alt Hacker NewsNo, deafness and blindness are disabling because they provide critical long range data. Being able to see is essentially a superpower if you are blind. Same with hearing.
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Meh, my formidable powers of foresight aren't really a superpower. Few people listen until things have progressed far enough that they see the things, too, by which point there are rarely many interventions available. And every time we do intervene early, that's "you said this would happen and it didn't happen!", making it harder to convince people the next time. And when things do turn out more-or-less as predicted, I "made a lucky guess" because "there was no way you could have known that".
In the land of the blind, why would anyone pay attention to this weirdo's ramblings about "rain-clouds"? Obviously they're just feeling changes to temperature, pressure, and humidity. Oh, and they know what shapes things are? Wow! So does everyone else who's touched the things. Sure, that "how many fingers am I holding up?" party trick is pretty neat (probably cold reading), but not something we should make policy decisions on the basis of.
You underestimate the extent to which humans are social creatures. See also: H. G. Wells's story The Country of the Blind. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind
Only in that narrow viewpoint. Most people talk about disability in the context of a society because much of what we encounter in our day to day is created by other people. The sights, sounds, smells, and experiences in our world are frequently because of others. So in that context, if the dominant culture makes it a point to create experiences that require hearing or sight to consume, then yes it's a disability. But if we adapt some or all of what we do for people who don't have those senses, then we can make it less disabling.
Maybe, but that isn't really what the GP post is talking about. At the level of mythology, the eye-earth is place where people of that group belong without judgment or limitation. No different from Harry Potter or Narnia or any other fantasy place one might imagine going where they can be with their people.
In any case, I'm not sure this even survives transposing to other senses that humans are weak in, such as smell (like prey animals) or magnetic direction (like migratory birds). A human who randomly had these would indeed be seen as superpowered, but that wouldn't become a statement that all regularly-abled humans are now disabled for missing the "critical" long range sense.