The Dino-Aspie Ex-Café (for Those 40+... or feeling creaky)

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Okay, show of hands, who has read Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman? Young, idealistic English teacher takes job at inner-city New York high school. Frustrations, laughter, and enlightenment ensue; everyone learns valuable lessons; blah-dee blah-dee blah.

Remember how Sylvia, in a radical move, puts a suggestion box into the classroom and invites her students to comment anonymously? And she gets all these scary letters from some entity who styles himself "The Hawk"? And after a whole year of threats and menace, "The Hawk" reveals himself to be the timid little kid who sits in the corner by himself and never speaks to anyone?

The Internet, for better or worse, has allowed many unobtrusive, inoffensive-seeming people to unleash their inner Hawk. There's little difference between Sylvia's suggestion box and yer average discussion forum on the Web, except that the Web is faster, and more people are involved.

So here we have this discussion thread on Autism Speaks. It starts off as a warning to members of that forum that one or two "well-intentioned but misguided young people", said to be members of Wrong Planet, are posing as parents and stirring up trouble on the Autism Speaks boards. Several people who haven't put much study into the matter, but who know that they don't like WP, throw in their two bob's worth. And less than 32 hours later, there is already dire talk of civil unrest, insurrection and bloodshed, and the following priceless gem:

I sit here at my keyboard, a middle-aged mum and certainly no threat to world order, and I have to laugh at the utter absurdity of it all.

I read the whole AS thread over there yesterday, and when I got to pezars post the only thing that ran thru my mind was

"You always accuse others of what your guilty of yourself."

And I remember reading "Up the Down Staircase" when I was young, but had forgotten all about it until you mentioned it just now SD.

And Lau your ability w/ "stats" astounds me. Am currently watching a course on "Probabilitys: taught by Prof M. Starbird at U of Texas, (also one on"Consciousness and its Implications: taught by Prof D. Robinson Oxford, it had a lecture on "Autism" also) anyhow I digress... Lau, you should be teaching the one on stats, the way you say it makes it much easier for me to understand.
OOooooI wondered just now if its eaiser for me to comprehend because it's the "printed word" No, I think its how Lau describes it all.

oooh, what is going on ?
someone bother to update me?
(not with 20pages though please )

Hi Lemon....synopsis....

There was a link pote by Semelina about Autism Speaks making an "offer" to have someone post more positive images of autism on their web site to create some balance.

Yesterday,I decided to go to their site because I was suspicious of their motives and wanted to know their site better, having only read other WP posts about how much they suck.

In the process I saw a thread about "Warning WP posters coming here possing as parents and giving bad advice"

I posted the 8 pages here, nausiating many in the cafe( )...

The thread posted in Autism Speaks was very insulting to WP and HFA in general but did have several level headed posters offering us support(some of them self identified as being on the spectrum.)





I believe the poster mentioned saying we are dangerious and don't take our meds WAS talking from experience. I maybe confusing him with another poster but I believe he mentioned that he himself had been homosidal and might habe become a "school shooter" if he hadn't been put on meds....it was interesting seeing the shift in "support" as one of the most anti-WPers began defending us and even suggested that maybe he was a troll trying to trick her into supporting WP by being more crazy then us

From my perspective...I went from being angry at the thread to being amused in some ways. Once they degressed to how "dangerious we were"...their own paranoia and stupidity just could not be over looked. If anything, these crazy people just help push other possible "converts" away from the site.

i remember something about alex and autism speaks, but do not really remember it so clearly?

who are these members of 'autism speaks' ? autists or parents of people on the autism spectrum?
maybe they do not have administrators to have peace on their site?

it all sounds kind of odd (inviting people from here and then depict them like you say )
and not good as an image for wp, i thought we were peaceful.

Yes, in high school I was depressed and angry, and even had violent fantasies regarding my so-called "peers". Why didn't I snap, and shoot up the school?

Because I'm not actually bugfrak insane.

AS has no bearing on one's degree of sanity - in either the psychological or legal sense. In fact, I'd wager we run saner than average, since most of us are so bad at lying to ourselves about the nature of external reality. (Not all of us, by any means - I've been involved recently in a theological discussion with a couple of people who don't seem to be able to differentiate between internal and external reality - but most of us.)

We are discussing "Autism Speaks" as if the word speak can be assigned to verbal flatulence...

Anything else they do on that forum besides plot to turn that puzzle piece into the next yellow Star of David?

That's exactly what I was thinking this afternoon after reading a few threads at AS. They aren't going to cure autism anymore than they are going to cure any other genetic condition or state. Reading some of the posts over there, I almost got the feeling that some of the members, in the event of no cure, would support eugenics.

That is scary!

Scary indeed....Eugenics is one end of it, Euthanasia is the other.

Quit being funny Richie...your going to dispell the mythe that aspies have no sense of humor...oh,I guess that has already been done in the cafe about 1,000X's....You guys eep this up and they are goning to have to rewrite all those expert books.(though it is so much more convenient to just say...You are not aspie BECAUSE you have a sense of humor...that is the kind of rigerous scientific logic that I LOVE.

Why take all the time and energy to kill us when they can just ignore us and deny us services long enough that we end up doing it ourselves...I almost helped them with that goal at 17...little do they know about our equally preservation tendencies.


I just noticed on our front page that one of our advocates..writtn several books to assest aspergers individuals.....but whom I had never heard about before...had commited suicide. Does anyone know about this individual or read her books?



http://www.wrongplanet.net/article360.html

I feel very uncomfortable about the whole idea. Some seem that extreme but I suppose there are always extremists.

My favourite part of the "There's a fungus among us!" thread on Autism Speaks is this:

Awesome, dude.


Yeah, it does seem a little excessive.

I've just been entertaining myself by identifying all the logical fallacies contained in that most informative thread. And wowie-zowie, they are all there. Argumentum ad antiquitatem. Argumentum ad hominem. Argumentum ad ignorantiam. Argumentum ad misericordiam ("appeal to pity"). Argumentum ad populum. Complex (i.e. "loaded") question. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc. And so on, and so on, and especially this crackin' tactic:



I cannot make myself believe that this sort of argumentation is being made purely out of stupidity, though I concede that it's possible.

What can I say, it beats cleaning the bathroom.



I've seen other references to her work. Agreed that her death is a tragic loss of an articulate spokesperson, and that she'll be missed.

oh, this is freaking annoying. my firefox has taken to locking up when i go to like cnn (and other websites). i deleted and reloaded it. no change. tried running it without skype running. same thing. deleted and installed an earlier version. same thing.

i.e. works fine (though i prefer firefox). this has been going on for about a week now and it's making me extremely cranky. anybody know anything strange in windows updates or firefox updates that happened recently that might cause this? literally stops responding and i have to go to task manager and boot it out of there.

i much prefer to do my "infiltrating" without bill gates, if at all possible.

I am computer moron but something that sounds similar was happening to me for most of the past year...after several tweaking attempts without success...I woke up a week ago and it appears to be fixed(perhaps I just passed it on to you )

I am thinking about starting a "computer horoscopes page" to explain such anomalies(planetary alignments) but not sure if it should be based on the date of purchase or the date computer was born????

Hope you get it sorted out.


About logic....I "can" think illogically at times but these AS folks really do take it to a whole new level. Actually I see a lot of poor logic in psychiatry and the whole AS DX(truth be told...and I usually do)

Might be fun for you to pull that apart as well ? I try and question at least one of their absurdities a day.