I have a disability so I can do anything I want

The BBQ Pit
201

So all those other “examples” you provided were only hypotheticals? That is, caricatures?

ETA: and just to be clear, I have more to say on your recent “submission” to the discourse as well, but I want to be very clear on the framing of this conversation. It is a foundational question I have now asked you. Repeatedly.

Until such time as there is an answer, I would say we are all—including your supporters—warranted in assuming bad faith in the OP.

ETA2: and just as an observation, thinking aloud, I’m curious if one of the options the mods offered you—in lieu of moving the thread to the pit—was to revise your OP to be less of a rant and more conducive to conversation of what is actually a very serious issue, worthy of serious conversation?

202

Yes, people with actual experience disagree with your characterizations. Fuck you very much you arrogant prick.

203

You are welcome.
And thank you for knowing my experience with disabilities. Would you care to tell the thread what that is to make your point even stronger?

204

So, again, were those all hypotheticals that you started off with, save with your last example of the student claiming PTSD on test day (which, not that you bothered to mention it in the OP, did not result in any special treatment for the student in question)?

As I said:

205

You should let this go. Some are so occupied with their preconceptions that continual attempts to explain your situation only makes things worse.

206

Except he hasn’t explained anything, jackass.

207

No, we did not suggest that. Perhaps we should have. Although there’s always, implicitly, the opportunity to start a new thread.

208

I am. I think I made my point because they won’t answer it.

209

Take a look, folks. The guy made a post featuring a bunch of ugly stereotypes about people with disabilities—and specifically people with mental health and neurological conditions—and now he can’t stand to admit how utterly rotten it was.

Fuck you very much, Saint_Cad, I’m done if you are.

ETA: Actually, you know what? Scratch that. If any of your defenders still want to cling to that steaming pile coming out of your ass, I’ll be happy to continue to excoriate them too.

210

From what you shared, you are a teacher, which makes you no kind of expert in this area at all. You won’t even talk about your hyperbolic examples in your OP. You went trawling for validation and revealed your own nasty biases when you invented things that you thought that “everyone” would relate to.

So, please clarify: did you want to get suggestions on how to work with the disabled, or did you just want to bitch about them? Because if you wanted to get suggestions, your OP would have been completely different. Nope. You wanted to whine about perceived privileges accorded to the disabled, and expected that everyone would be on board. Feel free to expand your repertoire by complaining about how women and minorities can’t get fired.

211

Well, my reading of the OP is that he/she is complaining about specific individuals taking advantage of their situation. Please explain why you are convinced otherwise; perhaps you can provide examples and evidence from the OP.

212

My reading is that Saint Cad is complaining about a subset of disabled people who are assholes. It’s like when Seinfeld told jokes about his Uncle Leo and accusations of antisemitism.

“The soup is cold. The chef must be an antisemite!” and so forth. Seinfeld was not claiming antisemitism didn’t exist, or that it wasn’t a terrible thing. He was just saying his Uncle Leo’s claims of antisemitism were unfounded and comical.

213

See, this reading is what I don’t see. How is an accommodation a “privilege”? It’s just a thing that happens to try to make things a bit more equitable so that disabled people have fuller participation in school / work. That’s why we call them “accommodations” and not “perks.”

Taking advantage of accommodations is a reasonable thing to discuss. I don’t understand why doing so means that you’re somehow attacking the entire group. I don’t see how it casts doubt on the legitimacy of the actual accommodation. I, at least, take it as read that honesty and integrity are present in the disabled population roughly as they are in the able-bodied, which means somewhere a good deal south of 100%.

Maybe it does, though. Certainly if this post had been about annoying things that Black people do in a way related to the Black-ness, I’d be appalled. So maybe there’s similar cultural baggage around disability. Maybe educate rather than pile on? If there’s real reasons to read more into the OP than is there, like the individual poster’s history or a general tendency to exacerbate the negative in order to cast doubt on the legitimacy of disabilities in our society, maybe point this out?

It’s certainly outside of my experience: I’ve talked about accommodations in professional contexts and with friends who have them, but since I’m not disabled myself, there could well be a whole subtext I don’t know about and don’t see here.

214

And, during my last job in the military, things were such that I often was assigned people who were “broken” (with PTSD from living under RPG fire in Afghanistan, or with various environmental illnesses etc, temporarily assigned to work for me. With all that, I was recommended as a really good guy to work for in that capacity, in case someone thinks that I am some sort of evil hard-ass or something. (I was on described as a “soft shit” btw)

215

Except he’s doing it in roughly the same way as some complaining about, say, noncitizen immigrants who are assholes, and he starts off by providing three examples that are wholly fabricated caricatures built on stereotypes (as we must now assume to be the case since he has repeatedly refused to clarify), including at least one containing dog-whistle language (scare quotes and all), and concluding with a slightly less over the top story that he actually did witness about an immigrant who tried to vote illegally and then threatened a law suit if they weren’t allowed to vote. Only he leaves out the part where said noncitizen immigrant was not only prevented from voting, but arrested and charged, as would tend to happen if a noncitizen actually tried to do that, ignorant stereotypes notwithstanding.

Would that seem like a good faith attempt to discuss the nuances of the immigration system to you? Or even just a perfectly innocent rant about “some immigrants” who “happen to be assholes”?

216

The OP didn’t read to me as bad faith, but I already gave my reading of it, and where I saw problems with it.

217

I had the same situation, but at least there were a couple of weeks left when he mentioned that he was mildly autistic.

I said “I wish you’d told me earlier! I WOULD’VE TAUGHT THE WHOLE CLASS DIFFERENTLY.” I fly by the seat of my pants sometimes, and “call audibles”, where we switch parameters of the assignment if my original plan isn’t working.

I’m sure that drove him crazy, but he never said anything…::sigh:: He and I sat down and restructured things, like laying out the rest of the semester by the half hour, and made a list of each day’s homework (and then I had to stick to it… me and my big mouth).

218

I don’t think the thread title maligns everyone who has a disability, I think it maligns everyone who claims a disability as a reason for acting like an asshole when in fact said acting is nothing to do with a disability. If that is indeed the OP’s position then I’m happy to stand with them on that (in fact I now see from post #168 that indeed appears to be the case).

It is a particularly damning act of assholery in that it can be very damaging for those who have a disability and are doing their best to manage it.

With that said, I appreciate @echoreply’s interesting point that sometimes, we should just give everyone who asks for it an accommodation and not worry about whether or not they ‘genuinely’ need it. Unfortunately I’m not sure whether academic exams are compatible with that, as it needs to be a level playing field. A bit like the Paralympics - the organisers do their best to make the competitions fair.

I also found @MandaJo’s posts very informative and interesting, thank you.

219

So, this is one of the things I’m coming to understand. Not that academic exams are not level but need to be, rather that academic exams are often, by their nature, farcical. Particularly when they are multiple-choice, timed, preclude making timely reference to source material, etc. The very exams many schools rely on for ostensibly merit-based admissions decisions are in fact the most absurd, and precisely the kind of exam that seem to presume an absence of disability in order to serve as a useful metric. Being mostly one-offs, there is the added problem that standardized tests have the highest cost-to-reward ratio when it comes to seeking accommodation. Whereas putting in emotional capital (and monetary cost, and time) to seek an accommodation in a school or work-setting has a pay-off that can last months or years (I only had to put in for an accommodation once in school), a standardized test requires an equal or greater level of effort in a narrower window of time and is really only good on that one standardized exam.

So, for instance, while I do have an accommodation in law school because my school was willing to grant it off my most recent VA disability paperwork and nothing more, the standardized test that I had to take to get into law school (the LSAT) needed its own, unique form filled out by a qualified professional:

https://www.lsac.org/sites/default/files/media/2022-2023-qualified-professional-form_accessible.pdf

That means having to go see a care provider and get them to fill out the form, and guide them through the particular accommodation I was seeking as a barrier to actually receive an accommodation. And that as a one-time thing that would be good on the LSAT only.

In my particular case, I did not have ready access to healthcare due to an absolute shit process (or rather, the lack of effective process) for transitioning ongoing care for disabled veterans from receiving care under the DOD umbrella, to receiving VA care.

There was also another form, a “candidate form” that I would have to fill out in addition to the qualified professional form describing (redundantly) my disability and providing a statement of need. And now we get to the subject of PTSD. Because if there’s one thing that really sucks about PTSD, it’s having to relive the trauma. Such as by being forced to write about it.

Anyway, the process was too much for me, so I took the LSAT without accommodation. I did… fine, but the end result was I got into a really good law school in Michigan (that allowed for a higher undergrad GPA to sort of balance out an LSAT score that was a few points below the median), instead of a really good law school in Texas (which is where I grew up, and was really hoping to be able to go and put my life back together after spending fourteen years in the Navy).

But the initial framing of this thread by the OP was not the sort of welcoming/respectful introduction to the topic that would have allowed me to share that without first taking the OP to task for its incredibly harmful and one-sided (and it turns out mostly fabricated) representation of people with disabilities (and, again, it turns out the people he chose to highlight as “bad people with disabilities” were all people with mental health or neurological conditions, in a way that contributes to marginalization and stigma surrounding such conditions).

Anyway, there is nothing about the LSAT, or indeed law school exams, that seems representative of the actual practice of law. So I’m not sure what a level playing field on such exams gets us. The underlying assumption is that such exams can serve as a proxy for how people will actually perform on the job, and I’m just not sure that’s true. Certainly, I do not think they are the best possible method of evaluating future job performance.

ETA: And I’ll just add, as far as that one true story from the OP goes, I can absolutely relate to sitting down to an exam and freezing, spending the first ten minutes just staring at the paper, or incomprehensibly going through the prompt over and over, unable to process the material.

220

That’s because they are norm-referenced intended to rank students and they want test-takers to get questions wrong. For them, having people with disabilities, non-native speakers and those growing up in a non-majority culture do poorly is seen as a feature not a bug. In other words, complete bullshit testing.