Vashti

My dad was born in the 30s, and was just as autistic as me. His mother (born 1910) died when I was little, but I remember her being eccentric, and my mother called her “difficult”. They both lived perfectly normal lives, they were just very different from the others around them. I’m autistic and so is my nephew; that’s four generations, spanning a century.

We have always been here.

Or people could have been autistic all along, and just not diagnosed?

The proof will be in what your child tells you, when they feel able to do so.

She has accused him both of rape and of grooming her. What on earth do you think her punching him in the stomach while he forcibly deep throated her was supposed to be?

This has been highlighted in the news coverage.

Both child grooming and emotional and sexual assault are illegal in the UK, bizarre as this may seem to you.

Disconcertingly close to the truth tbh.

Yes, it was a chest freezer with one of those little filing cabinet locks. It genuinely never occurred to mum that her eight year old could pick it with her hairpin.

… Have you honestly, genuinely never heard of test tube babies? Do you not realise we’ve had them since the 70s?

Think about that, then realise we had all this shit about “but the poor children” back then, for that, and none of it ever materialised because nobody gives a shit or ever knows the difference or cares at all.

It’s no different than giving birth by c-section, or indeed vaginally. There is no difference.

Who the hell is getting bullied for being a test-tube baby?

We had all this shit in the 70s before the first IVF baby, and to the best of my knowledge, bullying over it has simply never been a thing.

I figured out one of those locks when I was eight. Used to unlock the freezer with a paperclip

I mean, I’d never use Notepad. Download Notepad++, it’s better in literally every way.

Doesn’t have formatting, unless Notepad has got really adventurous at some point in the last decade or two.

Slightly annoyed about this, as I do use Wordpad (it’s lightweight and useful for quick notes that I want to mark up with bold and italic). I don’t always want to watch Word or Libreoffice load for twenty to thirty seconds.

Shitty decision, happy to be Wordpad’s one fan.

…for entertainment. For fun.

I don’t think many of us would come here if it wasn’t fun.

Populist really just means telling people what they want to hear. Bernie and Trump are both populists, they just have (largely) very different audiences.

I promise you, we had massive generational debt all the time I was growing up in the seventies, eighties and nineties, and when my mother was growing up in the 50s and 60s. We had way better public services then than we have today. Whether or not the government is making debt repayments has no bearing on public services—that’s all about the attitude of the government, and a government that wants to privatise everything and destroy the public trust will always find some pretext to do so, such as the triple lock being the biggest votewinner in the land.

It depends on the period of time they’re paid over, doesn’t it? Generational debts like these are repaid over, well, generations. It’s not going to be something we notice, and the UK aren’t the only country involved.

Plus, if that’s what you think, I don’t think you can have seen the state of the UK’s roads, hospitals and railways.

Good news - your government will spend as little as it can possibly get away with on those things whether you pay slavery reparations or not!

This always seems such a strange argument to me, as if governments are just screaming to spend money on roads, hospitals etc. They spend it on pet projects and tax cuts for their voterbase.

I do genealogy and so I know that my g-g-g-grandfather had to give up farm labouring during the first decades of the British Empire and move to the Bermondsey slums, where he worked as a tanner. If you know anything about historical tanning, you know that this sucked. He was screwed over by the infiux of cheap food from the Empire and our family is part of the underclass to this day.

The thing is, we still live in a rich country because of that. My parents and grandparents and their parents did. We’ve still had access to education and free healthcare and all that shit. We still had access to all that cheap shit that we robbed the rest of the world for.

So yeah, we owe those people’s descendents like it or not. Plus, considering that yes, we were repaying the descendants of slaveowners until just a few years ago, and paying off our Marshall Plan debts etc until very recently, I’m not too fussed if the government of my country pays its debts.

I mean if they’d been voted in there wouldn’t be a republican majority supreme court and roe wouldn’t have been overturned in the first place.