My first piece of advice when running a group for people with special needs or any mental health condition is contrary to the typical rhetoric surrounding these things in contemporary culture. The first rule of safe spaces are to set boundaries and expect delicacy. That’s a problem for the obvious reasons that when handling mentalContinue reading “How to Run a Special Needs Ministry”
Tag Archives: Friendship
Loneliness & Hegel
Contemporary loneliness is a Hegelian antithesis. It is a reaction to the Hegelian thesis of the world before of creepiness and darkness that was pervasive as well as its hyperbolization in the media such as in the horror and the true crime genres. A Hegelian antithesis is a psychological phenomenon of reactance to a norm.Continue reading “Loneliness & Hegel”
Honor, Liberalism, and Moral Stature
When nerdy good boys are delinquents and drunk cokehead playboys are model citizens. The end of virtue ethics and the rise of liberal consent. It was Martin Luther King’s dream that a pluralistic society would judge based on character and not superficial characterisitcs but liberalism decided that character meant a thick good and was incompatibleContinue reading “Honor, Liberalism, and Moral Stature”
Are Autism Experts Experts in Autism?
No, I recently had an email exchange with a psychology professor at the College of Charleston who specialized in autism and it didn’t go well. I was working with her on creating sensory-safe parties and other special needs support on campus. I’m not going to recount it all here but that would be tangential. TheContinue reading “Are Autism Experts Experts in Autism?”
Giving Toxic Relationships Happy Endings
It used to be a cliché that bad boys were faustian bargains and ultimately girls would be hurt by them. In the last few decades, they did a Taylor Swift and rewrote the ending so that Edward Cullen and Christian Grey, bad boys with so many red flags they may as well have been Soviet,Continue reading “Giving Toxic Relationships Happy Endings”
Sociology of the Apocolypse
Bullying is a hot topic but it is too often treated as the monolith that it isn’t. There are multiple forms of bullying with different psychological roots. The type of bullying most common where I grew up in and around Charleston was the pseudo-ethical type where the bullying takes the form of vigilantism. Furthermore,Continue reading “Sociology of the Apocolypse”
Fears of Strangers
I had to write a blog about this. I saw this headline and felt it belonged on The Onion. An actual major news website reported a story about someone at a Starbucks being creeped out by a stranger sitting next to him when the rest of the store was empty. Nothing sexual, violent, or evenContinue reading “Fears of Strangers”
The Path to a Social Japan and the Birth of a New Paradigm
As touched on in the article I wrote about the anti-catcalling laws, the over-punishing of minor anti-social behavior is not the result of progressive politics even if it manifests itself in it. It is the bourgeois, suburban, fears of the uncanny and the marginalized. I referenced an The Atlantic article by Conor Friedersdorf where heContinue reading “The Path to a Social Japan and the Birth of a New Paradigm”
Cultural Relativism and the South
When I was a freshman in college, I took an intro to Antrhopology course and in the course of it we were taught the traditional postmodernist line that we should respect the customs and morés of cultures. This made me boil with rage and seethe with anger. At that time, I was in the middleContinue reading “Cultural Relativism and the South”
The Spectrum Between Romance and Platonic Realtionships
As a heteroromantic asexual, I view it as inappasite to classify the type of relationship I would want to be the same as a hetererosexual. Fundamentally, a heterosexual wants different things. Also, as someone with a disability, I have different needs. For example, for someone with a lower-functioning disability, combining maternalism and romance may beContinue reading “The Spectrum Between Romance and Platonic Realtionships”
The Autistic Resistance 