Category: News and Views
Here’s my thoughts on Blindisms and if you believe in “The Organized Blindness Movement”, then you’re probably going to be worried if not completely hate what I have to say, no worries, I welcome it, LOL. I got the idea for this, as I’ve been thinking of it for a long time, but when I finished reading the board about Stevie Wonder a few minutes ago and what his attorney did to him, I believed that now’s the time to put something up. So let’s get this storm banging away!
For “Blindisms”, I wish we all would quit giving the sighted the power to point out things that cause more divisions between us and them then there are already are. You don't hear about a sighted person head-banging at a metal concert being told they have “Sightisms” and as for the whole: "What about if you're at a job interview" thing, oh please, they're not doing that shit at job interviews and to the ones who still love to use that towards us visually impaired people, let's look at the fact that for ones who are visually impaired who might have enough of a lack of education to rock, poke eyes or shake their head at a job interview, that this is what happens when socialization with a healthy emphasis on a balance between individualism and proper presentation is neglected. Finally, let's not forget that most of the people who are in their forties or decades older and who do these evil things called "Blindisms" are usually the ones you hear about who are in nursing homes for the visually impaired or are in a section8 apartment getting government benefits and society could care less. Want the real translation of what "Blindism" means, here you go: "We're normal society and we want you to be exactly like us even if we can't give you working eyes and if we can give them to you depending on your vision, then we will and if we can't give you normal functioning eyes, then we're damn sure going to break you like the breakers we are until you're fearful of the world, terrified of people and are a complete fucking mess inside and out, but don't blame us, because this is for your own good and remember, we love you, and we want you to be carbon copies of us whatever it takes you little blindy freaks."
In other words, these people who give us these jobs are no different than the white people who gave black people house cleaning jobs or other various jobs years ago, if they even got employed by anyone who wasn’t black. Long story short though, the whole: “Yeah, but what if you’re at a job interview?” trope is no different than the asshole closet racist who’s too much of a spineless little Bitch to say what he or she is really thinking and keeps screaming and crying about all these so-called inner-city people on welfare and how it’s these very people being hurt by these policies and by “Inner-City”, they’re really talking about black people. This continues the racist belief that all black people like to do is sit around collecting welfare and selling drugs and that absolutely none of them want to work. This is when you get right down to it, another part of the same problem, just people who are normal functioning who are too much of cowards to just admit that they can’t deal with the fact that they have to share the world with the blind and visually impaired and it continues the belief that all blind people all over the place all have “Blindisms” and not only that, but that “Blindisms” are as bad if not more so than all black people who only know how to collect welfare or sell drugs. As for the people who act as if we deserve what we get because of “Blindisms”, and how they talk about how we might get the hot date if we wouldn’t rock or shake our head, hmm, this is sounding more and more familiar, now where have I heard this bullshit before? Oh right, let’s see if I got it right. “Well, what dress did she have on when he raped her, it was probably that damn glittery thing that we all kept telling the little slut not to wear and if she hadn’t had it on last night, then she’d be alright today.” In other words, all that crap thrown at us is no different than a woman being blamed and it being made her own fault that she was raped. Do yourselves a favor and find people who know that it’s okay to rock in the privacy of your own home and who know how to teach you in a loving and compassionate way when and when not to do that and how not to do it when at job interviews or other events.
There, that's your real idea of what's really meant by "Blindism". For ones who work with us who continue on about the harm of "Blindisms" and a person not being able to work because of them, I say that that's funny, most of the ones who teach us not to do them are the ones who find jobs for us that are just for us to do data entry at an office on a computer all day or do phone calls in an office all day, and they truly don't give a fuck about truly trying to help us have equal access to employment in the first place, so to the sighted agencies who do this, fuck you, and to Stevie Wonder, rock on!
James
A-fucking-men!
I'd word it this way: some sightlings (and some blind people) want us to carry around all the baggage that comes with sight but of course we don't get any of the benefits of sight. I do (or don't do) a couple of things that seem to drive a few people absolutely crazy:
First, I rock. I understand why sighted people don't rock as much - it interferes with their vision. I would never want to force a sighted person to rock, so why would they want to force me to stop? I'm not sighted, and I have several legitimate reasons for doing it. For example, have you ever listened to the way sounds change when you rock back and forth? Ah, but we're supposed to pretend we're sighted, and most sighted people hardly observe what they hear because vision dominates everything.
Second, I don't care about my appearance. Before people make assumptions about what I mean, let me explain. I haven't seen, much less looked at myself or others, so the concept is theoretical to me. When I think of myself, it's purely based on what I can gather through my own senses. Sometimes I dress "nice" (in quotes) for an interview or something, but it doesn't mean I've suddenly started caring about how I look. Other blind people seem to like to be complemented on their appearance, but such complements do nothing for me. I say "thank you" because I was trained to do so. Now, if you complemented me on something I'd written, a cake I'd made, basically something I understood and put some effort into, then my "thank you" would be heart-felt. I have a crew cut because I like the way it feels. My friends in Austin don't care, but people where I grew up remember the way my mom used to style my hair and are bothered by it. I have no sense of why this is. I can study it on an intellectual level but that's all.
Yes, you can compliment my new haircut all you like, but I won't understand it nearly as well as if you complimented the cologne I'm wearing. I do understand that it's basically a sighted world, and to a point, we have to play the part in order to get where we need to be. This is true for the sighted people as well though.
I can't see or hear the people around me, so sure, I get pretty uneasy. They can watch , hear and critique my every sound and move, yet I get no benefit at all. If I'm at a job interview, I'll play the part. If I'm sitting out on my balcony, I simply will not. I think trying to mainstream blind kids from a young age, showing them things like body language and explaining why this or that move or such and such posture is appropriate would be a good thing. Show them not only the body language, but how it's interpreted as well. This is largely something I never had. I'm pretty easily coached, though,and do catch on quickly, but skills like this would have been a godsend had they been ingrained, like so many other useless things were ingrained. I was pretty much raised in an institution all through my childhood and teenage years. When I came out of there, I had a lot of adjusting to do. I did very well in some areas, and not so well in others.
I can’t say I understand blindisms, because for much of my early years I had lots of sight.
I will say, we need to understand, there is a time when we can be as we are, and a time when we need to curb them.
You can’t use Stevie, because he’s a musician, and musicians get away with lots of things.
Hairstyle, not wearing clothing others would to the interview with the record execs, and you name it.
I think Stevie’s handlers did him a real disservice, because Motown sent all the rest of their artist to charm school, so why not him?
Recently, even culprit America has been relaxing much of this, due to the likes, like Zuck, not conforming, and lots of others.
We’ve even got companies that are allowing drinking on the job, and providing the booze, rest areas and such.
They claim allowing people to be relaxed boost productivity.
But, I think, if you need to do whatever in public to not look odd, that is what you should do.
Even the seeing must dress a specific way, have a specific hairstyle, and speak in a specific way if you are going to be taken seriously.
Once you’re on top, you can say fuck it, and be as you wish, but until that time.
Rock, or whatever at home, or at times you are in a situation you can be yourself, but otherwise, fix it.
I don't just rock at home and I haven't died yet. I curb it at interviews but not everywhere. Somebody has to question why things are the way they are. And, not everyone is the same and that's okay.
And are you sure that Steevie Wonder didn't choose not to go to charm school? I know I wouldn't have gone. He's got plenty of money, so it doesn't seem like it hurt him any.
I have a perfect reason to not rock. You are absolutely fucking annoying to
everyone sitting around you. I'd rather sit next to a person who smokes four
packs a day than a person who rocks. If we meet, and you're rocking back and
forth, or you do that blind thing where you stare at the table instead of looking
at me, or you swing your head back and forth, I will stop talking to you. I will
shun you from any conversation I'm in, because you seem like a child to me,
and I don't talk to children unless I absolutely have to. If you can't wear
fragrance properly, I will dislike sitting near you, and will make excuses to
leave, and I won't take you seriously. You seem like you haven't reached
puberty yet, and I don't like talking to children. And if you come to a public
place of some quality, I'm not talking about hitting up macdonalds for a burger,
but going to a sit down restaurant, and you're dressed in ratty clothes that
you'd wear while binge watching netflix on your couch, I will think less of you,
because I think less of children.
Honestly, these posts smack of immaturity. Its wining about having to dress
and act appropriately. You're adults, act like them.
There are a few things you don't take in to consideration, cody. Though you may be able to do all these things, what if someone is deaf in one ear, only being able to hear you if they turn their good ear toward you? even then, if you're not sitting right beside them at the table, if they're deaf on one side and also blind, their inability to gleme enough of a sense of direction from their environment to stare in to your eyes will cause them not to know exactly where you are. So, you'd shun that person and not take them seriously? It's about like really wanting to be an athlete, but people laughing and shunning you for having no endurance and a bad back.
I had a similar conversation with a sighted friend. We were at a group event with many people talking at once. I was conversing with someone else and he saw that my head was tilted slightly down. He nudged it up without asking. I had to explain that I was pointing my ears that way for a reason: I can't hear very well with all these people talking at once. He never did it again.
Ya know? This kind of reminds me of when Kanye West wouldn't perform a song because one person at the concert was in a wheelchair and couldn't stand for him.
Anthony, if you have to point your ear toward a person to hear, then do that
while they're talking. But when you speak, don't stare directly at the table.
Cocking your head to the side isn't going to make you look rediculously rude,
and its not, for the blind listener, going to make it sound as if you're staring
directly at the table. But lift your head up when you speak. It makes you seem
engaged, even if you don't look directly at the person, at least lift your head up
and pretend you can see them.
As for the rapper thing, not sure where you were going with that. Are you
trying to say I won't talk to you because you're being rude and annoying, and
that's the same as a person in a wheelchair who is physically incapable of
standing? if so, your hyperbole is commendably entertaining.
I'm just saying you don't know every reason behind why someone might act as they do. Not taking someone seriously because they don't care is one thing, shunning them for not being physically able to meet your standards is quite another.
And isn't pretending to be something you aren't also childish? I grew out of that many years ago.
Hey everyone.
This first part goes to Cody and For Real, I can’t remember what your real name is For Real, I want to say Wane or something like that. So here’s my comments.
The only thing I have is rocking as what the site bigots would call a Blindism and when I was a kid and probably around 10, I got it controlled enough so that I do it only when I’m listening to music and sighted people can do and sometime do the same thing and they’re not called out. Next, you mention some places allowing drinking on the job, well that’s drinking and this is rocking and I’m not worrying about drinking on the job and should that be going on in businesses near me, I don’t think it’s a good idea given how people can be when drinking or getting drunk, but that’s another conversation entirely. I usually wear jeans and a shirt with the three buttons at the top of it and then dress clothes when going to job interviews or at work if I had a job, and when I did have my job at a call center three years ago, they allowed us to wear whatever we wanted within reason and I dressed in the clothes I mentioned before talking about dress clothes.
Okay, now to what Cody has to say. I think Cody, that what you said in terms of reducing blind people who rock or shake their heads down to children with whom you’d have no association says more about you and some sort of hostility as well as anti-child attitude that you have as well as a need for you to look down on others different than you than it says about any thoughts you gave about blindness characteristics. As to what you said about rather being near someone who smokes four packs of cigarettes, I’m actually smiling as I write this at the absurdity of that comment. So you’d rather sit with some thoughtless asshole who’s trashing their lungs, fucking up their genetic material such that they might get Cancer one day or put themselves at risk for having to have their voicebox removed and be like those three people in that anti-smoking add on TV all while the person would through the means of second-hand smoke be putting you at risk for Pre-Diabetes and lung problems of your own and for all we know maybe a removal of your own voicebox, given that we still don’t even know and have yet to find out what the full implications of second-hand smoking can do to non-smokers, and all because you can’t stand your fellow blind people who rock or shake their heads from time to time. Well, it’s your respiratory system, not mine.
On CNN and other fake news networks when they’re doing a segment dealing with problems with black people finding jobs or sustaining themselves without government assistance, they’ll invite on the token black person, usually some asshole who’s well-paid and he or she will give the same tired bullshit about how black people don’t want to work and how they just want to do drugs, sell drugs and just collect welfare all day rather than provide for their families. While it’s true that some blacks do this and the token black person is correct that this can be a problem, that’s not the point though. The point, is that they apply this social model to all blacks and they ignore the reality of the fact that black people are kept down and it’s not an accident, people are benefiting from the institutional oppression of blacks, namely The Prison Industrial Complex as well as similar organizations run on Neo-Liberalism. The token black person these news stations get on talks about none of this and chooses to say what their handlers tell them to say about how the system is fine and that if only blacks would just get up and go to work, then they wouldn’t be where they are today. They in the end, blame the victim.
So Cody, my point is this, that were a news station to do a segment on blind people, you’d most likely be the token blind person on there talking about how while there might be a few bad rehab agencies out there, that the problem in reality and the root of the problem isn’t them, but these crazy-ass blindies who won’t stop the rocking and get a job. I say this not because I’m attempting to put words in your mouth, but your post and the way in which it’s worded suggests that very thing and it’s attitudes like that that have put me in the position where quite frankly with a couple of exceptions, I don’t like most fellow blind people who are successful, because it’s this very way in which they conduct themselves, they can’t just be grateful that they’re in a good and well-paying job, they have to put down the less fortunate or the non-mainstreamed within The Blindness Community and as well-paid blind people wish to act that way, then I’d rather drink ninety million cases of Whiskey and feel my liver just completely fucking explode than ever have to associate with these token system-loving blind people who get their kicks off of mainly putting down the fellow blind people they could be helping and I don’t mean by hating on them because they rock. So finally, to your comments about us being like children, I guess should I ever adopt kids, I would hesitate to let you around them, due to what you might say the moment they’d do or say something you don’t like, given your seemingly anti-child attitude shown in the comments you made.
So in closing, what Cody said more than what For Real had to say is exactly the crap I’m talking about. That being said Cody, I do hope my reply doesn’t keep you from posting further, for that’s not my intent in replying back to you. I want to hear what anyone has to say, but what you people are going to have to understand and I know some of you who’ve already talked to me already do, is that I’m not among the mainstream and I keep myself intentionally alienated from it with a few exceptions such as me looking at going back to college if I can as well as when I worked at the call center and if I get a job again at some point and with that intentional isolation from the mainstream, I clearly have ideas that some if not most may not understand much less agree with. That’s okay, but if you read something I say or ask me for my view on something, you now know officially where I come from when looking at the world, so if or when I hear any comments where people are bothered or put off by what I have to say that may or not be a mainstream viewpoint, just know that you’ve been warned as to where I stand so if even after that you still run a freak out about hearing my non-mainstreamed viewpoint, then that discomfort in the face of knowing what you know now falls strictly on you and other like-minded people, and not me.
James
As to the one who said that a friend put their head up with their hand without you asking them to, had it been me who that was done to in that kind of situation, then a person touching me without my permition would definitely not do that again, as should they not listen to my first warning to not touch me without my permition, but the second time would get them 24 hours with three hots and a cot.
James
That was me, and it was someone close enough that I knew we could talk about what happened and come to an understanding.
There's something in your post that I think you may have meant as a throw
away line, but which I think addresses the crux of the argument. You said, and
I'm paraphrasing, that we who have been successful should be greatful that we
have our success, that we have good jobs or education. To which I say, abso-
fucking-lutely not. I am not greatful that I have my education, because I
worked my ass off for that education. I'm not glad I can fit in with the sighted
world enough to be regularly mistaken for a sighted person, because I work my
ass off to get that way.
That, I think, is the difference between us. You want the benefits, without
putting in the work. you want the job, the success, and the fitting in, without
the work, the not rocking, and the dressing properly. If you didn't, you wouldn't
be asking why people criticize you and others for rocking or shoving your fingers
in your eyes. so, in order to maintain that ideal, you have to believe that the
only reason I'm able to be successful is mere chance, and so I should be
greatful. I assure you, that its not.
Now, am I saying that the only reason I got it is because I know how to fold a
pocket square and the difference between a blazer and a sport coat, no. But
having those skills allows me to have a better chance of that success. A person
is more likely to hire me if I'm dressed properly, than they are to hire you if
you're dressed sloppily or unprofessionally. Or if someone went into the
interview, and creeped the person out by not looking at them, shoving their
fingers in their eyes, or rocking back and forth constantly.
I think another thing is that you're treating this as a majority versus minority
idea, which is evidenced by you ringing race into it, which I find frankly idiotic,
but that's a different board post. This is not a sighted world versus blind world
idea. This is an expectations idea. In the western world, we have ideals of
behavior. If you choose, and I use that word intentionally, choose to buck those
expectations, you can't then be offended and insulted when you don't get the
benefits of accepting those expectations. In the other parts of the world, the
expectations are different. In those, perhaps you'd have an advantage over me.
I doubt it, but perhaps.
and finally, I do hate kids. I put up with them out of necessity, but mostly
they annoy me. I don't choose to interact with them. I've never once been
excited about seeing children. So for you to accuse me of being anti-children
isn't much of an insult. I readily take on that mantle. Keep your kids away from
me if you expect anything other than blunt honesty and begrudging interaction.
You seem to be a master of hyperbole, and on many people that might be a
good tactic. I've used it myself on this site to make one point or another, but if
you expect to convince me of your argument, you're going to have to do a lot
better. yes, I would literally rather sit next to a smoker than to a person who
rocks. They both annoy me, though with the smoker I'd at least have
conversation fodder, but the rocker annoys me more. The change in your voice
as you rock back and forth, the fact that its impossible to look at someone while
rocking, both combine to make it a nerve destroying experience for me. I'd
choose the smoker. The fact that they may have cancer in the near or distant
future doesn't really impact my calculations, and one night of secondhand
smoke isn't going to do anything to me that hasn't already been done. so your
hyperbole simply falls flat.
And, I believe, you're new around here, so I'll let you in on something most
other people have learned about me. I'm incredibly egotistical, and I work hard
to maintain that. So, if you feel like accusing me of thinking I'm better than
someone, its probably true. In this case, if we're talking about a social setting, I
consider myself better prepared than the person who rocks, can't dress
themselves, shoves their fingers in their eyes, wears an eye watering fragrance,
can't carry on civil conversation, or does one of the other countless things that
cold be detremental to a social gathering. I have evidence for this, in that
before I learned these skils, I was ignored at most social gatherings, people left
conversations with me as quickly as they could manage, and people did not
want to talk to me. Now, when I go to social gatherings, I'm a popular figure,
because I know how to comport myself.
If you wish to buck that system, be my guest, but you can't expect the same
advanages if you do. The choice is yours, be comfortable and look like a slob, or
put some effort into it and be taken to be a serious adult worth interacting with.
Hi Cody.
Okay, I’ll start with the smoking bit. Though the article in which I read this was one that was from between 2006 and 2007, in it, it had information where it said that people exposed to second-hand smoke and if the exposure is over time, they’ve been finding within these people an increasing inability to manage and use natural insulin properly, in other words, they were going in to a pre-Diabetic state which is what someone who goes on to develop Diabetes will first experience. So no Cody, that was not hyperbole.
Next, the fact that even after I explained that I limited my rocking since my kid years just to when I’m listening to music and yet you keep giving the meaning of which still communicates that as far as you’re concerned that I never got my job or got ahead in life because of that shows one of two things, either that you’re just being an internet troll who only wants to get a response from people, or second, that you’re choosing to be the token blind person who one day, if you haven’t already will go on to go to the various conventions of either The NFB or ACB where you’ll tell everyone that it’s just “Blindism”-oriented blindies that cause us to still have a bad rep, and not the organizations, state agencies for vocational rehabilitation and other like-minded organizations that tell us to go out and work, but when we try to pick the job for which we want to get college training to do, they only guide us, and they definitely guided me to these jobs especially, which are just jobs where you answer a phone all day for some office or do data entry on a computer for an office all day and given that it’s mainly if not only those jobs they offer us, then it’s little wonder that we still have a high unemployment rate among the visually impaired, especially for ones in the community who tell these discriminating fucks to fuck off with their institutional discrimination.
Secondly Cody, I had from 2004 to this current year, a long line of state agencies in the form of my state agency who when I tried to get them to help me get classes then jobs in counseling or social work, they wouldn’t do it, but they jumped to get me in to Medical Transcription as another choice. And through all this, I didn’t rock, and I don’t and never have poked my eyes, besides my left eye is so fucked up from Glaucoma that it would hurt to do that anyway, if you wanted to know. Bottom line, You Cody aren’t me, you never had the life I had. You never had to live from years four to nine years old with a parent who chose husbands who night after night beat the shit out of her with you having to watch and actually intervene in hopes that he wouldn’t kill her like I did. You never had to go from ages 14 to 18 to a school for the blind where you had to watch one of your friends with prominent learning difficulties be pushed around physically by the phys-ed teacher from one side of the gym to the other being called a punk, because he was scared of the activity we were doing, due to not understanding it given his learning impairments and not be able to do a god damn thing about it, like what I had to see. You didn’t have to, at 14 years old, be taken from the blind school to an eye clinic, then be driven to another one where after a whole day of bright lights and other tests being done with tools you’ve never seen before, a doctor tells you that you have Glaucoma in your left eye and given that you’re already blind in your right eye, that unless they can control the Glaucoma in the left eye, you’ll go blind and it’s made all the more frightening in that your parents aren’t able to be there with you, because work wouldn’t let them be, the way I did. So if you want to disagree with my ideas, and if you’re comfortable in the system in to which you’ve been mainstreamed, then good for you and I hope you’re happy. Also, none of what I just gave as examples in the last few sentences was hyperbole. What I won’t take lying down, is you or any fucking body taking my life and telling me why things haven’t turned out for me the way they should have and saying that as if you lived my life for me and know with first-hand knowledge what happened to me when you’ve never fucking lived one god damn moment of the events of my life which I just described above! You call yourself egotistical, you got that right. Funny, with the exception of what the author Ayn Rand said about Ronald Raygon and what she thought about him, I can’t really get in to her ideas and how you’ve acted on both my topic pages today shows the real dangers of her philosophy, and I obviously don’t know if you read her stuff or even know who she was, but from what I have read of her stuff, it could easily have been written by you, given the cold, heartless and egotistical slant permeating every word. So keep sharing your ideas and should even one more of them be the evidence that you’re trolling, then you’ll just be yelling with your comments not at me, but in to the dark void of space, because when I see after a while that a person is just being a troll, then all communication stops.
James
Ok, now you're just bordering on the moronic. Yes, there is such thing as
secondhand smoke, everyone and their kitchen sink knows that. However,
sitting next to a person for dinner, as was described in my example, would not
give you any kind of disorders. You even said so in your post. Please do try to
read what I say before you answer to it. I can assure you that I am someone
who can and will point out your mistakes with ease. I urge you to be very sure
of what you're reacting to before you display that you weren't paying attention.
Now then, I'd like to discuss your placing of blame on state organizations. I
actually entirely agree with you. I hate them. I think they are entirely
responsible for the encouragement of blind people to get low level jobs without
the opportunity for advancement. But you'll note, assuming you're reading
carefully, that I said they are responsible for the encouragement. They are not,
however, responsible for blind people following that encouragement. Yes, I'm
sure you had people from all quarters telling you to get this manufacturing job,
or that typing job, or this medical transcription job, but only you chose to get
one of those jobs instead of one you wanted. Only you decided not to at least
try to get the one you want.
I had the same thing. I had people telling me that I would never be able to
get a degree. I was encouraged to become a massage therapist, a medical
transcriptionist, a carpenter, and to buy a foodstand along a popular highway
where I went to school. I hated each and every one of their ideas. As it sounds
like you did. I now have my college degree. I'm working on a second college
degree. Because I decided not to listen to those people. Yes, I had to work hard
for that. I had to abandon the thought of getting the technology that would
have made things easier for me. I had to do a lot of things by myself. I even
had to take out extra student loans to pay for accessible technologies. But it
was that, or get one of those jobs I hated. I got it done.
I do find it rather amusing that you come on to a site dedicated to blind
people and think that you're the only one who had any problems or had any
frightening stories about visiting doctors. If you think you're the only one you
are sadly mistaken. You have my sympathy for going through such things, but it
does not afford you any greater consideration than anyone else. If you want a
job or a college degree or a robot that will fold your clothes, work for it. even if
that work involves you eating nothing but spaghetti for a year while you save up
your social security. I had to do something very similar myself to get through
college.
You're angry, and I get that, but your anger isn't going to effect me. If you
want to impress me, you'll have to keep trying. For right now I honestly don't
see much more than an angry kid with a chip on his shoulder.
Okay, so this is just the same-old Ayn Rand every man for himself and fuck the less fortunate bullshit that I hear about aimed towards blacks, GLBT people and other minorities within our society, when you look at the subtext, that’s all this is.
Okay Cody. I hope it all continues to work out for you. Hopefully someday you can be of some service to the blind and visually impaired that doesn’t involve you performing reductionist arguments on what they say that would make Sam Harris proud. When I talked about the anti-smoking information I read back then, I did say that the information said that second-hand smoking “Over Time” can cause in people a pre-diabetic state, note the words “over time”, which should tell you that I don’t believe that sitting for only one evening with a smoker won’t fuck up your lungs for life, but that’s also the point, if you don’t want even the risk of any of the more pervasive health complications from second-hand smoke, then do as best as you can to never get exposed to it to begin with. There, that more clear for you now? So if you’re going to point out things in my writing that in this case aren’t even in there, as it relates to any mistakes, then do the same for yourself, if you wouldn’t mind. Glad you’ve proven my point, thanks for that and if you think you’re showing yourself to be an example to whom we should all look for improving ourselves, I can’t speak for others, but you’re no example I’d want to follow, for your ability to find within yourself an ability to feel happy with your accomplishments clearly comes at the expense of others by the very fact that you put others down of the blindness community who have no fucking choice but to use the state agencies, as they can’t find any other financial means with which to pay for college or find work, because they just happen to be from families within what’s left of our working class who can barely support themselves, so don’t give me any of this blame-the-victim bullshit about how it was only my choice and that I chose to listen to people around me. What did you think I was going to do, rely on the settlement money I got from the law suit from when my family sued the hospital due to their medical mistake and use that to go to college, then be broke afterwards and get myself in to collecting S.S.I. back then rather than prolonging that outcome to it happening today. You system worshipers with a few exceptions are all the same and you again prove my point of why I do things, but not with any formal system. Agree with me? Perhaps in a couple of ways you do, but this is the typical crap I and others in the community get from within-the-system types like you. Again, hope it all works out for you and maybe down the road, you’ll learn a little humility for the situations of others and try to figure out the roots of some of them being in the lower areas of the blindness community rather than just forcing them to be carbon copies of the sighted so the sighted can be comfortable without really having to do the hard work it takes to really get to know the blind and visually impaired among us and continue to have fun with aligning yourself with these systemors, because should there ever come a point when you begin to find a different viewpoint different from them and should you find you agree with it, let’s see how much the powerful sighted people around you enjoy you as a carbon copy of themselves then.
So that’s my latest comment and I’ll have more to say depending on who else if anyone has further comments to add.
James
Why should they want to get to know you at all? To be perfectly blunt, you don't
seem the type I'd want to get to know particularly well, and I can at least
sympathize with much of what you've said.
as for what I think you should have done, assuming your example was true to
form, that's absolutely what you should have done. If college was important to
you, why didn't you use the settlement to go to college, or at least work toward
getting a degree if the settlement wasn't that large? So you'd have to be on SSi,
or take out loans, are you so high and mighty you can't do that? If not, I have
zero sympathy for you being where you are now. Why should anyone hire you?
What do you offer them that a million other people don't also have? Your anger
and whining aren't going to make you an attractive prospect. Granted, its a tiny
sample, but all I've seen on here from you is whining, blaming everyone else for
everything, being unwilling to exhaust your resources, and having little to no
reading comprehension skills. I'm not surprised you don't dress wel. I'd expect
you blame that on stores not having nice clothing in the twenty-five cent bin
too.
And I'm sure you can find some semblance of randian objectivism, that's what
her philosophy is actually called, in my opinions. Some of her stuff is correct,
you should work toward what you want and be noted for your accomplishment.
Much of what she said is absolute drivel, but you acting as if you're the only one
with a hard childhood, and problems relating to blindness, on a site full of
successful blind people with hard lives who work daily to get what they want, is
only going to make you look more and more whiny. Its not going to impress any
of us. My family was by no means rich either. I'm the son of okie trailer trash
and rednecks. Don't think for a second I had a silver spoon anywhere in my
childhood. But I still fought for what I wanted. You could have done the same
thing. Espeically since I've never once heard of a state program that wouldn't
help with college to someone who wanted to go to it. Maybe next time you
should do your own investigations instead of just taking other people's advice,
and if they don't give you the answer you want, scream louder.
Okay, now you've just gone completely off the rails. So when someone doesn't like what another says, then imply that part if not what all of what they're saying isn't true. Yeah, you've definitely shown me in each and every single post why Objectivism is wrong on so many levels, for you've dismissed me as partially or completely lying about my story and actually I did scream louder at a meeting I had with our state agency's assistant director two weeks ago and one of the road blocks they kept throwing in my way all these years for why they wouldn't pay for me to take classes for counseling was that I didn't pass the vocational testing for that that they wanted me to do, and so they wouldn't do that. So no, I'm not blaming others as you rudely put it, I'm actually saying what happened in my own story and I'm still trying to get an answer as to who the hell you think you are to attempt to tell my story for me, by virtue of the fact that you're now implying that I'm lying about most if not the whole reality of what actually happened. The bottom line is that I'd did the best I could with what I had at the time with at the blind school and in recent years so until you go through the shit I went through, then as far as I'm concerned, you have no fucking right trying to reshape my story and my personal truth, just so you can fit it so that it matches up with what you hold in your head about whatever official narrative those punk-ass mother fuckers within the system told you about the blind people on lower rungs of society. Oh, and you talk about Ayn Rand and Objectivism as being helpful, and I'm still trying to figure out how systemors like you justify following things that are close to the teachings of a crazy chain-smoking little Bitch who basically endorsed rape in her novels. It's okay though, since you work within the system and have it all figured out. You clearly figure yourself to be the second coming of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins or Ayn Rand and so you’re going to come and tell all us rocking, eye-poking and lesser blindy freaks what it's all about.
Okay, well good luck with that one and let me know how many others unlike me on here or in the world buy your token blind guy bullshit. It truly wouldn't surprise me to hear months or years down the road that you end up working at our state school for the blind as one of the teachers or in some other capacity where you're talking this every-man-for-themselves bullshit to kids who can hardly keep their fucking sanity, you'd fit right in with those Orwellian abusers at a school. No, that's not hyperbolae either, I really mean that, because for all your supposed understanding for what I went through, you continue to sound like all the shallow-minded power-hungry people in the system I've had to fucking fight against all these years, so congrats and best of luck in the system to you. Hope that Objectivism gives you everything you want and when it gets you alienated from everyone, because you think you have it all figured out and that you know that all anyone lower than you needs is to be told that they just need to quit whining and blaming others when they’re just trying to hold accountable the assholes who failed to do their jobs, then don’t write comments to me, get a special computer that connects to Hell if there is such a place and send the comments to that cunt Ayn Rand’s e-mail address, that is if she isn’t busy cleaning out her speech valve from them doing a voice box removal because of how much she smoked while alive. Good luck and keep thinking, that’s obviously what you’re good at.
James
In school, our teachers use to do what they called social skills.
They did these especially for the blind, or visually impaired to make sure we understood how we were perceived.
Even at home, my parents made sure all of us knew to be clean, presentable.
Rocking from a visual point, isn’t all that bad, but if a person pokes their eyes, swings there had from side to side, speaks in a weird tone, and not because of hearing, but it is how they wish to speak, it is distracting.
It makes people uncomfortable, and they tend to wonder about the persons mental abilities, even though that person is smart.
Poking your eyes looks painful, so it distracts from the conversation as well.
If you need to put your head a specific way to hear, or in a crowd point your chin down, these are fine, because even the sighted do it.
In an interview, you need to put your best foot out, or you can’t complain because the person interviewing you felt you might not be mentally able to do the work, due to your voice, dress, and that swinging of your head.
They don’t know you.
In other social settings, depending on what they are, or in your home, or out, be as you like, but again, how you appear will have an impact on how people relate to you.
We can’t toes out the fact, because we are blind, we can live in our own world, and forget the rest of social interaction based on it.
If we do that, we’ll be segregated, and that won’t be society’s fault, but our own.
Seeing people rock to music and such things, even in public, so maybe this is a case of having someone tell you, as my teachers did, about how to be social, and what goes on in a social setting.
Everyone, even sighted people aren’t good at it, but something just are really distracting.
I suppose because you are blind, you don’t need to take a bath regularly, and can smell, have bad breath, and generally be a slob?
I’m blind, so socially, I should be accepted based on that, even though I stink.
Voyager, a woman with a crew cut just isn’t a big deal. In the summer, many women shave their heads.
Some women simply can’t grow long hair, so use scarves and other things to make them look different, or accent the head style.
I’m not saying you should, I’m just making the point. Being blind has nothing to do with your choice of hairstyle, but if you are going to interview, you will need to dress neatly, unless you’ve got something the company needs, like the latest thing that’s going to make them rich.
If you’re just Jane Doe, you’ll be lumped in to the pool with the rest and be judged along with the rest.
The woman that dresses neatest, smiles, smells good, and speaks correctly, will win over you.
That is true for dating, getting service, and lots of other aspect in life.
On Stevie, Motown made it mandatory there talent did charm school.
Stevie wasn’t rich, or a big star where he could control what happened to him until he was a grown man.
At that point it didn’t matter, but his dress, hairstyle, and other things were improved.
He doesn’t dress like a slob, and his clothes are now matched perfectly.
He’s clean, and looks like someone that has money.
He rocks, but that is Stevie when he’s playing.
So, I’m sure his wives, and others gave him pointers once he could do something about it.
He did too. He didn’t say, well, I’m blind, so…
As usual, I can see both sides of it. It's true that the way you dress makes a huge difference in the first impression you give. It's said that if you really want to be a supervisor, dress like one. People will begin to see you and think, "Wow, ya know? That person just looks like he'd be a good supervisor." Us blind people don't have the advantage of being able to look at someone and sumn them up, but we do a form of it, in one way or another. Take someone that you've never met and they write you a note. The words are terribly misspelled, there are no punctuation marks and their message is generally unintelligible. Your screenreader struggles with it and you have to apply your best guess as to the contents of that message. Based on that, what will you think of the writer?
Correct.
I don't have a problem with how people choose to be, but, I have to confess, if someone writes poorly, I assume they need to be given some help.
Maybe they should take an English class.
If they smell, and smell each time I see them, it is going to be a turnoff, especially on a woman.
Now, I don't know her side of her story, but if she knows she stinks, and refuses to bathe, because, well, I'm a X, She, or he has to accept I'm not going to enjoy company with them.
I know that some people aren't comfortable with disability, and I don't force myself on them.
But, we can't blame the world because they are not comfortable with our eye poking.
Do as you must, but accept your place because of it.
Oh god that drives me nuts. There is someone who posts on a friend of mine's
facebook quite often, and the writing is so atrocious its difficult to figure out
what words she was even trying to use, let alone what order she wanted them
in and what message she wanted them to convey. This is na excellent example.
I'm kind of ashamed I didn't think of it.
As for james. If you don't want to be in the system, you don't get to complain
bout the system. Its like if you were going off road while trying to drive from
florida to california, and complaining that there were all these houses in the
way. Why the hell didn't you use the road?
Yeah, sometimes the system is absolutely fucked. You'll hear no argument
from me about that. But this idea that its impossible for blind people, especially
blind people who graduated high school, to get an opportunity to at least
attempt to get what they want out of life, is laughable. You said that the reason
they wouldn't give you money for the things you wanted was that you hadn't
taken a certain test. Well, here's an idea. How about you take the mother
fucking test then? When I was in college, to convince blind services to even
consider doing anything for me, I had to sit down with them, literally because
they refused to do it over the phone, and go over my transcript for each class I
was taking. They wanted to know why I'd gotten this grade instead of that one.
Keep in mind, they had not spent a penny on me. so to get those pennies,
which I eventually decided I just didn't need, I had to let them pry into things
they had no real need to know. But, you know what, I did it anyway. Eventually
I got a little bit of help with one or two things. They were inconsequential, so I
gave them up, but I at least got them.
sometimes you've gotta do the song and dance. If you're not willing to sing
for your supper, you don't get to bitch to those who do that your stomach is
rumbling. At that point those of us who have done it are just going to ask you
why you didn't do things A B and C. So why didn't you take the test? why didn't
you use that settlement you mentioned to help you? why didn't you take out
student loans? Why didn't you go on SSI to help pay for things? In short, why
didn't you do the song and dance?
Is it because of your thing earlier about how you don't like being in the
mainstream? Cuz if it is, you're even more immature than I thought.
Purposefully being outside the mainstream is throwing a temper tantrum. If you
have a good reason for being outside the mainstream. Like musically you're
outside the mainstream cuz you don't like that guitars aren't allowed on the
radio anymore, that's fine and understandable. But saying that you're just going
to be outside the mainstream because you want to be, is called being a rebel
without a cause, or in some cases a rebel without a clue. But honestly, thus far,
you don't seem to be able to comprehend complicated subjects, so I fear I'm
probably just wasting my breath here.
Right, you have to give something to get something.
You've got to pay your light bill, or they'll shut it down.
It is a step sort of.
Forereel, actually hair may be a huge deal depending on where you live. I grew up in a small town, and certain people (myself not included) were obsessed with my hair. I had little choice as to what was done with it. While they were busy pulling my hair, my brothers had theirs shaved and comfortable. It's a relief to live in Austin where nobody cares and I'm free to focus on meaningful things. I'm no longer an object to be yanked on and twisted into the right shape.
Sighted or blind, we do have to play the part. Say your family agrees that they'll give you 200 dollars a month to help you with keeping your bills paid. There's always a string attached. Do something they don't approve of and you'll run the risk of them withdrawing their support. They're helping you, but at a price. It's up to you to decide whether it's worth it or not. In the same way, when Voc rehab helps you and provides you with the tools and/or funds, they get a certain amount of control. They think all blind people are capable of is working in a call center, washing dishes or running a vending stand. They're making an investment, so they want to know it'll pay off. They're not as apt to give you all kinds of money for you to go freelancing on and then just hope for the best. as fucked up as they are, I do understand at least the general logic. You want their help, then you play by their rules. If I know someone is going through a really hard time and I offer to pay their rent for a month, if they say something like, "Na, just give me the money directly, since I've really been craving McDonalds, and this would give me quite a few meals," I think I would have every right to withdraw my offer, but the person will most likely think I'm a real shithead and will probably trash me pretty good.
Voyager, the key to your last post is the phrase, I grew up. I grew up with
parents with absolutely no fashion sense. I had a buzz cut almost constantly,
wore polo shirts I hated, and cargo pants that made me look like a fat redneck.
But, my parents paid for the clothes and the barber's visits, so they made the
decisions. That's just how growing up is. Now, you're an adult, you can make
those choices now. If you want to get liberty spikes in your hair and dye them
neon yellow, that's your choice. Its not a good choice, but its your choice
because you're paying for it.
The problem I think, is that most blind people, myself included, aren't really
taught about what our image says about us, and how we can fashion our own
image that we're comfortable in and feel good about. So when we become
adults, we're kinda thrown in the deep in without being told how to swim.
I thought this might be helpful. Part of my point being, this says absolutely nothing about being written for blind people. Sighted people need to know how to do these things too. It's just that they can learn through watching, while we can't. Cody has a good point about how we're kind of tossed in to it late, which is a lot of what I said in my first post. Why couldn't they have started teaching me this stuff when I was a kid, so it would ingrain itself?
Take a minute to consider what your body is doing right at this moment. Are your legs crossed or stretched out? Are you
smiling?
Is your back hunched? Where are you resting your elbows? Are you looking at the screen with a dazed appearance on your face?
Whether you're aware or not, everything the body does will communicate something to the brain and to those around you. Although a few bodily gestures
might send more obvious messages than other ones, even the most subtle positions may affect your mood and impression you make on friends, clients, and
colleagues. Therefore, if you already are sending messages with your body all the time anyway, why not leverage body language to your advantage?
Even though most individuals understand how to influence other people with body language (yawning while in a meeting informs other people that you are
bored; wimpy handshake will imply weakness; lack of eye contact will make you feel untrustworthy), fewer individuals are aware of how to utilize body language
to influence their productivity level, their careers, or themselves.
Your physical movements may influence and shape your moods and thoughts, according to a theory referred to as 'embodied cognition'. By taking a minute
to change your expression or posture, you may affect the way you feel; therefore the way in which you work.
Here are 7 ways to optimize your body language in order to get the most out of the work day.
Strike Power Pose for More Productive Day: A 'Power Pose' is a method of telling your body to start moving. Productivity is all about telling the brain:
'I am in charge, I feel good to go.' A 'power pose' actually can cause a burst of testosterone, that's responsible for feelings of dominance. Having a
power pose in place for around 2 minutes may assist with confidence, decrease stress, and encourage a greater tolerance for risk.
Attempt one of the below body positions/gestures next time you want an increase in confidence:
Place Your Hands on Your Head with Elbows Out
This stance straightens and then opens the chest, improving the posture and helping when brainstorming or problem-solving.
Prop Your Legs Up or Extend Legs
This position is perfect for motivating you to do desk work, like making phone calls, answering email, or writing.
Rest your Arm on the Chair next To You
It will increase the quantity of space the body takes up, making you seem more powerful. Attempt this stance while having an important phone call or prior
to approaching a difficult negotiation.
Stand with Outstretched Legs and Arms
It's an alternative to additional power poses. With newfound confidence, you'll enjoy the attention this position gets you within the office.
Talk with Hands:
When speaking, use the hands to accent and gesture what is being said. Making gestures with your hands will activate the part of the brain referred to
as Broca's area; that plays a significant part in speech production. While debating, public speaking, or negotiating, utilize the hands and your voice
to illustrate your point--your sentences and thoughts likely will sound more articulate.
Open the Body for Better Retention
According to a study, as a test audience at a lecture had its legs and arms crossed, audience members retained 38 percent less than the audience that had
its legs and arms uncrossed.
Smiles are Contagious
Smiles make you feel happier! Forcing a smile as you are feeling upset or discouraged actually can improve your mood. But, smiles are also contagious!
When more individuals 'catch' your smile, you'll directly affect the moods of the people around you. That is a lot to achieve with just a single facial
expression!
Overall, awareness is important while controlling how your body language will affect your performance and presence in a room. At a variety of points
all throughout your day, particularly as you find your concentration drifting, your confidence low, or your stress levels high, check in with the body
and make a decision to attempt one of the above strategies of body language. Your more productive self is going to thank you for it! Now, go and strike
a pose!
http://www.inc.com/murray-newlands/7-body-positions-and-gestures-that-can-improve-your-productivity.html
I imagine you're right. I think my mom tried to do this, but she really, I mean REALLY loves shopping. She's an extremely visual person. And extremely girly. So my comfort level and my needs often went out the window. She doesn't do it on purpose, she just gets lost in whatever she's looking at and then I become the person to try it on. The only real style I developed was taking it off. So I can imagine that I would have developed differently under other circumstances, although I think I would still tend to keep things relatively simple.
Simple can be good though Voyager. Often times, people who wear simple
outfits will get one thing that really pops, and can draw attention to their
favorite part of themselves. Maybe a hair band that draws attention to the hair,
a necklace, earrings, glasses, makeup, a ring, even a pair of shoes or a belt.
That's all it really takes. Once you learn what to look for and what you like, it
gets easier, and then it can actually get fun. You don't have to dress to the nines
every day.
Okay Cody, since now you’re just going in to the at homonym area of things, I’ll give you a thum-nale telling of my story.
As the system I went through in so far as it’s the Vocrehab agencies, the school for the blind I went to as well as the job placement agencies, I did all of what was asked. You said that I should to use your words, take the mother fucking testing they asked. Well, I did and what I did back in 2005, was take aptitude testing which revealed that I had interests in Psychology, social work and jobs related to Science and Medicine. My Vocrehab counselor shot all those down and still advocated medical transcription and given that that was close to the last two years of high school for me and with me wanting to go to college afterwards like everyone else, I believed that I had to make a decision, not to mention that I was living with a parent at the time who would either support what I wanted to do emotionally-speaking or not, depending on the mood they were in at the time, so I went along with what the counselor said. As for how and on what I spent my settlement money, I used some of it to get some of the assistive technology so I could function in the public school I was attending at the time as my Vocrehab counselor would only pay for tech if I had a job and we were nowhere near the job placement process yet, and I had to get something to help with me doing class and homework. Then I paid for other things for college, and by that I mean I had to get a new laptop as well as I had to pay for a couple of the books and if I remember right Vocrehab covered the rest.
There’s also the fact that after college, I spent from 2009 to 2013 doing job development with various job placement agencies in Columbus here in Ohio and for the first couple of years, I stayed up in Columbus off and on in one of the hotels that Vocrehab paid for amazingly enough. Then my family recommended to me that maybe I could find a job better if I actually lived in Columbus, so I relocated up there and got my apartment in July of 2011 and at that point, I used the money I had and by that I’m talking about the settlement money to pay rent, utilities and the various things you would when living on your own. So while that was going on, I continued to work with the job placement agencies and finally in May of 2013 I got a job making calls at Sears Home Improvement which hardly made anything for me, except for me to pay a couple of utilities and I had to use the last bit of my money in the bank to pay rent and thus there wasn’t enough money coming in to put back and replace what was gone which is why I always advocated waiting to move on my own until a job came along, because I saw that coming if I did apartment first, job later or job second. So once I did go broke a few months later and after attempts to get Vocrehab to open my case up again and see what we could do about help with relocating or whatever other services they could offer, they refused since they considered me successfully employed. So I moved back down here to the town I’m living in now and back in with my parents and since the Spring of 2014, I’ve been collecting S.S.I. and am just barely getting by and in addition to that, I’m in the process of getting things up and running again to go back to school for some classes and I say in the process, of doing this, as my advocate and I are looking at financial options to pay for this in the event that Vocrehab after a vocational evaluation I’ll be doing in a few weeks says they can’t or won’t pay for it. So the fact that you made the at homonym arguments by way of asking me why I didn’t use my settlement money to do any of this, take the “Mother Fucking” testing and why I didn’t go on S.S.I. earlier, shows me that you’re still shilling out for the system who gives the impression that if you just do all that, that everything will be fine. It ignores the reality that we as blind people are given a utilitarian model of being funneled from either blind schools or public schools in to Vocrehab agencies and pigeon-holed in to the jobs I mentioned. So as for people saying that I don’t have the right to bitch when staying out of the mainstream, what I mean by mainstream is that system as well as the mind-set of said system that ignores the institutional discrimination given to us and it being called helping us out. So Cody I can easily say the same to you, that if you continue to stay within the power system you’re in that blames the lower classes for their own problems without really investigating and getting down to the root causes of the problem, then when you find that they’re making you prove yourself over and over again when doing a job knowing full-well that you can do it, having you do things that turn you more and more in to a carbon-copy of them and in the process, making you lose whatever shreds of individuality you have left, then you’re not really going to have the right to come to me wear ever I maybe when that day comes for you and cry to me about how you’re sick of how they’re treating you and making you prove yourself over and over again even knowing that you know what you’re doing as if they don’t actually trust you, because when that day comes for you, then you’ll see what I meant and then I’ll just say that you had a chance to stay outside of that in so far as that’s the mainstream, question it and have a good idea of what you were getting in to and find a more healthy area of the world in which to live, but you didn’t so thus you don’t have much room to come crying to me or others when it all falls apart and shows itself for the power-hungry parasite that it is.
As for the ideas about good hygiene and proper dress, I’ve known blind kids who’ve had problems with those and of course the system rather than getting down to the root of why that was, chose to yell at them when I’d be at the school for the blind and treat them like shit, and instead of calling their parents and calling them out for not properly socializing the kids in question thus making this work out for the better, they chose to put these kids down and gave them the argument that they wouldn’t ever find a job and never live successfully and should they not learn how to dress, bathe properly and ease down some of their mannerisms, then they probably wouldn’t ever learn how to live life in a meaningful way, but I won’t accept these arguments from people like those adults and others who think that way who make those arguments that say in the under-lying message that those types of blind kids are fucked for life because of low living skills as if nothing can be done to change any of that and as if they’re beyond redeeming themselves. With a system that’s supposed to help the blind and that acts that way, then it’s no fucking wonder that some of the visually impaired among us are where they are today and that’s all the more sad about Cody’s situation, because with him being among positions of power where he could do some good to fix this, he comes on here blames people for their own problems with little to no evidence with which to back up his arguments, then goes on his way like it’s nothing.
So when I talk about being a rebel and in that way, Cody is right in that I am a rebel. I’m talking about rebellion as in questioning things. An example would be if you have no choice but to use Vocrehab agencies, then when they say to sign such-and-whatever so we can do this testing, don’t just say: “Oh, okay, where do I sign?”. Ask them to read the forms to you, make them explain everything right down to the last detail. Should these systems still try to put the sleep-shades over your eyes, then have others help you with getting a job or with schooling in so far as you have family or friends who can do it, and yes rebelling in those ways means that you'll have to sometimes buck the system as I'm doing not in all ways, but in certain ways, so the same things in my life don't get repeated. Another part of being non-mainstream is that I say that some of the mannerisms should either be stopped, such as eye poking, for someone could unknowingly damage their eyes, and if rocking should cause an issue with you hearing or focusing on what a rocking blind person is saying, then a simple: “Would you mind holding still while we have this conversation?” would be enough, not a god damn crusade to stop all blind people from doing all of this while you don’t take time to investigate the context in which they might be rocking, poking their eyes or shaking their head. For example, if they’re rocking slightly while in a car or on a bus while listening to music, then unless you find out otherwise, then there’s really no reason to assume or to think that they’re not doing just that, so then leave them alone, unless the rocking effects the motion of the vehicle. As for them pressing on their eyes, how do you know that they might not actually be pressing on them slightly because of eye pain and that’s their attempt to get it to stop.
In other words, rather than a bunch of sighted people telling us none of those “Blindisms”, and pretend like they’re just helping us when they’re only forcing us to be carbon copies of themselves all because they’re not willing to be honest about how people who are different make them feel uncomfortable, let’s stop some of these, not because the mainstream says to, but because it’s on our own terms. Jesus Christ, of course I know that bills need to be paid and that you have to follow rules, that’s absolutely not what I meant by being non-mainstream. If you want it in a more shortened form, then here it is.
Don’t just blindly, no pun intended, follow absolutely whatever anyone or everyone says.
I'm back with one more comment about what Cody said about me not taking as he calls it "The Mother Fucking" testing.
I looked back at post 23 in this thread Cody and when you asked about me not taking the testing, I clearly said that one of the things they kept throwing at me was the fact that I didn't pass the vocational testing they had me do, and I go in to a little more detail in this in post 36, but the words "didn't pass the testing" should have told you within their subtext that I actually did do the testing. So I hope you have a nice life enriched by blaming people for their own problems. I'll await the day when I hear you on Glenn Beck, Rush Linbaugh or Shawn Hanity, for you'd fit in well with them, because when I listen to your "the system can do no wrong" bullshit that you're putting out on here, that's what I hear is little more than you serving as one of those radio hosts. So have fun.
The problem with your post james, is that people from Ohio, who went to that
same blind school, and dealt with that same system, are now doing perfectly
fine. Besides that, it sounds like you didn't plan very well. You moved to one of
the more expensive cities in your state without a plan. You used money you had
to pay for things you didn't need to buy, since accessible technology is
something public schools are required to provide for you by federal law, and
blind schools should already have at least the bare minimum. and I was in high
school in 2005 too, so I know what I'm talking about here.
So, the system you rail against didn't want to pay for your college. did you
apply to a college and try to get student loans? Did you try starting out at a
community college so that you could work toward getting scholarships so you
wouldn't ned as many student loans? You had a computer, did you try to find
some ways to get what you wanted? Or did you just accept that the one avenue
you tried wasn't going to get it done for you, so it must be somebody else's
fault?
You were going for psychology. Practically every college in the country has a
psychology degree available. How many of them did you apply to? Did you do
anything to try to advocate for yourself? Cuz, I'm sorry to say, but it doesn't
sound like your situation was all that hopeless. You went to a blind school, so
you had an education, certainly not the best one, but an education. You weren't
stuck in the inner city where you never learned anything. You would have had
all the opportunities you needed to take the tests you needed. You could have
taken the SAT, the ACT, and you could have gotten help with college
applications. I know this because I know people who went to the ohio school for
the blind, and then went to college.
So yeah, your childhood may have sucked, but that's no excuse. Lots of blind
people have childhoods that suck. Lots of those blind people go on to get the
degrees and jobs they want, because they work for it. So, you just keep railing
against the system. If you'd ever like to get something done, find someone who
knows what they're talking about, because you clearly don't have the
experience.
The following is taken from an e-mail I sent to someone a little while ago.
I’d love to get hold of the little fucker who came up with that bullshit called “Blindisms” and have a nice long talk with him, up close and extremely personal.
The problem with Blindisms ultimately is that the concept causes more discrimination than it prevents.
This is inherent within the concept rather than happening due to interpretation by virtue of the fact that whenever we’re told not to rock, for the sighted may not further be able to understand us, then it puts on us to make them understand and ignores the reality that if a person is going to be an uneducated asshole about us or any minority group, then unless they’re willing to learn and get educated, then they’re making the choice to be as such and if they’re set on doing that, then nothing at all we can do is going to fix that and it’s their choice to be assholes who want to be close-minded not ours.
It also gives a message no different than: “What was the little whore wearing last night when she got raped? Oh, you said the dress with the glitter on it, well than what the fuck did she expect? If she hadn’t had that one, then wouldn’t nothing have happened to her.”.
As men looked for excuses to blame women for rape and as society looks for excuses or makes up excuses to blame people for being sexually violated, so it goes for the blind and how the more powerful in the blindness community make a big deal about Blindisms as do the sighted who claim to want to help us.
So first goes the rocking, then the eye poking and as for that, how the fuck don’t these filthy little cunts know that a blind person pressing on their eyes isn’t because they’re actually experiencing some pain and that’s the only way they can think of to hopefully get it to stop?
Then goes more and more until we’re just little carbon-copies of the sighted and if they can’t give us normally functioning eyes given some of the incurable eye diseases from which some of us suffer, then they’re god damn sure going to break us until we’re walking, talking, making choices and living as close to like how they are as we possibly can.
My anger while at the sighted who spread this bullshit is high, but I save the rest of my hate and anger for the blind people who are in mainstream society and in the area of the powerful.
I’m talking about people who are blind who have well-paying jobs who say that if us lower on the rungs of blind society would just get up and get a job, then we’d make it like they have.
This ignores the reality of how some of us have families who don’t do much to push and help us to be fully independent both living-skillwise and financially, as well as the fact that there are vocational rehabilitation agencies especially here in the country who tend to push more towards picking college classes to help us do some phone answering or data entry job at an office all day, then eventually we’re funneled in to similar jobs and we’re told that this is us participating in the mainstream, but I see it for the bullshit that it is.
This is what the powerful among the blind do, they may agree with us that these agencies are bad, but they continue to push this idea that for the most part, the system is a good and we all should find a place among many places within it and be happy, but they miss the point that this system runs off of what was back then actual discrimination, but is now institutional discrimination in that these agencies before paying for you to go to college especially if you want to do a job of your own choosing, will have you take vocational and even psychological evaluations before deciding what classes they’ll put money towards, and even then they can say no on paying for what you want to do which is exactly what happened with me since 2004 which is when I started working within the system of agencies and that’s partly how I got to taking classes for Medical Transcription back in 2007 after high school, then getting my degree in that and from 2009 to 2013 when I did job development through various job placement agencies paid for by my state voc-rehab agency, I finally got a job at a Sears call center in the Spring of 2013, but since it paid hardly anything and the money I had to live on in my apartment ran out since that was all I had on which to live at the time, I had to move back in with my parents.
Translation, this kind of thing and my story I just told you isn’t specific to me, and many other people here in Ohio are going through the same thing and the powerful within the blindness community who could use their power, money and personalities with which to begin to change this and fight the neo-liberalism on which as far as I’m concerned this is all based, choose to blame the lower on the rungs for their own problems, focus on Blindisms and the destruction of them and keeping the system as it currently is, and this isn’t an accident.
They have to keep it as it is, for this is the system in which they live, work and build parts of their own lives for themselves, so why would they want to change it.
Furthermore, you see this same thing with the lower of the black community, in that we have a for-profit prison industrial complex here in the states and it’s not an accident that the highest number of people in prison are black men ranging from young to old.
They do some of the jobs to bring in money some of which are labeled by our laws as against the law, such as drugs and other crimes, but as the white among us who are powerful and who give them no incentive much less a well-paying job with which they could have a better life for them and whoever they have in their families, these same white people get on CNN, Fox News or whatever other news station one can think of and give the continuing talking points that black people are where they are only because of these lower blacks on the latter, they ignore the points I just mentioned above and here in is where it is similar to blind people and what we go through, in that they’ll get on the black man or woman who’s well-paid, has a good job and who’s in a position of power and authority in some capacity and they’ll pay lip service to ideas of “Personal Responsibility” and in this case, that term no longer means what it meant decades ago.
In a twist worthy of Orwell, “Personal Responsibility” in this case no longer means to be there for one’s family, admit when you did something wrong and try to fix it in so far as you have means and options by which to make better choices, but the “Personal Responsibility” that comes with doing all that the token black person did to get to a place of power and authority as well as wealth within a space within this neo-liberal system.
So that’s how it is for the blind in this country, at least the blind who are lower on the rungs of the social and vocational latter.
Chris Hedges has done great work on the issues facing the black community and other members of what’s left of the working class in this country and when I read some of his reports on Truthdig as well as passages in his books about this subject, it matches up almost perfectly with not only my experience in the blindness community and the sighted community, but with other blind people within the community.
So it’s time to tell the token blind people as well as the sighted who would tell us what to do with our bodies to go fuck themselves.
It’s time to stop cowering when they give us the trope about: “Yeah, but when you go for a job interview, then this, that and the other.”.
If they were truly worried about job interviews and us living a truly happy life, then we’d be dealing with the neo-liberalism which drives the system that gives only crumbs from the table rather than full opportunities of our own choosing, so fuck the system and those who promulgate it and think for yourselves!
You’ll be better off if you do!
Want to stop “Blindisms”, then stop them within yourselves, because it would be what you want to do not because of scared abled-bodied little twats who want to find one more reason to be afraid of who or what they don’t understand!
James
Okay token blind boy, have fun in the system and hope it doesn't fall down around your ears later on. I know what my story is and what it isn't, and again, you want to keep taking people's stories and reshaping them and giving them only supportive roles in their own stories with you serving as the main role in that you're now telling it for them in so far as it can fit the system and official narrative you stick to like an intestinal tapeworm stays stuck to a person's guts so you can stay within what's comfortable rather than doing the hard work to see these realities for what they actually are, then have at it.
You really have a lot of anger to work through. When are you going to stop
being a victim and start being a survivor?
Wait wait wait...Hold on! I don't like the term "blindisms" either, but mannerisms serve different purposes depending on the person. Some are easy to stop and others are necessary. For example, my brother and I both poked/poke our eyes. Both of us are congenitally blind and autistic. Neither of us do it because our eyes hurt. His eyes are more sunken than mine, and I think it's because he feels more of a compulsion to do it than I do. If I find myself poking I stop, because I really don't feel much need to. I can't line and say I *have* to do something when I don't.
Now for the rocking back and forth: Both of us do that also, and I can tell you why. I'm a living person, not a statue. Being still all the time feels awful. A sighted friend (note the sighted part) told me that it's because the world isn't able to break me enough to make me stop. I don't know about that, I just know that being still all the time feels awful. I rock back and forth when I hear great music, and I also do it when I experience strong emotions. Being told to stop it at that point would be like someone yelling, "CODY! Don't you dare smile. I don't care how you feel, but there are far more appropriate ways to express it than letting the corners of your mouth do that weird thing." "Stop rocking!" is one of my least favorite phrases on Earth, along with "Don't touch!"
I pace in counterclockwise circles in order to think, normally in the comfort of my own place. You know how you drink coffee or do whatever routine you do in the morning? Mine is similar, but it isn't still. I have a mathematician professor friend who paces also. Mathematicians are kind of nuts but that's another topic entirely. But he's sighted. I think human variation should be accepted more and questioned less, so long as it doesn't hurt others.
If I'm not angry enough to post on this board let me know and I'll go elsewhere.
Here is the problem with your comparison of victim blaming. You keep
thinking that this is only a problem with blind people. That's why I disagree with
the term blindisms. Its not blindisms, its a simple matter of being in a society.
Yes, we keep talking about certain things that blind people do, but we could talk
about things all people do and have the exact same argument. We could replace
eye poking with nose picking, rocking with not wiping your mouth at dinner,
swinging your head with having a scraggly beard or wearing clothes with stains
all over them. These aren't things that only apply to the blind. We're not special
in that we have things we have to control in order to fit in, we're no different
than anyone else. Every person in a society has to learn how to get along in
that society. Whether that means learning to wipe your mouth, learning how to
shave, or learning not to rock. So get down off the cross, someone needs the
wood. You're not a victim, you're just being childish and don't want to learn how
to behave.
Ok Voyager, let me explain what you're missing in that. To sighted people,
movement can be distracting. So if you're at dinner, and you're feeling a
particularly strong emotion, and you start rocking, it can effect everyone around
you. So, to use your example, if they tell you to stop rocking, its not the same
as saying stop smiling, its like saying "cody, stop laughing at the top of your
lungs please." You can move around, and even rock when you're aggitated, but
make it not distracting. Toy with your fingers, tap your foot, cross and uncross
your legs, drum your fingers on your knee. Something minimal and something
that doesn't impact everyone at the table. If you rock, what you're basically
doing is shouting that everyone should look at you, and its very distracting.
as for your eye poking, its just unhygenic, and that can gross some people
out. Plus a lot of blind people will just sit their with their fingers squarely
planted in their eye socket, and that is unnerving to some people. If you have a
problem with your eye, use the back of your hand to fix it. Like me, my
eyelashes stick to my eye, and I have to tug them free. If I'm in public, I'm
careful to use the back of my hand to do that so it doesn't look gross or
distracting.
Its no differnt than sneezing and doing it into your elbow than into your hand.
Its just polite behavior. everyone has to learn polite behavior.
The pacing thing is fine. Almost everyone paces. It might be a bit weird if
you're having a conversation with someone and you keep walking in circles, but
I'm sure you don't do that.
Does that help clear things up a bit?
Yeah, it does. And I do *try* to control the rocking in some places, although it gets hard, especially when I'm drinking. But my closest friends will try to tell me what's going on, or put me in situations where it's less distracting to other people trying to enjoy the performance. It does seem like people mind in some places more than others. I don't do it to piss people off, promise.
Are we talking blindisms, or about how the blind suffer in the system?
Cody's right, nothings wrong with rocking in some settings, others you need to not.
I can't decide to curse because I'm excited in some situations right?
When I get excited, or feel a strong emotion, I want to scream, and just scream. Is that okay?
You get the point I hope.
I don't scream, but what if I did?
How long can you put up with the person next to you screaming, because it feels good to them?
I had to put this blindisms in terms that will affect you as a blind person, so maybe it comes home.
As to use of money, lots of things could be the problem with why you had a difficult time.
We have people that have lots of money, but don't budget correctly, so they struggle and say, well, if I only had a few million more?
Struggling isn't a blind thing, it is a people thing, so you can't use that.
The thing about being blind is, if you apply, you'll receive things free. Seeing people don't always.
I'd agree, you have lots of anger to work out.
We as blind people can't expect to be treated as mentally sound, and stable, if we refuse to try to join the group. This is just how it goes.
Oh I know you don't do it to piss people off Voyager. Please forgive me if I
made it seem like you were doing it on purpose. None of these things are things
people do on purpose, or at least not many people. But its things we don't
realize are distracting because, to us, its silent. Though, as I've said before,
rocking even annoys me as a blind person because of what it does to your
voice. Its distracting to me too.
And yes, people will mind more in certain settings. I imagine places like a
dinner table, or a performance of some kind would be more distracting than it
would be somewhere very dark, like a movie theater or something like that.
But, I feel we should always take others into consideration when learning our
manners. So, when your friends tell you to stop rocking, they're not trying to be
discriminatory, they're just trying to tell you, hey, that thing you're doing is
really distracting.
Sometimes the only mentally sound option is to stay home.
And, though I think I get what you're saying, I doubt rocking hurts the eyes like screaming hurts the ears. I mean hurt in a very literal sense, as in sounds can physically hurt me like sticking a finger in an electric outlet, not the same as bad grammar and spelling hurting my sensibilities. Distraction I understand also. And so far we've only covered the binary possibilities of ROCKING or being still. What about rocking a little? Not very fast and not very far back and forth? Twitching my legs just doesn't do anything for me because my upper body is still, which is often bad. But if I move a little it doesn't seem to bother most people.
SilverLightning, you didn't make it seem like that. I'm just starting to get the impression that certain people do these things on purpose to upset people, and I just see no point in that. And when I talk to you in a noisy place I might actually be forced to be more still, otherwise I can't hear you very well.
Just gravitate to a rockingchair whenever possible. You're expected to rock in those.
I do that. Computer chairs are awesome. They give you the option of rocking and/or spinning.
And you forget about swing sets.
LOL I really try very hard to forget about swing sets. I'm a big guy, and I love swings, but I wonder if big guys and swings make a healthy combination. I could swing all day, or at least until something broke.
Rocking very gently would probably be ok, so long as you aren't pumping into
the table or anything, and your chair isn't creaking. Though it might still look a
little odd. Like you might get a few funny looks and some people wondering why
you're rocking back and forth, but I doubt it would be too bad.
Aw, sorry. How do you feel about water, as in a lake with lots of waves? Those don't break, at least not from big guys swimming in them.
For years, I've tried to forget about those as well, but now I'm super excited. The hearing on my left side is so bad that I got a cochlear implant at the first of this month. I'll get it activated on the 20th. The wonderful part, is that it's waterproof. I can swim with it and still hear what's going on around me. I can't wait!
Oooooooooooooh! If I don't go swimming someplace like that for a while I start dreaming about it. I hope you get to go as soon as everything is healed up and working!
Okay, let's see if System Shil or the internet troll known as Silver Lightning also known as Cody gets it when I say it this way.
Hi Cody, this is called America and here in America the slogon is known as: "The Land of the Free and the Home of The Brave."
Translation for you Cody: Mind!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Your!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Own!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! God!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Damn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Mother!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fucking!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Business!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and quit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! worrying!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! about!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! what!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Others!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! do or How!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! others!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Live!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Their!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Lives!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There Shill! That clear enough for you! Maybe you'd be better off in Germany if Hitler was still in power, as you're clearly not happy until everyone acts the way you do, just like how The Nazis did when they were in power back in the 1930s and 1940s! You just keep thinking Cody, that's clearly what you're good at!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
To anyone who wants to read this post in it's full clarity, turn on all punctuations, then you'll see.
Voyager, you could actually rock a bit. Seeing people don't set exactly still, or not all of them.
I liked the bit about a rocking chair. That work on the serious side.
A habit, is a habit, however, so can be curbed a bit.
Don't stay home, just go out and deal. People will get use to your ways, and you'll get use to burbing your habit or tempering it to a point.
Visual stimulation is just like audio stimulation believe it or not.
That screaming would be just like a flashing light on and off, even though you can't hear it.
Rocking is movement back and forth, so is sort of like a flashing light.
A person doesn't neede to see it directly, but it comes and goes in the side vision.
In order not to see it, a person would need to turn their back on you, and that's rude.
I guess we all have things we do around people we are comfortable with, and things we don't do in public.
They got swings for big boys and girls Anthony. Smile.
I love rocking chairs. My rocking recliner is *my* chair. In the privacy of my own home, keeping moving helps me think, releases the need for some kind of stimulation I can't really name. At work, I'll sometimes swivel my desk chair in a small arc side to side, especially in the first of the morning when I'm looking through e-mails and thinking through an issue. Sometimes it clicks though, and that repetitive sound pokes through my consciousness and I realize how annoying it is to me, maybe I should stop. When people come into my cube to talk to me, I have to make a forced conscious effort to turn around and look at them. It doesn't feel comfortable to me, but it's what is expected. As for dress, I wear slacks, a sweater or top, and either flats or wedge heels to work. My 31 year old male co-worker who does the same job comes to work in jeans and sneakers. That's acceptable, and I would certainly be more comfortable in that. So why do I bother with buying more expensive dress wear? I guess I feel like because I'm blind, I feel the need to make more of an effort because less is expected? Women are expected to look nice at work. There is less of a social standard for men, or maybe that's just the south in me talking.
I feel conflicted. I think the world needs to be a more accepting place of diversity. That would be better for everyone if we didn't have to put on masks and smile. I remember how pissed I was when someone suggested I should turn the lights on if I live with someone, because otherwise I would be weird. I can't use the lights, why would I turn them on? I would just forget to turn them off again anyway. I only remember to turn off my kitchen light after I've used it to scan something because the light humms and I can hear it. Why should I make such an effort to conform with something so useless to me?
But on the flip side, Cody is right. Society has certain expectations of everyone, and I do my best to follow those. Sometimes I forget to raise my head that extra inch to fully look up at people. Sometimes I'll sit thinking with my finger resting on the bone around my eye when I'm at a table and not interacting with anyone. If you want to walk to your own beat, that's fine, you just have to realize the results of that. I'm not going to a job interview in jeans and a t-shirt. I'm not going to sit in a still chair and rock around others, because I know what it's like when people do it around me. It is distracting and a little irritating because it's hard for me to concentrate with this giant repetitive motion and sound going on in front of me. Another blind mannerism, when people keep moving closer, and closer, and closer to you. I know the level of mild panic I feel when I'm on the receiving end of it. All I want to do is put something between us and back away slowly. I don't want to make a boss, or a friend, or a co-worker feel that way about me.
Maybe I'm a slave to conformity. Maybe I'm a blind person who is perpetuating the lack of acceptance of disability. But I feel like if I want a job, and friends, and people to treat me like they do everyone else, certain things are expected of me, and I'm OK with conforming to that. I'm never going to wear makeup. I'm never going to be able to match colored prints on my clothes, so I'll wear solid-colored pants. I have other habits that probably won't change. I guess we all have our lines in the conformity sand.
That makes a lot of sense. I think it's a set of cost-versus-benefit decisions. For instance, take facing people when you talk to them. I generally do this because it doesn't really cost me anything, and I benefit by hearing the other person better and also making it clear to them that I'm listening. Depending on what we want out of life, I imagine we find different things rewarding or costly.
James, there is something incredibly funny about someone posting an entire
rant on a public board post, accessible by pretty much anyone who cares to
look, and then telling the people who disagree with them to mind their own
business. How about, if you can't handle being disagreed with, you shut the fuck
up until you're mature enough to handle it, ok pookie? Now, go to the kid's
table and let the adults talk.
HR, sorry for some reason your name is slipping, I wanna say Kayla, but I
haven't had coffee yet. I completely agree that everyone has their line in the
sand. I don't wear a lot of bright colors, because I don't know how to match
them. Most of my shoes are black for that same reason, and all of my dress
shoes are, same with my belts. There's nothing saying we can't make the task
easier, but that doesn't mean we get to cast it off entirely without
consequences. As for the lights thing, I'm horrible at that too. The only one I
can justify is the bathroom light. sighted people, in my experience, are horrible
at knocking on that particular door, so flipping the light switch is a good way to
tell them you're doing your business and would like to be left alone. I still forget
to turn it off though.
At my last place I shared a bathroom. The nice thing about it was that the light was connected to the fan, so my neighbors could see it and I could hear it. I always used it as a signal to let them know I was in there.
After the site crashed, and having to type in word, here you go...
First of all, I do not understand rocking, like, at all, but I can imagine that it is distracting, and a friend demonstrated this when he was explaining to me how he use to do it. It was difficult to hear him, and to focus on what he was saying. So if you’re doing it and you are not autistic, why do it? I will have to be like Cody here, I will ignore you, because I am sitting still and listening to you and giving you all of my attention, so you should do the same for me.
Now, tilting your head is ok, I guess, especially if you can’t hear. However, I think you should give people a head’s up on why you are doing it. It is similar to letting someone know that you are blind in advance. Growing up, I always turned towards people when I spoke to them, so it is not awkward for me at all. What feels weird to me now is when someone is speaking to me, and I’m turned all kinds of ways. This is the same as rocking yourself to death because I feel like I am not showing them that I am paying attention to them, and so on…
I struggle with poking out my eyes because I have prosthesis. However, now that I am in college, and that I am constantly around people who can see the gunk that gets stuck on my eye, I try to not do it. Although, at times, I do kind of unconsciously do it…until someone walks by me, and I can imagine them going, “iiiiiw.” Lol
Like Cala, I do need to move in some way, shape, or form. So this involves typing like, in class, or if not that, I will just cross my legs and lightly move my leg back and forth. Hell, I think that sighted folks even do this. Oh, and fashion… Well, I think like voyager person, my mom dressed me, did my hair, and the whole shebang, so I do understand that, and now that I am a young woman, it is hard. My hair looks a mess at times, I dress a mess at times, and I often do not know the latest fashion trends until someone points it out to me. I am also stuck to wearing the basics, such as blue, black, grey, or brown t-shirt, pants, and some decent shoes, but I do not wear anything with writing, or tennis shoes at much. I did it throughout high school, so trying to change because being in college, there is always someone to impress.
And, finally, we advocate on a daily basis to have the rights, respect, and to illuminate the ignorance that our sighted peers and society has towards us, so why not try to do what we can to help our cause and case? Because face it, we live in their world. Hell, I even want to learn how to write because of this.
Oh, and suggesting that someone gets killed by Hitler? You seriously have issues… lol just saying…
There seems to be an implied accusation that in not being within the mainstream, that I just don’t do anything at all from paying bills, to dressing properly for job interviews much less dressing properly for a job I might go to during the day and so I may have to yet again clarify. Being out of the mainstream for me does not mean neglecting the paying of bills one pays, it does not mean choosing to dress like a slob for a job and or job interview and it does not mean not contributing in one form or another to society. I’m not quite sure just how many more god damn times I have to explain this to you. I’ve explained this in many ways over the past few days and with all due respect to some of what some of you guys are saying, you’re not children who don’t get this, you guys are adults who I’m going to educatedly guess are quite capable of understanding what I’m saying about myself not being within the mainstream and the comment about making sure the electric bill was paid that was made Yesterday, like hello? How do you think I operated my appliances in my apartment when I lived on my own as well as charge my devices? It’s because I took the initiative, picked up this wonderful device, maybe you’ve heard of it, it’s called a cellular phone and I pressed these things on it called buttons, I connected to an automated service and I paid the bill with this lovely thing called a debit card, after making sure of what the balance in my account in the bank was so I wouldn’t accidently empty it unknowingly, so isn’t that amazing how that works? So sorry my pretties, but I’m not the government-hating anarchist you’re looking for, who’s living in a cabin in the woods with no electricity and an endless seed vault under-ground like some Alex Jones nutjob.
What it means for me to be non-mainstream is that I’m going to do what’s expected of me, but not just because society expects it and I’ll give an example. This is actually a suggestion that Cody mentioned Yesterday. He asked why I didn’t take out student loans when first going to college as an option. The reason is that should they have been more than what my settlement money was, and unless I could have worked out a payment arrangement with whatever company does student loans, then I obviously wouldn’t have been able to pay them back in a timely fashion, which would have at some point given me lovely wake up calls in the morning which would go something like this: “This is Twat-face Credit Association Incorporated calling to discuss with you an important business matter. Please call us back at this number. This is an attempt by a debt collector to collect a debt and any information given here in will be used for such purposes. Thank you and good bye.”
Cody may or may not know how it was for people in my parents’ generation, but for them, in so far as any of them were in the working class back then, there wasn’t this trend of going to college and bankrupting yourself in order to do it. Cody claims that his family was to use his words, “Trailer Trash”, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he’s been acting on here. You’d think he comes from some super rich family from the way he acts and looks down on the people on the lower rungs of the latter. In other words, in the mainstream, people tell others to just take out student loans like it’s nothing, then when they all do it and the debt collectors are calling every day or every other day, then they wonder what the hell happened. So if I decide this time around to take out student loans, it’s going to be not only after all other options for financial support have been exhausted as well as being my own choice and no one else’s. Damn, I’m unfortunately starting to sound more and more like Ayn Rand as the days go by. Not sure what I’m doing wrong, LOL.
Joking aside, and this is more to Haunted Reverie. I can see what you mean about your desk chair making a noise after a while for which you’d probably want to stop turning it from side to side and that’s part of my point, what you’re doing with the chair isn’t exactly a “Blindism or a blindness-related mannerism, not just because I don’t consider it one, but because I see this from sighted people all the time. You guys aren’t really as unique with certain mannerisms as you think and if you truly stopped and took in through other senses or by someone explaining to you some of the things the sighted do, then you’d come to understand it.
The bottom line in the end, is how much do you guys want to fit in with people in our society and is your desire to do this so great that you’ll toss your individuality out the window to the point that you no longer know what it means to be yourselves? Forget jobs and job interviews for a moment, you’re not going to be in job interviews and jobs every single solitary moment of your lives, you’re going to be in other situations and in those other situations, you’re going to have moments where you can be yourselves and so you’ll have to ask yourselves assuming that you have much if any introspection left or any in the first place, whether or not you want to be yourselves in those moments or do you want to conduct yourselves in those moments and act as if you have some sighted person looking over your shoulder, so there for, you’ll not be yourself in any way at all and act as if big brother is watching you. Honestly, I hear more blind people making a big deal about ridding us all in the community of Blindisms than I hear sighted people talking about it, at least with the exceptions of the sighted who are the breakers who work at torture centers known as schools for the blind. I just think you guys in the end with a few exceptions are just over compensating and you’re waging war on a threat that doesn’t truly exist. I’ve seen more ignorance from sighted people about how we have sex, how we cook assuming they even think we can cook and some of them truly don’t think we can, as well as ignorance from the sighted about what our canes are for. I’ve seen more of this from them than I have any ignorance from them about eye pressing, rocking and head shaking and I do think the head shaking isn’t as frequent as it might seem. I only saw one person at the Ohio Blind School who did this and that was it and she didn’t really even do it that often. There’s also the point I’ll hammer home again.
The argument that should we rock, or do whatever else that falls along-side that as being called Blindisms, then the sighted would make fun of us and would want nothing to do with us. Okay, question time. If someone goes in to a gas station, pulls out a gun and empties it in to the man or woman behind the counter, then who’s to be held accountable? Let’s not focus on the root of why the murderer committed his crime, we can deal with that later for the sake of argument, but for now, we’ll just focus on who did what to whom. So again, guy walks in to gas station, pulls out gun, empties the whole thing in to the man or woman behind the counter, then gets caught by the police.
Who in the end made this guy kill the gas station worker? Was it the devil who possessed him and controlled his body to the point that he no longer had any measure what-so-ever of free will? Assuming you say no, then let’s look at another question. Was it voices in his head that he believed were being beamed to him from his DVD player? No? Is that what you said? Okay, then did he listen to any Black, Death or Thrash Metal and he believed the lyrics inspired him to do it? No? Did you say no? Okay, so assuming none of those are contributing or causational factors, then we’d have to go with the argument set forth in Dostoyevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” in which he argues that regardless of what reason Raskolnikov gave for his crime, the fact remains that his crime is still just that, a crime and that regardless of who or what played a part in him forming the ideas he did, that in the end, he and he alone swung the axe and nothing more.
So that would be the same for our hypothetical gas station murderer, and again, a full investigation would have to be initiated to see what exactly lead to him believing that murder was permissible, or even acceptable. Until that would happen though, he and he alone would have been the one to operate the gun. The man or woman didn’t become riddled with bullets because they danced in a way he didn’t like, touch their eyes in a way he didn’t like or shake their head in a way he didn’t like. Even if they did, last time I checked, we’re a nation of laws. Those laws might be anemic to say the least given the weakening of the constitution under the former War Criminal and Chief George W. Busch, and then continued under our current War Criminal and Chief Barak Obomination, but we have at least parts of the laws intact that say that you don’t just get to pull out a gun, knife or hammer an go crazy with Mayhem and soak the town red in blood just because a person does something you don’t like and should it be something they do that’s actually against the law and in so far as the police are willing to do anything about it, then you go to them, then it’s a matter of getting down to the root of why a crime was committed if not to undo what was done which is impossible, then to at least get down to the root of a person’s crime so we might be able to prevent it in the future. Root causes of criminality aside though, personal responsibility is still on the criminal in terms of him or her physically committing the crime.
So if we use the above thought experiment, then that obviously applies to the whole Blindism thing in that even if it makes us fit in to society when we don’t rock or don’t do any of the other mannerisms, the fact remains that we’re only doing this so that the sighted will like us and should any of them still want to dislike us even though there’s no Blindisms of which to speak that they could use against us, that it’s still going to be on them if they treat us badly and them alone. Bigots are going to be as such and even more so in so far as they choose not to open their minds and learn different ways and learn how to not be afraid of what they don’t understand and our job aside from making sure that we’re visually presentable at a job or a job interview is to follow the laws of this country in so far as they’re fair and laws that protect us all and that’s the same for abled bodied people as well. Stop trying to take responsibility for how some anti-blindness bigot acts towards us regardless of Blindisms. Even if they looked at us weird for rocking or pressing on our eyes, that shows that they look at us weird, probably because they don’t know what that is nor do they know anything about blind people in the first place and there in is the point. If they already have no understanding nor do they know anything about blindness or blind people, then they’ll look at us oddly anyway if we have Blindisms and even if we don’t have any of them, and they’re still uneducated about us, they’ll still look oddly at us. The question then becomes, will they then ask questions and make a true effort to learn about us, or will they be a bigot and discriminate against us either micro or macroagressively and to what extent are we going to sell ourselves out to fit in and thus disallow them from being held accountable as the bigots that they’d be or if not bigots, then at least the uneducated people that they’d be? When it’s all said and done about us looking good at job interviews and then jobs should we be hired, when all that is addressed by us, then it’s on to the sighted in terms of whether or not they’ll take responsibility for their lack of knowledge of who we are, and how can we expect them to educate themselves or get themselves to stop being bigots towards us if we’re always blaming and allowing the token blind people among us to blame us for what asshole bigots are doing. It comes down to a choice and sooner or later you people are going to have to decide what you’re going to do.
James
Look at me. I said look at me damn it! No! Your breath fucking reeks!
I just read Codies latest offering. I was talking Cody, about you minding your own business in so far as you concern yourself with whether or not people rock, or do anything else, I wasn't talking about you not posting here on this topics page, jesus Christ, that's what I put the damn thing up here for was for all to give their ideas about this for or against it. So you're just going to have to get used to the fact that I'm going to give you push-back on this and when I do, I push back hard, so deal.
Ramble ramble ramble, and excuses. Poor boy, no wonder why his life is shit...
Oh, and vocational rehab...did you know that that system was created for veterans? And, that I am using it wisely? It's paying for my schooling just fine. Just saying that we should all be greatful to our vets, and two, James's failures are on his self. You're priding yourself on not being in the mainstream, but doing this have you living with your parents...
I would stop bragging about my government free/loan free life.
I think that for many people, fitting in feels intrinsically valuable as in, the reward is being able to fit in. I don't think I've ever experienced this feeling. For me, rewards would be things like a job I liked, good beer, trips to favorite places, time with favorite people... In general they're tangible. And of course costs would be the lack of these things. Strangers' opinions of me don't matter to me that much, unless their in a position to either give me something I want, or make my life less pleasant if I don't comply. But if other people feel a need to fit in for the sake of fitting in, why stop them?
James, people are going to disagree with you. That's just the nature of living in a world with people in it. Your comparing SilverLightning to Hitler because he disagrees with you is frankly ridiculous. I regretted ever having responded to this topic when I saw that post last night.
James, thanks for posting. The topic does seem a bit angry, but I can feel the anger you feel coming through here. When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I would yell and scream for social change. I just found it wasn't the best way to solve problems. You will have more of an impact if you explain in a more calm and reasonable manner. Having said that, as this is a place for the blind, feel free to yell and scream all you want! The analogy of blind people compared to black people and slavery is also one I hadn't yet thought of, however it is completely valid. Our state agencies want us to find work, so they place us in sheltered work environments bc the sighted people can't bear the thought of changing how they do the job. So, why not just throw the problem in its own field so we don't have to work with them. As a kid, my mom used to constantly lecture me about these blindisms. Hell, even now, she still points them out. My last visit with her, I moved my jaw to the side for a second. She freaked out and asked what that blind tick was all about. Well, forgive me for adjusting my jawbone. When I was a kid, I would dread it when she made meat I had to cut. If I even touched the meat with my fingers or held my knife and fork wrong, I was a disgrace and got sent to my room a few times. I wonder how many sighted people cut their meat exactly how the law dictates. Now, whenever I go visit her, and she offers to make me a steak, I tell her I probably won't cut it to satisfy her, so she'd better either cut it for me or not watch.
i totally agree about sheltered workshops. tehy should absolutely be done
away with. The funny thing is, the big force behind the effort to get them done
away with, is the NFB, which James apparently doesn't like because they...
dress up? I don't know, honestly he just seems like he wants to yell at anything
and everything for no apparent reason. Not the first time I've been compared to
Hitler though. its like people can only think of one horrible person from history.
I'm waiting for the day someone wants me killed, or compares me to, Pol Pot or
Vlad Teppish. That will be refreshing.
Anyway, I agree that we have a lot of work to do. But part of the work we
have to do is to assure people in the public marketplace that we are equals.
How can we expect them to think that we're able to be equal, if we can't behave
equally? And here's something I'm curious about. If the people on here know
that its not acceptable to rock or dress sloppily in things like a job interview or a
work environment, what makes you think its ok in other public environments?
What do you really think is the big difference there?
as for student loans. Yeah, so you have to pay them back, big fucking deal.
Everyone has to do it. And while I'm paying back my loans, I have a college
degree that I am using to get higher paying jobs, and better college degrees.
Let me know when your individuality starts to pay the bills.
I think if people were more chill in general about this sort of thing we'd all be better off. I didn't read all 69 posts in this thread, only the last few. But Tanya's comment about her mum reminded me of what I said to james yesterday, basically that there is definitely a weird standard at play at times when the blind sscrutinise the blind, or when sighted folks who imagine it's their place to have a position on this issue are doing the scrutinising. I mean when you see the world at large, you start to realise just how strange people are, and that making the odd face, moving your head in an unusual way, all that kind of stuff is nothing compared with the quirks on display every day from so-called normal people. The sooner we realise that most people are freaks in some way or another, the better. One of my favourite things about getting to know people (no sarcasm, no smugness) is figuring out just how odd most of them really are under the surface.
of course, appearance is still important to the majority of society and it might be worthwhile to try to make positive impressions. When I'm alone at home I don't act the same as when I'm out and about. It's all just a matter of employing the appropriate filters for the appropriate times.
The big difference between an interview and other public environments is simple: In an interview I dress a certain way, or I don't get the job I want. In other places I get the things I want no matter how I dress.
Well, Cody, you keep ignoring the reality that for some people no matter how badly they want it, they don't have or may never have the amount of money that can help pay back these loans, yet you advocate that idea as if it's as good as a Christian advocating strict obedience to The Bible as if that's the only way.
If all that you have been saying so far on this board, Cody is to be viewed as I'm viewing it, then I'd have to make the guess that then when someone would take out student loans and started having problems paying them back despite them doing everything they could to do it, then you'd be concluding without listening to their side of the story, that they should have read the fine print. As for you thinking someone is going to have you killed, sorry, murder isn't something I advocate for any reason and at this point, I'm not really sure what your point is any longer other than you being a troll who wants to shill for the system for which you stand rather than try to understand anything some of us in the blindness community go through and in the way you've chose to make your arguments by way of victim blame and comments used to despairage the middle class among the blind. As to you talking about why rocking shouldn't be acceptable in other places if it isn't acceptable at a job or job interview, let me help you out with that. Other places such as being on a park bench in so far as no one is sharing it with you, means that you're there by yourself on your own time even if that's a public place, so there for, it's your own business. So Cody, I hope your collectivism in so far as it's a risk to remove individualism gets your bills paid and allows you to be yourself in the end.
This goes to Chris.
I’m definitely sorry to hear that about how your mom acts about that and my parents did the same shit in terms of my rocking. Of course I began limiting it to when I was listening to music when I got to be 10 years old, and though it’s no different than what some sighted people do, that still barely mollified my parents, and they couldn’t even be happy with when I was rocking back and forth in a rocking chair. It was rocking I was doing, not trying to move the chair sexually, LOL. So my parents definitely bought in to that shit. They finally shut up about it as I got older, but I know they still have their ideas. As to me explaining things in a reasonable manner, I have no trouble with doing that with people who make an effort to learn. I will not be nice and reasonable much less gentle though, with token blind people like Cody, as he knows or should know what he’s been trained by society to do and of course if he wants to become a carbon-copy of the sighted so they don’t have to really examine their own attitudes and ableism they have either knowingly or unknowingly and if he feels comfortable living his life like that and he’s making that choice, then I truly do hope it works out for him, but I will not engage in a discussion or debate with these kind of people be they blind or sighted who dismiss my enjoyment of music and the way in which that enjoyment finds its expression as just a Blindism, nor will I watch as these shameless hedonists of power blame the less fortunate of the blindness community for their own problems without even investigating and seeing what the root of the problem for this sector of the blindness community might be in the first place. I recognize that some who truly don’t know about all this might be shocked by my anger in these posts, but we should be not only getting angry at this kind of thing, but we should be speaking with this anger and calling this bullshit for what it really is. I call the testing that Vocrehab agencies have us do before they’ll even consider paying for college classes institutional discrimination, not an agency just trying to protect its interest and who are trying to be well-intentioned about it. I call the blind among us who act as if none of these things of which I speak as token blind people shilling for the system, not blind people who’ve managed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, for no one lives in a vacuum, even when being highly independent. I call discrimination as such, not us just having to concede certain freedoms in order that we can “play the game” as it’s been referred to on here by some people.
So I’ll have more later when I revisit this topics page again later today, and thanks for your comments Chris. I really appreciate them.
James
Cody, you seem to live in a very black and white world. It is either this way or that way. Let me assure you the world is full of binaries. In other wrods, it's full of greay areas.
Yes James, I understand that. its one of the reasons I think we need to adjust
the system. But I also think that there are ways, especially for blind people, to
go to college without going drastically into debt. Like I said, try starting at a
comunity college, work toward some scholarships, go to an inexpensive college
instead of an expensive one. Make some sacrifices. If its not important enough
to you, then don't do those things, but you can't expect to be on the same level
without having put in the same work. You want to work in psychology or
whatever, then its no one's fault but you're own that you aren't doing that right
now. You can play the victim all you want, but you're the one who took the
classes you took. You're the one who signed his name on the dotted line. No
one made you do that. No one from the blind services office put a gun to your
head and told you to do medical transcription or they'd kill you. You chose to go
along with them. Now you get to reap the benefits. I get that you're unhappy
about that, but it doesn't mean it isn't your fault.
James, I agree with you regarding Cody. I'm just saying that in your times doing the social work thing, you will encounter countless people like Cody, that are also sighted. You may end up having to engage in discussions with them, and most of the time it will be fruitless. But, what if that person is your employer? See what I mean? You also have to decide if it's worth it even engaging or not. Now, as to the rocking thing, I know you move the chair sexually damnit. You are rocking to get off. How many stains does your chair have on it? LOL, seriously, I used to rock as a kid. When I was about 9 or 10, I learned to control it. My parents wouldn't get me a rocking chair, so I wore out a spot on my bedroom carpet rocking to the music. I'd stop whenever someone walked in bc I'd get hell for it. Now, I have 2 rocking chairs. Hell, I used to have a porch swing in my place bc I loved the motion and the air blowing in my face as I swang.
Okay Cody, I hope your “I have all the answers” attitude and your continuing to look down on others who’s situations you’ve never had to live keeps the lights on and the phone bill paid for you. One reoccurring statement you keep saying on this page is: “You come on here acting like you’re the only one who had a bad childhood.”. So the fact that you keep making that comment and dismissing what I have to say when telling my story as me saying that I had a bad childhood and no one else did and attributing that idea which I never said implicitly or explicitly, shows right there that you obviously don’t give a shit about what others have gone through. Yes Cody, others besides me have had childhoods in which they’ve been put through and witnessed things they never should have had to have gone through, but that does not change the fact that I’m not all those other people, I’m me, I’m James and this is my story I’m telling, not anyone else.
Also, it’s funny that you accuse me, again with no proof what-so-ever of not going to a community college back when I took classes for Med Transcription, guess what, Hocking Technical College is a community college and it’s right up the road from where I live right now. Furthermore, at this point, it’s funny that you still keep saying that it’s my fault 100% in that I listened to the counselor and what she had to say when I began the process to get in to college for Med Transcription. That also shows me that for all your talk of agreeing that parts of the system are bad, that you really don’t care about anyone or what they have to go through. Others here in Ohio who’ve had to deal with our Vocrehab agency are having the same problems as I am, so what’s their problem? They just not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps either? If I’m not mistaken about the role of a Vocrehab agency, it’s role is to pay for assistive technology for college classes, the classes themselves, books for the classes, O&M lessons if needed and job placement once that becomes appropriate to the situation, and it’s there to do all that, as most of the blind and visually impaired who need their services don’t exactly have $100,000.00 and beyond lying around in a bank somewhere and should they start hording their S.S.I. payments assuming they get that, then they’ll have to wonder about not if, but when Social Security will get note of it somehow and bust their ass for going over the cap they say you can have saved in the bank and when I started collecting S.S.I. back two years ago, it specifically said that you can only have $2000.00 and no more than that and I read it right in braille in the notices they sent me as well as hearing it from the mouth of the woman who went through the application process with me, so unless blind people do that option to save up the money so as not to need student loans, or vocrehab’s help financially, then there’s really nothing practical that can be done and this only illustrates the danger of the ideas promoted by you and others who refuse to live life and do jobs as well as build systems based in reality and its constraints. Honestly, and I’m sure you’ll find something in this next comment to be pedantic about, but here goes. If I had it to do over again which I don’t, I would have told those Vocrehab assholes to go fuck themselves and I would have checked in to at least scholarships, but there’s a point that if you don’t look at, then I hope others will, and that is really what I said a moment ago about other blind people in situations similar to mine, but unlike me they don’t have a big thing of settlement money laying around in a couple of bank accounts somewhere, so they have no choice but to rely on Vocrehab and unless the counselor they have is willing to go further with them and there’s few who will, then they’re limited in their options. I suspect unfortunately though, that no solution is going to be good enough for you and that you in the end aren’t going to be happy with any attempt us who are lower on the rungs of the blindness latter make to better things for ourselves that doesn’t involve doing it at someone else’s expense and putting others down in the process so we can be on top. So keep posting, and if you see my comments and future postings written such that they’re not addressed personally to you as this one is, it’s because I’m honestly finished wasting my time attempting to talk to you and have you see the reality of what the lower classes of the visually impaired have to go through. So the bottom line is that there’s my situation where I could have and probably should have used my settlement money for college and got away from Vocrehab, but this doesn’t change the fact that they’re only going to treat other blind people this way who truly have no means by which to pay for college or the things I mentioned and knowing the things you’ve been saying, I suspect I have a good idea of what you’ll say to that which is probably something along the lines of: “Well, don’t worry about them, just focus on yourself.”.
Yeah, cause that attitude spread throughout our society and treated as the norm today has absolutely no harmful effects on us as a people what-so-ever. It’s not at all to blame for why some of the things in our country are fucked up and as you continue to say that no one held a gun to my head to use Vocrehab, fair enough, but that also doesn’t change the fact that despite my yelling and screaming about them to family, and others, even ones in The NFB you love so much, I was, and am still told over and over again that I need them for what I want to do, and yes, even people in The NFB when I asked them for help with dealing with Vocrehab kept on about how I need them and then in the same breath agreed with me about how bad they are, so I really don’t even know what you’re about at this point and that’s the problem, you’re in a system that’s going to not only shape and mold you as they already have clearly, but unless you balance out going along with them and thinking for yourself and if you lose the ability to have any sort of identity of self at all, then not only will I or others not know who you are or what things or morals for which you stand, but you won’t even know that either, so as said before, hope it all works out for you.
James
Hi Chris.
I agree with what you’re saying and I’m usually good with keeping my temper under control with the codys of the world, especially ones who would act that way at a job and so I’ll continue to do that and now I’m at the point where I really don’t have much more to say where Cody and his arguments are concerned.
James
Ok James, clearly you have zero reading comprehension skills, or the ability
to extrapolate. So I'll just let you be the angry young man you clearly are.
When you decide to grow up and realize that your ideals don't reflect reality,
you'll probably understand what it is I'm talking about. I suspect you already
do, since you admitted you'd do it differently if you could. The only thing I'm
saying is you should have done it differently the first time, and you can't blame
other people for not doing that. But, you're clearly not able to comprehend that.
I wish you the best of luck with finding someone to carry you through the rest
of your life until you decide to start doing it for yourself.
I'm sorry James.
The title of this board says.
"I have blindisms, and society should accept them, or they are wrong.
You came to bitch about that, and that's okay.
But when you bitch, others are going to say what they think.
You went from rocking, to jobs, to struggling to pay bills and so on.
Am I correct you believe you should be allowed to do whatever your blindisms are, and be totally accepted?
On the lights. I can see light but it does nothing to help me, so I simply don't use them.
I live alone, so unless someone comes over that can use lights, they are off.
It is a waste of my money even to turn on a light for my neighbors. Why?
Now, when I lived with seeing people, they'd do the lights, not me.
I can see them, so I turn them off if they need to be.
I can't see how not using lights is weird when people that need them can flip a switch.
When I have blind visitors, I always ask if they can see lights. If not, we party in the dark.
Laughing.
Wow! Barranca Grande, it definitely sounds like you have some issues with anger that you need to work out in your life. After reading through all the posts on this board topic, I cannot help but wonder how far in life you could go if only you would be willing to put all your energy and passion into pursuing the things in life that you really want instead of ranting and raving about how unfair life has been for you.
Here is the bottom line though, as far as I know, life is not fair to anyone regardless if they are blind or sighted, or black or white, or rich or poor. In fact, I am sure everyone who has posted to this board topic could probably provide at least one example in their lives where they felt as though life was simply not fair to them.
However, how you choose to deal with things in your life is totally up to you. Attending college while living on Social Security without the assistance of vocational rehabilitation while not going into debt can be a rather challenging thing to do. However, despite the fact that it may be difficult to do, it is still something that is possible to do. But I highly doubt that bitter debates on these board topics will do a whole lot in terms of achieving this goal.
However, if all you want to do is rant and rave about how life is simply not fair, perhaps you might consider posting your topics in the rant board topic category instead of the news and views board topic category. This board topic diffidently does not come across as being news worthy to me.
James, I think you are passionate about this subject and I agree with what you're saying. As to Cody, he just is who he is. He has lack of insight in some areas like this. Most people either like or hate me. I think that may be your issue too. People will either think you're angry or cool. Personally, I think you're pretty cool. You're forceful in your points, but that's not necessarily a bad thing if done correctly.
Hi ForReal and Crazy Cat. Thank you for posting. Have a nice evening.
Hi Chris. Thanks for the complements. I get what you're saying and yeah, some people are who they are and they'll either change soon, down the road, or not at all.
Anyway, I hope you're having a good evening. I should be on here most of the night posting and just mixing it up in this bitch. LOL.
James
That's your new game plan? You're going to try to engage in a discussion with
the kill them with kindness tactic? Someone doesn't agree with you, so you're
just going to totally ignore the fact that they said anything. Would you like to
take your ball and go home too? How pathetically immature. Honestly, you act
like you're twelve, or at least you have on here. I'm kind of ashamed I debated
you now. One should not duel the unarmed.
Hi Cody.
Yep, you've shown that there's nothing I can do or say that's going to be right according to you. I give my arguments, I'm an angry guy who continues to act like a kid. I explain things by way of a thought experiment, and go in to further detail about my story, then I'm blaming others. I tell people who truly aren't being effected by knowing that I rock to music to mind their own fucking business if they don't like it and that's twisted in to me not wanting people to post on my board. The problem is that you, ForReal and Crazy Cat are continuing to quote-mine my words, take them out of context and twist them to attribute things to me that I didn't even say, as well as accuse me of having issues I don't even have, such as an anger issue. Am I angry, yes, is that an "Anger Issue", that implies a pathological process in the way that you would accuse someone of having memory problems simply because they forgot for a moment where they put the car keys, no it is not.
If the three of you and by the three of you, I'm talking about Crazy Cat, ForReal and you Cody don't like what I have to say, then as you said that no one held a gun to my head and forced me to use the state agency to pay for my classes you little punk smartmouth kid, well no one is physically forcing you to read what I have to say. All I'm seeing here is you accusing me of what you've accused me of and when I see your recent posts, all it shows is that you're actually doing the very things of which you accuse me. You're the one who's crying about what I say in my posts, and you're acting as if you have no choice but to read them wear as with me, certain situations in my life were that I couldn't just do what I did accept for how I did it back then in terms of college and looking for work. I did the best with what I had at the time and last time I checked, I'm not legally obligated to explain my situation to bullying and heartless little punks like you. Yeah, I know you're young and you think you have it all figured out, but there'll come a time where you get down and out as once I was and you'll either stick your head in the sand or face the reality of your situation. Maybe then, you'll see what I was trying to teach you.
Why do I get the feeling you were one nasty little bully in high school? You would have fit in nicely at our school for the blind pushing around the younger kids and trying to tell them that it was for their own good. Well, have a nice evening and I hope your amorality keeps you warm at night and your utilities paid. ForReal, you just worry about your own lights and whether or not they’re on, and Crazy Cat, if you are worried about any emotional issues with me, I'd advise you to worry about your own issues if any. If you feel the need to seek the help of one of those quack doctors who call themselves Psychiatrists and give out fake labels of things such as Bipolar, Anxiety Disorder and Depression none of which are diseases, but symptoms of deeper problems, then you go ahead and you just worry about your own mental health, sound good?
James
Couple things here, and I'm sorry if I'm repeating anyone else. I've tried to read over and follow this as best I can, but may have missed something.
Many people say that we as blind people make a bigger deal out of blindisms than do sighted ones. I think they perceive that because most sighted people don't have the balls to tell us to our faces that we're demonstrating a blindism. They don't want to hurt or offend us, dont' feel it's their place, etc. I was lucky to have family that pointed those out when I was a child, and worked with me to break those habits. Not everyone is that fortunate, because some families just accept it, or think the blind child can't help it. then it's the teachers who get tasked with trying to correct these blindisms, but many professionals in the blindness field handle things like that very, very poorly. James wasn't far-fetched in calling them the torturers from the blind schools. I've heard plenty of those stories.
But anyway, back to my point about some blind people have this idea that we care more about blindisms than the sighted world. No, it's just that most won't say it to our faces. But I've been around sighted people who are totally nice to a blind person's face, and then afterward point out to me all the blindisms that person had, how strange they looked, how they'd never hire them. I've overheard conversations about this very thing. Just because someone doesn't have the guts to say it directly to you doesn't mean your mannerisms aren't getting noticed, talked about, and may be denying you that job, or whatever other opportunity. We as blind people are often the only ones willing to call each other on the carpet, and if another blind person gets offended, oh well. We know we can do better as blind people, and we're not afraid to say so. Many sighted people don't know we can do better, or even if they do, they get too afraid of hurting or offending us. But believe me, they notice.
I also don't understand this thing with you and rehab, James. Rehab, as you said, is there to pay for assistive technology, college tuition, books, and whatever else is needed to make us employable...in the field of our own choosing. I stress that last part. This is not the 1940's, and we do have choices about what career path we pursue. Rehab can't deny you services, funding, or anything else simply because your counselor doesn't happen to agree with your chosen profession. One of the big-wigs at my state rehab agency didn't like my career path and tried to threaten that services and funding could be denied if I didn't go into the career my counselor was suggesting. I've also had a different counselor try to force me into taking a job where i knew I would be a terrible fit for the position, and threaten to cut my services because I didn't take the job they thought I should take. But in both instances, I knew my rights, I advocated for myself, and rehab ended up paying for all my college tuition, in the major of my choice. I still have services, even though I did not take the job my counselor thought I should. Yes, rehab counselors will often try to overstep themselves. They think they hold all the cards, but they don't. If you and a rehab counselor ever have to face off again, states have Client Assistance Programs to help resolve these kinds of disputes. All I'm saying is, you may have to get pretty assertive, but you don't have to give into a counselor's suggestions, threats, or other attempts to intimidate you into doing what they think you should.
As a side note, these rights that you have where rehab is concerned are largely afforded to you by the organized blindness movement you seem to so hate. And I don't mean just NFB, ACB has done some advocating in the rehab realm, too. Think about that before you bash either or both organizations.
Okay, to anyone who still has issues with me not going with the party line on this bullshit, I'll from here on out refer you back to Post 64 of this thread in which I give at length the danger of reducing certain things down to Blindisms.
James
Warning, all continuing questions for those who continue to debate and make at homonym arguments against me and who twist what I say, from here on out, I'll refer you to Post 64 of this thread so you can look at why I have a problem with this party line about things being called Blindisms and those to whom I'm speaking, know who they are. To new posters, I'll discuss this with you and answer certain questions you may have that the posts didn't cover, but the posts really do say it all. Should you continue to have issues even afterwards, then that's going to be for you to sort out.
On to the next post below.
Okay, all I know is that Vocrehab at least in so far as it exists in this state is falling apart and options are limited and I can at least say Shadowcat, your post was more well put together in that you simply stated your ideas rather than go the way Cody has and yes I went that way in responding to him as well and I’m going to be working on not letting him get to me. That being said though, you guys are just not going to hear me go with the party line on all this and I’m just not going to tell you guys what you want to hear about how you’re right and rocking for any reason what so ever is evil, bad and makes us look stupid. Sighted people do this sometimes to music and I’ve seen some of them and none of them get called on it and when we do it, we tell one another that it’s Blindisms and that we should stop, thus opening the door to one day possibly having some asshole who’s sighted when we want to make a point about something effecting us, end up telling us something like: “What do you guys care, you guys are yelling at one another about rocking, and yet you guys say nothing about it to the sighted and so what about your blind-on-blind discrimination.”. What then. Sighted people who are uneducated towards us unless willing to open their minds already will be bigoted towards us with Ableism, so why compound the issue by doing the whole “No Blindism” thing and thus giving them an excuse to discriminate against us in the same way that women were and still are sometimes still blamed for being raped, because of what clothes they have on. So yes, you’re going to hear a completely different message with me so that’s just how it’s going to be in so far as you talk to me about all this.
James
Slippery slope falacy, thy name is James.
I'm honestly wondering how much sight you've ever had, and how much you understand body language. Because I honestly don't think you have a clue what most blindisms communicate. Rocking while listening to music is one thing, some people tap their feat or do other things while listening to music as well. But when a lot of sighted people i've seen move with the music do it while sitting down, its a very restrained thing. Where as a lot of blind people put a lot of motion in to it. As others have said, not only is it visually distracting, but from an audio point of view, its also annoying, because their voice is constantly moving. A lot of us have been told to look in the direction of the person we're talking to, and some of the extreme movement, from a visual point of view, makes that dificult to say the least.
Same thing with leaning your head way down. that communicates disinterest to the speaker in question.
there are so many visual tells that a body naturally communicates, or communicates based on social conditioning, and yes, sighted people that have issues with these things aren't taken as seriously as those that don't. Its just that simple. We know that fully sighted people consider the audio information exchanged in a dialogue between 5 and 10 percent of the total volume of information exchanged. Body language is the other 90 percent. Its been this way for thousands of years, and its not something that's likely to hugely change, and that's before we get into some of the stranger things that blind people do, like wave their hands around, etc. I just can't understate how weird some of this stuff looks, as someone with some sight, compared to the average person in society.
Again, I want to state, that some sighted people do strange things as well in public, but they're also judged for it, because humans are instinctively visual creatures.
And unlike you, they can actually see the way people react to them, they can, weather they understand, choose to react to it etc... See the non auditory subtext that's being communicated by their body language. Someone who dresses well, seems normal based on their ability to communicate, and isn't doing strange things, by the standards of society, that attract attention are going to get much better service in said society.
The fact of the matter is, that we evolved as tribal creatures. Being able to visually identify people who didn't have our norms/looks saved peoples lives in the past, and that instinct based on self protection is still a huge factor in modern society.
I honestly don't care what people do in their homes. But I know some blind people that don't have it together socially, and I'll admit, that when ever I met up with them, I basically had to understand that they were going to do things that attracted negative attention, caused us to be treated with less respect/not taken as seriously by people we actually needed to help/serve us, or just not go out with them at all. Maybe i'm an asshole, but I felt in several cases that dealing with that level of absolute cringe/a lower or worse quality of service from places I would go with these people just wasn't worth it. I didn't want to be viewed as a lesser person. and let me make it absolutely fucking clear... If sighted people acted like these people, they'd get weird looks/not be taken seriously by people either, so its not exclusively a blind issue. But I am the kind of person who doesn't like being put on the spot, so being out in public with people who don't respect me or themselves enough not to act weird just isn't something I can deal with most times.
I had a friend for example that would move around a lot, and I mean a lot in public, would spin around in public, with his arms out, loudly drum on his legs and chest speak extremely loudly etc. Not only was he at times in peoples way/in their space, not only did he know that he was viewed as weird, but he didn't care. He couldn't have a non awkward interaction with people in the service industry for the most part, and so by association I was painted with the same weird brush he earned for him self in society.
He wanted to be taken more seriously by people, but was unwilling to change his behaviors until most of his friends decided on mass that he was just too much trouble to deal with.
But my question is, would you seriously hire someone like that to work for your company, knowing that they'd go out in to the world representing your brand? Would you be completely comfortable associating with someone like this in public, and the lower quality of service that comes along with it? and last but not least... Have you thought about what judgements you make about people based on the way they speak/the way they think/act... well, anything that you can relate to from a non visual perspective? Can you seriously tell me that no factors like that play a part at all in weather or not you'd associate with someone/how seriously or capably you'd view them? Because I don't think you realistically go threw the world making no judgements at all.
I think the bigger issue is that you don't feel these judgements should apply to you, because you don't understand/take any value in how the visual aspects of society work.
You don't gain anything/can't really evaluate people on that kind of level, and thus don't understand why other people do/understand just how critical sight is in communicating.
You probably set standards for people you want to be friends with that are just as arbitrary as visual ones... Because everyone judges, weather they want to admit it or not.
Evaluating things and grouping them is one of the things our brains are best at, because it was those kinds of actions that kept us alive years ago.
But looking at things realistically, if someone sees you as strange/weird/ not what they're looking for, I can understand why they wouldn't want to hire you when they have other options available that are just as qualified/can effectively represent their brand better than you. Its a cost vs benefit thing. they can get more for their money by hiring someone who is qualified on both fronts. the way modern society functions demands that companies maximize profits. Just as in many ways, those who can't function in society aren't as valuable to the work force as those who can... people who have learned to do jobs that can be done more capably by an AI won't be as valuable as the AI they're being replaced by.
Its just evolution.
If I were to look at a person like what you described who was spinning and all you described, I'd first be wondering why they'd be doing that in the first place and the motions you described in that guy sound more like Autism than anything else and rather than judge him like you did, did you even consider wondering about the root of the problem, like who the assholes were who might have just let him be like that rather than at least making sure that these mannerisms weren't due to some organic brain issue that for all anyone knew could be faitle at some point?
As for sight, I had good sight in my left eye up until I was 14 and so I'd see my friend sitting beside me rocking at the blind school and I was focused enough on what he was saying that I paid no attention to his rocking and the root of that problem, was that even if his dad could have taught him not to rock, that's just the point, his dad didn't teach him shit nor did he do anything to improve the kid's skills. Not sure if that's the answer you're looking for, but that's my answer.
As for it being evolution, aside from it allowing us to evolve to become what we are today, that's all it does. Evolution doesn't make us rip on one another for the slightest mannerisms, we do. So now, let's just blame the genes. Nice. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Pinker would love this board.
James
I just went back and read the part about Hitler. You guys actually seriously thought that I was saying that Cody should get killed by Hitler, what the hell’s a matter with you guys, seriously! I’m not even joking when I say that. Fun fact, my grandpa on my mom’s side of the family actually fought against that blood-thirsty Bastard so why would I even suggest anything like that, Jesus Christ! What I said was: Maybe you'd be better off in Germany if Hitler was still in power, as you're clearly not happy until everyone acts the way you do, just like how The Nazis did when they were in power back in the 1930s and 1940s! That’s what I said to Cody!
What I meant by that was Cody is pushing this conformity shit, no differently than The Nazis did when they were in power. No what happened when everyone became like Hitler? I’ll tell you, they were given hardly any food, were left to basically rot and when The Russians invaded, they made what Hitler did to The Jews, Homosexuals, The Mentally Disabled and others he killed look like a slap on the hand. In other words, Cody would be attempting to conform in Nazi Germany to them like he is to what certain areas of the mainstream want today, and if he does not learn to balance out doing a job and doing all that it requires with thinking for himself, then when it all falls down around him and he’s having happen to him something similar to what the German citizens went through towards the end of WWII, then he’ll have no one to blame, but himself. The fact that you guys would make accusations about me saying that he’d be better off with harm coming to him in Nazi Germany with Hitler still in power when you could have easily read carefully through that sentence of the post to know that that’s not at all what I meant is beyond contemptible! I think this all really says more about you guys than anything else and I’m still trying to figure out how when I say that I rock, you guys immediately bring up bad hygiene as if you already know I don’t clean myself. Sorry, but if a sighted person assumed that about you guys with no basis in fact, you’d scream “discrimination” and rightfully so, but you guys doing this to others who don’t fit the perfect little blind person mold only proves that I’m not wrong in keeping my distance from the mainstream in so far as it says that we have the right to commit blind-on-blind discrimination and any sighted person who would make that charge against us to distract from their own discrimination of us no differently than white people raising the “Black-on-Black Crime” defense to distract from their own racism though wrong to do it, would still have a point in this case. You guys are committing blind-on-blind discrimination in terms of hating on one of us who rock even if it’s just to music and it’s going to be on you as to how all that plays out. So at this point with anything that happens to you guys because of the sighted who might discriminate against you and how you might feel compelled to scream and cry about that the next time it happens, I have someone you can go scream at, the person in the mirror, because until you deal with the blind-on-blind discrimination you’ve unleashed, you really aren’t going to have the right to bitch and moan the next time a sighted person says: “Does she or he need help with cutting their food?” rather than asking you themselves! Maybe then you’ll see in a moment of clarity by way of a sighted person doing it to you how you’ve been treating your own, all in the name of having a place in the lovely system!
James
James, analogy, look it up, it'll be good for you. Hile me!
Post 93.
You’d be wondering why the person was spinning like they were?
If that is true, I’m confused.
If spinning is a blindism, and should be perfectly acceptable, then why would you wonder?
You know the persons blind, right, so whatever they’re doing is probably just a blindism, or if we can’t use that term, normal behavior for a blind person.
Correct?
The next time you need to deal with a service person, what if they ended every sentence with the word peaches.
How may I help you? Peaches.
You wanted a burger and an order of fries? Peaches.
Smile. Crazy huh?
You keep using the fact that people rock to music, but they are doing the rocking because they are listening to music?
If they have to have a serious conversation, even with the music on, they stop rocking, and talk to the person they need to talk to, then they go back to rocking, provided the song hasn’t changed.
The rocking is different from a blindism rocking believe it or not.
The only time I spin is if I’m dancing and my partner spins me, or I them.
I don’t just start to spin say at the bus stop.
But, okay. I think I understand you.
If it feels right to you, continue with it. It won't bother me any.
Barranca Grande, you are right when you say that you did the best that you could do given your past circumstances. However, that was then and this is now. Perhaps what happened to you in your past was not fair. However, that was then and this is now. Perhaps there was no other way for you to be able to deal with the things that have happened to you in your past, but what are you going to choose to do about it today? Are you going to choose to be someone who comes across to others as an angry bitter person who is somehow entitled to certain things in life simply because you are blind or the things that have happened to you in your past? This is how you come across to me. Is this the person that you want to be?
Crazy_Cat. It looks like your own outlook on life has really changed for the better in the last few months or so, which is great.
To anyone who’s still confused by what I meant, I refer those said people to Post 64.
James
Post 64 was exactly the post that confused me.
You aren’t part of the mainstream, but you pay your bills, because it is expected of you.
You say sighted people swing their heads from side to side, but I’ll tell you, they do not, and if they do, it isn’t thought of as a blindism, but mental disability.
I am exactly myself when I sit still in a chair and not rock, or swing my head.
I dress nicely daily, even if I’m just going to hang out because I feel it reflex on me.
You say you dress properly for an interview, so you are acting in the mainstream.
If you didn’t, you’d be out of the mainstream.
I got confused, because at the start, and I said this before, you are defending blindisms, or saying they don’t exist, because these are normal things blind people should be allowed to do.
You say that in other post as well, and you don’t mean in the privacy of your home.
On top of that, you leave your thesis, and start talking about jobs, financial assistants, and other things, so are we talking about blindisms, or just what you are pissed off about generally?
To anyone who's still confused about what I've said in this thread, I refer you back to post 64.
James
Looks like that's all the clarification anyone's gonna get, so there's no more point really.
Don't worry, there'll be more, I'm just not going to explain every microscopic detail to those who I'm not completely convinced aren't intentionally misunderstanding what I say just so they can bask in their moral superiority. Again, I am not legally, ethically or morally obligated to explain every little detail as to why I hold the views I hold, anymore than anti-gay or other bigots are obligated to justify their beliefs to me, unless there's a proven risk that they could use these beliefs as a means by which to harm someone with whom they disagree.
James
Confusion on the part of the listener is due only to the inability of the speaker
to communicate properly. So if we are confused by your vaunted post 64, it is
because you are either unwilling or incapable of communicating your point
properly, something I noticed about you on your first board post. You are still in
that stage when you think that, so long as you can make your sentences
flowery enough, you will come off as intelligent. But all you really come off as is
a boy wearing his father's metaphorical suit. You put on airs you aren't entitled
to or capable of upholding, and it makes your posts muddled and confused,
rather than the erudite rhetoric you seem to think they are. You
overcompensate, and don't realize that it makes you less clear, not more
intelligent.
Blindness of the Intellect
While we’ve had sighted who believed that they know how to teach the blind and because they believed that the blind never need any help at all, they’ve externalized helplessness on to the blind, giving the impression that absolute independence will make everything better. Some of the sighted who think and act this way come out of the various schools for the blind and similar places. They believe that when they push blind kids to be completely independent with no help given at all, then these kids will be able to progress to a sun-lit utopia where they’ll never need help from anyone. Those who continue to need help, who can’t grasp how to do certain steps of a task completely on their own or who choose not to conform to this non-reality-based system are shunned, abused and cast aside. They’re treated this way, because this is what utopians do, they believe that negative traits whatever those might be are within whatever group they claim to oppose and that if we just convert, silence or eradicate said group, then the ones who believe in the utopian vision along with its leaders can all progress to their wonderful utopia.
For The Christian Right in this country headed up by Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham, the utopian idea is for a Christian United States where The Bible is the supreme law of the land. They believe that all who are not saved should be saved. People such as women with jobs, liberals, homosexuals or anyone in The GLBT Community or people of different faiths should be either converted, silenced or eradicated. This happens because this group has externalized evil with the belief that because they have their utopian visions by which to live their lives, that evil is external and not within them. Given this outlook, they now have taken on the characteristics of those who they oppose.
On the other side, there’s The New Atheist Movement headed up by the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennet. Christopher Hitchens wrote the book “God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Sam Harris wrote the two main books The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. Daniel Dennet wrote the book Breaking the Spell, then Richard Dawkins wrote the book entitled The God Delusion and these books all put together form the ideas of the movement. This movement doesn’t have the frightening and well-financed systems of indoctrination put forth by television and radio as do The Christian Right, but they do have well-worded arguments that certain people of the public, most of whom are disgusted with the religious chauvinism of the right have flocked towards.
The agenda of The New Atheists is disturbing. They believe that our road to collective salvation is through reason and science. They believe that morally, we are progressing away from evil acts such as murder and other acts. They believe that if we put our trust in reason and science, and that if the religious are converted, silenced or even eradicated, then we can progress morally as a species. When they speak of religion, they attack it as being backwards, irrational and dangerous. Sam Harris in his book The End of Faith calls for attacks on The Muslim World that could have been easily said by any fundamentalist Christian pastor. In one passage Harris says: “Some ideas and propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for even believing them.”. Then he goes on to call for a possible nuclear first strike against The Islamic World, saying that it would be unthinkable, but that it may be the only course of action we have given what Islamists believe. Harris mistakes a few small subgroups and groups of criminals and terrorists for the whole Muslim population of the world, no different than a racist who mistakes a couple of black criminals for the whole group.
These arguments by Harris and similar ones made by Hitchens not only endorse our illegal wars in Iraq, but they are also anti-intellectual. They also call for violence and murder as a way to remove roadblocks on the road to human progress. These New Atheists call for using education to reason people out of their religious belief, but because they do not accept human limitations and the fact that evil is within all of us and not just terrorists, then this education for which they have such love, is in the end, indoctrination. Though Dawkins is different in that he doesn’t support the imperialist projects lead by us that are going on in The Middle East, he still gives the belief that those who are religious whether moderately or completely are backwards in their thinking, are uneducated and probably evil. In his book The God Delusion, he describes God in terms that are as anti-intellectual as any Christian Right member ranting against homosexuality. Dawkins gives the following: “The God of The Old Testament is the most unpleasant character in all of fiction.”. He goes on to say that the god of the Bible is racist, homophobic, a malevolent bully, misogynistic and megalo-maniacal among other insults. Dawkins proves blind to his anti-intellectualism of which he accuses his opponents. He also through this ignorance, shows that he has little to no understanding of how the real world actually works and the seduction of evil and that even the most well-intentioned can be the most evil, for when they believe in the myth of inherent goodness as well as the belief that this can be educated to all, then there’s no end to their horrors and vanity.
In The Blindness Community such utopian visions flourish and have caused problems for the blind of the lower classes. Whether or not they rock, either to music or without, press on their eyes regardless of the reason or move their head from side to side or whatever the direction may be, all these are, rather than investigated by the blind or sighted, they’re just dismissed as what are called “Blindisms which is the term used for some of these mannerisms. The excuse given for this, is that as this is primarily a sighted world, then the blind should all conform to it. This once taken to its logical conclusion puts the responsibility for what anti-blind bigots may do or say to us, on us and takes it off their shoulders. The token blind people of this ideology when confronted with the truth of a blind person who rocks regardless of if it’s to music or not go on to make at homonym arguments that these blind people probably don’t shower or probably dress like slobs. These are no different than bigots who when they find out that someone is gay, automatically make arguments about whether or not the gay person is a child molester, rapist or has countless sexual partners.
Should a blind person rock in the course of a conversation regardless of whether or not music is playing and should the other person have trouble hearing them with the constant motion of their voice then simply asking them to sit still for the remainder of the conversation usually helps. Further work on teaching them to not rock while on a job interview or at a job by having conversations with them about ways they can reframe from doing this may be key, but the goal would be to have these conversations as an on-going thing that takes in to consideration that we all have oddities some of which are benign, some of which can be intrusive rather than one conversation and that’s it. Instead, the blind are told that they’ll never get ahead in life rocking or pressing on their eyes and as for eye-pressing, it’s usually never investigated to see whether or not their eyes hurt and them putting pressure on them is what they think might help whatever the pain might be. They’re talked to about these mannerisms in ways that are as anti-intellectual, cruel and abusive as any sighted bigot uneducated about the blind. These token blind people, usually in positions of power and authority in the upper-classes of the blind, have externalized oddities and other physical movements not within the mainstream on to the lower classes of the blind, no different than how The Christian Right or The New Atheists externalize evil on to people who don’t share in their utopian ideologies. These token blind people believe that if we just do everything we can to not look blind provided that we can’t actually get complete vision given some of the eye conditions from which some of us suffer, then we must be broken and reshaped in the image of “The Perfect Blind Person. Ones who don’t conform to this idea, are silenced, cast aside or ignored, as well as abused verbally, emotionally and probably physically in so far as it’s these people who act this way as first these same kids when at schools for the blind who would possibly bully the lower classes of the blind. Once these non-conformed lower classes of the blind are either forced to conform or are cast aside, then we can progress on to our sun-lit utopia of human perfectibility for the blind. These ideas are not rational. Within these utopian visions, these token blind people forget, assuming they were ever taught that sighted have some of their own motions they make, such as swinging from side to side in a desk chair while thinking, rocking slightly or outright to music or if they’re nervous, talking while waving their hands about and gritting their teeth. Yet through all this, we do not go on witch-hunts and crusades nation and even world-wide to convert or cast aside these people in The Sighted Community, nor do we call these mannerisms Sightisms and tell these people that this is or at least we want this to be “A Blind World”, so there for they have to never do these Sightisms, for they would look odd to us and should anyone in our movement want to be bigots to them, then this idea by implication would make any bigotry visited upon them their fault and we will have thus, shirked our responsibility for how we treated them, just like what’s being done to the lower classes by the upper-classes of The Blindness Community, as well as by some of the close-minded of The Sighted Community in the name of progress and conformity.
So in the minds of the blindness utopians, abuse of the lower classes of the blind is now justified. They speak of how this is a moral good to beat up on their own and they speak as if this is acceptable. Is this truly rational, is this moral? While at the school for the blind here in Ohio, I stood by boys who were told in front of everyone by sighted teachers and sometimes by other fellow students in ways and in words that could have been said by any ableist bigot, that no one would ever want them in the real world when they grew up if they didn’t stop the rocking or pressing on their eyes. I sat along-side other boys who were actually told by the youth leader of the dorm I was in my first year there: “I’m not happy with some of you guys and how you’ve been washing yourselves, so if I see any more uncleanliness with you guys, then I’ll start taking you in to the restroom and you’ll shower and I’ll watch every minute of you doing this to make sure you’re getting clean. You’ll be dressed in just swim shorts so you’re covered in certain ways, but I’ll watch you shower.”. Then there were boys who I saw screamed at for things that they should have probably been punished for in some manner and these things were ones that you would reprimand any kid, blind or sighted for, but they were still screamed at literally to the point that the anger didn’t even fit the scope of the situation. So what is the moral difference between any of this? I do not see one. Going back to what the youth leader said about showering, does that sound rational? Does it sound like something us blind people be we kids or adults should let someone do to us? Were that man to have been a closet child molester, would he have not been secretly getting off on watching us shower had he gone through with his plan? For kids among our group who might have been being molested at the time at home by who knows who and with them most likely not saying anything to any including us, would this act of his not have brought up for them periods of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Even if this man wasn’t a secret child molester and even if he had no feelings of sexual desire for young boys or any children, he still was prepared to commit if not legal transgressions by invading our personal space in such a fundamental way, then he was prepared to commit a moral transgression in that he was fully willing to scare us and make us possibly go on to have problems with how we viewed our bodies for the short term, or for all time after that event had he carried out his demented plan. This is a perfect example of what happens when people become utopian in their thinking, for there is no lengths to which they’ll go, especially depending on the situation to get what they want. We’ve seen this over and over throughout human history.
Utopian visions is what drove the evil and death Adolf Hitler brought to Germany when in the search for “The Perfect German Person”. It was present in the white people who enslaved blacks and who still discriminate against them in the form of The Prison Industrial Complex and it was present in the white settlers who came here and slaughtered The Native Americans. All were non-reality-based, all were utopian and all were evil ideas. Yet we continue acting as if those horrors are in the past, as if time is in a straight line to some final end point be it good or bad. For The New Atheists, it’s an end point to a world made better by reason and science along with the conversion or eradication of religious people, for The Christian Right, it’s an end point arrived at by the conversion and or eradication of GLBT people, people of different or no faiths, as well as it arriving in the form of believing in The Bible, Jesus Christ, signs and miracles and for The Blindness Utopians, the end point will come in the form of complete equality and a world free from what they consider to be Blindisms and blind people who need help in certain situations and this will come through abuse, the eradication of the need for help as well as casting aside the lower classes of the blind, at least those in the group who either can’t or won’t conform to such a dark utopian vision. Time and history are not linear, and if anything, our lives and life as a whole operates rather than linearly, it operates in cycles of light and darkness which the Greeks understood. The past and what came before is important. The Nazis and the horrors of which I spoke earlier are not evils that are beyond human understanding that once past, will never happen again and aside from the small murder here and there, we’re safe from evil. The evil and amorality which drove these horrors is as alive around us today as it was back then. This is the real danger in the belief of inevitable human progress. We discard the wisdom of the past at our own detriment and unless we begin listening to the voices of the past such as Dostoyevsky, Orwell, Tolstoy, Poe and Conrad, and unless we take to heart their lessons, then we kill ourselves first by what we do to others, then to ourselves. We do this physically to us and them, if not morally. Either way, unless we give up utopian visions of a perfect world and whichever group through who’s elimination we can make this world come about, as well as learn how to deal with issues by way of building systems of ethics that are realistic and take in to consideration, our limitations of being human, then we’ll collectively no longer have a future, at least one that is life-enhancing and life-affirming.
James
Committing Collective Moral Suicide
One other point that may be implied in my previous posting just before this one might be seen, but if not I’d like to explicitly state it here.
While some of The Blindness Utopians may not be actively cruel to fellow blind people who are in the lower classes, they’re still detrimental by virtue of the fact that while sighted people who want to be anti-blind bigots, if they see how The Blindness Utopians are treating fellow blind people of the lower classes, they can point to them and ask: “But what about you guys? You want to accuse us of bigotry and discrimination against you guys when you’re doing virtually the same to some of your own people.”. If not that, then the discrimination from the sighted in the form of non-accommodation and other methods can and does still happen for the simple fact that they get away with it, as The Blindness Utopians who can easily use their power and authority an deep ways to stop this are busy trying to mold the lower classes or middle class of the blind in to perfect carbon-copies of themselves and by extension, of the sighted so thus, they’re ultimately dangerous to us, as they in that regard, end up aiding the sighted peoples’ discrimination of us they sought to prevent.
James
I'm curious what independence you feel blind people shouldn't have, if being
encouraged to have as much independence as possible is apparently bad. Where
do you not want to be independent exactly?
Brake out the flame throwers, We've got a lot of straw man arguments we need to burn down.
In general I still contend that you don't actually have any honest way of evaluating how extreme/jarring/weird/potentially dangerous some blindisms are.
For example. There are huge visual differences in when/how/how much sighted people rock vs how much blind people do.
The spinning man I mentioned in my last post was arguably a safety hazard to people in many cases.
People only ended up avoiding getting clocked in the face by moving out of this mans way, and inconveniencing other members of society in the process...
I did also state that these behaviors were a result of him not caring about his actions, even when they were explained to him.
He doesn't have mental disabilities or other issues, so that's a non starter.
I'd also contend that the OP loses a lot of cred when he starts personally attacking others. One can't expect to be taken seriously as relates to not judging, when one judges other people...
But oh, wait. We're getting back to the parts of my post you clearly ignored about everyone making judgements.
The only difference here is that you have a different standard of what is right and wrong than many here do. that doesn't make it better or worse. It just makes it different.
Though if you're not capable of comporting yourself based on your own standards, I'm not sure why any arguments you make on that subject should be taken seriously. I don't mean that as a personal attack, I just simply think you've lost any rational dog in this fight.
Many of your arguments either partially or entirely rely on logical fallacy, and in my opinion having such structurally unsound arguments doesn't entitle you to the moral superiority with which you attack others, particularly when you're railing against people for flaws that you yourself have, even though you express and display them in different ways.
I think this is Terrance's little brother.
I had a similar thought actually.
I have beliefs as to what’s right and what’s wrong, and you just read about them in my posts today. I have a desire to see blind people have a life, but I’m not willing to do it by means of discrimination set forth by the blindness utopians.
James
So what system do you propose?
I'll second that question.
What is your plan?
Devilish Anthony, thank you for the compliment. I really appreciate it. I do not pretend to be perfect, or claim to know all the answers. However, I feel like I am in a better place these days. I have learned there is really nothing I can do about what has happened to me in the past, or how it has affected my life today, but there are still choices I can make in my life that can affect the quality of my life.
I find it really interesting how Barranca Grande keeps talking about how others wish to create some sort of utopian society, yet it seems as though so many of his posts on this board topic talk about how life should somehow revolve around his point of view as to how life should be.
When I first started to become blind, I did not want to be blind because I did not want to act in a manner that has been described on this board topic. I did not want to pick up all the weird behavioral habits I saw other blind people doing. However, now I know it is possible to be blind without displaying any of these strange behavioral habits. While I do my best to be polite and courteous towards anyone I meet, these weird behavioral habits still make me feel a bit uncomfortable, and I most likely would not interact with someone for very long with anyone who displays any of these weird behavioral habits.
And since I feel as though Barranca Grande is simply using this board topic to vent his feelings of anger and frustration in regards to his life, this is all I will say in regards to this topic. While this board topic has shown me that my life could be a lot worse, I also feel like this board topic is rather sad and tragic. And although I feel as though Barranca Grande does not necessarily deserve for me to feel this way, I still feel this way anyway. I sincerely hope that Barranca Grande can find the peace in life that he seems to be so desperately looking for in his life.
Oh my god, I’m so scared, now Blindisms are dangerous. At least according to 570. First they were distracting, then annoying and now they’re dangerous. Oh, the pain, the pain. Oh, how ever will I go on. What a load of horseshit. First of all 570 or 999 or 666 or whatever the hell your name is, I’m having a hard time even believing your story, and when I have seen blind people with the degree of asocialization of which you speak, it was mainly at the school for the blind and the kids who had this degree to the point where they were actually in danger of possibly being a danger, they were the ones who were just barely verbal if verbal at all, and who had many other disabilities most of which were probably neurological in nature for which they had no control and were probably never going to be able to be normalized in to controlling them and even if that were the case, that still gives The Blindness Utopians no right to cast them aside as freaks, just because they serve to these utopians as impediments to human progress and perfection for the visually impaired.
Next, as for your argument for the need to control all this because its evolution that makes us worry about that, that’s okay. Dawkins, Dennet, Harris and Hitchens misused human biology and The Theory of Evolution as well, to justify not only the myth of human progress, but also to explain why people wanted to oppress others as well as attempting to use it to explain religion which they call a series of Memes. They within this thought process, reduce the religiously inclined down to virus carriers and religion down to being a virus. Now where have we heard that shit before, oh yeah, when Hitler was calling the Jews bacteria and other lovely things. Okay, so discrimination, especially the type The Blindness Utopians are using as a means by which to justify their utopian visions is because not The Devil, but that evolution made them do it. Sorry Bitch, that guy who looked up your dress or that family friend who when you were a child, raped you can’t be blamed, you have to blame evolution. All evolution explains, is the evolvement of organisms, it does not explain inequality, discrimination or countries who destroy the working class in the name of Neo-Liberalism. The belief in this misuse of evolution is known not as Science, but The Cult of Science. In The Cult of Science, Evolution does for these people what The Bible does for The Christian Right, in that it explains everything and there for, these people believe that they have nothing left to learn. They’ve seen the future and it works. These Science-Cults tell us that we’re good, they tell us that we’re getting better as the days go by, and they warn us not to get in the way of progress. They offer easy answers, which is part of their attraction. We’ve seen movements like this before throughout history, we’d do well to beware these movements of today.
James
I'm curious, you've been against everything it seems. Science, the system,
blind organizations, driving toward independence, expecting blind people to act
normally, fitting in, so on and so forth. is there anything you actually stand for,
or are you just against everything? The only thing you've really said about
yourself is that you are outside the mainstream. I haven't seen much of that,
but it really only means what you aren't, not what you are. So what are you?
You’ve already read about that for which I stand Cody. I’m not here to hold your hand and while that’s a favorite slogan of the assholes who attempt to train us, you seem to need everything and every little detail explained to you. Again, I’m not completely convinced that you and a few others with the exception of Chris and Anthony aren’t just intentionally getting wrong all the things I’m saying, because you’re more concerned about your own intellectual superiority. You continue to hide behind the things you and people who think the way you do always hide behind which is anti-intellectualism and emotions which you confuse with knowledge and how you’re made to feel, then you go on to confuse all of that including knowledge with wisdom. Unfortunately, no one can reason you and others out of that. You’ll have to find your own way as to how to understand the concepts of which I speak. I understand that the norm of today’s age is to read and arrange our lives by way of self-help books such as The Secret and other shallow-minded trash which in certain and sometimes subtle ways blames people for their own problems rather than doing the honest work of investigation as a means by which to understand why people have had certain things happen to them. When we’re not reading simple-minded garbage like that, we’re allowing ourselves to be easily manipulated by The New Atheists, The Christian Right, or other forms of entertainment confused with true information, the purpose of which is to manipulate us in to believing that if we just do two steps, we can get everything we desire and thus, we live in an easy answer culture and given that it’s for most people, the mainstream, I choose for that not to be my reality and I choose, not black and white ways of looking at the world, but the ways that deal with ambiguity and nuance. To explain is not to excuse and to understand is not to forgive. To explain the root of a problem is not to deny responsibility for one’s actions nor is holding the people around one’s self for things they’ve done wrong to a person blaming others. The fact that you, ForReal, 570 or 666 or whatever he’s calling himself next week and Crazy Babe or Crazy Cat or whatever her name is going to be in 24 hours constantly need explanations from me about virtually every detail of why I have the ideas I have, make me wonder if you guys aren’t completely secure in what you believe, think or feel. I hope that your emotions and how you’re made to feel that you confuse with knowledge along with your pedantry keep you warm at night.
James
Also, it sounds like Crazy Cat needs to learn the meaning of the word condesention.
James
Sorry ForReal, but I think you might want to read my posts again.
James
What system do I propose Cody? You just read about it in my post from earlier this evening.
James
So, OP has complained about other people dismissing his experiences/making judgements based on things they couldn't have experienced. Yet when its convenient for him, He will do the exact thing he complains about when things don't meet his world view. Exactly what I expected would happen, based on his past performance on this topic.
Care to explain what the abbreviation O.P. means?
James
It stands for original poster.
I understand you perfectly.
I just don't agree with you.
Blindness: the History of a Mental Image in Western Thought by Moshe Barasch introduced me to this topic several years ago. I found it on Reading Ally when it was known as RFB&D. And though it’s a rather dated book, the ideas Barasch discusses are enlightening. I am sure there are other scholarly books which deal in depth with some of the subjects that have been brought up in this discussion.
One of the drawings discussed in Barasch’s book depicts how a primitive civilization – I cannot recall which at the moment - cared for the blind. He contrasts that peoples’ humane treatment of the blind with medieval civilizations in more industrialized parts of the world where the blind were believed to possess Tiresias-like qualities or they were considered cursed. My memory of this book is foggy so I am perhaps misrepresenting the details.
But it's fascinating that blind people in ancient times might have been viewed as a cause to bring whole communities together, whereas nowadays help offered by strangers is frowned upon among some disability groups who propagandize absolute independence. A historian looking back at such civilizations could probably evaluate one group as more humane than the other simply by how they treated such people.
Barasch also talks about a letter written by Denis Diderot who discussed the intellect of a man blind from birth, and explains the influence the philosopher’s views on blindness had on the Enlightenment. I strongly recommend reading Diderot’s letter.
Anyhow, I only wanted to introduce a brief comment here about the way the blind have been perceived across different places and times.
Thanks for the answer of what O.P. means.
James
Thanks for the suggestion Raskolnikov. I'll definitely check that out. That does sound interesting.
James
Now I suppose we know how OP will deal with his Cognitive dissonance.
As for what ForReal said about understanding but not agreeing with me, that’s how things clearly go and we all can agree or disagree on things. That being said though, we have the problems of which I speak and the mainstream as far as it goes in terms of The NFB talking and agreeing with me about how bad Vocrehab is and saying that they have other Ohioans who are having the same problems with them, but saying like how an abused wife does: “But we still have to use them.”, is the problem in that it continues to restrict our ability with which to choose what jobs we want to do and what classes we want to take, in so far as a college accepts us depending on what GPA we had and what accommodations they’ll give to us, in so far as they’ll do it without us having to push too hard depending on how much if any pushback we get from them. All that being said, whether or not any of us have a huge stack of settlement money with which we could pay for college, assistive technology or others, the fact remains that these agencies are just barely doing their jobs and the NFB says how bad the places are which they’re correct in their assessments of the companies and yet when they need them, they run right to them with the blind who are on the lower rungs of the latter and thus the lower class of the blind get entrapped in this snakepit settlement money or no.
What you fail to realize when having asked me about my money before Cody and to be fair, I didn’t mention it as I was getting out other details, is that my grandfather, a World War Two vet who got himself shot up by those Nazi Cock Sucker Mother Fuckers and who could have died on the battle ground came back to this country from France, worked his ass off in his store, raised ten kids, my mother among them then when I was born and the hospital made their mistakes, and the money was awarded to me from the courts, he saved it for me in C.D.s until I turned 18 at which time I took it over and as Vocrehab was being hardly flexible with all that they paid for, I needed the technology I had to get so I could function in school. Then I used it for other things relating to college and so if I did use it all on college and it turn out then like it did in the end three years ago, then that money wouldn’t have lasted very long and so I don’t really think that that would have really been much of a good way with which to thank my grandpa for saving that for me so that I could use it for the years that it did last. Again, people back in his and his children’s days weren’t making themselves go broke paying for college to do a job and let’s just be honest here, about the fact that most of these kids today who go to these high and mighty colleges and damn near bankrupt either themselves or their families to pay for it or get themselves in to almost crippling debt with student loans that you love so much mainly get these system manager and banking jobs and other business and fancy jobs more to make a name for themselves rather than to truly help anyone who’s in lower positions than them. You see in these call centers and other office type jobs, these kids at 23 or 24, or a couple of years older as manager, rather than back then when it were people who were older who were managers, not because of some ageism thing, but because older people had what we no longer have today. They had the understanding of living within the restraints of reality, not the nonsense of what Rhonda Burn puts in her self-help books like “The Secret” or other similar books by Anthony Robins or Stephen Covi. They didn’t have the ethic of thinking positively, the thoughts of which would give you all of what you wanted such as cars, houses, money and whatever lover you wanted. They understood that if you did want any of those things, that you had to physically do work to do it. While the self-helpers say that of course we still have to do hard work today to get what they talk about us wanting that I just mentioned and that the positive thinking or law of attraction simply helps us have the attitude to push ahead, this is a lie, for this is what they tell the people who aren’t within The Positive Thoughts Cult yet. Once you get fully in to their groups along with the high mighty job you get, then all talk of reasonableness disappears and they will actually tell you that if you truly believe with all of yourself that you’ll get that bonus and that bigger pay check this week, then you will and that if you didn’t get it, then you just didn’t believe hard enough. This is not a rational, nor is it an ethical or moral work ethic that works to the extent that you do or don’t practice it. It’s a cover for selfishness, greed, abuse of others in the name of financial advancement and power. This is what today’s generation with a few exceptions believe and I’m not convinced that this isn’t the perverted ethic of The Blindness Utopians in the end which they attempt to push on to us who are within the lower class of the blind. This ethic permeates The Blindness Community for the other reason aside from them pushing it on us, because with a few exceptions, we want to believe the lies. We want to believe that wealth and not having to struggle as other blind people have to do are just a few positive thoughts and a few million dollar checks away.
This ethic of selfishness and this Cult of Self no longer know what it means to be selfless and when they do give to others, it’s through charities that it’s questionable as to whether or not they’ll through their work get down to the root cause of the problems of the people they claim to serve. In other words, any concern for others by these selfishness cults are just crumbs dropped from the table as if we’re starving dogs. So for Cody and the others who dismiss my struggle as me “Just being angry”, to make a correction, I had no choice but to open up another case with Vocrehab two years ago and it’s still opened and we’ve switched from job placement back to education and we’re going through the process of seeing if they’ll pay for me to do classes at the community college I went to back in 2007 for Medical Transcription, but this time we’re seeing if they’ll pay for classes for counseling, or at least a few 101 classes to start out with, then go from there, and I’ve had more of the same equivocation with them in the course of working with them from two years ago up until now and though I’m digging in my heals more now than before, my attempts to use them in the past while having my settlement money were to keep most if not some of that money around, as I did have to buy essentials with it, as my parents couldn’t afford them that had nothing to do with Vocrehab at the time and spending all the money on college and leaving behind Vocrehab would have in the end made us get closer to the financial edge than we already were even with the jobs my parents were working at the time. So that’s more as an answer for you Cody, as to why I didn’t just straight up use all the money for college back then, because I had my parents with whom I was living at the time to think of as well, and if you still want to know why I didn’t do it that way and tried to hold on to some of it while using Vocrehab rather than spending it all? Well, I don’t know, um, like, maybe, perhaps it’s something like, oh let’s see? Oh yeah, it’s in the end something along the lines of, I’m not a fucking me-generation type of person, nor am I one of these selfish Bastards who sits and reads a bunch of self-help trash where all attempts in every word of the books is to be a nice way of saying that it’s okay to be a selfish asshole and act like a clinically diagnosed Psychopath who has no empathy for anyone but themselves that’s now called in this day and age, “Getting Ahead in Life”. You Cody and a few others on here with the exceptions of Chris, Anthony and Voyager all want to ask about settlements and why this and why that and why didn’t you and her and she and it and those and them and all the god damn world, but all your victim-blaming won’t change the fact that Vocrehab, at least here in Ohio is shit and they had an opportunity to do and still have an opportunity to do right by me as well as to do right by others who don’t even have settlements to fall back on and the powerful within The Blindness Community rather than be Blindness Utopians like what you yourself are being Cody could god damn well do something about this! You could easily do whatever it took within reason to talk about the realities of this problem in that Vocrehab here in Ohio and probably in many other states if other reports I’m reading are correct is broken, money-hungry and they use unnecessary psychological testing, pedantic vocational evaluations as well as giving some clients letters that even go so far as to say whether or not the blind person can even work or not and rather than you and a few others and many people with a few exceptions calling that as the institutional discrimination that it is, you just call it “Playing The Game” and just having to follow their rules if you want to work with them. Last time I checked, it’s your grades and getting accommodations for your disability in so far as you don’t have to do much or a lot of pushback in so far as the colleges aren’t being discriminating assholes to get said accommodations which determine whether or not you get in to college, but not so with the Bastards at Vocrehab. The advocate with whom I’m working has the right idea, in that he did tell me in one of our meetings the other day: “If we can’t get Vocrehab to pay for any of this and if they continue with this shit about testing this and testing that, then fuck them. We’ll find another way to pay for this.”. His right idea aside, this is what these Bastards in Vocrehab agencies are about and you can call it whatever pet name you like, but institutional discrimination is what it really is and you as well as a few of the other ones on here who dismiss all that I say have if not a legal obligation to stand up against this shit, then at least an ethical and moral obligation to do so and you continue to dismiss my struggle as me being angry and you more or less do the same with concerns that Voyager has. Honestly, though I have hate and anger for the sighted who do this shit, I save most of my venom for you guys, as you guys having some degree of vision loss if not complete blindness and my vision is about there, choose to go along with all this as well as to follow the culture that puts positive thoughts of no limitations because of happy thoughts of getting the right kind of job and various other things above true hard work to do it. So as to what others have said about that being then and this being now, in light of what I continue to deal with where Vocrehab is concerned, don’t give me that shit about my struggles being at an end with these Bastards, because unless my advocate and I can find scholarships or other means of financial assistance with which to pay for this, then no, my struggles with Vocrehab unless I say fuck it and get on a waiting list for HUD housing if only so I can at least have more of a permanent roof over my head, are not even close to being in the past, so for those who understand fully what I’m having to deal with, thank you for seeing the truth. To Cody and the other ones who choose to go the way of the mainstream, thank you guys so much. I truly do thank you, for you’ve taught me something very valuable; you’ve taught me through your actions and your amorality as well as through your disdain for us in the lower class of the visually impaired what it means to be traitors and cowards to your own kind as well as amoral creeps who sell us out again and again not only in the name of utopian ideas of success, but for wealth, power and status. So if you and the others who’ve talked the shit you have want to continue to do so, then go ahead. Continue to sit there and lie to one another about what’s really going on and then lie to us, and you’ll do the typical thing of repeating the big lie long enough and loud enough and you just keep doing that, maybe someone else will believe you. You Cody and various people within The Blindness Utopian power structure of The Blindness Community have become to us what Chaim Rumkowski was to The Jews in the city of Lodz when The Nazis were in power, when he sold many of his fellow Jews out and through this selling out, sent them to their deaths at the gas chambers and then for all his efforts, he in the end was sent to his own death. One day, you and your ilk will most likely find yourselves in a situation where your fellow utopians will sell you guys out for more power and wealth than they already have and you’ll find yourselves where I and many others in our community have been for years. Perhaps then, you’ll see where amorality that you confuse with morality and selfishness that you confuse with ethics can land you.
James
Slight correction, you can't use the collective pronoun if you are seemingly the
only one with those problems. The term you're looking for is I, not we.
Quote from post 129:
in terms of The NFB talking and agreeing with me about how bad Vocrehab is and saying that they have other Ohioans who are having the same problems with them, but saying like how an abused wife does: “But we still have to use them.”
Correction:
No you do not "have" to use them. VR is a completely optional/voluntary service for which you apply to and participate in fully willingly and sign upon that application, your understanding of their rights and responsibilities to you as a participant in their program and your rights and responsibilities to them as the provider of that program.
You are perfectly free to seek employment and education on your own or through other means. So to blame an optional service for your inability to pay for your own education and technology is pretty misplaced blame. It's not VR's fault your blind, or that tech costs a lot, or that you can't pay for the education you want to pursue.
VR's responsibility is to get people with disabilities back into the tax paying system by working. Therefore, it isn't a system designed to hand you your ideal education or career, it is a strategic system, funded by tax payers to invest more money back into the system.
Okay, I appreciate the comments thus far, and aside from various posts I may continue to make on this topics page as times go by, the pedantry from various people on here with a few exceptions only proves my point and for me to explain further would only cause me to appear as if I want to be right rather than communicate a uncomfortable truth. That being said, I've said all that I believe I need to say on this topic for the present time and it's up to people who track this board as to whether any of them choose to follow what I'm saying or not. As for making comments the wording of which implies myself wanting to debate points, I simply will not continue to do. If anyone regardless of who it is feels the need to private message me about questions they have, they're certainly welcome, but my comments of this back and forth form with the members who I've been communicating about this topic and they know who they are, that's done for the present time.
James
Fair. You can end anytime you wish.
However, I agree you must use I, not we.
VR paid for my college and any technology I required.
I chose my field of study, classes.
I had a good GPA in high school, and received 3RD party grants on top of what VR provided.
I had a wide choice of colleges I could attend, so wasn't made go anyplace at all.
When I got in to the work force, VR provided any adaptive technology I required to function in the jobs I did, so I had no cost for that.
Once I was stable on the job, I didn't require any more assistants.
I even once decided I wanted to be a personal trainer, and VR was willing to pay for me to go to the training course.
What I had to do, was have a plan as to why I wanted to do the things I did.
I had to have a plan as to what technology I required, and why.
If you want to be a personal trainer, what skills do you have, and why do you believe you will be good at it?
I never used the NFB for anything, so can’t say what they do.
When I wanted personal technology for my house, I purchased this just like you would anything else you wanted, like a stereo.
So, I can’t relate.
I have, and had, no blindisms, so I can’t relate to that either.
I do believe they are habits, and need to be done in your private space, or with friends that don’t mind.
Nature dictates what the blind can, and can not do, not any service.
You can’t be a truck driver, pilot, mail carrier, and a host of other things.
This is not VR’s fault however. The blind need to choose realistic things they can do.
Okay, it's a bit late but I wanted to make sure I really thought this out. Actually, it's simple. Nobody is harshing your mellow by saying you can't rock around the clock, or dig for gold in your eye in public. It just isn't right. If I drove a truck for a living and drank several mixed drinks prior to getting behind the wheel do you think that would be wise? I'd be pulled over. I wouldn't dare say "officer, shove it up your ass... I'll do what I want." It's the same with blindisms. Just don't do them in public. People can see you and nobody gives a furry rat's ass if you care about that or not. Suck it up and join the real world.
However, rocking and poking your eyes in public does not put any innocent people at risk in the way that drunk driving does. Yes, it will probably blow your credibility all to hell, but I seriously doubt anyone will die.
lol They probably pass out when they see you digging in your eye, but you can't know because you can't see them.
You might be able to hear them gaspe and fall... unless you're also deaf. >:)
So, all this in mind.
Lets suppose everyone on this board was responsible for hiring for a company.
Would you hire someone with blindisms they displayed in public, why or why not? Would you hire a person who is 10% less qualified for the job, rather than hiring someone with blindisms, Why or why not?
I wouldn't not hire them do to blindisms unless it was something so obvious that it made the company look bad. Are we saying that reactions don't matter?
If they were out on the frontline, representing my company in appearance, probably not. If they're in their own little room just answering phones and the likes and they can do their job and do it very well, I probably would.
Yes, reactions matter, but I don't think you can attach the same importants to them as someone drunk behind the wheel, taking innocent lives.
Perhaps it would help a great deal if most of the Original poster's arguments weren't made mostly of run-on sentences. Just a thought. A well-organized set of arguments, like a presentable person for that matter, will be received and considered much more seriously by others than a disheveled or scattered one.
It just seems to me that people are saying "to hell with social responsibility."
I don't like being grouped with blindisms. My rocking is because of trauma, and ADHD.
As far as rehab stuff, it works for most. They just don't know much about folks with more than blindness or/and deafness. So, I have decided to prove to myself what I can do. They don't care what I proved to them. They still think I'm gonna screw up. So, when I get a good job, they just don't get much credit, because the changes I made were me, not them. And, I still don't know how to half of the stuff I should have learned in computer classes. So, who's gonna teach me? Me. Or, I'll find other programs, which I'm working on. If I get a job, it will be because of what I did. I tried rehab, and because I'm not the normal blind person, my case is now closed. But, I'll be a 2-headed monster, with wings and a bloody tail, before I give up!
God Bless!
Sarah
That's what some are saying, and some are also against it. LOL isn't that the main gist of this board?
And yes, though I do agree that a well organized and structured set of arguments will be much better received, I know my own tendency to be rather disjointed and rambly, so I can't say too much on that one.
Depends what kind of job.
If they wouldn't be dealing with customers, and the job required a huge amount of technical skill then yes, I would. You'll often find in such jobs people who are a little socially awkward are given a pass, because their minds are so brilliant.
However, if they had to interact with people, and represent my company then no I wouldn't. Because ultimately these behaviours do make people uncomfortable, and I would have the best interests of my company at heart.
I'm sorry but it's the truth. If you can't behave in a way that is deemed to be socially acceptable, you can't expect the same opportunities.
Is that unfair? Perhaps. But it's how it is. Amd unless you are autistic and need to stim, as a blind person it's just a learnt habbit.
A well thought out analogy goes a long way as well. I cannot take your opinion seriously if you honestly think drinking and driving is comparable to rocking and eye poking. I can take what Cody has to say much more seriously even when I disagree with him because he clearly puts thought into his posts.
So Scarlett, it sounds like you're giving me a pass because I'm autistic. How do you or I know that there aren't allistic blind people (especially congenitally blind) who need to stim also? I don't claim to know what causes the desire, so I don't feel comfortable claiming that person X needs it and person Y doesn't. How can I know?
Because blindness is not a mental condition which would require stimulation,
and blind people are perfectly capable of finding stimuli which are socially
acceptable, whereas some, note I said some, autistic people are not. Autism is a
mental disorder, blindness is a physical disorder. Blindness in and of itself, when
not combined with anything else, does not change your mental abilities. It
simply changes your physical ones. If its combined with something else, then it
would be that something else which changes your mental abilities. So there is
no logical or chemical or genetic or rational reason that blindness would give
you a need to stimulate. It just wouldn't make sense. Those behaviors in a blind
person, even a blind person from birth, are learned and habituated. Therefore
can be unlearned and unhabituated. And I would even go so far as to say that
most autistic people, the mildly autistic, could unlearn and unhabituate their
stimuli, and replace them with less obtrusive ones.
Thank you Cody! I think certain blind people simply pick up such behavior from the environment.
I'm going to give a nod to what Cody said, but also expand on it.
Blindness is not typically neurological. If it is, or you also have a neurological disability as well, then I understand the need to stim.
A lot of blind people do these things simply because nobody ever expected them to walk, play sports, hang out with their siblings and otherwise participate.
So their families and teachers neglected to teach them social manners, and also to challenge them. If you were sat in a corner all day, no matter how neurotypical you are you'd probably stim. And that stim, for a blind person, then becomes a habbit.
Once they do get out into the world they continue to do it, like I did with biting my nails, it was a habbit I, like many other people, had from childhood.
So yes, I do see it as different. A lot of these behaviours in blind people literally come from the absense of realistic, and high expectations, rather than because they need to do them.
In my company, I would have to think about the worker relationship too.
If a work team is comfortable, they work better, but if we have a team member disturbing, no, it is distracting.
Now, if I’m allowed to get a full medical report, and I know a person is autistic, then I can hire them with that in mind.
I’d have to explain to them, you’ll work in your own office, so you can be comfortable, and the rest that find your rocking distracting can be comfortable.
We’re not talking skin color, or something, we are talking a disorder that makes the rest distracted.
I’m more likely to hire the person that is 10% less able.
Now if the person doesn't mind being in an office by themselves, and we agree, they've got the job.
I guess what we need to do is define what is socially acceptable behavior. When I think of blindisms, I tend to think of the people who have blindness and nothing else. So what do we do about that?
I tend to think of them as blindness related too.
I also think they are learned, not given because a person is blind.
If they were things all blind people had, and had to learn to over come, I could see them as blind related, but they are not.
When a person is only autistic, , they don't have blindisms.
I think we've established what issocially acceptable behavior already in many post here.
But if learning is largely visual in nature, kind of a monkey see monkey do thing, and young blind children are already at a disadvantage because they don’t receive visual input, then how does a very young blind child learn to rock? Learning for us is rather hands-on, so I have a lot of problems with the conclusion that rocking, say, is learned. What? Does a parent of a blind toddler actively teach the kid to rock only to have to teach him not to later on because it’s not socially acceptable? How does that even make sense?
Let's remember that you can teach by not teaching not to do something. If you started to rock and nobody stopped you, well, there you go.
But if you started rocking, why did you do it? You didn’t observe anyone else doing it with your eyes because presumably you don’t have eyes that work. Besides, the larger human community just doesn’t stand there rocking all day when it has nothing else to do with its time. And even if it did, you still didn’t see itbecause you’re blind. So,, if you started doing it all on your own, were you self-taught then, or is it a natural reaction to not seeing anything and not wanting to remain stationary when you couldn’t see the world around you? Are we saying that autistic kids naturally rock but blind kids learn it? If we are, I’m not following that logic. When I was a little boy, I did some degree of rocking, and yes, my parents taught me that this was inappropriate, so I unlearned it in time. On the other hand, I don't remember consciously teaching mmyself to rock.
An office by myself? Oh no, not that! Please don't throw me in that briar patch.
Okay but were you not rocked as a baby? If so, you have actually learned it.
Conceded. But then that leads to other questions for me as a non-visual person not overly familiar with babies/toddlers and how they behave visually and/or how they get visual input. 100 percent of us humans, blind and sighted, were once babies. Presumably 100 percent of us,, blind and sighted alike, were rocked as babies. Ergo, 100 percent of us, bblind and sighted, learned to rock. Yet unless I’m badly mistaken, what seems to be endemic among very young blind children is not endemic in their sighted counterparts. Many, if not most very young blind children, rock at some point in their development for whatever unknown reason. As far as I know, this behavior is largely unknown in sighted youngsters who can observe the world about them and get visual input about how most human beings behave. Blind youngsters, again, have to learn differently. For whatever reason, a lot of us have to be taught that rocking is not socially acceptable because, quite obviously, at some point in our young lives, we started doing it inappropriately. Is it that rocking is a lot more natural in blind youngsters than it is in sighted ones because one child has visual input and the other doesn’t?
Valid question.
I assume that blind kids that go to blind schools learn to rock by feel.
If you sit next to a person that rocks, you learn to move.
The spinning, I'm at a loss on that one.
The poking of the eyes, probably comes from how good it feels. You can't see, so you poke at them, or sort of massage them.
If you try it, and it feels good, or comfortable, you've learned.
I would say, seeing kids don't rock, because they'd need to close their eyes so they don't see things moving about.
How about this concept.
Babies are usually rocked by parents. It feels good.
Could it be the baby feels that input, so when the parents stops rocking them, and they don't see, they produce it?
some people who only have a bit of light perception have told me that when they poke their eyes, they see flashes or sparks and for whatever reason, they like it. Thinking back on it, it does seem to me that quite a number of the people that I know who poke their eyes do have a bit of light perception. I'm total, and I've never once wanted to poke my eyes. I tried it, when I found out that several of my friends did it. This was way way back, when I was 6 or 7ish.
I remember learning about sound and the way it bounced off walls and objects by spinning in circles with a stereo on. My mom tells me I started doing it as soon as I could walk.
Well, I used to like spinning chairs when I was little, so I guess I sort of see the spinning thing.
"Post 157 of 163
Voyager
Ignore Voyager
my ISP would be out of business if it wasn't for this haven I live at 484 posts
today 12:42:45
An office by myself? Oh no, not that! Please don't throw me in that briar patch."
Voyager, you have a great sense of humor.
:)
Rocking is movement, moving is innate. The likelihood is that blind children discover early that the rocking movement is a pleasant sensation whereas it is probably less than pleasant for those who have vision as it causes too much fluctuation in the visual field.
Is rocking different than thumb sucking? Many babies enjoy thumbsucking or are attached overly much to a blanky or favorite soft toy. They learn the pleasant stimulation through normal developmental discovery in the same way a blind child learns rocking produces positive internal feedback. However, thumb sucking is stopped and there comes a time we give up the blanky or the soft toy or the pacifier.
On the other hand, I was born sighted and do not have autism.
I think, however, that I play with my hands and hair a lot more now that my sight is almost nil although my friend tells me I've been playing with my hair since she met me in college before my major sight loss so who knows?
All ointeresting.
I had no idea about the sound of things when spinning. I'll have to give that a try.
Don't laugh. Lol
This came to mind when I was thinking about this topic.
Behavior seems to be under two categories. Things we can’t control, and things we can.
For example, if you had some sort of brain injury, and that gave you a nervous tick that be something you couldn’t control.
On a work site, I don’t believe anyone should be isolated from the group, unless they work on top secret projects that require them isolation.
Behaviors they can control would be a choice wouldn’t it?
Some jobs require dress to come to work. You can’t wear your shorts, and T shirts or you’ll not work there long.
If you show up for an interview in your shorts and T shirt, you’ll not get the job.
That is a choice, just like blindisms are a choice.
If a person says they refused to curb that behavior, then they must accept they may not get hired, because it just isn’t humanly right to isolate a person.
Yeah, I never rocked, spin, or anything like that, so I don't understand this. I never knew that blind people did it until I joined this site actually.
Now, the eye poking for me is because I have a prosthesis, but it's usually to get gunk out of my eye, which people will stare at you about. I am one of those that has to move to music, but when I do it, it's in the privacy of my home. So all of this... I can't stop and won't stop once I'm in public stuff is just...
Still, I think there's proper stimming. I'm sitting here now typing this out in my recliner, rocking away while I'm doing it. I'm at home, not in public, in a rocking-chair. All appropriate. But then, there are a lot of behaviors that are entirely appropriate in some settings while not being so in others.
James, to an extent I agree with you. The bureaucratic nature of some vocational rehabilitation agencies leave some blind clients disadvantaged. Many times I think it is more so the system's fault. Vocational counselors are caught between the clients' needs and the administrators' needs which are not the same. The admins take a more business-oriented stance. But this is for another discussion.
In regards to the topic at hand, blindisms as we call them are abnormal behaviors that are not considered to be acceptable behaviors in public or formal settings. Whatever you decide to do in your house is completely up to you, but such behaviors are not appropriate to society and are not done by all blind people, hence why I say that they are abnormal. It is not the same as someone who has a disorder such as autism, for example. One of the symtoms of autism is a lack of verbal communication. This is a symptom that in some cases is so severe that significant amounts of intense treatment can yield very little progress. This is understandable and is expected, and similar observation and reasoning is made about many mental disorders which have expected symtoms and behaviors. . These symtoms are classified very specifically in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). For obvious reasons, blindness is not classified in this manual. There are no such symtoms that a blind person must perform or exhibit, because blindness in and of itself is a sensory disorder. Therefore, it is not acceptable for a blind person to behave in such a way in a public or formal setting. It can be unconscious, but it can absolutely be controlled and noticed if the person is made aware of it.
I haven't followed the whole conversation, sorry, but I thought I'd just like to say that
one of the most frustrating things to all hell and back personally is how crappy people
treat blind employees. I know people with serious programming, networking, linux and
low end knowledge of computers who are stuck in shit jobs testing accessibility.
God it just pisses me off. I worked with some really stupid people before and knowing
that somehow they're more employable just because they can see is pathetic.
That is do to ignorance and misperceptions of the blind though.
And those misperceptions aren't helped by people who insist on rocking,
shoving their fingers in their eyes, spinning in circles, so on and so forth. act
normal, be seen as normal, and you won't have as much of those problems.
Nothing will solve all of them, but you won't have as many. That's the point I've
been trying to make this whole time.
People ignore and exclude me whether I'm rocking or sitting still, and the types I make friends with tend to not care how still I am.
But that's making friends. Its different when you make colleagues. Plus, how
many more friends could you have if you sat still?
To me it isn't about the number of friends one has, it is the level or respect one gets from people that don't know you.
Cody is right. Wear's the accountability? It seems some people are given a free pass in life. Now somebody can go ahead and say how thoughtless I am. Go on, let me have it.
"Plus, how many more friends could you have if you sat still?"
As I said, it doesn't make much difference. I tend to attract and be attracted to people kind of like me, in that we aren't that focused on appearance or bothered by people who do things differently. We're too busy talking about our interests. I would never have lots and lots of friends anyway because I spend a significant amount of time alone.
As for people who don't know me, I care what they think if not caring means I get a consequence I don't want or miss out on a reward I do want.
You just brush it off like it's nothing as so many seem to do. Sooner or later you will have a chance to interview for a job and you will be turned down because of your habbits. I'm not trying to be harsh but realistic.
Margorp is right. It may not matter to you now voyager, but just wait till you try to get hired for a job and someone labels you a "weirdo" or worse because of those things you do that you know are not socially acceptable. Besides, how do you really know your "friends" aren't thinking you are weird? Because, most people aren't gonna tell you they think that. They just won't hire you, or stick around for long. Not trying to be rude; just telling you how it is in the real world--your appearance does matter if you wanna succeed, as do the things that you do or don't do that are acceptable or not. If you never wanna do anything worthwhile in the world, then keep doing what you're doing. You only have yourself to blame in the end, whether you choose to change for the better or not.
Well, I guess that depends on how she looks at it finally.
If she simply doesn't choose to care about it, then she'll be happy as she is.
If one day she decideds to ask a question, because she has started to wonder, at that time it might matter.
She's already got that blind thing that limits her, so if you add more fuel to it, well, you get limited more.
You may not notice, because you simply don't care, but not carring doesn't change the facts.
She's posted on several boards about different things she chooses not to change, so she must be happy.
You can't been the world to you.
No you can't, but what I'm saying is there has to come a point when you realize you have to bend to the world to some extent, for lack of a better phrase. That's all I'm saying.
Yes, at some point you need to get with the program. Let's all stop accepting second best. Trust me, the rest of the world doesn't settle.
She doesn't strike me as someone who wants a job, therefore, she doesn't give two shits, and that's on her, but it sucks because when someone meets one blind person, they'll think we all do it.
Okay, so she doesn't want a job. Fine, that's her choice. Such behavior could cause her to miss out on social situations.
You guys are jumping to a lot of conclusions about Voyager. Unless I'm missing something, she has never stated she doesn't want a job or can't or won't adopt generally accepted social behavior when appropriate or necessary for the situation. She doesn't seem to feel that towing the line 24-7 will get her much further though.
And as for "getting with the program" and not settling for second best because the rest of the world doesn't, what are you talking about? The vast majority of the world settles for second best and much lower. We can't all be at the top of the pyramid whether we are blind or sighted.
That isn't to say we shouldn't strive to succeed and within reason, learn to adapt to the world we live in.
And we can't all live our lives in fear of worrying that our personal limitations might reflect poorly on the rest of the blind community.
I have my limitations and I have to live with them. That is a tough enough burden to bear without adding to it that I'm reflecting poorly on the rest of you.
We also can't be responsible for the lack of knowledge/insight of the masses.
There are plenty of eccentric people in the world. Most of them don't achieve fame and fortune, but some do.
I'm not advocating indulgent behaviors that drive people away (unless of course that is the aim) but everyone has to find their own happy medium, blending their own quirks with society and customs.
BTW, Voyager has mentioned that her life was pretty rigid in her hometown. She is away at college now and has a chance to express her individuality for the first time. That is a pretty normal thing. I don't know about the rest of you, but when I went off to school, almost everyone around me started breaking the rules that they'd been bound by at home. This is part of growing up. We find our balance, eventually.
When being held accountable comes in to the picture, it kind of sounds whiny, doesn't it? It's like, "I have to jump through all these social hoops, so everyone else should have to do it too."
To me, this isn't all that different from those who tell you that if you don't live, act and think a certain way, you'll burn in hell. We all make choices in our lives, and we all deal with the consequences of those choices, somewhere down the line.
I have no idea what she wants and doesn’t want.
She does think her blindisms should be accepted, and she says she has some people that accept them.
We can’t say she’s second best, because that doesn’t apply due to us not knowing what someone that views her is looking for.
What I’m saying, is, if she chooses not to modify, or change the blindisms, then she has to accept, or be comfortable with how she’s viewed.
That isn’t a bad thing, but it is something she must decide.
She has said she doesn’t like to dress. She doesn’t like her hair long, but prefers a crew cut.
These are all things she has stated.
She is not alone as to the blindisms. Others agree.
Now, we all understand most of these things matter in the professional ram, but among friends, no.
These things will matter as to how many dates she gets and how people that don’t know her view her however. That is just society.
Sure, it may keep her from a job she wants, but again, that is the decision she’s made.
When we say we disagree with social restrictions, and we don’t care, and refuse to be moved on it, then we have decided to blaze our own path.
Some people are successful with this, but as blind people, it will make our road that much harder.
I’m completely on the other end. How I’m viewed makes a difference to me.
I don’t have any blindisms, but if I did, I’d simply change them.
I have learned much about them on this board, as to why people do them.
I guess what I am saying.
You must be tough when you decide to be you. You can’t come and say, all of society must accept me and if they don’t, it is them that is wrong, not I.
If you wish to be free to be you, then you must also accept that others are free to not accept you.
You don’t want to be placed in a box, so you can’t expect others to get in yours.
That seems to be what some are expecting.
I'm just going to put this bluntly. It is easy to be mediocre. if that is all you
want out of life, to be mediocre, then do whatever you please. If you want to
depend on others, have an incredibly limited social circle, little if anything in the
way of prospects, and be seen as an outsider, simply continue with your
blindisms. if, however, you want to be accepted, to have the chance to get
gainful employment, to have the ability to fit in with almost any social scene you
wish without difficulty, to be considered urbane, classy, tasteful, pleasant and
agreeable company, if you want to transend your blindness and become a
person undefined by anything they don't wish to be defined by, then you have
to learn how to act appropriately. The choice is yours, but look at the results.
Lets take James for example, the original poster james that is. He has spent
this and other boards whinging about how he doesn't have the education he
wants, the job he wants, the home he wants, the life he wants. he hasn't put
forth any meaningful ideas about how to change that, he simply complains
about it, blames others for it, and advocates living exactly how he wants to live
without any consequences. He wants to rock back and forth as he pleases, and
not have anyone give him a second look.
Me, I love my education. I have several irons in the fire as far as occupation,
and prospects for several grad schools. Either way I look, either ocupation or
education, I'm excited about my future. I have troubles, sure, but for the most
part I am happy with the person I am, and the prospects I have. I don't blame
anyone for my situation, because I've built my own situation. I laid down the
groundwork for this brick by brick with my own hands. I filled out college
applications, saved up for application fees, picked what college I wanted to
attend, sat through meetings with professors and administrators, argued with
them, forced them to make things accessible. I advocated for technology I
needed, and got much of it bought for the college so that other students can
now use it. I moved out on my own, and lived comfortably, transporting myself
to classes every day. I gave lectures at seminal conferences I was invited
specifically to attned by people who had graduated and remembered me. I've
done work that I will be proud of for the rest of my life, and gotten recognition
for it. This is what you get when you decide to learn how to better yourself, and
work for what you want in the proper methods. if I'd simply said that I wanted
to be a blink, and left it at that, I'd never be where I am now. I'd be licking
envelopes or owning a food stand.
So the choice is yours. Be whatever you want to be, but you can't complain
when you get your just desserts.
Thank you Cody that was my whole point. People won't automatically accept you just because you're you.
I don't see where I advocated blindisms or not having to live with the consequences of choices. Geez, for all we know the hairstyle Voyager chooses might flatter her and it's been a long time since the majority of people felt that women had to have long hair.
Having short hair isn't a blindism it is a style choice so let's get off of that.
Na, VH. I wasn't referencing your post. I'm saying that we all reep what we soe, somewhere down the line. Each person comes with their own unique set of values. I think it's been pretty generally implied that if people like voyager don't conform, then they'll have to miss out on all those wonderful opportunities to be accepted and get somewhere in life. Maybe it matters to her, and maybe it doesn't. Maybe she'll wake up one morning and think something like, "Gosh, if those people hadn't seen me rocking and spinning yesterday, they would have offered me a job." Or maybe she won't. I'm rambling, but all I'm trying to say is that we all face some sort of consequences for our actions. It's just that not all consequences matter to each person in the same way. I wasn't trying to say you advocated for anything or not.
VH, I think you are missing the point I and many others have been trying to get across.
Sure it's voyager's choice what to do or not do with her life; no one has said otherwise. What we are saying though, is that just as she wants people to accept her as she is, she too, has to accept the fact many people may never accept her.
Here's the thing: if she never wants to become gainfully employed, if she never wants to be able to buy her own home someday, or travel the world, those would certainly be her choices. However, if she wants to do any or all of those things, she will have to change some of her blindisms in order to make those things happen.
If I'm not mistaken VH, you have been sighted or had some sight before. Maybe you didn't care about how blind people were thought of, or it didn't even cross your mind then. I seriously doubt it though, because I don't know that sighted people consciously think "Oh I'm not gonna talk to that blind person who's poking their eyes." It's just that they see a behavior that they know is socially inappropriate, and they react to it. And that is what many of us (myself included) are trying to help voyager see: the fact that even if she loves all her blindisms, the rest of the world may not. Therefore, if she wants to be successful, there are likely some things she has to change before she can be.
I know that I haven’t posted on this topics page in a few weeks and I’m still not going to post and by that I mean that I’m not going to give any new viewpoints, as I’ve said what I have to say, but I want to at least give an observation.
I’ve read all the comments after my very last posting on here up to the latest one today and I’m smiling, for it only proves my point that even when some of us put constraints on our mannerisms, like what I’ve done with rocking so that I can get successfully through a work day or a job interview and when I make clear in my posts that I do this and that I’m not what you token blind people would call a stereotypical blink, I still get the typical shit and if you’re thinking that I’m blaming you or crying about it, I’m actually not. You’re not actually hurting me, you’re only hurting yourselves. Some of you, Cody especially clearly haven’t picked up on the fact that I have constraints on my rocking and that I dress well for certain meetings such as job interviews and such, as well as keeping the rocking down to zero for said interviews, work days at a job or in certain professional meetings. Princess Cody and a few others clearly miss this most definitely, and they obviously do it intentionally. Why? It’s because they hear what they want to hear. This all comes down to me not being in “The Church of Blindology”.
Another example of this is that I’m a member of no church. I have my own ideas of religion put together from different authors I’ve read on the subject. That though hasn’t stopped my mom from telling me that I should join “The Catholic Church”, but more than that, she has gone on rants about how there’s no God in people anymore and that she knows what it’s like to have “A Dark Night of the Soul” which implies that that’s all I’m going through. She dismisses the faith I’ve found for myself, just like how you over-seers of the blind assume that I’m the stereotypical blink, unwashed body, eye poking and all when you know that that’s not true. My mother even has assumed that my being gay was me just being led astray by the guy who was my first boyfriend back at the blindness death camp I was at when I was a kid and has refused to listen to the reality that I am gay and have known this since I was 13. It’s like how you people with a couple of exceptions assume that I don’t want anything at all for my life just because of my ideas and those cynical thoughts of yours aren’t ones that I made you have because of what I said, you guys have made those choices, so if it’s anyone blaming anyone for anything, it’s really you guys. Me saying that you don’t have the right to shit on someone for their choices or personal ways of doing things in so far as those ideas didn’t harm anyone and for whatever mannerisms they have especially if they’ve been restrained to a certain extent for already mentioned reasons, is not me blaming others. But here in is my point. I’ve explained all this as best as I possibly can and yet there’s still the usual bullshit I get and it in the end isn’t about my advocating for individuality within reason, it’s not about your real concern for whether or not I get a job successfully or not and it’s not really about your concern for my life being happy and successful in the face of me being blind. In the end, it’s about the fact that because I won’t allow myself to be a convert to “The Church of the System-Oriented Blindies” in the religion of “Blindology”, then nothing I have to say is of any value. It’s just like what I described with my mom where it’s concerned with me not joining “The Catholic Church”. So have fun with what you people are doing and when there’s more discrimination facing us because of the discriminatory shit you guys do and say in the name of making us be carbon-copies of you so that together, we all can be carbon-copies of the sighted in so far as that’s possible, and when the sighted discriminate against us more along with you guys, then I’ll be there to laugh in all your faces and to say that I told you so.
As for my last comment in this posting, I have this to say to Princess Cody.
Hi Cody. I’m so glad to see that you’re still an ignorant ass who thinks you know everything. Here’s a news flash for you. Know what I did this week? Well, on Tuesday, I went to Hocking College with Lester, my advocate who’s been helping me. We got my FAFFSA filled out and are waiting on the results from that as to what money is available for me. Then Yesterday, I did the vocational evaluation that my state agency asked for so that they can get the results of that and let me know what if any money they’ll contribute to this and then sometime this up-coming week, Lester will be calling me and letting me know when we’ll be meeting with the housing people at Hocking to discuss me getting one of the rooms there in the dorms. So what was that you were saying before Queen Cody about me not doing anything with my life. Yeah, you’re just a holier-than-Thou trolling little asshole who likes to be above everyone and I’m glad to see that you’re totally in touch with your inner princess. Have fun my darling little Mac-Daddy Diva Pimp Master. Oh, but none of what I just mentioned in this paragraph will matter, because I’m not doing it absolutely on my own and have an advocate. Right, I completely forgot about that. Damn, must be getting Mad Cow Disease or something like that. What in the pink and purple, pin-striped blue fuck was I thinking?
So I think that just about wraps this bitch up. Later my bitches.
James
I guess if you need it more shortened up for you, I'll say it this way.
You people are just pissed, because I'm not only not telling you guys what you want to hear, not going along with your guys's pseudo religion for the blind and also not being a good little blink who will do as he's told so you and all the sighted to whom you all neal before can be happy.
That's all this is, so you all just be pissed and throw your little fits at me not doing as you all.
Please, do keep it up.
Seriously, really keep it up.
I'm enjoying the spectacle you're making of yourselves.
Yeah, if I was at Jones Town on the day of the mass murder, I guess that unless I was so programmed and confused by Jones's bullshit, then the guards would have to have shot me since I'd not be drinking the cool aid.
Later.
James
The only thing I got out of that was wa wa wa wa. I don't want to pick on you James. I don't know you, after all. However, you sound like a little kid on this board. I doubt you're really this way, but it's just how you present yourself in this discussion. Oh, and I don't think picking on people is productive. Cody, along with myself and others, have said what needed to be said and you just can't seem to handle that. Go ahead and live your life the way you see fit and the rest of us will be around to say "I told you so." See what I did their?
James, do you honestly think you matter enough for me to be pissed off
about you? You're a single blind guy in ohio I'm most likely never going to meet,
and certainly never going to like. You're not in my same social circle. Unless I've
drastically missed my guess, you're never going to be in my social circle. You
are, to be blunt, beneath me. So why would I be pissed off at you? You don't
matter to me. I'm just having an exchange of ideas on a social site.
But here's the thing James. wE all know you want things for your life. You've
made that clear, you want things. What you haven't made clear is what you're
going to do about it. Because, and I know this may come as a bit of a shock,
but wanting something doesn't make it happen. Working toward something
makes it happen. So come and talk to us when you've gotten those jobs, not
just applied to them. Come talk to us when you have the degree you want,
rather than just wanting the degree you want. Come talk to us when you have
the home you want, rather than just wanting the home you want. Til then, pipe
down.
Isn't it time to change baby james?
Carbon copies of sighted people? That's a new one I've never heard before. That's yet another thing that doesn't make any sense when you look in to it, because in order to be a "carbon copy of the sighted", one would have to do absolutely everything possible to hide one's blindness which doesn't seem feasible or possible. I know the real reason you decided to storm back in to the discussion out of no where. It's obviously because you can't stand the fact that there is an intellectual discussion happening here, that which you can't make a contribution to unless you burst out in a defiant, screw-the-system, I'm gonna do whatever I want to do and fuck the haters, sort of tantrum. Dude, all we're trying to do here is give some constructive advice. Do you know what conformity is, what social influence is? Well, in case you don't, they're beyond any single person's control. Sure, in some cases you don't have to go along with everyone else. You don't have to be a Christian because everyone else in your neighborhood is a Christian. You don't have to eat Asian food if you live in a China town. You don't have to go to school just because your family tries to push you in to it. But in this case, we're talking about an abnormal behavior that clearly is harmful to blind people's potential. You should seriously consider accepting the fact that anything abnormal you do will have an impact on how people view you and how people perceive other blind people. Don't care? Fine. Don't really give a damn what people think about what you do? Great. But Don't complain about being treated differently and looked at differently than everyone else. Don't whine about how unfair the system is to blind people. We have tried explaining this to you with several examples and reasons, and you won't have any of it. The system isn't perfect, and people can be judgmental ass holes sometimes, but I guarantee you if you end up struggling, those won't be the only causes of it.
Wouldn't we just be shit-stained ourselves if we touched his diaper?
Yes, so true.
I feel as if we're already ankle deep in shit as it is. This is madness.
No, this is Sparta!
I probably have said this before, but the topic tells me how the poster feels.
So, even though you know better. Maybe you dress correctly.
All the stuff you said in your last post.
It bothers you to have to.
Because you feel that way means to me you think the rest of the world is wrong.
We on the other side of the discussion just disagree.
That has made you really angry.
A person that feels strongly about it should be as you wish, and accept what you reap.
That seems simple to me.
Many people feel as if consequences don't apply to them.
Another good point Margorp.
And all you can do is try to move on and ignore such people.
Thanks once again for proving my point, and the comments about changing me, yeah, Chelsey, real mature. At least when I push back and with the exception of what I said about Cody in my most recent post, I don’t sink to the level of attacking someone’s intelligence.
Though I had some sighted people bitch about rocking and related issues in some of the blind, they asked questions more than anything else and that’s what I want. I want the sighted to ask questions about how we do certain things, and I don’t mean the cynical types of questions such as what some of you ask on here. Also, when some of you refer to things you’ve said on here about how and why Blindisms look bad, that reminds me of 570’s comments about his friend who would spin in circles and do it with his hands sticking out on either side to the point where he could easily hurt someone. 570 claimed that the guy had no disabilities that would justify or explain that kind of mannerism.
I think it’s interesting how some of you blinds always talk about how you know this or that person who has an issue of which they’re either not aware, or they know about it and choose to do nothing about it and you say with absolute certainty that they have no disease process at the root of it. Honestly, and I say this with all honesty, I don’t believe 570’s story and even if it did happen, unless 570 looked at his friend’s medical records, then I don’t see how he could just take his friend’s word for it that his spinning and arm extending isn’t due to any diagnosed disease process. What I also question, is the severity of these two mannerisms 570 talks about.
This sounds no different than the racist asshole or anti-gay asshole who talks about how they even have friends who either gay or black who with the gays, they swish when walking, or if they’re black, then they call women bitches or hoes and these people are quick to point out that they tell their gay or black friends about it and that the people in either minority need it pointed out since they don’t actually know they’re doing anything wrong or if they do know, then they need to be made to learn not to do it.
Obviously calling a woman a Bitch or a hoe can have more serious emotional consequences than a blind person rocking, for it still is on a sighted person in the end as to how they’ll react to that blind person’s rocking. The point I’m making about bringing up the anti-gay or racist people saying that they help some of their gay or black friends to not do certain behaviors in order to help them, is because you people and other blind people who want to be so-called “Normalized” to the fullest extent sound just like those anti-gay or racist people.
All this is doing is just contributing to and adding to the biases that some sighted people might have and not pushing them to challenge themselves to act differently towards the blind and it keeps them at risk for not being motivated to change their attitudes if we’re taking it on ourselves constantly to keep down mannerisms rather than taking time out to ask the question of what can sighted people do to educate themselves about the blind rather than us setting up an environment that encourages us to blame ourselves and other fellow blind people for evil Blindisms rather than understanding that some in the sighted areas of the world are going to sometimes be ignorant to us no matter what.
I had mentioned before that I had some sighted people be ignorant to me over the years and some of them made rude comments, but it was more to do with other things that didn’t have to do with mannerisms I might have been doing. To put it more honestly, I’ve had more bigotry thrown at me by fellow blind people than most sighted and any sighted who acted similarly to me were ones who believe the bullshit you people put out about how everything has to come down to blind blind blind. Perhaps we should do what LeoGardian suggested on another board about Blindisms and perhaps you guys would like to put up a Storm Front site, but this one would be not aimed at blacks and other minorities, but this one could be aimed at blind people who aren’t normalized in to the system that you guys love so much. I’m sure that would be nice, wouldn’t it.
James
I'm actually getting annoyed now. You think people should just put up with your blindisms just because you are so great? It's time to wake up! You claim you hate "the system." I've got news for you, the system you are thinking about is the real world. Grow up and stop bitching about it. Make an effort to better yourself.
He won't grow up. He'll be one of those blinks that live in their parent's house
forever, or just live paycheck to paycheck on SSI. You know the type.
I haven't seen this thread for a while; I've said this before however, I will say it again. Cody, you honestly have a good (as in wise) head on your shoulders, and what you have said here, I totally agree with, minus the blatent attacks; they are unnecessary.
But I loved your earlier post re wanting to be accepted in just about all social situations, verses not; It's very true, but if people are happy with their friendship groups who accept them for who they are and what they do, good. It does go for any minority disabled community obviously.
Allow me to also say, that I can see James' point of view here as well. I think he has explained some things quite eloquently and certainly not how a "little kid" would have and I think people need to take the time and read them and really think about the points he was trying to get across. He was brave posting what he did in light of the attacks that have been made on him and perhaps now he'll think twice about doing it again, understandably.
Let me also say that habbits are hard to break sadly if you've been doing them from when you're little; I think though, you ( and by that I mean anyone) would be doing a great thing for yourself if you really really work on trying to rid those habbits or blindisms.
I never really had many for example but I did constantly put my head on the side when I was younger and was constantly getting nagged by parents to put it up straight. Now I'm an adult and working among the sighted community, I'm OK.
What I still have issues with however, is using a knife and fork. Those are skills that I unfortunately can't feel comfortable with even though I'm told I look fine by sighted peers and family and to keep doing what I'm doing if I want to feel more comfortable. It's not that my parents didn't teach me, it's that they didn't persist when I was little as much as I would have liked because I would go against it and argue.
To the OP, if you can't handle what people are saying to you, you shouldn't have come back in the kitchen so to speak. You are the one who posted this topic, and as anyone knows who has been a message board user for any amount of time, posting a topic means that people can, and will in turn, respond however they see fit. You have every right to throw tantrums because people didn't react how you wanted them to, if you want. However, that is very unbecoming of an adult.
Yes Chelsey, I'm well aware of the fact that I'm the one who posted the topic. I have Glaucoma and Retinopathy of Prematurity, not Dementia. Thanks for reminding me though. That being said though, perhaps you might want to go and reread some of my postings where I do talk about how to put restraints on mannerisms within the context of job interviews or jobs we do every day.
To the one who commented on my being brave to post what I did, that's basically what I've been trying to say and thanks for seeing that. Let's remove for a moment the "What" of the things I'm saying and pretend for a moment that I'm talking about different subjects other than certain things the blind do. The main point I've been trying to make is that anyone who does give a view point that's not looked upon as being accepted by mainstream society is going to get some backlash. Now if the viewpoint is one that can cause problems for others and it can be proven that it can be harmful, then some of the backlash is warranted, but sticking with the idea that the idea one is giving as just strictly a personal viewpoint that harms no one, then they have a right to not be subjected to at homonym attacks and character assassinations such as done by Chelsey and Cody.
To Chelsey and Cody, you are two people who give high-functioning blind people a bad name and it's no wonder that some of my friends who aren't completely high-functioning have the lack of motivation they have. Yes, there are things they could do that they know they could do, but haven't done, to improve on their skills, but most of them have been confronted by daily living skill professionals with attitudes some of which are similar if not just like the ones displayed by Chelsey and Cody which push them until they do break and lose the will to keep going. So to Chelsey and Cody, it's not you guys giving valid viewpoints that they need to just get used to, it's you two being abusive to fellow blind people and calling it trying to help them and using the idea of teaching as a cover for your own abusive and amoral behavior. You two and others who think like you have done more damage to our community than any bigoted sighted person ever has. The two of you and others who think the way you do can say that you're only telling us the truth, and to that I say, yeah whatever helps you sleep better at night.
The ones blind or sighted who claim to want to break us of certain mannerisms will never be satisfied. The “Breakers” start with breaking a blind person of something, then they'll not stop until they terrorize a person with learning problems in to doing what they want. If not that, then they'll keep it up until they beat a person with PTSD in to doing what they want and don't think for one second that there aren't people able-bodied or disabled who don't believe that PTSD exists, because there are PTSD deniers out there as well. So now I'm not so much to the point that I'll never post on here again, but just at the point where I'll post whenever I feel the need to. So there's more to think about.
James
yeah, I have views that go against the norm too, you want a cookie? You're
not brave for posting here. you'd be brave for diving into the ocean to rescue a
baby from a great white shark, or joining doctors without borders to be a
surgeon under shell fire. That's brave. You posted an unpopular opinion on a
message board, where too people you don't know the first thing about, and will
probably never meet, and who will not impact your life in the slightest, said
some things that you didn't like. Get over it. I get attacked on here all the time.
You don't hear me crying about it or talking about how brave I am to have
logged in again. They're words on a screen by people I don't know.
If my friends said something like this, I'd probably take it to heart, because I
know and respect them, but James, or even Chelsea, or most anyone else on
here? Hell no. say what you want, it makes no difference to me. Like me, hate
me, agree with me, disagree with me, think I'm crazy, think I'm the sexiest
thing since sliced bread. None of it is going to change my life in the slightest.
So, OP hasn't met my friend. Has no idea how open with me they are, has no idea about who they are as a person at all, and yet he thinks he somehow knows better than I do. Based on what? His assumptions. Lets state this again. He does not know my friend, at all, there for he doesn't have any ability to provide any first hand experiential, or data driven counter points to my argument.
Considering OP is profoundly ignorant about my friend, its illogical that OP should attempt to make any counter argument. It would be one thing if both people in a situation were equally uninformed on a topic, such as is the case when looking at things we see in the daily news. This isn't the case, how ever.
The OP is free to believe what ever he wishes, but any comments he makes based on what he thinks he understands about my friend should probably be taken for what they are.
Speaking of that particular friend. What did he do. He stopped displaying behaviors that aren't appealing to those who would hire him, and is now working a very well paying job at a well respected company. Why did he suddenly start caring about how he is perceived? Because he needed more money than the government was providing him to live the lifestyle he wanted.
So, for him it was a simple calculation of cost vs potential gains.
He would have to filter how he behaved in public/on the job, because the rewards for doing so are respect, and a well paying job with huge potential for advancement.
What the OP clearly didn't consider was that my friend felt he had no reason to act the way society would expect him to, because he was once happy with the standard of living he was able to achieve with that mindset.
Now that he's actually doing productive work that effects the real lives of people around him, and being payed for it, he feels a lot better about himself, has more self respect. So for him, and him alone, it was a worth while trade.
Could he have gotten the job he did if he acted the way he once did, no. Could I blame someone for not choosing to hire him... Not really.
But at the end of the day, he had to make a choice, because like it or not, society judges people based on several hundred factors. How tall we are/how we're built/how attractive we are are things we largely can't control but that do effect our shot at getting jobs, making friends, and being perceived by people in a positive light. There are how ever factors we can control about ourselves. We can do a lot to positively or negatively impact our image, for example. Life is a series of tradeoffs. We all at some point have to decide what we want, and what we're willing to give in exchange. Because that's a lot easier than attempting to override hundreds of thousands of years of social conditioning, much of which has made society better, not worse.
I feel like OP is looking at the world from a black and white SJW perspective. Feel free to correct me though. Life is a lot more complicated than that.
He never answered my question about what kind of people he would feel comfortable hiring to represent his brand, if he was responsible for hiring at a major company.
I still pose that question. Would he be willing to hire people with extreme blindisms, knowing that doing so would likely result in a drop in sales, production or both, because of their negative impact on the work environment or customer relations?
I have a good friend that can tell you how well this situation worked out in real life, when the government contracted with the company he works for, to insure blind people got jobs, received them.
James you aren't brave. You are a baby who dropped his rattle on the floor. Guess what, I won't pick it up for you. Go get your mommy and daddy.
Okay, so now we’re getting on to baby raddles, SJWs and mommy and daddy doing or not doing for me. Yeah, this really does show me that you guys aren’t really serious and for me to continue to engage with you guys on this is to feed in to the trash-talking social climate on here which mirrors that found on Reality TV and various trash-talk news programs. I’ll stick with what I said before and as for 570 asking me about hiring people with Blindisms, I already said what should be done about putting constraints on mannerisms and that would include Blindisms. You’re just mad that I won’t be a bigot to my own kind like what you, Cody, Chelsey, Margorp and AgateRain are being. So have fun continuing to be bigots towards your fellow blind people, I’d expect nothing less. Oh, and I love that trope about anyone who fights for a fellow human and defends them from bullying, abuse or discrimination being dismissed as just being an SJW. Yeah, 570, real mature and compassionate.
James
So now I'm a bigot because I don't see things your way? Now doesn't that feed in to your "it's all about me" attitude? I think so.
He says so in the title of this topic, so he hasn't said anything new.
*puts on the bigot shoe.
there's a bigot shoe? Is it only one shoe? Is it a nice looking shoe? maybe an
oxford? I could use a good pair of oxfords.
Cody you bigot! There are other perfectly good brands and you just ignore them.
So, the only thing I've learned from this topic is that OP is unquestionably a Hypocrite.
He doesn't want people to judge his life experiences with out understanding all the facts, he doesn't want people insulting or looking down on him, but he's perfectly happy to do all these things to others.
He attacks peoples debate styles, while using the exact same tactics they seem to.
He's railed against zealots while being overzealous himself. He takes extreme ideological positions, while attacking people for not agreeing with his admittedly extreme views.
Reading back threw this board with any rationality employed would demonstrate this is all true, and yet... He believes his Hypocrisy, Bigotry and judgement are completely justified.
If OP isn't even capable of living up to his own standards of conduct, I struggle to understand why anything he says is worthy of rational consideration. If OP believes he is worthy of respect maybe he shouldn't resort to attacking people in the ways he doesn't want to be attacked.
The OP can't have it both ways, and for this reason he shouldn't be judging people if he's not willing to lead by example.
Or, the OP should just admit that he's largely full of shit. Either or.
Good idea. Jason, if you come on and say "I am full of shit" I will respect you for it. I will say "at least he's honest."
Look at the OP again, making presumptions about people. Surprised? Nope, that's what babies do, after all.
Baranca whatever your name is, you say I'm a bully because I have high expectations for blind people, the way sighted people have for each other. However, given that you know nothing about me, you wouldn't know that I was actually someone with blindisms like we are speaking of on this topic. I used to poke my eyes, as well as rock back and forth so fast it was hard for people to have a conversation with me. You know why I stopped? Because a teacher in elementary school educated me on how weird it looks, and told me that I would never make it in the world that way. She said "You might as well wear a sign that says don't talk to me. I'm weird." I thought about her words, realized she was right and worked hard to change my inappropriate behavior. So no I'm not a bully; I am someone who tells it like it is, in hopes that more blind people learn to care about these sorts of things.
Keep in mind James of the many numbers, we're attacking him for something
he started out by saying that he's proud of. He's proud of being the person who
is outside the norm. He likes being the rebel. he just, apparently, doesn't like
everything that entails.
And as I stated he is a baby. Wa wa wa. I refuse to acknowledge my behavior. Wa wa wa!
No Chelsy, people who act as that teacher you described who said that about the sign you should put around your neck are abusive cunts who deserve to fry in Hell if such a place actually existed for that kind of shit. I have no problem with putting constraints on mannerisms as I've done with my rocking as mentioned in previous posts, but I absolutely won't have understanding for cunts and cock suckers and hateful pieces of shit who serve as breakers who would say abusive shit to kids to get them to restrain mannerisms. Such people who would attempt to educate kids in that manner are nothing short of deserving of being sent to a cold winter-like island for life as far as I'm concerned. Maybe if the breakers had their asses thrown in gitmo and then be made to listen to full-blast Death Metal for hours and hours on end, I might not have objections to the place. So Chelsey, you said that you thought about her words and that they made sense to you. Yeah, there's a name for that, it's called Stockholms Syndrome. Sorry you are still operating under the delusional bullshit they filled your head with even all these years later. Now you see fit to be a breaker in your own way and you'll clearly do to other mannerism-oriented blind people as was done and said to you. It's actually really sad.
James
Actually it's not. If it was Chelsy would need to be held hostage. You know nothing you dribbler. Go do some research. And, I'm sure Chelsey never felt abused by someone doing her a favor. How dare you speak on things you don't understand. It's not even a very good use of the word cunt. Cunts should fry or be left on an island. Very nice. I can't hear over the crying. Somebody shut this goddamned baby up!
Sooooooo, what's wrong with being a cocksucker? I rather like being one.
Every cock needs a cocksucker no matter what sexuality you are.
Every cocksucker needs a cock.
Oh I didn't read that bit; I would not advocate being proud of a blindism, not at all.
Chelsea, what a thing to say from your teacher? Lol I would have been gobsmacked. Coodos to you for stopping to think about it without getting in a tizzy prob like I would have done at that age. :)
Baranca, how dare you assume you know what me or my teachers thoughts were, or say that you know we are abusive because we stand up for what we know is right. You have no business acting that way; all you are doing is making yourself look like an ass.
Rachel, I don't see anything wrong with what my teacher said. If it weren't for her saying what she did, I'd still have those blindisms, and probably not be successful at much, if anything today. I seriously wish more people were straightforward with kids, or adults who have such blindisms, because someone needs to tell them the truth and not keep them in a bubble.
It would be abusive if the teacher said "listen you stupid little piss ant, stop your rocking or I'll kick a field goal with you!" I highly doubt that happened.
exactly. the teacher just told the truth, and used an analogy that perfectly communicated how this would look to the sighted people around her. I don't see what's wrong with saying to someone "If you rock like that in public/poke at your eyes you're basically saying "look at me, I'm weird." You could maybe argue the truth could have been delivered in a nicer way, but I'd argue that this notice was probably more helpful in the long run than not.
By informing Chelsea how her actions would look from the outside, she was given the information required to choose if acting that way was worth it to her or not. I don't understand how educating someone about how the world will view them is a bad thing.
Realistically, society has no need to normalize most blindism like behaviors, because there isn't a large enough percentage of people who do them. On a practical rational level, society doesn't gain enough for that expense. There is a practical difference between unusual clothing/hair styles becoming accepted and weird looking behaviors becoming accepted. I think some of this comes down to counter culture liking different new looks, because they have something to communicate to others around you. You're advertising you identify a particular way based on your clothing/hair choices. Factors like popularity/coolness/edgyness of the people identifying with a particular look or style dictate how that look, style or set of behaviors is perceived by society.
See... Here is where the problem sets in. The most notable person I can think of with blindisms is Stevie wonder. At best, people assume the weird shit he does is what all blind people do. I've been asked why I don't rock like he does, for example, or asked if I do the strange things he does. Those with less tact have congratulated me for not having his look.
Even someone famous like that is viewed by society as being weird at best, and open to being made fun of at worst. There aren't a huge section of his fans that have chosen to take on his Mannerisms the way people have with other popular Celebrities. As a practical example, that should probably tell us something. Society can't identify with his actions. If someone with that level of fame can't normalize blindisms, resulting in him being known as that weird looking blind guy who writes music a lot of people like, what hope do people providing limited social value have in normalizing this particularly weird set of social behaviors? I'd venture to say none, Because there is no practical, rational or reasonable reason to do so, from a psychological, sociological or economic point of view. People can either let the way the world works hold them back, make the most of it, or try to change it. I just see this as a losing battle. People would be far better off investing their time in something that would actually gain them something.
and just to be clear. I don't really care, or judge people for what they do in their home, when it doesn't involve me. It only becomes an issue for me when my quality of life is being negatively effected by peoples negative behaviors.
I've said this before, but I figured it was worth repeating, considering how far the conversation has moved since that point.
Well if you want to rock or spin around in your home that's your business.
James 570RM, you are exactly right. I'm glad at least two people see that my teacher was not being mean to me. In fact, if she would've tried to be nicer, the point she was trying to make probably would've gotten lost on me.
This is one reason why I strongly advocate against "saying things nicer" because a lot of times, "nice" is not what people want. What they want is for people to water things down, which I would argue, does more harm than good because then no one knows where anyone stands.
I mean, if someone simply says "Stop rocking" and the adult/child asks why, I think they deserve to be given an honest answer so that they can decide, as I was able to, whether to continue said habit or not. If they aren't afforded that agency, then society would have an even bigger problem in my opinion because people know rocking looks idiotic, but chose not to tell the truth to help someone better themselves.
To be fare, you can be nice without watering things down but that's a whole other topic.
I think the OP has very similar mannorisms as my god chosen bride for life finally. I think the OP enjoys drama, being at the center of attention, making completely absurd remarks to get people to react dramatically, and finds using reverse psychology and things like race baiting to ruffle people's feathers. I also think the OP really thinks he is better than the rest of us blind ass holes on here, and he wants us to bow before his feet and kiss them, or something of the sort. Oh, but I shouldn't assume. I can sound quite absurd too sometimes. Lol.
Margorp, sure you can still be nice, but mostly people would be watering things down by saying things differently than my teacher said them, or just through life in general. Granted, people don't have to say everything they think or feel, but that doesn't mean they water things down either.
Hmmm, interesting comment about foot worship there Runner. Sorry though, not in to that. Maybe those who love "Fifty Shades of Grey might be in to that, but not at this I.P. Address. Anyway, looks like I struck a nerve here. Aww, how cute.
Yes, I've read the postings by My God Chosen Bride or whatever he's calling himself these days and even I don't know what the hell he's talking about. Anyway, you guys are so cute when you all bight holes in your spleens when hearing something that doesn't go with your self-imposed bigoted beliefs. To Chelsey, do I believe in telling someone something that's the truth, of course I believe in telling them an uncomfortable truth, but not like what your teacher did. As to you saying that if she had been nicer then that would have gone right over your head, sounds rather cynical to me, but it's your mind, not mine. Sounds like those people who say how badly they needed to be beaten as kids, but you can just sense within them, the anger they still have, but aren't trying to show it.
James
Chelsea, I didn't say I was against the teacher for what she said to you; I just said that that's how I would have reacted.
I did give you coodos for accepting it with grace and it taught you a valueable lesson.
I don't think a bash Chelsey session is needed. I applaud that teacher and I applaud Chelsey for making the right choice. James, ah but you seem to be the one getting all upset because we don't follow your ways. Quit wimpering; It's pathetic.
Rachael, my misunderstanding. Thanks for the clarification.
I'm beginning to think Baranca is a troll, just like MyGodChosenShitStain. We've lead the horse to water, but we can't force him to drink.
I actually don't think he is a troll. He really believes the bullshit he's spewing. I can just tell somehow.
You're probably right. That is sad, very very sad.
The troll thing is a happier thought but leave it to me to throw cold water on someone's dreams.
Hmmm, a troll huh? Funny. It's always interesting how people accuse others of what they're most likely doing isn't it? Well, after fighting back after Cody made the comments about me being a blink who would probably live with mommy and daddy forever, I've said the added things I've had to say, so you guys can go back to fighting it out among yourselves again.
James
You'll be back; everyone knows it.
And, I, will, be, back. Moooahahahahaha!
Honestly, I think we'd all have more respect for you, if you didn't act as if you believe you're above your own values. I state this based on the way you have responded to others on this board. This is only my assumption, as I clearly don't have access to the thoughts in your head.
How can anybody take this seriously?
When can we go back to talking about something more interesting -- like cocks? What? It works for me.
As long as they're fitting, we can talk about them any time. wahaha get it get it? Lol Lol
And another zone topic is destroyed. lol.
I'm willing just so I'm not asked to share mine. hahaha.
I'll admit, I'm a bit rusty and uninformed on this subject accept my own, but open it and I'll read. hahaha.
Good job op, we could have continued this on a more serious note but now, thanks to you, all we have are dick jokes. Round of applause!
after using a shovel, tongs, and a hammer, i have managed to plow and bash my way through this thread. to say the least,
it's been a fascinating read. The originator is almost totally incomprehensible. i have found the opinions, even those with which i disagreed, well thought out and interestingly presented.
as a woman who went to school in a dinosaur powered buggy, i was fascinated to learn that blindisms still exist. for some
reason, i thought that gen x-ers and millenials didn't use or need these.
as for rocking, for premature babies, it has always been taught to me that they didn't get enough motion in mom's womb as
she walked around. incidentally, this mannerism is seen in sighted preemie preschoolers almost as often as with blind
ones. about ten years ago or so, experiments were conducted where incubators rocked. Kids who lived in these had far less
evidence of this behavior. it's now common for incubators to have motion.
james, i have a few thoughts you might want to consider. after interpreting your convoluted sentence structure and logical
inconsistencies, i have one hell of a headache.
1. please shorten your sentences. after about nine words the average reader gets lost. are you trying to impress us with
your points or with your perceived intelligence.
2. I have learned that if I want to win the prize, I have to play the game. I may not like the rules, but that's the
way the cookie crumbles.
3. you mentioned going to a college interview with an advocate. why did you need someone to speak for you? in order to succeed we need to do that job for ourselves.
4. your language is abominable. your points would be much better taken if they weren't laced with expletives. granted,
this is a free country and we have a right to say what we need to in the manner most comfortable to us. You are a bit excessive. with a brain as big as you think yours is, i'm sure you could come up with better alternatives. if not, that's what wictionary or a good thesaurus is for.
5. if you are so thrilled with your rebellion against societal norms, why don't you appear to be happier? let me see, i will attempt to innumerate the people and groups with which you are angry. this partial list includes; evangelical christians, the catholic church, atheists, republicans, democrats, rehabilitation professionals, teachers of the blind, employers, nfb, acb, nazi germany, and the doctors who gave you too much oxygen so you could live. shock us all. say something positive and/or kind.
I enjoyed reading that last post.
That's very interesting about preemies and motion, Turricane.
I was one, but have never had these particular blindisms. But people will find *something* to pick about, and try to correct, and for me that was that I didn't hold my head up as a child, so was constantly reminded to do so. glad someone harassed me into it, though! And I do recall being questioned and teased by one girl in middle school for being so still all the time. If movement is distracting for sighted others, why is its opposite a bother, too, I wonder?
Because it looks unnatural and usually means you're staring at something. If
you just sit there statue-like, you're staring at something. It very well might be
a person who is getting creeped out. You've gotta move a little bit, but you have
to learn what movement is acceptable and appropriate.
It isn't so bad, but it looks dead, or doll like.
That is the best way I can describe it.
No expression, no movement, dead.
It's spooky for these that are in that frame of mind.
I wouldn't really call lack of movement a blindism though. Of course that's just me.
It isn't actually.
Good, I'm not going insane!
I've been accused of looking dead before, good to know that I'm not the only one. lol
And, I stepped away from this topic for a while, and I saw more dribble from the OP, valid points from everyone but him, cock talk, and some humor, so interesting, I guess. lol
Oh great, I'm looking dead and doll-like? Haha I do at least try to not have the glazed-over stare, but it's tough. I've been told that I look like I'm in deep thought, or that I look upset or angry, when none of that was at all the case. It's a bit discouraging. Who can smile all the time, anyway? Not me! But I do at least try to occasionally appear to be looking around, and look toward people when they're speaking to me. Not sure what else I can do. Well, at least the girl in middle school mentioning this made me aware of it; it's helpful to know what impression you're giving.
I get told I look like I'm tired sometimes. I do my best to fight this but nobody's perfect.
In college I was told by one or two friends that when I was sitting still, I was really, really ssitting still. But then when I suddenly mmoved, it was like going from zero to 60 in 2.5 seconds. No preamble; no indication that I was gunna just start moving. I’d just instantly spring into action. Apparently I’m pretty decisive when I wanna do something.
I have what is commonly known as BRF, Bitchy Resting Face. In other words, I look pissed off or stressed out half the time. Usually, I'm just concentrating on listening to what's going on around me. Grrr. lol
Bitchy resting face! For whatever unknown reason, I just love it!
I've always been told I smile too much. as my mom said, "send some folks to heaven and they'll complain about the wall paper." oh i too love bitchy resting face. maybe i'll try it sometime. it will be a nice pleasant change from too smiley.
In regards to post 261 from Turricane.
Wow Turricane, generalize much?
James
To Jondy, glad to see that you take this no more seriously than anyone else. Yeah, I'm sure that jokes about cocks will help the small-town people with the issues I've been writing about on this board. So keep up the good work, if that's what one wants to call it.
Hmmm, maybe I should stop reading the "Song of Ice and Fire" books, as I have my own little King Jofries and Sersy Lanesters on here. Oh, and what should happen if I say one more thing against the blindness crown? Am I going to get "Crowned like Visaris? If anyone has read "Game of Thrones", that is the first book of the series, you'll know what I mean by that reference.
Pease out up in dis Bitch.
James
As to the ones saying that they're sitting too still and being asked about it.
Yeah, that just goes to show that you can't keep the breakers happy, so fuck em.
James
I was just thinking, and after really thinking about it while doing other things here online for the past couple of hours, it's finally come to me that I've been coming at this at the wrong angle. I obviously started this topic to first, get my thoughts out, then to leave it up so others could discuss it. Clearly though, my responses have taken on a life of their own, in that I've been explaining myself to self-hating blind guys like Cody and trying to explain my story of education and other related things. So here's what I have to say to those who would assume that I didn't work or don't try to work hard to make a life for myself. So this might not be the most fancy piece of writing, but allow me to give it a try. Also, I probably covered it with different wording in previous postings, but here it is.
I find it interesting that you blind people always talk about whether or not other blind people rock, poke eyes and shake heads as much as you do and then give that trope about how those who do this effect or have the potential to effect you guys negatively. Huh, what a steaming pile of rat shit that is. Last time I checked, the ones who get negatively affected by another's actions are ones like children who are abused, people who are raped, those who are imprisoned and treated hatefully by their captors and those who are marginalized. These would be groups like gays, blacks, and other minorities. Those are ones who can definitely say a thing or 666 about peoples' actions effecting them negatively.
What do you guys do though, you guys come up with this crock of shit about how rocking, eye poking and head-shaking make all in the blindness community look bad. Then you guys go on to relate stories like that guy that 570 talks about and I'm quite honestly not convinced he isn't just making that shit up. It really does remind me of the skin-head assholes who talk about how we really haven't met those really bad blacks, gays or other minorities they're hating against. There might be some blacks who don't bathe or wash, there might be some gays who do have sex with so many people that they're putting their health and the health of others at risk, but according to these skin-head wanna-bees, there's a more dangerous type of these same minorities and if we just saw them, then we'd know why gay marriage, integration of blacks and other civil rights shouldn't be allowed.
Also, I still have yet to find any sighted people with the exception of the ones in rehab agencies and torture chambers known also as schools for the blind who worry about these things you people disdainfully call "Blindisms". You guys go on to tell stories or make hateful jokes about the really nasty blindies and blinks, your words not mine, who don't wash, don't work, rock, poke eyes and shake heads. With the exception of one or two guys at the death camp I was assigned to from 14 to 18 years old, I have never seen this eye poking you all get your intestines in a fatal blockage over. I'm not entirely convinced that you guys aren't just quite frankly making that shit up, no different than the skin-head posers or the real ones who talk more or less that same shit about the various minorities I talked about above.
The most I've seen in terms of ignorance from the sighted towards us is when a kid at the public school I finished up in asked me one night when we were talking on the phone how us blind people have sex. I actually wasn't pissed at that, it was actually funny and we laughed about it after I just let him know that we do it like any other couple, but we just don't use vision as a guide when starting to do it. So my point, is that you guys act as if ignorance from the sighted is just waiting around every corner to strike at us like people worried about suddenly contracting AIDS back in the 1980s and then you guys throw around the trope about the boss who might not give us a job if we don't stop the "Blindisms", and I have yet to see any blind people being denied a job interview, or the job after the interview simply because they were rocking. Realistically speaking, I'm going to stick my neck out and risk an educated guess that most bosses are going to decide to not hire a blind person for lack of work experience or the various other reasons one might not get a job. If a boss decides to discriminate and not hire a blind person and it is discrimination at the root, then that's on the asshole boss, not the blind person.
The fact that this "Blindisms" shit you people keep throwing up and warning us against is shit that I'm now starting to wonder if you guys in the community over the years didn't just make up because you guys are self-hating blind people who are so afraid of what sighted people will think of you that you guys can't even think straight. That's what I've come to think about the whole issue. You guys take certain self-expressions and act as if it’s Nazis or neo-Nazis putting up their hands in the Nazi greeting and yelling “Hail Hitler”, when all it is, are a few mannerisms that really isn’t hurting you guys at all when other blind people are doing them, unless you let it hurt you.
So as to Cody and others who talk to me about what will I do about not getting a job because of rocking which you guys know I don't do at job interviews or what will I do about getting in to college and why didn't it work out for me with the exception of the year I did at Hocking College the first time around for Medical Transcription, I say this to all those tropes. Mind your own god damn business, that's what! Focus on your own mannerisms if any, stop with the stories of the "Blindies" who spin dangerously close to others and participate in your own god damn job interviews and go to your own god damn college classes. Damn, what an idiot I was to actually start attempting to explain myself about my education history to you self-hating blind people. So there ya go. I’m just waiting for the blindness equivalent of the skin-head movement to start up where blind people who rock or shake heads are beaten up in the streets by the likes of you guys. This is how that shit gets started. You start out with making jokes about telling a fellow blind person to look at you then yell that they smell bad, and someone did post something like that a few postings ago. You guys look down on other blind people and dismiss them as nothing more than pieces of shit, so just let me know when you guys have set up the “Action T-4” centers for those blindy undesirables to be put down so you guys can keep your “living space”. Hitler would be so proud. Don’t you think so? Oh, also please let me know when the trains with the shower stalls are built. I’ll make sure you guys have full-functioning and brand-new Pac Mates on which you guys can record the names of the exterminated you have ridded the community of. Won’t that be fun? Like I said, this is how it starts. You start out with the word “Blink”, then it doesn’t stop until someone does get physically hurt, so I wonder just how far you guys are going to take this shit as well as other like-minded blind people who think the way you self-hating bigots do.
Put that in your braille writer and bang it out.
James
I'm bored. I'm getting ready for work.
But if rocking and eyepoking and the likes really aren't that bad, why would you not do these things at a job interview? If a boss doesn't hire you because you rock, he's not going to say that. He'll find something else. That's just kinda how it works.
lol I'm one of those people whose face makes up for not having eyes to express myself. So at times, looks appear on my face that I am totally unaware of. Also, I tend to get stuck in my head a lot, so I'm surely smiling at something 98% of the time.
Oh yeah, and I try to move around too now. Thanks to the iPhone now, I try to act as if I'm staring at my screen or something.
I'm sorry.
I don't think what one blind person does affects us all. If you have blindisms, that affects you.
I was once a seeing person, so I have no hate at all for other blind people.
But, I can tell you, that these activities will put people at a loss.
They forget how to talk to you. They don't know if you are mentally slow.
They have no idea how to say, sir, can you stop moving atround so I can stop thinking about your moving around, and talk to you?
This starts before you even open your mouth.
Imagine if you were having a conversation, and the person kicked you now and again.
You feel a kick on your shin. You continue the conversation, then you feel another kick.
This keeps going on.
Can you just ignore this?
Okay, that is silly, but it might give an idea of what it is like to watch someone poking there eyes.
As for the facial stuff, that isn't a problem, because your voice will give an idea of your feelings.
Keep that smiling. It is other folks problem if they are uptight, not yours.
Smile.
OP continues to prove everything i've written about him. Good job at being consistently full of shit.
His ability to twist peoples words and take what they're saying out of context, as well as ignore any arguments against his stance reeks of the highest level of internet troll.
Finishing off with some Reductio ad Hitlerum. I'd thought before now that he's hit every logical fallacy on the list, but I forgot the most important one on the internet. Well done, well done.
I love the part where he just assumes we'd kill off people who express themselves with blindisms, while having previously asked on this thread that we not judge him and his struggles.
TL:DR Troll is troll, not rational human.
3/10 you'll have to get up earlier in the morning to show me something new, oh wise most likely mentally ill, or mentally handicap internet troll. Your ability to follow the internet trolls handbook largely misses the mark, but you did get points for Hitler, and for making unsubstantiated remarks about those you disagree with. So, out of a possible 10 points, you get 3.
James you made me laugh so hard it hurt. Ahahahahahahahaha. Thank you; I needed that.
Cheap bastard. Ony 3 points?
Laughing.
I mean the op. He compares us to skinheads. Lol what a dope.
Hey, if the piss and shit filled-to-over-flowing adult rubber diaper fits, wear it.
James
Guess I can't get an answer.
Smile.
Wayne summed it up best in post 283. It's just distracting.
As for Bitchy Resting Face, I wish I could take the credit. It's a youtube video I saw on facebook a few years ago. It just stuck with me since it applies to me. Apparently, I'm not the only one. lol
No no no, it can't possibly be the way Wayne explained it. we all just hate
ourselves and want every blind person to be exactly the way we are for ,
reasons? Oh, and Hitler, somehow he fits in their too. Yay logic.
This is what happens when you have people thinking they're intelligent, when
they're just well read. This is how Will Hunting should have acted. Cuz no
amount of simple reading can give you actual education. Stay in school kids.
And while you're in school, don't simply memorize your text book and head home for the day. Actually try to understand.
Yeah, that's the major difference, especially with college. People think its just
reading a book, memorizing a fact, and then you have an education. Sadly, no. I
guarantee that if we took james and an english major, and made them both
read the same book, the english major would bend James over and spank him
with his or her knowledge and insight into that book.
Oh absolutely.
I hate the term blink hate it with a passion. Its discriminating.
Yeah, Jenni. I completely agree with you.
James
Had a roomie once who named his cane Blinkie.
It does have a nasty sound to it.
I've never, ever heard a sighted person use the term blink. I don't think most people know it.
I've only heard it on this site actually.
I thought blink had died a much deserved death. it's old and outdated.
What I would like to know is who the heck thought of such a term as blink to describe blind people. this make s no since
I think it's what other blind people call each other.
I hate the term 'blink" as well but I do use the term "blindy" :)
Same here. I never knew the word until I came to the Zone.
I was always just blind, now I'm excited, I can be several things.
Laughing.
Since you use to have sight, you're an ex-sighted person.
Damn. Okay, I'll add that to my word list.
How about former sighty?
Laughing.
A word a group of my friends used to use was blindow. As, in "you stupid blindow!" It was understood that it was only a joke.
Sorry, but I just think blindy sounds stupid. lol
I like braliens and sightlings.
I sure don't.
i think this came up on another thread, too, and I agree with Domestic Goddess, blindy sounds ridiculous. I don't mind blink at all, and the fact that it's supposedly outdated makes me like it all the more. At least blink is a real word!And since the sighted aren't referring to me as a blink, it doesn't bother me.
As I said over there too, I dislike "the blind", as in anything done for the blind, agency names, and such, like we're some freaks or aliens...which admittedly, some of us are. LOL
When I think of blink, I think just that.
If a person blinks, there only, um, visually challenged for a second.
Laughing.
A lot of what I'd say has already been said, so I'll say this. Silver lightning is mentally ill. I won't use his name because it's mine thank you.
Someone mentioned Trump? Personally I am listening to him and no one else because this go around election, there's a lot of fur flying, so rather than trying to look through it, listening appears to be easier.
James, aka Barranca Grande, hit the nail right on the head. I myself don't have any habits that I'd call blindisms, although when I am inside on the phone or outside having a cigarette I'll pace back and forth while I do what I do. But that's not really specific to blind people I don't think. I also pick my nail cuticles. I think I may have generalized anxiety or something I don't know. James basically stole my thoughts before I even came on the zone recently. I was dealing with an individual who I had previously purchased hotspot sets for jaws a few years back. He remembered me and I had asked him if he could send me a copy of the hotspots, even though I had sold my license of jaws to someone on this board and didn't have a licensed copy of jaws. My point was to study them and make my own, since he wouldn't just send me a copy for what I wanted even though I had already paid him and he had record of that. So he's telling me if I want a working copy I need to first go buy jaws, then buy another copy of his hotspot sets, which is really only a dialog box in hsc to type a serial number. So he really thinks by saying this he's going to get me to really buy another copy. What an idiot. I just got done telling the asshole I was broke as shit, just like probably 80+% of this board on SSI or SSI/survivors benefits. But like James said, he's got his shit and he's making money, so he basically says fuck the rest of you blind folks, I'm doing well, so now I'm going to fuck everyone over and that's how companies like freedom science fiction form. I'm blind, so most of the dumb shit sighted people do I'd never know about, and has no impact on my daily interaction with them so I'd expect them to be understanding to a point towards me. I myself don't really care what you or you or that guy over there does with his life, it's none of my business, please don't make it mine and I won't mind you it's really that simple. But yes, it's quite the paradox when we've got blind folks who uphold these stereotypes and yes I know a one or two. They are pathetic and I don't associate with them. My reason for saying that though it sounds harsh is that I don't uphold that image as it is ultimately to that blind person's demise. They aren't contributing anything positive to society and it makes me look bad. I've had a few run-ins with other fellow blind people and over a period of time I noticed their ways and when it negatively started impacting me I calmly told them that they had a problem and what the solution was. That turned into, "have some compassion". Well what the fuck you think I'm trying to help you for. I'm almost completely blind and I know what someone who is only blind is capable of doing and not doing, trust me I fight with those things every day, there's a lot of cool shit you just flat out need eyes for, and in a lot of case, eyes are necessary to help create the accessibility solutions, that's definitely the case with certain instrument vst's I'm thinking about. Most of the time if I go out to a store that I don't frequent a bunch like walmart where no one knows me it's like trying to communicate with a bunch of aliens. I go up to the service desk if there is a friend with me and I'm talking to the person behind the counter and then they turn and look at the person I'm with because you know I'm so worthless that you can't even talk to me. Mother fucker, when I pay you in cash, you don't give my money to the person I'm with, you do business with me. I get so pissed off and what usually happens is it's very obvious I"m fuming and the person I'm with is like, ehh whatever let's go. I'm total property to people it feels like. You know then when I'm with a friend, people are patting them on the shoulder saying things like "good job" because they see me with a cane and they instantly without even using more than half of one brain cell, assume that you are that helpless because you are simply in a sighted person's presence. I've had other sighted people go "oh I saw you with your care taker". My blood pressure went up pretty quickly as you may imagine when I heard that. Had it not been an elderly lady saying that I may have had a more dramatic reaction, but my facial expression I think was enough to deliver my discontent with the said comments she said. These people don't know anything because how many sighted people see a blind person at all. Even if I sit here and tell you I know 3 or 4 blind people in this very town I live in, it wouldn't make a bit of difference to 99.9% of the rest of the sighted population, they're still going to tell you, wow, I'm so fascinated that you can use that stick. I mean everything sighted people know is purely Helen Keller, Steevy Wonder, Ray Charles, the cliche gets pretty old, pretty fast, especially when every sighted person you meet has the same jokes, same lines, same people they talk about. What that tells me is that the issue stems in education. If the 99.9% of the world that is quote normal and sighted were to be taught something different than an example of a girl who is deaf dumb and blind, perhaps it may give sighted folks a more positive view of blind people. I'm not trying to talk trash about Keller, she is great and did a lot of great things and persevered. But if this is the best example you can give a class of seventh graders or whatever, they're going to probably have the idea that blind people are also deaf. Which is exactly what people do! Ever have the classic know it all get right in your face and talk loudly to you and ask you if you know sign language? No, I'm not trying to be funny, these people are just that stupid and I really have had that happen to me several times. I mean, are you hard of hearing yourself? Because I did say blind and not deaf, you did hear that, right? Blind folks I think have more of an advantage, we tend to be more in tune with technology and perhaps more intellectual and better with words, only because we need to be. Ask a sighted person to describe something. You know what response I get? "I'm bad at describing things, I don't know how to describe it". It's these people who have no concept of reality and they can't figure out that there is a world other than their own they just can't think. It is a systemic problem. If the education changed, the perception and interaction and treatment would also change. I've said all that and I'll say this about the blindisms. Institutions for blind people do more harm than good. For all public school's horse shit, I am glad I went over blind school. Trust me it wasn't fun and I didn't have a bunch of friends but I got along great with a lot of the tech students. I learned a lot at a young age and I am glad that I didn't have to wait until I was 20 to learn tht a majority of sighted folks don't give a shit and they know nothing about blind people and you're like a novelty to them and you clearly always need to be with someone. The rocking is probably one of the worst ones. I understand the auditory effects of rocking but it really does look strange to someone who normally doesn't see that. Perhaps it looks like you're doubling over in pain constantly? I mean your face doesn't indicate your cronically constipated, so what's up. That's probably what goes through a sighted person's head. I don't generally try to look in peoples eyes, for good reason, I just look at them, in their general area or hell, I'll even look away, at that point, even if I'm contributing to the conversation, you really can't tell whether or not I really give a shit. But that's just me.
I used to think I was just really angry a
I used to think I was just really angry but realized the real world sucked for real so I knew I wasn't crazy and apparently many of you guys on here clearly feel the same way. Yet what will be done about it, hmmm?
So I read a little further. Gotta say, I'm just as pissed as James about this stuff so I completely understand. Silver lightning is a great example, he's got it made so he doesn't feel guilty about taking the sighted stance which is his own justification. Whatever you are your own worst enemy.
My issue is why does one, blind or sighted need to conform to a system working for years and years to get a degree in a market which may be uncertain years down the road. There are so many loose variables and going to college, getting a degree and getting into the field and job you want is basically winning the lottery. Sure it's not impossible, but in my case, I hate school, I've spent all my life in school it's taken me 5 years taking 1 year off to get a 2 year general studies associates degree. I just can't stand school. I'm getting the same crap from my vr counselor. Call center jobs bla bla bla. I live in Oregon. I want to start my own business growing dank weed. To do this hydroponically you need about $2000 worth of equipment that sighted people could get for, gee, a few hundred but because independence science came out with a talking lab quest we have to jack the price way up, then buy all the sensors to measuring things. Don't even talk about the scale they have, that's like $500, gotta connect it to the computer with labquest. I'm surprised in 2016 how some shit is still not accessible. If by now software accessibility isn't better than it should be, why would you expect sighted people to be any more familiar in person with blindness than they are with the term accessibility. It's true, sighted people notice blind isms but they won't be rude, maybe, to your face but it doesn't mean they don't notice. I'd like to develop a course and teach other blind folks who were interested how to grow great buds by themselves and have it be like an entrepreneur launchpad, and who doesn't like great weed. But as you might expect, vocational rehab couldn't support a business plan. Yeah, because everything is a plan, and play by their rules, or you're going to just have to stay home until you're about, hmmm, 30 or 35, then maybe you'll have that social security stashed away enough to where maybe it'll be useful. As for myself, like any logical young adult would do. I move away from home, lived in 2 states, and have an apartment which all of my money by the third is gone, because, $753 is peanuts. So you try saving $50 a month Silver lightning and tell me when you have $100,000 to cover your college. Of course you didn't because you took out loans, but that only gives them more reason to give you hell. I agree with James, living in the system is difficult, causes anger because there is no easy answer, and then where do you actually get the help to do what you want without being a CC of sighted people. But really we're not even CC's because no one would dare touch us for labor jobs like throwing 50 pound bags of grass seed, driving a fork lift and stacking pallets. So yeah until that perfect call center job comes along, only thing one can do is wait, either collect your SSI for months and do it debt free, or roll over to the system so they have you later. Oh wait, hardly anyone is hiring so that degree you just spent $30,000 for to have the entire alphabet behind your name means nothing. People want to know what you can do, not what you said you learned. Show me what you can do. So really degrees are a bunch of garbage if you can't perform the job. I could go all the way through college, get the piece of paper, all the while getting C's because I didn't care and I just wanted that paper. It's hard, I'd never be able to do full time classes. I don't have that much in my life besides class if I did that and I do not feel that passionate and dedicated to a degree as all of that amounts to nothing in the end. I just want a job right now, any job, to make money so I can fund my own ideas and plans. I don't have to waste half my life away to get the job. Been living on credit cards too long, and working on getting my student loans discharged, which you can do through nelnet just can't make anymore than the poverty guidelines for 3 years and they'll excuse your debt. Easy just fill out the form and attach form 2690 from social security and you're good to go. Was thinking of filing for chapter 7 bankrupcy. The job I was told about that I may be have a chance with involves a 3d printer and they would want me to create 3d models of intersections for kids. I have not been able to find out anything on how to accessibly create 3d models. You see? This very thing I should be able to do. In 2016 what is so damn hard about this? So if it turns out there is no way for me to do that task, or some how figure out hwo to use adobe illustrator to emboss raised graphic childrens books then no job. So discouraging.
Okay, I read you.
Here’s the thing. It is 2016, and you’re still blind.
We, unfortunately, live in a sighted world, so when designers and such make things they make them as easy for the sighted to use as possible.
On your business, if you feel you’ve got a good business plan, how about going to the small business administration for that loan to get started?
Maybe an small bank in your city?
These are what the sighted person would have to do.
Maybe design a kick start bases on the fact you are a blind person, and could make a better life for yourself, if you could raise enough funding to start your business?
I totally agree, a college degree won’t make a blind person necessarily more able to find a job, but it is something to do while you are waiting.
College taught me even more about the world and how to deal with it.
We are blind, and that means we much live with it.
It gets difficult sometimes, but seems to me the best way to deal is to be happy not bitter.
Why, because these stupid assed people you rant and rave at don’t care, so your energy is simply wasted.
If you are spending your money, and you feel you are disrespected, don’t spend it at that store.
Last, just like you don’t understand everything about people, disability, or whatever, we have to understand others won’t either. Best way to help them is to teach them, if you feel like it. If not, just write them off as people that are lacking in education, and move on. Someone else will be better educated.
Now, all I just said isn't the magic bullet, but it is a way to live and not be so angry.
Stay away from Walmart unless your goal is to feel worse about yourself. I can't think of anything you would need on a regular basis that you can't buy either at a grocery store like HEB or online.
Sometimes SilverLightning posts useful and interesting stuff. If he started a blog I would read it. But Did you see that other thread where he basically said it was your own fault if you couldn't tie your shoes? So I explained in detail why it took me so long to be able to tie them, even though I really wanted to learn how. He never responded, probably because it was obvious to everyone how wrong he was, and he hates to admit his mistakes. I wonder if he knows how it feels to be made fun of for something beyond his control.
Well, with 317 I think I fundamentally disagree with you. The very reason I said the problem with the sighted is education is because if I did just what you said whenever I am disrespected, how many stores do you think would be left to go to. That's just silly. If I need something, then dammit I'm going to go to the closest store that has what I need to conduct my business. When someone is disrespecting me I have no problem treating them similarly so they get the emotion in their mind rather than using words. There is no justification, at all, under any condition, that a cashier can justify giving your change to some other person who may or may not be with you but may just be in your general area. I have no problem putting ignorant people in their place, that is, barring they are clearly acting ignorant. I'm perfectly fine with people who are curious and what to ask questions about something they dont' know and I'll answer them because I, as I said, am all about proper education. Children should learn that disabilities expand far beyond someone who is autistic and in a wheel chair, but I get that those are the defacto examples. We are nothing but just blind. And yes, when sighted designers make things they don't think about accessibility only what looks pretty. What are you saying by this, are you trying to give them credit for nothing taking the time and thinking of other people? Are you saying it's ok and I shouldn't point out certain things clearly because I observe them. I mean you're statement simply tells me people can disrespect you and it's ok, just go somewhere else. You're one blind person in an entire sighted world. Like I said I don't roll over to anyone and yes, I will point people out. Not being rude, but sometimes I do get angry. Letting those situations go just encourages the behavior and is exactly what I'm trying to address here. When people clearly get the idea they've done something wrong, perhaps they'll think twice next time. You have a job in customer service, then I hope you read the job description, because common sense should tell you any number of different people could come through your line. It is true that these people think they're being nice, as indicated by several sighted friends who tell me not to get angry, but when I explain that when it happens in many different states, in many different places, with many different people that tells me there's a problem with the bigger picture. Here's another example my buddy just gave me. One time, that I never noticed, when I was finished checking out, the cashier said thank you to me, and then under their breath they thanked my friend. As if I'm like not there or something or that it needed to be said under their breath because they clearly knew it would offend me If you knew it, why did you just feel I was a lower person than you, just like Silver lightning explained and think it was ok. When I say this I'm not in turn, trying to say that blindisms are ok to do, I don't think they are for good reason, but there is a time and a place for everything and I don't hate people that have those blindisms, but yes, unfortunately, in the bigger picture, regardless of blindisms visible in public, we'll always be looked at as the third wheel and a novelty to society no matter what, with some exception. Trust me there's wonderful people in this world who completely get it but unfortunately they're far and few between. Also, if you are assuming I have not looked into a small business loan, I clearly have, and they are extremely hard to get. Growing weed to fund that would be a more common sense option to me in that regard, but again that's just me, and when you can just grow your money, why would you at all come up with any reason to use the system I just can't understand at all. Not to get off on a jag about weed and the garb surrounding it, not gouging the market can and will insure you have a constant flow of buds and money, I've done it, and I've seen it work. Limitations on this are location and start up funds which are much more palletable than getting a small bizz loan or getting lost in the world of college that you have no clue what you can and cannot do. Sure, silver lightning has a point, you can do anything you want if you put your mind to it, but is clearly why he is the way he is because he realized the world is full of these same individuals and to deal with them he in turn has to be an asshole to assert he's not mentally challenged even though it looks like it on here which, as I've already said, he is his own worst enemy. Water seeks its own level and there's an ass for every chair.
Funny, you say I'm mentally challenged, and you spout off so angrily at me,
yet I have literally zero of the problems you have. I went to walmart two days
ago. Walked up to the counter, well asked for directions from a cashier first,
then walked up to the counter, got a person to help me, pulled out my phone
and went on about my shopping. The only challenge I had was communicating
with the person who was helping me, but that was because he was half deaf;
which coincidentally is the reason I hate going to walmart. But publix, where I
prefer to go, is under construction at present. I've never had, in my memory,
someone say that I use, or they saw me with, or even ask if I have a caretaker.
I havent had people ask me if I'm deaf since I was in elementary school. The
only people I have anything even approaching difficulty with these days are
children, and I think we can excuse children not knowing any better. I never
have problems with adults.
Now, I have frustrations with adults. Like I hate when cab drivers won't shut
the fuck up about my guide dog. And occasionally I'll have someone not want to
take my dog in their cab, or into their restaurant, but I haven't had anything
more serious than that since I was in at most middle school.
So, if I'm so mentally challenged, why is it that you're the one ranting so
furiously, and I have none of the problems you listed? What am I doing
differently?
And voyager, I'm sorry, I don't remember seeing your response. I'll go and
find it now.
That's easy, because you are now for all intents and purposes, just lieka sighted person, but I don't see you actually talking about the real core problem why you would even bring up cab drivers bitching about your dog, when if you really knew what was going on in the world, you'd know most of those cab drivers are either Kenyan, Simolian or some form of muslem. If you've been paying attention to anything lately you'd know these Isis people are being brought in under a ruse, so that's what you should be complaining about not about them wining about your dog, you should already know that. And, why should it matter if I go to a store by myself or with a buddy because me and him are out doing something. My treatment should not change by other people, and there is no argument or justification otherwise, sorry. I don't stop going to stores like I said, I'll just bitch them out and tell them to fuck off, I mean, that's kind of the attitude towards blind people it seems so hey, you know, I don't feel bad, but I certainly don't go out of my way to be angry. Just remember what you learned when you were a little kid, when someone talks to you, look at them, it is called respect, do I really need to explain that? I get some folks want to stop people and explain for 5 minutes that they really don't appreciate how they were treated, sometimes there isn't time for that, and a quick and dirty response is required, especially when there's people in line behind you and clearly saw what happened, they'll just leave and go to another line, which is exactly what happened in pennsylvania with my grandmom at walmart. Lots of people are pathetic, rude, and they simply don't care. Walmart can be weird but my overall experience has been fine. It's not walmart's fault, it's a problem with society and the exposure kids have growing up to blindness and the examples they are given. I just don't understand man, I just don't get it, why would you look away from someone because you know they can't see you so you'll go out of your way to look at someone else while you're talking to me, but you're really not talking to me then it makes me look stupid. I don't really care, silver lightning what you're experience is in walmart or any other store, as you have no control over the reaction of other people and for all you know they could be reacting to you in much the same as as me. It is a problem with communication and many people are hired that really can't do the job, so there you go.
Actually I take my first comment back about silver lightning, he's not mentally ill, he just sold out. Part of the sighted camp now, so why bother arguing with a black hole.
Of course people can be rude. That has nothing to do with the blind. Blind and sighted people alike can be rude to each other. What's your point here?
So wait. You agree with James about blindisms, but then say that you don't
understand why you wouldn't look at someone? You do realize that not looking
at people you're speaking to is actually a blindisms right? If you expect people
to look at the person they're addressing, you don't agree with James. Who feels
that staring at the table is perfectly fine and blind people shouldn't be expected
to be held to sighted standards. Honestly, did you even read the post your
commenting on?
As for the comment about taxi drivers, I see no reason to give your racist
comments enough to attention to form an argument to them.
Lol racist, that takes care of that issue huh. You really don't have a grasp on reality so let's not go there please. Typical lib here. Racist racist racist. Just ignore the facts. You really do live in your own world. Tell me about Orlando, San Bernadino, the Philly cop shooting, any of the other ones and your hunnies and dearies over at your favorite news channels say the same thing you do, so yes, how convenient, I'm a racist. You blame and finger point. I'm explaining calmly like a lot of other folks on here the world isn't black and white. So before you say I'm agreeing then disagreeing etc. Not my fault you've got an ego the size of a hot air balloon, have an attention span the size of a grain of rice when someone explains something to you and are a sociopath, perhaps that's why you claim you're so successful. Society seems to like those so that's not too far fetched. Thus my explanation of my comment when I said you were mentally ill, as sociopaths, I'd categorize are mentally ill.
When I'm standing outside having a cigarette, or riding in a car, no I won't directly look at someone, now, since you like to dissect everything I say, I'll preface by saying that I do, in fact, look at people in the context of a professional environment, not necessarily always in a casual one.
Since you clearly, as usual, didn't read what I wrote, I'll say one final time, that I do not hate anyone who is blind with a quote blind ism, and I have already said that there are times to curb such behavior, but that as an addition to that comment, I have also stated clearly that as James pointed out, sighted folks don't run our lives and dammit if I want to rock in the privacy of my own home, why do you give 2 shits so long as it doesn't bother you or effect me professionally. I personally do not encourage such behavior, though I do understand it, and agree that it is generally not acceptable. You, as you've already made clear have no tolerance for nearly anything and I'd suggest you maybe look into some anger management. Yes, I sound angry don't I, look who I'm talking to. You have no tolerance, countless people have pointed that out, and regardless of whatever little factoids that may be true that you squawk, doesn't validate you any more as a decent person. If you are so successful, what is your story behind why you're so active on this website, I have no job, yet am filling out applications, what is your excuse, mister 2 3 4 degrees guy. Why aren't you a professor teaching students, why aren't you doing cool shit like working with mechanics, engines, researching trends. Oh wait, lol, you're on here because really you have no job and you're unhappy with who you are and want to make an impression on the rest of us, but we all clearly see, aside from those who agree with your crap, that you really got something wrong. Honestly, I don't know what it is, but you have internet troll complex and you take pleasure in getting a rise out of the rest of us. Nope not going to work with me. If this post doesn't come across as clear as day to you, then it speaks for itself. I have no tolerance for ding bats, blind or not.
Wow, do you feel better now that you've gotten that off your chest?
Are you sure that's all you have on your mind or is your lunch break over? Actually that's all you had to say. Thanks.
And by the way, even if I am acting as angry as you, what, you can't take a dose of your own medicine? Dish it out buddy, be ready to take it.
Ever stop to think the traits you bitch people on here out about are the very same traits you possess? Self loathing. I know buddy, it's called accepting your blindness. Try it out instead of acting like you have and that you know everything about the sighted world. Get with the real world and what voyager and James said might make a little more sense. Sigh, but as one of my retired friends says to me all the time, it's a me world, no one gives a shit about anyone else. James's post was a little disjointed perhaps but I read them several times and yes, I do understand his point of view, I'm stating something similar and trying to be clearer with not just you but more importantly, everyone else.
Wow Just Chillin. What the fuck is wrong with you? You come on this topic and bash for no reason. You sound like a wimpering windbag to me.
What's wrong with me? Well nothing but I can't stand people like him. People like him discourage others from getting out and getting jobs. it's the attitude. So guess what, I'll give it right back to him, that's all, I mean it's not like anyone or myself is going to listen to him so who cares, and for those who want to read what I or he had to say they can process it for themselves. Wouldn't be surprised if this kid ever gets promoted to community leader status. I have no problem giving it right back to him. Like I said he antagonizes folks and doesn't work for me. I'll put the kid right in his place. Don't fucking tell me the rest of us are degenerates because some of us rock back and forth. Your a sociopath for acting like your king hot shit the world doesn't work like that. What makes him even more of a sociopath is the fact that he likely acts like flowers and rainbows in person, but on here, the filter comes off and all of us are unlearned blindies that rock back and forth and he needs somewhere to let out his anger. He needs to be banned probably. I don't know all of his activities but he's likely posted some hateful stuff and gets away with it. Guarantee if I posted something similar I'd be banned real fast. He's one of these people that gives you this little narrow path to success and the light at the end of the tunnel when he's talking is barely existent. He just needs to stop talking altogether. He does people on here more harm than good and bare minimum causes flame wars. You want one, you got one.
You say he is a sociopath for saying it is wrong to rock back and forth in public? Well I'm sorry but it is wrong. Does that make me a sociopath?
Nope, that is completely not what I said.
One more time.
He is a sociopath for his attitude/the things he says, and with no hesitation, he proudly owns his egotistical garbage. The fact he merely feels this way, not his opinions, but his actual true life feelings are what is dangerous about him. If he thinks he's that high up on the totem pole does he seriously treat people he meets as inferiors and garbage? Treat the wrong person like that he's going to learn real fast you fuck with the wrong person then you deserve what you get. Sociopaths by nature are hard to detect as they use lies and charm to get what they want and try and make you feel the way they want which doesn't always work. This character on the other hand proudly owns his shit, eats it, and tells you it's so good you must only eat his shit and no one elses. Only his way is the way to success. Any other actions, choices, words, or activities you do, to him are childish, ridiculous, a waste of time, and you might as well just go kill yourself because after all you're a piece of garbage for not already having a job yesterday. But, here he is on this site day in and day out probably, but not me. I'm actually working on getting a job with my skills, not driving myself deeper into debt so the system can have a hold on me later and waste time in school which is, to me, unnecessary when I'm perfectly capable of doing a job right now. Instead, he has described, and done, exactly what the system, I.E. the education system, and social system wanted him to do. Drive yourself deeper into debt, tell everyone else that it's a wonderful thing and then tell them they're retarded and moronic for not doing X Y or Z when the rest of us are smarter than that and know not to nonsensically put ourselves in debt for a hope and a dream of a job. If you want to do something yourself, the answer is not turn to other sighted people who will tell you that you are blind and they can't support you and blah blah blah. Just bypass them altogether. Notice how he beats the simple shit into the ground like tying a tie or cooking or tying shoes. That's what he focuses on to make that the center of conversation which he is well aware what he's doing. If nothing else he is a sociopath because he really cares nothing about other people, especially blind people just like him. He has sold out completely and for him to sit there and go off on nothing useful illustrates how little he's moved up in life, in my opinion. Why doesn't he talk about something different and unique. I don't even know what he does, but how is sitting there bitching at us telling us how he follows the system and he's on this site boasting about how he's right, I don't really see how any of that makes any sense. If he's got a job with this great education, where's his job, and why is he wasting his time on here? I'll admit I don't have a job yet, why can't he? If he can admit, as he has, that the system is fucked, why does he so proudly choose to go along with it. Why don't you take what you need from the system and build your own system that works for you? Screw the people that tell you you can't do things, do them anyway, you want a car, buy a god damn car, you want to grow weed, then fucking do it. You want to do whatever, within reason, go for it. He just wrote a bunch of stuff about how he had to asert himself when he was running into brick walls with professors and the like. By merely involving yourself with the system, and trying to get through to these sighted people who don't know your capabilities, then yes, it is no wonder the system has broken him into one of them, and they don't know anything else other than what they know, and they don't know anything about blindness. He is upholding their judgements, and while yes, blind people should curb their habits during certain times, you should not be so radical as to treat the rest of us like incapacitated lumps of bio material.
On me.
You see, I’m blind. That means that people will sometimes treat me differently.
Now, am I angry about that? No.
Why, because I understand that people don’t know better.
If I get disrespected in a store, I find the easy fix is to continue conducting my business. If they are speaking to my friend, and it is my friend, my friend knows when they need to help me out, or when they need to back off and let me do it.
I don’t feel better when I’ve “put someone in their place” I feel better when I’ve “educated them.”
Now that is if I feel like it. If I don’t, I still get my business conducted, and I forget about them.
Why? There not worth my anger.
I don’t get mad at children that don’t know better, so I put adults in that same bag that don’t.
You put that person in their place, and when you got back to that same store, they’ve forgotten, so treat you exactly the same.
If I’m disrespected enough, I’ll shop someplace else.
That is the beauty about living here, I don’t have to shop at your store.
Last, when I’m conducting myself in a calm and professional manner, that clerk has no choice but to respond to that.
Works every time for me.
Smile.
So, we've got another person resorting to logical fallacy, strawmen bullshit, and attacks on character.
I'd like to see a little more logic from Cody #2 and a little less slander.
I could compare what he's doing here to what trump is doing in the real world. Its actually rather apt.
Rather than present anything substantive that can be logically evaluated, they both take the path of emotional grandstanding.
Cody #2 has actually written a few things I somewhat agree with, key word is somewhat, but his presentation leaves much to be desired.
Calling someone on the carpet because you perceive what they're doing in a negative light, and using insults/slander to make a point isn't really an effective argument, and its hypocritical besides.
So, lets see some substance.
Put the grandstanding aside, and prove you can provide some concrete arguments that back your world view. You can't prove that people are looking down on a high horse with any fact based honesty if the entirety of your argument requires lifting yourself on a high horse to castigate those you feel castigated you.
This is a forum. The amazing thing about this method of communication is the fact that you have time to actually think about the words that you write. You aren't bound by the time it takes someone to conclude a transaction with you.
So, if you'd like to meaningfully contribute to the conversation, you've got plenty of time and space to rationally explain your ideas.
I just read through the latest board postings and it looks like we have quite the World War going on here, LOL.
Well said Just Chillen. You've basically said more or less what I've been saying, mainly that aside from curbing so-called blindisms to certain limits, and doing it and teaching people how to do it by way of not being a fucking dick about it, that that's the way to do it. How the hell Cody and some of the others get out of that that I say to do them no matter what is beyond me.
As for what Cody, Chelsey and Margorp say on here, I just hear nothing but this.
klsa;hjglhfduinuifdosvnuiodesnuiogrsdnhuitrhsuiofdhuvbionxs vfuiovsnbfuiovnsreoughsuderiohgujdklfhjklfdxcnsxjdifbvsudintfguvbioedrngbuioixhxjklfdhkgjfdhjdljgoifshgsdufihnsuirthuoirsytuirh45473y53897ty89ghureiobnsjjghjhjhjgghbnnbnbbbbbbbbbbbbbbvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvcccccccccccccccldsfdhbjvlisnfgbiosngoubisfgnbovuisngfubiofsngubiosdgnfubionvg jkfdhidfhyusdfhsufdhiuosfhufdioshgufdiohgsufdiohfduiohsfdoiugbsdfiuoofsduihnvbuiosfdhugiobhubiosdfougishfduogishufioghsodfuigbshuioghsouihubgiosdfhugiosfdhougisfdhgoufsdihfgsoduifhgouifsdhgsuiofhdgouisdfhgouisdfhgousdifhgsduifohgsduihfsuoidfghsdfuioghsouifhgouisdfghosduifhgsufdiohgsdufiovbhnsungfiogshuioghsuioghtfouihsfduigshuoifhsouifdhosufdh.
That's all I hear Cody and Margorp saying when I read their postings on here. They both really are such educational guys to talk with and learn from, LOL. Oh, and so is Chelsey, wouldn't want to forget about her. LOL.
James
I'm confused again.
Now I see you saying it is okay to teach people not to use or do blindisms?
I was under the impression you felt they were okay, and the world should just accept them?
James of the many numbers, I'm curious, which one is Cody number II? Are
you saying that Just Chilling is another version of me? If so, you wound me.
Comparing me to someone so inept. At least if I insult someone I don't
contradict my own words by defining the word sociopath, and then using the
phrase "him on the other hand". I am not nearly stupid enough to not realize
that doing so would negate my entire point of calling someone a sociopath in
the first place. (see post 333) You have to at least admit I have better writing
skills than he does; assuming its a he. I don't actually know or care. Just
another uneducated braying jackass not worth my time if you ask me. They're a
dime a dozen in the blind community.
I’d like to say this here.
We blind people wish others to be understanding, or tolerant of our disability, but when it comes to others having them, we aren’t.
“I hated shopping at WalMart, because the person was half deaf.”
I know this is an old saw of mine, but perhaps you could have asked what his or her best side was.
Or maybe, not shouting, but slowing down your request taking a bit of time to make the communication work?
You were receiving help, and the person didn’t say, well, he was all the way blind, so I really didn’t want to be doing that?
Did you know when you go in to a store the clerks see you, so can get busy doing other task so there not assigned to you?
That translates to your having to waiting longer, and that translates to your time.
I like to go to my store and have the clerks offering to help me. What I mean, is at my market I shop at all the time, I’ll have several people saying, I’ll help him?
Why? Because I treat them all with the respect, patients, and kindness I want from them.
I love going to shop and having a couple clerks willing to drag my blind ass around the store.
Laughing.
It seems I get the better clerks, and they work a bit harder for me to get me exactly what I am asking for.
That’s nice.
Sure, it is absolutely better shopping with a friend, relative, or whatever, but when I needs to get it done, my people are willing to make my life easier.
Just some thoughts.
I have a suggestion. I think the best way to start shoveling, and casting aside some of the bullshit, we need to really define the word blindism. Can we get a clear meaning? Yes, I think that may shut up the dribblers and bottle babies.
Good point wayne, I phrased that badly. I didn't mean that I had anything
against him. I simply meant that I had to repeat myself a few times, and so had
trouble communicating with him. Still, probably a bit agest of me after all.
Understood.
You had just stated something others have, but I didn't know how you meant it.
Others do however have problems with other disabilities, and that is odd.
It is like, oh, I wouldn't want to deal with a person in a wheelchair, or something.
These people need to stay home and get care givers.
I've seriously heard that from blind people.
Blind people won't date other blind people for same reasons.
Makes me laugh. It's crazy.
Now as to what makes a blindism, I'd say that is established.
Rocking, poking eyes, or any behavior generally done by the blind that isn’t seen on a regular bases in other community.
A seeing person generally wouldn’t look down at a table, nor would they look else wear when addressing the wait staff for example.
They may not look them directly in the face, but they will indicate with the eyes, or face direction that they are talking to them.
A glance over, or a nod, but they don’t look at the table and talk.
We only need hear, so looking at the table is same as looking in the person’s direction. Giving them what I call facetime, it does nothing for us technically, but does let others know we are addressing them.
So, not giving facetime would be a blindism.
There isn't any other way, if you've noticed, to even deliver a point calmly to silver lightning without instantly being discredited for it.
If silver lightning is correct, again, why isn't he working, are those degrees not working out for him, why is he spending so much time on this site. As usual, no response. So you, silver lightning, shut your damn mouth because you haven't contributed anything useful to this thread but parroting the same talking points as the sighted and other blindies who actually are successful so you don't have to feel guilty about what you're saying. Where are your new ideas, what other jobs do you suggest one can do if one takes your approach?
Sorry about your bad reading comprehension skills. You likely got your degrees, all while getting C's along the way.
But, as expected, silver lightning gets a pass and the rest of us are told to fuck off. Hmm hmm. I predict he'll be a cl soon. What does that say about AT Guys LLC?
All I hear is tie a tie or you're an idiot, make spaghetti. Oh but I'm afraid of using a blow torch. Get the fuck out of here. Really? Ever take a dab before using a Newport torch? I live in the real world and have many many sighted friends, so yeah, actually I do know what I'm talking about, you just wish you do because you've been, to use James's phrase, broken into the system that you so readily hate. If you hate it, as I suggested, why not build your own system within it and quit bitching about sighted people and telling us how hard it is and how much effort needs to be put into it to get a job in the sighted world yada yada yada. Old news, tell me something I haven't heard before. It's ok you refuse to learn how to properly use a torch, but dammit you're going to hell if you can't tie a tie. It's ok, SL said so.
He hasn't responded to nearly half of what I've posed, so like I said that says it all right there. There are likely many more of you out there like him. That's ok, but you won't get one over on me because I'm smarter than that. And by the way folks, I'm not on a high horse or trying to put me above him, I'm simply trying to put him in his place as he has no high horse to be on in the first place and he hasn't contributed anything remotely different. No original thoughts, none at all. Regardless of how you feel about how I make money, I do, and I don't use the system. So what will the trolls say about that. Oh, I'm breaking the law? Oh, I'm scratching my ass the wrong way? What? I mean nothing new has been added here except for things I've said and things I do but as usual, no one cares. Silver lightning doesn't get under my skin, I laugh at him because he's his own worst enemy. It's just necessary, as sometimes is in person with the sighted, to put him in his place. He's no one special at all. Some fucken blind asshole who's got a degree and walks around sticking his chest out like he's got a chip on his shoulder bugging his eyes out at everyone else because they didn't do the things he did because his way is correct. Fuck off. I'll put you in your place all day.
Oh I've thought my posts out alright, you just didn't think to read them in their entirety. Sorry I apologize for not being an English major. All blindies should be English majors.
Oh, I also had a good laugh as I reread James post and forgot to mention, why is it, that he picked up on the fact that my name too, is Cody, but none of you picked up on that. Clearly you don't read anyone's posts that disagree with you. I, on the other hand, read the entire thread.
When I was talking about Cody in a negative context, I was talking about Silver Lightning.
I didn't know that "Just Chillen" also had the name of Cody.
Sorry Just Chillen.
Hope you understand.
James
Oh ok, but yes, in one of my first posts I did mention the other Cody by his name and specified I wouldn't use his name, only his username as him and I have the same name, so to avoid confusion, and to avoid his bad image on me, I used his username.
Only point I'll say on is he's smart not to use a torch.
Can you do so poster above me?
I believe myself to be a totally handyman type, but I don't fool with torches, and I once could see, so understand how.
Tie a tie. Safer.
Oh, and he doesn't believe in hell. so.
Laughing.
He has no beliefs or any original thoughts, so yeah, you're right. And, if I have to reassert what I said once again, yes, have you ever taken a dab before using a Newport torch? Do you even know what those are?
I've seen several type torches.
When a person refers to a blow torch, I assume they mean the type that has a propane tank attached.
You light the top with a match, and depending on how much fire you want, you turn the nob on it.
Some are not attached to the tank, but you just have the wand in your hand.
Nieghter are advisable in my opinion for a person who is totally blind to handle.
You have no idea how hot the metal is, nor can you tell if you are directing the flame were you need it to be.
Now, if you are totally blind, not parshal, can you handle a blow torch?
If so, will you marry me?
We could go in to business building all sorts of things.
Smile.
Oh, and I do no you are male.
We could have a man marage.
Strictly business, you understand.
Laughing.
I have no use for a blow torch, however, on that note, I'd love to find someone to teach me to weld. I could do so much if I could learn safe welding techniques. Yet, you won't get that help from the sighted most likely, and certainly no help from blind know it alls.
And yes, I use a hand torch to heat up a reversible domeless titanium nail. The key is to feel not with your fingers, but with your dabber and have a good knowledge of where the red hot nail is. Just like tying that tie, it takes practice. And your rebuttal is....
And if you think I haven't burned myself either taking dabs or cooking on the stove making sure a pan is centered, think yet again. I didn't get cooking lessons. I learned it myself.
To further clarify, I use a platform to stand the torch up and line up the flame to the side of the nail, and wait about 30 seconds.
And one more thing. if you were sighted at one time, then using the I was sighted once so I know conclusively you can't do it, line doesn't work as I have never had sight and have no excuses. Sounds like my buddy that says I can't work on cars because I'll fuck something up. Uh, hello, how do you suppose one learns? With that attitude, it is no wonder why blind folks have such a hard time. No one wants to think outside the box.
Never said I can't. What I suggested is it wasn't advisable.
Cooking and using a blow torch aren't same.
Now, the thing about me is, if you claim you can handle something, I say, cool, can I watch?
Welding is a wonderful skill, but again, not for the blind. Even if you can get your work attached, your welds won't look vary nice.
Just one man's opinion.
Laughing.
Not quite the blow torch I was refering to wayne, but equally dangerous I'd
think. I was talking about a kitchen torch. They work very similarly, except the
tank and wand are the same thing. Think a can of hair spray that sprays fire
instead of hairspray. You use them to carmelize the sugar on the top of the
creme brulee I mentioned. I'm told you can do this with a broiler, but I haven't
tried it as of yet.
Either way, I don't think a blind person, certainly not a totally blind person,
should be using a blow torch of any kind. Save a cigar torch, those are fine. I've
used several of those, though I don't prefer them.
I never knew what these that are used in the kitchen were called.
So, okay.
My cooking isn't that fancy. I go out for that kind of thing.
Flaming meats, drinks, you understand
I'd burn the food up if I tried that.
Laughing.
Well to use one of silver lightnings lines, who cares if it doesn't look nice, the point is, you did it, didn't you? Since we're blind, who cares about looks, if it physically feels fine, then it's good to go. Standards aside, I think, as you have indicated, that it is, indeed possible with correct training. You, personally, just don't advise it. The very fact we're having this conversation demonstrates the difficulty one has getting the help they need doing something outside the box. If you're the welder, and you're the sighted person, and you're the one who has the capabilities, if you so choose, to show someone, with careful thought, how to do something and then, let that person expand their skills from there as they learn, doors will swing open. However, that is not the high level thinking most currently employ, and actually is one of the underlying foundations that the reason this thread exists. I and others just can't seem to hammer that point hard and clear enough. I'm not trying to nit pick small issues oh you can't do this you can't do that. I'm looking at the big picture of why we're even having this conversation in the first place both regarding original topic and on this topic of using a torch. This is the kind of stuff, if SL is to be as blunt as he is, that he should be talking about. I've only read what he can do. Wow, you can tie a tie, who cares, can you pull up your underwear too? Then he talks about things he's scared of. Well he sure has the wavos to tell us what to do and how quick to do it. This website and it's users should be contributing information to help other blind folks open doors that sighted people inherently keep closed. That will push us as a whole, forward. Saying these things doesn't deny my blindness, it only points out what work still is left to do in society. I'm not going to be a button pusher robot to quote fit in and be quote normal. Fuck that, if you can't accept me for simply being blind, then I feel sorry for you and your ignorance and is not my fault at all. On that same token, as we as blind individuals are nothing special either, we must also follow common sense social rules. For some, they need to be taught early. For others, it is learned later on. And there is no excuse, assuming the child is nothing except blind or visually impaired, for parents to be willfully ignorant enough to turn their child over to the state because they can't use their brain to think outside the box to teach them simple stuff. Doing dishes, tying shoes, doing laundry, etc etc. We shouldn't even be having this conversation as folks who don't have these skills are not at fault as they don't perhaps know any better, it is the fault of the system in which they live, and rely on. As that child grows older, they may or may not, depending on their social/environmental/psychological states, be able to see through the smoke screen of you can't do, you can't do. If that child learns to tie their shoes at 12 years old because the parents thought they couldn't learn or someone else thought that, then what do you think that child is going to think from that point on about being successful. Then you've got SL on here as a complete cookie cutter example of precisely what I'm talking about. We should be talking about tips for blind welders. We should be talking about how to safely work on engines, or growing weed, how to keep an eye on detail on plants, how to measure nutrients, something different that expands not only your motor skills but also your mental ones as well. Nope, we're stuck on one dimensional subjects like cooking spaghetti and tying a tie and oh that's dangerous stay away. If SL is so smart where is his input on these different topics of interest. Does he just not have any interest other than picking fights? Or is he just a complete fony who sold out to the system a long time ago? Not my fault his parents sat him in front of a tv as a toddler in crap filled diapers and now he's depressed because of it and he's mad that he sold out. So he has to have a chip on his shoulder to nullify his guilt.
If you've followed this breakdown, great, but I'm not going to repeat myself. If you make blanket statements as SL has, then why are you at all surprised that someone such as myself is feeding it right back to you. And I'm referring to sl, not you, for real, but I am answering your question though.
But isn't the purpose of this type cooking for the looks?
You use these sorts of tools for design, right?
So, if you do it, and it looks bad, doesn't that defeat it all?
I am asking?
No, not necessarily. I would assume, though I don't know, that one would have greater finer control over using a torch to caramelize a dish like that so as not to burn it and so no, it is not purely for aesthetics, though however cool it may look. Using a broiler, which I don't do, is very difficult to judge. Too little, you don't get what you want. Too much and the dish is ruined and is precisely why the torch is used. My roommate uses the broiler and I keep telling him he burns his burgers, just heat them up in the microwave or stick them in the oven or something but don't char your food for no reason just because you think it's faster or whatever. And yes he does burn his food either because he sticks it under the broiler and forgets about it or he has this idea that it's faster. So blind or not, a broiler is not always the fall back option.
I will not use a blow torch, handle rocket fuel, or run a chainsaw. I also won't go near a wood chipper. Is my avoidance of such things a blindism? Picking on Silver Lightning for not using a torch is stupid. Pure foolishness indeed!
My point is not to pick on him, my point is to illustrate he has no room to talk telling us like James how we should live and how we should have done things, yet it's ok for him to declare what he will and will not do. I don't give 2 shits what he chooses to do or not to do don't sit there and shoot your damn mouth off. Then the only rebuttal I get is oh your grammatical errors, oh, you forgot to put a comma here. Total diversion away from the subject at hand. Then half of you don't even read what I say and you sit there wondering why we're continuing to argue. I've said I have no patients for people like sl, so, if he is so comfortable to shit in my mouth, I'll shit in his. He stunts the progress of independence by insulting you when you want to have a different conversation. Hey if you don't like to do yard work or use tools, that's your choice, but don't sit there and shoot your mouth off saying that I'm saying not using a chain saw is a blind ism are you fucking serious. The fuck are you smoking.
Oh feel free to weld anything you want to chilling. use a blow torch, build a
nuclear reactor in your basement for all I care. I'm just saying that there are
certain things which aren't exactly advisable for blind people to attempt. I will
agree with you on one thing though. Using a broiler for burgers is dumb. Yeah,
it'll heat your burgers, but you won't get any char on them, which means very
little flavor. But other than that you and I will just have to disagree. And, for
your information, there already are blind mechanics. I went to guide dog school
with a man who makes his living doing two-stroke engine repair.
He was likely sighted at one time when he learned those skills or someone was an awesome mentor for him and also likely had the space for it as well. I'll also add that back in the day, and I don't know the age of the guy, but back in the 70's and 80's were probably no where close to how politically correct we are today, so among all the other garbage, this is just one more facet destroying our country. We need to discuss those things as that is where most of our issues stem from, even within sub-demographics like the blind community. The country and the world aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination in fact a lot of places have gone to hell in a hand basket here and in Europe, for example. And yes, it does get quite under my skin when you, sl, squawk racist without even looking at the facts, hence why I emphasize your questionable assertions as cold hard fact as it relates to really anything you voice on from this point forward. It makes no difference what you or I think of each other, it's what others take away from what I've pointed out and your reaction to such and the real issues at hand. You as a person make no damn difference to me as I'll never see you, it is what you spread as ignorance that clogs message boards like this for people who really want to know good, new, helpful and inspiration information but can't because dammit you took out student loans and can tie a tie. Who does that help? No one. Fix the fundamental problem with educating parents in society, give them facts and the truth about things, keep it real and we shouldn't even have to discuss laundry or tie or cooking or taking a shit or any of that. I did my own self development, and I guess I find it very irritating that conversation pieces like you instantly jump to are as behind the times as the assistive tech industry. Fuck. I'm not going to be able to do the job I was offered because the tactile graphics display isn't even being produced. Christ by now we should have displays that can show very simple 3d images with variable height pins. I know this is a small market but come on. Then you've got freedom science freaks who rake in all this cash and they sit on it they put out nothing new. This is why I get royally pissed because, as you see it's a vicious cycle. You break the system by making money your own way without consulting anyone else. If you have the option of saving the SS money, great, some don't like myself. I don't live at home with mommy, mommy died a year ago, and I've been on my own for nearly 8 years paying my own bills and rent. I don't want praise for what I just said, I'm trying to illustrate that by taking steps towards independence, one always faces the ultimate issue. Sure a job is great, but you want the job because you need money. What the hell do you think these blind sale and trade lists are for? I can't tell you how many times I see shit go up for sale especially braille displays. Yet these blind people need to understand you can't get all money hungry and think just because you are selling a brand new 40 or 80 cell display, someone is going to give you 5 6 7 8 9 10 grand instead of the manufacture, yeah right. Besides, we all know the markup is bullshit so they get sold for cheap on the "blind market" if you will. Trust me bro I know how this shit works. Most degrees are worthless unless something highly specific like electrical or engineering, so your braggadocios narrative is just plain immature to me. Why go to any college unless you know precisely what you want to do and spend all that money for what, a general studies associates degree? That's like Liberal arts, but they make you take all that shit. Don't forget most of these colleges and university are super super super liberal and I just cannot stand their brainwashing. It does nothing but hurt people and you, my friend, are part of their system and you are doing precisely what I just described, you put their narrative, work work work work only you never get to the top. What a load of horse shit. You see the level of difficulty if what any of what you said about yourself is remotely true turns you into the kind of person you act like. It makes me want to puke.
You have a lot of hate. You might actually have more than james, sans
numbers, has. That is both impressive and disturbing. Is everyone in the world
out to get you? And, for the record, making a jump from me using the phrase
taxi driver, to you talking about how they're all muslims and foreigners and
what have you, that is racist. You're assuming something about a person and
basing it on their race. They're taxi drivers, so they must be middle eastern.
And they're middle eastern, so they must not be able to speak english. Which,
though I doubt you'll believe me, is entirely not true. I don't think I've ever had
a middle eastern taxi driver that I can remember. Down here they're mostly
retired military or people past the retirement age who still want to make some
good money, but I'm getting afield. Your comment was racist. If you don't see
that, it simply speaks more to your inability to see past your hate than anything
else. But, I have a feeling that your inability to see past your hate is why we're
having this long and rambly conversation in the first place.
Well I can tell you that in the state of Maine, the cab driver I used to use is suing the city because all the illegals that they bring over here and give them free housing free cars, free food, pay for everything and they all start up taxi companies. He is suing them because they virtually all line up at the Portland airport and dominate the business. So yes they are a problem in this country. And yeah, they are muslem, and yeah, they do not allow guide dogs in the vehicles. If retired military are operating cab companies, they've got a discrimination issue if they don't like your dog, and you should address that issue. I don't have a hate issue my friend, I assure you on that one, but of course, as I've said over and over, of course that is what a classic democratic trendy liberal would say that's been groomed at college. There isn't any talking to you, if you fear using a torch, then Christ, you probably fear guns too, right and the second amendment is old and we should do away with it huh. So while you're over here squawking "hate speech hate speech" I'm over here pointing out the real issues that you and seemingly no one else wants to discuss. You make me sick.
And hey jack ass Islam is not a race it's a religion just thought I'd remind you
I have heard and understand the problem with the dogs for some Muslims, but it goes further than them being guide dogs.
The problem is there dogs, so unclean.
But, if the job requires them to take them, they either work the job or they don’t.
Many speak English just fine too. Something about education I’d say.
Now as to a blind person being a mechanic, you can learn to skill and not see.
I can fix, and repair many things, but it isn’t related to once being sighted.
If you’re talking a 2 stroke engine especially, the parts feel specific to what they are.
Even older cars are doable.
A blind man can also run a chainsaw, I have before.
The difference in a chainsaw and that blow torch is you can’t feel the fire. The saw is much like a badass knife. You can feel what you are cutting, and you have the power to pull the trigger or not.
Blind people would make the same mistakes as a seeing person running one, not being careful.
Now, remember, I never said a blind person can’t use a blow torch, even the kitchen kind, I just said it wasn’t advisable, nor does the work, cakes, or metal, look good when it is done.
I can't stand when people rant about how liberal this or that is. Go listen to right wing A M radio and stop pushing your hateful conservative bullshit.
Quit pushing my right wing hateful bullshit huh? So does this statement certify this website is completely and totally 100% liberal and explain much of the mental illness on a to a large degree? The I'm entitled so give me everything. That my god's chosen bag of shit person fits this description to a T, actually. But no, sorry, I'm sticking with reality and yes I'll point out things you and anyone else won't touch. I don't know why you have it in your head that I'm actually going to listen to you telling me to go elsewhere. I'm not actually trying to pick a fight, only point out facts, only to be attacked by folks afterwards because you're so fucken liberal you can't see the candidates for the ballot. Anyway you get what you deserve if you vote Hilary, or really, not voting at all. I don't care who you vote for, but please, for the rest of us, just admit the facts are facts. I'd be much happier if you said "yeah I know Hilary is a war criminal and lies and she's a walking corpse, but I'm still going to vote for her anyway because she's a woman". That's still mental illness, but at least your honest about it. I know Trump isn't perfect and yeah he has a brash approach, and it's one he rightfully needs to bring to the table considering how far this asshole has gotten us into debt.
Among other things, too, in fact he's not Christian, he's a muslem so it makes perfect sense why all these terrorists are being flown into the country to JFK and brought up through the southern border and let go without being screened for diseases. And yes, sir, border patrol actually does get those orders. When you don't follow orders and leak information, bam, you're shot. Sorry to break it to you pal, that's how the government works. Drug war? Yeah they prop that one up alright. Billy boy looks like his nasal passages need to be reconstructed he did so much cocaine. Why don't you go read a book or to. Christ. Want some starter ideas?
Well, I'll say one thing, you're good for a laugh. You clearly don't know much
about me if you think I, the person with the gun collection who advocates blind
people, especially blind women, learn to use and carry guns as often as possible
for their protection, is against guns. And I love that your defense is that the
group of people you're bigoted against isn't a race, so you can't be racist. If you
have to get that pedantic, you're in some deep water there. But then again,
everyone is against you, so you have to find defenses somehow, whether they
make any sense or not.
But here's my question. If you think welding is something you can do as a
blind person, and do it safely without losing your fingers, why not see if you can
find a welder who will teach you? That's what I did when I wanted to learn to
shoot better. I found a former SEAL who knew that shooting by touch was easily
possible, and he taught me. Or are you so set on the idea that everyone sees
you as a poor poor pitiful blind person that they'd never teach you? Honestly,
from what you've said, I"m starting to see how they'd get that impression from
you.
Never said it wasn't possible to find someone to teach you any new skills, but it's hard convincing them that you can do so, and that is my very point. If you own so many guns, then what are you on about on here bitching about you not using a torch. Get a fucken life. Regardless how many guns you have or who you teach to use them, it doesn't justify your better than everyone else attitude. So cut the shit. My college has a welding class, and, likely, as james pointed out and I'll illustrate again, if I applied for that course I'd get laughed at not to mention my vr counselor would laugh too. So, hence why I stated over and over to find someone outside of the system as you have with the retired seal teach you how to shoot. I have a buddy who is teaching me to shoot we've got a range here at town and my buddy owns over 500 guns from the spanish american war up to current day. And precisely what you described is building your own system using individuals outside of the mainstream system that dictates what you should and should not do or be able to do. So why you go on about your college degrees and how great the system is is just laughable you're a complete joke. Flip flop all day long to justify your point.
SO TLDR, its OK to be a bigot about some things in other james/Cody 2's world views. Just be a bigot about the right things, am I right? lmao
Honestly, its completely possible to get sucked into the hype on both the left and right side.
I was perfectly capable of reading your message. I just chose to call you cody 2, rather than your username because you made such a big deal about being removed from your own name. I wondered if you were truly that fragile. The answer is clearly yes.
You also Mischaracterized what I was communicating to you when I wondered if you could present your point of view without showboating and grandstanding. Its not about having a BA in english.
Its about dropping the unproductive fluff and actually communicating something substantive. Is that really so hard?
Clearly, the answer is yeah.
I honestly could respect the differing views of both Cody 2 and other James here a lot more if they weren't making a point of making character judgements while also attempting to strip the ability of others to judge them. Its a two way street. Cody 1 Has never suggested that someone can't judge him, when he's floated his viewpoints.
that's because rational people know that their positions, ideas and viewpoints either sink or swim on their own. They don't need protections, qualifications rationalizations or illogical falsehoods to give them a limited sense of remote Legitimacy.
Strip away the bullshit and come back to the table with your actual facts/logical opinions.
You've got some solid metal there,but you first need to Separate it from all the useless scrap.
I don't think that Cody or I would say the system is perfect, though I can't speak for him.
I believe that some aspects of the economy/job finding/the finantial system will need to be reformed, in a big way, sooner or later. And that has little to do with the struggles of us disabled.
You couldn't or didn't make a case that was strong enough to give the people in the system a big enough value proposition for your personal goals to be met. You could get angry about that... or...
Maybe its time to look for other sources of funding. A go fund me, Indiegogo, something like that. You'd need to do a very god job at marketing/managing your image, but its possible.
Maybe the next step is improving your Business Plan even further, and then going back to rehab, or the banks, or a small loan provider with a lot of substantive facts.
You have an idea. That's a step above what a lot of other disabled people do. Time to do some market research, plot out your expected costs and prophets, etc, etc... Put together a nice package with all the answers neatly provided to people. I know you don't want to play the game at all. But that's not really a realistic way of getting anything done. People with money don't want to just give it away. You are on a solid track for making money. There is an extensive amount of proof from companies making a killing in California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington. Maybe the Business climate isn't ready for grow ops in your part of the country, but you could do your research, look at everyone here out west, and go back with something workable. A lot of the heavy lifting has already been done.
If that doesn't work, as others have said here, you could easily spin this online. With a little marketing, you could easily create a campaign that would appeal to people. Again, put in the hours doing the research, build a realistic plan that can stand up to questioning. Make it air tight.
You're fortunate in that there is a lot of prophet in pot.
But... its all in how you spend your time. You could take all this passion and anger and channel it in to pushing yourself forward.
I've never denied that we need to advocate to make things better. But there are productive and non productive forms of Advocacy.
So, the question is... Do you want your dream or not? It only has 2 answers. either Yes or no.
Not yes but... or No... but...
People just yell at people for being liberals because they can't put together a valid argument. I'm not a Hilary fan but show me how she's sickly and a walking corpse. Back up your shit.
The problem is James, I don't think he actually has a plan. If he did, he'd be
willing to overcome the obstacles that life puts in front of anyone with a goal.
He wants everything to be easy. That's why he's so against colleges, because
they're not easy.
I completely agree with you. The system is not perfect, but its a lot better
than what he and the other james seem to be advocating; which is to say
precisely nothing. Why do you think james is willing to settle for the equivalent
of burger flipping jobs for blind people, and chilling isn't willing to actually use
any of the system to get something more than what he has now?
And he blames his problems on "the liberals." I doubt he even knows what that means.
Dealing with the way things are doesn't fix them, point them out, and brainstorming with other likeminded people who also feel the same way, and doing it where it matters is the way to do it, and that's who I am as a person. I don't just accept, well yeah the system is fucked but that's ok, I'll just have to deal with it.
When I refer to someone as a liberal it isn't the name which holds water, its the thought processes and actual way of thinking and beliefs which defines someone as such. It isn't pointing fingers at anyone person when it's many many people acting the same way. Liberals are the problem in this country, as far as I'm concerned neither party has any leg to stand on, it's a false choice since both sides are controlled and everything from that point downward is plain corrupt. But you see, the libs are the folks pushing for all this politically correct garbage, not wanting to look at the facts and not really recognize how serious things are in the world because you're too busy worrying about gender nutral speech and tranny bathrooms. Yes that's a real thing by the way I didn't just make that up.
Wow you seem to have the answers! Everyone else is the problem and only people who think the way you do should be held high. You want to know who the problem is? You and other conspiracy theory spewing, talk radio listening, robot following dumpsters of trouble like yourself. I'm still looking for links and such. I'm waiting for you to back up what you say and you outright refuse. You, sir, are a conservative windbag. Go ahead and blame everyone else for your problems. Go tell Rush Limbaugh or Alix Jones about your troubles in life. They'll even put you on the air!
But again, I'l point this out. I have a degree, I'm going for a second one. That
degree, or the third one I'll go for, will get me opportunities for high paying
jobs. You don't have a degree, and that limits you. I played the system. I didn't
always like it, but I did it, and its already paid off with better opportunities for
me. what have you gotten for your ideals?
The same could be said for james with the numbers. He's got education, and
it will open up opportunities for him. You don't see either of us complaining
about how we have to struggle. Because we've already overcome them. The
only people complaining here are you and james, neither of which are willing to
play the game.
Don't have a degree huh, well I know I've already said I do. Links are on the way, stand by...
I do need to correct you Silver lightning. Degrees do not always equal opportunity. Just trying to make things fare and even here.
By the way too, I don't listen to rush limbaw and I no nothing of this alex jone, other than the similar conspiracy theory cook stuff you've been squawking about, like cnn does so yeah you sound just like them. What are you trying to prove? So hilary is for women's rights huh, but she gets money from the Saudi government, the very people who chop women's genitals off. Oh yeah, makes sense to me.
Sailor Denied 'Clinton Deal', Gets 1 Year in Prison for 6 Photos of Sub. But clinton can have her own private email server, run for president and not get busted for it. And don't try to nitpick this article look at the bigger picture here.
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-08-19/sailor-denied-clinton-deal-gets-1-year-in-prison-for-6-photos-of-sub
Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones, both of whom have accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault, are standing up for Clinton rape accuser Juanita Broaddrick. Big lib media loves hilary.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/08/19/exclusive-clinton-sexual-assault-accusers-paula-jones-kathleen-willey-unite-nbcs-andrea-mitchell/
Hillary Clinton’s ‘Colin Powell did it’ defense of her email practices is just plain wrong
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/19/hillary-clintons-colin-powell-did-it-defense-of-her-email-practices-is-just-plain-wrong/
here's the link showing you hilary clearly cannot walk on her own and is very ill. She should not be president on this alone she is incompetent
Pharmaceutical Exec: Hilary Clinton Has Parkinson’s Disease
http://sandrarose.com/2016/08/pharmaceutical-exec-hilary-clinton-parkinsons-disease/
Let's keep going
Zero Hedge: Saudi Arabia Has Funded 20% Of Hillary's Presidential Campaign, Saudi Crown Prince Claims
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-13/saudi-arabia-has-funded-20-hillarys-presidential-campaign-saudi-crown-prince-claims
On the clinton slush fund have a read
Liberal group claims all of Hillary Clinton's speaking fees went to charity
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/jun/16/occupy-democrats/liberal-group-claims-all-hillary-clintons-speaking/
God I can't stand hearing her talk but watch this video
Hillary Clinton: I Took $675,000 In Speaking Fees From Wall Street Because I Didn't Know I Would Run For President
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/02/04/hillary_clinton_i_took_675000_in_speaking_fees_from_wall_street_because_i_didnt_know_i_would_run_for_president.html
Here is Hilary having a [c a e s u]re or stroke or something and unable to talk giving a speech. Secret service encourages her to keep talking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azUpfzDNxpw
Here she is lying for 13 minutes straight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dY77j6uBHI
Should keep you busy for a while.
This is all very good work. Now let's see how the other side is oh so perfect. You grasp at straws. Oh and I do agree however that I can't stand Hilary's voice.
Oh and that vid where she lies was cut together by the media so I don't believe it.
You don't believe it but you heard it right from her own mouth, it's to show you how bad she lies. Not all editing is bad, only when it is deceptive, that definitely isn't, so please, no cherrypicking. What the hell has trump done that is even remotely close to the shit she has done? As if the video of the secret service telling her to keep talking while she's bumbling isn't enough. Don't understand why you can't find this stuff on your own I shouldn't have to do basic homework for you. More to come.
By the way the media wouldn't spin it because they are for her, you see.
Sorry, but yes, a degree does mean more opportunities. Degrees mean more
jobs available to you, more degrees available to you, and higher wages for
those jobs. It doesn't mean you'll get them, but they do open up to you. If you
have no degree, you don't get those opportunities. You might find a job, but the
amounts of jobs is much lower.
Do you feel Trump is perfect? All politicians lie. And Silver lightning, no, you can get all the degrees you want but it won't guarantee you a job. It's great to have one, and it's great to have toilet paper?
Ah, but notice the different word. I did not say that having a degree
guarantees you a job. Nothing guarantees you a job. But having a degree gives
you more opportunities. An opportunity is not a guarantee.
You got me, and I didn't mean to compare a degree to toilet paper. Lol! But opportunities can come from multiple sources. Who you know is many times more important than what you know. I'm not saying that what you know isn't important but there is such a delicate balance. No black and whites in life.
That is very true, but even there a degree helps you. When you're in college,
you make contacts. That's a lot of what getting a degee involves, making
contacts. Those contacts help you get opportunities. If you're just some guy in
Fruitport Michigan who just graduated high school, has never set foot in a
college, has never left your home town, what opportunities do you think you're
going to have? whereas, if you go to the university of michigan, you get to have
a lot of contacts, and a degree, and training, and experience, and the
opportunity to get a great paying job, or an entry level job, or another degree,
or what have you.
Colleges tell people that they need degrees, because having the degrees will make it easier for employment. However, that is what they want people to believe, because if they didn't, colleges wouldn't exist. It's all about the money, people. Margorp is right; a degree does not mean people will have any less opportunities than if we are resourceful and determined to do things on our own. What works for some people, doesn't work for others--that is all I'm saying, is that many things really are not as black and white as some people may think they are.
Also, going back to my point of being resourceful: the point of being resourceful, is to make things happen for oneself, meaning put yourself out there so that you can make contacts, or share with people you know and trust within your community what you are looking for, and they just might find something along those lines, by virtue of someone they know.
And you can make contacts without degrees. As Chelsey essentially pointed out, the system tells us that there is only one way to skin a cat. This is wrong.
Ok, the cat in this instance is getting a job which requires a masters degree in
social work, which many do. Explain to me how you're going to skin said cat
without a degree?
Correct. It really depends on what you are wanting to do.
A degree of any sort simply is a better leg up then no degree at all.
Even 2 year college is better then no college at all depending on your goals and what your skills are.
If you have no skills, and no goals, while you're hanging out, you may as well get some paper, because it might help.
Also, just the college experience is worth the trouble. It was for me.
Yup. Obviously a job requiring a Master's degree will only be given to someone who has that degree. As wayne said, it's all about what your personal goals are.
But that's exactly what I've been saying. If you have a college degree, you
have more opportunities. If you have a masters degree in social work, you can
get all the jobs someone without one could get, and all the ones that a person
with one could get. That's my point. It seems logical to me. If you have
credentials, you get to apply for jobs which call for those credentials. That
doesn't seem very complicated.
Yes that's common sense. I guess I misunderstood you.
sAdly, I don't think many people will understand that. They seem to think that
college degrees are magical and are supposed to instantly get you a job. So,
when that doesn't happen, they think that college degrees are useless. But
that's simply dumb. there are certain jobs which you don't need a degree for,
but they're dwindling. In a few years, most things will require a college degree.
That's why its said that the associates degree is the new high school deploma. I
think if more blind people could get college degrees, the unemployment rate
would be a lot lower in the blind community. But then we have people like
james and chillin who don't want to put in that work because reasons.
Hmmm, not being bias, but would like to point out, it's all about what degree you get, what area you live in, and if you are one of those people with a liberal arts degree, the amount of work you put in to make yourself stand out. Employers are tired of seeing the same o boring applicants.
Just chillin person, I have seen videos on Dump that were terribly edited to make it say what they want it too, and some of your sources look completely like conspiracy theory websites, so I can't even be bothered to look at any of it.
Oh, and one more thing regarding college, you don't think that conservatives and other republicans are there? Cause I can promise you that they're going through school just fine, and is still pretty right wing, so sit down with the liberal brainwashed comments.
Well said Lakeria. It is all about what you put into it. Though the idea of the
absolutely useless degree is incredibly overblown. Believe it or not you can
actually make a living with a comparative literature or philosophy degree. Just
depends how much you're willing to work. Problem is, it doesn't seem some of
the people on this board want to work. They seem to want everything given to
them without them having to make any effort whatsoever. Which is why they
don't seem to be very happy.
My classes start on Monday, August 22, 2016. I'll be taking Principles of Addiction and Theories of Addiction that day. Then for Tuesday and Thursday, it'll be English Composition 1 as well as a class specific to this college called Corner Stone. I'm writing this in my dorm room here at Hocking Technical College and I've been staying here since Wednesday, the 17TH of this month.
I'm able to independently get from my dorm to the school and to all my rooms. The O&M instructor I worked with fortunately, wasn't one of the smart-ass abusive types that we sometimes have to be settled with and he helped me and really was good with explaining everything.
With me practicing the routs he showed me and also participating in the lessons he and I did, I know what I'm doing and am prepared for Monday. So Silver Lightning, what was that you were saying about me not wanting to put forth any effort to go after what I want to do? Could you please repeat that again, because I don't think I heard that properly, you fucking sanctimonious self-righteous Cunt.
James
Mommy wow! He's a big kid now.
If you aren't willing to put in any effort, a degree means nothing.
I disagree that in a few years all jobs will require degrees.
In fact, many high tech companies are going away from the what you got in school, to how smart or creative you are in the field.
They need people that can produce, not people that have studied how.
A degree will help in some cases, but not all.
But, again, if you're just hanging out, you may as well put that time to use.
Not only as a blind person will you hopefully meet people, you'll get much of the high priced tools and such you need to live day to day.
You'll learn how to deal with strangers, and what is expected of others in the world socially.
So, going to college with worthwhile anyway you slice it. It just doesn't mean you're have less blind persons not employed.
I'm not sure I understand what that last post means since I couldn't have gotten a computer science degree without effort.
I graduated in May. I've been doing contract work from home this summer but beyond that, I have no idea what I should be doing. I gathered from the very few interactions I was able to have with classmates and overheard conversation fragments that the situation for other students is unlike mine. Most of them find lots of internships and figure out what their specialty is while still in school. Many have a job lined up before they finish. I realized all this way too late, unfortunately. I spent my time fighting to learn as much as possible through all the access barriers which almost no one seemed able or willing to move, then coming home and collapsing from exhaustion, then doing it again...and again.
Voyager what I said was effort is more important than anything else. And Wayne is correct. Most high tech jobs are classified as trades now.
Effort is everything, in pretty much everything, not only college. Voyager, did
you not have a advisor at your college to ask those kinds of questions to? Every
college I've ever looked at assigns an advisor. Did you not have one?
I did have an adviser but talking to her was almost as useless as talking to myself. I understood the importance of asking questions, but her answer to just about everything was "do whatever you want." She had no knowledge of computer science. One of the few times she gave me specific advice on which class I could take, I ended up in a very visual software design class. The professor presented absolutely everything as a picture, even when the easiest way to describe it wasn't necessarily visual. Internships didn't come up much, but if they did, again, "do whatever you want."
And if I asked too many questions she would refer me to the disability office. They would then say, "we don't do advising here," and refer me back to her.
I found out later that my experience with advising was pretty common but most people coped by talking to their friends. And since they didn't have the blindness aspect to worry about, they could get a pretty good idea of whether or not taking a class was a good idea before signing up.
Ah, that's unfortunate. I'd have requested a different advisor.
Answers, answers, answers, sl has them all.
The more I leave this thread alone, the more other folks like James and Voyager just illustrate my point even further.
And yes, you're right, I guess the Washington Post, Zero Hedge and youtube are conspiracy websites, I should have known. Sorry about that. Hey why don't all of you refer to the best braille display thread for my new and inovative ideas that may help us get a job regarding graphics. Yeah, a multi-line display and high res tactile graphics tablet are now for sale. Again, these are tools for us, like voyager and James alike as well as myself to build our own system with these tools, problem now is financial and hoping the state can buy this for me. Oh wait, got to wait 90 days to add the vender to the list, and then another 12 or so weeks for the unit to be assembled and sent to me. By that time, I wonder if they'll still want me. Oh well, that's just the system for you.
Looked into kick starter and go fund me. Problem is, kick starter is for creaters to intend on delivering a final physical product, while go fund me relies on your close contact network to fund your project, that's a joke, no one I know has any extra money. Indie go go is probably the least viable option of them all so I won't even bother talking about it.
By the way, for all the bitching out I've done towards Forereal, post 407 shows a great example of precisely what I'm saying. Degrees don't mean shit. What does mean shit is if you can actually perform, that means, do you have the equipment to perform, not just talk about doing it during the interview. Pretty embarrassing when you're a smooth talker yet can't deliver. Now how will you explain that to your next employer. Degrees are for egos nowadays, you know, for folks like silver panties can brag about it and say he's done something. Of course he can say whatever he wants it's not like he's got to put that much effort into lecturing a group of people who could give less than half a shit what he does let alone if he's being honest.
Furthermore, this is exactly why you should build your own system and not use the old dying system of degrees and hopes and dreams and working your ass off to prove to someone sighted you can make a ham sandwich, because that's what it feels like. Find someone who knows you and/or knows you have the capability to be taught something out of the norm. As I said, and will say again, those people can be found but they are hard to come by. That person will teach you physical skills to do a job or a hobby which may become a job. Then you can show your employer demonstrably and not just use big words and non-threatening vocal expressions. So in this regard, it really is who you know, then it's what you know later on.
I watched your youtube videos, and some people said that she was overwhelmed, or... It did not make it clear whether or not she was having a seizure, so nothing to prove your point at all sir. Just something else for conservatives to talk about.
Voyager, at my school, each student is assigned an advisor in the field you're going in, so it sounded like your advisor was simply shit, and that you should have asked for another one.
Also, it all depends on what you wanna do, but key word: work.
And, good job James. I'm glad you've graduated from kindergarden.
How did we veer off topic so much?
Well, AgateRain, I'm glad you graduated from being a total Bitch, to a roil Cunt.
James
With over 400 posts, I'm not surprised we've gone afield so much. When you
only have two people whining about how life is just so hard and it hurts their
wittle feelings, its hard to have such a long conversation. even James can only
be a whiny little bitch for so long, talented at it though he clearly is.
I guess so. Oh and, the queen of England is the only one with the royal cunt. Hahahahaha couldn't resist.
just-chillin, folks.
I’ve been through the problem of getting what is required to do a job.
The problem is, we are blind, disabled.
We only have so many jobs available to us, and only so many types of jobs we are able to do, no matter how much equipment we have.
Your blind, you need to face that fact that you aren’t going to be equal to the rest of society.
You can’t just go to MC Donald’s and flip burgers, but you could if you could see and even have two burger jobs.
Our Government understands this, so provides income for some of us, so we’re not beggars.
Do you know how many other countries don’t do this?
Let’s say you are blind in Bangladesh, you either find one of the few jobs to work, or you are basically a begger and they put you in a group dorm situation to live.
If your family can support you, that is who has to.
If you are a woman, and lucky enough to have the looks, or connections, you might become a second, or third wife to a man, so you aren’t on the street.
Yes, I actually know people personally in that situation.
You can bitch all you like about what isn’t fair, or what your rehab won’t do for you, but one thing you miss, is you have the option to get that degree.
You can move to a different state that has more jobs available for the blind.
Why, because you’ve got that piss ant income to help make that happen.
You can even start a small business maybe writing articles, or leather works, or selling on EBay, but you’ve got options.
Why? Because you’re not hungry, and your apartment probably has free Wi Fi, so you can research on your expensive computer to do these things.
You have other resources that will give you that braille display other than your state if you ask and provide the correct reasons you need it.
Options are available to you, but you sit back and bitch with the lights on, a full belly, on your expensive computer, about what isn’t fair in your small corner of the Americas.
Try some place else?
Try some other outlets?
Write a better business plan you can take to a small bank and see if you can get it to fly?
Hell, you’ve even got access to credit that can be used. That is putting your money were your moth is.
Even if your state provided everything you asked, it won’t guarantee you’ll be successful, but I don’t see that said.
Just because you think you will doesn’t mean you will, so having the equipment is a given.
If you write your plan the right way, you can even get your state to fund your ideas, but I’ve not heard once, well, they turned me down once, but I’m going to try a different business plan, or idea.
You might work your ass off, get a masters and still not be successful, but at least you can say, well I’m out here trying instead of saying what they won’t do for you so you can fail.
Okay, that is off my chest.
good grief!!!!!!! just chillin, yo need to find a new name. perhapse aalways pissed off,just furious or maybe ingnorance rules. what a paranoid, mad person you are. I haven't gotten through this entire thread. what I can say so far is this.
1. don't blame the system for your because you can't do something. when I want to learn a skill I find a way to do so. the internet is a wonderful resource. so are our piers. when I moved out on my own, I could not cook. so, I could have gotten tv dinners and said "I'm a poor blind girl. the system didn't treat me right." instead I got cookbooks, asked questions, and made mistakes.
2. there are no blind mechanics. out here in Washington state I know of three or four guys who worked and were taught. since I'm elderly I all of these individuals are retired. oh yes, and I know a retired machinist.
3. no one talks about growing weed. there again, I know folks who do. will I give you any of these people's names? oh hell no I will not. you can drop your 200 pound chip off your shoulder get off your fat ass and figure it out!!!
4. the reason people like silver lightning forreel margorp chelslicious and others get help and respectful treatment is because they model what they expect to receive. if I actdt like a turd i'll get treated like one. smiling, saying please, thank you, and I appreciate might possibly make your life easier. that's not because they have sold out to anyone. that's because they have figured out that if you want to get the prize you have to play the game.
5. the thing which really frosts me is your comments about moslems. not all followers of that religion are terrorists. you need to stop listening to so many conservative talk shows and get out in the world. in my experience most people who believe in alah are folks who are trying to make it in a strange country that has rules which are entirely different from the ones which they are used to. there again, kindness and education work. of course there are ignorant cab ddrivers, chefs, beauticians, clerks at walmart, and on and on. the only person who is hurt by your anger and negativity is you.
Oh, I'm a queen now. Thank you James. :)
Thought you knew that already Lake?
Smile.
Turricain is right Just Chillin. Yikes get a grip
But guys, everything has to be the world's fault. Otherwise its their own fault,
and they're just perfectly little snowflakes who can't possibly do something
wrong. I mean really, the nerve of us to blame them.
Ahhhhhhhh, that pain-in-the-ass thing called reality. Isn't it a total fucking Bitch when we can't just live life and just believe that selling out to the system will make everything absolutely better for us?
James
Its a bit hypocritical of you to say that on this board james, while on another
board talking about how you accept financial assistance to go to college. You
can't have your cake and eat it too. Either the system is evil and doesn't help,
or its helping you. Which is it?
I'd like to add. The social security admin has, or had, a program for people trying to start small businesses, or purchase much needed living products.
It was, or is called the task plan.
Basicly, for about 12 to 18 months, you receive the same amount extra as you do each month to purchase, or try your idea.
You must keep records, and the idea, or product has to actually be purchased, and approved.
This still may not help you be successful, but it is an option we American's enjoy.
Hey, the system certainly has it's flaws of course but I think people do way to much bitching.
Chuckling at post 419. thanks for that laugh, margorp. Off to read ahead in my psychology textbook. Eight nore days until the first day of that particular class. :)
Hmmm. I don't share Just Chillen's views on Muslims, but I have to agree with him about Cody. If Cody has all these degrees he says he has, then how does he have the amount of time he does to come on here and troll, and why doesn't he actually do something useful with these degrees?
James
You guys do realize I only have one degree right? I've only ever said I have
one degree. I'm going to get more than one, but for the moment I only have
one.
Ah don't be shy and tell us about all your degrees and your P H D! I know you have it. lol.
This might be a bit off topic, but along the same lines of what the OP was trying to say. The same people that teach us how to be blind in public, are the same people that bitch and mone when we want to try and find a job that is out of the person's comfort zone.
Do I detect more of the same dribble we've seen from the op?
It matches my experience. The opposite is also true: People who share my interest in writing useful software also share my disinterest in whether or not I'm being blind the right way.
Being "blind the right way?"
Now, explain how that works.
Laughing.
I tell you what voyager, the day you write usefu software that people want to
pay a whole bunch of money for, is the day I stop caring about how your
behavior reflects on me. No one expects rich software tycoons to be normal.
They're supposed to be eccentric. Look at Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Not a lick of
fashion sense among them, but that was ok because people needed them. To
put it bluntly, what have you done that makes you essential to someone so that
your appearance, comportment, behavior, mannerisms, social skills and so on
don't matter, because you are essential? Answer that question, and I will cease
to consider you to be a bad reflection on the blind community. You'll be the
software version of Stevie Wonder. No one cares that he is a piss poor excuse
for a blind person, cuz he can sing.
Plus he rich.
Bring it on. I like the way he's blind.
Laughing.
Why don't you extend that privilege to everyone and not just rich people?
Not everyone who writes software that people need becomes rich, but they are often eccentric. RMS and others in the free software world are good examples. Like many of them, I didn't choose this path to get wealthy. I chose it because the computer is an endlessly configurable toy with limitless features. Being rich by my standard means earning a living doing something useful that interests me. (They might as well pay me to play games!) I could make well below what you consider big bucks and still meet that standard. I will not perform sighted tricks for you because I fail to meet your arbitrary standard. Life is too short.
It's also worth mentioning that the majority of the people who *choose* to spend time with me are sighted.
Cody, Bill gates at least acts socially acceptable. Do you think he can walk into a business meeting with is zipper undone, shirt untucked, and waving his arms around?
So does Stievie Wonder actually.
The only time he rocks is when he's singing.
After he learned that his dress was bad, he got help, and now dresses to the max mostly.
His problem wasn't rebellion, it was he didn't know better, and wasn't instructed like the rest of the musicians in Mowtown were.
They were sent to charm school, and such, but not him.
They figured, as seeing people do, he'd pass okay.
So, even he changed.
I guess if you know better, then you have no excuse.
If you know better, but have friends, or the means, meaning money to be what I callEccentric, so be it.
Rich folks get away with that only because the people depending on them don't want to make them mad, not that it is the best way to be.
Close friends won't tell you, because they don't wish to hurt your feelings.
Seeing people won't tell you, because, well, she's/he's just a poor blind person, so give him or her a break.
Smile.
It is your choice if you want that avenue.
It is your choice if you take that avenue, but you can't say everyone has to agree with you.
So, being blind the "right way" doesn't actually exist.
It, to me has nothing to do with being blind once you know, it is a choice you decide on, and that is personal.
Here's the thing Voyager. If you were rich, and a famous software developer,
like if you made the next facebook or something, people would contribute your
bad behavior to you being eccentricly rich. But you're not. So they blame it on
your blindness. Which means they expect me to then behave that way too.
Which I do not. So you need to either get rich, or catch up. Otherwise, you're
dragging us all down, and I don't like things that drag me down.
Get rich I say.
Laughing.
Too much effort and time expended on a reward which doesn't interest me that much.
SilverLightning, the opinions of sighted neurotypicals that I don't know concern me about as deeply as the habits of the birds that live nearby.
They're curious creatures to observe but pretending to be one would be silly.
You seem to think that a blind community exists and that I have no choice but to be part of it.
I question your first assumption and completely reject your second.
I only recognize obligations toward the communities that I join by choice. You cannot force me to take on extra burdens because I was born blind.
If one can say there is such a thing, I'm a member of the autistic community. Even sighted they're much easier to comprehend. They're more likely to pay attention to *all* their senses, not just their sight. They're motivations are also interest-based.. They don't care much that I'm blind as long as that doesn't hinder the persuit of an interest.
The idea that we should all behave in a certain way or it somehow brings down the rest of us seems as foreign to most of them as to me.
I never hear discussions in autism forums about extinguishing stims. The trolls that arrive with such nonsense are met with scorn.
I have more in common with Mensans and autists than with blind people, even though the first two groups are also very diverse.
But let's say for a moment that you approved of all my public-facing activities and that I eliminated all "abnormal" mannerisms.
What would change?
Sighted muggles would behave as bizarrely toward me as before.
They would still make funny noises at me, touch me without asking, say I'm amazing/inspirational/helpless/ all of those at once, and make it harder than necessary to obtain the things I need.
Nothing. So far my reward is zero and my loss is zero.
I would have to participate in more uninteresting activities, some of which cause me stress and pain.
Improving the image of the blind community requires a lot more time spent with normals.
Normals who do awful things, such as sitting close to fireworks displays.
I'd have to silently remind myself not to rock as a way to cope with pain.
And that pressing myself into a corner is not an acceptible coping strategy, either.
It'll be booooooring.
So rewards are still zero. Losses are boredom (to be avoided at all costs), overload, and all the energy I spent, which will have to be replenished later.
I like my life better the way it is. I get to be extremely selective about the people I choose to spend time with, I'm rarely bored, and it hurts less.
And I live far from you where nothing I do is likely to impact your life in any meaningful way, so chill out.
And yet, I and other blind people deal with zero of those things. I never get
funny noises made at me. I hardly ever get touched, and if I do I am able to
react in a mature and reasonable fashion. I get called inspirational, but that's
unavoidable. I don't deal with any of those things. Sounds to me like you're just
happy being below average. Which is fine, but you can't then get mad when
other people think you're fucking up the bell curve.
I'm above average in several areas and I'm not angry at you for being mistaken about that.
Under funny noises I also include things people say that lack content.
I mentioned them while I was describing how people will continue to treat me as a blind person, so I thought it was clear that the noises were often about that subject.
I suppose I should be glad they're talking to me but I quickly just feel bored. I like content, not the same annoying "you get around real good with that stick" comments.
That's one reason I'm selectively social, and why I'mnot too concerned about their thoughts. I have more complex thoughts to be concerned about.
I just ignore the "you're so amazing" comments, but if they put their grubby mits all over me I'm gonna speak up. Yo. Hands off. I don't even know ya.
No reason to respond reasonably to unreasonable behavior.
I deal with 0 of these things myself.
Might be because I act socially as anyone else would?
I don't get touched unless I invite it.
The reword will only come if you decide you want to work in the mainstream. In your personal life, as I've said, you can decide to be as you like. If you're not going to apply for a softwear engineer job where they'd like you to be dressed in a specific fashion, if you don't interview, in some cases, if you're not interested in dating outside of your disability range, you can be as you wish. 0 rewards are looked for.
But, and I'm sorry folks, it is difficult enough to get a date, job, treated with respect, due to us being disabled. Add some odd stuff on top of that and you make it impossible or even harder. Even going to the store and having people treat you as you want to be treated, namely, not making noises at you. I suspect this is kids who think it strange to see someone rocking, or other stuff, not dress properly, and generally looking and acting different so they jump in and join the fun.
Laughing.
Sure, you don't like that, but, hey, you've made that choice.
I also don't belong to the blind community, but I do understand I'm treated differently depending on my actions, dress, and such. Just how it works.
The interesting thing here if you are thinking about the dating, or companion part, is even other disabled people aren't going to be interested in dating you if you've got odd habits.
Disabled people don't really want to date other disabled persons even.
Sure, I understand dating, or companions aren't everyones cup of tea, but for me, it is an enjoyable part of being human.
I'm not speaking friends. These aren't the same.
I've acted normally and reasonably and still gotten the stupid sighted "oh my gawwwwd, she's blind!" treatment plenty of times.
That's the point I'm trying to make. If I get similar treatment no matter what I do then I might as well do what I want.
I also structure my life so as to interact as little as possible with morons.
Blindness turns out to be a wonderful filter for intelligence.
That's a ridiculous conclusion. You can fit in with society or be separated from it. This whole do what I want attitude is laughable.
Why? It works. I'm doing what I want and enjoying it.
When I did more work to fit in, I enjoyed life less.
Boredom and stress are bad; pleasure is good. It really is that simple.
Unless you're out in the open. That's when your theory falls apart.
This, as I keep telling you is whats simple.
Stop complaining about how your treated.
You claim you are enjoying how you are, no hiar, shorts T shirts at formal gatherings.
You like to rock, spin, whatever.
Now, I don't know all this, but it is what you have written.
If you like it, why are you bothered by the people?
If it is simple, stop complaining.
If people make noises, it is their problem, not yours, right?
Smile.
Why are you worried about measuring up, when you don't care?
For someone so happy with their life, you certainly complaina bout it a lot.
And that was my exact next point.
I think people, and this topic proves it out, do care.
They want the world to allow them to remain in their zone because it feels good.
"I acted normal" really?
Why did you do that?
It's all bullshit. You're happy with acting that way yet you want to fit in. It just won't happen.
I think some of you have completely missed Voyager's point and completely misconstrued her perspective.
1. She's not necessarily saying she wants all the perks that might (key word, might) come with doing everything in a way that's supposed to reflect well on the blind community. She has a life that she considers worth living. Who are we to judge that if it's not the life some of us would choose?
2. She's autistic. This means that some of the stuff we deal with on a regular basis has to be handled in a completely different manner, and takes more out of her than it might out of us. This also means that her concept of what is and isn't acceptable, as far as risk-benefit analysis, is concerned, will differ from a neurotypical person. Again, who are we to judge if we aren't in the same boat?
3. Wishing you had more than you've got isn't the same as wishing you had everything you lack. It also doesn't bespeak an attitude of entitlement just because you wish for things. Okay, if Voyager was in here yowling about how unfair the world was, and how things she chooses to do are making her life difficult, and then deciding to keep on doing them and keep on complaining? You'd have a point. But that's not what's happening here. I've read the thread, and there's a clear differentiation going on here. I see it plainly, and wonder why some of the rest of you can't, don't, or simply won't do likewise.
Voyager, feel free to set me straight if I'm misrepresenting you, as that's not my intent.
I see her points, and I have allowed for her being autistic, but that wasn't were I'm coming from.
I'm speaking generally about blind folks.
I guess you could say being blind was an excuse too if you allowed for being autistic?
She knows different, and has even said she's acted differently.
I say if she's happy with her place, that is good, but she can't put her place on the world and expect it to bend, autistic or not. Lets toss out all other disabilities, and just use blind.
Okay, now, I can wave my arms about, rock, sing to myself, poke my eyes, and talk to people that aren't there, or even in different voices.
I can stand at the counter of the place I work and spin.
I'm blind, so...
How entertaining.
So I've gone from having short hair to "no hair". I'm often outdoors swimming or walking (click click). I hope my scalp doesn't burn off.
And how many formal dinners do you think I attend?
Way too many places to eat and drink exist that provide even *more* enjoyable sensations than a formal dinner would.
They also have fewer arbitrary rules.
So if I find myself at a formal dinner once a year or so, I'm likely doing it to obtain something I want. Naturally, I dress how the rules dictate because it's part of the price of the thing.
But y'all have me pegged as that eye-gouging, rocking, muttering, spinning hairless weirdo who shows up in shorts to formal events all over Austin!
Want some more straw to play with?
Geez, I wonder if it's on the acceptable blind list to tap the wooden boards of the picnic tables. Some of them are quite resonant and they never sound exactly alike. I could probably learn to recognize each table just by that.
Watch: My caricature is about to pull out a set of drum sticks and apply them to all the tables at her next formal dinner.
Sadly it won't work: tablecloths. I guess she'll have to play the wineglasses instead.
You didn't read me well.
All the mannerisms I posted don't apply to you directly. They are just things blind people are said to do.
Also, I've said, you do know better, and you've even said at a formal dinner, if you attend, you dress accordingly.
That tells me you can and do go by the rules society dictates.
My question, is why?
If you disagree with them and believe they are a bunch of crap, why don't you attend the formal dinners in shorts, T shirt?
Your argument is that, your behavior should not cause people to react to you as you say they do. Making noises, touching you, treating you like, well, um, a blind person.
You wrote once you have a crewcut. That is pretty bald for a woman. Smile.
Short hair, I've written many times on some women looks good, but to say hair on a girl, shouldn't be a big deal, is a personal deal.
What if you were told, and by more then just people trying to get you to change that you looked nicer with longer hair, does, or would that matter?
Last, my post aren't necessarily directly for you, but for blind persons in general.
We simply can't blame being blind on the reason we act as we do, once, and I'll say it again, once, we know better.
It is a choice, and how people react is something we must deal with if we decide to continue doing specific things in public.
I agree with Gregg.
I think SW is representing me accurately.
I think this is a clash of value systems. I'll explain.
I used to wear a tactile watch. After breaking the crystal, I realized that it made no sense for there to *be* a crystal. Crystals are only useful to sighted people. Logically, I thought it would be better to have a metal face that felt interesting. I realized that a quarter would fit in my watch perfectly, as would other more unusual coins.
I made the mistake of telling a blind person and we ended up arguing for hours. Looking back, his first instinct was to think about how hard the watch would make it for me to fit in, i.e. how much it might scare the muggles. My only thought was, what a great solution I've come up with. How can I make it happen? Then I told a sighted person who thought it was a neat idea and helped me make one. I wish I still had it. People thought it was interesting and I'd often let them touch it.
Many blind people value fitting for no other reason than to fit in. I don't.
Ironically, the so-called blind community's fixation on seeming normal and pointing out anyone who deviates is abnormal. Most groups don't fear difference as much as you do. Those tend to be extreme groups such as followers of certain religions. So blind people, as a group, are pretty weird. And scared.
I wonder if deaf people in general are like this also. I suspect not, but I don't know.
I've come to the conclusion that this is how many NTs are, especially the blind.
I'm not here to tell you how to live. I don't do that unless your actions hurt me. And I don't play graph theory and worry that if you don't act perfectly, someone will tell it to a friend, who tells it to a friend, ... until it reaches my network. I don't view that as real harm.
You don't need to tell me how to live either. I can't want to spend my life accommodating average minds and stifling creativity.
Forereel, I'll answer your question one more time:
If I arrive at a formal dinner in non-formal clothes I'll be removed.
Arriveing someplace and immediately being kicked out is a total waste of time.
Somebody at that dinner has something I want, else I wouldn't be going. So in that instance, I've elected to pay the energy costs, comfort costs, etc.
I still think many of the rules are infantile.
I don't go to many formal dinners because there's usually no reason to. I've structured life so I have to deal with things I dislike less often. We all do that.
You act as though following all the rules is perfectly natural, comfortable, and costs no effort. It isn't. So my answer: I follow them in certain instances where the reward outweighs the cost. And fitting in is not a reward.
Two other things I want to say. One to Wayne, one to Cody, although the latter may be terribly out of date.
First, Wayne:
You can't just arbitrarily take autism out of the equation. It doesn't work that way. If part of the reason Voyager does what she does is because she finds it hard to cope otherwise, then that's the end of it. You can't say "oh, well, it's a blindness issue" because it isn't. It's both a blindness and autism issue, which means you have to potentially use both in your analysis of the response.
Now, Cody. I believe you said something awhile back about how you hate things that hold you back. You represented Voyager as the sort of person who, since she willingly makes choices that might permit sighted people to judge her harshly, and by extension judge other blind people harshly, is responsible in large part for your being held back. This is a clear-cut issue of utterly ignoring the vital link in the chain of cause and effect, namely that it takes a sighted person making a stupid assumption to actually risk harm to you at the end of the day. If Voyager does what she does and a sighted person sees it, they then have to judge her negatively (which is bad enough, considering they don't know her and probably don't understand the issues she faces on a daily basis). And then they have to make the enormous assumption that most or all other blind people are that way. Can you not see how ridiculous this is? If you saw a black person, a woman, a person with blonde hair, a fat guy, a skinny person, do something bad, and then assumed that all of the representatives of that group should be judged likewise, we'd rightly laugh at you for your idiocy. This is not much different.
Put another way: it's not Voyager's fault if someone makes a huge and illogical assumption about the blind community as a whole if they engage in questionable behaviour. It's the assumer's fault. You should put the blame squarely on that person making the assumptions, since it's they, not Voyager and others like her, who are actually holding you back. Come on. I thought your rationality worked better than that.
See, I'm generally in agreement with an overall point - that certain blindisms should be watched for and dealt with, if possible - but I'm tired of the shaming we do to the members of our community who don't fit precisely the mold we've laid out for them. Listen. I used to rock quite a bit. I've worked very hard on stopping (mostly I rocked to music when I was enjoying it, and I was never the whole-body sort of rocker in any case). Sometimes I have to think about not doing it, even still. But I don't want the negative attention it brings, so I don't do it anymore. But there are times when I'll catch myself rocking a little; if my stomach is upset, rocking distracts me, for instance, and if I'm at home on my own I will sometimes rock a little if the music is loud and particularly good. Yes yes, before you ask, I've thought about the effect this latter has on day-to-day rocking, in public for instance, and the effect is minimal enough that I don't care. When I'm on my own and no one's going to judge me, I don't care what other people think because they aren't there to witness. We should change behaviour in response to stimuli, generally.
Okay, this is specifically for you Voyager. Smile.
Let’s talk for a while, and see if I can cause you to see life a bit differently, or make you understand that I agree with you, but only to a point?
I don’t follow the rules, and I feel natural. A few posts back, I ask, what is living the blind way the right way? How does that work?
Let’s talk about your idea for a watch. You are correct, you don’t need a crystal, a metal top would work great, and you could make it interesting.
Did you know, that lots of watches are made exactly as you described, and that the blind person arguing with you doesn’t know this fact?
Seeing people use them all the time, and simply open them to see the time?
If you are going to a formal dinner, do you ask before you go what people are going to be dressed like?
Some of these folk’s dress as they like.
So, it is possible you’ll not be kicked out at all.
Let’s look at me. I dress totally as I please, and I wear things most people might not wear.
Sure, it is nice items, and I’m always totally clean, no spots, colors are matched.
However, on my feet, I might have on a pair of sandals, or even moccasins.
At a formal dinner, too.
I deliberately look for clothing that is different, and I put it with items that are regular.
I’m confident when I step in a place, and that makes people figure I am as I want to be.
Voyager, I’m speaking specifically about mannerisms though, or behaviors.
I could have on a suit, and be just like all the people in a room, but if I start to rock, talk to myself, spin, or poke my eyes, what I’ve got on won’t matter.
These behaviors, I’ve been made to understand, are what are called blindisms.
I’ve never had them, but know others that did.
I didn’t realize however, that other blind people felt they should be left alone with them.
Living as Voyager wishes to live, and wearing her hair as Voyager wants isn’t a problem if Voyager does this with confidence, but if she adds these blindisms to her public style, she’s going to have odd reactions.
These behaviors or mannerisms are the only things I’m referring to, and they are a choice.
What I’d guess is you need to separate mannerisms from personal life choices.
Only in public places though. At home, or with friends, you can display them as you like.
Now, I’ve got a question. When you’re out, and people are making noises at you, and such other things, why do you guess it happens?
It doesn’t happen to me.
I assure you it isn’t because you have on different clothing, or a different watch style, or haircut. It is your confidence, or maybe you’re displaying these mannerisms in public?
If you do, as I’ve stated, kids, especially are going to join the fun.
It flat out looks different, weird, and they’ll react to it.
I think that maybe you fit in just fine, but you don’t want to believe you do, or you want to say you don’t?
That’s a question?
Maybe you should find a friend that doesn’t have an ax to grind and has them about things.
Go out to the malls and feel things, or ask them about the people around you.
Maybe because you don’t know is why you think you are different, when in fact, you’re just not like the others you know?
Talk to me.
Smile.
Shep.
You're correct, but I'm or wasn't speaking specifically to Voyager only addressing blindisms or mannerisms.
Now I'll tell you something you don't know.
I know this because of your post.
Folks tap feet, and rock to music all the time.
I’m talking in public when they are alone, or walking down the street.
Me, I'm liable to simply dance where I stand, and I mean on the street, or wherever.
I simply don’t care. Smile.
But, if I’m in a business meeting, I’m not going to have that problem, because, they’ll not have on music, and if they do…
I’m gonna rock. Smile.
I only took autism out, because I have no idea how it works, but I do understand that Voyager knows when she’s not in place, or she thinks she’s not.
I suspect autism is like any other disability, you’ll have levels of it.
But, for this topic, we were speaking only of mannerisms.
These blindisms.
I’d say that blind people, and only blind, should do as I’ve suggest Voyager do. Talk to people and learn if they are actually out as much as the believe they are.
Even my kids that are totally visual will dance with me on the street if the music is fine, so that isn’t a blind thing necessarily at all.
I might hear it in my head, so nothings playing at all, right?
Grin.
Oh great, let's just take St. Greg's advice and continue to enable voyager to continue making excuses for why she chooses to live the way she does. Disability has nothing to do with it; while there are degrees of autism, autistic people, like the rest of us, can be taught what is appropriate or not appropriate in life.
Here is an example: if an autistic person hits someone who makes them mad, the autistic person can be taught that he/she should not respond by hitting the person back but by using their words and firmly telling that person that he/she doesn't like to be treated that way.
I know I was going a bit off topic there but I wanted to clear that up.
To get the discussion back on topic though: I think what we're dealing with here is voyager presenting that she doesn't care about how she's viewed by society. Yet the words she writes in her posts show that she does care how society views her, hence her dressing appropriately when she goes to a formal dinner.
Voyager, please hear me out because I'm not hear to attack you. I agree with your general primace that fitting in with society is pointless. However I urge you to think about the fact that no one here is saying not to fit in--the discussion here is about mannerisms which are totally different than fitting in or not fitting in. Mannerisms, like eye-poking, rocking ETC, are what we are against for anyone who wants to be successful in the real world. I specify "real world" because I believe some people need to be brought back down to earth regarding the way they supposedly don't care about how they are perceived by people.
I think the failure in commu ication is that we want voyager to be successful
in the real world. She, however, would rather make her own world and pretend
its real. She'd rather say that she's satisfied with creativity, having not created
anything of note. She has all the friends she could want, because having more
would take effort and perhaps a behavior change, and that's hard. Its much
easier to simply settle for what you have. If you build yourself a box, the box
doesn't seem to suncomfortable. What we're doing is knockingon that box, and
pointing out that there is a world outside that box. But she isn't interested in
that, or at least claims she isn't, because coming out of that box is hard, and
hard things just aren't worth doing. She'd rather be a creator, who notably
hasn't actually created anything.
That's why actual creators can be a bit odd. Artists, software tycoons, they
can afford to be a bit odd because they can depend upon their creativity to get
them through. Voyager hasn't reached that point yet, but its easier for her to
pretend she has. So she looks at some tick tack toe game she made for
windows back in college or whatever, and says "aren't I such a wonderful crator
of things"? And never strives for anything more. Its a mindset I find deserving
of nothing more than distainful dismissal. She is welcome to make her little box.
Just keep it in the closet where I don't have to trip over it on my way to actually
doing something.
Chelsea, your example is ridiculous.
Hitting someone is a great deal different than, say, rocking or tapping a foot or wearing one's hair in an unfashionable style or having a watch with a quarter instead of a crystal. Hitting someone is direct, cause-and-effect harm. Punch hits face, face is hurt. That's bad. I think we can all agree that that's bad, not something we'd be aiming for. Autism or no, people shouldn't go around wailing on one another.
But Voyager isn't hitting people, as far as I am aware. Most high-functioning autistic people do not randomly hurt others. They know that's wrong, so they don't do it. She's making choices that sustain the lifestyle she prefers. Whatever the limitations of that lifestyle, whatever the advantages or disadvantages...well, they're hers, not ours. You have a right to claim that she's harming the community when she literally hurts someone. Until then, shut up and get over yourselves. This is ludicrous.
Wayne, I know that some people rock, although from what I gather, when most sighted people rock it's more of a head-bob than a body motion. That said, I know it's not a terrible, awful thing to do in general...but yeah, not going to do it in a professional setting, for obvious reasons. If I'm on my own though, I don't feel a need to uphold a standard which no longer possesses any relevancy. I also admit that I love rocking chairs, whether they're the classical wooden variety or the sort of rocking recliners more popular these days. I dunno why, I just do.
Really, when it comes down to it, blind people sometimes exhibit weird behaviours - the sort of eye-poking, rocking, spinning and such that have been discussed just about to death in the thread already. The need to curtail those behaviours correlates directly to the need of that particular person to integrate into a society which generally doesn't look favourably on such things. Some of us have lives which demand a high level of said integration, and some of us don't. But I can't stress this enough. The level of integration one's life has, if it's a choice that person is deliberately making, essentially exempts them from having to meet your standards. You can judge all you want, I suppose. No one can stop you. But be prepared for people to sneer at you and call you high-handed if you try. Be prepared, in fact, to hurt the community in an entirely different fashion. Because for every comment I've heard from a sighted person about such-and-such a blind person exhibiting peculiar habits, I've heard at least one about how vicious blind people are to one another regarding standards and expectations. I've also heard a lot of this from blind people themselves, and as such, you might want to think twice about the toxicity you're fostering. If you want to sit on the argument that these "unfit" blind people are giving the rest of us a bad image, then you're hung by your own rope, because the more vocal you are about your judgments, thenmore offputting you might appear to others, and the more harm you may do to the blindness community as a result. Chew on that awhile.
I thought Chelsea's example was fine.
Behavior can be tought.
Yes, Wayne. Behaviour can be taught, at least most of the time. For a low-functioning autistic, the behaviour can be taught but the unwanted reaction may still occur. This isn't such a case, of course.
The issue is not whether or not behaviour can be taught. It's what harm said behaviour actually does. In the case of striking someone, that's demonstrable harm to a person's body, not to mention whatever social harm might be done by unnecessary violence. In the case of all these blindisms and the like, however, it's entirely different. The harm, if you can even call it harm, is mostly done to the self rather than directly to others, and thus we cease to be effective arbiters of what should or should not be taught, or stressed, or insisted upon in social situations.
Yes, behavior can be taught and starts early on. This may be a matter of parentage.
I just read through the latest postings. They’re very interesting. To Shepherdwolf, thank you! The man sees reason!!!!!!!!
Yeah, Voyager does what she does and any negative or bigoted comments aimed at her from people who are visually impaired happen because she chooses to do the behaviors for which she’s receiving these negative comments? No, I think it’s a little something like this. You guys don’t like her going her own way for lack of a better phrase and she’s not bowing down at the altar of the church of blindology. So rather than leave her alone to do things her way when she knows what she needs to do or not do, you people talk shit to her and use the excuse of her practically asking for rude comments from people because that’s the direct result of her not being a good script-reading disabled person who reads from the script you want her too.
No, she hasn’t brought negative attitudes on herself from you guys nor from people in real life, this is crap that you’re spuing at her that she brings this on herself not to truly show her a true way to go about life as a person with disabilities, this is you guys using teaching her as a cover to be bullying and the very bigots you claim exist in the sighted community who could talk shit about us. Thus, you’ve become those you’ve attempted to fight against all these years. How do ya like that?
James, why are you so bitter? People can go there own way as long as they can deal with the backlash. Rock away, but don't think you're getting anywhere in life.
Not bitter at all. I've called things for what they are all my life, especially when it comes to abusive bullying punk-ass creeps and I don't intend to do otherwise and play symantics now.
Hey, the truth hurts. Rock around, hop on one foot, make noises, but you won't be as accepted as the one who doesn't do such things.
I see the thread creator, who I will refer to as neurotic James from now on, has not changed substantially. He is still using the term bigot without any idea of what it means. One would be a fool in assuming that the same guy who has a Leninist/Banon "fuck the system, burn it down" philosophy would invest in a dictionary, but not to worry. I have done the leg work for neurotic James, so he can sit back and take a long, hard look at himself in the mirror when he discovers that he embodies the very term he throws around aimlessly. According to the dictionary, a bigot is defined as:
1. Intolerant, prejudiced person,
2. Crude, savage person
3. Person over enthusiastic about an interest.
4. Person who pretends, is deceiptful.
That sounds terribly reminiscent of someone familiar, doesn't it?
I'd like to know how a sighted person is prejudiced, intolerant, a savage, and crude for telling a person that rocking or poking his/her eyes is inappropriate. I'd also like to know what makes neurotic James and not-so-chill, neurotic Cody qualified to diagnose and assess people with having mental illnesses. I take especially keen interest in this because I have a degree in psychology, and I know for a fact that these two and myself have absolutely no qualifications to be diagnosing people. Finally, I'd like to know how neurotic, bigoted, hypocritical James has the cowardly nerve to compare blind people to blacks and homosexuals, who have been victims of real bigotry. Calling out a blind person for rocking and poking his/her eyes doesn't even come close to being enslaved, beaten, lynched, and stoned to death.
Because neurotic james never grew up and feels he should be able to ignore the rules of society and do as he pleases. We all know the type.
I don't think the echo-chamber quality of the attacks on James is doing any good.
I trust by now, though, that the points I've made about Voyager have stuck fast, and I hope they apply to others as well.
Remember what I said though. If you want or need to integrate into any group, be it society in general or some exclusive club, and if that society or club has pre-existing rules, you will have to either fit into those standards or have the power to ignore, modify or dismiss them. Most of us don't have that.
This is why it would be inappropriate to rock or eye-poke in a business meeting or a job interview. But it's also why, if such is a thing you enjoy doing, it's safe enough to do it in your own home if you want to.
And hey, if you have a life where the interactions with these societies and clubs is minimal, and if you can negotiate those minefields with a minimum of risk to yourself of others, then not a one of us is able to judge.
That said, James, you do look a little more than just truthful. You also seem a little bitter. My suggestion to you is to give yourself a good hard look, and maybe think about some of what you're saying and how you're saying it. You may have valid points - I'm not utterly convinced, but I'm willing to hear you out - but the way you're coming across makes it difficult to see past the snark. And the word "bigot" shouldn't be tossed around so easily, nor should comparisons to blacks or homosexuals. It is by no means the same thing. Sure we get a raw deal sometimes, but it's not like we're being beaten or killed or generally oppressed. Things are less than ideal, and I would be the last to minimize the struggles that the members of this community go through, but let's not over-inflate them, okay? Perspective is important.
I would also be interested in seeing a valid argument if one such argument exists for such wrechid behavior.
Pokes Margorp in the eye. Oops, sorry about that. I must be blind or something.
I think if you do these blindisms then maybe you deserve the title of blind or
blink? I read the first couple refreshed the page because of Publics and didn't
read the rest on the first page, but I have to agree with Cody.
Fortunately/unfortunately, I would say fortunately you, the rest of the blind
people,, and even I live in a sighted world. So we must act right and normal. I
think perceptions matter a great deal whether you like the idea or not! The
world demands a certain code of normalcy and etiquettes. it's not for you to
challenge them without judgement. The question is how hard are you willing to
try? If you want opportunities you need to be pragmatic and go after them. Yes,
even if you're naturally not such a pragmatic person. In this sighted world the
game is how badly do you want your success?
I think it's essential to act right and follow normal protocols of behavior and
understand all standards of the world. Even if it doesn't apparently make sense
as a blind person, to you, if you want to be integrate in to the sighted world just
do it.
Leninist Banon Fuck the System Mantality? Is that Banon as in Stephen Banon? Well, I'm glad to see that you guys in the Alt Blind are still screaming Blood and Soil as well as making complete fools of yourselves.
That...doesn't really even make any sense.
Rachel, I think it is important to challenge social norms sometimes rather than just, ahem, blindly following them, so long as people aren't hurt by said challenges. That said, sometimes people take a bad stance on this, and decide to challenge when they feel like it, or out of pique, rather than at an appropriate time. Challenging a social norm is great when the repercussions to you aren't damaging; it's not so great when you stand to lose a great deal. Pick your moment, is what I'm saying.
Pokes his eyes so he won't look foolish.
Smile.