that large envelope which appears to be pinned to your waist, instructions on what to do with your body in the event you succeed in throwing yourself down that crevasse?
Don't do it, Larry. We need you to stick around and extol your particular points of view. Now get busy and do what you were put here for! You're the only one who can do it.
PS. Many thanks for what you said to my stalker recently on gadfly. His undiagnosing schtick just has to come to an inglorious end. You really torqued him up and made him show what a hateful, arrogant (!) he is.
It's a map case Clay, as you can see from the mist behind me, it's not altogether easy to find your way down.
The envelope with instructions to my brother in the event of my sudden and unexpected demise, is to be found pinned inside my door as any sensible person living on there own ought to do.
correction, my grammar is ambigous at times, I did not mention anything to Dr Kreutzfeld, I believe he has passed before us into Avernis, I mentioned his resistance to Liz Crowe.
Not all Dr's co-operated with the Nazi's and resistance was possible, the public dialogue around the acceptability of death for disabled people needs to hear a few more voices of opposition.
Y'all walk in dangerous territory, where money and prestige are concerned.
The baby's family name (first handicapped child killed) was Knauer. According to Friedlander, it wasn't known whether it was male or female child.
"It only takes a spark, to get a madman gassing...And then all those around, will say 'they really didn't know that was human flesh burning"...That's how it is with genocide, once you've expressed it's need...You want to kill, all those who feel, you want to gas it on!"
(Sung to the tune of "Pass it On".
My apologies...)
Apart from your Poster, was there any other sign of Ethics at the Cambridge gig?
Socrates: -Here you go
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz8RjPAD2Jk
That'll do for a charge of Dumb Insolence. It's off to the Glasshouse, I'm afraid.
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