OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 29, 2009 3:36 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338)
In reply to: OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd by Baylink
Parent article: OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

> Deaf people (with a capital D) have some similar intersocietal behavioral tics. (If you want more on that, Google up "cochlear implant Deaf culture" and be prepared to duck)

This is off-topic, but since today seems to be my day to call people on things... I am genuinely offended by this statement. Certainly cochlear implants are a complex issue, but to dismiss a marginalized group's opinions on an often-problematic medical intervention as a "tic"? That's disgusting.

(Perhaps this makes our interchange an example of the "schizophrenia in the group behaviors" of white males; but then again, perhaps not, because members of a unprivileged minority can't get away with half the things you're doing.)

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OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 30, 2009 1:48 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

I haven't the impression from the (admittedly somewhat cursory) googling around that I did that "often-problematic" was the proper characterization; certainly CI surgery doesn't always provide what the non hearing impaired would call "good hearing", but you're correct in that the analogy with this handicap is probably not all that good.

I have, though looked into the arguments made by the Deaf community on CI surgery (capital D on purpose), and I have to tell you, as what I consider to be a reasonable man (yeah, yeah, don't bother :-) I have to say that someone who can *afford* CI surgery for a child, whose physician tells them that it has an excellent chance of allowing that child to function in the "real world" (where sound is, y'know, pretty common -- like car horns?), and deciding consciously not to allow that *because they want their child to grow up in the Deaf Community -- for me, that's so close to child abuse that you have to talk me down off the ledge...

and I'm about the most liberal 40 year old I know.

Hence my choice of wording; I apologize if you took it personally.

(I'll note here, for what it's worth, my view that if you are not deaf, you're not really *entitled* to be offended by what I said...)