Anti-Curist are suffering from reaction formation?

Post Reply New Topic

i am very very new to this board.

which came first? the anticure versus cure argument?

of the third x-men movie???

The anti-cure versus cure argument came first, and bears very little resemblance to the third X-Men movie in demographics.

it just seems that an awful lot of the things being said on both sides are in the x-men movie.
the offers to "help".
the statements about mutation not being a disease, therefore not needing a cure.
the fears that a cure will destroy the identity/personhood of the mutants.

art imitates life.

please explain what you mean by "demographics".

edit to clarify: i know what the word itself means, but what are you referring to in your use of it?

Frankly, I heard things einstein seemed to say that weren't smart. I read a book he wrote, and he DID make it clear it wasn't really possible.

I heard things FREUD supposedly said. I read a book HE wrote, and he didn't say them!

I am sick of this supposed "hate those that are as you are because you are that, and love those against you to sho you aren't that" garbage.

So why am I against it?

1. It CAN'T be cured and trying to is a waste of time!
2. It is on the premise autism is bad when it mostly isn't!
3. There are good worthwhile attributes from some autism!
4. Autism can lead to good personality traits!
5. Many don't want to be cured!
6. Curbies are SCAMSTERS! They just want pity and money!

And YEAH, most that feel that way are probably mild. Most probably see more benefits. SO WHAT? What do you do with the ones that aren't mild?

Steve

Here is what I wrote about it before (everything past here is an old blog post):

I’ve now seen X-Men 3. Most of my thoughts on it are summed up in either the post or the comments at the Ragged Edge’s review of the movie (although I’m sure plurals who read this will note that they’re represented in the Ragged Edge comments only by someone who thinks of them as having a “dissociative disorder”). Another thought, which has long bothered me about the X-Men despite liking them, is as follows. (Most of what I’m about to say is common to all X-Men stuff, so there won’t really be spoilers.)

It reinforces a particular way of thinking about people and their political beliefs, that is common but destructive. It lumps several beliefs and actions together, into basically two groups.

Group one (represented by the Brotherhood of Mutants):

* Bad/evil.
* More extreme views relative to the society they are living in.
* Separatist
* Hatred.
* Sense of superiority over non-mutants.
* Willingness to kill or betray without remorse, particularly non-mutants.
* In fact, willingness to kill all non-mutants. Only lives truly concerned with saving are mutant lives, and particularly mutants who are on their side.
* The strongly held belief that mutants are perfectly fine as they are and need no cure.

Group two (represented by the X-Men):

* Good.
* More moderate views relative to the society they are living in.
* Assimiliationist
* Love.
* Sense of equality with non-mutants.
* Primarily trying to save lives, killing only as a last resort and with reluctance, and a general sense of fairness.
* Saving the lives of mutants and non-mutants alike.
* More variety in response to the question of cure.

As one reviewer put it, you’re clearly supposed to side with the “good guys,” but it’s the bad guys making all the best arguments against cure and successfully pointing out the real ways in which it will be used. The issue of siding with the “good guys” is forced by the actions of the “bad guys,” which very few people would condone.

But those two groupings of ideas up above, are not the only way ideas can be grouped. Unfortunately, I’ve actually seen people arguing what views to hold and not to hold, based on whether they sound more like views held by the Brotherhood of Mutants, or more like views held by the X-Men. People are influenced by this stuff. It provides two convenient stereotypes of styles of activism, for one.

For the record, with regards to autism, I don’t believe in a cure, I don’t believe that cure will be voluntary, I don’t believe that even what looks like “voluntarily” choosing a cure is as voluntary as its proponents would have us believe, I believe that prevention would be merely a form of eugenics, I don’t believe that some autistic people are so defective that cure is the only option (I don’t even think of people in general as defective), and my views on many things disability-related are characterized by the society I live in as extreme. At the same time, I am neither hateful nor perpetually angry, I am not a separatist, I have no sense of superiority over anyone, I don’t want to see anyone dead, and I have a strong sense of equality for all kinds of people, autistic and non-autistic.

But take the first several viewpoints, and it’s easy to view me as at least either angry, hateful, or having a certain sense of superiority, based on certain stereotypes of what it means to hold the views I hold. And those are often charges I have to answer to, by people whose vision of the world seems to bear a strong resemblance to the cartoonified simplifications that make their way into the X-Men.

I should note, also, that while I am not a separatist, separatism does not necessarily mean any of those negative things either. It can mean just entirely or primarily wanting contact with a particular kind of people, for all sorts of reasons. There are many autistic people who mainly or entirely have contact with other autistic people, where they can manage it, and there are others who want to build communities of entirely autistic people. This doesn’t seem like a problem to me, even though I wouldn’t want to live there. I don’t automatically view them as hateful or supremacist, because most of them aren’t. Some people do view them that way, though, and that is not accurate.

Moreover, there are plenty of people who think that if they hold one of those views, then they themselves must do the other things described on there. There are people who start out with a view that we are absolutely okay as we are, and work themselves up into a state of artificial hatred or superiority that they would not have worked themselves up into to begin with had they not believed that these things were all necessarily connected. There are plenty of people with more moderate viewpoints who characterize the degree of moderation or “neutrality” in their viewpoints as the only way to promote equality or love, and there are people who are drawn to embracing more “moderate” or “neutral” viewpoints in the fear that they will not be promoting equality or love unless they do so.

In America, the extreme version of views of women’s rights a hundred years ago would be considered unbearably sexist now, even by most people who are not feminists. And many of today’s views held by many people who have plenty of sexist viewpoints, would have been considered unbearably radical back then.

Whether a viewpoint is considered extreme or not depends entirely on the society it takes place in. In a society that totally devalues a group of people, saying that this group of people is valuable as they are and does not need to be prevented or changed into a different kind of people, looks like an extreme view. But in a society that more or less accepts that group of people, it’s not an extreme view at all.

Therefore, it has always seemed to me that a view should be taken on based on whether it seems to be the right view, rather than on whether or not it is extreme in the society that it’s a part of. Taking an “extreme” or a “moderate” view for its own sake, is putting yourself totally at the whim of the society you live in, and reinforcing its own structure of how views are seen.

I talked about the movie to a neighbor of mine, and she said something like “It sounds like the good guys in the movie were what people think of as the good guys in real life. But in real life there’s a third group of people, and that’s us, even though people really don’t hear about us.”

So, while I enjoy watching the X-Men, I really hope that it doesn’t reinforce too many of people’s rather polarized views of what certain beliefs mean about a person’s other beliefs. There are third, and fourth, and fifth, etc, categories, we’re not all X-Men or the Brotherhood of Mutants out here in the real world.

now i understand that you were speaking about the way the varying views of the cure were taken and divided into the two polarized groups of affected people in the movie.

and i can understand your concern at that.


reading a portion of this board, every single one of the individual attributes of both groups is present.
and you have two groups present here, the curebies and the non-curebies.

of course, how people will shuffle themselves into each real group remains to be seen if a cure is discovered. but because all humans seem to like to divide themselves bicamerally, this division is to be expected.

Obviously, Freud couldn´t have said that. There is nothing regarding to sex there.

I had a conversation with a friend regarding this notion ages ago. (I was 16 at the time.) We had both seen the original "Body Snatchers" on television. If I acted "normal", everyone would know it's not ME ! ! I was joking that if a "pod person" replaced me, it'd be a dead giveaway ! !

That is to say, if I took some drug to act NT, everyone who knows me would say I was no longer myself. Good Lord, if I suddenly started speaking rationally, and mentioning NT stuff like Brittany Spears, people would drop their teeth ! !!

I would however like a pill for better memory, and to decrease some of my sensetivities.

Somebody has finally found something to beat penis envy.

Not just projection, but denial on a cultural level.

This entire thread reminds me of the recent news story about a severely developmentally disabled girl whose parents wanted to have her surgically prevented from growing further, to make it easier for them to take care of her as she gets older.

The intuitive impression I get of curebies is that their motivation is not philanthropic (helping auties lead the most fulfilling lives possible), but rather the curebies' comfort level. This is why they used to lock up auties in asylums -- not with any hope of helping them, but because "normal, decent human beings" found it so unsettling to look at what they couldn't understand.
______________________________________________________________________________

"Autism is a label which describes outer behaviours, not inner realities."
-- Donna Williams, "Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct"