[cthulhudundee]

I swear to god cis men are so naive.

[cthulhudundee]

Although to be fair the ABC does have the best disability rep I’ve seen on TV lately. They have a disabled reporter doing the disability stories and they have the SA reporter who just happens to use a wheelchair. I think they also have an autistic reporter doing online stories.

Recently they had a new disability reporter start and I really liked the way they introduced her. They aired her story first then interviewed her in the studio. If they’d done it the other way round it would have been infantalising because it would have felt like show and tell in primary school.

The way they tied the interview in with her story was neat because she was born limb different, iirc she has one leg and one hand that has some fingers fused. She has worn a leg prosthesis since 2 yo and tried an arm prosthesis at 7 but immediately rejected it.

Her story was about a young boy who lost a hand when he was 4, he looked about 12-13 now. The first question she asked him was bland and unremarkable but for the second one she asked if there were things he preferred to do without it.

This instant but brief look of relief crossed his face, his body relaxed. Like he was thinking thank god I don’t have to pretend this thing is awesome. All he said was yeah some things are easier...like holding a piece of paper.

Something you’d be doing all day at school. No biggie.

It was also clear from the briefness of his reply that things being easier for him was not on the radar of anyone controlling his life. He looked uncomfortable with it and I got the feeling he wanted to throw the thing across the room but his parents probably go on at him about how lucky he is or some shit.

No way you’d get a story like that on another channel.

[cthulhudundee]

I’ve started listening to Classic FM again for the first time in years and it’s a little different. Some ways good some not from my POV.

The good things are that they play a lot more varied music and composers now, a lot more women and people who aren’t white. One of their feature albums of the week was by a brass ensemble that just does arrangements of video game music so I’d be driving to work listening to Super Mario or something.

One piece that caught my attention was Pagi (Morning) by Belle Chen. I spent the first half of the piece trying to figure out what three instruments I was hearing before I realised it was a prepared piano. I was surprised because whenever I’ve heard pieces for prepared piano it’s always been kind of ‘look at me! *clonk*, I’m a prepared piano! *thunk*’ like the composer doesn’t really have a feel for what to do with it and as a result it doesn’t sound musical.

But this sounded like a bunch of instruments with different timbre effects because she’d clearly thought about what sounds she wanted. She was also looping as well so I guess classical electronica is a genre now.

The things I don’t like about it are pretty much all the things I dislike about ABC TV now. There’s too much talking and conversation and it has the rhythm of commercial radio the way they put the breaks in. Plus the endless cross-promotions they do all over the telly between all the ABC properties are on radio too.

Other than that it feels a bit like Triple J? They do a classical Oz Music Month for November same as JJJ. I miss the old Classic FM presenters with their sombre, stuffy back announcements. It used to be a much quieter station.

It feels like with Ita Buttrose they’ve put President Coin in charge of the place. All she has ever worked in is commercial media and it’s like she’s throttling the place with her perfectly manicured hands. I don’t like where the ABC as a whole is going at all.

[cthulhudundee]

So that was an unexpected detour.

I was expecting a few months away from here, it always takes that long when I start a new job – a couple of weeks of ‘I hate this and I’m never coming back’ plus working out what I need to settle into a new work routine.

What actually happened was:

Two weeks in my bad wrist got worse. I couldn’t bend it at all. I wore my brace all weekend but still no relief by Sunday evening. In desperation I played a few minutes of guitar, cursing and swearing all the way from the pain… and it fucking worked dammit.

So I had to start doing a bit of practice everyday, worked up a few simpler pieces, had to buy a suitable chair and look for a guitar rest because I can’t use footstools anymore with my bad hip. Did you know that there is a guitar rest that looks like a giant chopping board that you attach to the back of the instrument?

Still haven’t found one I like but there’s one on ebay I’ll try eventually. Also my nails were really brittle for ‘some reason’ so it was nail hardener and nail care all over. I had to pick the one instrument that requires them.

Thankfully just doing my job has strengthened my wrists to the point where that’s mostly no longer necessary..

Then at work they introduced an app for clocking in and accepting shifts etc. (The company I work for is a zombie of a thing where everything is outsourced and they actually rent me from a recruitment company).

Of course it wouldn’t work on my phone so I had to buy another just for work, then I had to remember to use the damn thing, then it turned out others were having trouble with the app too so they put an ipad in the office and I was using this whole smartphone just for accepting shifts. At least I picked one with an alarm I can find this time.

But that turned out to be OK because then we had a break-in at home and my other phone and wallet were stolen so I just switched to the new phone but had to buy another sim to get my old number ported (all of my 2-factor authentications go to that one, all official communication goes through it) So then I had 2 sims in my phone on 2 different networks (do you think I could remember to keep credit on both?) and I only finally got everything connected back to my original number last month. Only took a year.

And THEN, the week before xmas last year I got rear ended. Second time I’ve had a perfectly good car turned into a repairable write-off by a middle aged bloke who wasn’t paying attention. Being just before xmas/new year meant all the crash repairers were closed for a couple of weeks so I was driving around in an unroadworthy vehicle with an exploded back window covered in plastic.

Luckily there were witnesses (the people in the car in front who I got shunted into - my car was the only one with major damage) and we both claimed on his insurance because I didn’t have any…. He was insured with an industry co-op for people who work in transportation, he drives for a living. I got another car for half the payout amount though so that left me some spare money.

In between all this I discovered my iron and B12 levels had taken a serious dive and I was either close to or officially anaemic, depending on which standard you use. My skin looked exactly the colour of the image on the Wikipedia page for B12 deficiency. I thought I was just getting really tanned! So that explained the brittle nails. Got B12 shots, finally found an iron supplement I can tolerate (it’s liquid! It tastes nice! I don’t get side effects!) Now I have sustagen in my morning coffee and it’s not to make the coffee taste better.

My blood test this October just gone showed I’ve made it into the low normal iron range and many of the symptoms that cleared up over that time are things I have had for my entire life. Hmmmmm.

After that I got onto my first round of allergy blood testing, just finished the second round and the results are that I am allergic to flavour lol. I’m heterozygous for one of the coeliac mutations so 10% chance I’m coeliac. I’m allergic to onion, tomato, potato, sesame and chilli. That’s, like, my entire diet and it means eating take away is near impossible. Also can’t have most gluten free baked goods cos they frequently contain potato starch.

Spent a bit of time trying different ways to hide veg and such in food, tried some kitchen gadgets and have achieved 3 reliable recipes – egg-lemon rice with spinach, lemon herb chicken and decadent porridge. Cheese n crackers and popcorn for snacks. ‘Reliable recipe’ here means a) something I can cook without too much effort and b) something I will actually want to/be able to eat once it’s made. Food shopping has become pretty basic since, and I’ve found a brand of fresh frozen lemon juice that doesn’t contain sulfites so I can go nuts with the lemon juice with no risk to my vitamin B1 levels.

So my diet is still very restricted but it’s completely allergen free and I’ve managed to finally ditch coca cola. I noticed my cravings for it were a bit sus, I’d always want something with gluten after and I’m pretty sure it’s the caramel colouring doing it. Still trying to find ways to increase veggies but fibre capsules are a godsend and my cholesterol is also high. Welcome to early middle age I guess?

In amongst all this I noticed a pattern in my sleeping habits where I would always either fall asleep or wake between 3 and 5 o’clock. Could be a.m. or p.m. but always those hours. I tried setting my alarm for 5am – totally unrealistic hour for my entire life. And IT FUNCKING WORKED! It still drifts a bit because 24 hours has never fit with my sleep-wake rhythm but I don’t suffer in the mornings anymore. I’ve actually had to move it to 4:30 because that’s about when I start waking naturally now.

So that left me feeling liked I’d been body snatched and took a while to stop feeling weird. Really weird. My only issue is sometimes falling asleep too early in the evening but then I just do cooking or whatever when I wake at 12 or 2. I suspect the key to it is that I’m awake for both sunrise and sunset and those are pretty much the only two time cues my brain has ever noticed. Also I’m not sacrificing any quiet time at night, it’s just been shifted to early morning.

And on top of all that my housemate’s sister’s second job was looking for people. I had to turn them down the first time because I still hadn’t sorted out several health issues but they asked again a few months later and I was ready. This is the sort of job I was looking for in the first place (audio transcription rather than data entry but still) but it’s way better than the one I had originally lined up for myself and its $50+ an hour. It’s only 3-7 nights a month so good second job, I get like 2x my regular day job pay if I do a full session

And that left me feeling weirded out again because now I have two jobs that I like, they both pay well, in both I have good bosses, I wake everyday (still not knowing what day it is) looking forward to whatever the day is. I don’t dread mornings anymore or wake up with the thought of ‘not again’.

Some massive changes for the good this last year and also I finally cracked crochet and knitting. But important to note, I think, that the main thing that made these huge gains possible was having a livable amount of money coming in. I regularly drop $200 at a time at the chemist and I have to be able to afford that, never mind the specialists I have to see and my GP clinic no longer bulk bills.

Getting a job was literally what enabled me to move forward while Centrelink payments kept me sick because I couldn’t afford food that wouldn’t make me sick or even the testing required to find out which foods were causing it.

[dingdongyouarewrong]

do y’all remember that short story where a scientist like, raises his daughter with no contact from the outside world and teaches her english wrong, like he teaches her that ‘yes’ and ‘no’ have the opposite meaning than they actually do and that ‘up’ means ‘down’ and vice versa, and then this guy meets her and starts to teach her what the words actually mean and she kinda sorta starts to get it and like, realize that it’s fucked up

and then one day she’s not home and the house is on fire and her dad’s inside and the firefighters are like ‘is there anyone inside’ and she says ‘no’ and we don’t know whether she understands what she’s saying or not

wild

[quinintheclouds]

no I do not but please tell me more

[headspace-hotel]

What IS it with short stories that are just seven crunchy layers of fucked up?

[aokozaki]

There’s another one from the same author about a salesman who goes from town to town selling his miracle glue. He gives demonstations showing that if you rejoin two pieces of cut rope with it, the rope can hold up a car! (And of course, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link).

But it turns out he’s a conman, and while the glue does work, it dissolves after a few hours of use, which is why the salesman keeps moving from town to town. And we see a few scenes of people caught up in the scam, like a guy who’s canoe sinks because he plugged a hole using the glue, or an old lady crying because her fine china - which she thought she could finally repair for good - breaks apart again.

And then the salesman meets another inventor, who presents his portable flying machine. It’s a little box you attach to your wrist like a watch, and it really lets you fly! The inventor says he actually made two, and lets the salesman borrow one, and they go flying together. It’s quite fun, to the point of losing track of time, and the two seem to get along, conversing all the while.

The salesman loves the flying and the conversation, they’re miles up and it’s thrilling. But the inventor admits the two flying machines are miles apart in terms of quality, and he decided to give the better one to the salesman for their little flight.

 After all, it’s made using the salesman’s miracle glue.

[droctavius]

Whoa! I recognised these plots right away! These are both short stories by australian author, Paul Jennings - “No is Yes” and “Strap Box Flyer” respectively I believe!

They were both published in his “Un-” series of short story compilations with titles like “Unbelievable”, “Uncanny”, “Unreal” etc.

I read those books over and over when I was growing up and the plots of early seasons of the iconic Aussie kids show “Round The Twist” are actually based on his short stories!

He wrote heaps of other really cool stories I definitely recommend checking out! Paul Jennings is fantastic! 😎👌

[cthulhudundee]

as;ldfja;lkj there’s a brand of covid nasal swab test called Clungene. I was pretty sure clunge was slang for something. Looked it up. Wish I hadn’t.

Now I have it stuck in my head to the tune of Jolene.

Clungene ffs.

[grenade-maid]

I think the simplest way to understand that just because many mental illnesses benefit a great deal from being treated with various chemicals, that does not mean that mental illnesses are all therefore uniformly and necessarily caused by chemicals in the brain, is to remember that an aching back is not in fact the result of a deficiency of acetaminophen, nor is malaria a condition brought on by the body producing an inadequate supply of quinine. Health conditions have both external and internal causative factors. The same is true of psychological conditions.

[babyphat05-deactivated20250613]

Y’all need to stop using social media and start going outside. Literally, go OUTSIDE. Some of y’all are allowing social media to give you a warped representation of reality. People in the real world aren’t even like what half of the stuff you guys are telling me in my inbox. The majority of the people y’all see on Twitter and Instagram don’t know what they’re talking about.

[handsaniti]

The majority of the population are not avid social media users.

Social media is fun but remember that the majority of the population want to go about their lives and put food on the table. They do not care about celebrities getting cancelled because said celebrity said something bad five years ago. They do not care about YouTube drama. They do not care about beef on Tik Tok. They do not know what a milk duck is.

Defend your ideas in the real world and see if they hold up.

[babyphat05-deactivated20250613]

THIS ^^^

[kelpforestdwellers]

you know, i would love to, but like many people i am disabled and haranguing me to touch grass doesn’t actually change that.

[bittersnurr]

…Also this isn’t even true?

Like the reason social media is so much more toxic then shit like forums were, is because it’s now the norm for everyone. Half of why right wing radicalization of old people is such a problem is grandpa has a facebook account and isn’t internet savy. Your mom might not know what a meme or a furry is, but she’s probably heard the latest political gossip.

So yes, the people online are also outside, because everyone is online now. And this applies to young people too! The majority of the people who send death threats over fandom nonsense are offline too! Those people who are reductive exclusionists so many people assure you are just Terminally Online are sometimes running the supposed “safe spaces” offline.

Idk it just feels to me like we’ve taken the old “the internet is not real and neither are your online friends” bullshit and flipped it to online bullies not being real. Unless you are literally arguing with a bot, that person on the other side of the screen probably goes outside and interacts with people at least some of the time.

[cthulhudundee]

All the anti-vaxxers I know irl got that way through Youtube and Facebook and none of them would be considered terminally online. Yeah they want to ‘go about their lives’ but that now includes homeschooling their kids to keep them unvaccinated, and they want to put food on the table but it’s No Jab, No Job and they want to avoid vaccination more.

Online exists within meatspace, not apart from it. The mouth-foaming bigot on reddit or wherever probably minds their p’s and q’s at work or other places that it suits them.

[sonofmeatthawsmoth-deactivated2]

I think people should be able to use drugs if they want to, no matter what kind of drug it is, for whatever reason, including the reason that drugs are fun. I think they should be able to use them safely, which includes freely available information on how use whatever drug they’re using properly.

Even a lot of talk about harm reduction or drug destigmatization still operates on the assumption that drug use is bad, that people shouldn’t do drugs or that there are “bad” drugs.

[illiterate-goblins]

Except that prolonged use of certain drugs is incredibly harmful to your health??? I think the stigma and way we treat those with addictions needs to change, but I don’t think there should be free and easy access to shit like heroine or meth???

[sapphophallocentrism]

Why should harm to one’s health be the basis of wether people are allowed to do certain things? Mountain biking, an activity that I enjoy, has one of the highest rates of serious injury in sports, and at higher levels is a hobby that has a good chance of permanently physically impairing you. Virtually every top athlete to compete in enduro or downhill modalities has had major surgery as a result of accidents, and many have severely limited mobility because of it. Yet these events are heavily disseminated and accepted, bc we understand it’s _their_ health and they can take whatever risks they want with it.

There’s nothing fundamentally different between someone riding a black diamond trail and doing heroin, except unlike rolling down a hill with thousands of slippery crevices at high speed, something which is humanly impossible to completely surveil and safeguard against injury, most variables that could cause someone to die using drugs can be accounted for with proper access to information. I would actually say using heroin is a lot safer than many sports, not just mountain biking, the only thing that compels you to treat them differently is that sports are universally framed as good for society, regardless of how it actually affects individuals (even motorsports are eulogized), while drug use is frowned upon even when it’s harmless

[bittersnurr]

Also like, drug use is essentially self medication… Have people never read side effects on their rxs if they’re lucky enough not to get them? Sure you don’t usually od on the prescribed doseages, but you could argue for example that serotonin syndrome from antidepressants for example is? Should people be banned from trying antidepressants because that happens even under doctor supervision? If the logic is based on potential harm then the stuff that causes that should be on the controlled substance list with painkillers, but it’s based on potential for recreational use, aka how “fun” they are, instead.

Everything has side effects. Everything. The other side of drug stigma is “good” drugs get stereotyped as harmless. Man, do you want to see my heating pad burns that apparently significantly increase my rate of skin cancer (that I have family history of)? But heating pads are not generally abused recreationally so the damage they cause people not having fun isn’t worth considering.

I’ve had arguments with so many people (most of them doctors!) Saying I should replace my pitiful oxycodone rx that I still have to ration with more weed due to gut motility reasons, when the weed has the same side effect 10x worse at the dosage it would need to be to be anywhere close as effective. But opioids bad weed good! (For now at least, until this attitude hurts enough people they justify removing it as an option again to “protect” them from themselves.)

Informed access is way less harmful then the paternalistic bullshit of certain drugs being evil, which will always hurt the people who need them. Everyone does self destructive shit, it’s just some of those things are more socially acceptable.

[perseid-haunt]

The fact being sick makes you sicker is so fucking cruel.

"I'm weak because I don't exercise" but I don't exercise because I can't exercise. The weakness is an indirect result of my illnesses. This sort of thing sometimes confuses me into thinking secondary effects of my symptoms are my fault.

[kelpforestdwellers]

or being too sick to see doctors, or manage medical admin.

or being too sick to acquire, prepare, or eat good food.

or the illness causing organic insomnia and then sleep deprivation makes you sicker.

[bittersnurr]

I think the worst one is "you're making yourself sick by staying in the house all day" because unfortunately it is technically true, it's just something literally no one chooses, and claiming otherwise is incredibly cruel.

The sicker you are the more measures you need go take to manage it, and the less time and energy you have as well as the more stress. So the worse you get and the more you need a break, the less likely you are to get one.

[hate-kill-repeat]

Got some new stickers in!!

specifically sized to fit on your average mobility aid!

hmu if you want some!

~$2 per sticker

[hate-kill-repeat]

these are now available in my shop!

https://www.etsy.com/shop/HateKillRepeat

[hate-kill-repeat]

added some new ones to the shop today!  [ID: three images of a teal offset handle cane with long thin stickers, first reads “thanks for staring”, second says “don’t talk to me”, third says “this machine kills ableists”]

[jezabaeddel]

Nothing but respect for militant anti ableism.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Sometimes people in my life ask why I do research on Fox News and occasionally watch Ben Shapiro and peek at conservative sides of the internet. And honestly it’s because I want to know where people are coming from.

I’m no psychologist but I’m of the opinion that a lot of conservative ideology has to do with comfort and convenience.

[what-even-is-thiss]

A lot of conservatives are raised in authoritarian households, regardless of their parents’ religious upbringing. But a lot of them also belong to religious groups or cults that encourage a “Because I said so” attitude towards rules.

[what-even-is-thiss]

A lot of this stuff is very convenient for people in power. It’s the same reason some people beat and shame their children. Explaining why things are the way they are and why certain things have to happen is hard. Smacking a child into submission and training them to never ask questions is easy.

[what-even-is-thiss]

So you get generations and generations of people trained to never question authority for the convenience of people in authority. And the majority of them are able bodied white cishet people, so the system doesn’t actively beat them down in any way that they can see from day to day. So why would they question it?

But then some people that they view as outsiders question the system. And you’re not supposed to question the system. You’re supposed to not touch the cookie jar because daddy said so.

[what-even-is-thiss]

If you don’t accept authority you must be bad. Because that’s how they were raised. And so far that authority hasn’t hurt them as far as they know. So it must be right.

For all of them the authority they aren’t supposed to question is different. It might be their religion, their morals, the political beliefs that their father raised them up in. It might be the government or a cult or a certain famous person that they like.

And questioning whatever that authority is, is just as hard as being a responsible authority figure. If you want to know for yourself why you shouldn’t eat a cookie before dinner, you need to think through dad’s logic on that. And you might find that you disagree with him. And he’s in charge, so should you question more things now? That’s a scary thought to have.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I was raised in a liberal/socialist household. From a young age I was encouraged to ask questions. My parents explained to me why they asked me to do things. My punishments were mild and few and were explained to me in detail before they occurred. After a while I could see what my parents’ rationale was behind things and when I was asked to do things I obeyed not just because I was told to but because I understood why I was being asked.

Conservatives like Ben Shapiro claim that “facts don’t care about your feelings” while lying and cherry-picking and doing backflips to support ideas they’ve been holding onto for their whole lives. Because their politics are supposed to be this. Real republicans do this or that. Real Jews or Christians or atheists or any other religion do this or that. It’s a way of thinking that doesn’t allow new ideas to come in.

It’s the facts because I said so.

And I can’t imagine thinking like that. But they can’t imagine thinking like me either.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I do agree that people should try to do better. Offering an explanation for a behavior isn’t the same thing as excusing behavior. If someone was whipped as a child that doesn’t make them any less of a monster if they whip their own children, but their childhood might be an explanation for why they’re doing that.

Trying to understand why people do things, in my opinion, is one of the first steps in trying to get through to them. If you understand that no amount of facts and insulting will change a bigot’s mind and why that is you learn to get your points across in different ways and figure out which conversations aren’t going to do anything.

For people that are entrenched in this mindset, being mean to them will often times just fuel their persecution complex because they think they’re being silenced for “having common sense” when really they were just trained to be conformist. They don’t care about facts. Facts don’t change peoples minds most of the time. It doesn’t matter that we’re living in the Information Age if someone refuses to take off their blindfolds. And if you are in the business of trying to nudge people farther left in their political views, understanding why they won’t take off that blindfold is useful.

[findingfeather]

Note that there’s an important issue here in terms of one’s actual goals and specifically that OP is looking at this from a perspective of how do we make people as a large collection stop being so shit. 

This is because bluntly speaking if your only solution to what to do about these thousands of people who are Like This is basically “shoot them”, guess what! You are not a good guy anymore. 

When you’re having a personal, one on one relationship with someone, then yeah! It’s actually quite important to keep in mind that “they were raised shit” does not excuse them, say, treating YOU like shit. 

But if you’re trying to effect widespread changes of attitudes so that you can make society work better without having to kill a whole lot of people (which by definition makes society worse), “why” they are shit becomes important because it allows you to possibly figure out how to make them less shit. Even if that means having to approach them in a less angry way than they “deserve” because your options are “convince them to be less shit” or “shoot them dead” and the latter is not an option. 

[bittersnurr]

Also “people deserve rights” isn’t actually controdictory to authoritarianism?

Like plenty of liberals are authoritarian. They’re the ones screeching that we can’t criticize democrats for not actually doing their jobs. How dare you question the leadership. Don’t you know they believe people deserve rights? That’s enough. Not actually trying to protect those rights or get them granted if they aren’t already legally enshrined. They have to work within the system you know.

And this is honestly another one of the biggest issues with trying to make things better right now. People are trying to fight authoritarian shit with more authoritarian shit, which means when we switch between left/right people in charge all that power and inability to fight it drops directly into the potential fascist’s lap.

It’s also part of why we have people cheering on censorship like tumblr’s porn ban when it’s been justified by claiming it is going to be used only against Bad People™️, then being [surprised pikachu face] when it results in more of a purge of things like LGBTQ content instead. Authoritarianism generally turns conservative pretty fast after going into effect, but a lot of the time the initial framing is not, and a lot of progressives fall for it.

[zvaigzdelasas]

Maybe if instead of the vague cutesy term "brain fog" we use the more directly accurate term "neurological damage", that will help ppl stop seeing that as a "minor" outcome of covid

[thedreamsofgods]

Brain fog is a term that has been in use by disabled people for a specific type of symptom for at least 30 years. Instead of blaming disabled people for not being taken seriously when they try to discuss issues they face in the most understandable way possible, let's look at why doctors refuse to take patients seriously when they say "I can't think clearly, like a thick fog has covered my brain"

Brain fog was never a "cutesy term" before covid, and it isnt the fault of people who experience it that it's the best way we can think of to talk about this symptom when hey, we're experiencing it

Abled people are treating basically every part of long covid as "minor" and its affecting people who have experienced these symptoms their entire lives severely. It's not disabled people's fault abled people refuse to take our illnesses seriously and it's not the fault of the terms we made for ourselves and use

[kelpforestdwellers]

sorry but i'm disabled and i don't care who invented it, it's a bad term. it doesn't convey what we want it to convey, it just sounds like no big deal.

maybe it works when talking to others who have experienced it, and there's value in that, but it does a bad job communicating the severity to nondisabled people. they don't hear 'brain fog' and think 'confusion so bad you may forget how to speak or unlock your front door.' they think "brain fog? sounds like me before my coffee amirite."

i don't think 'neurological damage' is the right direction to go either, since it indicates a causality that isn't always accurate. i say 'cognitive dysfunction' and that usually seems to get the message across, in my experience.

[kelpforestdwellers]

the same is true for 'fatigue' and 'malaise.' which i think are medical inventions, not coined by disabled people, but nevertheless are the terms we have, and they don't remotely convey the seriousness of the symptoms they describe.

healthy people hear 'fatigue' and think 'sounds like me after work', not 'bedbound in a dark room for decades.' (at the extreme end, i know that's not everyone's experience.)

they hear 'malaise' and if they understand it at all, might think of a hangover, not the equivalent of 10 simultaneous flus, ie some of the worst physical suffering humans can experience.

[theauspolchronicles]

I saw someone say that the Liberals have been in power for 20 of the past 26 years and therefore obviously won’t privatise Medicare so clearly it’s just a scare campaign from Labor talking about “protecting Medicare.”

OK well quick history lesson: Gough Whitlam made Medibank, and introduced other progressive ideas, and the Liberals hated it so much they brought down the government through a coup by forcing a constitutional crisis. Then Fraser weakened Medibank and made it a user-paid system. Hawke undid that with Medicare, reintroducing universal healthcare. Medibank continued on as a government run non-profit and Howard vowed to privatise it like he did Telstra, but lost in 2007. Tony Abbott picked up the torch and privatised Medibank. Howard also cut a ton from health, and introduced the Lifetime Health Cover scheme which punishes people who don’t get hospital cover by age 30 by increasing your loading by 2% on top for every year you don’t get hospital cover until it reaches 70% increase. Howard is responsible for the BILLIONS in dollars of public money given to private healthcare in subsidies - and policy incentives for you to pay out of pocket on top of your taxes. So much for the free market - Howard took a stick to the public and demanded we support private healthcare.

Abbott went on to legislate cuts of $54 billion to hospitals over 10 years. Turnbull had to then backtrack and promise hospitals wouldn’t be fucked over entirely, while Morrison as treasurer at the time said that states should just cover the funding themselves without any assistance. Does that attitude sound familiar? It’s because just a few months ago he repeated the same stance: states should stop asking for extra money from the federal government to deal with the hospital crisis under the pandemic.

Turnbull in his memoir admits the Liberals haven’t got a good track record on health. Perrottet recently also said “Liberals and Nationals are not known for their health.” It’s not a fictitious idea to say that the Liberals are not as invested in caring about the public health system - it’s something they openly admit. Even if they lack self awareness of their incompetence in other areas they’re at least aware enough of this.

It’s literally the default setting for the Liberal party for the past 26+ years to go “health funding? Ugh. How can we avoid this?” They claim to be part of small government - and that means less public spending. That’s what conservatives do, but they’re hardly going to save money on tanks and outdated fighter jets are they? No, they need to cut health, or arts, or taxes for the rich.

Privatising Medicare isn’t on the agenda - at least not yet. They have to break it more first so the public wants it to happen.

But that’s not the threshold for concern. It’s not “oh, they won’t privatise it, so it’s OK.” No. They won’t maintain it. They won’t care about its funding. They’ll find ways to exclude items from it. They want us all to just pay for private healthcare and stop using our own taxpayer dollars to benefit the community.

The fear for me isn’t privatisation - it’s mismanagement of a vital public service. And small government small spending is antithetical to well maintained public services.

[plumslices]

Its really crazy to me that we’ve gotten to the point where being photographed in public without consent is like acceptable

[yvesdot]

This is what I've started thinking every time I see a TikTok of a random stranger. We've seen what happens to people who go viral from their own posts-- why expose a stranger to that possibility just for existing? What if whoever's in there didn't want people to laugh at them? What if they don't want to be a meme? What if they just want to exist in real life, and not in someone else's framing on the Internet? Other people are not for public consumption.

[clementiens]

i want a wheelchair built like a monster truck and i don't care about how practical or impractical it is. me on my way to walgreens for some tissues in my monster truck wheelchair

[clementiens]

love you all but i don't mean an all terrain wheelchair i mean a wheelchair on wheels that are like 4+ feet high. i want to be dying historic on the fury road in this thing. if it's street legal i'm not interested

[gehayi]

That sounds perfect.

[mias-back-from-the-dead]

bro i was JUST talking about this to a friend who mods their chair for stuff, demolition derby style wheelchairs!!! absolutely buffed out, welded to high hell, crunchmaster 4000s

[submalevolentgrace]

Vaccine rate for people with disability at about 50% in some regional areas, leaked data reveals

Exclusive: double-dose and booster rates among NDIS participants are much lower than average in regional Queensland and WA

please keep this in mind when you hear about how it's "mostly unvaccinated people dying", remember that the government diverted vaccinations away from disability care facilities to sydney private hsc kids, and cut in home vaccinations, telling disabled people if they wanted vaccination to go out and get it themselves

[submalevolentgrace]

eugenics continues

Disabled man unable to get Covid booster after Australian vaccine contractor prioritises aged care

Man told wait for Covid booster will be ‘another month or two’ as NDIS participant vaccine rates remain lower than general population