Notices by alex :disabled_knife: (alex@godforsaken.website), page 3

obviously the UK press is ignoring this unprecedented human rights investigation, so it's falling to independent disabled journalists to cover it, as usual.

capitalism doesn't want a healthy populace, it wants a working populace

PM is giving a reprehensible speech about disability benefits right now. terrifying and clearly unengaged with the reading.

sunak talking admiringly about job centre staff: "they are doing something incredible... by moving someone off benefits... and into work...", "their work is an enormous force for good"

he's talking about using AI to determine fraud???

imagine if they were like "we are going to improve public health" rather than "we are going to continue to wage war against our own populace's wellbeing and you will all simply have to toughen up"

(half dressed in armour) anyone seen my vambraces? in my greaves drawer? no no those are my gilded vambraces, they don't go with this cuirass at all.

:minion: babana

They should invent a type of weather that's nice

the point these ableists make is never "so the service workers should be paid more" or "infrastructure should be better", it's that those workers suddenly take on the role of "servants" for a luxuried class of private bosses (the disabled???) ... but only in that sole context where their plight can be used as a cudgel to punish disabled people and disabled people only. this is just anti-solidarity conservative rhetoric???

one thing i see a lot when class-reductionist dirtbag ableist leftists try to present disabled people (usually women) as luxuriating, lazy, wilfully home-staying parasites*, is that they focus on the idea of us relying on underpaid service/delivery workers. but like, yous get your groceries in-person from the stores staffed by the same underpaid workers?

*note that this is exactly the same attitude the UK Conservative party has towards disabled people, and is the impetus behind Austerity

(introducing you to my family in the parallel world where everyone's called Richard) this is my wife, Richard. and our seventeen sons: Richard, Richard, Richard, Richard, Richard, Richard, Richard, Richard, Richard, Richard, Richard, Richard, Richard, Richard, Richard, Richard, and Richard. and our pet weasel, Richard.

there's like 5 or 6 doctors in the UK who are absolutely invested in the idea of ME/CFS as a "biopsychosocial" condition that can be treated by talking therapy and a bit of exercise, and they are absolutely guaranteed a slot in any mainstream outlet of their choosing any time they want to whinge about how they've been hard done by, and how everyone else but them is wrong. it's so weird!!! it is *always* one of these 5 or 6 doctors btw. no one else does this.

many of this clique were involved the PACE trial. it's the *only* study that purports to show that exercise "cures" ME/CFS, a condition characterised by all symptoms worsening in response to activity. it was, unprecedentedly, funded by the UK Department for Work and Pensions + other private health insurers. it also infamously altered its criteria for "recovery" mid-way through, to the degree that many participants would have retroactively met the recovery criteria before even starting.

when NICE revised its treatment guidelines for ME/CFS, it finally dropped the PACE trial recommendations, on the basis that all its evidence were of low or very low quality. the NICE review process was exactly the same as it always is. however the PACE clique launched several unprecedented obstructions, having people removed from the panel, then having the new guideline release delayed, then rallying several UK insitutions to sign letters saying they wouldn't adhere to the new guidance

and they've still not let it go! they have the backing of the Science Media Centre, one of the reactionary freespeech orgs to grow out of the Living Marxism cult (same as Spiked). they have the backing of the Tory government (see arch-cliquist Professor Sir Simon Wessely's career trajectory). basically any time they like they can call up the Guardian or Today and have a slot to whinge about how they're being persecuted by irrational patient activists.

one really important thing about this is that they're already trying to attach themselves into the early stages of Long Covid research, since Long Covid is probably ME/CFS. they are absolutely already pushing for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Graded Exercise Therapy to be the main and only treatments for post-viral sequelae of SARS-COV-2. and that's popular with the private interests that will soon replace the NHS, because those treatments are cheap. but also they don't work.

lmao not the guardian citing team PACE / Wessely school biopsychosocial cliquists Chalder and Garner to say that NICE was wrong to disrecommend exercise therapy for a condition characterised by exertion intolerance. let it go dudes!!!

really good article on AI-generated imagery falsely reifying an Americanist understanding of emotional expression as universally, historically objective

[cw for offensive digital-Blackface ish AI-generated depictions of Indigenous people]

https://medium.com/@socialcreature/ai-and-the-american-smile-76d23a0fbfaf

i'm constantly warning everyone i know: do everything possible to avoid getting covid, because it's really possible that it will permanently disable you, which will ruin your life in ways you are not prepared for. and most people are responding like "that seems pretty extreme and pessimistic :-( and kind of inconvenient for me to consider rn". and i'm like, my guys, this literally happened to me from a much milder virus than covid19. i have genuinely had my life ruined by it.