You have hurt my heart
committing suicide is
the haiku answer.
We should be able to find out soon enough about her level of talent. According to the video, she will be getting a new computer which will allow her to type with just her eyes. That will be interesting to see if how her poems compare.
I’m curious-will this machine work only when she looks at it?
Good point. I’m sure the mom will find a way to justify that she (the mom) needs to be there.
Honestly, this level of self-deception is a little creepy.
OK, a lot creepy.
Jesus Christ, I can’t believe that happened so recently. Some years ago, there was a rash of cases exactly like this; that was the most disturbing aspect of the “Frontline” piece. But I assumed such a legal travesty wouldn’t recur because people would know better.
There’s no excuse for the prosecutor in this case; even if he’d never heard of “facilitated communication” before, ten minutes with Mr. Internet could have done wonders. He doesn’t have the right not to learn about something so central to his case.
And if he did know, and chose to ignore all the information available on the subject, he should resign.
And ABC News – I don’t believe they didn’t know they were presenting bullshit that would give people false hopes. Aren’t news departments full of news junkies? There’s no way they didn’t know the history involved.
Interesting… from googling around on her mother’s name, it seems that mummy herself is a purveyor of purple prose and even has a book to her name.
It’s true that there have been child prodigies in math and music. There was even that one crazy evangelical child preacher who mastered the somewhat formulaic pitch and delivery of a hellfire Protestant sermon. But what really sets of my BS meter is that child prodigies generally don’t present such a degree of self-absorption and self-satisfaction. They are entirely absorbed in their talent. On the subject of themselves, they’re just like ordinary kids.
It sounds to me as if mum’s quite full of herself, and that when faced with the reality of a less-than-perfect child, her mind simply imploded in self-delusion. It’s a tragic case of a real-life Mary Sue, author surrogacy wrought not in a fictitious character but in a living child. How sad for all concerned.
As far as many news outlets and shows like Oprah and Larry King are concerned, the goal is to get ratings by appealing to their core, credulous viewers. Presenting “both sides” generates a nice “controversy”.
Solid evidence doesn’t matter. Tales of the miraculous sell.
I jumprfing your dig.
It’s absurdly simple to test for this. Put a piece of cardboard between the two parties in such a way that the image seen by one is different from the image seen by another. What do you see? It’s either “apple” or “cat”.
They did that on an episode of Law & Order once. It was suspected that the severely autistic child was incapable of communicating, and the “facilitator” (the kid’s mom) was just making stuff up. Wily Jack McCoy showed the kid a picture of a bird while making the mom look away, and asked him to type what he saw. Mom got the answer wrong twice.
It took Jack until the fifth act to realize that the kid’s earlier “testimony” contained a clue that the mother shouldn’t know, even though the audience figured it out 20 minutes earlier. Stoopid McCoy.
Exactly. (Isn’t that what I said?)
Not a documentary, but another ABC News segment about a 13-year-old autistic girl that learned to use a computer to communicate. While she does get intensive therapy (25 to 40 hours a week), her communication is not facilitated - she types on her own. You can see it in the video on that page, and the language she uses is pretty much the same as you’d expect of any 13-year-old with normal intelligence, but some work to do on spelling and grammar and such.
ABC really owes it to all involved to invite these people to do a controlled test. Which would be really easy to set up. Just show the girl something that her mom can’t see and ask her questions about it.
If it’s bona fide, the mom should jump at the chance to prove the skeptics wrong. But I have a strong feeling that the mom will resist such controls.
I don’t know that this would really be a good way to test the main point of contention, i.e. that she can write bad prose with the vocabulary and diction of an overeducated housewife unaware of the phrase “sometimes less is more”. She’s not brain-dead and deaf-mute, she just has cerebral palsy. She may very well be capable of banging out ‘cat’ and ‘apple’ unaided, and a voracious reader as well. I guess it would be telling if she couldn’t, though. Let’s make a better test and stipulate that she has to summarize a short article from the daily newspaper.
Poor kid. Can you imagine how awful it would be for someone purporting to translate your thoughts and feelings to instead change them into her own? Assuming she has the mental capacity to realize and care, that is. (Wouldn’t they have done some form of cognitive testing at some point to determine her level of mental retardation for school and such?)
Although I guess the kid looks pretty content (though I don’t know how much control she has over her facial muscles). I hope she’s enjoying the attention, at least. And although I do believe her mother is doing the writing for her and I hope she’s found out, part of me wishes it were true for her daughter’s sake. The loss of all the attention she’s getting and the acclaim of being a child prodigy would be pretty upsetting, I imagine, especially given that her disabilities already put her behind her peers in many ways (physical coordination, communication, possibly intellect, etc).
Sure. I just fleshed it out a bit. 
Well, if that’s the case, you just fleshed out what I said way back in post #2.
It’s generally considered bad form to add “ing” to the ‘rf’ verb form, but you knew that.
Hey, here’s something no one’s thought of yet: Ask the girl questions about something the mother can’t see!
Also, I hear she’s getting her own computer soon.
Also, we’ve been to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Only once. For twenty minutes.