The obvious conclusion that “many disabled people are rejected for benefits and end up dying without any basic income for food, shelter, and medicine”
Is not “it’s because of fakers. Fakers gaming the system are to blame”
It’s:
The people who are in charge of determining who’s disabled enough to need benefits are very, very bad at figuring out who’s disabled and who isn’t.
And from repeated reports from people who have gone through the process, and people who used to work in these capacities, for the most part, they don’t even bother to try to figure out who’s disabled or not. They fulfill a minimum quota and then reject everyone else indiscriminately. They use superficial details about the applicant’s appearance or speech. They use incredibly stupid and unscientific tests like making you recite “car, balloon, flag,” after a five minute conversation to determine if you have “real” memory issues, instead of devising tests that demonstrate how your memory issues would affect you in a work setting.
Blaming fakers isn’t doing anything for me. Stricter and undiscerning measures to keep fakers out is hurting disabled people, not fakers themselves. Punishing fakers is not making my life better. People who are actually trained to understand disability would make my life better.
I keep trying to explain to friends and family, the process of applying is like hearing the phrase “dance cripple DANCE!!” over and over and over..
I was rejected for “not being disabled enough” when I have cerebral palsy AND spina bifida. I had a doctors note that SAID THIS, too. But it wasn’t until I got my records from Shriner’s and sent in the damn big ass manila envelope that they accepted my application.
I remember having to do an interview and they asked me why I couldn’t work so I explained to them why I can’t just go and get a job at McDonald’s or a restaurant like everyone else. The guy literally said to me, “Well, that isn’t really our problem…”
And lots of these tests are really, really easy to get past if you’re a faker.
I mean, take the memory one. Someone who’s faking disability can just pretend not to remember the words. Someone who can remember the words and is honest about this, but has real memory difficulties gets put in the “faking disability” box, while the actual faker doesn’t.
Good advice on what to do when you find yourself near a racist mouthy twat who is spouting out their crap at some unfortunate person.
NEVER engage the perpetrator. He (and it is usually he) is looking for confrontation. Instead speak to the person he is abusing. Say hello. Introduce yourself. Shake his or her hand. And just stand with them. Keep talking. About anything. Weather. Bus schedules. Football. This kind of bullying never works against a group of people having a conversation. Usually a single person travelling or a mom with a kid or maximum, two women are targeted.
Form a group of people with and around them if you can. Don’t tell them they are not alone. Just don’t let them be alone. I speak from experience. Once, I encountered a young girl wearing a hijab being abused as a terrorist by a drunk man on a train. I just went and sat beside her and started a conversation with her. After a while, the dude lost interest. I had a lovely chat with a young student from Qatar. She wanted to study literature while her dad was only prepared to pay for engineering or commerce as he wanted her to join the family business. It helped her feel safe and it expanded my horizons.
This is known in behavioral psychology as “non-complimentary behavior”; by not fueling the aggression of another person and you can flip the whole script of all their expectations, and without any footholds for their aggression (like direct provocation and confrontation/conflict) to launch into further tirades against, the aggressor can’t continue their angry scene-building. The more people who participate in script-flipping, the more successful it gets, as in this post you see with the advice to form a protective group between the bigot and their target for that very purpose.
There’s an NPR podcast called Invisibilia which goes into detail about how it works and what sort of people rely on it everyday professionally and for survival alike, in their Flipping the Script episode.
A friend of mine is taking an astronomy class, and she was telling me about some of the impressively large telescopes that exist throughout the world. These are the sorts of things that cost hundreds-of-millions, sometimes billions of dollars, and see into the deepest, farthest, most distant recesses of space, beyond anything even conceivable in human imagination.
And of course, for projects that take many years, hundreds of people, and billions of dollars, that broaden the entire realm of human understanding, the telescopes need names. And no one tops astronomers at naming.
Ask yourself, what should one call a very large telescope? Something cool? Something unique? Something meaningful. Well ask no more, as astronomers have solved that problem. Allow me to introduce you to the
Brilliant. Beautiful. Send it to the presses Jim. But wait! What about a telescope that’s even larger! Worry not Jim, as we’ve got that covered:
Of course. Exceptional. Elegant. But wait! What if there’s one even larg–
