Hello All, Due to a computer problem I have been unable to get to the list for a few days. This is a bit old, but I would like to give my two cents.
Hari Kumar wrote to Doyle (not Doug as his note says) Question: Hi Doug: I would not disagree with most of your premises. But please explain the "class" issue here. Hari Kumar Doyle The U.S. census says there about 54 million disabled people in the U.S. The class structure part of this story which is important is first that roughly 70% of disabled people are not working. The system forces many disabled people onto the streets because of lack of social support. The working class families often have to bear the burden of some member being disabled. The working class generally has a scapegoat goat for a variety of the problems of society etc. If you have a system that promulgates a ideal worker, then if someone is not that they are no longer a living being. So broadly you can see how class structure creates the disabled person? Another element is the fragmentation of many people away from everything in society. What do people who are paraplegics or blind have in common? The abstract idea of access and autonomy that other workers have to society is what they have in common. Or building a society that represents the whole working class. You know if you live long enough you are likely to be disabled. But if that is not in the working class is not affected by class structure but simply a natural example weakens of getting old then why should society do anything about the old worker? Or from another perspective, the problem that being disabled represents for building a society is pretty deep. The technology for disabled people is usual pretty advanced. Disabled people can be experimented on because of their social weakness. So they get to test the forward edge of the systems development. But what does solidarity really mean for disabled people for the whole working class? If you think racism is difficult, think of the complex issues that disability raises? So if we were to have a significant disabled movement the force it would bring would be a magnitude deeper than what has so far been attempted by socialist movements. The eugenics movement is directly an attack on disabled people, and by extension a weapon upon any element of the working class labeled marginal. Jim Devine writes: For what it's worth, dyslexia and many developmental disabilities are more perceptual or information-processing (awareness) problems rather than being cognitive (knowing & judgement) problems. Jim Doyle, Let's take the history of dyslexia as an example. Early on in the 20th century it was labeled word blindness. Can't see the words was the idea. Then that shifted toward a processing problem which seems like not seeing words but not exactly since every dyslexic seems somewhat different. Then by the sixties another shift in which the disability became a language disorder. That is deep brain processing not perception in any traditional sense. If you look at the retina for example, it looks like an exposed layer of the brain. The first layer is not the light receptors but the ganglions that first process the image after the rods and cones at the back of the eye capture a photon. So in some sense of the word, knowing, is happening right at the retina. By the time the signal gets to the optic nerve, 100 million retinal receptors are consolidated to 1 million ganglion cells carrying the nerve impulse back into the brain. If you define knowing as consciousness, then how does one explain blind sight. That is that the path to the occipital lobe is interrupted and conscious sight is not there. But the person still can 'see' by other routes totally outside consciousness but going into the cortex anyway by more ancient routes of the original mammalian brain. So if I don't see I can be knowing, but I know? That is another way to draw attention to my original use of cognitive. What is a broad term that can include 'perceptual' and cortex? You tell me what people whose disability is affecting their brain have in common? What word would you use? Cognitive obviously derives from knowing rather than perception, but the distinction as such is difficult to maintain in the face of how the brain works in many areas, dyslexia being a better known example. Rather for scientific purposes we distinguish parts of the brain for both practical and historical reasons. But for disabled rights we need to unite people who have dyslexia, traumatic brain injury, epilepsy, autism, etc. Therefore to me the broadening of the term to cognitive makes some sense. But if you can give me something that works better by all means do it. Doyle
