Do aspies generally dislike conservatives?

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The headline put out ASD spokespeople like Temple Grandin is that many ASD people are actually super-successful.

"Half of Silicon Valley has mild ASD"
https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/21/ ... ld-autism/

"NASA is a shelter for ASD people"

Temple Grandin herself had a movie made about how successful she became.

The message is that it's not a disability.

Diagnosed?
Cause people like to call anyone slightly odd aspies.

Autism is a disability.

People on the spectrum have poor social skills, but have amazing memory and storage capacity. Despite our wonderful memory, we have a hard time finding jobs. That is why autism is rightfully considered to be a disability.

Fortunately, we can use our vast knowledge to inform the public and start a revolution. That is the light in the darkness.

ASD is defined as a disability. If you're not disabled, you don't have an ASD.

Outliers like Temple Grandin prove absolutely nothing.

Well, you’re asking about party politics, so I’d say neither have a real solution.

I favor conservatism because of its reliance on common sense, as opposed to liberal elitism. Liberalism “sounds good,” is erudite and attractive to academics and pseudo-intellectuals, but I feel like it hinders real progress because it’s so prone to corruption. It feels good to say everyone is treated as equals, but once liberal and socialist ideals are put into action, what invariably happens is that we find “some people are more equal than others.” I feel that minorities and certain “protected classes” are exactly that: “more equal” than I am. Or so we are led to believe, anyway. The establishment of a permanent underclass of which I happen to be a part right along with protected classes and minorities has the effect of keeping the liberal elite in power. These people are hideously wealthy from money given to them, typically from academic institutions, labor unions, Wall Street, and regular joes who buy their books or send them donations.

So, no, I dislike what I see with liberalism and socialism.

I like capitalism because when it’s done right everyone has a chance. All you need is to simply want to do SOMETHING and then just go for it. Remember how I said we were homeless? We sold our house in the nick of time, took what we had in equity and purchased something reasonable, low tax area, basically squalor but it’s squalor that’s paid for. Paid off our vehicle note. Upgraded when our third baby came and paid CASH. Paid off all debts except student loans. Put our kids through Catholic school so they wouldn’t have to rot in public schools. This is Mississippi, trust me! You do NOT want public school in the Delta.

Capitalism encourages freedom. If you want to improve your circumstances, just do it. Don’t wait. Socialism creates dependence. Capitalism is about the individual and innovation. Socialism is about the collective and stifling creativity.

If we’d chosen dependence, socialism, liberalism, our kids would have to suffer through public schools where kids are undisciplined and bully kids who try to study and participate in class. We would be languishing in debt and struggling with the essentials. My wife once tried to get help with housing for us and was denied because she’s married, so our family would have been split up.

So yeah, maybe we live in poverty. But we are poor and FREE. Our bills are all paid in advance for a YEAR. We paid for our van in cash. We make lump-sum payments for school tuition at the beginning of the year. So when we get paid, all we have to worry about is where our next meal comes from. If we had to depend on programs, we’d still be stuck. Even though our income was painfully low for a while, we worked our way UP. And things just keep getting better. We don’t worry about bill collectors. But we do know welfare recipients who always have bill collectors on standby. It’s a bad place to be, and we know some of these people will never get out of it or have better lives.

A lot of times the success of those with disabilities depends on the resources and support structures available to them. Suppose you have two people who are amputees, however one only has one leg amputated and the other has both legs amputated. Suppose they both want to run a marathon but for whatever reason, the double amputee is able to obtain two prosthetic legs and the single amputee is not able to obtain one. Perhaps that reason is the double-amputee comes from a wealthier family. Perhaps that reason is the double-amputee qualifies for government benefits that allow them to get prosthetic legs that the single amputee does not. In any case the double-amputee was able to obtain resources necessary to run a marathon that the single amputee was not and despite the fact that the double amputee has a more significant physical disability than the single amputee, it's the double-amputee who is able to run the marathon.

Temple Grandin's parents, as far as I understand, put a lot of effort into working with her and providing an environment that fostered her development. Many children on the Spectrum from her generation weren't so lucky. Many children on the spectrum were either put into institutions where their brains and bodies were left to waste away, were treates as disciplinary problems and sent to abusive reform schools where some were killed, or had their troubles ignored entirely and were left entirely on their own.

On this forum, many members are able to articulate themselves in ways they cannot in real life. Some members are minimally verbal or non-verbal. Some are completely mind blind or face blind. Some have processing deficits, or impairments or differences in other aspects of neurological functioning. It's easy to forget that reading many of the posts here because here, people who struggle to interface with the world verbally or physically can better articulate themselves but the real world interface may be much different and I think that is important to keep in mind.

Last edited by Chronos on 12 Apr 2018, 7:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Did you forget our last conversation? Crime in England has gone through the roof in the past century, when it went from having no safety net at all, to the absurdly generous welfare state it is today.

^ This.

Only women with dependents get welfare. Criminals make their own money. They just do it with illegal s**t.
Republicans should praise the "gangsta"s. They're the epitome of alpha male rugged individualists. I think Paul Ryan's hero, Ayn Rand was herself was pretty fond of sociopaths.

The only difference is conservatives (and a few right-wing so-called Democrats) only like "legal" criminals, i.e. big pharma CEO's who blatantly abuse the patent system and price gouge to make billions off sick and dying people. They only reason the s**t they do is legal is because they buy the f*****g politicians. Who cares though. They're the heroes of capitalism. The true dominant alpha's of society.

They're all Parasites protected by the government violence. No better than mobsters. If some decent person with compassion says "f**k your patent" and decides to produces live saving medication for a fraction of the cost, government goons show up with guns and arrest the person. Most of capitalism's rackets are protected by government and politicians.

The problem is when you have a political system as corrupt as the one we have, one that praises sociopathic behavior in the name of "free markets", eventually the society is going to break down. They're playing with fire. People are going to get angrier and angrier. With the next stock market crash things may get really really ugly.

Expectorant....it's nice to know it's in there if I need to talk about cold medications but I suppose I should turn autocorrect off!

I was a leftist radical when I was young. When I saw what the Democratic party had become --the party of the elites, the smarmy and the smug -- -I became an independent. I have libertarian, and maybe populist leanings, but I'm definitely not a Republican.
I have notices that many Autism advocacy groups lump Aspies and Autistics in with 'the disabled" generally,
and because disabled persons are considered to be dependent on government assistance to survive, they are taught to hate Republicans who are presumed to be for paring down government subsidies-- although the facts don't really bear this out. Republican administrations help the poor as much as Democratic ones do --that is, not much, but enough to keep a lid on wider discontent. The government is the government and it does just as much as it has to, and no more, to keep control. I receive Food Stamps myself, and I am grateful for them, but I don't fool myself into thinking that it is a result of real compassion on the government's part.
To my mind, the real problem is --why are aspies considered disabled when they are merely different? Many aspies are extremely intelligent and talented in their areas of special interest. What aspies really need is an environment that allows them to thrive, and the government will never create one. It has to be other aspies or, dare I say it, philanthropic interests. The government may give you enough money to survive (barely) but most aspies will never be happy living that way. We don't just need fish, but we need to learn how to fish.

Any Rand is muh GIRL!

I wouldn’t get along with objectivists if I had to be in the same room with them all day. They are completely lost on Christianity. Their hatred for religion stems from the false assumption that Christianity by necessity is collectivist, altruistic, and stagnant. Various strands of Christianity have been a hindrance to innovation for the exact reasons the objectivists have stated. However, Randians have outright ignored, for instance, the contributions of Jesuits to the development of a rigorous scientific method. Further, Christianity as a whole is dynamic. So when it comes to faith and the role of faith in strengthening the individual, the objectivist are short sighted. Every time Christianity attempted altruism it was a disaster. This is Acts of the Apostles stuff.

Beyond that, objectivism and Christianity aren’t incompatible. Christianity teaches in the way of ethics that people should place value in one another. Jesus formulated reciprocity as rooted in evil self-interest. The only difference is that Jesus diagnoses this as evil whereas Rand denies it. In the sense that she reframes self-interest as RATIONAL, they are BOTH right. It is rational, but hardly a virtue. It only becomes a virtue when one values people in such a way that the interests of others becomes an interest of the individual. Rand has no objections to this. Jesus would say, “deny yourself and follow Me.”

Rand actually was quite brilliant. I think the problem most people have with Rand is that she actively avoids being pigeonholed and labeled. You have to learn a whole new vocabulary to understand her. Conservatives hate her because she’s weak on morality. Libertarians THINK they love her, but she never claimed to side with libertarians. Liberals hate her because she’s anti-collective. Ultimately she’s someone who stands alone without really that many friends because everything she says p¡$$es SOMEONE off.

I don’t have much time to myself lately, but I’m picking off We The Living a page or two a day. I read Anthem a few months back and felt so inspired I finally created a generative music algorithm that I’ve been dreaming about doing for a couple of decades now. It’s also inspired me to begin learning a computer language and build an app. Still working on that and will be for a loooong time...I’m just not that bright. But what I’ve read so far has encouraged me to stay true to and be confident in my ideas and keep moving forward with them. It’s ok to take interest in commercial creativity, but it doesn’t have to come at the expense of innovation. At the end of the day, I’m really the only person I can truly rely on, so I never feel quite so bad about “going solo.” I prefer getting people involved in my projects because I can do more and better that way, not to mention reward awesome people for wanting to participate in something good. But I never wait on others to push ahead. So I think there’s a lot of good stuff to glean from Objectivism that can benefit everyone from the billionaire corporate CEO to the stay-at-home parent with a side-hustle. As with any philosophy, there’s the usual grain of salt and tweaking to adapt to your own experience.

^This

If by "brilliant" you mean raging hypocrite, yes she was.

Ah yes...Rand the hypocrite. So original. *yawn* I think I’m supposed to ask how exactly you think she was a hypocrite...as if I care.

No. I expected you to already know.