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keri

@keristars.bsky.social

I've been reading Greg Grandin's America, América and it's got some interesting discussion about this, and Anglo-America vs Latin-America in general. I highly recommend it!

This passage is from the introduction, addressing the demonym "American" specifically.

Who is an American? And what is America? These questions go back a long way. “I that am an American,” affirmed Cotton Mather in the early 1700s. In 1821, the radical Catholic priest Servando Teresa de Mier—born in northern Mexico to a family that traced its lineage back centuries to the first dukes of Granada—also thought himself an American. Having escaped the dungeons of the Inquisition, Mier had set up a printing house in Philadelphia to publish books banned by Spain. He complained, in a letter he sent to a revolutionary compatriot, about the way English speakers used the word America. There were two problems, actually. The first was the constant equation of Spanish American with South America. Mier was tired of pointing out to his English-speaking acquaintances that North America was also Spanish America—that there were more Spanish speakers in Mexico (which at that point ran well into what is today the United States’ Southwest) than in all South America.

$The second problem was that each European empire used the word America to refer only to their colonial or former colonial possessions. Great Britain called the United States America, Spain called its colonies America, Portugal referred to Brazil as America, France and the Dutch did the same for their Caribbean islands. It is as if, Father Mier said, “there is no other America other than the one they dominate.” “A thousand errors,” he said, lamenting how America was fractured by such usage. All the New World is America. Confusion was natural. America, for Anglo settlers before their revolution, was both the entire New World and their sliver of that world—both their narrow dominion of a thin slip of land between the Alleghenies and the sea and all the land west of those mountains. In 1777, the Articles of Confederation named the new country the United States of America, but also referred to it as just America. Europeans liked to point out that the “United States” wasn’t really a “proper name” but rather an adjective attached to a generic noun.$

Washington Irving agreed. Irving wanted “an appellation” of his own to ensure that he wasn’t confused with a Mexican who by rights could also call himself an American. He wanted a name that would identify him as “of the Anglo-Saxon race which founded this Anglo-Saxon empire in the wilderness.” He suggested Appalachian or Alleghanian. The New England social activist Orestes Brownson thought such ideas rubbish. The “name of the country is America,” he wrote in 1865, “that of the people is Americans. Speak of Americans simply and nobody understands you to mean the people of Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Paraguay, but everybody understands you to mean the people of the United States.”[11]

Brownson was right at least about royal Canadians, who tended not to call themselves Americans to distinguish themselves from their English-speaking republican neighbors. But Mexicans, Brazilians, Peruvians, Chileans, and Paraguayans all thought themselves Americans, as did the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda. Nosotros los Americanos—We, the Americans—was how early Mexican nationalists called themselves. Somos da América e queremos ser americanos, said Brazil’s republican leaders, who wanted to overthrow their monarch: We are from America and want to be Americans.

Proprietary claims to America became politicized over time, serving as stand-ins for struggles about more substantive issues. “We’ve lost the right to call ourselves Americans,” the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano wrote in 1971. “Today, for the rest of the world, America means nothing but the United States. We inhabit at best a Sub-America, a second-class America of confused identity.” “We are more American,” goes a song by the Mexican norteño band Los Tigres de Norte “than the sons of the Anglo-Saxons.” Los Tigres are a favorite of migrant and borderland workers, suggesting the matter is not just a concern of literate elites.

In 1943, the diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis struggled to decide what adjective he should use to refer to the United States, reluctantly settling on American. It sounds better, Bemis wrote, than “the less euphonious adjective United States.” Latin Americans will occasionally refer to the United States as América del Norte, but generally use Estados Unidos and estadounidense, which in Spanish with all its rolling vowels is euphonious, mellifluent even.

November 27, 2025 at 1:38 AM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

i read this earlier today in America, América and wanted to share it, but now I can't remember why! other than jfc capitalism is a scourge.

first two are page 115, third is page 117

The horrors of chattel slavery were well and widely known to the public by the mid-1600s. Influential Spanish priests had been denouncing the slave trade for nearly a century—for them, the enslavement of Africans was just one part of the larger savagery created by the Conquest, impossible to separate from the stealing of Indian land or indigenous bondage. In contrast, Locke, Smith, and Hume—tribunes of tolerance, skepticism, human sympathy, and freedom—had little to say on the topic. At best they threw up their hands, helpless. At worst they wrote laws regulating slavery, reaped profits off its trade, and dealt in dehumanizing theories that justified the institution’s existence.

This wasn’t just hypocrisy. Rather, it reflected the centrality of slavery in underwriting liberty. The extraction of the world’s resources—the coin, food, and commodities needed to keep up the growth rate of an expanding world economy—produced the wealth that allowed more and more Europeans and European settlers to enjoy more freedom. Slavery (not the old feudal-servant slavery of Las Casas’s Mediterranean childhood, but a new system in which humans as property provided the labor for large-scale debt-capitalized, export-oriented plantations) was as essential to the emergence of bourgeois order as was the right of commerce and communication and the freedom of the seas.

For a short period after the Pequot War, settlers felt penned in by peace. In 1645, Emanuel Downing, John Winthrop’s brother-in-law, desperate for labor, urged that Puritans launch a war against the Narragansetts to acquire more slaves. “I do not see how we can thrive until we get a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business,” Downing said, complaining about the “great wages” demanded by European servants. Downing thought it best to trade Indian slaves to Caribbean islands for African slaves, who were unfamiliar with the territory and thus unlikely to run away.

For the sake of our “children’s children,” he wrote: if we want to “see this great continent filled with people,” we need more slaves.

November 24, 2025 at 11:46 PM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

I didn't realize the "Noble Savage" trope went almost as far back as 1492. Mendieta here isn't even the first to suggest a special innocence in 1556 (the year he arrived in Mexico. the quote may be earlier or later).

(America, América, p62)

For Mendieta, however, the New World’s common people were already simple genus angelicum, angel beings, “an isolated fragment of the human race that had retained the primordial innocence, simplicity, and purity that Adam and Eve had known in the Garden of Eden.”[23] Indians instinctively lived the values Christ preached on the Mount.

November 23, 2025 at 11:13 AM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

The book shifts from Las Casas to others of the time who were grappling with expanding their understanding of the universe to include this heretofore unknown place and people. Except, whether they're people was an actual problem for some of them, who wanted an excuse to conquer and enslave.

The main question, the one that would obsess Spanish theologians, philosophers, jurists, and clerics like Las Casas was this: By what right did Spain wage cruel war on the New World’s inhabitants? The reasons Spain gave for driving Islam off the Iberian Peninsula provided no helpful answers. That long struggle, starting in 718 and ending in 1492, was valid on the grounds that Iberia, before the arrival of Islam, had been populated by Christian Visigoths. So, Catholic war against Al-Andalus was, legally, not a conquest but a reconquest of lost Christian territory: La Reconquista. The fact that Muslims lived in a world that knew of Christ and yet they still rejected him bolstered arguments that Spain’s fight against Islam was righteous, since waging war against infidels, in canon law, was just. Such arguments could not be made about the New World—that is, if it really was “new.”

“God sent the Holy Apostles to all parts of the world,” said the Dominican friar Diego Durán in his Historia de las Indias de Nueva España, and, anyway, if Indians were God’s children, as many insist, then God would not have “left them without a preacher of the Gospel.” The point being that the New World’s people did “know” Christ and must have, at some point, rejected him, making them infidels and legally conquerable.

By the 1500s, Catholic theologians had mashed together Roman doctrine, the writings of ancient philosophers, the teaching of the saints, including Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, and papal and royal edicts to create a legal system that had evolved over the centuries. Yet suddenly Spain was in possession, or claimed to be, of an incalculably large land mass, home to an “infinity” of souls who had lived for untold centuries beyond the horizon of Catholic authority. Their existence revealed canon law to be provincial, its claim to universalism a sham.

Who were these people living, thriving even, outside the Catholic realm? Where did they come from? Were they sons and daughters of Adam and Eve? Did they descend from one of the eight people who came off Noah’s ark after God’s Great Flood? If so, how were they separated from the rest of humanity? If they weren’t children of Adam and Eve, did they carry the burden of original sin?

Eventually, in 1503, a learned commission answered the queen’s query, sort of: No. The people of the New World could not be sold. Indians hadn’t had a chance to reject Christ, so they weren’t infidels. And they were clearly fully human, in possession of rational minds and divine souls. They couldn’t be enslaved—unless, that its, they were captured in a “just war.”

The debate over the justness of the entirety of the uppercase Conquest would go on for decades. In the meantime, Spanish settlers took it for granted that all the lesser campaigns, the backwater massacres and dawn raids, were justified, especially if the immediate cause of any given skirmish could be blamed on indigenous incitement. Captives taken in these campaigns could be enslaved.

November 22, 2025 at 1:40 AM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

another bit of the intro that is also extremely my interest. what is it to be American? What is America?

and the way the USA separates ourselves from the rest, too, how does that affect the answers to those questions.

“America for America,” said Washington’s leaders as they tried to fashion their relationship to the hemisphere’s new nations in a way that was, as the North American Review suggested, something like London’s to India.

“America for humanity,” Latin Americans answered back.

Brownson was right at least about royal Canadians, who tended not to call themselves Americans to distinguish themselves from their English-speaking republican neighbors. But Mexicans, Brazilians, Peruvians, Chileans, and Paraguayans all thought themselves Americans, as did the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda. Nosotros los Americanos—We, the Americans—was how early Mexican nationalists called themselves. Somos da América e queremos ser americanos, said Brazil’s republican leaders, who wanted to overthrow their monarch: We are from America and want to be Americans.

November 21, 2025 at 9:45 AM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

i have just finished the introduction to America, América, but Greg Grandin, and ot feels like a starter before a good meal. From the Conquest to now, how Spanish and Portuguese America and English America saw each other, influenced each other, and, well, this quote.

America, América argues that the New World’s magpie rivalry, its immanent critique, played a vital role in the creation of the modern world, shaping its economics, politics, and moralities. The Protestant settlers who colonized, followed by the republicans who revolutionized, North America looked to Spanish America not as an alien other but as a competitor, a contender in an epic struggle to define a set of nominally shared but actually contested ideals: Christianity, freedom, law, sovereignty, property, equality, liberalism, democracy, and, above all, the very meaning of America.

November 21, 2025 at 7:49 AM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

lol mine stands up, too, except my hair is straight. 😂 I think of it as the Jimmy Neutron days.

this was right after a trim. it's very swoopy Jimmy right now, lol

and *definitely* the nonbinary cut 🤣

Selfie of a smiling white person with very short dark brown hair except for a shock on the top that stands up a bit. also, keri is in a white t-shirt and RayBan Wayfarer eyeglasses with clear acrylic for the front of the frames and teal arms.

November 20, 2025 at 3:49 AM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

went with the canned stuff with beef broth because i didn't want to have to pull out the flour, etc. just pour the can in and wait for it to get the cooked onions saturated with the flavors.

was low on cheese, too, but shredding it takes a lot of exertion and not today, no.

still, look! yum!

A crock of French onion soup. The top of the soup is broken pieces of crostini topped with melted cheese. It's all golden and toasty.

November 14, 2025 at 1:37 AM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

i regret i saved this without saving the artist's name, because it makes me giggle and i always think of otters as cat mermaids now 😻

a four-panel comic.
1. Cute otter in the water, head and shoulders visible.
2. Splash! it dives, tail briefly seen
3. An orange cat on a nearby rock saw it! it says Holy crap
4. close-up on the astonished cat's face as it continues speaking: A MERMAID.

November 13, 2025 at 11:02 PM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

but can your pocket be looped around the handle of your briefcase? (checkmate!! 😂)

www.apple.com/newsroom/202...

Product photo of the iphone sock. It's hot pink and has been wrapped around the handle of a stylish black bag. The phone pouch has been threaded through the sock's loop, like a slipknot or something, to keep it secure.

November 12, 2025 at 2:18 AM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

This was my sling, knitting in progress. :)
Eventually i realized knitting is TOO stretchy, so added a column of crochet slipstitch at the upward points of the chevron. (and used it to reinforce the strap, too)

knitting! It's a tube of magenta and cream horizontal stripes, except the stripes are zigzags. The cream stripes are twice as wide as the magenta. It's not complete and a skein of the magenta yarn is at the side.

But it's a tube, sock thing and the water bottle is inside. The top is just below the bottle's lid.

November 12, 2025 at 1:38 AM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

Chapter 9, "The Conquest of the West", in The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic has me looking askance at Three Vassar Girls at Home. Champney's choice to visit St Augustine and Fort Marion at the beginning was more significant/layered than I had realized.

(this chapter is very good)

The model for these schools was the original Indian military-style boarding school, founded by Capt. Richard Henry Pratt in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879. Pratt practiced his “educational” techniques, appropriately enough, as jailor at Fort Marion, Florida before he converted the military barracks at Carlisle into his Indian industrial school. His main goal was, speaking of Indians, “any course towards them which tends to their civilization.” Pratt sent his first students to Hampton Institute but soon came to the conclusion that it was not good “to unite the two race problems” and that Indians needed “fellowship with the whites, and not with the negro” for their “civilization.”

November 12, 2025 at 12:41 AM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

Here is my beloved casserole, and for comparison my square corning ware and the other one i got at home goods (too high on the shelf for me to reach tonight)

I'm holding the casserole dish on its side to show the pretty, petal pink color. The underside isn't glazed and looks like a strange reverse shadow, what's visible of it. My hand is visible on the far left, my thumb in particular. The pink of the dish isn't very different from my skin tone, at least in this photo.

Two small casserole dishes are on the portable induction hob. To the left, and sitting on a grey hot pad, is the rectangular Le Creuset with its glossy pink outside and cream colored inside. On the right is a square Corning Ware dish with the earth-toned veggies design. They're about the same height and probably the same volume, though one is rectangle and one is square.

In the background of the photo are other kitchen counter things: electric kettle, knife block, etc. But the focus is on the casserole dishes.

This photo looks up into a white cabinet. On the left is a riser, on the right are tall ceramic mugs and drunk powders.

On top of the riser is a rectangular, lidded dish. It's white with a design of pink and yellow flowers. About 8 inches wide by 3 inches tall. The perspective is a bit off, but it's definitely taller and wider than the Corning Ware dish under the riser. It's the same vegetable-theme Corning Ware that was compared to the Le Creuset before.

November 11, 2025 at 5:58 AM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

Finished chapter 8 of The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic today, mostly about the Supreme Court undermining Reconstruction and the 14th & 15th Amendments. got a bit of whiplash/déjà vu, because really ?? suddenly extremely clear what the "Heritage" Foundation refers to.

Miller claimed that all the rights nationalized by the amendment—what Republican senator John Bingham had called “the nationalization” of the Bill of Rights in 1866—were still granted only by states. The only national rights that the federal government could enforce were limited to access to ports and waterways, travel to the capital, the right to run for federal office, and protection abroad and on the high seas. By this stunning logic, the federal government could ostensibly protect the rights of black citizens abroad but not where they lived, whether in the South or other parts of the nation. The discredited states’ rights argument seemed to have triumphed over the Constitution itself.

The judicial retreat from Reconstruction occurred alongside the unraveling of a national political commitment to uphold it. But the Supreme Court was not merely reacting to political developments or public sentiment; it played an active role in destroying the rule of law.

The Supreme Court’s intruding into the legislative sphere and upending Congress’s law-making powers went beyond the customary scope of the judicial review of the constitutionality of laws. It simply ignored the plain meaning of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Writing the majority opinion in Cruikshank, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, a legal mediocrity appointed by Grant, cited the Slaughter-House Cases, revealing how the court built judicial precedent from one bad decision to another. “The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits a State from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; but this adds /nothing to the rights of one citizen against the other,” he opined. According to this “state action” understanding of the amendment, the law would not hold southern terrorists accountable for murder because they were private citizens.

The Supreme Court effectively declared open season on African Americans. Racist terrorists could now act with impunity, knowing they would never be punished...

The violent and legal counterrevolution against Reconstruction inaugurated in the 1870s would accelerate in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, when racial subjugation rather than racial equality became the watchword of the nation. Democratic decay coincided with the triumph of industrial capitalism, as the government and the courts moved to protect the privileges of capital rather than the rights of citizens. It also coincided with and was connected to, as we shall see, the colonial subjugation of western Indian nations.

November 11, 2025 at 2:48 AM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

Here's the results and conclusion from the abstract, as posted to the RECOVER site (to save you a click).

The test they used to measure outcomes is the Everyday Cognition Scale 2 (ECog2).

And if you'd like to see the abstract: recovercovid.org/publications...

Results: A total of 378 individuals were screened, from which there were 328 participants (median [IQR] age, 48.0 [37.0-58.0] years; 241 female [73.5%]; race: 15 Asian [4.6%], 47 Black [14.3%], and 235 White [71.6%]; ethnicity: 52 Hispanic [15.9%]). None of the 3 active interventions demonstrated benefits on the modified ECog2 in the intention-to-treat population by the end of the intervention period. The adjusted differences in mean change were 0.0 (95% CI, −0.2 to 0.2) for BrainHQ vs active comparator, 0.1 (95% CI, −0.1 to 0.3) for PASC-CoRE + BrainHQ vs active comparator, 0.0 (95% CI, −0.2 to 0.2) for tDCS-active + BrainHQ vs tDCS-sham + BrainHQ, and 0.1 (95% CI, −0.1 to 0.3) for PASC-CoRE + BrainHQ vs BrainHQ alone. Secondary participant-reported outcomes and neuropsychological tests showed no differential benefits for any treatment arm. All 5 arms demonstrated some improvements over time on the modified ECog2 and on secondary outcomes. There were no serious adverse events attributable to the interventions.

Conclusions and Relevance: This phase 2 randomized clinical trial failed to demonstrate differential benefits for online cognitive training, a structured cognitive rehabilitation program, and tDCS for cognitive Long COVID.

November 10, 2025 at 6:56 PM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

wow i am SHOCKED that none of these helped, though apparently some participants did improve across the study. Just not clearly attributable to this stuff. (possibly pacing better? lying down more ?)

sincere q: is this BrainHQ effective for *anything*??

Participants in the active treatment group were split into three groups:

Group 1 received only Brain HQ, an interactive online brain training program (developed by Posit Science, Inc.) with activities designed to improve memory, attention and the time it takes to understand and respond to information.
Group 2 received BrainHQ and PASC-Cognitive Recovery (PASC-CoRE), a virtually delivered, small group cognitive rehabilitation program designed to help participants learn skills and strategies for working through distractions and mental tiredness.
Group 3 received BrainHQ and active transcranial direct current simulation (tDCS), a cap that provided a non-invasive form of brain stimulation via an electrical current.

November 10, 2025 at 6:36 PM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

i might have seen one in the distance when we were in Lucerne, Switz., but not that I'm aware of! but i just read last month a book with a lot about glaciers from like 1890, loads of pictures.

A view of some of the Alps in the distance from Lucerne, standing on the historic covered bridge so the foreground is water and then the other, modern bridge, and then beyond that the mountains.

November 9, 2025 at 5:16 AM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

this bit does make it sound like they're trying to build on the Gemini brand and using LLM code, but it's not really the same software?

if it's only able to offer results from a specific (albeit broad) database...

While Google has recently been forced to acknowledge that hallucinations are inevitable, the Maps team says it does not expect that to be a problem with this version of Gemini. The suggestions coming from the generative AI bot are grounded in Google’s billions of place listings and Street View photos. This will, allegedly, make the robot less likely to make up a location. Google also says in no uncertain terms that Gemini is not responsible for choosing your route.

November 5, 2025 at 8:22 PM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

ah, yeah, someone else mentioned the Mariel Boatlift, and that's it.

The wikipedia page even mentions that it was rumored that the immigrants were from mental institutions or prisons. 100% this is stuck in Trump's brain as his main reference for asylum seekers.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_...

Fidel Castro stated that those leaving in the Mariel boatlift were undesirable members of Cuban society. With Castro's condemnation and reports that prisoners and mental health patients were leaving in the exodus it was believed by some that Marielitos were undesirable deviants.

November 3, 2025 at 2:19 AM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

OH! This might be the answer to something that has perplexed me for 2 years, that he was involved with Temperance.

I couldn't figure out this odd little defense of him in the middle of a 1920ish book. It's so fervent but random??

(Marjorie Dean, College Freshman)

“Let me see,” pondered Ronny. “Why don’t you write on the genius Poe as above that of any other American poet? Illustrate by quoting from other poets and then comparing the excerpts with his work. Read his essay on poetry tonight before you begin to write. It will give you inspiration. I brought a five volume set of Poe from home. Here’s the volume containing the essay you need.”

Ronny took from a near-by book-case the desired volume and handed it to Marjorie.

“Thank you.” Marjorie accepted it gratefully. “I believe I can write a fairly good theme on that subject. I have always admired Poe’s work.”

“I adore his memory,” asserted Veronica solemnly. “I have read every scrap I could find concerning him. He ranked next to Shakespeare in genius. I know he was an earnest worker and a good man. I am sure that he was not a drunkard, but a terribly maligned genius. He was purposely kept down through jealousy and had to sell the products of his genius for a copper. He suffered terribly, but I imagine he had the inner happiness of knowing that not one brilliant emanation of his master mind could be snatched from him by the unworthy.”

Veronica’s gray eyes flashed in sympathy for the misunderstood man whose transcendental genius made him an outlander among the writers of his period.

November 1, 2025 at 6:29 PM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

ah, not really kicking him out. Charles will still pay Andrew's rent, and he remains in the line of succession. maybe for Eugenie and Beatrice?

a pity.

Andrew's two adult daughters, Eugenie and Beatrice, will retain their titles as princesses, but Andrew's ex-wife Sarah Ferguson will have to make her own living arrangements
Andrew remains eighth in line to the throne

October 30, 2025 at 9:37 PM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

Wow. I didn't think they'd actually kick him out of the family, but that's effectively what's happening? Despite the Mountbatten Windsor name.

Do you think Charles has long wanted to do this, but Elizabeth refused?

www.bbc.com/news/live/cn...

Summary

Prince Andrew is being stripped of his "prince" title and will leave his Windsor mansion, Royal Lodge

Buckingham Palace says the King "has today initiated a formal process", and his brother will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor

As well as the title, the Palace says "formal notice has now been served to surrender the lease" on Royal Lodge - Andrew will move to the royal estate in Sandringham, Norfolk

"These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him," the Palace says

October 30, 2025 at 9:33 PM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

right?! i think that's why it was so memorable to me, plus the farthingale! And of course, it's hard to hear in the clip, but Elizabeth would have had the biggest, so as to require more fabric, and thus show her wealth/power.

bumrolls/padding were used for ages, and in fact still are!

A listing for "SPANXshape™" Booty-Lifting Brief from their website. ($48.00)

It's brief underwear with a high waist and padding on the bum in the shape of an upside down heart.

October 28, 2025 at 2:30 PM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

aw, yeah, love this near the end!

and i love Lindsay Adams's art throughout the article! it's so good.

For autistic people, disabled self-acceptance is a form of survival. It redefines competence through accuracy, not appearance. It says, I am disabled by design flaws in the environment, not by flaws in myself. The social model of disability teaches us that difference isn’t tragedy. It’s data. Every meltdown, shutdown, or burnout is a report from the body about what’s intolerable. Every request for accommodation is a reminder that access isn’t luxury—it’s baseline.

Disabled identity also creates community. Once you stop pretending you don’t need help, you start noticing how many of us were pretending the same thing. Solidarity becomes possible when shame is removed from the equation. You stop competing to appear functional and start connecting through shared truth.

Liberation begins with language. When you name yourself disabled, you remove the power of those who weaponize the term against you. You make room for justice work that includes you, not in theory but in practice. The neurodiversity paradigm was never about romanticizing difference; it was about protecting it. Claiming disability isn’t about limitation, it’s about accuracy. The kind that builds movements, not myths.

October 28, 2025 at 8:05 AM

keri

@keristars.bsky.social

Also, this, about "high functioning" - being able to mostly mask because i was forced to, or having learned ways of stimming that aren't obvious (or whatever) - and it denies the disability, both medical and social models.

The concept of “high-functioning autism” isn’t a compliment; it’s a containment strategy. It’s a way to applaud productivity while ignoring exhaustion. It’s how workplaces exploit autistic brilliance while refusing to accommodate autistic bodies. It’s how schools reward compliance while punishing difference.

October 28, 2025 at 8:05 AM

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