"Some of the [historic] strategies used by the system to exercise violence are sterilization, incarceration or even murder. These strategies have evolved as the capitalist system has evolved. These strategies arise from the need of capitalism to create and promote the idea of an efficient body, capable of producing maximum economic and social benefit. Since industrialization, what prevailed was the body understood as a source of labor. The efficiency of the body, linked to health standards set by medicine, looked for the body’s functionality. The medical standard defined the expected efficiency of the body, and thereby linked bodily health to economic productivity.
With consumer capitalism, production becomes so consumer-driven, that advertising, visual and aesthetic ideals take precedence. Social success, therefore, gets linked to the physical, and social ascent, will reflect how well your body conforms to aesthetic ideals, to the norm…Medicine under consumer capitalism will be responsible for promoting health linked to the aesthetic field, bodies that resemble the idea of consumer beauty will be considered healthy. Which in turn leads medicine to standardize bodies in order to achieve both health and beauty, creating the ideal of healthy, beautiful, good, slim bodies. Bodies will be adapted to fit this standard, which legitimizes the non-genuine."
- Itxi Guerra, The Fight Against Ableism, article from a fanzine, translated from Spanish 5/9/23.
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As always, we ask that in order to participate in the weekly megathread, one self-identifies as some form of disabled, which is broadly defined in the community sidebar:
“Disability” is an umbrella term which encompasses physical disabilities, emotional/psychiatric disabilities, neurodivergence, intellectual/developmental disabilities, sensory disabilities, invisible disabilities, and more. You do not have to have an official diagnosis to consider yourself disabled.
Mask up, love one another, and stay alive for one more week.
So annoyed. I got my most recent prescription filled, and both large bags filled with many items, every single item REEKS of perfume. Massive migraine trigger.
Can you make a vegan bernaise aioli for a sandwich? Probably. Can I though? We shall see today
idk what bernaise is but real aioli is just oil and garlic plus a fuckload of mechanical effort to form the emulsion, not any mayo or egg.
Bearnaise. I spelled it wrong. Basically I just put tarragon, shallots and cow parsley in my emulsion.
i still don’t know what that is, but i’m glad yours worked.
It’s a sauce put on everything here from steak and potatoes to fries and hot dogs.
And thank you. I am also glad it worked out.
It was possble and even edible.
I was looking through my dream diary and I found a dream I had a few months ago that I’d forgotten about:
I dreamt I was shopping in a supermarket when I started having an allergic reaction. I knew I needed to take an antihistamine tablet, but I didn’t have any on me. There were some for sale in the shop, I took a packet, but the queues for the tills were so insanely long I knew I didn’t have time to wait to pay for them. I asked a member of staff if I could open the packet now and pay afterwards and she said no.
My allergic reaction got worse and worse, so bad I ended up on the floor, suffocating. I begged all the shop staff to just let me open the packet now, pointing out how long the queue was but they all angrily said no. Rachel Reeves, the UK government minister who is always trying to stop disabled people from getting benefits, appeared as a member of staff. She was annoyed by the wheezing and gasping sounds I was making, and leaned down towards me, her face right in front of mine and screamed “SHUT UUUUUP!” Then walked off, leaving me in anaphylactic shock on the floor. I was clearly dying and everyone was just annoyed with me for being a nuisance, and tried to stop me from getting help.
I think it was a metaphor for being disabled/ill in the UK, and the government and society at large trying to stop us from accessing help.
The only way it could be a more fitting metaphor if someone jumped ahead of you laying on the floor while drinking something they opened before paying for it
Now, sure, I have 7 projects already I should work on… but I could start a new one.
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
8 projects sounds like a nice round number
It’s truly amazing how even leftists often justify the mistreatment and killing of the disabled. Literally everyone hates us. I’ve had some able-bodied person on lemmy arguing against everything I say about the treatment of the disabled, basically telling me I’m wrong, everyone cares for us and we aren’t treated badly. I mentioned how, during covid in the UK, the NHS was getting rid of disabled people by refusing them treatment when they caught covid. A lemmy user said this is fine, it’s just triage. But that was NOT triage. Triage is saying “This person is having a heart attack, so he’ll get treated before the person who has a twisted ankle.” What the UK was saying during covid is: “this person with covid is disabled, so we just won’t treat them at all, and let them die.” Triage is treating the people with the most urgent medical need first. It’s not saying “This person’s life is less valuable and more of a burden to society so we won’t treat them at all.” That is actually eugenics. And that’s what happened in the UK during covid. Do Not Resuscitate notices were placed on the medical files of many people with Down’s syndrome, autism and learning disabilities who were otherwise healthy before contracting the virus. That’s not triage, that is a choice to get rid of people considered useless eaters.
He said malice towards the disabled does not exist. When I gave examples of disabled people being discriminated against throughout history, he said there were other times and places where we weren’t treated so badly so “why only choose those examples?” Imagine if a black person spoke of their experiences of racism and someone just responded by giving examples of all the times they thought black people had been treated well.
Whenever I see leftists talking about how things are getting better, and one day we will succeed and things will be good for everyone, I just totally disagree. When even so many of our own comrades deny our experiences, justify us being left to die because our lives aren’t as valuable as able-bodied lives, and argue that we’re being treated just fine, I see there is no real hope.
Some quotes from the article:
many perfectly healthy individuals received letters from their GPs recommending they think carefully about whether they would want resuscitation if they went into hospital or would even want to be treated in hospital at all, should they get Covid-19.” Specialist nurses told Mencap that DNARs, also called DNACPRs, were “constantly” being put in place for people with learning disabilities “often inappropriately” and they were challenging them daily. DNACPR stands for Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation. Denying a person potentially life-saving treatment based on their learning disability is an act of discrimination and unlawful.
Mencap saw DNACPRs placed on medical files of people with a learning disability that were otherwise healthy, without their full understanding and/or consent.
Six out of 10 people who died from Covid between March and July 2020 were disabled, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
In one such case 56-year-old Susan Sullivan, who had Down’s syndrome, was declined admission to intensive care (ICU) despite being seriously ill with Covid at Barnet Hospital in March 2020. She was also given a DNAR notice despite the express wish of her mother that she should be resuscitated if necessary, and she was not seen by a consultant for 20 hours. She died on a general ward 28 hours after being admitted.
People arguing against reality like that usually just end up defending their own ableist viewpoints and beliefs, and they always get real mad about their fragile, imagined world being challenged.
It seems to be the same with everything, disability, poverty, racism, sexism, nobody wants to acknowledge the truth of it, they just want to imagine the world is fine. I don’t have any hope for humanity changing.
EDIT: Now another lemmy user is agreeing with the first one, saying “the other person is right, triage aims to make the best use of limited resources.” So, in other words, letting someone with learning disabilities die instead of treating them is the best use of resources. Why waste resources on the disabled, right?
This very much relates to the quote for this mega, too! Even the concept of triage, as we understand it medically, is biased against those who do not fall under the ideal of “having a high quality of life” by capital’s standards. We are sorted and categorized negatively before anything else.
Sadly, the average person cannot spend the emotional and intellectual brain power to consider the world around them and how it operates. It is a machine oiled by the blood of those unwillingly and meticulously sacrificed, largely ignored by the comfortable masses.
I feel somewhat spoiled by Hexbear, and this comm in particular, precisely because of the experience you’re describing in other parts of the internet. It can turn into a constant battle. I hope you can report and block those users, they’re certainly not worth your energy with those shitty takes.
I have blocked one of them because he kept bombarding me with really rude, abusive PMs telling me how awful, stupid and unrespectable I am. Just because I don’t think medical treatment should be withheld from people on the basis of how useful they are to capitalism. Because that’s what it is - killing the disabled as they’re less likely to work and pay taxes and more likely to cost money for care.
I want to drop the Quetiapine/Guanfacine.
Namely: The potential chronic side effects. I’m not interested in the possibility of my tongue constantly “dancing” and all that.
There’s also the bit where I got put on it because I had a blow out with my family which fundamentally boiled down to my mom not listening to me.
Also I hate the thing with the munchies, and the weird drowsiness, the crap where it causes my throat to be sore and my sinuses to temporarily swell… Yeah.
The older I get the more I think it’s just evil how the medical establishment provides drugs to treat something that then go on to cause about 100 other, often even worse, health conditions. I first noticed it years ago when i was a carer for the elderly. I looked after an old lady who was on a couple of meds for her health conditions but the total number of her meds was about 40, and most of them were to counteract the effects of her other meds, and more to counteract the effects of the meds to counteract the effects of the other meds.
Since getting thyroid cancer myself I’ve found the same thing. Almost all of my current health problems have been caused by the treatment for the cancer, not the cancer itself. This is a truly sick system.
To be slightly far on the cancer bit, the “scorched earth policy” is currently one of the better methods we have for fighting it.
Totally agree on the side effect crap. Really grateful for modern medicine! Pharmaceutical companies? 👌Not👌 so much.
Scorched earth might be best in terms of fighting cancer, but that doesn’t always leave a life worth living afterwards.
Thankfully we have really smart people in places like China and Cuba figuring out more selective methods of fighting cancer.
It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s worth doing!
Got the Xbox 360 Kinect working under Linux.
Neat look!
Cute even when grainy
On top of everything else now, the stove in this house stopped working a few days ago. We can’t cook anything. On Thursday someone is meant to be coming to look at it but who knows how much a repair will cost or if my landlady can pay? If not, I am dreading having to make another mutual aid post so soon, I always feel like people will think I’m taking the piss if I ask for too much help. We only have a microwave working right now, which means food is even more expensive now as I can only get things that need to be microwaved, like ready meals, or things that are already prepared and ready to eat like rotisserie food or pre-made sandwiches.
I have an idea that can work for short time like a month or so in long term will be difficult, you can ask someone, a neighbour or someone you know if you can cook there. Then you can cook a huge batch of beans, freeze them in ice tray and whenever you want food you put one in the oven. If you have electric rice cooker then you can use that for warm steamed rice otherwise you can freeze rice as well. Beans are quite nutritious so they’ll keep you full for a whole meal on their own if you can eat them with a salad and yogurt. I hope it isn’t anything major and your stove gets fixed soon.
But the oven doesn’t work. Anyway i barely know my neighbours, i wouldn’t feel comfortable asking for such a favour. I once locked myself out and stood outside in the rain for 6 hours rather than ask them for help.
Damn that sucks :( i hope your stove gets fixed enough. peanut on toasted bread seems like a good enough option for emergencies but I wouldn’t recommend it for an entire meal however if you can afford some vegetables a salad with toasted bread with be filling as well sadly vegetables are so expensive right now, potatoes might be the only vegetable that can keep you full for a low enough cost.
I have so many food intolerances due to my cancer treatment i can’t eat bread or peanuts. I can’t really eat anything now other than chicken, carrots and spinach without getting very ill, which sucks as i wanted to be vegan.
That’s sucks soo much, I am sorry that’s happening to you. Only way to cook any meat is a grill or stove of some kind so I don’t think there’s any other way to cook some chicken and spinach with carrots don’t make a complete alone :(
I just have to buy ready-cooked rotisserie chicken, which is more expensive and using up my gift cards quicker.
Meats are already so expensive on top of that you need ready-made yea I can imagine.
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The most despicable are false family and friends. For they eat up our flesh and blood.
It’s summer again. I haven’t drawn since last summer. I should try again, I will master the stick figure by september
Critical support for stick figures
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Do me a favor and either edit this under a spoiler tag or redact it entirely, it’s a bit too graphic and can fall under rule 3 of the CoC. If you spoiler it please CW for gore/violence.
Okay.
Appreciate it
You know who I really don’t get? The guys who fire off fireworks for the 4th outside of America.
Non-Americans do that?
I had never heard it before, but some absolute tool was doing it in an area that is populated about 80% by dogs.
Life is just getting too hard. I don’t know how much more I can take. I have tried to hold on for the dog’s sake but another 10 years of this? I’m in pain every day and it’s getting worse with increased migraines due to summer and everyone wearing perfume and crap, it’s wafting into the house from outside constantly, my mobility issues getting worse instead of better, my walking will clearly never improve and my left arm gets weaker and more useless all the time, I’m always exhausted and sleepy due to being unable to sleep at night because of my high thyroxine dose, the doctors say I’m at increased risk of another stroke, I’ll always be fighting disability claims and appeals to get a pittance, always in debt, and now mutual aid has dried up I can’t even get food or other basics I need. I don’t even have a single friend in real life because no-one can be bothered with a sick, virtually housebound person who is no fun. Seriously, what is the point of this? I can’t even enjoy basic hobbies like reading as I no longer have the mental energy or concentration, I can’t even afford to rent a film or anything like that. So I don’t even have a distraction, lack of sleep means I can’t even get a break for a few hours, every day I’m just constantly filled with worries and pain.
I am thankfully not sick like that anymore all the time but I am mostly housebound as well which is why I don’t have many friends either, I can read but I seriously don’t have will to enjoy anything and these people ALL the time saying “enjoy this” “enjoy that” like mf I can’t I barely have any outlets of joy and I can’t take on anything new, you know why? Because I am exhausted.
I know the feeling, I’m exhausted too. That’s why it’s so annoying, when I post a mutual aid request I usually get people ignoring the “no unsolicited advice” rule, and writing lists of alternatives for me to try, like different organisations etc. I’ve already tried them all, found I’m not eligible and each time i write a mutual aid request I have to answer these replies with a list of why their suggestions aren’t suitable for me. Even when I’ve had therapy for depression the so-called therapy is just a list of nonsense to try, which is exhausting and pointless. All the medics who treat me, like the physiotherapist, neurologist, etc insist on me keeping detailed diaries of my daily condition, almost daily medical appointments, regularly fighting disability claims, daily worries and struggles to get the basic things I need, I can just never rest. You’d think someone with cancer and recovering from a stroke could just be allowed to rest, but no. There can be no rest, ever.
People love to give unsolicited advice to people they think below them, like if you can’t help move the fuck on, yes we tried to learn maths, we tried to go to college, we tried to have a small job, we tried to talk to ngos, many of us have hit rock bottom and many of us are exhausted because of trying to avoid rock bottom and rest are barely holding on. Leave us alone. I sometimes want to write a disability separatist manifesto, I might post one in bad posting as a joke
I think it’s a mixture of virtue signalling, wanting to look like they’re helping without actually having to help, and annoyance that people are asking for help. There have been a few people even here who’ve wanted to sabotage my efforts to obtain help, who’ve strung me along with fake promises or posted irrelevant advice that makes it look like help is available to me when it is not. It’s happened so many times that I don’t even believe offers of help any more until the help has actually been received. I’ve even had people clearly trying to phish for my information with false offers of help. But yes it does make life even more exhausting dealing with all this.
It really is, I don’t get what’s going on in people’s head when they say or do all. It’s truly exhausting and honestly people should first try to fix their habit of giving unsolicited advice instead of giving anyone advice about fixing themselves.
doctor told me to try going outside more
okay man, never thought of that one before
Have you tried a positive attitude, getting a hobby or getting some exercise
You go from being a literally underweight sack of bones to obese in a few months with the only change being you started medication? Sounds like you’re lazy and just don’t want to exercise. Oh, you’re constantly fatigued too? Sounds more like laziness to me! (sarcasm based on shit my doctors have said)
I hate the lack of understanding these statements imply. Like, nobody’s arguing that positive attitude, hobbies or exercise are bad, it’s about people not being able to participate in these everyday activities because of their disabilities. But doctors who say stuff like this just demonstrate that they don’t pay attention to what you need
Driving lessons are messing me up. There’s too much happening around me and too much to pay attention to. I really don’t like it. Would much rather rely on public transit but that’s not an option where I live :)))))
For real. They see me white-knuckle gripping the wheel and say “Relax.” You see the giant death machine I’m piloting, right? How am I supposed to relax. One time someone got mad at me for going too slow, and passed me while laying on the horn. Literally haven’t attempted to drive since then. Add on top not infrequent hallucinations and weird brain fuzziness from the meds that are supposed to prevent said hallucinations, and I think I’m not exactly safe to drive.
Meanwhile my useless hack of a mom went the “fuck you, you’ll be the unemployed pawn I keep at home and slurp SSI off of and be the thing I constantly yell at” path.
She’ll get the nursing home with horrific abuse allegations treatment. Then again I’d feel bad subjecting abusive nursed to her. My vindictiveness has limits.
