Mercator.net has an amazing story of Anne McDonald:
Doctors thought I had an IQ of 20. You know what? They were wrong.
Escaping from Peter Pan�s prison
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"It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it." GKC
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Uhh, fascists and religion got along just fine. Some of Hitler’s most loyal allies like Franco, the Ustashi, and the Iron Guard were religious fanatics.
Wow. Just wow.
Reading this highly literate, spunky essay from someone who was “written off”–is inspiring and terrifying.
Reading more of her writing, I’m not surprised she is utilitarian about murdering those thought mentally gone– that many years of torture, it’d be shocking if some emotional damage *hadn’t* happened.
Wow is right! Let’s pray that Annie’s life will make us sensitive to people with special needs and challenge us to find new ways to comunicate with them.
Our IQ tests, etc, have always been inadequate. As a person who always received high scores on such things, I have always known them to be unreliable. I am a person with no “unskills” and I had a cousin who spoke 45 languages but was unable, according to fellow seminarians and priests, to tie his own shoes.
This story is an extreme of our inadequate testing that I would never have imagined. What a blessing that she was able to get the word out! This makes me wonder how many people, over the decades, suffered throughout their lives from misconceptions about their condition and abilities…It shows the importance of testing the test, now and then.
Uhh, fascists and religion got along just fine. Some of Hitler’s most loyal allies like Franco, the Ustashi, and the Iron Guard were religious fanatics.
Wrong thread perhaps?
Wrong reality. He’s back on the Ustashi again…
“Some of Hitler’s most loyal allies like Franco”
Ah, aptly named Hoodlum you really don’t know much about history do you? Franco stringed Hitler along but never entered the war on his side. As Hitler said after his pivotal meeting with Franco at Hendaye on October 23, 1940, he would rather have several teeth removed rather than have another meeting with Franco. Franco sent the Azul Division off to fight against the Soviet Union after Hitler invaded it because he had an old score to settle against the Soviet Union, but he remained strictly neutral as to the Western Allies despite intense pressure from Hitler to allow the Germans to attack Gibraltar. During the war Allied airmen crashlanding in Spain were not interned but driven to Gibraltar to get back into the fight. Franco turned a blind eye to Allied intelligence operations run out of Spain. Some 40,000 Jews during the war owed their lives to refuge given by Spain. No Jew reaching Spain was ever turned over to the Germans. Spanish ambassadors during the war granted Spanish citizenship to Sephardic jews in order to protect them against the Nazis. With such loyal “allies” as Franco Hitler didn’t need enemies.
I couldn’t figure out why Anne McDonald would count Peter Singer among her friends, especially when he proposes a parental “right” to kill one’s offspring into the toddler years. Then it struck me: She is deserving of human dignity because she’s SMART. She could manipulate the computer to communicate and she enjoys opera.
Singer thinks smart people are useful, too. Which is rather ironic, considering that tenured professors are among the greatest “deadweights”, especially those who publish books and then proceed to teach based on their books and a few snippets of articles and research here and there. Better to hire young professors, use the old textbooks, and euthenize… erm, retire people like Singer.
Still, McDonald gives us an interesting cautionary tale about how wrong it is to assume we understand the value of or capacity to enjoy life.
Inspiring and frightening. I am convinced that similarly erroneous assessments are made at the end of life.
Search my blog under ‘neurodiversity’ and you’ll see I see understand these stories very well. I was written off as a kid too, then ‘left home’ for good when I was 22 (I’m 40 now) to make mistakes, learn from them, hold down a job, live on my own, have friends and dates and do other things people on ‘the spectrum’ can’t do or have no right doing according to some.
I had a cousin who spoke 45 languages but was unable, according to fellow seminarians and priests, to tie his own shoes.
That’s what we ‘spectrumites’ are like: many act almost normal, just ‘quirky’; only a few have savant-level talent (in a less PC age they were called idiot savants; now, thanks to people like Anne McDonald, people know better) or talk like the Rain Man.
Some are like the character of Bobby Goren on ‘Law & Order: CI’.
(Steven Spielberg and Dan Aykroyd are diagnosed on the spectrum!)
Anyway it all proves the Catholic point that all human life is valuable in itself.
Agreeing with Peter ‘It’s OK to do animals’ Singer makes no sense.
Curiously, both sides of this argument make the same mistake, namely that one can declare oneself immune from the normal laws of morality, and invoke one’s experience as normative instead.
Caution: I’m not saying that Anne MacDonald’s viewpoint is wrong exactly. Far from it. I’m not negating her experience at all, as a matter of fact. I am merely stating that one cannot make moral distinctions on the sole basis of one’s experiences, which would rightly be called situational ethics. Situational ethics in pure form isn’t ethics, but rather doing what you want when you want, purely & simply.
One must for this reason be very careful with case studies. They can show all kinds of things, some of which will be true.