Solidarity or Silence?: How Leftist Politics Often Overlooks the Disabled with Anthony David Vernon

This podcast and YouTube episode features an in-depth conversation with Anthony David Vernon, a philosopher and educator, exploring the intersection of disability studies, left-wing politics, and the systemic failures of accessibility in a post-pandemic world. The discussion challenges the "normative" framework of society, examining how both civic institutions and political movements often fail to truly incorporate the voices and needs of the disabled community.

Key Discussion Highlights
The ADA and the "Checkmark" Problem: Vernon argues that because the ADA is enforced primarily through personal lawsuits and remains largely unfunded, it often results in "checkmark" compliance rather than true accessibility.
The Post-Pandemic Erasure: The conversation explores how the rush to move past COVID-19 safety measures has prioritized "normative desires" over the accessibility needs of high-risk and disabled individuals.
Multimodality as Justice: Implementing "ready-made" scaffolding and multiple points of entry into education and digital spaces benefits all learners, not just those with a formal diagnosis.
 

Referenced Works (APA Format)
Albers, B. (2022). Able-bodied leftists cannot abandon disabled solidarity to move on from COVID. Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/abled-bodied-leftists-cannot-abandon-disabled-solidarity-to-move-on-from-covid/
Data for Progress. (2023, October 3). Disabled voters do not believe politicians care about disabled Americans. https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2023/10/3/disabled-voters-do-not-believe-politicians-care-about-disabled-americans
Hryhorec, S. (2025, October 26). LET ME IN: Mark Butler’s office isn’t accessible [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEfbZzCspDk
Iacoboni, G. (2023). Why politics is failing disabled people and what to do about it. Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF). https://isrf.org/blog/why-politics-is-failing-disabled-people-and-what-to-do-about-it
Rotarou, E. S., & Sakellariou, D. (2024). Neoliberalism and disability: The systemic erasure of access. Social Science & Medicine. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953623007189
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. (n.d.). Disability studies and political theory: A framework for inclusion. https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/425af050-0220-49dc-b28d-f86d976dcf02/content
Varn, C. D. (2023, October). Multimodal availability for those with learning disabilities. PeerCentered. https://www.peercentered.org/2023/10/multimodal-availability-for-those-with.html
Vernon, A. D. (2023, December). Silence: Non-verbal communication in philosophy. Activated Thinker. https://medium.com/activated-thinker/silence-non-verbal-communication-in-philosophy-d5d148ba8a1d
Willies, E. (2025, June 16). Anthony David Vernon advocates for social democracy as a tool of rebellion against fascism [Video]. YouTube.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rs7l6jNGDzw

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

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Welcome And Guest Introduction

Joe Payne 0:48

Hello and welcome to Varmblog. And I am here today with Anthony David Vernon, a philosopher educated, educator, and writer, who is an adjunct professor down there in Florida, I believe at St. Thomas and Miami Dade College. All right. You're the author of books like Beyond the Fascist Curtain and Assumption of Death.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

Yeah. Yeah, a lot of my work is, you know, focusing on a mixture of like stuff to do with the body and a lot of left-wing political stuff, right? Not all of it, but certainly those themes do crop up for me.

Joe Payne 1:31

So you work a lot in disability studies, which is something that I've wanted to cover more on the show and haven't. So when the opportunity to interview you came up, I was actually very happy about that. I have done a very little bit on this topic. Unfortunately, I think it's about four years since I've had an interview on this topic specifically. And that was back with Beatrice Adler Bolton of the Deaf Panel Podcast a couple years after. I say after the COVID pandemic, which is wrong. When COVID became an epidemic, which is and a continuous one that we're just gonna live with, I guess now forever.

SPEAKER_02 2:15

Um, given annual shots, right? Like it's it's you know akin to the flu in that regard, right? Like this is a pathogen that is just you know propagating through our species, and you know, we'll mutate seasonally, annually, like the flu does, you know, for worse, obviously.

Joe Payne 2:33

Yeah, I mean, also like the flu, it'll probably get less deadly and more virulent, but although one of the things I learned during COVID, if I'm honest with you, is when people say, Oh, it's like the flu, I don't think they realize how dangerous the flu is.

SPEAKER_02 2:50

No, they don't.

Joe Payne 2:51

Um, yeah, because I'm like, the flu is only is the only common communicable disease in the top killers, I mean pre-COVID, in the in the top killers of people under 65. So I mean, like, maybe you shouldn't be so flippant with the flu comparison.

SPEAKER_02 3:09

No, no, and and and so like I think a lot of people when we we talk about the labeling, you know, of things, right? Like, oftentimes labels are meant to be like dismissive or shorthands, but and this is something very true with disability, they often fail to realize like the exactitudes of phenomenon, right? So, like when we're like, oh, COVID's like the flu, it's like just trying to lump all viruses together as if you know, you know, these viruses are the same, right? Like comparing flu to the COVID is like comparing cats to snakes, right? Like they're both animals, right? Like they're both in Amelia, but like, you know, when you get down to like you know this features, right? There's enough distinctiveness between the two, the cause and effect, right? A cat can kill you, right? A big cat, a snake can kill you. The way

COVID Comparisons And Masking Politics

SPEAKER_02 3:57

that they're gonna kill you is gonna be very sort of different, right? Again, imperfect metaphors, but you know, we see this all the time with people dismissing the exactitudes of phenomena.

Joe Payne 4:09

Yeah, um, one of the things the COVID pandemic slash epidemic has gotten me to think a lot about was actually how much we don't talk about this stuff with other practices and with other fairly communicable diseases. I've lived in Asia for three and a half years, and so the concept of like masking during respiratory virus season was not foreign to me at all. And yet, not only was it a controversial here, I have to be honest, the the Centers for Deceited Crow and the National Health and the National Institute of Health totally botched messaging on it in kind of ways that I don't think helped the general public paranoia around masking, partly because they did not trust the public. And I was very frustrated with this messaging to the able-bodied and the disabled uh during this time period because it it did not trust people to make decisions which I think perversely led to the distrust in civic institutions. I don't think it's the only thing. I mean, America Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 5:29

The the the haystack, you know, the X that that like final, you know, in the f famous philosophical example, the creation of the heap, right, occurred.

Joe Payne 5:41

So, you know, I think I want to talk a little bit about disability there, but I also want to talk about another era of disability research, one that actually concerns me. I talk a lot about this on on X, unfortunately, because I'm a dyslexic anaphagic, I'm also a synesthetia, I have uh damage to my corpus colossum, but I'm hyperliterate, and you can't tell except when I'm on Twitter slash X, because I'll just drop words. And I was reading some of your other writings, and I was like, oh well, you know, I work a lot with disability and literacy. I'm a I'm a public school teacher, it's my day job. And I work in a special program online, which I actually get a higher proportion of disabled students than the general public does. And a lot of them are disabilities that are fairly invisible to outsiders. So I want to breach both topics with you today, and maybe talk about how they might be interrelated, because when it comes to stuff like COVID response, I was I was aghast that we were basically willing to throw the disabled under the bus and the elderly, I mean, but you know, and have been for a long time. And while I know you know maximalist approaches to this may not have been feasible, what we basically did was very little to nothing, regardless of the political administration in charge. But I suspect people with with invisible disabilities that are affected by the COVID-19 virus um in particular were particularly vulnerable to it. So I wanted to ask you about how you think that went, what you think that taught us, and what kind of fill, I mean, this is a super broad question, but what kind of philosophical conclusions could we have from the way that all played out?

SPEAKER_02 7:49

Well, I mean, you're speaking to someone that's a born and raised a Floridian, right? So if any province in the state, right? Like, you know, right, like, you know, there's an understanding between Floridians for sure. And in that sort of regard, right, my uh mother's boyfriend at the time is someone who is MPN, which is a type of uh blood cancer. And this also gets into the very difficulty of defining disability and how often the label of disabled is one, an imposition by abled-bodied individuals on disabled individuals, by neurotypical individuals on you know others, right? Like, so one, there isn't, you know, even like a you know uniform way that it's imposed. And two, there's not a uniform way it's defined, right? What counts as disabling can be very different for you know various individuals, right? There are individuals who are blind who do not see themselves as disabled, right? They will say that they're blind but not disabled, right? You'll have you know, you know, these sorts of considerations often be in positions. And so really when thinking about you know the Florida, especially, right, but the United States' response to COVID, it was a disregard of, I think, all communities, right? And all sorts of communities, visible or invisible, right? Basically, the policy went as thus, where it's like, look, we are going to you know maintain things as if nothing is going wrong. And what that does is it does what it has always done to individuals who are disabled, right? The normative population's desires, right, superseded the needs and accessibility of those disabled, whether they call themselves as such, whether they have things that are disabling in their lives, right? It's a repetition of this process, this process of not being heard and having normative desires, right, supersede necessary access. And that I think if we're talking about this specific scenario, it points to a larger repeated set of patterns and ongoing patterns in human history.

Joe Payne 10:12

It it was interesting that that the COVID-19 pandemic did not create more of a space for disabilities advocates than it did. In fact, I think I heard more about it before COVID than after. I I wondered, you know, do you think that's part of the same trend, or what do you think is driving that seeming erasure?

SPEAKER_02 10:38

So one of the I mean issues, you know, at hand, you know, with you know, disability advocacy, and this is something my partner tells me, and my partner happens to be someone who is chairbound, right? And one

Defining Disability And Who Speaks

SPEAKER_02 10:52

of the things that she has told me is that unfortunately, like individuals who, you know, are of normative mobility, right, are more likely to actually be heard on you know these sorts of matters. And I think one of the you know connections, you know, that we have at hand, right? You would think that, oh, there would be this increase in disability understanding because, right, in some sense we were all disabled from our like normative access, right? Like we had to stay home. If, again, if you were following procedures, right, you know, all that sort of stuff. But what I think you know ended up happening instead was a sense of like Nietzschean resentment, like, you know, what came out. And then once people got out of it, right, a lot more people, you know, considered their own uh situations and especially their own situations amid you know inflation. I hear, you know, a lot more chatter about like survival, a lot more chatter about debt, right? A lot more chatter about payment. And whether this reflects the reality of people's scenarios or not, right? We can, you know, nonetheless, this is what people are feeling. So who has time for the accessibility of others when one cannot pay for their own gasoline, one cannot pay for their own, you know, groceries? And so really, you know, these sort of shifts, right, like, you know, ideally we're like, oh, we're online, we're opening up accessibility features, but you know, as soon as things ended, right, it was not only get back to work, but get back to work under worse financial conditions, right? Bosses who, despite having increases of productivity over like the post-pandemic period, right, like just after, and having these increases of productivity under remote work, still wanted to maintain the structures of power over the accessibility. And so I really think what COVID sparked was more of a mass cynicism, right? A more of a, well, if we could all die, if everything could fall apart anyways, right? Like I have to get mine. And I really think, you know, it was one of those things where, you know, I mean, in Gal Gadot, right, like singing imagine to everyone's cringingness, right? That sort of idea like, hey, we're all in this together. And people reacted to that with an F U. No, we're not all in the situation. Your lockdown is different from mine. And people came out of it, right, seeking their own as opposed to realizing, hey, if we all have better access and better communities, we'll all be better off, right? The the the approach, you know, created isolated cynicism as opposed to like collective connectivity.

Joe Payne 13:31

Your point orders at the mods, actually, I think, really crucial. I work with a lot of communities where medicate and Medicare are common. And even I, you know, devoted Marxist that I am, but I have some serious health problems, find myself struggling with the idea right now that the shitty health care that there that many people in Medicaid and Medicare receive is still more than I can even buy insurance for through my job. And I have a state job even. And you I think your point here is actually very crucial because I'm I I am systemically aware enough to know that like I have to squelch that resentment myself in the butt. But it is it's a harder sell when you're talking to people who are struggling, and they're like, Well, why did these poor people get stuff that I can't even get access? And I'm like, one, they don't get great care either. I mean, I know I one thing I don't talk a lot about on my show, but maybe I should a little bit more, is I come from blue-collar people who followed the trajectory described by great by Gabriel Wynamp. So if you're familiar with his book on the topic, I don't know, I'm not at all, actually. So he he wrote a book about how the industrial centers became basically hospitals and schools. I'm a teacher, my brother's a physical therapist. My mom, who was a waitress until she was 40, became a nurse with worked as a nurse for about 10 years before she nursed Jackie herself, also part common for blue-collar workers, and then died prematurely of cancer. And I think about this a lot because that means I'm well aware of how these systems work, but also how they fail everybody. So I know, for example, any resentment I may have at Medicare and Medicaid recipients, their care, while better than what I can buy, unless you are, you know, I'm making over $150,000 a year, is still really insufficient. And I know that from the back end because of my family's work, and they're telling me what you know how they have to court corners on Medicare and Medicaid recipients, why they do it. And when I worked a lot with disability advocates, particularly ones who are not disabled themselves, are on the spectrum of high needs disability. Let me let me be very, I think that's probably a better and more higher way to conceptualize it.

SPEAKER_02 16:13

There's no one perfect way to consider these things, right? Like I personally would not put myself in any disabled community, but if you look at the content creator, YouTube content creator punished uh Felix, right? He puts mental health and severe mental health in regards to disability. My partner who I mentioned earlier is not only someone with a mobility disability, right? To reduce her world to such would be moronic, but you know, she does work in uh social work, right? And she's someone, you know, that you would say, like, oh, you would assume would have a like very physical or very like you know, like extreme end of like understanding disability, but she would say, no, no, no, like major mental health can also be included, right? So, you know, the the the issue even at hand, right, is the whole like even beginning to define this sort of stuff, right? And the sort of you know, learning about like opening up accessibility, right? One of the things that you talked about just now was how industrial centers became hospital towns. And one of the biggest examples of this is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, right? Like steel mill, steel mill, steel mill, and it's now a center of like you know, medicine, you know, in all these universities. And so, yeah, I mean, I I think in that sort of sense, I I definitely did cut you off a bit, and I apologize for that, but I think the the there's not going to be a perfection of language, you know, with you know this sort of stuff, right? Like when you're in, you know, quote unquote disability spaces, you come across individuals in these spaces who don't even feel that they belong to these spaces, or individuals who, you know, are lumped in the same category but are like, yeah, but I'm not like that guy, right? Like, and it's it's you know, it's an interesting thing to see, right? It's an imperfect, you know, category to say the least again and again and again. And so, you know, your concerns with Medicaid and Medicare are like these universal concerns of accessibility, and how because a lot of our accessibilities aren't universal, they feed into you know resentments.

Joe Payne 18:18

Yeah, I think that that's absolutely correct. And I think I think to get to what I what was gonna bring up when often I talk to disability advocates, I mean I I should be very careful of generalizing here, but I deal with two broad swaths because of what I work in, because I work in literacy and in media as a psychic. I deal a lot with like linguistic justice and on one end, and then I deal a lot with people who are very interested in dealing with institutional limits

Resentment And Unequal Health Access

Joe Payne 18:52

and trying to figure out ways that we can even figure out how we would document this, particularly in schools, like because there's a lot of data out there, but the data is self-reported, the systems are problematic. There are systems that are abused. My the one one, for example, uh, and since you work in education, you're familiar with 504s, yes, but I tend to take 504 accommodations and apply them to almost every student that I have because I will tell you that richer school districts have more 504s, not because they have more students with needs, but you get them from a doctor's diagnosis, and who can afford to go to the doctor to get a diagnosis, particularly on certain kinds of disabilities that are not particularly obvious to the general population. And this, you know, you know, I don't want to say that most of the people who have them from the upper middle class neighborhoods don't deserve them or don't need them, I don't know, but it does lead you to some teachers who resent them because they feel like the game's being played. And I'm just like, just make just you know, for what you can, you can't do it for every single accommodation, but for what you can generalize them, and also you know, I'm not against rigor, but scaffold more. And I was thinking about this approach to you know the general public, and when you know what like one major failure in American life is the ADA is a really useful law, except that it's and anyone who studies disability law knows this, almost completely unfunded, correct? And it's enforced by lawsuit, which ironically means also that public institutions, being that they are much harder to sue, if not impossible, and every state in the nation, are actually more exempt from the ADA than private ones, because the mechanisms of enforcement are are purely lawsuits. When we try to deal with this in terms of like policy, you you get, you know, like look, I'm a Marxist. I I don't shed that many tears for the for the poor petite bourgeois business person, but at the same token, they they do have a real complaint that like I don't you don't provide me any funding with this, but I can get sued to oblivion for it. I'm just gonna where I can opt out of this entirely, which does not provide any access for for the disabled, and I think that comes from not universalizing where you can these accommodations and and whatnot. I wanted to get your thought about that because I was thinking about universalization and solidarity and why because you know disability, ironically, is something that not only everyone can fall into, I don't, you know, I don't you your gender can change, so I guess that that's yeah, that's that's something you usually actively do. Right.

SPEAKER_02 22:14

Brianna Albers talks about this, like you know, that you're basically one car accident, one tragedy away from like joining the ranks of the infirm, as she words it.

Joe Payne 22:23

Right.

SPEAKER_02 22:23

I mean, you know, I'm I'm talking to you today after an accident this morning, and I'm in like three braces, and it's just it's just you know, I was actually laughing to myself about I hope you're okay first and foremost, above everything else, and I'm glad you could you could make it everything else, and that you're good enough to make it. That means more than anything else.

Joe Payne 22:43

Well, yeah, yeah, I appreciate that, but I was thinking about this because my natural inclination. Would be to hide this. I have, you know, I'm of a certain age and I have a certain kind of unconsciously toxically male disposition that you do not show weakness. And, you know, I was like, okay, I'll I'll get over it. I'll I'll come. I can do this today. And I wanted, you know, I was thinking about that though, because I'm like, well, the two blocks to solidarity with with with with disability, infirmary, and all that, even though it's a category that you could very easily fall into from almost any other category. Not almost, from any other category. I can't think of anybody who's exempt from like getting hit by a car. I mean, you know, for some people that they they'll have the means to hide it better, but nonetheless. I was thinking about that, though, I do think one the the stigma of not being able-bodied is really high. And two, and I guess that's obvious, but two, because of that, one block to solidarity I think might be you don't want because it's something that you could actually end up being, you don't want the risk of being assumed that you are already in that category, and you don't want to think about being in that category. Do you think that is an active block to solidarity socially when it comes to disability activism?

SPEAKER_02 24:14

So, I mean, there's a lot of layers to the question. So I actually want to work some of the things uh kind of down that you mentioned before. So my mother has been a speech pathologist for over 30 years. My sister is currently a doctoral student in speech pathology, and they're kind of the means by which I got introduced to communities that were considered special needs, right? You know, into this sort of thing. And, you know, I mean, it's getting cheaper to as like an like and I and I mean truly, like even like with a price point thing, because there are more speech pathologists that have entered the field, right? Like they do charge like literally dollar less

ADA Enforcement And School Accommodations

SPEAKER_02 24:52

than they used to before. However, right, that's the difference between, you know, my mother in the 90s being able, if she wants to, to charge, you know, insurance or even privately $100, right, for an hour of work, to my sister being able to charge like $75 for an hour, right? Like, you know, and these are numbers that many people just, you know, just cannot, you know, put aside or do not have the insurance that's going to do the coverage. And so it's that sort of sense where it's like obviously the people that they are diagnosing and working with, like, you know, do range all the way from, you know, the, you know, you know, let's say stutters or ticks all the way up into like paralysis, right? And to say that someone who, you know, has access to financial privilege, but does not, you know, have you know physical mobility should not have a speech pathologist, obviously is an you know, absurdity. Like, and and that can, you know, of course, be agreed upon. What is the real travesty is that everyone who needs these sorts of services cannot receive quality, you know, care, right? And you know, the issue at hand that you point out very well for the ABA, right, it is a personal enforcement mechanism. And so you have already people being held back by normative society, not even always explicitly, right? Just through implicit matters. Let's just say a poorly designed ramp or just you know, construction based upon the phenomenological experience of just you know being of normative body, right? And you have people already disadvantaged, then needing themselves to represent themselves and demonstrate their own disadvantageousness to individuals, to a jury of peers that is very unlikely to share their experiences, let alone their unique experience of disability. For again, as as uh as issue-filled as that word can be. And so, in that sort of sense, though, it's not even just the people don't want to imagine themselves being disabled. We just simply do not know certain experiences, right? I don't know the experience of my sister's patients. I don't know the experience of my partner who, you know, net needs a chair to, you know, live her life. I don't know the experiences of my dad's adoptive daughter who has, you know, a learning disorder, right? You know, these sorts of experiences I simply do not have. All that I can do as someone who you know is of quote unquote normative mind, normative body is do my best to translate experiences and difficulties for individuals. And so it's not even just the fact that there is a fear of joining the ranks of the infirm, as Brianna Albers, I think, writes too well. There's also this sort of sense of that it just doesn't come to our minds. My favorite example to use with students is scissors, right? Are you left or right-handed yourself?

Joe Payne 27:59

I uh I am right-handed today. Right-handed today. I was no, I I I pretty much had it trained. I was ambidextrous as a child, and I was pretty much had it trained out of me.

unknown 28:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:10

But so for you, right? Like you're handed a pair of right-handed scissors, left-handed scissors, no problem at all, right? But you know, most scissors are just right-handed because most people, including myself, are right-handed. And there isn't some like major conspiracy against left-handed individuals. So there's is with disability, it's that element on top of the yeah, explicit eugenics, right? And so it's a it's a double sort of jeopardy for lack of a better term here of the implicit actions against, the non-harmful actions against, the unthought actions against, in addition to those explicit fears and acts against, right? And these two things come together and make disability solidarity difficult because there are just these phenomenological gaps on multiple fronts, right? And not only are these these phenomenological gaps, then there's these times where a lot of people try to make solidarity, right? And will say things like vision impairment. And then you'll have a blind person be like, no, I'm fucking blind. I'm not visually impaired. What are you on about? Right. So even then, like we the the biggest, I think, struggle we have with disability conversations is that we fail to individualize people's experiences, take them as just being members of the normative population, that there is nothing abnormal about these sort of things. It is a difference of experience. And all sorts of experiences come with degrees of issues for sure, right? This isn't to put down the experiences of others, but this is to say that like we make assumptions about people who have one issue going on and then assume they can't do X. Your case was perfect with yourself, right? This assumption of I have dyslexia, I must have poor literacy. Well, no, right? Your literacy, your comprehension of text isn't, you know, affected per se by your difficulties in processing, you know, the information visually. And so that's one of the issues that we have with this solidarity, right? The the the the when we even do try to build that bridge, right? We may, you know, overassume that bridge and extend it past the point where someone needs where we are crushing them with that very bridge we were trying to build.

Joe Payne 30:32

Yeah, I think about I think about uh, I mean, I was thinking about linguistic justice, and I remember just the debates about like person first language versus disabled language, and uh and me going like I'm just gonna try to respond. Yeah, like to whom I know I'm going to need to use that language in that case, because I do know some people like no, I'm disabled, you know. Well, you know, don't try to soften it, go fuck yourself. And then I also know people who very much do appreciate the person first language, and I mean this is this is true in most forms of these kinds of politics. So, like when I think about system designs, which I think a lot about. I mean, I I write curriculum and I I actually write curriculum for for LMSs and SMSs, so I also have to think about how we're designing the the layout of the curriculum and dealing with accessibility and accessibility tools, which again is often on the individuals. And weirdly, as I as I mentioned earlier, as of as I work in public institutions, my bosses don't think about it because they're not that likely to get sued. And it is sort of incredibly disempowering, and to think about how much of my job and my design, for example, is based off of lawsuits, because there is a disability category that we do care about in education, and that is people who receive special ed, because that is one of the few areas it's covered by by federal law where you will get sued, and so administrators really, really care about that. We spend lots of money on it, and yet we're not worried about that with the general population, even the general, you know, quote unquote disabled population, because there is little financial incident incentive for people to care. And like with many things, I mean, one of the things about who becomes teachers, well, who becomes teachers because of the pay, which is good, which is good compared to the general population, but bad compared to everyone else who has a similar degree because of stigmas, because it's largely like journalism, like a few other fields, increasingly dominated by people who can afford to take the financial hit. You have people in the upper normative demographic and everything. I mean, you know, they're married well, so they have wealth if they don't have income, you know, etc. etc. etc. Disproportionately white, disproportionately able-bodied, because in some ways you kind of have to be, uh, etc. etc. COVID pointed a lot of this out to me. My program that I work with right now, I don't talk about my day job show, but my program that I work with right now came out of COVID. But I think about this, like when I'm designing, they'll have me some disability check software that's just designed to make sure that particularly private schools are ADA compliant in a serious way. But when I say serious, I mean serious enough not to get sued. Right. Not really from the philosophy of like we're doing this to make this accessible for the most amount of people with the least intervention. And maybe because I'm also really busy. I would I almost said I was lazy, but a person with with two jobs is has a hard time telling themselves lazy if they're being serious. But let's just say I want to be see I want to be efficient here, right? So I I design a lot of the stuff for maximum accessibility, partly for efficiency, right? Because I don't want to have to go back and change it, but partly out of solidarity because you know uh the you know, I I I do not think of myself as part of the disability community, but I had a disability activate, like sit sit down with me one day, a friend of mine, and she was like, No, this, this, this, and this about yourself. You are definitely part of this community, and I'm like, huh. You know, I guess I am, but I don't feel that way. But I do think about that a lot when I'm designing, like, okay, I'm gonna assume for the sake of for the sake of my life that I'm gonna use these things that I've experienced as a point of empathy with these other people when I'm designing these things, right? But I don't know a lot of people that do that, and I know a lot of people that would have pushed back. In fact, I did like for a long time. I'm like, I'm not disabled, I don't know what you're talking about. Like, I just happen to have this and this and this and this and this and this, but those are just things that happen to me. I don't know, like, and when I really sat and think about it, I'm like, oh, I'm being delusional. Like, but I think a lot of people are like that, particularly in these kinds of jobs. So that's a rambling responsibility.

SPEAKER_02 36:02

No, it's not a ramble at all because it really connects well to what you brought up earlier and didn't get what I didn't get to with your scaffolding, right? Because one of the things that you're trying to do now is ready-made scaffolding, right? It is ready-made for accessibility. And one of the things that we don't even like train people how to do is not just even ready-made scaffolding or assistance on making sure you know scaffolding is ready-made, right? Like if you have you know any sort of touch with you know, disability advocates or disability communities, being ready-made, you know, becomes more to steal from Heidegger, comes more ready to hand, right? Because you just, you know, you have experiences, right? Like you learn like some of those things, like God, it's size 24 font and above, boom, right? Like, you know, these, you like even a little thing like that. And so one of the

Universal Design And Real Listening

SPEAKER_02 36:52

things that it's not just about ready-made scaffolding, right? Like uh that that we fail to do, right? Like, even if that can't be accomplished, we don't even teach people how to, you know, uh efficiently retrofit. And not to say that retrofitting, you know, doesn't have its problems, but better to have a quality retrofit than to have nothing at all. And one of the things that St. Thomas University is starting, it's been out for about a year or so, is a learning differences center and you know, having a faculty mentors, not just in the sense of being faculty that mentors students, but having faculty that speaks to other faculty about like, hey, like what can you do to make things more accessible, right? So there, and that's not the literal faculty mentor role, but that sort of sense of, hey, like, you know, what are things that can be done? And it is that sort of sense though, where a lot of people do push back, right? Do think it's difficult, do ask, why do I have to, you know, accommodate, you know, not in this space per se, but just you know, in spaces in general, like there are moments where this comes up. And so, you know, what we have, you know, in these scenarios, right, is this sort of way in which, like, yes, when you learn how to do it, it becomes second nature to make things, you know, ready-made for you know accessibility. But, you know, if you don't have that training, you assume it as a larger challenge than it is, and there is this lack of retrofitting. And then the third thing, right, that you know often can happen in these spaces is that people aren't listening to the experiences of, in this case scenario, students, be they higher ed, you know, be they, you know, high school, middle school, etc. Right. And one of my things to do, it's like when I get a student's, you know, IEP, right, I look at I look at it and go, all right, so it says you have double testing time. You've seen my assignment, right? Like, do you think you'll need double testing time? Do you think you'll need one and a half? What would you prefer, right? To actually have a conversation with students on what they need. And sometimes, right, the IEP that you know I am given, you know, as a result of, you know, the eight, you know, the ADA is, you know, why there's certain you know, IEPs that they exist as they do, right? It's like these things can also be very limiting, right? Those very sort of constraints of like, oh, we only need to hit this check mark, this check mark, this check mark. And when you turn disability into, oh, I hit the check marks, I did whatever, as opposed to like what the ADA ideally should be doing, increasing accessibility for people, right? You lose track of the very spirit of the law. You lose track of the very spirit of accessibility. And the point in an educational space, in a hotel room, right, whatever's trying to be accessed, right? It's like, aren't you actually setting things up to where different people from different walks of life can actually come in in a way that they are comfortable with and can succeed, right? In the educational space, can they succeed in the classroom? In the hotel space, can they succeed in having a good, you know, shower, right? And you know, that's a very, you know, not like personally personal, but you know, seeing, you know, hotel rooms that are labeled, you know, ADA, but like, you know, they're only ADA because they have like a handlebar in the shower, right, type thing. And so it really is, you know, one of these sort of things where the the issue of accessibility isn't issue of openness. And I think as you also go back earlier, right, people don't want to feel as if they could benefit or need accessibility, right, until you get down to, hey, isn't it nice to have like, you know, a greater openness of ways that you could interact with this class? Isn't it nice to have a greater openness of like ways that you could come into this space, right? I mean, you know, my go-to example for this with my students is elevators, right? Obviously, elevators weren't built with disability in mind, but like, you know, it's that sort of tool that's very useful for disability. And so it's like, hey, you can use stairs. Why are you using the elevator? I, you know, obviously am being you know facetious with my students. And they're like, oh, you know, it's tiring, it's this. And I'm like, right, that's great. Like, I'm not shaming you for that. Like that, like use the things at hand if you want to use them, right? That that should be the sort of open case. And so I think that's one of the things that I guess in academic spaces is you know can be forgotten that like you're just making your life easier by allowing more students to succeed. The hotels, like you are, you know, making your guest experiences better for everyone by opening up the space for everyone. And I know I'm doing very basic social theory of disability here, but you know, it's that sort of sense where you know we forget the very spirit of accessibility and think about it as an obstacle rather than as an opening.

Joe Payne 42:03

Yeah. This brings me to something that I think a lot about in terms of like getting people to change the way they think about literacy, about all kinds of skills. And I'll I'll I'll kind of contextualize it for you. I am both a disability advocate, but I am I am old-fashioned in quotations about quote-unquote rigor, something that I think is very vague, but I do think you know, the only good quote that I have from George W. Bush, and there's only one, and it's the is the bigotry of of low expectations, which I actually do think is true. At the same time point, though, I've always thought that I would really appreciate not trying to norm this to a false statistic because people have a boner for quantitation when it's inappropriate. So I, you know, and I'll give you an example about this. I teach literacy, it would be way more, and I I do standards-based grading, blah blah blah. For those for those of my listeners who are most of them who have no idea about education, your eyes are free to graze over right now. But I still have to convert it into a number system, which we then convert into traditional grading score for what because one, because our equipment makes us literally like yeah, like it's literally like built into the very designs of, like, in my case, Canvas. Right, yeah, yeah. In fact, we I use Canvas too. Um, it's built into Canvas, it's built into our SMS on the back end of Canvas, it's built into the way we report to universities like yours. And yet, I'm like, so we talk a lot about great inflation, and my response is like on one hand, I do hate great inflation because it doesn't help anyone. On the other hand, we have stigmatized these frankly fake numbers that I mean that don't really, you know, meaning like every every basic educator is like, well, how do you know if a kid knows something versus when they just comply versus and I'm like, you don't, you don't, because we reported in the form of a number of an overall of an overall class. It makes no sense. I would much rather say what a student can and cannot do. Period. The reason why we don't do that, there's twofold. One, the computers don't like it. And two, it is a large amount of work for the amount of students the average teacher, even in universities now, you guys aren't exempt anymore.

SPEAKER_02 44:49

I teach six classes, I double adjunct, and I get about 230 to 250 students a semester.

Joe Payne 44:56

Yep. I teach about 400 students a year, which is oh my god. But I live in Utah. Just oh, that'll do it. Yeah. Yeah. We get paid a little bit by better than you guys in Florida, but uh but they ask a lot of us. But my point, my my point about this is not, you know, even slagging only systems, like there's no way for me to do a proper narrative transcript for every student that I see in this system, even though you know, if I was designing a system that actually took these kids' abilities at hand, that's what I would do. I wouldn't even necessarily say what they couldn't do, I would just be vouching pretty rigorously about what they could. And I've thought about this as a way to design and handle disability too, because because one of the things when you deal with disabled, you know, I I have a learning disability. We talk about dyslexia. I have some very specific learning disabilities that don't show up, you know, in my grades. They didn't even back then. It's just like, oh, you can't spell to save your life. And you weed, you read strangely. And if I ask you to read out loud, you're gonna say you're gonna change the word, like, but didn't necessarily affect my ability to answer, like, particularly since I went to school in the 80s and 90s before the IDEA revision. Um, I could just, you know, fake it assertively. You wouldn't, I mean, my teachers wouldn't even know if I was literate or not, frankly. Because I could pick it up from listening. And I bring that up because I think it is almost a way we have to think about entire societies like that. If you're gonna deal with society that incentivize people to be the absolute best they can be, all right, which is one of the things I want to do. Is like if I had a social society, that would be one of our our goals. At the same time, I also want it to be as inclusive as can be and realize that people do not have carbon copy needs, and thus to incentivize everyone to be the best they can be, I have to figure out ways to incentivize everybody to have the accommodations that they need, the scaffolding that they need, and ways to assess that. How could we start to think you know in that direction as a society? Like if you're talking to like your you know average leftist utopian, or even you know, hard-bitten cynical Marxists like myself, right? How do you can how do you convince us to change the way we think about this to both hit this this you know optimization of people on their own terms while also meeting them where they're at?

SPEAKER_02 47:49

Yeah, I I mean I think you almost like hit kind of the the nail on the coffin on how many disability advocates would speak about this, because I think many disability advocates are very Rawls-in about these ideas, right? You know, as much as John Rawls, you know, gets put into liberal theory, which is obviously extremely accurate, let's be real. He's also a crypto social democrat at the end of the day, right? That just won't admit to being one. And yeah, a lot of the answers so far are crypto social democratic if you're a liberal and just straight up social democratic. It's like, oh, well, we need to focus on equity, right? Like we need to make sure that everyone has access to these spaces, knowing that not everyone's

Rigor Versus Grades And Thriving

SPEAKER_02 48:33

gonna do equally well in these spaces. And, you know, while not the worst theoretical answer, a lot of the data shows, right? There's not a lot of research on it, but the limited data that we have is that social democratic politics and policies, right, do provide like goods and resources for individuals who have disabilities, but don't necessarily improve access, which might sound quite strange. But what we have in these sort of Rawlsian ways of thinking are these things that, like, okay, if we're more Rawlsian, people who are disabled have more of their needs taken care of, right? Like more of just the you know, the physical, bodily, medical needs taken care of, but it doesn't improve access to spaces. And so one of the kind of you know, struggles, you know, at hand, right, is that sort of sense of okay, right, how then, right, do we actually allow individuals to live independently as much as is possible, right? This is a big conversation that happens with learning disabilities, mobility, you know, disabilities. And really, you know, the the sort of answer there is a largely infrastructural one, right? And I mean infrastructure, not just in regards to like, you know, physical spaces, right? Like making sure, you know, there's you know, level crossings, right? Like I mean the very like infrastructure of you know classrooms, the very infrastructure of, you know, you know, uh web spaces, right, is actually made it so that someone can confront something on their own terms and that you can actually see that you know assignments and work are not just based upon, you know, copying someone else, but actually yield out one's own experience in the world. Because if you really want to figure out how someone understands something, right, you show them how it can be applied in real life. My go-to example of this, right, is that Socrates' example, as imperfect as it is, where he shows the slave boy, you know, the the the you know how a triangle works. And, you know, as silly as that example is, you know, in in the sense of that, like, you know, how often are we trying to draw perfect triangles? What it does show is that oftentimes our disability thinking is thinking in terms of, you know, like mitigation of suffering, right? It gets too Singarian, which again is horrible because Singer is a eugenicist regarding disability, right? So we apply a you know a utilitarian or Rawlsian style of thinking onto disability, how to ease the suffering, and we don't think about these senses of thriving, right? And not everyone's going to thrive at the exact same things. The the imperfect example I like to use in class, like we're all unable to do things. And I joke with my students of like, hey, do you think I'm gonna dunk on LeBron James? And you know, all of my students, you know, obviously say, no, like you're not doing it, bro. You're not dunking on LeBron James. And so I think a lot of our, you know, educational systems as they exist, a lot of our social systems exist as if we're all going to fit the same expectations within certain rooms, but like we logically know that, like, hey, different people are gonna have different successes in different places. One last example I want to bring up before passing it to you. My partner was someone who applied for the uh nursing magnet program at a local magnet school here in South Florida, Robert Morgan. And she was ultimately rejected from the nursing program, right? Because they're like, look, you physically can't reach certain shelves. Like you physically can't move through the hospital given that you're in a chair. Like they had to be, you know, honest with her, right? And she could have taken that as been like, I can't be a caretaker in general, right? There were these physical limitations. There, there it you know, there had to be a realism around that given the way things are designed. But right, seeing that sort of spirit of wanting to take care, right, trying to guide people towards doing the more essential things for themselves. And that's a lot more abstract, it's a lot more theoretical and takes a lot more of a personal understanding around education rather than a you know, fill in the blanks. Did you know exactly what the teacher was talking about? Form of like education and thinking about, you know, moving forward in society, right? Like seeing like this person wants to take care of people, how can they be a caretaker in spite? This person, you know, you know, truly has you know the acumen for literacy, but they have you know this literary issue, right? How do we, you know, you know, make sure that one is not a complete blockage upon the other? How do we make sure that you know certain skills can thrive despite limitations? And this is true for you know everyone, you know, it just comes to different degrees when we're talking about you know disability as a very general thing.

Joe Payne 53:57

Hmm. I guess this leads me to certain things that I have struggled with, particularly when talking with disability advocates, but also with you know, I move in in socialist spaces, I move in um some pretty far, far, far left socialist spaces, even. And I would say disability is an area in which we are simultaneously very good and very bad. We often realize it's an issue in a way that you don't that a lot of people don't. We often also ignore the perception, and you sent me an article actually about this, that I think it was by let's say is it Pew? No, let's diet it for progress. That most people don't think disability uh matters to the general public, even if it cares for the individually, and that's actually not completely true. It does seem to kind of matter to the individual to the general public, depending on how you frame it, but that's true for most things, yeah. Um most people still don't believe that it matters to the general public. I I was I was thinking about this, you know, because think about like, for example, I am not hearing impaired at all. It's one of the one of the senses that I don't have a problem with. And yet I am so grateful for closed captioning. Like, I try to make sure that you know, I use software to try to make sure I can provide decent closed captioning to my own videos now and not just uh weird random crap that YouTube generates. And I also know if you have to do it manually, how incredibly hard work it is because I did it for one summer for my own classes and almost went insane. So I think that's like one of the obvious things, you know. The everyone also binds up, well, you know, now the sidewalks have ramps on and off that everyone uses, including the non-disabled. But you know, thinking about these things in socialist and communist circles is actually a little bit hard to get people to do when they are advocating or even dealing with the way we handle this or that. I mean, there's yeah, I think about the utter shit storm about the DSA 2019 convention where like people were were snapping as opposed to clapping, which I'm like, everything about this is a mischaracterization of of what we should care about as to say. Well, advocates. I'm not I'm not going against essentially you know, the people with sensory needs. That's not my point. It's just the entire discourse on the left about this was like, have we asked anyone what they need instead of debating about whether or not it's too woke to snap or not? Like this whole debate feels dumb. Uh to use uh also a problematic word when I actually think about it. So, how do we, you know, how do we get people to change their framework about this? Because I I I really do think if you change your framework about this, I you change your framework about uh like downstream and other things. So, for example, everything I do for people with literacy-based disabilities is awful is also helpful for MLs, which is also helpful for people with low reading skills who are not disabled, but just maybe come from social, low social economic backgrounds, is also helpful for very high-end readers if I'm using it to moderate scaffolding for them. Like I have to I have to guide people in different ways on how we're going to take advantage of the approach or of the accommodation that I'm giving to everyone or whatever, but it does benefit more groups than initially thought. Whereas these flashpoint kind of frankly cultural issues around things like linguistic justice or are showing proper respect are not even as ubiquitous in the communities themselves because we're not asking for them, we're just assuming that's what they want. I wanted to you know get your thought about like what are the things we need to as leftist, you know, not just as general public, start thinking about when we approach this. Because, like I said, we do we do at least know that this matters, you know, which is maybe maybe is not what the general public perceives about most fields of politics, but we we don't really uh address it, I think, any better than any other segment of society.

SPEAKER_02 58:55

Yeah. So I think it begins with that, like we as quote-unquote leftists, right? And and we're different spectrums of leftists, right? You're you know, a Marxist, I'm a social democrat very openly so, right? But it's like we don't represent disability, right? And we're not here to tell like disabled people what they want or need, right? Like the the too often the relationship is like, oh, like, you know, we got this for you, we got this for you, when it should be the other way around. I think left-wing politics has a lot to learn from disability studies. And it's almost surprising because one of the most famous statements in you know, of Marx is, you know, from each according to his ability, from each according to his need, right? Seems like the most like, you know, die hard

Left Politics And Disability Studies

SPEAKER_02 59:42

anthem of like, hey, make a world for everyone. And in that sort of sense, right, you do, you know, hit the nail on the head of something called multimodality, right? Like the more modes that something offers, the more people can get into it and the more people can absorb from it. You know, I also use closed captions also in my class, right? Like I'll use the elevator and closed captions as examples of tools that we think in association with disability, even if they didn't originally stem from disability, right? Elevators because of skyscrapers, closed captions because of silent films, but you know, then realizing later that it could assist with deafness and hearing impairments. But the sense of like the best thing that we can do, like from the left, is actually not just try to be like, hey, look at how these left-wing policies will benefit disabled people. That's what the social democrats have been doing and having, you know, not accessible success, but medical success, right? Like resource success. And that's helpful. That does make individuals' lives with disabilities better, better health insurance, better food access, of course. But there is still that alienation, right, as a result of how the world is structured. And so there is too much, I think, of like this imposition and too much of like, hey, you should join us, where instead, like, hey, right, like left-wing thinkers need to draw from disability studies more so. And, you know, we can see right the real like lack of this in content creation online, right? A lot of left-wing content creation is about a bunch of very, very, very important issues, right? But there's really only one major person, at least that I know and can think of. If there's others, please share. But it really is kind of punished Felix on an island on his own as a you know left-wing, you know, content creator thinking about disability. And so it's that sort of sense though, right? One of the things that he you know does, right, is that he is drawing from Katari, he's drawing, you know, from disability, you know, scholarship, from video game design, and thinking about how these sorts of things, right, how these sorts of you know thinkers and you know, UI designers, right, can actually improve our sort of social systems, our sort of social understandings, right? And you know, instead of this imposition of left-wing ideas on disability communities, that the left can be improved by multivodality, by actually having conversations with you know disabled individuals, you know, as opposed to saying, oh, well, like this will help with hearing sensitivities. Yes, like it will, it does, but you know, was that had in like an actual real conversation? And like, you know, that DSA clip is, you know, infamous, right? But it's that sort of you know thing at the end of the day, right? No one's going to succeed everywhere, right? I mean, you know, I'm not someone who's a personal uh stickler on language because you know, I, you know, I I know we're going to, you know, fall short, right? And for me, what's more important than falling short, you know, culturally, is right, falling short everywhere, right? And I think if you you know aren't investing energy into you know openness, if you aren't investing, you know, energy into actually allowing multiple people, you know, to come into something, right, you know, and instead think in terms of like negatory terms, right, you're going to shrink that circle. And really what you know, individuals who are disabled face, or at least report themselves saying, I should, you know, say, right, often experiencing the world as an obstacle, experiencing a world that's not built for them. And if you know, you are left-wing utopian, if you are, you know, a luxury communist, if you are a stateless, classless, moneyless society individual, right, even if you're a social democrat, right, like preventing the world from being an obstacle benefits everyone. And I think disability scholarship, you know, does something better than any other scholarship to show the many ways in which the world can be an obstacle. Not that like, you know, labor abuses, you know, don't create obstacles, not that race doesn't create an obstacle, not that faith doesn't create an obstacle, right? But you know, what these types of thinkers, you know, often don't get down to is the very physical obstacle, right? Obstacle in that sort of like speed bump sense, right? And that's something we may fail to often think about in the left, the the how not only the cultural changes that need to happen, the labor changes, financial changes that may need to happen in left-wing thinking, but the literal changes to our physical and you know digital spaces.

Joe Payne 1:04:50

That's I think that's very crucial, and we have to think about that also in like how we campaign, what we ask people to do, how we handle it. I mean, you know, one thing in social democratic world, and you know, I I deal with that world from two ends. I'm both a union rep as related to my day job, and I am tangentially part of a socialist organization. Say tangentially, because I don't always do that much with them, but I do think that there's been a lot of you know, people like, well, how do we recruit, you know, more people of color? Let's let's have so many in the leadership, let's have a certain percentage of the leadership. How let's do progress progressive stack, and and and I I actually those things I think are right-headed in some degree about what they are trying to address. I I don't know they actually always work, and I also think I've seen scenarios with like quotas of leadership where we literally throw people into leadership before they're ready to meet the quota, and then they get burnt out, and you're just actually putting the most work on the some of the most disadvantaged populations in your in your organization. But so I do think we have to think about this as to like how we get people in there, and I've been thinking about this in dialogic terms of you know, Bactinian dialogic terms, like what is the various weights that people are coming to that we need to incorporate? What's behind everything we're assuming, and where is it all coming from? And how do we like try to hear all the things in that all. The time I think that leads to multimodality, which I think is actually really important, but I also think it leads to a better sociological understanding than just trying to do it by like like rote demographics or mere representation. Because the other thing that I think a lot about is the way in which, like, for example, in something like the autism spectrum, people on the lesser needs of the part of that spectrum are going to be more able to advocate and are generally going to speak for everybody. And often they're not that much better than the general public for people who have different needs sets than them. Of course, there is more relationship, you know, you know, just like anyone with any kind of neurological concerns is our non-normative uh mental experience is going to have, you know, some understanding of what someone on the spectrum is going to deal with. But I can't, you know, just because I might have a mental disability doesn't mean that I understand other mental disabilities. And let's be frank, just because I have a specific mental disability, say autism, aphasia, and doesn't mean that I can speak for someone with aphasia so bad that they can't talk. Like it's a very different experience of the world. And I think trying to get people to be more inclusive about that is kind of a political action that's hard to get people to do, but would make them better at their politics on a like not just on this issue. Because, you know, I I know there might be theoretical issues with code switchings these days, but I have to code switch all the time with who I'm talking about, even in left-wing circles, like when I'm talking to very specific left-wing subcultures, like I don't know, very specific, like anti-imperial Maoist. I'm gonna speak differently than when I'm talking to anybody that I don't know their background in the DSA, and I'm gonna speak to both differently than when I am talking to rural school teachers in the union and who are talking to me, and I am in urban Utah, and they're in rural Utah. I switch code, and I don't know that I mean I would say leftists are often particularly bad at this because we often insist not just on things like disability, but that people speak our code. Like it is almost a con. And I find this very, very frustrating that people like put so much into that versus I don't know how do I meet these needs right now? How do I get these people on board? And I think maybe as a way to pivot this and talk about how you would build positive politics here, how do I get their voice in the voices of what we're doing in a real way, and not even just in a representative way? Like, how do I incorporate them? And I wanted to ask you like, where do you think we've seen success and failure with incorporation, real incorporation, not just representation or assuming or accommodating from an outside standpoint, et cetera, et cetera?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:11

So, I mean, uh to start off, right? I think real success comes from that more spectral thinking, right? Like that realization, like we talk about autism, spectrum disorder, right? Like, and and yes, there is the spectrum there, but all disabilities on a spectrum. Mobility is on a spectrum, vision is on a spectrum, hearing is on a spectrum. And that might sound like a weird place to start with success, but really a lot of these uh successes are you know paying attention, at least, you know, for me, on these like individual bases, right? And it's not to say that, like, oh, you know, to be, you know, overly neoliberal about this and success is only found in like individuals being able to succeed. And

Mutual Aid And Shared Power

SPEAKER_02 1:10:57

it's not even to go social democratic and that, you know, success is making sure you have the equitable base where everyone can, you know, reach a certain height. This is more so to say that you have to set up policy, you have to set up spaces that attract individuals who have disabilities because they are attracted by knowing that you have created a space that fits for them. If you really want a shining, you know, example, it would be Lavorde under Gatari, right? His form of you know being the therapist with the patients, right? Not above the patients, right? Not being hierarchical on these matters creates success, right? Being the type of person, right, that, you know, would provide, you know, you know, goods and resources, even if they didn't follow a sort of like, you know, labor logic, right? These sort of things of like, hey, right, you're interested in having a bike, but you don't show up to meetings very often. Well, maybe if I gave you a bike, you would show up to meetings more, right? This is an actual example. And so it's these little things where I would say the most success in these spaces really comes from a sense of like, not like a government program, right, but comes from these senses of mutual aid within and outside of typical modes of production, right? That sort of sense where people actually have these conversations and find ways that they can mutually provide for one another. Because it can be very easy, right, to then be like, okay, we have this policy that's going to count for all individuals who are disabled, the ADA. And that's a good policy. And we should definitely have, you know, you know, a more focused digital ADA, right? We should have, you know, better enforcement. Of course, better policy is helpful. And I have bias towards this as a social democrat, but it's also that sort of thing of right, like, you know, mutual aid, right? And systems that allow for mutual aid create a lot of success because they create these, you know, sort of, you know, spaces that are both accessible, allow for independence, but where others can account for others is weakness. And it's not to say that, okay, let's live on communes and stuff. No, no, no, no, no. That's not necessarily even the point here, right? The success here is when you actually work with people, right? Actually take individuals from wherever they land on whatever spectrum and go, all right, you know, we have these systems, we have these institutions, right? We have all these sorts of you know options, right? How can you participate in X, Y, or Z system? And how can said person, you know, make it better for you to participate in these sorts of systems, right? And I really, you know, you know, would say here that yes, I am stretching mutual aid, you know, beyond its like Kropotkin sort of points, but it's that sort of sense, right? Like in order to even get to like the Kropotkin point of mutual aid, well, you have to practice mutual aid within existent institutions, be they capitalist, non-governmental, private, you know, public, etc. of the sort, actually practice these sorts of things and encourage these sort of senses of individuals actually working, you know, with each other, actually helping in you know improve one's skills and right, also create these sort of you know access points for individuals, right? Even if you cannot change how an entire school operates, or you can't change how an entire neighborhood operates, right? At least be that point of access and provision yourself. That's where I've seen the most success, right? And you know, to to, you know, while it's it's not necessarily a hard, you know, example, you know, per se, minus L'aborde, right? I think one of the things that I one of the reasons I should say I don't have more examples, because you know, I don't think there are many more examples or many people, you know, emphasizing the very direct relationship that care for disability is not just a one-way street, like here, we care for you, but creating the spaces where individuals who have disabilities care for everyone else can actually shine in those abilities if they have them, right? Like, you know, obviously don't want to universalize once again, but allow that sort of two-way mutual participation. And too many of our, you know, systems, right, you know, are assuming an otherness, right? You know, at you know, one level or go all the way to eugenics, right? And in these sorts of things, always assume that like the other is something distant from us that cannot participate in our systems, be they capitalist, NGO, social democratic, Marxist, whatever they may be. And I think that, while very you know, abstract, right, is really, I think, the the place that things you know need to start.

Joe Payne 1:16:04

I mean, that gets me thinking about you know, mutual aid and also you know, community cohesion, uh, political subject cohesion, even. And it does take me about something I pull from classical Marxism, is the point isn't just better policies, it is to empower the workers to run things. And why are we doing that? It's not just because they're workers, because on some level, if you're not a worker, who cares? The reason why you did that is there's a structural logic to believe that workers can reproduce society and the SaaS people who could reproduce society, they are not invested in maintaining those kinds of social distinctions forever, although there are a few that they've uh historically have been proven to be invested in race, gender, uh probably ability. But you know, teasing that out, we should have the same attitude towards most of these other areas. People need to be incorporated and part of the people making decisions of their own lives, they don't need to be made it for them, even as good policy. I mean, uh nothing wrong with good policy, like I'm not one of those, you know, ultra-obstentious Marxists who say, like, you know, since Medicare for all doesn't meet my pure definition of socialism, we shouldn't do it because it would distract from socialism or whatever. I think that's ludicrous. Um, but I I do think that we have to think about that when we're thinking about incorporation, and I think about this a lot because for all of you know, I don't want to pretend that Marx was like really good on disability or whatever, but there's some other parts of the critique of the Girth of Program where that quote uh from Mark, well, that quote with Marx is quoting from a French guy who's quoting it from someone else, quoting for, but anyway, is from to get you know, because the goal for Marx is from each to their uh from each from their own ability to each their own needs, and also the reason why you can't give the workers back everything that they put into the system is twofold. One, you have to reinvest, but two you would be condemning those who do not work to death. And Marx does seem to realize that that would be a problem because he knows that not everyone can work, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:33

Not everyone can care to the same degree, and I think that's something like even in my own spiel, like maybe I didn't emphasize enough, but that is you know an important necessity to add for sure, right? Like one's ability to participate in a system may not be equal to everybody else's, right?

Joe Payne 1:18:51

And even then, when we say like work and labor, I do think the incapacitated, the disabled, you know, whatever we're gonna call this broad category of people who are outside of physical and mental norms. Almost everyone then could contribute meaningful labor. What that looks like if it's social reproduction labor, whatever, like they all do somewhere. I mean, if it's care labor, even if you know, like there's all kinds like I've never met a person who interacted with other people who didn't contribute to the overall society in some way.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:28

Yeah, because I thought for a second we were going the route of like valuing disability for labor. And I'm like, okay, this is not what's happening, right? Like, ah, right, because you know, that would like accidentally defeat the purpose. But yeah, no, like by by by that sense of mutual care, like I mean, as corny as it is, right? Like, you know, just being, you know, there for someone, being someone who can have a conversation, that's a valuable thing, right? Like, what like for me, you know, one of the my favorite things to do is just to banter. I just love to banter, right? So, and if that to me, that's like socially valuable, that's life enriching. And so, you know, you know, while it may not have a a price tag on it by any means, yeah, like, you know, why is that alone not valuable? Why is that alone not an experience that should not only be you know protected, but also seen as an experience that you know provides just by the sheer fact of you being a person that you know is good to others, right? As nebulous as I'm saying that, like that in and itself is you know a valuable contribution and an immeasurably, you know, difficult one to even like measure. Like, how do you measure the value of a good you know conversation?

Joe Payne 1:20:42

Yeah, I mean I think about this when we talk when we talk about labor, because I get one of my points is not, you know, I'm not such an old an ultra-leftist who believes that everything's gonna be play, but I do think that we should think about labor as things that contribute to the both the reproduction and both socially and physically of society itself, and that includes you know shit that makes commodities that people use, but it also includes anything that is that is socially maintaining things altogether, and humans are social beings, therefore, you know, if someone is not totally shut off from their general human function, they will be social in some way. I mean, even schizotypical people are still in some way social. So I think, you know, no, I don't want to have to disable like this like milling away in a workshop somewhere where we where we figure out how to use them better, but I do think we need to we need to think about what the fatality of labor is, and that does include all kinds of unpleasant things, but it also includes things that are not just that, and I I wonder if we started shifting our conceptions there, if it would help us understand and think about social contributions in a way where we we would more actively see the see all kinds of individuals as being able to contribute to the collective good and management of society in their own lives. And I think that's really vital, and I think disability is kind of unique in the way it gets everyone to think about that and both the limits and what that might mean, because the problems associated with some of the other categories can seem voluntary or abstract. Whereas with disability, like you can physically see immediately in some cases, although not all, as we talked about in the beginning.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:01

Yeah, there's plenty like there's you know mental disability and like obviously like you know, mental health again, depending on how certain thinkers categorize that in the broader camp of disability. But yeah, no, and I think you know, in that sort of you know, sense also, right? One of the things, you know, that that you know you're definitely you know alluding to is this sort of regard, right, that you know, Marx is a very economic thinker, obviously, right? At least most uh stereotypically, right? Obviously, he gets you know beyond this in plenty of other texts. And you know, one's life value is obviously not just economics, just obviously like the big you know cultural shifts in Marxist thought, right? Not just from himself, but just you know, from you know preceding uh thinkers. And you know, in this sort of sense, right, given going way back to the beginning, right, given that we're in a very much like economic mode of concern right now, right? Given you know dynamic pricing, right, given inflation, right, given how war increases prices, right, the concerns are very like that material, you know, monetary at the moment. And when things are of material monetary concern, right, a lot of times like this is a lot of the start of you know, eugenic style thinking, where individuals get seen as right being you know a waste, right? Get seen as not being able to contribute because we only value certain forms of labor, of existence within society. And and the question here is that sense that you point to, like, what do we want our society to produce? At the same time, right, we don't want just a society, and I think as Brianna Albers points to, where individuals who are disabled become some sense of like inspiration porn, as she exactly words it, right? This sort of sense, right, of you know, allowing people as much as is possible, you know, to exist on their own terms. And no one's fully independent, right? No one's fully, you know, an island on to themselves. And really, right, the the you know concerns you know that are had here, right, is that I really think that not getting these things right is not just a concern, you know, about you know, disability, but the way that we you know treat one segment of society, right, not to create a slippery slope argument per se, but right when we make justifications in one area, right, these justifications can be translated on to other areas of life, right? These justifications around closing off one group can allow for closing off of others. And it's not to say that, like, oh, it's this group first or that group, you know, sort of second, but you know, what we really end you know doing by not examining disability studies, right? We don't even pay attention to the other ways in which we close ourselves off, right? As much as people are annoyed by Al Tuzair, right? His sort of thinking is, hey, look at how we close ourselves off here, right? You know, in Marx's thinking, right, is look how much we close ourselves off through our economic mode of thinking, at least most famously. And so how are we, you know, closing off our physical stages, our digital spaces, our educational spaces, our expectation spaces by, you know, the ways in which we, you know, normatively live. It's not only just about how we cut off others, even if that is the most important thing, right? It's also how we are cutting off ourselves and our own abilities to increase our own possibilities.

Joe Payne 1:26:56

I think that's a good point to start wrapping up on. I I've really enjoyed this conversation, actually. I did too quite a bit. And I'm glad we we brought it up. So uh I would like my my audience and maybe myself to know where we can find more of your work.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:16

Yeah, I mean, I just always say Google my full name, Anthony David Vernon. I always say, I have an email. Feel free to email me about stuff, agreements, disagreements, whatever. I try to be very just open to people. And my work is so all over the place, but you know, it's that sort of thing. Like if you find my website, you'll find, you know, anything from like an essay on like Quelbe music all the way to like the beats

Where To Find Anthony’s Work

SPEAKER_02 1:27:42

I've made to just just just all sorts of random stuff out there. I like to just create and do. And so, you know, hopefully there's something within my work if anyone's interested in it that you know is of you know interest to them. But yeah, Google my full name, you know, maybe you'll find something. And you know, I like to engage in conversation and like you know, hopefully get corrected on things, learn things, pick up things, and you know, hopefully collaborate with others, just like this lovely uh collaborative conversation that I've had. And thank you for allowing me on your show. It's been beyond a pleasure.

Joe Payne 1:28:20

Yeah, it's it's I've really enjoyed it. Thank you, and people should look up your name. I'll put some of the the data sources that we uh referenced today in the show notes under links, and I'll put actually some of what we didn't reference so that people can read it if they want to. And I will make sure that your website is available. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much, also.