Ken Reibel at Huffington Post: Teen With Asperger’s Arrested: Were Callers Racial Profiling?
Neli, as his family calls him, is 18 and has Asperger’s, a mild form of autism. Three Mondays ago, he rose early and left home without telling his mother. “When I entered his room at 6:30 am and didn’t see him, I assumed he had gone for another walk,” she says. It was a school day.
Four hours later Stafford County authorities had ordered a lock down for eight schools, and Neli was in police custody, facing one count of malicious wounding of a law enforcement officer, one count of assault and battery of a law enforcement officer, and one count of knowingly disarming a police officer in performance of his official duties. The cascade of missteps that led to the arrest suggest a combination of public racial profiling and the over reaction of law enforcement officers who are unfamiliar with autistic behavior.
If I believed that the people doing h/c bingo were bound to write horribly problematic stuff, I would not be writing this post. Because it’s a lot of effort and not really all that pleasant and I don’t like talking at brick walls and in that case I could just wait until you wrote the horribly problematic stuff to take it apart. The reason I am writing this post is because I think it might change things. And I think the same goes for a lot of people in this discussion.
Kelly at Underbellie: Look fabulous or go home
The vast, vast majority of the eighty-three (so far) comments on this post concern women’s bodies, full stop. The list went on: people (women) are in denial about their size; thus they wear ill-fitting clothes which are somehow a grievance committed against us, the viewer; people are gross for being fat but they’re really gross for not disguising this fat in some way according to the standards of the poor innocent bystander who has to see this body.
Katy Butler in the NY Times Magazine: What Broke My Father’s Heart [trigger warning for some discussion of assisted suicide]
Upstairs, my 85-year-old father, Jeffrey, a retired Wesleyan University professor who suffered from dementia, lay napping in what was once their shared bedroom. Sewn into a hump of skin and muscle below his right clavicle was the pacemaker that helped his heart outlive his brain. The size of a pocket watch, it had kept his heart beating rhythmically for nearly five years. Its battery was expected to last five more.