Fallacy Week: The Harder Fallacy & The Uncomfortable Fallacy

Hi guys it's FALLACY WEEK! Every day you get some fallacy action from a post I made a super long time ago at LOVE-NOS.

A lot of the time, when you are having a conversation about disability and/or ableism, the person you are arguing with will make a fallacious argument. Most of the fallacies I’m describing in this post are fallacies of relevance. Wikipedia describes fallacies of relevance as “presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but does not address the issue in question.”

Fallacies of relevance can be very difficult to respond to for several reasons.

1. They involve an abrupt change of subject, which can confuse and distract you, causing you to lose your train of thought. Depending on your disability, this can have the effect of making you have to quit the conversation altogether.
2. Often the change of subject isn’t obvious–it may even be unintentional on the part of the person who’s using the fallacy, if they are responding emotionally rather than logically. You may end up feeling that something isn’t right about what they said, but unable to identify exactly what it is.
3. A lot of these fallacies involve stating something irrelevant that is true. You may become confused and think you are wrong because the other person said something true.
4. A lot of these fallacies involve stating something irrelevant that is related to violence, the speaker’s personal feelings, or other emotionally powerful themes. You may become uncomfortable and think that it would be wrong to disagree, because you might be implying that you don’t care about violence, people’s feelings, etc.

I have experienced 1, 2, 3, and 4 in real-life and online conversations, and as a result I’ve become super interested in sitting around by myself and deconstructing what happened–why did I feel like I was wrong even as I sensed that the other person wasn’t being fair?

In these examples, John is a disabled self-advocate, while Mary is using various fallacies to oppose him. From example to example John and Mary are different people and have different relationships with each other. I tried to give John a few different disabilities, since most of these fallacies are fairly universal. But I felt awkward doing this, because I was mostly writing from my own experience; I hope I haven’t stuck in disabilities that don’t fit the example.

The Harder Fallacy

JOHN: I didn’t like the story we read in class. It was told from everyone’s point of view but the son with CP, and whenever it talked about the disabled son, it would just list everything he couldn’t do. We never learned about his personality or how he felt about anything. I thought it was an offensive portrayal of a disabled character.
MARY: Come on! Are you saying it’s not harder to have a kid with cerebral palsy? That’s a ridiculous thing to say.

Rebuttal:
John wasn’t talking about whether it’s harder to have a disabled kid than a non-disabled kid. He just wanted the disabled kid to have a point of view and a personality, like the other characters. If someone wanted, they could easily write a story that portrayed a family having a very hard time coping with their son’s disability, while still portraying the son as a well-rounded character and not a plot device.
Mary was responding to a totally different statement, which she made up in her head and is pretending (or actually thinks) is what John was saying. The way the harder fallacy works is that when someone makes any comment about disability being portrayed offensively or inaccurately, you respond to the following imaginary statement: “It isn’t harder to be disabled and it isn’t harder to live or work with a disabled person.”

(Fun fact: some people use a form of the harder fallacy to defend statements like, “This weather is retarded.” Their argument is that having an intellectual disability is harder than not having one, so therefore intellectual disabilities are bad, and words relating to them can be used to mean “bad.” I guess this is a legit argument, except that most people who make the argument don’t apply their “harder life=synonym for ‘bad’” rule consistently, and only apply it to stigmatized groups.)

The Uncomfortable Fallacy

MARY: Wow John, it’s so nice of you that you do that program where you go bowling with people who have special needs. I really admire you because I’m not the kind of person who can talk to special needs people.
JOHN: Well, they’re just people. I’m sure you could come bowling with us and it would be fine.
MARY: No I can’t. When I’m around special needs people, I feel really uncomfortable and don’t know what to say.

Rebuttal:
This is a less classic fallacy, and not quite an argument; but I think it’s worth exposing. Mary is confusing a feeling with a fact. She interprets her discomfort with “special needs people” to mean that they are a homogeneous group which one needs certain skills to interact with–skills which, she concludes, she must not have.
If Mary always feels uncomfortable around an entire minority group, it’s probably because she hasn’t been around people from that group very much, or has heard a lot of bad things about them. There is no way an entire group of people could be so similar that one person possesses the ability to either get along, or not get along, with all of them. The uncomfortable fallacy is when you think that being uncomfortable around another person necessarily indicates something about the person.

(Fun fact: You may be wondering why John considers this an argument, when Mary just told him he has admirable skills and is nice. Remember, John is disabled. From Mary’s attitude towards disability, we can guess that she probably doesn’t know John is disabled. But John knows that John is disabled, so he’s probably thinking, “I wonder how Mary would feel about me if she knew I was disabled. Or if she does know, why is she talking to me and why did she tell me she’s uncomfortable around other disabled people? Does she think I’m not really disabled?” And so on. Although Mary meant to compliment John, she simultaneously insulted him which makes him feel, well, uncomfortable.)

Asher made this post about microaggressions, it was really good. I want to make a post like it someday when I can remember to write things down.

One thing I was thinking about was--well, obviously I basically can't go anywhere without hearing or reading the r-word, and "psychotic" is really thrown around to mean evil as well. But the words Asperger's and autistic have also reached, though not the same level, a level of use as an insult. For example a few months ago I read this book where the author kept using the word "autistically" to describe the behavior of an unlikable character. And you can't really go anywhere without running into the following awesome usage (this is from a blog post about the movie trope of Manic Pixie Dream Girls):

More so, sometimes they are outright uninterested in making conversation. I mean, he’s obviously busy FILLING OUT SOME FORMS. But much like Asberger’s patients, some Quirky Girls fail to understand social cues, and force themselves into association with the movie’s hero without any delicacy or grace.

I didn't comment on the post, even though it was at Feministing which I guess should try not to be total assholes re: minority groups. I just felt embarrassed. If you can't even spell a disability, then should you really be making reference to it? And what's with the word "patients?" Do you think all people with disabilities just spend their entire lives being studied/treated by doctors? (I guess I could give her the benefit of the doubt and imagine she means "the patients of Hans Asperger," but if she was that educated she'd probably be able to spell it.)

Yeah so I do feel stupid every time I see this stuff--stupid for being affected. It's so little and it's just a pop culture blog or whatever.

Did I post about this time I was cashiering and this girl decided she didn't like the reusable container program and proclaimed in the most whingey voice, "That's just...RETARDED!" I guess I must have looked pretty shaken because she said, "Oh, not you," and hurried off. I wanted to say, "Oh, fuck yes, me. Good observation skills."

eta: I just decided to go comment on the Feministing post; I made this comment saying I have ASD and I have problems with her "Asberger's" reference. And the second I sent it I was like, "shit! People are going to read this and think I don't understand jokes and I take everything too literally because I have ASD. I should have just said I was disabled, or I should have said I have a friend who has ASD--now no one will listen to me. If anyone answers, I'll have to come up with a response that makes me come off like I'm really sensitive to other people's feelings and I have a good sense of humor."

I just thought that was funny.

yeah so I want to use the r-word in a story I'm writing

and I'm going to use it in this post so be warned.

I'm not actually going to use it in the story I turn in to my workshop, because last time I turned in a draft of this story it was the most awful experience ever. Basically I wrote a story about a 12-year-old boy who goes to a behaviorist school for kids with autism (but no disability-related words are used in the story, because no one has outright told him he's disabled). The boy is obsessed with lions and with the idea that he's slowly turning into a lion and will grow up to be one; his parents and teachers try to discourage his interest. He also has a lot of meltdowns and the story ends with him having a violent, swearing meltdown at school and having all his lion paraphernalia taken away as punishment.

So, everyone in my class got exactly that out of the story. A disabled kid doesn't understand he's disabled and can't control himself. (Some of them also made comments that outright assumed I wasn't disabled.) What I turned in was a really rough draft but I felt really positive about the germ of the story, and I felt depressed because almost no one reacted to it or related to it at all.

I sent the story to some of my friends who are good on disability stuff and asked them what they made of it. They got out a lot of the things I was putting in: the main character is faced with adults who try to control him, while his non-disabled twin is more wholly nurtured and accepted; identifying with lions is a way of feeling powerful and dealing with the fact that he feels like he's not human. My friend Laura wrote, "it seemed like he loved this thing/lions and nobody understands that it's something to just love and so they try to make it out to be a problem and to use it to get him to behave how they want him to... i think it seemed like a lot of it was about behavior modification and the loneliness of being told to act a certain way when you're just not naturally inclined to."

Which made me love her so much. I know it's only a workshop, but I've been in workshops for years, you know, and I've never had one hurt before.

I'm trying to write a more clear-to-my-class version of the story and the way I'm doing that is by having most of the story take place when the main character, S., is 17. The point of doing this is that by this age he would be aware of his diagnosis and stuff (in the original draft, I was trying to show that he hadn't been told about his diagnosis, but still sensed how he was being treated; but I think people just took it as typical "disabled person doesn't understand" stuff). It is also cool though because I get to address some issues of passing as ethics and passing as cure. I'm having trouble writing the story because I want S. to express his resentment of the way he was treated when he was a kid, but he's very isolated and doesn't have a lot of people he can talk about those things to. And he's also not quite sure how he feels about a lot of it.

But anyway, S. has been in a mainstream school for four or five years, and his main activity is selling his medication and making drugs for people. (The story has some magic realism elements so he's invented his own drug.) He finds this comforting, probably because he has something that other people want; he frequently accepts little or no payment even when he could ask for a lot of money. It's just what he does.

S.'s parents don't know about this and see him as a success. S. realizes that his mom has started referring to him and his sister as "the twins" when she never referred to them as a unit before. There is some anxiety about how S. is going to apply to college because his years in special ed may make him look "unstable" or like he's not capable of doing college work. But overall he has a sense of finally being someone his parents can be proud of. He goes to a normal school, he looks normal, he acts normal (with the kids he gives drugs to, he's intentionally weird and cold, and they see him as a creep; but he sort of likes that, because he's controlling their view of him).

But he is, you know, pretty masochistic with the whole throwing away opportunities to make money thing. And he doesn't really have any friends.

He desperately misses his best friend from special ed, but his friend is on a completely different life trajectory; he's still quite visibly disabled and needs help doing things. S. has no idea of what a friendship between them would look like now that one of them is supposedly normal. When he runs into his old friend, he lies to his friend's staff about how they know each other.

S. meets up with the head of his old school, and is overwhelmed by memories of trying to bite her, having her analyze and remake the way he walked, having her snap at him and take away his lions--but she's completely friendly, as if they are family members or old neighbors. S. falls into compliance, finds himself following her lead, trying to make himself sound even more successful than she already thinks he is. Wants to ask her why she cared how he walked or what was wrong with lions, but those kinds of questions don't belong in her world. He feels stupid even thinking them.

S.'s twin R., who is in boarding school and isn't around much, is the only person he's really close to. She's always known him roughly the way he is and when she comes home for Christmas he manages to tell her some of the things he's thinking about.

Anyway, for some reason I have this scene in my head: S. makes some comment about how he now looks normal. R. says, thinking nothing of it, that he doesn't. S. is really offended and scared. R. says that S. doesn't look normal to her because he's her brother, he just looks like her brother. And besides, he always says he doesn't want people to like him anyway, so it doesn't matter if he looks normal, right?

"That's retarded," S. says. "That's a retarded thing to say."

Now, the reason I won't really put this in my story is because I think people in my class may just throw this word around in their lives without thinking of it as hate speech. And I want S. to use it as hate speech. I will explain.

I feel a very intense urge sometimes to use the word about myself. Usually in some kind of school or work situation where someone is patronizing me or has failed to understand the nature of what I can and can't do. The sentence I want to say comes in two forms:

"I'm not retarded," when someone is explaining something they think I don't understand. And, more commonly:

"Yeah, I'm retarded, sorry" (little laugh)

because when things are really hard and someone is obviously kind of annoyed with you or thinks you're lazy or lacking insight/knowledge about basic things, you just...hate yourself. And them. And you're supposed to say, "yeah, I'm sort of slow, sorry," "oh yeah I'm kind of a space cadet." Like it's something small, and cute.

But it's not fucking small.

The word retarded is the most vicious word I can think of to quietly and passively explain myself. The reason I find myself wanting to use it is because it feels almost on the level of physically hurting myself or the other person, which are things I do not believe in doing (well the first one happens sometimes). And it doesn't seem like such a big deal to most people to say that word. But to me it feels like punching myself in the head, and sometimes I want to feel that way.

I really like this Retard Theory post but I don't think that's an acceptable word for the poster to be using. Maybe more on this later. But I know that some trans women really don't like for transmasculine and genderqueer people to try to "reclaim" the word tranny--there's a web page in fact trying to collect evidence that the slur is mainly used against trans women and therefore doesn't belong to other trans/gender-variant people. I think this is important.

I like the word queer a lot and sometimes use it about myself. But when I was growing up, no one ever used that word as a slur, so it's funny--I feel like nowadays people who call themselves queer are not really reclaiming it, we're just using it because it's a cool word or it feels less constricting than another description. On the other hand, I fucking hate the word dyke, and I was really angry when someone I knew who had never been openly lesbian would throw the word around and use it about me. She said, "Well, I'm a dyke so I can use it." But I mean...I've actually been called that, so it's actually painful for me to hear it, and I don't see how someone can "reclaim" it when it was never used against them in the first place.

The SpeEdChange guy is implying in the comments of his "Retard Theory" post that he was labeled MR at some point and that's why he feels he can use it? Eh, I don't know. I just haven't ever heard of a person with an intellectual disability identifying that way, and I'm leery of absolutely anyone in the world who doesn't 100% for sure have that exact disability using it...I know this all seems very nitpicky, but I just am always against the idea of people saying things like "we're all the same, we all go through the same things." No, we don't.

I do think his intentions are very admirable though, and I certainly don't feel included in the terms crip or gimp (I may not be supposed to). I like the idea of saying Failure Theory, but YMMV.

The Nicest Moment of My Life

I swipe cards at the dining hall. I'm sort of the backup cashier for when it's busy, and people aren't used to there being someone at my register. As you may know, normal people have a lot of trouble adapting to new situations, and would rather wait in line for five minutes at the main register than walk a few steps to mine. Sometimes when the main cashier is on break they'll just stand forlornly at her empty register, waiting for her to come back, as I frantically wave my hands to get their attention.

(One time this girl was waiting there and a guy with Down Syndrome, who also works in the dining hall, had the guff to talk to her--presumably asking if she needed help, or what she was doing there. She just shook her head as if she couldn't understand why he was talking to her. When she finally realized I was there she didn't even laugh or apologize like some people do; she just walked over and held out her card with the same expression on her face, probably thinking about how she's going to be president someday.)

Anyway, today a big crowd of people were clustering around the main cashier and one guy noticed me. He made his way over and we had the following conversation.

Guy: Are you open over here? Are you swiping cards?
AWV: Yeah.
Guy: Oh, so people are just being retarded.
AWV: (swiping his card) Yeah, pretty much.*
Guy: Or, I mean--they're being silly.
AWV: Oh, thank you for not saying retarded! You're great!
Guy: Yeah, I'm trying not to say it anymore.
AWV: That's so awesome. That makes me so happy.
Guy: Oh, well, I'm glad.

<33333

*I know, I know. It always sort of hits me, but I don't want to get in a fight; people just get pissed at you and don't care and tell you you don't understand language.

The most boring, shitty person there is

I hate this one Television Without Pity recapper, Jacob. I mean, maybe he is an okay person in real life (just kidding, I'm sure he's not), but his recaps are the most annoying thing I've ever seen. They're not like recaps should be. I should know; I started reading TWoP recaps when I was 13, because I don't have any friends, and I still remember the first line that made me laugh out loud: "Previously, Willow wore an ugly brown top while insisting that Tara would never hang up on her." See, it's good because it's kind of funny and focuses on a random part of the scene, while still summarizing the content. This is the point of TWoP recaps. They help you find out what you missed, and/or relive something you enjoyed, while also amusing you, and (if the recapper likes the show well enough) you get to see what another fan thinks of such-and-such plot development. (It's a little annoying to read, for example, the Firefly recaps, because the person who did them really didn't like Firefly, and just picks various things apart. But they're still worth reading, I think.) Starting last year, I've marathoned several TV shows online, and have often read TWoP recaps during or after watching. Especially when I've been watching something like Carnivale which is fairly hard to follow, it's really nice to be able to read a recap that helps me figure out what's supposed to be important. And it's a bit like watching a show with someone else (okay, I have friends now, but they're not always around when I want to watch TV).

But he's either a super prolific recapper, or I'm just unlucky, because so fucking many of the shows I watch happen to be recapped by this guy Jacob, who thinks he's James Joyce. SO UNFORTUNATE. Instead of just saying what happens and what he thinks about it, he launches into these really long, flowery essays about various aspects of the show. Or, sometimes, things that have nothing to do with the show! ANNOYING.

I just went on Google to find out if I am alone. And I'm totally not. Apparently other people hate him just as much. (Every word is a different link. This was my most satisfying Google experience.)

Anyway, I'm not going to tag every post like this "intellectual disability," because I'm not saying anything really interesting or helpful, but what inspired this post was the most douchebaggy Jacob passage yet:

(...You don't remember [something it's unrealistic for the character to not remember]?...This isn't even [character]-bashing right now: I'm legitimately confused. Because either the acting is fracked or the script is, and with [character] that's always the question, isn't it. So I don't know. Either [character]'s making a choice here, a really ugly and petty and resentful one -- which: wouldn't that be something? -- or the actor thinks that [character]'s just sleepy and confused about shit, which...makes no sense. Or else I've been right all along, and [character] actually is just a high-functioning mentally retarded adult, which means [character's husband] got a retard pregnant, and also that he hits retards. And I'm not totally enjoying [character's husband] right now, but that is way harsh.)

I mean, Jacob says retarded all the time, like a lot of people do, and what else would you expect from someone who's so obsessed with proving his intelligence? Intellectually disabled people are probably his greatest fear, because they frequently manage to be likable and interesting without spewing out incredibly long bullshit recaps about television shows. Whereas he probably thinks that his bullshit is all he has. But with this passage, he took the fucked-up-but-possibly-unintentional implications of his word use and made them absolutely clear. Not only is Jacob an annoying egotist who sucks at his job, he's a horrible person. The More You Know.

I tire myself out again

So I went to the Onion AV Club and it said that Jay Reatard died and I was sort of glad. I don't know anything about him except that he called himself that, but hell, I'm just so fucking sick of people thinking that the word retarded is okay and acting like it's ridiculous for anyone to have a problem with it.

It's really rare for me to criticize anyone for saying it, especially in real life. But when I do, don't worry, the other person always acts prissy as hell. The AV Club bit linked to an interview with him they did a few years ago, which is here, where he says, "who cares? Your average 6-year-old uses it as an adjective...It's a name...When I was a child, my grandmother raised retarded people for a living. I spent my youth, when I was 4 or 5 years old, playing with [them]...I don't want people to just laugh at them. It just stems from how I do really dumb shit sometimes."

I'm not quoting the whole answer, because he said something about the people he played with that I find kind of gross. It's just fucking boring. At FWD they say you shouldn't use "stupid" as an insult, and I don't know if I agree, but I do find that there are a lot of words I prefer, like boring and cowardly. That's what my irritation and anger is usually about; I am totally, completely bored of hearing people using the words "retard" and "retarded" in an insulting manner, or making fun of people with intellectual disabilities. And I'm bored of hearing their dumb descriptions of why it's okay. Because everyone uses it! And I forgot that retarded people are actually real! I guess that being insincere and not caring about stuff is maybe supposed to be good if you're punk or whatever genre Jay Reatard was, but okay, I will just state that if your music genre thinks the word retard is okay, then your music genre is boring.

Anyway, I am sorry he's dead; he was only 29 and I'm sure he was a good person, and even if he wasn't, it's sad for anyone to die. But sometimes I am a shit and feel little flashes of triumph when I shouldn't. I just hate that word. And I hate the excuses and I hate how people think insulting disabled people is cool and smart.

When I was in twelfth grade, my calculus teacher would sometimes bring his baby to class. Many of us were infatuated with the baby and would ask to hold her and play with her. She had Down Syndrome. One time he brought her to an extra help session and was making faces at her to make her laugh. One of the girls said, "Make that retarded face at her."

My teacher said (in a completely friendly, non-confrontational way), "Don't say retarded, she's retarded."

The girl said, "What? No, she's not!"

"Yes, she is."

"That's a horrible thing to say!"

"You're the one making fun of retarded people!" My teacher laughed, throwing up his hands in disbelief. He was so simple and cool. I wish I could react to things that way.