this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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For some reason I cannot see your post in context or see it on the thread. So I don't know exactly what you're responding to.
But the question absolutely is making light of it. It doesn't have to make fun of people to be making their lives harder.
How does having people imagine what it's like do anything other than reinforce stereotypes? On a very quick skim I can see people saying illiteracy would be fine because it's so easy to learn to read. And others saying they've had to spend time in a wheelchair so they reckon they'd be fine without legs. Shut the fuck up, all of you. Jebus.
There's been quite a lot of output from disabled people speaking out against this kind of context-free 'empathising'. Most recently due to some exhibit that has people walk around in the dark so they can 'experience' blindness. They can't. They never will.
Disabled people don't need a bunch of randoms cod-empathising in the middle of a bunch of other randoms speking their branes. They can speak for themselves. And they do. If only the rest of us thought they were actual human beings worth listening to, and could shut the fuck up for long enough to hear them.
My reply was on your comment here (don't know if linking will work or not) https://feddit.uk/comment/1959414
I think I get your point. Nobody who hasn't experienced these things will ever understand what it's like. And no amount of imagining what it's like will ever come close to living it.
Speaking for myself here, I think at least trying to fathom the challenges is better than never even thinking about it. Awareness is better than ignorance. I agree with you that it would be better to hear about the real experiences of people who actually live with these challenges than randoms taking guesses. I don't think it's all bad though, and it's ok if we disagree about that.
Of course its better to think about it. And you don't have to think very hard to realise that pulling the answers straight out of your own brain is not going to give you anything useful to think about.
I've had people chastising me in this thread for discouraging the OP from educating himself, and others chastising me because he clearly wasn't trying to educate himself.
I do not know why this point is so fucking difficult to grasp or why you're all scrabbling so hard to excuse it. The slogan is "nothing about us without us" FFS.