"The Omen, AS, Teachers/School and Child Lib"!

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I don't think it is the right to vote so much that is important, rather is is that children are forced to go to school, whether they want to or not. They have to sit at desks and follow the teachers instructions. I really think the whole thing is an assault on a child's individuality. The other side of it is that it becomes unbearable, especially for teenagers, and I don't think its just aspies, look at all the emo-kids, the druggies, etc. That can't possibly be what being a healthy teenager is all about. It happens because the school is forced on kids. And then kids are forced to take medication so they can follow some absurd and arbitrary rules. This is called preparing them for success at a job. People, the industrial era is over. There are less and less of those kind of factory and office jobs. Why make kids suffer needlessly for jobs that don' t even exist?

I think it would tell us a lot if we voted by decades. under ten, ten to twenty, and such.

The under eighteen vote would be small, but if they were taught to vote, at an early age, turnout would be better.

The government is basically a government employee union with a third of the vote, and they vote to keep themselves in power.

The American two party system limits any expression other than chosing from two pools.

In other places minority parties do get a seat at the table.

Vote by decade, with a choice of what to vote about, would tell us about our culture and how it is changing.

Change is happening fast, we cannot take a generation to adapt, and that is the way government is set up.

As for that stress stuff, I think we are all getting an overdose.

Why, ouinon, did you title this thread as it is, concerning autism, horror tales and children, then label the poll to involve politics, but have yet to articulate some meaningful connection between any of those four subjects.

Instead, you seem to spend most of the thread talking about the emancipation of women, but even there, only in terms of the Victorian upper classes.

I've moved (or rather, caused to be moved, as I was a bit slow) this thread to the PPR forum, as it hardly touches on anything related to autism.

If the right to vote were based on the capacity to think for oneself, ( something very few individuals manage to do in their lifetimes!), or to understand abstract arguments then it might seem a little less like injustice that people under 16, or 14, or 12, or whatever age do not have such a right. But while the vote is extended to everyone over the age of 18 irrespective of their intellectual capacities , or degree of mental independence, it is pure abuse of power privileges to exclude people under 18. I think a good measure of whether someone is fit to vote is whether they express the desire to.
My 8 year old son would like to.
And he does not appreciate his rights being essentially those of a household pet.

Ah, thank you for explaining why it had been moved; i was wondering. I don't agree with the move!

My point is that the recent increase in numbers of diagnoses of sensory and cognitive disorders on the autism spectrum is perhaps very largely a symptom of a crisis in adultism, and in the position of those people known as children in our society, which might be leading them to develop many desperate and serious and mysterious disorders and difficulties as women did in the 1800s before they managed to overthrow their oppression.
Without political rights, entirely unconsciously, lacking any other tools/means of expression they used their bodies and minds to express their feelings of injustice, exclusion, and powerlessnesss. The people known as children find themselves in a similar situation now.

Also making up the numbers in this phenomenon may be those people under 18 who are simply behaving in what to them is a healthy and reasonable way, but is unfortunately for them not respectful enough of the limits imposed on "children" in our society, and results in their being labelled with medical terms which both discredits them and puts fear into other under-18s.
( NB: in the hysteria epidemic aswell there were many women just being labelled aberrant for behaving in a way totally natural for them but which did not fit "the role of woman" at the time.)

Re; the horror film connection; i believe that horror films are sometimes/often very powerful vehicules for expressing the major, almost taboo, fears of a society. And that the rash of "child -hating' films of the 70's may have represented a first wave of reaction to "children" behaving with increasing rebelliousness and "disorder liness" . The "children" who were becoming more and more difficult to understand or to handle.

My point is very much about autism. The reason i referred so repeatedly to the proliferation of "womens hysteria" in the late 1800s is because it is the latest ( that i know very much about anyway!) striking, and well documented, example of just such an "outbreak" of mysterious disabling syndromes in a part of the population, and turned out to be directly related to issues of political oppression.
The FACT is that many many doctors, scientists, and researchers spent many decades studying these ailments and disorders, and trying out many treatments , creating many theories to attempt to explain the wave of "womens problems", and that the cause turned out to be political oppression.

I think my thread is extremely relevant to discussions of autism, including aspergers. I obviously didn't show my reasoning sufficiently. I thought i was being more than clear, practically labouring the point! But i must have skipped bits.

Last edited by ouinon on 19 Dec 2007, 7:30 pm, edited 16 times in total.

>> Is the "Autism epidemic" a mechanism for political repression of the class of people known as"children"??

No, children have always been politically repressed. They can't vote, can't buy alcohol, generally can't sign binding contracts, and are legally considered subservient inferiors of their parents, or their loco parentis handlers in the schools.

Non-conformists have always been hammered to fit the mold. Most people that are into this repression don't believe in diagnoses like ADD, ADHD, AS, etc - they see it as excuses to not comply with the molding. Recognizing the diagnoses is likely to establish the fact that people are different, and cannot be expected to submit to the one-size-fits-all model.

So were women until 100 years ago, and black races in Western countries until various points over the last century. Now people under 18 years old are the only ones left without full human rights, with in fact about the same rights as a domestic animal. THAT is why it has become a problem. This isolation is new. Previously they were in the same boat as women and black people. Now it's just them, with the animals.

Does my poll title sound as if i'm suggesting the repression is something new? But i think i explain it enough in the thread, no?

Last edited by ouinon on 19 Dec 2007, 1:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Nope. I still don't see any sense in this.

I can quite happily support the concept that an arbitrary "18 years" is... just that... arbitrary, and not consistent everywhere.

What this has to do with treating children (not persons with age deficit, please) as animals, I don't quite see.

To provide a scenario for your consideration:

You are standing at the top of a cliff with your son and his friend. They decide that it would be fun to jump off the cliff and fly to the bottom, like Batman and Robin. They outvote you, 2 to 1. Do you jump with them?

I am just very struck by the similarity between the documented increase in AS disorders diagnosed in the last 10-15 years and the womens hysteria "epidemic" at a time, the late 1800s, when women were still disenfranchised and beginning to experience this as oppression and abuse. That "epidemic" disappeared after women were emancipated.
All those hysterical disorders evaporated when women were given a voice in society. The vote. And perhaps it would have the same effect on the "autism epidemic", to give full human rights to people under 18.
The fact that many overtly "child-hating" films were made in the 70s made me suddenly wonder where that hate/fear/insecurity around "children" had gone. And I wonder if it hasn't been directed in to the labelling of many as aberrant. As happened to women in the 1800s.

Last edited by ouinon on 20 Dec 2007, 9:23 am, edited 3 times in total.

Heck, I wouldn't give rights to children and in no terms do I really think that decreasing the voting age is a good idea. Heck, I want less people to vote, not more.

If the argument is that this is similar to women's rights, well, my counter argument is that women's rights are built upon an intellectual equality between men and women that cannot exist between adults and children. The reason I say it cannot exist is because if I define intellect as a function of one's ability to think and one's knowledge then unless kids are really really thoughtful, they cannot compete with an adult who has education and experience. Now given that people don't get dumber as they grow up but rather smarter as their thinking skills grow stronger, it appears to me that there is no case that the average or median child is even comparable to the average or median adult.

If there is counter-evidence that the average or median child could be qualified then present it, but I would not have extended to my childhood self any of these rights. Honestly, the major reason that adults have most of these rights is just a matter of maintaining a rule of law and of liberty, not because they honestly deserve it.

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 19 Dec 2007, 1:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Discrimination based on age doesn't stop when you're 18... or 20 or 30 or 40 for that matter.

No. I did not add any perspective. You quoted me out of context. It was you that was saying that children are treated as animals.

You did not give an answer to my scenario. Would you jump?


Continually talking about an autism epidemic, but enclosing it in quotes and prefixing it with "so called" still does not make it real.

Are you of the opinion that there is a real autism epidemic?

I didn't realise it was a serious question.
I don't think it's a serious question. Is the vote of two other people supposed to be binding on me for some reason? Why? Can't they just jump off on their own? etc. Please explain question.

Last edited by ouinon on 19 Dec 2007, 7:38 pm, edited 3 times in total.

The intellectual equality you talk about between men and women was not believed to exist before 1900; most men said that there was no way women should have right to vote because they would never be able understand politics. ALL the arguments people use against giving full human rights to people under 18 were used to argue against women getting them 100 years ago!

I don't believe that it has ever been proved that people get smarter as they get older.
Perhaps "know" more, but be better at processing it? Not necessarily .

I think 7 years is the age they give for a child being able to stand and talk equally to an adult, in various old traditions. The age of abstract reasoning according to Piaget.

Last edited by ouinon on 19 Dec 2007, 2:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

So? The reason things are different isn't because the arguments were wrong in and of themselves but rather that they are based upon bad premises, heck, I recognize that the same reasoning was also used against black people too but I know why they were wrong and I am right. There is no reason a woman cannot be equal to a man, but there are significant reasons why a child cannot.
Oh, not during adulthood so much as childhood. Like, even in the teens there are still brain activities taking place what would be problematic in terms of rights. Like teenagers still are working on various issues of responsibility and control. Knowing more is a significant part of what I was speaking about though, so even if children have the same processing ability, they still should be discriminated against because they don't have the same amount of knowledge.

So? The child and adult aren't equal. Old traditions and Pavlov really aren't what I am looking at.

What significant reasons are there for believing in an essential, inevitable, inequality between a group of people under-18/16 and another group older than that?

PS : you say "Teenagers are still working on issues of control and responsibility", ..... and people over 18 are not?!

PPS : Piaget was a groundbreaking psychologist working in the 50's/60's (?), who made many very important discoveries about the stages of human development in terms of our understanding of things at different ages, starting at birth.

Last edited by ouinon on 19 Dec 2007, 7:39 pm, edited 6 times in total.