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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I pulled out what you wrote earlier:

    Michael Phelps is double jointed. He’s the best swimmer in the world because he has a mutation that makes his feet more effective flippers. You said a flaw is still a disability even when everyone has it. Nearly everyone is single jointed, and that makes us worse at swimming than Phelps. Your argument would imply that single jointed people are all disabled.

    You can’t define disability in absolute terms, or you’ll run into problems like that. You have to define disability in socially constructed terms.

    And none of it has anything to do with my point or the definition of what makes something being categorized as a disability.

    1. I never wrote a flaw is still a disability when everyone has it. I actually wrote the opposite but you didn’t understand it.

    2. Phelps mutation is not classified as a disability. So it is a moot example for the discussion. Even when using as a hypothetical example.

    3. You also did not understand the definition of what makes a disability. Just because certain disabilities can lead to a benefit in certain areas for certain individuals, that neither makes the disability in general not being a disability anymore. Nor does suddenly everyone else should be classified as disabled.

    I try to give an example that’s perhaps easier to understand.

    Blindness is considered a disability, because most people are not blind and our society, most of it’s appliances, etc. are therefore build around non-blind people.

    That is already part of the definition of what makes something a disability.

    A (permanent) blind person will not be able to live a life equally to how they would live their life when they were not blind. And the negative effects (!) of it will be present for longer than six months.

    Even when the whole world would make effort into building accommodations for blind people, it would still be seen as a disability. Although other things would change on how blind people are treated in our society.

    When in a parallel universe there is an earth with humans where everybody is naturally blind, blindness wouldn’t be a disability.

    When suddenly superman-esque humans were born it doesn’t suddenly make everyone who isn’t superman-like a disabled person, but being susceptible to the negative effects of kryptonite could possibly be seen as a disability, when kryptonite was somehow part of our daily lifes.

    Until the superman-like people become the defacto standard human, then the odd one born without supermanpowers would start to be seen as disabled, even though they are immune to kryptonite.

    What does not make sense it to try to draw a line between intrinsic and non intrinsic disabilities. And claim that something is not a disability anymore just because people could potentially start to accommodate it better.


  • I didn’t contradict myself, you didn’t understood what I was writing. Otherwise, please provide where I contradicted myself.

    You tried to substantiate your claim that the question whether or not something is a disability depends on (social) context with mentioning that the “flaw” that Michael Phelps has supposedly aided him in being a better swimmer.

    My point is that, for the definition whether or not something is categorized as a disability, it doesn’t matter whether it is not disabling in certain contexts for certain individuals. Or whether you can imagine a society where it’s not disabling.

    “Intrinsic” and “non-intrinsic” disabilities, this differentiation does not make sense.


  • Do you mean the question where you tried to paint me as dumber than you because I do not agree with your reasoning?

    Yeah, I won’t answer to your narcissistic ramblings because your premise is wrong. I have no trouble understanding your reasoning, I just think it’s wrong.

    What is and isn’t categorized as a disability isn’t subjectively decided randomly. It’s a decision based on our current real life situation. Not your head cannon.

    Autism is considered a disability because of the definition of what makes a disability I provided above. While you personally can say that you feel not disabled, a claim that “autism is not a disability because when people were different it wouldn’t matter” isn’t rational reasoning.




  • You said a flaw is still a disability even when everyone has it.

    Where did I wrote that?! I wrote that the hypothetical situation where everyone has a broken leg and therefore then it would be considered normal, doesn’t invalidate that a broken leg is a handicap in our (non-hypothetical) real life.

    Also, being double jointed is not considered a disability.

    And further, the word is clearly defined (this is translated from my language to English):

    Physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which prevent a person from participating equally in society for longer than six months.

    And what we categorise as a disability is grounded on the definition above. Since autism is categorized as a disability, it wouldn’t make sense to diagnose someone with autism if the above is not true.

    I don’t see how this can not make sense. It seems so obvious that you do not have a disability when nothing is disabling you. When someone says “I have disability X but it’s not disabling” then congratulations, you are cured.