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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 6/12/16

If Your Autism Has No Place for Self-Cultivation, It Will Be Bullshit

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Autistic people cannot afford to deliberately alienate others.

The time has come to be courageous.

As a progressive, I support accommodations.

But that can never be a one-way street.

There is an old saying from Flavia Dzodan:

My feminism will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit.

I won't comment here on the internal debates around intersectionality, in feminism.

I will, however, insist that if it is possible to raise the question of limited views in social justice or political critique, it is also possible to raise the question of limited views of selfhood in autistic life; including, but not limited, to autistic critique.

If your autism does not involve self-cultivation, it will be bullshit.

If you are autistic, and want accommodation from 'society,' but you do not want to reciprocate by accommodating neurotypicals and non-autistic people:

You are also the problem.

If you are autistic, and you think that adaptation is the responsibility of others, and not of you yourself:

You are also the problem.

If you are autistic, and you privilege social exclusion by others over medical impairment (whether as a causal explanation or a moral justification):

You are also the problem.

If you are autistic, and have no vision of self-cultivation, and you expect everyone else to tolerate and accept you, while you remain exactly the same, or even sink ever deeper into a morass of self-indulgent entitlement and whingeing...

You are every bit as much the problem as 'they' are.

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Jonathan Ferguson is a socio-economic liberal with strong libertarian leanings in some key issues.

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