The cure for writer's block is...writing

[valarltd]

I've been writing at a prodigious rate, between 2000 and 4000 words a day. My hands hurt all the time.
But I'm not moping around, complaining I am blocked or can't figure out what to write.

And lately, new ideas are cropping up

I submitted a proposal for an Alternate Sherlock Holmes anthology. (Holmes as a woman, Holmes in the Renaissance, whatever floats your boat)

And two stories have caught my eye on the news.

It's The Mirror, so take it with all the seriousness of Weekly World News.
Retired US Marine claims he spent 17 years on Mars protecting five human colonies from Martians.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/secret-alien-base-mars-marine-3745652

That would be a GREAT story.

India declares dolphins to be non-human persons.

In my topsy-turvey mind, that got me thinking about human non-persons. What would a world be like if the profoundly retarded (those who never advance past mental infancy) were classed as "human non-persons"? They would be considered human, so they could not be abused or murdered or harmed. But they would not be people, citizens, with rights and responsibilities. What other groups would be conveniently classified that way?
(I have inklings of it in my space-opera universe, where slavery is still a thing and there is a "livestock, sentient," department in most bureaucratic buildings)

Comments

[elliemurasaki.livejournal.com]

The horrifying part is that the "could not be abused, murdered, or harmed" would, for many of the disabled people to whom you refer (using, by the way, a slur; please refrain from use of the R word in future), be an improvement. Ditto for many autistic people.