4 ms·
I think the GP comment meant, like, low-functioning autistic people. Not people who won’t conform; people who cannot. People who do not have the mental capacity
by derefr 5y ago
I think the GP comment meant, like, low-functioning autistic people. Not people who won’t conform; people who cannot. People who do not have the mental capacity to grasp and conform to social norms.
I don’t think China is sending such people to re-education camps. Those camps don’t have the infrastructure required to care for such people. They only really “work” as an oubliette for able-bodied/able-minded people that will understand and carry out orders when threatened with force.
(I’d believe you if you instead said they were e.g. having nursing staff at Chinese hospitals do secret state-sanctioned eugenic infanticides, to avoid having such people around in the first place. But allowing parents to invest a lot of resources into raising unable-to-conform children, just to then inevitably send those children [likely permanently] to re-education camps, seems wasteful.)
- baffythegoat 5y agoDo you think a totalitarian state makes that distinction? They are not known for their sensitivity. I would imagine they are simply dispensed with.
- nefitty 5y agoIt would take me some time to dive into the prevalence of abusive “therapies” or what every day life is for autistic people in China. I did find this report about a rehabilitation center that forces autistic children to walk 19km (12 miles) per day as part of their treatment. It gained notoriety after a 3-year old died while in the center. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/811/toddler-jia-jias-death-highlights-autism-ignorance https://www.sixthtone.com/news/811/toddler-jia-jias-death-hi...
- derefr 5y agoThat does sound more like it. My point was that this type of pseudo-“rehabilitation” can’t really be conflated with pseudo-“re-education.” No matter how abusive these rehabilitation centres are, they still have staff and facilities that the POW-camp-like environment of a re-education facility doesn’t (and probably cost a lot more to run.) Similar to the difference between state prisons and state mental asylums in America in the 1960s.
- noduerme 5y agoBecause people who can't conform are a lot less dangerous than people who won't.
- bmn__ 5y agoIf a person is disabled (physically or mentally), they will be mostly confined by the family to their home for their own good and not participate in the wider society.