The Neurodivergent Experience in Josephmooon’s “So Far So Good”

Our own Ronan is releasing an album. Ronan is lyricist for Josephmooon. You can read the story of their distributed collaboration on their blog:

These songs resonate with my autistic, bipolar, and disabled life. I’m super excited to add them to my favorite playlist, Chronic Neurodivergent Depressed Queer Punk: Punk Rock, the Social Model of Disability, and the Dream of the Accepting Community, where they will become part of my everyday coping.

The album “So Far So Good” will be available on streaming platforms on Oct 1. Preview and pre-order on iTunes.

Listen now, and then read ‘The Neurodivergent Experience in Josephmooon’s “So Far So Good”’ over at Stimpunks for my interpretation of these songs and how they resonate with my life as a neurodivergent and physically disabled person. I share lyrics from each song and relate them to my own, and the broader, neurodivergent experience using selected quotes from community writing.

My August Blogging

Almost all of my blogging for August was on Stimpunks. That’s where my DEI, neurodiversity, and disability blogging will happen for now. boren.blog will be for SpIns, for personal news, and for toxic Christianity and Texas politics through my particular set of lenses.

Fostering healthy pluralism, which democracy demands, means confronting intolerance.

boren.blog

Stimpunks

Read more at Stimpunks.

August at Stimpunks: Our Blogging, Our Reading, Our Giving

In the Queue

  • We Long to Belong: In Search of Psychological Safety
  • Being Legible: Legibility as Social Status, Situational Privilege, and Belonging
  • Try Again: Mercy is Necessary to Learner Safety
  • Online Classes Are an Equity Requirement: If Opening Schools Is About Equity, Why Aren’t We Listening to Those Most Impacted?
  • Vestibular Issues with Parallax Scrolling and Transition Animations
  • Psychological Safety in Families
  • The Neurodivergent Experience in Josephmooon’s “So Far So Good”
  • It’s Not Rocket Science: Considering and Meeting the Sensory Needs of Autistic Children and Young People
  • Craft, Flow, and Cognitive Styles
  • Equity Versus Equality
  • It’s About Equity
  • Accessible, Equity Literate Care
  • Disability Dongles and Cultural Engagement
  • Wheelchair Flow Patrol
  • The Bipartisanship of Behaviorism
  • Practicing Pluralism: Minority Stress, Harm Reduction, and Triage
  • Accommodations and Emotional Bids in Neurodiverse Relationships
  • Taking Control of the Mask: Unmasking as a Spoiled Identity

Texas Republicans: Making Texas Schools and Texas Cities Unmanageable

This grift is happening in all Republican states, but especially Texas, where we just watched fascism ascend in the 87th Texas Legislature.

I believe the 87th Texas Legislature featured the ascendance of a brand American fascism that had heretofore been constrained by business and libertarian factions in the Texas GOP.

The law enables him to essentially operate as a dictator, and Greg Abbott is beginning to do just that.

Source: Grits for Breakfast: In what world are mask mandates too draconian but COVID justifies massive law enforcement deployments and new detention camps for migrants? Oh yeah: Greg Abbott’s Texas

Two of the main targets of this ascending fascism are public education and blue cities.

The GOP base in Texas includes totalitarian, racist elements which lately have been swirling in a near-policy-free furor of anger and resentment. By engaging with libertarian factions and more compassionate elements in the religious wing of the party, I’ve argued in innumerable trainings and funder conversations, the criminal-justice reform movement in Texas was attempting to “blunt the spear tip of American fascism.”

In 2021, the spear tip was unsheathed and thrust deep into the body politic: A combination of the pandemic, President Trump’s defeat, and the January 6th insurrection seem to have finally awakened the beast. This was the year the far-right wing of the party finally got its wish list they’d been denied in the 20 years since Republicans took power in Texas: The entire legislative session was about abortion, guns, jingoism, and “backing the blue.” Compassionate conservatism and non-gun-themed libertarianism were more or less banned from the building, or at least the eastern wing.

The Texas House, with a larger, more ideologically diverse membership, retains a broader array of Republicans that still includes some “small government” and/or “compassionate” types. They managed to pass several significant criminal justice reform bills, but virtually nothing of consequence made it through the senate. Reforms with overwhelmingly positive, bipartisan polling numbers like reducing marijuana penalties and ending arrest/jail for Class C non-jailable traffic offenses could never even get committee hearings on the eastern side of the building. Instead Sen. Joan Huffman wasted weeks on a failed effort to gerrymander appellate courts to rescind recent Democratic gains.

Some of this lurch toward totalitarianism was overt and ham-handed, perhaps most notably legislation to require sports teams to play the Star Spangled Banner. More insidious were attempts to control historical narratives about race and slavery in Texas schools and museums. These efforts were as shameful as they were transparently authoritarian. We’re just a step or two away from parading historians through the streets in dunce caps.

Perhaps the most subtly fascist influence radiating out of this session was HB 1900, ostensibly punishing cities that “defund police.” Large cities and counties henceforth must prioritize spending on law enforcement, leaving roads, parks, social services, or any other traditional municipal functions to wither in a time of massive urban growth.

Grits believes the purpose here is both political and dystopian: Texas’ large cities are now almost all (but Fort Worth) run by Democrats. So the Governor and his allies aim to make cities un-manageable, then blame Democrats for mismanaging them.

Also: Grits for Breakfast: Fascism Unsheathed: Let’s be very clear about what just happened at the #txlege

The grift is effective. We’re trying a nearby private school for one of our kids this year. This school has mask and vaxx policies aligned with pluralism and public health instead of Christian alt facts and sadopopulism. It isn’t as beholden to the laws forcing Texas public schools into a showdown with the state.

All means all.

Free, life-changing, and available everyone.

Texas Republicans are using a pandemic to accelerate the trashing of public education and the breaking of those promises. I’m heartbroken and pissed.

Previously: